Prioritise fixing the lag and the general poor state of the servers before everything else

[Dagobert]

I don't know how people are finding playing on other servers but Laurelin is in a dire state at present.

I will firstly say I am running an i7 processor, 32 gigs of installed ram, an 8 gig graphics card, a high end monitor, and wired mouse/keyboard/internet all with the best of high speed gaming standard cabling. I have solid realisable 500 gig broadband which generally gives an upload capacity in general of around 50 gigs, download of over 400 gigs, and idle latency of 9. So no problems with either hardware or internet.

Just some of the issues with lag and general connection:

1. Characters freezing in world - unable to move - sometimes you DC - sometimes you get to move again

2. Lag in Raids and Instance - at higher tiers this is an absolute nightmare - and keep entering instance until you find one in the "60s" to have any hope in HOA. The lag in a T1 HOA was so bad last night that one of the group members was joking that we had Schrodinger's Lag, as we couldn't tell if we were dead or alive.

3. A tanking class practically unplayable - warden - trying doing gambits to stay alive with bad lag - unfortunately I know many players abandoning this fine class, including myself.

4. Long load screens - these occur randomly to players and can be so bad the only option is to shut down the game entirely, they create a fine mess in raids and other group content when a player attempts to swap classes because an extra tank or healer is required.

5. Missions - get bad enough lag on any of the higher tiers and you can be blissfully standings in fire or poison to your hearts content. Not to mention that you can't get off your rotation in an optimal fashion to get the mobs down as quickly as possible.

This problem is not something that occurred this week, or last week, but is ongoing and frustrating, and looks at present to be permanent with no impetus to solve it. This is such a pity as the content this expac is very enjoyable with higher level mission, DOCG, SV, and HOA all good fun.

Please SSG prioritise solving these lag issues ahead of new content, or anything else, but the game is just becoming downright unplayable.

[IamAdrenaline]

Considering getting back into the game with a full group of six and this stuff scares me. By miracle I get everyone down the committ, that we do and the game isn't playable without major tolerances. Excited to hear about the difficulty scaling and PvMP changes as I use to play that all the time as well, so the idea of that being laggy sounds miserable.

[Fargasia]

FWIW, not everyone experiences lag. When we discuss it on my server, it's quite a mixed bag of those who experience it frequently, sometimes, or very rarely. I'm in the latter category, and am playing on a 10 yr old iMac.

The SSG team has discussed lag on several of their more recent streams. It sounds like there are many sources of lag, which makes it difficult to eliminate with one simple solution. Things like inefficient data transfer algorthims - I memorised that from one stream, because it sounded more interesting and more difficult to solve than just get better servers!

You and your friends might want to give the game a try, see if you're in the category of "rarely lag" or "always lag". If you haven't picked a server, def go for a less populated one.

Despite the lag, there are hundreds of players playing every day on my server (gladden) so the game is definitely viable and lots of fun! Good luck

[ertr]

When reading all these complaints about lag, I find it very strange that I so rarely encounter lag that is serious enough for me to even notice.
Occasionally freezing in place in the game, but that is pretty rare and has minimal effect on my game play.


I can't help but wonder if the reason I see so little lag is because I have an old and slow computer and therefore need to disable lots of graphical goodies to get decent performance.

[DavidmeetHal]

I can't help but wonder if the reason I see so little lag is because I have an old and slow computer and therefore need to disable lots of graphical goodies to get decent performance.

I would have to say no, because I was stuttering and lagging hard on an old comp before I replaced my desktop and lappy with new rigs, and I'm now playing smoothly.

[maartena]

Arkenstone is not much better. It often goes like this:

- Click NPC. Wait 15 seconds. Get quest offered. "Pick up 10 crates somewhere".
- Go to location. While going there, you "zone" from one named area to another in the open landscape. Completely "freeze up" at the "invisible border" (right where the name changes), and wait 30 seconds.....
- Arrive at location to pick up the crates. Click on a crate. Wait 20 seconds for it to react. Get the crate. Move to next crate.
- Encounter an orc in between. Fire off a skill. Wait 20 seconds for it to react. Realize you have fired off 2 more skills that don't react because the first one wasn't done. Get annoyed. Do it again.

This does not happen ALL the time, sometimes it works just fine.... other times it is literally as bad as described above, with accurate real-time waiting times.

And that is just landscape questing, I don't even want to know how bad it is in instances or raids these days.....

The lag isn't getting better, it is getting worse. And it would seem that the SSG engineering crew either doesn't have a clue on how to solve it, or the solutions that may actually work (possible hardware upgrades, server code re-writes, 64-bit servers) are too expensive in either purchasing of equipment, or man-hours to complete, and as such aren't done. Meanwhile they are preparing to add more content without a good lag solution in place....

