Don't say it like that or the forum police will flood the thread stating DA does not cause lag and it is just a warning.
You have to say it in a long drawn out way like "The events that lead up to a DA notification causes the lag".
There has been a lot of good discussion on this subject and some not so helpful. I find it best to take emotion out of the mix.
Focus on the issue at hand and then offer ideas that address the issue.
So the issue is aggro'ing large packs of mobs is causing a a huge spike in resource usage that is resulting in a game sync issues (a.k.a. lag).
Since we cannot see the server utilization stats we have to take SSG's word on this. No matter if you beleive it or not that is what we have to work with. Anything else is just speculation and serve no purpose in finding solutions.
The causes for this, outside some dungeon designs that everyone triggers an alert are:
- Players grinding favor. (Don't care about XP or Optional) just finish the quest.
- Players running XP pots just want to finish the quest to get the XP and move to the next before the pot runs out.
Any changes to reduce or make slowing down to do optional worth a boost in XP only addresses part of the issue.
Any thing done to slow things down (Like my earlier post of have a movement speed debuff) would address the favor grind but would cost the XP pot users real world money as they will burn through pots faster.
This not not a single fix that will address both causes. Since both have a speed component lets start with it.
Having a movement speed debuff that gets worse as the DA notices get higher. This will have to be combined with a carrot for the XP pot users so there pots are not diminished in value. I propose a much more substantial boost to XP for completing optional and/or the total number of kills. Make it so slowing down, killing everything and/or completing optional yield more XP than running multiple quest fast to the end.
As for the favor grinders there can also be a carrot. Have the max favor be higher if the DA notifications are not triggered.
If there is a compelling reason to pump the brakes players will do that. I doubt any of use run quests just to run them. There as to be a reward for the effort. Designed the reward around the desired behavior. In this case taking it slow.