Experiencing atrocious game lag using Ingress Version 2.92, would rather play Kirby Star Allies using Nintendo Switch. Just wake me up when the issue has been fixed.
Wi-Fi is good and yet, my ability to charge is…not an ability. Y’all make this game so frustrating when you can’t defend portals as advertised. Please roll back whatever you did over a year ago…
At least this bug affects both teams. You can smash a portal and the enemy cant defend due to lag; Its a feature
Lag is compounded lately as carriers are turning down 3G in the transition to 5G. I basically cant play during the day, except with Wifi.
Ingress is not good at dealing with poor signal. It purposely (for security) logs you out, but doesnt tell you, so you can see the map, but not do actions. You can recover by going into settings and logout and in again, or restart the scanner. Which is painful when signal is low.
Low signal also leads to speed lock, as you move around but the location is sent to the server sporadically.
When ingress is playable but laggy, I've noticed speedtest says I have download speeds of about 3 mbps, but upload speed of 0.08 mbps. ingress mostly needs download speed for the portals, but actions require a little bit of upload speed.
I play around and against Niantic, so I'm sure they are aware of the lag issues
Niantic Lightship is slow, this is harming not only Ingress but other products too.
For comparison, Diablo 3 (Immortal) launched last week for mobile, this is running at 60FPS on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Exynos 2100.
This is a huge game that pulls every possible resource that our little mobile computers can muster. There is more than 10x of this happening without lag in that game. And the device not overheating
Why is it then that with the rendering lag that some people have in Ingress, plus the network lag that is only apparent in Niantic Lightship is still not a critical thing for the Niantic Lightship Dev team to sort out?
Even lag with filling the kinetic capsule, defense is really impossible, scanner communication error/drone already at target portal with the drone almost everytime.
It's so sad. I have not played that much but experience latency almost every time I do something in the game, it's crazy.
The capsule was already filled, but the game didn’t know. It’s the same with the drone, scanner communication error and the next move “drone is already at target portal”.
And then whilst you’re hacking, another “scanner communication error” will pop up.
I seriously believe this game no longer has a full time development team. I suspect Brian et al, are pulled onto other NIA projects for the most part. Only returning to Ingress when time allows and/or easily fixable problems occur.
Which would explain why we see few new features and no real progress in fixing the lag issue.
Adding rare kinetic capsules and allowing linking under fields would not of required huge amounts of work to implement.
Missions only load if you tap the down arrow to prompt them to download. I don't think that is the underlying issue that is causing the lag. It's something that they changed in like May/June of 2020 I believe. I believe there was a Lightship update around that time. Maybe something to do with how Lightship connects/hooks into Ingress to provide the poi dataset? We do know that the lag is off even worse when you are around a ton of portals (or attacking them). Though it doesn't explain why at 4 AM when I haven't seen anyone else active in hours in a 50 km radius of me, I get the lag when I'm near one portal and nothing else. Or maybe it does. The poi/dataset hangs, because it reaches out for an update, but the update is soo small, it hangs on the refresh (ie config or dataset file is tiny, and it just doesn't load like it should)?
This is starting to get old. The pure chance of actually being able to play the game when you open the scanner is becoming more and more scarce. Yeah, Lagg. Again.
I was at a location doing some work for a project I'm working on. A coworker that was there with me saw me loading up my Kinetic Capsules. We are near a park. Thought it was a great idea to show him the game. Too bad, it really wasn't. This is a park that I've micro fielded in the past year. I have great signal here. Shouldn't be an issue. Capture a few portals along the edge of the park. Walk towards the middle of the park, where a bunch of portals are at. Attempt to deploy on a portal. Lagg, nothing happening. Try another portal, same thing. Laggggggggggg. Check signal, great LTE connection. Nice shiny, new Pixel 7 phone. No 5G here, not an issue, LTE should be fine. **** around trying to capture portals for about 5 minutes, then check in with an xfac Telegram channel to see if maybe Ingress was down or something. Start walking back to the edge of the park, trying to deploy again, still lagg. Finally when I'm in my vehicle I'm able to deploy. Signal is the same as it was. Others are mentioning in the Telegram channel that the game has been laggy earlier in the day.
This is the 4th time in the past two month I've tried to show someone new the game. This one didn't even install the app. He was curious to see what to do in the game before doing it. He hasn't played any GPS games before, nothing by Niantic. But guess what? His first taste of a Niantic game ended up being pretty darn cruddy. If the game is constantly lagging, and having issues, how are you going to attract new agents to get them addicted? Plain and simple, you effing aren't.
