The Lag Monster

Inspired by the Eve Druid post ‘Let’s talk about lag, baby’ I decided to write something on the subject, it is the hottest topic in Eve at the moment it seems.

Let me sum up the recent events first : Eve did win the european game of the year contest by the way, despite the threadnaught of, as of now, 84 pages. Most of the concerns expressed in there and in the ‘18 month hiatus’ blog was about lag. A response (of sorts) came in the form of the dev blog called The Long Lag where a plan was laid out how ccp is going to go about trying to fix the now infamous 0.0 lag.

As there have been many forums posts and blog posts concerning lag, what I would like to talk about how have you actively changed your game play to avoid lag.  I am not talking about tweaking to the game client or staging ships in a system before a fight, I am talking about a directly change in game play decisions to avoid lag .

In my game style, in hisec, missioning exploring and what not, you don’t encounter a lot of lag. There is the odd situation where you might have some module lag in a somewhat busy mission system, but it’s been a while since I suffered from that.

eve-tracert

What I do remember and what seems to be very similar to what the current 0.0 players are experiencing, is the factional warfare ‘lag’ from about a year ago, that took quite a while to fix (investigations started early 2009). At first the problem wasn’t even acknowledged (the logs show nothing !).

This wasn’t your regular ‘oh it takes 3 secs to activate my guns’ lag, that’s why I put it in quotes. When there were more than 10 people or so involved in a battle, not only would you lag, but experience complete desyncs, still being shot after podded and being in station (very odd experience that one), and stuff like that. This certainly hampered my FW-alt gameplay, I simply gave up on it. It was unplayable and very frustrating. I don’t mind loosing ships (we’re talking ruptures, vexors and rifters here), but to loose them to technical problems is very annoying to say the least.

After all it turned out to be quite a complex bug and had to do with standings and such if I remember well. So it could very well be, the 0.0 issue is something similar. Let’s hope the recent mass tests and other data will result in a fix. Eve really needs this at the moment, as more of this lag monster will result in more bad press and dissatisfied customer. And the 18month development hiatus does not help people’s patience either.

7 thoughts on “The Lag Monster”

  1. Lag is certainly no fun at all but beyond that I think the ‘no other stuff but DUST/incarna for 18 months’ has set most people off including myself.

    PI is a joke, I wont be able to play DUST on my PC and why would I want to be able to walk around in a 0.0 station? I mess around with fittings, contracts and hanger sorting. Not sure how the masses feel but being able to get out of my pod is not something I want or am looking forward to.

    Wrote something similar over at my site: http://bit.ly/cv0MLs

  2. Blurring out your IP address is all well and good, but when you can still get the IP address by the hostname you left visible it becomes a bit pointless.

  3. I am a relatively new player, started in March of 2009 and in that time I have fell in love with Eve. At first i was a highsec player like most the community, but I have since moved into nullsec.

    Now most people has no clue what the “lag” is about at all. In jita with 1400 people in local the lag is minimal (recently, not when it was on a dedicated node). The problem is nullsec is that if you get a medium-small gang fight, say 30 vs 30, the server lag is just horrible. 30 seconds+ to activate modules, guns will only fire once and unable to stop or reload them. And this is in a small engagement with maybe 70 people in system.

    In large scale engagements, its impossible to play at all, you better pray you load grid right away or you will be stuck at a black screen or without grid for HOURS, unable to move or even self destruct your ship to get out of it. I’m talking about only 250 vs 250 with roughly 700 in local.

    But don’t get me wrong here, i’m not really complaining but I feel CCP should be focusing on fixing this instead of working on walking in stations (lol?). In all honesty im glad EVE won that thingy, such an awesome game deserves it even with the fleet battle issues that currently plagues nullsec corps/alliances.

    I’m not quite sure why you have a trace route pic there, the ‘lag’ is not network lag, but server overload lag. Such as when you have way too much crap running on your pc like running a huge file compression job, moving large files and trying to play 5 intensive games at once. In the way it would take 10 mins to open notepad in that situation even tho its a tiny app.

    Just thought i would say something somewhere, as i have kept my mouth shut about the issue and i always ask “Can i haz ur stuff?” when i see somebody talking about rage quitting.

  4. I think we have all had a few experiences with lag in EvE. It is a little difficult to not to, depending where you are. I have been rather lucky in 0.0, getting involved in maybe one or two 100+ each side engagements and not really experiencing too much other than the 1-2 second response times from the UI.

    Though it is interesting as yesterday down where I was scan probing seemed a little sluggish. Something I haven’t really experienced in a while, not that the lag had anything to do with my subsequent death.

    The meaning of `lag’ does change from time to time. A traceroute as shown can show that there is nothing wrong with your connection, and that as you said Anxiir, originates server side. However too many are the FPS gamers who refer to lag as graphical slowdown from underpowered systems, despite their ping and latency being more than adequate… but thats a different story all together.

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