What's going on with Excelsior?

[CountZero]

Before this weeks reboot, everything was fine. Post the reboot, the amount of lag and rubberbanding had just made the game unplayable.

 

And before any idiot chimes in with "it's a problem on your end", speed tests are giving me ping rates of around 20ms when CoH starts acting up, all while music is being streamed completely uninterrupted. 

[lemming]

I find CoX is more susceptible to network issues.   Anecdote:  My router was failing and the first sign was frequent disconnects in CoX.  Everything else was doing fine and speedtests are great for in between you and whereever the test is going to, but won't show you how you're doing with the CoX servers.

 

/netgraph 2 may give you a better idea how your connection is doing in game.

 

 

[Injunuity]

you could also test your connection to the games host via Speedtest || iperf by OVHCloud and select a Canadian host for being on Excel, otherwise for those on Reunion, choose a Germany Host. once the test is done, check for the usual, ping rate, but most importanty Jitter. when doing the screen snippit (winkey shift s) only the right column, don't want to dox (sp?) yourself, by including the right.

 

[CountZero]

3 hours ago, Injunuity said:

you could also test your connection to the games host via Speedtest || iperf by OVHCloud and select a Canadian host for being on Excel, otherwise for those on Reunion, choose a Germany Host. once the test is done, check for the usual, ping rate, but most importanty Jitter. when doing the screen snippit (winkey shift s) only the right column, don't want to dox (sp?) yourself, by including the right.

 

 

Depends where in Canada the servers are but the results range from "not great" to "complete dog shit"

[Glacier Peak]

In game you can use the command "/netgraph 1" and it will show your ping and network latency.

 

I found that even if my ping is 20 and my internet download speed is over 1/GBs and my upload is 500/MBs, and my FPS is over 160, I still experience crippling slow slideshows during major raid events like MSR, Hami, or Labyrinth. And that's on Indomitable. 

[Injunuity]

6 hours ago, CountZero said:

 

Depends where in Canada the servers are but the results range from "not great" to "complete dog shit"

i'm in BC, so about as far from Quebec as one can get. and ikd, which isp ovh runs off of, but i'm with shaw/rogers cable.

 

5 hours ago, Glacier Peak said:

In game you can use the command "/netgraph 1" and it will show your ping and network latency.

 

I found that even if my ping is 20 and my internet download speed is over 1/GBs and my upload is 500/MBs, and my FPS is over 160, I still experience crippling slow slideshows during major raid events like MSR, Hami, or Labyrinth. And that's on Indomitable. 

few of the HC team have commented, @michiyo most recently, something about how the graphics are processed? or is it how the mobo cpu processes the game, vs how the game was meant to be handled by computers. single vs multithreading i think, been awhile since it was last brought up, but a search on discord can bring em up.

[Marine X]

On 8/27/2025 at 11:58 AM, CountZero said:

And before any idiot chimes in with "it's a problem on your end"

 

If I get on Excelsior I have no lag or rubber banding, which this idiot's experience tells me the issue is not on the server end unless under heavier load when you connect, there were lag issues back when the game was live when under heavy loads, so it can certainly happen here. Depending on where you are, you may jump through multiple ISPs on your way to connect to Homecoming in Canada, something a speed test doesn't cover. All the shards are in the same place except Reunion which is in Germany, so load is the only variant between the NA shards.

 

I would also run /netgraph 1, it may give you some idea what is happening.

 

Running /netgraph 1 in game puts a little connection monitor in the lower right corner of your screen. Out of the way and you can let run while playing.

In the chat line type:     /netgraph 1

     to turn off                /netgraph 0

 

 

Interpreting the netgraph:

 

Spike shape: The height of the bar representing server ping time in milliseconds. Short is good, long is bad.

 

Green bars represent received packets.

Short = normal/good

Long = low bandwidth.

 

Yellow bars represent retransmitted packets.

Short = ISP/Router issues

 

Red bars represent dropped packets

Short = ISP/Router issues

Blocks of Red = Interrupted communications

[kanga]

Yeah, in Aus, it has not felt right since the last update either.

Several times while in missions with others, I'll see stuff going on around me, but my character is unresponsive, then after say 10-15 seconds, things will suddenly catch up. this does not show up in the green netgraph bar either. 

lots of 'micro rubber banding'

sometimes when switching characters, it will appear stuck and I will hit esc to bring it back to log in screen.

