Seriously bad lag.

Saturday evening and the latency to either Washington DC or Dallas is through the roof. I had to quit as PoE is unplayable right now:





In the last image I'm just standing at my stash, not moving, just standing motionless, and latency is all over the place frequently going above 100 and even over 200. Never had this kind of problem even way back in the desync years. Even Perandus League with chest guardian mobs and the latency stayed below 100 ms.

Something is seriously wrong with Prophecy.

Done for the night. I'll try again after church tomorrow.

Edit - 6/6/16 at 1:15 am: Just finished playing a few hours. Daytime playing is still too laggy. Started on Dallas realm but it was bad so I switched over to the DC realm and it started out laggy too but got progressively better as it got later into the night. This coincides with Steam Charts showing peak players last 2 days in the 3 to 5 pm time period (Eastern Standard Time). My link is not being overloaded at any time so either GGG has a serious Prophecy server side load problem (too many game sessions per game server cpu core), the game hosting company is getting overloaded, the hosting service has some kind of bandwidth throttling and GGG is hitting their limit, and/or the server side game simulation isn't multi-tasking properly. Whatever is causing this it's very bad and GGG needs to get it fixed pronto. Good night.

Looking for WinMTR results....not seeing them, i'm sure you've been here long enough to know what you need to do.

"

lagwin1980 wrote:

Looking for WinMTR results....not seeing them, i'm sure you've been here long enough to know what you need to do.

Didn't post them since they don't reveal anything out of the ordinary other than a few intermediate hops that are showing packet loss (but the last at Softlayer is not). I'll run it this morning and post the numbers. My bad (thanks for being kind with no snarky post).

Here's what WinMTR shows:



From this it looks like NetworkLayer is dropping packets on my link from Shire (my Linux router) coming out from Cape Coral, Florida to our fiber carrier FPL Fibernet (fplfn.net: #6) out of Fort Myers (dynamic105.cyberstreet.com is our high end Cisco 7400 series router that the FPL fiber plugs into) to Miami (mia), Houston (hou), and Dallas (dal) for the Dallas realm or to Atlanta (atl), Washington DC (wdc) for the DC realm.

From this info NetworkLayer is dropping a significant number of my PoE packets. 1% or maybe even 2% packet loss might by tolerable by PoE but 3% or more is not good and is probably why I'm unable to play PoE very well. Instead of my normal smooth movement when I play the build with 58% move speed it is very jerky and stutters frequently which kills my being able to play this evasion archer. Other slower builds fair slightly better but the latency is preventing me from having any fun in Prophecy League or any league right now. I don't know what GGG can do to light a fire under the NetworkLayer techs to get them to fix their internal backbone packet loss.

I remember Chris stating that Networklayer (SoftLayer) has had problems starting around the March release of Perandus League and if they couldn't get this resolved that GGG may be forced to look for a new game hosting service. The packet loss problems seem to be getting worse over time and now are killing my ability play PoE. Sigh!!!

It is ironic that as I am sitting in my home office in Cape Coral, Florida typing this post and my physical link to our data center in Downtown Fort Myers is through 6 Ubiquiti 5 GHz radios to get to Gondor (our CyberStreet router) I can run WinMtr forever and not once have I lost a packet across my wireless link (even during a thunderstorm). But once the data is handed off from FPL Fibernet to Network Layer at the Miami NAP then I am seeing packet loss. One would think that a WISP communication link could drop packets due to other 5 GHz communication in my local area and fiber should be more robust that's not the case and thus WinMTR is showing 0 pack loss at my end of the link.

Anything that you can do GGG to help me out would be greatly appreciated. I can imagine that you are frustrated and angry that NetworkLayer is having internal packet loss problems that just aren't getting tracked down and fixed in a timely manner. Maybe they are too big to be able to provide quality service anymore?

6-6-16: Monday evening I tried to play a couple of hours. Dallas realm is still way too laggy to use with the DC realm not much better. Got a few Normal act 2 zones done and a couple of minor prophecies but movement is still shit crap. It's move a few steps, latency pause, move a few steps, latency pause, rinse and repeat. The Rain or Arrows attack is also super erratic with many frequent large pauses and then followed by several rapid fire shots as the client tries to catch up to where the server simulation is in Lockstep. And no, no one suggest I try Predictive mode, I had as much as I'll ever tolerate with PoE: The Desync Years. I'll quit playing PoE before I ever go back to that.

So what's happened??? I was playing my 2 Perandus League builds, an incinerator triple flame totem GMP MO tanky build and my super Crit Blast Rain Archer build in Normal League after Perandus ended and all was good. Then Friday afternoon came (6-3-16), I installed the Prophecy update, and thereafter and now I can't get any smooth play for nothing.

What the hell did you do GGG to ruin the server/client communication? Did Hardlayer suddenly have a router or fiber problem that coincided with the release of PoE v 2.3.0? I've seen much smoother play in the past even when desync was driving me crazy. Please don't tell me I can't play PoE anymore because it'll take years to fix just like ending desync did.

