Game Lags, Mechs Don't Spawn and Everything Warps Once Server Has >=20 Players

[J-Me]

I've pretty thoroughly tested this.

I'm from Australia and most of the servers I play on are located in central US. So that means Huntress, Bulldog, Official and TLL. My ping is around 220 ms to these.

Everything works fine until the server populates to 20 players and beyond. Then the game changes dramatically to pretty much unplayable!

Symptoms:

• I get the connection problem logo and everything freezes. But I don't get a connection timeout. This occurs for 5-120 seconds.
• Mechs spawn in the hangar without their torsos. Vehicles and Mechs won't spawn at all sometimes. The hangar door sometimes stays closed.
• Everything warps around and hit detection is horrible. Missiles take ages to lock on.

This is quite a game wrecker. I can only play TSA and TC on lowly populated servers and I have to leave when it starts to get populated. I am able to play SA fine though due to the lower player count.

I'm pretty sure it's not a client PC power issue. I have an E8400 and it runs at about 80% load. To reiterate; Everything is normal at 18~19 players and then at 20 it hits the wall and everything goes bad. It seems like the server doesn't bother to communicate with my client properly.


EDIT:

I'm currently troubleshooting this problem.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

Could be an internet issue, I play from NZ with an i7 2600k, and can play fine on Huntress with 28 players at 220ms (on a 10 down/1 up adsl).

[J-Me]

I have 20 Mbps cable.

Just tested and I got 19 Mbps down 0.5 Mbps up.

[thEClaw]

Which CPU are you using? Most of the older CPUs have their limits, some will allow you to play with 32 players, others with maybe 27 and if you are unlucky you can only play with 20 players or less. Going beyond that limit will dramatically decrease framerate or cause other issues. (I myself see the disconnect-symbol lately.)

[J-Me]

E8400 3 GHz 6 MB L2 plenty of power.

http://ark.intel.com/products/33910

[Spooky]

This can happen to anyone, especially on servers with over 24 players. It's odd though, that you experienced it with 20 players already.

[thEClaw]

If it's not overclocked, it could very well be the reason for your problems. My two cores are running at 3.6GHz (E6750 or something) and only when not running any CPU-hungry programs* in the background I am able to play on servers with up to 28 players. Otherwise I am limited to 20 to 22 players.

Overclock your CPU a little bit and see if anything changes. You should be able to go up to 3.4GHz without a problem - I would assume that you can go even further.
Check your taskmanager for programs that run in the background, maybe there is one that causes you trouble.

*=Anything that uses more than 5% of my processing power.

@ Spooky: I upgraded my CPU a couple of months ago. Went from 2.8 to 3.6 GHz, and suddenly I was able to play with any amount of players (highly enjoyed the 14vs14 TSA-game with the new CPU). Then I installed a program I need to run in the background and now I am back to about 20 players. So I would assume that these problems are related to a lack of processing power. No chance involved.

[tedarin]

I had connection and hit detection problems on huntress yesterday, never had it before.
My ping was my normal ~150, and there was about 22-24 players on the server.

I also had 3 CTD:s which I normally don't get...

Specs:
Win7 64-bit
i5-2500k non-OC
8 GB ram
Radeon 5850

[~SJ~ Atlessa]

It's been a while since I last played, but I had the same issue as the OP ever since the switch to wars, starting from 20 players upwards, regardless of ping/internet load/server.

[(TLL)CapperDeluxe]

Defender and I were on Huntress with 28 people and were having huge issues as well, but I believe it more to do with very low FPS than it does being laggy as I believe I was in the 50ms ping range or so.  I have an OC'd Q6600 (2.4Ghz->3.2Ghz) so short of upgrading my PC (which I plan to do in a few to several months) I've reached my limit there.

Perhaps a 20 player limit is the right thing to do here?  Give it some thought anyway

[=KoS= Eldragon]

220 ping is quite high. Im in central usa and rarely have over 100 ping to the servers you listed. Run a tracert to the servers you listed and see if any one hop is abnormally high. Then call your isp.

[F22-sama]

I'm from Australia and most of the servers I play on are located in central US. So that means Huntress, Bulldog, Official and TLL. My ping is around 220 ms to these.

I had problem with hit detect when player count is very high but everyone have this too. MRM not doing any damage, PPC shakes but not hurt, etc...

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

220 ping is quite high. Im in central usa and rarely have over 100 ping to the servers you listed. Run a tracert to the servers you listed and see if any one hop is abnormally high. Then call your isp.

220 is from NZ. Aus is even worse, 240+ most of the time. ISP's down here can't do anything about being almost literally on the other side of the world (unless you were referring to another post, in which case disregard all that lol)

[-SM-SUCKER]

I do have those "connection" problems as well. Mostly on the RDL server and Huntress (both give a ping around 120-180max).
I do not understand though, why the cpu could be related, because the symbol indicates a networking problem.
Would it be a FPS problem, then should it not be just a bit more stuttery? This timeout can take several seconds. And your own internet connection will usually not just die for some seconds.
But this does really only occur on full servers. Maybe the Server looses track of the client for some time, some bug in the netcode maybe.

[Defender]

I noticed when I'm doing bandwidth intensive stuff (torrents, file uploads to my webserver) my internet will crap out on my for 5-10 seconds at a time, intermittently. Make sure you've powercycled your router/modem recently as I find a simple reboot of my internet does wonders after it starts crapping out.