The Lag - Request to EQ Players

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

Feel free to laugh me off the boards and tell me to STFU.
I have never taken up a complaint crusade before about an EQ issue. There are things that have annoyed me, but this is the first problem that has made me question whether I really want to play or not.

The lag has to go. In case you don't know, Elemental zones slow to a dying crawl once you get more than 80 people in the zone. This is real, server-side lag. This is not a bad connection or video overload on the EQ client. This problem is the EQ servers being unable to handle 80 or more people.

To put this in perspective: imagine you're in the Plane of Knowledge. Imagine a mob chasing you from the Plane of Tranquility stone to the Nexus stone. A normal mob would take about 7-10 seconds to complete that path. Under these lag conditions (found in the Plane of Fire and other raid zones), it would take a mob roughly 30-50 seconds to complete that same distance. If you aggro the mob, it "rubber bands" back after chasing you a step or two. Something is going on where the server cannot process the mobs movement and slowing it down.

When you cast a spell - the timer will complete and all your gems will remain grey for 3-6 seconds. During those 3-6 seconds, your spell has not actually landed. Eventually, if you're patient it will (assuming your target doesn't go OOR). If you try to loot a corpse, there is roughtly 1-3 seconds lag each time you click on an item. Looting your body can take over 1 minute.

Those are the whiney aspects where the player is damaged. Now, let's cover how it trivializes high end content and completely cheapens the game.

In the Plane of Fire there are several mobs with AoE effects that can be real nasty. Most of these effects are on a timer and proc every 30 seconds. Without these effects, these high end mobs are pretty much killable by any AoW capable guild. With the AoEs, these mobs can wipe out a VT equipped raid force of 60. Well, the lag completely gimps the AoEs and also gimps the melee of caster mobs.

We engaged Arch Mage Yozanni. The fight took roughly 7 minutes in the lag. AMY did his AoE 2 times in 7 minutes. The first AoE was done right when he hit camp. It took him roughly 2 mintues to cast the spell. He did not melee on our MA for that entire time. Our MA did not start taking melee damage until AMY was around 66% health.

The AMY fight normally lasts around 2-3 minutes and he normally procs 5-7 AoEs in that time. Tell me something isn't seriously broken ON THE SERVERS .

Back when most servers had 1-3 guilds Elemental this problem didn't exist. It would have sucked then too, but it could have been dealt with. Now that servers have 5-10 guilds wanting to run in 4 Elementals, this is only going to get stupidly worse.

From my perspective, I'm planning on only being in the Elementals a short time longer, so maybe I shouldn't care. For those of you hoping to farm this stuff now, I lament what you're facing. On one hand, you're probably going to be able to gimp past some mobs that might normally own you. On the other hand, every night you go for content it is going to be a lagfilled pukefest.

Like I said, this is the first time I've ever seen a truly game breaking change go ignored by SoE. Of all the crap people whine about, to me this is a real and very serious problem that demands attention.

I am doing a /bug and a /feedback 1 time every night demanding (or maybe pleading) for a fix. I don't believe this problem is something SOE can snap their fingers and change. I'm guessing it will involve some serious server toggling. So, unless there is a deafening demand, it will go ignored. I ask those of you who are going to have to work through this to join me in doing 1 /feedback and /bug nightly.

I'm going to spread this around to other boards to see if I can encourage others. I'm probably an idiot. I'm probably wasting my time. But, this is completely unacceptable.

I realize this has been touched on before on various boards, but I would really like to encourage a /bug /feedback campaign. It probably won't do anything unless there is a mass flood of complaints. Even then, it's probably squirting in the wind, but oh well.

[EZ_Dagny Blazestorm]

Yes, this needs to be fixed. I know they know about it, but they act like it doesn't happen.

[EZ_Guurn]

Quote:We engaged Arch Mage Yozanni. The fight took roughly 7 minutes in the lag. AMY did his AoE 2 times in 7 minutes. The first AoE was done right when he hit camp. It took him roughly 2 mintues to cast the spell. He did not melee on our MA for that entire time. Our MA did not start taking melee damage until AMY was around 66% health.

