Counterproductive

In most MMOs the release of new content is a time to celebrate and to get back into the game if you've been away from it for a while. In Neverwinter, last week's release of Sea of Moving Ice has just made the game (temporarily) completely unplayable for me. I get disconnected almost as soon as I log in, and if I somehow manage to stay on for a little while, I suffer thirty second lag spikes and rubberbanding up the wazoo, making it unpleasant to impossible to even do something as simple as a couple of dailies.

Maybe I'll actually get to check out the new content in a month or so.

Rubberbanding

I've been meaning to mention for a long time how I think that Neverwinter's biggest technical problem is the horrific lag and rubberbanding that besets the game at times. It's almost always present to a minor extent, and at its worst it leaves the game completely unplayable, even if the way you get teleported into unexpected places is kind of hilarious. One of the reasons I haven't actually made this post before is that it's something that's best seen for yourself and hard to capture in a screenshot (even if you're lagging enough to have time to inspect your unicorn's butthole).

Well, tonight I was finally able to capture some nice rubberbanding while doing dailies on my hunter ranger in Sharandar. Enjoy this little demonstration:

Unicorn Butthole

I'm not usually one for crude humour, but let's just say that being stuck in a massive lagspike that lets you inspect your mount mid-leap in ways you usually wouldn't be able to (because the action combat limits your camera options) reveals a surprising amount of detail on the unicorn mount...