Efforts towards fixing the lag

[monteeburns]

Yes. What's your point?

They aren't omnipotent. They have identified a problem. They are now fixing it. If reports of "lag" (often a misused term) persist after this fix, it will likewise be reasonable to wonder how widespread the problem remains and/or if those still experiencing "lag" might be suffering from "traditional lag" outside of Turbine's control. Just as they did after they fixed a known/documented problem on the 21st that they thought would fix reports of "lag."

So we'll be right back at square one. And it will either be fixed for the vast majority of folks currently suffering or it won't. And if it isn't fixed, we'll go back into "discovery" phase and you guys can all continue willfully twisting and misreading everything Turbine says and accuse them of all the same malfeasance you chose to see in this case.

--H

My point is you keep saying it's fixed. When in reality they think it's fixed, no-one knows for sure yet. They thought that before. It's just a little early to break out the champagne and start slapping backs. That way, at least if it isn't actually fixed, there won't be exactly the same thing on the forum with people saying 'you told us it was fixed grrrr'.

[Aedfrith]

Did you forgot RoI hunter upgrades?

Check the forums mate - a lot of us think that "upgrades" is entirely the wrong word to use. Yes, stat caps were removed, but this is true for all classes. Meanwhile, medium armour was nerfed, we gained some completely useless skills, and as a result our survivability took a hammering.

The other main DPS classes - champs and RKs - *gained* in survivability and healing (after some bugs on the RK side), as well as being able to put out bigger numbers. This is not in itself a bad thing if the other side of the balance is addressed - if these classes gain DPS, hunters should gain survivability. Instead, DIDDLY SQUAT.

Now, hunters are being left out of raids in favour of champs, burgs and even LMs as DPS classes. Though a hunter is my main, I have a 75 raid-specced burg as well, and 75 warden (warrrrrrrrrrden ) and minstrel alts.

Explain to me how this is an upgrade.

[Hurin]

Okay, this is my final post. Because this is clearly a waste of breath. . .

At no point did Turbine ever say: "It's your fault. It's not us." That never happened. Not once. Yet you folks keep repeating it. Shame on you.

And they have only pointed out how few people were posting and reporting this issue by way of explaining why it was so difficult to track down (because some people seem unaffected).

And, perhaps when you have a thread filled with people who insist on misquoting you and (mis)attributing meaning to your words that you have repeatedly, explicitly disavowed, and those same people continually stating that the game is in shambles and ruined because of this issue and that it should therefore be incredibly easy to track-down because you've been so helpfully informed that the cause is update 6 (now go fix it!). . . personally, I don't blame Sapience for providing a little bit of context and perspective via some numbers covering how many people have posted here and submitted tickets.

That this bothers some of you so much is actually. . . well. . . sorta strange. Given the outright abuse the Turbine staff endures day in and day out, I'm willing to forgive them for occasionally breaking the golden rule of customer service and "pushing back" a little. Even though it does them no good in the end. Because it only enrages the easily enraged all the more.

I'm out. Enjoy your rage everybody!

--H

[monteeburns]

And they have only pointed out how few people were posting and reporting this issue by way of explaining why it was so difficult to track down (because some people seem unaffected).

And there have been numerous people pointing out that they haven't reported it because they didn't know about the method for reporting bugs / it went to the wrong person / the bug report was totally unfriendly to the user.
Did they ever stop to think that maybe the reason that they have had so few bug reports is because the bug report system stinks?
That's why it's a shambles. Different parts of their infrastructure are preventing others from operating efficiently. It's a bit of a mess.
Strangely, most of the rage I've heard over this, has come not from those who have a problem with lag, but from those who don't, but seem to have just as much of an issue with anyone taking Turbine to task over this.

[probitas]

The bug report tool is a pita. It's unwieldy for one. It's not a very good way to do one, popping up a browser screen which forces you to log in (yet again? from a logged in account??), and then attempt to scroll and use a mouse on a very unfriendly screen. Small wonder people have been avoiding it. When its hard to report problems, odds are you won't think there are very many at all.

Still, give it chance. If it's actually fixed, you'll know soon enough. Time enough for more rants after they've actually failed.

[Ingaras]

At no point did Turbine ever say: "It's your fault. It's not us." That never happened. Not once. Yet you folks keep repeating it. Shame on you.

