Regarding lag, LCTM,etc.

After reading this...
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...age=0&vc=1

in this thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....=0#Post13787050

...it made me think. Please excuse me for the text wall, but it's a little complicated what I thought up...

I really wish I knew what you guys who have this issue were talking about, but I hate to say it... it just does not happen for me. Period. Even during Rikti raids. I never see this.

That's not to say I haven't had the obvious "I don't have a Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition, thermocouple cooled, overclocked to uber, coupled with the top of the line NVidia card, also uberoverclocked, so I just don't have a system that can deal with all that crap going on, so slide show it is" type frame rates. I ain't got that kind of money to get something to deal with all that stuff going on. But the the *very* occasional LCTM? The *extremely rare* 'pop to login'? So rare you could start a pool on when it might happen to me, and there would probably be several months involved before it hit.

Maybe I'm not on the same times you are, the same servers you are, and most probably not the same internet connection and therefore chain of routers that you are.

Still, how can that be that I don't have issues and you do? It makes no sense on the face of it. If the game is universally broken in this way, I should see this problem, yes? But it's not like that. It's a 'personal' issue, sort of. And so I thought about it... and came up with this:

It seems that the ports used by Co* are very non standard, if I remember right. It's also true that routers can and do get set to give lower priority to weird (to them) ports. For example, at my work I have my routers set to allow only certain traffic on certain ports, websites, etc. It's easier to block or set to low anything that screws up my bandwidth. More to the point, the prioritization of web pages is top, because we've become quite the users of websites, so any traffic that's not a web page... such as Co*... get screwed because I don't *want* that traffic on my network, we have work to deal with.

Given my needs, and what I do about it, it's easy to see how it's *possible* your ISP, or the routers in the path to the game servers you're forced to use, have prioritization issues that just might cause the spiking, LCTM, and popping.

*If* that's the case... and I kind of suspect this has to be it... then of course, NCSoft can't control that. They have no real choice but to say "it's your ISP or the chain of routers somewhere." They also have no choice but to throw it back to you. They cannot possibly be held responsible for investigating why one person in one location on a certain ISP can't get in right. That would just be too costly and time consuming once you multiply that out to all of the problem areas.

Before any mention of (the game what's name shall not be mentioned) is made, and how "it doesn't have this issue, so Co* shouldn't!" (which seems to be the most popular argument about this and other issues...) let me say this: Co* = <300K users. (the game what's name shall not be mentioned) = >10M users. The squeaky wheel would get the oil... and their ports, or their server IPs, get bumped up to prevent the issue, because woe be the ISP that doesn't allow (you know what) to be flawlessly dealt with.

That and it's likely (you know what) isn't sending NEAR as much information as Co* is regarding body parts. Ragdoll dontcha know. That info is a lot more data on top of the situation, so the prioritization affects it even more than if it were a simpler amount of data.

If *all that* were even remotely close (because it's a theory, mind) It's no wonder that during a Rikti Raid, some of you guys and gals get messed up. Imagine if all the things those grav 'trollers toss about were also synched? Everyone saw a pool table, instead of the various different things? And their positional info? During a raid? Yeesh... Bad enough we have to deal with what we have to already, ya ask me... Unless you would like the ragdoll/positional stuff turned off to save data 'space' on the packets...

(Hey, there's an idea... Nah, that'd be complicated to figure out and implement... But who knows... they said that about Power Customization, and here comes I-16...)

Again, I don't know if I'm remotely close. I highly suspect that I am. Heck, there's a chance I smacked that teeny little finishing nail dead straight and centered with a gigantic 3 mile wide hammer. Although that's probably pushing it... maybe a 2.7634 mile wide one.

In any case, this has been going on for *years*. After everything else I've seen regarding this, and especially a certain case in Alaska (where it was emphatically proven to be the 4th or 5th router in the chain causing them to be sent to Japan or something on the way to SoCal) the only conclusion is this:

It's IS your ISP. I know you don't like that answer. People who take their car to a mechanic don't like hearing it's the transmission and it needs replacing. People who go to a doctor don't like the answer of "we'll have to operate." These answers suck, but they are the right answers, regardless.

