Guild Wars 2

How can A-net DARE to say “Thanks for your patience!”

We are out of patience!

Concept: Fantastic!
Implementation: Fail.
Confidence: Gone.

When you bill something as ‘one time’ and when you get in and it’s impossible to participate it’s utterly disheartening. I play an Ele, and for anyone that plays one, half the fun of an Ele is attunement dancing (to me) and chaining combos. None of which I could because switching attunements was lagging out so hard, I pretty much just stood there the whole time. When my abilities fired off, nothing was alive anyway, or had already moved out of the radius of my abilities, so I couldn’t tag or help kill anything. I ended up just switching to water and trying to heal everyone else around me that apparently could participate, but that just resulted in expensive repairs because I kept dying while trying to rez others. Sum total of this event for me was a repair bill and a complete lack of enjoyment.

Everything was OK, the animation started and then everything just froze a loading screen poped up and that was it. I was just hanging in loading screen for like 10 minutes, then I closed the game and restarted and again it froze in loading screen. On my third attempt I managed to actual load into Lions Arch just to find I am dead and when I choosed a waypoint to respawn, I got stuck at loading screen again. I restarted the game over and over, but in the end I gave up.
Now that the “one time only epic event” is over I can finally log into a game just to find out that I missed everything. I wanted to be there, I really did and it just saddens me I wasn’t.
To more, my guild mates were talking about the event and showing the great stuff they got – for standing still during the whole vent, because they supposedly want able to do anything meaningful – and I am happy for them, I really am, but the only thing I was looking for, to simply be there, just vanished.

CC Eva.6742:

Rest assured that the team is working on it.

They are working on a new game engine from scratch?

Because the current engine can’t do it; there’s nothing to fix.

Even if the tech exist, the infrastructure does not.

It does not matter if this can be done, when there’s people behind copper wiring eating by rats.

We’ve got ISPs all over the world overcharging people, and using outdated and outmodded infrastructures.

Things must be done so those with the worse connection can do it fluently.

I hope there are some Karka to kill outside these events (for the monthly achievement), because I got a grand total of 9 kills from this one…

Waited an hour for event, partied with a friend. Event starts, there is 10 second delay lag on skill use. Players take 30 seconds until you can see them. Can’t do anything but auto attack. 5 seconds delay on chat.

Gets much worse.

Halfway into the event the game times me out. I log back in, I’m in a different instance. Can’t move back to my friend’s instance. The new overflow I’m in barely has players. The event starts from scratch, there’s not enough of us and we keep getting slaughtered by the Karka. When we have 20% left to finished the event, suddenly “event failed”.

Terrible experience. This never happened in the events during beta. I am guessing because in the beta events players were spaced around the map rather than all at the same spot.

There are no words to express how disappointed I am about this event. 40 seconds to 1 minute skill response time!? Are you kidding me!?

People expressed their concern so many times about how you will not going to be able to sustain normal play conditions with so many players in one place yet you ignored that fact completely and decided to invite even more people. Now what do you think how I feel about the fact that it was more important to you to invite more potential buyers instead of keeping your attention to people who already paid for the game? You are becoming greedy and the more time passes I think you have less and less things in common with everything that represented the original Guild Wars spirit.

And now when the “event that will change Lion’s Arch forever” is over I am sure glad that I witnessed it cause you know… Spending 10 silver coins on repairs just to be able to see how a lighthouse gets cut in half was totally worth it… NOT!

I haven’t been on this game for a few weeks, this event enticed me back, but I’m growing bored again already with this lag. Well Halo 4 is still there!

what a shame. I was there trying to play but there was so much lag that I gained zero credit for the event. Then got server error and was kicked. By the time I got back in the event was over. Hopefully tomorrows “event” goes better.

setilight.8713:

I hope there are some Karka to kill outside these events (for the monthly achievement), because I got a grand total of 9 kills from this one…

If I understand correctly, the Karka will be in the new zone.

I had a fight with fastweb 4 days to get back to the line running this event where I can not move? are you kidding me? what can it be Anet? Been trying to empty the server?

Yeah, this was really terrible. Hopefully Anet learns from this feedback and the rest of the event isn’t so bad.