It's easy to misinterpret Sapience's posts from March 30th that way (which is sorta when things exploded)... with hindsight he was just reporting back 'Well we're pretty sure we've eliminated our datacenter as the cause and are now looking into other things'. But instead the message we got was 'if it would be 100% on our end, 100% of the players would see it and I'm not seeing anything wrong' along with 'other games are also reporting increased lag' and 'it might be out of our control, but we'll keep monitoring just in case we missed something'.

Shortly after that we got the 'report your situation' thing and after that the message that they were trying things out with a limited test group, which basically means that people actually interested in helping to fix the issue didn't have to bother posting anymore, so you're just left with complaints and people who didn't read the dev comments for the last couple of pages.

[Gilarianen]

I must say that people are getting overly stressed about this, We had an issue, some of us reported it (myself via ingame ticket, which btw has been handled perfectly all the way through for me) and now it looks like Turbine have found a problem and are attempting to resolve it. Yes , it would have been nice to be updated more on the status of the problems, but seriously why start flaming each other over peoples opinions of what was the correct action of Turbine. Methinks that some people should go outside more and get some fresh air.

[jcmanda]

Methinks that some people should go outside more and get some fresh air.

What is this... "outside" you speak of? Is that a new questpack? Does it cost TP? Also, they nerfed the "fresh air" skill on the hunter, so my main doesn't really even bother using it anymore, so I don't see how your comment will help me here.

...

...

What?

[KhelgarFK]

Methinks that some people should go outside more and get some fresh air.

Yes, condemning people for arguing with each other and then insulting them, good way to make your point

We are a casual kin, we don't have a lot of time or opportunities to raid, usually a Friday evening as most people don't have work the following day. When that small time which is hard to organise is constantly ruined by raid wide lag spikes you might understand why people get upset, especially when they are told that there isn't a problem, that it has been fixed, that it's a small group experiencing it etc...

[Mark_J]

Hurin,

You're way off the mark on this one and arguing with everyone is only going to get this thread closed.

You're simply ignoring the perception many of the players had about this lag issue. After Sapience came out and said the issue wasn't Turbine's servers or datacenters the players assumed he was saying it was all on our end. Then we saw many players running traces, reinstalling the client, and a myriad of other attempts to fix what players thought Sapience said, which was that the issue is on the player's end.

Turbine has never been good with communication to the player base, they tend to speak in ambiguous language and talk to us as if we're in their meetings and have all the background they do. Many times I personally get the feeling that players are tolerated not appreciated when we're given information. If a statement was put out briefly outlining how Turbine would address investigating and/or fixing this issue I'm quite sure the perception the players had would have been different. My wife was a Communications Instructor at one of their best colleges in the country, I am fortunate to have her showing me how the information could have been released without this 'fog of war' surrounding it all making it difficult if not impossible for players to understand...

Let's just be happy they found the problem and worked out a fix and not be so quick to condemn players who were under a different perception than you were. Their perception was created by the type and quality of communication we are receiving.

[Gillianrial]

Turbine has never been good with communication to the player base, they tend to speak in ambiguous language and tend to talk to us as if we're in their meetings and have all the background they do.

Going to disagree here. Turbine interacts with customers much more frequently and with more candor than most other games I have played. Their community team is pretty top notch, IMO.

[Mark_J]

Going to disagree here. Turbine interacts with customers much more frequently and with more candor than most other games I have played. Their community team is pretty top notch, IMO.

That brings us to our final point: communication.

We’ll take this as a sign that we need to do a better job in clear and open communication. In the future we will take more time to explain why - not just what we’re doing.

I think even Turbine has recognized that they need to do better with their communication to the players so I'll have to disagree with your opinion on this one...

[Gillianrial]

And you would NOT see that in other titles. That's an excellent example of exactly how much better they are, IMO.

[danno8]

I think even Turbine has recognized that they need to do better with their communication to the players so I'll have to disagree with your opinion on this one...

Expect future communications to me much more brief and generic. Elaboration seems to lead to misunderstanding. I would expect more of "We are looking into the issue." Period. Nothing more.

When people minconstrue, misunderstand and infer meaning in more detailed explanations, you can expect those details to begin to vanish.

