Lag: DETAILS

[jakeelala]

You hit the nail on the head.

Guys, we know lag makes the game frustrating to play. We take a lot of pride in this game, and want you all to have the ultimate DDO experience. We want the lag eradicated. We're already working on fixes for lag issues, but unfortunately it is not as simple as flipping a switch and making it go away. These things take time, and we're going to need a little more.

Hang in there, we're doing everything we can, and we appreciate your patience.

I'm sorry. Are these some sort of state secrets? Is this privileged information? Would it be embarrassing somehow to the overlords if it was revealed the nature of the problem and your proposed solution?

You know the world has borne evidence in the last 10 years to the power of the social network...Wikipedia, THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT, twitter, etc. Over and above the fact that if you just gave your slavering players a few choice morsels on something as mundane and boring and as your network stats and broken back planes they would sit and wag their tails like dogs...there's an off chance that some of them, given enough actual information, may actually be able to offer helpful advice.

I understand if you can't release upcoming feature details. But persistent lag issues within the game (for what has been literally years) really should not be something you withhold details and specifics on. It's:

1. An easy way to keep your customers informed and engaged. That's worth more than all your new subscriptions in a month.

2. Trivial, non-competitive, non-game specific information that does nothing to your control information flow around features, enhancements, and development work

3. Potentially a FREE way to get some very good advice, or at least other opinions on what's wrong and ways to look at it.

I work in the professional services industries. I know a thing or two about keeping clients happy, covering my ass, and controlling messaging and expectations. You guys need to start thinking more like consultants with clients, and start aiming for low hanging fruit for big returns on little efforts.

Letting your most devoted and interested gamers into some of the technical aspects of what they're frustrated with in-game is 100% win-win. It's easy, it's free, and it will go an enormously long way in building trust and goodwill.

Please, I beg, I DARE you to come up with a reason why I'm not right.

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. And I don't mean me, I mean the forum members who are begging for a glimpse into just what has stumped you guys for so long, and affects their game play so disproportionately.

-Jake

[DoctorWhofan]

Also, it took over an 1/2 hour to do the Kortho's Island mayor quest. Stuck on the ladder. Was cleaning it out on my own on normal. mimiual buffs, if any. I actually recorded some of the lag. THEN I ge get out to the slayer's part-no lag. Do the Cannith Cannery quest in the same instance, no problems except for some step lag at the beginning. THis was Friday.

[greystone306]

The issue here is not just the lag, the issue with this company is some of the worst customer service I have ever seen or heard of. Simply appallingly bad. Tolero included, we have a 40,000+ view thread of complete hate about respec mechanisms, not word one. But someone posts a thread about vin diesel and we get like, 7 responses in an hour. Sheeeeeeesh.......

How the in the Heck is the amount of responses to a thread on the Forums a Custumer Service issue is beyond me..There may be potential Customer Service issues, but forum responses is not a way to Gauge them IMHO.... Now if it was 7 responses by Turbine Employees in an hour to the vin diesel thread that might be a problem.. Maybe nobody cares about the respec mechanisms or replied in 1 of the thousand other threads going on about respec mechs and just viewed your favorite 1..
and to the person about Deeds not words.. IT Deeds take time usually.. except for the DEED of Turbine just saying **** ** and deciding to shut it down and turn off the DDO servers permanently.. Also, if you haven't noticed the Economy right now is not the greatest, and people are cutting staff/costcutting across the board...its possible the needed Suppliers of equipment are also having production issues..

[greystone306]

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT. And I don't mean me, I mean the forum members who are begging for a glimpse into just what has stumped you guys for so long, and affects their game play so disproportionately.

-Jake

www.notalwaysright.com
Enough Said

[Fubars_Snafu]

It's not latency.. I, on avg, have a latency of 20 ms with 0% loss of packets.. I am about 15 miloes as the crow flies from turbine's HQ... this is definitely a server issue .. one thing it may be is the server trying to adjust the gamestate so everyone is on equal footing ( a way to "equalize" latency for all players in an instance) or there are not enough servers in the cluster to handle the work load and the game is constantly playing catch up... that's my two coppers

[jakeelala]

www.notalwaysright.com
Enough Said

there's a difference between a customer being uninformed (your link) and a customer being right in asking for more information in response to inadequate level of service (turbine customers on this forum)

[Vordax]

THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT.

