Why Do I Zone Incredibly Slowly?

Discussion in 'Player Support' started by Staccato, Jun 9, 2021.

  1. Staccato New Member

    Greetings. I find that I zone incredibly slowly in-game and I have no idea why. I run a 3900x CPU, a 3080 GPU, 64GB of RAM, Steam/EQ is installed on an 860 EVO, etc. My hardware is great.

    Sure, the game is old, but plenty of people I group and raid with regularly zone in a fraction of the time I do. I'd appreciate any insight or thoughts as to what I could do to improve my zone times. Thank you in advance!
  2. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    It doesn't seem to have much to do with hard drive speed, I will say that. Sometimes my slower machine with a physical HD zones faster than my faster machine with an SSD. Could be something with caching in those cases though. And we're talking about an A10 versus a 2600X with 16gb and 32gb respectively. No reason the slower box should ever win.

    Internet speed seems to matter somewhat, but I'm guessing yours is decent if you have that setup and play online games. Maybe do a full file check, or there could be an anti-virus program interfering. Hard to say.
  3. Conq Augur

    Shut off p0rnhub.
    Conq
  4. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    I will say, to reinforce the internet speed thing, that I suddenly remembered an experience from Sullon Zek, oh so many years ago. Was playing a Druid in Butcherblock, near the Greater Fay zoneline. Got jumped by two players, and with the use of blind, actually was doing pretty well for myself. They got their vision back and decided to run, to Greater Fay. I followed them into the zone, came out the other side moments later. Waited for them, and finished them off.

    I was on a cable modem, long before they were common. Most were on dialup then. Can't say for sure these two were on dial up, but it would fit with what I've seen in the past. Could be something with receiving the zone data and confirming before letting you finish zoning.

    This was probably the only time I ever came out of a PvP experience alive. Thanks early adoption of high-speed internet!
    Stymie likes this.
  5. Metanis Bad Company

    You've likely got network issues...

    If you're on Wi-Fi try to use a hardwired Ethernet cable to your modem/router instead. If that's not an option make sure your Wi-Fi isn't saturated with other traffic. If your options are limited perhaps you need to invest in a better router.

    In my own situation all it takes is a couple of iPhones on my local Wi-Fi to saturate my uplink which causes ACK packets to be dropped and then the EQ server will time-out and have to retransmit. I'm hardwired to the router so when I've got company using iPhones I'll turn off the Wi-Fi while I'm raiding! Some things around here have priority!

    Besides the gear on your local environment your ISP could be trying to "optimize" your connection by dropping your ACK packets! Try ExpressVPN once. And/Or adjust your TCP/IP MTU downward from 1500 bytes to 1492. Packet fragmentation can cause slow zoning. In either case if the EQ server has to keep retransmitting packets your zone times will suffer greatly.
  6. Staccato New Member

    Yeah, I have 1gig down/40 Mbps up, and while I couldn't find anything on Google about EQ's server locations, I stumbled upon https://pingserverstatus.com/everquest.php and my ping to those locations is more than adequate (thankfully).

    A file check came back clean, and I don't use an AV program, so that's no concern.

    Thank you for your input.

    Not using WiFi, so no worries there, thankfully.

    Using a VPN didn't resolve the issue, and even after a quick Google search, I couldn't figure out how to adjust my MTU as you advised. I'll look more into that just to see if it could make a difference, so thank you for the recommendation.
  7. Raccoo Augur

  8. Staccato New Member

    Metanis and Niskin like this.
  9. Niskin Clockwork Arguer

    Thanks for reporting back, it helps us help other people later on. :)
  10. Warpeace Augur


    What exactly do you mean by a more up-to-date and functional UI? Did you just delete and install a fresh standard UI or custom?
  11. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    They are referring to a UI element - 99% certain they were using a custom UI.
  12. Staccato New Member


    This is correct. I was using a player window that I found on EQInterface.com that had been updated in 2020, but was still well over a year old. After removing it and replacing it with this UI my zone times went from >45 seconds to <2 seconds.