Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
Please give examples of maps/missions/powers that make the lag worse. Give dates, times (plus timezone!), errors, warnings etc that you get.
Did others in your team have everything freeze up at the same time?
If so or if not, are you all in the same country? (remember not give any personal information out!).
Have you given the results of a ping test.
The more information you can give, the more the engineers have to use to try and diagnose the problems to then work out a fix.
Please don't make it sound as if every single post on these forums is a complaint as that clearly isn't the case. There are a great lot of us who have posted detailed information - including Cryptic error tracking numbers and such - to the appropriate bug forums here. Most all of them go unanswered, or are said to be "fixed" but aren't, or get the general "we're working on it".
Personally, I don't see the harm in asking for an update on how these issues are progressing. Something besides "we're working on it" or "MMOs are complex" and the like would be nice.
Thank you. I've helped with all of that at various times. That post almost seems as if it paints the forum as nothing but unhelpful, bratty whiners who have never done a bug report in our lives. Just like all the trash talk towards the forum that I pointed out on Reddit. Even if that IS the "official perception," I don't think it really reflects the truth.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
Please give examples of maps/missions/powers that make the lag worse. Give dates, times (plus timezone!), errors, warnings etc that you get.
Did others in your team have everything freeze up at the same time?
If so or if not, are you all in the same country? (remember not give any personal information out!).
Have you given the results of a ping test.
The more information you can give, the more the engineers have to use to try and diagnose the problems to then work out a fix.
Please don't make it sound as if every single post on these forums is a complaint as that clearly isn't the case. There are a great lot of us who have posted detailed information - including Cryptic error tracking numbers and such - to the appropriate bug forums here. Most all of them go unanswered, or are said to be "fixed" but aren't, or get the general "we're working on it".
Personally, I don't see the harm in asking for an update on how these issues are progressing. Something besides "we're working on it" or "MMOs are complex" and the like would be nice.
The problem is, sometimes there just isn't anything to feed back on even if they are working hard on it, do you really want them posting on here "hey guys I'm still working on it, so far this week I've done 56 hours of staring really hard at the code to see if I can find an error, but i'll be fooked if ican find it!"
Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
Please give examples of maps/missions/powers that make the lag worse. Give dates, times (plus timezone!), errors, warnings etc that you get.
Did others in your team have everything freeze up at the same time?
If so or if not, are you all in the same country? (remember not give any personal information out!).
Have you given the results of a ping test.
The more information you can give, the more the engineers have to use to try and diagnose the problems to then work out a fix.
Please don't make it sound as if every single post on these forums is a complaint as that clearly isn't the case. There are a great lot of us who have posted detailed information - including Cryptic error tracking numbers and such - to the appropriate bug forums here. Most all of them go unanswered, or are said to be "fixed" but aren't, or get the general "we're working on it".
Personally, I don't see the harm in asking for an update on how these issues are progressing. Something besides "we're working on it" or "MMOs are complex" and the like would be nice.
The problem is, sometimes there just isn't anything to feed back on even if they are working hard on it, do you really want them posting on here "hey guys I'm still working on it, so far this week I've done 56 hours of staring really hard at the code to see if I can find an error, but i'll be fooked if ican find it!"
Why not? It's better than nothing.
Why bother? It just says nothing written in a more interesting way, so no it's not really better than nothing.
Information has been posted on these forums as well as Reddit, Twitter and the like before.
They are working on these things continuously.
Not everyone has problems. I for one, experience this only on the very odd occasions and I think most of that is due to the huge amount of apps I have open when I play!
Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
Please give examples of maps/missions/powers that make the lag worse. Give dates, times (plus timezone!), errors, warnings etc that you get.
Did others in your team have everything freeze up at the same time?
If so or if not, are you all in the same country? (remember not give any personal information out!).
Have you given the results of a ping test.
The more information you can give, the more the engineers have to use to try and diagnose the problems to then work out a fix.
I also saw someone mention about the Dev Tracker. The new one is in production - we will have it here as soon as we can.
I'm with the Mod on this. I'm in the UK, I suffer very little rubberbanding and UI lag and pinging at 118ms. I do get FPS stalling, which is down to my laptop's limited GPU (768Mb), but that's ok most times and only affects busy maps, especially Borg Disc (The Voth ship explosion specifically), which is why when some blames FPS on the server I laugh.
On my trace route, I don't see Cogento anywhere, so maybe Cryptic needs to stick the boot in there??
