Lag in dungeons

euphora

Sometimes when in a dungeon, me and the rest of the party can experience rubber banding, unresponsive abilities and very low AP gain. For people whose builds focus on AP and daily power spamming, this can make the dungeon harder, especially for healers who use such build. I'd be thankful to learn what causes this, what can we do to fix it and if Cryptic already took note and can improve the connection.

greywynd

The internet causes it in the majority of cases.

euphora

Thank you for your reply. I could have never guessed. I will try playing without internet and see how it goes.

rockster

It's not the internet, all it is is sometimes the hamsters turning the generator wheels for the servers get tired and things slow down a bit.

tchefi

You are always lagging in any online game, weither or not you notice it .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag_(video_games)

an online game requires to be maintained on a central server in order to avoid inconsistencies between individual clients. As such, the client has no direct control over the central game state and may only send change requests to the server, and can only update the local game state by receiving updates from the server. This need to communicate causes a delay between the clients and the server, and is the fundamental cause behind lag

The most frequent reason why you are lagging is the network performance (losses, corruptions, jitters, etc) usually because of congestion and/or unsufficient bandwith (can be on the server side, on one or more clients side, or anywhere in between as the routing can be quite very indirect).
outdated hardware on the client or the server side (the first being more likely)
installation performances (for exemple using wifi rather than wire while your mom/wife/husband is using the micro-wave) or protocols
poor optimization (server having to send too big/too much packets at the same frame)

There are some others, but not so frequent.


A too big/long desynchronisation between the server and the client can cause what we call rubberbanding (the client "rewind" from its predicted state to what the server sent as the absolute state), and in extreme cases a Server Not Responding red message to pop (which doesn't mean the problem is from the server-side though)

For what can be done from the client/player side is to keep his hardware and drivers up to date, play with a wired fast connection/big bandwith connexion, do not watch (and do not allow anyone in the house to watch) 4k streams while you are playing, etc. From the server side, there are some strategies (beside an up to date hardware), but I'm not skilled enough in the field to pretend being able to explain.

Anyway, there will always be some lag, as it is inherent to the travel time communication has to spend between the server and clients. Even light is not instant, so your eyes are slighlty lagging behind what is displayed on your screen, and your brain is lagging behind what your eyes are seing :P.

euphora

Thank you very much Tchefy for your explanation. Fortunately, it doesn't happen too often. Just need to know one more thing. Can playing in a group with people from all around the the world cause that lag and affect everyone in the group?

greywynd

Yes, because you have 5 or more clients sending and receiving to/from the server. All of which need to be updated with the changes from the other clients.

rockster

I used to get a lot of lag back in the old days and had to lower my settings to minimum or off but this was due to my GPU and operating system. All the lag I experienced back then (which was dreadful and constant) was at my end because my GPU was just struggling too much to process the data. So a lot of lag can be your GPU. Having said that I now run a very good top-end GPU and rarely ever get lag, but sometimes from time to time I do and when it happens it always ends-up being at the server end and others in the game are also experiencing it at the same time. One way to find out is to ask around and see if it's generally happening to a few people and if it is it may be at Cryptic's end, if no-one else seems to have it happening when you do, it may be your GPU struggling and one way to reduce this is to lower your settings.

greywynd

I have to deal with that from time to time myself. 39 other people trying to kill a dragon can sometimes leave me lag-locked.

tchefi

I have a fond memory about one good old 25p Tiamat, I think it was during mod12 maybe, together with 24 guildies/allymates, everyone on discord, where we experimented some 1 minute rubberbanding "rewind back" situations, and not everyone was rubberbanding at the same moment.
The most serious of us trying to plan their moves accordingly to the rubberbanding and voicing crazy strategy plans, some of us seeing players fighting a head that was already long dead on our screens (but very alive for some others), seing countless deaths by falling in the rifts or walking to far ("dude you jumped into the void" "what do you mean ? i'm currently fighting the red head ... oh nevermind i'm rubberbanding back to my death")

We were not able to put Tiamat down (even though we were routinely doing so usually), but it was a 15min hell of laughs.
Having fun together in any situation, that's how I love to play the game

greywynd

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XechCNr0iwg