What Actually Causes/Eliminates Bad Ping/Lag?

Night_Wolf2112

I am not a very technical person and don't always understand how things happen. Please explain what causes Lag and what can actually be done to eliminate it! Also, if it can be eliminated or lessened, what keeps ZoS from actually implementing said fix?

cjthibs

There are probably 50 different variables to consider.

I'd bet about 90% of people who complain about really bad lag are playing on Wi-fi.
(Outside of Cyrodiil....Cyrodiil is a different matter entirely.)

jedtb16_ESO

ping.... is about your connection to the server.

Milvan

I live in southeast of Brazil. Besides the very bad internet provider services, we also get bad ping because of the distance from the US server.

Just to point a few.

Night_Wolf2112

Ok... I live in the middle of the US. I have Ethernet connection (supposedly some kind of fiber wire thing)! What's my problem? My ping flies between 300 and 900 on bad spikes when I PvP. Like I said, I don't fully understand how it works.... I need it spelled out like I am a 6th grader or something!

Draqone

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

I am not a very technical person and don't always understand how things happen. Please explain what causes Lag and what can actually be done to eliminate it! Also, if it can be eliminated or lessened, what keeps ZoS from actually implementing said fix?

There are 2 causes of what people call "lag". Turning on the FPS/Ping display in the interface will allow you to find the right cause.

FPS - Frames per Second
First is their PCs not being able to handle the game. Many people claim they have good PCs while in reality they are playing on a laptop or a very old or just poorly built PC. This means they experience frame rate (FPS) drops especially during boss fights and crowded locations like main cities where there are a lot of players and fancy effects for their PCs to process. This is technically not lag but many people call it that nevertheless.

Ping (also called latency) - time measured in miliseconds
The second one is ping which is the time in which the data arrives and is processed by the game server.

Data travels to the server in packets. If the packets have a long way to travel or they get lost and need to be resent it results in lag. The reasons why data might arrive to the server slowly or late are:

• You play on wifi and some packets get lost because of interference. The best fix for that is to not play on wifi.
• You are far away from the server.
• Your internet provider sucks.

In ESOs case there is also the issue that sometimes a lot of time is taken by the server to process all the requests from the users (players). If there is too many requests at once they are put into a queue and of course standing in a queue increases the travel time. This is most noticeable in locations like major trade hubs and Cyrodill where large groups of players stay in one place.

wayfarerx

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

Ok... I live in the middle of the US. I have Ethernet connection (supposedly some kind of fiber wire thing)! What's my problem? My ping flies between 300 and 900 on bad spikes when I PvP. Like I said, I don't fully understand how it works.... I need it spelled out like I am a 6th grader or something!

There are literally about a million things that can go wrong between your machine and the server that can cause lag. Your home network might suck, your ISP might suck, the interchanges between your ISP and ZOS's servers might suck, ZOS's servers themselves might be getting overwhelmed, etc.

The best you can do on your end is make sure that your home network is solid and that you get minimal latency from your ISP.

Night_Wolf2112

Thanks, Good Explanations!

Draqone - you win for spelling it out for me!

If others would like to win too, feel free to spell out your definition of the problem!

yodased

There is a handshake connection between your computer and the server.

There are also the same connections from all other computers.

Each button you press, each lighting change and shadow is sent to the server from yours and every one elses computer.

FPS drops come when there is too much information to process FROM the server to your computer. Your computer literally can not compute the variables fast enough to show smooth movement. You fix FPS by lowering the expectations of your CPU, the less things it has to process and send to the GPU, the better and smoother your animation will be. Lower your settings until you get a mixture you are happy with.

Latency, or LAG comes when the SERVER can not process the amount of information and return it to the client in the expected time. There is a round trip of data when you press 1 it gets sent to the server that you just pressed 1 and 1 is this skill. The server says, OK lets check to see if anyone is in the area of effect of 1, including the caster. This and thousands of other checks are happening pretty constantly, when the server can not handle the load, it slows everything down and responds slower than expected, giving you a definitive pause before the things you want to do from the client are acknowledged from the server.

Latency also has to do with distance and bandwith, but they are less of an issue than packet return speed.

SirAndy

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

I am not a very technical person and don't always understand how things happen. Please explain what causes Lag and what can actually be done to eliminate it! Also, if it can be eliminated or lessened, what keeps ZoS from actually implementing said fix?

Bad client/server code is the main source of "lag" in ESO.
The only way to fix it would be to re-write the entire client/server system.

Interestingly enough, many of us early beta testers warned ZOS about the shortcomings of their code long before this game ever launched on PC.

And here we are, 3 years later, still talking about lag ...

thewolphub17_ESO

I haven't seen anyone mention it so far, but addons and cause problems as well, like minimap addons.

Patouf

This is the equation :

Servers + Code + localisation + bad engineers = Latency-LAG-Ping + FPS drops + UI/Crash/Errors bugs + Memory leak



That is all about the ZOS job and technically that does not shine, not at all.

