Lag

[Siftwind]

Ok, guys chill out.
Wert and Oboy specificly, if you can't reply nicley, then you may suddenly lose the ability to reply at all.

I appreciate you have lag, but the best, and practicly the only way you can get it sorted is by sending in ping plots, unless you want to move to Paris so you miss out on the OT routers.

Bitching at GM's does 2 things. 1) Pisses them off because they have to deal with your ill informed, ignorant whines. and 2) Pisses me off because you're acting like berks.
The GM's come here, out of their own free will, its not in their contract that they must reply to retards posting shit on FH. If people carry on flaming them, i can reasonably see them not posting so much, which would be to the detriment of the community, which, I think in general, appreciates the "personal" touch we get by having GM's post here. Thusly, you need to be nice to the GM's, or else you might find yourself slapped with a ban stick.

That is all.

Tilda

Agreed. If you can't post in a constructive manner, without swearing and abuse, then don't bother. It's not big. It's not clever. And it's past your bedtime.

Having said that, I can understand the frustration that leads to people writing these posts. The lag situation, which is affecting multiple people, with different ISPs, in different countries, has been ongoing now for over 2 months (I think). It's certainly making at least one of my alts unplayable at times and as a paying customer, I don't think I should be experiencing this level of service degradation over that period of time. It's inevitable that this will provoke yet another 'Don't put up with it and go play something else' response. Maybe I will. Maybe lots of people will. Maybe after lots of people have, there will be little profit to put back into development and support of the game, which can only lead to worse things. Sorry I'm rambling.
What I'd like to know is: are GOA doing anything proactive to investigate this problem or are GOA relying on the paying customers as the sole source of investigative data? I don't know what sort of profit DAoC provides but I would hope it would be enough to cover the cost of 1 or more GOA representatives hotfooting it to 1 or more of the countries experiencing this problem, in order to get some reliable data. Maybe even with the full version of Pingplotter rather than the trial version. Or maybe GOA have some official contacts, in countries other than France, that they could engage in order to get some data. I just find it unbelievable that we're being told that, unless we (the customers) get GOA the data, the problem isn't going to be fixed. I don't think I need another analogy to explain this (please no!). I appreciate that, perhaps, those reps are already en route and we just haven't been told but that's another part of the problem; the information being supplied, regarding this problem, just isn't good enough. I would appreciate knowing what the plan is to resolve it, what the timescales involved are and would like to see it communicated via the official website (please forgive me if it's been posted and I've missed it). All I know at the moment is that GOA are collecting Pingplots. You have a rough idea of where the problem lies. What's happening?
I'm not bitching; I just want some information that will enable me to make an informed decision as to whether I continue to play DAoC, or not.

Regards,
Sift.

 

[IainC]

ever heard the expression "The customer is always right" ???
This apply to all business and a manager that dosnt know about this will soon loose their customers to someone that do.

So the right thing for a manager to do in this situation (the starter of the topic problems) is to give several concrete advice how to fix/help to fix the problem starting with the most possible one (lagg from ot). What the gm did in this case was giving a advice taken from above and having a "its not always ouer fault" attitude. Whit this attitude you get ZERO customers and most ppl realise this when there out of business
Nuff said.

This is the last time I will reply in this thread as I seem to be saying the same things over and over again.
The issue with OT is well documented and there are many threads there where we (myself and other Goa representatives) have given specific advice in how to go about resolving this issue. The specific point of the original post was that he was getting lag spikes causing him to LD at set intervals. As the OT lag seems to be much more random than this - it's either a constant background latency or randomly spaced severe spikes from all the plots I've seen - I pointed out that there may be an issue with a different part of the chain. There is an issue that I have seen with certain network cards at their default settings. I've also seen older drivers cause serious problems and it's to be expected that these problems will increase given the graphical upgrades and the extra amount of data being sent between server and client in recent patches.
That is why I posted the information that I did at the beginning of ths post. Please don't presume to tell me what my motivations were.

