I know it's a weekend, but it's been something that I've had trouble with the last few weeks, and it's only been getting worse. Just a few minutes ago I was trying to do the Tour the Universe (short run, of course), and I spent 21.5 mins looking at loading screens by minute 36 of the hour (and I was a minute late to start because of...loading).

That is just plain ridiculous. And this is with all settings turned down to min, and no downloads or anything running in the background. My connection to the server is good - no lag or any of that stuff, just the bloody loading.

The biggest offenders are of course ESD, DS9, and SFA (Klingon Academy as well), in that order, but Sol system itself takes a while sometimes, and randomly different sectors will take up to a minute themselves to load. It's not the patching; I can see when that happens, and it wasn't happening here.

I have not played any other game that has loading this long after an install/patch. As I said, this is ridiculous.

just a shot in the blue....

what hard drive do you have? (MB/s?)
and when did you do your last Defrag?

When you get stuck on a loading screen, close sto, restart start it, and load back in. It's alot faster if you do that. I have trouble sometimes too. When it sits at 96.3 for more then 20 seconds, i relog. Dont know if they ever will fix that, but if you just relog it may help. You must have alot of patience, as i would never sit there for 20 minutes waiting..

Not everyone experiences this, so that indicates its on the user's end. You've got on-demand patching turned to off right?

I want to avoid that, because that itself will take a couple of minutes, at least.
I don't sit here for 20 mins, It was 5+mins x 3 loading ESD, plus the loading for everything else. But still, this is crazy. I see folks getting 64+ pickups, while I only get 34 usually, and the last couple of times I've only gotten about 20. This time I gave up after 12, because a race is not fun if you're not racing.

I don't; I see when it says patching, but it doesn't happen during the races, from what I've seen. I'll turn it off and see what happens.

EDIT: Well, the first thing that happened was a 3500MB patch.

EDIT 2: It only took 1:50 to get into ESD from space instead of my usual 5+. Still way too long, but far better than before.

Lucky you, I had 24GB of patch to download when I turned off my on demand patching!

also, it is not the users end imo. I run an SSD and it *still* takes aeons to load ESD, DS9, Qonos etc.

Well, hopefully that will not increase for you. But I think its a good suggestion by zerobang to defrag the hard drive you play STO from.


Well there is no denying that high population instances do create these loading problems - although I've only ever experienced them when it was an issue affecting everyone due to old instances that were not terminating correctly when people had left them or were otherwise not functioning correctly.

24GB! I really think the majority of people who are not aware of on-demand patching and who have loading delays would have a much better experience if they were at least aware that on-demand was ON.

Actually, the delays are always there, regardless of time or server population. The population numbers really hinder the loading time, with ds9 and esd being the worst by far. Even without the on demand patching it still takes aeons to load. Granted my weakish CPU is likely to be an issue but I've got a bit of an upgrade coming very soon so I should be able to take that out of the equation in a few days time.
Laziness permitting of course