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lag/rubberbanding still an issue
viox2k
Member Posts: 36 Arc User
the updates barely helped alot, power lag is still persistent, can we please get some updates on this ?
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When 5 players after a smooth CSA run gather to do ISA and complain about lag its highly likely that this is still heavily on game side, their server infrastructure or access.
It’s getting ridiculous because over a dozen peeps in my fleet were so annoyed past Sunday that they went offline.
The most annoying lag result seems to be missfire. You know you launch a grav well, get full CD on it but hey.. no grav well?! When getting to a point that half the FAW & CSV attacks don’t happen during a single run and that team-wide peeps begin to loose their patience and go away.
I don’t blame them.
Cryptic said they would tend to it. Fine, but when do we see the results?
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Please see this tracert from a few nights ago: http://perfectworld.vanillaforums.com/discussion/comment/12616331/#Comment_12616331
This has been a pretty consistent finding for the past week or more. EDIT: Just added another tracert from tonight to that thread.
Tonight, however, was particularly bad. I was being thrown all around in the Foundry today, to the point where some of the battles were nearly unplayable--and they were nowhere near the scale of some of the largest battles in the official missions. Huge lag on movement AND on clicking my powers.
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Posting tracerts and pings won't help honestly, because many times (while Cogent and Comcast are no angels...and they aren't always the network I am pathed through, usually after your "network upgrades") they come up clean. All pings less than 180, most less than 100. If it was just network then why, while I'm running a clean tracert, is it still counting minutes into SERVER NOT RESPONDING?
The most common effects are:
This usually occurs when:
- zoning (especially any kind of "hubs")
- timed events (i.e. Risa horga'hn hunt, Risa powerboard race)
- space combat
- any combat where there are either a large number of combatants (and I'm not even talking STFs, as I don't do STFs) or a lot of effects going off, both in space and on ground
- logging in
- logging out
- travelling in sector space
- Delta Quadrant (especially where the "sparkly skyboxes" are)
- Solanae Dyson Sphere
- Feature Episodes (especially Blood of Ancients, House petaQ, and Broken Circle)
...which pretty much sums up most of the game.And the effects get worse and more frequent every time there is new content added to the game. If you're asking about graphics issues due to some of the graphics-oriented faults above, I still had problems in space combat during Broken Circle even with turning my graphics all the way down. (I've done the troubleshooting gig before.)
Oh, and while I'm typing all this, I'm currently in the middle of Broken Circle, the first section of space combat. Why am I typing this during a mission? Because I SNR'd then DC'd zoning from the Krenim Research Lab into space, Login2_Timeout on first attempt to log back in, then SNR'd during the first wave of space combat, watching nothing happen 'til the Keystone Cops arrive, and chasing an immortal EMP Probe through the sky...then SNR'd again. It gets just a little frustrating...
EDITS:
Mission update: 2 of the 3 ships couldn't be rescued while proceeding to the gateway as I couldn't get to them in time, due to lag and rubberbanding. Barely saved the 3rd. Good thing the AIs in this mission are a little more helpful than the I.K.S. Gagh in House petaQ. (Yes, I despise the vumpu' lo'laHbe'.)
.
That's all well and good, it's great that you guys can provide detailed information for your issues, but you guys aren't the OP, your symptoms and causes could be completely different to his/hers, the OP was asked to clarify his/her issues so that we could trouble shoot it.
Just because you have one set of symptoms that you call lag doesn't mean it's the same as what the OP calls lag, there are many types of lag and if people won't clarify exactly what is happening to them, when it's happening to them, and does not follow basic trouble shooting like ping traces etc. then it's impossible to help them.
It's great that you can provide this information for yourself, but it doesn't really help the OP because he/she could be suffering from something completely different to you, until he/she clarifies we can't be sure.
Edit: you can actually see how different peoples issues can be in the two quotes above, they both have similar symptoms yet one is showing network issues just before the servers and the other isn't. They are two different issues but if they were like the Op and just said "it's lag fix it" we wouldn't know that, that's why when you're being helped you get asked to do things like ping traces and DXDiags etc, you need them to rule out a cause as much as prove a cause.
