It is time you own your lag problem.

[myliftkk_v2]

Because doing so might give us all information that is worth knowing?

I bring up the suggestion above because I have very little lag, even when I have 5 accounts in a dungeon.

What is different about my situation and the average players situation?

I rarely play reaper. When I do play reaper in that scenario things are definitely not as smooth lag-wise and none of my toons have more than a handful of reaper points.

Are 4 of those accounts doing anything other than standing there?

[Gniewomir]

People upset about the lag in groups - give the community some data we can work with.

What do you mean by "community can work with"? It's not like we can do anything. The only thing we can do is avoiding some lag friendly circumstances, but it's not what we're supposed to do. If you buy car with broken lights you do not stay silent about it and use your car only when there's sunlight, you go back to place where you bought it and demand repairs/another car.

On the other hand i don't remember much times when devs asked players for feedback or some additional data to help them track problems, but when they did - there was always response from community. Now they're not asking community for additional data, so i think they do not need any players feedback. And like i said earlier, players can do literally nothing to actually fix the problem, so im not sure why we should exchange informations about when and where someone lagged.

[Annex]

'Lag' continues to be a problem, even for a solo player like me, without any Reaper Points, playing on Khyber. My play times vary wildly and 'lag' can hit at any time, day or night. The most recent 'lag' related changes/fixes, implemented some three weeks ago at the start of the Anniversary Event, initially provided significant improvement. Over the last three weeks, that improvement slowly deteriorated. The 'lag' last night was roughly equivalent to the 'lag' six weeks ago.

Darth Severlin spoke about 'lag' at some length during the February 24(25?) Live Stream. If I recall correctly, various developers commented on 'lag' during the Anniversary Live Stream a few days later.

Since I started playing in 2013, DDO has experienced at least 6 upsurges in 'lag'. In each case, the 'lag' eventually returned to acceptable levels because of work performed by the people at Standing Stone Games and Turbine.

The last 'lag' related update I am aware of occurred around February 24. I can vaguely recall many other 'lag' related updates implemented over the years.

The Epic Destinies overhaul coming later this year will include changes to help mitigate 'lag'. If I recall correctly, this may include reductions to Attack Speed.

In my opinion, the argument put forth by the original poster has zero merit since the people at Standing Stone Games speak to 'lag' on a semi-regular basis, implement 'lag' related updates on a semi-regular basis, and have revealed future plans to reduce 'lag'.

Adding additional Rest Shrines to every quest would invariably require a massive amount of work on the part of quest designers and thus represents a completely unrealistic solution to the 'lag' problem. However, players most certainly experience more 'lag' related deaths under current conditions. Perhaps the developers could temporarily add a new form of Spirit Cake to the game. A vendor would sell these new Spirit Cakes at a rate of one per hour, but they would decay in two hours if not used. This would effectively grant each player one free revive per hour.

I am personally satisfied with efforts to resolve the latest round of 'lag' and understand it will take much additional effort and time to correct. While the people at Standing Stone Games continue to work on the problem, I will adjust my playing behavior to compensate as best I may. If the 'lag' becomes unbearable, I will quietly leave DDO, work on other endeavors for a time, and return in a few months. Emotional outbursts will not improve the situation.

[JamnJD]

Did players do exact collections of data about exactly WHEN lag occurs ?
Quests ? Group layout ? Classes ? Movement ?

Yes.

If memory serves, there was a guild in the past that did a lot of in game testing (mostly in raids) to replicate poor performance issues. I forget exactly when, as it was a long time ago, but it I believe it was a little while after the Shadowfell expansion had dropped (Shadowfell brought a lot of terrible performance issues into the game, and in this writer's opinion was also responsible for breaking the Mabar dragon raid), so probably circa 2014.

This guild had determined that there was a bug related to threat/aggro management during prolonged fights with multiple mobs (they did a lot of testing in raids at the time because of the prolonged battles). The longer the fight would progress, the more likely it was that performance would begin to degrade, eventually grinding the instance down to a halt, to the point that player characters could no longer move, and yet the mobs would continue to fight and wipe the party. A player could not even move as a dead ghost standing beside it's soul stone UNTIL the last party member would perish, at which time the party members could then almost immediately move freely again. This makes a lot of sense to me, when I consider what happens in the instance after the last party member dies. Mob threat/aggro resets/gets taken away and they go inactive again, hanging around or slowly pathing their way back to their spawn point.