It is your ISP, because *somewhere* in the entire house of cards that is the chain of boxes, wires, and circuits between your computer and the game servers is the issue. A router that's having a bad hair day, a circuit that has spilled spaghetti sauce on it's shirt, a cable that got a flat tire, someone spilled beer on the server (probably Pinnacle)... It's amazing it works at all, really.

However, I also blame NCSoft. For using weird ports, first, and secondly, for daring to have such a complicated program that has such high data needs. There is probably a good set of reasons they did this (like, it's more realistic to have ragdolls than not, for example, so they added that to the data transmission needs.)

So. Now what? Well, you have some choices to deal with:

1) Work the problem. You can't do anything about the data or the ports. So figure out where in the chain of routers your issue might be. And then work with both your ISP and NCSoft and get them to figure it out, and like the Alaska case, it was. (This took a month, btw, before he got it done, but his ISP fixed it like the proper ISP they should be. They changed their backbone *supplier*, if I remember right. Be like you changing from Cable to DSL and fixing things. How's that for an ISP?)

2) Change your ISP. This one rankles so many, I know. I have Comcast Cable Internet in Houston. I will not have it taken away easily. It works, I *rarely* have issues, and I attribute that to the awesome that is Comcast. A good router system such as apparently I have is the backbone to Co* working. That is why I'll not likely leave anytime soon. But if they did have issues, I would jump to UVerse, or DSL, or whatever lets Co* work right. I'd first attempt to find the problem, but if I couldn't or I found it and they wouldn't fix it, I'd be cancelling things and telling them why. Of course, there's no guarantees you can ever find an ISP that will work well with Co*, depending on your situation... in which case you're kinda left with either...

3) Give up, and cancel your accounts. I hate this choice, because I just can't quit Co*, but if that's what you have to do, then that's what you have to do. It's not likely that Co* is going to change it's ports, or reduce it's data needs.

or

4) Put up with it. You're a trooper. 'Nuff said. This'd likely be me... maybe. I don't know, I've not had to deal with it.

I don't know if that helps or not. But I'm posting it anyway, in the hopes that it maybe, just maybe, helps explain the situation... or maybe a Dev will show up and go "you suck, houtex, completely wrong." Either way, something good might come up from this.

That, and I was up at 4am (WAY before I should have been) with a splitting sinus headache and couldn't sleep, so there's that... ow...

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I just realized, Co* is the ultimate testing program. Seriously. I will now use it to diagnose internet issues, as until I thought about this lag/disconnect issue... it never occurred to me that Co* could be used in this way. But now it's obvious: Not only does Co* kill unworthy computers, it will show unworthy ISPs and/or their router chains. Nice!

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August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012

Interesting thought(s) there. I think I'm gonna have to pretty much agree.

For me, I know what the main source of my sever lag during invasions/ship raids/etc., map servers, and logouts is: My compy is 5 years old. I've upgraded it in just about every way I can, but it's still old. I'm sure that when I get a new one, I'll see a huge reduction in the problems.

But until then, I just deal with it. Of course, I started playing this game on Dial Up, and with only 256 MB RAM, so I quickly learned to deal with that stuffs if I wanted to play...

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

Hmmm, interesting theory... it might just be so.

I wonder how big of a deal it would be for Paragon Studios to switch the ports for the game? Are the port numbers just a few constants sitting in a file somewhere that they could change in 5 minutes, or do they have deals with their ISP that would have to be re-negotiated if they switched ports? It might be interesting to, say, put one test server on one set of ports and another test server on another set then have people try both out.

Another thing I've been curious about is zone specific lag. It's getting pretty rare these days but, when the game first came out, it was common to find one zone horribly laggy while another zone worked great. What's the story with that?

