How long have you had this issue? If it’s been less than a week or two, it may be caused by bad routing in the servers between you and the Boundless servers.
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Yea, no one can really help you. No one here is going to be able to offer any advice outside of saying “somethings wrong between you and the servers”. It was literally the catalyst for why I quit over a year ago. I’m still having issues with it every other day. but it’s not every day like it used to be. Amazon will tell you their servers are fine. Your ISP will say your connection is clear. Your home network will have a pristine connection. This company that makes the game will say everything is fine on their end.
It will literally be down to you trying to find out where your connection is failing, but your route can change daily, as I saw first hand when i tried to figure out my issues way back then.
The real problem is there is such a small amount of people that are impacted like this that it doesnt warrant any support from any one who you would hope to get support from… the game company, your ISP, the server host.
You can go back in the forum and see a few posts scattered throughout the last few years of various people having the same problem.
I am one of those people. I had to stop playing for over a month it was so bad to Aus (where my base is)… but it was not the server as many of my Boundless friends never had any issues. The problems to Aus finally just stopped, with no changes on my end or the server… so very likely a key link in the internet chain between me and Aus was having issues and finally fixed.
I do still have issues to EU planets occasionally from here. But 99% of the time I can resolve them by using a VPN to “force” a different route for my internet traffic to take to the EU servers… which, at least in my case, means it was not my internet or the server, but somewhere in between… if forcing a different route cures it for me.
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Routing issues are sort of outside of everyone’s control. It’s effectively an automated system that almost nobody can touch. Maybe, sometimes, and ISP can reach out to a server or reroute something, but it’s usually just an untouchable system.
This is a problem for a small set of people for relatively short periods of time, for all online games I have ever followed. Usually it comes in waves as one server somewhere makes a bad routing connection for one reason or another.
I used to support a business SaaS application, and had people occasionally report slowness like this. We would get them to run a traceroute to us, where we would just highlight the server in the chain that is causing the slowness and say “Take this to your ISP and see if they can help, but in all likelihood you just have to wait for this to clear on it’s own.” It’s just a fact of how the internet works. Sometimes you get routed across an extra ocean for no reason, and nobody can fix it but time and an automated system.
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Right. My point was there isn’t anything that can be done. Whether it’s normal or not is beside the point. It’s an issue that forces a customer to decide if waiting for it to clear up is worthwhile. I’ve never experienced this in any other game, to this extent, though I understand it does happen. For me, when it gets bad im not going to spend the time/resource to figure out a fix when there’s other enjoyment that doesn’t require that expense. I’m sure OP is in a similar frame of mind.
Yeah, no worries, just helping frame it as an internet problem, not a “these devs don’t care” problem.
I’m actually starting to see a trend where AWS hosted games have this issue more than others. I wonder if some servers are deliberately avoiding storing routing data for AWS or certain AWS datacenters.
Sometimes there is though, but I understand the point you are trying to make.
Personally because of my issues with Aus where I tried everything and never saw an improvement, I was super frustrated… but sometimes it is something that can be fixed, either on the users end, or by using something like a VPN to reroute the connection.
The devs do care, and so do many other players trying to give assistance in the forums. I think it was @Simoyd that told me to try the VPN thing, and even though it did not fix my original Aus issues, it absolutely does fix my occasional EU server issues.
After that I have suggested the same VPN fix to other people with connection issues after they have tried everything else and it has solved some of their issues as well. Not saying that a VPN to reroute traffic is the magic bullet, but if you have tried all of the other suggestions (especially the ones from the devs) and are still having issues then as a last thing, giving a VPN a shot might help you sort the issue. If it does, then maybe that gives you the information you need to track down where the actual problem is (if changing the routing via VPN stops the unplayable connection).
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I can’t speak for all console players but I know if several that encounter this issue a lot and it’s been a thing for 2yrs, and just like it always Devs will say it’s not their game, cable company says its not them, but honestly it’s the game I never have any issue with other MMO games.
This problem has been on and off, but mostly on, since I moved to seattle.
When I tweaked my connection as I noted above, it seemed better for an evening, then it resumed.
I am very much aware that this is not a server side issue. What bothers me is that the issues are ONLY with this game, and there hasn’t been much response from the devs. There must be a reason for this, and it should be worth investigation since this game does have a small user base and the problem is mentioned frequently enough. I think the reason for this is, as another user noted, movement and interaction are handled server side (if this is true) which is an odd choice that makes the game much more sensitive to connection issues.
Interestingly, my partner works for AWS, and the company as a whole is very poorly run; they supposedly have an agile system yet… they throw out all agile principles and methodology in favor of just do what you want… I can’t answer about their servers as, well, I avoid them and choose to go with a company with competent management.
I have also tried the VPN thing as well. It did not help. I also do appreciate all the other users that have tried to help.
If that were the case, wouldn’t you have a delay between each keypress and seeing it on your screen equal to double your ping plus render time? That isn’t what I seem to experience, even when I’m hitting lag spikes. I just see traditional rubberbanding.
That sounds like a form of agile, just not a good one.
I really can’t answer either of those, lol. I’m a technical artist, so while I’m very very technologically inclined (and even do some C coding) I’m also still mainly an artist, so I’m not very competent with tech stuff.
I have, for now, disabled router based security, made a DMZ for just my PC and for the past 30 minutes of testing it seems to have worked (fingers crossed). If this works, then I would say that port forwarding should work, but… so far I haven’t found any info as to what ports to use.
Just over an hour of testing and this seems to make it playable. I still have way high ping compared to most servers (gaming and otherwise) that I would deal with, but it’s very playable. IDK if this is a tenable solution, but it does seem to be a solution.
I’ll now embark on the quest of finding the ports for port forwarding.
The ping thing is a bit confusing too since the boundless “ping” is not the same as most game pings. I think in most games it is only measuring internet latency where the one in boundless combines multiple factors into that number so it may may display higher when the actual internet latency might be identical to another game.
That is exceptional, really.
Using just the latency monitor from the debug menu, I’m still hovering around 80-100ms which is much higher than I normally experience while gaming… again, measuring actual time to communicate with the server.
I don’t really have great enough understanding of current networking technology to really figure out exactly what the difference is, but setting a DMZ for my pc has brought it from the 1+ second spikes down to the <100ms stability. I would really be interested (in addition to the ports I need to forward) in any info as to what the difference is exactly, from a functional viewpoint, when I disable security and enable the so-called “DMZ” on my pc, since it has given me the longest window of playability I’ve had with the game in the past week.
Yeah, the latency meter from debug is measuring multiple factors to come up with a “overall game latency” and not just a time to server thing. I think it even takes in to account HDD speed. I noticed an improvement in that number when I switched from SSD to NVME when everything else stayed the same.
Started last weekend. Haven’t played much since. I’ve been playing for months with no problems. Im just going to give it time it will sort itself out. Might be Midcontinent having problems. I have noticed random lag spikes in other games to that aren’t normal for me.
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