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croupboi
Member Posts: 76 Arc User
So as the title says im wondering if we are getting any closer to having anythind done about these constant disconnects.. rubberbanding.. power activation lag.. ping spikes of over 1k.
I mean come on guys seriously these problems have been going on for years now and only seem to be getting worse.
We as a community have tried to help when you have asked by performing trace routes and yet still no action has been taken or even any discussion to let your community know whats happening.
Come on guys give us some answers!!
I mean come on guys seriously these problems have been going on for years now and only seem to be getting worse.
We as a community have tried to help when you have asked by performing trace routes and yet still no action has been taken or even any discussion to let your community know whats happening.
Come on guys give us some answers!!
Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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Also its pretty much accepted by the community, based on traceroute data, that the culpret is not Cryptic, but Akami, a security firm that is designed to throttle activity in the event of a DDoS attack in order to enable the target of the attack to respond. The problem is they can't really tell the difference between a DDoS attack and normal MMO traffic.
And before you ask, no Cryptic is no in a contract with them. The connection route you take between your computer and the servers is not a straight line. Think of it like the downtown streets of a major city. You have intersections everywhere.
While you are trying to get from Point A (Your computer) to Point B (STO server) you're passing through many intersections. Any of which can coincide with Akami's service acting like stop lights at those intersections.
Even if Cryptic were to change ISP, it may very well have no effect as you'd still be passing through nodes that are covered by Akami. And STO isn't the only MMO that has this problem. Elder Scrolls Online apparently has some lag issues due to Akami.
Sorry, but the situation has been taken notice of, action has been and will continue to be taken, and the issue is pretty much well described in these forums. What is happening is endemic is a whole variety of online games that I play, so it's not unique to Cryptic.
They can't or won't fix power activation failures, rubberbanding, and other game breaking bugs.
Anything I get from the game now is from farming, and anytime the frustrations get too much I swap games.
It's sad cause I really like STO, but a non-viable game approach that drags on for unreasonable amounts of time needs to be left to face the consequences by a drop in funding and active participation, so it can decide whether to fix it or shut down.
STO is not the only online game out there, and isn't unique in the problems it faces, yet somehow most other games actually manage those same struggles.
I was staring at my ship for like a full minute or so while being shot at by fleets of Romulan ships. Couldn't move, couldn't fire, you wouldn't even see images of previous shots being fired.
And I didn't even get a 'SNR' in red text anymore.
Abilities were activating cause I would have been destroyed if they hadn't.
It took like a full minute before I would finally see my weapons' fire and see my ship make its movements again though.
I play several other online games, none have this issue.. it's isolated purely to STO. Any other game I have ever played with this type of performance, the issue was dealt with by the game developers.
Cryptic will fix it by releasing more lock boxes.
While I haven't had any problems with FF14 or TOR... apparently ESO does have some problems. Not sure about other games though. Haven't touched WoW in years, don't play LOTR...
The issue here is that when an MMO like STO has a special event, people who haven't played in a considerable time, years in some cases, will jump online. All at the same time. This of course leads to a massive surge in traffic. Now, when a certain address usually gets a certain level of traffic, but that level suddenly jumps, the "expert" system fielded by Akamai interprets that as a potential DDoS, and does what it's programmed to do - no matter how frustrating that may be.
For those games with multiple server farms scattered around the globe, this is no more than a minor inconvenience - your client, on detecting the slowdown, can navigate to another server, as on the internet all places are the same place (although some governments do regulate traffic through their physical space). Cryptic, however, maintains exactly one server farm, so when their traffic is slowed by the ISP, there's duck-all they can do about it. In many locations, thanks to government regulation, there's only one high-speed data service available - around here, for instance, that would be Comcast, and nobody else is running fiber-optic lines in here to handle the data flow - so competition isn't really a thing. (Our Comcast connection is better than it might be because the same company also services the Tacoma area, and Tacoma has their municipal Click! Network that was installed before the aforementioned regulations were passed.)
It's not like the ISP is going to stop using their favorite anti-DDoS package because it annoys one client - let's face it, Cryptic Studios isn't exactly Blizzard here. (Yet, anyway - there was a time when Blizzard wasn't a big deal either, and if Cryptic ever fields a game that catches on like WoW, well...)
Huh. Ya know something? This is the last time I'm going to bother explaining, because the replies tell me people are more interested in having their moral outrage over this than they are about the actual way systems function. Y'all knock yourselves out. Let's see if getting apoplectic over this will somehow cause the ISP to change its corporate mind. I'm not holding my breath.
We're getting to the point of practicality here. Its a combination of Cryptic being smaller than the others who have fewer problems and the popularity of Akamai. Catch 22.
If this Akamai thing is so popular, many more games are likely suffering from that software being used. Meaning they could team up with many other game developers. Cryptic / Perfect World wouldn't be alone in this fight.
An ISP of course has a good reason using said software if it's used to counter DDOS-attacks. But they also have an obligation to ensure that their services will still be provided to their clients.
Where I live, ISP's are prohibited from slowing down internet speeds or discriminating between speeds granted to the use of specific services (say, reading news websites vs. playing online games).
I have no idea what it's like elsewhere (I did read something about net neutrality being under attack in the States), but it would seem odd that ISP's could just discriminate against game development companies and make potential DDoS attacks (not even real ones) basically their problem, by providing unreliable services - and that those gaming companies would be unable to take legal action over this.
Then there's also the issue that a server host migration might take a while and it's not 100% sure either of those are willing to keep the servers up during the migration.
Also depending how the contracts were worded it might be extremely expensive for Cryptic to cancel the contract with their current host (it's not like with a private user where you call the customer service and say "I cancel my contract" and maybe pay a nominal fee, for a company the cancellation fee might be something akin to server fees for the remaining time left in the contract and that could be years). Sure it might be possible for Cryptic to convince their host that cancelling the contract early and without fees is best for them but that needs evidence and it's also best to remember that crippling rubberbanding is not universal (in fact I get little to no rubberbanding even when I got a web browser running in the background), so Cryptic needs to convince their server host that large enough portion of the player base is suffering from crippling lag and rubberbanding that actions need to be taken (and that is by no means easy).