This is our official topic against lag and related networking issues. Reading through this guide and following the recommendations should help you understand the causes of lag and how to improve the situation.

#############################################

Different types of lag
It is important to know that there are 3 major types of lag that affect Zezenia Online. Identifying the real problem is a must to actually be able to find a solution.

Low Client FPS
FPS stands for "frames per second" and essentially means how many times per second the game client redraws the game screen on your computer. A decent FPS is required for the gameplay to appear smooth. Generally 30+ FPS is very playable, while 60+ FPS is great. The main component affecting your framerate is your computer's graphics card (sometimes a chip integrated to your motherboard or CPU). Performance delivered from your graphics card is heavily affected by your driver - if you have a very old version or are using a generic driver that comes with your operating system your FPS will usually be low or vary heavily by the used rendering engine. A simple way to improve FPS is trying out the 3 different rendering engines the client has (OpenGL, Direct3D, DirectDraw). You can change your rendering engine on the fly by opening the options dialog with Control + O. It is also very important to have an up-to-date driver. To install the correct driver you need to identify what graphics card you have and then download the software from your vendor's website. The most common vendors are nvidia, ati and intel.

Server lag
Obviously it is also possible that our server itself is lagging. This is, however, quite rare because it is constantly monitored and optimized to run at a high performance at all times. Contrary to what seems to be popular belief our used hardware is great overkill and 90%+ of the CPU is idle at all times.

Network latency
The most common form of lag. Network latency today is almost perfectly proportional to the physical distance between two computers, limited by the speed of light. For example, if you are playing in South America and the server is located the United States, there are thousands of kilometers between you and the server. Latency is measured as a round-trip time (ping) between the client and the server in milliseconds. Usually a ping lower than 50ms offers a very smooth playing experience in Zezenia Online, while lower than 150ms should still be playable. Another common problem is the fluctuation (jitter) of ping - at one time it can be 30ms, but suddenly it is 200ms! Ping fluctuation is more often than not a problem at the client side, or in the network of the player's internet service provider (ISP). More information about testing your ping to our servers as well as locating the source of the problem in the next section.

#############################################

Testing ping & tracerouting
On Windows, press the Windows key + R, type cmd in the text field and press Enter. A command prompt should open.

To test ping, enter ping platon.zezeniaonline.com and press Enter. This will test your ping to Platon. You can also test Elysium and Everath by simply using ping elysium.zezeniaonline.com and so on.

To do a traceroute, enter tracert platon.zezeniaonline.com, press Enter and wait for the test to fully finish. Again, you can also test Everath and Elysium by changing the address.

Understanding the ping & traceroute data
In my case the results look like this (tested on old server, Tipitaka):



The most important data is shown in the area encircled in yellow. If there is a high difference between min and max this can indicate a latency fluctation problem. In my case we can see that the ping does vary a little bit, but the 3ms difference in min and max times is negligible. On the other hand a latency of 56ms (on average) is not that amazing, especially considering Finland (my location) and Germany (the server's location) are not too far away from each other. Let's do a traceroute to see where the problem is:



Each "hop" is a computer or a router along the way to the destination server. Since there obviously is no direct cable between my computer and the server in Germany, the data flows through a series of operators and their routers. From my traceroute experiment we can see that the time it takes for the packet to reach my router is less than 1 millisecond, but after that the first hop is already a 20ms delay! Considering I live in a city and the first routing point of my ISP is probably located a few hundred meters away at most there is clearly a problem with the cabling in my building. The next major change in latency is between hops 5 and 6 (from ~21ms to ~53ms). Looking at the reverse dns entries we can see that this is where the traffic goes from Finland to Germany (*.fi.eunetip.net to *.de.eunetip.net). This difference is fairly reasonable, although some could argue that a packet from Finland to Germany should not take 32 milliseconds to deliver.

#############################################

Lowering latency

Lowering your latency is usually not that simple, as the Internet is a giant network. You can however improve your own situation with a few tricks:
- Use a cable to connect to the Internet instead of wireless.
- Don't stream videos or music or download large files while playing.
- At your own risk, you might want to try out the Leatrix Latency Fix.

#############################################

Report issue

If you experience lag in the game and don't know how to fix it, post in this thread with the information listed below. If you do not write all this information in your post you will be ignored.

1) Write where you are located (City, Country) and what game world(s) you play on (Tipitaka, Platon, Elysium or Tartarus).
2) Write which rendering engine you are using and what your average FPS is (you can see this information in the client's title bar while playing).
2) Describe the type of lag you experience (stops between walking, freezes, kicks, ...)
3) Provide a screenshot of both a ping and a traceroute to the game world(s) you are playing on.

You can also send this information to support@zezeniaonline.com if you do not want to show traceroutes or other information for privacy reasons. Once we have all this information from you we will do our best to locate and explain the cause of the problem to you.

For people who don't trust it, I made mbam scan it and it seems legit, I've been using latency a long time and never had problems with it. :)

+1 me too
<short>

I've tested it,

Goes like this ;

Platon > Minimum = 104ms, maximum = 106, average = 105ms.
Elysium > Minimum = 106ms, maximum = 109ms, average = 106ms.
Tartarus > minimum = 101ms, maximum = 105ms, average = 102ms.
Tipitaka > minimum = 23ms, maximum = 27ms, average = 25ms.


So tipitaka will be the best for me.
But can you explain why i barely lag at elysium, even with this average.

If you would have read the post thoroughly you might know:

well through my LoL experiences, lag only starts to become noticable after 150~200ms range
(believe me i've played with everywhere from 20 to 1500+ ping before..)

Elysium , Platon , Tartarus = ping 150-200

Tipitaka = ping 240-270

China pls ? X

-

Packet loss has become more severe since my previous post. almost 15% packet loss now

Update: Forgot to check Platon earlier. Also getting similar packet loss there. The other Atlanta based server.