They need to do something about "time dilation" lag, you ask me.
By
Crimson Vanquisher,
Posted on: 2011-04-14 21:02 in CoH and CoV General Discussions
I've had a theory about this for a while. I just have no real evidence to back it up. I could probably create test to prove it out, but, brutally honestly, I don't care enough to do so. 
The theory relates to whether or not proliferation of things like IO set bonuses don't compound this. That includes other stuff too, like always-on accolades, Mystic Fortune, Mutation, and other temp powers. These things aren't just straight-on buffs, where you get the power, it lasts X seconds and ends if you happen to die. Many of these are actually implemented as passives, meaning the server has to track their refresh timers.
We also have had proliferation of effects that we were told are computationally intensive. Night Widows have resistance that scales with their health. Stalkers and Defenders both check for allies in range. Every Scrapper, Tanker and Brute attack now has to perform a check to see if Fiery Embrace is active. The point is that the amount of server-side computation our characters require has been on the rise for some time now. I can't help but wonder how that factors into this kind of thing, especially for situations where players (and now lots and lots of pets) are massed.
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Quote:
The "powers show recharged when they're not" is an artifact of a design decision for the game and server load.|
Originally Posted by Vanden
You know the kind I'm talking about. Moving NPCs start and stop, every power gets a pause at the end of its activation, powers say they're recharged when they're not, as if time slows down. It plagues nearly every big exciting thing you do in the game.
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Your client will, assuming that no information to the contrary is sent from the server, display powers recharging at the normal rates for each power. When you're slowed, the server sends a packet telling your client to slow the rate at which the recharge is displayed. But when the server starts getting loaded because of lots of players, lots of AI transactions, or lots of combat effects, its internal clock gets slow, because it's taking longer to process each slice of time. Since the server isn't running in real-time any more, your powers take longer on the server to recharge. But the server doesn't pass recharge percentage for each of your powers with every update packet, so your client will continue to draw the recharge happening at normal speed, taking, say, ten seconds to get back to recharged, while on the server, only five seconds worth of game time has processed, and the server thinks that power is only half recharged. Sometimes attempting to use a power that the server doesn't think is recharged yet will make the server send a 'recharge status' for that power in its update packet, which is why powers will sometimes jump from the 'recharged' full size to the 'charging' shrunk size after you try to use them and discover they're not recharged yet.
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I wonder why cut scenes make powers like Hasten look like they are recharged on the client side (I know the reasoning for why it happens during a trial/escapee phase but...doesn't really make sense when the server is just doing a cut scene).
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Quote:
The server stops all recharge for the duration of the cutscene, but doesn't tell the client that it's going to do so.
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Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
I wonder why cut scenes make powers like Hasten look like they are recharged on the client side (I know the reasoning for why it happens during a trial/escapee phase but...doesn't really make sense when the server is just doing a cut scene).
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Quote:
That one is just an oversight. The server clock is frozen during the cutscene (at least as far as powers and combat go), but it doesn't instruct the client to do the same. So the client continues to recharge your powers and expire your buffs and gets out of sync.
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Originally Posted by Energizing_Ion
I wonder why cut scenes make powers like Hasten look like they are recharged on the client side (I know the reasoning for why it happens during a trial/escapee phase but...doesn't really make sense when the server is just doing a cut scene).
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/signed
Fix this please, ASAP! The most frustrating thing about the new content.
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I'd been watching ship raids on Lib during I19 and you can predict how bad the powers lag will be by how many MMs/multi-pet Controllers and Spiders there are. More pets = more lag.
That being said, Lore also means more targets for that AoE confuse, so it could be a combination of both.
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