Guild members involved posted their findings and opinions on these forums, and there were multiple pages in the thread on this topic. Unfortunately at the time the response from Turbine was the typical </crickets> </crickets> </crickets> on the issue (that is to say, no response at all)

I can tell you that a few friends and I still experienced this issue about 6 months ago (so this would be about 6, yes, count it, 6 years later folks!), as we had mistakenly entered an epic elite Cabal for One (we were running our only 2nd life characters and had intended epic hard) but decided to give it a go after realizing the mis-click. If you know this quest, about 1/2 way through we encountered a large group of mobs, with displaced casters, and we had no true-seeing. And so, it was a prolonged battle for us squishies, and yet experienced players. We were actually holding our own, and began to make some headway...and then it happened, just as described above.

I believe this bug still exists to this day, and eats cpu resources for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and particularly evening snacks, and impacting players outside the instance that the problem is occurring in. And this was reported in these forums many moons ago.

...J

[JamnJD]

I've never understood why there are loading screens when the engine clearly has the map & asset data already in place - we can see this due to the rubbish server lag as we'll zone into an area, see the environment, then the arbitrary loading screen will pop up for us to play server connection Russian roulette.

Is there maybe a way to preload the connecting public environments/areas or some way to get rid of the loading screens? I can already install & run DDO in a ramdisk so why can't the game be updated to take advantage of the available resources?

I think the loading screens are there to give us something to look at, while the game instance manager confirms that our character can successfully teleport into the instance, whether it's a public instance or a dungeon. Once confirmed (as there may be character level requirements, have we purchased the quest pack, etc...) we can then get a visual of the instance, at which time our character stats, attributes and buffs are applied to (or removed from) the instance. It is only then afterward that we are able to interactively move about the instance.

(my speculation) The loading screen problems we've been experiencing lately are not related to our client, but server side only, and are directly related to periodic poor server performance. During these times, we experience difficulty logging in, logging out, delayed loading screens, loading screens that do not recover (due to failed teleport) and delays in getting dialogue or quest entrance interact windows. All of these problems are actually one in the same, in that the instance manager doesn't get enough server CPU resources to process the requests in a timely manner.

I don't believe there is anything that our client software can do to help, these issues are entirely server side, as there are processes there running that are using up available resources at times and bogging the server down. But I do believe that as the DDO team addresses lag issues to free up server resources (hopefully soon(tm) ) these issues will essentially fix themselves.

We'll see how they do with it.

...J

[acemonkey]

I think the loading screens are there to give us something to look at, while the game instance manager confirms that our character can successfully teleport into the instance, whether it's a public instance or a dungeon. Once confirmed (as there may be character level requirements, have we purchased the quest pack, etc...) we can then get a visual of the instance, at which time our character stats, attributes and buffs are applied to (or removed from) the instance. It is only then afterward that we are able to interactively move about the instance.

(my speculation) The loading screen problems we've been experiencing lately are not related to our client, but server side only, and are directly related to periodic poor server performance. During these times, we experience difficulty logging in, logging out, delayed loading screens, loading screens that do not recover (due to failed teleport) and delays in getting dialogue or quest entrance interact windows. All of these problems are actually one in the same, in that the instance manager doesn't get enough server CPU resources to process the requests in a timely manner.

Agree on the cause, and the fact that it's all related to lack of server resources.

You can actually blindly take actions, move, use text chat, cast, etc quite often in the new zone while the loading screen is up, and I quite often would zone into a new area without a load screen and see the new zone, take a step, etc, then have the load screen kick on for a few seconds. When I do get stuck on the loading screen, I'll send the party text to let them know I'm stuck and relogging and they get the message (assuming the chat server isn't down). I always summon my horse while waiting for the load screen, takes some timing, but it's very doable and saves a bit of time.