To me this is the issue. What fun is a game if the mob can't kill you, we may as well be playing Doom in god mode. I agree wholeheartedly that this needs to be fixed ASAP.

[EZ_Cyprex]

On Rathe, many times Ssra has 100+ people in it. This results in non stop 3 sec delays. It’s odd to watch the entire guild swing once, then 3 sec later swing again. As I MT bosses there, the fights end up taking 3 times longer than normal and I take like 80% less damage, funny lag it is.

[EZ_TipaDaKnife]

Yesterday, my guild was killing the charm birds & stuff while another guild was over at the second castle killing the frog.

Died to Magmaton melee as we were all severely lagged (he didn't seem lagged). It took so long to loot my corpse that I automatically stood up and had to try again to get the rest of my gear.

Plane of Air is laggy. But not as bad as Fire.

Earth doesn't seem too bad, and I have never experienced lag in Water.

[EZ_Rasil Sabishi]

Try doing water with 100+ people, it's lagged too. Nothing is as bad as fire with 80+ in it. Some encounters get harder, most become trivialized. One blazzax fight, while another guild was at bird camp, was completly gimped, blaz wasn't even melee'ing. He was just standing there. No AE, no melee, nothing. We were laughing our asses off. Clerics stopped the rotation and were melee'ing.

Of course, the lag was so bad, half melee hits were OOR or out of LoS for some odd reason. 3 out of 4 arrows were poofing (that's almost status quo in PoFire now) It's just horrible and NEEDS to be fixed.

Sat there and plunked 20 arrows into Reparm before he ever aggro'd on me for the pull. Any more and I would have been summonable.

While funny, it's also majorly annoying.

[Marbh]

Is it possible that the server cluster hardware isn't being upgraded to match the graphics? With EQ2 in the wings it seems possible.

[EZ_Sharkeye Shadedsight]

I do believe this has to do with the extremely high utilization of LDoN instanced adventure zones. Some of the server farm has been diverted from Ele's to load up the Dungeons.

I hope that they are planning on putting that hardware power back into the Ele's and maybe give up hardware for old zones that are not used.... almost all of Kunark is empty all of the time on Fennin Ro. I ran from FV to OT the other day for 'old-times' sakes and the desolation almost made me cry

[EZ_mikebridge]

its a separate server farm for instanced dungeons, shared among all servers. could just be poor network topology with more players being active more often. /shrug. with less people LFG and more people fighting, more packets are being sent into SOE's network, maybe they need to grab a couple more leased lines...

[EZ_MadroneDorf]

thats what soe ssays!.. i never really noticed the lag until ldon was around the corner i bet they just used some other servers for isntancing lol

[EZ_Kati Wizard]

Sony need to get rid of the hamster wheel and get some servers that can actually support there new LDoN population of players.

[EZ_Gallerus]

Quote:i never really noticed the lag until ldon was around the corner i bet they just used some other servers for isntancing

Totally agree - all this lag in elementals started happening like 1-2 weeks prior to ldon release. Its totally screwed up right now - 2 guilds in any elemental zone = unworkable lag atm, its totally frustrating & not fun.

[EZ_Rainus7]

reparm and fennin is such a big joke now


with the lag

someone brought like 80 peeps to fire and kill fennin first time

In the process he only AE twice and rampaged once I believe

taking away AE and page from fennin makes him basically an overglorified Fire named at most

[EZ_jocke98]

My guild did Blazzax for the first time today; 80 peeps in PoFire and he sure quadded very fast and AEd every 20 secs. So at least on AB it looks like the lag is gone (today at least).

Ouch btw.

Pling, Maestro

[EZ_RonneWasTaken]

Rallos with 2 adds is fun, no nerf pls

[EZ_zotha]

Quote:My guild did Blazzax for the first time today; 80 peeps in PoFire and he sure quadded very fast and AEd every 20 secs. So at least on AB it looks like the lag is gone (today at least).

Thats impressive as his AE is on 30 second timer, were you getting antilag?!