Also I've noticed a distinct UI lag while in the Delta quadrant missions.
For example:
I have "fire all beams weapons" bound to a side key on my keyboard (M1), and "Fire all torpedo's" to the key below it (M2).
In Beta Quadrant missions like Japori or Careya I can hit M2 and assuming the torps arent on cooldown they fire fine. Now if I do the same in a Delta Quadrant mission, such as Argala, I can be hitting the key until my finger bleeds but they refuse to fire reliably. However when I click on the UI button for "fire torpedo's" they then fire!
Its a tad frustrating when a torp spread can clear your path only to find you've sailed past the targets because you've been stabbing away at the keyboard lol
And, in a troubleshooting sense, the fact that we face similar end results with differing network traces could be an identifying factor on its own.
So rather than be the self-appointed forum police and, in a sense, try to squelch all but the OP's complaints (thereby making yourself appear as a dreaded "white knight"), how about let midnite or ask or trendy or smirk or whoever lends their attention to this thread ask the questions that need asking to actually help.
Your ship frequently rubberbands even when not in combat. Across many instances there is skill activation lag. I often find myself frantically clicking on a skill many time before it decides to work. In the aforementioned instanes, I have often wasted an entire 30 seconds cooldown on torp spread while I click "fire torpedoes" repeatedly because it is doing nothing. Boff powers also often simply go on cooldown when clicked without actually activating at all.
In the European morning hours it is not so bad, presumably because the server pop is at its lowest.
i can post tracert's all u want, it wont help, this is clearly a server side issue. There are enough tracerts out there, mine wont change anything. The Lag/Rubberband is always the same like ppl explained it already. There is not really a differtnece if u look up close.
Devs said they work on it and they updated several powers to decrease lag, but it didnt really help so i may ask the devs if they really know what they do... They reworked some of the skills wich have high performance usage... but the lag and rubberbanding effect (wich is showed in youtube videos) is still there everytime u do something in this game.
That was exactly my point.
I'm just saying let the guy give more details otherwise he can't be helped. It's like pulling into a garage and saying my engine keeps cutting out, it's the same as the other guy that came in here who's engine was cutting out. Then it turning out the first guys problem was a blocked carb and the second guys problem was he'd run out of petrol.
I wasn't saying don't post your stuff in here at all, I was just saying we need the OP to give a little more clarification to help us help him specifically.
That's a very poor attitude. If you won't give the details of your problem and won't carry out the basic trouble shooting tips then there's almost zero chance it will be fixed for you. We've already had two people with the same symptoms but completely different causes, if one of them had refused to give details and just said "it's the same as him" and then they issued a fix for the second guy, then the first guy would still be complaining because it's not fixed and it would be his own fault.
As I said in the quote, things like trace routes aren't done so they can prove it's your fault, they're just as much to prove that it's not your fault, a trace route with no issues is just as important to them as a trace route with issues and vice versa. By not carrying out the simplest of tasks you are shooting yourself in the foot, it's no wonder things don't get fixed when people won't even do the simplest thing to help them work out where the issue is.
The thing is, it did help quite a few people, which by default means the issue you and others experiencing lag still have is a different issue, they now have to look into why the rest of you are experiencing it and they need more information to do that, they can't just click their fingers and fix it they need data to trace where the problem is. It's not going to be an instant fix, it will be a long process with lots of small fixes and tweaks.
The. Game. Server.
Add that many...MANY...of us play other games as well, even other PWE games, and do NOT have the same issues on the same scale as when we play STO, it becomes quite academic what the true problem really is.
Even when, like mattjohnsonva stated above, players are running Teamspeak and there's no issue with it, or you can easily access these very forums and STO's website (Arc, of all things), or have no issues streaming music or surfing the 'net while leisurely travelling through sector space, demonstrating no 'net connectivity or traffic issues at all, STO is a nightmare.
And yet the Blame Game keeps getting played, from PWE, from Cryptic, from those players that are self-appointed Team Cryptic "white knight" forum trolls: Gettin' old, peeps...gettin' really old.
