Thread: Stable Mounts Issue and Stuttering/Hitching issues

Wow, just upgraded my wireless card only to find out that I'm still getting lag spikes. Nice... Wish I had found this thread a few days ago...

You know, if anything, the problem seems to be getting worse each day. Tonight, I managed to play for around 40 minutes before I logged out in frustration. 5 out of the 6 horse rides I took, lagged out forcing me to relog, only to have some really weird #### happen when I logged back in, like horses veering off their route.

This needs fixed badly. I know "only a few" appear to be experiencing the issue (since you are basing it purely on complaints), but there are a LOT more complaining about it in the game who are not reporting the issue.

Why don't you have your GM's log in and monitor chat on each server. Or even log in to each server and ask in chat if anyone has experienced this problem, then you may see the much larger picture.

I had Travels die 4 times in 2 hours right after the Festival patch was up.
When it happens that often it makes the game unplayable when you are trying to level in Moria.
It's been less often in the last couple days but I still freeze in place every so often.

I'll get a stutter every now and then, but nothing to the extent of what's posted here. It was horribly bad at one point last week, during EST overnight hours, but not since.

Am I just lucky here? I also don't play with any sort of ultra setting, so maybe that's where the difference comes in?

I just came back after a 4 month break and am definitely getting hitching/skill activation lag.

I noticed it on all of the toons I have been questing with but it is the worst on my warden when trying to build gambits.

On the warden I am getting delays in skills firing 3-4 times in a single fight, every fight. This leads to broken/incorrect gambits being used and a lot of frustration when playing.

Ping times do not seem to be a problem as there is no packet loss and ping times are consistent.

To me this seems like something on Turbines end more than a problem on my end or in-between - some kind of server processing lag rather than network related.

Originally Posted by Berzerker_prime

Actually, as far as I'm aware, cooldown timers for both maps activate when you use one of them. It's like the cooldown timers on potions; it triggers for all of them when you use one. Other than the weird lag you got, I don't think that's new or a glitch.

I only remember that happening when a map skills was used, though. Now, if you change your mind and move to cancel the first one, both maps are activated.
I tried this again after posting here and found that there appears to be a 5-10s delay on map skills. Click a map and move to cancel, and the map will continue to load and try to port you once you stop. I now have to move around for a while before it's cancelled and I can pick a new map. I don't remember that happening before.

I've experienced the minor stuttering and stable problems everyone else has mentioned. It seems especially bad for Bree-based swift travel. I'll move forward on the Swift Horse, then stop without proceeding and have to dismount to move on.

I also suddenly find my PC seems to have to work much harder and use more resources. I have never had a problem running the game on High, and now it consistently seems to need to be tweaked to run well.

Another weird thing I've experienced only recently is that my character no longer performs most emotes. When I type in an emote, I will see the text but no onscreen movement from my character. However, she doesn't lag. She just doesn't visibly perform the action.

For example, I'll type "/sit"

I see the words of the action performed in my Chat/action log: Farien sits.

But my character doesn't move. Although, weirdly enough, she does do the new /Toast emote. So some emotes work, but for now, many do not occur once typed. She just stands there.

Hope the additional feedback helps.

I've only experienced the stable mount issue once, as I posted before in this thread, but now I've been noticing some really strange performance issues. At first, let me list the insides of my computer to let you know what kind of performance I should be expecting;

CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 980, running at stock clocks of 4x3.70GHz
RAM: 12GB DDR3 1333MHz
GFX: GeForce GTX460 1GB

Also, I'm running both my operating system (Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit) and LotRO clients from an SSD drive to gain maximum performance for gaming. As you can probably figure out, performance with that rig should be excellent.

And it is, with one client. However, I've had a habit of running two clients at the same time. If I'm leveling up a character on my "secondary" account, I often have a captain from my main account logged in to summon the lower level toon back into camp for hand-ins, as I really hate all that running back and forth inside Moria.

