Smash Ultimate piles of problems

[SmashUltimate]

I've had the netduma R1 for several months now and I'm just not convinced the router is doing anything.

It's possible I have it configured incorrectly, but I've read through these forums and now I'm going to appeal for some help.

The problems:

#1 Some nights every single match has lag. 

#2 The host tick rate and even ping as visualized by the scroll graphs do not seem to correspond to the actual in game experience. Pings can be decent 30 ms, tick rates in the 60s and the game feels like goddamn mud. Tick rates can be in the 90's and the game feels fine. It feels like window dressing.

#3 The dashboard constantly crashes. Particularly when a match is very laggy, but also just randomly. The only window I have in dash is the ping and tick rate visualizer so that I can blacklist easily. It constantly crashes and if I can't blacklist the laggy opponent I want to pull my hair out.

#4 The geo filter improves very little. Going from a 400 km to an 800 km to 1200 km radius around Toronto Canada does not change the average connection very much at all. It does drop more connections at the low end and I can reduce the radius to the point where it doesn't connect me with anyone.

Any help? I'm not particularly happy with my purchase at the moment. The switch is wired, nintendo ethernet adapter.

[Netduma Alex]

Welcome to the forum, sorry to hear you're having problems.

Do other games on your connection experience lag as well? It could be that your base ping is unstable, which would affect all traffic.

If you use the following guide, what kind of ping do you see on PingPlotter: 

I'd like to figure out if the ping is fluctuating or not.

[SmashUltimate]

Many thanks for the prompt reply, here attached an output of ping plotter.

I let it run and did see the occasional spikes but they cannot account for the crippling lag I often experience in game.

Any help much obliged!

[Netduma Alex]

It does initially look like there's some spikes, but the ping is overall very low so the graph is zoomed in close, it's actually a stable connection so that's good. That means we can rule out an unstable connection as the problem. That's not to say that there isn't something unstable somewhere along the line when connecting to Nintendo, but there's no problem on your end.

I think i'll need to do some more testing of Smash Ultimate in the office in order to get a hold of what might be going on with Geo-Filter. It might be that Geo-Filter is unable to improve Smash Ultimate performance, but looking online, it seems that Smash uses peer matchmaking instead of dedicated servers, so it SHOULD work pretty well. The only issue is if servers are being located incorrectly on the map.

Regarding the Dashboard crashing, what browser are you using? I have seen an issue before where having too many visual elements on the Dashboard would cause some panels to load incorrectly, I wonder if this is related. If you could show me a screenshot so that I could recreate your dashboard, I would be able to try and recreate the crash. This would be really handy for getting it fixed.

[SmashUltimate]

Thanks, it definitely does peer-to-peer so it should work in principle. It has some strangeness that it uses both TCP and UDP.

Browser is Firefox 72.0.1 under Ubuntu linux if that matters.

There are 2 types of crash:

#1 Very common as seen in the image attached. In the middle of a match, it will just say there is no host or connection.

#2 Uncommon, I get an actual numbered error message from the netduma software, not a browser error. For whatever reason I didn't get it last evening, but as soon as I do I'll post it here.

[Netduma Fraser]

Just to go back to your plot for a second that red vertical bar on the graph indicates you did experience some packet loss briefly, you don't get it again in the 10 minute plot but a game must last at least 10 minutes I would have thought and you said it happens every game so maybe keep an eye on your plots to see if packet loss appears again.

Also what is your physical setup? E.g. ISP Hub > XR500 > ALL devices. What speeds do you pay for and are you using QoS?

Linux could be the cause in this scenario, although it is hard to tell if #1 is actually an issue or because nothing is shown on the Geo-Filter. I would suggest looking on the Geo-Filter next time you're playing and see if anything actually appears. If you could also provide a full screenshot of the Geo-Filter when you're in the game that would be helpful. #2 definitely provide a screenshot of that error the next time you get it please.

