TECHNICAL SUPPORT / WEB APPs BUGS

I've had some lag and please waits in this game since I came back to it, it is annoying but bearable. Over the last week or so though it's been bad and right now I'm running around the desert teleporting back constantly along with please waits.

I've checked my network and I see nothing wrong, I also have no problems in any other onlne game or any networked related things. Just Ryzom.

Does anyone know of any method to reduce the rubber banding and please waits cause right now I've pretty much had enough.

you'll learn the times they happen the most and learn to find a safe spot for the biggest of them, don't worry though, the new dev roadmap says they've been fixed. (i think it might be a ryzom joke they're telling us, as we all see them, mostly at 0200 GMT/UTC time)

Well, I can say pretty certainly that most of them are caused along the communication lines between you and the server. (On rare occasion they are caused near the server -- but you'll know that when everyone is complaining in Uni.) I know that for my 1.5Mb connection that I can trigger them by having my laptop downloading updates at the same time as I am online, or even downloading mail in the background.

I can't speak to the last week, though, since I've been on a trip to places that almost uniformly had lousy wifi. :(

hmmm, everyone in uni does talk about them bittty, someone check bittty's payrole, always covering for the game. (just picking on you bittty, but you do always seam to be willing to make excuses for WG, i'm on a 25Mbit connection and pings are good throughout the teir 1 networks, as well as teir 2, so i guess it's my connection.... doubtful.)

I just got upgraded to 50mb and I'm still getting PWs - Local traffic can contribute but on this evidence it's more likely the server I would think.  Caveat - I'm not too tech savvy so I might be talking rubbish (and not for the first time).

Also on a 50mbps line ... other games work completely fine (Counter Strike, Path of Exile), Ryzom gets PWs.

To me it's fairly obvious the developers are trying to spread some recurring tasks evenly throughout the day, which causes mini-PWs and lags.

a quick ping trace can show where the lag is, if it's network related. but don't worry arfur, there's plenty of geeks (myself included) that play the game, and some of us take the time every now and then to check. no worries, better to make a bad guess then not make one at all, gives us something to talk about :)

One of my guildies made an astute observation, since the lag often happens at the top of the hour, it could be due to scheduled server backups. Makes sense to me. Could it be this? If I means keeping the game safe and operating I suppose I could continue to tolerate it. But hope eventually they find a solution.

i use my mobile hotspot at home and I can use the Speedtest app to force my connection to change servers, this sometimes helps with pws on my side...

So picture Placio pvping while I am frantically tapping the refresh server button on my smart phone :D

Don't want to dive into if we have issues with please waits or not. But there's some technicality here to understand: The speed of your connection is mostly irrelevant. It does not matter if you are on a 1MBit/second, 16MBit/s, 25MBit/s or 1ExaBit/second connection. As long as the speed is enough to cope with the amount of data Ryzom sends to your end (and vice versa) speed is no issue. And Ryzom was designed for a time ten years ago where most people were stuck on an ADSL line with a 1MBit/s downlink and a 192kbit/s uplink.

What is important is latency and stability.

Speed really is throughput: Data per time. Latency how long it is for the bits to reach their destination. You can have a 1000Mbit/s throughput, but a latency of 1 second. If you want to download a movie, throughput is what you care about. If you want to play games you need a low latency in both directions, so that the game server can quickly react to your keystrokes and you can quickly react on new information send by the server.

Latency is what you can measure with a "ping". It is often called the "roundtrip" time. The time it takes for a packet of data to travel from you to the server and then receive the server's response. Since those tests are done with a few bytes (e.g. 512 bytes), the ping time (latency) does not really depend on your having a 50MBit/s connection.

Stability is the other thing of importance and is not easily measured. There's a tool called "traceroute": Like ping it tells you how long it takes for your data to reach the destination. But it also lists the "hops" in between. You're never connected to the Ryzom server directly (with a 1-1 cable link), there's always some hardware in between. This is the route from your computer to the Ryzom server. The internet is notoriously unstable. And it is designed to cope with that. As a result, every now and then the route your data takes does change. This can lead to unexpected, brief delays. It can cause the Ryzom server to "please wait" you.

Your internet provider is also likely to do traffic shaping. Ryzom's udp packets may be the first the carrier or the internet provider is dropping - if you're unlucky. Consider internet telephony or video conferencing, or life streaming. For all three applications it is important that no data traffic is lost or delayed. Also, providers earn extra money with these services. So this is usually prioritized. ftp and http data is probably the least important, and is often dropped - web browsers and servers will happily retry 100ms later and users often do not care. Ryzom's udp packets might be treated by those automatic traffic shaping algorithms as medium to high priority real-time gaming packets, or they might be very low priority because Ryzom is a fairly unknown and unimportant application to the providers. We'll probably never know.

One other background information: Ryzom uses such udp packets because they are smaller, and carry less overhead. At one time they were ideal for a crowded internet where realtime information had to be exchanged. Unfortunately the effectiveness comes at the price of having no guaranteed delivery. In other words: If a udp packet gets dropped/lost by the network, the Ryzom server will not resend the information, and you client won't either. Lost packets could e.g. explain the "rubberbanding" we see occasionally. Don't take me wrong: I don't know if that's the root cause, it's just one of many possible explanations. Most of the internet works with tcp packets these days. If network equipment drops one, it will be resent. For games and other realtime applications, tcp often is ineffective because resent information might already be outdated.

To make a long story short: If you experience lots of "please waits", ask in universe channel. If others experience the same, it's likely either the Ryzom server's fault (software or hardware) or the network connection near the server. If you're the only one it may be that you just lucked out on the internet connection. You could do a traceroute when it happens, and then later again when it works well, and see if you can spot a difference.

If you have constantly "please waits" (for longer than an hour) you might want to monitor all incoming and outgoing Ryzom data with a tool such as Ethereal (Wireshark) or similar and analyse if there are differences between good and bad times. But this is not for the uninitiated I guess.

I apologize for the rambling...

nice to see real information shared :) and methods too.

@ Irfidel. Thank you. Your explanation was very informative and wonderfully explained.

Irfidel, Thanks for that information. It was very informative :D