Thread: Stable Mounts Issue and Stuttering/Hitching issues

Skill lags very much happening on my Champ still, got a very repeatable one when crossing the boundary between Evendim and Shire in the little back area of the Goblin camp that leads to the pond near where the Dolly the sheep quest is given out. If I clicked a skill as I crossed this line it would not fire for up to 3 seconds, even instant skills like Glory / Ardour. Tried to bug it in game, but the bug tool kept bugging out when I tried to submit, and that was when I could even get it to load in the first place. This was on Riddermark server.

Trying to summon a mount the instant you load into an area which allows one from an area that doesn't allow mounts - mount icon sits there with the ring circling for a second or so pretty much every single time, every day for the last few weeks.

Have also noticed that lately my connection icon goes to yellow for the first second or so when I load in... never used to see this before.

Getting weirdness where when I run up to a monster and hit it, it runs away a short distance in the direction I was moving before coming back to me... it seems as if the monster thinks I ran past it, then goes, "hang on he's back there" and runs back to where I actually stopped. Did some kind of client movement prediction get added in? Or is this also an exampe of lag?

Crafting facility stop and slide / stutter / hitch thing still happening.

Originally Posted by Cadennza

I wonder if Turbine is hiring for customer service? You see, we are your customers. We have a valid complaint. We've HAD a valid complaint for months. Your condescension is appalling. I can empathize with the frustration, but it is NEVER ok to lash out at your customer base or "smack them down" as someone else said. If our complaints weren't valid, I'd be a little more understanding of your response.

That particular person's "complaint" wasn't a complaint at all. It was factually inaccurate ranting and only served to further misinform people.

Everyone is entitled to express an opinion. Everyone is entitled to express dissatisfaction and request redress or compensation. But nobody is entitled to state things that aren't true with a tone of absolute authority and certainty without having those false assertions scrutinized and corrected.

Sapience merely pointed out that this person was stating things that were demonstrably untrue. And he had a tiny bit of fun doing it.

Perhaps you could climb down off your "I'm a customer! Respect me!" high horse and read this little card that I have made for you. No? Then I'll read it to you. . . it says: "Welcome to the internet."*

Please loosen up. What Sapience said was quite tame given how frustrating it is when someone is spouting 100% nonsense with a tone of absolute certainty when you know they are wrong.

--H

*To clarify: I do not intend to say that the internet gives everyone carte blanche to behave poorly. Merely that "customers" behave much, much worse in internet-based forms of customer service than they ever did back in the "good old days." Yet people still refer back to the same old golden book of standards for customer service written back when the milkman was delivering glass bottles via horse-drawn cart (I exaggerate only slightly). It's a new era, and customer service reps on the internet aren't always dealing with polite, civil, or even honest customers face-to-face (or ear-to-ear). For that reason, I personally tend to cut them a little slack if they break a coveted "golden rule" here or there in this new era while being constantly bombarded by abuse, ignorance, and truly bizarre levels of hostility that only the pseudo-anonymity of the internet can generate. So, given all that, I'd say the infraction cited here is so slight as to be trivial. You should have seen Floon. He was magnificent!

Reminds me to ask:

why is this not in the "known issues" given that it is an issue known to at least Sapience and apparently a couple existing coders there?

Neither are the attempted fixes in the release notes for 6.1 and U7. Why?

Originally Posted by Darmokk

why is this not in the "known issues" given that it is an issue known to at least Sapience and apparently a couple existing coders there?

Probably only fixes that have been confirmed but not yet released are being put into the official known issues (as in we know of the problem and we fixed it and it will be coming soon to the live game).

It gives them an official way out of problems they could not address yet - be it because of a resource point of view that they could not work on it yet or that they just did not find a fix for it yet.
If they put every bug they confirmed on the known issues list it likely would be huge and some problems would never get fixed (e.g. the fog problem in Forochel).

Originally Posted by monk_tbd

Probably only fixes that have been confirmed but not yet released are being put into the official known issues

Nah, no way.

Originally Posted by Hurin

Sapience merely pointed out that this person was stating things that were demonstrably untrue.

