59 replies to this topic

[Eboli]

I am so sorry for you guys that have had this happen. We certainly suffer from the tyranny of distance, made even worse if the channels makes the ping even worse. I can only hope that things get sorted and I can see more guys there with a ping of 240+ playing at the same time I do.

[MonkeyCheese]

Hmm It looks like the common factor here is Telstra internet.

If only our new and old governments had actually done something serious with our lackluster national broadband network.

I would say changing to another company might work but we have no idea if it is ISPs or a location issue.

Anyone know of any west coast / Perth Aussies that can comment on this issue?? I wonder if it is the same for them.

[Appogee]

The server move added 30 to my ping, and the patch added another 40.

It's now 279.

GG PGI.

[Vezm]

I'm in New Zealand, I went from 220-240ms to 320-340ms. Everything I ping in Montreal gets me about 200ms, but MWO is special.

edit: playing at 400-450ms atm...

Edited by Vezm, 07 September 2014 - 03:06 AM.

[Blunt_Object]

Yeah I have had the same thing of late, Few months ago it was ok and only a mate of mine used to say he had these issues as described in initial post. I never believed him and than maybe was just a random thing. but I have been getting them myself lately. you land shots and it even registers as a hit on your screen but nothing actually counts at the end. I have no doubt some of it is registering but a lot is not.
same with mechs and 'impossible shots' I can't see them but i'm being hit from angles and locations that couldn't' happen.
They admitted in a post somewhere that they are having issues with our Australian ISP's but from all the posts i've seen its not just telstra. I'm on iinet dedicated Fibre link (Pre NBN neighbourhood cable) so I can't be using their gear. it is the fastest net available in my area (including NBN) yet still have massive issues , dsyncs random lag. unresponsive controls, mechs doing things i didn't tell them to.
The worst pate is that its not always the case some days you get a run of it just working perfectly great games, good hit reg/dmg at end of a game then just long runs of nothing.
Case being last night during the challenge was doing extremely well, better then normal yet wasn't dong anything differently then BAM.. game after game of lag, non response. slow response and little to no damage as even though it looked like a hit on my screen nothing showed.

I don't know who or where the fault lies but seeing i've changed nothing and PGI has changed something i'd say while the blame isn't them, i'm sure they can assist in resolving.

[Night Fury76]

Lily from animove, on 06 September 2014 - 05:03 AM, said:

people buy gaming pcs just for games, people buy gamign mice and gamign screens just for games.
Why would someone not change the IS when the current one they have uses crappy routing the the most commonly hosting countires when he plays online games regulary?

You are not married wth your ISP, internet connection is just a product and you use what every you need and you are able to afford.

Our population is not that big compared to the USA and so some of us have one isp provider.
So we do have a choice, one or none.

Btw I think everyone is forgeting that we the users are reporting only ping issues with MWO.
Now let me repeat this because even PGI is trying to roll this into a ISP issue.
We with the [redacted] high pings are only having the issue with a single game.

Yes i'm ticked my 75 odd mechs are idle and i can't have fun playing the boardgame i played as a kid.
But we are stuck and just have to wait time things get fixed, and this is the p!sser about it.
In a few days maybe a week PGI will come out and go oops, we may have found something on our end that is the issue.

Such Is Life.

Cheers

Edited by Egomane, 08 September 2014 - 01:10 AM.
language / wordfilter avoidance

[SomeMech]

MonkeyCheese, on 06 September 2014 - 10:08 PM, said:

Anyone know of any west coast / Perth Aussies that can comment on this issue?? I wonder if it is the same for them.

Yeah, Perth over here. I had the same issue. Ping used to be 250-280 and now it's around 400. But I haven't played much in about a week because of it so I don't know if it's still the same. Annoying because I was just getting in to the game more as well.

Everything else is fine, it's only MWO that has the problem.

[LTGear]

man i was so glad to have 247ms i can still kill but now it's skyrocketing 4000ms yes 4K!!!!!!!!!!!!! am so totally depressed

[Dogs Die in Hot Cars]

Ping was never really an issue for me. 300ms is playable but what makes the game unplayable is the stuttering and rubber banding. And these things have occurred after the server transfer.

A tracert to the server shows I'm having trouble on the IPs 198.27.73.249 and 198.27.73.179. A quick google search tells me that those IPs have something to do with US Telus, some ISP in North America.

