Latency problems?

[Anakha]

I have heard no other people in the Help channel mention this, and when I asked in that channel, a couple of people said they had had the issue, but it went away by itself.  However, as I have made no changes to my own system, and no windows update has occurred during the time the issue began, it seems wise to ask on a wider scope.

 

Have been playing CoH without issue through the last week since I heard about it and installed.  There are always minor latency problems, but well within the scope of any normal online game.

 

On Saturday (June 22), I started having issues with using powers which also seemed to affect graphics.  Instead of trying to explain, I will try to detail a standard fight to illustrate the problem.

 

Assumed, I am playing a basic tank character with three primary offensive melee powers and two situational ones.

 

I hit 1 for my first attack, it greys out.  Nothing happens on the screen outside of normal non combat animations.

I hit 2 for my second attack, it greys out.  Nothing happens on the screen, outside of normal animations.

I would normally hit 1 for my first attack again, as it would have refreshed by this point, but it is still grey, so I hit 3 for my third attack.

The graphics of the enemy being hit by the first and second attacks suddenly show, the 1 and 2 attack keys refresh, the enemy hit bar refreshes.

I do a handful of normal "combat rounds" without issue, then the issue begins again.  It can sometimes continue to lag in this fashion for a couple of "combat rounds" before returning to roughly normal.

 

The issue is not limited to combat.  I can occasionally run into it when toggling a power or using the Rest key, where either the toggle will show a highlight (red circle around the onscreen button) which will continue to be displayed, or when restoring health and such with Rest, I will hit the Rest button again to exit that state and nothing will happen for several seconds until the latency problem resolves.

 

Unfortunately, the issue is a bit hard on normal play, since the enemy hitbar refresh always applies to my own, as I can display full hits and then suddenly drop to ten percent hits displayed.  Should the issue occur when I am trying to use a Green or a Defensive consumeable (apologies, as my recent return to the game has caused me to forget what the F1 to F5 consumed resources are called at the moment) it may not resolve for eight or ten seconds.

 

On top of that, it sometimes seems like the server does not accurately know where I am or where my enemies are located in a zone, so I can be fighting an enemy who will be popping all around me during the fight, or I will decide I am in over my head and start to run, ten seconds later I am dead and back on the spot I had left ten seconds earlier, with no indication in my combat box as to what killed me, as I am not aware the latency issue has occurred (or occasionally turning to run and finding I am unable to move for eight or ten seconds while the server or my client catches up to what I am doing).

 

I assumed on Saturday and Sunday that there was simply a higher server load causing some problem, so I shrugged and did my best to keep ahead of the xp debt, but as the issue has continued through today, and seems to be more frequent than on the weekend, I am less certain that is the cause.

 

Again, few others seem to be getting this, but I cannot find anything that has changed between Friday and Saturday on my computer, so I am looking for external causes at present.  My internet connection has remained stable through the weekend, with a single glitch on the routing history over the last three days, lasting under half an hour.

 

It was suggested that video might be the problem and as a result I lowered my graphic settings from Ultra to High, but the issue neither resolved, nor decreased in frequency.

 

Any insight is appreciated, as I have enjoyed five of the last eight days I have been playing.  Regrettably, having to get every bar of xp twice due to the frequency of deaths causing permanent xp debt is not something I believe I can continue to do with any enjoyment.

 

 

 

[goblinite]

I have noticed latency/delay but nothing as bad as you are describing and usually only at peak times.  Even the Rikti spawn yesterday didn't cause much more than a brief frame rate stutter on my end.

 

What version of Windows 10 are you running?  If you need to know run Winver and it will tell you.  Windows 10 1903 is the latest and we are seeing some rather odd issues with 1903.

 

I know you said no updates had been applied but MS released a set of updates on June 18th.  Is it possible you have pending installs or were downloading at that time?

 

When you see the issue have you tried pinging the server and see what the time is or running a tracert to see if you can identify the point at which you are having issues?

 

 

 

 

[Anakha]

What version of Windows 10 are you running?  If you need to know run Winver and it will tell you.  Windows 10 1903 is the latest and we are seeing some rather odd issues with 1903.

I am running Windows 7 Professional build 7601.

 

I know you said no updates had been applied but MS released a set of updates on June 18th.  Is it possible you have pending installs or were downloading at that time?

I assume those June 18 updates were to win 10, as my latest windows updates were June 12.  I had said though that there had been no updates at or close to the Friday/Saturday (June 21/22) range when things went from business as usual to unusual issues.

 

When you see the issue have you tried pinging the server and see what the time is or running a tracert to see if you can identify the point at which you are having issues?

Pinging the server gives a ping in the 81-85 ms range, normalized at 83 ms.  A tracert gives 12 hops with latencies in the 76-83 ms range, with two timed out pings immediately before the server which I am assuming are firewalls.

 

 

[goblinite]

Per Philotic Knight there has been a client patch that caused issues with Win 7 that did not adversely affect Win 10.  I would reach out to him for more information as I'm not running Windows 10 on any of my setups at this point.