Slow internet makes for impossible PVP

StephenB

StephenB
Obviously a slow Internet is going to cause problems, I currently have between 7 - 9Mbps which is fine for just about every game I play except ED. I just got killed in a 1 vs 1, both of us in a Vulture. I saw a wanted player that was Interdicting a clean player in a Cobra, I dropped in to help and began firing at the Wanted Commander. As we fought he kept missing me, he very rarely got an accurate hit until we smashed into each other and both lost about 50% of our shields. The commander flew away to turn and shoot but was firing as he flew away from me, I just thought he was inexperienced and kept the fire trigger held but then suddenly it said shields off-line and I began losing hull despite him flying in the opposite direction from me. He turned and shot at me; this time hitting me and I thought forget it this is too laggy and I engaged my frame shift drive then suddenly my ship explodes at roughly 70% hull.

I paid my insurance and I'm fine with dying, I'm just curious as to why player to player connections are so bad in this game? I also want to know if any of you have had similar experiences if so what speeds do you run at?

I always play in open and don't mind getting interdicted but I think I may play a bit more solo when it comes to warzones considering fighting one player was so laggy I'd hate to see what happens if I play with multiple players.
 

Night Fury

Banned
Night Fury
it also is a problem if you find someone with HUGE ping, makes all the players with good internet connection lag as well

more important than speed is the Ping your connection has, it should be nice if ED can show ping with the CRTL+B function (bandwith monitor)
 

Distance

Distance
You sure it was lag? It's easy to turn FAOff and fly backwards whilst shooting. If you died with 70% hull he probably shot out your powerplant.
 

StephenB

StephenB
Distance said:
You sure it was lag? It's easy to turn FAOff and fly backwards whilst shooting. If you died with 70% hull he probably shot out your powerplant.
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True he may have shot my powerplant however when I say he was flying away I mean he was shooting in the direction he was flying, into the dark abyss of space 180 degrees from my position.
 

Mnemoch

M
StephenB said:
I always play in open and don't mind getting interdicted but I think I may play a bit more solo when it comes to warzones considering fighting one player was so laggy I'd hate to see what happens if I play with multiple players.
Click to expand...

It's completely unplayable is what happens! I have the same problem, my ADSL is 15MB down but 756k up (in theory) and anything with more than 2 or 3 commanders goes nuts. Warping, banding, ships I can see but can't shoot, ships I can't see shooting me, all sorts of fun stuff.
 

StephenB

StephenB
Bacon Sarnie said:
1 word "Turrets"
Click to expand...

As I said not hitting me, flying away. The pulse lasers he shot flew off into the darkness where he was aiming. Nothing was fired towards me, nothing hit me as he flew away and I lost shields then hull.

If there was no lag and it was turrets you would at least expect them to fire at me not away from me.
 

Talarin

T
If it happens all the time, it's probably you. If it happens occasionally, it's another player.

Latency is the key here. You could have 1gpbs broadband and would still suffer if you get poor latency.

I agree with the comment about latency stats. It would be nice if the interface showed us this data.
 

Schlack

S
Mnemoch said:
It's completely unplayable is what happens! I have the same problem, my ADSL is 15MB down but 756k up (in theory) and anything with more than 2 or 3 commanders goes nuts. Warping, banding, ships I can see but can't shoot, ships I can't see shooting me, all sorts of fun stuff.
Click to expand...

Been there, have been in solo ever since. Shame really, cant really play with more than once cmdr in an instance. and sometimes even then...
 

YoBuck

YoBuck
Just saying I'm on max 1.5 megabits and it plays fine here. Rubber banding in a busy SC from other players but in normal space it's fine.
 

Space Dandy

Space Dandy
Is cause p2p netcode instead of the traditional server method, I would wager you would also have similar problems in vindictus for example.
 
