"Enjoy the Lag?"

ThePonzzz

Odd thing happened today during PvP. I died. No, that's not the odd thing. I was trapped inside an enemy keep by myself when I finally got caught. I was picking people off as best as I could and hiding all over the place. Eventually, one of the players I killed said, "enjoy the lag." I didn't quite know how to respond, so I just ignored it. Figured it was someone just trash talking and I didn't understand. About a minute or so after I got that comment, my ping went from about 100 to 500 and my FPS dropped to under 20. No one was around me. Within a moment, I was surrounded and the death screen was up before I knew how I died. Is this just a coincidence or did someone actually cause a lag spike to kill me? I'm really not a high profile PvP player. Just someone trying to get better at it.

Decayed_Inside

Sounds like they are a modder. You on PC or console? I think next gen consoles are jailbroken but not widespread yet

ThePonzzz

PC. Happened today while I was trapped in Glademist.

mr1sho

Sound like he flooded your IP

Decayed_Inside

Kids on console say things like "Offline " and it kicks you off for like 5 mins. Not sure what they are doing. Not just off ESO but off PSN completely

Slappah

Decayed_Inside wrote: »

Kids on console say things like "Offline " and it kicks you off for like 5 mins. Not sure what they are doing. Not just off ESO but off PSN completely

It's called being booted offline

They just flood your IP and time you out

It's not just consoles either, it can happen to pc players as well, and if anything, it's probably easier to do on pc.

TX12001rwb17_ESO

ThePonzzz wrote: »

Odd thing happened today during PvP. I died. No, that's not the odd thing. I was trapped inside an enemy keep by myself when I finally got caught. I was picking people off as best as I could and hiding all over the place. Eventually, one of the players I killed said, "enjoy the lag." I didn't quite know how to respond, so I just ignored it. Figured it was someone just trash talking and I didn't understand. About a minute or so after I got that comment, my ping went from about 100 to 500 and my FPS dropped to under 20. No one was around me. Within a moment, I was surrounded and the death screen was up before I knew how I died. Is this just a coincidence or did someone actually cause a lag spike to kill me? I'm really not a high profile PvP player. Just someone trying to get better at it.

Someone lie that needs to be banned for life.

Malmai

ThePonzzz wrote: »

Odd thing happened today during PvP. I died. No, that's not the odd thing. I was trapped inside an enemy keep by myself when I finally got caught. I was picking people off as best as I could and hiding all over the place. Eventually, one of the players I killed said, "enjoy the lag." I didn't quite know how to respond, so I just ignored it. Figured it was someone just trash talking and I didn't understand. About a minute or so after I got that comment, my ping went from about 100 to 500 and my FPS dropped to under 20. No one was around me. Within a moment, I was surrounded and the death screen was up before I knew how I died. Is this just a coincidence or did someone actually cause a lag spike to kill me? I'm really not a high profile PvP player. Just someone trying to get better at it.

Its called PvP in ESO, best coding, best servers...

Docmandu

coincidence. The person you killed probably got fed up with the lag.. and let me guess, you were an NB?!

JaJaLuka

It could be that your ping spiked because they were all sneaking towards you, the more people around the higher the ping. It would also explain why they "suddenly" appeared and killed you.
Mind you, I don't generally keep up with hacks/bots or whatever people do that totally trash other people's game experience, so I wouldn't know if they were actually using anything like that.

riverdragon72

ThePonzzz wrote: »

PC. Happened today while I was trapped in Glademist.

PM me name and alliance plz, I have some video gathered of simillar circumstances I will be turning in soon.

Clarkieson

Was it a buch of reds? I have had long chats with blues and we all agree there is something up with the reds. No proof or evidence to provide but its strange how blues and yellows notice "funny things" when it comes to the reds.

If you can get your ip flooded and timed out, what is to stop them lagswitching as well? Seen it before on playstation with other mmo's and no one shows any interest in putting a stop to the cheating. Sad really .

ThePonzzz

I dunno, it was just rather odd, because I don't know if he was just upset with the lag and left (like someone mentioned). They weren't sneaking around me though. They ran in, the FPS got so choppy, I could see them running toward my direction, and then suddenly, they were there.

But yes, I am a nightblade EP, it was on Azura's, and it was around the time where Glademist was red. I ran in there to help defend, but there were hardly any defenders, so after it flipped, I hid and started picking people off.