U are wrong, i have played other mmo's where those problems last few hours or lets say 1-2 Weeks (wod launch), then it got fixed. Actually there is not a single one mmo out there wich has such huge problems with lag and rubberbanding FACT. In the case of STO we are counting months right now. If the devs cant handle the lag because they dont know the issue or simply dont get the green light for new servers its not my fault or altitude, its theirs... Its just the same way we look at bugs... they fix one but oh, 3 others appear... they just cant handle it, but ofc its my fault.
If u watched them u always see the timeout on cryptics side, please stop complaining about traceroutes and helping me, help cryptic
pretty much this
You have either been very lucky or not played many MMO's to be able to say this. I can name off the top of my head at least half a dozen MMO's that have had far far worse problems than this one, one of which had a zone that nobody could enter without disconnecting for almost three years, another of which had so many rubber banding issues (caused by slow drawing scenery) that they had to reduce the speed of mounts to compensate, it never got fixed in 6yrs, another had a so called hub city that couldn't sustain more than fifty people without crashing for the whole lifespan of the game, so please don't try to tell me other games don't have these issues because compared to some we have it easy here.
I'm not saying there aren't issues, I'm not saying the issue isn't with the server (I'm fairly sure there is), I'm saying give them as much info as possible, even the most innocuous piece of data could be the key to finding the cause.
For example the whole traceroute thing; there may be a server hop that is corrupting the data somewhere, it may not show as a timeout or high ping but it may be a problem, if they receive fifty reports of SNR's and all the traceroutes show as gong through the same server hop (remember not everyones path to the server is the same) then they can investigate.
I'm not saying that's the issue, but it's one of the many possibilities and a good reason to be giving as much data as possible.
If that's a dig at me then you are way off, I am not white knighting anyone or anything, especially not cruptic, there are issues, I know there are issues, I'm fairly sure it's TRIBBLE coding on the servers, but for them to find the issue they need as much hard data as they can get, saying "my problems the same as everyone else I don't need to give them my data" is just foolish.
The worst part about boff powers going on cooldown without actually activating is that they most likely aren't on cooldown on the server, it's just the client that thinks they are. Recently I was messing around with stuff I (or anyone else) hardly use just for fun. Even though it was a torpedo with a 1 minute cooldown and 15km range (bio-neural), when I fired the torpedo when a net lag spike occured (visible via /netgraph 1) I'd get that 1 minute cooldown with no torpedo launch. After that occured, I could just simply remove the torpedo and put it back on, and the cooldown vanished (wasn't in combat) and I was able to fire it again right away. I also tested this when it actually fired, just to make sure it wasn't a bug. When you remove and equip the torpedo back on after a successful firing, the cooldown stays.
If Cryptic could fix this issue, at least net lag would be a lot more tolerable. Especially with 8 beams and other powers being activated (or failed attempts to activate) all the time.
So i serious doubt the issue is at our end. It is a badly coded, poor game engine with bargain basement hardware and servers not capable of handling the traffic and use that is required of it.
And I'll go ahead and add a tracert of mine here which is finding the same thing.
1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms
2 8 ms 9 ms 14 ms
3 8 ms 8 ms 17 ms
4 16 ms 11 ms 11 ms
5 37 ms 21 ms 14 ms be-33491-cr01.350ecermak.il.ibone.comcast.net
6 35 ms 37 ms 35 ms be-10617-cr02.denver.co.ibone.comcast.net
7 34 ms 34 ms 33 ms ae-12-0-pe01.910fifteenth.co.ibone.comcast.net
8 34 ms 35 ms 35 ms te0-0-0-0.rcr11.b006467-1.den01.atlas.cogentco.c
om [154.54.10.33]
9 34 ms 35 ms 34 ms te0-1-0-3.ccr21.den01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54
.83.29]
10 52 ms 52 ms 68 ms be2128.ccr21.mci01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25
.174]
11 36 ms 36 ms 35 ms be2156.ccr41.ord01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.6.
