why have the updates to fix game lag stopped

[BangoTwinkletoes]

If you have ever worked in Tech Support, you know that most people never report problems . . . they just complain about them!
The idea that "somebody else reported this" is a common attitude that simply does not get problems logged and fixed, especially ones where any kind of technical information about the event is needed.

Here we go - another apologist trying to blame the rest of us for the game's problems.

Companies delivering enterprise scale IT services (MMOs are on that scale) always have focussed & dedicated user testing teams who work together with the developers to coordinate tests around specific areas and features of the software. They also have testing strategies & plans designed to facilitate this. What they don't do is blame the users when things go wrong - unless of course they want to go out of business.

Turbine has the people on the current PC to help with this and, if that's not enough then they should be asking for volunteers to do the job properly.

[Moonrager]

"Mr. McKittrick, after very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new server sucks."

[UwS-Harledir]

Here we go - another apologist trying to blame the rest of us for the game's problems.

Companies delivering enterprise scale IT services (MMOs are on that scale) always have focussed & dedicated user testing teams who work together with the developers to coordinate tests around specific areas and features of the software. They also have testing strategies & plans designed to facilitate this. What they don't do is blame the users when things go wrong - unless of course they want to go out of business.

Turbine has the people on the current PC to help with this and, if that's not enough then they should be asking for volunteers to do the job properly.

bingo! spot on.

[UwS-Harledir]

I have said it in other threads.. we already know how they are going to do Mordor.

1 Take the Angmar map flip it north to south
2. Take out carn dum and put in isengard tower with a eye on it
3. Take out rift camp and make it mount doom camp
4. Make everything redder
5/ charge 995tp for it calling it the greatest questpack ever released

They maybe even throw in a new instace cluster

The Bells of The Black gate a 6 man instance where you race to the black gate
Flight To The Black gate a 12 man raid where you fight wacves of orcs and trolls coming out of the gate
Battle of the Black gate a 12 man raid where you fight 2 trolls who guard the gate
and finally
Fires of Mount Doom a 12 man raid where you have to put out the fire aroubnd mount doom and keep to smoke clear for sam and frodo
<end sarcasm>

Nooooooooooooo...........stop giving them ideas!! since they haven´t managed to pull one idea out of the hat themselves..... this will be so true in 2017 at the lastest.

[thinx]

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.

In this case I would suggest another update for the bug reporting system. Maybe not for now, but for later.

What should be improved:

• loading time
• more preloaded info. Really, do I need to enter my full name, my email address, my account name, my platform and my race each and every time? It seems it is possible to fill in location, level, character name. Why not the rest?
• interface. My screen is much bigger than a tiny window with scrollbars. And one of the things I hate most is entering a text in a tiny restricted window that starts scrolling after the 2nd sentence.
• Get the crash summary file upload fixed. I personally know people that were not able to play continuously due to the upload blocking their whole bandwidth, resulting in a failure, creating a new zip etc.
• Get "tab" working in the browser. I do not want to choose every field with the mouse
• Get keyboard repetition working. Deleting a word takes ages.
• Replace some of the scrollboxes by full boxes. The interface takes too long for scrolling, due to the small boxes it is not easy to pull the sidebar.

[elderlygamer]

This has been said continuously, over and over again, for as long as I have been playing -- FILE BUG REPORTS !-- and I'm a Founder/Lifetimer!

And for people in the Moors with lag problems -- include SCREEN SHOTS so the Devs can see how many people are involved and what they are wearing!
That means you need to do it twice -- first use /Bug and then attach the Screen Shot with the follow-up email that has the bug number -- OR complete the "Submit a Bug" version in the Forums, which allows you to include attachments. Just remember, if you use the Forum form, copy the location information from the /bug form, and any other auto-completed information.

Again, not necessary. All employees have to do is go to the moors themselves and go near 1 or 2 dozen people and they can bask in the glory of all kinds of data as they try but fail to move their characters. They can get data directly. They can talk to the ops people, if they have any, as they're experiencing the lag LIVE and troubleshoot problems with ops LIVE without looking at "I lagged out here" tickets days or weeks later. I do not believe for a second that the employees do not run into these same problems, and it's ridiculous that they expect us to believe that.

I came here hoping to see a post from an employee finally acknowledging the severity of the problem. Of course I did not see such a thing. You'd think I'd learn after all these years.

Back to another mmo...

[ShireDweller]

This has been said continuously, over and over again, for as long as I have been playing -- FILE BUG REPORTS !-- and I'm a Founder/Lifetimer!

