Game not running smoothly, keeps pausing then playing catchup

I live in Albany, New York and am connected to the Washington D.C. server and my game doesn't run smoothly very much. While I am running around my character will occasionally pause for a second or 2 or 5 and then everything starts again but at 3 or 4 times speed then it will go back to normal until the next pause. I thought it was a connection issue with my ISP (Time Warner) so I contacted them and spent more than an hour and a half with 2 reps including 2 share screens while I showed them the issue. After making changes to my computer and modem and pinging several places and running ALOT of tests (lol) they assure me that the connection is okay though it does have an occasional hiccup (which is understandable). They said it is probably the game server having high latency due to high user traffic and I should contact the game for support.

I went to the forums and have followed your instructions and here is the results of my test:
http://pastebin.com/3UWL9sTB

I do not know what these numbers mean and would happily accept any help I can possibly receive.

Thank you for your patience reading all of this and I look forward to being able to play a smooth running game.

Dissi

This is what happens in Lockstep mode. The game "pauses" and then plays catch up when it starts to receive data again. You can go back to predictive, but then you'll get Desync like the old days.

Looking at your winmtr...wow. You are only losing a few packets, but man that latency. That's whats doing you in.

To fill you in a bit on the numbers: Sent/Receieve should be self explanitory. The first number is % of your packets lost. Best/ worst refers to your ping times. Lower is better for Best and same for worst. Your worst is horrid :/

If you've been through the run with your ISP, there really isn't that much that can be done.

What is "Lockstep" mode and how can I get rid of it or fix it or something? D:

Ehh...yeah, not surprised you are having problems, you are having spikes of latency over 4000ms from the second hop onwards and packet loss...you need to call your ISP.

Basically the numbers are from the top line (that would be from you) to the bottom line(the server) and all the "hops" in between.

It's measures the connection by sending packets of data to each hop that the connection to the game server takes and logs the time it takes for those packets to arrive(if they arrive)

You sent a packet every second for 633 seconds, come the second hop though you lost some of those packets and it took on average 69ms to get there(thats high for a second hop) on occasion it went as high as 5 seconds for the data to get to the seconds hop(you are actually quite close to a disconnect)

Also, even if you turn off lock step the problem is still there, it'll just show itself in massive desync (you teleporting back into places you've been , into packs of monster etc)

Hehe, go into the options screen while at the main login window. Go to UI, it's the first option.


One other thing I just thought of (sorry, it's all but 3am as you well know)
Are you running in full screen windowed? There have been/still are issues with it causing lag spikes for whatever reason. If you are, try switching it back to fullscreen.

Ugh..... so it is an issue my ISP has to deal with. I was hopeing I was done with them for tonight :(

I'll try the other stuff too ^_^ hopefully something works.