DaedraPrinceSatan

1st: Your bandwidth speed - When you download or ESPECIALLY upload something while playing the ping goes high, also up to your provider and general bandwidth capability
2nd: Territory - If you try to play on Russian or US server but you are living in the EU, you are better off not playing at all or use the EU server. US is usually still fine as long as you dont have a crap provider or live on a farm.
3rd: Bad computer - When you have low FPS, it "lags" too. However, this is not considered a ping/connection problem usually.

There are more possibitlies but they are too unlikely to name.

bertenburnyb16_ESO

What causes it: ESO
What eliminates it: uninstalling ESO

Asmodean

As people here have already responded with the wikipedia statements - I'll skip that.

As mentioned above: quite a lot of people mistake 'network lag' for input delay or low fps. Which is not the same thing.

ESO specific: I've no latency issues outside of Cyrodiil. In Cyrodiil near battles, etc is another matter. Can be unplayable.

Example: you don't see many people complaining about a steady, consistently bad latency. It's generally Cyrodiil related, and unstable spikes, etc.

(this is just speculation) I think ZOS is using some unusual P2P form of shared packet transfer using player machines within a certain radius of the player to crunch packet I/O. Simply because - if the server objectively couldn't handle X amount of people using their abilities at once, etc, etc during battles in Cyrodiil (where the game is very bad for latency). It wouldn't matter where you were on the map - you would still have the same ms spikes happening. But it only seems bad when you're near the action.

Unless they're using some kind of server phase instancing that's transferring you to different server instances based on location on the map. The fact that the ms issues only happen relatively near the large fights, etc show me that they haven't instanced off the server I/O for each player. Seems like each player is have server I/O for all other players around them along with themselves.

Each player should have instanced off server I/O. Direct from you to the server. Not passing through everyone else around first.

That turned into a semi-wall of text #_# my b

potirondb16_ESO

Asmodean wrote: »

As people here have already responded with the wikipedia statements - I'll skip that.

As mentioned above: quite a lot of people mistake 'network lag' for input delay or low fps. Which is not the same thing.

ESO specific: I've no latency issues outside of Cyrodiil. In Cyrodiil near battles, etc is another matter. Can be unplayable.

Example: you don't see many people complaining about a steady, consistently bad latency. It's generally Cyrodiil related, and unstable spikes, etc.

(this is just speculation) I think ZOS is using some unusual P2P form of shared packet transfer using player machines within a certain radius of the player to crunch packet I/O. Simply because - if the server objectively couldn't handle X amount of people using their abilities at once, etc, etc during battles in Cyrodiil (where the game is very bad for latency). It wouldn't matter where you were on the map - you would still have the same ms spikes happening. But it only seems bad when you're near the action.

Unless they're using some kind of server phase instancing that's transferring you to different server instances based on location on the map. The fact that the ms issues only happen relatively near the large fights, etc show me that they haven't instanced off the server I/O for each player. Seems like each player is have server I/O for all other players around them along with themselves.

Each player should have instanced off server I/O. Direct from you to the server. Not passing through everyone else around first.

That turned into a semi-wall of text #_# my b

Maestrom Arena also have a VERY BAD lag !

Kaspar

Reducing your GPU settings and in game graphical settings/video bling can help a lot in PVP. Naturally a 2GB memory GPU or greater is an asset if supported by your computer and can allow for higher quality settings. I'm using a 1 GB card since the 2 GB card I received apparently is faulty and/or not compatible with my motherboard and I haven't bothered to try a different one.

My GPU settings for ESO:
AA: Use application settings
Filter: Standard
Morphological Filtering: Off
AF: Use application settings
Texture Filtering Quality: Performance
Surface Format Optimization: Off
Wait for Vertical Refresh: Off, unless application specifies
OpenGL Triple Buffering: Off
This is for an AMD GPU using Catalyst Control Center, but NVidia cards have a similar control panel.

In Game Settings:
AA: 4x
Texturing: High
View Distance: 100%
All the bling at the bottom of the video settings panel: Off

Likely some others but I am using in game settings from memory. The game still looks okay this way and it really reduces the overhead that can affect your FPS and increases the amount of time it takes for your GPU to get overloaded which seems to happen and reduces your FPS over time. Re-logging after awhile can reset your FPS to maximum.

Since my motherboard networking interface allows it I set up my 2 Ethernet ports to be used as a team which results in a combined 2 Gbps interface although my service is only 60 Mbps and can never utilize this full potential it splits network traffic through 2 different router and Ethernet ports so conceivably it helps since 2 interfaces are processing data. At times I still get RED LATENCY BARS though.

Rylana

Using steel wire instead of twine between your cans.

cjthibs

Kaspar wrote: »

Since my motherboard networking interface allows it I set up my 2 Ethernet ports to be used as a team which results in a combined 2 Gbps interface although my service is only 60 Mbps and can never utilize this full potential it splits network traffic through 2 different router and Ethernet ports so conceivably it helps since 2 interfaces are processing data. At times I still get RED LATENCY BARS though.

Something to keep in mind with bonding/NIC Teaming is that it typically will just alternate one packet at a time to each NIC. IF it is using the second at all. Many times it will not use the second NIC until the line is saturated on the first.