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
Information has been posted on these forums as well as Reddit, Twitter and the like before.
They are working on these things continuously.
Maybe, but they need to hurry up. After MONTHS some people are going to give up sooner rather than later. But yeah, sure they are working on it.. (zzzz). Im pretty sure that is not what they are working on it.. (but the next shiny group of ships, yeah i have powers i know what are they working on).
And btw... what info has been posted in the forums???? people is complaining precisely because there is NO info about the status of the lag problem.
Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
So you are saying we can't complain anymore? I read that as we are a bunch of ungrateful, unhelpful adolescents. That is the purpose of the forums. The definition of forum is "a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged." So get over it. we are expressing our views in this thread. Currently our views aren't positive. But his is your chance to calm the natives so to speak give us some quantifiable details IN THE OFFICIAL FORUMS. Don't make us search the internet for some cryptic quote from a DEV. (see what I did there?)
I submit bug reports and issues in game. I get no responses there other than the automated mail. I for one would be quite happy with some details behind "we're working on it" Ie something like this.
"We've identified that the powers X Y and Z are causing 3x the server load than similar powers due to <insert reason>. We are current revamping the process within the server that executes these server requests and we anticipate that we will have this fix done in the next two weeks. We are also going to be examining that graphics display for powers, A B and C as we THINK this is causing client side lag etc etc etc."
Just telling us that you are working on it in this day and age where more and more of your players are knowledgeable in the software development process doesn't work.
Give us good answers and stop being condescending to your player base.
Nah, midniteshadow7 have no idea at all. Lol, the forum is filled with tracers everywhere but absolutely no info about the problem from cryptic's part. Just dont read what he writes.. he is obviously defending cryptic for some weird reason..
Information has been posted on these forums as well as Reddit, Twitter and the like before.
They are working on these things continuously.
Not everyone has problems. I for one, experience this only on the very odd occasions and I think most of that is due to the huge amount of apps I have open when I play!
Scanning this thread I see very little information that the Devs can use to help identify issues; I have only seen complaints.
Well if this doesn't stink of self-righteous ignorance I don't know what does.
As plenty enough folks have said already, there are plenty of us reporting and trying to get the issues in this game dealt with, and that goes for everything. This lag issue has been going on for ages, it isn't unreasonable that we ask for an official thought on the matter if nothing else especially with how prevalent it is. If you can't find the information that others have been posting not just about the lag but other issues as well, might I recommend you step down as a mod seeing as you apparently don't possess the required skill set?
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
"You don't want to patrol!? You don't want to escort!? You don't want to defend the Federation's Starbases!? Then why are you flying my Starships!? If you were a Klingon you'd be killed on the spot, but lucky for you.....you WERE in Starfleet. Let's see how New Zealand Penal Colony suits you." Adm A. Necheyev.
Since some of us don't want to be pressured into signing up for social media (example: Book of Losing Face ), this is definitely helpful.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Well if this doesn't stink of self-righteous ignorance I don't know what does...
If you can't find the information that others have been posting not just about the lag but other issues as well, might I recommend you step down as a mod seeing as you apparently don't possess the required skill set?
Exactly. Or are we now supposed to violate forum rules by spamming every thread with the exact same material and post?
I run an $1900 desktop monster, have an insane internet connection and this is the only game I have any issues with at all. I feel safe in saying it's them not me.
Thank you, this will be greatly appreciated as you no doubt gather having read this thread.
May I persist and suggest that we receive regular updates, I personally would suggest fortnightly. Don't be afraid to put on the updates that you tried X and Y and it didn't work, at least it's something to cross off the list. Then instead of self entitled players like me shouting and generally making a fuss, I'll be right behind you guys as we discuss this at fleet level and on the forum, your company's forum.
This is a good idea, to just hold to a schedule and update on that day even if the update is that some particular attempt to fix things didn't work out as planned. I second this motion.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-) Proudly F2P.Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
There are a lot of working elements that are being changed with the powers affecting lag. Yesterday I went down to Cryptic and spoke with a couple people who really were able to put it into a better perspective for me.
The team is changing a lot of the way that these powers function with regards to the server. The major issue is their interaction with said server. Don't worry, your powers aren't going to be changing in a way that you can see (your pew pew and deeps deeps will largely go unaffected as I understand).