The incident itself was pretty insignificant, I just was curious about if this is a new thing. I die all the time, I couldn't care less. I didn't save any names of the attackers/victim. Just thought I'd ask here. I always hear about these lag switches and latency spikes, but it's never happened so... Perfectly?

It recovered right after the death. Maybe there were a ton of people around me in stealth that I didn't see.

JD2013

I don't call them the Zergenheart Pact or Lagenheart Pact for nothing.

I always notice the spikes around large groups of reds. Never around yellows.

AlnilamE

Where they all running Magicka Detonation? Because when groups stack and rush in while charging that is when I experience a lot of lag.

Elsonso

My first thought was quite a bit different from the prevailing wind in here. The guy who whispered probably knew that a zerg was on the way, whether because he announced that you were there or because he knew from others that it was coming. Lag is a given at that point.

Lehman

He saw the ball Zerg coming.

Theory is they moved a lot of the client calculations to the server side to prevent botting in the past (crazy coldharbor bot trains). The servers themselves could/can handle the process load, the nic or the switches can't, they appear to bottlenecking and dropping packets. Those "lag" spikes are dropped packets.

So really the cause of this lag/freezing is the dropping of tcp packets. They use tcp not udp which is another nerdy topic to get into.

The cause of these dropped packets though, oh man that is a huge mess to dig through and I feel bad for that group of IT guys. Because normally you want to point to the straw that broke the camels back but in practice it won't fix it. It's a slew of things that snowballed.

A Zerg of players though is just not the cause. Depending on setup/gear/colors/abilities/cp so on and so on a group of 8 players can create as many calculations as a group of 40 players and flood the NIC/Switches/firewall/router.

Until they change client and server relationship, this won't go away. Client requires too many check ins.

LegacyDM

Slappah wrote: »

Decayed_Inside wrote: »

Kids on console say things like "Offline " and it kicks you off for like 5 mins. Not sure what they are doing. Not just off ESO but off PSN completely

It's called being booted offline

They just flood your IP and time you out

It's not just consoles either, it can happen to pc players as well, and if anything, it's probably easier to do on pc.

How would they know his IP? Only ZOS would know. It's not like they can packet sniff ZOS connection than isolate to that guy.

However, they could have been using a device called a lag switch, look it up on google.

riverdragon72

There are 3 players that if I tab target and concentrate on that funny things happen, extreme lag, fps goes down to 3-5, they are near impossible to hit. When I untarget them and move to someone else in the group everything goes back to normal, tab target again and it starts all over.

Then there was the "cloaking" DK in our scroll temple the other night. I got two attacks from stealth off, POOF he disappears from right next to the scroll platform. A few seconds late he reappears by the outer gates, I get a critcal rush on him, POOF, disappears again, reappears over by the ruins where the sky shard is where I finally knock him down. There was maybe 40 people total on the server at the time, so no it wasn't lag.

KhajitFurTrader

Lehman wrote: »

Those "lag" spikes are dropped packets.

So really the cause of this lag/freezing is the dropping of tcp packets. They use tcp not udp which is another nerdy topic to get into.

I see the direction you're going with this, and I think you might be on to something with your assessment. Here's a great write-up on the topic whether games could/should use TCP or UDP, pointing out advantages and drawbacks of each for a variety of use cases. For most MMOs, especially those with a client-side global cooldown around 1000 ms, TCP can be alright to use, as occasional lag spikes due to TCP congestion control might be masked by this. But since combat in ESO is resource-based, and thus more "twitchy", the effects of packet loss/latency spikes are felt more harshly.

Lehman wrote: »

The cause of these dropped packets though, oh man that is a huge mess to dig through and I feel bad for that group of IT guys. Because normally you want to point to the straw that broke the camels back but in practice it won't fix it. It's a slew of things that snowballed.

Surely I wouldn't want to be the guy who fields the idea of completely rewriting network code to use UDP at this point in time. Would you?

Lehman wrote: »

Until they change client and server relationship, this won't go away. Client requires too many check ins.

Yeah, but don't forget Raph Koster's "the client is in the hands of the enemy" from his Laws of Online World Design. No offense meant, he uses drastic wording to drive home the point to developers that no inbound data can ever be trusted and would have to be checked for plausibility all the time. The game had a real problem at the beginning with farmers/botters using unintended ways of moving, word on the street back then was that it was all too easy to pull off. That was changed, fortunately.

I like to think that somewhere there's a middle ground, it just would have to be approached iteratively.

