The lag fix seemed to work

[Hawkwier]

How many people were in the raid group? I haven't experienced a raid since the fix.

Full 12.

[TitusOvid]

Friday 3pm-6pm Boston time

Better than wednesday, still bad spikes.
In

- quests moving and casting, special attacks
- public areas. moving, quest windows
- chat (user chats)
- apply and accept group seems to work fine though.

Cheers,
Titus

[Singular]

As a disclaimer my experiences yesterday was playing just on the Hardcore server. My assumption is that it is the most stressed server because of population.

The experience yesterday was wonderful. I played on and off the entire day, solo and group play, and noticed no server side lag. My camera still spins around randomly at times when I move and climbing a ladder is equivalent to soloing the Tarasque but the lag fix seemed to work ... so far.

I didn't notice a change. Still lots of lag. We were running the new quests. I often couldn't move during combat. etc., etc., the same lag as before.

[Jaxtan]

So far today:
- a couple of occasions where couldn't transfer items to banker, standing next to them but it keeps saying banker is too far away. After a minute or so, can eventually start transferring items.
- a couple of occasions of load screen delays/hang ups requiring hard restart of the game
- lag spikes in game, but only a few seconds here and there, nothing fatal yet
- dropped spells and ranged shots where spell points and ammunition are used, but nothing is recorded (either hit or miss)

Seems the normal bad, but not 100% unplayable.

[voxson5]

More on HC, solo w hire & pet:

Search & rescue (server 32 from /loc) stutter lag throughout the quest, worst with the helmed horror spawn points & the kobold spawn points.
Outbreak (server 54) slideshow in the end fight - I could move ok but from the client's perspective everything else was frozen for several seconds at a time

[BDog77]

Sigh...

I would say lag, for me, is worse. Disclaimer: I did not as a rule experience any lag before this update (occasional stutters in quests, no full stop deaths though). Now I seem to have a low grade lag always throughout everything, quests, explorers, public areas. Things just seem slightly off all the time. Had 2 instances of full stop death (Slavers part 1 EH and House of Rusted blades ER1). I now understand why people were so frustrated. I play on Gland, btw. Also, I thought we were going to lose the much beloved scrolling of effects long after combat was over, but this has not been my experience. Although my hits seem to register closer to the actual time they "land", I still have a long scroll of things happening after combat. Note: Anecdotally, these seem to be a clump of healing effects, misses (enemies missing me), blurries, displacements, etc. In my opinion, this is much worse than the way it used to be. If I am to see these effects, I would rather see them in the ORDER they happen, even if that is slower than WHEN they happen. It is really unhelpful to see them after combat, so if that is the answer, then let's remove them from the scrolling effects altogether.

Also, I have noticed a new, smoother looking lag in the game. Rather then seeing the enemies "flicker" towards me when this lag hits, I see the enemies far away, far away, far away, then suddenly they are behind me. They look like they are moving all the time, just very slowly closer, then BOOM, they are behind me. I don't know whether this is server side lag or client side, however, starting to swing when I see this lag does not result in me hitting the enemies as they "pass" me. This is much worse than any form of lag I have seen before, as even with the full stop short lag (lasting a second or 2), if you keep swinging then when the lag releases you will see those hits.

So for me, this update is a complete fail, and I am not at all factoring nerfs into my evaluation. My 2 mains are THF, so I have not tried a "nerfed" playstyle yet.

Beyond the "new" (to me) lag, I have noticed a lot of unintended (I hope) effects (call that halo if you wish).

My TR partner was disconnected 4 times in Slavers Part 1 (which we finished), as well as being disconnected so much during the beginning of CitW that we just gave up on that. She has recently started to have that happen (last 4 months or so), but never more than 2 times a session although fairly often once per session. We are hoping this improves going forward, but at the moment the game is borderline unplayable for her.

As she did the traps in Slavers part 1, we got to the 10% bonus, but she DCed, when she returned, we had lost that bonus. Her trap count continued to increase to 39 where it stopped counting traps. No matter how many more she did, the total remained 39, nor did we ever get the percent bonus back. Now this may have been a visual bug only, we did get the approximate XP I expected on completion, but I am not entirely sure whether we got that bonus or not.

Monster aggro seems to be broken again. we had at least 4 instances of orange dungeon alert, and uncountable greens. The way we play, I am not sure we have seen 4 orange dungeon alerts in the past few years (unless we were running CitW), so to have 4 in a session was startling, to say the least. The 2 quests we played are quests we play all the time, so something in aggro definitely changed.

As other people have reported, swapping items is slow, doesn't happen a lot of the time (more than it used to), lost spells, lost Endless Fusillade, pause after LOH (although my LOHs seemed more reliable than before). None of these things taken separately is that much of a big deal, but taken together, they result in a much degraded game experience.

Hirelings seem a little worse, of course.

We have NOT had any opening quest lag, bank or vendor lag, or loading screen lag.

As I mention above, the general reason for me judging this Update a fail is the general game experience. For me it has lost that "active control" feeling that separates DDO from all other MMOs. All that being said, I don't plan to quit, having faith that most of these issues can be worked out. Whether or not I can get that active control feel back to the game will likely weigh heavily on the amount of time I spend in game.

Sorry for the WOT, thanks if you stayed with me this long.

B

[AbyssalMage]

This would likely have minimal if any impact on loading screen issues as that would be caused by something different. This should help particularly with "start of fight" style lag.

If that is the case it is noticeable much worse.