@ace Is there any chance, I mean any that for Year 10 Ingress will see a fix for the lagg issue that has been plaguing the game for over 2 years now? Any chance? Just let us know now. Should I even be bothering to try to attract new agents to the game? Because every dang time I do, it's a full on let down. My co-workers already thought I was crazy for playing Ingress to begin with. Now each time I try to show someone the game, it doesn't work correctly due to a issue that is ONGOING for YEARS now. sigh I like the game, I love the game. When it works. But sadly it just doesn't work soo much of the time these days.
I'd cancel my CORE subscription if I thought it would help anything, but I doubt it would and I'd rather have the extra space. Granted it really doesn't matter most of the time, because trying to play is getting less and less fun.
@NianticBrian You are the PM for Ingress, right? Can you give us ANY update on the lagg issue? It's been ongoing for years now. Is there a chance your team has been able to locate the issue? Did you just give up trying to find the problem? Is it just too expensive to fix? Just tell us what's going on. We just want to know. We want to be able to go out and open our scanners and play without spending time trying to figure out if the game is lagging, or if it's down, or why it's not working.
I'd tag another Niantic person, but she'd just reply with a meme that doesn't help anything and at this point, it's no longer funny.
Maybe @ofer2 has some insight on this? He's given us some good answers and insights in the past on the forums.
I thought about shaking this tree once more. As in the past it gave us a topic to report in, a 'we didn't forget, we just didn't find the root cause yet' reply. That last one was a year ago. The other one 2 years, when the issue was already going on for 3/4 of a year. We're coming up on three years of latency issues; recharging is hit and miss, so is deploying resonators. And those are the ones you'd want to work, since it's so vital to the game.
Since then there has been so many additional issues, drone movement that lags out, scanner communication error that pops up while hacking, missing portal key error when linking, etc. It's not even fun anymore. All the while my regional settings don't work (12 hour notation in game, 24 hour notation everywhere else). Let alone the diminishing playerbase and activity.
I really want the game to work, I still play Ingress, although I often wonder why. And I know the answer, there is no game like this and nothing will even come close. Still it's sad to see the game in the current state, seeing the issues people are having with little to no reply/resolution.
I play a lot less, still it's something that isn't working nearly every time I actually open the game. Like @EvilSuperHeros said, it's just hard to endure the constant issues and just play the game. Let alone showing it to someone else...
Deploy lag has been very bad the last days, really frustrating when its not summer anymore and temps starting to reach under 12c. Many times stuck deploy resonators and by the time lag passed u drifted away from the portal it shouldnt take sometimes 1 minute to deploy 8 resonators....
I canceled my core a few months ago and i dont see any reason start it again.
So, there are a few things here, but first, let me start with this: I know this latency / lag issue sucks. It sucks for everyone. It makes the game much harder to play. And for us, we've been working on this on our side for...god knows how long at this point. We'd much rather be working on awesome features, but this is core to playing the game and needs to work. If we could throw everyone at it and have it be solved, we'd totally do that, but that wouldnt actually help. So far, we've discovered at least three completely separate issues which have all been contributing to this. Some are client side and some on the server side. Because of this, it makes it so that the overall problem isnt fixed until all the other problems are fixed. This makes it especially hard to know that we're getting closer. We're still working on this (literally just had a standup update about it) and hopefully we'll get there soon, but honestly, we wont really know until we're there. Sorry that all of this is so difficult, but we really are trying to fix this for everyone.
All of that being said, what you're referring to is a separate issue which happened yesterday: Google decided to upgrade the software of the machines that we're running and so Google took them down for 10-15 minute maintenance. We had servers still running, but we were just at a much reduced capacity which led to latency spiking. This hasnt happened in quite a long time (especially since we've asked maintenance to be scheduled at night and not during the day), but hopefully this shouldnt happen again. If it does, we'll probably take additional steps to make sure that Google maintenance doesnt have this large of an effect on us.
Really appreciate the response. Is it possible to get more frequent updates from @NianticBrian / @NianticThia even if it’s not yet fixed so that we aren’t left in the dark?
Comments
Experiencing atrocious game lag using Ingress Version 2.92, would rather play Kirby Star Allies using Nintendo Switch. Just wake me up when the issue has been fixed.
🤬🤬🤬
Wi-Fi is good and yet, my ability to charge is…not an ability. Y’all make this game so frustrating when you can’t defend portals as advertised. Please roll back whatever you did over a year ago…
At least this bug affects both teams. You can smash a portal and the enemy cant defend due to lag; Its a feature
Lag is compounded lately as carriers are turning down 3G in the transition to 5G. I basically cant play during the day, except with Wifi.
Ingress is not good at dealing with poor signal. It purposely (for security) logs you out, but doesnt tell you, so you can see the map, but not do actions. You can recover by going into settings and logout and in again, or restart the scanner. Which is painful when signal is low.
Low signal also leads to speed lock, as you move around but the location is sent to the server sporadically.
