Input lag

@Fredbooger 

I'll pass along the dateils. When there's some news, I'll post an update.

@EA_Aljo 

I would like to add a very relevant anecdote. After @Fredbooger 's comment on lag compensation, I thought I would ask my friend who I played the other night (mentioned him in a previous comment on this post) about his internet connection since I experienced so much delay in that game.

He lives in a region outside of my town (acreages) and runs internet at 1/5th the speed of my connection (I run gigabit wired internet on cat 6e cables) and his system tops out at 200 mb/s down (which should be enough) but usually is much lower than that. The big problem I noticed is that he runs a wireless connection.

Again, he said the play was super smooth for him, and he doesn't have any problems when playing NHL 22 online. However he mentioned that his lag is horrible when playing call or duty.

I on the other hand, have the exact opposite problem. Call of duty and other games run perfect and lag free for me (as my great internet connection should provide), however NHL online is horrible.

Remote location, slower internet (with fluctuation), wireless connection, and plays seamlessly in NHL but has horrible lag in call of duty and other games. 

That kind of sounds like lag compensation to me. I would love to hear the feedback on this when the dev team looks into it. Would it be possible to ask you to provide updates on the progress of the investigation & what is being done as opposed to us just waiting on a conclusion? I think many of the people hear just want a little transparency and I for one would love to hear when the dev team starts looking into this issue, if they start to have some initial findings, or even when we should expect to hear a response, because it's a little hard to be in the dark for weeks hearing that we'll be notified if there's an update. I know it takes time to investigate this and all of our anecdotal data can't give a clear solution to the problem, but I really hope that it can give some ideas to the team to look into and hopefully fix this problem.

It really shouldn't penalize good connections to allow people with slow connections to play seamlessly. Usually even if I'm experiencing some delay I might be able to grind a game out if I'm that much better than the other player, but it's really not fair to those who want to enjoy this game competitively. I'd say about half my losses are the result of this delay, it really ruins online gameplay.

I have 1 gig fiber hard wired 19-20 ms in game solid line no packet loss and no lag ever, but the game is literally the most delayed unplayable sack of ****. I have 2 isp right now and it is nearly an identical unplayable game because of delay on both. I play on a 1ms response time monitor as well. Tried upnp of/off, dmz, multiple dns servers, all of the port forwarding, multiple modems and routers to this point and not a single one has given this game an even playable connection. I have not spent a penny on packs this year because of this delayed gameplay. There is literally no fix to this. The minute this game switched to a server based game from p2p it has been unplayable. I had these issues before the tuner and ever since I've had a full second input delay making it even worse to where I literally have to stop playing this game. Speed tests running on my network read 980+ mbps upload and download with <4 ms ping and <.1 jitter.

@HEP2214 

Where are you located? If your connection got worse when we switched to dedicated servers a couple of years ago, it makes me think you're in a more remote location that is far from a server. This also means that P2P connections could be better because chances are good you're connecting to someone much closer to you than a dedicated server.

I live in North Carolina and connect to the Virginia server. 19-20 ms ping every game solid line never spiked. Other isp give me 22-23 ms ping and same thing. Never lag and never disconnect the game is just a full second input delay to move or pass and you can't check.

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@Fredbooger wrote:
@EA_AljoI’m starting to think this is related to lag compensation. From what I’m reading there is a maximum buffer time for the “smoothing” when network connections aren’t ideal. So when 1 person has a good connection and the other doesn’t, this buffer helps the game not look laggy, just delayed. In the past, ea reduced the maximum buffer time and this helped those with input delay. There’s a huge article on it on Reddit and it makes prefect sense. The people with great connections (like most of us on here) shouldn’t be penalized because we’re playing people with slow connections, while using Wi-Fi. The people with the weaker connection should get penalized. It’s definitely not a coincidence that most people here are wired, 300+ MB connections and are having delay. Can you talk to the people in charge to reduce the maximum buffer time on the lag compensation model to see if this alleviates the issue? Even if it’s for a day, we will immediately notice if it works.

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This makes a lot of sense to me.

i got fiber connection with very good connection. I always expect a flat graph with low ping when looking at network performance.

when watcing high end players on twitch with very smooth game play, their graph often show up as a roller coaster graph. Same for american and european players.

Perhaps we should try an inverted qos setup?

@mturesson 

Would be interested to see how that plays out. With gig fiber that I have enabling Qos generally just drops your speeds and causes more issues because it is totally unnecessary to have with high speeds. I tried port forwarding again and last night the game went from 1 sec input delay to 1/2 sec but this morning same settings it's back to the same delayed mess with 600 lb dudes skating around playing a team of 5 McDavid's on the ice. Luckily the vast majority of people that play this game aren't good so I can still win games but any time I play anyone around my skill level there is just no chance.

Had a lenghly thread with EA_Aljo on Fat man lag on NHL 21 over here: Old Thread 

I am happy that more players are talking about this problem, everything I have to say about the problem is in the other thread, it's been a problem for years, in my opinion (and as mentioned before) due to lag compensation (game is using UDP (GVSP) for online traffic) so players with a worse connection than yourself get an advantage. That's why I always have problems against players from Eastern Europe for example (I am from Germany). 

