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Cryptic Your Servers Suck
gholendhor
Member Posts: 447 Arc User
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gholendhor
Member Posts: 447 Arc User
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The problem is BETWEEN you and cryptic... not Cryptic.
Grow up.
@DevolvedOne
No its not. Ping is fine as shown by /netgraph 1
Its plain simple server lag at cryptics.
Greywolf Taskforce - Officer of the Fleet
Either that or Verizon and Cogentco are still having fights over the price of cheese in Norway
"You don't have to do something again and again and again repetitive that doesn't have much challange, that's just a general good gameplay thing."
there is a load of arrogance for you. unless your a server technician running on behalf of cryptic to fix their problems to the server in boston, your opinion about it just being the client end or in between holds as much weight as a garbage truck doing a mexican dance.
they have had problems on their end in the past.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
Yet many of us can play the game just fine without even the slightest bit of lag.
Of all the online games I play, STO and Guild Wars 2 are the most stable and lag free. Sure, there are times in either game where you get spikes or the occasional hiccup, but at least 90% of the time it's smooth as can be.
The OP like many others are just assuming it is Cryptic's fault and that everything on their end is just perfect. The last time I was getting severe lag in STO, I checked my connection and it turned out I had an issue. I had my ISP resolve it and no issues since.
It's not always the game causing the problem.
I noticed that one as well on my end.
Cure n Kith space sometimes ISA.
The internet may be a tricky system and its surely a long road from Germany to Cryptic but why I lag on those maps much more often than on others remains hidden from me as well as all the IPs from here to there.
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the point is simple, server end problems can happen, they usually last between an hour or two at most, remember a few weeks ago when the team from Neverwinter updated us instead of smirk about a server problem and it kept getting delayed? nothing is perfect.
but i never wrote anywhere either it is only confined to the servers, to continue this is to make assumptions i never stated.
Been around since Dec 2010 on STO and bought LTS in Apr 2013 for STO.
I do indeed remember that.
While I normally have little to no problem with the connection, I'll never argue that the communication from the Star Trek Online staff to the players doesn't suck big time. It was pathetic that we had to get all our updates from the Neverwinter Team. :mad:
PWE pays the IP server company for maintening the server farm.
Cryptic and the other studios upload their games on these servers.
To say that the server are reason for most of the problems is only half of the truth.
Actually from the point of many players the servers just run fine while for a large bunch of people there seem to be problems.
The issue is (mostly) the connection between player and server. Depending on location of the player different kinds connections paths are used... some with issues... some with no issues at all.
Its clearly not the players fault that they can not connect.
Cryptic/PWE on the other side would have several options how to deal with such problems but it looks like they simply dont care.
They could try to get a new server host which is routing their data through network paths that dont have such connection problems.
They also could simply stay with their current host but release all neccessary information how players are able to connect to the server using the existing proxy servers.
I had the these connection problems aswell which prevented me and nearly half of my fleet to play the game in the evening hours until I found specific proxy settings which allowed to me to play again.
The standard proxy settings of the launcher are a joke actually but there are working proxies which can be used to connect to the server.
I meanwhile even completely bypass the STO launcher since from time to time this piece of junk does not even work due to connection problems with the patch server.
Ive build myself a new launcher and distributed it to my fleet members... since that all can play again.
What cryptic/pwe sux at is releasing information to the players how to solve connection problems... they completely ignore the problem and not even bother to offer a solution.
The lag issues on maps like ISA... well thats something totally different.
Thats clearly server/game related.
All other maps work fine... but ISA all of a sudden started to act strange a few weeks ago.
This can not be explained by connection issues.
This would be the truth. Right now as I login in the UK. Everything is smooth. Soon as our American friends logon, boom. It becomes rubber bands a plenty.
Resorting to ad hominem argument only points out you don't have anything to support your assertion. Noting that Cryptic has had problems on their side in the past doesn't in any way prove that all issues are their problem, so let's not base our conclusions on faulty logic, eh?
So let grandpa, who manages 33 servers, has written millions of lines of code, and done more than his share of network issue analysis since 1986, help you out here. I've been writing transaction systems supporting thousands of simultaneous users for the last 18 years. (I'm a top-ranked computer professional for a Fortune 400, so impeach those credentials, why don't you?) I'm not employed by Cryptic, but I know a lot about how this works because I've written a lot of code like this, and studied for countless hours on how one designs software of this nature.
