Performance is slowly but surely encroaching literally unplayable

Tiphis · January 2022

Cyro is either dead outside of prime time or broken during it, what a joke

Feaky · January 2022

Its gd unplayable during prime time. Just went several mins without being able to cast or swap bars then got hit with a dozen attacks at once and popped back to where i was standing a min earlier. It's a joke.

Tried coming back after taking a few months break but I see it only got worse not better. It also looks like DC is still not fixed.

SkaraMinoc · January 2022

It's like having an oven/microwave that stops working during dinner time.

neferpitou73 · January 2022

I've literally never seen worse performance than the last few weeks. Literally entire groups DC'ing; we've gone from ults not going off to normal abilities not firing. The game is coming apart by the seams. If they want to keep their players they need to do something *now* because noone's going to be left to see their coding fix when/if it gets here.

fred4 · January 2022

Tiphis wrote: »

Cyro is either dead outside of prime time or broken during it, what a joke

Yep.

Kaysha · January 2022

PC EU Ravenwatch is running ok‘ish during prime time. Or I just got used to the pain…

But I haven’t seen it pop locked for some time now. The fights have an ok size though.

divnyi · January 2022

Pop-locked cyro is no go. I'm done with building bomber builds, I can't find an environment where I would use them - only pop-locked cyro have enough players to justify using it, and you can't execute proper bombing sequence there.

@neferpitou73 not trying to defend em, but sometimes you just can't speed up coding and releases. And if you do, it's potentially even bigger disaster, so I'd like them to finish everything correctly and test it thoroughly.

EmperorIl · January 2022

Tiphis wrote: »

Cyro is either dead outside of prime time or broken during it, what a joke

This, literally. I have become less interested in playing lately at all due to this. Non-primetime it's mainly "elite" jumping players trolling who will 4v1 you then teabag you and call you garbage......and primetime you can't get a skill off due to unplayable lag.

Had to edit, don't want to criticize too much, as I tend to get in trouble for "bashing".

xFocused · January 2022

EmperorIl wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

Cyro is either dead outside of prime time or broken during it, what a joke

This, literally. I have become less interested in playing lately at all due to this. Non-primetime it's mainly "elite" jumping players trolling who will 4v1 you then teabag you and call you garbage......and primetime you can't get a skill off due to unplayable lag.

Had to edit, don't want to criticize too much, as I tend to get in trouble for "bashing".

Agreed. GH NA on PS4 is just such a laggy, broken mess. So many bluescreens, getting kicked to the login screen during a big fight, can't swap bars, skills not going off, super toxic players sending you hate whispers. I'm not even finishing this current campaign and don't plan on going back to PvP until midyear mayhem, just not feeling it lately.

gariondavey · January 2022

Come ravenwatch. Even in primetime, I only have 3-5 lag issue events a night. Sad but that's about as good as it gets

neferpitou73 · January 2022

divnyi wrote: »

Pop-locked cyro is no go. I'm done with building bomber builds, I can't find an environment where I would use them - only pop-locked cyro have enough players to justify using it, and you can't execute proper bombing sequence there.

@neferpitou73 not trying to defend em, but sometimes you just can't speed up coding and releases. And if you do, it's potentially even bigger disaster, so I'd like them to finish everything correctly and test it thoroughly.

Oh I agree, but we've been doing this song and dance for 3 years now with no results and it's finally collapsing under its own weight. I want them to do it right but at this rate they won't have anyone left playing once they've finished doing it.

xylena_lazarow · January 2022

neferpitou73 wrote: »

we've been doing this song and dance for 3 years now

You mean 8 years. It's lagged since launch. To the devs' credit, there are fewer crashes and bugs compared to 3 years ago, and they are finally going to try to address the underlying server problems this year. Obviously improved performance would bring a lot of players back, but it's not just performance driving players away, they'll also have to address severe balance problems like the massive floor/ceiling power gap and the inevitable stalemates with unkillable groups.

BGs are suffering too, and you definitely can't blame that one on performance.

divnyi · January 2022

IMO BGs mostly suffer because it's not getting enough dev attention. They do queue changes once in a year, and that's it.

BG wouldn't mind more maps, more modes, changes to existing mods, checkbox type selection instead of queues, and also 12v12 BGs. But that's all dreams because there is no dev team implementing all that.

Larcomar · January 2022

So tonight I actually left my guild raid way through. First time i've ever had to do that. But it was just unplayable. Even deep in yellow, miles away from where nova were mucking around I couldn't get anything off. I think we're at the point now where yeah, like divyni says, poplocked - or at least prime time cyro - is now a no go

MEBengalsFan2001 · January 2022

neferpitou73 wrote: »

I've literally never seen worse performance than the last few weeks. Literally entire groups DC'ing; we've gone from ults not going off to normal abilities not firing. The game is coming apart by the seams. If they want to keep their players they need to do something *now* because noone's going to be left to see their coding fix when/if it gets here.

Lag is really impacting the game fun factor. So are cheaters who are using 3rd party devices that can cause lag switching.

Indigogo · January 2022

EmperorIl wrote: »

Tiphis wrote: »

Cyro is either dead outside of prime time or broken during it, what a joke

This, literally. I have become less interested in playing lately at all due to this. Non-primetime it's mainly "elite" jumping players trolling who will 4v1 you then teabag you and call you garbage......and primetime you can't get a skill off due to unplayable lag.

Had to edit, don't want to criticize too much, as I tend to get in trouble for "bashing".

This is my experience exactly.

I just missed my first campaign in 3 years.
Had to step away. I'm done dying to crashes and lag. Done fighting the trolls at night.

