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When will we get a lag free game?
smr12
Member Posts: 49 Arc User
So like the title says, when will these lag problems be solved?
Every single day it's the same things, lag, delays, non responsive things.
Many times i just die because the game isn't responding at all and to be honest it's getting pretty frustrating.
This game is FTP, but the cashshop sells us things up to hundreds of USD and for all that money spends we don't even get a game without lag.
I've been playing since 2013, and i can't remember a time when this game would be running without an unacceptable lag.
I know it's not my connection, but i do know that any online game from cryptic suffers from the same lag.
What will be done about this?
Every single day it's the same things, lag, delays, non responsive things.
Many times i just die because the game isn't responding at all and to be honest it's getting pretty frustrating.
This game is FTP, but the cashshop sells us things up to hundreds of USD and for all that money spends we don't even get a game without lag.
I've been playing since 2013, and i can't remember a time when this game would be running without an unacceptable lag.
I know it's not my connection, but i do know that any online game from cryptic suffers from the same lag.
What will be done about this?
Until Cryptic fixes the bugs and the huge lag problem, i refuse to give them a single cent. A company that charges hundreds of dollars but can't even give a stable bugfree game (or at least doesn't have bugs that are years and years old), doesn't deserve my money.
Also when coming back after 2 years not playing STO, spending $30 and getting hit immediately with a 7 day account probation.
This shows very little respect from cryptic towards their playerbase and, this is another reason to not spend any single cent on this game.
Also when coming back after 2 years not playing STO, spending $30 and getting hit immediately with a 7 day account probation.
This shows very little respect from cryptic towards their playerbase and, this is another reason to not spend any single cent on this game.
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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However, due to the nature of an online game, there are a lot of factors that go into that. How the player connecton, ISP on both ends, connection routing, and such. Which means, there will never be a 100% lag free online game. Especially not the MMO genre, as now you have thousands, or more, players connecting to it. This present a great many ways for lag to occur, bugs to form, and things that just get broken.
Right now, if you look at the Lag Hunting post, the majority of it seems to be pointing at Akami Technologies. Or as it runs on your computer, Akami Netsession.
The main factors: they're not a high end company, and a lot of their profit goes to PWE (the actual owners)... so they can't afford to have the latest and greatest either in servers or programmers. Their old netcode had issues from day one (in CoH) and it's likely they stuck some old TCP/IP library routines in there and have never looked at them since. They apparently use Akamai to filter their incoming traffic and that appears to cause another set of issues. Finally, they sometimes do something on patch days that cuts off their own account and login servers. Apparently they never learn from the many times they've done this, how to stop doing it.
Add all that together and you will never get a lag-free Cryptic game. You'll be lucky if you get a Cryptic game that isn't the laggiest game you've ever played.
(Edit: Yes, your home setup, ISP and net traffic are a factor. But those factors apply fairly equally to every internet destination you use. If STO is laggier than other games and services for you, then that's an STO issue for the most part.)
Some MMOs can handle this by routing traffic among their many server farms - Blizzard is especially famous for this. Cryptic, however, apparently only owns the one server farm, somewhere outside Boston, MA (which also means we can be subject to the vagaries of Eastern Seaboard weather, but that's a whole different matter).
Remember that we first learned of the Akamai link when research into game lag turned up a long-running issue with Elder Scrolls Online - and Bethesda's servers, to the best of my knowledge, don't use the same ISP as Cryptic's. (I think their main center is located in Texas, but don't quote me on that.)
Some insightful information, if accurate, pertaining to the ever present STO lag. Most times, 85%+, it isn't too bad for me & only like 5% unplayable very rarely.