Absolutly awful, people are talkning about cinematics, i got 2s at the begining and then dropped into a fight. No idea what to do.
I manage to get 4 samples and eventually work out how to get to the NPC who is in the middle of the bigest fight. So much lag it takes ages just to get the chat screen and as soon as i get teh 4 handed in, i get booted from the server.
The next server is even worse, with my character rubber banding about, and compleatly unresponsive. A few more server disconects follow, till eventually the event is over, i have not been able to take part.
What a waste of time, at least I know what I wont be doing tomorrow and Sunday night. Thank god this is going to be a one time event, I couldnt stand it happening more often.

Didn’t get kicked off the server or anything but it still was very laggy, and as such not very fun. I try to avoid LA on normal days due to the lag, don’t know who thought this would be a good idea. Instead of having it all in LA, they could have done pretty much the same thing, just across all the major cities.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Even if the tech exist, the infrastructure does not.

It does not matter if this can be done, when there’s people behind copper wiring eating by rats.

We’ve got ISPs all over the world overcharging people, and using outdated and outmodded infrastructures.

Things must be done so those with the worse connection can do it fluently.

completly agree, even if Anet get the best servers money can buy and super computer to manage it all.

we’ll still be stuck with the crappy infrastructure of the world wide web.

this event for them is a lesson in what can and can not be done with the current infrastructure.

it’s not good enough, you can stress a server before it goes live by simulating concurrent users across varying broadband speeds so they really should have known this was going to happen.

Overflowed overflow, again after Halloween event..

I’d like to point out that I did not lag in the Halloween event, and I didn’t receive fps drops during this event. But it was laggy as all hell after the attacks began (not beforehand). I have to chalk this up to server lag since my fps didn’t drop and my connection had no problem with Halloween event.

It wasn’t very fun to push a button and sit waiting, see the target disappear and a bunch of new karkas pop onscreen from out of thin air.. for an hour. :P I’m on a medium-population server and I was in the overflow.

Well I guess i’ll go try out darkfall when it comes out on Dec 12th. Anet you guys have alot of issues you need to work out and you don’t seem to understand.

If I were one of those free trial players and this event were my first experience with the game, I would walk away without a second thought, which is a real shame, since I know things can be much better. The network lag was so bad that skills only activated intermittently, if at all. The culling was so bad it felt like playing with a clump of ghosts who were constantly fading in and out in a 20 foot perimeter around my character. Then, after finally finishing the event, I discover that the scavenger-hunt style quest chain has broken and become undoable within a matter of minutes. This is not exactly putting your best foot forward.

The sad thing is, I really like the game on the whole. I enjoy it and want other people to enjoy it too, but I doubt today’s performance convinced anyone to become a paying customer. It may even have sent a few customers packing.

Honestly, I don’t know what to say. After a pretty rubbish balance pass, where a lot of people were left scratching their heads over the changes, you follow it up with one of the worst events that I’ve ever partaken in, in any MMO. On top of that the chain quest is bugged, so even if you did want to follow this questline you get gazumped by bugs.

All of this, during a trial weekend. Honestly, I was playing this for a trial, after seeing that horrendous confusing lagfest in Lions Arch, the last thing I would be doing is buying this game…

Really, ANet?

I usually don’t whine and would appreciate your efforts to supply us gamers with epic events and new content – particularly that short after the initial release…

However… if you advertise a one-time event in Lion’s Arch and give out trials that are only valid on this week-end, I have one question:

What did you expect to happen?

I am utterly disappointed by how this turned out.

I think i got one shot off… but most likely I missed!

Unplayable …

I guess this is why they didn’t want to put a massive spawn or boss kill during halloween one-time a month ago. It’s inevitable to have massive lag.

Last month, I heard many complaints about halloween one-time event should’ve been about epic killing mobs in Lion’s Arch. They heard you. They gave it to you in this event.

I had horrible lag through the whole event UNTIL the mails arrived. I got all three mails at once and then the lag was gone for me and most of my group. We were able to play the last little bit properly but it was still not a fun experience.

Anyone seen an apology saying sorry we stuffed up from ANet?

