This has been happening for a while but recently it has become quite a problem.

In most cases one mobile player in sector is enough to cause significant lag for everyone else.

From minor lag things seem to progress fast (in a matter of minutes) as he stays in the sector longer - 'invulnerable' effect starts happening (no shots registering on mobile player and in the worst case, shots not registering on anyone).

This also affects NPCs.
Recent example was during attack on conquerable station with a mobile player in a group - turrets became 'indestructible' and no swarm shots were registering on them. As soon as he lagged out and disconnected, everything returned to normal.

This might not be a bug but I sincerely have no idea where to post this.

Is this mobile players effect on sectors just a reality we have to live with or is it something that can be mitigated?

Oh noes he said a bad word.

Out of curiosity, are there any plugins on use which pull player information like targetless, bountyhud, or one of the proprietary guild plugins that does sector spotting? And if so, does the behavior persist with all plugins disabled?

Yeah Kierky, I know... the usual answer is - it's the internet, so sue me for asking if maybe there is something that can make this particular occurrence related exclusively to presence of some mobile players in the sector less severe.

The thing is that there can be 50 players in the sector and if only one of them is a mobile with a bad connection - he will cause problems for everyone else until he disconnects or leaves sector.

Savet, not sure what would be the right answer here.
I only use TCS and target list but I fail to see how is that related to mobile player causing sector lag equally for all players in the sector.

If there's an additional overhead interfacing with the game pulling data on mobile players in the sector that adds latency to such requests, your game client could be getting overloaded waiting for such requests to finish and impacting other network operations like hit detection.

A recent example is: https://www.vendetta-online.com/x/msgboard/2/30910

I would recommend trying to replicate this behavior without any plugins. If the behavior does not persist, I would try with just target list. Then just TCS. If it occurs without any plugins then it's game related and something GS would need to address. If it's related to one or both of the plugins, then it might be necessary to look at the data that these plugins are polling from the game to determine what could be causing the impact.

There is a perfect example of what has been happening inside this recording of the latest NW.

Pay close attention to 'mobile invulnerability' of General Jack O'Neil' and Mamu in this video:

https://youtu.be/g9RS8hd50io

Are you saying that mobile players that weren't jack or mamu caused jack or mamu to be invulnerable?

It's pretty widely accepted that network lag on one side of a fight will potentially cause one or both of the players in the fight to not register hits. If jack or mamu were mobile, this would explain their missed hit detection.

It's another thing if a mobile player in a sector causes a non-mobile player to not be able to hit other characters or NPCs. That is how I understood the problem described in this thread, and the video you posted doesn't seem to support that as I saw players being damaged which were not jack or mamu.

Savet - If you look closely, you will see that Lazy did not get hits registered on him while fighting mobile laggers in a few situations too.

Add Boda Shandis to that list in that video as well, and not talking about when he was undocking.

Anyways, what I really wanted to say was thanks for watching!

Umm. There's about 50 different.. issues with the reports here. But Bojan, most importantly: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation.

The best example of this problem is the idea that because one guy logged off, suddenly the NPCs started working again. I'm not saying those events didn't happen at roughly the same time (I imagine they did). I'm saying you're jumping to extremely unlikely conclusions, based on timing that was probably related but not causal. If anyone is going to get knocked off the game by a high latency spike or SD issue, it's definitely going to be the poor mobile guy who was already laggy to begin with. That doesn't prove (or imply) that he was causing the problem, or.. anything else, for that matter.

Mobile players are not causing actual lag. There is the possibility that Savet raised about perceived lag (on your particular client) because your configured plugins keep spamming for information on surrounding players, and those with increased latency take longer to reply, and this is filling up your outbound queue on the server. But this is not impacting anyone else. Even in the actual bug Savet linked, it only impacted people with these plugins, and did not impact the "sector" or any such thing.

Like Savet says, try playing without any plugins for awhile, in some of these situations, and see how that goes.

A video of people having occasional collision misses is not conclusive evidence of anything other than "yes, they were playing over the internet". When there are cases of large latency disparities, misses are going to be more common.

If you want to report something about "lag", Stick to the rules laid out in the related thread (and read that post thoroughly before posting), in particular:

- Make detailed reports, dates, times, in-game locations, activity at the time, etc.
- Stick to the facts, either leave out the theories entirely, or put them at the bottom.
- Don't put too much emphasis on "but everyone I know is seeing the same issue!", that just means you're all using the.. internet. It is helpful to report group commonalities like this, but not conclusions based on them.

This thread is an example of exactly what not to do. Lots of theories and "conclusions", almost no data.

Thank you Inc, you are right of course, correlation does not imply causation. I am not enough tech savvy to be certain about anything and, at best, I can guess.

Only thing that I know is - I actually play the game and run into the same issues with the same mobile players on a daily basis.

