My Titan AoE Lag Experience

[garborg]

I play on Leviathan.
I have 50MB fiber/dsl from Quest in Arizona.
I can not reliably dodge Titan AoEs'

To start, the lag I experience is slight but constant. Only rarely have I noticed major lag (warping, frozen play) and it has been during prime time and holidays.

The lag is slight enough to make Titan fight a nightmare for me. Coil is cake.

Here are some video clips I've captured.
twitch.tv/garborg/profile

Here is standard ping and trace route result.

Pinging 199.91.189.42 with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 199.91.189.42: bytes=32 time=114ms TTL=245
Reply from 199.91.189.42: bytes=32 time=114ms TTL=245
Reply from 199.91.189.42: bytes=32 time=115ms TTL=245
Reply from 199.91.189.42: bytes=32 time=120ms TTL=245

Ping statistics for 199.91.189.42:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 114ms, Maximum = 120ms, Average = 115ms

Tracing route to 199.91.189.42 over a maximum of 30 hops

  1    <1 ms    <1 ms    <1 ms  192.168.0.1
  2    19 ms    19 ms    19 ms  phnx-dsl-gw66.phnx.qwest.net [67.40.227.66]
  3    19 ms    23 ms    19 ms  phnx-agw1.inet.qwest.net [75.160.238.9]
  4    34 ms    34 ms    34 ms  lap-brdr-03.inet.qwest.net [67.14.22.78]
  5    32 ms    32 ms    32 ms  63.146.27.146
  6   113 ms   113 ms   113 ms  xe-1-3-0.mtl10.ip4.tinet.net [89.149.184.74]
  7   123 ms   114 ms   114 ms  ormuco-gw.ip4.tinet.net [216.221.156.110]
  8   114 ms   114 ms   113 ms  192.34.76.2
  9   114 ms   121 ms   115 ms  199.91.189.234
 10   115 ms   114 ms   115 ms  199.91.189.42

Trace complete.

I'm at wits end to find a solution. Avoiding using ping services because I should not require it with a 115ms ping.

[Will01]

Judging by your videos your moving when you see the plumes, ime that never works, you need to learn the rotation for when titan is about to do plumes and move in advance of them being cast.

PS, How are you doing coil if you haven't beat titan?

You must have beat him at least once...

[garborg]

I have beaten him. The fight has not gotten any easier with gear because of the AoE lag, nothing more.

Moving before the AoE is what I have to do. However I can end up killing other people when I am supposed to be plume stacking and I move too soon.

I understand what tactics people use to beat the fight. I am suggesting I have a network problem or the fight is broken. Did you ever play a game in the 80's called Dragon Lair? Yeah that sucked too. Move before something happens because it's per-ordained. I am pretty sure AoEs were not designed to be dodged before they occur. Hey but I could be wrong.

I am dreading them making Titan the easiest of the extreme mode primals with how it currently plays.

[Nabian]

garborb...this could be just me and I only watched one or two of those videos but it seems to me that your getting hit because your not out of the plumes in time. If you watch titan cast bar he finishes casting before you are out of the plumes.

In this game the animation doesn't mean crap. Its almost 100% about the cast bar. If your not out before the cast bar is finished your going to get hit.

I'm not saying to don't have a lag problem or that the fight is perfect for everyone. Just the examples i looked at you weren't out of plumes in time.

[RaineMagus]

I "do" see a slight-problem here with your Qwest / CenturyLink ADSL connection.

Note the first hop on the ISP's end -- this one:
2 ----19 ms----- 19 ms 19 ms phnx-dsl-gw66.phnx.qwest.net [67.40.227.66]

The connection has "slight" interleaving enabled (~6ms symmetric). Your latency is probably about 12ms higher than it should be (artificially, due to buffering for ATM bit-shifting). You can lower your pings by calling CenturyLink (they acquired Qwest) repeatedly and demanding that they switch your line to fastpath (shut interleaving off) until they finally do so [be prepared for lots of stress, this will take weeks and dozens of phone calls]. With interleaving shut off, your latency to the first hop at the ISP will drop usually to 6-8ms.


There's a price to pay for doing this (of course) and shutting off interleaving may make your connection less stable, or cost you bandwidth (require lowering speed in order to get stability back) ... yet if you keep at it, you can make this trade and get your Phone CO to provide you lower latency (to everywhere on the internet).

