Game Performance Improvements and Feedback

[Katrina]

Tonight, 8 pm, on Cannith server:

2 attempts at DOJ. We only took 7 people to try to prevent lag. We also reset it a few times looking the "best instance" to prevent lag. Both attempts lag-wiped. Entire party unable to move for over three minutes.

Doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason, it's just unplayable at times and then all of a sudden, it's fine.

[Flavilandile]

EE CitW today 3:30 to 6:00 pm EST on Khyber.

We lagged (froze in place) when:

• We aggroed more than 5 monsters (5 being an arbitrary number, a medium amount of monsters)
• Monsters lost line of sight to the person they had initial aggro on.
• Monsters aggroed too many players over the duration of their life
• Guild renown came in
• objectives progressed (like when ana went inside portals, when purples died, when all orbs were drained, when lolth went away)
• random times (we were fighting a single bebelith and we lagged for 5 seconds). That rarely happened, but it did happen nonetheless.

It's consistent with what I've seen and way more detailed. Maybe Pain in the Navel has some use finally: Troubleshoot game serverper formances.

The lost LOS for the aggroed person got me wonder, I think we also got that one in Hound, and it might be what caused lag during Velah Friday evening.
( especially when going up the last bit, with the archers on top and the lava pond below ).
I'll have to experiment more, this one should be easy to reproduce in places like the Tear of Dhakhaan hob village.

Your random times : did you check if they were tied to red/orange named mob becoming active ? I suspect it's one source.

Yesterday evening :

E-Chrono :
- EE; as soon as a pack of mob aggroed, lag appeared. 1 to 3/4 was ok, more was not. The more mob, the more lag.

Hound :
- EH; same pattern : 2/3 mob, ok, more not ok.

MOD :
- EN; it was laggy but manageable.

[dogbreath68]

Had a raid group set up last night on Gland and house j 1 instance wouldn't allow members to load in. They had to alt f4 just to get out,and switching from instance 2 to instance 1 was not good. Soloing quests still lags you up,and any raid with more than 8 members is unplayable. Ive been playing since beta and we had many more people playing I believe than we do now and Fernia was so smooth to play on. My thing is if you do something for a long time you will get better at it,so why is this getting worse with every update and every so called fix?

[mikarddo]

DoJ EN with 8 man last night.

Major lag spikes. Freezing for 15sec, rubberbanding etc. In the end fight - killed the wurm and had a solid 30 seconds of not being able to do anything meaningful. Still won but only because we played on Normal and had good dps.

Raids are simply no fun right now. We have to play at lower difficulties and with fewer people - and every single person that joins the raid asks about lag - never how we intend to actually play the raid.

I see fewer and fewer people log in - and far fewer that want to raid. If this isnt solved soon the number of people left that want to raid wont be enough to get raids run as we are spread too thin. I fear you are losing a major segment of the playerbase including me. If raids are not fun there simply is no reason for me to continue playing - I run past lives to get better at raids so with raids ruined there is no reason to run past lives either.

Man, this is borked.

Now, where the heck is the Executive Producer hiding through this mess? A single thread where only he and other Turbine employees can post where he posts once every workday - thus showing that he takes the issue seriously, apologises for it, and keeps us up to date with the measures taken to alleviate it - would go a long way to retain confidence. Right now - there is none.

[Deathdefy]

Last night:
scary lag in EH Fire on Thunder Peak,
then again in EH Deathwyrm (EH because of lag worries incidentally, so even when you do get a raid you don't get the fun of an EE),
and also in the Thunderholme explorer.
Nothing that actually exceeded about 5 seconds of freeze, 20-30 seconds of rubber-bandy 'oh god am I going to wake up dead', or a few consecutive minutes of very choppy but just playable-ness, but it felt like it at any time it might creep into 'lol you're all dead'-land.
I bailed on the potential L Shroud after that and am unsure if it happened or not.

So I ETRed and am now Deep Gnome (and a legitimate nightmare to party with due to the kill-steal-fest-fun than is multiple PK SLAs).

No lag at all when playing solo or in party so far today.
Did:
Invaders,
All GH Walk-ups and flags except PoP and Crucible
Droam Chains 1 and 2
Relic of Sovereign Past
The Madness Chain ending in In The Flesh.

Some in nearly-full parties (like 4 people with 2 hirelings... I mean it's Easter). Literally no problems whatsoever; not a blip of lag at any point. So yeah I don't know what the deal is. Something about party size > 4 and/or large dynamic spawns?