[EZ_Dove Whispersilk]

I agree with you fully Orme.
The lag not only makes most of these encounters trivial for just the reasons mentioned, but it also makes going to Plane of Fire (this is the only zone Ive had a problem in) a huge annoyance for a guild that can normally take these mobs. Pulling takes *forever*, spells take longer to cast, melee is more slow. Its just no fun even fighting in the zone like that

[EZ_patofnaud]

Try being in Tactic when 3 guilds are racing to RZ.. 180 people.. Ack

[EZ_Katsuo Muramasa]

There giving us a new Engine. This SHOULD fix the lag issue. As for fixing the current game engine lag. Never going to happen.

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

Rewriting the client engine will not affect serverside lag.
Next.

[EZ_Guurn]

Why isn't this in the main lounge rather than spoilers?

Strange how this thread goes against many changes that have happened lately. Rather than making the game easier fixing this would make it harder, and most people want the game to be difficult. Easy = boring

[EZ_Slartibartfast]

Yup. Server lag in elemental started 1 to 2 weeks before
LDoN release, and has continued ever since. Sometimes,
it totally trivializes encounters: Killing a Blazzax and a
Babs that never meleed once or fired a single AE. What
a challenge! Sometimes it prevents you from winning:
The time we had a 36 person AM try, with 83 of another
guild in the zone. It took almost 10 minutes to get him to
70%, but he was still firing the AE like clockwork. So we
said F this and hit TL.

I am quite surprised Sony doesn't seem to give a damn
about this. It mostly trivializes elemental content. All
you have to do is bring the zerg and mobs stand there
quietly and die. This needs to be fixed. I don't know how,
but it's killing the game at that level.

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

On Tech Help they have semi-acknowledged this problem exists:

boards.station.sony.com/u...47522.html

Feel free to bump and remind them how much you want this fixed

[EZ_Santerre]

I love it when mobs enrage at 1% health.

[EZ_Katsuo Muramasa]

Sorry, I was assuming u where talking about the frame rate of the game. That would be your video lag. As far as true server to PC ping lag. Well I havent seen any. /shrug everything seems fine on my PC.

And yes, rebuilding the game engine will reduce video lag if done right, a$$.

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

This issue is about serverside lag, not video lag. Hooked on Phonics can work for you.

[EZ_Bigmeeno]

This is when as a melee you turn attack on, and you do one round, and sit there a good 15 seconds before you do another round. The mob fails to attack at all in many cases, and even when it is supposed to cast an AE spell every 30 seconds (which is whats supposed to make the encounter hard) it often does not cast at all, or casts just 1 or 2 times over a 6 to 10 minute period.

I have had the BS button refresh before I got the response on how much damage my last BS did. And actually saw one case where I had 2 BS's queued up. I had no packet loss, and pretty good ping times when this occurred.

Whats happening is that the server isnt keeping up. All the clients are waiting for the server to tell it whats happened, and the server isnt saying anything for 15 seconds at a time. Or more sometimes.

In Plane of Water tonight, we had an enchanter cast tash which has a 1 second cast time. It landed 19 seconds later. This was with 180 players (yes, 3 guilds) in the zone.

I have a pretty decent box. I can fight in all of the zones with less than 80 people in them without any noticable lag. But since the August 27th patch, you get 80 or more people into any of the planes zones, and everything just stops. I can move around normally during the time everything has stopped. So my client isnt lagged.

[EZ_Tiane]

Trying to loot your EB item in a massively lagged poWater is real fun... your breath-o-meter isnt lagged, as you wait to see if it reaches empty before your looting clicks register on the server side!

And yes, it most definitely got very bad starting about 2 weeks before LDoN launch, and hasnt gotten better. Something changed Sony-side, that's for damn sure.

[EZ_Midi Brell]

Its not only elementals. It seems almost any POP zone that hits ~80-90 pus has this in it.

Last Monday, doing Agnarr for reflagging- 115 or so in BOT between our raid ant the normal players-server lag was horrid.

tallon zek twice lately with 90-100 total in tactics- total lagout

Bertox- 113 in zone- crawled to a halt.

Last weekend-2 raids in fire, our by charm birds, another doing FR. Total ~ 125 in zone. Really painful. Once they beat FR and left and numbers dropped into 60s the zone was playable again.