86]
12 43 ms 44 ms 46 ms be2351.ccr21.cle04.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.44
.86]
13 57 ms 57 ms 56 ms be2009.ccr21.alb02.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.25
.89]
14 60 ms 60 ms 59 ms be2299.ccr21.bos01.atlas.cogentco.com [154.54.43
.9]
15 60 ms 60 ms 59 ms te0-0-1-0.rcr11.b002133-1.bos01.atlas.cogentco.c
om [154.54.46.134]
16 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms 38.111.40.114
17 78 ms 67 ms 59 ms 198.49.243.253
18 * * * Request timed out.
19 59 ms 59 ms 59 ms patchserverrebirth.crypticstudios.com [208.95.18
5.41]
This is incidentally why tracerts do help people. Though lag is a broad problem with many different potential inputs the recent problems (which go well beyond sub-optimal power coding) with massive, unplayable lag seem to be due some technical problem on cryptic's end that they should hopefully be able to pin down soon so long as we provide them with real information, not just pithy attitudes.
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The only consistent pattern I've noticed is temporal, IE. later in the day (US) the game becomes progressively less playable (ie. during peak hours). Sector space, solo missions, underpopulated hubs, once things get bad they get bad. Where you are doesn't seem to matter. You lag out. And to be clear this has only been a problem over the last week or two.
It seems like something pretty basic to running the game online is breaking due to the load.
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The lag/rubberbanding/SNR/DC/Login2_Timeout/etc. doesn't seem to be consistently tied to the high pings on tracerts on any hop(s) on the route. I've had high lag periods where one tracert showed horrendous pings and a tracert moments later (with same amount of lag) showed clean.
I'm of the firm belief that, while the network issues contribute to the problem, they are not the problem.
Here's my tracert just now...and I can't get the launcher to finish loading up to login to save my TRIBBLE$. While I have 2 "* * * Request timed out" lines, this is the same clean path I've had for weeks now (albeit different named patchservers..."patch", "patch2", "rebirth", & "xbox"), with varying degrees of playability (on some occasions quite good playability...as long as no one else is on it seems).
My TS gut's telling me it's not (just) the network. It's not (just) the graphics. It's not (just) the commands. It's not (just) the new content. It is, however, highly attributable to server player load. Too many doing too much at the same location(s) at the same time. STFs, WW and Risa events, FEs, hubs, Delta Quadrant, Red Alerts...it's population that's more of a constant than anything else.
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Edit: This typically has no effect on the actual connection to the destination.
All recent tracerts seem to be timing out at the same location (stop on by the support forums too). And do focus on the word "recent" since it hasn't been a typical feature of the tracert diagnostic to do this. This correlates to the massive uptick in lag over the past week or so during peak hours. 1+1=2. Its not a absolutely certain, proven beyond all doubt, causal relationship, but that's not a workable standard to apply to any topic that you don't want to shut down just for the pedantic hell of it.
Its safe then to accept what we see in tracert results as a reasonable, workable, guess that something at cryptic isn't working properly and that's having a recognizable affect on the population (though you could have come to that conclusion without a network diagnostic tool.)
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Just to clarify my post, I meant the hop that times out cannot be taken seriously, not the entire tracert. That clarification was my fault in my original post.
But typically if every other hop after that hop performs better and without issue, than it's most likely just a router that doesn't feel like responding. Take me for example, STO never lagged at all, not in the slightest before the anniversary patch, and my tracerts always had a hop that timed out. Now, especially today, with the massive lag spikes, the tracert remains more or less the same as before the lag spikes became a thing.
I agree though that the issue is definitely at Cryptic's end, as today has been mostly unplayable for me during peak hours. I suspect that later on during off-peak hours it'll be mostly lag free (except the occasional lag spike/rubberband here and there.)
Since cryptic has a horrible track record for keeping solved problems in the patch version we got back to what it was month ago with the last patch. Now - as always - we can only hope they find all the fixes they originally put in that now where removed last patch by being in another build or whatever and put them back in.
Out of all strange sh*t cryptic does this is actually what makes me think of them as being stupid as f**** the most tbh. They rarely fix stuff but when they do they always find a way to remove the fix at a later time and then take additional weeks to put it back. It would be hillarious if it werent so sad^^
This particular incarnation of lag started either with the 10.5 update or the following patch.
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