Ability Delay -- Character Responsiveness (This will make or break SW:TOR)

[BlownSi]

Since the last three patches, my delay, which I only ever saw on my marauder, has gotten better to the point where only maybe 1 in 10 abilities gives me a delay. Sometimes I will play for a few hours without having one animation delay.

 

However, I am still noticing the Force Jump/Leap not landing on the target, and this is happening fairly often. The entire time playing my BH I have never seen or noticed any delay.

[Figmentus]

When I play my trooper using my knockback is a total crap shoot. Sometimes it fires right when use it, sometimes I press the button and it goes off a second later, and sometimes I use it and it does not fire for a full 2-3 seconds after. At which point I am hurling the ball carrier to the goal line for a score.

 

Not to mention the delay with mortar volley, which for me, is not reliable. It will finish its channel and i will start running around, after a sec or 3 while running, I will get the three mortars that fly out and land where I wanted. Resulting in having to guess where my target is going to be a full 6 seconds ahead of time. This occurs mostly in pvp, but has happened in pve questing numerous times.

Edited February 24, 2012 by Figmentus

[notebene]

The improvement was amazing RIGHT after patch but has graudually reverted into **** again. Force Sweep on my sentinel is so delayed and stuttered.

 

Almost feels like these problems occur when their caches fills up or whatever. Please fix

 

While it seems this entire post was necro'd, this is what I experience the most, especially with respect to whether my mouse 4 and 5 buttons decide they will react.

 

Right now, there's 15 people on Nar Shadda, and more importantly, there really aren't many people on the entire server (I'm betting), and it's reacting well. As the day goes on, 4&5 start reacting less reliably. Sometimes I fight as many as 5-6 clicks before they will do anything (which is sad because 5 is my mount and 4 is auto move).

 

I have experienced this as long as I can remember.

 

So now I wonder if what you experienced was being one of the first people on after the patch, you were told things were better, so you focused on how things were reacting (without thinking much about it before), and it seemed better, because it was. Not so much because they did anything, but because there were fewer people on. Then as everyone got logged in and later that night, it went to pot again.

 

I remember someone started a 'woohoo' thread that morning, and by prime-time, there were a lot less 'woohoos' and some retractions.

 

So maybe it just has something to do with inefficiently handling and processing requests from the number of people on a server?

 

I don't know, I'd just like to see my mouse buttons work more reliably through all server loads, so if this is all related, I'll cross my fingers and hope they solve it.

[Gohlar]

Ah the good old days when ability delay was the biggest problem.

 

Then we all hit 50 and realized this game has no legs at all.

[skotish]

I have been playing since beta and I still have yet to experience anything other than cooldowns. I think some of you guys are drunk or high when playing.

 

Do you want a cookie ? your opinion is rubbish if it really doesn't affect you then eh

[Nepumuk]

Did they workaround the problem with the vehicle activation bar, by moving the delay to the beginning of the activation?

 

I noticed yesterday that when I start to move forward the moment the activation bar hits the end I don't get dismounted anymore. Maybe I just have a slow reaction but a few weeks back I was able to consistently dismount myself when trying to move right when the activation bar was full. This does not happen anymore.

 

But now there seems to be slight but quite apparent delay between when I click the vehicle button on my quickslots, to when the activation bar actually shows up, maybe 250-500ms. So it seems as if the activation bar is still inaccurate, as it shows up too late. Or maybe it was always that way and I just never noticed before.

 

I'm testing on a level 35 Bounty Hunter, with 34 players on Alderaan, but no one anywhere in my vicinity. 50-70 fps and 43 ms, while activating and deactivating the vehicle.

 

P.S.: 20 frame drops from just activating the vehicle in a otherwise empty area is a pretty big drop isn't it?

The only life around are maybe 6 static NPCs in about maybe 60-90m distance.

Edited February 24, 2012 by Nepumuk

[Killowatt]

Did they workaround the problem with the vehicle activation bar, by moving the delay to the beginning of the activation?

 

I noticed yesterday that when I start to move forward the moment the activation bar hits the end I don't get dismounted anymore. Maybe I just have a slow reaction but a few weeks back I was able to consistently dismount myself when trying to move right when the activation bar was full. This does not happen anymore.

 

But now there seems to be slight but quite apparent delay between when I click the vehicle button on my quickslots, to when the activation bar actually shows up, maybe 250-500ms. So it seems as if the activation bar is still inaccurate, as it shows up too late. Or maybe it was always that way and I just never noticed before.

 

I'm testing on a level 35 Bounty Hunter, with 34 players on Alderaan, but no one anywhere in my vicinity. 50-70 fps and 43 ms, while activating and deactivating the vehicle.

 

P.S.: 20 frame drops from just activating the vehicle in a otherwise empty area is a pretty big drop isn't it?

The only life around are maybe 6 static NPCs in about maybe 60-90m distance.

 

Is this the only delay you see? Or are you having ability delay?

[GreymaneAlpha]

I just wish they were remove some of the ridiculous animation-based delays...changes which should be very simple.

 

The most notable to me (as a Sage) is Force Wave // Overload, which has a second-long cast time (despite being an "instant" cast) that can be interrupted by other people's stuns and knockbacks.

 

It's *********** stupid.

[Liquid_Drano]

I just wish they were remove some of the ridiculous animation-based delays...changes which should be very simple.