60MegaBIT, is only around 7 MegaBYTES per second
1GigaBIT, is around 120 MegaBYTES per second.

There is absolutely no reason to be bonding without a much larger uplink. In fact, this will create additional processing overhead and slow down your actual throughput. (Probably not enough to be noticeable.)

smacx250

Note that the latency reported in-game is not the same as the network latency - it is reporting a client-to-server application latency (a part of which would be network latency). I sometimes run "nettop" (mac terminal command) to check the TCP connection statistics, and the round trip latency at the TCP layer is typically less than half of the in-game latency. Also, in bad lag situations where the in-game latency goes "999+", the TCP round trip latency almost never increases. It seems that much of the bad latency episodes I've experienced are most likely due to the client or server application running slowly, and not due to actual network latency issues.

Pyr0xyrecuprotite

Other than the issues mentioned above, the biggest thing to keep in mind is whether anyone is sharing the network on your home system end. For example, you have a home network with two or three PCs; or your laptop is using a college campus network. In this situation, your network traffic from the server (and especially back up TO the "server") can sometimes be bottlenecked and delayed by congestion caused by traffic from other computers on the local network. (When another home PC is downloading a Windows service pack update, it causes a noticeable slowdown of ALL your internet connections). ESO is VERY sensitive to tiny delays in network traffic (especially on your uplink), and these can cause game disconnects, especially in Trials (as well as PvP). That said, lag is always going to be worse for those who are further away from the servers, e.g. the poor saps in Australia and Japan. Folks in the central USA should have very few ping-related problems, unless their ISP is having some sort of router problem (which does happen occasionally), or there is a DDoS attack against the ZoS systems, or a network/server problem within the ZoS network. All of these HAVE happened in the past two years, but are usually rare, temporary, and affect many people, which means that the issues can be identified and fixed.

Other factors can sometimes be important, e.g. our tank kept disconnecting in a vDSA run yesterday, until he switched to the 32-bit client - something different in the communications re effects showing, perhaps? For me, there was also a cumulative issue after each patch, where busy zones (and Cyrodiil) became more and more laggy over time (from an original install in Beta days), to the point of nicknaming Grahtwood as "crashwood". Doing a complete reinstall of the game can fix this (on PCs anyway), or sometimes just deleting and rebuilding either the Shader.cooked file or the files under My Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\.

Night_Wolf2112

So if my kids are playing their PS4 online games (via wifi to the router) and my wife in on her phone (via wifi to the router) and I am directly plugged into the router.... I could be (probably am) getting 'bottlenecked' and could be part of my problem, correct?

TheEnigmatic

Many things.

Starting from the top, from the top of my head:

• Badly-optimized server hardware
• Badly-optimized code
• Badly-optimized server latency (their end) from their ISP
• The hardware itself can have bad RAM, bad cores in their CPUs, bad motherboards
• Bad cat6e cables at their servers
• Power outages
• Bad, faulty, or missing load balancers
• Bad management of all these
• YOUR connection

Now if the game is glitchy, shows weird colors, slow-to-move and bad FPS, it's YOU.

cjthibs

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

So if my kids are playing their PS4 online games (via wifi to the router) and my wife in on her phone (via wifi to the router) and I am directly plugged into the router.... I could be (probably am) getting 'bottlenecked' and could be part of my problem, correct?

That's entirely possible.
There is only so much going around, and by default your router is going to give each steady connection a fair shot.

Orlacc

bertenburnyb16_ESO wrote: »

What causes it: ESO
What eliminates it: uninstalling ESO

Funny stuff!

Kaspar

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

So if my kids are playing their PS4 online games (via wifi to the router) and my wife in on her phone (via wifi to the router) and I am directly plugged into the router.... I could be (probably am) getting 'bottlenecked' and could be part of my problem, correct?

True. You have only 1 "pipe" into/out of your home that the router splits to supply each device using it.

Thrasher91604

thewolphub17_ESO wrote: »

I haven't seen anyone mention it so far, but addons and cause problems as well, like minimap addons.

This is huge. HUUUUUUUUUUGE. Unlike Donald's tallywacker...

Why? What incedental information do I have to fap around?

I downloaded the harvest map for Cyrodiil, and took a look. It turned my FPS into a slideshow.

HarvestMap is now defaulted to off.

Jade1986

wayfarerx wrote: »

Night_Wolf2112 wrote: »

Ok... I live in the middle of the US. I have Ethernet connection (supposedly some kind of fiber wire thing)! What's my problem? My ping flies between 300 and 900 on bad spikes when I PvP. Like I said, I don't fully understand how it works.... I need it spelled out like I am a 6th grader or something!

There are literally about a million things that can go wrong between your machine and the server that can cause lag. Your home network might suck, your ISP might suck, the interchanges between your ISP and ZOS's servers might suck, ZOS's servers themselves might be getting overwhelmed, etc.

The best you can do on your end is make sure that your home network is solid and that you get minimal latency from your ISP.

No, the fluctuations in Cyro are normal when there are huge groups battling. Sadly this is normal. If it happens in non pvp areas, then it is likely something else.