@d3adst1ck said in This new update concerns me.:
This game has network problems for sure, and I don't think there is much of excuse for it. The animations start to lag out when you have a lot of people moving in close quarters - like the tavern in arena. I know its not the engine, because its Unreal and this doesn't happen in other games so it has to be a low tick rate synchronizing player animations.
Then you can look at games like the recent installments of the Battlefield series - which have tanks, bikes, planes, helicopters, cars all driving around. Projectile ballistics, rockets, grenades... 24-64 players per server and it is able to handle the load much better than the Azure servers. You will occasionally get lag if you get onto a server far away or one that is running on hardware that is unable to handle it or overtaxed with too many instances, but its nowhere nears as noticeably bad as it can be on SoT.
Dice has far more resources and personal than Rare, they're almost 3 times the size of Rare (again, using LinkedIn numbers as a rough guide). They also a lot more experience with their game and engine than Rare has with Sea of Thieves and Unreal.
Hynieth also made a good point earlier that closer comparisons could be made to games like WOW and FFXIV than COD or BF.
It's not just tracking players or ships, it's tracking A LOT of data and doing it server-side. Everything from loot positions, to AI, to wave simulations, to day-night cycle/TOD, to transactions at merchants. When you break it down, it's far more complexity going on than it appears at first.