Lehman

He used Elusive mist under the Vampire tree. What you just described is exactly right with the "cloaking dk.

riverdragon72

^^ Mmm no..

Digerati

mr1sho wrote: »

Sound like he flooded your IP

How would he have gotten a player's IP?

GreenSoup2HoT

joshdm2001_ESO wrote: »

Slappah wrote: »

Decayed_Inside wrote: »

Kids on console say things like "Offline " and it kicks you off for like 5 mins. Not sure what they are doing. Not just off ESO but off PSN completely

It's called being booted offline

They just flood your IP and time you out

It's not just consoles either, it can happen to pc players as well, and if anything, it's probably easier to do on pc.

How would they know his IP? Only ZOS would know. It's not like they can packet sniff ZOS connection than isolate to that guy.

However, they could have been using a device called a lag switch, look it up on google.

@Digerati

It's very easy to get a player's ip address on console. PlayStation's own party chat system.

Someone can invite you to a party chat and simply find your ip address by going into their network setting's on pc and looking at the ps4 connection's. (This does require a 3rd party program on your pc to define what the ps4 is connecting to).

Once you find that ip you just flood it with another 3rd party program (usually a paid service). It's these 2 program's on pc that allow you to do this. There are many youtube video's that show people how to do this and state they are "educational video's" with warning's so they do not get sued them self's.

This is common on console but easily avoid-able. Never join a party chat without messaging them first and asking what they want. This is illegal. If this happen's to you, just report that person. Sony can look into it and potentially ban their psn.

It's very rare to see these kind's of people, i don't doubt their are people in eso who do this.

ThePonzzz

This was all on PC, sorry if I didn't express that earlier on. I'm also not on a witch hunt or anything like that. We didn't lose the campaign because of this move. It was just something that struck me as very odd. As I've gotten better at PvP, I've been getting more and more whispers from players. I never *knew* of this side of PvP until recently. I'd never whisper to someone to harass them because they killed me (no matter how cheap they were). Dying in PvP is an accepted reality.

Lehman

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Lehman wrote: »

Those "lag" spikes are dropped packets.

So really the cause of this lag/freezing is the dropping of tcp packets. They use tcp not udp which is another nerdy topic to get into.

I see the direction you're going with this, and I think you might be on to something with your assessment. Here's a great write-up on the topic whether games could/should use TCP or UDP, pointing out advantages and drawbacks of each for a variety of use cases. For most MMOs, especially those with a client-side global cooldown around 1000 ms, TCP can be alright to use, as occasional lag spikes due to TCP congestion control might be masked by this. But since combat in ESO is resource-based, and thus more "twitchy", the effects of packet loss/latency spikes are felt more harshly.

Lehman wrote: »

The cause of these dropped packets though, oh man that is a huge mess to dig through and I feel bad for that group of IT guys. Because normally you want to point to the straw that broke the camels back but in practice it won't fix it. It's a slew of things that snowballed.

Surely I wouldn't want to be the guy who fields the idea of completely rewriting network code to use UDP at this point in time. Would you?

Lehman wrote: »

Until they change client and server relationship, this won't go away. Client requires too many check ins.

Yeah, but don't forget Raph Koster's "the client is in the hands of the enemy" from his Laws of Online World Design. No offense meant, he uses drastic wording to drive home the point to developers that no inbound data can ever be trusted and would have to be checked for plausibility all the time. The game had a real problem at the beginning with farmers/botters using unintended ways of moving, word on the street back then was that it was all too easy to pull off. That was changed, fortunately.

I like to think that somewhere there's a middle ground, it just would have to be approached iteratively.

KhajitFurTrader wrote: »

Lehman wrote: »

Those "lag" spikes are dropped packets.

So really the cause of this lag/freezing is the dropping of tcp packets. They use tcp not udp which is another nerdy topic to get into.

I see the direction you're going with this, and I think you might be on to something with your assessment. Here's a great write-up on the topic whether games could/should use TCP or UDP, pointing out advantages and drawbacks of each for a variety of use cases. For most MMOs, especially those with a client-side global cooldown around 1000 ms, TCP can be alright to use, as occasional lag spikes due to TCP congestion control might be masked by this. But since combat in ESO is resource-based, and thus more "twitchy", the effects of packet loss/latency spikes are felt more harshly.

Lehman wrote: »

The cause of these dropped packets though, oh man that is a huge mess to dig through and I feel bad for that group of IT guys. Because normally you want to point to the straw that broke the camels back but in practice it won't fix it. It's a slew of things that snowballed.

