Evernight is unplayable due to lag... again

[Winzhi]

The lag is not server wide. Its game wide. Even Treebeard with around 200 players logged in have awful lags and players rubber band constantly.

Its not even game wide, its across several titles including DDO, EQ1 and EQ2.

[Emaldiom]

it's kinda been worse than ever before on Evernight the past weeks
Running instances you constantly have the same lag spikes
Landscape getting quests and doing dailies is painful with rubberbanding, delays etc all the time

You need to fix this before a new raid is out.. Can you imagine doing progression raiding with this lag!?
Cause we player do.. The past 3 raids was NUTS to do progression raiding with this raid. .

For fokd i would say 20\30% of our raids got cancelled due to the server performance just didn't allow you to play the game

[OghranNasty]

Out of curiosity: at what resolution and graphics quality setting are you guys running?

[Emaldiom]

It's not about your own graphics or whatever settings you yourself are using
There is ofcourse FPS lag (as the FPS in this game is so unstable it can vary from 20-200 constantly)

It does not matter if you run high settings or very low, the result is the same
It does not matter what PC you are running as the result is just the same (I'm sitting on a 2080 TI, i7 9700k etc etc)

They (SSG) are aware of it but seems to believe it's getting improved while it certainly is not (atleast for Evernight)

[OghranNasty]

That is not my experience.

Reducing graphics quality helped me a lot with area loading, stutter and rubber banding. Little or not at all with skill delays, vault activity and such.
Logically you'd expect it to have an effect on framerates, but as I never monitored that it is just a guess.

[subadar]

Its not as simple as just buying new server hardware or reducing graphics, its the way the game is made.

ALL calcs are done server side, so you use a skill, your input is sent to the server, calced out then the results are sent to your PC and displayed on the screen.

this happens for every player, every skill used, every move, every inventory check etc etc.

while this keeps LOTRO remarkably hack free for an MMO, its an invitation to lag that cant be easily fixed.

so its never fixed, would require a complete software revamp that while i hate to say never, is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

[Harvain]

That is not my experience.

Reducing graphics quality helped me a lot with area loading, stutter and rubber banding. Little or not at all with skill delays, vault activity and such.
Logically you'd expect it to have an effect on framerates, but as I never monitored that it is just a guess.

You are just lowering the amount of Data being sent to and receiving. So yes, it will help.

But LOTRO's issues are not Hardware based beyond the Server Box(es) being used at least in Late 2021 needed an Upgrade based on what SSG had stated. As far as we know, this hasn't occurred but this will only provide a small benefit. Basically putting a band-aid on an open and bleeding wound.

LOTRO's issues are Software based with how the LOTRO Client & LOTRO Servers work. It's one key reason SSG won't add more Storage Space for Character Vaults & Shared Storage in the foreseeable future. To give a quick example, lets say 15 more Personal Vault Storage Spaces were added in 2022 and that in 2022 there are 300,000 Characters that purchase & use said 15 spaces. SSG would be adding 4,500,000 more Spaces and Items that their Data has to keep track of. This would be putting a very noticeable strain on an already overburdened game.



To give an example for Graphics, I have 3 computers.

I have an old Office 2012 PC which with an RX 550 2GB GPU could easily see in excess of 100 FPS with a mixture of settings and using 1920x1080 . This PC however is pretty much using all it's CPU, RAM & GPU Usages just for LOTRO.

I also have an i7-3700K and have used that same RX 550 2 GB GPU and my main GPU a GTX 970 4GB (really 3.5 due to how they made such) and both also see in excess of 100 FPS usually with somewhat better settings than the 2012 Office PC.

Finally my main pc, a Ryzen 7 2700X with 32GB of RAM, GTX 970, running Windows 10 OS on it's own M.2 NvME SSD, LOTRO on another M.2 NvME SSD with mostly maxed graphics Ultra High/High Fullscreen Windowed with certain elements like the 5 things under Post Processing not being used can get up to 120 FPS as I have it limited to such.

But pending where a Character is in LOTRO, how much is going on, etc you can see such FPS numbers dip. Plus while in 2021 I admit I was among the folks usually not encountering various issues with Game Performance except for areas where a lot of Characters were at such as Festivals or the Gundabad Expansion's main area. This was also on all 3 given examples for computers I own. But since Jan 1st, 2022 I've seen more Performance issues akin to what others report although I've not had a game crash so far.

