Question about lag on POTCO....

[MacIronhawk]

Over the past five months I've noticed that I've been having more and more lag on POTCO.
Is there any way to reduce lag?
What is lag and what causes it?
Will lag ever go away?

Can anyone answers these questions for me so I won't be on POTCO not knowing if I can reduce my lag or not?

[akamystic]

Some of the LAG is on the Disney side (server issues, etc.) and some of the LAG is on the end user side (your PC). If you are running POTC Online after a clean boot with no other applications running in the background it should run fairly well (on a PC with decent hardware).

There are many other things that factor into this. Your CPU, your RAM and your Video card are HUGE factors. It's a night and day difference from my third PC which I use for backup purposes only to my primary. I also played on my friends new Quad Core CPU Dell (running Vista) with 4 GIG RAM and a 512 PCI Express Video card.....this ran awesome.....everything was very smooth with an occasional hiccup.

Aside from tweaking your OS and running system utilities (disk cleanup, scandisk aka error checking, and disk defragmenter) it all comes down to hardware. I have not personally tested POTC Online with the slower throughput DSL (1.5 or less) services either. I'm on Comcast Broadband which averages 10-15Mps on the downstream and 1Mbps on the upstream. If your system has an open PCI/AGP/PCI Express slot and will accept a higher end video card...it's 100% worth it. Adding RAM will also make a difference as your hard drive will be less active caching data.

newegg.com is a great place for upgrades - I ordered the wrong memory for my Dell and they told me to keep it as it was not worth the trouble sending back as they could not resell it (invoice was around $27.00). That is customer service!

[The Skirata Clan]

I had massive lag, what I did was set the game settings to the lowest or to a combination of medium and low. That has helped a lot... I have been privateering without a problem on the ideal servers. I run it on a Mac.

And lag will never go away... it is the newest POTCO enemy! That is going to be the new Chapter Quest: The Lag Attack. sorry.

[Poison elf]

Your connection may have a lot to do with how much lag you get.
How many back ground system programs running. Such as potc launcher itself, as well as windows explorer, uses a good amount.

Graphics is where the lag mainly comes into play. Early games with dial-up, you could set things on the ground. When someone came through a door and got all those items, they would lag for a long time, or even crash.

This is a similar effect you get at maybe a GM event with lots of players to look at.

There are things you can do to cut lag, and cleaning some of the system up would likely help a lot. I would get a professional to do this, there are things you do need and can't just remove.

Or some of the other things mentioned above may help dependant on each personal computer set up.

If you run the game with a lot of windows up, or on task bar, that is a easy thing to stop doing.

On my system I don't run hardware acceleration in xp, and found some couldn't even play until they did that in the past.