Multiplayer on a certain server is unplayable

[Modin]

• When I join, it takes between 30 seconds and 10 minutes to join. The average is more like 5 minutes. Sometimes it takes no time at all, sometimes it takes ages. Often, I have to try to join several times before it finally succeeds.
• Sometimes it's stuck for minutes at a time at 0/529 map chunks. Often, it never moves and I have to forcefully close the game.
• I had to download a custom .class file that removed the 60 seconds timeout on downloading chunks, or else the game would keep giving me an error after 60 seconds and force me to close it. Unless chunks download super fast which rarely happens.
• Sometimes the game simply crashes while joining.
• Sometimes after I join, the game tells me to make a new character even though I already have one. I've heard that if you do make a character, the previous one is literally just deleted, just like that.
• While playing, cars are often unresponsive. Start a car, nothing happens. Sometimes, 30 seconds later, the car starts by itself, sometimes it never does and I have to leave and rejoin.
• Sometimes a car is started but won't move, the engine sound responds in a weird way to my input but there is no movement, and I have to leave and rejoin.
• When leaving the server, my character is not properly saved. If I leave too fast after picking items up, the server saves that they lleft their container, but not that they entered my inventory = items are deleted. Doing the opposite allows for easy duplication of items.
• Very very often, a chunk will load slowly as I drive around - orange traffic cones. Very often, as I slow down and wait in front of it, it will not load and stay black forever. In certain cases, every direction around me has black areas and I have to leave and rejoin.

 

My ping is pretty stable at 250 ms, the server is almost on the other side of the world. I don't see anyone else complaining about any of this, but most players are much nearer to the servers than I am.

 

My connection, on my side, is fine. It's sure that mods and server performance cause some of these issues, but it's also clear to me that my distance to the server is exacerbating them. I've tried using a VPN to tunnel to the server's city but it doesn't improve anything (if anything it could make it worse).

 

I'm kind of at my wit's end, I see no way to alleviate or work around these issues - they are making the experience horribly tedious. I spend more time look at the loading screen than playing the actual game given how much I have to leave/rejoin to fix these random issues.

 

What more can I do? Why is it so bugged for me but not so much for the people nearer to the server? I had worse ping and probably worse traceroutes back in 2005, but I still gamed fine back then.

 

Edit: other, closer and less populated servers are a-ok, but not this one - and again the issues seem to frustrate only me and maybe some other foreigners far from the server.

Edited March 22 by Modin

[Beard]

Quote

My ping is pretty stable at 250 ms

We generally consider anything above 100 prone to issues and anything above 200 to be quite unplayable. That ping is way too high to have a good experience, and most of the issues you described would be caused by that. Therefore I can only recommend playing on servers that you have better ping and are closer to your actual location.

[Modin]

Thanks for the reply, Beard!

 

After playing more, observing more and thinking more about it, I've come to the conclusion that it's most likely something to do with the time of day.

 

The issues are the worst during peak hours for the server's location, while they are much much lessened during off peak hours. E.g joining the server is extremely slow (5 minutes) during peak hours, extremely fast (10-20 seconds!) during off-peak. I think the most likely explanation is that the server resides on shared server space and its resources are strained during peak hours where there is the most activity and traffic.