Guild Wars 2

Since the last patch, there have been huge lag spikes reported by lots of players on Yak’s Bend’s Southsun map. At times, it gets so bad that the client disconnects from the game. Like most others, I thought it was just extra load caused by all the extra players running the events.

However, today I got sent to an overflow map. The map was still packed to rafters with players, but there were absolutely no lag spikes (fps drop during the queen fight, sure, but no lag spike, no disconnect). It was great. I happily blew up fishies for an hour without any problems. I hoped that maybe ANet had fixed the problem.

So I go back to Southsun after reset. I’m not in overflow, and it’s exactly as bad as it was before. After just five minutes, I got disconnected. I log back in in time to get credit for the queen kill but again it’s laggy and messed up. I tried logging my grenade fisherman in, but no dice. Just can’t play.

Oh, one thing that does work out in the players advantage. When the lag spike hits, if it’s not long enough to cause a disconnect, the server seems to fire off all your grenade attacks that should have happened all at once. This makes for awesome explosions and pretty much wipes out everything you were fighting. The mobs’ attacks, however, all stop. So what happens is you attack a bunch of stuff, lag spike hits, it ‘saves’ up all your attacks, lag spike ends, all your saved attacks proc at the same time wiping out the mobs, and none of the mobs ever get to have attacked you. If there was any way to predict the spikes, this could be a blatant exploit. Since the spikes seem random, it’s just luck if it works out in your advantage.