The team has a combined effort of different things. For one, they're fixing the powers as they can find them. There's been a large list of powers that they've already worked on to reduce the stress put on any server-side processes. The other effort is that they've included monitoring processes on live to get a better analysis of how different powers are hitting the server.
Let's say that mathematically, you have an interaction that creates a fair amount of server load. You get a few hundred people on Tribble using this at at time, and you might not see anything really substantial as far as server load goes.
But what if that same thing interacts with thousands of people on Holodeck? What if it's exponentially heavier on the server rather than simply additive? What if that power interacts with other powers creating an exponential recursive effect? It hits hard. But the team is working on it. Hell, they're bloody well tearing into the problem.
For a while, I have been putting out company-wide reports. I talk about this being an issue and in turn, Cryptic has been combing through the power interactions to change them so that you, the players, don't have this problem any more. They've showed me that they're working on it.
First thing: Game Crashes
The team has been working on a graphics related crash that's been dropping people. This is believed to be the major cause of crashes and it seems to be usually happening at or around startup. We have a test going through that will have potentially a major fix for it, but that's still in testing. We're getting more testing data on that.
We're still analyzing crash data to look in terms of any specific area related to it. There isn't a specific classification data pool for it (brand of graphics card, O/S, ram size, etc.) so the cause is still a little nebulous. But we're still narrowing in.
Second thing: Lag (Server Stalls)
There's a specific distinction between server stalling and client stalling. We have our data to tell us that there's data stalls happening on the server, so that's where a lot of our attention has been. We've been spending a lot of time doing analysis on the combat (powers) systems. This meant a lot of retooling of previously expensive computational designs. We're constantly retooling these powers so that they work better in terms of overall server load. This has been a case/case/case basis.
For some people, they see these in more intensive maps related to power usage. That being said, I'm happy with some of the changes I've been seeing. We're seeing another big batch of changes come into testing right now that we'll be able to analyze.
Thank you, this will be greatly appreciated as you no doubt gather having read this thread.
May I persist and suggest that we receive regular updates, I personally would suggest fortnightly. Don't be afraid to put on the updates that you tried X and Y and it didn't work, at least it's something to cross off the list. Then instead of self entitled players like me shouting and generally making a fuss, I'll be right behind you guys as we discuss this at fleet level and on the forum, your company's forum.
Without giving you a flat out yes, my full intention is to try and be more transparent. I'm making more regular trips to Cryptic now (I work at PWE) in order to get a better understanding so that I can communicate with ya'll. I don't want to say a regular X amount of days, but my full intention is to keep you informed as I learn more. Always.
It's actually very refreshing to at least get some form of update on the matter.
I for one appreciate the time taken to post this, even though I still feel it's an issue that is not going to go away anytime soon. I'm just not sure it's high enough up on the priority list.
Without giving you a flat out yes, my full intention is to try and be more transparent. I'm making more regular trips to Cryptic now (I work at PWE) in order to get a better understanding so that I can communicate with ya'll. I don't want to say a regular X amount of days, but my full intention is to keep you informed as I learn more. Always.
Do you think a Twitch Community Chat once a week could be a thing? Kinda like your impromptu twitch announcement. Occasionally drag down a Victim-of-the-week from Cryptic to join you. Or reddit if twitch is too chaotic.
To piggyback on Trendy's statements, I'd like to let everyone know that we're already discussing the option of doing a "Performance Review" Tribble event, once we have a number of our more prominent powers tweaks in place. Basically inviting players to come play a few specific queues, with Devs playing along, to see if we can see any measurable improvements with power performance.
So, keep your eyes open if you'd like to be a part of such an event. We'll make an official announcement, once everything's situated.
Jeremy Randall
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
To piggyback on Trendy's statements, I'd like to let everyone know that we're already discussing the option of doing a "Performance Review" Tribble event, once we have a number of our more prominent powers tweaks in place. Basically inviting players to come play a few specific queues, with Devs playing along, to see if we can see any measurable improvements with power performance.
So, keep your eyes open if you'd like to be a part of such an event. We'll make an official announcement, once everything's situated.
Now this^^ is some of the best news I've seen in a while, count me if you need help.
To piggyback on Trendy's statements, I'd like to let everyone know that we're already discussing the option of doing a "Performance Review" Tribble event, once we have a number of our more prominent powers tweaks in place. Basically inviting players to come play a few specific queues, with Devs playing along, to see if we can see any measurable improvements with power performance.
