19 replies to this topic

[Nova2]

It has been awhile since I have last played, but now that I have startud back up again I am having high-ping and even lag problems...
It is now taking awhile to target mechs, switch from one vision to the next (normal/heat/night), even LRM locks will hang more than usual. Sometimes this delay/lag will be several seconds long. Mechs (even slow heavy/assualt mechs) are jerking all over the place (including myself). I have not had a horrible gaming experiance like this since I was on dialup (15-years ago).
My pings in game are now typically from 250-450ms seeing spikes going up into 500-600ms at times. However when I look at other players pings in the game they are anyware from 60-150ms with a few straggling off into the 200s.
When I ping MWOMERCS.COM I typically get anyware from 100-110ms (which is about normal for pinging a server for me), when I ping my web-server (located in Chicago) I will get anyware from 70-120ms. If I try another game like TF2 my pings are from 60-200ms while mostly hanging arround the 100-160ms while playing, but I have not experianced any hanging/lag like in MWO.

I have tried everything I could possibly think of on my side from bypassing the switches and directly hooking my PC to the router, to enabling the QOS and setting my PC and MWO ports to the highest priority.
My location is in North-West Iowa (mid-west USA), and I have these problems no mater which servers I play on (North American, European, or Oceanic).


Is anyone else having these same problems, or have any suggestions on what I can try doing to lower my ping down and eliminate the hanging issues?


Thanks in advance...

[GreyNovember]

We in oceanic understand your pain of 3 digit, 300 ping. Having had to go through it until regional servers came out. And even then.

However at this point we're unsympathetic.

TL;DR: It's not that bad, really.

[Nova2]

That is just it, I have been playing on and off since the closed-beta days and I have never seen it this bad. Even while somone else on the home-network was streaming movies it was never like this.

I am not looking for sympathy, I am looking for help or an explanation as to why these problems have recently come up...
300ms is 0.3 seconds, that is the time the packet (whatever size it is) takes from going from my PC to the server and back to my PC. So why are some things taking up to 5 seconds to respond? At five seconds my ping should be showing up at around 5,000ms not 500ms.

[Chuck Jager]

There can be other delays that feel like lag.

In many games folks will macro an action that cause issues between client and server. An example is spamming the A/D keys instead of constant key press. Their actions may go through perfectly on their side, but the key press may cause a hesitation on the server side sending info to other players. This is compounded as higher level players find out about it. Even updates on different hardware software systems that are used when playing a game can have a similar effect.

I'm at 110ms because I have DSL as only option, and the game has felt laggy recently even though my speed has not changed. I was thinking it was mostly the agility/speed nerfs.

[Ghogiel]

Nova2, on 15 December 2015 - 06:07 PM, said:

So why are some things taking up to 5 seconds to respond? At five seconds my ping should be showing up at around 5,000ms not 500ms.

Probably packet loss. I used to never be able to connect to MWO very well and while my ping was low the input and responce lag was real.

Anyway, use a cable and not wifi connection to your router, untick the far away servers and only play NA for example. Contact support and ISP and cry as you get jerked about for the next 6months.

[adamts01]

Ghogiel, on 15 December 2015 - 06:59 PM, said:

Probably packet loss. I used to never be able to connect to MWO very well and while my ping was low the input and responce lag was real.

Anyway, use a cable and not wifi connection to your router, untick the far away servers and only play NA for example. Contact support and ISP and cry as you get jerked about for the next 6months.

I had very similar problems when I was living in Texas. It was a routing issue for me.

Not enough bandwidth can cause this too. Make sure nothing is downloading, close other programs, run the patch tool.

If that doesn't help, try a VPN like pingzapper or astrill, they have free trials and can work wonders.

[Nova2]

Later ontoday it got rather interesting...
It actually got down to a resonable rate arround 80-190ms (even the lowere 60ms when I first connected to the server), But yet it could still jump up to 500-600ms (there was one spike that was almost 700ms).
I have been trying to find all the server IPs to manually ping and the Singapore (Asia/pacific) servers seem to ping steady in the 300-350 range, while the North American IP (looks like it is located in Montreol) was arround 70-110ms. I did not finish the tracert on the NA, but it siad there were like 60-some hops to the server. :/

This might be a packet-loss issue (it almost feels like it), so I might possibly be getting routed through some bad networks or lines.
When I did the ping to the NA server I did not have any packets get dropped, but I will have to try tinkering with packet size and see if there is any issues with that.

