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Lag issues with beta for Non-US based customers

nicolsnicols Member Posts: 31
in Champions Online

Hi

I was wondering if the lag issues had been dealt with before beta ended this week. I (and many others in UK /  europe and the southern hemisphere e.g. New Zealand) were  expereincing very poor pings and some sort of traffic shaping with our connections to the LA based central servers. This was in part due to there being no regional servers (due to the one world with many shards design) and apparently partly due to our ISPs interpreting the games data in a similar way to torrent and file sharing data (something my ISP doesn't normally do for other MMOs and online games). It made the beta all but unplayable in my case (standing stil I was getting FPS of 60+, but using travel powers or just turn around with mouse look saw a huge lag spike, sometimes lasts a couple of seconds and making the apparent fps drop to like 2-10 fps), plus lots of rubber banding (many also had problems zoning / logging on but I was lucky to avoid most of that).

Cryptic seemed a little bit at a loss but said they were investigating the issue and were going to introduce a tool to help identify what was happening. Did things pick up in the last couple of days? I only ask as its supposedly officially launched in Eu next week but I'm considering cancelling my preorder - until they fix this I can't play (too many deaths fighting simple mobs that suddenly appeared as I rubber banded array the zone) and don't want to waste my first free months play.

Shame.. from what I  saw of the game, there were some nice ideas and features in there that would appeal to the more casual MMO player like my self.

So any other EU players suffering the same problem / not suffering? (I'm in the UK using BT - not the best ISP by any means but unfortunately they own a large part of the net market (and infrastructure) in the UK and are the best of a limited bunch of options in my relatively rural location.

I've asked on the official forums but no responses as to whether this is fixed yet.

Thanks in advance

S.

Comments

  • zarzuzarzu Member Posts: 126

    you're aware that your fps has nothing to do with connection lag, yes?

    i am located in switzerland and i had hardly any lag during cb and ob, there were some intervals where i was rubberbanding, but the whole zone complained about lag then.

  • BademBadem Member Posts: 830

    Hey Nicols

    I used to work for BT on their tech team for BB connections (i work for Carphone now)

    The FPS (contrary to belief) can actually be caused by the connection to the server as turning requires the client to connect to the server adn obtain details of what is where, if this is delayed or disrupted then the FPS will plummet as the client is trying to draw what it doesnt have

    The rubber banding is going to be because of Client to server lag and this is also ISP related

    What you need to do is to do the following

    1)Ping the servers, are you getting a good return ping from it?

    2) Contact your ISP, ask for the Interleaving to be turned off if its on and on if its off, try this and see what happens

    Go into your router settings and ensure the internet connection is set to 'ALWAYS ON' anything else is useless (since ON DEMAND will only transmit data when its needed and tends to be screwy as hell)

    also run some speed tests, make sure your getting a decent speed, if you internet is not totally clear then its up to BT to sort it out for you

    Hope this helps

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png

  • nicolsnicols Member Posts: 31

    I did say apparent fps (as read by fraps) but yes.. when I tied in the output graph from fraps (as monitored on my g15 keyboard) to the built in netgraph commandline tool ingame, the drop in fps correlated to a huge spike on the netgraph tool. I'm not sufficiently up with the technical side of things to explain this in detail but from the netgraph tool, my ping was averaging 200-400, my sent packets were a couple of 100 (with a ratio of 1:1 (packed to unpacked) whilst my recieved packets was several 100 to several thousand but the ratio of packed to unpacked was 1-2 fold standing still and 10-50 fold when I turned around using the mouse or moved forward more than a couple of steps... and thats when things got unpleasant. 

    This problem does appear to be location and ISP dependent - in the UK, BT have a huge chunk of the market and are known to be avid traffic shapers, no matter what service package you are on (I'm on their unlimited, highest domestic package) and a lot of the other complaints were also BT and SKY users (sky piggy back on the BT network I think) but I saw similar complaints from users in other eu countries and New Zealand.  Some said they saw improvements at odd hours e.g. 0400 in the morning Uk time - that would be after work in LA and before normal worktime in the UK (when BT does a lot of its traffic shaping apparently) but I tried at the weekend and saw only marginal improvemnts in playability. I did contact my my ISP but the man in the Indian call centre said there were no reported problems (BT's customer service does leave something to be desired). Cryptic said they would talk to the ISPs once they'd collected more data - just dont want to be paying a sub whilst they do that. There were similar problems with Warhammer last year for some users (not me - my lag was ok in that game). 

    This was a big thread on the CO forums last week but its been bumped to the bottom by other issues (graphics performance, patching problems, server disconnects etc - which ironically, I'm not experiencing).

     

    S

  • nicolsnicols Member Posts: 31

    Thanks Obidom, I'll give that a try when I get home (can't try it with CO at the moment of course but I can check my hub settings etc) and yes, I agree re the fps issue - there did seem to be a strong correlation between the fps drops and the huge data spikes on cryptics in game netgraph tool (that measures ping and data sent / recieved). 