I can state things from sapience that were untrue, like we fix lag and stuttering with update 7.
It's been 2 months now and nothing happened

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

Originally Posted by Sapience

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

So this means we should continue to /bug it as often as possible to provide you with as much logging data as possible?

Originally Posted by Sapience

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

I appreciate this information.

Would it not be of benefit to ask the player base at large for detailed bug reports (possibly through the launcher)? I know many players I play with have already said they still experience the issues but have reported it once already. Isn't it possible that there are more players experiencing this issue but you're not aware because they have been told that Updates 6.1 and 7 addressed the issue and have simply stopped reporting it?

I have 5 computers that I can run Lotro on and they all experience lag, although, not always at the same time. Each computer is a different build ranging from an old Pentium 4 to a year and half old quad core amd processor.

Memory ranges form 2 to 8 gigs. Each machine has either a nvidia or ati graphics card from low to mid range in performance in comparison to high-end cards available today.

I used to be able to play Lotro on at least high on all my machines. Now only 2 of them preform well at those settings the other 3 I had to lower to medium to get acceptable frame rates.

Not sure if any of this helps but I will try to bug each and every time I lag if that will hasten a fix. (Which is fairly often!)

Jorlan

Originally Posted by Sapience

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

WELL after 2 months of waiting for the lag to get better and being dissapointed my entire guild disintigrated, a good 15 subs lost for turbine........ a raid that is to hard with very little loot and terrible lag is a recipe for the death of a 5 year old raiding guild GG

Originally Posted by Sapience

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

This just makes the problem even worse. Not only can you not fix it, but you have no clue why it's even happening! It doesn't happen in other MMOs, just this one, and the fact that you have no clue (as evidenced by the 2 failed attempts to fix it and MONTHS of ongoing issues) puts it over the top.

So basically update 7 provide you with tracking tools that could maybe point you in the right direction to even finding the problem, as your tech team has no idea how to fix such a major and content destroying bug. Gotchya.

Originally Posted by EU_Meliana

It doesn't happen in other MMOs, just this one, .

I'm not looking to downplay the issue, it stinks and it's definitely impacted my desire to play this game.

But your statement is completely false about other MMOs. Most at one point or another, if not persistantly, have performance issues that last for awhile until they get them straightened out. In fact, I should say all, rather than most, but I cannot claim to know about all MMOs. All I've played anyhow, and I've played numerous.

The closest without performance issues was a MUD I played back in the early 90s in college, but one could argue with no real graphics rendering that was to be expected.

Originally Posted by Sapience

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

Sapience, as a software developer myself, I cannot understand why your development team cannot take the codebase from the version before 6.0 and compare it to 6.0's code base? If I worked for Turbine this is what I would have done it would have taken less than an hour to pinpoint what code was changed between 5.x and 6.0 and what caused the stuttering/hitching/mounts issues...

And if the answer is because your development team doesn't have the LOTRO source code within a good source code versioning and control system then Turbine has bigger problems on it's hands. Which could explain why your development team keeps reintroducing old bugs that have been fixed at one point in time, only to have them broken again in future updates.

Whatever the source code problem is, there seems to be a very bad collaboration going on amidst the Turbine development team.

Originally Posted by Sapience

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

Also Sapience, did any of the developers check the code base of the sound engine? After update 6.0 was released there was problems with the sound engine that started occuring, as well as new sound issues when 7.0 was released. It is possible that a bug in the sound engine code has caused the stuttering/hitching issues that clients are seeing. What was changed with the sound engine between 5.x and 6.0? What was changed with the sound engine between 6.0 and 7.0?

I'm still having Stuttering/Hitching issues. I've tried to keep a log, but still seems random. I just cannot move for 60-90 secs within a 3-5 minute frame. I've tried switching characters, logging off & on, switching to windowed mode, reducing to low graphic settings, but nothing helps. I have an older xps710 running xp with iffy isp service, so I've had lag issues before update 6, but nothing before this has made the game so unplayable for so long.

