I experience up to 1 second of lag even when making a premove. That is to say, I can have the move queued up, hear the click of the piece after the move is completed, and still have time to look over and watch my clock run down.
I seem to lose .3 to .5 seconds on average every move due to lag here, but this is the only site where I experience this. I am on a 30MB cable connection and I experience this even at 4AM when my block traffic is almost completely dead. Sometimes my ping to Lichess goes up to 300-500ms even though my ping to major sites like Google, Yahoo, etc are unchanged and around 30-50ms. No packet loss, just high ping and it doesn't appear the site has any way to compensate for that so opponents without this issue are experiencing a significant advantage.
Watching streaming players play bullet I sometimes see them make 10+ moves without even losing 1/10th of a millisecond. Why is that I am losing time even on premoves? I've played games where I've premoved the first 15 moves and I still lose 2 seconds. I love playing on this site but all I play are bullet and blitz and this lag issue is frustrating since I am essentially losing almost half my time to lag every game assuming a 40 move game. If there is some way to address or fix this issue that would be excellent.
Try playing bullet when your ping suddenly goes from 1,000 to 3,000. 500 is nothing.
I've seen it go over 1000ms not uncommonly. But even at 500ms with a 40 move game that is 20 seconds lost. It's almost like berzerking every game just due to lag. Except its worse because when you berzerk you don't lose on time when you have a forced checkmate since you aren't losing any time as long as you premove. With the lag you can lose a short forced checkmate with 2 full second left.
I notice there is a large population of bullet players here - and most the streamers are playing bullet and blitz. So I think it's something that needs addressed.
When I play blitz on a bad wifi connection, with ping 2000-3000 ms, I don't have any problems. After making a move, I look at the clock. The time ticks down a few seconds, and then goes back up to where it was when I made the move. For me at least, the site compensates for the lag automatically.
Interesting adakell. When my ping is 1-3 thousand, I often get "reconnecting" and sometimes will lose 10+seconds.
It's not compensating in all situations then, because I've lost more games then I can remember with a 1 move mate on the board, my premove queued up, and like 0.5 ms left on the clock. It makes the move, I watch my clock run down, and then it takes my move back and calls the game a loss.
I've also recorded my games so that I could watch the clock closely without paying attention to playing and I'm very definitely losing time on premoves, it's easy to see once my clock starts showing milliseconds. I do see it compensating sometimes, but other times it does not.
I have had a similar issue with lag on my premoves with a similarly solid--not spectacular--cable internet connection. My ping ranges between 150 to 500 ms. As goldprospector said, losing near 20 seconds in a game is no joke, if that is what is happening. It is very noticeable when it is concentrated in the time scramble and unable to premove to mate.
I do not have these issues on other sites. What is different here, and is there any way that it can be changed?
I experience the same premove lag with a ping of 50ms.
It is most frustrating and has now resulted in me finally deciding that I cannot play the hourly bullet tournements.
I have lost count of the amount of games where I premoved a checkmate and the move has been made, then it takes it back and tells me I am down on time. Maybe this is some sort of clue what is going on?
If it makes the final move, you hear the take noise and then it undoes the move perhaps the clock is still running after the move is made? For what reason could that be?
I have yet to have any decent explaination on the issue, a couple of players have tried to help, and have looked at move times from games and discussed my computer (I tried doing scans for viruses, malware, spyware etc and just getting my computer in good order... all to no avail) but no word from anyone technical from the site. Which kind of annoys me more than the issue itself - why is there no effort being made to understand/explain or resolve this?
Sometimes these problems do affect me on good wifi. Definitely should be addressed.
The way other sites (like ICC) compensate for lag is to have the client timestamp the move as it's made. This informs the server of the time actually used, ignoring lag. lichess appears not to do this.
One problem with timestamping is that it can be hacked: the client can be hacked to deduct (say) 20% of the actual time used giving the player a significant edge. To forestall this, ICC encrypts the connection, but that's only a small help.
FICS does the same, as far as I know. Not sure about the other chess sites out there.