Cyclical Latency Issues

[cultofthefish]

I’ve noticed some new, strange behavior in DDO over the past few days. Basically, I’ll experience (normal for me) latency of 50-80ms and then without explanation, DDO latency will pop up to 1400-1500ms. It stays this high for several minutes, then drops back to the expected values. This cycle repeats during gameplay, roughly every 3-5 minutes per phase. What’s happening?


To explain, I’ve got a nice (for me) system – SSD, plenty of ram, etc. with a less than amazing DSL internet. It’s not pokey but the ~600Kbps I usually see is MORE than sufficient for DDO, so I’m happy. I’ll normally experience latency in the realm of 80ms or less with the expected green connection icon.


So, on to my issue:
Playing last night, swapped characters a few times (about 4 times, honestly don’t recall) during a 3-4 hour play session. Joined an EE Temple of the Deathwyrm, ported to the quest entrance before I was actually in the party and got the ‘you cannot join a raid in a dungeon message’ – no biggie, recall, rejoin, good to go. I port back in, loading screen clears, raid entrance pops up and DDO crashes to desktop– no error message, no hanging, just load and crash. OK I think, odd but maybe it had to do with a long-ish play session, too many character swaps, or magic fungi. Restart, Aye.


During this restart, DDO Client takes longer than normal to load, only the most recent message (Store More Loot!) appears, but I log back in and see the ‘cleaning up old connections’ message – again, nothing really out of ordinary here. Join the group in progress, we eventually complete, but all the while I notice strange ‘lag’ spikes – My latency will pop up to ~1500ms with a corresponding yellow icon for a few minutes then magically drop back down a few minutes later. I do what I usually do and blame the warlocks and continue on my merry way.


The problem is this keeps happening with different characters (explained in the first paragraph) and I’m unable to figure out why. I'm not downloading anything, only DDO seems to be affected, and it's only happened since this Deathwyrm crash. (I would definitely notice a yellow icon instead of a green one just over my HP, so this is certainly new).


Help?


Edit:

Also of note, I've been running Windows Task Manager to observe changes when I'm affected, as data sent skyrockets from a very low near-zero number to 300+ Kbps, if this information helps in any way. Immediately closing DDO when I see this ends any associated 'latency' so I'd venture it' safe to say it's a DDO specific issue and not some random bloatware downloading cow porn on my computer.

[dontmater]

i think the game allways get ugly when ever you get a messages like the "raid one" or the "charters do not meet the lv requirements" i know right when those errors started..(when they "fixed" a bug

swapping characters is real bad lately :better off restarting the game

at least you haven't been getting the "voice chat/all chats but tells" bug

[-D_Rock-]

Your not the only one experiencing this. One of my guildies is going through this as well. Not only in raids but just hanging out on the airship doing absolutely nothing at all but monitor it. It does not matter what she is doing it's there and comes and goes randomly exactly like you are saying. She also has recently bought a brand new computer too so we all know its not that. We are all at a loss over this. It's very odd to say the least. Lets hope Turbine devs are aware of this and if they are not please submit a bug report out of game. The very least we can do is let them know.

[theboyftw]

I'm experiencing the same thing since I upgraded to Windows 10. I tried some of the various tweaks I read online, with no success. I wiped my machine last night and did a clean install of 10 and I'm hoping this fixes the issues. My symptoms sound the same, but I didn't experience this at all in Windows 7

[cultofthefish]

I suppose good forum etiquette dictates I post some sort of follow-up, so here goes.

A few days after I posted this I ended up contacting Turbine Customer Service – their advice corrected my latency issues immediately. In fact, I haven't had any issue since. Huzzah!

Turns out it’s a simple fix for a problem that plenty of others have had. I say this because today marks the third instance a player described problems suspiciously similar to what I experienced.

After a little bit of arm twisting from a previously affected player, I am re-posting some of the everyday magic the tech support people shared with me, because I no longer feel it’s not an isolated issue. It’s not my intention to steal their thunder and more importantly I don’t want to provide bad advice; what worked for me may not work for everyone else (but it has on at least 3 other occasions).



To start, please first make sure that the game launcher is fully closed out (you might want to reboot the pc just to be sure) and then perform the following steps:
1. Hold down the Windows key and press "R"
2. In the run line that brings up type or copy & paste the following command exactly as it appears below, pressing enter when done:

%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\
3. Within that folder, you should see a folder named "Dungeons and Dragons Online" and possibly one named "Turbine"
4. After finding either or both of those right-click on it and choose "Delete". If you receive an access denied message at this point, the game launcher is most likely still running
5. Once it is placed into the system's recycle bin, relaunch the game to test
Thank you,
The Turbine Technical Support Team



That was it! Previously DDO was sending huge (for a crappy DSL at least) files on a cyclical basis causing mind numbing latency spikes as described in the original post. This corrected the problem even if the underlying problem (crash logs slowly growing to behemoth size) still exists; two months later and the files are manageable <150 KB size as opposed to 10+ MB.

I hope this helps those still suffering from the cyclical latency spikes.