[SmashUltimate]

So I watched it for a good half hour and there were no additional red vertical bars. Smash matches typically last 3-5 minutes, and it's not merely lag spikes that are the problem. Some matches are crippling slow throughout the match and just unbearable for a fighting game.

My physical setup is:

ISP Ottawa Fibrestream: https://www.fibrestream.ca/  500 Mbps I've attached an average speed test result. It's not godlike, but pretty close to godlike, optical network.

My netduma router goes to a dlink AV2 1000 gigabit powerline and then to the switch. All the results shown are with my laptop plugged into the wired connection coming from the AV powerline (i.e. the ethernet the switch uses).

I have a bunch of devices and I'm using QoS with heavy focus on the switch. I've adjusted this in the past, turned off devices, and there's not much difference. My bandwidth is huge and basically never being eaten up.

Also attached are two pics of the geo filter. I *think* it's working, but you tell me. Two different opponents, minutes apart.

Also a new error, not the numbered error I mentioned, this one is new as of today.

I played today with decent, even very good connections, and the Auto Ping constantly crashed. It would start the match, register rates for about a minute and then say there was no ping. The match continued on and it would re-start to register rates when I found a new opponent. 

 

[Netduma Fraser]

That's great then, thought it was worth mentioning to keep an eye on. It looks like it is working just fine there. I would suggest you unping auto ping from the dashboard completely, then see if when on the Geo-Filter page it shows the ping continuously throughout the game. What is the average ping you're getting as shown by the Geo-Filter? As it is a P2P game you are reliant on the quality of the other persons connection so if theirs isn't good then it doesn't matter what you do on your side. Also I would suggest trying without the power line adapter if you can and see if there is an improvement there, it already looks to me as though the wiring in your home isn't capable of transferring your full speeds so it may also be impacting the connection generally.

[SmashUltimate]

So I unpinned everything from the dashboard and on the Geo-Filter page it does not always show the ping continously throughout the game. The autoping graph will often outright crash, even in an non-laggy match. By crash I mean it shows the "there is currently no host or server to ping".

One thing that might help debug is that it sometimes continues to show the red ping line after all the others have dropped to zero.

The average ping is very important in that if I have a terrible ping, say 80 ms  game is awful. But the tick rates seem almost more important, because I can have a match that says ostensibly 30 ping but literally it's freeze frame lag as the tick rates explode.

I really don't know the code you guys are using under the hood but is there a way to kill potential opponents with bad tick rates?

[Bert]

Replace that powerline adapter between your router and switch with a proper LAN cable. You can see in your pingplotter log that you have 5ms ping from your PC to your router, there is an issue there. That should be sub 1ms with a proper LAN cable.

 

Also you can see there is ping variation at hop 5 (Toronto Internet Exchange), so you have a bad hop in there, possible traffic congestion.

 

You state you have a 500mbit connection, but your sliders are set to 700mbit. QoS doesn't work if it's set up like that.

 

Also, a R1 won't support a 500mbit fiber connection with QoS on. You really need a XR series router for that, XR300/450/500/700.

 

In peer to peer games you can always expect a lot of connection variation though, unless you are host yourself.

[Netduma Fraser]

When the ping 'crashes' do you still see a host on the map? If you ping manually does the ping appear correctly? Not sure what you mean by "is there a way to kill potential opponents with bad tick rates? " could you clarify please?

[SmashUltimate]

Replacing the powerline is not an option, and if it's only 5 ms or a half frame I would be overjoyed. But that's not the problem, literally stutter fest and teleporting opponents. Likewise the ISP is not the problem. I adjusted QoS but really, even with nothing else running on my network it's just as terrible, so QoS is also not the issue.

I still see a host on the map when the ping crashes. If I open up a terminal and ping them, they still exist, we are connected and the game continues. It's only the autoping window that dies. It dies without exaggeration 1 out of every 5 matches sometimes when the lag is actually quite fine, typically when it's garbage.

