Since Halgar server was closed I have not been able to play more that a day or two without experiencing gamebreaking lag and spiking problems. I had great hopes for the improvements that were being worked on, but although things seemed to improve for a short while, they have gradually gotten worse again to the point where there is no point even attempting to play Vanguard anymore. I only ever experience the lag and spike issues when playing Vanguard and only on Telon server. When Halgar server was still available I never experienced a single moment of lag, so it is definitely a server issue rather than a game issue. Much as I enjoyed playing Vanguard, unless there is a drastic improvement in the playability, a massive reduction in lag then there is no point letting it take up so much of my drive and I am better off uninstalling it and looking for another game. So my question is what is the likelyhood of such improvements actually happening, or should I just accept that the game will not be playable for me anymore and find a different game to play?
ultimately , that choice is yours. It is interesting though, that a very small percentage of players hasn't benefitted from the recent changes. Have you put in a ticket to let the tech guys help figure out what is causing your set of issues? Have you tried some of the suggested setup changes in your INI file that Sinisna has posted. Hopefully it can be resolved, good luck!
I am not part of this discussion but I don't know if I have seen that post or not about the .ini. Can you link it please? Thanks.
No I haven't put in a ticket for the tech guys as they haven't been able to figure out why only Telon server had those issues for me the past when Halgar server never had any issues. They only said it must be an ISP problem, possibly connected to routing. The only recommendation was to play on Halgar rather than Telon, since that server had no issues for me. Sadly that advice is on no use now that they have closed Halgar down. I don't know how many are affected by these issues, but I do know that the thriving Guild I was in on Halgar has been decimated since the transfer and has now effectively folded due to lack of players. I don't know how many have moved on to other guilds, but the login figures are pitiful in comparison to what they were before the switch. No, I haven't seen Sinisna's INI tweaks, I will go look and see if I can find that post. What I am looking for here is some sort of official advice on whether there are upcoming changes, tweaks or fixes that may have a bearing on the playability of the Telon server for myself and others like me with similar problems as I know from previous replies and discussions that this problem is not limited to me.
actually , sinisna has posted technical responses in a number of different threads, you will have to do some searching of his posts. there isn't a particular thread for me to refer you to. sorry. Maybe he will read this and jump in.
Hello The developers now have the tools to be able to analyze these problems and rectify them. We can therefore presume that the situation will improve in the near future. Are you using a wi-fi connection? If so, have you tried to playing while using a wired (RJ45 Ethernet) connection instead? Have you also tried to see if going through a fast VPN makes any difference (if you know how to do so)? Circular reasoning. You are not putting in a ticket because they have not been able to figure it out because you have not put in a ticket... Let them at least try to help you. Even they are unable to solve the problem you are experiencing, they may give you other ideas. For both Podgie and Mark: Depending on how much RAM your system has, I would suggest raising the game engine cache size. The process has been detailed here: http://www.thetelonproject.com/sysconfig-ini.
I saw that on a different site. I did that but couldn't really say I noticed a difference. I didn't do the .bat part of it I just changed it manually. I set mine at 512, hell I'd set it at 1,024 if I knew for sure it did something. I had a question about that though. Seems to me doing it after the launcher patches and before hitting play - Are you sure that change is even noticed by the game? What I mean is, how can we be certain the game even "picks up on" the change we made - didn't it perhaps already load the sysconfig.ini into memory at this point - e.g pre-loaded it from it's default value? Get what I mean?
Excellent question Mark. You can be sure because if you delete the file after the LaunchPad has run its check, the client will only get as far as the splash screen. Therefore, it has to read the contents of the file afterwards, not before or during the LaunchPad check. I have not tried any higher than 512, so do it at your own risk!
Alright, that sounded like an acceptable answer I can buy. Yeah when I heard others having issues with "hitching" and figured that meant the little stop n go stuttering in movement I deducted oh, I got this too! So I went searching and using some search-fu I found that info on a different website forum. I figured, well I have 8 gigs so why not just do 512 but I really couldn't tell any difference. Thanks for your reply Sinisna.
I am using an Ethernet cable and not using wifi. Sorry don't know what a VPN is let alone how to use one. Another thing to research I suppose. I haven't put in a ticket this time (since Halgar was closed down) because I had these same problems with Telon while Halgar was still up and they couldn't help me then. I have tried that and unfortunately it made no difference at all. One thing I have done is monitor the connection status and that varies wildly (the connection monitor flickers between green/yellow/red, like a demented traffic light), even when just standing still in an area where nothing is happening. As far as I can see (from what more tech savvy people are telling me) the problem is the speed/strength/quality at which the signal from the server is reaching my router. It's like a poor radio signal that keeps being lost in static.