And for people in the Moors with lag problems -- include SCREEN SHOTS so the Devs can see how many people are involved and what they are wearing!
That means you need to do it twice -- first use /Bug and then attach the Screen Shot with the follow-up email that has the bug number -- OR complete the "Submit a Bug" version in the Forums, which allows you to include attachments. Just remember, if you use the Forum form, copy the location information from the /bug form, and any other auto-completed information.

If you have ever worked in Tech Support, you know that most people never report problems . . . they just complain about them!
The idea that "somebody else reported this" is a common attitude that simply does not get problems logged and fixed, especially ones where any kind of technical information about the event is needed.

And yes, those Screen Shots from the Moors are likely to show Zerg-fests in progress -- not "normal" play styles. That is important information!
Two or three against one is a very different situation that 20 or 50 to one!

And then there are the cosmetics -- the flowing capes and the "pets" -- involved. All things which are known to cause Lag.

The other information -- which I don't believe is captured by /bug (unless it was changed recently) -- is your system and ISP information. That probably needs to be added as a follow-up email.


And this applies to Bullroarer as well!!!

When I'm on Bullroarer, TESTING, I fill out bug reports.

When I'm in the game now and I'm PLAYING (or trying to), and confronted with the never-ending stream of

-lag
-skill delays
-hitching/stuttering/zooming of NPCS and other players
-delay in landscape items appearing
-delays in accessing storage and mail
-being incombat state before a mob appears/after the mob is dead
-plus the occasional disconnect, router reset, or client hang

as I am these days, I log off and go do something else.

Writing bug reports for the occasional glitch, I have no problem with, I never have. Writing bug reports for the amount of glitches in the game today is an effort I'm not willing to take, not anymore.

If Minas Tirith hadn't been released in the state it was, nearly unplayable, I might have felt differently. But if Turbine is willing to release code in that bad shape, why should I expect them to take my bug reports seriously? I have lots of other things to do with my time.

[Yuffie67]

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.

Not sure how to send a "detailed" bug report for "crashed 40 times today, with no error code..... Some at log in, some 5 sec in game, some 30sec...
Location... everywhere.
Time... all the time, at all times....

I see others with same issue. No way for me to narrow it down from that.

its CTD-Festa! At all hours, all times, all locations. 40+ times a day.

It Started Friday 5th Feb, the game became unplayable almost instantly. Now that Yules over and I missed it AGAIN.... I manage to log on for more then 10mins on 12th, beating my 1min and 30sec record since feb 5th. I manage a few hours later 12th, but suffered 2-3 sec delay in skills, insanely long load screens that sat at 5% of a bar for 10mins.

Today 13th, has been CTD festa. I manage to log on in MD, walked into Shire AH... and enjoyed the 5 mins splash screen and game CTD with no error.

I don't even know what to submit in bug report anymore, you guys closed my one about missing items form transfer, and ignored one about renaming.

And Honestly... you guys n gals said you where "working on it" So I didnt brother sending bug reports since you guys seemed aware. >_>
And now post its "clearing up" etc and having me giving you a dirty look. >_<

[Macdui]

I had a long walk today from MD to MT through the Shire, Bree, Lonelands, Trollshaws, Eregion, Edenwaith, Westfold, the Westenmet and into Gondor and finally into Minas Tirith.

I don't play in lower level areas much but it was noticeable how the game just slows down as I get to the newer areas. Early areas my FPS is very high and decreases in Gondor until MT where it's a fraction of that of the early game.

I hadn't realise how much I have adapted the way I play to compensate for the "wading through sludge" feeling of the end game areas. I had always put this down to latency, being in Europe.

I don't have a great PC, I tend to upgrade when things break, but it handles the early game fine.

I'm sure the content devs have great rigs now, far superior to those of the early game developers but are they putting in content their machines can cope with but not necessarily those recommended for the game?

If I stand in the entry of Minas Tirith and look around there's maybe 40 or 50 non-selectable npcs with some animation that my client has to render. I guess it's the same for other areas that have had a revamp. In the early game I was impressed that an npc you'd previously done a quest for would call out as you passed, acknowledging your prior help. I don't know how much more the client machine has to handle now compared to the early game but with server performance down and increased pressure on my client in level 100 areas I'm wondering if a fully functioning datacentre, even in Amsterdam, will ever be enough for me.

Someone above suggested Mordor would be the Angmar map turned up-side-down with Orthanc and an Eye on top. I'm thinking I'm up for that, I might get some playable end of the game content.

