Improvements to better your gaming experience Resolving technical issues is one of our top priorities.
Here is a preview of the improvements we are currently working to solve the major technical problems you might have encountered.


Solving considerable lag issues:
Some players encounter considerable lag problems and untimely disconnections during peak hours.
We partly identified the origin of these problems and, part of the network infrastructure of our hoster has been completely replaced.
At the same time, we are testing completely different platforms (with our public test servers for instance) to choose the right one, appropriate for our game servers.

Within the next days, we're planning to upgrade all of our game severs in order to improve their general performances.
We regularly optimise our servers' software. Also, we're currently working on outsourcing the in-game chat systems so that all of our calculations and data transfers linked to the chat channels are taken into account by other servers.
This complex modification won't be available for several months.

We're also working on the optimisation of the data transfer between the game servers and the DOFUS clients in order to reduce disproportionate lag.
The AI research that was carried out for Wakfu enabled us to find new ways of optimising DOFUS. Therefore, in the next months, these modifications should enable us to improve the general performance of our game.

We also keep improving our performance and server statistics tools to be able to find the origin of our technical problems and intervene more quickly.
The development of the system "disconnection - reconnection" on which we worked a lot is suspended for now failing good results.
Meanwhile, several hardware improvements of our hoster's technical platform are planned and the latter should allow to reduce some of the untimely disconnections.


Solving waiting lines problems:
We're working on the setting up of several connection servers, capable of working in parallel in order to considerably reduce waiting lines when logging in and to allow for a better redundancy in case of the failure of a connection server. Besides, we've planned to install new database servers to reduce the waiting lines when accessing the game servers.


DOFUS Client's performance:
In order to reduce the memory used by the DOFUS client and avoid lags when there are too many players on a map, we decided to completely revise the way the characters' visible items (capes, hats and weapons) are being handled by the client.
This new system will be integrated to the DOFUS client during our next major extension, in a few months' time.


Improving our websites' performance:
Several new database servers, and some for the website management, should be added in order to improve the accessibility to the Ankama Games websites and to the support in peak hours.


Download improvements:
In order to improve the download speed of the DOFUS game and updates, we're currently developing a program which should allow for an automatic update of the DOFUS game by downloading the necessary content (full game or simple patches) in "peer to peer" mode.
This program should enable players to quickly download the game and its updates under all circumstances (even when there's a compulsory update).
We intend for this program to be beta tested in the coming months.

Reduction in waiting times
In order to reduce waiting times during peak periods, we are going to put a new database server in place which will be dedicated to the treatment of identification requests from the connection server.


Reduction in connection times
In order to prepare for the increasing connection times foreseen with the growing size of the DOFUS community, improvements to the internal network are in development with the aim of increasing the bandwidth available to our servers.


Changes to the hardware infrastructure
In order to improve your gaming experience, to reduce connection times and to improve the stability of connections between game servers and your DOFUS clients, several hard and software improvements have been developed.

As a result of these significant modifications, the next DOFUS beta test will take place on an entirely new hardware infrastructure.

If the beta version is successful on the new infrastructure, these modifications will be introduced into all servers (game, connection and database) in the following months.

We decided it was best to explain these significant hardware changes to the community as early as possible.

Furthermore, our development team has been adapting to changes in the DOFUS server engine which were carried out to optimize the sending of information to DOFUS clients. These software changes should lead to a significant reduction in connection times.

Internal testing must still be carried out in order to ensure the suitability of these modifications, but we are confident that they will be introduced onto all game servers in the coming weeks.

Optimization of the friend and enemy lists
We have found one of the origins of the recent slowdown on our servers in the way the servers manage the friend and enemy list.
We noticed that many players tried to add incorrect names in these lists, causing the servers performance to deteriorate when looking up those names, in vain.

With the 04/07/08 maintenance, we have entirely remodeled and optimized the way the servers deal with incorrect searches. These modifications have permitted us to increase the size of your friend and enemy lists.


Improvements in the monitoring of our game servers
We have also modified and enhanced the way the server reports commands which take too long to execute as well as those being sent to clients when the network appears to be saturated. This way, we will be able optimize the way certain commands are processed in game to monitor and identify more efficiently the origin of possible slowdowns on our game servers.

Optimizing the management of messages between the DOFUS clients and the game servers
The improvements made to better control the performances of the game servers on 04/01/2008 enabled us to determine that most of the lags on the game servers were due to a high number of network messages sent towards the DOFUS clients.

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve modified and optimized the sending of these messages in order to gather them and send them in packets when possible.

This modification considerably improved the performance of our game servers. We intend to keep on optimizing this running aspect of our game servers, to improve gaming conditions and reduce the latency that is still too important.


Changing the game servers
The recent improvements of gaming conditions made many players come back therefore increasing the population on some game servers by up to 20%.
Such an increase on the game servers is the reason why some players have encountered considerable lags lately (especially on weekends).

Within the next weeks, we’re planning to change the real servers which host the busiest game servers for more powerful equipment.
We’re also still planning to change hosters within the next months in order to improve our global hardware platform. But we still have to test it all to make sure that everything will work properly when it gets to you!


Improvement of our hoster's network hardware
During the maintenance on 29/02/08, our hoster will take advantage of the downtime to replace some of its own network equipment with models of higher performance in order to improve the regulation of numerous simultaneous client connections to connection servers and data bases.

Optimization of the game servers
During the games servers update on 15/04/08, we used a new version of our game server management software. The command engine was considerably improved and allowed us to reduce to a great degree the lags in the internal treatment of various commands.

In addition we corrected the problems which affected memory management issues and other issues concerning the delayed processing which had been cumulatively degrading the performance of the game servers (particularly on the weekend and Monday evening).


Server hardware replacement
Highly populated servers were replaced by machines of higher performance in order to improve global performance.