Originally Posted by Whipersnaper

WELL after 2 months of waiting for the lag to get better and being dissapointed my entire guild disintigrated, a good 15 subs lost for turbine........ a raid that is to hard with very little loot and terrible lag is a recipe for the death of a 5 year old raiding guild GG

Sorry to hear that man...Turbine needs to step up their game.

I don't understand why they can't/haven't done what they did a couple years ago when there was a server line issue. Rollbacks and server lines causing tons of lag, skills not firing, etc. They eventually asked for volunteers to download something that basically mounted itself to the lotro files and they were able to log exactly when it happened. It's actually pretty pathetic this effort has already not been taken.

Originally Posted by Vysion34

Sapience, as a software developer myself, I cannot understand why your development team cannot take the codebase from the version before 6.0 and compare it to 6.0's code base? If I worked for Turbine this is what I would have done it would have taken less than an hour to pinpoint what code was changed between 5.x and 6.0 and what caused the stuttering/hitching/mounts issues...

And if the answer is because your development team doesn't have the LOTRO source code within a good source code versioning and control system then Turbine has bigger problems on it's hands. Which could explain why your development team keeps reintroducing old bugs that have been fixed at one point in time, only to have them broken again in future updates.

Whatever the source code problem is, there seems to be a very bad collaboration going on amidst the Turbine development team.

Word to the mother.

Two words: Regression testing.

Originally Posted by Vysion34

Sapience, as a software developer myself, I cannot understand why your development team cannot take the codebase from the version before 6.0 and compare it to 6.0's code base? If I worked for Turbine this is what I would have done it would have taken less than an hour to pinpoint what code was changed between 5.x and 6.0 and what caused the stuttering/hitching/mounts issues...

And if the answer is because your development team doesn't have the LOTRO source code within a good source code versioning and control system then Turbine has bigger problems on it's hands. Which could explain why your development team keeps reintroducing old bugs that have been fixed at one point in time, only to have them broken again in future updates.

Whatever the source code problem is, there seems to be a very bad collaboration going on amidst the Turbine development team.

I will second the opinion that the problem is not the developers, it's the versioning system. Although, I'm not sure I entirely agree with diff'ing the entire game code. First of all, most of what exists in Lotro is either a database, a texture, or an ogg sound file. The engine code is just one small part of what could be the problem. Secondly, even the diff of one version to the next might be a stupendous amount of code to pore through. Thirdly, a lot of Lotro design is done in a WYSIWYG 3d environment, especially things like automated motion, interaction with objects, and porting in/out of a space. And finally, we don't know if Turbine keeps the old codebases around. Does Turbine even have a pristine Siege of Mirkwood release? Good versioning would ensure they do, but as we've seen, the versioning system/policy is not quite up to snuff.

So a simple diff won't do. Technically, the problem WILL be found in a diff, but traditional troubleshooting methods would probably prove to be faster than poring through a ton of code, databases, and the proprietary files of a (rather old) WYSIWYG editor.

Originally Posted by Thane9

But your statement is completely false about other MMOs. Most at one point or another, if not persistantly, have performance issues that last for awhile until they get them straightened out.

But what major MMO currently has lag issues that have lasted this long? Rift? WoW?

I would be curious if any of the current competition has issues like this that last so long? And I don't mean find one time in the history of those MMOs that they had trouble - I mean within 2012. Thanks.

I (and several kinmembers) experienced a bad server hickup on the Laurelin server this evening. I am unsure what the exact time was, but I think it was around 8pm GMT+2. What happened was:

- One of my kinnies was kicked offline.
- One of my kinnies was online but seemed not to be part of our kinship anymore (I received a tell from him, but I did not see him in the list of online members of our kinship... he saw in his kinship social panel the explanation on how to join a kinship).
- One of my kinnies tried to use map home but it didn't seem to work... although 2 minutes later he teleported.
- I myself was in a swift travel from Rivendell to Inner Caras Galadhon, the loading screen took me about 3 minutes, while normally this does not take more than 30s for me during a swift travel.

It was the worst server hickup I have experienced so far. To be honest, I expected to see a message that an emergency restart was required, but that didn't happen and I didn't notice any further (severe) connection problems afters that, except the skill lagging we are experiencing since update 6.

