Raids and spell lag

Discussion in 'General Gameplay Discussion' started by Drumstixx, Jan 21, 2013.

  1. Primaeval Active Member

    Without being an expert, what's happening isn't entirely linked to some longstanding issue imo. While lag has been bad at various points in EQ2's history and the incremental spell mods implemented in CoE are likely linked to some of what we're experiencing, something dramatically changed about a month ago with one of the updates.

    It could be some memory leak was created or even server hardware was moved off EQ2 support for EQNext, but there was absolutely a tangible and dramatic rise in poor performance corresponding around when Drinal returned to the game (not suggesting that event is linked, but that gives some sense of the timing).
  2. Koko Well-Known Member

    I think you’re on the right track, I also noticed an increase in lag post-expansion. I believe it is related to the timing of packets between the client and server, and there is a partial fix.

    I disabled TCP Delay before playing Everquest II for its lag reducing effects. I had no idea ‘spell lag’ was until after buying a new computer (which did not have TCP Delay disabled) and immediately began to hate life.

    I am not a computer expert. A guide to disabling TCP Delay on Windows 7 Professional can be found here. The process should be similar for other forms of the Windows OS, but I recommend finding an appropriate guide through a search engine.
  3. Wanyen Active Member

    Beyond the platform issues, like Koko mentioned, I think and others have noted that the variety of effects is probably contributing substantially.

    This is in part to the fact that timers and trigger chance is often if not always per player, instead of per slot (meaning vorpal on my sword won't 'stack' with vorpal on my chestpiece). The reason for this is a history-of 'abuse' of certain effects, where'good' effects were creatively stacked to make otherwise challenging encounters trivial. Instead of adjusting the particular effects that caused the problems, triggered effect stacking was all but eliminated (for worn triggered effects especially). If the offending effects were adjusted, and stacking was allowed, the wide variety would not be quite as necessary. Perhaps if effect stacking was not just purely cumulative but also applied diminishing returns to stacked effects, it could self insulate against 'abuse'.

    While I love variety, I don't feel there is mechanically enough variety to warrent a six different ranks of the same effect, and a renaming of an effect for newer context. If anything, effects should scale very slightly with character growth and gear (the underlying gear should obselete before the effect), and they should stack, but stacking should induce diminishing returns.

    Having six different heal procs doesnt mean much to me. Effectively, they, on average will heal for a certain amount during a certain period of time. Thats it. Having one accumlator effect 'proc' that was an in-combat heal-rate adjustment would essentially be the same thing, and I am positvely comfortable proclaiming it would be vastly less load on the server applying the 'constant' of in-combat heal rate modifier over listenting for 18 different. and 'distinct' heal procs (counting group and raidwide procs).

    Likewise, direct damage procs of forty different 'varieties' could easily be consolidated into a constant but temporary base damage modifier (or whatever is appropriate) accumlator (or counter). I also think they need to rethink the prevelance of really short duration effects that have a moderate to high trigger rate. They look nice at first glance, but really, its +.05 or less cb on average. And while it all helps, it really does no one any favors by cameflouging the marginal effect into something more than it is, least of all the server.

    Not only would consolidation and adjustments to effect stacking, to include diminishing returns for like effects, make server load more managable, client side visual effects wouldnt have to be under constant fire. No, I dont need to see every bracelet proc of Oracle II; I am really only intersted in seeing when vorpal fires, or anything else that is big and infrequent.
  4. Rocketjones Active Member

    About two months ago I built a new computer. It's overclocked to 4.8ghz, 8gb of ram, windows 7 loaded on a SSD, game's loaded on a raptor, big ole power supply, gtx 650ti. My bandwidth is 50down/10up. It was freaking amazing raiding for the first month. I now freeze in raid for 5-20 seconds at a time. I can push buttons but there's no telling what's firing. I can be the only one in my GH, running 100fps crafting and I get lag from out of nowhere. Nothing i've tried has fixed it. Right now I am sitting from raid.
  5. Primaeval Active Member

    This problem is seemingly getting worse. Last night in PoW even attempting to kill the massive load of trash we hade 10 second blinks where it stops and you return to a mob or 3-5 people in the raid dead. Great fun.
  6. Twyxx Well-Known Member

    Last night was the worst it's been for me.
  7. Estred Well-Known Member

    We were unable to take down Eriak The Fetid because of frequent LD's and MT-Healers lagging out. Spent 2.5 Hours o_O bashing our skulls in and making everyone mad. Plane of War is by far the worst offender of lagout followed by Harrows End... when it isn't crashing due to Drinal wipes.
    Kalderon likes this.
  8. Koko Well-Known Member

    I will amend that last night's raid we very lag heavy (non visual, but transmission based lag).

