Why do we accept the ENORMOUS performance drop in this game?
By
Addicted,
Posted on: 2010-02-18 11:57 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
Quote:
I'd be incredibly curious to see what lag valley did if phalanx fighting wasn't included on the mobs. Just give them another 8% def and call it a day, and call the power Phalags Fighting.|
Originally Posted by Emberly
The ITF is a server-side problem. There's a lotta Romans in that valley and correspondingly there's a lotta calculations for whatever shield defense/grant cover/phalanx fighting crap they have going on. Nothing to be done about it because fixing it would involve throwing a lot of hardware at the problem. This is my understanding of it, as told by someone who knows a Whole Lot More than I do.
Other than that portion of one TF, the only other place that I can think of that irritates the hell out of me is the last room in the LGTF, where scenery, mobs and everything else randomly appear and disappear while you go about your merry way. Not sure why that occurs but I sure wish it didn't. I am pretty sure that these problems frustrate and annoy the devs too. They have a lot of justifiable pride in their work so these things probably drive them absolutely warbonkers. |
I have a sneaking suspicion that this simple change would really help that particular map.
I know there is an issue with the ITF. What I am saying is that through upgrading my computer, Several times now. When I run the ITF I don't have LAG in that valley hill area anymore.
I have 18 Megs of ATT Uverse as well.
I ran ITF last night on Virtue. I know what I am talking about.
We were fighting under that bridge, when you go up through the middle. It was the FIRST TIME EVER... That I didnt lag out.
Quote:
Oh, the devs have commented on it, and implemented a few fixes. The server side lag now is not as bad as it was when the Task Force was first introduced. |
Originally Posted by Blue_Centurion
Post Deleted
|
That being said, I think the developers are waiting on some of the engine changes made for Going Rogue to be implemented on the live servers, or for some of the coders to be made available. Remember, ITF hit in 2008, about the same time the developers began work on Power Customization and began to train new staff in how the existing engine works. I suspect that there are some underlying engine changes that could be made that will help reduce lag in this specific map.
That being said, I do agree that 2 years for a lag fix falls on the side of: TOO BLOODY LONG.
Mewwit, I knew I forgot something.
I do have some bad news for you. Buried somewhere in that gigantic "post Going Rogue Info here"We do know that SG's / VG's aren't going to be cross-compatible. If you want to have a current villain character join a Super Group, you'll have to completely make the change from Villain to Hero. If you want to have a current hero character in a Villain group, you'll need to completely make the change from hero to villain.
I believe this mechanic is in place to retain market separation. Rogue's will still have access to the Black Market, while Vigilantes will have access to LagWorths. If the devs allowed Rogue's to join SuperGroups, Rogue's would technically also have access to Hero Salvage and Hero Enhancements. If the devs allowed Vigilante's to join VillainGroups, Vigilante's would technically also have access to Villain Salvage and Villain Enhancements, enabling players to merge the markets through SuperGroup / Villain Group transfers.
Okay, I'm working on partial information here. The developers haven't actually explained what will happen with Badges or Accolades. My suspicion is that if you have earned an accolade power on one side of the game, you'll be able to retain that accolade power if you fully convert from one faction to another.
I suspect that unless you fully convert your avatar though, some badges, such as Task Force or Strike Force completion badges, might not actually be available.
If you are planning on making a complete switch though, I wouldn't get too cozy with the badges you have.
Again, the developers have talked about the lag issues in the past. The imperious task force is just one of the rare instances where the ambition of the developers over-stepped the boundaries of what the server could reliably accomplish.
Quote:
The Devs have commented on this. That most badges have parity blueside/redside and that the title and description are the differences between the two. If you take your hero fully to villain-side, the badges will flip.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
Okay, I'm working on partial information here. The developers haven't actually explained what will happen with Badges or Accolades. My suspicion is that if you have earned an accolade power on one side of the game, you'll be able to retain that accolade power if you fully convert from one faction to another.