I would 100% agree that fixing the lag needs to be first priority over everything. I can wait for ANY new content to release in 2024 or beyond if we can spend the remainder of 2023 mostly on fixing lag, because at this point in time it is absolutely atrocious.

And no, it is NOT my computer (a gaming rig built in 2021 that runs many other games perfectly), and it is NOT my internet (a 1 Gbps fiber link with 3ms pings to Google and 65ms pings from west coast to the game servers). This lag is on the SSG side, and for about 5 years now they claim to be "working on it" with little results that we can see from the player side. Maybe it would be much worse if they didn't do what they did already, but removing things like "Sic Em" indicates to me that they are just slinging mud at it, and seeing what sticks.

SSG: Hire some new Engineers or ask EG7 for help/budget. Because this isn't working.

[Pharone]

If your character just stands there doing nothing during a fight for a really long time, and then finally it starts working again, and you can see that your character TOOK NO DAMAGE DURING ALL OF THAT LAG TIME, then it is not a client-side issue.

If it was a client-side issue, the server would have been processing the fight WHILE your computer was lagged out, and your character would have been taking damage the whole time you was lagged.

Maybe people can't figure this out because they only play max level characters where their character gets hit like a mac truck ran them over the second the server comes back from server lag, so they assume they have been getting beat on the whole time they were lagged out. Go create a level 1 character, and it will be easier to see how you can lag out for many seconds at a time, and when the server catches up, you haven't taken a single point of damage during that whole lag spike.

This is server lag. Nothing else. There is nothing to figure out here on the player's side. This is 100% SSG, and they have SAID on these forums many times, they are aware of the issues and are working on them. Why don't we all let them do their job, and stop trying to make the players feel like it's their fault while we all wait for this to be solved?

[TesalionLortus]

I can wait for ANY new content to release in 2024 or beyond if we can spend the remainder of 2023 mostly on fixing lag, because at this point in time it is absolutely atrocious.

I can't. In fact, if this lasts any longer (them focused on lags, them tweaking the old code and observing positive changes, people still complain about lag because it didn't help apparently) then I would rather have them focus more on actual visible improvements to the game: graphic shaders, UI upgrades, map updates, overall bring the game to 2020+ even if with this unavoidable lag. Also, update the website and take care of some... modern appeal and info about what this game actually offers. (Because it's hardly there)

[egarthur]

FWIW, not everyone experiences lag. When we discuss it on my server, it's quite a mixed bag of those who experience it frequently, sometimes, or very rarely. I'm in the latter category, and am playing on a 10 yr old iMac.

The SSG team has discussed lag on several of their more recent streams. It sounds like there are many sources of lag, which makes it difficult to eliminate with one simple solution. Things like inefficient data transfer algorthims - I memorised that from one stream, because it sounded more interesting and more difficult to solve than just get better servers!

You and your friends might want to give the game a try, see if you're in the category of "rarely lag" or "always lag". If you haven't picked a server, def go for a less populated one.

Despite the lag, there are hundreds of players playing every day on my server (gladden) so the game is definitely viable and lots of fun! Good luck

For those who report "no lag" or "rarely lag", I'd be intensely curious what their play profiles are like. High-level characters versus low-level characters? Lots of completed quests/deeds, or not so much? Lots of items in inventory versus little in inventory. Ditto for cosmetics. Where are their characters logging out -- zone, area, etc.?

Part of performing Root Cause Analysis is first gathering relevant data. I sincerely hope that the client is reporting this data to SSG, because the client knows when it's getting slow responses, or no responses from the server (i.e. lag), and the client also knows where the character is, what operation the user is performing, etc. That seems like a perfect place to gather telemetry and forward it to SSG for analysis. And when I say "analysis", I also include matching up the client-side data with the server-side data, looking at the issue from both sides.

If some people are getting lag, and others are getting no lag or rare lag, then that gives hope that there are solutions to the problem. But trying to fix lag without having input data on which to base attempted solutions, is just going to result in the "shotgun" approach.

Before anyone chimes in with, it's your PC, it's your network connection, etc. those are sometimes a contributor to lag, but I would think, at this point in the conversation, we're beyond identifying those as the main source of lag...

[fealegwe2]

For those who report "no lag" or "rarely lag", I'd be intensely curious what their play profiles are like. High-level characters versus low-level characters? Lots of completed quests/deeds, or not so much? Lots of items in inventory versus little in inventory. Ditto for cosmetics. Where are their characters logging out -- zone, area, etc.?