First there is a ton of things that can cause lag. If you're running on an underpowered rig, they're running on underpowered servers or something along those lines, it will cause lag. It's also not a straight shot to their servers from your computer. Each time you send a command to the server, such as to turn your ship, a signal gets sent to their servers from your computer to turn the ship. The signal is routed through several hops through data centers that process the signal and route it on to the next center until it reaches the destination of their server. An acknowledgement of your signal is then received by the server and sent back to you to show the ship is turning. All of this happens at or near the speed of light. It's possible that your rig, their servers, and data centers are fine, but something else is going on. There is also typically hundreds of miles of wire between your rig and their servers. If something is happening to a line your rig is taking to communicate, it will appear as lag.
Second, Akami was contracted by Cryptic's ISP not Cryptic themselves. Akami is a security company and part of their job is to protect against DDoS attacks. The problem is that it's often times hard to distinguish between a DDoS and legitimate traffic without having someone constantly monitor it. Each time someone logs on or tries to do so it pings the server and sends a request to connect. When someone attempts to do a DDoS it pings the server and attempts to bog the server down with a ton of requests to the point it can't keep up. These often appear similar to a server getting alot of login requests. In fact Blizzard had an instance where they thought were getting hit with a DDoS, but it was just folks trying to log in. So the question for Akami is how to tell the difference between legitimate traffic and DDoS. Also, how do they open up more traffic to Cryptic so they're not throttled without also opening them up to attacks. It's not that simple as you would think.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
My power trays never activate in a timely or reliable way, ground or space.
Ruins the game.
I just no longer play STO much.
Why bother when every other game out there has highly responsive controls that keep it properly challenging.
I play massive fast paced battles leading platoons of infantry and vehicles - hundreds of real players - on the same map on ~50 ping, even with others from EU that sit around 200 ping very competitively. Sure it's far from perfect, but not stone age and half-broken like STO.
STO can't fix its power tray bug. STO can't eliminate its rubberbanding.
STO can continue to watch its player base dwindle then.
Last time I remember it being this bad was when they started sharing servers between Neverwinter and STO that caused a few performance issues
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
C:\Users\xxxxx>tracert patchserver.crypticstudios.com
Tracing route to patchserver.crypticstudios.com [208.95.184.200]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 3 ms 2 ms 2 ms d67-xxmystuffxx- [67.193.188.241]
2 9 ms 8 ms 12 ms morexxxs
3 20 ms 20 ms 20 ms stillmorexxs
4 17 ms 16 ms 16 ms 10.0.18.69
5 17 ms 17 ms 16 ms toro-b1-link.telia.net [62.115.54.234]
6 20 ms 17 ms 15 ms toro-b2-link.telia.net [62.115.117.229]
7 26 ms 26 ms 27 ms chi-b21-link.telia.net [62.115.118.100]
8 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms akamai-ic-326536-chi-b21.c.telia.net [213.248.74.223]
9 26 ms 25 ms 27 ms po110.bs-a.sech-ord.netarch.akamai.com [23.57.98.243]
10 25 ms 26 ms 35 ms a72-52-1-137.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com [72.52.1.137]
11 26 ms 26 ms 26 ms ae120.access-a.sech-ord.netarch.akamai.com [23.57.98.249]
12 35 ms 36 ms 36 ms ae156-2220.access-a.sech-iad.netarch.akamai.com [23.211.114.15]
13 45 ms 45 ms 44 ms a209-200-147-156.deploy.static.akamaitechnologies.com [209.200.147.156]
14 66 ms 45 ms 47 ms 198.49.243.237
15 47 ms 41 ms 46 ms patchserver.crypticstudios.com [208.95.184.200]
Trace complete.
(198.49.243.247 is an address owned by Cryptic.) This shows me almost half the links between me and Cryptic are Akamai, and generally when I experience lag or dropped packets, it's in those links. Also that the last links before Cryptic are Akamai, not an ISP. Maybe I'm reading the tracert wrong, I haven't had much practice because for all my other games I don't need to, and for Cryptic it never does any good anyway.
Personally, if my company was using an ISP that employed a technology that regularly disrupted thousands of my customers... I'd be shopping for a new ISP.
