Arelith

Description of Bug Experienced:
in the past few days, possibly following an update, arelith's servers have been suffering from large and frequent spikes in latency

this results in – as one would expect – delayed actions and the usual crashing on area transitions, though also increasingly bizarre bugs including, but not limited to: npc/placeable dialogue being replaced with other text, receiving combat log notifications intended for other players, and even entire chat messages being replaced with unintelligible text (which fortunately appeared to be client-side only)

these severe lag spikes occur even at times of low player activity, or on servers which should otherwise be unaffected by the performance of others (Underdark typically doesn't lag when Surface does, from my experience)

this lag is not persistent, in fact there are moments where there is no perceivable lag at all, especially when server load is at a minimum, which leads me to believe there is some process executing every X amount of seconds which causes these sudden drops in server performance, but i'm no expert

Steps to reproduce the Bug:
do anything

Expected Result:
no lag

Actual Result:
yes lag

Additional Information/Notes
no, this has nothing to do with the ongoing DM event, it's never been this bad before

As of this posting, I can't log on any server because it gives me a black screen, I don't know if its related to lag or something else but I literally cannot log in. Having started around 10 minutes of this post during the DM events, if it's any important.

After about 20 minutes I was able to log back in but I don't know why this happened at all, I could select the character but as soon as I clicked play it'd just go into a black screen that I can only quit the game from.

I have the same problem. I try to play but the lag is so severe i end up giving up after ten minutes or so. I don't know what is causing the lag spikes cause I used to play fine with a bit to relatively no lag a wekk ago maybe? .. Anyone knows whats is going on?

lag's still here, lag still sucks

many of these lag spikes last SEVERAL SECONDS which is enough to make basically any form of gameplay border on impossible

i've since noted that it apparently does not affect everybody, but a few players i've asked personally have seemingly experienced similar issues as of late

unlike typical server lag, where everything appears frozen all at once until the server "catches up", this lag seems to apply inconsistently, other PCs may be shown still moving around and talking, whilst your own actions are delayed arbitrarily

for what it's worth, i've tried pinging the server IP a few times now, showing some amount of packet loss, but not to such a degree that would align with what i've been seeing in-game
the tracert command also reveals several request timeouts enroute to the server, but without having tested any of this before the lag started, this may not be unusual