Lag has become the elephant in the room.

[Justfungus]

Is there ANY plans to actually address the game stopping lag? Not a, well we will try this and see what happens. Hire some specialists to come in and pin point the issues so they can be corrected? The 'all games have lag' statement is laughable, yes all games have some lag, but nothing like the lag here on a semi-constant basis. My guild is having to quit dungeon runs midway through because the lag starts ramping up so bad that it is nearly impossible to complete and certainly not fun to play. Hey, I like this game like everyone else, but it needs to be FUNCTIONAL. and right now, it is not.

 

[Ying]

 

[karthunk]

Is there ANY plans to actually address the game stopping lag? Not a, well we will try this and see what happens. Hire some specialists to come in and pin point the issues so they can be corrected? The 'all games have lag' statement is laughable, yes all games have some lag, but nothing like the lag here on a semi-constant basis. My guild is having to quit dungeon runs midway through because the lag starts ramping up so bad that it is nearly impossible to complete and certainly not fun to play. Hey, I like this game like everyone else, but it needs to be FUNCTIONAL. and right now, it is not.

It will never be fixed.

The lag is because of the game engine; LOTRO has the same exact lag issues as DDO and they use the same game engine. If the lag is too much for you to take then I would suggest moving on to a different game.

 

[seph1roth5]

Apparently it was pretty bad yesterday, so bad they addressed it on social media. Then after an hour or 2 posted that it was "mitigated" lol.

 

[ChaoticDrivel]

The problem is:

They made Dragonlord's stun work on everything.

Including the servers...

 

[Grumpy]

Apparently it was pretty bad yesterday, so bad they addressed it on social media. Then after an hour or 2 posted that it was "mitigated" lol.

My heroic group was stomping through quests, and for over an hour the lag had just been ramping up. We were in the Lordsmarch quests and there were times where the characters would freeze, and the rest of the game was still running, seemed slower, but mobs were still trying to hit you. My typical frame rate is about 13ms and O packet loss, which I have been told is very good. Yesterday it was running about 130 with a packet loss of 30-45% and then the game crashed for me. The log in servers appeared to be down, but the game was still running, and from the people that were still logged in and trying to play, it was just horrible. Im guessing a server restart fixed it all, because it only seemed to be down for an hour or so.

Im not an IT guy so I can't recommend any possible solutions to fix the lag, but I can agree with the OP when the suggestion was made to hire an outside consultant to look at the issue. I cant even begin to speculate the cost required for that, nor do i want to think about how much money SSG makes, or how their finances are, I just simply want to play the game. I want to be able to log in play the game, and hang out with friends who also are playing DDO. I will probably keep playing the game, as long as I am able to play the game.

Yesterdays lag was not "normal" DDO lag. Lag causes you to have delayes when trying to get in to quests, it makes you wonder if you crashed after you recalled out of the quest, or if you are just "lagged" and a hundered other things that I have just grown to accept that when you blend code that was written about 20 years ago or more, and you blend it with code from todays programmers it doesn't always go well. By no way am I not saying that someone at SSG should be doing better to fix this, but yesterdays lag was the worst I have seen in years and years, and from the perspective of the player what ever it was that was causing the lag, was crashing the game servers, because as soon as I crashed, I went to that website that shows if the games are up, and it was already showing that all servers were down, but it must only track the login servers, as my friend was still playing. Something is seriously wrong, and it would be nice if you fixed it.

 

[Sarlona Raiding]

There was definitely bad lag yesterday which was acknowledged in the dev tracker, but beyond that and a handful of raids I rarely get lag. I am not trying to dismiss issues others are having, but I don't get those issues. So I do wonder how much control the devs have outside of issues like yesterday and raids that always seem to have lag.

 

[AMess]

It seems to me that lag is baked into the architecture, not intentionally, but b/c of the architecture it's an easy formula to evaluate. Specifically, we see more lag the longer a server has been up & the more players are on a specific server the more lag we seem to have.