Surely I wouldn't want to be the guy who fields the idea of completely rewriting network code to use UDP at this point in time. Would you?

Lehman wrote: »

Until they change client and server relationship, this won't go away. Client requires too many check ins.

Yeah, but don't forget Raph Koster's "the client is in the hands of the enemy" from his Laws of Online World Design. No offense meant, he uses drastic wording to drive home the point to developers that no inbound data can ever be trusted and would have to be checked for plausibility all the time. The game had a real problem at the beginning with farmers/botters using unintended ways of moving, word on the street back then was that it was all too easy to pull off. That was changed, fortunately.

I like to think that somewhere there's a middle ground, it just would have to be approached iteratively.

I can't disagree at all you can't trust the traffic, but like you said somewhere there is a middle ground and I hope they can find it. I've been in and out of this game since November 2013 beta and seen the performance changes, the good and the bad.

I hate saying it but going the route of phase/zones and maxing population to reduce the traffic would be the quickest solution. Or reduce in game functions or character functions, as bad as it will look turning off certain character animations or shadows could also have a drastic impact.

Using only graphics as the only tell, design or lack there of a UI may be huge misstep by them. By implementing a correct UI, they could probably reduce the load of animations.

About the TCP/UDP, there's no back tracking, they need to trim the excess data fat to prevent the bottlenecking we are seeing.

Digerati

GreenSoup2HoT wrote: »

joshdm2001_ESO wrote: »

Slappah wrote: »

Decayed_Inside wrote: »

Kids on console say things like "Offline " and it kicks you off for like 5 mins. Not sure what they are doing. Not just off ESO but off PSN completely

It's called being booted offline

They just flood your IP and time you out

It's not just consoles either, it can happen to pc players as well, and if anything, it's probably easier to do on pc.

How would they know his IP? Only ZOS would know. It's not like they can packet sniff ZOS connection than isolate to that guy.

However, they could have been using a device called a lag switch, look it up on google.

@Digerati

It's very easy to get a player's ip address on console. PlayStation's own party chat system.

Someone can invite you to a party chat and simply find your ip address by going into their network setting's on pc and looking at the ps4 connection's. (This does require a 3rd party program on your pc to define what the ps4 is connecting to).

Once you find that ip you just flood it with another 3rd party program (usually a paid service). It's these 2 program's on pc that allow you to do this. There are many youtube video's that show people how to do this and state they are "educational video's" with warning's so they do not get sued them self's.

This is common on console but easily avoid-able. Never join a party chat without messaging them first and asking what they want. This is illegal. If this happen's to you, just report that person. Sony can look into it and potentially ban their psn.

It's very rare to see these kind's of people, i don't doubt their are people in eso who do this.

holy *** that is a gigantic security hole... WOW consoles suck. Is that also present on the xbone version?

I know that joining a teamspeak or mumble server on PC can reveal your IP to the TS/mumble server admin, but it doesn't get revealed to other users...

User-to-user IP explication is insane... imagine if we were to leave a security hole like that in our enterprise systems... Canned! You may even be put in prison for compromising data like that! negligence? I'm pretty outraged for you guys...

ContraTempo

Digerati wrote: »

User-to-user IP explication is insane... imagine if we were to leave a security hole like that in our enterprise systems... Canned! You may even be put in prison for compromising data like that! negligence? I'm pretty outraged for you guys...

LoL, as an employee of a federal agency, oh yeah. We would even hear about the results in campaign speeches.

Tomato

The lag is real!

Docmandu

Lehman wrote: »

The servers themselves could/can handle the process load, the nic or the switches can't, they appear to bottlenecking and dropping packets. Those "lag" spikes are dropped packets.

So really the cause of this lag/freezing is the dropping of tcp packets. They use tcp not udp which is another nerdy topic to get into.

Thanks for the laugh... now back to reality...

Digerati

ContraTempo wrote: »

Digerati wrote: »

User-to-user IP explication is insane... imagine if we were to leave a security hole like that in our enterprise systems... Canned! You may even be put in prison for compromising data like that! negligence? I'm pretty outraged for you guys...

LoL, as an employee of a federal agency, oh yeah. We would even hear about the results in campaign speeches.

I do enterprise infrastructure support and deal with federal/state agencies... I can't imagine the consequences of letting something like that go live... is this a PSN issue or a ESO issue?

Is the xbone version also affected? How big is this data breach?