As other correspondents have hinted, no one has a direct connection to the servers. Your packets route through your ISP, into their network provider, and probably into their network provider's provider. At each stage there's an opportunity for that level of the network to fail to carry all the traffic. In some cases, the failure happens at the join between two very large pipelines. The best example of that scenario was back in the 1990's when Sprint (somehow) managed to marry MAE East and MAE West, a pair of OC-3 trunks carrying the merged traffic of their halves of the USA, with a T-1 line. That was a recipe for massive packet loss, and it was horrible.
As more and more packets verge on a smaller and smaller number of carriers (which, I hasten to point out, try to have more robust hardware and wider pipes), the possibility for packet loss increases. There are about 16 hops between my router and us1.proxy.crypticstudios.com. Any one of them could have intermittent problems at any time.
So, if you're thinking, "the traffic has to get there," let me assure you that it doesn't. The general practice for most MMOs is to use a mix of TCP ("guaranteed" delivery) and UDP (probably gets delivered, maybe not). The servers send redundant UDP packets because UDP is cheap as protocols go, given that you're not guaranteed that all the packets will arrive, and those that arrive won't always do so in a guaranteed order. The games use TCP for content that absolutely has to arrive in a given order (like you shooting at an enemy in a space battle), and UDP for general updates (like that ship flying past you in sector space or toons walking past you in ESD). [Note that I put "guaranteed" in quotes earlier. TCP is guaranteed in the sense that the packets will eventually get there in the correct order--provided something doesn't break along the fiber or copper connecting here to there in the meantime.]
The game server-side logic has to prioritize what to send to the game client all the time because each data stream can only carry so much information per unit time, and the number of packets in each data stream is fixed as well. Sometimes that means choppier motion for you and the objects around you because the client has the job of predicting your motion and the motion of objects around you until it can confirm the location with the server. You're on a time-share basis with the server, right? The client can't know the position of everything in the galaxy, but that's okay because it only has to render those things you can currently see. Generally the more players there are in a sector or STF instance, the lower your confirmation rate is with the server because one can only split a second into so many useful parts. (It gets worse when everyone spams torpedoes at the same time.) When you see rubber-banding it's because the predictions made by the client don't match those on the server--and when there's a disagreement, the server always wins.
You've seen this in action already during disconnects. Your ship fired a beam or torpedo at an enemy, when suddenly everything stops moving around--but your ship keeps firing torpedoes or beaming. The client runs the animations when it sends the packets advertising the action to the server, and continues doing so until it gets an acknowledgement from the server. If the server "ack" never comes back, the client just keeps replaying the action, because the assumption is that the response will arrive within the next couple of time cycles and no one will notice the difference. In a full-on disconnect, you do notice the difference--but you've just learned a little bit about what goes on under the hood.
Another thing happens that non-programmers might not know which is critical to this discussion: a given computer only has 65,536 socket ports available, and not all of them can be used because they're dedicated to other purposes. (The first 1,024 are for low-level system protocols, and others, such as 3389 are for Remote Desktop, while others are for SQL Server and other services.) Even when TCP/IP isn't used for internal inter-process communications, there are a limited number of server handles available for the server-side processes to use because computers have finite resources.) Socket port numbers have a characteristic recycle time in the socket stack, which means that after a disconnect that particular port number isn't available again immediately. That means somebody or something waits until the port's available again so that more work can be done.
I assume that the client has one or two dedicated TCP connections and listens for a raft of UDP packets which it must sort out. The incoming packets to the server would generally be passed on to a thread pool of workers to process the incoming business, update in-memory structures and add data to database update queues, and formulate a response packet (or packets). Thread pools are also finite, which means incoming business has to wait for an available thread from the pool. The more players there are, the longer the wait. Thread pools can't expand indefinitely, because memory is a fixed resource, as are CPU cores. This happens even with multiple servers in play--I'm sure the architecture in place scales pretty well, but during usage spikes there will be slowdowns. (Comparing STO--or any MMO--to a multi-player First-Person Shooter won't get you anywhere because the dynamics of the underlying game are different, so the network architecture is different. FPS twitchers are supposed to have close to real-time network performance, while MMORPGs aren't.)
On the client (player) side, I have to point out that if you're using a $75 consumer-level router bought at StapleMax Depot, and you're not doing a full power-cycle on it every two weeks, you're asking for trouble. They'll do okay surfing the news or watching a YouTube stream, but when the packets start flying hard and heavy during an MMO session they'll start to falter ("fail under stress"). I was having network issues at my home two weeks ago and eventually traced it to unreliable voltage from a failing surge protector. That's the way it works. Sometimes the problem is closer to you than you think.
There are lots of potential points of failure in an MMO setup, and not everything that happens is the fault of the player or the game provider. I understand that looking for someone to blame is the oldest human hobby, but I think it helps when one knows what's going on prior to pointing a finger.
