Why isn't Cryptic talking about the extreme lag on all platforms?

zedfighter

title... words and stuff

sandukutupu

Latency (lag) is not always caused by the site you are trying to access. However this recent lag appears to be due to a free mount event pushing server population up. The server shard has to keep track of all the players information; position, actions, etc.. The system also has to track NPCs the same. The areas you will run into the majority of lag are Protector's Enclave and Avernus. I didn't experience lag until exiting the Moonstone Mask to use the mail box and it took me a long time to walk to it and back inside.

I can only guess the reason no official Cryptic people are here to comment about it; what can they say? They can just acknowledge it exists. I would like them to be working on it, than here chatting about it. But this is Sunday, I doubt there is anyone but a small skeleton crew there today. I am also speculating, they could be having some issues with hardware. I am not disrespecting their servers, but I assume it is mostly the same equipment that dates back to Champions in 2009.

None of the players here can do anything about the latency either. Just go find an area unaffected by the large surge and special event, and have fun!

mentinmindmaker

And then there is the corona situation that makes people stay at home too. Extra load on the systems.

plasticbat

Personally, I have not got any lag except certain PE instance. Wait 2 minutes and a jump solved that.
Loading was fast, no problem doing Dragonrun in WoD and everything (except certain PE instances) was okay in the past few days.

rickcase276

Yes the only lag I got was in crowded PE instances, and the still ongoing issues with instance 3 in Vallenhas.

arazith07

What lag?

In all seriousness though, there are a ton of variables as to why someone could have lag. Your physical location, wifi vs wired, internet infrastructure, your ISP, server population, instance population, plus everything that could be on Cryptic's end.

zedfighter

sandukutupu said:

Latency (lag) is not always caused by the site you are trying to access. However this recent lag appears to be due to a free mount event pushing server population up. The server shard has to keep track of all the players information; position, actions, etc.. The system also has to track NPCs the same. The areas you will run into the majority of lag are Protector's Enclave and Avernus. I didn't experience lag until exiting the Moonstone Mask to use the mail box and it took me a long time to walk to it and back inside.

I can only guess the reason no official Cryptic people are here to comment about it; what can they say? They can just acknowledge it exists. I would like them to be working on it, than here chatting about it. But this is Sunday, I doubt there is anyone but a small skeleton crew there today. I am also speculating, they could be having some issues with hardware. I am not disrespecting their servers, but I assume it is mostly the same equipment that dates back to Champions in 2009.

None of the players here can do anything about the latency either. Just go find an area unaffected by the large surge and special event, and have fun!

It would take all of 15 seconds for a community manager to pop in and say that they're aware and working on it. Instead of ignoring the issue.

Don't make excuses for a company that will gladly and effortlessly sit back and take your money.
I bet my payment goes through frustration free.

zimxero

The problem is definitely Cryptics server. I am getting 25ms ping and good speed tests, but am getting lag so long in PE that it is hard to map out of there. This problem goes away during RTQ/REDQ, however.

At my household I can normally watch 4 different HD movies on different devices at once and play Neverwinter with no problem. The PE rubberbanding lag persists even if I shut off everything and dedicate the game using a hard connection. When does this chicken event end?

b4t1b4t

When one faces a lag based issue it is always easy to state it is that of the server and not factor in many other things that can cause it. Look at how we are now. Everyone or almost everyone is now at home and playing. Now assume that so many are logged in and in PE capping the server. This can cause lag. What can also cause lag is the isp of each user knowing the bandwidth is really high because we are all using the net. It can also be the isp of that server that has bandwidth issues. What I am saying is very simple. It is not always cryptic server that is the root cause to the over all problem. Fact it until this outbreak is over with and things return back to how they are issues of this nature is going to happen and really no one can do anything much about it.
If you play other games you may also see lag with in those games now as well. I can also say that perhaps why lag happens in 1 area then another is because maybe not so many are in the instance thus no lag.
I really do not see it as a lag in the servers but more other factors are at play.

bigblackafrica

Protectors Enclave is a nightmare. I'm having a much harder time doing the chicken stuff today compared to previous days.

plasticbat

So far, I only experienced lag in certain PE instance which can be resolved by jumping to another PE instance. It seems instance number over 50 is good. Lower number seems to have lag issue. The lag does not happen in another area for me. So, for me, server (as the hardware) is not the issue. The internet connection between me and server is also not the issue. The issue is certain PE instance (more or less certain processes running within the server).

greywynd

Look for low population PE zones to switch to.

darthpotater

I think the lag is due to all the chickens out there in PE. Maybe some bug recycling the entities or something

Other maps are fine for me.

pitshade

IMO the lag is related to the chickens putting people in combat. I've had a bunch of characters repeatedly be put into combat after finishing the Flighty Fowls quest. Typically this ends if you get away from the location. One character had to Defeat Me to break it.