That's my report anyway - small party = fine, raid = extremely unpleasant to the point I simply won't be doing them again (having now hit my 20 double dragons and TR-ed) until they're fixed.

[Faltout]

The lost LOS for the aggroed person got me wonder, I think we also got that one in Hound, and it might be what caused lag during Velah Friday evening.
( especially when going up the last bit, with the archers on top and the lava pond below ).
I'll have to experiment more, this one should be easy to reproduce in places like the Tear of Dhakhaan hob village.

Not as easy. I suspect that loss of LOS activates pathing algorithms. And pathing algorithms have to do with the dungeon you're in. CitW has had awful experiences with pathing. Remember how many patches ana needed to make sure she wouldn't get completely stuck or lost? And ana still may drop off the webs.
Places like tear of dhakhaan may have different terrain and thus not able to repro the problem. If you succeed though, then that would be a win

Your random times : did you check if they were tied to red/orange named mob becoming active ? I suspect it's one source.

The only random time was when we fought the bebelith on the island before staging island. Whole group was there, ana was nearby, bebelith spawned, people started attacking. About half of bebelith's health we lagged. And then it went away and we killed it. But I see absolutely no cause for that lag.

[Taskmage]

A few minutes ago, Thelanis, Creeping Death LH, full group:
First run: Constant slight lag, most of the tiime my crossbow bolts hit "late", some didn't proc any message. Some lag spikes, usually around 5-20 seconds. Mostly playable, but not fun.
Second run: Still constant lag, major lag spike after second sigil, entire party coulnd't move for >5 minutes. Lag stopped the instant the entire party was dead. Looks like we were dead for quite a while but didn't notice till the lag stoppped.

Yesterday, VoN 5 EH / 6 EE:
Several heavy lag spikes during VoN 5, most short (2-5 seconds) one with about 50 deconds freeze. Several major spikes and constant minor lag during VoN 6. Every time the entire raid was affected.

This gets more and more anoying. While at first it seemed the changes you made did improve the situation, i'm now not sure anymore.
It looks more like the lag only gets better when less people play. Well, at least that means lag will be gone in one or two weeks.

[Baahb3]

Premium Account

Level 2 Character - Gregorii | Rogue/Monk
--With one other player, no hirelings

Quest: Redemption
Date Time: 3/27/2016 | ~4:40 PM CST

Notes:
Experienced about 2 minutes of strong stuttering and lack of response from clicking on intractable items.

[Aletys]

Today, on Khyber, noon EST USA, Von 5 & 6, EE, full party, my toon is a level 30 cleric.

Bad lag in Von 5, several lasting 1-2 minutes long, rubber banding (into deep lava, of course), freezing, stutter lag, spells taking 1-6 seconds to go off after casting them (when they went off at all), managed to complete, but it was not fun.

Half party left after Von 5 because they didn't want to do a Von 6 EE with that kind of lag. Remaining players were all high level & should have been able to complete Von 6, but, lag was terrible. Players assigned to electric couldn't get there because game kept rubber-banding them back to fire. Finally got players on all bases, but the lag kept interfering & we couldn't get everything down at the same time. Kept freezing, rubber banding, mobs would kill party members while we were frozen. I managed to stay alive, took down fire 3 or 4 times (sometimes by myself, because party members weren't getting raises), but it was hopeless. Rest of party wiped, at which point we decided to bail & I teleported out to marketplace.

This is the first raid I've tried in over a week because of the lag issues, and it's not getting better.

Then switched to a level 15 warlock who needs her house K favor, did the level 5-6 bar quests in house K. Constant lag, sometimes freezing, sometimes rubber banding, sometimes stutter-lag. In Chamber of Insanity, if I had been doing it at level, it would have been a party wipe.

The game has become not fun to play much of the time. Many of my friends are not even bothering to log in. LFM boards are pretty sparse. This game is dying fast.

Tracert's, ping's, latencies, etc., same as I've reported in the past (no difference between when it's lagging & when it's not). I have a high speed FIOS connection with plenty of bandwidth, a new rig with an SSD & a ton of fast RAM. I don't have these problems with anything else. Whatever it is, it's inside Turbine's house.

[Starla70]

Tonight on Argo, starting at 7:24 EST, tried to play through DOJ. Trying to use spell clickies 1 out of 3 were going off, Spells one in 5 maybe. Got to the second room with the blades had about 9 deaths due to lag. One the ramps was almost to the top, then back at the bottom. Spells were taking 10 to 15 seconds to actually go off, if they did. Skills were not able to be used could be up to a minute or more if they did. None could swing, more then you could swing. Trying to change weapons could take 5 tries or more. The raid was over before we even saw more then one fallen archon. Most of the ones who were trying the raid logged off after it. We did try again, but before everone got out of the middle we called it, the second time the blade room was better, but the ramps were horrible.

