Re: Input lag

For what it’s worth the game is unplayable today…it was not this bad last week…my players feel like they weigh 1000lbs and cannot change direction without momentum pulling them for an extra second or 2 before it registers. I would  rather lag spikes than them slowing the whole game down to a crawl (for one player not the other) so at least it would be competitive. It’s an absolute joke how this game is playing right now. Are these servers running pentium 3 processors with 1mb ram???? Come on!!

Today im struggling with some massive issues. Every now and then my commands happen in the wrong order. I use a skillmove and then press the pass, the pass goes of and the recieving player does the skillmove. doing a mcgeady spin ALWAYS results in a body feint left and right. 

I've always been a big fan of the NHL games but I feel like a sucker paying for the Ultimate Edition. This issue provides a negative experience. I would of just stuck with the regular version of the game and played Versus and Franchise Mode. 

@EA_Aljo I just played a game of rivals where I happened to match up with my friend. So I messaged him to chat and upon the start of the game I noticed huge Input delay. Like 3/4s a second for my players to respond, turn radius of semi trucks, beaten by the wrong counters on draws, and so slow to accelerate. My 87 Kane got outskated by base Getzlaf when I had a 10 stride head start... So I asked him if he was getting delay, but he said it was completely fine for him, no problem whatsoever. I checked the ping - 40ms, not amazing but shouldn't be a problem at all. Why am I being held back by the game, delaying me to give my opponent an unfair advantage? It can't be server distance, we live in the same town and therefore would have very similar distance to the server and ISP.

I know the difference between puck luck & huge input delay. This makes the game absolutely unplayable. 

The crazy part is that the next game, absolutely no delay, also 40ms ping. Next game after that, also 40ms ping and no problem.

Can we start some open brainstorming with the staff @EA_Aljo ? I have to agree with @Fredbooger here, it's very frustrating for this now overwhelming number of people coming to this page to report facing the exact same issue and being brushed off that there aren't enough people facing this issue and that you'll update us if you find out anything new.

Can you engage in some sort of constructive conversation with the various people of this chat who seem so very willing to help? They have all provided so much data and offer ping plotter charts and are changing everything in their setup to try to find the fix. We know it has to be some sort of server or coding error as to why this is happening, and both of those are on EA's end...

Is there some sort of lag compensation or something else at play and why this issue keeps being put off? I think the excuse that not enough people face this problem cannot be used anymore, and playing the runaround game of canned responses and giving us no info can not keep going.

There is something critically, critically wrong about this game (not even considering the plethora of other unfixed glitches and errors that are still present a month after launch) and we have so much evidence and are so willing to help. What will it take?

Please, honeslty, we need some openness with the community and some substance to the efforts on your end. This is not an insult or a baseless call out, but a matter of fact now.

What are your thoughts @EA_Aljo ? Or anyone else at the EA team have any word? This is not an excuse for bad play, it's not a localized internet issue, it's not an HDMI cord problem, it's a widespread issue (as verified by the 200+ responses in this chat, more than any other post in this section by a large margin) on a game that costs over $80-$130 CAD. That price warrants effort and a true investigation and fix by the EA support team. 

Please let me know your thoughts, this is beyond frustrating and we need some real input, not the same copy and paste response please. If it's a matter of collecting data or insufficient resources or whatever just be open please. This is impossibly frustrating for the community. Even take a look at the Reddit page, there's not small amount of posts on this exact problem, and a good number of people who are confusing it with ice tilt too because they don't know what to call it. If everyone who experienced this issue came to this page and commented on this post I can guarantee we'd be at thousands of responses not hundreds.

@Chaseinator5 

Thank you for all those details. I'll pass them on. I'm very sorry if I gave the impression this was being ignored. That's absolutely not the case. As I've said multiple times, this is being investigated. It will take time. I don't have an ETA on this either, but just because I'm not providing daily updates, that doesn't mean this is being swept under the rug. As soon as I have spme news, I'll provide an update.

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@EA_Aljo wrote:

@Chaseinator5 

Thank you for all those details. I'll pass them on. I'm very sorry if I gave the impression this was being ignored. That's absolutely not the case. As I've said multiple times, this is being investigated. It will take time. I don't have an ETA on this either, but just because I'm not providing daily updates, that doesn't mean this is being swept under the rug. As soon as I have spme news, I'll provide an update.

