Guild Wars 2

Has anyone else noticed an increase in the amount of bandwidth the game is using in the past 6 weeks or so?

When I started playing in January I found that I was using 10-15 MB per hour playing, which matched most of the on-line posted results from various sources. I am forced to suffer satellite internet as my only choice for standard service, which is certainly tricky to use on any game. So I use my cell phone as a hot spot for GW2, and GW2 only. With a 5 GB AT&T cap, I didn’t get anywhere near the limit for the first four months, with a high of about 2.2 GB. Then for June, I hit 10GB. Yesterday was the first day of my new billing cycle. I played a lot — about 8 hours. Total bandwidth used – 900MB.

Obviously, I am not running any non-essential background programs while playing and my phone and PC are blocked from steaming and downloading things in the background. Those 900 MB yesterday are all GW2. I turned my phone on to play and off when I was done. But to go from 10MB to 100MB per hour seems like a monumental leap. I do remember some changes in the way the game rendered distant objects a while back, but still…

Has anyone else noticed an increase in bandwidth used? I am hoping there is another answer, or it will be the end of this game for me.

I just pay my bills, I don’t look at them :/

Wow, that’s.. huge. I have never seen GW2 take up that much bandwidth and other than patches I can’t think of anything that would cause it to do that. The most I’ve seen is roughly 60-70mb per hour during primetime zerg WvW. Are you absolutely sure there wasn’t anything else running accidentally? (I once lost a lot of bandwidth due to the BITS windows service :/) Have you used any of the new in-game overlays or similar event tracking software that people have been creating?

Personally I haven’t noticed a change. I monitor my usage as well and just went through my logs to check. I’m still at 15-25 per hour when I’m actively playing and hopping zones, and ~55mb in WvW.

Are you including patches in your figures? Because there are a lot of patches an that seems consistent with some of the more recent content.

No, the total does not include patches, which I download over the 5.0 Mpbs satellite. I immediately suspected a virus or root kit of some kind, but I’ve run three different Malware programs and they all come up empty. Time to dig in deeper and run some sort of individual program monitoring app.

Thanks for the numbers feedback. I’m actually relieved the problem is on my end. I am quite thankful GW is one of the less bandwidth hungry games out there.

Assuming your are using windows (like most players);
Did you check resmon (Windows+R → enter “resmon”)?

Using the network overview, I filtered GW2, went to Lion’s Arch Mystic Plaza waypoint and took a look at network activity:
~5kb/s average, which would be 18000kb/h or ~17.57mb per hour.
That would correlate almost perfectly with your 15mb per hour average.