ZOS, Massive Spike in Ping/LAG in Recent Days - What Gives?

TaSheen · August 24

Well.... it might be doing the protecting - but if it's the root cause of the ongoing issues the rest of you are experiencing, that's something that ZOS NEEDS to figure out/start working on and fixing.

Photosniper89 · August 25

TaSheen wrote: »

Well.... it might be doing the protecting - but if it's the root cause of the ongoing issues the rest of you are experiencing, that's something that ZOS NEEDS to figure out/start working on and fixing.

So knock on wood... but I switched from fiber to starlink and Akamai is no longer in the routing table (that I have seen so far anyways) and I haven't had a crash or any lag (aside from the super minor sat lag once every few hours).

TaSheen · August 25

Photosniper89 wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

Well.... it might be doing the protecting - but if it's the root cause of the ongoing issues the rest of you are experiencing, that's something that ZOS NEEDS to figure out/start working on and fixing.

So knock on wood... but I switched from fiber to starlink and Akamai is no longer in the routing table (that I have seen so far anyways) and I haven't had a crash or any lag (aside from the super minor sat lag once every few hours).

Knocking really hard on my wood desk for you! And that's my experience with hughesnet as well (unless as I said above, akamai is part of cogentco....)

The sad thing is that so many people may not be able to route around akamai.... especially by swapping to sat.

Dragonredux · August 26

So disconnected twice in one hour in IA and then other later. Between this and animations not playing and having to relying on an addon to see timing so I don't get heavy attacked out of nowhere, I'm questioning my eso+ sub again.

Photosniper89 · August 26

TaSheen wrote: »

Photosniper89 wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

Well.... it might be doing the protecting - but if it's the root cause of the ongoing issues the rest of you are experiencing, that's something that ZOS NEEDS to figure out/start working on and fixing.

So knock on wood... but I switched from fiber to starlink and Akamai is no longer in the routing table (that I have seen so far anyways) and I haven't had a crash or any lag (aside from the super minor sat lag once every few hours).

Knocking really hard on my wood desk for you! And that's my experience with hughesnet as well (unless as I said above, akamai is part of cogentco....)

The sad thing is that so many people may not be able to route around akamai.... especially by swapping to sat.

Agree with you 100%. There is something going on with akamai (or the hop before or after) that is causing these issues. Although it "technically" might not be a ZoS issue it's extremely frustrating that contacting my isp to reroute some hops is one of the only ways I can play this game without crashing every 20-40 minutes or rubber band every 5 minutes.

Ren_TheRedFox · August 26

At this point it really feels like "The Elder Scrolls Offline" given that the ping spikes make it unplayable in any place ... even when you're afking in your house where nobody else is you're getting a red ping bar with at least 350 ping ... kinda makes the game unplayable especially in IA and PvP ... pls fix that asap

Photosniper89 · August 26

Ren_TheRedFox wrote: »

At this point it really feels like "The Elder Scrolls Offline" given that the ping spikes make it unplayable in any place ... even when you're afking in your house where nobody else is you're getting a red ping bar with at least 350 ping ... kinda makes the game unplayable especially in IA and PvP ... pls fix that asap

All I could do is laugh the one time I rubber banded in my own house while placing stuff. Everything went all over the place and moved back to random spots.

GlassHalfFull · August 26

Yesterday the lag was really awful for me, worse then since this thread was started.

Animations did not play, skills occurred after the target was dead, could not tell if some skills worked or were skipped, etc.

On a couple occasions my companion put away their weapon and walked away from combat I was in before i could see target defeated.

To me, I think this means the server-side processing knew the combat was over before me on the client-side was made aware. This was a horrible immersion experience, yet the lag ended in less than five minutes and then had a normal experience for the next hour.

Thankfully, unlike other posts here, the high ping/lag did not result in any crashes. I an not on fiber, and in a rural area, using Sparklight ISP, which make me wonder why i had no crashes and those on fiber do.

I did notice the trace route went through Akamai near the end.

