Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Slow Forum Performance

Im mostly on Discord bc thats where most of the modding discussion appears.
If they can just fix forum speeds...then we can keep both!

Hopefully the issue with the forum periodically not loading can be fixed! I like posting here best!😊

Other sites have good points as well, though! On Reddit news is posted really quickly, and I like that there are so many fans and seeing fan art.

Because I post so much here, I don’t usually post much on other BG3 sites. I would probably just end up repeating the same things I post here.

We can always rely on Icelyn to find the positive .

And I agree, one of the things I scroll through reddit for is the fanart and there are some really talented people posting that.

In the interest of balance, and now Icelyn and LostSoul have made adding a third voice feel less like a pile-on (thanks, folks!), I should also admit that while I try not to judge and am glad that we're all different and all that, I do find some of the more ... voracious ... posts about NPC relationships that seem to pop up more frequently on reddit than elsewhere a bit disturbing .

EDIT: Btw, the forums seem okay for me right now. Which I'm sure unfortunately won't last but recording here in case of future diagnostic utility.

Forum is running better today than it has in weeks. Maybe the murdered the gremlin inhabiting the servers?

Well, I don't want to go off-topic to much, so I'll make a "brief" comment on the various platforms, just in case this could have any value (which I doubt).


Like many who posted above, I don't really like the other platforms (Discord, Reddit), and I much prefer the official forums.


Reddit is ... mostly decent ?

It has a couple of formatting options, which is a good thing, although it doesn't have not as many as the forums.

Once a thread is opened, it can then evolve in kind of the same way as here.
I don't think the non-linearity is a particularly valuable feature (if your post C is a reply to post A, your post will go underneath it, and a post B that was chronologically second will not be displayed between A and C). We can handle that sufficiently well in linear threads (what we have on this forum) by quoting the bits we are replying to.

But Reddit (I mean, the BG3 subreddit) does not have sub-forums, to keep General, Suggestion & Feedback, Tech Issues, News, etc, together.
I mean, it has tags, but it's not the same. And there isn't one for Feedback.

Overall, I feel it's harder to search for things on Reddit.

And while I don't want to bash too much on the crowd there ... I'm quite impressed (negatively) by the number of people who prefer spending 2 minutes typing the question they have in mind, straight from stream of consciousness to Reddit post, when a 2 minutes search would have yielded the answer. There's a fair share of posts you can help answering by simply providing a link to the FAQ. I guess RTFM has become endangered mindset.

Also, I'm really not fond of the upvote/downvote feature. Possibly, there are subreddits out there, that are not named somethingsomestuff.stackexchange, where posters ask questions to a crowd of individuals with varying levels of expertise (and varying amounts of spare time to write answers), and in the end the best-quality answers get pushed to the top of the thread. But I suspect that in most subreddit communities, some sort of group rule emerges, and posts that irk the majority get downvoted to oblivion, regardless of value.


As for Discord ... no thanks.

Well, firstly, I think Larian set up their Discord server with some specific security settings. Discord wants my phone number before I'd be allowed to post there, so I can't post on this Discord server, Just lurk.

For a while, The Composer was maintaining a nice policy on the Feedback channel : all posts are from player to Larian. You can see what feedback other players are sending to Larian, but you're not supposed to reply to these other players. This probably make feedback just as good and the moderation much easier. I don't know how much this is still the rule. But this is a matter of community and policy, not a platform-related feature.

The Feebback channel was turned from "chat mode" to "forum mode". Which overall is a better way ot organise things.

A major issue with Discord is that its made for chat/messenging. I don't expect that it's particularly good for writing posts longer than a paragraph or two.

A related issue is that, in all the channel that have the original "chat mode", well, good luck following a discussion. I mean, it's possibly for some semblance of discussion to take place. Probably during the night when there are fewer users.


So yeah, forums have their place, in my view. It's not because of the particular community that cristallised here, over the video game BG3, on the BG3 forum. It's mostly because of functionalities.

Although, obviously, these functionalities better support a certain style of posts, and tend to create communities with a certain kind of people.

But for a video game company seeking feedback on their game, I think forum is the best platform/tech to use.



Anyway, digression aside, I'll echo what some have said above.

The forum has always been noticeably slow to open pages.

Some days it's really bad, and pages don't open (timeout, connection expired sort of thingies). But even when it's not really bad, it's really not great.

I definitely found your comments interesting. I've never given either Reddit or Discord what I'd consider a fair chance, and I absolutely acknowledge that forums are what I'm used to so they're comfortable, so it was good to read feedback that articulated many of my impressions of those other platforms better than I could!



Bringing it back to forum performance, my impression is that it has remained pretty good (for these forums at least) for a while now, with the exception of a few minutes on Wednesday evening when I was getting timeouts. There have also, usually, been far fewer instances of the bots that we were provisionally blaming for the slowdown. So that is consistent with our hypothesis that they were responsible, but given the number of variables it's a long way away from confirming it.

I'm going to continue to keep a closer eye on bots and on performance so we can highlight problems to Larian. Feel free to continue calling out here if you're experiencing unusually poor response times.

So right now it's slow again for me.

Yeah. After being good for several days (not perfect, but better) it has slowed down to a crawl again.

Edit: it took about a minute and a half for the site to post this reply after I hit the button.

ugggggghhh

Yes, it's been awful for much of the day. I was even going to post here but couldn't as it kept timing out.

There has also been more dodgy bot activity than there has been over the past few days, though not at the levels we were observing back when the forum was like this a week or so ago, so that remains a possible though not certain culprit. I know vometia was intending to follow up that possibility further, so I'll check in with her.

Forum has been fristratingly slow in the last 30min (16:15-16:45 BST).

Yes, this forum gets slower and slower the closer to release we get ^^

The timing of this slow down is a bit sus, not going to lie lol

Well ...
Today especialy i would be willing to forgive its poor performance, since there is probably record amount of people watching it ... but yeah, its bad. :-/
Quite often i get "the service is not available" response, rather than slow loading.

Hopefully the same isn't happening to the game!

Yeah, still pretty bad here. Takes about 20-30 seconds to get into the form and then very slow when replying.

Forum loading speeds remind me of ye olden days of the 1990s with dial up. Not fondly though.

I live in the states, not sure if that matters. Since day one of my account creation, my loading times are horrible the worst I've ever experienced. From the moment I click the forum on my google bar it can be up to or more than a minute before the page opens. Then... any sub category I try to go into its a minute or so and then each thread it really is horrible.

I have high speed internet not dial up or anything like that. All links on this computer load instantly, Larian forums is the only one I struggle with.

That definitely is not normal for me. Usually, for me loading the main Forums list takes 5-10 seconds, whereas refreshing the Active Threads feed or clicking through into a thread or editing a post takes 2-5 seconds I'd guess. So not super speedy, but personally I'd be okay if it was like that reliably.

Unfortunately it isn't, and lately has been particularly bad, hence starting this thread a couple of weeks back. It seemed okay for a little while, but as you can see from scrolling back there have still been a number of instances when things have ground to a halt.

Yesterday was particularly awful, and the timings you give are probably what I was experiencing then, at least when it didn't timeout completely which it frequently did. For me this morning it seems a little better, at least not timing out but still taking longer than normal. At least it was, now that I'm focusing on it and decided to actually time how long pages are taking it's loading practically instantaneously. I know that's not going to last, though!

I wasn't able to even load the site the last few days. I went to discuss the news on reddit, though I'd rather discuss with you guys and gals.