PSA : A simple trick to help reduce lag

Swomp23

So, since I started playing pvp about 1 month ago, I've never been able to rush the flags in a defended keep because the game would aways drop to atrocious fps, crash, and send me back to Xbox's home screen. I also had many crashes in medium-sized fights outside of keeps. I have a basic Xbox 1, with the game installed directly on it's hard drive, so it might be the most fragile setup, but this situation has pulled me back from Cyro to a point where I was only playing BGs.

All this until last night, where I could'nt queue in any BG or dungeon, because the damn group finder was bugged again. So I decided to hop in Cyro, to begin to farm my tier 1 reward for the month. Someone in my random group told us that a great way to reduce lag was to type your own name in the search tab of the guild roster. It reduced cpu usage or wathever. I thought this was a load of bs, but I tried it anyway, since it doesn't cost much. Well, believe it or not, after that I was able to rush the flags in 3 heavily defended keeps without too many lag spikes and no crash at all. Well, not too many lag spikes for this game anyway...

I know it's just 1 session and it doesn't mean much, but all 3 pops were locked and there was a lot of people, so it's pretty encouraging for now. Try it yourself and tell us if it helps!

Grimm13

Swomp23 wrote: »

So, since I started playing pvp about 1 month ago, I've never been able to rush the flags in a defended keep because the game would always drop to atrocious fps, crash, and send me back to Xbox's home screen. I also had many crashes in medium-sized fights outside of keeps. I have a basic Xbox 1, with the game installed directly on it's hard drive, so it might be the most fragile setup, but this situation has pulled me back from Cyro to a point where I was only playing BGs.

All this until last night, where I couldn't queue in any BG or dungeon, because the damn group finder was bugged again. So I decided to hop in Cyro, to begin to farm my tier 1 reward for the month. Someone in my random group told us that a great way to reduce lag was to type your own name in the search tab of the guild roster. It reduced cpu usage or whatever. I thought this was a load of bs, but I tried it anyway, since it doesn't cost much. Well, believe it or not, after that I was able to rush the flags in 3 heavily defended keeps without too many lag spikes and no crash at all. Well, not too many lag spikes for this game anyway...

I know it's just 1 session and it doesn't mean much, but all 3 pops were locked and there was a lot of people, so it's pretty encouraging for now. Try it yourself and tell us if it helps!

Tried this on my older PC, it worked. Dropped my CPU usage by 20%. Told my Guild about it, one member has been a horrible time and straightened out a nice amount of the issues. This might not fix everything but it's an improvement.

From what I can tell is the roster is inquiring locations for all guild members. So this is a possible 2500 inquiries in whatever interval ZOS has it set for. Set it to you and it no longer does those checks and still addons like easy travel still works fine.

So in a zone of 50 that is 125,000 inquiries being done if all are in maxed Guilds. In Cyrodill it what 250 per side, 750 players with a whooping 1,875,000 Inquiries. NO WONDER THERE"S LAG IN CYRODILL.

Would be nice to be able to lock the filter by to yourself so it loads up faster. ZOS would have to add that to the guild roster ui.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom Let the lag team know about this, I can see where

RinaldoGandolphi

wow..............

Sylvermynx

Um. A very strange thing.... not saying it doesn't work, though I don't expect to see any improvement in my ping tomorrow - since mine's totally due to satellite.

Probably no way something like this is going to mitigate 2000 ms + lag. But I'ma try it anyway!

Syy101

Thanks for the nice tips! Gonna try it tonight!

But I really don't understand why a guild roster in the background can affect PvP lag...I guess ZOS is ZOS after all

Sylvermynx

Syy101 wrote: »

Thanks for the nice tips! Gonna try it tonight!

But I really don't understand why a guild roster in the background can affect PvP lag...I guess ZOS is ZOS after all

Actually, anything running background can be problematic. I had no idea that the guild roster is running background. Can't hurt to stop it....

OFFL1MIT

This is true.
The reason you're getting more lag is because it's refreshing the status of those all names, but if you put your name, it only refreshes your status, so less lags.
The worst lag and constant stutter if when you're trying to check was being sold. Like every 10 secs or so game freezes for 1 sec, that thing is a killer of perfomance even when you close it.
Ofc it depends on how active your guild is.

Syy101

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Syy101 wrote: »

Thanks for the nice tips! Gonna try it tonight!

But I really don't understand why a guild roster in the background can affect PvP lag...I guess ZOS is ZOS after all

Actually, anything running background can be problematic. I had no idea that the guild roster is running background. Can't hurt to stop it....

Yeah I mean I didn't know guild roster is running background as well. Seems a bad practice of programming to me. Unnecessary features chewing up resources.

Sylvermynx

Syy101 wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Syy101 wrote: »

Thanks for the nice tips! Gonna try it tonight!