I suspect that unless you fully convert your avatar though, some badges, such as Task Force or Strike Force completion badges, might not actually be available. If you are planning on making a complete switch though, I wouldn't get too cozy with the badges you have. |
I'll try to hunt it down, but at the moment I have to leave pt1 of my job to go to pt2 of my job, something I am not looking forward to. -.-
I remember closed testing that issue, before the bridges and the associated mobs were added to the valley.
That was mostly lag free.
I do think its simply related to the sheer numbers of Romans in close proximity, and the server slowing down due to the number of calculations.
Ontop of that would be framerate issue for some machines.
@Catwhoorg "Rule of Three - Finale" Arc# 1984
@Mr Falkland Islands"A Nation Goes Rogue" Arc# 2369 "Toasters and Pop Tarts" Arc#116617
Quote:
I consider myself edumacated. It's where da loot's at! |
Originally Posted by je_saist
So, it's the perfect storm of high-level task force components.
Chance for Purples? Check Chance for rare salvage? Check Can be done with a PUG? Check Can be done quickly with a PUG? Check Decent Merits / Influence for the time? Check This is why so many players in the Task Force channels treat ITF as the only game in town. |
K5K - The Killbot 5000
A Spanner In The Works Part One, ArcID: 336662, A Spanner In The Works Part Two, ArcID: 336665, Enter Japes, ArcID: 96001
In The Darkness Creeping, ArcID: 347709, When Dimensions Collide, ArcID: 412416.
Quote:
It's very possible to run it several times and not lag at all. There are several factors that can cause the server-side lag to happen, but it doesn't mean it happens EVERY time. |
Originally Posted by Perfect_Pain
I know there is an issue with the ITF. What I am saying is that through upgrading my computer, Several times now. When I run the ITF I don't have LAG in that valley hill area anymore.
I have 18 Megs of ATT Uverse as well. I ran ITF last night on Virtue. I know what I am talking about. We were fighting under that bridge, when you go up through the middle. It was the FIRST TIME EVER... That I didnt lag out. |
The specific lag we are talking about is server-side, and CAN NOT be fixed by your own personal system specs. That would be like saying if you had a faster processor, that you could read this message before I hit "submit reply". You can't. It's impossible.
I have to send the message before you can read it, just like the server has to finish processing the player AoEs, Cimeroran AoE buffs, multiple patrol and ambush pathing errors... before you can see it. The kind of lag we are talking about is when it happens to EVERYBODY at the SAME TIME, not randomly to each player who happens to get a lower framerate when something big happens.
Your own personal video lag might certainly be reduced, but you did not solve Server lag... unless you reprogrammed or upgraded the server. lol
I "never" lag on the ITF anymore either, but I'm wise enough to know it's largely because of how we run the mission. I'll admit some things are beyond my control and once in a while it's still going to happen. That's just common sense.
As for the OP.. why do we accept it? I dunno. I guess I don't see it as a large problem. I have fun during my countless hours of play, and a few moments of lag are not enough to turn it into a bad experience. I do still think the ITF should be fixed though. It's obviously broken, and has been since it was released.
Quote:
Astute observations, as always, by BillZ. There are ITFs running pretty much constantly on Justice. Now, I'm not saying that there's one piece of hardware upon which that "server" is housed, as I've never seen the physical setup of the game's servers. But I do know that from the sheer amount of people running the ITF at any given time, especially during peak hours, if the server itself had some sort of lag then I should see that lag at some point during normal play. |
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
I understand what you're stating, and I've also heard that the lag in that particular case is a server side issue.