Ren_TheRedFox · August 26

@Photosniper89 sounds like a lovely "feature" to me xD You'll get those only if you're an exclusive member xD

Photosniper89 · August 27

Mass crashes happening right now @ZOS_Kevin

Just_Attivi · August 27

yea, I hopped in tonight to play in PC NA GH with a friend, and from about 7pm to 8pm EST it was decent. after that the lag has just been unreal, pings skyrocketing, people teleporting, swaths of players disappearing (whether it was queue outs or crashes, i cant tell you, but no one queues out of GH in prime time). experienced by both myself and my party member, so i can at least somewhat clear my new, less-than-stellar internet from some of the blame.

thinkaboutit · August 27

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THESE SERVERS?

IS THIS EVEN ON ZOS RADAR?

Photosniper89 · August 27

thinkaboutit wrote: »

WHAT IS GOING ON WITH THESE SERVERS?

IS THIS EVEN ON ZOS RADAR?

tonight was one of the worst nights all year I'd argue.

Dkrewe · August 27

Couldn't even play because every fight ended the same. Freeze, staring contest, crash, error 103 for 10 minutes before I can log back in, then log in to my corpse. I never experience lag or crashes even during the largest Cyrodiil fights so this is not my setup.

thinkaboutit · August 27

Whatever is going on in your infra, it's picking 1-3 people at a time and disconnecting them.

M33tr3 · August 27

thinkaboutit wrote: »

Whatever is going on in your infra, it's picking 1-3 people at a time and disconnecting them.

While the group I was in didn't have any disconnects, 3-4 of us had issues at a time in GH pc-na. We were in the same area and out of the group a few would have rubber-banding/high ping for 30 seconds to two minutes. Then a different set of people would have the same issue. It just bounced around somewhat randomly. This was around 10:45 eastern. Right before this there was a LARGE number of people that got disconnected (not our group, but there were complaints in zone chat).The funny thing is we had been talking about where in the world we were all located earlier in the night. When the issues happened, the people experiencing them were not in similar geographic areas (some on the east coast would have issues while others in the same metro area did not, but someone on the other side of the country did). The other PC in my house had no issues during this time. One couple had one computer having issues while the other did not from the same house.

Jaraal · August 27

M33tr3 wrote: »

thinkaboutit wrote: »

Whatever is going on in your infra, it's picking 1-3 people at a time and disconnecting them.

While the group I was in didn't have any disconnects, 3-4 of us had issues at a time in GH pc-na. We were in the same area and out of the group a few would have rubber-banding/high ping for 30 seconds to two minutes. Then a different set of people would have the same issue. It just bounced around somewhat randomly. This was around 10:45 eastern. Right before this there was a LARGE number of people that got disconnected (not our group, but there were complaints in zone chat).The funny thing is we had been talking about where in the world we were all located earlier in the night. When the issues happened, the people experiencing them were not in similar geographic areas (some on the east coast would have issues while others in the same metro area did not, but someone on the other side of the country did). The other PC in my house had no issues during this time. One couple had one computer having issues while the other did not from the same house.

Hard to describe this behavior as anything but latency and packet loss somewhere between the house and ZOS' servers. Sounds rather convincingly like an Akamai re-routing issue.

Auberon1983 · August 27

I didn't think to take a video. Just wanted to showcase what performance was like on PlayStation/NA today.

You'll notice the exterior of Solitude didn't render (look at the floating gargoyles) completely. I made it to the Impresario tent area, then was "rubber banded" back to the BGs tents. Started going back down again, and then DC'd.

Cyro tonight (GH campaign) was quite actually unplayable, as late as 11PM Arizona Time/PDT

thinkaboutit · August 27

M33tr3 wrote: »

thinkaboutit wrote: »

Whatever is going on in your infra, it's picking 1-3 people at a time and disconnecting them.