So, keep your eyes open if you'd like to be a part of such an event. We'll make an official announcement, once everything's situated.
Now this^^ is some of the best news I've seen in a while, count me if you need help.
Same here, that'd be fun
Ten soldiers wisely led will beat a hundred without a head. - Euripides
I no longer do any Bug Hunting work for Cryptic. I may resume if a serious attempt to fix the game is made.
To piggyback on Trendy's statements, I'd like to let everyone know that we're already discussing the option of doing a "Performance Review" Tribble event, once we have a number of our more prominent powers tweaks in place. Basically inviting players to come play a few specific queues, with Devs playing along, to see if we can see any measurable improvements with power performance.
So, keep your eyes open if you'd like to be a part of such an event. We'll make an official announcement, once everything's situated.
Borticus I would very much love that to be a thing... With a LOT of People on at one time!
PLEASE if this happens give us 2-3 days notice... So that we can get the word out to as many fleet mates as possible and allow them to get tribble patched up. For many of them who are not on tribble that often, it could take a while.
Comments
Thank you. I've helped with all of that at various times. That post almost seems as if it paints the forum as nothing but unhelpful, bratty whiners who have never done a bug report in our lives. Just like all the trash talk towards the forum that I pointed out on Reddit. Even if that IS the "official perception," I don't think it really reflects the truth.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Yeah......
"He shall be my finest warrior, this generic man who was forced upon me.
Like a badass I shall make him look, and in the furnace of war I shall forge him.
he shall be of iron will and steely sinew.
In great armour I shall clad him and with the mightiest weapons he shall be armed.
He will be untouched by plague or disease; no sickness shall blight him.
He shall have such tactics, strategies and machines that no foe will best him in battle.
He is my answer to cryptic logic, he is the Defender of my Romulan Crew.
He is Tovan Khev... and he shall know no fear."
The problem is, sometimes there just isn't anything to feed back on even if they are working hard on it, do you really want them posting on here "hey guys I'm still working on it, so far this week I've done 56 hours of staring really hard at the code to see if I can find an error, but i'll be fooked if ican find it!"
Why bother? It just says nothing written in a more interesting way, so no it's not really better than nothing.
I value honesty and candour over silence.
I'm with the Mod on this. I'm in the UK, I suffer very little rubberbanding and UI lag and pinging at 118ms. I do get FPS stalling, which is down to my laptop's limited GPU (768Mb), but that's ok most times and only affects busy maps, especially Borg Disc (The Voth ship explosion specifically), which is why when some blames FPS on the server I laugh.
On my trace route, I don't see Cogento anywhere, so maybe Cryptic needs to stick the boot in there??
Maybe, but they need to hurry up. After MONTHS some people are going to give up sooner rather than later. But yeah, sure they are working on it.. (zzzz). Im pretty sure that is not what they are working on it.. (but the next shiny group of ships, yeah i have powers i know what are they working on).
And btw... what info has been posted in the forums???? people is complaining precisely because there is NO info about the status of the lag problem.
So you are saying we can't complain anymore? I read that as we are a bunch of ungrateful, unhelpful adolescents. That is the purpose of the forums. The definition of forum is "a place, meeting, or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged." So get over it. we are expressing our views in this thread. Currently our views aren't positive. But his is your chance to calm the natives so to speak give us some quantifiable details IN THE OFFICIAL FORUMS. Don't make us search the internet for some cryptic quote from a DEV. (see what I did there?)
I submit bug reports and issues in game. I get no responses there other than the automated mail. I for one would be quite happy with some details behind "we're working on it" Ie something like this.
"We've identified that the powers X Y and Z are causing 3x the server load than similar powers due to <insert reason>. We are current revamping the process within the server that executes these server requests and we anticipate that we will have this fix done in the next two weeks. We are also going to be examining that graphics display for powers, A B and C as we THINK this is causing client side lag etc etc etc."
Just telling us that you are working on it in this day and age where more and more of your players are knowledgeable in the software development process doesn't work.
Give us good answers and stop being condescending to your player base.
Well if this doesn't stink of self-righteous ignorance I don't know what does.
As plenty enough folks have said already, there are plenty of us reporting and trying to get the issues in this game dealt with, and that goes for everything. This lag issue has been going on for ages, it isn't unreasonable that we ask for an official thought on the matter if nothing else especially with how prevalent it is. If you can't find the information that others have been posting not just about the lag but other issues as well, might I recommend you step down as a mod seeing as you apparently don't possess the required skill set?
also:
lol
'SuperTrendy'!! lol
Trendy, much appreciated.