[OghranNasty]

You are just lowering the amount of Data being sent to and receiving. So yes, it will help.

You are mistaken.
What lowering graphics quality does is lowering the amount of data being processed locally on my PC.

Don't believe me. Look at the network numbers to see that it is impossible to render all that landscape detail with the bandwidth the game consumes. Or just do what I did: download the sysinternals suite and trace Lotro with procexp64 (correction: should be procmon64). You'll see that most of the game's activity is based on locally stored game files and that network activity is surprisingly small.

I am pretty sure all the landscape rendering is a purely local affair, as are mobs rendering, and that all interactions with the landscape, mobs, inventories and so on are server-side. Simplified: how an orc looks is defined by the game files, whether it attacks you, with which attacks and what the effect of your actions is controlled by the servers.

All this is not meant to say you are wrong, or that there aren't serious issues with server performance and landscape design, only to say it is a little more complicated that that, as performance issues usually are.
There are serious issues with server side coding (see recent comments by Raininia for that), server hardware (they are not replacing them for giggles), but part of the performance issues an individual player experiences could have to do with local bottlenecks. Experimenting with graphics quality could help with alleviating some of the less bothersome performance glitches. It will not help with the more annoying issues such as skill lag or anything that has to do with interacting with the environment, npcs, mobs, inventories or other players.

[Braer]

Currently dual clients running on Evernight. One with losses between 5% and 20% the other 0.1% losses. No I can't figure that out either.

[Uroc]

Since Cordovan asked to say if we feel any difference from this update:

I don't feel any difference. Yesterday I have played Big Battles with my kinship and there were terrible big lags. We are playing on Evernight.

All people in group had lags, so its not our internet or pc.

[Once_of_Bree]

Sunday afternoon 900 players on Evernight is creaking, it takes seconds just to add a quest to the quest track, you hear the click and then several seconds later the quest ring gets highlighted and the quest appears on screen.
Storage giving general errors etc. etc.

What ever you're doing that is supposedly fixing things isn't working, the lag is as bad if not worse.

[1Asy1]

@Cordovan & @Raninia

All jokes aside, the bandwidth increase has done nothing to improve the performance of the game.

Running the new 6 man last night around 7 pm GMT was practically a slide show at times. The lag was synced for all of us in the group and there are countless people complaining about in World chat.

Please address this as a priority.

Lob

[Vilda]

@Cordovan & @Raninia

All jokes aside, the bandwidth increase has done nothing to improve the performance of the game.

Running the new 6 man last night around 7 pm GMT was practically a slide show at times. The lag was synced for all of us in the group and there are countless people complaining about in World chat.

Please address this as a priority.

Lob

Yes, it is terrible. It seems like every day it gets worse and worse.

[Nubja]

The game is still as bad if not worse than the video i posted from shortly after the LI revamp

[made_of_light]

My play experience has be good lately. Did they change anything? Am I the only one who noticed the lag is much better? Mostly just delayed sound fx now.

[Harvain]

My play experience has be good lately. Did they change anything? Am I the only one who noticed the lag is much better? Mostly just delayed sound fx now.

Depends on the Individual.

The SSG LOTRO Team are "stating" they are doing continued Development Work to Improve LOTRO's Game Performance.

X amount of folks have stated they "feel" it's better.

X amount of folks have stated they "feel" it's worse.

It's mostly that LOTRO has far too many Performance Issues and any 1 bit of work is unlikely to see a "Holy crude! LOTRO's Performance is night & day!" moment in the future. It's going to take a lot of Game Performance Work that hopefully will see by end of 2022 where LOTRO will be a much better MMORPG Performance-wise for a Majority of folks.

[1Asy1]

@Cordovan & @Raninia

Can we expect the 13th raid member to be present on Thursday?

Thanks,

Lob

[Braer]

Coming off night-shift with the Ashes Tours and Winter Olympics over-with has me finding either a load of peeps have suddenly gone over to Anon or are AWOL. Evernight.

Is this really something you can twist into a "generally well received" comment on LIs and RT? And maintaining of the fallacy of signs of improved performance without citation, from this game?

Back on "normal" playtime has me experiencing the exact performance expected (and grown use to) in proportion to the active pops.

[1Asy1]

@Cordovan & @Raninia

Any update please?

