Thread: Stable Mounts Issue and Stuttering/Hitching issues

A quick update for you guys. I waited to make sure it was done and in before I posted, but there are changes in Update 7 that we believe will address this issue.

Fingers crossed and hoping.

Thanks to all the people who've been working on a fix!

Also thanks Sapience for the update!

and when its update 7 ????

It's good that we have a fix coming, but the question is, when does update 7 release? I'm assuming not in a few days. I'm also assuming that this "fix" can't be put in as a separate update sooner?

Does this update include getting rid of the remaining lag?

Originally Posted by Livejazz

..What DOES bother me greatly are the occasional crashes, which in my case lock my computer & keyboard so badly my only choice is to power off completely from the wall switch.

Since this thread was explicitly started for stable rental lag issues, and for NO OTHER issues, I've not posted (even though I do suspect a lot of my issues are related to similar causes, based on a hunch and little more), but it seems other threads (in General, anyway) relating to lag are no longer available for discourse, so I'm unclear on the appropriate method for discussion..

That said, this is, so far, one of the only posts I've seen that seems to suggest similar, but not identical, behavior to what I experience (and I suspect the differences may result mostly from different hardware & perhaps different OS setups). I now have an open ticket with Tech Support, so I'm trying to work through it..

What I see is a pattern of client crashes that almost invariably occur at or very shortly after a port or swift travel. It may occur when I first attempt to activate an NPC or an object (task board, etc), but sometimes it happens when I am simply approaching one or the other.. (I find it difficult to perceive what might coincidentally cause the client to become unresponsive just because I'm getting NEAR a virtual location with my virtual 'toon)

Sometimes, but not always, upon one of these client crashes, my screen goes black and operation does not return to Win7 desktop for several seconds. From the best I can see, this has a lot to do with the client having been usurping more than 2G of virtual memory prior to the crash, and Windows trying to "get it back." Now, I'm fairly certain the client hasn't ALWAYS sucked up resouces as it seems to be now.. But then again, I never had a reason to look into it..

On both of my Wardens, there's a convergence of these and other issues that makes them even less stable than other classes. Also, EVERY time I log in one of my Wardens, it is accompanied by an (item acquisition) alert window.. ("You have received an item," or some such nonsense) No other classes get these, and it happens even though no new items have spontaneously dropped into my inventory. There HAS to be something you can learn from this, right? heh heh

In diagnosis, so far, I've attempted disabling audio in Device Manager, and done the (high-res client repair) as laid out in Sapience's post to the sticky area of the Tech Support forums (I think many should look at that thread just in case). What I saw last night was that each of these options improved game play somewhat measurably, HOWEVER, ALL the facets of my issues still manifested. It's just that it seemed to take a bit longer for it to occur. That means something, but I'm not sure what..

My $0.02..

My game has crashed 6 times now, all since update 6 and always between stables on stable mounts. Hope this helps.

Originally Posted by AdrogoAmros

My game has crashed 6 times now, all since update 6 and always between stables on stable mounts. Hope this helps.

Can you be more specific what "crash" means here?

the issue I am having is after I chose which toon I want to play.AS I'm coming into world I freeze for a good minute while loading.i hear all sounds and music as npcs and other players slowly materialize into view. then i stutter along on my steed for a few minutes before everything evens out. this only happens on first toon log-in.

Originally Posted by deliguy

the issue I am having is after I chose which toon I want to play.AS I'm coming into world I freeze for a good minute while loading.i hear all sounds and music as npcs and other players slowly materialize into view. then i stutter along on my steed for a few minutes before everything evens out. this only happens on first toon log-in.

thats not lag. thats your system loading stuff into memory off the hard drive. all games do this. in fact all programes do this. how bad ig gets and how long it takes to settle down depend on how much info its loading, the speed of your harddrives, the speed of the bus(that thing between the hd and the rest of the system) ect.

to speed things up you could try defragging the hd. other than that you may need to upgrade to a better mother board or faster drive or cpu or add more ram if the problem is hitting the swap file a little too often.

on my system, from launch it takes about 45 seconds to settle down if there are no other programs running in the background.

i curious why it can't be included in monday's maintenance ????? When they messed up the gift boxes it was patched on a wednesday

Please DO something about this bug. My horse stops EVERY time I travel somewhere. Yes, every time! It´s extraordinarily annoying!