Edited by chicken tikka masala, 07 September 2014 - 02:08 AM.

[Vezm]

I'm getting all sorts of results from IP geolocation but one says this goes from New Zealand through Australia, Hong Kong, California, France, Quebec and then back to France. Another says it goes through Aus, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Italy, France and then to Canada.
What the heck.

Anything I try to ping by OvH Hosting is slow at 330ms+, others are mostly 200-240ms and some are 240-330ms.
http://myip.ms/brows...D/96/cityID_A/1

I'm not liking these OvH guys so far... I havn't pinged everything on that list though, and I don't think I can be bothered tracerting any of them.

Edited by Vezm, 07 September 2014 - 03:07 AM.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

MonkeyCheese, on 06 September 2014 - 10:08 PM, said:

Hmm It looks like the common factor here is Telstra internet.

If only our new and old governments had actually done something serious with our lackluster national broadband network.

I would say changing to another company might work but we have no idea if it is ISPs or a location issue.

Anyone know of any west coast / Perth Aussies that can comment on this issue?? I wonder if it is the same for them.

Yes it is and we had two large threads where Telstra users were the common denominator for user inside Aus, there were users in other countries around Asia effected as well.

But yea other ISP users in Aus are ok, some have benefited but people would rather expect the people who can't do anything to do something.

And if your an online gamer, you definitely pick your ISP around your main game, be it MWO, LoL, WoW, just because one ISP offers you 100mbs over the rivals 30 does not mean your going to have a better time.

Edited by DV McKenna, 07 September 2014 - 03:40 AM.

[Batch1972]

@ El Bandito

I live in SW Sydney, a 40 min drive from the CBD, in a fairly typical suburb. I have a choice of 1 Telco - Telstra - that's it. They control the exchange and in fact there is a 9 month waiting list to get a land line. NBN isn't even on the radar. Changing ISP isn't an option.

For me, a week later, my ping has settled at around 300 from 240. Gameplay is however bad. It's getting to a point that combatting fast light mechs is almost impossible. I'm almost forced to boat lrms on everything.

I like this game, I play it more than any other but I've hardly bothered this week. I'm tired of the constant weapon (re) balancing and I'm tired of the lack of perceived effort to fix glaring bugs - rubberbanding / dc's etc.

I can't justify spending either my money or my time on this game anymore

Edited by Batch1972, 07 September 2014 - 04:05 AM.

[1DeathWalkingTerror1]

As of server shift game is now unplayable for me. Australian player, with Telstra. Ping has gone up 150-250+. Is sitting at 410 now and the game is unplayable.

Really unhappy I just bought some clan mechs and premium time.

Please PGI sort this out, help us down here in Australia. Also rubberbanding & disconnects shocking, yeah I know...separate issue...!

[Astrocanis]

l33tworks, on 05 September 2014 - 06:37 PM, said:

So I always saw those threads where people rage quit in and like most people I had some fun reading them. I never actually told them” bye you wont be missed” or any other smug remarks, I could relate to some of them sometimes, but the most part I felt they were mostly being over dramatic and childish, simply because the game was very fun and worth playing, certainly more than other games out there for my taste, and mostly importantly the fact that whatever changes to the game they were complaining about, EVERYONE was in the same boat because the change applied to all players. Maybe I have become one of them overnight but not by choice or without good reason.

I never imagined a server “upgrade” would pull the brakes so hard on this game for me. It just happened all of a sudden, so it’s a bit surreal, but overnight the game is just not playable for me. Not that I cant still play it, but that I cant have FUN playing it. I am not ragequitting more than sadly being led not to not play. Its more a serenity quit.

The connection to the server that decides what is reality is just so bad now that gameplay is such a mess that I question the intelligence of Australians left playing this. Heck its not even that I felt like Australians were treated as second class citizens. I always felt well that’s the nature of the internet, longer distances mean more lag more packet loss less reliable synchronisation with the servers etc, but the evidence says otherwise. IF ANYBODY needed a performance increase its Australians, not Eueopean players, they were already in he 110-130ms range and doing just fine, so if they moved servers for performance reasons it should have been closer to asia not further away!

