City of Heroes: Live Forum Archive

Please do something about the lag in trials

Adeon Hawkwood

By Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-04-29 06:21 in CoH and CoV General Discussions

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
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.
It's not like you have to "look" hard to see it. Just run a BAF. It seems like, generally, the bigger the team, the more lag you get. Noticeably worse since the last patch. Pre-patch, you could run a 16 with no lag and a 24 with tolerable lag. Now the 16s I've been on seem almost as bad as the 24s used to be, and 24s...well, I'd just rather not run them. No fun sitting there and watching a power wait to activate for 5-10s, then the power button spinning as it activates for another 5-10s.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Adeon Hawkwood View Post
Interesting, did you have people just stop using Destiny, Lore and Judgement or did you ask them to unslot Interface as well?
It was just powers with animations attached to them.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Zwillinger View Post
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.
Can you also look into the lag on the Hamidon raids? The lag has killed Hamidon raids on Virtue.

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Posted

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Originally Posted by Alien51 View Post
Can you also look into the lag on the Hamidon raids? The lag has killed Hamidon raids on Virtue.
Are they using the League system? If so, try it without and see if it makes a difference.

"Leagues" are currently an anagram of "u see lag"



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Posted

Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.
Sounds great, really hope this works haha

Been experimenting with this at Virtue Hamis


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Posted

We discovered on Freedom that almost 100% of the lag during a Hamidon raid consisting of 4 full teams in a league was caused by Destiny: Barrier. The first wave it was absolutely horrible, we had used all our Destiny buffs - second wave, the leader asked for no Barriers, and we were fine (until someone popped their Barrier on Hami after the mitos, then the lag spiked noticeably again).

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.
Is this going to fix the increase in the amount of lag we've seen since the last patch, or is it going to improve it further to make it even better than it was before?

In other words, even before the last patch it could get laggy. Are we going back to pre-patch lag, or will there be even less?

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Posted

Sounds great Positron, the less lag the better.
Just came out from a Molambda attempt (2 in a row). All went well until we faced Marauder. It was not him, nor the enemy that was the problem, it was the powerlag and general lag with delayed power usage

Looking forward for the fix

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.

Great news to hear, however I do hope that the fix doesn't cause more issues.


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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.
Please FOR THE LOVE of GOD! Don't just fix it in trials. Fix it in everything. We had this problem in shipraids and hamiraids all this time and now that you are going to fix it for trials please fix it for everything and not just trials. The lag has gotten WORSE since issue 20 release in things that have had the lag problem all this time anyway. We've waited and waited very patiently for years to see this fixed.

I beg you to not just fix this problem in trials fix it in everything and you will make alot of people very very happy.

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Originally Posted by Noyjitat View Post
Please FOR THE LOVE of GOD! Don't just fix it in trials. Fix it in everything. We had this problem in shipraids and hamiraids all this time and now that you are going to fix it for trials please fix it for everything and not just trials. The lag has gotten WORSE since issue 20 release in things that have had the lag problem all this time anyway. We've waited and waited very patiently for years to see this fixed.

I beg you to not just fix this problem in trials fix it in everything and you will make alot of people very very happy.
This fix does not sound like a general lag fix (which may not even be possible). It's a fix for a specific thing (or a number of related things) that are causing extreme lag in league events. I would not expect it to improve things in relation to pre-league lag; I don't know that anything short of a major engine overhaul or replacement could do so, and maybe not even that.

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Originally Posted by MrTogo View Post
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.
I was on that raid. I was joking that City of Heroes had become a turn-by-turn MMO. I've played email chess games that were faster.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Balanced View Post
This fix does not sound like a general lag fix (which may not even be possible). It's a fix for a specific thing (or a number of related things) that are causing extreme lag in league events. I would not expect it to improve things in relation to pre-league lag; I don't know that anything short of a major engine overhaul or replacement could do so, and maybe not even that.
Yes I'm very much aware of that. That's why I'm asking that they don't stop here and pretend that the original lag issues that have been complained about for years don't exist.

Taking the time to fix this for trials atleast is great but I don't want to see it stop there since it was a problem way before issue 20 in shipraids and hamiraids.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sermon View Post
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?
From being on several BAFs and Rikti mothership raids where the lag has gotten ugly, the problem appears to be the use of powers from the Destiny slot -- the first Destiny power doesn't add much lag, the second shows a noticeable slowdown in server response, and the third turns things into slo-mo puppet work.

Making the Destiny auras on others "extra" effects to be hidden with the graphics option toggle to hide extra effects might help, but it would have to be tracked at the server level, so the server didn't try to manage sending dozens of 'Character X has this type of bubble" notifications, but the server would still have to manage who has what bubble and send updates to everyone that doesn't have the options flag set. Making the bubble something that only you see around yourself would work better; that would cut down the recordkeeping of who sees what, although the purists would likely creeb about it...

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Noyjitat View Post
Yes I'm very much aware of that. That's why I'm asking that they don't stop here and pretend that the original lag issues that have been complained about for years don't exist.

