Taming the Lag Beast — Putting Tools in Players Hands
The EverQuest II servers send a lot of data to the game client, especially when a player is grouped with 23 others, all decked out in top end gear, adornments, and running potions, all triggering and multiplying heals, damage, and so forth. Years ago, this came to a head with Procs (built-in effects on items). They were critting, magnifying each other, and just creating a cascading mess of combat events which put a strain on servers and player’s computers alike.
Fast forward to 2013 and while Procs have still been largely kept in check, the addition of more AAs, more Prestige abilities, and just more of everything has once again put us in a situation where the more powerful the raidforce, the more their computers choke on thick data milkshake of endless combat events.
A New Slash Command
The EQ2 team are always looking at ways to optimize both the client and game servers to keep the amount of data under control. But this time, to offer players some relief, a new slash command has been added to the EQ2 client to further assist players as the optimization process continues.
From Zoltaroth on the EQ2 Forums:
As an aside we are also spending a bunch of time getting some of the code to run more efficiently to help as well. We made changes last week that increased character load times by 2 orders of magnitude. This is a critical issue for us. Please keep the reports and info coming.
and as for the feature that went live last week but has now had all the bugs worked out of it…
I’ve spent the last few weeks on live watching raids to see the issues and what we can do to continue our improvements.
There is a new command on live “/combat_filter” which will cause the server to filter what combat data you receive. One of the things that I noticed on these raids is that some spells cause a ton of combat messages to come back to each person. I want to see how much this is actually effecting people before we make huge changes to how it works.
How /combat_filter <filter#> works
This command will turn on server-side filtering of combat data.
Filter #’s:
0 => None (same as before the patch)
1 => Self (you will only get combat messages for yourself/your pet)
2 => Group
3 => RaidAs this is a testing command, this value does not persist through zoning so you will have to set it each time you zone.
If you are seeing huge lag please try “/combat_filter 1” and see if that helps and then reply to this thread.
What is the purpose of this tool?
Zoltaroth again:
This isn’t to address client lag, it is to address network lag. I think we are flooding your network connection with a ton of packets which is causing problems. If you look at the Yellow meter in F-11 you can see how high it goes during raids. One thing I noticed with the raids I was on over the last 2 weeks is people with slower internet had more issues than those with really high bandwidth connections.
There are plans to add additional filtering. Again this is a temporary solution as ongoing optimization continues. Taking away people’s special abilities might be a quick fix, but it’s not a long-term answer. Identifying which spells generate the biggest problems is. We’ve already seen some of this in Game Update 66 with how pets generate damage.
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Comments (16)
Daalilama
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“We’ve already seen some of this in Game Update 66 with how pets generate damage.”
Guess thats the real reason they decided to jump into the swarm/temp pet issue this “fix” update….and explains the craptastic needed fixes that as a whole never materialized.
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Necromancer
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EQ2 in general is a poorly optimized game.
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Gash
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So what does it filter out exactly? If I use /combat_filter 1, will I only see myself on ACT? Or will I just see myself and the mob?
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Greygore
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Act only see’s what you see, so if you filter to only show yourself that’s all act will report. You’ll be guaranteed to top the parse every time! 😉
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uncle
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the filter seemed to help some with button lagg for our raid force at least.
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clownshoe
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WHARRGARBL
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Zarbok
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I remember back during Velious in EQ1 they added a /serverfilter command to help people with lag from mobs with damage shields….glad to see that 10 years later the EQ2 team manages to implement a decade old fix to their game…again.
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perm
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For some reason this makes me nostalgic for this game.
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pluto
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Don’t touch anything SOE. Every time you do, you break something else. We have come to expect it and have gotten use to it. Save any changes you have for EQN.
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Nyna
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I especialy love when some people deliberately increase the number of bullcrap text, like
“I am casting stoneskin now”
“Healers you can take 15 secs off”
“I am the uberking of the world tank”
“LIFEBURNING the suckers, I NEED HEALZ!!!1”
and useless crap like this…
This new switch is generally a good idea, but of course you wont be able to use ACT in a fancy way if you have it on.
It might be a better idea to collect DAMAGE DONE for all members and send out updates in 5 second intervalls containing the damage for everybody.
You wont get accurate DPS on trash mobs, but it should be good enough for bosses, and reduce traffic A LOT.
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Wanyen
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Hit aggregation would have helped too.
Multi attack returning the number of multi-attack hits and the total damage for the round would have been fine in most cases, for example. Same with flurry, same with pretty much any AE or encounter ability.
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Nyna
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alternatively – SOE could just run their own ACT log for each instance and make it available somewhere. Then they could just scrap sending out any dps related data to the client directly.
I know some people might now agree, cause they’re scared their bad dps gets known serverwide, but they could add an options flag, default off, or let the group leader do a ready-check that included “I agree to that my dps will be shown for this instance” or something.
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Feldon
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If you have to wait til after each encounter that would make testing different casting orders more difficult.
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Nyna
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^^ this way you would only see your own dps in chat directly, or none at all.
Would make for a way more readable combat-log, and easier to spot RELEVANT messages, like boss emotes that require certain actions.
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Amybelle
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@ Nyna … I burst out laughing at your post
Thanks for the giggle. 🙂
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Sadric
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A person would have to have like 18 emotes for every hotkey to make it equivalent to what elemental toxicity puts out for the same button push.
I’m keeping my “NETHERLORD INC” macro.
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