My personal contention is that CogentCo has an issue with one of its switches, and CogentCo denies that (I've had e-mail exchanges with them). That doesn't surprise me because the first thing the legal department tells you is "never admit fault." Their claim is that the apparent 100% packet loss in Boston is due to the device deliberately not responding to an ICMP ping (as a means of avoiding a DDOS attack), and that the TCP and UDP traffic are going through just fine. Given that I don't have a breakdown of the traffic that Cryptic expects to see on the socket, I can't write code to test that assertion, so I'm left with only my suspicions, although the explanation is certainly reasonable. At the same time I have to wonder why only one of six nodes up there is blocking ICMP--but that's idle curiosity, not an accusation.
For someone who has checked her entire internet connection last Friday by a certified technician from her ISP : There is nothing wrong with the connection between me and Cryptic. Yet I do lag around, rubberbands, experiences temporal fluxes and spacial anomalies throughout the game.
Mentioned technician even took the liberty to check out their installation on the street to see if any problems may occur there and returned with a healthy bill of it.
So, only conclusion I can come up with is : It's at Cryptics end that the problems are, especially when it's not one person that suffers from this lag, but many of us do.
Damn !
The only thing I have noticed from a players point of view is this
we have 14 people on team speak doing 3 group acvtivitys STf/ STF ground STF
the 2 space stfs complain of rubberbanding /choppy screens but two players say everything is fine. Now we lose 4 players at the same time in 2 different STFs in space
The 3 of us doing a BHE experience no problems at all
From listing to my buddies on TS it seems space is more vunerable to disconnects and rubberbanding
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
This is pretty funny. So you believe your certified technician (low paygrade entry level help desk working off a prompt system) from your ISP has no motivation to tell you their system is absolutely fine and its all someone's else fault?
I'm not saying there aren't issues, but its pretty gullible.
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That ensures that your connection is stable, but is it fast enough?
When I was having problems, my connection was stable but my upload speed was far lower then what it was supposed to be. During normal web browsing and downloading it was perfectly fine, but trying to game online was a lag fest. It turned out that it was a fault in my Cable Modem and once I swapped it out all was well.
The point is, I also had a tech look at my connection and verify that it was fine, the problem was still on my end. You could have faulty equipment, a virus/spyware, it could be any number of other things.
That low grade help desk dude, according to you, is an highly skilled person, knowing what qualifications you need before you can even work for that ISP. Below a Cisco 4 certificate, don't bother to apply with this ISP. And if he hadn't any motivation at all to tell that their systems aren't fine, I don't think he would have spend 5 hours around here, replacing what might have caused any issues, from cables to routers, from the socket to the end point.
Don't bother to think that you even know what's going on in someone's place. You ain't god and can't see what's happening on the other side of the planet in someone's private surroundings.
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- ESD : only sometimes; the prob is the "moonwalk attack pattern skill" <- no need to explain
- federation fleet alert: each time i have lag, this is when we fight gorn or borg
- ISA 8/10 times
- KVA 5/10 times
- CCA mostly when there are the rifts (but my 3d card is responsible of video glitches)
STF or ground missions (defera) with Borg are my main source of lag
i have a 200 mega fiber connection and no problems. Before DR, i was able to upload and dowload a lot of files and playing STO at the same time.
"You are the first and only person" I might add that claims to be lag free. As may people here I have complained bitterly at times about the many problems in the game from a UI latency of 2-6 seconds to the many lag rubber banding issues. I spent hours with my ISP Engineers trying to trace down the problem. The answer was Cogent and Cryptic and the hardware nodes. Cryptic has admitted to having issues with the servers both on US and European soil. Frankly, I have been playing this game for five years I have never seen it run completely right.
I was hoping that once the Anniversary event was over things would change and go back to being manageable. So much for that.. don't believe me go look in the GAME PLAY BUG REPORT section.
To the OP, could it be a problem with your ISP?
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I'm going to assume that you're not citing the conspiracy theory that hundreds of players who didn't even all know each other all switched ISPs on the day of the year-5 patch in order to get connections that lag with STO but not with anything else.
I mean, that would be crazy if you really believed that, right?
Instead, I've noticed that the problem is when people use lots of abilities at once in an instance, like in ISA when the leader says "go" and then everyone turns on everything they need for their alpha strikes.
In other words, people who know how to play the game well seem to experience more problems. People who are like "Maybe I'll use a boff ability? Nah, I'll save them for when I really need them" probably experience almost no lag so this whole discussion is foreign to them.