Red Ring of Death!

[Sephirah]

Furthermore, for those of you not experiencing the issue - why are here?

First off, I'm sorry to hear you are experiencing this issue Lurkios hopefully it can get resolved soon.

...once again I just want to say I'm not trying to place blame on anyone. Was just pointing out 2 things, that AoEs are infact avoidable, it's just as damaging to the games reputation and potential if nobody even gives it a chance because they see things like those old beta 3 gifs floating around; and to point out that there MAY be a solution for people without waiting for SE.

I'm not trying to claim there is no delay or anything like that, and by no stretch of the imagination am I trying to get anything swept under the rug or ignored, but as indicated by what I said in that previous post, the people who are experiencing this issue don't realize the damage they are doing as well.

You say getting this issue ignored is damaging to the games potential subscriptions and longevity, but I don't think you realize just how many people are making noise about this, and a large number of those players could take steps to improve their situation without SE doing anything. If everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs that the game is broken and nobody can avoid anything, then nobody will give it a shot, which is much more damaging, than this issue not being addressed at all.

Once again I'm not blaming you or anyone else, so please stop taking offense at the notion that there could be something wrong with your connection, for the last time your connection is not YOU.

Hopefully SE can get this all sorted out, but in the meantime, now you know there are other steps that can be taken to help improve things, if you choose to willingly ignore those steps on the grounds of "you shouldn't have to", then that is fine too.

[Ryios]

It is the connection sure... But not 100%... The problem isn't as simple as your connection needs to be better. Sure a better connection can do it and not get hit by the aoe's but peoples connections would be fine the way they are now if there wasn't a 300ms hard coded delay between server side xyz processing (your horizontal/vertical/height position). It artificially increases everyone's latency to +300ms. So if your ping is 34 ms and that puts you at 334 ms on a worse case scenario and you move out of the aoe with more than 334 milliseconds remaining then you won't get hit. But if your ping is 200 something that puts you at 500ms (half a second) and you move out of the aoe with less than half a second to do it so you get creamed. Now realistically, the average human being takes 200-300 milliseconds to respond to stimuli with a motor reflex. That means from the time your eyes receive the light from your monitor to the time your brain processes that into an image and you think and respond to it with a motor reflex that usually takes about 150-300 milliseconds, and the older you get the slower your (reflexes) in that manor are. So take that half a second and add 300 to it, now your at nearly a full second of latency you can do nothing about.

Sure you can lower that 200ms ping to 50 with a better isp and optimizations, but your still stuck with a 300ms hard coded server side processing loop and a 150+ms brain delay.

Simple math really. They need to get rid of that 300ms processing timer and process everyone's xyz the instant they are received.

[Lurkios]

Hopefully SE can get this all sorted out, but in the meantime, now you know there are other steps that can be taken to help improve things, if you choose to willingly ignore those steps on the grounds of "you shouldn't have to", then that is fine too.

I get what you're saying - and it's true that in some cases the problem will be largely ISP, client configuration or hardware related. However, given the number of complaints and my own personal attempts to diagnose the issue I'm certain that this is not the larger issue.

For example, I can tell you that over the 6 hours I measured I've averaged 121ms latency to Lamia with 19 spikes over 200ms, the highest (for a returned packet) of which was 457ms sustained for one measurement interval (one second). The highest average latency over any 5 minute period was 127ms and the highest recorded packet loss over any 5 minute period was 0.03%.

1/2

[Lurkios]

The connection is, for all intents and purposes, rather stable. The latency is respectable, but not fantastic - certainly manageable. Over this 6 hour period I continued to experience around .4 seconds of delay regarding AOEs and summoning mounts (spell casts, horn goes off - takes half a second before I'm actually on the mount). I can't remember any other specific cases where it was noticeable.

Now, given the numbers I've posted, you'd obviously expect 121ms of delay plus a few additional for processing and such, but .4 seconds is a fair bit beyond what you would expect even in the worst of circumstances. Taking actual network latency into account I believe that the .3 second discrepency that keeps being mentioned is relatively accurate.

2/2

[Sunarie]

I'm not trying to claim there is no delay or anything like that, and by no stretch of the imagination am I trying to get anything swept under the rug or ignored, but as indicated by what I said in that previous post, the people who are experiencing this issue don't realize the damage they are doing as well.

You say getting this issue ignored is damaging to the games potential subscriptions and longevity, but I don't think you realize just how many people are making noise about this, and a large number of those players could take steps to improve their situation without SE doing anything. If everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs that the game is broken and nobody can avoid anything, then nobody will give it a shot, which is much more damaging, than this issue not being addressed at all.

Please realize that the only way to get a response from SE is to keep bringing the issue up. Threads complaining about it that went without response for two weeks got closed because apparently "no one was experiencing the issue anymore". Additionally, if a person is unable to play a game without jumping through hoops to diagnose their connection because playing with a less than optimal connection is not really supported by this game (without getting said issues people keep bringing up).. then folks deserve to know prior to buying it. There are very few threads that actually flat out say AOEs are impossible to dodge (I recall one).. the major threads, and what people keep discussing usually go over that things can be dodged but you can't rely on your screen indicators. Which is true for the majority of the population (example of this would be Titan strat). People deserve to know that -before- spending their money.

Players are not damaging the game in this case. Yes, jumping through all the hoops may help you a bit, but it still leaves the major problem in tact... and even worse, SE might mistake it for the major problem being fixed. If SE fixed the root, all the jumping through hoops would no longer be required and the threads that are so damaging would disappear. I do get what you're trying to say, although your original post (prior to massive editing), put it in a horrible way that was basically asking for people to argue and not at all being constructive (lawl, check your connection but I'm not going to tell you what/how to check it even though most of you probably checked the basics and don't really know how to get into the more technical aspect of it). I just don't agree. The issue needs to be fixed, and pretending it can be resolved completely (instead of just bandaided) by troubleshooting your connection does just sweep the issue under the rug, even if that isn't your intention.