I would have to disagree with this.. The customer MAY be right. Some businesses will then pretend that the customer is "ALWAYS" right. These businesses usually don't last long though.

Vordax

[Dark_Helmet]

In this case, fixing the lag is easy.

Turbine needs to undo whatever they did a few months back during their "mystery update" that caused all of this to start. Most seem to suspect that they removed hardware from DDO. If this is the case, then the problem isn't that they can't fix the lag... it's that they refuse to, because some exec somewhere decided they needed that hardware for something else, and won't be changing his mind anytime soon(tm).

Not to sound insulting, but I see advice like this from people who know nothing about computers or data centers.
The issues are complex and while I don't know their current configuration, I do know that it isn't as simple as "put it back":
A lot of commercial companies depend on COTS (Commercial off the shelf software)and have no control. The companies who make that software put out patches to fix bugs and security issues (mostly security patches are badly written and the crux of the problems as the quickest fix gets out to prevent major damage).
So, they have some sort of Server software (Such as Windows or Unix), Clustering software (sometimes part of the OS), Database (such as Oracle, MS-SQL), hardware drivers (network agregation, optimization, SAN, RAID, backups, etc). Each manufacture of those pieces of software released updates, patches, security fixes (those are typically installed during the maintenance windows that aren't improvements to DDO itself).
Doing "roll-backs" don't always fully uninstall, leaving artifacts that can still cause lag (some DLL refused to leave the system and you would have to track it down if you didn't do a file level dump - yes, I have experienced that).
Put on top of that that Turbine may have outsource the running of the Data center and their risk is potentially higher and hard if not impossible to fix (something that bean counters never factor into the "cost saving" of outsourcing, but I digress). The only way people try to fix these issues is to "throw hardware at it", but the original, crappy code is still there taking up precious cycles preventing the system from ever running at normal loads again.

Evidently, DDO doesn't have any real Q/A test environment (something like a full replication of deployed hardware and test tools such as LoadRunner with a stress test replay that replicates user behaviors that was recorded during one of the heavily occupied timeframes). If they did, they would know when some maintenance change to software would impact the live systems and be able to point directly to the company responsible.

Only way to fix it is to restart from scratch with a proper system... which we won't see (just hand me downs from LOTRO).

[Yaga_Nub]

Agreed. There have benn so many times over the last year that this tripe has been spewed at us. We have lag fixes coming! This should eliminate a bit of the lag! All that has happened is the lag has gotten worse and worse and worse until at times some quests in the game are unplayable. And, like so many other issues, the complaints on the forums have to reach a near riot befroe we can even get a single PEEP from someone at turbine about it.

Yeah and even then they probably shouldn't have responded because the complaint/"issue"/thread wasn't worth responding to.


The issue here is not just the lag, the issue with this company is some of the worst customer service I have ever seen or heard of. Simply appallingly bad. Tolero included, we have a 40,000+ view thread of complete hate about respec mechanisms, not word one. But someone posts a thread about vin diesel and we get like, 7 responses in an hour. Sheeeeeeesh.......

It's not about customer service. This forum allows for interaction but does not guarantee ANY level of interaction with someone from Turbine. There have been many times that I've had an issue, submitted a bug report and gotten more than just the automatic response. Try that if you want a response.

If you're really ****ed, go for a walk. Go shag your boyfriend/girlfriend. Get away from the computer for a while until it doesn't bother you any more. It's not worth getting upset over. Well, maybe the Vin Diesel thing but Tolero is a woman isn't she?

[skyking613]

Was in the shroud last night. Lag right from the start, as soon as we went after the trash at the start. Someone suggested to turn off all combat feedback. I ignored him. But the lag did seem to improve a bit a couple seconds later. On about the 5th-6th portal lag came back a bit not as bad as the start bad still bad. So i thought what the hell wont hurt to try right. Turned it all off (Boy did i feel nekkid). But geusse what it improved. Portals were going down at an insane speed. When done with part one the walk up the stairs where it always lags, I didnt even hicup. Part 3 also went without much lag. All week the shroud has been absolutly horible with lag. I havent seen a shroud go this smooth in weeks. Was it a coincidence? Or does the server lag because it needs to send so many of those combat logs to the client. I can think of no other quest where there is as much combat text as in the shroud. What if we all try to turn off the combat text this weekend and see if this improves the lag across the server this weekend. As someone who troubleshoots all day for his job I know sometimes the client has to get involved. So why dont we help them out and do this for the weekend. And also announce to the party to do this at the start of the shroud. Some people will just blow it off, but if we get at least half of them to do it we may see an improvement. If we dont see any improvement, Well as long as enough people tried then we will know what it isnt.

