I've been experiencing latency in game. Everything from lagging health totals (i.e. heals//damage not registering immediately) to ability lag. The ability lag is especially discouraging, and I can best describe it as "the game feels as though everyone has zero recovery speed" I think my troubles my related to the April 28th update, Specifically the first one. Has anyone else shared my experience? How can I fix the lag/latency issue?
Noticed this today on my mystic, cast heal on a group member and about a .5 second delay before they actually recieve it. Or at least the UI is displaying it that way.
Can confirm life sucks. I suspect the change was so the client receives an update every 0.1 seconds vs. 0.01 seconds, thus saving bandwidth but making everything "feel" incredibly slow. This would also cause the "no recovery speed" you are experiencing, as it would effectively add 0.1 seconds of delay to all of your abilities. Related, it is also the cause of "fighters noticing a damage increase" as their health jumps in 0.1 chunks vs. 0.01. Anything that is reactively cast (e.g. saves, heals) will come out much slower and it will appear they are spiked harder. Hypothetical delays are loosely empirically determined (I made them up), but they feel accurate and they describe your symptoms.
I have terrible ability lag now. My Primal Chains are almost impossible to get through w/ all 6 firing. If I get a reset on slot 4, I can forget about it firing off while Ferocity base pot is active. Unchained Ferocity is the worst offender. I suspect it's because you can spam it 10x in a row w/ no cooldown - and since it's updating so *infrequently* as compared to how it used to, the rhythm of combat is completely off. CA's don't cast at all sometimes, other times they don't seem to cast and then three or so CA's will fire off in rapid succession, and not necessarily in the order that I pressed them. Raiding was especially tricky and I've not played since Wednesday because of it, except to test on a dummy. Dreadtalon, a Freetard of Freeport
I noticed the change also but I just figured it was a normal problem, so I went and reset my router/modem/computer and tried again but same. Something changed. Maybe they got around to changing Spell Refresh so its not a totally worthless ability?!? (not tested) I'm sure adjustments will be made to resolve whatever the trouble is.
I just tried the x2 in OSS contested, encounter is completely bonkers. I'd sooner expect a templar to top a raidwide than my interrupts to land within the cast interval. It wasn't just me either, groupwide. This is ridiculous. How did this bypass test?
I've been noticing the same things. The two problems bothering me specifically are: Ally health bars lag behind the actual heal. If I use a big primal heal, and health bars don't move immediately I may be misled into thinking my heal missed (it's a beastlord thing) and try to burn another high-reuse primal heal that I don't actually need. Combat arts can't be activated as fast. At max ability casting speed and max ability recovery speed, while either having an ability casting or queue'd 100% of the time, I can get off a lot less combat arts in the same amount of time than I could before the patch. This is really bad for beastlord primal chains for several reasons (you have to complete them before Dragon Claws and Feral Pain wear off after 10s, and you can't interleave as many other CAs between primals to push savagery back up).
I thought it was just me. Things don't "feel" the same - they feel clunky, tired... Rebooted modem / router / PC, cleared cache...no increased performance. Not sure exactly when it occurred, since my playtimes are erratic - though I did experience the same type of "lag" / hesitancy / etc thats being described here.
That would be the one Koko. After doing a lot of testing, updating the UI of connected clients was a large amount of the work the server was doing during combat. Raid combat in particular. Additionally, it was causing client load trying to parse, and update all of that data too. Players in beta did give some feedback, and I did tag along a raid and tuned the value to what they found to be the "perfect" balance. However, it looks like it needs to be tuned down a bit more. I'll get on doing that and let you know when it has been updated.
Alright I increased the frequency of UI updates by about 20-25% and that should be active now on all zones on all servers. I can't increase the frequency much more without just going back to updating all the time. If that is what it takes, that is what it takes and I will look elsewhere for performance increases.
Thank you for your efforts, and I appreciate the end goal of less server/client work. I expect it is what it will take, but I'll happily do some testing on live before I commit to that statement. Is it possible for users to change the client update speed individually? If so, the user could update constantly for smooth performance or lessen the server load in situations where it might be lagging their client/the raid. Is it possible to send client information at different rates? If so, useful information (skill delay, health) could be sent continuously where less useful information can be delayed (what proc'd). Is it possible to change proc dependent gear (uplifting, practiced) to gear that does the same thing but without as large of a server load? I'm uncertain of how those items stack up to "if grouped with X or more players" in terms of computations, but I can testify that their effects are essentially the same.
It's noticeably better; however, It's still noticeably delayed/jumpy. The worst offenders are still positionals and stealth abilities, at least for this scout-y type. Dreadtalon, a Freetard of Freeport
Back with results, it is better but far from perfect. On "spam-y" characters (warden, beastlord) there is a noticeable performance drop. On less spam-y characters (warlock) it isn't as significant, which makes sense as there is less inputs/time. This also explains why there are a lot of beastlords here, as they are hurt the most with less skill spam.
The change you pushed out did help. But it's still a problem for beastlords at least. Despite the new buff on Feral Stance I think I'm actually doing less damage than before the patch because of it. Let me quantify the problem a little bit here. At 100% reuse, 100% ability casting speed, and 100% ability recovery speed, every beastlord combat art (except U'lla's Spinning bite, the weird odd man out) has a 0.25s casting time and 0.25s recovery time. So in the the most optimistic case a beastlord will be using 2 CAs per second non-stop (though will eventually run out of stuff to use for brief periods of time). I just tried it on a training dummy a few times in the guild hall. Here I should have 0 server lag and I'm running at 75fps. The reality is so far apart from that 2 CA/s, that I think even this small sample size here speaks for itself: 18 CAs in 14s or 1.29 CA/s 16 CAs in 12s or 1.33 CA/s 16 CAs in 12s or 1.33 CA/s 17 CAs in 14s or 1.21 CA/s I wonder if the UI update speed reduction is preventing the client from telling the server to queue up a CA as soon as it could be, because it thinks it's not ready yet or something.
Does the actual load of a server take into account the total number of users logged into said server? I can see how testing some mechanics may be of use on beta, but in order to track down a latency issue, I would imagine that the total server loads would need to be close to identical. One raid of 24 people on the beta server that may have a total user load of 100 people would perform different than Antonia Bayle running multiple raids at the same time during its peak hours, I would imagine. I don't see a basis for comparison. I did, however, notice an improvement after that last tweak - but the performance is not back to where it was before.
This change helped a lot but it still isn't back close enough to normal imo. I still have to click certain spells twice before they register. It is fairly annoying on my dirge and very frustrating on my assassin. Getting a good VC take good timing and this has thrown it off for me. Backstabs/stealth required CAs seem worse than normal attacks. It unfortunately seems like going back to having the ui constantly update may be the best option.