 

The most notable to me (as a Sage) is Force Wave // Overload, which has a second-long cast time (despite being an "instant" cast) that can be interrupted by other people's stuns and knockbacks.

 

It's *********** stupid.

 

Exactly. I believe this to be a HUGE portion of what the delay is. A lot of the problem is that the avatar performs an action of some sort BEFORE unleashing some form of offensive, and this looks like it takes a while, and thus grates on our patience. It makes combat feel bad. People say "look at the mobs health; it does damage right away even if your character is in the middle of the action." I do not care. They should sync up and we should not feel like we're waiting for our actions to go through.

 

The trooper and imperial agent have a ton of these. Mortar Volley, for example, the guy just sits there while the cast bar goes down...... it's unbelievable. Full Auto does it too. The character raises the weapon, sets his feet before even firing. And there are many, many other examples. This needs to change, hard.

[Exertim]

Any news on future improvements on delays? I still think it's the biggest issue with this game atm. Played a bit of TERA's closed beta and it just made me realize how bad SWTOR's combat is when your abilities just randomly don't fire or are delayed for 0.5-1 second. Completely unacceptable in this day and age, especially when games like WoW have had combat fluidness down since 2004.

[Trews]

any word on timetable for fixing some of these delays?

[OldBenSmokin]

They can't, otherwise they would have already. The game has been in development for 6 years.

 

The real question is how many of you are foolish enough to hold your breath waiting?

 

 

 

 

If I'm wrong, great, I'll re-sub and eat my hat.

Edited February 29, 2012 by OldBenSmokin

[skotish]

They can't, otherwise they would have already. The game has been in development for 6 years.

 

The real question is how many of you are foolish enough to hold your breath waiting?

 

 

 

 

If I'm wrong, great, I'll re-sub and eat my hat.

 

I re-subbed bc i was bored the ability delays are still there on my JK and marauder its killing my fun so will need to cancel again unfortunately

[muzzle_flash]

Its already broke it, the whole engine needs to be torn down and rebuilt, as it stands it runs like a Unity3d game that was built and optimized for a Cray computer...

[KronikInsomniak]

Master Strike for Jedi Knights still bugs out all the time. Animation plays but nothing fires. Other times it gets stuck doing the animation with no way to cancel the cast. The ability delay is gamebreaking in PvP when you play the class.

[iResist]

I have 0 ability delay, don't know what you all are on about. I play a Sorcerer and Bounty Hunter and there is no ability delays on any of my abilities.

[getdownsb]

Ability delay has been dramatically improved. However there is still ability stuttering, the animation stopping and/or re-starting repeatedly. It's kind of hard to accept an MMO where you press buttons and you have a random chance of them behaving in a specific manner.

[tyfle]

Ability delay has been dramatically improved. However there is still ability stuttering, the animation stopping and/or re-starting repeatedly. It's kind of hard to accept an MMO where you press buttons and you have a random chance of them behaving in a specific manner.

 

I actually just resubbed since they talked about this was fixed in a patch, however with my 3.2 ghz I7/gtx480/6 gb ram and 100 mbit fiber link I still have major ability delay and proceeded to unsub immediately. €15 lost, but it was my fault for believing what they wrote.

 

It's ridicules that this is in the game after 6 years or whatever they spent development.

[Sixthy]

The issue went away (almost - a few things here and there still messed up constantly, like Master Strike) for a while, but lately it seems to be an issue yet again.

[BlackZoback]

I actually just resubbed since they talked about this was fixed in a patch, however with my 3.2 ghz I7/gtx480/6 gb ram and 100 mbit fiber link I still have major ability delay and proceeded to unsub immediately. €15 lost, but it was my fault for believing what they wrote.

 

It's ridicules that this is in the game after 6 years or whatever they spent development.

 

Something is wrong on your end if you haven't noticed a vast improvement to the problem your describing.

[Tekkoclarky]

There still is an ability delay, but it has been improved a lot.

 

Cast bars disappearing still happens too much as well.

 

I have TERA beta this weekend, I'm excited to see how that plays compared to this game.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Tekkoclarky

[Mangetsu]

I've been experiencing this ability delay issue recently. It was mostly gone after devs said they fixed it but it started again (since patch 1.1.4 I think).

 

At first I didn't care much but it's getting worse.

 

15 minutes ago I was playing a fresh jedi consular. It was so obvious that the animations were delayed. I always kept an eye on latency; it was fine, no lag at all but the ability delay was there, so easily seen on double strike and project.

 

System specifications:

 

Asus M51SE laptop.

Win7 32 bit.

Core2 duo T8100 2.1 ghz.

Ati mobility radeon hd3470.

2 gb ram.

8 mbps connection.

Graphics set to lowest. Shadows off.

 

 

Character and server info:

 

Character name: Gölge

Level: 3

Class: Jedi Consular

Server: Eye of Ashlanae

 

[archfiend]

Ability delay has been dramatically improved. However there is still ability stuttering, the animation stopping and/or re-starting repeatedly. It's kind of hard to accept an MMO where you press buttons and you have a random chance of them behaving in a specific manner.

 

yup.

the ability delay has gotten much better, but the double even triple (or more if you keep hitting the button) pumping of ability animations still remains.

[ihyln]

I've cancelled due to this bug. What a fundamental flaw in this game that they refuse to address.

[Toweleeeie]

Sentinels/Marauders suffer the most from the double or even triple animation pump.

 

I had to spec out of Combat and into Watchmen bc it is so bad with Blade Storm.