Mac

[Faitha81]

Sorry your having a total laugh turbine the lag and crashes are still heavy and this is coming from a player whos lotro never crashed ! Honestly when i heard about the never servers etc i thought this could make a huge improvement to the game sadly the opposite has happened !

[FyreBrand]

Not at all.
I am saying that if you don't tell Turbine you have problems they won't know about the problems. Without good bugreports they will also have a much harder time to pinpoint the cause of the problems.

Yeah, that's not true. There are client/server metrics they gather. They know my ping was over 600 because they're reporting the ping to me. They're reporting "reduced awareness". No pass on them for this. They need to hire people who understand how to run their framework under the new architecture.

I haven't had crashes, but ping, lag, and overall game experience has been subpar. No biggie for me. I have other stuff I'm playing right now, but the game could be running a lot better.

[BINKLEY1]

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.

Makes sense. One thing we've done on systems is have them automatically log when violating SLAs, even if operation continues normally. It was straight-forward to feed into AppD or ELK and get correlations of system/software activity with slow behavior. In your case, I suppose the client would log to your server.

Cheers,
Gloimli @ ex-Windfola

[Urwendil]

Right now my cook is doing some work in the MD crafting area. Somebody passing behind him rubberbanded stepping without advancing and then got beamed up to where they would supposed to be (a few steps ahead). In Michel Delving. The Shire...

[BBChild]

Anyone else furious?

No contrition, just more denial, smokescreen and saving face as if the Chinese buyout went through rather than WBs.

I want to see +names on the servers at peek time asking to join groups who are experiencing lag before I believe this warped view of the performance.

Mac

Reminds me of Frelorn reporting that he had gone through the Moors and "hadn't been rolled," so therefore nothing needed to be changed balance-wise. Lol.

Do these guys only log on to a special dev server or something? Their reports on performance and the game's overall condition are just... entirely disconnected from reality... Just out of this world...

I don't can't even feel angry. I'm just in utter disbelief that they had the balls to claim "the issues have mostly cleared up." Do the endless pages of forum performance complaints mean nothing? Do the constant bug reports mean nothing? Does anything we say mean anything?

Turbine has been witless before, but this level of stupidity is absurd even to their standards.

If I stop and try to open the bug report panel and wait till it decides to come up, then fill in all the stuff it wants before I get to the actual problem report text input area, my character is dead...

Thank you for reminding me: Turbine, your ticket window is laggy as hell. It can take a full ten seconds for that damn thing to load, and then an extra five seconds per option you click (what type of ticket, what subcategory of ticket it is, ect). Fix that thing before someone pops a bloody brain vessel from the added frustrating of trying to send in a ticket.

If you want to experience this VYV/ Frelorn (or any other Turbine employee) just come to Evernight Ettenmoors peak EU time, make a creep and ask for Cojones De Mithril tribe , you can join our TS and we will be happy to show you whats still wrong with the game.

Not sure if "happy" is the term I would use...

[maartena]

I'm not sure about you or anyone else, but.. I want to play the game, not spend every 4th minute writing a bug report for things that have been brought to Turbines attention by numerous people right here in the forums for a month.

Nobody says you have to.

Just realize that if no one does that, it will take turbine a lot longer to fix things. The /bug reports contain exact information on your location, the exact time, etc..... they can then go back in the logs and see how many people were in the zone, whether the hardware that zone is on was overloaded at that time and needs its resources tweaked, whether there were connection issues between equipment at that exact time, and whether certain game code was used at that particular time and location. All of that helps them to figure it out.

There is a HUGE difference between going on a forum and say "I have lag on this server and this location and this time, and now fix it", or filing a /bug report which on the background reveals a lot of different information to the developer.

[Jillymala]

Nobody says you have to.

Just realize that if no one does that, it will take turbine a lot longer to fix things. The /bug reports contain exact information on your location, the exact time, etc..... they can then go back in the logs and see how many people were in the zone, whether the hardware that zone is on was overloaded at that time and needs its resources tweaked, whether there were connection issues between equipment at that exact time, and whether certain game code was used at that particular time and location. All of that helps them to figure it out.

There is a HUGE difference between going on a forum and say "I have lag on this server and this location and this time, and now fix it", or filing a /bug report which on the background reveals a lot of different information to the developer.

