Lag and character buried in floor when mounting

[Doghouse.1562]

This seems to have started with the Wintersday patch. I've been doing the Orphan run and mount races (sometimes swapping mounts), and every so often, when i attempt to mount, there's a lag of about 2 seconds, during which time my character is buried up to its shoulders or deeper in the "floor". That then clears and I'm properly mounted. However it's annoying, it breaks immersion, and it gets in the way of my successfully doing anything that I'm doing under time pressure.

[Autumnmane.3574]

It tends to be a lag issue, when my computer is chugging from a big zerg I find it happens more frequently. It's likely noticeable in DR because of the extra snow effects and the high number of people all in that small area at the moment.

[Syronus.7605]

From my observations this may just be down to how the game renders the mounts. Essentially in crowded areas if the game is loading other people's characters or other objects then your mount is later in the queue to get rendered therefore doesn't appear for a few seconds. This is just a guess though and I assume if this is the case the solution would be giving the player's mount render priority before continuing to load other content.

I've had this happen most when I load into LA and use my mount straight after loading in or sometimes after the Octovine event when I hop on and off my mount with large amounts of people running around nearby.

[Doghouse.1562]

@"Autumnmane.3574" said:It tends to be a lag issue, when my computer is chugging from a big zerg I find it happens more frequently. It's likely noticeable in DR because of the extra snow effects and the high number of people all in that small area at the moment.You're probably right. Although it's happening in parts of the city where the extra Wintersday effects are less noticable, plus my machine and card have plenty of spare "oomph", and it's the only lag issue I've been actively noticing. I'll maybe try turning a few settings down and see whether that makes a difference.

[Schimmi.6872]

Sadly it's an old bug that hasn't been fixed till now, it happens mostly on crowded maps or maps with performance-problems. There is a "solution", but it's an expensive one, because it normally doesn't happen, if you use gem-shop mountskins, as they load the default one asap before they completely load.

[StormyFae.2761]

I'm getting the "Final Countdown" effect a LOT recently. Today in the Citadel just running around doing map completion on a new toon. It's a real bummer that we have to spend gems to make something work that should work already.

[Adzekul.3104]

As far as I an determine, from a lot of testing, it only happens on the basic mounts and it seems to coincide with the rendering of the mount skin. SPECULATION: Maybe forcing the basic mount to render without a mount skin causes some wonky behaviour.

[Blude.6812]

^^^^^^ Confirming what Adzekul has said. As to his speculation, I hope they aren't doing it on purpose. My SPECULATION: They don't have the expertise to fix it anymore so they ignore it and don't communicate(like other bugs). It seems (from all the other threads about this same issue (search function!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)) that this happens only on the default mount.

[kumiponi.6047]

For what it's worth, one of the worst areas with this issue is Western Grothmar Valley, which also has a falling snow weather effect.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

If you get a skin for your mounts, you won't encounter this problem. For some reason they didn't outfit the default mounts with a preload variant to let you move around right away.

[kumiponi.6047]

Wow, thanks for that skin tip! It really adds a new aspect of fun when you can mount up when you want... Devs, please add at least one mount skin set that can be bought with coin/karma/other in-game currency. It can be super ugly, I don't care, if I just can play the game as it's meant to.

[Doghouse.1562]

@"Schimmi.6872" said:Sadly it's an old bug that hasn't been fixed till now, it happens mostly on crowded maps or maps with performance-problems. There is a "solution", but it's an expensive one, because it normally doesn't happen, if you use gem-shop mountskins, as they load the default one asap before they completely load.

That's interesting - if expensive, as you say. I'm not quite entirely convinced that this isn't more specific, mind. I'm beginning to see that it's only (and frequently) happening, to me personally, in one place. I run all over DR doing the Wintersday orphan run, following Tekkit's route on TacO, hopping on and off my mount everywhere - and the only place I see it (and that almost every time) is right at the end, in the Upper City just north of the bank. I come out of one of the vertical TPs, turn into the corridor leading to the final orphan (adjacent to the room with the BL traders), hop onto my mount - and sink into the floor for a couple of seconds. I guess it's possible that there are invariably lots of people in that area close to me - as I said, it's near the DR bank, after all - and presumably the game is rendering all of them, even though they're visually behind walls...