After not playing online in several months (since US Nat’ls, really), I hopped back on today and after a bit noticed that OCTGN was more or less completely dead. Waiting 20 minutes on average to find an opponent.
I figured the hobby wasn’t dead and that j.net must have picked up the slack, so I headed over to the site to check it out. I had never used j.net before, and I was impressed by the slick interface and quick setup time – loading decks was a breeze, no need to download card packs, etc. Then I played a couple of games…
Have people really abandoned OCTGN for this en masse? Is it always as laggy as it was today? I get that OCTGN has a learning curve and that it’s not much to look at without the card packs installed. I LOVE the fact that j.net actually recognizes which cards are in which servers. But the lag, dear lord, the lag – even with the 20 minute wait to start on OCTGN, I’m fairly positive I can finish a game over there faster.
The short answer is: there has been a longstanding “slow drip” memory leak that over the course of a few days would degrade performance and eventually consume server resources. It’s only just recently been diagnosed and the fix will be deployed soon.
I experience almost zero lag on Jenteki, but FWIW I assume I don’t play during the primetime slots due to time differences. When I’m online there are usually 20-40 games open and performance is great.
Yes, sadly. For an idea of just how dramatic it’s been look at the total number of players with games played in the most recent OCTGN Stimhack Leagues. Stimhack league 4 (ending date 6-17-15) had 275 players with games played. League 5 (ending date 8-28-15) had 208 players with games played. League 6 (ending date 10-31-15) had 139 players with games played. The current OCTGN league, league 7, (start date 1-12-16) has 35 players signed up and only 6 with games played.
The first Jinteki Stimhack League had 243 players with games played, and with 173 in this second Jnet league, there’s no reason to think it won’t be as big again, if not bigger. People who had Macs and Linux systems, and so couldn’t use OCTGN are part of the reason, as is the impressive improvement of Jinteki over the last few months, but the biggest reason in my mind is the ease of use. You just pop open the browser and go. Much easier to just get in a game compared to OCTGN, for better or worse.
This is my experience as well. Rarely see over 40 games at a time at the hours I’m on.
Basically yeah. I usually see more Thrones/Conquest than Netrunner on OCTGN these days, despite Netrunner having many more players than either of those games - the majority of Netrunner online players seem to have migrated over to Jinteki.net.
That isn’t to say nobody plays Netrunner on OCTGN, but it’s definitely fallen off from the peak.
Correct, you’ll have dragging problems in general. The console commands can only handle items in your hand, so if you need to voluntarily trash ICE or items from a remote, you’ll be out of luck. Mobile devices are not recommended (unless it’s something you can plug a mouse into, like a MS Surface).
I gave it another shot last night, and the site was pretty smooth overall. I don’t know if the fix has been deployed or if you just reset the leak, but either way if last night was closer to the average lag time I can see why it’s not generally a problem.
Yeah, that’s pretty dramatic, particularly considering that with the timing of League 6 (ending right before Worlds) I would have expected higher participation.
