Evernight is unplayable due to lag... again

[Emaldiom]

We have had this issue on Evernight since Anvil days..
Just not as bad as this..

If i recall right this started happening when the 3man instances was released during 120 cap

[Zyot]

Was thinking to reinstall the game, but seeing that they can't deal with this issue after such a long time....makes me wonder if they actually want to do anything about it anymore.
It seems easier to avoid spending resources into this and milk what's left. Meanwhile "we're looking into this" a year later. Such a shame that the performance was much better 10+ years ago when the server's population was higher also.
Can't believe I was hoping to see at some point an EU located server like we used to have during Turbine/Codemasters time. Dream on!

[1Asy1]

Hi Cordovan,

Will Robin Flodin be addressing this point specifically in the near future, I'm hoping it's at the top of your issues list?

Thanks,

Lob

[Boskone08]

Could the Missions (likely a heavy load, esp with the Festival special missions) and Interludes (likely a very light load, but...) be 'spun off' to a new, dedicated server bank? A few seconds of additional transfer time going into and coming out of a Mission would be a pretty small price to pay if there was a noticeable improvement in the overall server performance? This does assume that load is a 'contributing factor' to the server issues, as indicated in the earlier post. To be honest, we already see a sometimes-significant delay (I've seen on the order of minutes, including today) in a Mission loading and being populated by mobs, esp. during high-load periods. The 'hand-off' delays might be excessive (including error-checking), but it might be worth consideration.

[Chrisbo-Sando]

What exactly is the reason you wont bring a European server?

Like it seems this game is plagued by lag, crashing and various other performance issues. Is there a plan to make upgrades to the game to combat such things? Is there a plan to put a server back in Europe to allow for european players to have a better connection, like we had when we started playing the game?

I personally feel, you need to write a dev blog at the very very least, to let the players know what is being done and what the plans are for the game as it continues to age.

[mcflyvii]

Jesus god, Arkenstone is unplayable right now. Just spent 30 minutes trying to put a handful of things in Vault and Shared Storage. What...the...hell...

[Odinshaw]

Jesus god, Arkenstone is unplayable right now. Just spent 30 minutes trying to put a handful of things in Vault and Shared Storage. What...the...hell...

I got kicked out; but that was after various struggles similar to what you mentioned. I went to get a snack and came back as my character pondered the movements of his digital assets in the etherworld between his inventory and the vault... and I was greeted upon my return that 'the connexion has been lost!'

Perhaps it is a busy night. It'd been a little glitchy throughout my playtime today, and various instances had what I considered to be aggressive notifications that I was getting kicked from them in 0 minutes once various goals were completed. Often you can choose to look around and smell the roses or slap a horse's rear or whatever before reaching an exit point or just leaving the instance via one's portait menu, but I never had the chance, as when the instances ended.. They really ended.

So, to me that meant they are (or were) aggressively managing the connection traffic.

One could speculate it's any number of reasons, especially if more than just one server is experiencing the performance issues.

[Shazzbot]

Jesus god, Arkenstone is unplayable right now. Just spent 30 minutes trying to put a handful of things in Vault and Shared Storage. What...the...hell...

Yep as someone from the UK playing on this server it's a nightmare. I have 5 second pauses just running forward sometimes, almost like the server is losing connection and sometimes I get disconnected after this pause. Something needs to be done.

[Braer]

Since this week's switch it off and on again I've noticed my regular quiet spot for sorting out the mail and storage has take a hit. It had me immediately wondering if some of the attempts to address the missions hand in is no more than stealing resources from elsewhere, if that's how it's done.

Juggling? When I reached my three ball jugging limit adding another ball made it very precarious and unstable. Hats off to anyone who can take on five then six. I can still juggle 2 balls with one hand but that's far less impressive so I chose to use both arms. The most impressive is taking a non juggler side by side into a three ball juggle, you can precisely throw to them for an easy catch in their dominant hand and pluck their throws from a wide volume to keep it going.