Failed event and now the NPC’s etc. for the even are bugging out.

It was pretty miserable as an Ele with the skill lag. I pretty much just had to stay Water because otherwise people would just be downed immediately from the Poison. :/ It would of been a lot more enjoyable if it was playable enough to learn/understand the Karkas “shell” concept. We will see more of them though for sure. I also liked it was so bad auto attack didn’t work.

I liked the scavenger hunt though…

This was very disappointing. The lag was terrible. 10+ sec delay on abilities. This probably would have been a really fun event had it not been for the lag, which made it nearly unplayable.

Hopefully none of the Anet employees read all this focused hate and become disheartened.

Yeah, the event wasn’t fun, and things are kinda broken, but it’s kinda cool that they’re taking risks and trying something different. At least we’re not paying monthly fees for this while they’re still figuring things out, right?

I wish the Anet peeps well on fixing Lost Shores and their continued efforts to make GW2 a fun and awesome game!

i got 3k xp for leeching the entire event, cause i was really lost

The skill activation lag during the karka killing spree (if it can be described as this) was… terrible. And now I’m sitting in Garenhoff, in a tiny room with god knows how many other players – waiting for Canach to become hostile. Come on, seriously – more bugged NPCs? That’s some quality testing thus done before release.

Considering this is a one off event, this is very familiar with one Canthan New Year’s event in GW1. And you actually re-ran that particular event due to similar “lag” issues.

Well it all worked pretty well for me. My FPS was quite low but can’t say I had any significant lag. I am in the UK, on a European server and a 6meg connection.

Really enjoyed it.

CJ

And now I can’t log into the game before it crashes. Seems I’m getting spammed by the same Email (in game) to do with the quest line, each time I receive one, the game locks up.

I don’t like to be negative but I’m going to be constructive with my complaint. They knew in the betas that big group events lagged the game so bad for most everyone playing the game with anything less than a uber bleeding edge top end PC and they chose to put this in LA where the game hits performance the most for everyone and make it a group event at that so there are 100s of people and enemies and several times that in skill effects so that even a nice system capable of rendering LA in a normal heavy population at about 30fps get pegged down to 1fps and sit in once spot the whole time having nothing but floaty names render and a few skill effects here and there the whole duration of the event while standing in that one spot doing nothing.

Ok so here is the constructive part. Why wasn’t this event delayed so that it could be shifted into an instance with lower population counts or lower the population cap on LA so that each instance of LA (main and overflows) were limited to an amount that didn’t cripple practically everyone’s PCs? This had to have come out in testing? I assume it was tested. I hope this and the halloween event were a lesson to get future one time events done right.

The following is how I would have done this and the one time event for halloween. Instance the one time event with smaller but large enough groups as needed to provider the experience desired. For this event that could have been putting players in instance groups of 20 or 30 and then starting the event. Not only does this correct the issue of 100s of people and mobs and several times that skill effects cripple most peoples PCs so they can’t experience the one time event even though they were able to be there for it. But it also solves the issue of a one time event taking place at only one time and day. Because with it in an instance the controlling factor of one time event is getting to only do the instance once. Just like the starting instance of the game that puts us into the story of the game. Players can log in when they are able to then enter the instance as a result of their first visit to lions arch and experience the one time event. There is no concern of others getting to experience it first. Anyone who cares to not have spoilers doesn’t read anything with any level of details about the thing before they experience it anyways so no loss in details being out there for anyone who wasn’t there the moment the event went live. Once the one time event instance is completed players are put into the persistent world again where the aftermath of the event is at. That way there is no immersion broken for those who have already done the one time event and those who didn’t can’t see spoilers in the game until they have completed the one time event to continue playing. The one time event can still be a limited time like a weekend or a week long time frame. But it also has the ability to be a permanent feature of the game so that all future players get to experience the one time event as it is meant to be not repeatable. Everyone wins.