[Lerincho]

A lot of Eveningstar quest had lag that did not directly coincide with dungeon alert. Typically laggiest when nothing around, though some lag spikes is trash fights in all Demonweb quest on Epic Elite.

Part consisted of:
20/9 Artificer/Epic Halfling
20/10 Warlock/Epic Drow
27th level cleric hireling
25th level favored soul hireling
1 artificer pet.

Essential forgotten realms featured more lag than Eberron quests, all epic elite.

Spells not going off, spell points consumed. Switching weapons significantly delayed. Use of rune arm majorly delayed. Period of repeater hiring but no damage/rolls occurring.

[Cordovan]

We want to thank people for their reports over the weekend. We are continuing to work on improving lag and game performance, and have identified several areas to investigate further in the coming days.

[Livmo]

We want to thank people for their reports over the weekend. We are continuing to work on improving lag and game performance, and have identified several areas to investigate further in the coming days.

Heads up that I was on Sarlona this weekend on all my accounts single and multiboxing. Oddly I had more issues single boxing and not sure why. I rubber banded allot in the Marketplace and Harbor single boxing.

I played PST both Sat. and Sun., on and off all day, and most the nights. I'm on Comcast and in California. I was too lazy to do traceroutes, please forgive me.

On the lowbies I ran Korthos, Harbor Quests, Marketplace quests, and the Depth chain in House D.

For epics I did Chrono, Kings Forest quests and some High Road.

The rest was the Anniv. Challenge with L15s and L16s.

[Phoenix-daBard]

Heads up that I was on Sarlona this weekend on all my accounts single and multiboxing. Oddly I had more issues single boxing and not sure why. I rubber banded allot in the Marketplace and Harbor single boxing.

At a guess: If you have the memory for it multiboxing forces your computer to keep more of the game's datafiles in memory at once so there is less swapping.

[Bolo_Grubb]

We want to thank people for their reports over the weekend. We are continuing to work on improving lag and game performance, and have identified several areas to investigate further in the coming days.

Good to hear.

Thank you

[esojiul]

We want to thank people for their reports over the weekend. We are continuing to work on improving lag and game performance, and have identified several areas to investigate further in the coming days.

Great you are focusing in the mayor problem. Many ppl has stop playing because the Lags Itsue. You continúe having a unique game. Ir you are able, to solved. Then i know Many ppl Will come Back.

[Livmo]

At a guess: If you have the memory for it multiboxing forces your computer to keep more of the game's datafiles in memory at once so there is less swapping.

Nice!

I did accounts on 2 differetn machines and the results were the same. Less lag when I had 2 accounts up on each machine (same time), rather than just 1 account and only 1 machine. Results were better when on 1 machine and 2 accounts vs 1 computer and 1 account.

EDIT ~ I should also mention that when I had 2 accounts going on the same machine, my main account with all the bells and whistles got lag stuck in the Marketplace and my other toon was fine and lag free in House D in the Depth chain. Same machine at same time. One toon frozend for about 10-15 min in Market place and the other completed the Depth chain no problems.

[Cordovan]

We will be making some adjustments on Tuesday morning Eastern time that we hope will make improvements to our environment. When the worlds reopen after Tuesday's maintenance, we'd love to get more information from the community on their current experience.

[Cordovan]

We have made changes throughout the worlds that we hope will improve things. Please make sure to include your server in all feedback related to lag, and let us know how things are going.

[Thoggy]

K-world from restart until ~3pm CST today.
In Central USA.
No hires, 1st life permadeath, first life, etc.

Solo 6th level Fighter in Anniversary Lvl 6 = no lag.
Solo Waterworks chain (all 4 at normal) 3rd lvl fighter = one short hitch lag and one transport lag (transport screen bar did not load for about a min then it did so quickly). Even gathered all monsters in WW wilderness and then killed them = no lag.
Solo various Korthos wilderness quests (normal, hard, and elite) with 1 or 2nd lvl Wizard. Ran with Skelly, summon dog, and flaming sphere (broom!) = no lag events anywhere & guildie was not worried about lag deaths.

Running around town = no lag events

Chatting with guildie running solo (level 3 arty running Normals and Hards) Catacombs chain = a minor rubberband, nothing else, no problem with pets and summons either.

Even leveled up a toon to 8 without any slowness or lag when I did that.