I'd prefer if they introduce a wholly character selectable "quiet place" you could exit a mission to and once updated continue to the mission/instance starter locale, it's how the workaround works so well. We still have many waiting around, perhaps they don't have access to ally hall ports or can't work out the missions stable locations or just never got the ports to many for it to work.

I don't know why it wasn't handled like the normal instances, just release the memory used on starting a new one or when declining the popup to return to it. Content bloat? Reminds me of the skills "bloat" reasoning for trait trees bunkum. Tackle the fundamentals rather than prod it I tell my Doctor, I wish.

[OghranNasty]

It's 2021 and the servers can't handle a mere 2k ppl online, also no matter what SSG do they can't do anything about the awful latency for EU players.

It might come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, but network latency has surprisingly little effect on Lotro's performance issues.

I have been seeing a pretty constant 95-ish mS latency over the years, and while that figure sounds terrible, I have had smooth gameplay with it. This is so counter-intuitive that I've taken to checking the network numbers (as reported by the game) every time performance issues irritate me. There usually is no correlation at all. I've even noted relatively smooth gameplay with 120 mS latency a few times.

I'm not saying that latency doesn't have a part in performance issues, but based on my observations it doesn't as long as the number stays below 100 mS.

What does correlate with bad game performance is population and packet loss. Packet loss is the worst: even 0.1% renders the game unplayable for me.

[BlitzKr1eg]

It might come as a surprise to you, as it did to me, but network latency has surprisingly little effect on Lotro's performance issues.

I have been seeing a pretty constant 95-ish mS latency over the years, and while that figure sounds terrible, I have had smooth gameplay with it. This is so counter-intuitive that I've taken to checking the network numbers (as reported by the game) every time performance issues irritate me. There usually is no correlation at all. I've even noted relatively smooth gameplay with 120 mS latency a few times.

I'm not saying that latency doesn't have a part in performance issues, but based on my observations it doesn't as long as the number stays below 100 mS.

What does correlate with bad game performance is population and packet loss. Packet loss is the worst: even 0.1% renders the game unplayable for me.

Even if it's an MMO a latency of a whopping 120 ms is very noticeable, even tho it's far from the biggest problem. I never said it had an impact on the network performance? I did say that the latency issue won't be solved until we get a server located in Europe.

[Once_of_Bree]

Evernight is almost unplayable yet again. Handing in missions 3+ minutes, swapping trait line minutes, which means you can't use any skills for minutes, loading housing minutes, both the last two you can see them load 1 by 1.
Please no more new stuff, no new features until server issues resolved and they actually stay resolved for 2+ weeks.

[Burzdolion]

This lag question keeps getting brought up on the weekly LOTRO stream and it's constantly given barely any weight.

Would love for a GM to come raid with us on a Saturday night and experience the absolute frustrating lag intervals the group has to put up each time. It's not playable at all, and we're having to quit the raid because of it.

This thread has been ongoing for a while and SSG seem like they couldn't give less of a ####.

[Thurallor]

What exactly is the reason you wont bring a European server?

Like it seems this game is plagued by lag, crashing and various other performance issues. Is there a plan to make upgrades to the game to combat such things? Is there a plan to put a server back in Europe to allow for european players to have a better connection, like we had when we started playing the game?

I personally feel, you need to write a dev blog at the very very least, to let the players know what is being done and what the plans are for the game as it continues to age.

They don't make a European server because it would cost more. That's all.

Network latency (i.e. the amount of time it takes your packets to travel over the internet to/from the server) is not the primary source of performance problems in this game. In the absence of packet loss (stop using WiFi if you haven't already), and on a low-population server, there is no appreciable difference in gameplay between players in San Francisco and players in London.

However, in the presence of packet loss, network latency can increase the effect. If you are losing packets, the greater latency means that it takes longer to notice the error and either retry sending the data, or proceed without it. (Depending on the particular protocol being used, which is not public information.)