Purchased ride from Rivendell to Thorenhad.
Ride halted at ~10:50 pm EDT on 5/16 at 33.9S, 11.1W.
Logged off then on again.
Ride resumed and then halted again at 33.5S, 11.4W.
Logged off then on again.
Ride completed.
This is my first report of many such freezes (not in this same location however).

I'm back again. Been following the thread but after I went into rant mode, I figured I'd best just be quiet for a while. Anyway...

Since U7, I've been experiencing some new issues as well as most of the old ones brought on by U6. Before getting into them though, I'd like to say that...

• The stable issues seem to be less frequent than they were, but they are still there. Before U7, I had about a 20% to 30% chance of successfully completing any Stable ride, both normal and swift travel. Now I seem to be averaging about 90% successfully reaching the destination. BIG improvement!
• The lag/hitching seems to be a lot less in open landscape areas, BUT it is still quite prevalent in certain areas no matter what server (both low-pop Firefoot and hi-pop Brandywine during off-hours) and even with low graphics settings and no big crowds of players - certain areas in Bree, in the Shire, etc. (Note that I did try the suggestion of turning the game engine down from the highest setting in the Troubleshooting area in the Options Panel so this may be a factor).
• The crashes on exiting the game using normal exit functions have all but disappeared, but it seems to take an unusually long time now.

That was the good news. The bad (both old issues and new)...

• The skill lag has gotten worse. As an example, a green wolf attacked one of my Hunters (level 20) while he was harvesting a resource node and almost took him down because my skills wouldn't fire and then I froze for approximately 5 seconds. During all of this he was busy gnawing away at me unhindered. Finally a few skills actually fired and he went down as usual but my moral had dropped to 57!!
• The lag while moving items within and between the bags, vault, and shared storage has gotten noticeably worse. As an example, at one point last evening, I was moving items from shared storage to my bags. I double-clicked the first item and nothing happened. I repeated the action 3 more times and it finally disappeared and I assumed it had moved to the bag. I then proceeded to click the next 5 items in rapid succession, all of which disappeared from the shared storage. I looked at my bag... the 6 items were nowhere to be seen! I started to panic a bit since they were rather expensive items and would be somewhat difficult to replace. As I stared at the screen in disbelief, they suddenly all appeared simultaneously, a good 5 to 10 seconds after they had disappeared from the shared storage. That was the most extreme case so far, but it indicates how bad it is getting.
• Twice since U7, I've crashed to desktop upon entering an open door portal - once going into Thorin's Hall; unfortunately I can't recall where the other one took place at.
• As others have mentioned, there are some weird sound issues since U7. The music dies out or becomes so quiet that it can barely be heard and only comes back by opening the Options Panel/Audio and moving either the Master Volume slider or the Music slider. Just one notch and it comes back at the set volume but fades again within minutes. In addition, ALL of the sounds seem to be quieter than before the update.

So how are those meetings going Sapience? Any insights, revelations, possibilities, hope?

Lag Issues still present, and as far as I can tell as bad as ever.

Prior to U6 LOTRO was pleasingly free of lag most of the time. U6 made things unpleasant. U7 and U7.1 haven't improved anything. If anything, they've made it worse:

On Snowbourn yesterday (mid evening UK) I was doing GS on an alt, mid boss fight, when I assumed I'd lost internet, from chat both in party and global it was clear there was the longest pause I've ever seen in an MMO. We were chatting, unable to move for perhaps 30 seconds or more before activity resumed. When things resumed, half the party was dead, and well on the way to a wipe

Boss fight continued, but several more major pauses resulted in the first wipe I've seen in GS for months! Global was full of comments and questions making it abundantly clear that it was affecting many, if not all, online players. For the following 20 minutes or so server performance was intermittently awful.

Sometime shortly after everyone on the server (going number of members count when it recovered) lost connection to all chat channels:

"Connection with chat server has been lost"
30 seconds or so elapse (during which movement was unaffected beyond being a bit laggy)
"Connection with chat server has been reestablished"
You joined room 'globallff' (UserChat1). Number of members: xx. (where number of members was about 40 at a time it's normally 500+)

General view in global a lot of the time is the challenge mode in the revamped Water section of Fornost is pretty much unachievable due to lag spikes - many groups have complained of lag spikes whilst trying, and I've seen it and experienced it in the groups I've been in.