For some clarification:
I was solo/molo (soloing with a mercenary) most of yesterday (Thursday pm/Friday am) and didn't experience much in the way of lag. It was more a slight delay that I attributed to my personal internet connection. I friend I commonly group with was mentioning the horrible lag they were experiencing and we were talking about it through chat. I then switched characters and met up with them and we ran a few quests together in Epic GH. Holy H*E*Double hockey stick was the lag horrendous. Every encounter with a group of enemies left me waiting for the system to buffer. It was much more pronounced when the NPC's go from a neutral state to active one OR they "spawn" from no where (i.e. not invisible but code makes them appear from some trigger, like walking into the room).

So from my POV you made it much worse with no benefit (To be fair I expected this).

[Kielbasa]

After a few quests super laggy today. Auto attacking was fine. But every time I tried to do my great maul, shred, roar combo it was lag, lag, lag. Felt like the game was hitching with every ability use. Surprisingly was able to quit the game and not have it hang forever and force me to force shutdown it in the task manager seemed a bit better after the client reboot.

[Jbo335]

We (4-5 in party) did some slayer in Barovia wilderness yesterday. First, it was kind of OK, but then huge lag with freezes and no way to continue playing. After dying we reconnected, but I decided to quit as it was just no fun.
This was in a non-raid party in a wilderness area.

[Aelonwy]

I'm reserving judgement until I've played through the weekend. The first couple hours I played on Friday afternoon felt better but my after dinner playtime felt the same as ever.

[Hawkwier]

This would likely have minimal if any impact on loading screen issues as that would be caused by something different. This should help particularly with "start of fight" style lag.

Thanks for clarifying. I guess the load screen issues are simply coincidence then.

Having played more today though, I'm afraid I'm not seeing any meaningful improvement, in fact quite the reverse!

In particular it is far more noticeable that some things fail to proc...

On several occasions Boulders Might failed to activate as the button failed to press. This was immediately after hitting Adrenaline, and it certainly wasn't happening like this before. This might be a similar issue to those reported for Intimidate?

Also, critically, I died when tanking a VOD as the remove curse pots failed to activate twice in a row when quaffing to remove the curse. They were consumed but nothing happened, and I died due to the anti heal curse persisting. Not had this happen before either. I can't be sure what the underlying cause was but lag surely can't be ruled out, and like I say, never experienced it pre U49.

Had a few other lag moments but nothing serious in terms of impact. Just disappointing to still see it with such frequency.

On the up side, running up Yester Hill seemed smoother overall. Not, IMO worth the other issues for this though.

So, whilst still willing to wait before bringing back the jury, it's not looking very good in terms of their prospective verdict at this point I'm afraid...

[fatherpirate]

fixing what you just broke is not an IMPROVEMENT
it is just a fix

[Alizar]

Lag improved drastically after patch. Happy camper here on Cannith.
.

[phillymiket]

While I've seen a few lag blips here and there, the fix has exceeded my expectations.
But I'm going to wait and see how it looks next week at the end of the server restart cycle before I do a happy /dance.

[FengXian]

Just had a huge serve wide lag wave on HC, confirmed by multiple guildies in DS. Second time I see this after U49, and I've played maybe 5hrs overall since the update, usually not at peak time either.

Great fix, totally worth sacrificing proc builds, AF, aggro management etc...

[bruener]

I haven’t seen any change in the lag issues. Played quite a bit this weekend. Same issues that I usually see. At least they keep trying.

[SimCat]

Got lag in every single quest, raid, wilderness, and common area to one degree or another. I think that the lag fix was a bust. Making changes to everything that no one wanted was a bust. How about a statement of accountability from SSG that this didn't work and that the fixes are obviously not the issue. What's next?

[Khurse]

Haven't seen much lag in a half dozen raids /groups since the update.

A few times in slayer areas, annoying, but cleared up relatively quickly.

Still going to wait a month or so before passing judgement, but so far it seems considerably better.

[voxson5]

We had such bad lag on HC today in Sin's that the quest completely locked up for maybe 15-20 seconds after Gula went down (at the time there were no other mobs and no dungeon alert).

A few spikes in bastion at the end fight for both phases too.

It really feels that SSG management doesn't care about all this feedback, and I find that pretty sad.

[dunklezhan]

Playing from Europe (UK. But it's functionally Europe since the data is all using the same transatlantic pipe and all the rocks are connected to the same plate):

Main playstyle: solo whenever or static group on Sunday (3), Monday (6), Wednesday (2). None of the groups raid.

Previous lag experience:
Solo: fine. Never really had a problem except the occasional stuck loading screen.
Group lag: always been the case that we have occasional group wide lag: a loading screen will get stuck for one person and it then sticks for everyone, or the whole instance pauses for very little reason (or noticeably right before a bunch of spawns happen, particularly in Wheloon which is presumably Shadows-related).
One of those players in the 6 person group is constantly lagging (or blaming it on the lag lol) so we're fairly happy that must be their particular hardware/internet connection/personality .
Loading screens being stuck can also be an individual issue, seems no rhyme/reason from our end (like, it happens to high RAM machines or low RAM machines, good GFX card machines and bad etc).

Current lag experience:
Solo: basically it's all been fine as usual.

Last weds, after the patch: duo group. Every loading screen or quest entrance screen is taking an age except when I'm playing solo. Other than that, seemed normal in-quest: no sign of sudden group-wide lag mid quest as far as we could determine. We were running epic Spies in the House and related Saga stuff.

Last night (3 person group) was crazy bad. Every loading screen, mid-quests freezes for the whole group, the whole nine yards etc. We were doing the Age of Rage chain 1-4.

Monday's full 6 person group hasn't played yet! So I don't know. We'll be running, I think, heroic High Road.

So... I have to say if anything the sort of lag we would generally experience in our small groups is worse, and seems to get worse the bigger the group gets (although a few nights play for solo and one night each of duo/triple is very very very vey small sample size, admittedly). Or Monday night (euro time) was just particularly bad this week.