- Loading screen bug is back with a vengeance.
- Server performance is the same if not getting worse.
- Chat servers are - General Error 0x00000003.

People want more than a 1 liner in the official updates, where are the 64bit servers? where are the other material improvements?

If we make it to another 15 years, we'll be looking back at 15 years of laggy servers.

Lob

[Brinswith]

20 minutes spent in a queue.

A further 15 minutes spent on the loading screen.

Had to force close the game and now can't get back in to Evernight.

[Mollymixtures]

The character left in their in undies after a failed load is back, I've noticed. I got to see what my poor minstrel looks like her in smalls after failing to get into the game the first time around.

It may also be worth mentioning that I've always suffered the same bug since coming back a couple of years ago, whereby the usage of my right-mouse-button can cause my camera to turn a sudden 180 and sometimes turn upwards so I'm looking at the sky, but now it's worse than it's ever been. There are times when I literally undergo it several times in a row, and can't direct my character properly or see a damn thing. Going over bridges has always been done with my keyboard in case the camera bug causes me to veer off over the edge, but this past week I've been avoiding them altogether. I could handle it when it happened maybe once an hour, but now it's neverending, and I must look to outsiders as if I've completely lost control of my character.

I'm sad to say I haven't noticed any server improvements at all. In fact, things are worse than ever, and verging on unusable for me.

[Fadil]

The character left in their in undies after a failed load is back, I've noticed. I got to see what my poor minstrel looks like her in smalls after failing to get into the game the first time around.

It may also be worth mentioning that I've always suffered the same bug since coming back a couple of years ago, whereby the usage of my right-mouse-button can cause my camera to turn a sudden 180 and sometimes turn upwards so I'm looking at the sky, but now it's worse than it's ever been. There are times when I literally undergo it several times in a row, and can't direct my character properly or see a damn thing. Going over bridges has always been done with my keyboard in case the camera bug causes me to veer off over the edge, but this past week I've been avoiding them altogether. I could handle it when it happened maybe once an hour, but now it's neverending, and I must look to outsiders as if I've completely lost control of my character.

I'm sad to say I haven't noticed any server improvements at all. In fact, things are worse than ever, and verging on unusable for me.

What you describe has nothing to do with lag but is a known bug that also happens to people playing Wow.

Maybe this helps: follow the links shown in this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/lotro/comme..._of_the_weird/

[DoRonRon]

I'm seeing more of a black screen with UI showing on top in the missions load than before but less time waiting for mobs to load in the usual suspect ones. Hand ins even with max capacity seems quicker too despite a bunch more peeps with access to WotTP. Ofc the same skill delay and mobs' death standing under load just as bad.

It's like someone's still trying to improve things but would rather not say. Only got one fail to load/naked char but loads of empty gardens about so whatever thing they have to do to clear that for a while needs to be done again.

[Tirian-Hammerfist]

Today was a disaster trying to log in on Evernight.

Tried twice to log in, before being timed out each time and receiving the black screen with the 'The Connection to the server has been lost' message.

Got in on the third attempt after turning texture detail down to very low (this is much worse than just very low graphics - it essentially just makes things blobs, and some things stay as blobs no matter what settings you change once you get in!)

On for a bit, logged off and returned later.

Two attempts with texture detail (and everything else!) turned down to very low and was timed out both times. One of these times, the character was naked, but I still couldn't get in.

Eventually got in on the third try.


My computer may not be of the highest spec, and my main character may be a completionist (and so therefore there's a lot more data to load in relation to them), but I've never had the problem this badly before. Please look into making the log in process so insufferable!

[Mollymixtures]

What you describe has nothing to do with lag but is a known bug that also happens to people playing Wow.

Maybe this helps: follow the links shown in this reddit post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/lotro/comme..._of_the_weird/

Thank you! I've been searching this problem for ages. I've changed settings, and I even changed my mouse, all to no avail. I've also noticed it only happens on a small number of mmos, and as a result I assumed it was lag related due to poor servers or server distance. I can occasionally go through periods where it lessens or even disappears, but it always comes back in the end, and makes playing very difficult. This past week has been unbearable, along with general lag, hence my reason for putting the two together.

The discussion you posted is interesting, but it appears as if it's centred around WoW. It has given me some understanding as to why it's happening though, and a few things to try on my end.