While the group I was in didn't have any disconnects, 3-4 of us had issues at a time in GH pc-na. We were in the same area and out of the group a few would have rubber-banding/high ping for 30 seconds to two minutes. Then a different set of people would have the same issue. It just bounced around somewhat randomly. This was around 10:45 eastern. Right before this there was a LARGE number of people that got disconnected (not our group, but there were complaints in zone chat).The funny thing is we had been talking about where in the world we were all located earlier in the night. When the issues happened, the people experiencing them were not in similar geographic areas (some on the east coast would have issues while others in the same metro area did not, but someone on the other side of the country did). The other PC in my house had no issues during this time. One couple had one computer having issues while the other did not from the same house.

Seems to be some sort of load balancer or routing issue on the ZENIMAX end.

Photosniper89 · August 27

thinkaboutit wrote: »

M33tr3 wrote: »

thinkaboutit wrote: »

Whatever is going on in your infra, it's picking 1-3 people at a time and disconnecting them.

While the group I was in didn't have any disconnects, 3-4 of us had issues at a time in GH pc-na. We were in the same area and out of the group a few would have rubber-banding/high ping for 30 seconds to two minutes. Then a different set of people would have the same issue. It just bounced around somewhat randomly. This was around 10:45 eastern. Right before this there was a LARGE number of people that got disconnected (not our group, but there were complaints in zone chat).The funny thing is we had been talking about where in the world we were all located earlier in the night. When the issues happened, the people experiencing them were not in similar geographic areas (some on the east coast would have issues while others in the same metro area did not, but someone on the other side of the country did). The other PC in my house had no issues during this time. One couple had one computer having issues while the other did not from the same house.

Seems to be some sort of load balancer or routing issue on the ZENIMAX end.

YUP

thinkaboutit · August 27

So @ZOS_GinaBruno are we still calling this a DDOS?

Solariken · August 27

Multiple

Photosniper89 wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

Well.... it might be doing the protecting - but if it's the root cause of the ongoing issues the rest of you are experiencing, that's something that ZOS NEEDS to figure out/start working on and fixing.

So knock on wood... but I switched from fiber to starlink and Akamai is no longer in the routing table (that I have seen so far anyways) and I haven't had a crash or any lag (aside from the super minor sat lag once every few hours).

I'm on Starlink too but I am experiencing the connection/lag/hanging issues discussed in this thread.

thinkaboutit · August 27

Seems to me like this issue is getting blown off as its not affecting the entire server at once and only small segments of it.

Photosniper89 · August 28

thinkaboutit wrote: »

Seems to me like this issue is getting blown off as its not affecting the entire server at once and only small segments of it.

or the typical "oh its pvp lag yeah forget it"

Aurielle · August 28

Performance was horrible today in PC NA. Health bar desyncs galore, both in PVE and Cyrodiil. Multiple disconnects to other members of my guild in our Cyrodiil run.

Just_Attivi · August 28

I logged in for a second night in a row, though this time I logged in about 8pm EST, PC NA GH, and it was pretty much instantly 999+ pings anytime you got near.... literally anyone, friend or foe. rubberbanding, teleporting, skills failing to fire, occasionally the lag would favor me and id feel like a slide show god, but I know people on the other end were feeling the lag, too.

pretty miserable. but hey, we are almost at 4 months of this thread! thats something to celebrate! right?!

thinkaboutit · August 28

Seems like its time to go above ZOS head and reach out to a higher power in the ORG.

YandereGirlfriend · August 28

Absolutely apocalyptic performance in Cyrodiil last night.

A 12-player raid only ever had 10 members actually in-game at any given time because a random 2 would be chosen on a rotating basis to get booted from the server.

Everyone else was dealing with an insane cycle of: game frozen for 5 seconds -> light-speed rubber-banding for 5 seconds. The actual definition of "unplayable".

guarstompemoji · August 28

Lag and stutters were so bad again last night that our raid group just...stopped. There was talk of disbanding on a more permanent basis as this has consistently happened week after week.

ZOS, I'd like to play with friends.

Please fix this. If it's Akamai, surely Microsoft can leverage something?

thinkaboutit · August 29

@ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_Icy @ZOS_Bill @ZOS_Adrikoth @ZOS_KaiSchober Any kind of update on this issue? No resolution on the 'DDOS' problem?

Where can we get updates on what steps are being taken to resolve this issue?