Event lag [Merged]
I’m being fair to everyone at Anet that busts their humps to deliver us the best experience possible when I say thank you. I know they work long hours and pour their heart and soul into this game, to which if they did not they would probably not be employed.
I do register my share of complaints, but I’m extremely tolerant about performance (connectivity, lag, bugs, etc.). They happen, they get worked out, things go back to normal (mostly).
There is no going back on a one-time event.
Players have every right to be upset, but also to be very worried right now. This was the opportunity to relieve lingering frustrations, refresh player morale and leave the impression that the state of the game is strong. Unfortunately, if the game was in a hole with its existing issues, it now more closely resembles a foxhole.
Long before release I told myself that a brand new MMO, especially one so highly anticipated, would best be enjoyed after months of tempering and refining. As my receipt would tell you, I just couldn’t wait, and as my friend who joined me that very night with her own purchase has had utterly no time in RL to continue past the first week or so, I cannot muster the courage to tell her that the game is currently in a poor state, even for casuals like us.
As much as it would pain me to miss out on great content and experiences that will surely be missed if I don’t stay committed, I’m in a rare state of mind to put this game down and let it mature. It just hurts too much to watch it struggle, and to put myself through disappointment is making less and less sense.
Best wishes all, this is a rough road to be on.
While I’m all for new events and content, they would be better served fixing all the bugs that I’m sure have been reported numerous times by now.
Producing a laggy, bug ridden ‘event’ is not the way to make things better.
I managed 36 kills first event, looted 9 mobs and just barely made the hand in, no time warning just woosh and the hand in guy was gone, the event was not even playable couldnt see what I was hitting or what was hitting me. Canach is bugged on Fissure so that quest stops, so I quit to give them time to do a restart or whatever and I just logged in time to see the invisible attack in caledon where you could not see the mobs or target them and did no damage at all. Not a great start the guys that designed this event must be heartbroken to see their work go down the tubes like this.
I don’t get it. You must have known that this would be the outcome for most (if not all) of the players.
You have a great game, the best mmorpg out there, and now you’re showing off the worst side of it in a trial weekend. It just seems like such an illogical thing to do.
puzzled
Well, even tho I had issues with not being able to participate as it was meant to be for the event, I cannot blame Arena Net for it. You guys really don’t have patience for anything, you just come here and spam how you are unsatisfied with everything they do.
It was bad, I am not saying it was not – but I’m sure that if they could have done it better, they would. On the other side, I entered the dungeon, finished the snowy part of it-and it was epic! Excellent job in designing that one , it is epic!!
Whole new patch seems excellent so far…
Thanks for this..
This is why wasn’t that annoyed about not being able to participate. The lag is unbearable, they seem to not want to reduce the limit of players in LA for these events so it doesn’t lag unbelievably. All those people around spamming particle effects just makes the FPS go right down the toilet.
NSP – [Zos]
While I did suffer through the same lag, culling issues with invisble players and monsters and all, I do NOT want events like this to be instanced. Even with the frustrating side effects my overall feeling towards the event this evening in LA is positive.
I do feel Anet did make some planning mistakes that might reduced the lag impact though:
Offer the free trial the days before the event, or after the event. If they want their free trial players to experience something unusual then make an event like the halloween portals that are all over and disperse the population. A lagfest like this doesnt generate box sales anyway and the extra free players also impact your paying customers.
Secondly, spread out the event. Even if thematically it is an attack on LA coming from the sea, have the monsters come in through different beach areas and offer some activities behind the lines to spread the players out.
I think thats both fairly simple and would have helped alot.
Events like this that assemble 100’s of players together in the same area are doomed to failure unless some kind of steps are taken to mitigate the traffic the servers have to handle. These problems have NOTHING to do with the performance of our computers … this is a server side traffic handling problem, either with the game engine itself or with the in/out bandwidth the ANet has leased.
For a VERY simplistic description, consider what happens when two of us are in the same area. Let’s say it takes a data packet from my computer to the server to tell the server what action I just took, and another packet from the other person to the server to tell the server what he/she just did. Then a data packet is needed to tell me what the other person did and a 4th packet from the server to tell them what I did. In this simplistic model (which by the way even ignores acknowledgement packets), the total number of data packets flying around is a quadratic function of the number of players in close enough proximity that they all need updates on what each is doing. Two players generates four packets, three players generates nine packets, 10 players generate 100 packets, and 200 players generate 40,000 packets.
The same thing happened in Rift, and in spite of similar comments from the devs that “we’re working on it”, the reality there was that Trion simply waited until enough people got fed up and stopped doing those events that the problem took care of itself … but not in a good way. I’m not expecting a significantly different result here.
What stumps me to no end is that ANet didn’t see this coming. I saw posts on these forums days ago from players predicting that server lag was going to be a huge issue with Lost Shores, and SOMEBODY at ANet should have been able to do the math that guaranteed it. Yet they went ahead and dropped this kitten on everyone anyway. Astounding …
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
I would also like to share my thoughts about the ‘’Lost Shores’’ event.
I was excited about it. In fact, it made me get into the game again after almost two-month period of stagnation due to the fact that i pre-ordered the game and enjoyed it for the first two weeks for what it was, but then basically did everything that i wanted to do and felt bored.
That’s why when i came back few days ago and saw that there’s this big patch coming up, with new content and whatnot, I felt pretty pumped up and it motivated me to play the crap out of my warrior to upgrade it to his fullest potential for the new content, having loads of fun along the way.
