why have the updates to fix game lag stopped

[gells]

...Putting in a /bug automatically sends us the back ground data we need to match up to the symptoms you are describing. ...

Vy, what's the process for reporting in-game crash to desktop issues? I've been having MANY of these lately and it's pretty frustrating.

I'm also experience VERY LONG waits between logging out and trying to switch to another character to come back into the game.

Are these related? They seem new since post-data center moves. How should I report these? Are you are of these issues, already?

[LagunaD2]

This is why I am asking for bug reports and contacting technical support. We need data like time the problem is happening, your location in game, and your location in the real world, your ISP provider, your hardware specs, etc, to piece together a pattern we can then investigate. Forum posts tell us that you are seeing issues, but they do not give us the specifics we need to diagnose.

So the 100 or so crash dumps that my machine alone has uploaded to crash.lotro.com over the past month, each of which can be loaded into a debugger to show the exact line of code where the client crashed, and the reason (usually division by zero), and the thousands upon thousands of similar crash dumps from other people who have also crashed, are not sufficient to "piece together a pattern"? But sending a text message (bug report) to Customer Support saying "My client crashed to the desktop in Eastern Gondor" will provide crucial information that you don't already have?

I would like to give you and the rest of the team the benefit of the doubt, but statements like the one quoted above make it really difficult...

[UwS-Harledir]

you know what? They will experience NO lags, because they are located very close to datacenter and sitting on the fat data pipe. And I can bet their hardware is top notch understandably for game developers.

maybe, but they can see and speak first hand (that will be something new for them, i know) with players that actively experience these problems. If they truely want to fix the problems for their players and not keep loosing them more and more (which they are at the moment) they would have to mingel with the common folk (instead of putting up more and more invisble fences and farce implementation like the PC).

Knowing that another game of Turbine's has had the same/similar issues for a few MONTHS now - bascially shows you how much Turbine cares about the playerbase these days - as long as you all buy things in the LotRO Store, everything is fine for them.

[UwS-Harledir]

Vy, what's the process for reporting in-game crash to desktop issues? I've been having MANY of these lately and it's pretty frustrating.

I'm also experience VERY LONG waits between logging out and trying to switch to another character to come back into the game.

Are these related? They seem new since post-data center moves. How should I report these? Are you are of these issues, already?

Every lotro client crashes is automatically uploaded to the server - BUT this server storage space is full

[Frelorn]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

[UwS-Harledir]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

So why was this not posted and said about 4 weeks ago (or even better a few years ago)?

[LagunaD2]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

So the automatically uploaded crash dumps are just deleted then?

[Feraxks]

So why was this not posted and said about 4 weeks ago (or even better a few years ago)?

Every single time they have responded with, "Submit bug reports". But most of you are too busy complaining to actually help.

[Feraxks]

So the automatically uploaded crash dumps are just deleted then?

Did he say that? No. So why say that?

[Frelorn]

So the automatically uploaded crash dumps are just deleted then?

We do get those, but what about everyone who is complaining about lag and delays. If the client does not crash, it does not automatically send us logs, hence why we want the bug reports.

[UwS-Harledir]

We do get those, but what about everyone who is complaining about lag and delays. If the client does not crash, it does not automatically send us logs, hence why we want the bug reports.

Hurray! Communication at last!

[LagunaD2]

Did he say that? No. So why say that?

He said there are 5 or fewer reports of crashes per day. I crash more than 5 time per day, and send more than 5 crash dumps per day.

Therefore he implied my crash dumps are not being looked at.

He also implied that they have no way to investigate crashes without player-submitted (text) bug reports and are somehow starved for information on crash problems.

It is absurd to suggest that a bug report saying "I crashed to the desktop while riding through Eastern Gondor" somehow provides more information than a crash dump that shows the exact line and reason for the crash.

[Macdui]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

Frelorn could you add this request to the launcher page. I know many don't come on the forums and with New Player / Support forum spam maybe putting off others. Please stress that this is the best way for you to get a handle on the problems. Please also add a message that you continue to work towards a more stable environment.

I myself have been remiss in compiling bug reports as on a journey of 2 mins I could experience several occurrences of hitching/lag/rubber-banding and this would turn into a journey of 30 minutes with reports. I like to get something accomplished when I log into the game however bad the performance might be but I'll never be compensated for my time as I am a Lifer.

