Low framerate, hitching, freezing, stuttering =/= lag. I really hate how 'lag' has become synonymous with 'bad thing is happening' when talking about video games. Especially since it makes it nearly impossible to help anyone with their technical problems. The lag is bad and it seems worst in PoW. I did notice lag on EQ2 got a little better after I moved to southern california from michigan. Not exactly a viable solution for everybody. Lag along with a lot of other things (content, itemization, RNG) is piling up to make EQ2 generally unfun for me. It's like I'm pushing a bothersome boulder in the hopes things will get fun again later.
Why lag happens, can have so many reasons, that the task to solve the problem is almost not doable But, a few things SoE might can do, get the servers some upgrades (oh, well i know it´s not the cheap solve of the problem, but could help). Or put some code into it, which handles some situations more properly.
Yeah, performance since CoE seems like a step backwards to prior to the server upgrades. I can't say whether it is the server itself struggling under the load of all the additional proc/increment calculations, or related to data flow as someone else mentioned. Either could be plausible, but something really needs to be done about it, because it is greatly taking away from the enjoyment.
In my experience everything worked ok "not good" untill last weak when suddenly all this weird lag starting to occur for us. Pow - Eriak more or less freezes everyone from time to time for a couple of seconds same on Teku. ST unearthed - Ancient sentinel HM when machines pops same effect as on Eriak. Some people getting insane lag in HE. + All random kicked to char select and other stuff. I realy cant se this should be something wrong on the players side, 24 people raiding together from all around the world, everyone with a different computer/internet connection, some with the latest top graphicscards cpu loads of memory to some people with computers that are around 5-8 years old but everyone experience the same bad lag????? I dont think we can turn down settings much more, i mean red dots = npc's, blue dots = raid/group members on a black background to make it playable
Yeah I know exactly what you mean, it's like molasses with 21-24 people. I think it's worse when everyone's casting slow spells on each other. And with ability reflection... several of my scout slows actually work on epics so if there's any reflection I get hosed. I don't even go there with my casters, they're slow enough. In eq1, we used to follow someone like another caster, and face the floor... follow, target thru tank, camera facing floor... that was raiding back then. It still works now. Not much to look at, but it does help the frame rate. Oh and of course, extreme performance mode. Sad though that We can't actualy enjoy those zones in anything that looks even slightly decorative. My scout doesn't get the choice of looking at the floor, it matters where to stand, etc.
Hm, beyond 1 day in Wurmbones End (Solo) I haven't been experiencing bad lag at all. No freezes, no skips, no tearing or anything like that. I still get the occasional packet-loss disconnect for 10-30 seconds but that has happened ever since I went Wireless. There has to be something both Client and Server side going on here. Driver conflicting perhaps? Maybe DirectX is having a hissy-fit? Maybe someone elsewhere pulled 5-10 rooms of mobs and the server got dumped on? It can't be 100% player issue or 100% Sony issue here. If it were 100% Sony then wouldn't everyone raiding or not be experiencing this?
It pretty much has always been procs/temp buffs/debuffs that have caused most of the lag in this game. Lag seemed to crop up basically since Echoes of Faydwr the type of lag the OP is talking about. How many times have you been in a massive AoE fights and ET and a bunch of other temp buffs are up, DPS shoots up massively and so does the lag, it shoots up so much that people starting going link dead some crash out some do not. When dungeon maker and procs from experimented gear were going off, 20-22 procs vs 200+ stack mobs guess what happened, a ton of lag, mulitple seconds worth prior to the nerf to it. When there over 50 people in a contested zone pulling stuff heroic content the lag really starts to creep up. When there are multiple raid guilds in the same instance the lag again really shoots up, most raid guilds try and avoid raiding at the same zone/time because of this to this day, same effect as the old PQs, there were times where people reported that they were getting cross instance detrimental impacting each others raids even though that should not have been technically possible. You want to fix lag then its simple, stop putting so many procs into the game. However good luck with that as it seems every time the lead dev/game producer changes for that sort of guidance they seem to forget/oblivious to the history of this lesson and add back in a ton of new procs. Can almost guarantee if you put auto attack/flurry into one big hit rather than lots of little ones (pretty sure they chose 7 autos as the cap as back when it was uncapped it was producing tons of lag) and if you stopped with the mechanics that temp adjust up and down stuff like potency/crit bonus/ability mod and just gave flat static buffs you'd see far more stable/consistent performance, am sure it is hell on the number crunchers at the servers to co-ordinate all the temp buff procs and player class temp buffs as and when they cycle together. Then there is the stuff that sort of procs off of everything type proc, ET is one of those, in big AoE fights with a decent grp setup you can see client and server strain trying to catch up with the flood of data that generates, typically that seems to happen when stuff like ET generates between six players like 10 million plus spike dps for its duration. I've seen the network usage spike over 50mbs during such times (up+down), there has to be a better way to get relevant data around during such intense bursts. Also moderately sure this is why we don't see too many AoE encounters, real ones like 10 and up linked, and most are 2 or 3, even though I know some guilds are comfortable pulling multiple, multiple trash encounters to aoe it down more efficiently this expac. It also probably does not show up in their internal testing because it probably never occurs to them, 10-15 raid guilds could be hitting that instance(s) at the same kind of time and snarling up the servers that are setup to handle those specific instances. I have no idea what kind of peak demand load balancing SoE does for their back end games but, between the network stuff and all the DB log file stuff, its just stupid amounts of data that really don't need to be that big in the first place. The changes they would need to make sound simple in terms of consolidating variables, but given what we have seen over the years when they add new stuff or remove seems to end up adding lag or breaking something else. At some point there will need to be a mechanics revamp/reboot again along with netcode/db rebuilds etc. Degradation of service is inevitable with this kind of setup. Adding new hardware is only a temp fix, its a shame eqnext if it happens is not going to be a replacement for this game but, hopefully they will build it in such a way that they don't need to reinvent the game basically every expansion, from the outside looking in it seems to be that way.