That said, this thread was posted on a Sunday and Cryptic doesn't normally have people working 24/7.

kreatyve

I had @nitocris83 look into this yesterday after reading complaints on Discord, but I don't know what the conclusion was, and didn't have a whole lot of information to give her other than "lag, mainly in PE". I'll try to get an update today.

tribbulater

As others have said, when getting extreme lag in PE (I've waited 30 seconds and more just for a door to recognize I'm there so I can leave), switch to an instance of PE with fewer players.

In other zones, and low-pop PE zones, I'm currently experiencing a bit more lag than typical, but not enough to interfere with playing. Some PE zones are ridiculous, though. Taking almost 2 minutes just to run from the prayer circle to a door and try to exit the zone is frustrating.

plasticbat

darthpotater said:

I think the lag is due to all the chickens out there in PE. Maybe some bug recycling the entities or something

Other maps are fine for me.

If I can speculate, I would speculate there is memory leak in those PE instance processes. It grows bigger over time and starts swapping.

sandukutupu

zedfighter said:

sandukutupu said:

Latency (lag) is not always caused by the site you are trying to access. However this recent lag appears to be due to a free mount event pushing server population up. The server shard has to keep track of all the players information; position, actions, etc.. The system also has to track NPCs the same. The areas you will run into the majority of lag are Protector's Enclave and Avernus. I didn't experience lag until exiting the Moonstone Mask to use the mail box and it took me a long time to walk to it and back inside.

I can only guess the reason no official Cryptic people are here to comment about it; what can they say? They can just acknowledge it exists. I would like them to be working on it, than here chatting about it. But this is Sunday, I doubt there is anyone but a small skeleton crew there today. I am also speculating, they could be having some issues with hardware. I am not disrespecting their servers, but I assume it is mostly the same equipment that dates back to Champions in 2009.

None of the players here can do anything about the latency either. Just go find an area unaffected by the large surge and special event, and have fun!

It would take all of 15 seconds for a community manager to pop in and say that they're aware and working on it. Instead of ignoring the issue.

Don't make excuses for a company that will gladly and effortlessly sit back and take your money.
I bet my payment goes through frustration free.

I hope you took time to read through my whole post. I don't see any "excuses" I am just being honest to these facts;

• You asked the question on a Sunday when no one is at work.
  
• The question you posted is loaded. - It is implying they don't care about your question before you asked it.
  
• You and I don't work at Cryptic, therefore we have no idea about the workload.
  

In my statement above, paragraph one simple explains the most likely cause for this latency is the chicken event. When you enter PE there is a horrible lag, once I switch to a low population map instance, it goes away. This doesn't excuse the fact the event is causing such an issue. When the event is done and over it should return to normal. In the second paragraph, anyone from Cryptic stating they are working on it, means very little to me. They have acknowledge problems and issues in the past and ignored to correct them. Finally I point out the hardware could be very old, and again this is not an excuse, they should be able to maintain and upgrade servers.

So @zedfighter where is it you see me excusing them for anything? I don't excuse you for asking a loaded question on a Sunday and assuming people just don't care.

motu999

There was heavy lag in PE. The lag is usually very high in instances with high population. It is usually rather low in instances with low population. Knowing how modern game servers (actually a bunch of hardware) work, this is easily explainable. There is no single game server. There are several physical server boards (usually with several CPUs). Each CPU on a board can run several processes. The entire work load is distributed among server boards, CPUs on the server boards, threads within a CPU (or CPU-kernels). There are also communication subsystems and shared memory. But no need to overly complicate things.

Depending how the work load is allocated to the subsystems (more dynamically, or more in a static way), some instances will lag more than others. So clearly a server problem (where "server" means all the hard- and software at the disposal). In fact, if the lag instantly gets better, once you switch instances, it is absolutely obvious, that the source of the lag is the "server", e.g. exclusively Cryptic's fault. If the lag were external, e.g. produced by bad routing, limited bandwidth at home (wifi) or other external sources, nothing you do ingame could affect external sources of lag. So once you know you can change the lag by switching instances (clearly an ingame action no external hardward could know aboout), you know its internal, e.g. "server" lag.

The most likely source of the lag is, that the load distribution software (and hardware) is not dynamic, but more or less static. In other words, you need to adjust the way, how the work is distributed among the server-subsystems, manually. And this is what Cryptic apparently did, DURING THE WEEKEND, by restarting the PE instance. The lag become better immediately.

It is understandable, that people are upset about the lag, even more so when some posters fantasize about routing problems, Wifi problems or similar "external" influences. That was - rather obviously - not the source of the lag we experienced (mostly in PE) in the last couple of days. On the other hand, I am thankful that Cryptic addressed the problem rather quickly. In fact, when you know how difficult it is to do a hotfix for a running system, they reacted very fast. Since the restart of the PE instances, the lag is ok - and this covers all PE instances (and the other instances). So thankyou!