Hoping after a break I can come back fresh but I dunno. Not looking promising.

neferpitou73 · January 2022

Larcomar wrote: »

So tonight I actually left my guild raid way through. First time i've ever had to do that. But it was just unplayable. Even deep in yellow, miles away from where nova were mucking around I couldn't get anything off. I think we're at the point now where yeah, like divyni says, poplocked - or at least prime time cyro - is now a no go

My group was lagging in our guild meeting in my house.

RinaldoGandolphi · January 2022

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

we've been doing this song and dance for 3 years now

You mean 8 years. It's lagged since launch. To the devs' credit, there are fewer crashes and bugs compared to 3 years ago, and they are finally going to try to address the underlying server problems this year. Obviously improved performance would bring a lot of players back, but it's not just performance driving players away, they'll also have to address severe balance problems like the massive floor/ceiling power gap and the inevitable stalemates with unkillable groups.

BGs are suffering too, and you definitely can't blame that one on performance.

Xylena! Longtime, Good to see your still around.

I just recently came back after a 2 year + hiatus.(have to catch up on CP before i even attempt pvp) I was here at launch too, and you are right, the game has always lagged to a degree.

I don't have a whole lot of faith in their announcement though. One key thing stood out to me in Firor's annoucement:

He talked about re-working the server, but he never mentioned anything about the netcode. The Netcode is like 80% of the performance issues. Their reliance on TCP in particular for a real-time fighting game was bad news from the start. TCP has too much overhead, furthermore, TCP requites packets to be Acked before more data is transfered, TCP in most cases recovers from lost packets easier, but at a cost. If you lose one packet. TCP assumes this is due to congestion and will dial back throughput and resend the previous packet, now your client is behind compared to everyone else. When you have everyone hammering on abilities which requires your client to send packets, server overload, it simply can't accept and respond to more, so they just get dropped knowing TCP will dial back and re send...this works great for reg internet programs, not so much for real time online games.

WOW got around this with cooldowns, other games just wrote their own UDP based netcode and wrote their own error handling and lag algorithmic on top of it. If you lose a packet in a UDP game, it don;t matter as the next packet has all the updated info, no need to throttle your connection and attempt to resend.

Cyrodill will never work right as long as they are using TCP as the backbone of their netcode. it has too much overhead and scales poorly. Now if their server re-write includes writing their own netcode based on UDP then im all in. Most of the work here should already be done, They own Carmac's UDP Netcode from Quake, so the majority of the work there is done, they just need to port it in and add what extras they want.

I am cautiously optimistic, but if they are still using TCP after these re-writes, it won't be drastic changes to performance.

BlossomDead · January 2022

RinaldoGandolphi wrote: »

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

neferpitou73 wrote: »

we've been doing this song and dance for 3 years now

You mean 8 years. It's lagged since launch. To the devs' credit, there are fewer crashes and bugs compared to 3 years ago, and they are finally going to try to address the underlying server problems this year. Obviously improved performance would bring a lot of players back, but it's not just performance driving players away, they'll also have to address severe balance problems like the massive floor/ceiling power gap and the inevitable stalemates with unkillable groups.

BGs are suffering too, and you definitely can't blame that one on performance.

Xylena! Longtime, Good to see your still around.

I just recently came back after a 2 year + hiatus.(have to catch up on CP before i even attempt pvp) I was here at launch too, and you are right, the game has always lagged to a degree.

I don't have a whole lot of faith in their announcement though. One key thing stood out to me in Firor's annoucement:

He talked about re-working the server, but he never mentioned anything about the netcode. The Netcode is like 80% of the performance issues. Their reliance on TCP in particular for a real-time fighting game was bad news from the start. TCP has too much overhead, furthermore, TCP requites packets to be Acked before more data is transfered, TCP in most cases recovers from lost packets easier, but at a cost. If you lose one packet. TCP assumes this is due to congestion and will dial back throughput and resend the previous packet, now your client is behind compared to everyone else. When you have everyone hammering on abilities which requires your client to send packets, server overload, it simply can't accept and respond to more, so they just get dropped knowing TCP will dial back and re send...this works great for reg internet programs, not so much for real time online games.

WOW got around this with cooldowns, other games just wrote their own UDP based netcode and wrote their own error handling and lag algorithmic on top of it. If you lose a packet in a UDP game, it don;t matter as the next packet has all the updated info, no need to throttle your connection and attempt to resend.

Cyrodill will never work right as long as they are using TCP as the backbone of their netcode. it has too much overhead and scales poorly. Now if their server re-write includes writing their own netcode based on UDP then im all in. Most of the work here should already be done, They own Carmac's UDP Netcode from Quake, so the majority of the work there is done, they just need to port it in and add what extras they want.

I am cautiously optimistic, but if they are still using TCP after these re-writes, it won't be drastic changes to performance.

On top of that I'm not even sure how extensive their server nodes are. If they keep 3 tired servers in New York and 1 in Frankfurt, we will still have issues.

Maybe they can make use of Microsoft's cloud more now.

malistorr · January 2022

I wouldn't be surprised if this game was running in AWS (Amazon) like so many other cloud services these days. I have no idea. Now that Microsoft owns the company hopefully you're right and they'll move there if possible. At least then Microsoft could prioritize performance. They should limit people playing with only people in their own local geography to help speed up performance and hopefully they'll add locations. People on the West Coast of the US shouldn't be playing on servers in the East or with players from the East and vice-versa (For performance reasons). Hopefully if they're really going to rewrite the code for all of PVP then can come up with a better game plan for more server locations and upgraded hardware as well.

I understand a lot of the TCP/UDP talk since I work in IT. I can see why something that needs to happen in as close to real time as possible (action in an online video game) would need to run in UDP like audio and video streaming that doesn't do error checking/correction (for lost packets). If something is missed it's missed and there's no way to go back in time and replay the fight scene.