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[PC] Are Lag/Latency Issues Ever Going To Be Dealt With?
resumeplay
Member Posts: 9 Arc User
I really enjoy this game, but only when it is playable and therefore fun. Increasingly, this is not the case. I have done every tweak known both on my computer and within the game, but lag issues seem to be getting worse as time goes on. It has gotten so bad in most dungeons that I can no longer do them as I constantly die. I also don't feel it is fair for other people in my party. Without dungeons it is near impossible to get better gear/boons/etc. The game becomes NOT fun at this point!! I loathe going to PE because it is lag heaven and I am constantly being spammed while trying to use chat. New mods dont even interest me anymore, because I can't even enjoy the areas I'm in now. Like I said, I really do enjoy this game, but that enjoyment is waning. Can anyone tell me whether or not anything concrete is being done about this issue? I refuse to spend any more money until there are some improvements. I know I am not the only one who is frustrated with this issue. Thanks for listening!
Post edited by zebular on
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for example in other mmos i get 100+fps easily with everything max and much better gfx engine. here it is around 1/3-1/2 that.
1. FPS:
This depends on the user hardware / drivers and the game code. Luckily this one is easy to test either by external program or in game by first doing /showfps 1 (Wont do anything by itself) and then /showdevui 1
The game is not as well optimized as some major engines and the game engine is not new so there are FPS drops, but it's relatively stable so playing with the options can bring the whole thing to 30+ and more even on weak hardware.
Fortunately the game did have some improvement/fixes in this area (MC playable, there were some powers that created crazy fps drops, they were fixed), and even if not in most cases the game engine can budget itself correctly so it's still playable.
2. Network lag:
The physical time it takes to a data packet to travel between the server to the player and vice versa. Some of it can be improved by the devs. Mainly by improving the infrastructure if it's the line to the major exchange or if it's the filtering/routing hardware.
But a lot of it is not in their hands, from the speed of light to the routing of each players ISP.
This can be seen / tested with /netgraph 1-3
Also the routes themselves can be tested with widely available network tools.
3. Server 'frame rate':
IMO, this is the most important factor, it's what makes things unplayable and it's mistaken for 'lag' but it's not.
All the game interactions, damage, encounters and timers are calculated server side, so for each server 'frame' - server tick, it has to calculate all the DoTs if some events happened all those distance based spells, and the worst case all those global interactions. For exmaple with some DoTs procing in tenths of a second and with 40 players in an instance using one Astral Seal can bring the server to it's knees and the tick rate drops from 30 per second to 1 per year.
An overload like this will make immediate rubber banding and in some cases even instance crash.
This can and should be solved by changing the skills inner working, profiling and optimizing, slapping cooldowns is not a solution for everything.
And in some cases even skill balance can take into account hardware limitation, for example making some skills to not proc from DoTs at all and buff them in other ways to balance it.
A lot of the player skills didn't take this into account at all. And never tested, and only after plenty of complaints they were changed, usually by distance cap, target cap, or CD. KV, Prism, AS (still not good) and many others i don't remember.