Taking the time to fix this for trials atleast is great but I don't want to see it stop there since it was a problem way before issue 20 in shipraids and hamiraids.

And ITFs

But yes, I was in a MSR last night and it was worse than a BAF (for me at least)...I think we had 3-4 full teams...

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.
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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Noyjitat View Post
Please FOR THE LOVE of GOD! Don't just fix it in trials. Fix it in everything. We had this problem in shipraids and hamiraids all this time and now that you are going to fix it for trials please fix it for everything and not just trials. The lag has gotten WORSE since issue 20 release in things that have had the lag problem all this time anyway. We've waited and waited very patiently for years to see this fixed.

I beg you to not just fix this problem in trials fix it in everything and you will make alot of people very very happy.
You do realize that the lag from those two events is from the sheer number of players within close proximity to each other, all the NPC's and the powers being used by both...it's a well know fact that in these cases the server goes "no hold on a minute, one at a time"

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by srmalloy View Post
From being on several BAFs and Rikti mothership raids where the lag has gotten ugly, the problem appears to be the use of powers from the Destiny slot -- the first Destiny power doesn't add much lag, the second shows a noticeable slowdown in server response, and the third turns things into slo-mo puppet work.

Making the Destiny auras on others "extra" effects to be hidden with the graphics option toggle to hide extra effects might help, but it would have to be tracked at the server level, so the server didn't try to manage sending dozens of 'Character X has this type of bubble" notifications, but the server would still have to manage who has what bubble and send updates to everyone that doesn't have the options flag set. Making the bubble something that only you see around yourself would work better; that would cut down the recordkeeping of who sees what, although the purists would likely creeb about it...

I doubt it would be the graphics causing server side lag. If Destiny is the culprit, it's probably the fact that it has "tiered" levels of effect. Some of the Destiny powers cause somewhere around 30-50 effects to be placed on every player and pet in the area.

IMO if Destiny is the culprit, the powers probably should be "my team only" like the Leadership-type powers now are.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by V-Tron View Post
You do realize that the lag from those two events is from the sheer number of players within close proximity to each other, all the NPC's and the powers being used by both...it's a well know fact that in these cases the server goes "no hold on a minute, one at a time"
Which probably should have been something to think about before adding content that required such a sheer number of players to be within such close proximity of each other with so many NPCs and powers being used by both. And I'm not just talking about Incarnate Trials. This has been going on since the game's original Launch back in 2004, with the Hamidon. In fact, part of the player guide for defeating the thing included how to target the Hamidon nucleus when it disappeared due to sprite overload and how to use your powers under the effect of server lag.

When server hardware limitations are a large part of a widely-accepted strategy, your event design is faulty.

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Draeth Darkstar View Post
We discovered on Freedom that almost 100% of the lag during a Hamidon raid consisting of 4 full teams in a league was caused by Destiny: Barrier. The first wave it was absolutely horrible, we had used all our Destiny buffs - second wave, the leader asked for no Barriers, and we were fine (until someone popped their Barrier on Hami after the mitos, then the lag spiked noticeably again).
I don't think it was just barrier, clarion seemed to be lagging the raid too. But yeah, once the Destiny buffs faded everything was fine. When the buffs were running, the lag was much worse than anything I've seen in BAF.

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Arcanaville View Post
I was on that raid. I was joking that City of Heroes had become a turn-by-turn MMO. I've played email chess games that were faster.
I was on a similar one on Victory. A friend of mine remarked that we had been (back in our Final Fantasy XI day) on Aht Urgan Astral Candescence raids (700+ players, equal #s of monsters) that played better than this. And we had been using a Playstation 2!

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow View Post
Which probably should have been something to think about before adding content that required such a sheer number of players to be within such close proximity of each other with so many NPCs and powers being used by both. And I'm not just talking about Incarnate Trials. This has been going on since the game's original Launch back in 2004, with the Hamidon. In fact, part of the player guide for defeating the thing included how to target the Hamidon nucleus when it disappeared due to sprite overload and how to use your powers under the effect of server lag.

When server hardware limitations are a large part of a widely-accepted strategy, your event design is faulty.
Indeed

bout the only way they will be able to "fix" these is to limit the amount of players that can take part at once. Since all the cuplrits now are in open zones I don't see this happening any time soon or at all.

I also wouldn't be supprised if the lag with barrier powers is caused alot in part by real numbers being sent to all memebers of a league, instead it should only be sent to team my members only...or just make the powers work on teammates

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Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Positron View Post
Hey guys,

Thanks to your feedback we believe we have tracked down the cause of this lag (we did something weird with Leagues), we're working to get this resolved on the live servers as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience, understanding, and most of all your feedback on this situation.
Ok, not to be a pain, but these lags were complained about repeatedly during beta. Why is it just now you guys find the problem?

 

Posted

Quote:
Originally Posted by Santa_Laws View Post
Ok, not to be a pain, but these lags were complained about repeatedly during beta. Why is it just now you guys find the problem?
Short answer is they didn't. What they basically did was reverse a change they made in the last patch which made the lag even worse. So the alg should be back to the level it was prior to the last patch.