This has never been an issue - I was able to run up to four clients at once without any hitching based on my tests about a year ago, with the same configuration (except for the SSD drive, that's relatively new).

As of now, I'm getting serious performance issues whenever I run just two clients at the same time. Crashes, graphics glitches, lots of hitching and stuttering. There's no difference in performance with one client between pre-U6 and post-U6 versions (I can run one client with everything absolutely maxed out), but with two clients the difference is very noticeable.

Something has changed for the worse, and it's definitely not my computer.

Originally Posted by Angeliel

Another weird thing I've experienced only recently is that my character no longer performs most emotes. When I type in an emote, I will see the text but no onscreen movement from my character. However, she doesn't lag. She just doesn't visibly perform the action.

For example, I'll type "/sit"

I see the words of the action performed in my Chat/action log: Farien sits.

But my character doesn't move. Although, weirdly enough, she does do the new /Toast emote. So some emotes work, but for now, many do not occur once typed. She just stands there.

Was this at the Bree fireworks area? Emotes are disabled there (you see a "serious business" notification in the buff/debuff bar when you're in the affected area).

The new /toast emote does work there, though, probably to show it off (since it fits with the festival theme and can be won in the envelopes) and also because it doesn't affect anyone else when you do it.

Last night there was some serious issues going on. I had 2 'connection lost' events following some extreme lag. I know it wasn't my connection as I was two boxing at the time and only one account went down.

Last night = an unplayable night for me, I gave up after an hour.

Do we have any updates on the progress towards fixing these issues?

I have noticed a reduction in "stuttering" since the fix to U6, however it is still quite prevalent.

Here is what I am seeing while fighting a warg that moves in and out of melee range.

As the warg charges into melee range he pauses then appears about 10meters behind me. His movement remains continuous until he comes back in for an attack. Over half the time he is in melee range he "stutters" and appears behind me.

I'm also seeing extreme skill stuttering. Even though I am in range for attacks my attacks will stutters. I can see my shoulders twitch for the attack but it never completes even though the warg doesn't move. It's like I'm somewhere between in and out of attack range, so that the attack passes one check but fails the next. I also have upward of 4seconds to complete something simple like placing a banner.

I have noticed that freep on freep stuttering is reduced. When I ride with freeps they rarely stutter. It seems almost exclusive to creep on freep now, however I'm not certain on that so put it at the back of your mind as unconfirmed, this is just my recollection at the time, and only for the moors. I still stutter in PvE I just seem to have noticed a difference since the last update in pvp freep/freep stuttering.

My fps remains at 60, I have a quad core processor with 8g ram, and a good vid card, I have cable internet.

I have experienced mounts stopping, skill lag in pve battles, and horrid lag any time I fight a creep with my freep, even 1-1. In the moors there are hangs lasting 1-10 seconds in general play, but getting into combat makes the lag much worse. Though they haven't posted here, all the guys I usually run with in the moors have complained about the lag, and it is getting bad enough that it's unplayable freepside. The combat lag does seem to not be as bad creepside for some reason, but it does still lag.

My friends and I have good hardware and experienced zero issues with lag until recently.

Example: Last night on my warg, I watched a minnie ride their horse through Hoarhollow. They would be riding, then look like they stopped, then teleport 50 feet forward, etc. It works the same in combat.

I know I have entered my fair share of complaints about this issue, but I do have to say in Turbines defense that sometimes these issues can be a nightmare to troubleshoot. I work as a QA engineer for a software developer and have just spent 3 weeks with an issue which a ton of customers were seeing, but we could not replicate in a test environment using identical hardware etc as the people with the issue. We did fix it eventually (we had to find a customer who would run some diagnostics while encountering the issue and send us the logs), which actually ended up being something very simple, however, even simple issues can take a long time to troubleshoot.

I would say, I think the main issue here is communication. I know you probably don't have anything new to report, but just a simple "hey guys, engineers are still working on this" every now and again, lets us know we haven't been forgotten

In saying all that, if you do have any debugging/logging tools you want someone to run while playing the game, I'm sure there would be several people here including myself who would be happy to assist in any way to speed up the resolution of this issue.

