In the comments to my “first glance” post for the Pirates of the Burning Sea, Rusty from Flying Labs responded to my experiences with lag and random disconnections while playing. To be fair, it was my son who was having the lag, on Rackham, and he mentioned that a lot of people were complaining about it at the time. My problem was with losing the connection. It’s possible they were related.
Rusty wrote:
I would be surprised if the lag you’re experiencing actually is because of Rackham. It’s busy, but other players are on it with no lag, and it’s running inside our tested tolerance. Noting that you’re also disconnecting from Bonny several times, is it possible there’s a problem with your router and UDP traffic? I wouldn’t normally suspect this, since CoD (excellent game, by the way) seems to be running fine, but I thought I’d check.
Oh, and for Relmstein – Our travel times are dramatically faster than Eve, and so far players delivering cargo seems to be working out.
UDP is a protocol that is used to send information that does not guarantee delivery. In the case of PotBS, my son’s problems with lag could very well be something to do with this. MMOs send you information on where you are and every other moving object in the game on a regular basis. In order to let you play smoothly, the local client has its own idea where you should be, and sends this information to the server every so often.
Apparently, for some people, the server and the client occasionally disagree, and the client takes the server’s word for where you are — and suddenly you’re back where you were five seconds ago.
My disconnections might be related — I don’t just lose the connection to the server, I lose the connection to the Internet for about thirty seconds. It’s almost like I was being hit with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. It could be that UDP packets are being held up somewhere, then delivered all at once, knocking me offline.
My guess is that some sort of routing error between my computer and the PotBS servers was causing both problems. After a few disconnections and the server itself apparently disappearing for awhile, I played the rest of the night with no problems whatsoever.
That’s good to hear that you were able to finally play with no problems. Has your son tried it again with Rackham?
He’s been more or less sucked bodily into CoD4, so he hasn’t been on. I restarted on Guadaloupe and got some jitters occasionally after zoning. I’m not sure of the cause, but it was nothing like he was experiencing.