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Lag, as compared to AC2
shmig
Member Posts: 43
To the best of my knowledge, LotRO is the first significant game Turbine has pumped out since Asheron's Call 2. At the very least, it's the first game (that I know of) using Turbine's engine since AC2. What concerns me is that lag killed AC2. Not to say that they didn't totally destroy the game along the way through total overhauling various in-game systems, but the horrible rubber-band lag made it nearly impossible to do the most basic thing in any MMO: travel.
It was nearly impossible to walk 3 yards without being pulled back to where you were. Moving from one point to another typically involved a lot of foward progress overwhelmed with instantious rubber-band lag putting you right back where you started. Aside from that, it really wasn't that bad of a game. There were towns that would actually grow based on player's effort, crafting (in the end) became integral in being a successful player, and not a passtime as in WoW. The cut scenes were neat, the story was interesting, fighting was pretty fun. But this isn't about AC2...
What concerns me is that Turbine might not have realized their failures. A game like LotRO has a lot of appeal. There's a lot of story, culture, room for RP, all that jazz that's possible in this game. I've heard that the game includes a small area of Middle Earth. This doesn't bother me, so long as it's big enough. Assuming this game has approximately a 5-7 year lifespan, I'd like to see a game that in the end is very large. In WoW you can see this, Azeroth is large, but the Outlands even bigger. Since Turbine can't exactly make up new continents without undercutting the loyal fans, starting small makes sense. I've heard there's no main city. That doesn't bother me either. There is absolutely no reason in the world to expect a city in a world like this. London was not exactly a large city throughout all of history, in fact it wasn't even one of the largest trade centers (though still large). But this isn't about game content either.
In the end, what I am absolutely most concerned with is rubber-band lag, and lag in general. This game is running on the exact same engine that essentially failed to produce a quality game in the past (AC2). Occasionally someone will mention lag issues. How bad is it? Is it rampant, or just the select few DSL and dial-up players? Is it isolated to highly populated areas, or can you not even walk a few feet without being 'rubber-banded' back to where you were? Did Turbine learn from their mistakes, and at this current time is LotRO worth my money?
It was nearly impossible to walk 3 yards without being pulled back to where you were. Moving from one point to another typically involved a lot of foward progress overwhelmed with instantious rubber-band lag putting you right back where you started. Aside from that, it really wasn't that bad of a game. There were towns that would actually grow based on player's effort, crafting (in the end) became integral in being a successful player, and not a passtime as in WoW. The cut scenes were neat, the story was interesting, fighting was pretty fun. But this isn't about AC2...
What concerns me is that Turbine might not have realized their failures. A game like LotRO has a lot of appeal. There's a lot of story, culture, room for RP, all that jazz that's possible in this game. I've heard that the game includes a small area of Middle Earth. This doesn't bother me, so long as it's big enough. Assuming this game has approximately a 5-7 year lifespan, I'd like to see a game that in the end is very large. In WoW you can see this, Azeroth is large, but the Outlands even bigger. Since Turbine can't exactly make up new continents without undercutting the loyal fans, starting small makes sense. I've heard there's no main city. That doesn't bother me either. There is absolutely no reason in the world to expect a city in a world like this. London was not exactly a large city throughout all of history, in fact it wasn't even one of the largest trade centers (though still large). But this isn't about game content either.
In the end, what I am absolutely most concerned with is rubber-band lag, and lag in general. This game is running on the exact same engine that essentially failed to produce a quality game in the past (AC2). Occasionally someone will mention lag issues. How bad is it? Is it rampant, or just the select few DSL and dial-up players? Is it isolated to highly populated areas, or can you not even walk a few feet without being 'rubber-banded' back to where you were? Did Turbine learn from their mistakes, and at this current time is LotRO worth my money?
Comments
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/thread/127199
I have very rarely seen another player that appeared to be suffering actual net lag, but since it's been rare and isolated, my guess is that the person's connection was the culprit.
I have NOT experienced even a single instance of rubberbanding after what has to have been over 80 hours of total played time during Open Beta/ opening day retail. (Only on a 768 DSL here).
Once in that time, I had the "stuck in place" server lag, but unlike WoW, where that always seemed to mean a disconnect or server crash was inbound, I recovered after about three seconds.
Hope that helps
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This game has 0 lag from a server side. I stuck in another gig of ram to give the game some breathing room, and all I can say is Woah, this is the best performing mmo at launch. ever .
who me ?
Let's just say that Turbine has improved their engine A LOT.
There are certain things that you can tell it's from the same engine, but for the most part it's everything that it should have been in the first place. There is no rubberband lag, and I personally have not noticed lag of any sort in the open or closed beta.
I'm not gonna go into a big review of the game here, but I'll just say that it does remind me a lot of the good things in ac2:
Right now the community is helpful and mature. Most(?) people seem to be more concerned with having fun(hanging out and playing music, first one to find me gets x, etc) than participating in an arms race(ala WoW). I believe the community is a little older than usual, so that may be part of it. Also, as far as I have seen, not many guilds from other games are coming in to 'take over'.
The graphics are great and run well on a range of machines and the atmosphere in each of the areas I have explored has been top notch(ambient music, sound effects, snow falling, etc). The world doesn't seem enormous in land mass, but it feels huge in the amount of history the areas have. However, we know they are expanding to more areas starting in June.
I'm not sure why you didn't try out the open beta, but I'm probably going to be putting my $199 down at the end of may for a lifetime sub if that tells you my impression of it.
Turbine did a lot of stress testing to locate issue with the engine and fix them. My experience from closed beta was LotRO is 100 times better at performing then AC2.
Only time I really had lag toward the end of beta (early there was issue in Bree during prime time but that seemed fixed) was during events where there was 100s of players in the same place (town invasions) and In my opinion no game can handle 100s of player in the same place.