Also if you could tell us your server hardware specs in return for ours then perhaps some of the good people here could offer some advice

Mac

/Mood_Angry reinitiated

[UwS-Harledir]

Frelorn could you add this request to the launcher page. I know many don't come on the forums and with New Player / Support forum spam maybe putting off others. Please stress that this is the best way for you to get a handle on the problems. Please also add a message that you continue to work towards a more stable environment.

I myself have been remiss in compiling bug reports as on a journey of 2 mins I could experience several occurrences of hitching/lag/rubber-banding and this would turn into a journey of 30 minutes with reports. I like to get something accomplished when I log into the game however bad the performance might be but I'll never be compensated for my time as I am a Lifer.

Also if you could tell us your server hardware specs in return for ours then perhaps some of the good people here could offer some advice

Mac

/Mood_Angry reinitiated

very good idea - i would second this !

[ertr]

He said there are 5 or fewer reports of crashes per day. I crash more than 5 time per day, and send more than 5 crash dumps per day.

No, he did not say that.

He said they get 5-10 bug reports per day about lag and disconnects.
Nothing about crashes in that statement, nor is "5-10" equal to "5 or fewer".

[LagunaD2]

We do get those (...)

Great, so could you give us an update on progress toward fixing THAT problem?

I understand the lag issues are important too, but since you claim to have insufficient information to address lag, but must have almost limitless, extremely detailed information on crashes, why hasn't the problem that you CAN solve at the moment been addressed?

[Mandura]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

Could you maybe make a post describing which kind of information we should put in to the bug reports? I think most players don't actually know what they should write in the report besides "Hey I crashed while riding around Minas Tirith" or "There was some bad lag about 5mins ago while running DoS".

[LagunaD2]

Just crashed while attempting to interact with the Task Board in Arnach, and sent a bug report saying so. It seems completely pointless if they are, in fact, doing more than deleting the crash dumps, but hey, now they have a bug report too.

[Jillymala]

Why does this thread exist if you want people to submit tickets?

https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...ardware-Thread

I think perhaps telling people in that initial thread that we should be submitting tickets instead of people posting updates in that thread would have been a better way to go about it.

[siipperi]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

I don't want to be rude here but after 3-4 years of severe lag people are just not bothering to send bug reports as source of lag on ettenmoors. Maybe if old servers worked perfectly and now it was only time lotro have ever lagged but this have gone on so long that many players just don't care wasting their time writing on bug reports on the cases that should be obvious when reading forums.

Another thing that really puts people off on reporting bugs/lag is, well I have sent tens of class related bugs over the years to turbine and only very rare of them have actually been fixed, and many of them really seem very basic for us players (like wrong skill tool tip text). Not to mentioning if you actually report somebody cheating/exploiting/rank farming in the game you people don't ban or do anything about it. It's lag + cheaters what you see in todays lotro.

Could you maybe make a post describing which kind of information we should put in to the bug reports? I think most players don't actually know what they should write in the report besides "Hey I crashed while riding around Minas Tirith" or "There was some bad lag about 5mins ago while running DoS".

This is exactly what most people write to lag reports and no way it's useful information for Turbine.

[Michaleo]

If you want to see how even moderate skill lag can reduce the playability of the game, play a guardian and see how many reactive skills can't fire fast enough. Block and parry responses nominally last 6 seconds. The sequence is: the server decides a block or parry occurred, notifies the client, the client indicates to the player a block or parry occurred, the player enters a reactive skill, that skill gets sent to the server, and the server decides if the skill occurred while the response buff was still active.

If it's too late, the skill gets discarded with the message "The skill cannot be used". The bottom line is that this happens to me much more frequently since the move. It happens even solo in Pelennor or the MT dailies public instances. It happens in groups doing Roving Threats anywhere. Some times are worse than others, probably based on server load. It is random, so it doesn't fail every time, but can happen several times during a RT fight.

I monitor my CPU, disk, and network usage, and this can occur when the CPU and disk are not saturated, and the connection status shows 80-90ms latency and no loss. This suggests the problem is on the server.

Other classes may not feel the problem as much because they do not have as tight a loop between the server and the client. For example, my hunter may not complain about seeing "The target is already dead" more often while spamming Penetrating Shot. That's not as bad as my guardian having a 3-skill reactive chain discarded in the middle of a fight.

Before I decide my computer, internet connection, and/or fingers are no longer fast enough to play guardian, you might check whether the server scheduling and processing of skills has gotten slower on average or has a higher variance than before the move. Even small changes could dramatically increase the frequency of failures.

I'd be interested to know if other guardian players or other classes with reactive skills have observed the same problem.