I've experienced similar. Had a character on Halgar temporarily, with no connection issues. I've found that with recent developments, Telon has mostly come up to speed. The actual server is messing up on some raid targets, but that's about it. A few people are still having trouble on chunk lines and things like that. By comparison, somewhere I used to work had software connecting to a server in Miami; it would hang unreasonably and crash, as you describe. What I did was surf up some ip addresses in that area and run a /tracert to them. I found the problem was neither us nor them; it was at points in between that weren't part of either internet service. Of course, that doesn't help or fix anything. Each person's ISP can only get them to the backbone and we kind of take it for granted that's always perfect, which it's not. At one point, Sprint severed Comcast which caused some pretty severe chaos. With these things, it's irrelevant if you're in Canada, Australia, or Egypt. It seems like 90% of the Vanguard traffic finds a fast route but certain people pretty regularly can't share in this. Wish I had an actual useful suggestion. Only thing I can think of are some ip-masking services where essentially, all your internet traffic originates from someone else's computer. Therefor your ip can't be seen, hence can't be attacked. That's a security measure, don't know if it works for games, but that's about the only way you'd have any influence over where your signal hits the backbone. Also would try with a freshly restarted router.
Router has been restarted a couple of times in last week (for electrical maintenance on my house) and that made no differenceat all. Game is still laggy as hell and stutters constantly. This is despite lowering graphics to absolute minimum, which looks ugly as hell. I used to have max graphics on Halgar with no problems (sob).
While not endorsing any particular service or program, I used WTFast for a brief period when ArcheAge launched in Korea and it helped immensely.
For the benefit of the more tech minded, I have tried playing today to see how things stand and it says my ping has a roundtrip of 500 and upwards. I am only getting 5 or 6 FPS, and that is with everything switched off that I can and all graphics set to absolute minimum.
From my experiences running it with 2 PC's, this games just not playable on some lower spec'd PC's, desptite such systems being above the minimum. I played for a while with an older Athlon X2 4200, w/2 GB RAM, Geforce 250 GS and SBlaster Audigy 2, WinXP SP3 with settings on low and with virtually every INI tweak and edit I could find in forums. I couldn't run with the CacheSizeMegs=256 setting in sysconfig.ini as it pushed my total system RAM usage over 2 GB, which caused a hit in perfomance due to disk caching, but I could run with it set to 128 which helped . I also did the 3rd party install of the newer OpenAL32.dll and created an auto routine that deleted the older file in my \Bin folder whenever I started the VGClient. Try all that I did though, I couldn't get the program to run properly on that system and frequently had FPS dips in the 8-12 range. I've since got a Quad core w/8MB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 5670 and Win7 and the games now playable on Telon server even on medium-high settings. It's still not perfect and I get some major lag at chunk lines, but I at least get 30+ fps 90% of the time now. I don't buy into the "it's mostly due to Internet lag" explanation, because the fact of the matter is that my older PC can run many MMOs on low-medium settings that are on par with Vanguard in terms of graphics and territory size.
I might have considered this, except for the fact that I played on Halgar server on max graphics and with no problems. My problems only occured on Telon server. If it was a computer issue it would have occured on Halgar server as well. Since it didn't occur on Halgar but does occur on Telon and nothing has changed with the computer set-up and software, then it has to be internet related. Also this problem is not just confined to my computer, several of my friends have exactly the same problem on Telon, but never had it on Halgar. This includes players from England, France, Serbia, Canada and Australia that I know of. All of these players played regularly on Halgar, none of us has been able to play on Telon since Halgar was closed down. We have all quit Vanguard and moved on now and we have formed a Guild playing on Rift where we don't have any problems at all. I miss Vanguard, but since it is now unplayable for us without Halgar..........
Sad to hear. There are still folks on from Europe and Australia, nevertheless, it would be telling to know how many could not function on Telon after closing Halgar. I'm still of the opinion it's mostly routing issues, which no one can really fix that. Vanguard does not quad core very well, it runs the vast majority of the game through one thread on one core and is a heavy hard drive user.
Just to add a tidbit to the discussion... Podgie, where you said your connection strength varies wildly when just sitting there...I have not had too many problems with Vanguard in the past (I would be part of the small group that would say it has gotten worse, and not better since the devs came back last year), but since last Thursday's patch I have been having the exact same problem, but only in certain chunks. Before this I never experienced this issue in VG. I realize this kind of info probably only helps the devs, but I thought I'd put it out there just in case...
That is most likely just bugs or memory leaks in server code. Like one day Afrit gave me single digit screen update numbers while I got steady 60 fps in other chunks.
The problem is clearly neither your computer nor the game, otherwise you wouldn't have been able to play on Halgar. Equally, the problem isn't Telon either, otherwise no-one else would be able to play on there. It seems to me that the problem is an internet routing one, and if you're right that a few other people are experiencing the same problems from different regions/countries then the bottleneck would seem to be nearer the server end rather than nearer your computer end of the route (but not so close to the server that everyone is affected). However, a simple tracert ought to pick up any such problem points. Also, what is the speed of your internet connection, and have you tried the technical support forums for your ISP? If it's practical then changing your ISP may be an effective, albeit drastic, way of changing the routing.
