The terrible Server Performance and SSG's lack of impactful changes to it is seriously pathetic

[Snobs]

How is it that server performance has been continually become worse and worse over the years with every single patch despite a decreasing player base?
How can an issue which affects 100% of the player base over multiple years in a negative way still exist?
How can it be that there has been very little communication by SSG regarding this issue other than "We're working on it" while not actually fixing anything (over years!)?
Why haven't there been any meaningful changes to performance that actually improved the server performance in any way ever?
How is anybody supposed to have fun if the servers fundamentally do not allow the game to run fluently in the slightest?
PvP isn't fun because of Lag. Raid vs Raid isn't even possible anymore. Even in PvE, the constant lags are incredibly disruptive nowadays. Hell, you can not even do landscape quests normally. This affects everyone!

Seriously. How do all these things still persist to this day? The server performance issues have become such a striking problem that it's pathetic how this couldn't be their #1 Priority of things to fix. How many more threads regarding server lag do we need for anything to happen?

[MourneBlade]

How can an issue which affects 100% of the player base over multiple years in a negative way still exist?

100% are you sure?
It RARELY affects me at all! Even after 15+ years of playing.

Raids/instances run pretty smooth.

Also I rarely venture to the moors and really don't give a care for PVMP, so that doesn't affect me either.

Guess I'm just lucky like that.

[Boraxxe]

100% are you sure?
It RARELY affects me at all! Even after 15+ years of playing.

Raids/instances run pretty smooth.

Also I rarely venture to the moors and really don't give a care for PVMP, so that doesn't affect me either.

Guess I'm just lucky like that.

Yes. It's quite the mystery.
I also have fairly uneventful game play, as others that I know.

Why do some players have "Terrible, almost unplayable Lag" and others have almost none?

[CaerArianrhod]

How is it that server performance has been continually become worse and worse over the years with every single patch despite a decreasing player base?
How can an issue which affects 100% of the player base over multiple years in a negative way still exist?
How can it be that there has been very little communication by SSG regarding this issue other than "We're working on it" while not actually fixing anything (over years!)?
Why haven't there been any meaningful changes to performance that actually improved the server performance in any way ever?
How is anybody supposed to have fun if the servers fundamentally do not allow the game to run fluently in the slightest?
PvP isn't fun because of Lag. Raid vs Raid isn't even possible anymore. Even in PvE, the constant lags are incredibly disruptive nowadays. Hell, you can not even do landscape quests normally. This affects everyone!

Seriously. How do all these things still persist to this day? The server performance issues have become such a striking problem that it's pathetic how this couldn't be their #1 Priority of things to fix. How many more threads regarding server lag do we need for anything to happen?

We will not see any answer from SSG.
As for so many years, the answer will be: silence.

How is it that server performance has been continually become worse and worse over the years ...
How can an issue which affects 100% of the player base over multiple years in a negative way still exist?

You can hear the answer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9sMvpZWybc&t=820s

[DoRonRon]

Try Evernight and you will know

Just need to login a new char to Evernight 3pm EST; wait in a queue for a bit first ofc, sort out a chat window showing only /wd, select preference for the smut filter (advised) and start a chatlog.

Who wants to take the simplest of actions to undermine their own assertions that are no more than a defence of their continued investment.

It's "lucky" there are no GMs or SSG staff around to admonish the "fruity" language users and reporting anyone now involves a ridiculous assault course in stead of a click or two.

[DoRonRon]

Just looked at the video:

I had to laugh when the subtitles came up with "Token World".

So long as SSG can downplay/deny the issues they don't need to inform the suits above and rock the gravy boat.

[Askelin]

There has been a large influx of players all claiming them sweet valar packs. And a lot of players are even sticking around to play, new and returning.
But the lag issues have been around for much longer than just the anniversary. You can see greater signs of server stress with various issues such as but surely not limited to...

