My thought on the cause of lag......

[Geonis]

I have a new theory on where the lag is coming from. I think the recent lag issues are coming from the massive /tell spammers are sending. I think they have finally programmed a bot, and it is literally sending to a, then b , then ... then aa, then ab, then ac, and you get the picture. This would probably cause the amount of lag we have seen recently.



What do you think?

[JacknCoke]

*user error*

[BlueLightBandit]

I highly doubt that is the case.

For one, they would be sending themselves the tells more often than they'd be sending anybody else.

Secondly, to do it randomly like that would take literally millions of tells. Take a five character name, with 36 characters allowed in each position your're at 36^5 possibilities, or 60,466,176 different possible variations. Breaking that down backwards, assuming they could send 100 tells a second, that would still be 604,661 seconds or roughly 168 hours, just to hit you once. And that's IF they ONLY sent out tells to character with five characters in their names... if they started with 1 character, and worked their way up to say 10 characters, we're not talking about a few hours, we're talking about tens of thousands of hours... just to hit each person once.

And that's IF they can send 100 tells a SECOND.

Considering I get a tell about every half hour, I'd guess that this was not the strategy they are using.

[Krago]

Maybe they are not rolling through every possibility, but creating a database will all the known names. Easy enough to pull them off the "Who" list.

[Yvonne_Blacksword]

even if they are anon...apparently.
and have been for months.

[parvo]

The chat server is seperate from the game server no?

[Impaqt]

It does appear the Chat server is separate fromt eh game server... THere are many times when my game lags, but VOice and Text chat continue normally.

Plat framers sit in the wavecrest and gather names... Annonymous or not, your character was in the Wavecrest at one point. THey have your character name.

[Lorichie]

I dont know computer, or server specifics but ive always thought that theyve done it this way for a while now, at times i multibox, or my wife sits next to me on the second computer, and quite literally, if one toon gets a mail, the other does too, pretty much at the same time, thats not humanly possible, theres no denying that one person cannot send tells that fast. ive been in groups where everyone has said they received the same tell within ten seconds of each other....ive always suspected a bot, and i still do.

Im not sure about the chat server lagging the game server, but ive always felt that when within a group, whatever the number of folks in it is, if one persons connection is really borked, (i guess comp specs too), or something really nasty happens, it affects the others as well, problem is this isnt always the case. there are no doubts that sometimes its server side, but i dont think its as much as we think at times.


Anyway, i digress. while i believe there is a bot and have for some time, i dont think its lagging the game server. However i may of course be incorrect.

rich

[phinius]

They have hacked the online player structure within the client. Anonymous is just a flag used by the who tab. The client always knows what players are online. That is how they can hit an anonymous character as soon as it logs in.

They also have a database of any character they have ever seen in game. They just automate the /tell's starting at the top and work to the bottom. When banned, log next char and continue where the previous stopped.