Flintlock Burnfur

Brentwood, Saskatchewan BRENTWOOD-16726 Shard: Everlasting Global in game: (at)lady skald Base is an urban environment in a northern boreal forest.

Well, after all this, I have finally discovered the actual problem. Nothing to do with Windows 11. Nothing to do with ASUS at all. Nothing to do with the router. It's completely and totally with my ISP. I'm with SaskTel (which, if familiar, should give an idea where I'm located). SaskTel has 3 levels of internet packages. I'm on Internet 5, which means 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. I needed to swap to Internet 10 or Internet 25 (which is the one I swapped out to). So it was more that the package I was on was not good enough for online gaming.

The crux of the problem is why does CoX run with such garbage ping when Guild Wars 2, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and ESO run with a ping of less than 100, but CoX is running at 150 then skyrockets to 700-800. What's different about the network connections of those games compared to the network connection that CoX is on?

Firstly, the graphics are fine, that's all fine. There's nothing to worry about with the graphics. Also, that's not the problem. Secondly, turned off the firewall while playing didn't have any effect at all, ping still skyrocketed to 1500 and then settled back down to 700-800.

I've tested that, having Discord and Steam, both of which were running in the background when I checked them, and they both were consistently running at normal priority.

It is still Below Normal after using that command in game. I even tried a registry edit explanation that I found and that's not working either.

This is a few months late, but no, the problem still isn't solved. I have learned a few things, however. Windows 11, for example, doesn't exactly play nice with older games, especially older MMOs. Another issue I've noticed is through Task Manager. You can set priorities for each application, and the exe file for CoX always comes up as running Below Normal. I then tried launching CoX and opening the task manager and setting the priority to Normal, but it just automatically goes back to Below Normal.

Okay, NOW it's solved. Apparently I had the HC Launcher unblocked in the Windows Defender Firewall list, but not the 64-bit CityofHeroes.exe file.

Spoke too soon, it's back to what it was doing before.

Yeah, I've been in game playing for about two hours a night since I posted that on Sunday and have had only minor issues. Doing a hard reset on the hardware of the machine has helped tons. There's been the odd time that the ping has skyrocketed to 750 but I just log out to character screen and go back in and it's fine. I'll eventually get an external GPU but that's just to help make things pretty. Outside of that, everything runs fine, I have no issues at all and even server side things like the environment animations not created clientside are running fine now. It's been a journey, in which I was hoping a brand new laptop would alleviate the issues my Mac was having and just run that machine as basically a fancy TV that I can watch movies and shows on or use it to run GIMP, Inkscapes and Scribus.

Just got a tip from Crystal Dragon on discord. She was offering a suggestion to someone else for another model of Asus, but it worked with mine as well. Power the laptop down, then hold the power button for 30 seconds. Turn it back on and the reboot should be a bit slower, but that's because it's resetting hardware. So far, an hour and a half in game and the ping is stable at 150.

That's a good suggestion. I've already had to purchase a USB hub due to the fact I have more connections than USB ports (mouse, keyboard, mic, an XBox controller). I'm gonna check with Western Wireless first just to see what they have, but I'll ask for those specs.

I'm literally three feet away from the router.

Whether it's on 64-bit or 32-bit, I run into the same issue. It's a preinstalled machine, and all the Asus software was disabled after this issue was discovered, and continues even after it's all disabled and the computer is restarted showing the Asus stuff is not running at all. The router is on the wall at head level in my house. Same location as where it was when I ran the Mac, which never had this problem. My bad on not mentioning the connection, it's WiFi, and to my amazement... there's not a single Ethernet port on the laptop. At all. Because that was something I was going to try. It floored me, because I've seen newer laptops that have a "hidden" Ethernet connection (like a small "door" where you can pop in the cable) but there wasn't anything at all I could find. Turns out the ASUS X515 does indeed not have an Ethernet port at all and the suggestion is to get a USB Ethernet connection. Which I'll try on Monday as the one shop in town is not open on the weekend. ... by one shop, I mean the only computer store. Which doubles as the SaskTel Mobility centre. As well as the Mac authorized store. And they sell high end televisions/monitors. Not running anything like that at all. I do have Vortex for mod installation for Skyrim, NWN, The Long Dark, Tomb Raider, etc., but when I'm not using it I shut it down. I've even checked in the taskmanager to see if it's still running and nothing is there to identify Vortex. And all of the locations of the router are no different than when I ran it on the Mac (2016 Mac running Catalina). The only difference is that the laptop is running Windows 11. Now, while the Mac's FPS ran poorly (averaging 15 fps) there was no issues with horrible ping such as described above (going from 150 to 600 or even 800). The router is even the exact same router. Now, unless that's an issue where the router is used to a Mac and not a Windows laptop... though this would not surprise me. I've even tested it recently with the Mac being in a completely different room and it still works fine with no lag and no horrible ping. I may have forgotten people through reading, but I'm doing this while cooking supper. I will most likely come back and read some more.

So here is my issue. I have recently purchased an ASUS X515 laptop (last May). Because my old Mac was not that great, and it was time to get something new. Here's the specs on it. And for information, it has an integrated video Intel Iris Xe. When I first started running the game, the graphics were fine, but things were choppy. Where I had quite a lot of lag. With some help, someone suggested putting this in the command line in the launcher. The first is to limit graphics, the second is to limit frame rate to 30 fps (it was holding nicely at 60 fps even with the problems) and the third one is to direct the launcher where the mods are located (Vidiot Maps and such). Just for information sake, here are the mods I'm running. Now, while I don't get the lag with the first command line, there are a couple of other ... issues. This first being a texture problem. The spoiler has the examples. See through walls, textures that just aren't there ... To be fair, I can live with that, that's fine. What I can't live with is this. Upon launching the game after a short time I began noticing a severe amount of lag. NPCs walking would hover, then move to a new location after a second, cars would drive in place, then continue down the street and repeat. Even other player characters were having the stutter walk. So, I ran a netgraph. Upon launching the game and starting up the netgraph, this is what I get. And I let it settle down for a moment. Still good, run through a couple of missions (in this case in Faultline, but I've seen this in Steel Canyon, Atlas Park, the Hollows), and after about two, maybe three missions, the ping just tanks. The second icon on the map is Arbiter Sands. His icon blips in and out as he travels following me. So I've gone from 150 ping to about 650 to 850 ping. And it stays that way until I close the game and relaunch it (I've kept it open an hour, two hours and three hours and always within twenty minutes to half an hour of launching the game, it goes from 150 ping all the way up to 750 on average, the worst I've seen is 1500). And it gets worse. See all the red, as time goes on, that red just becomes larger and larger, giving me nothing but lots of Lost Connection to Mapserver messages. I'm at my witts end with this. I bought this laptop to have an upgrade from an aging Mac (2015). And now, I can't even use one of the games I have enjoyed. To add a few things extra that I've done, ASUS does have proprietary optimization programs that run in the background, all of that has been turned off, I've also changed the DNS Server assignment to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (which runs through Google). But any additional help outside of calling up my ISP to see if it's my router would be appreciated. In the last three months, I've gotten nowhere with this.