I do use the WASD keyboard method, however spamming taps is not any worse than I do when playing an FPS. Movement seems responsive (both WASD and mouse), most weapons seem responsive eccept firing LRMs (they can delay up to a few seconds at times), targeting will be laggy at times (sometimes it is spot-on and other times it can take up to five seconds), zooming is the same thing 0-5 seconds delay. It is kind of strange as to what is and is not effected.

[Jun Watarase]

Nova2, on 15 December 2015 - 05:40 PM, said:

It has been awhile since I have last played, but now that I have startud back up again I am having high-ping and even lag problems...
It is now taking awhile to target mechs, switch from one vision to the next (normal/heat/night), even LRM locks will hang more than usual. Sometimes this delay/lag will be several seconds long. Mechs (even slow heavy/assualt mechs) are jerking all over the place (including myself). I have not had a horrible gaming experiance like this since I was on dialup (15-years ago).
My pings in game are now typically from 250-450ms seeing spikes going up into 500-600ms at times. However when I look at other players pings in the game they are anyware from 60-150ms with a few straggling off into the 200s.
When I ping MWOMERCS.COM I typically get anyware from 100-110ms (which is about normal for pinging a server for me), when I ping my web-server (located in Chicago) I will get anyware from 70-120ms. If I try another game like TF2 my pings are from 60-200ms while mostly hanging arround the 100-160ms while playing, but I have not experianced any hanging/lag like in MWO.

I have tried everything I could possibly think of on my side from bypassing the switches and directly hooking my PC to the router, to enabling the QOS and setting my PC and MWO ports to the highest priority.
My location is in North-West Iowa (mid-west USA), and I have these problems no mater which servers I play on (North American, European, or Oceanic).


Is anyone else having these same problems, or have any suggestions on what I can try doing to lower my ping down and eliminate the hanging issues?


Thanks in advance...

Sounds like an ISP issue. I once stayed at an apartment where there was some issue with the wiring...the internet would cut out every couple of minutes. We managed to get a tech to come look at it, who said we might have to get an electrician to look at the wiring...so we called the real estate agent who rented the place to us and he told us that past tenants had the same problem and it was just a scam by the ISP...(of course, he hadn't mentioned that the apartment had this issue when we rented the place...)

[adamts01]

Nova2, on 15 December 2015 - 10:27 PM, said:

Later ontoday it got rather interesting...
It actually got down to a resonable rate arround 80-190ms (even the lowere 60ms when I first connected to the server), But yet it could still jump up to 500-600ms (there was one spike that was almost 700ms).
I have been trying to find all the server IPs to manually ping and the Singapore (Asia/pacific) servers seem to ping steady in the 300-350 range, while the North American IP (looks like it is located in Montreol) was arround 70-110ms. I did not finish the tracert on the NA, but it siad there were like 60-some hops to the server. :/

I had the exact same problem. 60 hops is ridiculous. It's absolutely a routing issue if that's the case. Try a VPN, seriously. It's free to try for a couple days. Pingzapper worked great for me in the states. Astrill works for me in SE Asia but you you need the paid account to make it work with MWO. I think people have good luck with Strong VPN. Try Pingzapper first though, it definitely works with MWO and is free to try.

Oh, forgot to add. Make sure you're wired to your modem and have tried deactivating firewalls and antivirus. But with 60 hops it really sounds like routing.

[dario03]

GreyNovember, on 15 December 2015 - 05:46 PM, said:

We in oceanic understand your pain of 3 digit, 300 ping. Having had to go through it until regional servers came out. And even then.

However at this point we're unsympathetic.

TL;DR: It's not that bad, really.

250 ping isn't to bad for this game, however a unstable ping/connection is. His issue sounds far worse than a steady high ping.

[adamts01]

dario03, on 16 December 2015 - 12:01 AM, said:

250 ping isn't to bad for this game, however a unstable ping/connection is. His issue sounds far worse than a steady high ping.

