First things first, I really love this game. I think the marriage between the online repeatable content with a crafting based gear system was the inevitable step which games such as the phantasy star online series simply didn't catch on to.

I also really like the PvP mini game. However, the amount of lag I FEEL I am getting whilst PvP'ing is quite perplexing. Why? Simple. I don't appear to lag, neither do most people I am playing with... but certain individuals do. Most of these individuals end up on the top of the score board. They also normally have a ratio of something like 30 kills 0 deaths. As I started to notice these certain individuals I became curious of how they were doing it, so I have spent a fair amount of time just racking up some PvP experience the last few days. What I noticed is that the lag issue is quite similar to that on other SEGA servers back on the dreamcast and xbox, around 9 years ago.

There are some strange situations regarding lag and bomb detection. For example, player X plants a bomb and stands next to it. It goes off whilst player Y runs past. Player X dies but player Y survives the blast through lagging. Some people are so laggy they are almost immune to bombs, to put it quite simply.

There are also people dropping bombs directly on top of others. Normally pathing would come in to play, and you should be able to move your character in the opposite direct, right? Well, with the 'lag factor' this is not the case. You get stuck on the bomb. It is as though the server puts you and the bomb on the same grid, and the bomb always wins. Therefore this little glitch seems to be a combination of lag and the way the actual arena is split up in a grid for allocating where bombs go.

I assume from these problems that the servers are setup in a somewhat similar way to how SEGA setup their old online servers, because these problems are -somewhat- similar to the ones which were around 8 or 9 years ago with those servers. For those who don't know back then the SEGA servers were renown for being easy to exploit with lag. You could actually manipulate the game to make your group mates crash and loose all non-equipped items, lag out and in to duplicate items with lag switches and even produce unreleased items through the same method.

The problem above regarding PvP makes me wonder if this is a problem with the games servers or if it is simply a few people using a lag switch to avoid bombs going off. I don't find this game breaking, but having played similar games on SEGA servers before I think issues like this should really be nipped in the bud before they become widespread. It has yet to become apparent if there are any other issues with lag in the game, but I suppose time will tell. Luckily all other aspects of the game are somewhat flawless, for a free to play game.