Chad Gulzow-Man

Ah yes, the ONE good thing to come out of Issue 13...

Ditto. Only for those who added Going Rogue, of course.

That's why I made mention of the hyperbole.

Hyperbole post is hyperbol...ic(?).

Issue 20 has only been out since early April, or just over one month ago. And I doubt you're running 30 BAFs (at about 25 min apiece)... that would be 12½ hours a day of repeat BAFing, not counting any recruiting time. Even 10 a day would be four hours.

If you are BAFing for 12 hours straight every day, then... um... uh... go outside!

Bah, was just about to edit my post with the same. Kudos on the speedy fingers, Deej.

At level 50, with no flight speed enhancements whatsoever, Fly is already at the speed cap. Use an end cost reducer (or two) instead.

Flight speed was buffed in Issue 18 (if I recall correctly), negating the need for speed enhancements in the Fly power.

Except that we disagree in that I think they will work on the problems as solutions arise, and when time tables allow. More work is actually being done for i20.5, which will contain the raid on Antimatter's Reactor. I20 isn't in the grave yet.

But I also think the lag problem for the most part lies less on their end and more on the situations that individual players find themselves in between their personal systems and their internet providers. I've certainly experienced mapserver disconnects--as recently as two weeks ago, I was mapserved 4 times in one night--but that was a problem with my ISP losing a bridge to the CoH servers, including these message boards. Nobody else got booted, no one else was unable to reach the CoH web page, so I knew it had to be something on my end.

We'll see how things go after Friday the 27th, when they have as many people as possible log in to Freedom. They're planning a server stress test, the results of which may directly affect the issues being complained about in this thread.

You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means.

The point I've apparently failed to make without blatantly saying it is this: no one person can fix these issues. It's something that has to be handled by a team of people. And the specific people who would be best able to work on a lag problem are also those who are most important in current development projects. It's also not something that can be banged out in an afternoon, so those important developers will have to devote serious time that will impact the timelines designated by the lead developers and (more importantly) the investors in the parent company, which directly affects their funding. Arguably, they think more dollars come about from "moar stuffs nao!" than fixing some issues.

Any potential fixes have to go through rigorous testing with the QA department, because "fixing lag" is almost certainly going to be something that could have complicated and completely random effects throughout the rest of the game--changing a bit of AI here means that suddenly Vahzilok zombies suddenly stop closing into melee range, and /Device Blasters find themselves stuck in their own caltrops and web grenades!

And since the developers are all connecting locally, the support team is not likely to see the lag that a player across the country does in the first place, which makes it even harder to pinpoint the issues.

I don't think the issue is entirely hardware-related the way you do, either. I'm sure a super expensive server upgrade couldn't hurt, but they do upgrade the hardware occassionally. Do you really think we're still on the exact same hardware that CoH launched on in 2004? Or CoV in 2005? I recall hearing something about a pretty major upgrade around the time of Issue 17, a few months before Going Rogue... aka a year ago.

I think the major reason players are experiencing lag has to do, again, with them mistaking graphics slow-down for lag, and with their personal internet connections. It's not like Paragon Studios in California can call up an ISP in New York and complain that their network pathing to reach the servers is too slow. And again, a system slowing down from too much graphics processing can be handled by limiting the features, or by upgrading one's personal hardware.

I experience next to no lag on a Hamidon raid. Seriously. It runs absolutely fine for me.

I get "lag" on Rikti Ship Raids, but mostly it's not network or server lag, it's graphics slow-down. If I turn down my graphics, it runs pretty cleanly too, especially considering that there are upwards of 100 enemies nearby attacking the 30+ players and their multitude of AoE attacks.

And the ITF "lag valley" actually HAS improved, considerably, since the task force was released in Issue 12. Most teams I run with these days actually charge up the path, rather than the tradition of pulling back to the bridge and then group-TPing over the valley to the computer. Controls are responsive, there's very little rubber-banding, and only about a second or two where powers say they're recharged but still won't fire. It's not 100%, but it's unarguably improvement over the slideshow that i12 ITFs were reduced to in the valley.

I'm not mad, I just think you're being childish. You don't seem to have any idea how things work, yet imply that everything would be fixed if we just listened to what you were saying: "Send a guy to fix it."

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I can almost assuredly tell you why Lambda trials get laggy in the grenade phase: too many enemies (AIs) requesting server instructions at the same time. The common tactic is to run from object to object as quickly as possible, while leaving the enemies behind. These enemies become "active" on the server, and begin to request server instructions on what to do. Furthermore, ambushes get summoned when the destruction starts, and ambushes don't stop and wander off after a while the way regular mobs do--they hunt down the party until they've been defeated or the event is over and they despawn.

There are two "easy" ways to improve this: 1) force players to deal with the spawns, or 2) remove the ambushes and limit the enemies' aggression timer. The second option would make the challenge negligible, so that's off the table. And players would complain if the grenade phase suddenly became a kill-all, so that's not really a solution either. There are no other simple solutions.

As for the BAF, I'm not really sure why it's so laggy during the escapee phase--the only time I personally experience server lag. (There's sometimes graphics slow-down during the AV fights.) I would assume it's also an AI-related problem, but since they have no attacks and should only be operating on a simple path-following algorithm, I don't understand why that would cause problems...

Well, try harder, because you failed.

It should be pretty apparent that if the solution were as simple as having one dude do all the testing and fixing himself, they'd have done it. Also, it would apparently be the early 1980s, and the game would be on an Apple IIe or Tandy. Nobody in the current industry has the necessary expertise to fix every cause of this slowdown.

It's very likely a problem with intricate ties in AI, mapping, networking and hardware. You show me a video game programmer who's an expert in all that and can extrapolate a solution from just seeing this "issue" five different times on wildly different hardware, and I'll show you a dude who's about to end up in a government think tank with a 6+ figure salary.

A massive recovery bonus and a tool to use when you know you're about to go in over your head, like against a +4 AV at the end of an STF or a herd of Devouring Earth dropping those damned Quartz eminators...

Random spawns are random. It could be 5 minutes in between, it could be an hour, or it could be an entire day. (I'm pretty sure I recall reading something early on in the life of CoH that made it so GMs had to spawn at least once per 24 hours.)

Nope, only for reporting an exploit that you kept secret from the rest of the playerbase. Since this isn't an exploit per se, and you posted it plainly in the forums, I'd say you're 0 for 2 there.

(I admire your moxie, though.)

The badge that thousands of characters hold saying they beat her up seems to argue with you.