Multiplayer Server Lag (Damage Delay/Bursts, Block/Attack, Ability Timing)

Hi,

I wanted to bring this to your attention as I've heard from many other regular players in the community that are upset with this issue. After discussing this with many regular players I see around and play with in Heroes vs. Villains, I decided to attempt to bring this up to EA/DICE to hopefully get a resolution given that I have knowledge, education, and experience with these underlying technical areas. Many players would be very grateful if you were to resolve this issue. It seems to be very obvious that EA/DICE have downgraded the Battlefront II servers' performance capabilities over time, so much so that these servers cannot handle the number of players on them. I will outline some of the major server lag issues I have encountered:

1. Damage delay/lag

The server does not seem to be able to keep up with player damage at some points. For example, a player will hit with their lightsaber and it will go through a block or dodge because the server is not able to register that the player is blocking/dodging versus when the damage is being applied because it cannot keep up with these actions. This makes lightsaber dueling and other Heroes vs. Villains fights very frustrating and up to server lag chance rather than skill and tactics.

2. Ability delay/lag

The server does not seem to be able to keep up with player abilities at some points. For example, a player will use an ability that comes at a later/delayed time (its damage or its effect, such as a push) because the server can't keep up with the actions of dashes/blocks versus when the ability was executed. This becomes even more blatantly obvious when we time a dodge correctly from an ability, only for it to teleport us back to before we dodged and perform the ability on us. It's clear in this case that the server was not able to keep up with the multiplayer actions, resulting in a low-quality server lag experience.

These are just some examples of the server lag. I am purely talking about serverside lag, not clientside lag. This lag is occurring to all players in the lobby because the server cannot keep up with the events/actions happening in the game, resulting in mismatched timings on many fronts. This is not a performance issue with my computer or latency with my Internet. I have played the game since it came out and have noticed this deterioration of server performance over time. I have 1.2 gigabit Internet, 32 GB of RAM, an extremely powerful CPU, several M.2 NVMe SSDs, and a very powerful graphics card--it is not a performance issue with any of these. I'm located in the United States and have my in-game settings set to use the best server available--however, I have tried manually selecting servers to see if it helped, but that did not either. It claims that I get about 30-40 ms to each one of them. Further, this ping is inaccurate because while the settings menu claims 30 ms, the TCP IP the game connects to will be near 140-200 ms due to the servers not being able to handle the concurrent connections. I think something that definitely demonstrates proof of this is that when Epic Games gave the game out for free for a week, the game experienced similar numbers to what it had around launch. These servers crashed and EA said they had to deploy more and upgrade them to handle the influx. This shows that there has been a change in the server infrastructure between launch and afterward. This upgrade was short-lived and did not solve these server lag issues, it only allowed people to actually be able to connect to the servers. The game servers should not only be able to be connected to but are responsible for providing reasonable gameplay.

I can only note these observances for the PC Battlefront II servers. I'm not sure if this issue is also happening for console players as well.

I have observed the TCP connections during the game and found that you guys are using Amazon AWS to host your game servers, where multiple lobbies are hosted off of. Please upgrade your AWS server instances as the current virtual hardware you have allocated toward these servers is insufficient for keeping up with gameplay. I understand that the game is several years old, but you have many customers who paid good money to be able to play the game and still do. Providing good service over the lifetime of the game (until you decide to shut down the servers) will result in a happier community that is more willing to buy your games in the future.

Thanks for your time and consideration.