You gotta fix this lag

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Ninelder, Mar 22, 2021.

  1. Ninelder Augur

    I am not sure why somehow nerfing wizards was supposed to be a fix. They didn't get anything new this year, or if they did I haven't heard about it. We didn't have lag last year or not this bad, but this year you moved from hamsters to pill bugs or something. And its already cost you...

    I was trying to get a friend here interested in the game, hes an older retired guy.

    He comes over last night and watches me get my little 3-box crew together to do a an anniversary task(not even the new one.) We zone in and its like 5 mins of you cant do crap, or 5 mins of watching yourself not be able to cast one spell. Everyone gets disconnected to server select, and we lost a pet to "poof" We weren't even in combat.

    Its unplayable lag so he waits as i remake and rebuff and regear the pet. And I say maybe its something wrong with this mission lets just go do an old mission for coin. So I go to TDS and get the TDS HA, literally 15 levels under current, it should be a breeze nothing can go wrong right? Wrong.

    Once again we zone in and its 5mins to cast a spell, we get dissed, and i lost 2 pets this time to nothing. Once again, we were not even in combat.... At this point I am like maybe its some server damage or a night time cleaner accidentally unplugged something important. Come back tomorrow and it will be better.

    Today, I get the toons there and request the same old anniversary task(Plane of War) and then send out a couple of TAs and the guy wont let you in. I am having to look up to double check I wasn't saying the wrong thing to the wrong guy, all the toons had the mission were in the mission and just couldn't get in for an hour. At this point, realizing that I had made no mistakes and that my computer could still download a 2 hour and 30 min 1080p movie in 5mins that there was no lag on my end. Not that my friend waited the whole hour. After about 30 minutes he said, "well this obviously takes a lot more patience than I think I have." And he left...

    People that have been gone get the anniversary memo and wanna come back and check out the anniversary... Could you have possibly dropped the ball more here??? Its pathetic, fix it. And stop blaming it on crap that obviously wasn't a problem and figure out what YOU CHANGED to cause this.
  2. Darchon_Xegony Augur

    More ideas to fix lag:

    Rework Twincasting Nukes to work like twincasting DoTs. Rather than actually casting each Nuke twice, giving each Nuke a chance to fire sympathetics and then each of those resulting direct damage effects having to calculate resists, criticals and all other modifiers. Instead just have a twincasted nuke double the base damage of the spell before going through any other calculations. To address balance concerns make Wizards Twincast do 2.5x damage modifier, magicians 2.3x and druids 2.2x (the three classes with spell Twincast) and everyone else 2.0x

    Rework many sympathetic procs on Type 18/19 Augs and the Rallos Ear aug. Change the functionality to either a stackable focus effect that adds raw damage or a multiplier to your Nukes or just remove the effects entirely and replace them with large chunks of spell damage (in the 1000s) to account for their removal.

    Remove Triple Attack and increase upward the value on Veterans Wrath so that players aren’t needing to calculate so many melee swings every second.

    Greatly Reduce the proc mod on several “almost every melee round” proc buffs like Arcane Symphany and Talisman of Lioness as well as the 100% chance to spell proc auras from enchanter/druid Man Replication and IceRend Auras. Change all of these to be much higher Nuke values but Fire much less often. Having these abilities that grant everyone in their group an additional damage calculation or 3 (after two casts) every single round or cast is probably not great for lag.

    Remove all Clicky swarm pets and most AA swarm pets. They are either lag generators or exploited to hold raid mobs at bay to prevent a wipe. Outside of a few useful spell lines from the 3 pet classes, most other swarm pets should be eradicated.

    As with everything these are all balance concerns that would need to go through several rounds of testing but as it stands it is clear the game has been allowed to generate way too many days points every second on raids due to an explosion in proc effects, rates of melee swings and number of swarm pets on raids. I think it’s time to start taking drastic measures to try to curb all of this data getting generated and just accept a few patches where balance is wildly out of wack as they tune things better.
    Mongol311 likes this.
  3. Zanarnar Augur

    I think point to the biggest issue. They need to fix how they calculate the offensive and defensive values totally. Right now they get re-calculated every attack round. I firmly believe this has gotten progressively worse as melee attack rates have gone up and swarm pets have proliferated (causing even more server-side recalculations)

    These values should be calculated 4 total times + spawn in. (Buff Lands/Fades, Debuff Lands/Fades, Skill value change, level value change) not every attack round. Sure it might only take 23-30ms to run all the calculations, but multiply that by all the players and pets and its just too much for the server to do on top of all the other work in the 1000ms it has per second. It just gets further and further behind as time goes on.
    Mongol311 and Coagagin like this.
  4. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    They need to stop slow rolling fixes. We don't have time for testing right now.

    If proc augs are the issue, deprecate them out on a patch. All of them.

    If swarm pets are the issue, remove them on a patch. All of them.

    You get the idea...

    Most (cause there are always a few) players, especially those raiding, will take a temporary loss in power for less lag. Raids are unplayable at least once a night right now ... if you are lucky. Instances are a crap shoot. The game cannot continue this way or it will die.

    We need aggressive action. Let's overcorrect for lag ... then we can slowly add pieces back in a changed manner so that the lag does not return with it. But these little bitty incremental things aren't working.