But I really don't understand why a guild roster in the background can affect PvP lag...I guess ZOS is ZOS after all

Actually, anything running background can be problematic. I had no idea that the guild roster is running background. Can't hurt to stop it....

Yeah I mean I didn't know guild roster is running background as well. Seems a bad practice of programming to me. Unnecessary features chewing up resources.

There's a - level - of "blindness" in some of the systems in this game. Some of those blind spots wind up a major SNAFU for the players. It's.... a problem.

Vapirko

Does this work with multiple guilds or only if you're just part of one? Also @ZOS_GinaBruno can you pass this on and have the team take a look at this? If its true then this should be optimized asap.

@Sylvermynx if you're getting 2000ms in lag I assume you're playing from outside server country? You should really look into a good routing service like Mudfish. Its really cheap to try and may improve your performance by quite a bit.

Sylvermynx

Vapirko wrote: »

Does this work with multiple guilds or only if you're just part of one? Also @ZOS_GinaBruno can you pass this on and have the team take a look at this? If its true then this should be optimized asap.

Hmm. I bet it's inclusive of multiple guilds. Just sort of "the nature of the beast"....

Tsukiino

Lag as in... ping/connectivity/response time?

or

Lag as in... frame rate?

What_In_Tarnation

True or not, I'll try it and give it a shot.

Vapirko

Tsukiino wrote: »

Lag as in... ping/connectivity/response time?

or

Lag as in... frame rate?

FPS.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Vapirko wrote: »

Does this work with multiple guilds or only if you're just part of one? Also @ZOS_GinaBruno can you pass this on and have the team take a look at this? If its true then this should be optimized asap.

Hmm. I bet it's inclusive of multiple guilds. Just sort of "the nature of the beast"....

What I meant was, if you type your own name into one guild and then move to the next guild to do the same, will the first guild roster still retain your search result?

Sylvermynx

@Vapirko: my guess would be no considering the way things work in the UI now.

And if all this tweaks is FPS.... even messing with it isn't going to be great for me - my FPS is fine all the time.....

Vapirko

Sylvermynx wrote: »

@Vapirko: my guess would be no considering the way things work in the UI now.

And if all this tweaks is FPS.... even messing with it isn't going to be great for me - my FPS is fine all the time.....

Never hurts to have less CPU drag in Cyrodiil fights though. ZOS should absolutely be looking into this at any rate, there must be an untold number of silly things creating unnecessarily bad performance like this. The latency issue is a whole other can of worms that they won’t even acknowledge.

Sylvermynx

ROFL! Nope. Don't do Cyrodiil.... when I get ready for some Oblivion nostalgia, I'll just die a lot. I DESPISE pvp.

The latency issue is for me totally locked into only having satellite for connect. There's not one damn thing ZOS can do for me from that angle.

Grimm13

Vapirko wrote: »

Tsukiino wrote: »

Lag as in... ping/connectivity/response time?

or

Lag as in... frame rate?

FPS.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Vapirko wrote: »

Does this work with multiple guilds or only if you're just part of one? Also @ZOS_GinaBruno can you pass this on and have the team take a look at this? If its true then this should be optimized asap.

Hmm. I bet it's inclusive of multiple guilds. Just sort of "the nature of the beast"....

What I meant was, if you type your own name into one guild and then move to the next guild to do the same, will the first guild roster still retain your search result?

Just have type it in once. It applies to all you belong to.

Vapirko

Grimm13 wrote: »

Vapirko wrote: »

Tsukiino wrote: »

Lag as in... ping/connectivity/response time?

or

Lag as in... frame rate?

FPS.

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Vapirko wrote: »

Does this work with multiple guilds or only if you're just part of one? Also @ZOS_GinaBruno can you pass this on and have the team take a look at this? If its true then this should be optimized asap.

Hmm. I bet it's inclusive of multiple guilds. Just sort of "the nature of the beast"....

What I meant was, if you type your own name into one guild and then move to the next guild to do the same, will the first guild roster still retain your search result?

Just have type it in once. It applies to all you belong to.

Well I’ll definitely be testing this out, can’t believe this is such a huge oversight.

Vapirko

Sylvermynx wrote: »

ROFL! Nope. Don't do Cyrodiil.... when I get ready for some Oblivion nostalgia, I'll just die a lot. I DESPISE pvp.

The latency issue is for me totally locked into only having satellite for connect. There's not one damn thing ZOS can do for me from that angle.

Damn, satellite? That’s rough.

Morgul667

Wow, is this real ?

Grimm13

Sylvermynx wrote: »

ROFL! Nope. Don't do Cyrodiil.... when I get ready for some Oblivion nostalgia, I'll just die a lot. I DESPISE pvp.

The latency issue is for me totally locked into only having satellite for connect. There's not one damn thing ZOS can do for me from that angle.