Let me walk you through what the game feel like now for me. Every form of interaction with the game is like a slideshow, where you feel it is happening in a dream instead of right now. Lets quickly skip over the massive delays in targeting an enemy, target info gathering, missile locks, zooming in and out, heat vision, nigh vision, coolant flush, startup/shutdown, incoming misssle warning delays etc. Lets just deal with the enemy mechs and shooting at them.

You fire your weapons at an enemy, a sound is instantly made, your heat instantly goes up, instantly loose your ammo, you MOVE about 20 metres down the road, and then somewhere from a location back a few seconds ago, you see your weapons fire come out of thin air behind you, travelling into an area where the enemy mech was 2 seconds ago, and it either goes right through them or it hits them but you never register a hit anyway.

At the same time you feel like 50 things went down and you missed all of them happening one at a time, like they are supposed, to because they came at you in a flood. You take 50 clicks worth of damage, the enemies have had 50 goes of seeing you and reacting and targeting you moving around, suddenly missiles are slamming you with almost no warning, you’ve been pelted by mechs that must’ve seen you standing around like an idiot for a good second or so, not reacting because on your end you saw nothing of them. I am NOT TALKING ABOUT DESYNCS. I mean the game as it is non stop.

You can be even prepared and wait for an enemy to come around a corner, shoot them the instant they appear, nothing happens for a few seconds, you see the enemy immediately warp back into cover, the server catches up, your take damage and your shots NOW begin to fly through the air but its too late they have cored you had a cup of coffe and moved on and you’ve shot a wall where they were 2 seconds ago.
One more time of this and your dead before you could even click the mouse. Anything faster than 90kph circling moving on the field? Forget trying to hit them. It doesn’t matter if your aim is perfect or if you learn to aim ahead and SHOOT INTO THIN AIR. Even if you register damage It will only be a fraction of a fraction of what your meant to register. Your only hope is shooting at standing still assault mechs that are not aware of you, even if they spot you buy the time they turn around on your end, they have already began firing at you, by the time you can react and retreat you’ve taken tons of damage. Oh and ALL of the above is only using pinpoint damage weapons like ACs PPCs and gauss. You have NO HOPE of landing a laser beam, they are like tickle devices.

I’ve never been bothered by OP this or that, or “balance”, or lack of of content or maps etc, NONE of that every bothered me, heck I don’t even mind loosing most of the time, I STILL enjoyed the game immensely. But you now feel like a baby trying to catch a fly out there. Everyone just runs rings around you, you may as well just shutdown and serve as an easy kill for the real players. I still try to drop, but its with a meh sad face because I know I cant possibly have a good game, and I don't know how much longer I can do that.

Sometimes the surge of activity (gathering and surging) can be caused by the default behavior of the M$ TCP/IP stack settings. Look for a program called Leatrix Latency Fix. It makes some registry setting changes (the first version of it worked pretty well for me and the latest works very well for me). It makes a change to the TcpAck settings.

The default stack settings gather groups of packets - call it a batch - and then sends them as that group. When the far side receives them, it sends an acknowledgement back to your computer. In high latency environments, this can be deadly (as deadly as game play can be). With the new settings, this is changed.

I have found it to work for me. Your mileage may vary. In any case, if it doesn't work for you, it has a removal feature that works quite well. When you have either made the change or reverted it, you either need to disable then re-enable your network card or reboot your computer for it to take effect.

It won't fix the latency itself. It will merely make the latency less noticeable.

[Impyrium]

DV McKenna, on 07 September 2014 - 03:40 AM, said:

And if your an online gamer, you definitely pick your ISP around your main game, be it MWO, LoL, WoW, just because one ISP offers you 100mbs over the rivals 30 does not mean your going to have a better time.

Not all of us have a 'main game' and base our lives around it. We don't have the luxury of choosing a ISP based on what games we like to play. At least, I don't.

The fact is, other ISPs here aren't suited to gaming. This one really isn't either, but it's what we have. We pay a lot for it. There isn't a 'second option'. The fact is, however, that it worked fine before and still works fine with other games.

To be frank, I don't know anyone who chooses their ISP based on a single game they like to play. Personally that sounds a little silly, to be that obsessed around a single game. I like MWO, don't get me wrong, but I don't see the point of spending megabucks to switch ISP just for a single game.