I second that. Right now my ping is 239 to the closest server, which should be fine, but assault mechs are skipping around everywhere, f***ing PLDT. And I thought cable companies in the States were bad...r

[Nova2]

OK, I did some ping testes to try and sniff things out…
I ran six instances of ping at the same time, sending 200 packets each for a total of 1200 packets for each a test. The bits are the size of packets used for the ping test.

128-bits: 1 out of 1200 packets lost (<1% packet loss)
256-bits: 1 out of 1200 packets lost (<1% packet loss)
512-bits: 1 out of 1200 packets lost (<1% packet loss)
1024-bits: 2 out of 1200 packets lost (<1% packet loss)
2048-bits: 189 out of 1200 packets lost (~16% packet loss)
4069-bits 510 out of 1200 packets lost (~42% packet loss)

Over-all when packets were not lost my ping was anywhere from 90-150ms average, honestly I cannot complain about 90-150ms for me that is doing good (and is about what I normally see in other games).
But the packet loss, that is horrible. It looks like once the packets of data go over 1KB they start having problems being sent and received in a timely matter. Once again I am not sure what the actual packet sizes that MWO is sending, but by looking at these tests they look like they can get up to 2KB to 4KB or even higher.
So perhaps there may be some communication lines down that are creating the excess of hops.

Just for comparison I did a test on my server (a dedicated VM server for web hosting located in Chicago), I decided to take off where the MWO NA server got bad and see what the loss was like.
4096-bits 0 out of 1200 packets lost (0% packet loss)
8192-bits 2 out of 1200 packets lost (<1% packet loss)

[Nova2]

As an update I grabbed a program called "VisualRout" to trace the rout, there was only 16 hops (I forgot that was standard to tell you about maximum of 30 hops LOL), but on several traces the same hop (12) came back up with packet-loss:
IP: 206.223.119.152
Name: eqx.chi.ovh.NET
Location: Redwood City, USA
Network: Equinix, Inc.

This hop did not alwayse have packet loss on every test, but if there was this was the only one showing up with loss during the tests.

[adamts01]

Try a VPN dude. They frequently cut the hops in half.

[Jun Watarase]

Nova2, on 16 December 2015 - 12:46 AM, said:

As an update I grabbed a program called "VisualRout" to trace the rout, there was only 16 hops (I forgot that was standard to tell you about maximum of 30 hops LOL), but on several traces the same hop (12) came back up with packet-loss:
IP: 206.223.119.152
Name: eqx.chi.ovh.NET
Location: Redwood City, USA
Network: Equinix, Inc.

This hop did not alwayse have packet loss on every test, but if there was this was the only one showing up with loss during the tests.

Have you contacted your ISP about this yet?

[xengk]

I have this problem from time to time, getting 200+ Ping connecting to Oceanic server from "Oceanic" country.
I usually solve this by restarting the modem.

[adamts01]

xengk, on 16 December 2015 - 03:27 AM, said:

I have this problem from time to time, getting 200+ Ping connecting to Oceanic server from "Oceanic" country.
I usually solve this by restarting the modem.

Have you done a trace rout? I'm in the Philippines and my signal frequently goes to California before Singapore? It's good some days then bad the next. Just wondering if I'm the only one with this problem.

[Ghogiel]

When it was pretty bad >

I spent months playing the game like that. Warp every 5-10 secs, I used to time my peeks so I wouldn't poke out and burn an alpha into a moonwalking mech, making all the dmg go into the ether, and eat a load of **** in return by getting teleported an extra 2 mech lengths out into the open from where I peeked to have my un responsive face tanking CT gibbed.

[Nova2]

Jun Watarase, on 16 December 2015 - 02:59 AM, said:

Have you contacted your ISP about this yet?

No, I have not yet. Things are rather buisy for me today so I will have to try tomarrow. I did give Equinix Inc a call last night and they said that IP was not one of thiers :/

[Nova2]

I figured I would give a small update...

That particular node is still giving me problems when I try to ping or tracert it.
But on the up-side the huge lag-spikes have been calming down allot now, I am typically anywhere from 100-250ms, with lag spikes going up to about 360-400ms. The delays on the zoom and targeting have gone down to 1-2 seconds at the worst. And it is only the small zippy mechs jumping around.
It is not the best it has been for me, but it is at least somewhat playable now.

I have not gotten any response from the three different Equinix techs I emailed.