add me: ^-^
I’ll edit this post once you’re done.
Let’s see if we can figure something out
Thanks I wrote it down you can take it down now.
We’re in veeery different timezones. I’ll be around when it’s a bit late in the evening for you. Sorry about that
Not a problem, I typically stream early in the evening anyways so I’ll be around after that.
We tested through Shaw against an AWS instance based in Oregon. He had his client run at 125Hz both ways (standard for this game) on a ~40ms ping. Everything went perfectly fine in game. I couldn’t find anything odd or unusual.
Just to be a little technical, said game doesn’t extrapolate clients on the server as OW does (it just executes commands as they come, so players with inconsistent connections visibly hitch in the game). I was expecting something obvious (or none of it) - the latter happened.
Just like the netgraph in OW the connection (as seen from the server) is textbook consistent. I have packets from his clients evenly spaced at 8ms intervals with very little variation in the dumps.
As I was explaining, it looks like the issue has to do with the server extrapolating a (missed) command and then executing the actual action with delay when it’s finally arrived (causing a rollback of the animation on the client/a slightly delayed shot in the game). Because there’s no visible lag spikes or loss on the graph I thought it could be a node throttling packets on the way up to the server - a node holding onto packets for some ms, then delivering them all at once.
That’s where it gets tricky. I went into more details and I actually have exactly that in the dumps, but not to the extent I would have expected. I have a number of small lag spikes in an otherwise perfectly perfect dump, basically packets visibly held for ~10ms each time, and later delivered in a burst (at 125hz that’s 2 packets…).
So I’m really unsure. Either there’s something going on that’s not directly related to the local ISPs as a whole, or OW in his case (considering the otherwise heavenly connection) is doing too aggressive a buffering, is then caught off guard by random unexpected throttling. Commands in OW run at 16ms intervals, 10ms is not even one command. But maybe in perfect conditions OW lets the server catch up with the client stream?
I have one especially clean record of 80s of gameplay. There are 3 cases of ~10ms throttling in this dump.
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@drakuloth
Its been just over a couple weeks so I figured I’d check in. Has QA pinpointed the cause of the issue at least? All I know from my support ticket is that it required ‘extreme conditions’ to mimic my issue.
VeiledFlame,
We haven’t heard anything back from QA yet other than that they’ve seen the issue before but only in very extreme cases (similar to how CGG intentionally mangled their network.) The engineer we’re working with is basically seeing if he can reproduce the event and then trying to figure out in what situations a player would see it. I’d keep sending players having the same problem as you to this thread so we can get more reports. As of now you’re the only official report of the behavior, which means the priority of investigating the issue is lower.
That’s unfortunate. Yeah CGG essentially mimicked the result by hindering the connection, so I’m just trying to figure out if its on my end or blizzards end.
Posting from my other account since I can’t repost on my main, but is there any update on this? I’ve been waiting quite a while now to hear back from a simple report on the issue. All I need to know is where the issue is originating. Or even just how QA reproduced the problem would be great.
Mirage,
Without accurate reproduction steps or more reports there’s not a whole lot we can do here. I’ve bumped our thread to see if we got lucky, but the last time we talked with the engineers about this it was basically them happening upon the problem completely at random while doing some things during debugging that a player like yourself wouldn’t ever be able to do because it requires backend tools.
Edit: We heard back, and without more information there’s nothing else we can do on our end. We don’t have information on how to consistently reproduce the problem using a normal setup, and the kinds of things one can do to reproduce the problem are completely unnatural for a normal PC/network setup, so the information is pretty useless for testing. We totally understand that this is a frustrating error, but unless you can direct more people to this thread who have the problem and who can get us more information, we’re at an impasse here.
For now your best plan is probably going to be finding the best VPN you can and using that to play to at least minimize the problem.
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Appreciate the response. From what I’m gathering here its some way shape or form of a network issue that seems to happen at random. And more specifically it seems to be at least on a provincial level to Alberta, I went to my brother’s house in a small town 3 hours north of here and brought my setup, same issue there too with another ISP (wasn’t fun hauling that setup out there).
That’s really all I wanted to know so I could investigate it myself. As much as I’d like to use a VPN it does almost nothing to fix the issue from my findings. Unfortunate but the game isn’t playable for me in the current state its in. Not sure if its just isolated to Overwatch but not much more I can do when my network tests are coming out clean.
Hey Drakuloth,
I wanted to follow up on this forum here and throw my hat in, as a player who get frequent rubber banding, inaccurate hit detection and other major issues and who has been advocating for a solution since very early in the games life cycle.
I know for a fact that I’ve reported these issues well over a single digit amount myself alone and have followed literally hundreds of Canadian players who all share this inconsistent experience.
Please, I’d love some way to understand why this is such an issue for you and your team, but from everything I’ve gathered, it’s simply your ignorance that perpetuates this biased and poor service you claim to be fair.