Im new to Lotr and tryin to enjoy this new experience and a few bugs. The Stable/ Mount stickin is terrible to be on a paid path and the mount just stop...more than once might i add is gettin frustrating. i have serious lag issues with a brand new computer..makes no sense and game play not very enjoyable. I hope that the maintence will make a difference!

Originally Posted by dauthiatull

thats not lag. thats your system loading stuff into memory off the hard drive. all games do this. in fact all programes do this. how bad ig gets and how long it takes to settle down depend on how much info its loading, the speed of your harddrives, the speed of the bus(that thing between the hd and the rest of the system) ect.

to speed things up you could try defragging the hd. other than that you may need to upgrade to a better mother board or faster drive or cpu or add more ram if the problem is hitting the swap file a little too often.

on my system, from launch it takes about 45 seconds to settle down if there are no other programs running in the background.

how come it never did it before update six? i have a quad core with 7 megs of ram and a 1gig vid card running eyefinity and it has always ran smooth till update 6 came along and i defrag once a week

also that wouldnt explain mount freeze while i'm riding along

Originally Posted by deliguy

i have a quad core with 7 megs of ram

A whole 7 megs? How does DOS run these days? :P

/joke

Originally Posted by deliguy

how come it never did it before update six? i have a quad core with 7 megs of ram and a 1gig vid card running eyefinity and it has always ran smooth till update 6 came along and i defrag once a week

You guys go on a side thread and you should probably stop. This poster was addressing somebody complaining about loading times (including incremental loading during gameplay as you visit new places) in this thread that isn't about loading times.

There is a separate game issue that loading times on machines with low RAM (4 GB) has gone through the roof recently but that needs to be kept out of this thread.

ummmm he is having issues with hitching and stuttering as well as mount issues. That is what this post is for. I have the same issues that he has a computer that should be able to run lotro 3 times over and suffers from hitching and stuttering while im playing. No its not a maintenance issue i defrag and even clean my registry regularly.

So after having a great few runs a couple of days ago, today was absolutley horrible. Running Foundry was a constant 3-10 seconds pauses every 30 seconds or so. Caused us to wipe on the last bosses as I could not get up any gambits, healer could not heal, no one could move in a somewhat mobile fight.

Oh and then the last boss refused to reset despite changing leaders, dropping group, rejoining etc. and we had to give up.

Fun.

Today, lag was the worst I've yet seen it ... in Zurr-Thurkh, I was finally getting the sort of issues that everyone else has been describing, & it was highly unpleasant.

It was not fun, & that's the first time I've had to say that about this game

I'm on a swift travel horse from Lossoth to Himbar(Angmar) horse stops at the bottom of the path and freezes. Do ya'll plan to fix this or break more stuff first. This is very stupid and old.

Had stable horses stop 7 times today. And one instance where I took a horse from esteldin to aughaire, the stupid horse missed the pass in the esteldin wall, and proceeded to run into the wall until I dismounted and started the ride again. On the way from Rivendell to Gwringis(spelling?), the horse started rubberbanding and wouldn't stop even after a log out/in. Absolutely ridiculous.

Originally Posted by Cylestra

A whole 7 megs? How does DOS run these days? :P

/joke

oops my mistake 7 gigs of ram.but still my problem coincides with my mount stuttering or just plain stopping.not fun when your riding around in moria. a couple of stutters and your over a cliff easy

Still having issues with stable mounts occasionally. Usually, they just stop and relogging gets them moving again.

However, yesterday, I purchased a ride from West Bree to Buckland. The horse was fine until the T-junction near Adso's camp. The horse circled once, then came to a dead halt. I relogged as usual, when I was back in game, the horse was a different colour (bay instead of black), I don't know if this is significant. I used to think that different coloured horses took different routes. The horse then cirlced round twice, before setting off towards Buckland again.

Originally Posted by Merilda

However, yesterday, I purchased a ride from West Bree to Buckland.

That was your first mistake. Bree to Buckland? That's begging for it.

Heck, I had a swift ride bug out on me coming out of Thorin's Gate. Same thing you described: it circled around a few times, then it just stopped and wouldn't move after that.

I was in a hurry, so instead of relogging, I dismounted, ran back to the stabledwarf and made for Michel Delving again.

There's 80 coppers I'll never get back. Maybe I'll bill Turbine for them.

I also wonder when update 7 comes out. I haven't seen a date yet. But what really kinda irritates me, is that if there's a store fix or a gift box fix by jove that's fixed immediately! But a persistant problem that's affecting thousands of people and making us not want to play, or in my case, not play really at all except for raid nights, no...no..that's for a fix sometime out in the future when update 7 appears. Horrible, horrible customer service!

