i totally support the idea of monitoring and banning lag abusers. If someone is lagging for 1000 units then there is a real problem there, and if it happens regularly, ban them.

Even if it is an unintentional lag, there is a lot you can do to reduce this, from reducing the clip range, stopping updates/steam/torrents running, using less bandwidth on your voice chat, even using classic models on your DOAC client.

If there was an enforced ban, people would go out of their way to help themselves get a better ping time than just whining that people should accept that they might disappear from view at a critical time.

If after all the changes you still have a poor connection, then WTF are you doing playing an MMO??

I don't think a ban is neccessary. Just make it unattractive for people to intentionally lag.

A message like "You experienced heavy lag (>1000ms) within the last 10 seconds and cannot perform this action." on trying to attack/cast/heal/whatever right after the lag might help. That way, people can continue playing after lagspikes, but cannot abuse it right after their lag stops (naturally or "magically").

I think it could be implemented pretty easy as some sort of "disarm" buff. The question is how difficult it is for the server to detect lag spikes for each client.

If a client is really low on processing power, it is always possible to increase FPS using /effects self/group, classic models, reducing graphics details, resolution, etc. -- I suspect most people complaining about "regular heavy" lags here have done none of those. If you really have regular high lags it should be in your own interest to reduce them. Unless - of course - the lag benefits you

an 'action' debuff would work also

You cannot punish people for not having the money for a new pc & have a bad connection

Sonnenschein wrote:You cannot punish people for not having the money for a new pc & have a bad connection

+1

Sonnenschein wrote:You cannot punish people for not having the money for a new pc & have a bad connection

That's nonsense.

First of all I can guarantee you that none of the people complaining here have (a) constant heavy lags and (b) tried to reduce lags by reducing gfx settings. The just like to complain, or might fear for their "advantage"?

Second, I told you it's quite easy to improve hardware performance. People who have real issues with 1920x1200 max. details 16xAA can just drop most of that, moderate details, no AA, reduce resolution and can play DAOC perfectly fine.

Third, DAOC is 10 years old, so sufficient hardware you can get on eBay for 50€.

Forth, it is perfectly normal to punish people with bad connection. If you play ego shooter with > 150ms lag you have no chance to compete. In DAOC, its even fine to have 200-300ms lag and you can still play. The point is that from a certain number you get ADVANTAGE in certain situations of having lag, and that can well be punished.


BUT you know all that. You also don't care about people with lag issues. You just like to troll on boards.

when this game first came out i was playing it on a Compaq i486 DX2-66 piece of garbage computer and a 56K Modem running at 6Kbps

sometimes there was lag, but most of the time i would just go LD.

Then i "upgraded" to a single ISDN line running at 128Kbps and let me tell you the lag and LD was gone.

The only lag i get know is for 5 minutes after logging in as my PC settles itself down and "lagdar" when you quickly pan your camera to spot enemy inc.

if your connection is so bad that you cant stop lagging then you seriously need to do something about it because that just sucks.

Blue wrote:I don't believe you. 10 second lags are not possible with just Teamspeak or Ventrilo in the background.

Do you believe the GM that was in my group when this was happening? I can give you their toon name if you like.



Do you believe the moderator on this forum who I play with weekly who watches this happen to me?


I am sorry Blue, but for US players, 10 second spike is not such a difficult thing to attain. And that's 10X what you were suggesting as a limit for bans. A 1 second spike? uh...happens all the time.

This is a little off topic but thought repost it for fun.

This vid was posted on Gawaine VN long while back and re-posted recently. Shows a sorc who was notorious at lag casting, so someone made a little fun of him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFuBjrdRWj0

Force wrote:I am sorry Blue, but for US players, 10 second spike is not such a difficult thing to attain. And that's 10X what you were suggesting as a limit for bans.

So Blue suggested a limit for bans? Learn to read, man....

shade wrote:First of all I can guarantee you that none of the people complaining here have (a) constant heavy lags and (b) tried to reduce lags by reducing gfx settings.

I was never complaining - I don't have any lags - but I know how it can be!
And there is several reasons for lag - not only gfx!

shade wrote:

Force wrote:I am sorry Blue, but for US players, 10 second spike is not such a difficult thing to attain. And that's 10X what you were suggesting as a limit for bans.

So Blue suggested a limit for bans? Learn to read, man....

Blue wrote:"The idea is not that bad. A lag of >1000ms is unusual if not intended. So there should be some penalty if it still happens"

What else is that supposed to mean there, Mr. Reading Rainbow? Your previous post mentions disabling keyboard input, and also banning for 3 days.

shade wrote:
The "worst" punishment I have seen so far for that was 3 day ban, which is not really much of a threat. I would definately like to see a few harder punishments (7-14 days ban maybe) for players that get "caught in the act" abusing lag/movement-mechanics repeatedly.

Penalty != Ban. I suggested one possibility how to penalize, there are probably some other ways to penalize without using a ban.

I used the word "ban" only when talking about

shade wrote:players that get "caught in the act" abusing lag/movement-mechanics repeatedly

but I also said that this is probably hard/impossible to prove.

So, NO, Blue did NOT suggest general bans for players with >1000ms (nor did I), just SOME sort of penalty.

To clarify, I was discussing two different things.

One is how to treat players that are provably caught in the act abusing window dragging or others intentinal generation of very heavy lag. Here my oppinion is that a time-ban is well in place. This is hard to prove (but, as Blue said, he was in a situation where he could prove it).

The other one is how to automatically handle heavy lag occurances. This should not be heavy punishment but rather a small in-game penalty to compensate for the advantage that can occur in certain situations from having lag. Of course you should not be banned if your wife starts a windows update on her machine in the next room. But in my oppinion it's OK to add a small penalty ingame since if you didnt cause that lag intentinally, you can't even do something useful during that time anyway, but if you caused it intentionally you should not gain advantage.

To give an example, I have seen situations where a caster got slammed by a tank and lagged > 1000 units away. Tank sticked (ok, mistake on his side, but not really his fault). By the time the lag ended, the caster "jumped" back 1000 units and started to nuke the crap out of the tank which didn't even make it back before he died. No matter if you caused that lag on purpose or not, you should not have that advantage as the caster in that example. (Even if the tank had staid in the place where he stunned, he would have lost 9 seconds of damage on the caster).

sounds like a witch hunt to me, and penalizing people because they lag is retarded, they are already penalized from lagging.

shade wrote:Penalty != Ban.

Ban = most common type of penalty on uthgard. and when its already mentioned in the thread, its a fair assumption to make in context.