My Theory About the Lag Issue

[Baines]

I only DC when switching weapons during major arkfalls, which sucks but I work around it by picking a good all around weapon and not switching it if possible.

I don't know that it is switching weapons itself that is causing the problem, or rather that the problem is revealed when switching weapons.

Playing on PC, I don't get disconnected when switching weapons. Instead, the game doesn't respond to the weapon change and you can no longer fire the equipped weapon. This can last a few seconds or maybe a minute, and then the game suddenly catches up.

But the issue isn't the weapon switch itself. Rather, it is that switching weapons causes the game to realize that something is broken in its communication with the server. I can't speak for consoles, but PC Defiance has a network/connection issue where the game can't get your loadouts. This shows when you switch weapons, when you call for your vehicle to spawn, and of course when you try to look at your loadouts.

If the game has issues communicating with the server, it will continue to let you fire your weapon as long as you have ammo. You can continue to fire and you'll see enemy lifebars drop, even though enemies don't die (they just stay there with empty lifebars) and you can't interact with objects (revive players, or any other "press 'e' to activate" items). Eventually the server overload or communication issue or whatever will clear, and your client gets caught up to the current game state through a burst of compressed action. (At which point things either work okay for a bit, or the same cycle immediately repeats.)

But if you try to switch weapons, I think the game requires that server communication to proceed. When your client doesn't get a response, on PC it just locks up your weapon state until the server and client get back in sync. You can still run around, but can't switch weapons and you can't even use the weapon that had previously been working because the client is waiting to hear from the server about your new weapon state. The underlying issue was there all along though, it is just that the player might not notice until he attempts to switch weapons and gets hit with immediate and blatant evidence that something is wrong. (At least on PC, you can see similar with a vehicle call. You get the horn beep, but your car doesn't appear. Sometimes your car might appear after a few seconds, sometimes it never appears. If you quickly bring up the loadout menu in those incidents, you can often see an empty loadout screen where the client can't find the information, just as happens when you realize the game can't switch weapons.)

I should probably say that the PC version of Defiance seems nearly incapable of actually disconnecting. You could drive around for 20-30 minutes with no enemies spawning, no communication possible, and the like and the game just keeps running. It can't seem to detect that anything is wrong. The only times I can recall being disconnected are when the servers were flat out unreachable/down to the point that you could not log into them again for a while afterward.

[Wurm]

That is pretty much my opinion as well, and I said as much in the other thread. Sure hope it gets fixed and soon.

[Bonehead]

My theory is in the bad netcode/inadequate server line of thought. I think they are trying to run their game on servers that only just meet the minimum system requirements for the task. Too bad they laid off the engineers before they could get it sorted out.

[Atticus Batman]

My theory is in the bad netcode/inadequate server line of thought. I think they are trying to run their game on servers that only just meet the minimum system requirements for the task. Too bad they laid off the engineers before they could get it sorted out.

Don't forget about using a modified prototype game engine that they can't figure out for their game.

[Bonehead]

Don't forget about using a modified prototype game engine that they can't figure out for their game.

Yea, I'm gonna go back to the "too bad they laid off the engineers" line of thought for that one too.

[Demonsoul109]

Yea, I'm gonna go back to the "too bad they laid off the engineers" line of thought for that one too.

lol took the words out of my mouth. It would be nice to get some explanation from the Dev team or some kind of insite as to what they are doing about it. Id be happy with anything at this point.

[Lorchra]

Yea, I'm gonna go back to the "too bad they laid off the engineers" line of thought for that one too.

Such a bright move... they knew that they were supposed to support the game in the long run but they still followed the usual practice.

As to the theory, I think it was near the end of June or in July when I first noticed excessive lag. Before that, I had no issues (excluding the occasional floating helion) so my suspect is patch 2.0.0 or one of the subsequent hotfixes. Patch 2.0.13 already tried to mitigate the lag problem ("To help mitigate lag, updated the frequency that player and vehicle updates are sent from the server to the client." My note: I assume they reduced the frequency of those updates), funny thing is my lag issues started around that date.

[Ruinne]

Such a bright move... they knew that they were supposed to support the game in the long run but they still followed the usual practice.

I'm not going to say I agree with the lay off of an entire studio at all, but I get where the action came from. Trion was in deep trouble at the time, the management would have been spending all of their time putting out fires instead of planning for the future of the company. Payroll for an entire studio would have been another fire. The decisions that got them into that position aside, it's not hard to see why they did what they did. The trouble with putting out fires in any company is that the only decent material for putting out fires is the future, every fire you put out costs you a little of your long term sustainability.

[adrokier]

maybe it adds up more than you think. Think about it all character stats are stored on Trions end meaning you cant alter them you need a third party program that causes the game to reduce your threat lvl allowing you to shoot a creature that is to everyone else a TL10 but to them its a TL1. This would throw the whole calculation process into a error loop causing huge amounts of error msg's being dumped into the server log. Ive ran modded servers for alot of different games and if that server log fills up fast it causes alot of lag and crashes. Granted it usually crashed the server also but im sure Trion has ways to prevent a server crash. I dont know but this discussion may help them find exactly what the cause is.

Dnt forget - when relog u r in an other phase/channel may be new channel, servers wiped away the load and can start your toon in a "clean" or more empty environment ... until the load is again to high ... but sure the hackers may do the rest ... on PS3 we dnt have hackers ... I think Server Capacity or Cluster size is for for sure a part of DC and Lag issues we have on all Plattforms and as far I check the forums it seems the ISP hosting that Game isn´t that fine / good / stable as requested. I think there is a Thread where a guy posted some ping and tracerts to the Gateways .. cnt remember exactly and the tracerts are very complex in this Thread. The Tread was posted not more then 2Weeks ago...

But I m not a technican ... Its all from my experience and my theory

[AllGamer]

Another that is obvious, the servers are under-powered, they did not expect this amount of players activity in game.

Even before the major hacking began, the servers were lagging already, it was playable, but it does show the servers are not handling the users properly, at least not separating the users among all the instances

Whatever the Load Balancing they are using it's not adequate for the task.

That's why when we log-off / re-log we get into a new instance most of the time, as the old instance is "full" or "too laggy" to respond for you to fall back into the same instance.