Can't Tame Animals Anymore

[Kifyi]

I took a break from the game for a while and came back recently. I use animal handling and now I can't tame animals anymore. I keep getting the error about network lag or my computer running faster than real-time. I don't have anything installed to accelerate my gaming or make my computer run faster than normal time and if it's network lag then I'm not sure what I can do about it. :(

It has been going on for over a day now and I still can't tame things.

[Kifyi]

I fixed it. I had my RAM overclocked and after restarting was able to tame a rat. Could be I just got lucky but I'd been trying stuff for hours.

[Murk]

This happens to me with many abilities when you click them when they re-activate after Cool down. Lots of times. :mad:(workaround - count to One, then press the button) For example Hunter's stride. I don't use tame very often at all though these days as I've got no stable space in my Ark, so I can't say about that particular ability.

I don't think overclocking you RAM would be the thing here. What I have noticed is that for some abilities: when it becomes available, don't click it too quickly, as it's available state has to agree with that of the server's. I don't know how that pans out with the tame ability, that's a bit odd.

[Citan]

Seeing that message while taming is definitely due to overclocking the computer. Basically the server tells your game client, "okay, now show a progress bar for 10 seconds while the tame happens", and the client says "okay I'm done"... but it's been less than 9 seconds. (More than 10% too soon.) If the client were to report in too LATE (say after 15 seconds), that could be due to network latency or a bad connection. But if the game client is finished significantly SOONER than expected, that means the client is running faster than real time.

This doesn't necessarily mean someone is trying to cheat -- we've seen it happen especially with "CPU overclocking" and "RAM accelerator" type software that comes bundled with new gaming computers. It's a cheap trick that can make some some games feel more responsive: by making the game think time is moving 10%-15% faster, you can move faster, etc. This is fine in singleplayer games, but it's unfair in multiplayer games.

Murk - I don't know what you're referring to, but if you have a reproducible scenario please report it in-game. And of course make sure you aren't running anything that can overclock your computer :) It kind of sounds like you're using overclocking software that is just barely under the threshold that we check for.


(In the patch notes, we mentioned that we removed an error about overclocking when you try to reuse a toggled ability. That's a different scenario: toggled abilities have a reuse timer like every other ability (say, 10 seconds). The game client assumed you could turn the ability off without waiting 10 more seconds. But the server assumed you had to wait the full 10 seconds to turn it back off. So if you tried to turn it off after only a few seconds, the client would be fine with it, but the server would tell you that you seem to have overclocked your computer -- because it assumed the client actually tried to wait the 10 seconds. That scenario was just a bug, and is fixed now. The overclocking error message can still show up, correctly, in other scenarios.)

[Murk]

@Murk (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/member.php?u=943) - I don't know what you're referring to, but if you have a reproducible scenario please report it in-game. And of course make sure you aren't running anything that can overclock your computer :) It kind of sounds like you're using overclocking software that is just barely under the threshold that we check for.

@Citan (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/member.php?u=59) Well. No accelerator software that I know of and I had the misfortune of having to do a re-install a few months ago to stock windows. Just 6 cores + hyper threads. i7-4960X. Nothing is overclocked. It is something I presumed many other people have experienced as far as I am aware, people have mentioned it to me on several occasions. Are you saying somehow that the client's wall clock is going faster than it should be by 10% or the OS's high resolution timer? I'd be interested to know what clock we are talking about here, so that I can identify the problem as it's most annoying. It is by the way usually the skill "Dig deep" when flying around that I notice it most, it is almost never the combat skills as far as I remember. I also wonder if it has anything to do with CPU scaling that is enabled, since it's a Notebook system. If there is some thing on my system you want to see that I can supply then please ask, or anything in the logs I can check. I have been presuming up to now that many people see this from time to time.

Edit - could I suggest that abilities that appear to start, or complete too quickly be executed at the proper time, instead of be cancelled altogether. I presume the RAM accelerator mentioned above would be changing the DRAM refresh cycles. I can't see why this should prevent getting a reliable timing source, though, but I am not knowing some things about this, so I'll ask the internet.

Being old, and sensible* I have no interest in cheating at multiplayer games.

[Niph]

I have a similar problem, that I reported and for which I have a possible explanation and solution.

Basically, if your client sends "starting to tame" at 0 and "tame finished" at 10, and the server measures 10 too, it's alright. But if the network lags on the "starting to tame" packet, and the server receives it late, when the "tame finished" is received the server only has counted to 9 and rejects it.

Here I assume that packets don't contain time stamps, but if they do then my scenario does not match what is happening. On the other hand, cheating with time stamps would be easy, so I really hope there isn't any.

A possible solution would be to add a small, generic, "slowdown" delay applied to all abilities. For example, adding 1% to all delays (ideally, we would be able to customize it). This way, odds that when the first packet is sent slowly the entire cast fails would be reduced.

[Daguin]

This happens to me with many abilities when you click them when they re-activate after Cool down.

I can report this is an issue especially with Resurrection (my guild parties now gives advice to cast a different spell first, or count to five after the cool-down ends). It is a little annoying having to wait for the entire cool-down period again once the server rejects your attempt to cast. I have experienced this with Haste Concoction and Dig Deep as well.

[Yaffy]

For me one of the easiest ways to reproduce the issue is trying to use a skill with a very long cooldown the moment it comes off cooldown. When I try using a skill with a 15+ minute cooldown the moment it's coming off cooldown I always get the message telling me to turn off 3rd party accelerator hardware, even though I'm not running any. It seems like the extra time you have to wait increases the higher the cooldown of the skill as well as the chance that you might get the error message.

[Murk]

I have a similar problem, that I reported and for which I have a possible explanation and solution.
Here I assume that packets don't contain time stamps, but if they do then my scenario does not match what is happening. On the other hand, cheating with time stamps would be easy, so I really hope there isn't any.


That's an interesting theory. I am going to test with specific network lag later, to see if I can reproduce it all the time.

[Tagamogi]

For me one of the easiest ways to reproduce the issue is trying to use a skill with a very long cooldown the moment it comes off cooldown..

Yes, that exactly. I usually see it for abilities with a somewhat longer cooldown that I'm watching closely and hitting just when they come off cooldown - hunter's stride, positive attitude, collect milk, dig deep, etc. It seems it happens pretty rarely to me now, but I have definitely seen it and I'm not overclocking anything. If the server uses some kind of percentage calculation to see whether a skill can be reused, that could explain why it happens more to skills with a longer cooldown timer.