Abnormally Long MP Loading times

Im just commenting here out of solidarity, I have the exact same issues listed here, slow menus, long initlal load to even get past the opening cinematic, terrible long load to get to my home city to edit my decks, and multiplayer games simply wont start, it gets to the pop up after everybody has ready’d up and sits there until someone cancels it.

I just installed a brand new SSD drive and installed the game there to see if that would fix things and of course it didnt.

i have a Gtx 1060, a TB of memory on the SSD, 16G of Ram I believe. I dont think its my computer either like you said.

Ill say I tried playing a week ago and for one glorious evening it worked perfectly again, the next time I launched the game, back to this nonsense.

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Hi,
I also have this issue. It wasn’t present when I first started playing but yeah, about a month or so ago it started happening. I’ve tried reinstalling. Moving installation to another SSD. Verifying game files. Updating graphics drivers. No joy.

I figured out the issue,
I posted it on this similar thread,

Hopefully this fixes the problem for everyone.

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@arnoldstrife Damn this has fixed the issue for me, I also have Malwarebytes. The reason I didn’t think it’s an issue with Malwarebytes is I had all exe files in the game folder whitelisted in Malwarebytes, so I thought that was enough…

Thank you!

Everyone who posted here please let us know if this applies to you as well or not.

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Damn, I also run malwarebytes premium, and have had this same issue for over a month now. Ill try the suggested changes and post here if it helps.

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It worked. Thanks alot!

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Ill just post in the thread as well that although i appreciate arnoldstrife trying hard to figure this out, his solution didnt work for me. (dont have malware bytes, just windows defendor, and tried his more detailed solution in the other thread).

Anyone else still having issues?

Update here - this issue is still not resolved for us, even after disabling all real-time antivirus and malware software (Windows Defender and Malwarebytes). RAM and CPU usage hits 100% utilization at the main menu when clicking on any of the available options (Home City, etc…).

This game is totally unplayable and this this issue needs to be addressed by the developer.

Well, you seem to be talking about a separate issue, this thread is supposed to be about match loading time.

Anyway, how much RAM do you actually have in total? Note that the game’s official requirement is 8gb minimum to even run the game, and from my experience even anything below 16gb will likely not run the game well for long.

Yes, the original post of this thread was about long match loading loads. Since then, multiple other users have posted regarding this issue which has then progressed into the unresponsive menus making it impossible to even access the multiplayer browser. These issues seemed related, which is why a new forum thread was not created.

To address your question, the computer that is having this issue has 16 GB of RAM, GTX 1070 and can plays modern titles well (60 FPS in R6:Siege, Cyberpunk 2077, Witcher, etc…) as per my previous posts. Friends with 16 GB of RAM have no issues running this game even with large 4v4 matches that run over an hour.

This game on another computer with ample ram (64 GB) only consumes 4.4 GB at the menu, however on the 16 GB machine it consumes 100% at the menu. The game on the 16 GB RAM machine has been uninstalled and reinstalled multiple times since this problem occurred on a SSD and HDD.

This behavior seems suspect of a memory leak as it wasn’t present until about a month ago (the game ran fine beforehand). At this point I’m considering wiping the OS drive and performing a clean reinstall of Windows (assuming the game’s poor coding degraded files on the OS drive causing other Windows services to grind to a halt). This last ditch option seems ridiculous however, as I’ve never had to consider a fresh Windows install for a modern AAA game to run properly.

I have the same issue. I dont use Malwarebytes and whitelisted the aoe3de.exe and battleserver.exe
I also get the bug when starting a singleplayer game and try to record it.

If you don’t use Malwarebytes, where did you whitelist? Try just completely disabling whatever 3rd party antivirus software you have.

Why is an Age Insider recommending that users whitelist or completely disable their antivirus software? While it appears to have worked around some issues reported on these forums, how is this dangerous suggestion considered an acceptable resolution for defective software released by Microsoft?

This problem continues to persist even after whitelisting the application and disabling OEM Windows Defender Antivirus (including real-time protection) on a computer with no other third party antivirus software.

I’m pretty sure he just meant it as a test. disable them temporarily to test if it solves it or not. not permanently. just for collecting more data to diagnose and isolate the issue.

Hello.

I also had this problem.

However, it was cured by updating the NVIDIA drive to the latest version.

I also lowered the graphics settings for the game.

try it.


it often happens that this is completely blocked on this screen when starting a multiplayer game

My friend still has this problem, but he has found a workaround: Before you attempt to join other multiplayer games, create a multiplayer game, add only AI, start the game and wait until it finally loads. Then quit that game (don’t just kill the process), and join other multiplayer games which should load OK.

This has worked the last few evenings we played LAN multiplayer together. Previous to that we usually gave up and played the original AoE III Warchiefs (solid as).

We think it is something to do with the Steam profile getting out of sync or something, esp if you shutdown your PC immediately after playing. Occasionally Steam would have a dialog box up (in the background) asking which copy of his profile (online or local) he wanted to keep.

He had previously tried uninstalling MalwareBytes but that only worked once.

Multiplayer (LAN) load times seem to be greatly improved. I hope it is because of the latest AoEIIIDE update, and not a fluke. We haven’t experienced getting stuck on the load screen at all.

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