Reducing the traffic with this trick should give you some help, also reducing the processor load so it can work on other aspects of the game. Don't know if you're metered, most satellite feeds are, so a month of this should give you a little relief there.

MakoFore

if this honestly works-i
if the relief to a glaring problem that has crippled pvp for 4 years is this? man..it just highlights how incompentent zos are if anything....

NinchiTV

can we get any confirmations fellas?

Sylvermynx

Eh, it IS rough @Vapirko - but I've been dealing with it since 2006 (that was when I retired - again - and was able to play WoW instead of working....)

It works. As long as I don't expect "instant" for using abilities etc. Yeah.... nothing is instant. And of course I don't do group content - can you imagine the.... fallout? Serious - my ping is 2000 ms +. I don't expect ANYONE to mess with that. I deal.... but no one else has to.

Grimm13 wrote: »

Sylvermynx wrote: »

ROFL! Nope. Don't do Cyrodiil.... when I get ready for some Oblivion nostalgia, I'll just die a lot. I DESPISE pvp.

The latency issue is for me totally locked into only having satellite for connect. There's not one damn thing ZOS can do for me from that angle.

Reducing the traffic with this trick should give you some help, also reducing the processor load so it can work on other aspects of the game. Don't know if you're metered, most satellite feeds are, so a month of this should give you a little relief there.

Well, I can only hope. I'm going to try it, because hey it can't hurt. I'll post back with whatever I find. Yes, I'm metered - 17 gb on 30 day rolling. As in, it never zeros.... And the upgrade to unlimited which zeros on billing date (which has some serious issues anyway) isn't available here.

You know.... there actually aren't really very many places in the Lower 48 where.... you can't get "local tv", "real broadband" etc. I live 40 miles one way from "real broadband and tv". But.... there's a 10k + mountain between us and there - and it's not moving any time soon. Thankfully I guess.

Still, I live in a place with very few people (other than summers or hunting seasons), and the cleanest air and water in the US. In the long run, works for me.

Alcast

If this really works, can someone please make an addon for this, tyvm.

bearbelly

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I live in a place with very few people (other than summers or hunting seasons), and the cleanest air and water in the US. In the long run, works for me.

I want to go to there.

Hostee

Well I’d try but servers are down for maintenance fml

swippy

Sylvermynx wrote: »

I live in a place with very few people (other than summers or hunting seasons), and the cleanest air and water in the US. In the long run, works for me.

bearbelly wrote: »

I want to go to there.

yes! let's ALL go there! we can enjoy the peace and quiet together!

MLGProPlayer

Grimm13 wrote: »

Swomp23 wrote: »

So, since I started playing pvp about 1 month ago, I've never been able to rush the flags in a defended keep because the game would always drop to atrocious fps, crash, and send me back to Xbox's home screen. I also had many crashes in medium-sized fights outside of keeps. I have a basic Xbox 1, with the game installed directly on it's hard drive, so it might be the most fragile setup, but this situation has pulled me back from Cyro to a point where I was only playing BGs.

All this until last night, where I couldn't queue in any BG or dungeon, because the damn group finder was bugged again. So I decided to hop in Cyro, to begin to farm my tier 1 reward for the month. Someone in my random group told us that a great way to reduce lag was to type your own name in the search tab of the guild roster. It reduced cpu usage or whatever. I thought this was a load of bs, but I tried it anyway, since it doesn't cost much. Well, believe it or not, after that I was able to rush the flags in 3 heavily defended keeps without too many lag spikes and no crash at all. Well, not too many lag spikes for this game anyway...

I know it's just 1 session and it doesn't mean much, but all 3 pops were locked and there was a lot of people, so it's pretty encouraging for now. Try it yourself and tell us if it helps!

Tried this on my older PC, it worked. Dropped my CPU usage by 20%. Told my Guild about it, one member has been a horrible time and straightened out a nice amount of the issues. This might not fix everything but it's an improvement.

From what I can tell is the roster is inquiring locations for all guild members. So this is a possible 2500 inquiries in whatever interval ZOS has it set for. Set it to you and it no longer does those checks and still addons like easy travel still works fine.

So in a zone of 50 that is 125,000 inquiries being done if all are in maxed Guilds. In Cyrodill it what 250 per side, 750 players with a whooping 1,875,000 Inquiries. NO WONDER THERE"S LAG IN CYRODILL.

Would be nice to be able to lock the filter by to yourself so it loads up faster. ZOS would have to add that to the guild roster ui.

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_JessicaFolsom Let the lag team know about this, I can see where

Thats... Wow. Just goes to show how poorly this game is optimised.

Since I doubt ZOS will fix this in a timely manner (or ever), I hope someone can make an add-on that automatically queries a search of the guild roster.

Sparr0w

100% testing this later, need to get tier 3 on a couple chars anyway so will have plenty of test time