Serious Performance Issues (latency/server response time)

[Raist]

Been at this for nearly 20 years now...back to the days of dial-up and the introduction of residential broadband to our area that only offered 128k to 2mbit bandwidth plans that costed a premium of up to $70 a month---and that was bundled or yearly contract pricing. Online space flight sim, FPS, RTS, MMORPG, video conferencing/VOIP, regular streaming A/V....been there and done it all. Hosted content off old x86 platforms that would be a toaster compared to today's standards (were a lot of games where you hosted missions and maps locally on your machine--the game server was just for matchmaking).

We have always had to wrangle with latency across the internet. Still the same now as it was then...often the great equalizer (or punisher depending on how good/bad yours is). Content can be served on the best and most expertly optimized hardware at the endpoint...and a flaky router in Cleveland can kill a group of users' service in a heartbeat.

The servers and this game are plenty responsive enough. We have frequently found that unreliable sessions across the internet cause a major chunk of the issues. This has been repeatedly affirmed on these forums...in general, people with good transit have a good gaming experience. Granted there have been issues on SE's side in specific cases, but in the general scope of things those are the exceptions. The general consensus is bad session means bad game play.