Truth be told, patch 3.14 ranks right there along with the original 3.0 patch. While 3.0 was less than playable and failed to live up to the hype surrounding its release(CIG failed to acknowledge that much of the game play code would need refactoring), patch 3.14 is unplayable due to a rash of ERROR(s)- CIG services(Code 16008). Truth be told, even CIG doesn’t fully understand this issue. After reviewing the RSI Roadmap for clues it would appear the root cause of these issues is the removal of account login in services from the main Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) to the network code in preparation for server meshing.
As described during this year’s CITIZENCON, the concept of a SHARD is being implemented.
The Shard Manager functionality is responsible for creating a shard in the EntityGraph database, ensuring it is “seeded” with an initial population of entities, communicating with matchmaking so that players can join a shard, and talking to provisioning services so that a Hybrid and Dedicated Game Servers (DGS) can be assigned to a shard.
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/progress-tracker/teams
In anyone’s book, this is an extensive and critical update and it is understandable that this uprooting of account login procedures and refactoring to implementing a “SHARD” is consuming quite a bit of time. Not only is populating a new database time consuming, but I suspect that the account login procedures were not thread safe, and difficulties have arisen as to the best way to deal with event signals that never occur. Better them than me.
The 3.15 PTU exhibits the same issue, but the problem has been greatly reduced. In 3.14 I was lucky to login about 5% of the time, now I seem to get lucky with 25% of my attempted logins.
The good news is that FM is looking sweet, we haven’t seen ship performance at this level since prior to the 3.0 patch. 3.15 promises to add back in differences in shield performance(A,B,C,D) and hopefully stealth game play.
For now, I have taken my light sabers out of storage awaiting CIGs completion of the necessary refactors on their way to server meshing.