When ingress is playable but laggy, I've noticed speedtest says I have download speeds of about 3 mbps, but upload speed of 0.08 mbps. ingress mostly needs download speed for the portals, but actions require a little bit of upload speed.
I play around and against Niantic, so I'm sure they are aware of the lag issues
Posting this for context.
Niantic Lightship is slow, this is harming not only Ingress but other products too.
For comparison, Diablo 3 (Immortal) launched last week for mobile, this is running at 60FPS on my Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra Exynos 2100.
This is a huge game that pulls every possible resource that our little mobile computers can muster. There is more than 10x of this happening without lag in that game. And the device not overheating
Why is it then that with the rendering lag that some people have in Ingress, plus the network lag that is only apparent in Niantic Lightship is still not a critical thing for the Niantic Lightship Dev team to sort out?
Servers are horrendous today, everything is stacking automatically
As we have more missing Portals now.
Unholy amounts of lag atm, black screen at startup, map slow to load, and most actions giving communication channel too hot
Yep. Very bad lag. Black screen and very long recharge delays.
A nice example of Power Bar synch issue.
The discussion regarding in game lag was opened nearly a year ago. Although the issue had been around before that.
Here we are - nearly one year later - still discussing those very same issues that plague our daily gaming experience.
That is an utter joke.
The lag has been horrendous over the past weekend. Lag with hacking, deploying and fielding.
As noted by another agent, this was nearly a year ago, and the fixes haven’t yet been done?
Even lag with filling the kinetic capsule, defense is really impossible, scanner communication error/drone already at target portal with the drone almost everytime.
It's so sad. I have not played that much but experience latency almost every time I do something in the game, it's crazy.
Wait, we can put Lag into the KCaps? What does it make? How many units of lag do we need?
:D
The capsule was already filled, but the game didn’t know. It’s the same with the drone, scanner communication error and the next move “drone is already at target portal”.
And then whilst you’re hacking, another “scanner communication error” will pop up.
last days has been more laggy then ever with weird error popups not sure if lower drone cooldown etc is cause of that.
Just wait, they'll implement another 'tentative fix' that doesn't work in the coming 12 months. (Soon™)
Interesting bug from the lag.
This was prior to checking Sojourner ticking up.
It really is a joke.
Lag on deploy resonators, mods etc.
Lag on recharge
Lag on attack notifications. (I get the EMAIL notification faster ****).
Lag on attack
Lag on throwing link/calculation.
I seriously believe this game no longer has a full time development team. I suspect Brian et al, are pulled onto other NIA projects for the most part. Only returning to Ingress when time allows and/or easily fixable problems occur.
Which would explain why we see few new features and no real progress in fixing the lag issue.
Adding rare kinetic capsules and allowing linking under fields would not of required huge amounts of work to implement.
A clue?
I notice that when viewing an Agents profile, the missions are EXCEEDINGLY slow to load and display.
Is this related to the server lag!? If so, that should be an easy item to diagnose?
Missions only load if you tap the down arrow to prompt them to download. I don't think that is the underlying issue that is causing the lag. It's something that they changed in like May/June of 2020 I believe. I believe there was a Lightship update around that time. Maybe something to do with how Lightship connects/hooks into Ingress to provide the poi dataset? We do know that the lag is off even worse when you are around a ton of portals (or attacking them). Though it doesn't explain why at 4 AM when I haven't seen anyone else active in hours in a 50 km radius of me, I get the lag when I'm near one portal and nothing else. Or maybe it does. The poi/dataset hangs, because it reaches out for an update, but the update is soo small, it hangs on the refresh (ie config or dataset file is tiny, and it just doesn't load like it should)?
This is starting to get old. The pure chance of actually being able to play the game when you open the scanner is becoming more and more scarce. Yeah, Lagg. Again.
I was at a location doing some work for a project I'm working on. A coworker that was there with me saw me loading up my Kinetic Capsules. We are near a park. Thought it was a great idea to show him the game. Too bad, it really wasn't. This is a park that I've micro fielded in the past year. I have great signal here. Shouldn't be an issue. Capture a few portals along the edge of the park. Walk towards the middle of the park, where a bunch of portals are at. Attempt to deploy on a portal. Lagg, nothing happening. Try another portal, same thing. Laggggggggggg. Check signal, great LTE connection. Nice shiny, new Pixel 7 phone. No 5G here, not an issue, LTE should be fine. **** around trying to capture portals for about 5 minutes, then check in with an xfac Telegram channel to see if maybe Ingress was down or something. Start walking back to the edge of the park, trying to deploy again, still lagg. Finally when I'm in my vehicle I'm able to deploy. Signal is the same as it was. Others are mentioning in the Telegram channel that the game has been laggy earlier in the day.