I am glad that Anet team is trying stuff like this but the ambition of the idea is ahead of what can be done. I could not play at all then dropped my video settings to minimum and could at least move around and fire off attacks – but as others have said I had massive lag between hitting a skill and anything happening – which was also a challenge when trying to see/pick up stuff dropped from the karka. Still a great game though -but as others have said – maybe better investing time in fixing basics than creating events like this to compete with other launches this weekend and actually making game seem unstable

Anet i hope you fix these problems before phase 2 and 3 becasse at the moment its terrible, the lag is so bad it will decide to randomly cut sounds, freeze, not render anything, cant use skill or move, and god knows what else.

Just in case Anet you have no idea whats like in the player POV

Danikat.8537:

enos.1580:

The thing is, I don’t really blame anet’s server team for this. Even Blizzard doesn’t do events like this, you know why? Because there’s not a server system in existance that can handle that much stuff at once.

WoW tried this ONCE. Years and years ago, a large server-wide event to open the AQ gates, culminating in a one-time event in one zone. Every single server that ran the event crashed without fail.

I mean, I give anet props for reaching high. It looked like it would have been a pretty neat event if it was playable. It’s just inexperience showing trying to run something like this, when history has shown we don’t have the server technology to handle it.

The thing is Anet have managed it in GW1. They regularly had events which encouraged everyone to be in the same place at the same time and I never saw lag like this.

They managed it by limiting each map to a certain number of players and creating new instances as needed which new arrivals were automatically added to. Basically every server had an infinate number of overflows which increased or decreased as needed.

I don’t understand why they didn’t do the same thing with this game.

GW1’s events were never combat situations. Ever. They were funky little events where you did client based things like emotes. All the combat based events were very small instances like PVP games.

The problem, I think, was that while the regular, non-overflow servers have population caps, from my understanding the overflow servers do not. As a result, since they cannot possibly have infinite overflow servers, LA eventually hit an excessive amount of players and the lag went to insane levels.

I agree that this is why you don’t do mass one-time events. There’s no possible way to have the bandwidth, and potentially processing power, to handle all that data. The people that are posting their specs…it never had anything to do with your computer. The only thing that would matter from your side is your connection speed, but even so I doubt anyone who had at least 1MB/sec would have issues. It has to deal with the fact that ANet could not have possibly processed all the changes from the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of players, NPCs, and enemies all at once like that.

The event will culminate in a one-time only event chain that will run multiple hours with a finale of defeating the Ancient Karka.

…

Join in on the epic multi-hour one-time event, battle the Ancient Karka in Southsun Cove.

Source.

If today’s event is anything to go by, Sunday’s event is going to be remembered for all the wrong reasons for a very long time to come.

Although new content, especially this early since release is highly welcome and appreciated, I wish Arenanet would thoroughly calculate their decisions before implementing them. I feel like this was a disaster to begin with and the free trial players will leave incredibly disappointed without seeing the better parts of this game.

setilight.8713:

I hope there are some Karka to kill outside these events (for the monthly achievement), because I got a grand total of 9 kills from this one…

At least you saw them. I got 8 kills and have no idea what I just killed even looks like! They never rendered. I killed 8 of them, managed to pick up 2 of the loot things we needed to grab, and never even saw them. I had to go to facebook just to see a picture. I know there were a lot of people there but I barely saw them either.

I also bugged out and saw everyone else watching the cut-scene while I saw nothing. It was rather sad to see everyone else stop moving and get the movie symbols over their heads while I was left behind :’(

VincentDW.9376:

If I were one of those free trial players and this event were my first experience with the game, I would walk away without a second thought, which is a real shame, since I know things can be much better. The network lag was so bad that skills only activated intermittently, if at all. The culling was so bad it felt like playing with a clump of ghosts who were constantly fading in and out in a 20 foot perimeter around my character. Then, after finally finishing the event, I discover that the scavenger-hunt style quest chain has broken and become undoable within a matter of minutes. This is not exactly putting your best foot forward.

Yeah, it’s truly unfortunate. I am suddenly glad I didn’t convince my buddy to join in on the weekend. I imagine he would have been pretty irritated and just have felt like the game is a waste of time.

