anybody know how to fix infinite loading screens

Time for actual knowledge once again folks.

So to actually answer your question. Loading in the game was and is, but isn't dependent entirely on the read/write speed of the hard drive the data files are on.

In the past if you had your game files on a certain drive with excellent r/w speed you could quickly load from death, game barring the loading of the azure space and network connection limitations.

However, the developers inserted a time requirement in the game which actually limited respawn time (actually time to load) . The unintended side effect of this is that it affects teleporting and some other aspects of the game because I suspect there is no individual coding for specific things (as in one for ferry, mermaid, siren statue individually). I think the ferry of the damn teleport coding is the same as everything else and is all the same thing just sequenced at best. So you can still speed up your r/w speed and in theory get the fast mermaids, siren statue back to ship. However, the pathing in the code gets jumbled all the time and or they are bugged or copy pasta'd from one instance(not game server instance) to another. I haven't done any dedicated testing but I suspect that either the coding is very bugged or copy pasta'd or linked to one sequence that is the same sequence as from the ferry or bugging to that sequence of the code resulting in unnecessarily long loading times when there shouldn't be. Best practice is to create individual instances of code for each process, however, from what I've seen of the development process from insider to release and patching I think I can safely say that they go at break neck pace all the time and just focus on the get it working not streamlining or polishing. This is pretty evident in the time it takes to fix a bug to the prevalence of recurring bugs every patch.

Networking is not the cause of this, it's a combination of bad code and r/w speed of your game files. Also possible they added specific timers for merms and other things that require loading and never mentioned in patch notes but I highly doubt it as no two teleport sequences are ever the same and the variance is too great for anything else other than bad coding to blame. To the point that if you actually count the seconds from ferry to being on your ship after death the time is always the respawn timer then usually whatever is going on with the game coding. Most respawn timers except on sloop are long enough for even the slowest of r/w drives to load the game files etc.

So hope that helps, get a faster r/w speed drive where your files are loaded and ideally dont have anything on that drive besides your game files for optimum performance. But you will still run into the bugs that I experience everytime I play where fast loads should happen but you get 30 second blackscreens whenever the game decides to lose its mind.

Hope this helps.

Warmest Regards,

TP