Originally Posted by Rieven

I know I have entered my fair share of complaints about this issue, but I do have to say in Turbines defense that sometimes these issues can be a nightmare to troubleshoot. I work as a QA engineer for a software developer and have just spent 3 weeks with an issue which a ton of customers were seeing, but we could not replicate in a test environment using identical hardware etc as the people with the issue. We did fix it eventually (we had to find a customer who would run some diagnostics while encountering the issue and send us the logs), which actually ended up being something very simple, however, even simple issues can take a long time to troubleshoot.

Agreed. I troubleshoot for a living, too, and when you have something competely unknown, which isn't fixed using the normal methods, and which denies you your normal tools, it can be an absolute bear.

I hope that people will continue to keep in mind that the flow of information goes both ways. A problem can only be fixed if you have enough information to know what to do. You never know what information can be helpful, so if you notice a symptom, tell them about it. Simply saying "it's not working, fix it," is fairly useless to a troubleshooter.

Data is what the devs need, not a measure of how unhappy you are. They get it, trust me.

Stable mounts are still stuttering for me and in addition to that 90-95% of the time the LOTRO client always crashes on exit. Earlier today it also crashed on character transfer stage. Currently I am standing still on a swift travel mount at Thorins Hall.

Originally Posted by Dirlettia

and in addition to that 90-95% of the time the LOTRO client always crashes on exit.

I have that, too, BTW. 2 out of 3 machines I use for LOTRO have crash-on-exit. One XP and one Linux machine affected, one XP unaffected.

I am running W7 and have had no exit game crashes.

This week I have been having the "delay of signal" stop/jump forward both in travel, running or horseback, and in pve fights a lot.

I agree that debugging can be as hard as not drawing wife agro. ;D (To female programers jk )

K since turbine hasn't said much i decided to look into the possible issues that could be occurring or not occurring on my own. I don't do this for a living or anything but here is what i have done so far. I updated all my drivers, reinstalled lotro completely, turned off sound, reduced graphics settings to med., i had my ISP check my line, i used a disk optimizer (fixbee), and cleaned out my registry. None of this has impacted it very much i still get the same skill lag and strange occurrences of rubber banding and matrix moves right out of the movie. So i decide i would load my system while playing lotro just to see what would happen, I went to TSN and watched streamed sports highlights and left it running while i played and i noticed absolutely no increase of lag which doesn't even make sense. I asked around and one of my friends mentioned Nova Bench had been very helpful when they had problems that seemed to hide from them so i gave it a try. Here is the results of the test it runs im hoping this info will helpful to the techs working on this.

NovaBench Score :545

4/26/2012 2:13:49 pm
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Intel Core2 Q6600 2.40 GHz @ 2393 Mhz
Graphics Card: Nividia Geforce 9500 GT

3071 MB System RAM (Score:95)
- RAM Speed: 3663 MB/s

CPU Tests (Score:361)
-Floating Point Operations/Second: 101774244
-Integer Operations/Second: 279915324
-MD5 Hashes Generated/Second: 794889

Graphics Tests (Score: 71)
-3D Frames Per Second: 228

Hardware Tests (Score: 18)
-Primary Partition Capacity: 466 GB
-Drive Write Speed: 22 MB/s

If there is anymore info i can give please ask . I asked around and people have said that it doesn't appear that my setup is having any issues that would be related to the OS or my hardware.

I have also had consistent stable mount freezes and stuttering/rubberbanding since U6 which have not improved at all since the fix. Stable horses freeze more than half the time for me - relogging does "unstick" them, but nothing else helps. Sometimes my horses have also run into obstacles and stuck galloping in place.

I have not had quite as intense lagging and hitching as others, but I do have significant mini-freezes and rubberbanding episodes, especially while grouping or in highly populated areas.

Any news from the blue-names would be greatly appreciated as we work toward a solution.

