Its clear that a quite many players experience input lag and inexplicable slow game play, especially in online modes.
It might not be the majority, but also a lot of players would probably not know if they are a target of input lag, or be bothered to report it.
When you play this game (and previous series) every day you get a lot of experience. How the servers behave during different times of the day or how semi-offline modes (eg SB) feels like compared to online modes such as rivals.
As an experienced player you can also tell when an opponent has skill and when they dont. Opponents who straight lines, avoiding turns, going for shots at every time possible occasion are usually players who didnt invest so much time playing the game. You could also tell by looking at their less valued team. With the input lag on your side, even these less-skilled players are hard to beat. Input lag makes it hard to defend, hard you turn and accelerate, and the opponent with a low valued team is moving much quicker.
This is probably they most annoying part for myself. Loosing against players who have less skill/experience due to lag on my side, and why do I say this; because there are also occasions when input lag is gone, and then its a completely other story. Playing is determined by skill and I know which players I can beat and who I cannot.
Off course games are not predetermined, but more skill usually makes the difference 😁
The endless amount of recommendations about trouble shooting are pointless in this specific case.
yes, power cycle your console, change dns servers, activate qos, turn on upnp etc… these all relates to improving the general connectivity. Reading the feedback online and considering my own setup, these problems cannot be solved at client side. Myself I want to have a proper gaming setup for competitive play. Hardware or knowledge about isp, network is NOT the problem.
BUT the problems we are experiencing have a relation to the time of the day, which probably relates to server load or variations in peering during the day. These actions with trouble shooting do nothing to improve the inputlag, because the input lag is removed by itself when you play at odd hours.
This last week I have been playing rivals at different times during the evening. At 18-23cet the games are frustrating and full of input lag. Looking at the performance graph its stable, 20-23ms flat line. Then between 23-01cet the games becomes much smother and less lag. The performance graph shows the same thing, 20-23 flat line. So you cannot determime the lag by looking at the network graph.
Problem is that I cannot play the game at 1:00am because I need to work the next day… + my wife will be mad.
So further trouble shooting my connection is pointless, simply because I (and multiple others) have gone through every possible step AND the lag will sort itself at certain hours of the day.
This was similar in NHL21 but, on a smaller level. Todays level makes it unplayble.
In my opinion, i have 3 options: stop playing, play offline (not an option for me), or pause and wait until servers are less overloaded, or the peering changed for your cloud sub servers you are paying for.
Could you send me a private message with the server address of the HUT server I am connecting to (see my details such as gamer tag in previous post). Then I can run ping plotter to analyze the peering during laggy time interval and also during non-laggy time interval? Thx
