I experience lag or disconnect from Lineage often.

Lag is a term commonly applied to any perceived slowness with your connection to the game. It manifests as your movement being slowed or as a delay between your action and the world's reaction -- such as it taking a long time for doors to open, attacks to occur, or objects to move.

Also, note that a few things look like lag but are actually slowdowns on just your system. This is heavily dependent on your system and tasks you might be running in the background.

Internet lag develops in your connection through the Internet to our servers. Signals from your computer go through many nodes on the way to the data center (where our servers are), and any of those nodes can cause a delay in that signal, which causes the perception of lag. While you are lagging in this way, the person next to you may not be. Internet lag caused in this way is utterly beyond our control -- the nodes are owned and controlled by other companies. The Internet is indeed chaotic and nobody can guarantee good Internet connectivity all the time. If you suspect this kind of lag, try a different Internet Service Provider (ISP), and use an Internet diagnostic tool to find out where the slowdown might be occurring. A "trace route" to www.lineage.com may be indicative of your connection to the Lineage servers, though not always fully indicative -- your route to www.lineage.com may end up looking better than your route to the Lineage servers actually is.

How can I tell where the lag or disconnection is happening?

If there is a faulty piece of hardware with your ISP, or on the route to the game servers, it will likely result in you experiencing lag, or even complete loss of Internet access. This can happen to dial-up and broadband (Cable/DSL/LAN) users alike. You may have exceptionally good ping times, and good trace and ping results, but an intermittent problem with hardware along the way can disconnect or lag you and then return to normal before you can capture the information with a trace route or ping. This makes troubleshooting extremely difficult since things work fine when you run the tests.

If you are running Lineage on a Macintosh® operating system, please run the following commands in the terminal window (without the quotes) and send us the result:

"% traceroute 216.107.243.51" for Depardieu
"% traceroute 216.107.243.52" for Ken Rauhel
"% traceroute 216.107.243.53" for Lands of Aden
"% traceroute 216.107.243.50" for Test

If you are running Lineage on a Windows® operating system, please follow the instructions below:

There is a free trial program called PingPlotter Standard that may be of some use to us in determining the health of your Internet connection while playing Lineage.

**This program is not supported by NCsoft**

You can find the program and information on how to use it at

http://www.pingplotter.com/download.html

Please download and install the Standard version of PingPlotter. Run the program and in the upper left corner you will see an Address to Trace: section.

Type in one of the following IP addresses based on which server you want to test:

216.107.243.51 for Depardieu
216.107.243.52 for Ken Rauhel
216.107.243.53 for Lands of Aden
216.107.243.50 for Test

While PingPlotter is running its trace, launch Lineage and play the game as you normally would. Please allow the tool to run for at least 30 minutes while playing. If you lose connection to the game or notice large amounts of lag, switch back over to PingPlotter and click on the Stop button.

Next, click on File -> Save Sample Set and save the file to your computer in a location that will be easy to find, such as your Desktop.

Many ISPs will not accept Ping Plotter results when submitting reports of connectivity issues. We inform our customers about Ping Plotter because it is a simple tool for customers to use and provides visual results that are somewhat easy to read and understand.  Feel free to send us the results as an attachment using the Ask a Question tab if you would like help reading them.

Windows 2000 and XP users have a great tool included with the Operating System called Pathping. It does basically the same thing that Ping Plotter does, except in a text format. To run this, open a command prompt (Start -> Run -> type 'cmd' and click OK) and type (without the quotes): 

"pathping 216.107.243.51" for Depardieu
"pathping 216.107.243.52" for Ken Rauhel
"pathping 216.107.243.53" for Lands of Aden
"pathping 216.107.243.50" for Test

This test will take several minutes to complete, so please wait until it has finished. Once it is done, right-click the window and choose Select All. Then press ENTER on your keyboard. This will place the contents onto your clipboard. You can then Paste these results into a text file or directly into an e-mail.