A Guide To Delay

Overview

Welcome.In this guide I will thoroughly explain the delay issue in Paladins that has been plaguing the player base for most of 2019 and presumably for most, if not all of 2020 as well unfortunately. It will be informative for the most part, but it may contain some rant-like elements, the reason being that my patience is running very thin with this issue being fixed, as I believe it will follow the game into it’s eventual grave which is soon to come if it won’t get resolved.Disclaimer:This guide is in no way intended to insult and talk badly about the developers, but rather to document a fundamental, game-breaking issue and act as an open letter about the frustration of a significant amount of players. I am not trying to spread negativity or hate with this guide and I hope anyone reading this will understand.There might be updates or fixes / tweaks to this guide in future.

What is delay?

Delay is a technical issue in Paladins which has always been in Paladins, but became a widespread part of the game since the steel forged update in 22. May of 2019. Hi-Rez / Evil Mojo have stated many times that they were investigating and working on fixing it, with no success until today.

It has been affecting players of all regions (although inconsistently), but mainly European players have suffered the most, which happens to be a large part of the player numbers, and it continues to run rampant with very little that people can do to stop it.

While the developers have no doubt been giving their best to fix it, the actual problem sits in the faulty code of the game and possibly also the servers, as the original dev team for Paladins has built the game on very un-optimal and frankly, bad code, which is the main cause for the plethora of bugs we have in Paladins today.

Additionally, as mentioned before, Hi-Rez states that delay is occasional and only happens in ranked and custom lobbies, which is misleading as this statement is actually false. Delay appears in every game mode, not just ranked and customs. Aside from that, it is not occasional and can be reproduced very easily.

Symptoms of delay

In this section I will explain what delay actually does and the damage it causes to the gameplay experience. Some of these issues are also similar or related to delay and are be worth mentioning as they make the game just as unplayable as delay does.

These are just the symptoms. Tips and tricks that you can use to fight these issues will be explained later in the guide.

The most common and also most complex problem delay offers. It can cause a player to be “held hostage” in the champion select screen for an extended amount of time. It’s immediately noticeable you are delayed when you try to select a champion.

Usually it takes a very long time to register your selection and thus leaving you without a character for a while until it works (This also applies to locking your champion in). In this time you can’t interact with anything in the menu, and picking another champion takes even longer, or on very bad occasions, doesn’t work at all.

Changing cosmetic options also takes longer, and even tends to increase the effect of delay significantly (even when members of your team do it) which can cause you to load into the match a lot later than your or the enemy team. Changing skins / champions too often can crash your teammate’s games. Depending on if your fellow players in the match are also delayed, they will see your actions sooner or later than you.

Another telltale sign of delay is the countdown timer going completely haywire. What usually happens is that the timer goes down as it should, but also go back a few seconds, greatly extending the wait time. When delayed, it also tends to get stuck at 0, and keeps holding your game hostage until it decides to either put you in the match, or with very bad luck, kick you back to the menu and give you a deserter penalty.

That’s right, you get penalized. A lot.

But it does not end there, if you DO happen to get into a heavily delayed game, very strange things can happen:

• No weapon viewmodels for the rest of the game
  
• “Early Access Singleplayer mode”
  [link]

• Default mount and weapon skin for unknown reasons
• Getting kicked into the main menu again and having to relaunch the game to get back into the match
• A very high chance of VFX glitches occurring frequently throughout the rest of the match
  
• And many more…

Works similarly to champion select delay, but it happens in the main menu and can also cause serious problems at certain times. It usually only occurs after a delayed match ended, and makes the menu interaction options either unresponsive or glitches them out.

It can also have one of the arguably worst effects of delay in the game, such as party members of your party not seeing the queue timer show up and then not following the rest of the party into a match lobby, or sometimes even getting deserter occasionally.

A similar effect, appropriately named the “deserter roulette” also stems from this. It causes a random player to not load into the match lobby and instantly give them the deserter penalty with the affected player sometimes not even noticing what happened. The roulette happens randomly but still VERY FREQUENTLY, and the affected player cannot do anything to prevent this from happening to them other than grinning and bearing it.

Moving on…

Tips and tricks to fighting delay

In this part of the guide I will show you what you CAN do to help yourself against delay, even if your options are very limited at this current time. None of these methods are actual official fixes, but rather just temporary precautions you can take in order to minimize the effects of delay as much as possible, and prevent your gameplay experience to be ruined completely.

Disclaimer:
As much as I recommend doing these tricks, they might not work for you. They have been known to work for many people, including me, but there is no guarantee this can help you. I also want to mention that you use these tricks at your own discretion, I can’t promise anything.

This might sound strange, and it totally is, but keeping a low number of friends in your friends list decreases the intensity of the delay for some reason. It won’t get rid of it completely but it can help you get out of these champion selection hostage situations easier on some occasions.

I have absolutely no idea why this happens but it seems to work for many players and it can have a big impact in the long run. Though, if you are wondering what a “low number” actually is, there isn’t an exact answer. My recommendation would be to keep it at maximum about 25-30 friends, but go below 20 if you think you won’t interact with certain friends often. An ideal number however would be a single digit number.

Another strange method, is to avoid playing with 4 other people in a party at the same time. The effects of delay get amplified significantly when playing in a party. It gradually increases from noticeable (1-3 other players in party) to game-breaking (4 other players in party).

Delay gets to its peak when inside a full party of players. It will plague your game session with many extra long wait times and a ton of deserter penalties.

Again, I do not know why this happens and I wish I could explain. If you plan on 5-stacking a Paladins session, expect many difficulties in actually playing the game. It’s very sad and disheartening to know, playing with your friends can make the game unbelievably frustrating for all of them and yourself.

For some reason, opening the friends list inside of the main menu for the first time upon opening the game can also cause delay.

Changing your customization options or your character can greatly increase the effects of delay and as stated earlier, can also crash the game for some players in your team on rare occasions.

This trick allows you to undo a deserter penalty that you gained from delay issues. Simply open the system chat and enter the command

/logout

and it should undo your deserter penalty after logging back in again. However.
This method may or may not work for you but it’s the only option you have in order to help yourself. If it doesn’t work after logging back in, you might just have to wait out the duration, unfortunately.

Community contributions and showcases

[link] [link]

Final verdict

It has been many months since the start of delay and it made Paladins literally unplayable at times. It was the spearhead of a terrible year for the game and there has been very little comment from Hi-Rez regarding what this issue actually is, why it’s here and what kind of progress they made on fixing it.

Thank you.

~L.