Part of performing Root Cause Analysis is first gathering relevant data. I sincerely hope that the client is reporting this data to SSG, because the client knows when it's getting slow responses, or no responses from the server (i.e. lag), and the client also knows where the character is, what operation the user is performing, etc. That seems like a perfect place to gather telemetry and forward it to SSG for analysis. And when I say "analysis", I also include matching up the client-side data with the server-side data, looking at the issue from both sides.

If some people are getting lag, and others are getting no lag or rare lag, then that gives hope that there are solutions to the problem. But trying to fix lag without having input data on which to base attempted solutions, is just going to result in the "shotgun" approach.

Before anyone chimes in with, it's your PC, it's your network connection, etc. those are sometimes a contributor to lag, but I would think, at this point in the conversation, we're beyond identifying those as the main source of lag...

to me it seems with every new content release the lag gets more frequent and each effect is intensively worse. this last week i had 2 days in a row of crashing to desktop when choosing a charachter and pressing play. last night in Raid i could not move out of puddle while taking damage. Hrimil even froze before flopping down in defeat at the end. Half of us got ported to victory hall where chest is. other half reported being in an empty arena - i got ported somewhere in Nirvana under the floor of ice only to die 2 minutes later.

I stopped playing the warden halfway through Minas Morgul because i broke a keyboard in frustration.

SSG needs to close this game down to a point where its just maintenance status and re-release it in Unreal Engine 5. use the old assets in a modern coded environment.

I don't think the spaghetti code can be understood by any devs coming from dev school these days

[elderlygamer]

For those who report "no lag" or "rarely lag", I'd be intensely curious what their play profiles are like. High-level characters versus low-level characters? Lots of completed quests/deeds, or not so much? Lots of items in inventory versus little in inventory. Ditto for cosmetics. Where are their characters logging out -- zone, area, etc.?

I experience "jitters" where things sometimes freeze for a few seconds. I could probably count on one hand how many times the game has lagged longer than that for me in the past 1-2 weeks. I think I've only been disconnected once during that time. All of my chars are 70s or lower. Bag space varies. Zones vary.

I expect I'd lag more as I use a wireless broadband connection. I also use a vpn since the connection I have is only supposed to be used for business purposes lol

Possibly worth noting is that I am usually not around other players, presumably due to my low levels.

[Fargasia]

For those who report "no lag" or "rarely lag", I'd be intensely curious what their play profiles are like. High-level characters versus low-level characters? Lots of completed quests/deeds, or not so much? Lots of items in inventory versus little in inventory. Ditto for cosmetics. Where are their characters logging out -- zone, area, etc.?

I mostly play my array of 8 chars at lvl 140, and only play solo. I have chars below 100 that I've been playing thru the new lowbie areas and just levelling for a change of place and to revisit older areas. I've been playing for 10 years, so my older chars have a lot of quests and deeds completed. I have maxed my wardrobe space and shared space and personal vaults. I log off in a variety of different places, depending on what each char has been doing. In addition to landscape questing/deeding, I do missions, solo instances, delvings, decorate houses, and craft.

I'm not a techie person, so I would never tell another player who's lagging that it's their computer or their connection or whatever. All I can share is my experience, which is that I very rarely experience lag. If I knew why the lag monster leaves me alone, I sure would be sharing that info.

[DavidmeetHal]

If your character just stands there doing nothing during a fight for a really long time, and then finally it starts working again, and you can see that your character TOOK NO DAMAGE DURING ALL OF THAT LAG TIME, then it is not a client-side issue.

This happened to me last night with a noobie hunter in Chetwood last night. I could do nothing but watch my stationary character until everything cleared up. I know Jagger Jack has super powers, but even that is beyond his reach.

[DoRonRon]

I would have to say no, because I was stuttering and lagging hard on an old comp before I replaced my desktop and lappy with new rigs, and I'm now playing smoothly.

This happened to me last night with a noobie hunter in Chetwood last night. I could do nothing but watch my stationary character until everything cleared up. I know Jagger Jack has super powers, but even that is beyond his reach.

Sure, the new rig will more easily handle client side loading DAT files and rendering but it's still going to be neutered from server side bottlenecks. Smoothly to stationary with posts a day apart not the panacea you'd have hoped for? If we have current rigs that are meeting client side needs then we are unlikely to get so much benefit. Better would be investing at the time the bottlenecks are removed and get the Rig of the time whenever that happens to be. Great for you if that's just around the corner, not so much if it's far beyond the horizon. SSG being "on the case" might have persuaded you though.

Not to dissuade peeps not handling client side so well from upgrades ofc. But they are more likely hitting OS minimums before Lotro's.