The server may not care what my system is rendering, but the fact stands that some rigs suffer less lag than others during the same ITF. That implies that there's something going on there other than *just* the server getting hammered for your particular instance of the zone. And I've never fully bought that argument anyway. 1 section of 1 zone gets hammered but every other zone instance being managed by that server is unaffected? C'mon. If I'm getting minimal lag while another player on the team flat out DCs when someone fires off a tier9 nova, then something beyond *just* server lag is happening. This is why I'm in a wait and see mode. We don't know if the devs learned how to streamline some of the more ridiculous performance-degrading zone design decisions with the code changes involved with changing the game to allow for ultra mode. RV, Gville, CaD and Mercy these days are all poorly designed in relation to end client performance. I'm curious as to whether those that choose not to turn on ultra mode will end up getting some performance benefits related to the back end changes necessary to get ultra mode working. <shrug> We'll see. The devs haven't stated one way or the other that I've seen. |
When I used to play on my laptop (which was not far over minimum requirements to play), I would see crippling lag during the ITF, being able to fire off a power maybe twice a minute. Since I upgraded to a custom gaming rig, I see a drop in lag valley, but not lower than about 20 FPS. While that's not great (especially compared to my performance in RWZ/Hami raids), it's far from unplayable, and I don't see DCs anymore at all.
I'm more inclined to believe the rest of the lag is caused by something along the lines of bandwidth, where the client and server are trying to pass more information than they have lines open for and it's all being funnelled through a few ports. This could also explain why the lag is only seen by those on the TF, as the server would dedicate a certain amount of bandwidth to each user and therefore not lag to anyone but the users who are requesting too much information at a specific time. Just a theory, as I may have a better-than-average technical ability, but I'm no networking genius.
Global- @SailorET, Justice Server
Sheryl Fiero, 50 AR/Devices Blaster
Louise Fiero, 50 Merc/Traps MM
Various assorted alts
Proudly serving in our military so you don't have to.
Good answers/info. You can say I am using brute comm mode, but if anybody here is saying that there is not a buttload of server lag in that valley sometimes (even if you using NASAs finest comp), you need to crap in your hat and wear it. Cause you a poopyhead.
Last night we did it straight up the valley, and everybody on the team hit that truly horrific lag. No D/Cs, just everybody getting one attack every 20-30 seconds.
Tonight I was on a team that hit the comp first, eased into the valley from behind. Then pulled the gens to the bridge. No lag.
Sad Pabda on the news about SGs and VGs. I really utilize the SGs for salvage/inspiration storage. It is gonna be interesting to see how I solve this new problem.
New question (should probably be in diff area, but wtf): On villain to Hero conversion, I/Os cannot be carried over? And what happens to my wonderful collection of Purps and such I took 2 years to collect? They cash them out for 2.3 mil?
Quote:
You'll be able to take stuff with you. In one of the Herocon videos one of the devs talked about a new opportunity to be a "gun runner" by carrying expensive goodies with you while you switch sides.
|
Originally Posted by Blue_Centurion
New question (should probably be in diff area, but wtf): On villain to Hero conversion, I/Os cannot be carried over? And what happens to my wonderful collection of Purps and such I took 2 years to collect? They cash them out for 2.3 mil?
|
Freedom: Blazing Larb, Fiery Fulcrum, Sardan Reborn, Arctic-Frenzy, Wasabi Sam, Mr Smashtastic.
Quote:
in addition to this i think it was mentioned somewhere that heros and villains would be able to trade with each other (not sure if that only includes inspirations), to help with the co-op tfs (like when your the only hero on a all villain LGTF and you die and the rest of the team cant give you a wakie and nobody has a rez power)
|
Originally Posted by Sardan
You'll be able to take stuff with you. In one of the Herocon videos one of the devs talked about a new opportunity to be a "gun runner" by carrying expensive goodies with you while you switch sides.
|
Quote:
Based on comments, observations, and my own experience, "Justice" is probably one to three racks of servers in a datacenter somewhere. When you enter a door mission, the server code will create a new map instance and put it on whichever server has the lowest load. Here's the part I'm not sure about: if I were designing it, each map instance would be in its own virtual machine, with resource limits to keep any problems from leaking out, so only people on the ITF with you would see lag. Starting up a new virtual machine has high overhead, though, so they may have gone with the option of leaving all map instances directly on the hardware. In this case, lag on your ITF will affect other map instances on that server, but won't affect map instances on any of the other servers that make up "Justice".|
Originally Posted by SailorET
Astute observations, as always, by BillZ. There are ITFs running pretty much constantly on Justice. Now, I'm not saying that there's one piece of hardware upon which that "server" is housed, as I've never seen the physical setup of the game's servers. But I do know that from the sheer amount of people running the ITF at any given time, especially during peak hours, if the server itself had some sort of lag then I should see that lag at some point during normal play.