As for stable issues, I still seem to have a 20% chance of an abortive run - almost always right at the start, or at a load point.

LOTRO was always pretty stable for me, now I often crash to desktop after "enough" loads from zone changes or entering vault etc. Where enough is some random number in the order of 20. On exiting game it is normal to see the Windows crash message most of the time rather than a clean exit.

Have the same on Snowbourn. Since coming back to the game after a long break, it seems that with each week lag and playability is just getting worse! Keep losing connection to the chat server, initial loading time has tripled at least, stable horses are still broken and the game will kick me off for no reason. I miss Codemasters and the pre-migration gameplay....

Originally Posted by Thane9

I'm not looking to downplay the issue, it stinks and it's definitely impacted my desire to play this game.

But your statement is completely false about other MMOs. Most at one point or another, if not persistantly, have performance issues that last for awhile until they get them straightened out. In fact, I should say all, rather than most, but I cannot claim to know about all MMOs. All I've played anyhow, and I've played numerous.

The closest without performance issues was a MUD I played back in the early 90s in college, but one could argue with no real graphics rendering that was to be expected.

I meant in my experience playing other MMOs, or from what I've heard from the player community. I of course don't claim to know about all of them.

On and off issues, of course, every game has them, but never such a major problem that was ongoing for months without the tech team even knowing why.

Originally Posted by EU_Meliana

On and off issues, of course, every game has them, but never such a major problem that was ongoing for months without the tech team even knowing why.

I beg to differ. Sigils of Healing have been falling through floors since shortly after Siege of Mirkwood was released; possibly before that. And RK bugs... ugh... I could tell you stories....

Originally Posted by EU_Meliana

This just makes the problem even worse. Not only can you not fix it, but you have no clue why it's even happening! It doesn't happen in other MMOs, just this one, and the fact that you have no clue (as evidenced by the 2 failed attempts to fix it and MONTHS of ongoing issues) puts it over the top.

So basically update 7 provide you with tracking tools that could maybe point you in the right direction to even finding the problem, as your tech team has no idea how to fix such a major and content destroying bug. Gotchya.

Hey I like bashing Turbine as much as anymore. But I highly recommend not to get back at Sapience and trash him after he gave direct answers to our questions.

Originally Posted by Majic

Two words: Regression testing.

If you are able to make regression test suites that would catch a situation where remote network clients on various kinds of connections have timing-dependent problems please pm me your resume. It might be worth your weight in gold, or mithril, whichever you prefer.

I still think that Turbine is doing a bit of foul play here by not adding this to the known issues. To me it looks like an attempt to sweep it under the carpet and not have it show up in quarterly reviews or whatever they are doing in WB.

Originally Posted by PerfectApproach

I beg to differ. Sigils of Healing have been falling through floors since shortly after Siege of Mirkwood was released; possibly before that. And RK bugs... ugh... I could tell you stories....

Oh, there are other bugs that have been in game for a long while too. But most of them can at least have workarounds, like not using a sigil and dots not transferring damage properly. It's annoying, yes, but the server "hiccup" issue is just horrible.

More examples of long lasting bugs in this game doesn't exactly hurt my argument either, lol.

Originally Posted by Darmokk

Hey I like bashing Turbine as much as anymore. But I highly recommend not to get back at Sapience and trash him after he gave direct answers to our questions.

All due respect to Sapience, nothing personal, but just because there was an "answer" it doesn't make it a good or acceptable one.

Originally Posted by Darmokk

I still think that Turbine is doing a bit of foul play here by not adding this to the known issues. To me it looks like an attempt to sweep it under the carpet and not have it show up in quarterly reviews or whatever they are doing in WB.

This also bothers me. In addition, if you read the official responses to it, they always include some form of "as far as we have experienced it's not happening" or "some reports suggest it may be fixed or reduced".... basically just downplaying the magnitude of the problem.