[Aranaan]

I can't. In fact, if this lasts any longer (them focused on lags, them tweaking the old code and observing positive changes, people still complain about lag because it didn't help apparently) then I would rather have them focus more on actual visible improvements to the game: graphic shaders, UI upgrades, map updates, overall bring the game to 2020+ even if with this unavoidable lag. Also, update the website and take care of some... modern appeal and info about what this game actually offers. (Because it's hardly there)

please stay on the topic!

The lag is server side, end of discussion really!
SSG could upgrade their hardware to handle more load, but since its obvious they do not have the cash to do that, they attemt to tweak the gaming code, hoping that will do it.
This they have done for years now and behold! The lag gets worse for each year.

I will mentioned it again. No lag on other mmo games or on the legendary server Treebeard. Hence its not my gear or connection.
Once I pop in a f2p server, laghell! Its not there always, but more often than not. Hence its clearly a server issue.

Since SSG are still abcent here with a decent reply, I assume that those who are silent, agree.

[DoRonRon]

please stay on the topic!

The lag is server side, end of discussion really!
SSG could upgrade their hardware to handle more load, but since its obvious they do not have the cash to do that, they attemt to tweak the gaming code, hoping that will do it.
This they have done for years now and behold! The lag gets worse for each year.

I will mentioned it again. No lag on other mmo games or on the legendary server Treebeard. Hence its not my gear or connection.
Once I pop in a f2p server, laghell! Its not there always, but more often than not. Hence its clearly a server issue.

Since SSG are still abcent here with a decent reply, I assume that those who are silent, agree.

The scurrying about implies something will come of it. Ignoring what was done to present Daybreak with something they could profit from, the issue. Daybreak had them double down on it until both games failed. SSG have all the proof they ever need from that attempt. Still, there is the 64-bit server to dangle (but that ends with it's release). SSG have all the freedom to develop the game (they have told us this many times), none to run it (or they might have mentioned it).

[WorrBinpike]

SSG once said that the war horse system eats a lot of server sources. I also think the new delving system also eats a lot of resources. Thousands of people choose between different difficultys and the server always has to generate the mobs to that difficulty level the player chosed.

I dont think this will ever be fixed.

[shino047]

FWIW, not everyone experiences lag. When we discuss it on my server, it's quite a mixed bag of those who experience it frequently, sometimes, or very rarely. I'm in the latter category, and am playing on a 10 yr old iMac.

If those who "don't experience lag" joined a raid where everyone gets it at the same time, they would definitely get it too 100% sure

[TesalionLortus]

please stay on the topic!

I did and I disagreed with the premise that the devs should entirely focus on lag for next years and beyond and have their engineers always busy with lag, always preoccupied with it to the point they can hardly work on these other features many of us want to see that need serious engineering work done. That's perfectly on topic - no, do not "fix lag" for god knows how much longer "before everything else" because the game is in desperate need of engineering work in other areas if it wants to last 15 years longer or beyond. Believe it or not, not everyone feels about lag as strongly as you do in MMO game that's geared so heavily towards single player. (Which is very true of this game, even too true with how easy the landscape has become)

[Capt.Hunor]

I did and I disagreed with the premise that the devs should entirely focus on lag for next years and beyond and have their engineers always busy with lag, always preoccupied with it to the point they can hardly work on these other features many of us want to see that need serious engineering work done. That's perfectly on topic - no, do not "fix lag" for god knows how much longer "before everything else" because the game is in desperate need of engineering work in other areas if it wants to last 15 years longer or beyond. Believe it or not, not everyone feels about lag as strongly as you do in MMO game that's geared so heavily towards single player. (Which is very true of this game, even too true with how easy the landscape has become)

BS. If you like to stuck for near 1 minute every 3 minutes in game, go o a role-play server and you can make music all the day long. But let us play on a decent server, because we pay a decent price for a decent server not for a ####.
We have enough that we lost our free time in instances that fails because skills frozen for 1 minutes, because we are stuck on running, etc....
And that's because of lags that developers are not able to fix since years. The more time passes, the worse it gets

[Ainworth]

For all of the complainers:

The fastest way for SSG to "FIX" lag: SHUT DOWN LOTRO!

Yes, this is a rant. I am sick of all of the complaints. Yes, lag can be annoying, but if that is your be all and end all, there are more serious things to worry about.