For NHL 22, I changed consoles from Xbox One Series X to Playstation 5 and I have to say that the fat man lag is even worse on the PS5. Just yesterday, a 78OVR Cody Eakin from Buffalo completely danced around my defenders (88OVR Hedman for example) , my players where just standing there and when I switched to them I basically couldn't do anything due to the fat man lag. Forechecking was not even remotely possible as well as poke checks, my opponent players were all faster. I have videos if the development team needs some.

What I still haven't tried is making my connection bad on purpose (changing router ports to 100Mbit for example or connect the PS5 to LTE or a bad WIFI) and don't really want to do that. I just hope that EA finally changes something because the game is not playable competitely online (outside of Scandinavia).

@99manfrottin66 

If you're able to completely switch connections and play fine, this normally indicates the issue is on your ISP's side. Your data connection isn't going to use the same connection as your ISP so this can be a good test that helps narrow down where the issue resides. The regular lag is most likely caused by the wireless hotspot connection. By regular lag, do you mean gameplay stuttering, freezing, then speeding up and returning to normal and repeating?

@Fredbooger 

If you read the solution, you'll see why it was accepted as such.

Something I experimented with this weekend and worked was playing the game very late at night.  I as well tried to get my champs games in but it was basically unplayable (way too much input lag) during normal hours (7/8am-10pm.)  On Saturday night, I decided to try again but this time, start at about 11:30pm CST. I played several games up until about 2am with almost no input lag.  It was glorious.  However, I can't just do that every night - my wife/family and body won't put up with it.  For the record, my ping was exactly the same as it was during the day (~30ms). I think it was just EA's servers. They must not be set to handle the current load during the day...That in combination with how the current version of the game handles input (i.e. smoothing, etc.) ends up providing a poor user experience for many. 

I keep going back to that 93 page and counting FIFA thread. It's impossible to not link these threads with the same exact pervasive issues, and yet EA talks down to us like we're fools or have some unique case. It's a massive issue, just not massive enough to force action, which like most things goes back to money. There will never be "anything to report." 

I feel like introducing Peer to Peer connectivity would address this issue. I rarely ever lag on versus compared to the constant input lag in HUT. 

I just ran a bunch of traceroutes to ea servers and my results were <10 ms max early on for my isp and <50 ms on the far back end for my worst results. Most end results were under 30 ms. So no issues here yet the game is still massively slow and delayed on 2 different isp one on a fiber line and another cable line both 1 gig that I have currently.

This is definitely not solved. You can do everything that supposedly "solves" this issue and you will still experience the issue. I have talked to everyone I play in leagues with across North America and every single one of them is pretty much experiencing the same issue just some less than others but they can't be bothered to come in to these forums to say anything about it because they dont even think EA cares enough to fix it or it's a waste of their time. Not sure if it is just me but a lot of these issues starting peaking with people I know shortly after the latest patch or update whatever you want to call it. If people are also experiencing these issues across various EA backed products then maybe just maybe that could point to an EA issue but from the looks of the supposed "solved" status of this obviously they won't take that into consideration. Obviously no forum manager has the power to fix these issues themselves and can only relay information but that is supposed to work both ways. Does it cost you money to ask for the right people to check? If you want to make everyone happy that it is infact not an EA issue check all of your servers and show us. People want proof not word of mouth that a problem is not present when it obviously is. To me it feels like things are being hidden from us. Sorry for doing this as a response to fred not sure if its going to tag him but there was no other way for me to respond that I could see. Not sure if that's because they think they solved their issue or what.

@sinisterdisciple 

If you read the solution for more details on why it has been marked as solved. When we have news on this, we'll provide an update.

Is there a section that I am not seeing? When viewing said solution all it says is to check all your equipment which I have done. All those troubleshooting steps listed (which is all I see) have been done yet I still have the issue. What am I not seeing here?

@sinisterdisciple 

I was specifically talking about this part:

EA_Blueberry: Accepting solution for more visibility on the information we're requesting. 

If you want to go through the troubleshooting steps, send me a private message and we'll do that.

I know how to do the troubleshooting. As for accepting a solution to the problem what does that even mean? Does that mean it is being looked into further or the troubleshooting steps that I have completed to no avail are the solution?

@EA_Aljo 

For further evidence on how significant/common of an issue this is, I posed this poll in the NHL HUT subreddit to test if this issue is common in the general community (& therefore people experience it and don't report it).

These are my results after a single day...

Just wanted to address your guy's comments that not enough people experience this...

@Chaseinator5 

I see 11 people have responded so far. We're going to need to see bigger numbers before claiming this is affecting everyone. With small numbers like this, it doesn't add credence to the issue being on our end. However, I understand not everyone posts on Reddit or these forums. This also goes to say that there are many people that don't experience lag that also aren't actively posting their experiences online. With the number of variables that go into connections, it's impossible to test them all. We will continue to monitor for any issues though.