 

Normally i'd just put this down to my isp, but I have seen similar comments from others in general. This is all intermittent too, so repeating it will be annoying. Sometimes i'm fast enough to catch odd stuff with shadowplay, I will attempt to do so.
don't know if anything under the hood was changed at all, or if its just some router out there playing up between us and the server

Edited Sunday at 12:34 PM by kanga

[RedSamaritan]

I'm in the US and I'm getting lots of the same. I've never seen rubber banding persist over the course of several days like this. Different zones, different characters, different times of day. It's worrisome.

[Captain Fabulous]

Since it's not something that's affecting everyone it's most certainly not a server issue but more likely a bad node between you and the server, something your ISP and the server hosts can do nothing about.

[GM Crumpet]

We've done some investigating, and Cipher has run his OVH tools, and it's something on the way to the OVH servers and is outside any of our control. Some bad nodes or outages elsewhere meaning the signal is bouncing round the world trying to find a route between players and the servers. Which is why some people are lagging and some aren't. It literally depends on where you live. I'm in Europe and have no issues as we use a different trunk.

[BlackSpectre]

This might help to test out different servers and locations to find the best one for you (the one with the least jumps and the least latency using ping )….

 

Also, using a VPN to connect to different servers around the world might help you find a better route. I’ve found that VPNs often cause more trouble though, but it’s something you can try. 

 

 

[LordXenophon]

The MSR League on Indomitable discussed this last night. What those experiencing issues had in common turned out to be Windows 11.

[mechahamham]

I've been watching my /netgraph since this behavior began, and this screenie is pretty typical of what I see:

 

 

My graph goes from spiky in/out to simply flat green. Then, after the event, it pops up that flat yellow or red area in the graph after its already been drawn.

 

In terms of gameplay, I'll be playing along fairly reasonably and then just stop being able to get packets out. My powers and ability to chat stop working. After the event passes, I rubberband back to where I was when it started if I moved.

 

Importantly, this only seems to affect data *out* from my client. I get chat messages *in* just fine the entire time the issue is occurring, and enemies can still attack me.

 

I've found that it's least problematic if I connect to Excelsior from a Euro VPN node, but it still happens pretty often.

 

Just going by chat, people start complaining loudly in /help and /gen whenever it happens to me, so I can only assume that it's affecting a fairly sizeable fraction of the server's population in addition to me.

[lemming]

I haven't seen much lag on my end, but for the heck of it, I did a little network analysis and am seeing a large drop of packets from

be-2411-pe11.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net 

which seems to be in the path to the servers.  It's been a long time since I did any real work with this, so not positive this is showing anything useful.  It might just be tossing packets it doesn't think are useful, such as ones from a diag tool...

 

[mechahamham]

3 hours ago, lemming said:

I haven't seen much lag on my end, but for the heck of it, I did a little network analysis and am seeing a large drop of packets from

be-2411-pe11.seattle.wa.ibone.comcast.net 

which seems to be in the path to the servers.  It's been a long time since I did any real work with this, so not positive this is showing anything useful.  It might just be tossing packets it doesn't think are useful, such as ones from a diag tool...

 

This kinda goes in with the idea that connecting from Europe results in slightly fewer packet drops, but backbone network routing is DARK Black Magic.

 

My personal (conspiracy) theory is that there's an intensification in the number of DDOS and malware attacks happening that are targeting North American targets and that lots of services and individuals are getting caught in the crossfire.

 

In the last couple months, the fairly popular Arch Linux User Repository removed some malware that had been uploaded. Almost instantly after the removal Both the AUR and Arch Linux's main servers came under DDOS attack. That *kind* of thing happens all the time, but it seems to me that I'm hearing about it more often. I doubt that CoH is actually in the crosshairs of a similar attack, but maybe someone else at OVH *is* and we're getting splash damage.

[KingofDunkvale]

I am having the same issue its unplayable for me, its not my network its the server.

[KingofDunkvale]

I also can confirm used different versions of Windows same issues so its not only a 10 vs 11 issue.

[Marine X]

5 hours ago, KingofDunkvale said:

I am having the same issue its unplayable for me, its not my network its the server.

Already been confirmed by Cypher it's outside the server structure but probably a bad node somewhere in route to there.