I predicted that the summer of 2016 was going to be sad with the removal of Cadiro Perandus (he really should have been made a permanent resident of Wraeclast) but I never would have ever guessed that the next league would make my client/server latency go all to hell like it has.

The sound stayed on all the time (2 hours of play) so the latest patch is good but with such shitty communication to both realms I'm unable to continue to play.

Could the update have bunged something on my client and I need to start over completely with a fresh full install? Or would that just be an exercise in futility?

Please help me find a solution GGG.

"

Arrowneous wrote:

Saturday evening and the latency to either Washington DC or Dallas is through the roof. I had to quit as PoE is unplayable right now:





In the last image I'm just standing at my stash, not moving, just standing motionless, and latency is all over the place frequently going above 100 and even over 200. Never had this kind of problem even way back in the desync years. Even Perandus League with chest guardian mobs and the latency stayed below 100 ms.

Something is seriously wrong with Prophecy.

Done for the night. I'll try again after church tomorrow.

Edit - 6/6/16 at 1:15 am: Just finished playing a few hours. Daytime playing is still too laggy. Started on Dallas realm but it was bad so I switched over to the DC realm and it started out laggy too but got progressively better as it got later into the night. This coincides with Steam Charts showing peak players last 2 days in the 3 to 5 pm time period (Eastern Standard Time). My link is not being overloaded at any time so either GGG has a serious Prophecy server side load problem (too many game sessions per game server cpu core), the game hosting company is getting overloaded, the hosting service has some kind of bandwidth throttling and GGG is hitting their limit, and/or the server side game simulation isn't multi-tasking properly. Whatever is causing this it's very bad and GGG needs to get it fixed pronto. Good night.

good to know i`m not the only one

ya im having the same issues thought it was maybe my ISP but i tried playing some other games with an online connection like rocket league and didnt experience any latency issues. hopefully this will get a fix soon bec it sucks to play on a laggy connection which makes lockstep impossible to play, so im playing what i can tolerate on predictive desync crap.

"

Zardyact wrote:

ya im having the same issues thought it was maybe my ISP but i tried playing some other games with an online connection like rocket league and didnt experience any latency issues. hopefully this will get a fix soon bec it sucks to play on a laggy connection which makes lockstep impossible to play, so im playing what i can tolerate on predictive desync crap.

I feel your pain. The most frustrating part of all of this is that I played Perandus League and only twice out of 100s of Perandus guardian mob encounters did I have any FPS drop (I died only twice due to screen lag) and then kept playing my 2 Perandus league builds in Normal League up until Friday morning (6-3-16) and all was normal and working good. Then I install the Prophecy League update and everything goes to hell and latency is spiking all over the place (my max latency spike last night was over 1700 ms... a super severe packet delay) and with lot's of latency over 150 ms the once smooth playing of PoE is now super jerky and frustrating. Hopefully Network Layer (the PoE communication fiber backbone) can work out where the packet loss is emanating from and eliminate it. Until then I can't play PoE.

6-7-16

Latest WinMTR statistics:




 Wow, this is a much better communication link today. I let it run 1000+ times to get a better average and one really long 7500 test. I'm not sure what changed from last night to today but I'm happy my link to the 2 PoE realms is pretty much back to normal. I played a few maps (tier 6 and 7) with my fastest exile (58% increased speed evasion archer) and PoE played the same as it was before Prophecy League started. Hooray!!!

 I don't have a specific reason for the severe lag that started when I installed the Prophecy update but I know that BGP routing protocols will frequently cause my egress (outbound packets) and ingress (inbound packets) data to be a different physical Internet path. For My WISP business in Fort Myers/Cape Coral Florida I have fiber from FPL FiberNET, T3 (a local SW Florida phone company), and now (as of last night at 10:30pm) we turned on our new CenturyLink fiber. So right now (6-7-16 at 1:15pm EST local time) there are 3 ways that my PoE data can go from my home router (Shire) to the PoE game servers and back. So right now my outbound data is going out on the FLP Fibernet link and at this time 80% of our total traffic is coming in through our new 200 Mbps CenturyLink fiber so most likely PoE inbound data is also coming in from CenturyLink. This may be why I'm back to normal today and last night PoE still lagged badly (I tried to play before the CenturyLink fiber was turned on). Needless to say this is all very highly technical and I don't understand how BGP routing decides which physical link is seen to have the fewest hops (route links) from our data center to Dallas or Washington DC and back but WinMTR is only showing me my egress data (packets going from the PoE client out to a PoE gateway) and thus I would need to find a Looking Glass site to run trace route tests for the ingress data.

 Anyone who has gotten this far reading this should now have a better appreciation of the GGG techs and their near impossible task of making PoE play smoothly world wide. I'm just a single instance of a relatively short link to a PoE game server and in the United States the Internet QoS should be much better than many other countries so trying to track down where Internet communication delays (latency spikes on the PoE in-game real time graph) are emanating from is a formidable task to be sure.

To all GGG techs that are on the front lines to keep the PoE realms working and us happily playing PoE I salute you. Good day to you all.