|
Quote:
| When I used to play on my laptop (which was not far over minimum requirements to play), I would see crippling lag during the ITF, being able to fire off a power maybe twice a minute. Since I upgraded to a custom gaming rig, I see a drop in lag valley, but not lower than about 20 FPS. While that's not great (especially compared to my performance in RWZ/Hami raids), it's far from unplayable, and I don't see DCs anymore at all. |
"Low framerate" is when your computer is trying to draw more than it can. It shows up as jerky animation, and in extreme cases, the feeling that you're watching a slideshow. Upgrading from your laptop will avoid low-framerate situations by increasing the amount your computer can draw.
Are you talking about framerate or network lag when you say performance. Because the only time I ever experience a performance problem is during rikti ship raids or invasions and that is network / server lag. Which is I think more on our side, because I know a few people with super connections that don't get the latency issues such as: Powers not firing when recharged.
I don't really see a performance issues other than that and I don't think thats anything they can truly fix. I guess I'm very much pleased with this game and its developers. No real complaints here.
edit: reading everything again Im guessing this is another itf complaint. Not really sure what to say here. It happens to me sometimes but not everytime.
Friends don't let friends buy an ncsoft controlled project.
Quote:
the gun runner statement was retracted a bit later, I believe by Positron.
|
Originally Posted by Sardan
You'll be able to take stuff with you. In one of the Herocon videos one of the devs talked about a new opportunity to be a "gun runner" by carrying expensive goodies with you while you switch sides.
|
Did Noy really just say it was a server issue, so there is nothing they can do about it?....
This is from Wikipedia:
"Latency is the time taken for a sent packet of data to be received at the other end. It includes the time to encode the packet for transmission and transmit it, the time for that data to traverse the network equipment between the nodes, and the time to receive and decode the data. This is also known as "one-way latency". A minimum bound on latency is determined by the distance between communicating devices and the speed at which the signal propagates in the circuits (typically 7095% of the speed of light in vacuum). Actual latency is often much higher, due to packet processing in networking equipment, and other traffic.Now i'm pulling out a section for emphasis:
While strictly every packet experiences lag, the term lag is used to refer to delays noticeable to the user. There is often a correlation between latency and the physical distance that data must travel. Thus the time taken for a packet to travel from a computer server in Europe to a client in the same region is likely to be shorter than the time to travel from Europe to the America or Asia. But protocols and well written code that avoid unnecessary data transmissions are less affected by the latency inherent in a network. Modern corporate networks have devices to cache frequently requested data and accelerate protocols, thus reducing application response time, the cumulative effect of latency.
In many online video games such as World of Warcraft and Quake III Arena, the lag is caused by bad connection to the host. Internet lag is undesirable because it disrupts normal game-play. Due to this, many players that have a high latency internet connection are often not permitted, or discouraged from playing with other players or servers that have a distant server host or have high latency to one another. Very often it also causes the death of the player character when it engages in combat. Extreme cases of lag may result in extensive desynchronization of the game state. The game may attempt to correct this by pausing game-play and attempting to fully resynchronize all players. Games that do not or fail in the attempt may simply drop the offending players. A reverse is shown when the player is near to the server geographically, allowing for, in some cases, almost instant transfer of data, and therefore no lag."
"Extreme cases of lag may result in extensive desynchronization of the game state. The game may attempt to correct this by pausing game-play and attempting to fully resynchronize all players. Games that do not or fail in the attempt may simply drop the offending players."To blame the servers as the only culprits is rather silly, as silly as saying its all client side. Or saying its the number of ITF's running on a server.