I tried playing without any plug-ins (no TCS, no target list) but the result with those players in the sector was the same as previously described so it's probably safe to say that TCS and target list are not the issues that might be causing problems.

Indeed, we are all 'using the internet'. Also you have to understand that mostly nobody playing the game will immediately grab pen and paper and write down immaculate detailed reports.
We are here to play the game, most of us will just say 'this is weird' or 'this was odd' and continue playing.

The common thing with all the weird stuff happening (it's the internet, right?) is - if you don't know about it, it does not exist.
I will just pretend this things don't happen and not bother you with it anymore - it's probably the easiest solution for both of us.
Sorry for posting this in the first place, it will not happen again.

I've encountered this in the last two bus wars in Sedina D14 I have participated in, but I also forgot to write down the time it happened.
I think it was on the 28th and 29th January. Sometime around +/- 21pm GMT on the 28th, no idea about the 29th though.

Anyway on both occasions there was a period of time where no one was able to cause damage to each other for a few minutes. We were about 5 people sitting still and shooting at each other wondering when hits would register again until I suggested that Arlanthis Johaun (he participated in both bus wars) should try to relog and see if this might change anything. He unfortunately has the reputation of having a higher latency mobile connection.
Surprisingly as soon as he logged out, we were able to damage each other again, so our guess was it must have changed the sector behaviour somehow, and it still worked after he logged back in.
This holds true for both occasions.

Same thing happened in Sedina b8 one night after that with the same mobile Player (sorry, I don't want to point any fingers), however I do not know when it happened. I'll try to remember writing down the time net time.

Edit: I had the idea to tell Arlanthis Johaun to relog into the game and see if it temporarily causes any differences after Bojan told me about a similar situation during station conquest with another mobile player on his team.

Inc, if you want details into this, check your logs:

Wednesday (2/3/2016) night, between 8:00PM to approx ~12:00AM EST. Edras I-2. Hit-checks on NPC targets would occasionally stop responding (no beep) during the battle. This includes shots not registering on blockade fighters, capships, as well as repair shots on ARF_01's Trident.

We are here to play the game, most of us will just say 'this is weird' or 'this was odd' and continue playing.

This is why I've previously asked for a way to have the game client notify the player that "Hey, there's a problem with the internet connection right now"

I want to elaborate that this isn't about the occasional shots not registering, but that in some circumstances one player seemingly stops *all* damage between multiple players in one single sector to register for a prolonged time.

Like when that happened a few years back, but judging from our latest experiences this time susceptible to the game connections of single players and somehow easily fixed by that player reconnecting. The problem, as ARF said, is a lack of an easier way to identify the quality of ones connection and that results in everyone blaming everyone else.

Yeah, it resembles the issues from a couple years ago when time sync problems would cause the sector to stop registering hits for everyone. Player ships still move around, shoot, and generally appear not-laggy, but NPCs get stuck, stop firing, etc.

I will just pretend this things don't happen and not bother you with it anymore - it's probably the easiest solution for both of us. Sorry for posting this in the first place, it will not happen again.

Actually, what I'm asking is for you to just stick to the facts. If you posted "hey, I saw this weird stuff yesterday in this place", that's actually is much more useful than a lengthy conspiracy theory about mobile players lagging everyone else, and a bunch of followup posts intended to support that theory.

Also you have to understand that mostly nobody playing the game will immediately grab pen and paper and write down immaculate detailed reports.

I don't expect immaculate reports. But if one has the energy to make a Bugs post at all (let alone several lengthy posts about pet theories), then one definitely has the energy to write down the date and time of the incident and include that data. It's up to you: if you want to help, then help, I'm all for it. If you prefer not to post at all, that's ok too. But posting theories without data is actually the opposite of helpful, it's just a time-waste for both of us.

I want to elaborate that this isn't about the occasional shots not registering, but that in some circumstances one player seemingly stops *all* damage between multiple players in one single sector to register for a prolonged time.

That is useful, and it jives with an independent theory / project of mine (which I've actually been working on for a couple of weeks) about some issues I think are impacting the server. I don't think this has anything to do with the internet at all.

This is why I've previously asked for a way to have the game client notify the player that "Hey, there's a problem with the internet connection right now"

I agree, that would be helpful.

Conspiracy theory?

I posted about a problem majority of players are experiencing and know about but don't have the balls to say it out loud in fear they would slow down development or get smacked by you for wasting your time.

As I said earlier - I am not enough tech savvy to be certain about anything and, at best, I can guess.

If problem persist while a mobile player with a bad connection is in sector and then disappears when he logs off or laggs out and this keeps happening dozens of times every damn day then, guess what?
I deducted that problem might be related to a mobile player with a bad connection.

It's a simple deduction for me, for you it's a 'conspiracy theory'.

Was my deduction wrong? I don't know and that is the reason I posted this in bugs for you to take notice and use your expertise to find out what is really happening .