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Thx for feedback.

to give you an idea to put this in perspective…

lets say I am am the biggest fan of action movies, and i dont appreciete other movies.
i bought a device of 700EUR just to be able to watch.

i also paid a starting fee of 100EUR and a subscription fee of 20 EUR per mth to get access to a streaming service, eg Netflix

but… for some reason, all action movies are exclusivley in slow motion.

if a service does not work, i normally simply switch.

if i really like the service, i will contact customer service to help out with debugging.

quite many have offered their help in analyzing this. if you fail to reach a solution, it will come down to ignoring customers, lack of reaources or a hidden restriction which you are very much aware of.

I give up. The games unplayable. I've done everything possible on my end. This is beyond frustrating. I just played against an absolutely horrible player and couldn't do anything because of the input delay. He was flying around poke checking, hitting me before I could pass the puck. He clearly had no delay. This is insane. Pinging at 12ms playing like 200ms. These servers are so bad. 

I'm in div 4 now 1650 rating, I quit about 100 games due to this delay and being frustrated. I was div 1 at 2150 rating.

I was considering trying to compete this year and doing gwc but that would be a joke trying to compete against any top player when I can't even beat a div 8 player on this crap. Lol

I honestly think ea is fine if we quit the game. Think about it, we already paid for it and they won’t have to answer anymore questions on this thread. It’s a win win for them.I love hockey and this is the only hockey game, so I want to help figure it out. There are a lot of people on this thread that want to help but the only question we are being asked is our gamer tags, IP addresses, etc. there has been no other back-and-forth after that besides “we are looking into it.” It doesn’t take this long to look into it, it’s been three weeks. How far into the year do we go before the game is dead and no one cares?

@Fredbooger 

There really isn't anything to go back and forth on. You all insist the issue is on our end so we're looking into it. Despite numerous complaints that your opponents are able to play without lag. Again, if everyone were experiencing this, it would be a lot easier to figure out. I understand how frustrating this is, but it's going to take time to find out what is making some of you experience lag.

@Fredbooger 

That's not something we can do. When we have news, an update will be provided.

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@EA_Aljo wrote:

@Fredbooger 

There really isn't anything to go back and forth on. You all insist the issue is on our end so we're looking into it. Despite numerous complaints that your opponents are able to play without lag. Again, if everyone were experiencing this, it would be a lot easier to figure out. I understand how frustrating this is, but it's going to take time to find out what is making some of you experience lag.

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@EA_Aljo a while back I provided a graph from my PC via Ping Plotter pinging the IP my router says I am connected to while playing the HUT mode.  I also noticed something that seemed a bit off with some of the numbers, but I do not know enough about gaming traffic to know in detail what it all means.  I do know that my total number of hops is 37 with 3-9 being Charter Spectrum and 10-37 being something related to Amazon.  The Spectrum hops look normal as far as I can tell (no latency spikes or packet loss).  It's the Amazon ones that seem a bit suspect with some of the numbers I see.  Maybe it's nothing or maybe it's something, but there should at least be a "back and forth" about it I would assume since nobody seems to have any answers yet.

I have provided this plotted graph in both public and private spaces and haven't really heard anything about it one way or another.  The biggest frustration with this game aside from the problems we are having is how the people here affiliated with EA don't seem to be very "hands on" or transparent with where they are at in their "investigation".  

I'd be curious to know if anything can even be learned just by looking at the graph I provided since I don't really have much else to go on other than somebody coming here and trying the game themselves.

Solving an external problem in a vacuum....guess I better not hold my breath on a solution

@Confusion2000 

We don't go into fine details about these investigations. At least, not while they are occurring. I simply don't have any more details at this time. 

As far as the ping plotter goes, you can see you're getting spikes early on. The 3rd hop shows a max of 182. That is well before our servers. Then, it looks ok until a spike of 72 on the 13th hop. This would be before our servers as well. That said, I'm not an expert with ping plotter. In the past, the UO Trace tool had our servers being the last ones on the list. This makes sense since they are the destination. I'm not sure that ping plotter works the same way since I can't confirm which are our servers. I know they would be after the hops I mentioned though so it looks like the issue is not on our end. I'm not saying absolutely nothing is going on on our end. We'll have to wait until we have some news on this. I don't know when that will be.

I have been experiencing the same thing , the game is heavy as hell, guys are stuck in the mud, passes takes 0.5/1 s to leave the stick etc... In the last 2 weeks i had 1 night where it was 100% fluid and the game was enjoyable All the other nights have been not envoyez-le at all.Since the patch it has been worse. It is probably the servers. Hopefully something is done to fix this. Thx.

@gregy9999 

Have you attempted any troubleshooting? Those steps are here. Since this is still under investigation, it would be good to try those steps since it's very possible they could help.

@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.