    2/10/2013
    8:00-11:00 CMT
    Freeport Server
    Roughly 1~4 second intervals between skill use. Entire raid mentioned it.
  9. Thorine New Member

    We also had problem with lag in ST:Unearthed on Sunday (From 9am PST, Oasis server).
    It happend to 5-6 of us and always at the same time. It's not on our side becuase I'm in Europe and the other are spread out over USA.
    Pingspikes at +600 and sometimes the packetloss was so bad so for a minute nothing was moving on the screen. Sometimes the spikes/lag could last for more than a minute and sometimes 15-20 sec. It sometimes happend during a fight and sometimes when we were just moving.
  10. Xelgad Developer

    Hey guys,

    Terrogaunt (and other coders!) have identified some abilities that are causing latency and we're going to get those patched as soon as possible. We're hopeful most (if not all) of the abilities can be optimized without much effect on gameplay.

    Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for helping us sort it out!
    Estred and Avirodar like this.
  11. Rhita Active Member

    Thanks for the update Xelgad, a few guildes and I were talking. We were thinking that the new prestige abilities with the accumulation of increments might be adding to the lag problems. Since CoE lag has been getting worse and worse, and that is when the increment system was released so figured I'd let you know our thoughts.
  12. Primaeval Active Member

    I blame the Warden. Everything was great till we got one of those. That and dingos.
  13. Estred Well-Known Member

    Thank you very much, my guild had begun to investigate ourselves which spells could be causing lag. As our SK reported only certain skills caused him to lag out. This would explain why I as a Guardian have not been lagging; I do not use spells. Keep up the work as much as it may not seem many of us appreciate it.
  14. Bolbir Active Member

    Yes, big thanks for taking action to this.

    But what i dont understand is why does suddenly "these abillitys" starts to cause lag now and not at the start of CoE? For us the lag started around 3 weaks ago and getting worse for each raid and especialy in ST Unearthed and some fights in PoW. IF it is the new prestiges for some classes causing it? I mean did 90% of the raiding community just discovered that they had unasigned points in the new prestige tree or what :)
  15. Koko Well-Known Member

    New favorite GMs. <3
  16. Alarra Well-Known Member

    Tell us who the other coders are, give credit where credit is due ^_^
  17. Kalderon Well-Known Member

    well, i would say, lets wait what came out in the end :) a working solution can be harmfull.... in some ways ^^
  18. Daalilama Well-Known Member

    TBH I have not experienced anything more than the occasional 1-2 second lag in raid zones however I have been experiencing 3-4 second lag spikes in group/overland zones...not sure if thats related to the overall discussion but its down right annoying wherever it occurs.
  19. SentinelBasch Active Member

    Finally able to post this - the forums are really slow-loading at the moment. The lag today is really bad, not just on skills, but on everything. It takes a few seconds to start harvesting nodes, starting conversations with NPC's, pulling up quest windows, and pretty much everything else. I can execute 4-5 combat arts in succession before any of them register, and then the damage numbers for all of them show up a few seconds later all at the same time.

    Also, I'm not sure if this is a related issue, but I'm in Steamfont right now, and some enemies and items cannot be selected with the mouse. On occasion, I can rotate my view to rectify the issue (with the camera behind me instead of in front), but sometimes that does nothing and there are nodes I can't harvest and enemies I can't loot. It seems to be the most prevalent in the far western crater, with the 6 million kobolds running around.

    I know it's not my connection - I'm direct-connected into 100 MBPS (currently getting 62.84 MBPS from a speed test), and I'm not having issues connecting to anything else (except these forums today). Are there any game settings I can try changing to reduce the lag, besides the overall graphic quality (which doesn't help, I already tried that)? I know the devs are working hard on this, and thank you. I had to log off for a while, though, because I really can't take it anymore at the moment.

    EDIT: Oh, and it put my whole post into one big paragraph. Good thing I know enough HTML to manually add the 'p' and 'br' tags in. :p
  20. Eileithia Active Member

    If you're also having issues connecting to the forums it may very well be your connection. Not your specific connection to the internet, but the path your data is taking to SOE's servers is slow. Do a ping or traceroute to forums.station.sony.com. (Or look up the IP and ping that)

    Not saying there aren't definite lag issues, but I very very rarely have experienced that kind of lag in overland zones. Dungeons and raids however, I completely agree, it's been pretty bad the last couple of weeks.