granted it could be that the procs and new systems are what's behind the lagging issue. it could also have to do with the the amount of people running the zone at any given time. i remember back in the day when you could get shinies for the ear reward in TSO. palace raids were impossible to get thru wiht out 3 to 7 second spell lag. to make it worse i was in GUK at the time and that server was terrible for lag in all the raid zones but worst in palace. so wht happened? things were great in SF and even DoV for the most part. i wouldn't mind loosing the increment thing. wouldn't mind cutting down on the group procs either.
This problem is still present. It will continue to exist. And that is the biggest problem. What do you think is going to happen when they introduce even more abilities and content? Yes there has always been slowdown on AE fights, but I'm not even referring to that specifically. The general focus is all around ability casting delay even on Single Target encounters this expansion and beyond. The spell lag for the past 24 months has not been even close to what it is now from the last ~3-4 months. You cannot enjoy a game that continues to perform worse & worse as time goes on, regardless of upgrades to users' computers.
Careful, last time we did this they decided procs made lag, so the solution was to remove procs from gear where possible. Along those lines, sure seems like we're running alot of procs again...
Thanks for letting us know. We'll start looking into debugging the lag on our spell system and the like soon to see if we can find the culprits.
Great, I really hope that a solution is found and soon because we've been losing players left and right lately because it just is not fun to log in to a game you enjoy only to press a button and have to wait sometimes close to 15 seconds for something to happen. This is a very serious issue so I'm hoping for the best.
For me at least, it seems like PoW has the most consistent spell/ca lag. I usually get .5-1.5 sec lag from when I hit something to when it goes off, which is awesome when trying to complete a chain in a short window of time. In ST sometimes and HE more often I will get lag spikes of 5-15 sec, which has only been occurring the last few weeks. My framerate is fine and all of the other applications I have running on my system have no issues (my Bigfoot 2100 card only has eq2, guild connect and act as the highest priority, so those should be getting the resources over other junk...), so I am assuming it is server side lag. Really, it's kind of funny just sitting there for 5 or 10 sec and doing nothing then having the game fast forward to catch up and seeing orange numbers popping up crazy fast as the game tries to catch up, but it's not really fun when needing to move on HM Oligar... Usually run in eyefinity at 6048x1080 when experiencing it, but have run it in a regular resolution and still get the spell lag (at least in PoW).
Is it really the zones, or is it simply raid encounters with multiple mobs? I see a frame-rate hit in PoW, but I think thats due to my render distance and the shear number of objects that are potentially in range. But to be clear frame-rate lag is a client issue and not related to spell lag in this thread. I find any raid encounter with many simultaneous mobs tends to be more likely to generate lots of spell lag. it just happens to be PoW frequently has many mobs engaged. I fear the issue is related to procs again, and I'm not sure we're going to be happy with where this goes.
I'd be happy with where it went if they implemented proc removal in stages. Mainly, first of all remove all pathetic, 200dps non-crit damage procs that nobody even cares about that are on gear from avatar necks to the lowest of the low yellow adorns. Then start consolidating procs/effects down like making ET 1 type of damage. I do wonder how much that alone would do at the cost of like maybe 100k raidwide dps at the most.
For me at least, I'm in very high quality with max rendering distance in PoW, and have never had problems with spell/CA lag before this month. It's not even consistent, most of the time I do not notice it, but then it will start and seems to persist for awhile until it goes away. I have never had major spell lag, and everything else is keeping up (parses are correct on my ACT), so it seems isolated to me. My framerate is just fine in PoW, I mean not great I usually get 35-40 simply because of the zone, but it's not that my framerate is dropping, just that at times I will hit something and it will not go off for a second or two. I can still move around during the encounters I am not freezing up or going LD like some people in our guild are experiencing, just there is a noticeable delay from when I hit something to when it goes off.
They load balance these zones, and its going to be dependent on how many other raids are running on the same server as your PoW was load balanced too.
Sorry but I don't think procs have ever made this game all that interesting. They are nice, at least the ones that boost our useful stats, but there's entirely too many that aren't very good. I thought they were out of hand last expansion. Focus effects, or similar ones, that actually affect our class/subclass/archetype specifically are a lot more interesting. I'm pretty sure proc'ing 2k damage is pretty crappy compared to proc'ing 15% CB. Thanks terri-bad jewelry from everywhere. It's not just gear procs that are causing server performance issues. There's plenty of abilities that cause enormous lag on encouter AEs. As much as I hate managing clickies, they are more interesting than procs because they're not just random boosts. And with some procs, they're practically up all the time anyway, so what's the point?
i don't know what the procs are or not not doing and frankly i agree with drum that the dumb damage procs can go away. you should really just add procs that people would want to have and leave out the random 1.6 x min 10k proc stuff. another thing is that pow is where most of the spell lag goes one. other zones do lag but no where near as bad as this zone, at least for me.