That's the job of the community team, yes, to keep the community "calm and somewhat satisfied" and buy time for the tech guys to fix it. It's the community's job to keep pressure on and continue with the complaints, to force them to take it even more seriously than they already are and fix ti already.

Originally Posted by Darmokk

If you are able to make regression test suites that would catch a situation where remote network clients on various kinds of connections have timing-dependent problems please pm me your resume. It might be worth your weight in gold, or mithril, whichever you prefer.

I still think that Turbine is doing a bit of foul play here by not adding this to the known issues. To me it looks like an attempt to sweep it under the carpet and not have it show up in quarterly reviews or whatever they are doing in WB.

Well they better come up with a solution fast cause this has been going on for how long now? Now add all the probs with update 7 to that, there are many unhappy people. It's going to get to the point where more & more are gonna say to heck with it & move on to something else they can actually play & enjoy.

Originally Posted by Eartholloth

Well they better come up with a solution fast cause this has been going on for how long now? Now add all the probs with update 7 to that, there are many unhappy people. It's going to get to the point where more & more are gonna say to heck with it & move on to something else they can actually play & enjoy.

Well...

According to Fernando Paiz (in his Pax East keynote) people won't leave no matter how hard they complain. You can listen to the audio recording.

Not saying it's a good assumption but I think you can see where the lack of resources for testing comes from. Why bother, right? Same with the new rendering errors that affect both ATI and NVidia, aka 99% of the customer base. Slipped through regular QA? I don't think so. As long as WB doesn't learn about it. That's why it's not in the known issues. The know issues only contain items that higher exec don't understand or that will be fixed by the time they read the notes.

Well i for one have had enough of waiting for them to fix this. I might come back down the road and see whats been fixed but for right now im going to play something else. Most of my kin has already left and being at cap and not able to participate in the raids just sucks.

I have been experiencing many difficulties after update 6 with stable swift travel where I'm kicked out of game. It started for me in Dunland, mainly Galtrev but it has happened in Great River area too. It seems to be more likely to happen after playing for a while (~30min.) and then I get on what I believe to be a quick ride only to be booted. I usually end up near the end point of the ride, but never at the destination stable as I should. It's wierd how sometimes it happens right after the graphic interlude starts and other times right before it should end or even after you're back riding again. But it hasn't happend before I get the swift travel graphic interlude.

It doesn't seem any better or worse now than a month ago, I thought it was just my problem until I saw this thread. Of course I've experienced more graphic errors also with the recent updates than ever before too. I use Nvidia.

First Stable Mount Issue since U7 from Rivendell to Echad Candelleth - Stop in High Moors, logged out and then in to resume the ride. Filed a bug report

Originally Posted by Sapience

Two attempts have been made to address the lag issue. One in Update 6.1 and one in Update 7. Both were code fixes. Neither had the fully desired result, though Monday's fix does seem to have helped some players. We have meetings scheduled for the issue today and again later this week as part of our ongoing investigations. This is not an issue we take lightly.

One of the challenges to addressing this matter is that we must know the exact moment, location, characters, and actions involved when the lag occurred. We have added (as noted in the release notes) additional logging and server monitoring tools with update 7 to help us pinpoint things in addition to the changes we made that we had hoped would address the issue more fully.

Wow. This post pretty much just infuriates me. I mean...SERIOUSLY!?! You KNOW that this problem came about because of update 6. SOMETHING in what TURBINE coded for THAT update changed the game in monumental, game-breaking ways. And, Sapience, you come on here and expect us to belive that load of drivel you just set down? You people at Turbine must think we are all complete idiots. I will admit that some of the lag seems to have disappeared with the most recent update, but its still happening often enough to be noticeable. And I still here in GLFF about horses stopping on a regular basis, I almost never use stables so it really has only happened to me once. I'm glad you're all sitting around the campfire singing Kumbayah and all but this problem is seriously affecting the population on your game. It should have been fixed YESTERDAY! Compare the code. I mean...it worked pretty well before you updated it with U6, find out what changed and return it to working or replace it. This is just silly that its taking this long to fix such a major screw up.

