I searched for other lag threads, but none seemed to produce an answer.
I am playing in wifi right now (at home: usually i have a wired connection.) and it has been working just fine for about the last 3 weeks since I have been home. Just today though, the game decided it didn't want to be played. It started when I was logged in, playing, and it started lagging terribly. Not just FPS slowing, but all of the characters walked off-screen, I could walk/run and attack, but nothing interacted with my surrounding. No text came up, and this would happen for minutes at a time, sometimes fixing itself and I would resume and catch up with my party. Later, it happened again but instead of fixing itself, i was stuck in the forever limbo, unable to interact. Strangely, I could talk with the party now, but couldn't walk through a gate that they had unlocked and proceeded to pass through already. This made me quit and try to fix it.
First I simply shut down the pc, and went with that. No fix, same problems.
Then I went to Steam -> Spiral Knights -> Properties -> Verify Integrity of Game Cache. I let it do its thing, fix the files, ETC. Then i shut down again, rebooted and try again. Somewhere in this process, it got worse, and for a long time wouldn't even let me log in. It would log in through Steam, knight selection would appear and then upon choosing, would try entering the ready room for a couple of minutes, and then just disconnecting me from the server. This would just keep going. So, I then went and deleted all SK local files, and re-downloaded the entire game. Now I can log in, enter Haven, missions and arcade... but the damn lag (if that is even the right word for this mess) is perpetual. I get maybe one minute into it and then the same thing happens.
What do I do about this? Or should I just wait a week until I have a wired connection?
Having all the characters run offscreen is a symptom of having intermittent connectivity.
If you are on a shared wifi, you are likely not getting enough bandwidth to support the game. Wifi isn't the problem, its the other people on the Wifi that is the problem. With some of the lower price ISPs in america, simply loading 2 youtube videos on the same network can bring the game communication to a grinding halt.