Lag. What is it? What CAN be done about it?

CovertDistress4 · December 2016

If you're a well intended person who is only guessing... or because your friend or buddy said so... don't respond, please. If you're wanting to vent your frustrations, this isn't your thread, start your own... I am truly trying to understand so that I don't flip out when it happens... I don't want your council, just aneed exact answer or a link that explains the cause and fix... thanks. Oh, ZOS, please feel free to explain... you won't, but it's an open door to you as well.

KisoValley · December 2016

We all know the easy fix is to revert the lighting patch and take away aoe caps. Majority/worst of the lag came around when the lighting patch was introduced. Zos try to claim it's just a coincidence cause they don't want to go back on an update but that's the simple answer for you.

outsideworld76 · December 2016

It's incompetence, that's what's causing the lag. It could have been fixed by now but ZoS [SNIP]

Edited for Profanity

ZOS_PeterT · December 2016

You may notice that we have edited posts on this thread because they contained Profanity, this is in violation of our Forum Rules.
Please in the future avoid doing this and keep comments constructive and on topic.

Sureshawt · December 2016

I'll assume you are talking about lag as in latency/ping and not FPS (Frames Per Second). They both can produce a laggy feel but the mechanics beneath are fundamentally different.

I''m gonna give you a quick rundown as a full technical explanation would be lengthy and full of jargon.

In layman terms lag can generally be caused by multiple issues including the following:
-Your home network
-Your ISP
-The Internet itself (http://www.internethealthreport.com/)

Lag can also be caused by the server core(cluster) of the service you are trying access through the Internet, in this case ESO through ZoS as well as their ISP.

You can easily isolate lag issues from being on your end/ISP or the Internet itself. If you have another online game and your performance is lag free then you know the lag is with ESO(ZoS) somewhere.

In my personal experience the lag is on the ZOS side 80-90% of the time. ESO used to run much more lag free back in the day before 1.6? (The lighting patch mentioned by another poster above).

I've heard that during this time frame ZoS implemented a cheat detection engine. This makes more sense then blaming it on a lightning change. Graphics are processed locally through your video card and while this can cause FPS loss it is unrelated to latency induced lag.

A cheat engine on the other hand has to process the network packets being sent from your client to make sure they are legit. This process has an overhead cost and associated delay in response which if it gets really busy will noticeably slow the response time back to your client. You get bad lag.

Again this is a very simplified summary of the issue without going into details on how the Internet works and the intricacies of packet switched networks much less the unknown details of ZoS server core capacities/engineering etc.

Sigtric · December 2016

One thing that has helped me tremendously in the pc-pvp side of things is turning off addons that are not critical.

The addons we run utilize memory and some processing power and things get dicey when the game is trying to use most or all resources available.