The AOE dodging issue has literally happened in zero other MMOs, not even when we get back to when many were on dial-up. The skill lag has happened in one I can think of, but was quickly patched and repaired. The fact of the matter is, SE is so far away from industry standards when it comes to that stuff. Players are going to complain about it, and they should. It really is not acceptable, and complaining/quitting is the only way to get it changed. I have a sinking feeling that players actually quitting is the only thing that may get them to review it in the end, but I hope it doesn't come to that as many people don't like to give things a second chance without some major publicity from the publisher.. and in the case of this game, it would a third chance. SE supposedly was already going to address this going from 1.0 to 2.0. You're asking us to understand your side, please understand ours as well in the sense that the handful of people who keep saying it's a connection issue and pointing to the players to fix it (because that is what's happening with these threads, not necessarily from you, but from a few others such as Tupsi), you are actually helping to prevent the core issue from even being addressed.

[SchalaZeal]

Simple math really. They need to get rid of that 300ms processing timer and process everyone's xyz the instant they are received.

They can lengthen the aoe 'safe period' by 300 ms. That's more realist than having faster servers.

They should also remove the auto-update position that casting does. Just leave it at the normal 0.3. That way being caught casting won't screw you for 0.3 seconds more.

[Alcyon_Densetsu]

there are other steps that can be taken to help improve things

I'm going to be very candid with you, and with all the people who think there's no issue on SE's part (no irony/trap question etc).

Even though I don't have issues in any other online game (and I play my fair share of those), I agree every server (datacenter) is particular (notably, particularly "placed" within internet's many routing nodes), so I can agree with you that troubleshooting is always useful, if only to confirm/rule out the origin/cause of a particular issue.

I wrote a summary of the steps I've taken here. What do you make of it? I'd really like you to point to anything more one could try, as well as commenting on my conclusion (that of all scenarios I've experienced, the only variable that yields problematic responsiveness are those where I play ARR, whereas any scenario not involving ARR works just fine).

Also, question (just fishing for possible causes/culprits): could it be SE's datacenter ISP that has an issue? Perhaps not able to sustain the traffic properly thus physically throttling the traffic that comes out of the datacenter? When people tend to blame ISP's, strangely enough then only focus on the players', but isn't it also theoretically possible that the problem lies on the other side? As in "it takes two to make a pair" —which any server/client or client/server connection can conceptually be reduced to.

Also, as in all datacenters, I suppose they actually have multiple simultaneous connections to the net: could it be that some are faulty (deficient router, cable, whatever), or subpar (heterogenous hardware, whatever); generally speaking that their parallel routing infrastructure isn't entirely symmetrical (voluntarily or not, rather not) from one path to the next, explaining why some would have issues and others not, or less?

I'm starting of thinking this way because, in all honesty, while I can always "feel" at least the .3s positional check, sometimes it gets much worse than that. Not saying that I find .3s acceptable unless they implement some form of interpolation so as to minimise felt latency, but it doesn't even seem to be the only issue —and I'm pretty sure it's not me "varying" since, as you can see in the post I've linked above, my ping/routing/packet loss is flat out stable (and using a dedicated VPN should have totally ruled out any such variation, if any).

Also,

The fact of the matter is, SE is so far away from industry standards when it comes to that stuff.

I agree. This can observed anytime in the game, judging by the rather "slow" responsiveness of any action (talking to a NPC, moving an item from one slot to another, changing your inventory's tab… anything that prompts a server response): there's a slight delay of "a few hundreds milliseconds" that isn't felt so much in other games. I'm not versed enough in database management to have a definitive take on this, but the little I know from experience is that they either haven't optimised their database enough (building indexes or whatever), or there's too much server-side checks (back to the client not being empowered/authoritative enough, not building a local cache, things like that). Possibly a combination of both. All being aggravated by latency, wherever that comes from.

[IamBenpi]

I admit I did not read all 25 pages. I read the first 12-15, and then skipped to the last 2 or 3. I have a few things to say on the issue:

1. Yes, some people troubleshooting on their end could fix their issues, whether it is the majority or not is simply a guess, and anyone who says otherwise is making assumptions with absolutely zero evidence to back it up.

2. Asking people to troubleshoot on their end is in general, unrealistic. When I worked on networks (I know, everyone is an expert on the internet, I'm not claiming that) it was mostly in the military. I literally, absolutely no joke, had on more than one occasion someone tell me their computer (in this case on an aircraft) wasn't working. When I showed them that the on off switch was in the off position, their answer, "I thought that was the official position." Yes, this is a joke in the military, but it started because yes, it happens. Think about how many people you probably still know (assuming we are talking about adults) who can't even use a keyboard shortcut, let alone troubleshoot a video card issue. This is why game developers have to try and find solutions to issues that in a perfect world, would be on the end user to fix, otherwise those people with little to no tech knowledge won't play their games.

3. Assuming someone's ISP will work with them is making a very big assumption, especially when you consider the previous point, and the fact that the first tier or two of techs you reach know very little more than the people mentioned in the previous point. My own ISP tech support didn't even know what I was talking about when I asked about 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz band support on their routers.

4. This is obviously a problem for a lot of players, based on the number of posts about it. Even [I]if[I] SE has absolutely no problems on their end that are leading to it, if they want to keep their players, they need to do something about it, even if that starts with a simple section on the forum for people to post comp specs, trace routes, etc, and then goes from there.

That is of course all just my opinion.