It's an valid issue, those of us who worked back in the day on GD/DVD,etc games really ran into bad loading walls if we didn't duplicate data for straight streaming.

Data-sizes has continued to grow and HDD-seek times haven't gotten better due to physics (even if streaming probably has kept up), the assumption isn't too bad considering history.

It's a good that they actually revisited it _when they had time_ because launching a game, especially a multiplayer one, will run into a lot of breaking bugs and this (while a big one, pun intended) is still by most classifications a lower priority issue.

I've been involved in decisions like this that seem stupid and obvious. There's a million different things that could/should be fixed, and unless you're monitoring this proactively you're unlikely to know it hsould be changed.

I'm not an arrowhead employee, but my guess is at some point in the past, they benchmarked it, got a result, and went with it. And that's about all there is to it.

> our worst case projections did not come to pass. These loading time projections were based on industry data - comparing the loading times between SSD and HDD users where data duplication was and was not used. In the worst cases, a 5x difference was reported between instances that used duplication and those that did not. We were being very conservative and doubled that projection again to account for unknown unknowns.

They basically just made the numbers up. Wild.

You can't bench your finished game before it exists and you don't really want to rock the boat late in dev, either.

It was a fundamentally sound default that they revisited. Then they blogged about the relatively surprising difference it happen to make in their particular game. As it turns out the loading is CPU bound anyway, so while the setting is doing it's job, in the context of the final game, it happens to not be the bottle neck.

There's also the movement away from HDD and disc drives in the player base to make that the case as well.

It's pretty standard to do that duplication for games on CD/DVD because seek times are so long. It probably just got carried over as the "obviously correct" way of doing things, since HDDs are like DVDs if you squint a bit

It's very easy to accidentally get misleading benchmarking results in 100 different ways, I wouldn't assume they did no benchmarking when they did the duplication.

It seems plausible to me that this strategy was a holdover from the first game, which shipped for PS4 and XBO

I don’t know about the Xbox, but on PS4 the hard drive was definitely not fast at all

worse, in their post they basically said:

>we looked at industry standard values and decided to double them just in case.

The good old "studios don't play their own games" strikes again :P

Games would be much better if all people making them were forced to spend a few days each month playing the game on middle-of-the-road hardware. That will quickly teach them the value of fixing stuff like this and optimising the game in general.

They used industry data to make the decision first to avoid potential multi minute load times for 10% or do of their players, hard to test all kinds of pc configurations. Now they have telemetry showing that it doesn't matter because another parallel task takes about as much time anyway.

A tale as old as time. Making decisions without actually profiling before, during and after implementing.