Ah well, hopefully they will learn from it and make these “One-Time-Events” instances which happen every 4 hours or something but only be playable once per player. That way, everyone in Lion’s Arch would have gotten a pop-up, offering them entrance to the Event. Those who wanted to participate could hit “yes” and ANet could instance it properly. Knowing you could do it at a number of different times would cause some people to not show up or say “no”. People who work (or can’t bring their laptop to work ;-) could participate later. And each instance could be optimized for a given number of people, with weakened enemies in the case of there not being enough people.

Whatever the case, I didn’t have much fun but I certainly appreciate the effort. Hopefully the content, itself, will be more enjoyable.

And now there is lag in Caledon Forest….

Raf.1078:

Lag isn’t always a game issue. Could be system or ISP on your end as well…might be a combo of all 3.

While I agree you cant blame Anet for 100% of the issues BUT you can be certain

1. they were obviously not ready as many people are complaining not just the odd 10 people but hundredS.

2. omg the lag, for anybody to gloss this over and say hey this is just the players with bad systems would be wrong, wrong oh and did i say WRONG

3. the event itself was just badly planned, badly coded a mess.

4. servers was obviously not able to cope with the issues above (ring of fire especially)

I can not even log into my main character at lions arch in fear of miyami spamming me to death with the same email an obvious quality control issue, not loading at all when my other characters outside of LA can, event timings are tight and everyone rushing to get into it = tough for people who work over the weekend including me…

Wow…..So disappointing, in so many ways its hard to describe how I feel other than kinda cheated, not even sure thats the right word for it. I feel for the dev team, I really do empathize with them. However, what on this earth and there minds made them think, "hey lets have a Huge One Time Event, invite free members, have it all in one spot. Because you know we dont have any problems with the clipping and rendering in WvWvW where its a 100v100 zone, so lets have it be in Lions Arch with over 1k playersVSMobs. Whats funny (or terribly sad, or awfully pathetic), is they actually thought this would work when they haven’t even fixed WvWvW. I truly am perplexed. Is there a bet in the office at A-Net that they hope this game fails in epic and historical ways. A-Net you have the framework for a great game, an AMAZING game, yet you still insist on this? why? I dont get it.

Sorry, but the way this event has been implimented you can’t even see the Karka when trying to kill them, as they just don’t load, then again neither to 3/4’s of the players.

This has to be just about the most shocking implimentation of a game changing event I have seen in any MMO…

Thank god for WvW so i don’t have to put up with any more of this.

Yeah and its getting worse, the moment players get new mail about a new attack, 5,000 plus players spawn there.

I couldn’t with low settings, see my attacks go off, or hit any mobs, not getting any credit for any of the new events spawning.

Such a fail world event.

Why are you doing this?

I arrive to the events, and what happens? I only see two of the too many people around, no enemies, and I cant get credit for the event.

Is this some kind of psychological test? Are you testing what ite takes to drive someone insane, or out patience or something?

On top of that, In Baruch Bay it didn’t even start.

the way I am feeling now is I might as well just go play another game till the event is over as I can not enjoy it due to the lag fest in all the map locations,and theses are 1 time events per day..way to go and you really didn’t see this coming

Canach is bugged on Tarnished coast so you cannot proceed any further.

Have we heard from Anet about fixes?

I admire Anet for being so ambitious, but it’s now obvious that this kind of one-time event simply doesn’t work. Having almost everyone in the same area at the same time is completely unviable with +15 second skill delays and constant disconnects. For me, the fourth time I was disconnected I couldn’t even log back into an overflow server, so I missed out on any rewards from the event even though I waited at that lighthouse for a good 40 minutes before the event even started. Quite frustrating really.

Anet needs to ditch the whole one-time event thing and just run special weekend events as instances.

I am not in mood for constructive criticism. So far I was not able to do any of the events because of the ridiculous lag or the failure of enemies rendering in Caledon Forest. Then I tried to follow the map riddle…NPC’s are bugged as well..I guess Noll ragequitted too! Dungeon entrance bugged. What am I supposed to expect tomorrow? Or the day after?
Absolute failure Anet…sorry! If you are not ready, do not release expansions. Nobody would blame you!
Such a major disappointment so far. Actually now I don’t even want to see the new map and its events! Who cares! I ll just stick around and read the forums! More action and lulz here!