First, the connections are routed through Akami much like a security checkpoint before entering a City Hall type building. Also I would advise adding your tracert to the lag hunting post that I have pinned at the top of this GenDisc forum. Cryptic has no control over what their ISP does as far as who the ISP contracts with and so on. Secondly, they can't just jump ISPs at the drop of the hat. As I pointed out above it can sometimes be very difficult to tell the difference between legitimate traffic and a DDoS without looking under the hood with a microscope. Aside from possible contract issues and legalities like that, Cryptic would need to have something else in place before they changed ISPs. Even then that ISP would also have a company under contract most likely that protects against DDoS attacks. The issue that Akami and any security company will face is how to open up for more traffic without leaving Cryptic and anyone else vulnerable. As annoying as it is, it's just not as simple as you're making it out to be. I really wish it was but it's just not.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator
In the early years of this game...that issue was a few and far between. Today, the impact is touchable and getting worse. We all are at the mercy of ISPs, besides complaining to kill the lag, just pray the current infrastructure holds up for now.
We have one web and application server that we would really like to move to Amazon Web Services, but several of the applications are 10+ years old and using ancient Perl, PHP (not compatible with 7.x), and flat files instead of SQL databases. It's also the company mail server.
There is a list of re-writes needed for the code, we need to migrate to something like Exchange Online, and finally we need to find a good time to have the server offline when it's used 24x7 by customers around the world. And we need to fit this in while still doing normal development and maintenance.
Setting up new servers on AWS is easy but moving to them isn't always practical.
if people start putting the tracerts in my whine thread than it better be closed.
Also when coming back after 2 years not playing STO, spending $30 and getting hit immediately with a 7 day account probation.
This shows very little respect from cryptic towards their playerbase and, this is another reason to not spend any single cent on this game.
There's already a sticky thread for tracerts at the top of General Discussion: https://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1252798/lag-hunting-data-submissions-round-2#latest
It could even be that the anti-DDoS systems the two CDNs use might not play well together or something like that. A quick look at the Cloudflare community turns up reports of problems where things route through both networks in fact.
I don't think ANYONE can realistically expect a 100% lag free game. But it has honestly felt like a ZERO percent lag-free experience for MONTHS now. Every...single...day...at ANY given time, space OR ground...ANY map...the lag and rubberbanding is HORRIBLE. I've been playing STO since right before Legacy of Romulus was released (a long time now), and it has NEVER been this bad until about 7 or 8 months ago now. Even back then, yeah I saw rubberbanding every once in a great while. But this is just exaggerated now..
But how do you "know" it isn't your connection? I know I don't get lag that causes me to die..sometimes I'll get a little rubberbanding but nothing major
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> But how do you "know" it isn't your connection? I know I don't get lag that causes me to die..sometimes I'll get a little rubberbanding but nothing major
because I know, I tested it and every website software and game shows no problem on my end.
Also when coming back after 2 years not playing STO, spending $30 and getting hit immediately with a 7 day account probation.
This shows very little respect from cryptic towards their playerbase and, this is another reason to not spend any single cent on this game.
I'm in the UK and whether I use the EU/US or no proxy it makes no difference. I did once change the compatibility for the launcher to run under Win 7 instead of Win 8 (my OS is Win 10) for 2 days everything was running great then the rubberband monster managed to find me again and now that change makes no difference.
Hello rubber banding my old friend, time to bounce around the battlezone again, where are all my bug reports going?, out of love with this game I am falling, As Cryptic fail to acknowledge a problem exists, Shakes an angry fist, And from Support all I'm hearing are the sounds of silence.
The short answer is when PW sells STO to someone who will furnish the game with state of the art servers. Cryptic has always had LAG. When PW bought the game they made it worse by stacking other games on the same servers. Right now PW has roughly 47 million dollars in the game. It would take an investor with roughly 100 million to properly fix the game and update it to an Unreal Engine. With the age of the equipment I can't say what PW would sell STO for. You can only surmise it will be for a tidy profit.
Right now it appears that the issue is with security.