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[ QUOTE ]
For using weird ports,

[/ QUOTE ]
NCSoft didn't use "weird" ports, NCSoft simply didn't hijack a commonly used port like TCP 80 (which'd be hard to do, since the game runs on UDP, the other common Transport Layer protocol, which most all games use). Blaming NCSoft (/Cryptic) for not designing the game in a way to try to trick ISPs is a bit silly... especially when it really didn't become very common (at least for the public to know) that some ISPs (like comcast... [censored] holes) like to throttle their user's traffic (because, ya know, how dare they use the service as intended!).

[ QUOTE ]
and secondly, for daring to have such a complicated program that has such high data needs

[/ QUOTE ]City of Heroes really doesn't send that much data (for the most part, it can run on dial up). CoH just likes low latency, which isn't something that most ISPs will even go near mentioning (broadband only refers to your transfer rate... it wasn't unusual in the early days of broadband to have LOWER latency on dial up than broadband... especially dsl).

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Excellent points Kistune! Allow me to respond and fill in gaps I missed?

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re: "weird ports"

Naturally, Co* (and others) shouldn't hijack commonly used ports such as 80, 21, etc. That would be naughty. And it wasn't to say they were picked and are weird... but to a router that has port priorities, they are exactly that: Weird. Odd. Non-important. Call it what you will, I simply used weird. I like the word weird. It's weird.

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re: high data needs

Yes, truly, it's not all that much, in comparison to other data streams. I'll grant that. But the sheer volume of the amount of each item in the game on the client that needs to know where it is, it's directional stance, and *each limb, and sub limb* position... that's way more than Character 123 is at position X,Y,Z.

Multiply it out by all NPCs (waving and such), characters, enemies... items, objects, etc, etc. Even the boxes have full positional information, or they wouldn't spin on their own, "looking" at whatever they're targeting.

Add more and more data to be dealt with on top of THAT... (say, with a raid)

And finally, into the mix... routers possibly 'screening the calls', or being screwed up.... being on satellite maybe... whatever the network issue...

Boom. LCTM. Pop to Login. Not terribly surprising, if all that works out as I think it might.

So yeah, lower latency is key... hence I stand by my "ISP router chain" is the problem, and having a good one is key to the whole works.

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Now, just for flavoring, I recently started having dabbling interest in Left 4 Dead. That game is... interesting. Solo, I can play it NO ISSUES. My computer likes all the hordes, the graphics, all that, no problems, no complaints.

While trying to play multiplayer, which only has 8 users, plus the zombie hordes about the map... Getting on a bad server, or a bad chain (I don't really know how to test for that, for this game, they're random over the US) yep, I've gotten the equivalent of lag, LCTMs and PTLs. And we go find another server, 'cause it's just the way it is.

It's like the old days of Quake, Quake II, etc. There were a few programs made for the *sole purpose* of finding, for you, the lower ping servers so that you could find a good match for your worldly position. QuakeSpy comes to mind. So I might play on servers in the nearest states, never hitting one in Virginia. And the guy in California might never hit the one in Louisiana. All because the pings would be sucky. Even QuakeLive has pings listed and part of the filters, if I remember right... might need to revisit that.

Point is, we don't have that kind of luxury the Quakes and L4D and others of this kind of multiplayer have. We have three, THREE server farms. One on each side of the USA, plus EU. Lower half of the world must really get screwed, dontcha think? I have no idea about (the game what's name shall not be mentioned) has for server farms, but they have a *ton* of shards. Not only for to split up the player base, but I bet they're also scattered in multiple locations.

Unlike Co*. So again, bottom line is, near as I can tell, you gotta work the problem, deal with it, or, sadly, decide you're done.

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August 31, 2012. A Day that will Live in Infamy. Or Information. Possibly Influence. Well, Inf, anyway. Thank you, Paragon Studios, for what you did, and the enjoyment and camaraderie you brought.
This is houtex, aka Mike, signing off the forums. G'night all. - 10/26/2012
Well... perhaps I was premature about that whole 'signing off' thing... - 11-9-2012