Somebody feed the server hamsters quick!

... because Defiant server just died a few minutes ago.

I was playing a mission in Praetoria when suddenly started having lots of "Lost conn to mapserver" messages over my screen. I asked in Defiant Events chat channel if anyone else was having the same problem and several people replied affirmativately, all of this still having more lost conns.

A couple of minutes later I got kicked from the server, and I haven't been able even to log in, while the server status http://eu.cityofheroes.com/en/news/server_status/ says Defiant is green and up.

EDIT: Effectively, Defiant was back again; I asked through Defiant Events if more people had had the same problem and several people answered they also had been unable to log in or were having lots of lost conn, also reporting a huge amount of lag. I did finish my mission and was on my way to my contact when I started having lost conn messages again, then I decided to call it a night, thus leaving my char into a day job location.

I just logged off Union.

Completely unplayable rubberbanding.
CoH for me has always been the most laggy mmo. I have played many free to play MMO's that were far less laggy.

I really wish they would do something about the eu servers. It really is appalling that a pay to play game has such substandard servers.

Yea, talk about evil lag, rubberbanding, chat lag felt like i was on the rikti raid that was happening in Grandville when this all started.

Took me 5 attempts to move a few yrds and trying to chat to the team was difficult enough itself. All the team bar 1 disconnected. we then reformed and the mish owner then got dc'ed

It was a harsh amount of lag. I have actually logged off and going to bed early as I just can't play with this amount of lag, rubberbanding etc.

This seems to be happening across many servers. I was on Triumph and Freedom and I cant reach my misson because I keep getting teleported back to where I started from. Chat is delayed and so are the npc's responses when I click on them. For example clicking on a vendor and it takes 3-5 seconds for something to happen. It has been like this off and on the last few days.

Surprisingly, I haven't had any issues on Freedom even though I have experienced them before.

It just goes to show you how random it can be, but it still exists as a problem, despite what many forum posters say to the contrary.

It's definitely a game code or server issue, or a hub that people in both America and Europe have to go through to different server clusters.

The problem came up last night on both UK servers at the same time. Rubberbanding like crazy and LCMS - I was seeing it on Union and Defiant Events had several compaining about it at the same time.

The usual cause of this is one link in France through which all UK traffic is routed to the servers in Germany but if the US servers were seeing this at the same time its probably something else.
Were both US server farms affected simultaneously and did this coincide with the problems in the UK (and I presume on Zukunft and Vigilance also)?

If so its unlikely to be the game code - a bug in the server management software otoh is a possibility.
A hardware problem simultaneously affecting multiple servers is also extremely unlikely.

They ask for that information for a very good reason.
They need to know what you are doing at the time of the problem so they can try to reproduce it. If a problem cannot be reproduced then it will be a nightmare to identify far less to resolve.
If there is a problem on the users PC that can be identified that needs to be fixed first so that it does not hide any other problem which lies elsewhere.

If a problem is affecting one user then its probably that user's PC or their connection to their ISP.
If it affects everyone in the same way then its probably either the game code or the servers.
If it affects everyone on ONE server and no-one else then its probably to do with that server.
If it affects ALL servers at one location then its probably related to the server management or their network connection.
If it affects many people on all servers at one site then its probably a routing problem on the internet which is outside their or your control - how many that will affect will depend on where the problem link is. If its close to the servers them the majority of users will be affected, if its close to the users then only those in that locality will be affected. In both cases other users not routed via the affected link will not be affected. This will also mean that the dev/support teams will see everthing as working normally as they are connecting over an internal network.
It could also be a Denial of Service attack on any link in your connection to their servers or even be a side effect of an attack elsewhere.
Or even a perfectly legitimate peak in internet traffic caused by something totally unrelated - maybe a new game was released for the PS3 and everyone is trying it out online, saturating a server at some point which is also used to route traffic between you and the game servers.

In short there are 3 type of problem
- ones at your end which the support team can help you to fix but ultimately are your responsibility.
- ones at their end which are their responsibility to fix and
- ones on the network between you which could be any of a multitude of others responsibility but very difficult to identify who or what.