Weird things that happen when Warframe gets laggy

Lag is a universal thing. Everyone can get a bad internet connection simply because we’re lazy, cheap beings who can’t ever do anything properly. Luckily for me and my shitty connection and overall bad location in general, Warframe is actually somewhat playable, even up to 300+ ping. Which happens sometimes, because each mission is peer-to-peer, rather than it all being hosted on one server. That being said, strange things can happen when your connection starts bouncing around.

Doors Stop Opening

By far the most common issue is when doors, which are reliant on the host’s connection, start to falter. At best, they take an extra second or two to open. Sometimes a door will only half-open and you have to roll or slide underneath it, like a hero in an action flick. If your connection is really poor, sometimes you have to run away then run back and try again. Sometimes, a door will only open just crack, taunting you with your inability to pass through it (unless you’re Titania).

The worst times are when you get ‘desynced’ and can’t open doors at all. While you may appear in one room, a bad connection might mean the host thinks you’re in a previous room (or somewhere else entirely), meaning it doesn’t know what door to open.

Never-ending status effects

When ping is high, that means counters are high as well. One thing I’ve noticed that happens pretty consistently is that any status effect on you doesn’t always end correctly. Which isn’t too bad when you’ve been hit by an Electric attack, but it’s absolute hell when you are currently being poisoned via Toxin and all you can do is roll around like a twat or watch your health drain away at random.

Random teleports

Coming back to the evil doors of not-opening, sometimes even stranger things have happened. Sometimes the game just flat out gives up and can’t work out where you’re supposed to be. At this point, you’re often screwed. As to what happens, well, mostly you end up lagging and perhaps being stuck inside a room with a door not opening, but sometimes the game will think you are outside the map.

Other times, the game just fucks you around and teleports you somewhere strange, desperately trying to work out where you’re supposed to be. Just the other day, an unlucky player found themselves teleported 300 meters away, even though they were standing on a Corpus hijack target with the rest of us. I’ve somehow been teleported outside the playable areas in Archwing missions.

Nullifier bubbles don’t break abilities

Just a simple one here, occasionally you can kill a Nullifier and their bubble will remain in place for a few seconds. On incredible laggy hosts, you can see them lying around, full-size, with no Corpus bloke in sight. On the flip side, a super laggy connection also means you can run into the bubble, kill the Nullifier and get out before the game realises it’s supposed to have stripped you of your abilities.

Perma Shocking Speed and other abilities

Sometimes, though, laggy games can benefit you. One side-effect of lag that I’ve seen a few times is the electric ‘aura’ around a Volt using the Shocking Speed augment will linger and still affect enemies, even when the Speed ability itself has run out. Similar things can happen when deactivating abilities, like toggling Hysteria and accidentally keeping Valkyr’s claws.

Stealth kills everywhere

The best thing about lagging in Warframe though is that you can get stealth kills, seemingly at random. This is most likely because the server hasn’t realised that the enemies can see you yet. Amazingly, this can work on any mission, including missions where all enemies are automatically alerted to your presence. It’s not a truly amazing thing, but stealth kills can net you a nice chunk of extra affinity, and it also means you can complete the Get 10 Stealth Kills mini-challenges on Defense/Survival/etc. missions.

Of course, I still wouldn’t recommend playing with laggy hosts. A tip though, if you have a poor connection, go to Options, then go to the Gameplay tab and change PC Type to Laptop. This will tell the matchmaker that your computer/connection/whatever isn’t very good and that you shouldn’t host as often.

On the flip side, if you’ve got a blazing fast connection and a good computer, set PC Type to Desktop so you can host more regularly.