[TesalionLortus]

BS. If you like to stuck for near 1 minute every 3 minutes in game, go o a role-play server and you can make music all the day long. But let us play on a decent server, because we pay a decent price for a decent server not for a ####.
We have enough that we lost our free time in instances that fails because skills frozen for 1 minutes, because we are stuck on running, etc....
And that's because of lags that developers are not able to fix since years. The more time passes, the worse it gets

Server alone isn't an issue. They're making changes in an ancient code of a game that grew bigger than what it was originally expected to be and growing this Middle-earth I think it is safe to say is something many of us are here for, some lag or not. Last time I was stuck for 1 minute every 3 minutes was sometime back in 2013 or so... ironically... so yeah, let them keep doing changes and observations they're currently in the process of doing, but at some point in the future I would love their engineers to get fully busy with other critical features and improvements rather than investigate lag and code for 5 years straight as a priority. Completely overhauling code and 100% solving lag in 5+ years aren't gonna keep this game afloat

[PetrNev]

We got more people due to the tv series, which is adding to the lag, now a lot of people (including me) play less or left the game due to the lag.. so its autobalancing itself. I get 0 lag issues during low player population hours, but it gets unbearable in the prime gaming times - Friday evening + weekends. So if here is some kid playing after returning from school he wont get much lag due to low server population early afternoon he can then wonder why the heck are people talking about lag.

[SniperCT]

SSG needs to close this game down to a point where its just maintenance status and re-release it in Unreal Engine 5. use the old assets in a modern coded environment.

I see this kind of comment on a variety of MMO forums and I always laugh.

1) maint status would kill the game, what money they're making would dry up
2) converting it to UE5 would be a huge, massive and expensive undertaking that probably isn't even possible with the assets they have now. This engine is over 20 years old. We also have no idea if the engine can handle a game as large as lotro is, tbh. It's one of the largest, if not the largest, MMO worlds in terms of actual square kilometers. They might as well start from scratch as that might actually be easier than converting the assets they use and then having to fix tens of thousands of them. And there's no telling what would happen to the landscapes themselves. Importing it, if at all possible, wouldn't be enough.

please stay on the topic!

The lag is server side, end of discussion really!
SSG could upgrade their hardware to handle more load, but since its obvious they do not have the cash to do that, they attemt to tweak the gaming code, hoping that will do it.
This they have done for years now and behold! The lag gets worse for each year.

I will mentioned it again. No lag on other mmo games or on the legendary server Treebeard. Hence its not my gear or connection.
Once I pop in a f2p server, laghell! Its not there always, but more often than not. Hence its clearly a server issue.

Since SSG are still abcent here with a decent reply, I assume that those who are silent, agree.

Previous legendary servers started experiencing lag once they started getting 80+ in level cap. Anor, by the end, was experiencing many of the lag spikes seen by live servers.

There is clearly multiple factors involved, not just the actual hardware.

Their last hardware refresh was like what, 2015? 2016? They were definitely due for one in recent years but I'll bet the super conductor shortage affected them the same way it affected FF14. I think that's mostly cleared up but there is still the cost to consider, plus the ramp up time to get the servers, test them, and then upgrade them, all without losing our data.

So IOW it needs to be done, but it's not going to be the silver bullet. There are other things going on.

BS. If you like to stuck for near 1 minute every 3 minutes in game, go o a role-play server and you can make music all the day long. But let us play on a decent server, because we pay a decent price for a decent server not for a ####.

I mean the two roleplay servers are among the most populated and are certainly 'real' servers so I take offense to that lol

Server alone isn't an issue. They're making changes in an ancient code of a game that grew bigger than what it was originally expected to be and growing this Middle-earth I think it is safe to say is something many of us are here for, some lag or not. Last time I was stuck for 1 minute every 3 minutes was sometime back in 2013 or so... ironically... so yeah, let them keep doing changes and observations they're currently in the process of doing, but at some point in the future I would love their engineers to get fully busy with other critical features and improvements rather than investigate lag and code for 5 years straight as a priority. Completely overhauling code and 100% solving lag in 5+ years aren't gonna keep this game afloat

Yeah, there is something (probably multiple many somethings) in the code.

The code that was first laid down in the 90s and originally meant for Asheron's Call 2.

But I disagree that it shouldn't be a priority. I just agree they shouldn't make it the ONLY priority.

[Aranaan]

For all of the complainers:

The fastest way for SSG to "FIX" lag: SHUT DOWN LOTRO!

Yes, this is a rant. I am sick of all of the complaints. Yes, lag can be annoying, but if that is your be all and end all, there are more serious things to worry about.

You are supposed to be a master over your own situation and actions, right?
Why visit forums post about lag complains and become sick?
Why do you torment yourself with such?
Im perflexed that people seek out things that make them sick.
Its a rather selfdestruction pattern and I would be concerned, if I where you bro.