Ferry of the Damned Loading Screen Delay

  • Okay so I was stacking a lot of loot. Three sunken shipments and three fortresses with a grade five merchant flag.

    I was on my way to Galleon's Grave to sell when a skelly sloop spawned on me. Easy; would've took it down in a minute if a skelly didn't decide to play hero and one ball me.

    I was solo, so the ferry of the damned would've taken around 12ish seconds to respawn me, but I was on the loading screen (not the ferry) for TWO MINUTES. When I FINALLY respawned, I was on a faraway island with no way to get back to my loot before it sunk.

    Rare you NEED to fix this, your servers are unreliable and there are situations where this could have been a lot worse. Imagine a toxic but bad crew getting the upper hand on competent players just because they were stuck on the loading screen of the ferry of the damned. Please fix this.

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  • System?
    Xbox one or PC with a traditional hard drive ... upgrade and it will go away. (Former Xbox 1 upgrade to Series S)

  • The time is usually a hardware issues, not server issue.

    When the loading screen takes THAT long its because as you went in and were waiting, your ship was sunk, so you're stuck waiting for it to load up where you're ending up with your ship, across the map.

  • @tre-oni said in Ferry of the Damned Loading Screen Delay:

    The time is usually a hardware issues, not server issue.

    When the loading screen takes THAT long its because as you went in and were waiting, your ship was sunk, so you're stuck waiting for it to load up where you're ending up with your ship, across the map.

    To add to this: Sometimes the game not only loads you in the "easier-to-load" Ferry of the Damned, but instead of keeping certain areas of the world loaded, it will just be unloaded. This means your system will basically try to reload the whole entire world like you're logging into a session for the first time, which, if you're lucky, shouldn't be too long.

    This is however, noticeably more apparent during combat, when your ship is taking on water, where I assume the game is trying to load the world, your ship, the state it's in, the other ship(s), the water level in your ship, the emissary flag, the trinkets, etc. the game can just fail to load it until it can. Some call this the "black screen of death" because the game just fails to load the world around you and it tends to conveniently happen in a ship battle, where long loading times are not preferred.

  • @pithyrumble
    I play on a NVME SSD (Mobo ssd which is the fastest)
    doesn't happen often but I still encontered a few rare instances where I was black screened for 3+ minutes where I had to restart my game (alt+f4) and rejoin since it was faster that way.
    Also it goes without saying, but private servers with 4+ galleons in the same area, also drastically increases black screen times of 1+ minute no matter how good your Console/PC is.

  • As someone who upgraded from an OG Xbox to a series X, I can say that the loading screens are hardware related a vast majority of the time.

    But there is also a legit bug where the game simply doesn't let you off the black screen for inexplicable reasons, and yes it is usually during combat.

    My entire crew has experienced the bug and we are all in different types of systems, so it isn't hardware.

    But the "flow" is generally the same. Get killed. Go to ferry. Door opens. Go through door. Get green pinwheel at the bottom.

    Notably, the ship is NOT sunk and you are no longer in the ferry area. While staring at a black screen/green ship wheel, you can hear combat. Bucketing. Repairing. Remain crew begging for help because they are undermanned. And you are loaded in "enough" that you are moving/attached to the ship model as you experience thus even as a ship is in motion. They aren't sailing away from you leaving you to eventually hear waves. You just get to listen to chaos.

    I've had this persist for 5+ minutes. Sometimes the ship sinks and that's when the game spawns me in to just take a mermaid. Sometimes the ship gets out of combat and I spawn in when things are calm enough for the system to catch up. And sometimes, for no rhyme or reason, after minutes of waiting, it just decides "okay, now I can load you" and I pop into existing in the ongoing combat.

    There is literally no easily discernable pattern beyond "usually in combat" to explain this issue. And being in a series X, I can say that loading into a brand new game, where the game has to load the entire world, is still faster. New game = 15 seconds from setting sail to tavern wake. And 2ish "loading panels" artwork in between. Pinwheel of death, many multiples of minutes.

    This isn't a hard drive or memory bandwidth issue. When it happens, it has every appearance of a server-side issue of being under too much strain and not having time to sent the client acknowledgement that you are loaded in and "releasing" control to the player. And even if it only happens 1 time out of 100 to lose a battle or lose progress to it is one of the worst player experiences to have.

    The OP is right. This needs to be fixed once and for all. And not just for solo reasons.

  • Yeah the load from death is completely bullcrap and makes no gods damned sense, it aggravates to no end. I initially load in so much faster than my friends when we load in to our adventures yet, if I died due to jerk pirates I sit there seemingly forever staring at that stupid wheel which lasts longer than the initial load into the world.

  • Its not a hardware issue. 15s black screens during combat happen all the time on brand new SSDs. Occasional 2 minute ones too.

  • @alienmagi
    Game is just badly optimized, no secret.
    You can have the best hardware and still encounter big FPS drops/ blackscreens 1+ mins, and random game crashes.

  • They could prioritize loading sequences on older/slower setups but they won't.

  • It's a hardware problem that not much can be done about, apart from just giving xbox one players less time on the ferry to compensate for their guaranteed long load times.

    My crew has the same pain. Our only solution is to put our xbone player in a position where he's less likely to get killed and subsequently trapped in a loading screen.

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