[Armitas]

Sapience.

Any chance you guys changed something in the last few days. It normally takes me a very long time to load in with my main, now I'm loading in much much faster with no change in my pc. I asked a few people on my server if they were experiencing the same thing and 2 replied with a positive, none with a negative (early morning). or is this coincidence?

Also can we get back on topic here, with helpful data that the devs can use. If we spam this thread with too much off topic stuff (I am an offender as well) a dev might miss a key piece of info or begin to ignore the thread altogether.

If it hasn't been said yet... when I expeirence the "lag" those with me receive it at the same time, so It sounds like there is a hard trigger there. I do not know if that is always the case, just that sometimes I can confirm a simultaneous experience of identical lag.

*"lag" all players freeze except you.

[tiltowait]

At no point did Turbine ever say: "It's your fault. It's not us." That never happened. Not once. Yet you folks keep repeating it. Shame on you.

Let's review... here's why:

Ultimately, we can control one thing and that's our server's performance and the network stack on our systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is all working as expected.

there are no issues on the server side or within our datacenter. With that said, we'll continue to look at other possible causes, including the reports from others that a number of non-tubine titles began seeing reports of lag within their communities at the same time.

the only 'solution' anyone has reported (and we have confirmed it here on at least one machine) is that a completely clean, brand new download and install (with 0 carry over data from a previous install or installer) seems to fix the lag issue.

The fix (it's one issue that caused both problems, and it was within the client) has been tested and confirmed and will be included in Update 6.1.

The statement "all working as expected," followed by a nice little CLOSED THREAD icon, will go down along with whoppers such as "it grows with you" and "convenience, not advantage" in my book. And overall Sapience's posts have been a pretty demeaning way to spin the issue.

I generally lurk on these forms because the back and forth between haters and fanboys isn't very productive, but since the scope of the lag is being questioned, it bears repeating by one more poster: myself, along with several dozen kin members to several hundred pug companions and glff posters have all experienced frequent hitching since update 6.

I'm glad to hear a fix is forthcoming, and am appreciative of my fellow players who have filed bug reports, especially given the attitude that they're apparently met with.

[bastiat1]

So, you either believe that Sapience lied about how many people he sampled. Or he lied about what they told him.

OR they were just flippant in the way they approached investigating problem. It's possible that Sapeince didn't lie at all, and it's possible that no one lied to him, but it is still possible that he walked into a bull pen and asked "hey anyone getting lag" and that 70% of the people ignored him and the other 30% said no but didn't do anything except sell something in the AH. Sapience then comes back and tells the community, "hey guys, not sure what you're seeing, but NO ONE I know is getting this problem and we play for hours" (my paraphrasing). In this case he didn't lie, but he didn't exactly exercise due care before reporting back that no one was experiencing the problem. I think they relied on shoddy anecdote.

That's the downright funniest thing I've read in a long time. You can't prove "mathematically" what Sapience was told.

I never said that, and only a severe lack of basic reading comprehension could read it that way. It is fairly easy to show mathematically that it is highly highly improbable that one sample of 20 can uniformly experience the problem and another sample of several uniformly cannot. The key is uniformity. One of us aren't credible- Sapience's sample or my sample. It is highly unlikely that they can both exist. I have a lot more confidence in my sample because it's been directly observed, and it's been corroborated by videos of other kins and multiple textual accounts from other kins.

I laid out the equation, you can use any inputs you want to show yourself, but instead you seem interested in only deliberately misrepresenting what I've stated. To what end? I have no idea other than to bolster your own self-delusioned pride in logic. I don't know where you studied logic, and maybe it was just on a somewhat more rudimentary basis that didn't employ mathematics, but the field of logic is filled with math, and if you insist on being a champion of logical analysis you might want to brush up on it a bit.

Either they told him what he says they told him, or they didn't. Math doesn't enter into it. It's actually somewhat disconcerting that you're clinging to "math" here.

The math shows that it is near impossible for the facts that Sapience laid out to exist simultaneously with the facts others have laid out in this thread. I can't make you see that. You kind of either "get it" or you don't. You would be surprised at how many insights you can gather with some basic math.

[VentoPT]

Let's review... here's why:


The statement "all working as expected,(...)

