Some Reasons for Lag and what might help
This is in regards to consoles-I have both the xbox and ps3 versions.
I downloaded the patch for the xbox sometime ago, but just got around to doing so for the ps3 and here's an observation. I had Firefox and my email program running while downloading as well as another computer connected via wifi to my rounter. My PS3 is connected via wifi too. Just shutting down the email program doubled my download speed.
So consider these things when playing the game.
Things that contribute to lag:
A slow connection (duh, obviously right).
The use of a wifi connection. Wired is better.
Other devices using your connection-you only have so much bandwidth.
Devices we all sometimes forget are connected to our wifi--smart phones, tablets, laptops, ereaders, and even our TVs.
Also, desktop PCs lately tend to have wifi built in themselves so they may be using the wifi too, but even if not when they are on and online, they are using up precious bandwidth.
And on the PC, if you have an internet browser running, it may be constantly accessing ads or other things that do download something to you and use that connection.
Your PC may also have apps that are running that may be polling the internet from time to time and may cause a drop in the connection speed for your console.
Tablets and smartphones may also be updating things and often do so only when connected to wifi.
Timeouts can occur when these things happen-say you do have an email program running or a browser or an app. Each of these things may be automatically and routinely accessing the internet, using your bandwidth. So when they do this your connection speed may slow way down temporarily. Enough to kick you from the game, but not enough to totally dump you offline.
Getting into phase with specific people or going into groups and joining friends. Online games rely on matchmaking-they try to assess connections and put together random people who have similar ones so as to reduce the possibility of lag. Joining friends overrides the best choices matchmaking would like to make. It happens in other games as well-lag is almost always worse when you join a friend's game.
Busy times. Hard to avoid. And we all play when it's convenient for us to play. But those times may not be the best times. Some of our internet connections will slow way down when others in our area that have the same service are all using it at the same time. You can test this and see if it's true for you by trying out a time that might be less busy in your area. It's counter-intuitive but sometimes you can have less lag with someone halfway around the world than you can with a friend down the street.
In game things that cause lag:
Vehicles-the more vehicles and the bigger the vehicle, the more the lag. Test this yourself with your clan or get together a group of friends. ATVs cause the least lag. The Titan causes the most. The Raptor with 4 people in it causes a lot of lag.
BMGs-lag and more lag and even more lag. The more BMGs going off at once, the worse the lag. At best if this lag hits you, you end up with a blue aura that won't go away. At worst, you lag out, but you can have medium effects where there's a BMG stream that follows you everywhere and/or you cannot do anything at an event. You can't switch weapons or shoot or things happen very slowly. People hover in mid-air and at times you can shoot and then you can't. You can't get ammo. And the arkfall never seems to end-wait 20 minutes after it is over and others say it is, and then it may end for you too.
Detonators and other explosive weapons-these cause sometimes instant high lag that can instantly lag you out. As with anything, the more of these the worse the lag.
Volge LMG-not as severe but similar to the BMG.
All of these things have a tendency to lag out people who are not using them-they can lag out the user, but often they will lag out a whole lot of people who are not using them. The Raptor is an exception because it can often lag out passengers.
Busy phases. It might help to log out and log back in to see if you can get into a different phase that's not as busy and might be less laggy.
There are other things, of course. Lag is inherent in online gaming and in larger persistent worlds. A solution might well have been to segment the world into smaller bits but that would have meant we'd continually hit loading screens. Also, a lot of dynamic things going on at once cause it as well-plants, clouds, all kinds of moving parts. Great to look at but far more complex than a static environment.
Lag is such a big part of what's wrong and causes the timeouts-I've really tried to look at some of the causes of it with an eye to maybe helping others to minimize it (can't remove it) in their games.