[Braer]

UDP

[OghranNasty]

Even if it's an MMO a latency of a whopping 120 ms is very noticeable, even tho it's far from the biggest problem. I never said it had an impact on the network performance? I did say that the latency issue won't be solved until we get a server located in Europe.

I didn't mean to say you are wrong, just wanted to add my own observations on the matter, which quite surprised me.

In my day job ping times above 10 mS are a serious issue, many of the tools we work with get into 'go get coffee' up to 'go do the week's shopping' territory with such numbers. As a techie, I am seriously impressed by how well the game can perform on such latency numbers. Caching strategies in a multi-actor environment are rather seriously tricky, but the engine seems to handle that rather well. Pity it doesn't scale to high population as well.

[Nubja]

In the absence of any meaningful update on or improvement to the server performance in this game... bump.

Please give us something meaningful. You've been "aware and working on it" for longer than we can remember and we're sick of the vague, worthless responses.

Show. Us. Action.

[Nubja]

Down all day and now it performs even worse!
Freezing for 15s at a time in raids now <3
2-3s skill delay <3

Really impressive work SSG

[BinaryTertiary]

there is no lag get a better pc

my 2011 gaming laptop i got from my sister's father-in-laws grandson's friend has no lag when i afk in bree auction house

/s

[Ungolliant]

Funny how people say its unplayable yet they play for hours they come here after playing with lag and they state it is unplayable, last time i checked it was 700+ players on Evernight when i logged far from unplayable sorry illogical post

2 sec delay is not being unplayable or ocassional crash , freeze, do you what is really being so unplayable ? really its quite obvious

lol at players saying so lightly what is unplayable or not

[Nubja]

Funny how people say its unplayable yet they play for hours they come here after playing with lag and they state it is unplayable, last time i checked it was 700+ players on Evernight when i logged far from unplayable sorry illogical post

2 sec delay is not being unplayable or ocassional crash , freeze, do you what is really being so unplayable ? really its quite obvious

lol at players saying so lightly what is unplayable or not

Yet another festival monkey who doesn't do anything outside of landscape I guess

[Braer]

A bit of venting when your endeavours are close to your limits only to be trashed by random spikes?

The "investigations" seem not to be making headway, but why would they if the obvious reasons are not on the table or openly acknowledged?

[Ungolliant]

Yet another festival monkey who doesn't do anything outside of landscape I guess

Exactly nothing because nearly everything landscape is terribly bad and fallen, do you think i will bring myself to torment of end game grind and quality of raids or monster play just general instances is nothing what it used to be

you put it will i only do landscape and story because thats the best lotro can offer

far from unplayable

i think it is often miss-leading players who say unplayable their definition does not accomodate their wishes of appropriate FPS so easier to say its unplayable

you can enjoy 5 FPS - 15 Raids

[Nubja]

Exactly nothing because nearly everything landscape is terribly bad and not fallen, do you think i will bring myself to torment of end game grind and quality of raids or monster play just general instances is nothing what it used to be

you put it will i only do landscape and story because thats the best lotro can offer

far from unplayable

i think it is often miss-leading players who say unplayable their definition does not accomodate their wishes of appropriate FPS so easier to say its unplayable

Ah so you are just a clown thx for confirming. If you take a second to use your eyes (might be hard for you I know) you'll se this is nothing to do with fps

[Ungolliant]

there is no lag get a better pc

my 2011 gaming laptop i got from my sister's father-in-laws grandson's friend has no lag when i afk in bree auction house

/s

lag in lotro has barely do anything with quality of pc judging how game is old lol

even if you put settings to lowest on powerful machine it will slow and stutter in some scenarios especially wirth a lot of units on screen , etc

its the engine to blame cannot handle it or connection

i have more lag now then i had with my 2006 pc in SoA same settings i can put its much worse now