Hey Inc, if you would like a specific example in this video of NW #432 on 1/31/16 look at the following time stamps:

13:54 - Numerous shots hit Boda Shandis for no damage
14:12 - Niki mentions in chat not being able to damage General O'Neil
14:22 - Shark mentions in chat not being able to damage mamu
14:51 - Numerous shots hit General O'Neil for no damage
14:57 - Niki mentions in chat still not being able to damage General O'Neil

The start time was somewhere between 5-10 minutes late so I don't have a very specific /time to give you, but was supposed to be 19:00, sorry.

Was my deduction wrong? I don't know and that is the reason I posted this in bugs for you to take notice and use your expertise to find out what is really happening .

Bojan, you just don't read anything, do you? WE DON'T WANT YOUR DEDUCTIONS, EVER. That's a huge part of why I wrote that lag post, lines like "Because these people are usually wrong, and it would have been better to just report the basic facts to us, without the theories."

And yet, when you're justifiably criticized for posting loopy theories, you frame yourself as some kind of community saviour who "has the balls" to post about this topic. But you aren't saving anyone, you're just confusing the issue, wasting time, and making things worse.

I already said, it would be just fine for you to post the specific facts of what you've seen and let us know you're seeing a problem. That would be welcome. What I don't need is all the BS you add onto it with your "deductions", and your tendency towards drama.

I mean, this entire thread is called "Mobile players causing sector lag"; but you admit you aren't technically competent enough to understand this issue, and yet you're willing to claim that mobile players are commonly causing sector lag. WTF??@#!.

I give up, man. I'm not burning any more time explaining this stuff to you, because you have evidenced zero interest in reading it, or adjusting your behaviour to be useful. I've had these kinds of exchanges with you in too many different bugs threads. I'm just banning you from Bugs.

FYI to all: I welcome on-going posts of issues like this, that emphasize specific facts, especially with dates / times / locations. But really, any facts are welcome. Just minimize the "deductions" and "theories".

Someone has expressed concern to me privately, so to clarify a few things:

Bugs is not a "customer service" forum, that isn't what we do here, that's what support tickets are for. This place exists for tightly honed group-enabled reporting of specific problems that have been seen in the game. (Note: problems and not theories).

We put a large amount of effort into investigating and debugging things that come up on Bugs. It may not always be evident, but we do. It's a big chunk of our time, every week. We can't always solve everything, but we actually do try to figure out what's happening.

However, for this forum to have value at all, it requires a mandate of players to raise the level of their dialogue and behaviour, and adjust it when required (such as, at developer request). Without that, the use of Bugs drops below zero, and we might as well have a placebo-robot posting here saying "Thank you, your complaint has been noted". Because if people won't stick to the facts, we end up spending hours chasing ghosts, and wasting our time without fixing any problems. The value becomes worse than nothing.

This isn't the first time I've asked Bojan to stop posting theories here and stick to facts, or otherwise alter his behaviour. If he can't do that, then he just keeps making threads like this, which actually end up having net-negative value to development. I don't have time for net-negative Bugs threads. Again, this forum is not here for customer service, it is here for debugging.. the former is really about making people feel "loved", the latter is about actually tracking down technical issues as quickly as possible (and hopefully fixing them, if we can).

As it turns out, I already knew about the problem that's probably causing the issue here. I've been working on it for weeks. But because it isn't a network or mobile thing at all, I'm forced to defend against some other unrelated fictional problem, about mobile players, simply because people can't stick to reporting the facts.

So, I expect people to stick to the facts.

It isn't like we mandate everyone be a network engineer, or having perfect information, just that the information they provide be more-or-less limited to the facts.

It is totally acceptable to post "We keep trying to shoot turrets in station assaults, but we can't damage them sometimes, and then they start working again, and the mobile people all get disconnected", or some variation thereof. Yes, we prefer times and dates and sectors, but if you're going to report anything.. just stick to what you actually know.

I don't consider being banned from Bugs to be a horrifying thing, in the big picture. But I will not hesitate to do that if an individual's Bugs contributions become, over a period of time, more of a time-drain than they are a benefit (intentionally mis-posting for attention, and spurious theory-driven threads like this one). If someone wants their status reversed, they can submit a support ticket making the case that they understand exactly how they need to behave from now on, and I'll take it under consideration.

Someone specifically asked why I responded to Bojan at such great length on this thread: I wanted him to change his behaviour, which is why I kept speaking to that issue. It was not an accident, or un-intentional. Bojan's been around forever. I really care about that. I would prefer to have him on here, but only if he can keep his bad-habits in check.

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, behaviour on Bugs is much more important than an individual player. And if the quality of someone's reports drops too far, and they seem unable to change even when repeatedly asked (over months).. well.. hey, they don't have to worry about contributing Bugs posts anymore.