Why does it take so long to fix serious issues? When friends ask how LOTRO is I can just show them this picture

Originally Posted by Darmokk

You guys go on a side thread and you should probably stop. This poster was addressing somebody complaining about loading times (including incremental loading during gameplay as you visit new places) in this thread that isn't about loading times.

There is a separate game issue that loading times on machines with low RAM (4 GB) has gone through the roof recently but that needs to be kept out of this thread.

I'm not sure where you've been since U6, but that is also one of the issues and does indeed belong in this thread - since U6 my loading times have doubled, tripled, and worse. This has affected ALL loading times, from the initial loads when launching the game, to getting into the game after character select, to going through doors, changing areas, using maps, and swift travel. And all of this started post-U6 so yeah, it does belong here.

Sapience, how about an update on these issues. It's been a looooong time since we've heard a peep out of you on this. I was hoping (probably very naive on my part) that this maintenance would have a fix or two in it, but of course it didn't. I actually had a few good days in there on all servers where the lag and stable rides were near normal, so much so that I could actually turn my graphics back up to higher than medium settings and still had acceptable frame rates. Then last night the bottom dropped out again and things are now back to ridiculous. I just don't get it.

One issue that has really ticked me off though is the festival races. I have yet to be able to successfully complete a race with any of my characters because invariably, somewhere along the route, I get a stutter, a hitch, or a stop (and the timer keeps advancing) which always causes me to just fall short of completing the race on time, and that is with every graphics setting either disabled or on the lowest setting. Between this and the appalling drop rate for mounts in the envelope quest (I refuse to do the exploit even though it looks as though Turbine isn't taking any action on it or the abusers), it looks like my mains are all going to come out of this festival mountless. I am not a happy camper here.

Slow travel to the vineyards in Lorien last night and my stable mount did a U-turn, headed the wrong way, stopped, turned back the correct direction and froze.
Really, really getting fed up of this and all the other stuttering freezing and poor performance issues.

Still having "lag" issues, still experiencing up to 3 or 4 second "freezes", be it open world, be it an instance, be it solo or group play.

The last (long) server downtime had no effect.

Originally Posted by Darmokk

There is a separate game issue that loading times on machines with low RAM (4 GB) has gone through the roof recently but that needs to be kept out of this thread.

The lotroclient is still a 32 bit application.
If the "largeaddressaware" flag is not set then the maximum on virtual and physical memory it can use is 2GB otherwise it would be 4GB (and that only on a 64 bit OS).
I will have to check whether the lotrolient has that compiler flag set though.

In DX11 I had the lotroclient using almost 2GB of memory already while in DX9 it seems to use less memory. I also think that the problems are worse with DX11 than with DX9.

I cannot be sure but I tend to think that the higher memory load leads to timing problems causing some communication lag on the client side which then causes the stuttering and hitching.
Especially since the stopping of stable rides usually happens when you change zones or get on a new grid of the map where data has to be loaded or different (and maybe a lot) of broadcast messages have to be processed and/or sent.

Bottomlline is even if you have a 16GB machine lotro cannot use all of this. However you can run lots of other stuff in the background without causing lotro to page out to disk. With my 4GB under DX11 I start paging when I also use my virtualbox with linux in there at the same time. In DX9 I have no problems with paging.

Originally Posted by Adder

Sapience, how about an update on these issues. It's been a looooong time since we've heard a peep out of you on this. I was hoping (probably very naive on my part) that this maintenance would have a fix or two in it, but of course it didn't. I actually had a few good days in there on all servers where the lag and stable rides were near normal, so much so that I could actually turn my graphics back up to higher than medium settings and still had acceptable frame rates. Then last night the bottom dropped out again and things are now back to ridiculous. I just don't get it.

One issue that has really ticked me off though is the festival races. I have yet to be able to successfully complete a race with any of my characters because invariably, somewhere along the route, I get a stutter, a hitch, or a stop (and the timer keeps advancing) which always causes me to just fall short of completing the race on time, and that is with every graphics setting either disabled or on the lowest setting. Between this and the appalling drop rate for mounts in the envelope quest (I refuse to do the exploit even though it looks as though Turbine isn't taking any action on it or the abusers), it looks like my mains are all going to come out of this festival mountless. I am not a happy camper here.

Whats annoying is that Turbine cares enough to shutdown and remove threads in the general section, but has provided no significant updates on this issue.

