Can Mounted Combat Lag Be Fixed?

 

When the latest “Twenty Questions” was released by Turbine, I noticed a large part of the community focusing on the question about LOTR licensing. Perhaps it’s my background, but I was drawn to a different question, the one about game performance issues:

Q13: I wish I knew the real reason for the lags and if and when you are going to eliminate them. I suppose it is a problem in the server code/engine and/or client/server protocol which is not easy to fix?

 

A13: There is more than one cause for lag today, and as time goes on and the game (and the internet) change, new causes of lag are introduced. We have folks who work on this all the time, and if you are not satisfied with the results, well, know that we aren’t either. We have some brand-new performance monitoring technologies that we have recently put on the live servers, which have started to provide important clues. We are hoping for some significant improvements with the expansion pack, especially for some of the Mounted Combat cases. – Nathan

I’ll analyze the answer a little later, but let’s start with some basics about video game performance issues and why they’re so tough to fix.

 What is lag?

Lag, in gaming lingo, is a general term used to describe a condition where issues with performance are interrupting the game experience. It usually manifests as graphics momentarily freezing, characters jumping from one point to another, or delayed interactions with the game. Actually, lag has been around as long as video games. I remember my old Zenith 486 trying to keep up with the demands of the original “Doom”! The only way to fix lag in those days was to buy a new computer. As both games and computing have become more complex, we have introduced more and more places within the end-to-end gaming system where performance can be impacted.

 What contributes to lag & why?

When you get right down to it, there is one major thing that causes lag: latency. Latency is a measure of time delay in a system, or something that keeps network traffic from being delivered at “wire speed” (the speed at which light is delivered over a fiber optic, or electricity is delivered over copper wire).  What’s equally simple is what causes latency: pretty much everything. Every router that makes a decision on where to send the packets, any server process that interacts with the application, network traffic congestion, firewalls, even just the pure distance between the client and the server data center. All of these things delay the delivery of network traffic, and thus inject latency into the system.

Truthfully, packet re-transmissions are another thing that can contribute to lag. These can be especially troublesome on a wireless network where packets are lost more frequently, but for now, let’s just focus on latency.

 What is most affected by latency?

Everything on the Internet is affected by latency, it’s just more noticeable in some types of traffic than in others. A web page that renders an image more slowly than normal is not as noticeable as a video that pauses to buffer. Audio and video are two types of traffic that are especially sensitive to delays in delivery. However, most on-demand services have found ways to work around the latency.

 What can be done about latency?

Netflix, for example, built its own Content Delivery Network last year to cache (store) its videos closer to end-users and promise optimal Internet routing. Spotify, Pandora and YouTube buffer their content in order to mask any inconsistencies that may occur while the song or video is playing. While these are all great latency work-arounds that enhance the end-user experience, they also do a great job of raising our expectations for any service delivered over the Internet. We now expect smooth, consistent delivery of all of our Internet services!

Where latency is still most noticeable today is in real-time streaming services and gaming. This is because the above work-arounds of caching and buffering aren’t possible for real-time interactions. Skype can’t predict what the person on the other end of the line is going to say to you in order to pre-cache it, and any attempt at buffering a conversation would cause very frustrating conversation delays for both parties. Likewise, games must still rely on the user action -> server receive -> server respond -> client receive cycle in order to deliver an interactive experience, and are still very vulnerable to any type of latency.

So, should we be concerned about the lag in LOTRO?

Honestly, I am a bit, and here’s why. I look at the entire LOTRO gaming system end-to-end, and I see 3 parts. Your home network, including your PC, which you control, Turbine’s servers and data center, which Turbine controls, and the rest of the Internet, which various ISP’s control. Of the places where latency is injected into the system, Turbine has complete control over about 5% (or less). They have absolutely zero control over the latency injected into the system by you, or by the ISP’s providing Internet transport. If the mounted combat mechanic is as sensitive to latency as it seems, I don’t know how they’re going to solve these performance issues when they only have direct control over that 5%. Maybe I’m wrong, and perhaps the servers and application code account for more of the issue than I’m giving them credit for. I hope that’s the case, but it seems to me that they’ve built a mechanic that requires a guaranteed quality of delivery that the Internet just isn’t built to provide.

How should we interpret Turbine’s response?

I’m both a little concerned and relieved with Turbine’s response to the question. I’m concerned because we’re now nine months past the Riders of Rohan launch, and they still don’t know what’s causing the mounted combat lag issues (“We have some brand-new performance monitoring technologies that we have recently put on the live servers, which have started to provide important clues”). However, given my reasoning in the previous paragraph, this doesn’t really surprise me very much. I suspected that if they knew the reason for the issues, they would have been fixed by now. I’m relieved to know that they’re still working towards a resolution, as opposed to just scrapping the whole idea of mounted combat for future releases (“We are hoping for some significant improvements with the expansion pack, especially for some of the Mounted Combat cases”).

I’ll finish by saying that I don’t really fault Turbine too much for the current lag issues in mounted combat. They had an ambitious vision, one that would bring an experience unique not only to Rohan, but to MMO’s. Testing a system unlike that of any other, with a full production server load, accounting for every variance in the Internet and every home user’s network is not only difficult, it’s impossible. The only thing they can really do is execute as close to the vision as possible and adjust as needed, which sounds exactly like what they’re doing.

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Braxwolf can be found on Twitter at @Braxwolf

or on Windfola, injecting latency into Sauron’s plans for world domination