-Taking a longer time to enter doors (particularly in Bree)
-Skill lag (makes my warden sad)
-Housing issues such as outside and indoor areas failing to load or permissions failing to load (relogging may or may not fix them)
-The connection failing when you load in resulting in you being forced to restart the game (signified by your character wearing no armour when you return), more commonly occurring if you log out in a housing area
-Rubberbanding, especially on warsteeds. Not usually a problem but it has gotten pretty bad recently
-Rubberbanding even off a mount, this can be particularly annoying to the point of being forced to relog
-Particularly bad lag in raids, even worse in pvp
-Chat issues that often fix themselves within 10 minutes of logging on, but still pretty annoying
-Items bartered/bought/transfered into inventory being delayed, sometimes tricking people to attempt to purchase the item again, you end up with 2 items. The trick is to wait, it hasn't been lost to the void it is just being delayed.
-Various issues with texture, object and player load (though this has always been a thing).

From what I've seen, a lot of people who say "what lag" usually aren't people who play particularly intensive parts of the game such as raiding or pvp activities, but I agree with OP when he says this issue affects everyone, rather it affects every demographic of the game no matter how casual or intense your style is. And I sincerely hope there are future efforts to help fix the lag issues in the game.
This won't come easy, this won't come quick, this won't come without trial and error, but I hope all the same for something meaningful to be done about it. And I don't particularly reckon removing sic'em and calling it a day was the developer plan.

[TharbadThief]

Over the last few days, I've tried to get myself interested in this game again after ~half a year of absence.

Logged on to several characters across several servers, mostly just to unpack some of the new freebies, anniversary gifts etc. Then I settled on a lvl 20ish character on Crickhollow because I wanted to see what they did with the Yondershire. During that whole time I spent questing in the newest area, the server population was very modest -- only a few hundreds non-anon .. and despite that, I constantly failed quests because of insane lag, total freezing, rubberbanding, "Reduced Awareness due to helping relieve server processing load", all the usual things.

I didn't seem to be the only one either, as the world chat was very regularly filling up with frustrated comments about poor server performance. So I'm sure everyone here knows by now, SSG included, that server population is only a part of the problem. If they still use that as a shield and deflect: "oh but there are soo many peeps in game right now" and leave it at that, I see they have learned absolutely nothing during these months.

I have to say, even if it may sound a bit edgy, that I miss this game surprisingly little, and what I saw during the past few days doesn't really draw me back before the next house upkeep is due.

[Gandolf_TheOld]

Yes. It's quite the mystery.
I also have fairly uneventful game play, as others that I know.

Why do some players have "Terrible, almost unplayable Lag" and others have almost none?

The route to the servers...

[Pontin_Finnberry]

So long as SSG can downplay/deny the issues they don't need to inform the suits above and rock the gravy boat.

SSG knows there is lag issues and they know its a problem and aren't denying anything, there are reasons we may not understand on why it hasn't been solved or made somewhat stable yet, just cause it hasn't been solved yet doesn't mean they are ignoring it.

[Raninia]

Cross-posting from another thread:

Lag continues to be a problem, and we continue to work on it. I understand it's frustrating that it continues to happen, but I can honestly say, I don't enjoy us having to constantly deal with this problem any more than y'all enjoy experiencing it.

Here's a quick update as to where we are now:
Overall, performance is in a better place than when Gundabad released, despite larger player concurrencies and overall player population. "Better" doesn't mean good, but it's nice to see that the months we spent working on various improvements over the past six months have born some fruit.
With Update 33, we saw a huge influx of players, the likes of which we haven't seen in at least 6 years. This has led to worsening performance across all worlds. We even thought we'd lost a Landroval blade - someone's gonna use this to try and argue we are or aren't virtualizing, we still are, but VMs still gotta live somewhere - but it went down temporarily and was successfully revived. We also re-rolled out a fix we'd introduced for 32 and then disabled for 32.0.2 because of issues related to the Spring Festival. It's gone really well and has further reduced some of the issues we're seeing.

