Please do something about the lag in trials

The other option is to run with small teams. I find I get no lag on a 12 man team and only minimal lag on a 16-20 man team

Hmm the lag is never that bad during the BAF on Union.

But then Union, unlike the US servers, always runs them Master OF style (going for all of the badges in one hit) and the traditional way of doing it on Union is going for the 'keep 'em seperated' tactic anyway.

Ran a Keep em Separated full BAF this morning and it was still much worse than it was pre-patch. I am just spamming buttons hoping to hit one that is up, timing on powers seems to be completely random. It was a full BAF, but we were in three groups well apart from each other. I was on Nightstar and couldn't see the add group or the siege group from where I was. If there are settings or things I could turn down to cut this I would do it in a heartbeat.

Ran my first post-patch BAF last night (been avoiding them for a bit...getting badly burnt out on the grind) on a 16-man team. The lag during the prisoner escape phase, where I've always found it most noticeable, was about the same as it was, pre-patch, on a full League run.

Which is not good...

I also found the lag during the AV fights (especially the finale against both) to be worse than it used to be, despite the smaller League. Not unplayably bad, like it apparently gets for some people on a full League, but still annoying and un-fun. Dropped after one run, which was successful, including a "Not On My Watch" badge, which that character didn't have.

I was willing to put up with the lag before because I hadn't gotten burned out on the endless, repetitive grinding of the two iTrials at that point. Now, with it already feeling more like work than fun, I'm simply not willing to tolerate the lag (and near-complete lack of any opportunity for RP, given the breakneck pace).

This lag issue really, really needs to be addressed.

The network diagnostic tools I'm using tell me that the client is being sent far more information than it was before the patch. Sitting by myself in a nearly empty zone, CoH is receiving around 2,000 bytes a second. Towards the end of a Hami raid I was on earlier today, I was receiving around 25 times that much information. I'm convinced the problem is server-side, and it's sapping my desire to keep playing.

I did a BAF trail last night. That is, last night for me, in Aus. So it would be like..6am stateside? Surely not peak time in the least. And it was just so so so laggy. The ambush mobs were porting in, in stages, then being knocked back in slow motion. Pulling the AVs to the helipad made for one huge collection of powers spamming...and I dc'd twice during the final fight.

Prior to the patch last week, I had NEVER dc'd during an iTrial due to that. I have done rikti ship raids with at least 5 teams, zombie invasions in Atlas on Freedom server. And have never dc'd. This is getting stupid.

As people are saying..we all want to advance our 50s, yet this lag is killing any remaining scraps of fun that the new content has. Which, after doing 200+ of both trails, is very very small amounts of fun.

I have seen people of Freedom forming 16 man BAF teams, just to try and cut down on the lag. Doesn’t work to well, because it ends up a big pile on the AVs anyway.

Surely it has something to do with 24 people ALL nukes, destiny aoe buffs, and interface procs, all adding up as more data to be sent back and forth. Not to mention 2 pets each, also getting buffs etc.

Someone was talking about CoX sending more data..I can confirm this. This month, in about 15 days of lots and lots of iTrials, I somehow went of my download data limit, which I had never done in a full month before this.

Also, claiming the lag can be fixed by going for the 'keep em seperated' badge is just a stop gap fix at best, and silly at worst. Not every league CAN complete the trails that way, not every league wants to. What's next, cut down lag by only using single target powers, no aoes, no pets? Minimum graphics settings for everyone who lags on a BAF?

Let’s be serious..nearly all of us had zero problem before these trails came along, and I would say only some minor issues before that oh so great patch last week. Have all our PCs suddenly turned into relics? Of course not.

Again, the trails are already getting boring and repetative (to put it mildly). Having them as boring, repetative and laggy to the point of inplayability just is not good. All credit to the Devs for adding something new and on a bigger scale...but surely they have to be asking..if no one’s having fun waiting for a 30 sec power to recharge in less than 2 mins, and then dc'd at the end...what is the point?

Back to the grind last night, a BAF and a couple Lambdas. The BAF was 16 people, and while we didn't try for the Keep 'Em Separated badge, it seemed to have slightly worse lag than I've seen, post-Patch. I'm not sure what the difference was. Fewer Masterminds,. maybe? The prisoner stage was the usual un-fun lagfest, though.

The Lambdas were pretty smooth, lag-wise, I suspect largely due to being quite a small League. Had one period of rubberbanding (which got me faceplanted...grrrrr), but that may well have been on my end: occasional connection hiccups. The "now you see it, now you don't" Ninja Run bug was a real pain, though, as the character I was running doesn't have a conventional travel power. Makes it a bit tough to get over the wall! Fortunately, a teammate had Recall Friend.

Oh, and one Common table, one Uncommon, one Rare...

Could the new lag simply be the increased number of MMs playing on the BAF trial? ie. not a new bug, just a circumstantial connection with the last patch?

Either way, something needs to be done sooner rather than later. Until then, its 16 person BAFs for me.

atm we are having the worst lag ever in the weekly defiant MSR raid, and we are not even on the ship...

come on... THIS. IS. CRAZY.

EDIT : someone timed the lag here, we can fire a power every 24 sec

It may be related to the League system and have nothing to do with the trials themselves. In fact I'm sure of it.

Tonight there was a regular mothership raid on Virtue. The first run everyone was in a League for the raid and the there was massive lag for everyone in the League as soon as people moved on the Pylons. Power delays, movement, it was nigh unplayable just like the worst people are seeing in BAF. The second you quit the League, the lag went away.

The second run, people formed non-league teams and there was no extra lag, beyond typical mothership mojo.

It's something about the League system.



.

Ya, that happened to me as well. Last Wednesday, did a mothership raid with a league. It was horrible, horrible lag for everyone involved. The various teams left the league and lag lightened considerably. There was still a lot of it, but it was a lot more manageable.

It would not be the first time a UI element has impacted a server performance.

In late CoH beta the friends list used to auto-update at an incredibly fast rate of fire. Multiple requests a second. This would cause zones to become increasingly slow as they became more crowded to the point of failing completely.

It is not ONLY related to players, though. On master of lambdas that don't take care of the large swaths of enemies that build up you begin to get massive slowdowns of the nature you see in BAF trials. It reduces if you can drag the army away from Marauder and the player pile.

Yesterday night I joined a Mother Ship Raid on Triumph late. I got the league invite after getting into the RWZ, and I was in the base. They had already taken out the GM, and was just doing cleanup. The second I got the invite... BAM, slowdown. I clicked the portal to leave the base, and it sat at a black screen for about 10 seconds. There were 4 full teams on the league, and it brought me back to the Mitobloom of hami raids. It was horrible.

Pretty much any BAF above 18 has been rough. We tried to do a few MoLambda but once all the stuff was out to start fighting Marauder it slowed down real bad... really annoying because I could see we probably had a team that could've passed it. Not sure whether it was all the additional spawns since we didn't use acids, or all the additional pets and effects. I can say that when he jumped to a new location, the lag let up a little bit until everything was at the same location again...

Add in my disconnects, and I'm getting really sick of the game. And I'm one of the people that actually still enjoy the trials after doing them about 100 times each, so that's not an easy task...

Do hope that they get this issue fixed and fast. Was trying to play BAF trial yesterday and the lag killed any fun and joy that could be found.

We are continuing to look into reports and experiences of performance issues within the Trials, BAF specifically.

We'll keep you updated if and when we have new information.

More specifially the use of incarnate powers in leagues. We did a test with the Mothership Raid in RWZ. Using incarnate powers = tons of lag. When we asked people not to use them as an experiment there was a marked decrease in the lag.