Even on public servers running solo, some things are obvious:

1) Large outposts lag*, even when nothing much is going on. It just appears to be too much geometry for the game to handle at 30 FPS.

2) Whenever I see a good squad on each team, I know that the game is going to lag. I'm not part of any of those squads, so it's not the voice coms that lag me, it must be the blobs and uplink spam as mentioned before.

3) Being near the blob is always causing lag as well.

I have never played PC yet, but the few times I've squadded up have predictably all made the situation worse. I can only imagine that the situation is even more exaggerated in PC, and frankly that kills all my interest to squad up, let alone play competitively in any form.

30 FPS is very difficult to bare to begin with, and it really isn't a sky high bar you set yourself there. The fact that the game consistently drops below this mark, often MUCH below it, is just too much for me to tolerate.

What annoys me the most is that this issue doesn't seem to be acknowledged very much. There won't be a magic bullet to suddenly make all framerate issues disappear. Unless you completely overhaul the engine, which is unlikely to happen, it will never be able to handle the geometry from the large outposts and it will always be overwhelmed by the amount of objects being rendered when two blobs battle it out.

Unless there is an obscure bug which reduces performance for many/most of us, you might never be able to fix the performance problems on the PS3 unless you take some drastic measures to reduce the amount of visible objects on screen. And the large outposts are really not acceptable either, you can't just add as much detail as you like and then say "oh well" when it doesn't meet the target framerates. If you really want to make a visuals vs. performance tradeoff, then at least give us the option to switch to low detail geometry.

Ultimately this is just really frustrating, because I play console games partly so I don't have to put up with stupid framerate issues. I'd like to see some clear acknowledgement of the problem, and at least some indication that there are plans to rectify the issue. Right now the only thing that gives me hope is the potential switch to the PS4. Please do take this seriously CCP... I don't think there is anything that would do more to improve the feel of the core mechanics than if the game would consistently run at 30 FPS.



* Whenever I say "lag" in this post, I am referring to framerate issues (visual lag), not network latency.