We have in the works, and in various stages, several initiatives, some of which I've spoken about before:
64-bit servers are closer, but they have been just one can of worms after another. A lot of the game is built on assumptions about underlying architecture, so it's led to a lot of digging and reworking, but it's making progress. I don't have an ETA yet, but I've been told "Soon." This is a constant conversation I have with the folks involved, and I'll be getting more updates later today.
In part based on data we've been provided, we've sussed out previous issues, and are building better tooling to help us identify problems and their solutions faster. There are several things happening within here, but most of them won't have any immediate player-facing impact, since they'll just make it easier for us as we're solving the problems, not solve any itself. Nonetheless, this is important, and the next one should be ready as soon as this week.
Our deprecation of the 32-bit client is related to this work, as some of the improvements we're looking to make require 64-bit. Those next set of changes have been in testing now for a few weeks, and will hopefully get stabilized soon. Further improvements to the 64-bit client are coming, again based in part on player reports and data that have been provided, so thanks again for sending that stuff to us. Keep it coming
Later this week, we're also hoping to have several sets of new features ready for internal testing, that will help with some of the sources of lag around communication with the game databases. That's another avenue we're looking at to chip away at the problem.

There's a bunch of other stuff that's also down the line, but isn't as heavily focused atm, so don't want to speak about it too much yet. And this doesn't include changes we're making to our creation processes for new updates that will reduce the stress those areas place on clients and the game server, some of which we've seen benefit what we've released with the Angle and Yondershire, as well as future stuff to come.

We're still looking at this, we're still working on it, and we will continue to. A significant portion of the engineering effort that is being done and planned for the coming year is focused on continuing to improve the performance of the game for everyone. Thanks for your patience, I know it doesn't always come easy.

[DoRonRon]

Is the reincarnation of Snowborn in any of those discussions? We'd have argued at the merge it should never have been closed as our service on Evernight has been the poorer since.

All the work being done suggests marginal gains over some time that might alleviate mid pop servers. Evernight stands out as the preference for all non French and German EU players who aren't into that full role play experience. US has a choice of four main servers, LS's you undermine/sabotage with each new variant, bizarrely.

Do you want to retain or turn away new players because the performance is the worst of all the servers consistently? With some prior incumbents returning there and preferred server status for newcomers it has to be a better new experience to offer. Or are 150 max logins on a VIP LS with a Damocles Sword hanging over their continued existence the rub? Or are we back to server compatibility issues, can't recreate a target main server for Evernight players?

[Raninia]

Is the reincarnation of Snowborn in any of those discussions? We'd have argued at the merge it should never have been closed as our service on Evernight has been the poorer since.

All the work being done suggests marginal gains over some time that might alleviate mid pop servers. Evernight stands out as the preference for all non French and German EU players who aren't into that full role play experience. US has a choice of four main servers, LS's you undermine/sabotage with each new variant, bizarrely.

Do you want to retain or turn away new players because the performance is the worst of all the servers consistently? With some prior incumbents returning there and preferred server status for newcomers it has to be a better new experience to offer. Or are 150 max logins on a VIP LS with a Damocles Sword hanging over their continued existence the rub? Or are we back to server compatibility issues, can't recreate a target main server for Evernight players?

We're not planning any new live worlds at this time.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I understand your questions. Evernight is popular in part because it's popular; many players like to go to a popular world. We currently don't recommend it as the world for new players, so that's certainly not a consideration they're getting from us. I'm also not sure how the Legendary Worlds factor into any of this.

[tanlis]

We're not planning any new live worlds at this time.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I understand your questions. Evernight is popular in part because it's popular; many players like to go to a popular world. We currently don't recommend it as the world for new players, so that's certainly not a consideration they're getting from us. I'm also not sure how the Legendary Worlds factor into any of this.

One word, Reddit

People come in and ask what EU server they should go to and Evernight is always suggested.

[MimDerZwerg]

We're still looking at this, we're still working on it, and we will continue to. A significant portion of the engineering effort that is being done and planned for the coming year is focused on continuing to improve the performance of the game for everyone. Thanks for your patience, I know it doesn't always come easy.

I appreciate your update in one of these many threads.

For myself I can tell that the raid performance is really improved with HoA.
Sometimes it is still laggy, often when you join a raid or instance on server 30+.

Please keep working on the addressed issues step by step with a plan as you do.