Basically it seems like the servers can support about 70-80 tops in each zone before they start massively lagging.

[EZ_MidnyteRagebringer]

Agreed. This needs to be fixed.

Pharming PoFire is fun, don't get me wrong, but not the way the game is intended. I want it fixed.

[EZ_Hailic]

There will be only one problem when they fix it. They will take the easy route and will make the mob to be able to do all its abilities while all the players are still lagged out making raids gimped instead of the mob.. And you think blocking guilds to named is easy by just being there first. How about just being in a zone to lag out a raid to keep them from killing the mob. The lagging in the zones started about the same time the zones stoped shutting down when it overloads. So it is a give take situation either crash the zone or continue to have lagged out encounters on the hardware they are using.

[EZ_Katsuo Muramasa]

Quote:Hooked on Phonics can work for you.

Wow, did u take 5 min to think of that one or did you ask a friend for help.

I said I assumed (meaning I saw my mistake). You didnt need to act like a jerk both times.

[EZ_Hideto27]

This is horrible....this needs to be adressed by Sony

[EZ_Kemora Kementari]

We were doing Maestro tonight and another guild came up to do inny, giving 110 people in the zone...

For the last 15% of Maestro's health, no spells could be cast.. so MA died obviously (Though when i don't know).. the Lame adds that pop managed to wipe out about 10 people after Maestro died because no one could do anything about them.. they'd pop on you and you'd suddenly die.

The chat lag was 3-4 MINUTES... I hit Divine Arbitrate on my cleric and it went off abot 8 minutes (no joke) later.

It was.. so bad it was funny. Fortunatly it cleared up in time for loot to be auctioned, would of been impossible if it hadn't.

Whatever they did, they totally broke the game. My guild purposely avoids raiding bot, due to the insane lag that's in that zone anytime there's a raid going on. I can only imagine how bad it's gotten in the elementals now that there's 6 or so guilds in there every night.

[EZ_eqsunil]

We got VT on a weekend day a while back when this whole thing was introduced. We had a full raid + maybe a couple in VT, but we were the only ones there. AHR g-fluxed twice and probably did less than 10-20k damage the whole 10 minute fight. The other mobs were pretty much the same story, but it reeeeaaaally exaggerated the friggin VT mob push effect. Any time we get more than 50 people in VT, we get this server lag, and it is most pronounced on the named fights.

BoT is probably worse than any zone for this, since there are usually 60+ people in the zone exp'ing at any time. Kiting Agnarr while the raid sets up is a joke.

[EZ_The True Chymeria]

Sorry for laggin' ya out there Kem! (was at work, so I didn't help, but they still my guild! :P)

Aye, I remember when we were in PoFire, killing Magmaton and another guild was set up at the birds' spot. Got to watch the whole guild fight in frames. On the upside, just the way the reports were timed, backstab would be refreshed for each frame. Got away with 10 duelist backstab attempts during that fight.

(edit: wish I could spell ><) Edited by: The True Chymeria at: 10/23/03 12:01 am

[EZ_Ishwar2]

Well if the LDON zones run a a seperate serverr form, they either spend tons of cash buying new servers, or consolidated other zones into fewer servers. I know what my guess is

Sounds like a pure server computing power problem. Might be solvable with restructuring zones on servers, and might require massive hardware upgrades.

[EZ_Ahlanah]

Had the same happen in Ssra while killing cursed.
Another guild was killing emperor so there were maybe 90-100 people in the zone.
Lag wasnt really bad until cursed got pulled, after that i couldnt even twist 2 songs with my bard.
Cursed got maybe 5 AEs off the entire fight and the healers started to nuke because they had nothing else to do.
Was definatetly server lag, but this time the mobs seemed to lag even more then the players

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

My real fear is that it is something that will require lots of additional hardware. If that's the case, I worry that it will be quite a while before the issue is fixed.

What I'm really hoping is that there is some type of memory leak or memory mismanagement on the servers that can be fixed via a code change.

When I posted on their site about how it makes mobs easier, it does make me wonder if they won't have something in the next patch message like, "Corrected a bug where mob melee and spells were too slow if excessive people were in zone, these mobs should generate full dps now regardless of lag."

