Star Trek Online plans to improve performance with more elegant math

If you aren’t super interested in reading detailed technical breakdowns of changes to game clients, you can just accept that Star Trek Online‘s developers are working to make the game perform better under stress. That’s enough. If you would like to read up on the details, though, there’s a lengthy post available on Reddit that breaks down exactly why the game has been having some performance issues. Simply put, the modifiers applied by skills, abilities, and so forth are starting to reach the point of slowing down the game… all due to an inelegant method of coding.

When an ability buffs all damage dealt by a player, the game is coded to actually provide a series of 16 different modifiers to the player, each of which increases damage of a specific type by an appropriate amount. If the ability stacks, each stack applies all of those modifications separately. The result was that the game’s processes for identifying and processing stat modifications were getting overloaded, and the team is going to roll out a new setup to group these modifications together, which should reduce load, improve performance, and be totally invisible to players. Except, of course, for players who have read about it.