It follows that the likely CoH "lag" culprits would be:
1) your distance from the server,
2) latency of each person on your team,
3) the degree of de-synchronization that the server allows before taking action, and,
4) what the demands are from the server for rendering on the client and your machines ability to render it
It's not a black or white world. During ITF any or all of these could be affecting game play. On that ITF map, the servers are trying to maintain synchronization between 8 clients with varying connection speeds and latency, each attempting to render a map full of hundreds of minions with capes, emotes and powers. The servers are trying to sync this across the internet going 8 different directions across the country (or the world). Once the players start engaging the large mobs in the valley, I'd bet that the servers are sensing 8 clients out of sync with one another and begin pausing for brief periods continuously until each client catches up.
This explains why you can be on one end of Talos and not experience the crippling lag dozens of other players are seeing during a rikti invasion on the other side of the zone where the servers are trying to maintain synchronization among dozens of players, where dozens of enemies and players are all casting powers at the same time.
Anyone with a decent pc and who currently experiences lag on ITF who cares to test my theory should solo (have 1 person offline of course) or duo that third mission of ITF. It's my belief that you won't experience the infamous "lag" in the valley, regardless of how many instances of ITF is running on that server.
I ran this TF about a month or so ago. I didn't experience all this lag, but I was probably too busy trying to keep Daedalus alive while the rest of the team was running off doing whatever it was doing.
To be honest, I don't remember what server I was on, but I know it wasn't on Freedom or Virtue, so perhaps which server you are on may have something to do with the amount of lag you are experiencing during that tf.
Which server was it btw?
I wonder how many teams may have been running the TF at the same time (I'm assuming that could possibly increase the lag).
I'm not going to say I never lag; I've been to a Rikti Raid or two. I can say that recently I have had, have seen characters, and have heard of characters experience bad rubber-banding to a set lock-point that is similar to the old OOS bug. (I haven't experienced it recently.) However, this does not seem to be what the OP is talking about and I seriously didn't notice any excessive lag when I ran the TF in question.
The OP is just in time to ask this question because in 2 months time 70% (guess) of the player base will not notice the lagg in any way!
Because around then they will have upgraded their gfx card to run Ultra Mode. And the main problem of lagg hill is the amound of capes and enemies in the zone. The new gfx cards can handle that much easier.
Doesnt take away that this has to be looked at though.
- The Italian Job: The Godfather Returns #1151
Beginner - Encounter a renewed age for the Mook and the Family when Emile Marcone escapes from the Zig!
- Along Came a... Bug!? #528482
Average - A new race of aliens arrives on Earth. And Vanguard has you investigate them!
- The Court of the Blood Countess: The Rise of the Blood Countess #3805
Advanced - Go back in time and witness the birth of a vampire. Follow her to key moments in her life in order to stop her! A story of intrigue, drama and horror! Blood & Violence... not recommend to solo!
Quote:
Aye, recently the game has started to lag as h*** for me when I'm in a team. In Arachnos bases it's dreadful. In other big maps and office maps it's bareable. What happens is that I don't just have delay for a sec or so, I can't MOVE, attack or do anything at all lately! And when it doesn't lag as much I still have that damn irritating small delay lag which makes my toon look like I'm afk and that pisses everyone off.|
Originally Posted by Addicted
For a while now I"ve been curious into certain matters in this game that just seem absolutely absurd.
On my mind currently is the amazing degradation in performance that we seemingly accept blindly in the zone of Cimerora/ ITF maps specifically. Would someone please explain why a company/game currently celebrating it's 6 year condones such lousy care of its own game?? My real purpose of this thread is to seek out information that would allow anything to be done about such a beautiful TF/SF performance increase. I mean it's one of the latest advances in the game and plays worse than the first ever TF in 2004. Not to mention it is one of the best experiences as far as I'm concerned, well, if you have a great imagination to mentally negate the visual lag it is. P.S I"m a huge fan of this franchise. I'm not attempting to cause trouble- I'm just surprised about certain things that have gone on and continue to. |
More then often I get dced because of all the lag. Yesterday when I was farming with my SG I got dced every 15 minutes. Doesn't matter if i'm on wifi or wired.