Just saw this thread.... good to know about the /bug tip for in game. I have had my stable mount hang in Moria twice where I had to dismount and then summon my own horse to finish the trip. Both of the trips were to the 21st Hall. One of the trips started from the crossroads, that trip was with my warden a couple weeks ago. The other was from the flaming deeps with my Loremaster last night.

Horrendous amount of issues since U6.

Game will crash every time I exit. (Not overly detrimental, but annoying).

I was raiding just fine before U6, the same day I patch my client and raid I noticed an extreme amount of lag, at an unplayable level (No loss, and latency still less than 100), CPU running at 30-40%, so it doesn't seem to make any sense.

Ridiculous log in times on occasion. Have had to wait 15-20 minutes at times before I get on to the actual game. Again, all started after U6.

Judging by the large amount of responses it's fairly clear there is some issue within the game as of U6, and would certainly appreciate a hotfix so that I can actual play the game without having to resort to making it look like a SNES game on the bare minimum graphics.

Ta.

The stable horses/goats get stuck on my lore master (lvl 58 elf) more often than my guardian (lvl 75 woman).
The only difference in using the stable masters is that my guardian has swift travel unlocked and my lore master doesn't (reputation/quest/deed gated). However, this has happened to my guardian once with a swift travel purchase (from Stangard to Bree).

Honestly, I would much rather this happen more to my guard than lore master. She is better prepared for random stable bugs than the lore master. She has quite a few ports and a stable horse is just a way to save an hour cool down for later. My lore master only has two ports (one milestone set in 21st hall and travel to personal house/kin house, both are in the same neighborhood).

I really hate when this happens in Moria. I can't be the only person who gets lost in Moria. Taking a stable goat is a way to make sure I get to the right area without dread. Is there a way to make the goat/horse go again? Should I just wait or dismount and hope my poor lore master doesn't get eaten by a warg?

I don't post on this forum, or any forum normally.

But I was trying to find out why my system (which two weeks ago was working great) was stuttering around with my new dwarf champion. I guess I just got caught up in the bug that is this issue.

I can not complete a stable mount journey (normally around the dwarven areas) over 50% of the time, it just stops..often at the exact same spot in the middle of nowhere. I have constant jerking, pausing...all that fun stuff. I have been doing my fights by memory just hitting the buttons wait 10 seconds everything catches up and the bad guys are dead around me.

My system is a gaming desk top build, its not my system. It worked fine a month ago, works fine on AoC or Aion right now. Works fine on massive PvP encounters in AoC right now...but a pony ride from Thorin's Gate? Everything falls apart.

I cancelled my V.I.P. just because I really don't know if this is even being addressed.

It is not just my new champion, I tried moving around with my Warden in Bree (an area I normally have zero problems with) and it was a bit laggy but I attributed that to the festival, besides I mainly keep him parked at the skirmish camp, By the way skirmishes work great for me no lag at all, or at least nothing as noticeable as the 10 second teleport around the landscape I am having with this champion (the only character I am currently playing)

Just letting it known that I have this issue, and I have had this issue for a couple of days and there are probably others like me who just don't like putting in tickets or crawling around on the forums when it's so much easier to just ignore it or do something else (like another game). However I was really starting to enjoy that short bearded champion so I do hope it gets fixed.

Landroval server

Just before the finish line in the Shire horse race, I was teleported backwards, heard the broken leg sound and rode across the finish line in slowmotion with a falling injury.

I created a new character on another server the other day and the game was running very smoothly. No delay on skills, no stuttering. Nothing in the vault, no costumes, no kinship, clean friend's list, so a lot less things to load.
When I switched back to my regular server, the problems returned.

Sapience - is there any information which would be useful for those tracking this one down to have? Have been bug reporting but not sure just how useful that is.