This is the 4th time in the past two month I've tried to show someone new the game. This one didn't even install the app. He was curious to see what to do in the game before doing it. He hasn't played any GPS games before, nothing by Niantic. But guess what? His first taste of a Niantic game ended up being pretty darn cruddy. If the game is constantly lagging, and having issues, how are you going to attract new agents to get them addicted? Plain and simple, you effing aren't.
@ace Is there any chance, I mean any that for Year 10 Ingress will see a fix for the lagg issue that has been plaguing the game for over 2 years now? Any chance? Just let us know now. Should I even be bothering to try to attract new agents to the game? Because every dang time I do, it's a full on let down. My co-workers already thought I was crazy for playing Ingress to begin with. Now each time I try to show someone the game, it doesn't work correctly due to a issue that is ONGOING for YEARS now. sigh I like the game, I love the game. When it works. But sadly it just doesn't work soo much of the time these days.
I'd cancel my CORE subscription if I thought it would help anything, but I doubt it would and I'd rather have the extra space. Granted it really doesn't matter most of the time, because trying to play is getting less and less fun.
@NianticBrian You are the PM for Ingress, right? Can you give us ANY update on the lagg issue? It's been ongoing for years now. Is there a chance your team has been able to locate the issue? Did you just give up trying to find the problem? Is it just too expensive to fix? Just tell us what's going on. We just want to know. We want to be able to go out and open our scanners and play without spending time trying to figure out if the game is lagging, or if it's down, or why it's not working.
I'd tag another Niantic person, but she'd just reply with a meme that doesn't help anything and at this point, it's no longer funny.
Maybe @ofer2 has some insight on this? He's given us some good answers and insights in the past on the forums.
I thought about shaking this tree once more. As in the past it gave us a topic to report in, a 'we didn't forget, we just didn't find the root cause yet' reply. That last one was a year ago. The other one 2 years, when the issue was already going on for 3/4 of a year. We're coming up on three years of latency issues; recharging is hit and miss, so is deploying resonators. And those are the ones you'd want to work, since it's so vital to the game.
Since then there has been so many additional issues, drone movement that lags out, scanner communication error that pops up while hacking, missing portal key error when linking, etc. It's not even fun anymore. All the while my regional settings don't work (12 hour notation in game, 24 hour notation everywhere else). Let alone the diminishing playerbase and activity.
I really want the game to work, I still play Ingress, although I often wonder why. And I know the answer, there is no game like this and nothing will even come close. Still it's sad to see the game in the current state, seeing the issues people are having with little to no reply/resolution.
I play a lot less, still it's something that isn't working nearly every time I actually open the game. Like @EvilSuperHeros said, it's just hard to endure the constant issues and just play the game. Let alone showing it to someone else...
Deploy lag has been very bad the last days, really frustrating when its not summer anymore and temps starting to reach under 12c. Many times stuck deploy resonators and by the time lag passed u drifted away from the portal it shouldnt take sometimes 1 minute to deploy 8 resonators....
I canceled my core a few months ago and i dont see any reason start it again.
So, there are a few things here, but first, let me start with this: I know this latency / lag issue sucks. It sucks for everyone. It makes the game much harder to play. And for us, we've been working on this on our side for...god knows how long at this point. We'd much rather be working on awesome features, but this is core to playing the game and needs to work. If we could throw everyone at it and have it be solved, we'd totally do that, but that wouldnt actually help. So far, we've discovered at least three completely separate issues which have all been contributing to this. Some are client side and some on the server side. Because of this, it makes it so that the overall problem isnt fixed until all the other problems are fixed. This makes it especially hard to know that we're getting closer. We're still working on this (literally just had a standup update about it) and hopefully we'll get there soon, but honestly, we wont really know until we're there. Sorry that all of this is so difficult, but we really are trying to fix this for everyone.
All of that being said, what you're referring to is a separate issue which happened yesterday: Google decided to upgrade the software of the machines that we're running and so Google took them down for 10-15 minute maintenance. We had servers still running, but we were just at a much reduced capacity which led to latency spiking. This hasnt happened in quite a long time (especially since we've asked maintenance to be scheduled at night and not during the day), but hopefully this shouldnt happen again. If it does, we'll probably take additional steps to make sure that Google maintenance doesnt have this large of an effect on us.
Really appreciate the response. Is it possible to get more frequent updates from @NianticBrian / @NianticThia even if it’s not yet fixed so that we aren’t left in the dark?
Really appreciate the update on the lag side of things. And everything else.
Most of the lag I encounter, appears to just be a data curruption issue that isn't being handled too well with Protobuf.
The github for it shows that there are still some reliability issues with it.
Which would explain the issues we see, and other Niantic games too
I think it's something ofer2 can easily explain versus Brian and Thia from the sound of it.
In Redacted when we had lag this, we could do a force sync and everything was peachy.
We don't have that. Maybe it might help?