If your like me your frustrated with the level of lag in STO. You may have even wondered whats causing it. The blame being pointed at users hardware or ISP.
The truth is that its intentional and has nothing to do with PWE or user hardware.
STO is hosted through Cogent Communications, who are embroiled in a dispute with Verizon, over you guessed it money. Verizon perceives that its owed money from Cogent, and Cogent preceives that it doesnt owe Verizon anything.
So what does this dispute mean for us players? It turns out that Verizon is intentionally slowing traffic from Cogent, which just happens to be the company hosting STO. This intentional slow down is whats causing the lag that we experience in STO.
We STO players need to know that until this dispute is resolved, or PWE finds themselves a new IPS, that lag in STO will not be going away.
Heres a great article that explains this problem in detail.
Also google search Cogent Verizon dispute.
http://johnsaucier.blogspot.com/2013/08/corporate-greed-how-verizon-is-sticking.html
Comments
there are TWO separate lag issues that people are conflating.
1. the Powertray UI lag. minor issue. Started with the release of the new power tray/power icons. Powers are activating correctly but the UI for the power tray is sluggish in updating. This got improved by one of the patches so it's not as bad as before, but it still exists.
2. Network/server lag. serious issue. started with the anniversary and got worse with the release of the command ships. could be the omega minigames and the inspiration mechanic taking up to much server clocks. symptoms: rubberbanding, stuttering, abilities not activating, inability to turn/move ship/toon, getting destroyed then seeing your death animation, etc...
On a slightly different note, the linked blog is interesting, the digging the guy did and the info he came up with is useful.
However when he says "if companies need more bandwidth, just add more, no problem!" and "don't ever let anyone tell you that it costs to transmit data. It doesn't" he is showing a woeful ignorance of the physical/plant/maintenance costs of running a data service.
Oh well, still good info; but hard to see what Cryptic/PWE can do about it other than to switch providers. An MMO sharing providers with the main Netflix/Youtube service provider never seemed like a good idea to me anyway.
It's a blog full of opinions not a true news report.
Sadly if you check the /netgraph 1 - you see that even when you ate lagging hard the ping to cryptic servers is okay like sonewhere between 150 and 250.
That means its actually and truly cryptics fault because its the servers not coping with the needed load and NOT a connection issue. That may increase the problem on top of everything else but its not the main part.