Maybe you can implement "report lag" button which captures every detail (position, time, char data, population, ..etc.) needed for analyzing issues.

I guess chat server might be an issue too since every single action is blown there and the filters are obiously only display filters.

[maartena]

We're not planning any new live worlds at this time.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I understand your questions. Evernight is popular in part because it's popular; many players like to go to a popular world. We currently don't recommend it as the world for new players, so that's certainly not a consideration they're getting from us. I'm also not sure how the Legendary Worlds factor into any of this.

Well I do have an idea:

Anor is close to getting to live on its level cap.... I do not know when exactly it will hit that, but with the server going to 130 about 1 month ago, we have about 2-3 months before Anor joins the "live worlds" with level 140 content and essentially becomes a "regular" server. Since Anor is certainly less populated than most other worlds, maybe it is an idea to allow free transfers TO Anor (but not from) so people that are wanting a server that is a bit more quiet have a chance to do so and at the same time it helps Anor increase its own population. SSG can monitor and see how things go with the population.... and maybe it will alleviate some of the lag on some servers.

Now, I do not know how this will all work with transfers from EU worlds to Anor and US worlds to Anor and such things as transfers between the two remain an issue, but if such a thing were possible it may help a little to bring down the stress on some of the more busy servers.

I would expect that when the new Amazon TV series launches, it is an excellent opportunity for SSG to advertise for the game and attract new players, but for that to happen.... you would either need some more hardware in place to be able to host some more servers, or get a little creative with the hardware you currently have and expect to have for at least the 2022 budgetary year.... and perhaps free transfers between SOME servers, such as the scenario above, might help.

Just an idea, I do not know how viable this is.

[NeoNatal]

The route to the servers...

True dat.

I live in Massachusetts, only a couple of hops from the servers. I've played the game since the beginning, and have had very few lag problems over the years.

Location, location, location.

[techtite]

100% are you sure?
It RARELY affects me at all! Even after 15+ years of playing.

Raids/instances run pretty smooth.

Also I rarely venture to the moors and really don't give a care for PVMP, so that doesn't affect me either.

Guess I'm just lucky like that.

Rarely ? never. "Pretty" smooth is not smooth. So yes OP is right it affects 100%. If you are going to say it doesn't affect you(even though it does and you know it) fine but don't say rarely or kind of or barely or any other descriptors which says otherwise. Any lag, whether it happens for a split second or 5 minutes is lag pure and simple and it is affecting us all.

[DoRonRon]

We're not planning any new live worlds at this time.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I understand your questions. Evernight is popular in part because it's popular; many players like to go to a popular world. We currently don't recommend it as the world for new players, so that's certainly not a consideration they're getting from us. I'm also not sure how the Legendary Worlds factor into any of this.

Obviously because it's the only sensible choice given that English is a common second or third language in Europe if surrounding yourself with fantasists puts you off. It always has been the only choice since the merge. Where are you sending these dopes, a US server? Not in light of recent comments that an EU datacentre isn't totally off the table now and would block anyone's transfer? Or perhaps the Laurelin flock will have them brought into line to suit the suits better. Where IP loyalty is measured only in $$$ not those seeking a better service.

As of for the LS, unless you have somehow reduced overheads with the virtual setup that makes no difference to costs of keeping one server running or not then I'm just suggesting how'd you make space for a Snowborn with the same data structure as Evernight and available for free transfers to balance you out of your current problems and not ####### off newcomers who see the dreadful state of performance at it's very worst. With years of experience you can adapt your goals to bare it more easily, develop tricks to mitigate the worst of it, not possible if a newcomer has arrived from playing another publisher's games I'd suggest.

The login queues surprised many of us and ofc you all too. The threshold set in the game's infancy, perhaps from those same set in AC/AC2? We aren't pottering about SoE with half a dozen skills though. Honestly you have to set it at 1000 rather than 3000 to have our experience match those who continue to remark how lucky they are to not experience lag. But you can't do that. You do prevent us helping you out by charging us fortunes for a mature account to move server. But we on Evernight don't have that available as a serious option.