So.. let me get this right. Turbine needs a lot of people to file a bug report about lag in Moors (for example) for it to be 'real' and not just.. imagined?
Can't they .. you know.. hop on into Moors on a busy server at prime time and check it out for themselves? Maybe a server where literally a hundred people are posting negative feedback on?
Are you literally telling me that they can't 'replicate' lag like every player in Moors is seeing? Here, I can fix that:

I invite them to fellow with me on Evernight at prime time a couple of days this week.. I'll show them an experience that no bug report will ever be able to give. Someone

Really late edit: At this point they can't even remove ridiculously large pornography from the forums with a report... Evernight and even a new one this morning. Both reported and still there. One has been sitting there in Evernight since 3:48 pm on Saturday, FIFTEEN HOURS later. Someone needs to get things in order really soon, the inmates are running the asylum.

[Hetweith]

Nobody says you have to.

Just realize that if no one does that, it will take turbine a lot longer to fix things. The /bug reports contain exact information on your location, the exact time, etc..... they can then go back in the logs and see how many people were in the zone, whether the hardware that zone is on was overloaded at that time and needs its resources tweaked, whether there were connection issues between equipment at that exact time, and whether certain game code was used at that particular time and location. All of that helps them to figure it out.

There is a HUGE difference between going on a forum and say "I have lag on this server and this location and this time, and now fix it", or filing a /bug report which on the background reveals a lot of different information to the developer.

actually no. there is no difference with turbine. lag has gotten worse from day one and with almost nine years of bug reports we have what we have. a rolling disaster.
we have a game that needs to be fixed desperately. but the only people that can fix it are the ones who shouldn't be touching anything.

[MasterOfNothing]

I think we are operating from wrong assumptions.

As another poster in another thread said, it is likely that the main cash-flow comes from solo players that are new to the game and still levelling.
These players don't experience lag (or very little of it), because questing solo or in small groups in low level areas puts the minimum strain (PER PLAYER) on the servers.

The maximum strain PER PLAYER by far (I estimate at least by a factor of 10-20 larger than solo play in low level areas) is from raid sized instances and PvP.
See https://www.lotro.com/forums/showthr...e-or-we-can-do for an (unfortunately too lengthy) attempt of an explanation.

I am fairly certain that Turbine knows of the much higher strain on the servers during instances and PvP.
If they did not even know the basics of their own system, well ....

However, Turbine is not interested in acknowledging, that *parts* of the game (those parts that bring the less revenue) are not playable.
Well, these parts are sometimes playable (as long as not too many instances, BigBattles and PvP are going on simultaneouosly)

That is the reason why we are supposed to file in more and more bug-reports: It gives the *impression* that they care about ALL parts of the game, but they actually don't.
For that reason I will not file bug reports any more concerning lag. They will not solve it anyway, because it would require additional hardware expenses.
Reshuffling the inadequate server power a little around, will not solve anything, but it gives the appearance of activity (we are monitoring and improving)

The slightly better performance that Turbine is seeing (if Turbine is actually seeing it), is probably due to
- people having stopped playing altogether
- people avoiding peak times, instances, PvP and raids
- people (like me) leveling alts in almost lag-free older areas solo

[1Asy1]

As requested Fre, I've raised half a dozen bug reports this weekend. All whilst in the moors, different times and locations. Same issues though, lag... Skill lag.... Bugged debuffs, bugged buffs etc....

Largely unplayable during peak times and high activity areas....

I've included tonnes of detail, ISP and machine specs.

Lob - Evernight

[Apache140]

We acknowledge they are there and we continue to look into them, but we have moved form problems that everyone is experiencing and things that our server monitoring systems can show us, to problems that a subset of users is experiencing, which makes tracking down those specific problems and reproducing them to find a solution more difficult without specific data.

Do you truly believe this is a problem that a subset of users are experiencing?

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.

All the time. Whenever reduced awareness notification appears. Every location in the world. All ISPs. Any hardware specs.

Forum posts tell us that you are seeing issues, but they do not give us the specifics we need to diagnose. You can tell you doctor over the phone your symptoms, but they still need to see you in person to diagnose the disease because there is other data they can only get in that way. Putting in a /bug automatically sends us the back ground data we need to match up to the symptoms you are describing. We have folks that go through those bugs every single day to parse out the information we need to diagnose the issue, but when we dont have data to work with, we are working blindly which takes more time.

Doctors will take your urine or blood for cultures or chemical analysis, perform an x-ray, a CT scan, or MRI. Things they are trained to do and interpret. Your analogy is assuming the patient knows how to operate such machinery or preform sterile cultures and you simply are there to interpret. Nice try, but big difference. On top of that, we pay you to play a game. We pay doctors to treat our ailments. The game has an ailment. We don't need to play it. You pay a doctor to fix your own ailment. Let us know when it's fixed and we'll consider coming back.