I should be excited about U7. I'm not and one main reason is this continual stuttering/hitching or whatever it is.

Yes...I continue to have the stutters on two machines. My main desktop is being upgraded to a I5-2500 for other reasons. It will be interesting to see if anything changes.

Originally Posted by swt46

My main desktop is being upgraded to a I5-2500 for other reasons. It will be interesting to see if anything changes.

I've got an I5-2500 Overclocked at 4.2 and Lotro still runs like a dog. Loading times now take forever, coupled with the lag and horse issues. Every one of my other games ( including much more demanding games than Lotro should be including ME3, Witcher2, Rift, GW2, NFS the Run, Dead Island, BF3 ) run fine on high/max settings.
It makes no difference what settings I choose on Lotro the result is the same. So don't get your hopes up.

Originally Posted by MRNot

I am currently in a dialogue with Tech Support and haven't yet had a chance to follow through on their requests. Certainly, disabling audio from my BIOS improved the performance, BUT the same symptoms still occurred.. Just took a bit longer to get there. Next up, I'll be reducing my game settings to minimal for another round. Yay!

So they want you to completely disable your soundcard to play LoTRO?

Lol .... just lol

*Speechless*

I just wish every dev and higher-up at Turbine were forced to sit here at my puter and play LOTRO for 4 hours. Then we'd see how long the fix would take. My bet is that after experiencing the utter frustration and total aggravation of these issues (and now add in the forum issues) for those 4 hours, everyone at Turbine, from the janitor to the CEO, would be working round-the-clock on finding the problem and getting it fixed, and that fix would be live within days. (Yeah, I'm ranting now.)

I have still had stable issues since the update, sudden stops now and then with no lag, horse running into rocks and therefore another form of being stuck, and one time a horse took me off a cliff. Yes that's what i said, it took me off a cliff. Who knew a stable horse could get a falling injury? I have confirmed this to be true. My kinfolk and I got some humor out of that one.

Originally Posted by monk_tbd

..I cannot be sure but I tend to think that the higher memory load leads to timing problems causing some communication lag on the client side which then causes the stuttering and hitching.
Especially since the stopping of stable rides usually happens when you change zones or get on a new grid of the map where data has to be loaded or different (and maybe a lot) of broadcast messages have to be processed and/or sent...

I really, REALLY, think you're on to something with this hypothesis. I'd like to think the concept is obvious enough that it's being considered already, but if it's not, time to start.. lol

Frankly, I'm getting irritated (not to the point of rage quitting. I like Middle-earth too much) at the frequent client crashes which force me to endure another seemingly interminable log in (worse on Warden, and often the next log in doesn't even succeed and must be re-tried).

I am currently in a dialogue with Tech Support and haven't yet had a chance to follow through on their requests. Certainly, disabling audio from my BIOS improved the performance, BUT the same symptoms still occurred.. Just took a bit longer to get there. Next up, I'll be reducing my game settings to minimal for another round. Yay!

Originally Posted by monk_tbd

Especially since the stopping of stable rides usually happens when you change zones

This portion of your explanation has only been true of a couple of my stoppages -- others have occurred just a few "steps" from the stable.

or get on a new grid of the map where data has to be loaded or different (and maybe a lot) of broadcast messages have to be processed and/or sent

This seems reasonable, but is very difficult for an average player to describe, as most of us probably have no idea where the "grid" boundaries are on any given map.

Originally Posted by MRNot

I really, REALLY, think you're on to something with this hypothesis. I'd like to think the concept is obvious enough that it's being considered already, but if it's not, time to start.. lol

Thanks.
Well they said they have a fix for this in U7 and since I tend to believe that they found something.

Another thing - besides my observations - that makes me believe the problem is in that direction is one of the problems that surfaced with U6 and got fixed in the first patch for U6:
http://lorebook.lotro.com/wiki/Update_6.0.1_Official

You will no longer get landmark names repeatedly popping up on your screen when other players enter the area.

This was about a bug that a player reported he got multiple "entering the 21st hall" messages and it seemed from the devs answer that everyone got all messages from everybody entering that area.
So my thought is that either that was the only problem (i.e. showing the message) or that U6 changed what is all broadcasted to others which also causes the hitching/stuttering/stable horses problem. I tend to to think the latter is the case.

I am pretty sure they had an idea what is causing it for a while but it was probably quite difficult to come up with a proper fix (which we don't know yet if they have one but let's hope so )