Currently experiencing exceptionally long load in times, opening the crafting tab or the map is now similar to how clicking the 'completed quests' box used to be in terms of a long period while things load up, there is consistent stuttering which does not seem to be 'normal' lag related, there are raid wide spikes of such lag where people note that skills just aren't firing in a timely fashion and queuing skills can lead to some not firing at all etc.

Anything which we can provide which can help narrow this down for you?

Still up to a few seconds of 'stuttering' for all people in a raid at the same time on Belegaer. No patterns.

I've had several Lag/Hitches/Stuttering occasions happen to me since U6.

Mounts/Stables
On several of my toons/characters I would take a stable master horse sometimes it would be a swift & sometimes a Standard/slow travel. On the Standard/Slow travels I would sometimes get about 1/2 way to my destination & just stop. On the Swift Travels I would get through the loading screen, get almost to the Stable Master & "BAM" dead stop & just sit there. Now when this happens I would just dismount & continue on my way.

Hitching/Stuttering
I've been in Instances where I would be fighting a boss & my screen would just freeze I would still have the "yellow marching ants" thing around my skills tho. Other times I would be running around say Parth Celebrant to be specific & I'd enter combat for no reason and start taking damage. (Its a good thing my Main is a Champ & I have AoEs I can fire off). Well I ended up defeating whatever it was attacking me & it ended up being one of those vicious hounds. The funny thing is, it never even appeared on my screen. It was like I was fighting a ghost.

I have also noticed ALOT more lag than prior to U6. Sure I don't have a top of the line computer but its worked on LOTRO so far. At least till U6. Pre-U6 I'd run at about 25-30 FPS (With Graphics settings on around medium). Currently I run at about 5-15 (With Graphics settings on the lowest possible).
I've also noticed that this mainly happens on my high level characters.

Yesterday I had the "stuttering" for the first time (yep never had it THAT bad before). Skills didn't fire as fast as usually and every movement was with this "stuttering" effect. My wife was on an other (older) laptop (same internet connection) and had no problems.. very strange. We both had only lotro running .. wait no I had the logitech gaming software for the G13 on, too (as always) (I run windows 7 - 32bit on a Dell E6400 / my wife runs Windows XP - 32bit on a .. ermm .. laptop *G*)

I would like to report that I took a stable ride from the 21st hall to the flaming deeps and it froze halfway through

Last night I got a goat from 21st to Orc watch but just outside 21st it ran into the wall and then kept going round in circles and back into the wall. Multiple relogs didn't help so in the end I dismounted

Several stable rides broke with no pattern at all.
Looking at what happened at the route Rivendell - the outpost-i-don't-remember-the-name-in-the-trollshaw, i think it broke after a bit of stuttering:

it didnt stop, just anticipated the u-turn on the road outside of rivendell and got stuck in the slope.
two times, in two different locations

Frequent hitching/stuttering on several toons, in random locations, doing random activities.

I also noticed that the video card is working harder than before.
Sometimes the vg driver even stops working.

I did a fresh install on a ssd drive lately, but the problems are still there.

About internet lag, yes, occasionally. Prior U6, no lag at all tho.


Tried changing dx10-dx11, no effects at all.

Thought I'd wait awhile after the update to see in what way things had changed. For me, things have improved, but are still troublesome. Stable rides complete more often, I've been playing more but had "only" two occurrences - a complete stop and a horse that got confused halfway between Hengstacer's and West Bree, getting hung up on a fence that shouldn't have even come into play. This compared to about 1 in 4 issues with stable routes prior. Still hitching (in addition to the hitching I've always encountered when loading into places like Bree when it's really crowded) and lag with skills going off. That too is improved, but by no means back to pre-update 6 levels.

Perhaps the most troublesome issue is that my system is running hotter since Update 6. I have variable speed fans that pre update 6 would to come on when loading into a new area but drop back down to about medium once everything was loaded. Now the fans are running on high almost constantly when Lotro is running. It's gotten very noisy in my office! Nothing else in my set up has changed, and as before, when I close down Lotro the fans settle down to near zero. On the advice of others I deinstalled Pando. That helped a little bit, the fans don't work so hard at places like character select, but once I'm into the game world, the over-working of the fans continues with very little change.