The host and client tick rates. Is the software doing any sort of selection process at all beyond geographic location as to selecting my opponent? It doesn't feel like it is.

t really needs to be doing some average ping and average traceroute calculation and rejecting opponents above a threshold which the user can input.

[Netduma Fraser]

The variances in ping do suggest it's related to the P2P nature of the game, especially if QoS isn't doing anything so you're not getting local congestion either. Usually if the auto ping stops it's because the host disappeared or something else appeared and it couldn't tell what was the host, does any other icons other than the host appear at that time?

No it's just using Geo-location. You could use Ping Assist to ensure you only get a host under your ping limit, this will have the same affect.

[Bert]

10 hours ago, SmashUltimate said:

Replacing the powerline is not an option, and if it's only 5 ms or a half frame I would be overjoyed. But that's not the problem, literally stutter fest and teleporting opponents. Likewise the ISP is not the problem. I adjusted QoS but really, even with nothing else running on my network it's just as terrible, so QoS is also not the issue.

I still see a host on the map when the ping crashes. If I open up a terminal and ping them, they still exist, we are connected and the game continues. It's only the autoping window that dies. It dies without exaggeration 1 out of every 5 matches sometimes when the lag is actually quite fine, typically when it's garbage.

The host and client tick rates. Is the software doing any sort of selection process at all beyond geographic location as to selecting my opponent? It doesn't feel like it is.

t really needs to be doing some average ping and average traceroute calculation and rejecting opponents above a threshold which the user can input.

 

It's not just latency but powerline adapters are poor in general. You can see this by your speedtest result as well, you're testing against a host that is on your ISP's network and you're getting just over 100 Mbit on a 500mbit line. That could partly be an issue with the R1's QoS but in turbo mode with QoS running, you should still be hitting 400-420 mbit. Speeds on powerline adapters are just theoretical but you would be lucky if you achieve anything near that speed.

 

If you have TCP/IP datatraffic and you drop packets somewhere along the line, the sender will just resend them. That means interference will just slow you down but it will work eventually. However, most games use UDP packets. They are just send off and there is no acknowledgement whatsoever and packets do not get resend.

 

You might very well have an issue with that, hence why autoping is not showing any host. It detects UDP traffic between you and the host to identify it as gaming traffic.

 

At least, I would test this by plugging your laptop straight into your R1, bypassing your powerline adapters. Even try playing the game connected straight to the R1.

 

The powerline adapters are the weak link in your entire network since they sit between your switch and the router. It's actually the worst place. Powerline adapters are means to provide your with some connectivity in places where wifi won't reach and you can't run a LAN cable. Not as the backbone of your entire network / internet connection.

 

Also, about your QoS. You give your switch 66% of the bandwidth but I would set that to the regular share excess and normal distribution for the time being. A switch with a IP address is generally a managed switch. I have not tested this, but you may very well be giving your switch's management suite about 66% of your bandwidth and restricting the rest of your network (can't see if you have share excess on or not, if you have it off, this will give you an issue)

 

I would just start at the basics.

1. Turn off geofiltering completely

2. Turn share excess on, and give all devices equal distribution

3. Turn on super turbo mode and disable QoS 

4. Plug your laptop straight into the R1, do a speedtest and see what you get. Set up the speeds in your router according to this. You should be getting close to 500/500 with this setup.

5. Re-enable QoS and repeat the same speedtest. If this reads lower, adjust sliders down to compensate for this (QoS won't work properly if the router is maxing out but you're telling it to give you more bandwidth)

6. Plug the laptop in your switch, and test from there. If this reads massively lower, you will need to adjust your QoS sliders again to lower your bandwidth. The issue here is that these powerline adapters can create a bottleneck. You tell the router you have 500 mbit bandwidth, but if the powerline adapters restrict this to 100mbit, you get bufferbloat because of that. The whole point of the ABB system in the R1 is choking the connection so the choke point is at the R1, and QoS can manage it.

 

This will get your setup right but these powerline adapters can still give you issues with gaming.