    At this point, we should probably start write in campaign towards their new overlords in Sweden to let them know how much the ball has been dropped here.

    P.S. Who here doesn't think the recent datacenter move isn't the main cause of this stuff?
  5. Tappin Augur

    My guess is that it’s either the severs or the location of servers that is causing the problem. Meaning, optimizing code is just a band aid and will be required in some form every year if they adjust AAs for expansions. I don’t think constant nerfs is the way to go.
  6. Warpeace Augur


    Me for one. Its been happening for several expansions. Sorry if your just catching up to what my server has experienced for years during raids or just randomly through the day.

    More like RoF / CotF raids were being effected by the lag bug and only got worse as expansions progressed...so way before the datacenter move.
  7. Ninelder Augur

    The game is unplayable. While I don't think nerfing anything will actually have any effect. What they need to do is undo whatever the hell they did to make the game unplayable. If that was moving servers. Move them back... If they cant do that, find a new server that isn't worthless....

    The fact that the game is unplayable trumps everything else.
  8. Svann2 The Magnificent

    Right now I dont think the current lag has anything at all to do with game mechanics. Something broke and when you have a broken gear no amount of grease will smooth it over.
    Vumad, adetia, Ninelder and 2 others like this.
  9. Coagagin Guild house cat

    Biggest limitation here is that EQ1 is still 32bit. We can only assume fat pipes, fiber to the server farm and distribution plane and control planes. Without seeing into the server infrastructure itself, VM pipes and utilization stats, all we can do is shoot into the wind and see what falls.

    Oddly, I am sitting in a meeting on much the same problem but on a global scale application. Fundementals are the same but with far more information on my side. The irony is not lost on me.
  10. Accipiter Old Timer


    Perhaps you should be paying attention to the meeting, hmmm? :D

    (I'm in a meeting, too.)
  11. Duder Augur

    I agree. Lag after last February's data/server migration exploded. Aradune in it's first 60 days was far worse than even live servers, and they fixed it instantly with one patch. I believe they know the glaring issues causing poor performance, however, the fix doesn't fit into their budget.
    adetia and Zynt like this.
  12. kimbotta Lorekeeper

    This. They have to know what the root cause(S) are. If they don't they should have hired an outside firm to come in and let them know. After this much time no way that can still be searching for the answers. If that is the case well, god help us all.

    The fix must be very costly and time consuming. I wonder if they have a limit of compute they are willing to pay for. I would think in the short term they can't just over compensate for software shortfalls with more raw power, but this can get costly and the longer they have to rely on this approach the game can rapidly become unprofitable, and if they cut it off and go back to today's standards the rage will be epic.
    adetia and Duder like this.
  13. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    I'm sure the EQ servers are all custom engines and code, bringing in an outside firm wouldn't be an option. It would take that firm years to learn the ins and outs of how it all works together. DPG would go broke paying them before they could ever make a recommendation. At least a recommendation that DPG didn't already know themselves.

    There are also two different issues, though we don't know if the causes are related. There is the server lag, and there is the more recent instancing issues. Instances were fine until the anniversary started, and if they aren't on cloud servers they can't just pay to ramp up the specs to compensate. That will likely persist through the anniversary period unless they can identify a code issue that is making instances unstable under these levels of utilization.

    I will say to the OP, it sucks that you had this experience. As someone who wishes all their old EQ friends were playing this game instead of a bunch of other crappy games, I can empathize. Some of this is just bad timing, but there is an aspect of being an EQ player that involves patience and tolerance for these kinds of things. Not everybody has that, or loves this game enough to put up with these kinds of things. I hope you have better luck in the future. All I can recommend is keeping an eye on the forums from time to time to be aware of what requires patience that week. That doesn't fix anything, it's just a more pro-active approach which might avoid some land mines.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  14. minimind The Village Idiot

    They know. It's not a simple button they have to press. It's about balancing existing resources and the risk of worsening the problem with potential solutions.
  15. KrakenReality Augur

    From the most recent example of the TLP launch, their solution seems to just to be wait until the player count drops enough for the issue to resolve itself.
    Tucoh and Duder like this.
  16. Tappin Augur

    Similar issues occurred with instances during Beta. My guess is the servers can’t handle the traffic.
  17. Kragin011 New Member

    N

    Not my proc augs!

    But really i think the lag issue is alot more server based, if your on a server with less people your gonna have.... less lag
    Duder likes this.
  18. Sissruukk Rogue One

    Not necessarily. Vox is a medium-populated server at peak hours and we still experience lag. Lag in raids, lag in instances, lag in general.
    Mongol311 likes this.
  19. Kragin011 New Member

    On Phinigel lag seemed to get much better after the patch, still some rough patches(When full burning) but not anywhere close to what it was.
  20. Tatanka Joe Schmo

    So how does Tunare compare to Vox? Can honestly say I haven't seen a single lag spike of more than a few seconds in well over a year.

    Full disclosure: don't raid, almost never in the popular zones (CoV, ToV, etc), other than PoK, obviously. Do instances with some regularity, including Unity every day since last Wednesday.

    Peak times? I usually log in after 9pm CST, so I would think I'm on for the tail end of peak time.