When they announced the one-time events I didn’t even think that something could go wrong, even when I’d seen that trials will fire off at that time as well. So I waited for the event, thinking about how awesome it will turn out to be. Everything went fine until the ending of the first cutscene. From that moment forward I was just baffled – people disappearing and reappearing again, lag which makes my skills fire off after 10 or so seconds (at the end before my dc it was more than two minutes). Died several times, good thing I had some repair canisters with me, so that wasn’t a problem. I missed the event though, because as I gathered 6 or so samples to take them to the scientist, the game crashed without even saying why straight to the desktop and when I re-entered, it placed me in an overflow, where the event had already been completed.
I said to myself, well, that’s too bad but hey, there are some other chain quests I could participate in.
The donation thing wasn’t very useful for me, as I currently have little to no money. I went to inspect the washed up things along the coast, but to no avail. Went to Caledon Forest, made the 1st part of the chain, then did the alchemy thing and hit a wall again when I found out that the NPC, responsible for the 3rd part was bugged. Then I received a letter telling me that a fight has begun in Caledon Forest, but when I arrived, it was…you guessed it, already over.
So basically right now I am really frustrated and don’t know whether I should continue playing if this continues to happen. GW2 is a great game and I would love to play it for a long time, given that there’s enough well-executed content. I upgraded my PC because of it. Hell, I even own GW1 and all its expansions and while I liked some things and disliked others, I was fond of the whole concept and gave the second one a chance, thinking that this time it will fully deliver. Sadly, so far this is not the case.
I want to underline that I’m in no case bashing, I actually feel bad for the developers when I think what they’re going through right now – receiving blow after blow in the form of posts from angry customers, as well as mocking attitude from the trial newcommers.
I trust that you will learn from this grievous mistake, Anet, and make the next events a bit more exciting and a lot more fluent. Please do not fail your playerbase, because many, me included, want you to succeed, but in order to succeed in something you must first plan accordingly.
Best wishes,
Arch Enemy (irony at it’s finest, don’t you think?)
(edited by Arch Enemy.6928)
My lag was insane, and I have my settings on lowest, but it did’nt affect the mobs that were beating on me. I’m hitting the sucker once every 15-20 seconds, he’s pounding me down like crazy and I’m desperately clicking on heal to no avail.
After I died the second time due to this and the knockdowns that were neverending and lasted a hour shy of forever, I ressed in LA and stayed there until it was over. BTW, that was the only time I’ve ever seen LA DESERTED!
Lag isn’t always a game issue. Could be system or ISP on your end as well…might be a combo of all 3.
had 68mbps downstream; my machine was absolutely fine and due to the widespread complaint I’m 99.9% certain that the fault was on Anet’s side.
I didn’t join the event, but is this why my fps hit rock bottom today even on low settings when it was perfect on “best appearance” last night?
I JUST started playing the game yesterday, and got really stoked to see that I purchased in time for this “one time event” and thought my husband and I could play tonight.
Am I reading correctly that we would have logged in at a SPECIFIC TIME today to do it? Everyone at once? Are you joking? Why not make it like the rest of these “world events” that trigger all day for a group of people entering an area like these starter ones I’m loving so much?
If the fps/input lag doesn’t straighten up my husband’s not going to be happy that I talked him out of $120 for this.
I couldn’t even see anyone in the lions Arch around the event. Just watched as my HPs went from 100% to dead instantly after about a minute….sorry but the engine is completely incapable of any sort of large scale gameplay. Really terrible.
NPCs are nowhere to be found. Mostly a big failure. If this wasn’t a one time event I could forgive it, since hey, just do it in a week…but nope. The big fissure in the ground looked cool, although I never did Kessex hills, so maybe it was always there=)
WOW, a MMO never specifically designed for large scale combat, handled large numbers of players infinitely better than this, from day 1. Its really bad that in 2012, it can’t be pulled off. Why even design anything large scale when you can’t see 1/2 the people in front of you? I don’t get it. Its as if ANET thought people wouldn’t give a %$^#&.
(edited by Josher.9612)
Those lags + invisible encounters/allies (+ FPS drops) within this big focused events are really disgusting! Whatever is necessary to stop that from happening in the future, you should do it… I can’t even imagine what will guys with a friend invite think after that experience. Why on earth should they want to play that game after that?
sorry guys and gals at anet, but this was just painful… hope the new zone and dungeon make up for it :/
i’ll be glad when the event is over, at least i’ll be able to play the game without dc’ing every few minutes
Next time plan world events when the servers are at their lowest population. Better to make 300 people happy than 4,000 people mad.
Or, fix the server load handle issues.
Well, the lag should’ve been expected as:
-Lions arch is the busiest place even when there is no big time event
-As the event is one time, (and even advertised to be a big change in the game to lure in the players that have already been bored to the world), so if you would want to participate, you’d have to be there at the exact right time
And most importantly:
-The TRIAL WEEKEND PEAKS THE NUMBER OF THE PLAYERS ON ANY SERVER.
Therefore, I might speculate if this really was a stress test rather than an event, as any imbecile would guess at the developement that this will be too much on the servers. No offence, but there is no reason to sympathise ANet (and as it is, the game itself is rather awesome,even as the one time events are not due bad decision making) for letting this laggy disapointment to happen, but rather to instruct them to think what impression would they wish to give those who are supposed to enjoy the trial, when a greatly advertised event turns in to unplayable mess.
I myself missed the start due to the lost connection two minutes prior the event, and therefore missed the beginning totally, and started to mildly accept the gameplay at half way trough when most of the people had probably already given up (as I almost did too after the 4th disconnect).
The One Time Event was the BIGGEST FAIL of Lost Shores by now. Where I was just terrible, skills with 15 sec delay… Chat with 10 sec delay… FPS gone from 40, to 10!
The Event Idea was awesome… But this event was not an sucess, sadly for me it was unplayble. =/
For Not Talking About the Invisible Monsters and Players, what maked things.. Interesting.
Asura thing.
I’m stuck at Lions Arch loading screen and have been for 15 minutes.