Latency

Slang for "Latency".

When a player is suffering from lag it means their computer or internet connection is causing a delay in their awareness of what is going on in the game. This is normally caused when the data packets you send take longer than normal to reach the server and/or vice versa.

Lag can adversely affect gameplay in many ways, for example when a party is attacking a mob, a lagging player will see monsters in places they no longer occupy, will hit monsters that have already died and react to conditions that no longer persist. E.g. Try to heal someone who is dead or remove a hex that is no longer there. In the eyes of the party, the player will be standing around, then running at a corpse, then casting a meaningless spell. In a very bad case of lag a player may not be able to move at all for a short amount of time.

Lag may also cause "rubber banding" whereby you move to a location then immediately appear back where you came from, this may occur multiple times before a player can walk properly again. However this may be more symptomatic of dropped packets, where data packets do not reach the destination at all.

A player who is lagging should let his/her party know so they can account for that.