[MourneBlade]

Rarely ? never. "Pretty" smooth is not smooth. So yes OP is right it affects 100%. If you are going to say it doesn't affect you(even though it does and you know it) fine but don't say rarely or kind of or barely or any other descriptors which says otherwise. Any lag, whether it happens for a split second or 5 minutes is lag pure and simple and it is affecting us all.

Well if word semantics is the only rebuttal you have, come back when you have something better.

I stand by what I said.

[Thentix]

100% are you sure?
It RARELY affects me at all! Even after 15+ years of playing.

Raids/instances run pretty smooth.

Also I rarely venture to the moors and really don't give a care for PVMP, so that doesn't affect me either.

Guess I'm just lucky like that.

Yes. It's quite the mystery.
I also have fairly uneventful game play, as others that I know.

Why do some players have "Terrible, almost unplayable Lag" and others have almost none?

There are always those few people who claim they never experience anything bad. Yes, it is quite the mystery. I have amazing internet for california. I can connect to games overseas and have no lag whatsover. Games with a lot less revenue and players than SSG. Games with their servers a lot farther from me than SSG servers. I am usually the one saying I do not experience any lag but, I can assure you, most of the game is experiencing it. I lag out the wazoo here for some crazy reason. I agree with people here, it is utterly amazing how this is still a problem and a company that charges absurd prices for their expansions, with 1/8 the content and 3 times the price of other games expansions and get you to buy them by shaming you that you aren't the "ultimate fan" if you don't, can't fix their fixable servers.

[maartena]

One word, Reddit

People come in and ask what EU server they should go to and Evernight is always suggested.

Same on Facebook, especially now with Facebook actually having ads for the 15 year celebration....

There are many new players on Arkenstone for instance, which is typically suggested for the US side.

This image from the LotroStats website shows it clearly:



The activity on servers has nearly DOUBLED since the introduction of free content.... part of those are NEW players, and part of those are RETURNING players, but basically most servers have seen a big jump in people playing, and that has a heavy effect on the lag experienced by a great deal of servers, especially on the more busy ones such as Evernight for the EU and Arkenstone for the US.

[DoRonRon]

True dat.

I live in Massachusetts, only a couple of hops from the servers. I've played the game since the beginning, and have had very few lag problems over the years.

Location, location, location.

Many EU lifetimers bought in with that in mind. My ping was 44ms at the game's start. The narrative that "we'd be better served with a NJ datacentre". A crock the day it was uttered - months after the decision had been taken. Always a chosen narrative rather than one based on the facts/situation. Sorry blew the budget due to technical incompetence, would have been refreshing. Still it's ever the unseen issues that create the delays and yet can't factor that into tech dev goals. We're all wrapped up in a fantasy world in one way or another it seems.

P.S. @ Maartena the corresponding EU graph's Y-axis goes up to 320
For an RP server to be second it suggests a lack of options. Or being directed there?

[maartena]

P.S. @ Maartena the corresponding EU graph's Y-axis goes up to 320
For an RP server to be second it suggests a lack of options. Or being directed there?

I saw that. Evernight is by far the busiest server of ALL servers.

The only hope there may be for some, is that Anor is NOT a US server nor a EU server, and has population from every corner of the earth, and that server will join the live worlds in about 2-3 months, when it reaches level 140. It won't help people already ON Evernight, but perhaps people that will be joining because of the new Amazon series can then be directed there as the "preferred" server.

Maybe it is time to lock Evernight for a few months so no new accounts can join it until some lag issues have been addressed.

[DoRonRon]

I'd not want any newcomer trapped elsewhere like when the EU and US tags were dropped from the server lists on log in to the launcher and people got caught out by the preferred server and influenced why the datacentre got dropped.

The advantage of Arnor, if we can wait that long, is that it is "capable" of transfers to both US and EU main servers. I use the quotes intentionally. But it doesn't and never will provide a viable target for Evernight players. Y-axis 19 vs Y-axis 240 currently. And it still requires VIP, will that be dropped on catching up, can't remember offhand?