Husband and I had some stuttering issues in Moria last night (around 9pm cst until 11pm cst). And hitched stable routes there as well.

Also took a really long time to log into Nimrodel this morning - around 8am cst (had to do my mail quest runs!). Took 10 minutes before I managed to get in. It got hung up 3 times.

Not huge problems - not keeping us from playing certainly, but definitely glitchier (is that even a word?) thank normal!

I don't know if anybody else already mentioned it or how relevant it is (if at all), but I got the impression that stable-mounts stopping dead in their tracks occur more frequently for me when I have myLotro open in-game.

On longer rides I like to check up on the forums that way and the stable-mounts glitch out on me relatively often; on shorter rides I very rarely have myLotro open and I hardly ever experience the stable-mount glitch.

Today, I bought a ride from the 21st hall to the Orc-watch and the stable-goat glitch out twice. Both times I had myLotro open when this happened; once the goat stopped, I logged out and back in which got the goat moving again. For the third and by far the longest leg I left myLotro closed and I didn't experience another unscheduled stop.

Since this is considered a 'client' issue, I'm sorely tempted to just wipe my box and reinstall W7 and the client fresh.

3x last night

1 ride from Ost Forod to Kauppa Kahti (sp?)petered out halfway
2 ride from Kauppa Kahti (sp?) to Penti-pendle(sp?) not even halfway
3 ride from MD to Hobbiton just past Waymeet before the big curve

2x today
1 ride from Buckland to West Bree -- just before Adso's camp
2 Hobbiton to Stock just past Methel Stage

Originally Posted by joev

Since this is considered a 'client' issue, I'm sorely tempted to just wipe my box and reinstall W7 and the client fresh.

Why would you format your hard drive and re-install the operating system?

This problem is happening to hundreds if not thousands of lotro players. Therefore the culprit not your O/S it is LotRO. You would be wasting much time and effort in a vain attempt to fix it.

You could uninstall the game then re-install, but even then I cannot see why that would help. It will only have a placebo effect, where you think there is some improvement but what you are noticing is simply the slightly quicker responsiveness of a fresh install, from it having no fragmentation. But that will go away after playing the game because the client will become fragmented.

Originally Posted by enginekid

Why would you format your hard drive and re-install the operating system?

Maybe I want to? I realise you're just trying to be helpful, but the only time I'd waste is about 30 minutes as I have a fresh W7 WIM on my server share that I can just blow n' go whenever I feel like; I also have the full client DL'd sitting on my app server.

Seriously, not every player in LOTRO is a user. kthnx.

Laurelin server, 2012-04-28 07:45 AM BST.
The Methel Stage is empty. No NPCs, no fireworks, even the chairs are missing.

Originally Posted by joev

Since this is considered a 'client' issue, I'm sorely tempted to just wipe my box and reinstall W7 and the client fresh.

3x last night

1 ride from Ost Forod to Kauppa Kahti (sp?)petered out halfway
2 ride from Kauppa Kahti (sp?) to Penti-pendle(sp?) not even halfway
3 ride from MD to Hobbiton just past Waymeet before the big curve

2x today
1 ride from Buckland to West Bree -- just before Adso's camp
2 Hobbiton to Stock just past Methel Stage

I think the software client is bugged. I had to reformat my machine last week because of a corrupted MS update download, and reinstalled LoTRO after that. Things didn't get better. Tonight I got stuck in the wrong square of Siege of Gondamon. The skirmish was going on all around, but for two full minutes, my toon could not move, nor could I leave the instance. Hit ENTER just in case I'd accidentally typed in the chatbox, but I hadn't. Tried the spacebar, he wouldn't jump. Again - it was just me that was frozen, the skirmish was behaving normally apart from that.

Finally, finally I was able to port out, but again - two full minutes of absolute stuck. The game is rapidly becoming unplayable.