Forums » Bugs

do they play around with lag and death?

12»
Feb 17, 2005 ananzi link
when i am botting, sometimes it will lag for a second or two.
as i am 300m away from 5 arklan guardians, you can imagine that
when i come out of lag, i am exploded instantly.

however, i remember a few weeks back when this happened, you would
end up in an empty sector, not dead, but severely damaged.

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whats going on here? am i imagining things?

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i can only imagine the frustration i feel at losing 30,000
credit ship because of network problem is miniscule compared
to what people will feel when they lose a 5 million dollar
capital ship with all the gunners and ships aboard due to
network lag.
Feb 17, 2005 CrippledPidgeon link
Uh... what can I say?... Move to Wisconsin?
Feb 17, 2005 yodaofborg link
dont usually get a lot of lag, being in the UK im pretty far away from vendetta... ...The odd lag death i do get does pee me off, but comparing to lag in a lot of online games (even some that support a max of 16 players, and with a low ping) well, the network code here is solid.
Feb 17, 2005 Starfisher link
If you lost the old capital ship to lag (assuming you could fly one), it would mean you took tens of thousands of points of damage. That means it was either a really big lag spike you can't possibly expect the devs to do anything about, or you were in such a terrible situation that you were going to die anyway.
Feb 17, 2005 ananzi link
ok but what about the way it used to just have you in an empty sector?

or was that when lag was so bad i lost connection to the server?

and you can easily lose 50,000 hitpoints in 1 second.. if you fail to make a jump or something, or you dont raise your sheilds in time, or the enemy ships are just out of range of your defensive guns, or whatever.
Feb 17, 2005 roguelazer link
VO's lag handling code is the best of any online game I've ever played. Period. There's not much they can do to improve it without breaking something else, or making many exploits possible.
Feb 17, 2005 Hoax link
I guess the code is good. I lose ships to lag while botting ALL the time and it is infuriating. You can see it coming, the bots drift for a second then the screen flashes red and hit points drop to 0 ... uhg

I wish the client would tell the server not to register bot hits when lagged out. That sounds pretty exploitable though. I don't know a good solution.

I wouldn't just brush it off though, botting is so tedious and the game is kind of so-so below combat level 5 (IMHO). Lag death turns tedious botting into a nightmare.

In theory I have a good internet connection but it must be prone to spikes.

ananzi: I've never ended up in an empty sector, just dead back at the station.
Feb 17, 2005 Starfisher link
ananzi: What are you going to do about it? You're in a frigate. Even if you didn't lag out, you were going to die if you manage to take 50,000 points of damage in one second. One second is nowhere near enough time to make a meaningful course correction in a fully loaded centaur, let alone a frigate.
Feb 18, 2005 The Kid link
Although it's true that 1 second lag shouldn't affect a frigate, it would certainly affect a fully loaded centaur. But I think the topic of the thread is...
There is some random "server freeze" times, and when you're botting, it seems to come more often. At those times, everyone seems to experience lag (at least in multiple systems and sectors), but the bots don't freeze. That means you're floating in space while the bots have a nice easy shot to tear you up. That has happened to me a couple time to arklans in my vulture.
I don't know what causes it, or at what frequency.
Feb 18, 2005 Solra Bizna link
I've experienced these lag spikes, sometimes they're server-wide and sometimes they're not, but you can usually avoid being badly damaged by them by turboing laterally relative to the bots as soon as you notice -- then the lag compensation will prevent most of the hits IME.
-:sigma.SB
Feb 18, 2005 johnhawl218 link
I've definitely, with in the last week, noticed a VERY LARGE lag issue. Now I don't know if it's because of the server ethercard issue or bad isp or my computer but this is the first time I've really ever had any lag at all and it just seems to be getting worse by the day. The fact that I keep hearing others complain about it when I do tells me it's probably not my issue but something with the server or network it's on. I could be wrong but it's starting to be very frustrating dieing simply because of lag and then have others thinking they are that good.
Feb 18, 2005 Forum Moderator link
Hard to say. I'm in CA on DSL and have experienced no significant lag at all.
Feb 18, 2005 Hoax link
Do you still bot much FM? One thing in particular is that I don't notice it with player charactors, but with bots, esp large groups it becomes quite apparent.

It starts acting like I have low latency but it's interupted with lag spikes. The bots start drifting close then there is a corection jump. Repeat 2 or 3 times then appear in station and assume that lag killed you. Meanwhile my ping never goes above about 110. I don't think I should see this much stuttering at 110 max. Also this is the range my ping has been in since I started playing, about 80 to 110 for several years now.

I used to have these symptoms evertime a convoy jumped but that doesn't seem to be the catalyst anymore. Maybe large groups of trade NPC's jumping at the same time cause a server bump?

It's preventing me from even getting to combat 5. I haven't made it through more than 2 or 3 rounds of bots before it gets me. Aaaaaarg!

We need to get this fixed or just give me 5 so I can get the damn axia positrons and start playing for real again.
Feb 18, 2005 Martin.mac.au link
My suspicion is that most of the recent lag issue is the net in general. If it was something local to the Vendetta servers I'd expect to see a constant lag increase applied to all people. eg: 50ms added to all pings. As it is most peoples pings seem to have increased depending on their distance from the server. Yoda (in the UK) and myself in Australia had pings that were double or greater than our usual pings (400 - 600 in my case vs 200 - 300) whereas people closer to the server had far less of an increase.

Makes me wonder if there's any new fun virii out that are hammering all the bandwidth. I noticed much higher pings in my games when some of the nastier virii came out to play.
Feb 18, 2005 Solra Bizna link
I've checked this over, recording a few VO lag spikes and my overall Google ping. Ordinarily they are almost hand in hand--with Google about 20ms higher. When I download using BitTorrent, both pings go erratic (100-900), but during these lag spikes (some of which are several seconds long!) my Google ping is unaffected. This leads me to suspect that it's not an overall network issue, but these results can be interpreted in other ways.
Also, my ping has been unusually high lately, 110 instead of 74.
-:sigma.SB
Feb 18, 2005 RelayeR link
As a matter of fact, there is a new version of the "mydoom" virus (th) running around atm. As you recall, it harvests addresses, self replicates and mails itself.
Feb 18, 2005 RattMann link
Although I don't see a large degradation in performance overall, I have had two
"lag deaths" in the last couple of weeks. Insignificant really, but much more than
the last few months. As for the experience of winding up in another sector after
a lag attack..... it's never ever happened to me. And flying around to avoid being
lag killed? I don't think so. When severely lagged, your ship in the Vendetta
universe is at dead stop, and nothing you do in the "local" (client) universe will
help you. Or at least I don't think it will....
Feb 19, 2005 The Noid link
try to do a traceroute during one of those spikes, then you can see if it's somewhere in the connection, or the server.
Feb 19, 2005 Starfisher link
When you lag out, your ship moves at whatever speed and direction it was moving in when the server stopped receiving packets from you. The moral is that at all times you must be try to move at the most insane possible speeds and angles so that in the possible event of lag spike you are less likely to be hit.

Or everyone can accept that this is the most stable MMO ever and realize that nothing is perfect.

And it's a game.
Feb 19, 2005 ananzi link
i dont play any other MMOs, so why would i care what they are like?