Originally Posted by Vysion34

Sapience, as a software developer myself, I cannot understand why your development team cannot take the codebase from the version before 6.0 and compare it to 6.0's code base? If I worked for Turbine this is what I would have done it would have taken less than an hour to pinpoint what code was changed between 5.x and 6.0 and what caused the stuttering/hitching/mounts issues...

And if the answer is because your development team doesn't have the LOTRO source code within a good source code versioning and control system then Turbine has bigger problems on it's hands. Which could explain why your development team keeps reintroducing old bugs that have been fixed at one point in time, only to have them broken again in future updates.

Whatever the source code problem is, there seems to be a very bad collaboration going on amidst the Turbine development team.

THIS THIS THIS and a thousand times THIS!!!!! He states the problem very well. Especially when you keep breaking the game with every update. My heartfelt suggestion to you people at TURBINE:


STOP WITH CONTENT UPDATES AND JUST FIX ALL THE THINGS YOU'VE BROKEN ALREADY!

The store will still be there when you fix this #### and you can releaser all the content you want then that's a for the store content realease like U7 (but that's a whole different story).

In response to a post that is likely to be deleted but makes reference to being "infuriated" by the "drivel" posted prior in this thread by Turbine.

It's not as easy as comparing x to y and then removing from y whatever is causing the lag.

You have to compare x and y, isolate the differences, and then figure out what it is about those differences that is causing unexpected behavior. And the word unexpected is key there. They know something changed. They know when it changed. But it's ridiculous to assert that this narrows things down to the point where fixing the issue becomes easy. After all, the offending code isn't obviously bad on its face (if it were, it wouldn't have made it into the game). So you don't just compare the two sets of code and say: "Aha! That's it!"

To illustrate the point. . . it does not look like this:

Code prior to update 6
. . .
five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine.
. . .

Code after update 6
. . .
five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
fifty thousand lines of code we added in update 6
another fifty thousand lines of code we added in update 6
I am a line of code added in update 6 that is obviously causing lag! Fix me!
another fifty thousand lines of code we added in update 6
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine
another five thousand lines of code that is working just fine.
. . .

We've been told that posts by Turbine have been found to be "infuriating." I'm not quite so emotionally invested. But it's, to say the least, annoying that people don't seem to understand that isolating when a problem started doesn't help as much as one might think in actually isolating the root cause of the problem. They cannot just open up the code to the game and say: "Oh, that's what's causing it!" Because if it were so obvious what was causing it, it never would have made it into the game to begin with.

The code at fault is not glowing red. It is not highlighted. It is not begging to be singled out. It's just some lines of code among millions. And, here's the kicker, that code may in fact be fine. There may be nothing wrong with it. But it may be interacting with older code in the game in unexpected ways. So at that point, you'd be going over your "new" code with a fine-toothed comb as the forum know-it-alls assert is the obvious and easy path to a readily available solution. . . and it all checks out fine.

Because it's not so freakin' simple as the oh-so-easily infuriated brigade wants to believe.

So Hurin, what you are saying is basically that Turbine is in over their heads?

Originally Posted by Cindir

So Hurin, what you are saying is basically that Turbine is in over their heads?

Nope. Only that this is the nature of troubleshooting complex systems. It doesn't always happen instantly. It doesn't always all get fixed at once. And sometimes, despite what the "duh! It was update 6!" crowd says, it takes a bit of trial and error and sometimes even a bit of luck to finally isolate the root cause and address an issue fully.

Banging our spoons on our highchairs about things we don't fully understand and just asserting that the fix must be easy and obvious doesn't get us anywhere. Because neither are true.

It would help some understand if they would actually get their heads around the fact that there are real people, probably fewer than we'd think, sitting there and dealing with the unpleasant reality that sometimes things go wrong and the fix is neither obvious nor easy (until it is discovered and seems to be both in retrospect). They are of course doing their best and are very motivated to find the cause. But there are only so many of them, and so many hours in a day. Thankfully, if they're lucky, their bosses are more versed in the realities of the situation than the average forum dweller who just wants to rant and wail, facts/reality be damned.