[Mar-Evayave]

Ok so some clarification.

We have not stopped looking into the issues that remain. We acknowledge they are there and we continue to look into them, but we have moved form problems that everyone is experiencing and things that our server monitoring systems can show us, to problems that a subset of users is experiencing, which makes tracking down those specific problems and reproducing them to find a solution more difficult without specific data. 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. You can tell you doctor over the phone your symptoms, but they still need to see you in person to diagnose the disease because there is other data they can only get in that way. Putting in a /bug automatically sends us the back ground data we need to match up to the symptoms you are describing. We have folks that go through those bugs every single day to parse out the information we need to diagnose the issue, but when we dont have data to work with, we are working blindly which takes more time.

Can you please, please, please, then, tell your tech support people to stop giving us port forwarding as a solution? I've never needed it before and my dad is a network administrator. He may not know MMOs, but he does know networks. Port forwarding would not resolve my problems, and I've been trying to explain that to the tech support people, but they just keep giving me more of the same answers. Our firewall/router/modem is so open you could drive a tank through it -- if and only if we make the first connection, otherwise it is Fort Knox. And when I start up the launcher, that's the connection being initiated on my end, which automatically allows the game to communicate fully back at me.

I wish they would think a little more outside of the box. Last time I had this problem (last November), it was fixed by deleting the game's crash logs. It's resurfaced, and deleting those logs isn't helping this time, but I feel like I'm being stonewalled with all the port forwarding chatter. I've asked several times for any non-networking solutions, but as of yet I have not received any. I don't know one tech support person from another, but I feel like whoever is handling my ticket now is not the same person who handled my ticket in November, and I'm really missing the service I received then.

I'm not even crashing. The lag is worse and I have a lot of packet loss, but the worst part is more about launching the game, and you can't submit a bug report from the load screen. My problems are not the same as most of the ones I've been hearing about, yet I'm being given the same cookie-cutter solution. It is disheartening, to say the least, and in five years of customer service, this is the first time when I haven't really been all that satisfied. Usually your tech support team is much better than this. Heck, last fall the problems went on for a good 4-6 weeks, but tech support was with me every step of the way, trying every solution imaginable, no matter how remote or unusual. Who would have thought crash logs could cause so many problems!

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.

Is there any way to turn that on? I haven't had the crash log prompt in well over a year, on both my laptop and my desktop. My laptop will crash all the time. My desktop, rarely (though very, very frequently when MT launched). But neither have prompted me to send in a crash report in a very, very long time. If either crash, they just crash hard to desktop. No error, no popup, no nothing. It's like the game just gave up and died.

[Gutterat]

We continue to work in the background on improving performance but the general feedback we are seeing through CS and bug reports and our own staff running trough the game is that the issues have mostly cleared up. However we do note that there are still some outliers which we are attempting to hunt down. If you are continuing to see crashing and severe lag problems please send in a big report in the area you are seeing the problem and/ or contact technical support so we can gather more information on the circumstances in which you are seeing the problem. Bug reports and the information gather by support can help us see if the issue you are having could be a regional or hardware conflict.

Thank you,
Vyvyanne

The Ettenmoors. Everywhere. For everyone. Lag. Crashing. Can't use some skills. Can't target. Totally unplayable.

It would be really easy to check this for any turbine staff:
Log a creep or a freep. Walk around the rear west corner of TR. Laugh as your character comes to a dead stop. Join a raid. Try taking a keep. Laugh as you watch your skills trying to work.

[Menweviel]

Why the hell dont your QA just play alittle themselfes during peaktime and you will have enough high quality bug report? You say you get 5-10 a day, ok, but then join us in the moors where nothing works and you can gather all the information you want.

I dont think you are telling us whats really going on here. Something (legal probably as the sick nation the u.s. are) made you change your new data center plans and there will be no EU DC ever. You are stuck in an infrastructure not made for gaming and things simple cant be fixed?

Well to be honest. Ive as sooo many others, have given up. I canceled my VIP. There are other games out there.

[Zachski]

Hostility solves nothing.

We're adults. If you can't at least pretend to act like an adult, then don't post at all. Your hostility and frustration is doing less then Turbine is doing.

[Menweviel]

Hostility solves nothing.

We're adults. If you can't at least pretend to act like an adult, then don't post at all. Your hostility and frustration is doing less then Turbine is doing.

But miss information, lack of acknowledgement of problems, asking for the obvious and ignore demands of compensation from the responible part does, you think?