[Missing_Minds]

Please, I beg, I DARE you to come up with a reason why I'm not right.

Because you have NO "rights" here, you have "privileges". Learn the difference.

[Vardak]

The lag is rather obvious... someone needs to call Bob, owner and operator of "Bob's Server Farm" and politely ask him to quite hosting all those p0rn sites.

[kingfisher]

Was in the shroud last night. Lag right from the start, as soon as we went after the trash at the start. Someone suggested to turn off all combat feedback. I ignored him. But the lag did seem to improve a bit a couple seconds later. On about the 5th-6th portal lag came back a bit not as bad as the start bad still bad. So i thought what the hell wont hurt to try right. Turned it all off (Boy did i feel nekkid). But geusse what it improved. Portals were going down at an insane speed. When done with part one the walk up the stairs where it always lags, I didnt even hicup. Part 3 also went without much lag. All week the shroud has been absolutly horible with lag. I havent seen a shroud go this smooth in weeks. Was it a coincidence? Or does the server lag because it needs to send so many of those combat logs to the client. I can think of no other quest where there is as much combat text as in the shroud. What if we all try to turn off the combat text this weekend and see if this improves the lag across the server this weekend. As someone who troubleshoots all day for his job I know sometimes the client has to get involved. So why dont we help them out and do this for the weekend. And also announce to the party to do this at the start of the shroud. Some people will just blow it off, but if we get at least half of them to do it we may see an improvement. If we dont see any improvement, Well as long as enough people tried then we will know what it isnt.

interesting indeed. worth a try, i mean you already know you are kicking the portals ass dont you?

[Missing_Minds]

I spent the last few days poking a few devs to see how we, the players, could help with data gathering that they would find useful. This is what we came up with.

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=175724

So if you want to help, give them data. Thanks all.

[Thanimal]

I spent the last few days poking a few devs to see how we, the players, could help with data gathering that they would find useful. This is what we came up with.

http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=175724

So if you want to help, give them data. Thanks all.

AWESOME! I'll try to gather that data the next time I experience ugly lag and post it on that new thread.

Also, anyone have ideas for how to get the word out on "No Combat Log Weekend"? Oh, and: Can someone remind me how to turn it off!?

[skyking613]

Im at work right now so can't remember which option it was under off hand. It was towards the bottom of one of them though and there were like 15+ to turn off.

[Missing_Minds]

AWESOME! I'll try to gather that data the next time I experience ugly lag and post it on that new thread.

Also, anyone have ideas for how to get the word out on "No Combat Log Weekend"? Oh, and: Can someone remind me how to turn it off!?

No combat log weekend? I don't think you can turn off the combat log as I'm pretty certain the client will always receive that data. Other wise the simple method is to just remove that chat tab so that it no longer exists.

[skyking613]

With the chat tab removed it may still be sending the data to the client.

[skyking613]

Now that i think about it if you have any combat window (not even active) it will update it and you can click on it to see it after the fact. But what if there is none to begin with i think when you add it, it will only show you from that point on. I still think it would be easier to turn it off. Just in case someone has it turned on one of the tabs but forgets about it. It will also make it simpler to turn back on when we want to.

[The_Phenx]

12 Man shroud.

approx 4-6 seccond delay between casting time and effect time. Last evening at 10-12 EST.

It seems to peak in several areas... portal beat downs... harry fights.

Tried ultra high and then low graphics... saw no change in frame rate. Internet connection speed at that time was 8.8 MBS 35 ms latency. (using a 3rd party speed tester) No other programs running on my comp... xp - 2 gig ram dx 9 amd 3000...256mb graphics card

Its like the server has issues processing all the twf blows, and has to que everything and it gets all jammed up.