[EZ_Bigmeeno]

If the mobs go at full speed, but the players are only getting in one round of melee per 15 seconds or so, and casters continue to see 1 second cast spells taking 15 seconds to land, the mobs will be unkillable.

They have to fix this right, or the game will be even more broken than it is now.

[EZ_Orme the Singing Bard]

That's what scares me.
By SOE logic it is better that a mob be unkillable than a mob be gimp.
Look at Coirnav. They fixed the timer to it so the event is 15 minutes regardless of lag. Who cares if the event is unbeatable with a competing guild in the zone. Want to cockblock Coirnav? Just zone in when your opposing guild kills the trigger. Edited by: Orme the Singing Bard at: 10/24/03 6:59 am

[EZ_Subtle SOH]

A couple weeks ago, we were doing the cursed cycle, I dont know how many ppl where in ssra at the time, we only had 30 there at most. Cursed casted his aoe around 3 times the entire fight. It was right after a patch so we thought the patch messed up the mobs aoe. We did Emp a week later or so, and couldnt figure out why the MT was so easy to heal, there where none of the usual spikes in his HP's, the MT said his DD was hitting like normal, but it certainly didnt seem like it. I thought Sony just made mobs like emp easier, but it must be related to this server side lag.

Subtle

[EZ_Rasil Sabishi]

Just did bird #1 with 95ish people in zone, it would have normally sucked. No lag noted and rangers reported near 100% archery hits. Maybe this serverside patch this morning did it. WHEE!!

[EZ_Gallerus]

Quote:Want to cockblock Coirnav? Just zone in when your opposing guild kills the trigger.

That is so true. With 90 people in zone you could stand in front of the trash fish in lair for like 30 seconds without getting agro, was totally impossible to win.

[EZ_Slartibartfast]

"Just did bird #1 with 95ish people in zone, it would have normally sucked. No lag noted and rangers reported near 100% archery hits. Maybe this serverside patch this morning did it. WHEE!! "

Nope We did the 2 charmbirds and Quavonis with another
guild doing Reparm and Mags. First charmbird took over 3
minutes to path the 100 feet to our raid after it was pulled.
It never fired a charm, and meleed as if double turgured.
Next bird did the same thing. Quavonis fired off like 3 AE's
total the entire fight, and seemed to have forgotten to turn
on autoattack, if you get my meaning.

Oh yeah, the pullers first arrow finally registered as a hit
over 5 minutes into the fight. Neat huh?

Fix this @#%$ Sony, and while you're at it, stop the Mystical
Arbitor of Earth from falling through the damn world if he so
much as brushes a wall. Christ. Fix the air ring that hasn't
respawned since PoP release too maybe? I got a long list
I can email to you too.

[EZ_1TruKing]

Recently my guild did high priest in ssra with around 40 while another guild did emp with 100 and a few xp groups in the zone. It took 5 minutes of me sitting in front of the mobs prior to HP room to get them to agro. It took 15 minutes to pull the mobs out of HP room and have them path to jail and we had no disciple repops during hp fight and none of the mobs in the room outside repopped. I heard the guild killing emp had 1 of the 4k procs the whole fight. It seemed like the guilds dps was normal but hp didnt hit the MA at all the whole fight.

[EZ_Slartibartfast]

Just zerg everything and it is totally trivialized. Please allow
this to keep happening Sony! I want to see 15 guilds in time
on every server. Once the masses figure out all you gotta
do is add more numbers, and the mob stands there doing
nothing till it dies, the real fun is gonna start.

[EZ_Dervil]

Agree entirely, it completely trivialises them.

Being in a Euro time guild, we normally have the zone to ourselves, 40-50 people at most. Were used to having exact AE timiers and full speed melee.

This Friday we had a late night session after the servers had been down and ended up being in Fire with another 70+ raid. Babnoxis and AMY fired 1 AE each then stood there and died, Reparm hardly melee'd at all, Magmaton seemed to be melee'ing at a usual speed but rampaged maybe 3 times the whole fight. It was a complete joke.

Were trying Xegony at the moment, perhaps we should just zone 120 people in for that too!