Feldon In a thread which has been going since January, but which has really come to a head in the last few weeks, players are sounding off about EQ2 Server Lag, Routing issues, and overall unpleasantness when trying to play the game.
Despite endless trolling from players who have been quick to accuse players of having deficient computer hardware, as well as numerous red herrings about Traceroutes and ISP issues, the reality is, this issue has been affecting a cross-section of players in all forms of gameplay, in different parts of the country, and on top notch PCs which previously played EQ2 without difficulty. So that isolates the problem to SOE and the traffic providers who serve SOE.
Routing Roulette?
One solution has cropped up which we would normally dismiss out of hand, except that it has received backing from a number of different players who are geographically dispersed. Zoning, or doing a Disconnect/Reconnect cycle seems to temporarily resolve the issue for some players. We have been unable to confirm what basis this “fix” might have, but numerous players have reported that by somehow switching to a different routing, their game performance improves immeasurably.
 Solutions in Sight?
We’ve been receiving regular updates from Zoltaroth and Kander. Zoltaroth went so far as to add a feature to filter out combat logging from other characters, just to try to eliminate any server flooding, but this doesn’t seem to apply to the current routing problems players are experiencing.
Kander‘s update on the 9th:
We are doing everything we can to see if we can identify an issue. Code is talking to network engineering, network engineering is investigating.
and Kander‘s updates yesterday:
Alerting Net-Engineering now. Thanks.
and today:
Yes, last night was pretty bad. They are definitely aware and working on it.
And more recently, updates today from Zoltaroth:
I just wanted to chime in here with a quick update.
We are working on these issues. There were some DDoS issues last night (unrelated to SOE but affected our service provider). We have our network engineering guys working with our service providers to find answers and solutions. This is a top priority for us.
and also from Kander:
Another update.
At 2am today our service provider made changes to their network to help with this issue. SOE will also be re-configuring some of our hardware to best take advantage of their changes at 6am on Thursday (7/18). Please keep updating this thread with network lag issues the more data we have the better. If you can include a traceroute that would be even better.
Thanks guys, we are working on it as fast as we can!
I’ve heard a lot of player frustration from friends and so I hope these issues can be addressed before Game Update 67 hits.
It’s the NSA tapping into the data stream looking for terrorist chatter. 🙂
The game’s been out since 2004 and the fact that someone says ” you need better hardware” is laughable to determine if lag has something to do with that.
It’s quite obvious this is a definite server-side issue. Two raids on Sunday and Monday that fell flat due to half our force having lag so bad that some of them froze for 5-10 seconds in battle.
Monday, July 15th, 8PM EST … lag was insane in Harrow’s End. Opted to zone out at Drinal after the zone crashed while attempting to kill the encounter. Seeing 2-4 second hotbar button lag/clicking and watching Drinal cast “nothing” over and over. He was literally ghost casting meaning the UI on the client-side didn’t register what he was casting so his cast bar was empty. We zone crashed, another guild zone crashed simultaneously. We left … we killed the encounter the next day and the experience was much more pleasant.
Sort of un-related to the lag is the client crashing while zoning, it’s like the game just dies, no error whatsoever. Most times it occurs when zoning into the HM challenge DUO zones released recently, but I’ve had it happen zoning back to Guildhall for example.
There has been some major packet losses the last few days I am getting small spikes then I get a huge spike and kicks me off line or freeze I get booted when I zone to my guild hall as well
I called my Internet provider it is not them so this is on SoE
I can’t even break 30 FPS in instances or raids. I get 60+ FPS in almost any other MMO its bad.
Just realize that FPS has nothing to do with server or connection lag. Server or connection lag is when the animation keeps going, but all the characters freeze. You can click on spells, but nothing happens, until the action unfreezes and then all your spells fire off.
I’ve actually seen really good FPS during a lag spike (probably because there’s no combat to render). I remember running the Ring War PQ and getting 45 fps while everyone (including the giants) stood around without attacking. Every 5 seconds, we’d all attack at once and then go back to staring at each other.
Does this mean there’s a possibility I won’t get stuck in the zoning screen any more?! /hopes
It always seems to get worse after something new releases. Not sure if it’s the program arguing with it’s self or just the increased traffic with all the shiny new stuff to do and see.
Things I’ve been told by customer service when i petition about 1 fps, lag, and being stuck in the zoning screen for half hour or more…
1) We would like you to try clearing your computer’s cache.
2) Open and immediately close the browser in game once, then close Awsomium a second time through the processes tab in the task manager.
3) open MSconfig and close all but the microsoft processes and startup programs.
Pre AOD I was fine in my GH.Post Aod I didn’t dare step foot in it,insta crash to the point i’d have to call rl friends to log my toon and get it the hell outta hall. This went on for months,despite my having a pretty burly comp,nvidia 560 ti card,7 mb dsl…Tried everything.Dumb gfx all the way down,petition,read forums for work arounds,send in msconfig,etc. The solution for me was to upgrade win7 to 64 bit. Which is pretty silly for a game this old,and the fact they wouldn’t just come out and say it kinda pissed me off. Along with there never being a ” we’re looking into it”. I wouldn’t hold my breath on this..
Often the 64 bit OS upgrades are related to stuff other than the EQ2 client, most common of which (from my experience) has been video or audio driver related.
Until win7 X64 I was hard pressed to find a more stable os for my (old) hardware with eq2 than xp x86. It’s good to hear you finally got sorted.
HAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHA!
OMG THE BEST VIDEO EVER MADE! My stomach hurts from laughing so hard. Thanks for posting that Eq2wire!
OMG that video was hilarious!!!!!
heh I enjoyed the video as well.
To note though, EQ2 is highly cpu bound. You can have the latest and greatest video card to date, but if you’d cpu is mediocre then you’ll only get mediocre framerates. EQN is a different beast, it’s going to run the Forgelight engine and takes advantage of a lot of the gpu goodies.
hate to burst ur bubble forge light right now is a F*&^%ng mess worse then eq2 launch there code is such a mess its hilarious im running 4.8ghz ivy brige with 16gb ram and 7970 vid card haf the time the game has no idea if ur cpu should be grafting or ur gpu so as best as i can tell it asks the random number generator to roll a 0-1 to choose i swear to god it might aswell for all intents and purposes if that isnt smoothed out to reduce vid lag ui input lag then eqn will fall on its arse at launch sadly and im gutted cos ive been waiting 3yrs for eq3….
I’ve experienced server lag in planetside 2 but not nearly to the extent that your describing. In fact its very, very rare for me. It seems to happen after patches and they tend to fix it pretty quickly. I find it impressive how well the game runs during fights involving hundreds of players.
its been much more of a problem in eq2 since the release of CoE.
And judging by the number of people playing planetside theres no way eqn will fail at launch because of forgelight.