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

It is not and will not get better. A new more modern forum after about 20 years would also be really appropriate... I don't know any other forum that a) has been outdated as long as this one and b) has problems with stability since 2003 https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=100902 Could there please be a final solution?

I note forum performance is very poor again today.

I think probably Lotus Noctus is right that there is a limit to what can be done with this creaky old platform, and one of these days Larian are going to have to decide whether to continue to support the forums and so invest in upgrading them, or to kick the last of us remaining holdouts onto Discord and close them completely (I have no special insight into their thinking on that front). But still, given the forums aren't always horribly slow or timing out, I hope it might be possible to at least make them better.

I'll follow up after the weekend to see if anyone's had a chance to look at this. If there is anything that can be done, feels like it would be good to do it before August when we may get busier again!

This forum has always taken longer than other sites to load for me. Sometimes just a few seconds longer, and sometimes dozens of seconds or not loading at all. (Currently it's taking ~30 seconds for even the "preview reply" to show up).

I agree with @Loctus above that it's probably inherent to the outdated-ness of this forum and can't be changed until (if) Larian updates their forum. Which they almost certainly won't do, as these types of discussion hubs seem to be (unfortunately) moving to discord.

confirming performance is extremely slow as of right now: 11 AM PST

Closing a forum completely would be a shame and already a bit stingy for a company. Even P-Servers have a more appealing forum with links e. g. Discord.






One would like to read e.g. at work in the break comfortably the one or other thread, fill the bugtracker etc. pp. There are also people who work all day in a call center, they are happy if they then only have a forum to read.

Ugg slow

It's been pretty bad all day, is Larian getting hit with a DoS attack or something?

Larians forums seem permanently slow load in, but fine after loading till you try again later and need to load the page again

If I were going to migrate to Discord or (shudder) Reddit, I’d already done so. If Larian shuts down this forum I’ll just call it quits.

If we are going to migrate to Discord ... i think at least half of us (most likely more tho) will not migrate at all.

Im in the discord atm and dont use it , i like the slower pace of the forum

I agree. Some people are substituting forums by Discord but it isn't the same use at all. On Discord, lenghty and serious discussions can be ended in seconds by some other less serious discussions. You just can't concentrate on a single topic, it is more a flow of thought than anything else.

No to discord or Reddit 🙅🪧

I have to believe whomever is watching your servers for activity could easily see if there are increased requests being made to the server. Any modern SIEM should be able to identify what's going on. I have to assume it's just not a priority for Larian.

I'm not a fan of DIscord or Reddit either, and though I have joined both the BG3 subreddit and Larian's Discord and intermittently take a look at them to see what's being discussed I've never actually posted on either. Discord in particular I struggle to follow given the way everything is mixed together in each section, but then you have to dip separately into each section to get an overview of what's happening. Though I confess I've never really spent enough time with it to find my way around properly.

Personally, I really hope that Larian will find reason to upgrade and maintain the forums.

And, just to make extra, extra clear ... I have absolutely zero special insight as a moderator into Larian's plans for the forums and have no more idea than anyone else what their thinking is. I only theorise that they might be considering whether it's worth investing in the forums as frankly it's what I'd be doing in their position. It would take time and money to get them up to scratch and with much of the community seeming to prefer Reddit or Discord, if they're looking to avoid community fragmentation, then the forums are probably the prime candidate for cutting. Though of course it's a vicious circle, as if they don't invest in the forums and they're slow and unreliable then of course many folk are going to go elsewhere. I'd speculate (and it is total speculation) that what happens when BG3 releases in August might help determine their future, and how busy we get and whether more folk hang around and prefer being here. Not that I'm not happy with the select group we have posting here regularly now .

(Oh, and btw, the favoured hypothesis about recent intermittent poor performance - as opposed to just general creakiness - is still that it's caused by badly behaved bots. There seems to have been a correlation between some of the recent slowdowns and increased presence of crawlers that our admin vometia is aware of as having reputations for bringing websites to a grinding halt. Unfortunately, they also tend to be the kinds of bots that won't respect officially specified boundaries, but vometia is following up to request some additional blocks to try to keep them away.)

As clunky as these forums are I much prefer them to either Reddit or Discord. Reddit is mostly hornyposting and fans trying outdo each other with their displays of fandom. And Discord is just a group chat on steroids - I can't stand it.

These forums, on the other hand, host Master's thesis level feedback threads and some deep insights from filmmakers.

The constant performative horniness on Reddit wears quite thin quite quickly.

I don't want to shut down valid comparisons and discussion, but will just ask everyone explaining why they prefer these forums or don't like reddit/discord to be wary not to go too far and slip into being insulting about the communities there, who might also be here or at least watching.

As always when criticising something, perhaps in front of the very faces of people who are part of it, it's not so much about what you say as about how you say it and trying to make it as little about people or their intentions and as much about content or tools as possible.

(I'm not saying we've already been too rude about the reddit community here, but I think we might be teetering on the edge of it and would rather forestall tipping over if I can!)

It’s been a lot of this today.

They’ve been terrible, haven’t they? Vometia has put in a request for some actions to try to restrict bot access to the forums. I’m not connected to the technical side of things and I don’t know Larian’s typical turnaround for changes to their live internet settings (I’d imagine it’s not something they jump into without testing!), but fingers crossed. Even if the bot activity turns out not to be responsible for the recent even-worse-than-usual performance it would be good to exclude that so other possibilities can be considered.