With the migration of EU servers my latency went from around 85 to 120... working as intended (!!!) since then game performances has come down and never recovered, still working as intended.
Servers brought up to handle the initial wave of F2P have been left over on low populations but still no issue there... working as intended.

From my european VIP paying prespective i could not care less about reporting lag issues.
As thing are, for Turbine i simply live on the wrong side of the ocean, on the wrong country. Fortunately at least this time, even though reluntely they at least acknowlegde and addressed the issue hopefully it will be fixed


When i believe the game is not playable from my side i will simply cancel my subscription and go play something else.

Cheers

[bastiat1]

With a sample size of 20 out of a total population of maybe 200K? At least some of whom are playing together regularly, and therefore aren't even remotely like a random sampling? Um... no. But nice try.
Khafar

You do realize that the solution has been identified right? It's the game code. So saying that the model is incorrect because cross-correlated factors like hardware or ISPs could be in play is completely irrelevent? Notwithstanding, the people in my raid group all have different hardware and all play in different parts of the world. It is randomized. The fact that we play together is no more suggestive of it being non-random than to say any other sample becomes non-random once the sample is evaluated together. That makes absolutely no sense.

One could argue that it's the code but the code could only affect one person who then cross-affects others. But even that is highly unlikely because my raid group also identified the problem as occuring individually while playing solo.

The thing you are ignoring is that you don't need a large sample when the uniformity of the results are so extreme. We have multiple raid groups of 12-20 players uniformly experiencing the problem. It's not like of that group of 12, 9 are and 3 aren't. It's everyone in those samples. The uniformity is highly suggestive that p is high even if the sample were smaller than 20.

It is highly unlikely that you can have large samples experiencing different but uniform results unless those samples are highly stratified. The laws of mathematics just don't allow that.

Here is a simple illustrative example for you that exactly mirrors this problem. Flip a coin 25 times until you get all heads on the first 20 flips (my raid group) and all tails on the remaining 5 flips (Sapience's sample). Let me know how long that takes you. 20 seem big enough now?

Nice try though, bro.

[Mirthgar]

It appears that this thread is severely being derailed with a "he said, they said, Turbine said" argument and that was not the point of it.

Here is a bit of elaboration on a few things:

I do not think we directly asked for /bug or in-game help reports in this case because I specifically asked at the beginning of this thread for technical support tickets because we needed to do some basic troubleshooting with folks willing to do so in an effort to 'eliminate the probables' and test for what if anything affected this.

What was also perhaps not readily apparent to everyone, is that there was a bit of a confluence of things that had to come together in a sense for this one to become more readily apparent to players in general. This is why not every player was encountering it in every situation. (This also was one of the behaviors that made it that much more difficult to pin-down as well)

I also stated at the beginning why the other lag threads were closed, because the specific server issue that was causing those specific instances that players were encountering were fixed at the server level, if they were left open the reports received via this thread would have been clouded and it would have taken that much more effort to glean information about it.

"So why was this thread left open then?"

- Because even though we could not see a server-side cause of the issues being reported it was apparent that these were unrelated reports of potentially completely different issues, so along with checking for other server-side issues those original issues and the steps taken to remedy them were re-checked as a 'just in case'.

"Why'd you say it was our ISP's/computer's/network's/hardware/software/pet's fault?"

- No one ever said that, It was merely suggested early on that there are multiple possible causes for the behavior encountered and we were having difficulty narrowing it down. We never said "It's your fault" anyone that claims otherwise is severely mistaken.

I understand that you're frustrated by the issues, I know that you want us to press a button and fix the issue but we really did need good feedback from players as we do in every case.

We have several stickies (many linked in my sig) about how to contact support in addition when you click on the support tab on these forums it is detailed right on that page how to submit a ticket.

I would ask that anyone that wishes to continue the 'he/she/they/Turbine said' argument take it to pm's so that this thread can remain clear for players to post with details on "I'm seeing X when I do Y" and the like, please.

[Sapience]

As we believe we have fixed this issue, and there is little to report on from any side until these changes go live we're going to close this thread. When we push Update 6.1 we'll keep a close eye out for new reports and address them in a new thread (as this will indicate we fixed part of the issue but not all of it) and will request new reports and feedback via that thread should the need arise.