[Zanathan]

When the new servers were launched, my ping bumped up about 80ms (to ~330) on both of my ISP connections I play on (my place and my parents that I visit on the weekends). Then after the patch it dropped down to normal pings again (~250). Now it's back up slightly to ~300.

So I doubt changing ISPs is going to help. I'm connected to TPG at my place and Telstra at my folks and both have about the same ping.

Tonight started ok but then it began fluctuating and was pretty much unplayable. I'm giving up for tonight and will try again tomorrow to see if it's any better.

[Astrocanis]

Please read my earlier post. It does help somewhat.

[Mawai]

Hi,

1) I sympathize with all the folks in Australia reporting poorer connection times to MWO. It has to be extremely irritating and frustrating.

2) To the OP ... what is your ping? If you are lagging by seconds then your ping would need to be 500+ or possibly (as another poster suggested) your network traffic is being sent in groups. Also, in addition to ping time ... what is your packet loss percentage? For bad lag, lost packets are even worse than latency since they have to be resent (unless the server just assumes that you continue to do something until a new packet arrives ... thus ignoring the dropped packet).

If you have the tools you can run tracert (or traceroute) to determine the routing to the MWO servers. You can then run ping to some of the intermediate sites listed in the tracert ... this can give you a picture of where the ping time picks up the most AND if you are losing packets it will usually tell you roughly where they are being lost. If the packet loss occurs between your computer and your local ISP then the issue is your local network ... if it is between PGI's ISP and their data center then it is a PGI/datacenter issue. Otherwise, the problem may have to do with overloaded routers dropping packets somewhere along the route.

Router overload and packet loss can be time of day dependent so performance may vary based both on time and geography.


3) Not everyone in Australia seems to equally affected. Some report improvements and some are much worse off. This tends to indicate that it may not be a PGI datacenter issue that is the root cause of the problem. It may be a routing issue or some other internet problem that is causing larger latency and possible packet loss.

4) This is one problem that (at least without more documentation) that I don't think can be blamed on PGI. They moved their datacenter presumably for business reasons to reduce cost or provide better game servers. As a side effect this seems to have negatively impacted some players from Australia who are understandably irked ... any change is likely to impact someone negatively ... this can't stop PGI from making business decisions that should be in the best interests of the game and the players as a whole.

5) Anyway, based on the comments in the thread it appears to be a routing or packet loss issue ... if the Australian players can identify where that issue is arising then you might be able to get someone to address it ... but without documentation it will be challenging. (I had an issue one time where I was unable to reach part of the internet needed for work ... there was no route and the issue had to be escalated and was eventually fixed by two large internet infrastructure providers re-establishing a peering link that had dropped but gone unnoticed ... routing on the internet is a very complicated structure).

6) Someone suggested running a VPN ... depending on how it is routed you might get better performance. A VPN that uses the same route you have currently won't work much better ... but if a VPN leads to a route directly to the US rather than through Europe ... and from there directly to the MWO servers you might see better performance despite the encryption layer on the VPN which would add some latency.

[Symbiodinium]

I'm on Vodafone (Telstra) cable internet in Wellington NZ. Ping went from 230 to 320 after the server move, and the ping seems less stable, bouncing up to 400-500 occasionally. Tracert indicates that routing is going through Europe rather than to the US via Hawaii (the main undersea cable). That seems to be the source of the problem. I've tried VPN servers in multiple locations in NA but that leads to even higher and more unstable pings than my normal connection. I've tried playing at this ping, joined a lance last night for the event, but it's very frustrating and not fun. Just when I'm starting to enjoy myself a high-ping burst around 500 will hit, everything will desync and I'm dead. Unless both myself and the target are stationary hitting anything with a laser is impossible. I could LRM boat, but even then the targeting delays make it more difficult than it should be. I won't be playing regularly until this is fixed.

Running tracert from the university network bounces to Australia directly to Canada, total 16 hops, for a ping of 230. It looks like a Telstra issue, both in AU and NZ. As for moving services, there are a couple of other ISPs but nobody else has cable internet (plus Telstra owns the backbone), so speed for everything else would suffer.

Edited by Symbiodinium, 07 September 2014 - 04:01 PM.

[Eboli]

Many thanks for the tip on using Leatrix Latency Fix Astrocanis. I have not suffered like other Aussie players (actually improved) but I am going to give this software a try and see what improvements it may make.

Will report back with results.

Cheers!
Eboli