My computer doesn't suffer from this in any other mmo I'm playing (Aion, EvE, War, EQ2, WoW) so please devs, FIX IT!!!
It's correct that I'm a europe citizen who is playing on the US virtue server. But I play on US servers in those other MMO's I mentioned earlier above as well, where I've yet to lag! A couple of these MMO's have far higher system requirements than CoX and hundreds of more active players so my location and my internet connection is not the issue.
CoX is an instance based game just like Guild Wars which works flawlessly during missions and even in pvp zerged instances or events so what the f*** is CoXs problem?! A 25-player raid in WoW with 10folds of buffs, a lot of animations at the same time, several AOE's and healing/damage numbers floating around everywhere doesn't lag a single bit while a small 8 man instanced mission in CoX lags a**? I fail to see the logic..
If it lags like this now, what will happen when Going Rogue hits the store and more people probably will buy subscriptions? Lagfestalicious?
If I'm needed you can find me dancing to DJ Zero or drinking sambuca and flatliners in the bar at Pocket D till this lag gets riddled out...
Quote:
My suspicion is that there is also too much data coming down from the server when these events occur, possibly updates for every entity just defeated, plus all their power effects, and possibly their visuals as well.|
Originally Posted by Bill Z Bubba
If I'm getting minimal lag while another player on the team flat out DCs when someone fires off a tier9 nova, then something beyond *just* server lag is happening.
|
This suspicion is based on which of my regular TF partners suffer said DCs, and what other kinds of events hammer their performance in what ways. For example, I know someone with a rig that doesn't struggle under visual effects load, but his internet connection does struggle under high data load. He can DC during ITF map AoE kills, but everyone else just generally has to wait for the server to wake up. He observes his netgraph-reported ping spike during these events.
Another tangentially related thing I've noted over time is that CoH client side performance is extremely sensitive to memory availability and swap memory performance. CoH takes a chunk-ton of memory, and this only grows during a typical session. (While I believe there may be some honest-to-god memory leaks here, the way it only generally grows when you zone or see new characters/critters makes me suspect overaggresive caching.) If you lack enough physical RAM to hold the game, parts that are still regularly needed get pushed out to swap memory, and performance starts to degrade. Suddenly the performance of the HD your swap file is on figures dramatically into the game's performance, including things like how fragmented the swap space is. I do think the memory the game uses is a performance-related issue we can put before the devs, as I cannot possibly imagine playing the game on the minimum spec machine given its current memory use patterns.
If you end up combining things like the ITF server-side lag, the likelyhood the game may be running out of swap on mid-range (probably 32-bit) rigs, and the way it seems to soak bandwidth, the experience sounds like it could be pretty raw. My rig is good to go on everything but the overall physical RAM, as I'm still on XP (something I'll be addressing soon), but I know people with less high-end specs (including bandwidth) run into some annoyances, to say the least.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Quote:
Well I ain't got a monster machine. My rig is; Mac Mini Late 2009, 4 gigs dd3 ram, nvidia 9400M and a 2.53GHz intel core 2 duo but it's more then enough to handle the games I play without any hassle. As I'm also in Os X 10.6 there should be no problem at all with memory needed to run CoX. Especially taking in consider what I said before; that a 25 man raid in WoW with most of the settings maxed out, some on high and medium draw distance doesn't even make my Mac Mini break a sweat (yes it stutters some in Dalaran but that place is so damn zerged). |
Originally Posted by UberGuy
If you end up combining things like the ITF server-side lag, the likelyhood the game may be running out of swap on mid-range (probably 32-bit) rigs, and the way it seems to soak bandwidth, the experience sounds like it could be pretty raw. My rig is good to go on everything but the overall physical RAM, as I'm still on XP (something I'll be addressing soon), but I know people with less high-end specs (including bandwidth) run into some annoyances, to say the least.
|
I love CoX. Would they only adress this issue I would love it even more then I already do. Hopefully GR won't suffer from the same tearinesss
Quote:
The way the game slows down and your powers don't recharge is a server-side problem, and there is nothing they can do about it without|
Originally Posted by Blue_Centurion
Did Noy really just say it was a server issue, so there is nothing they can do about it?....
|
a) redesigning the core game engine
b) throwing more hardware at it
c) redesigning these missions so you cannot fight as many opponents at the same time.