Since some of us don't want to be pressured into signing up for social media (example: Book of Losing Face
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Thank you Trendy
Thanks!
Exactly. Or are we now supposed to violate forum rules by spamming every thread with the exact same material and post?
I run an $1900 desktop monster, have an insane internet connection and this is the only game I have any issues with at all. I feel safe in saying it's them not me.
This is a good idea, to just hold to a schedule and update on that day even if the update is that some particular attempt to fix things didn't work out as planned. I second this motion.
Christian Gaming Community Fleets--Faith, Fun, and Fellowship! See the website and PM for more. :-)
Proudly F2P. Signature image by gulberat. Avatar image by balsavor.deviantart.com.
Basically the main thing everyone can do is to NOT use all the nice ships/traits and powers you have bought as it's those that create the lag.
Put your command ship in the bin. Remove all the traits you use from the ships you have bought. Don't use APB, Kemocite etc.... etc....
The team is changing a lot of the way that these powers function with regards to the server. The major issue is their interaction with said server. Don't worry, your powers aren't going to be changing in a way that you can see (your pew pew and deeps deeps will largely go unaffected as I understand).
The team has a combined effort of different things. For one, they're fixing the powers as they can find them. There's been a large list of powers that they've already worked on to reduce the stress put on any server-side processes. The other effort is that they've included monitoring processes on live to get a better analysis of how different powers are hitting the server.
Let's say that mathematically, you have an interaction that creates a fair amount of server load. You get a few hundred people on Tribble using this at at time, and you might not see anything really substantial as far as server load goes.
But what if that same thing interacts with thousands of people on Holodeck? What if it's exponentially heavier on the server rather than simply additive? What if that power interacts with other powers creating an exponential recursive effect? It hits hard. But the team is working on it. Hell, they're bloody well tearing into the problem.
For a while, I have been putting out company-wide reports. I talk about this being an issue and in turn, Cryptic has been combing through the power interactions to change them so that you, the players, don't have this problem any more. They've showed me that they're working on it.
First thing: Game Crashes
The team has been working on a graphics related crash that's been dropping people. This is believed to be the major cause of crashes and it seems to be usually happening at or around startup. We have a test going through that will have potentially a major fix for it, but that's still in testing. We're getting more testing data on that.
We're still analyzing crash data to look in terms of any specific area related to it. There isn't a specific classification data pool for it (brand of graphics card, O/S, ram size, etc.) so the cause is still a little nebulous. But we're still narrowing in.
Second thing: Lag (Server Stalls)
There's a specific distinction between server stalling and client stalling. We have our data to tell us that there's data stalls happening on the server, so that's where a lot of our attention has been. We've been spending a lot of time doing analysis on the combat (powers) systems. This meant a lot of retooling of previously expensive computational designs. We're constantly retooling these powers so that they work better in terms of overall server load. This has been a case/case/case basis.
For some people, they see these in more intensive maps related to power usage. That being said, I'm happy with some of the changes I've been seeing. We're seeing another big batch of changes come into testing right now that we'll be able to analyze.
~LaughingTrendy
Without giving you a flat out yes, my full intention is to try and be more transparent. I'm making more regular trips to Cryptic now (I work at PWE) in order to get a better understanding so that I can communicate with ya'll. I don't want to say a regular X amount of days, but my full intention is to keep you informed as I learn more. Always.
I for one appreciate the time taken to post this, even though I still feel it's an issue that is not going to go away anytime soon. I'm just not sure it's high enough up on the priority list.
Do you think a Twitch Community Chat once a week could be a thing? Kinda like your impromptu twitch announcement. Occasionally drag down a Victim-of-the-week from Cryptic to join you. Or reddit if twitch is too chaotic.
So, keep your eyes open if you'd like to be a part of such an event. We'll make an official announcement, once everything's situated.
Cryptic - Lead Systems Designer
"Play smart!"
Now this^^ is some of the best news I've seen in a while, count me if you need help.
Same here, that'd be fun
Borticus I would very much love that to be a thing... With a LOT of People on at one time!
PLEASE if this happens give us 2-3 days notice... So that we can get the word out to as many fleet mates as possible and allow them to get tribble patched up. For many of them who are not on tribble that often, it could take a while.