For the first one, we could have more server reboots. I think possibly one Mon evening and one Thursday morning may give us more consistent performance. And you want to rotate the time of day the reboots happen so as to hopefully affect fewer of the same players. Conceivably you could reboot every other day at various times...though realistically, we're probably bound by the 8-5 M-F work schedules of staff on the east coast.

To handle servers being overloaded by users, it may be possible to have a grouping server where folks form groups. Then once leader starts a quest, they get assigned a quest server. In this way, quest servers could be managed similar to web-servers for load balancing. The drawbacks would be that you'd probably have some wait time transfering between servers & if there was a routing issue specific to your geo-graphic location, then some geo-graphic quest servers would be bad for some folks. To combat those issue, folks could be given a choice of which quest servers they're ok with using...so while on the grouping server, the choice of quest server could be compiled based on members server selections.

 

[Justfungus]

I would see no difficulty in a >short< daily reboot (Eve does one every morning) KEY WORD ----> Short.

 

[Guntango]

 

[The Narc]

Lag started getting really common in this game when they added the enhancement system and all its bells and whistles that interact with all the weapons/spells/class abilities.

Then they added epic destinies

Then they started tweaking mob ai to do more calculations to be smarter and more reactive in combat

Then they added reaper enhancements

And…..

Here we are!!!

 

[kmoustakas]

Is there ANY plans to actually address the game stopping lag? Not a, well we will try this and see what happens. Hire some specialists to come in and pin point the issues so they can be corrected? The 'all games have lag' statement is laughable, yes all games have some lag, but nothing like the lag here on a semi-constant basis. My guild is having to quit dungeon runs midway through because the lag starts ramping up so bad that it is nearly impossible to complete and certainly not fun to play. Hey, I like this game like everyone else, but it needs to be FUNCTIONAL. and right now, it is not.

DDO has been laggy since the original release. It's two main culpits. Monster AI (pathing and aggro mechanics) and later on the mail system was introduced. That's what responsible for the 3-5 second lag freezes once every ~15 minutes or so. Someone tried to tinker with it about 5+ years ago and totally borked it.

Monster AI lag will never be fixed. They are trying to circumvent it by removing players resulting in less monsters activating. Aka dungeon alert.

For the mail lag (and UMD lag and reaper lag which are actually related) there is hope!

 

[Guntango]

I noticed lag in 2007.

 

[Kobay]

 

[Dude]

There was definitely bad lag yesterday which was acknowledged in the dev tracker, but beyond that and a handful of raids I rarely get lag. I am not trying to dismiss issues others are having, but I don't get those issues. So I do wonder how much control the devs have outside of issues like yesterday and raids that always seem to have lag.

I play on Argo and usually never experience lag. During the last two weeks, though, I've experienced significant lag.

 

[Wini]

Lag has been very bad lately.

Sometimes, after a day or two without playing because busy with work, I log in, get jumping lag and It just feels bad. I love DDO but when that happens is like Oh boy, it's time for Netflix or perhaps I should go to sleep...

 

[The Narc]

DDO has been laggy since the original release. It's two main culpits. Monster AI (pathing and aggro mechanics)

Monster AI lag will never be fixed. They are trying to circumvent it by removing players resulting in less monsters activating. Aka dungeon alert.

Yep this and the they try and put out more abilities where we are encouraged to do less moving around in hopes that the mobs will have less calculations to do. (This is never going to happen devs, the only reason to play this game is the live action fighting and the character building options)

 

[AMess]

Well, sad to report, on Orien and an hour after new release/restart and it's fairly laggy. Got one good raid before it got bad.

I'm wondering if the data center changes traded smaller more frequent lag for data center destroying issue. is this new normal? any other servers see issues?

maybe all the alt accounts are logging in for IOD pack.

 

[Grumpy]

I would see no difficulty in a >short< daily reboot (Eve does one every morning) KEY WORD ----> Short.

Short daily reboot won't solve this issue. Happened again to the same group of people running R1 Heroic Sharn, and lag so bag the game froze 10-15 seconds at a time. The entire game, chat servers stopped working, direct tells wouldn't work, crazy bad lag, and this is less than an hour after the servers came up. Something is seriously wrong.

 

[mordek]

Ying this is SPOT ON!!!