The problems with these maps is unique to Cimmeroans. There have been (exploitative) AE maps with so many ambush foes on them that the game engine will not render them, and those maps do not suffer from the server-side delay the ITF maps do. This leads me to believe the problem is actually a combination of how many foes are in play and what powers they are using.
The NPC version of the Shields powerset the Cimerorans have is clearly computationally intensive compared to many. Consider that for every non-Surgeon on screen, in order to determine a Cimeroran's defense and mez protection the server must determine how many other Cimerorans are in range. (Edit: Defense and mez protection are probably calculated separately, incurring the in-range sweep twice.) Checking to see if something is nearby in this way for every active entity on map is going to chew up a lot of cycles. The game's main event loop starts to fall behind, and "game time" starts taking longer than "real time".
The reason this doesn't always happen is because playing through the map different ways causes less of the NPCs to become active at once. When Castle said the probelm was the ambushes, I do not think he meant that the AI computations for ambushes themselves was at fault, but that ambushes containing Cimerorans cause more computation to be needed for their shield powers.
This means that if you drag spawns together, you'll create the lag problem whether you have ambushes or not. Ambushes will just make the problem more severe. However, if you are careful to fight one spawn at a time and can defeat them and the responding ambushes as they appear, you will get minimal degradation.
If you have issues where your screen doesn't update as you move and turn (once the server lets you move or turn), then that's more likely to be a performance issue on your side that a better video card, lower settings, and/or possibly more RAM would help with.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
Quote:
I can verify that soloing an ITF is a lag free experience. Granted, that was with a claws/sr scrapper (meaning very minimal FX) with a C2D proc OCed to 2.7GHz, 2GB ram and an G92-8800 GTS.
| Anyone with a decent pc and who currently experiences lag on ITF who cares to test my theory should solo (have 1 person offline of course) or duo that third mission of ITF. It's my belief that you won't experience the infamous "lag" in the valley, regardless of how many instances of ITF is running on that server. |
Be well, people of CoH.
Quote:
So in the end the lag is the players fault because we aggro too many spawns?|
Originally Posted by UberGuy
This means that if you drag spawns together, you'll create the lag problem whether you have ambushes or not. Ambushes will just make the problem more severe. However, if you are careful to fight one spawn at a time and can defeat them and the responding ambushes as they appear, you will get minimal degradation.
|
booo...
I've played the ITF a couple of times, I'm not sure what people's fascination with it is, some seem to treat it as the only game in town. It's okay as far as story content goes, if it's laggy, so what.
The number of successive runs on KHTF saw some of the first changes to the Task Force system, such as the timer between how often players could run task forces. The... "abuse" of KHTF also lead to the the creation of the merit system we have now.
The Imperious Task Force has many of the same advantages as the KHTF. It can be completed in a relatively short amount of time. Some teams are capable of turning in sub-40 minute runs, and even pick-up-groups in Cimerora are capable of turning in sub 1-hour times on the task force.
ITF also offers a high chance of rare salvage drops across both arcane and tech types with it's mix of Cimerorans and 5th Column opponents. The task force is also conducive to dropping rare purple recipes.
The task force itself is not as difficult as say, Dr. Khan, Barracuda, Statesman's Task Force, or Lady Grey Task Force. Nor is it as long as Dr. Quarterfield, Sara Moore, Faathim the Kind, or Justin's TF. It is far less annoying than Lord Recluse's Strike Force.
So, it's the perfect storm of high-level task force components.
Chance for Purples? Check
Chance for rare salvage? Check
Can be done with a PUG? Check
Can be done quickly with a PUG? Check
Decent Merits / Influence for the time? Check
This is why so many players in the Task Force channels treat ITF as the only game in town.