Retrieving Character List....

I get it, there's a queue.

Why does it take so long sometimes (a minute, two) and why is it almost instantaneous other times. It doesn't seem to matter what server or time of day, sometimes it's fast and sometimes incredibly slow.

No other game I play does this.

I've not seen an actual queue on any servers in quite a long time (unless you see numbers, I don't believe there's actually a queue)... it also never takes more than a few seconds (maybe 5 at the max), certainly never minutes! And I regularly play on Freeodm and Virtue, which are always the heaviest loaded servers.

We've been saving Paragon City for eight and a half years. It's time to do it one more time.

One thing I hated with the coming of Freedom was that damn thing. I have NO idea what caused it, either, but it was not welcome

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

All the servers are now virtualised (which was how they were able to add Exalted and combine the european servers into the list) so you could be queued with anyone from any 'server'.

And besides, as VIPs we are supposed to have "priority", but I also get the retrieving character list every time I log in. It never goes to straight to the character list like it used to.

It bugs the hell out of me.

It's not the queue. Most times it probably takes 5-10s. But sometimes it takes upwards of 45-60, and that is some bogusness.

Very rarely seen the queue. I see the Retrieving Character List thing every single time I log in, and like the OP, sometimes it takes up to a minute. Sixty seconds! What's up with that? It is my internet connection? I've got a good connection, not great but 50 megabits down/2.5 up, and my ping times are good.

the first time i log in each day it usually takes a good 20 sec or so, but i think thats because its loading the data on all of your characters on the server you select, its only really bad for me when i log on my home server of victory since i have 44 toons on that server while most of the other servers i have between none and 4

Yes, I've noticed this. The wait while the game retrieves your character list has gotten quite a bit longer recently. And if you back out of it before the character list loads, it asks you if you're sure you want to leave the queue. It seems as if we ARE in a queue of some sort, but the UI isn't reporting that. So we wait, and wait, and wait for a list of our characters to appear.

Speaking of, has anyone else noticed a recurrence of that old problem where the zone loading screen would get hung up around 85-90% loaded, and then seem to get stuck there for a very long time? It's doing that again, at least for me. And if others have noticed this, could it be related to the above?

d

Add me to the list of the annoyed by this "feature".

I run CoH on two systems, one a Macbook Pro (wireless) and one a PC (Wired). I also have two accounts, a main one with 25+ toons on Victory and the second with about 15. At first I thought it was because of the amount of toons I had on Victory. However the main account takes at least twice as long loading on my PC than on my Macbook which baffles me as my PC is also much more powerful than my Macbook.

If you try to back out of the retrieving screen, doesn't it (or didn't it at one point) prompt you if you want to lose your position in the queue? I always assumed that's what it was.

When the game is "Retrieving Character List" its querying the database for all your characters and their appearances and displaying it to the screen. From... umm... local home network traffic analysis... it seems that the data takes a long time to compile and deliver, not render.

There are several possibilities for this:
1) A simple optimization change. When going F2P, one of your major goals is to minimize unnecessary traffic to minimize the cost of the free player. it could be that the game previously requested all servers' character lists at the moment of login. By the time you clicked on a server, the list was generated and on the way. That way, we'd never have seen the list. To avoid sending a bunch of unnecessary data, it could wait until you click now.

2) Sheer Data Size: the more data a database has to manage, the longer it takes to pull out the necessary request. If Freedom caused (for example) a doubling of the number of characters per server, then you'd see longer for the server to generate the list of YOUR characters on that server. If this was the case, you'd probably see it more frequently on the higher-load servers (although... they also have more resources to deal with the load... so not necessarily...)

3) Login Server Capacity: we have one Login server that verifies your account at login. When you select a server, that server verifies your login "token" (to avoid technical terms) against the login server to verify that you are who you claim to be. Each time, the login server has to compare that "token" against your previous authentication and confirm you are who they think you are. That login server could be slower to respond due to the load, so we see the "retrieving" message until both authentication is confirmed AND the list is retrieved. Subsequent visits to the server aren't as delayed then because your "session" on that server is still active and authenticated (and the data is cached)

4) Foundation for future development effort: if you wanted (for example) to offer "cross server teaming" or "cross server PvP" there are several preparations that would be needed to lay the groundwork. MMO's have servers/shards/instances for various reasons-- often for optimizing performance and/or avoiding technical limits. When you start looking at reaching across those servers/shards/instances in different ways, you run the risk of undoing some of that optimization. Not saying that's happening here, (but I hope it is).

Fingers crossed on #4

But that in itself doesn't make sense.

First, if we're waiting in the queue, it should tell us we're waiting in the queue. It shouldn't deceive us into thinking it's doing something that happens after we've made it through the queue.

But second, even if it is "lying" to us about the queue, sometimes it takes a long time to load the character list at times when is absolutely inconceivable that we are actually waiting in queue, such as late at night on servers that have primarily US populations and show green in the list.

That suggests several possibilities to me.

One is that the message about leaving the queue is actually a bug - backing out of any incomplete log-in might trigger that message, whether or not we are actually in queue.

Another is that we are being processed by the queuing mechanism, but it is actually slow to even get to the point where it checks to see if we even have to wait on a slot on the server. Imagine, for example, if all of our sign-in requests are handed to the queuing system, and it has to handle them one at a time. We might be waiting on other log-ins to process. In this case, exiting counts as "backing out of the queue" even though there isn't a queue of people waiting for slots. (If this is happening, the queuing system may need beefier hardware, or some tuning.)

Personally, I wonder if it isn't because the character list is now tied to our account status. It may be that it has to check the account server for each character, to see if we're allowed to play them based on our status. My understanding is that each shard has caches of this data, so I'm not sure this is a likely cause, but it is something we know changed with Freedom.

If this is true:

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Originally Posted by _Klaw_ All the servers are now virtualised (which was how they were able to add Exalted and combine the european servers into the list) so you could be queued with anyone from any 'server'.

And the foundation for "cross-server" stuff has been laid:

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Originally Posted by Chase_Arcanum 4) Foundation for future development effort: if you wanted (for example) to offer "cross server teaming" or "cross server PvP" there are several preparations that would be needed to lay the groundwork. MMO's have servers/shards/instances for various reasons-- often for optimizing performance and/or avoiding technical limits. When you start looking at reaching across those servers/shards/instances in different ways, you run the risk of undoing some of that optimization. Not saying that's happening here, (but I hope it is).

Then it would really make sense that somewhere in that transition, all characters may have been combined into a single database. If that's the case, then queries to pull 30-40 character's worth of data could conceivably take longer and maybe account for some of the delay we are seeing.

They already mentioned cross-server stuff in the survey and it was mentioned somewhere by a redname.