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TriumphANT

TriumphANT
Space Dandy said:
Is cause p2p netcode instead of the traditional server method, I would wager you would also have similar problems in vindictus for example.
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For many-to-many game types like ED each has its advantages/disadvantages. For fast games, p2p can be better, but you're dependant upon many things. Ping time between every client, upstream speed of each client. If one client gets his upstream saturated it can cause all sorts of issues for him and everyone else. The server model looks better on paper, but geography and network topography affect things much more due to the double-bidirectional nature of everything, plus the "big" data which has to be moved in each frame to each client in one go rather than the UDP p2p streams from client to client. But overall, the server model is stronger. It just takes a lot more effort to get it right. As the game is made just now if the server glitches for a few seconds or gets saturated, the game can go on with the only problems being when changing instance, which is typically the LEAST horrible place for things to go wrong. A server going batty during combat can cause lots of grief to lots of players. That's why services like Xbox Live cost so, so much to run effectively. Everything from Avatars, Experience, voice comms, multiplayer games etc. have to be working 100% of the time. Downtime affects everything too.
 

Trader38

Trader38
Start\All Programs\Accessories\Command Prompt
Right click and choose 'Run as administrator'
This will open a window now...
Run your ED launcher, login & click 'Play'
Wait for the main menu to load and the IP will be in the lower left hand corner.

Go back to your command prompt window and type
Code: 
tracert xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
(replace xxx for the actual ip numbers) and wait.

You should get a screen like this:
Connect_1.jpg
Notice that before the final ping to the amazon server in rows 8 & 9 there are two timeouts and in rows 14, 15 & 16 a further three. That's bad !
Exit ED and close the launcher.

Open a new launcher and repeat the process until you get something like this:
Connect_2.jpg

You should find the game plays much smoother. Unfortunately there is no way to reduce the actual ping.
A broadband connection ping to server should be anything up to 70ms but as you can see on these servers the ping adds up to over 400ms AND as it's peer-tp-peer you have to double that for the other side (person you are shooting) and then double it again for the response giving a round trip ping of over 1600ms..... which is bad :(

However, use my trick to get the best server connection you can.
 

Talarin

T
Er, Trader38

The request timed out is not an issue. Nor is measuring ping time to the match making server. In short, that resolves little relating to multiplayer.
 

-SOVEREIGN-

-SOVEREIGN-
It can be an issue. What tracert does not show directly is packet loss which is usually a more severe issue than a higher ping (not talking about 5000 ping here) and timing out requests can relate to this exact problem. I had the exact same problem a while ago playing Battlefield 3 where tracert in the beginning lead me to the final conclusion that I had packetloss issues. But they were related to my provider, not the game.
 
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Trader38

Trader38
Talarin said:
Er, Trader38

The request timed out is not an issue. Nor is measuring ping time to the match making server. In short, that resolves little relating to multiplayer.
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Sorry but you are wrong. The hop request is forwarded to the next relay on route, if this relay is unable to process it times out and the request is sent on to the next. There is a delay caused by this timeout which is not shown on tracert, it is around 100-200ms (not sure if it's dynamic).
The relay timeouts are incredibly important, so is the ping and so is the quality of the connection (as in dropped packets).
 

Aewarin Jameson

Aewarin Jameson
Trader38 said:
Notice that before the final ping to the amazon server in rows 8 & 9 there are two timeouts and in rows 14, 15 & 16 a further three. That's bad !
Exit ED and close the launcher.
Click to expand...

I am sorry but you are not quite right with your assessment. Tracert works by sending out 3 pings repeatedly to the destination, first round the TTL is set to 1; next round it's set to 2; and so on. When it moves through the network the TTL is decremented and when it reaches 0 the packet can't be routed further and the device it hit should send back an "expired" message (ICMP time exceeded) - tracert uses this to determine the IP address and reports the latency.

Some internet-admins disable ICMP responses so when this packet arrives and expires it's dropped - hence the *'s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traceroute
 
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kurush

kurush
People usually start to cry "hacks" in this scenario :) . The game maintains the state of the current instance on all connected peers and synchronizes this state using direct connections between them. If your internet connection is losing packets, this synchronization can be delayed and you would be seeing and firing upon the enemy copy where your PC thinks it is while your opposition will be seeing and firing at where they think you are. Once the game manages to push the synchronization data through your bad connection, the damage dealt this way gets delivered to you. If it does not happen, you see a logoffsky and my cat is fat and happy :)
Keep in mind that it not bandwidth related, but rather connection quality related. If you have a bad router or ISP that loses your internet packets, you will experience this behavior. If you use a cheap router sent you by your ISP, do yourself a favor and upgrade it to something decent.
 
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