As to why we need you to send this info in and why it would be nigh impossible for us to harvest it ourselves, well the internet is a big place, there are hundreds of hubs and thousands of different routing paths. As the lag isn't constant but comes at intervals we'd need to monitor practically every hub in France along across every concievable routing combination 24/7 to stand a chance of capturing a moment of lag. We'd then need to give some poor sap the job of analysing all the data collected - most of which wouldn't show anything usefull. Or we could say 'if you experience difficulties, plot your route and send us the results.'
That way we only need to deal with useful data (i.e. plots that show problems) and we see which route and hub combinations are experiencing problems. As a matter of course hubs move connections around as demand changes so your route over the course of an evening can change dramatically. Us pinging various hubs from Goa HQ isn't going to show the effects of that, your route from your home ISP to our servers will.

Edit to Sift. - I will try and get some information about the issue in the Friday News however it isn't my decision as to what goes in. It may be that the decision is made that we can't openly criticize another ompany on an official website or somesuch however I'll see what I can do.
As to sending reps around Europe to check the lag - I can see me selling that one to my boss:

Me: I've found a fix for the lag problem.
Boss: Really?
Me: Yes I'll go to Monte Carlo for a week, play DAoC all day every day and tell you what the lag is like. Here's my expenses claim.
Boss: Get out.

 

[Daedalus]

This is the last time I will reply in this thread as I seem to be saying the same things over and over again.

Good idea, that. It seems that there's an endless stream of idiots who keep going 'round in circles.

 

[Siftwind]

Edit to Sift. - I will try and get some information about the issue in the Friday News however it isn't my decision as to what goes in. It may be that the decision is made that we can't openly criticize another ompany on an official website or somesuch however I'll see what I can do.
As to sending reps around Europe to check the lag - I can see me selling that one to my boss:

Me: I've found a fix for the lag problem.
Boss: Really?
Me: Yes I'll go to Monte Carlo for a week, play DAoC all day every day and tell you what the lag is like. Here's my expenses claim.
Boss: Get out.

Thanks for the response. Tell your boss that all he needs to pay for is a return ticket to Bournemouth airport. I will accommodate said GOA rep in my spare room and furnish him with a spare pc and internet connection. I will pick said rep up and return rep to the airport. Occasionally I will let him out of the spare room and may provide small meals and water but only if regular updates regarding the problem investigation are forthcoming. Draw straws in the office tomorrow and PM me with the name of the lucky winner and when I should pick him up

Regards,
Sift.

 

[Ingafgrinn Macabre]

Good idea, that. It seems that there's an endless stream of idiots who keep going 'round in circles.

 

[Amiga]

First of all this not me trying to whine even more about the lag (even tho it bothers me like hell hehe). This is just some tests i did tonight. The tests shows some pings i made with pingplotter and with normal command prompt pings.

Heres what the pics shows (time shown is CET):

1. patch.camelot-europe.com -> Our belowed login server. Net and server belongs to Goa (Wanadoo).
2. Router/Switch -> Owned by Goa (Wanadoo).
3. Opentransit router
4. Opentransit router

As you can see in the "no error" picture all my 4 pings got replies (its in swedish but u get the picture i hope).

No error: http://213.112.14.14/pics/goa%20no%20error%20new.jpg
Error: http://213.112.14.14/pics/goa%20error%20new.jpg

But if we take a look at the error picture we can see that 3 of my 4 pings have stopped to work. Both "GOA" adresses doesnt reply and also one of the opentransit routers (no 4). However, the router above the "broken" OT router works like a charm and so does the rest of the routers in the traceroute pingplotter prints out.

Conclusion: Well nothing really (im no network expert) except that it shows that something needs to be done

By looking at the error picture it looks like no 4 is the thief here but it could be the one above (no 3) as well. Hell, it could be anything afaik but it sure looks like one of those 2 are having problems.

Dont know if this little test gives any useful info but this is what ive been going thru all evening. Game has been impossible to play due to these massive interrupts (just look at the red downtime bar on the error pic).