[SamsonTanner]

We do get those, but what about everyone who is complaining about lag and delays. If the client does not crash, it does not automatically send us logs, hence why we want the bug reports.

Well, Vyvanne's "mostly cleared up" response is certainly worrying.

I had minimal lag with no crashes ever, before the entire server transfer event of doom. now there's a bit of lag still, though it is far better than a couple weeks ago. The lag is especially bad on warsteeds.....anywhere. I don't know how detailed of bug reports people can give when they are getting lag issues just ridin warsteeds around and skill lag during fights sometimes. What would the reports say? warsteed lag in minas tirith.....pellenor.....rohan. ...gondor? skill lag in osgiliath.....skill lag in this instance or that instance.....this is some of what I and others I play with are experiencing.

As far as crash reports go, you should have massive amounts of them and at least 5-10 a day from the 3-4 hours I play most nights. Most of my issue is crashes. Porting to Bree-crash. porting to minas tirith-crash, riding through minas tirith on my goat-crash, warsteeding from MT to Osgiliath-crash, leaving the culverts in osgiliath-crash, starting big battle-crash, randomly during big battles-crash.

My point is minimal lag and no crashes 5 weeks ago, to a bit more lag and crashes ALL the time now......only thing that has changed in that time is the server transfer, so, NO, it is not my regional issue or hardware problems as Vyvanne seems to think. My brother and I both have PC's we built 1-2 years ago and play call of duty BO3 on high graphics and all, so trust me, our pc's are far more than capable of running LOTRO.

That's my 2 cents.

[robbie1435]

We do get those, but what about everyone who is complaining about lag and delays. If the client does not crash, it does not automatically send us logs, hence why we want the bug reports.

Would it be possible to add an option to send Crash Reports to Turbine? Just curious.

[LagunaD2]

I have tried to follow Frelorn's request over the past couple hours.

I have crashed twice, and submitted bug reports saying so. We still have not heard any explanation why the huge volume of crash dumps that are automatically sent to Turbine have not allowed the frequent crashes to be fixed. If those are insufficient, I find it hard to imagine how manual bug reports saying "I crashed at XXX" will somehow prove decisive.

I experienced skill lag in several places, and submitted bug reports saying so. Note there is not even a bug category for "lag", so they were filed under "Other".

If I were to file a bug report every time I lagged, hitched or rubber-banded while riding on a warsteed, pretty much anywhere in the world, I would need to file several bug reports PER MINUTE.

Years ago, Sapience claimed that the client had been instrumented to provide feedback about lag directly to the server, and he later claimed this had led to huge improvements (which I'm not sure any player ever noticed). Was this instrumentation removed? If not, why does it no longer suffice? If so, can be reactivated?

[Snowlock]

We are and will continue to work on resolving the issues some of you are seeing. One thing we would like to point out is that for everyone here saying they are submitting bug reports, we get no more than 5-10 reports per day on lag or disconnects. This number is actual detailed bug reports and not posts to the forums here. We also read the posts here on the forums, but in many cases just telling us it is happening, does not really help us narrow down the issue or issues. This is why we ask for detailed bug reports, rather than just post telling us to fix it. If the solution was something simple, the team would have fixed it by now so everyone playing could have a good experience. However since it is not simple, we need as much information as we can get in these bug reports.

I try really hard not to get into "kill the messenger" mode with you because I know, just like I knew with you predecessor, that you're required to say stuff like this in these times. I would hazard a guess that even Vy, who may not be required to say what she is saying, is bound to have to say it given the fact that she cannot simply go in and fix what ails us and she's at the mercy of very expensively paid people who know they have her at their mercy.

So, pardon my disgust with this status update. Both hers and yours. There may be lag all over the game. There may be numerous issues that affect differnent players different degrees in different ways and in different places.

But there is one place where all of the issues come together to affect everyone at the same time, in the same way. PVMP. I know you've got 4 years of bug tickets on what we're talking about in PVMP. I know it's been discussed directly in the past with Turbine employees such as Rowan, and Jinjah, and even people in Net Ops through PC interactions, both in person and on the forums. And I know and I'm sure you do too of the dozens if not hundreds of threads, and thousands of posts on this topic. All centered in the same place under the same conditions. Given the pervasiveness of the lag effect on such a wide dispersal of players at the same time, you can even replicate it simply: GET OUT IN THE MOORS AND PLAY.

So please, explain to me, a customer of coming up on 9 years now, what additional information, could we possibly provide.