    Something else I found that really helped with another game (Age of conan - I like it, so sue me :-P ) was that I had lag / a small fps drop every 60 seconds or so - then I found out that it was to do with my wireless set up / vista, which apparently checks for stronger wireless signals every minute, briefly disconnecting you in the process. You can't turn this off in vista but a little program called vista anti lag (VAL) does this for you - suddenly my connection to AOC was very smooth and unitterupted.

    obviously, tried CO with and without VAL loaded but no discernible difference in this game.

    Thanks again

    S. 

  • BademBadem Member Posts: 830

    I hear you on the call centre one, I once tried to report a fault with my BB service and the guy was reading teh script, even after telling him I was a BT engineer I knew what the problem was he was still clueless

    A similar issue occured with EvE a while ago and it was found to be one of the carriers dropping the packets.

    I know its a ball ache but the guy from the call centre is talking rubbish, I would speak to them again, check out you interleave setting, they can do all kinds of things to optimise the line for gaming, I did it to mine and did it when I finally left BT to use my own companies BB service.

    do you have any other issues with lag in other games? LOTRO is a good one to test as the server is quite sensitive to lag and you will see rubber banding all the time on it (worth getting the trial just to test)

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png

  • nicolsnicols Member Posts: 31

     Whilst not derailing the thread to moan about BT's service... :-)

    When I moved into my house I got the bt homehub (which had just lauched that month with a huge advertising campaign).. and when they reconnected the phone, the internet didn't work and had flashing error lights as per the installation instructions. I spent hours on the phone (charged for as well!)... excuses included that it was to do with my pc and I needed to buy a newer model (I asked if I should replace the other 3 desktops / laptops I'd tried as well, at which point he went very quiet), that the internet connection was working fine and that it was my browser settings - he totally refused to acknowledge that according to the manual, the flashing light supposedly indicated a line fault. Eventually, he said I had a faulty hub and posted out a replacemnt.. which came a week later and gave the same error lol. Eventually, after much pleading, a different guy finally agreed to do a remote line check but said it was a waste of time.. it took less than a minute and then he said.. err,, I'm getting an error. (it turned out they had switched on my bt connection... but had failed to switch off the SKY connection that the previous owner had cancelled and both were going to the same number). It took less than 5 minutes to correct (or 2 weeks from my perspective lol). the only upside was I got a spare hub and 3 extra phones (you got a free phone with the hub but they couldn't meet the orders so they sent out a complimetary phone.. then sent another because they realised the first one wasnt compatable with the hub.. then sent me 2 white hub phones a month later.. one for each hub lol!!).

    Having said that, I've had few BT related problems since... and to answer your question Obidom, my bt connection is average speed at best due to my distance from the exchange. I was at 0.5 meg when it was connected but bt upgraded the lines a bit last year so I got 1.2 meg.. I then picked up a BT iPlate socket on ebay (equivalent to cutting the bell wire on the line I think) and my hub settled down to 1.7-1.9 meg connection with far fewer disconnects. Unfortunately my non-BT options are pretty limited where I live.. no virgin cable, no wimax services (there was one being trialled in my village and I nearly joined up but they went bust very quickly).. just BT and companies that piggy back on the bt lines. Having said that, 1.7 meg is more than useable at the moment, AOC works fine (last week), Warhammer was fine last december, Runes of magic was fine earlier this year and I can stream the bbc iplayer with few problems. The only other possibiliity is that I've gone over some arcane secret download limit on my unlimited service and BT is throttling me without telling me but my internet usage hasn't increased compared to other months and other download activities ie steam seem unaffected.

     But thanks again for your tips - always willing to peek under the hood to tweak things and get a few more % out of my connection... I just hope crytpic can sort it their end (they shoudl - its affecting a lot of Uk users according to their forums - let them talk to the call centre and see how far they get lol).

    Thanks

    S

  • nicolsnicols Member Posts: 31

     Oh.. just to add a final anecdote to the BT saga.... after a while, I decided to sell one of the freebie phones on ebay. Ended up having to give a full refund.. the boxed, never used, shrink wrapped, hub compatable phone was faulty  and didn't even switch on lol!

     

    S.

  • BademBadem Member Posts: 830

    ahh I could swap stories about BT all day long lol

    I guess I am lucky 400m from exchange, 'secret' connections that top out at around 50 meg (dont ask ;) ) and as for download limtis? what are those, crafty perks of the job :)

    Only thing I hated about teh hub was paying 80 quidd for it only to find its locked to BT's network so I couldn't use it any way :(

    Hope they have this sorted tho, I got my pre-order done today (your post encouraged me to check the game :) and I want to play now :)

    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ab/Norsefire-logo.png

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