**Keep complaining and hassling your provider until they concede. They're going to tell you over and over that interleaving CANNOT be shut off (or that they never do it for any customer) -- this is a lie, I've personally gotten Qwest & CenturyLink to shut it off**


=====================================================
To give a jist of what this all is and why it's a big deal.. ATM has FEC (forward error correction) capable of correcting a single bit-error (not multiple concurrent bit errors). Unfortunately, alot of the noise on DSL lines is not a single error, but a burst of errors or a spike (impulse noise). For example, a lightning strike during a thunderstorm.

In the lightning example, that spike of noise may look like this (in ASCII art):
____|-------|_____

The problem is that the above spike is uncorrectable / FEC is wasted and retransmission is required. Yet, what if we instead were to "buffer" that window of data (where the noise occurred) and keep a frame-synchronized RNG (seed not being re-transmitted ever) on both ends of the connection? Then you could "randomize" the bits contained within the buffer (re-sequence them) and re-arrange the data back to the original order on the other end (due to knowing the RNG sequence / being in sync).

The shifting of bits requires no extra bandwidth and could (ideally) change the above noise pattern into something like this:
_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_|_

^ which is correctable by ATM. In jist, interleaving improves resistance of the line to impulse noise.


While this all sounds fine and dandy.... The problem is that the re-sequencing of data always implies buffering, and buffering implies "latency". So, perhaps you don't want to be making this trade [even though for the average user (not a gamer) interleaving may be in their favor].
=====================================================



--The only other thing that I can say is that I've watched some of your Titan videos, it looks like you may simply be reacting too slow. There is a window to active dodge a plume (with up to ~180ms latency going off just the animation effect), yet it's very small and requires 'immediate' movement on sight of the plume.

*Start by getting interleaving shut off and see if that makes it easier for you.

[Raist]

looks like you are also picking up some extra jitter coming across the tinet and Ormuco exchanges (hops 7 and 9 show a larger variance than the rest of your route). Hard to know for sure with a small sample set if there is anything going on that far down the route, but there may be something happening intermittently. A pathping may shed a little more light on what may be going on (100 pings vs. 3 in tracert, and it also looks at forwarding between hops as well).

[garborg]

garborb...this could be just me and I only watched one or two of those videos but it seems to me that your getting hit because your not out of the plumes in time. If you watch titan cast bar he finishes casting before you are out of the plumes.

In this game the animation doesn't mean crap. Its almost 100% about the cast bar. If your not out before the cast bar is finished your going to get hit.

I'm not saying to don't have a lag problem or that the fight is perfect for everyone. Just the examples i looked at you weren't out of plumes in time.

Yes, you are correct about animation finish. Are you saying the animation and cast bar do NOT start at the same time as others have pointed out moving ASAP when animation starts is too slow. Along with your explanation that would mean there is an issue if the animation is showing up AFTER the cast bar starts.

--The only other thing that I can say is that I've watched some of your Titan videos, it looks like you may simply be reacting too slow. There is a window to active dodge a plume (with up to ~180ms latency going off just the animation effect), yet it's very small and requires 'immediate' movement on sight of the plume.

It seems so odd though as I watch videos with healers finishing a cast and move and be fine. As a bard I'm moving ASAP and still get hit.

[RaineMagus]

It seems so odd though as I watch videos with healers finishing a cast and move and be fine. As a bard I'm moving ASAP and still get hit.

What alot of casters and DPS' used to do (although it's less a problem now than it was before), is to execute any ability shortly after dodging a plume [you'll see this alot in older tutorial videos]. As abilities in the game are 'positional', alot of people have theorized that using skills forces a position update to be sent to the server.

(this indeed seems to be the case, and makes alot of sense or there'd be alot of frustrated players with their flank attacks not landing after a reposition)

[garborg]

So as Bard my issue could be using animations as I'm moving... which I've always wondered if it was.

I see people post all the time they have no issues with AoE lag and I have a hard time believing it.

[Will01]

What alot of casters and DPS' used to do (although it's less a problem now than it was before), is to execute any ability shortly after dodging a plume [you'll see this alot in older tutorial videos]. As abilities in the game are 'positional', alot of people have theorized that using skills forces a position update to be sent to the server.

(this indeed seems to be the case, and makes alot of sense or there'd be alot of frustrated players with their flank attacks not landing after a reposition)

Or just jump.