Guild Wars 2

This is addressed to people who are playing spvp on a server not on the continent they live on. North Americans playing on European servers and vice versa, Australians or South Americans playing on North America, etc.

Is pvp playable, or is it too laggy? Can you still pull off clutch moves like dodging big damage skills etc?

If you used to play on your local server and then switched (eg you’re EU and used to play on EU, but then transferred to an NA server), was there a noticeable degradation in your ping and the game’s responsiveness after you transferred?

I know there are (or used to be) a few high-rated NA teams that played on EU servers, so I’m hoping someone will be able to help me! And if you’re in one of those teams, I’m curious: what made your guilds decide to join an EU server?

Thanks in advance!

servers are in Texas so u can play on europe doesnt matter

i play guild wars 2 from malaysia, south east asia and for most times sPvP is very playable for me without much problems.

game breaking lag spikes very rarely occurs.

the ping ranges from 300ms – 500ms and for me that is good enough to play guild wars 2.

Is pvp playable, or is it too laggy?
yes, pvp is playable.
no, it is not too laggy.

Can you still pull off clutch moves like dodging big damage skills etc?
not sure as my dodges are kinda random dodges.
i lack the required level of hand eye coordination skills for accurate dodges.

i play sPvP on NA servers.

i play casually though.

lag is barely noticable

dodging is usually not an issue…. dodging instant spells like steal (even if you know it is comming) is troublesome though

sometimes it does happens that you actually dodge something and it shows you dodged it but you still get affected by attack

I bought this game while I was in the US and then moved to India. Lag is pretty bad. Things like skill activation times, weapon swap times etc. take a lot longer than what you are used to. You have to be extremely sharp and know what attacks are about to come your way if you have any chance of dodging them. Example – Eviscerate was suuuper easy to dodge back then, even if I stopped paying attention to what weapon set my foe was in, the leap made me instinctively hit dodge. Now, it’s extremely hard to dodge it as I have to basically dodge right when they are about to cast it, so it doesn’t hit me mid-dodge roll (yes, that kitten happens a lot). Even trebuchet shots, the dodges have to come way early than when the trebuchet hits you, or you’re kittened.

Rome.3192:

I bought this game while I was in the US and then moved to India. Lag is pretty bad. Things like skill activation times, weapon swap times etc. take a lot longer than what you are used to. You have to be extremely sharp and know what attacks are about to come your way if you have any chance of dodging them. Example – Eviscerate was suuuper easy to dodge back then, even if I stopped paying attention to what weapon set my foe was in, the leap made me instinctively hit dodge. Now, it’s extremely hard to dodge it as I have to basically dodge right when they are about to cast it, so it doesn’t hit me mid-dodge roll (yes, that kitten happens a lot). Even trebuchet shots, the dodges have to come way early than when the trebuchet hits you, or you’re kittened.

He said he plays on EU though. I would imagine that lag from India is bad since it is really far away.

I live in EU and I play on NA server. I have no lag.

Depends on your connection. From the UK I can play EU and NA no problem but both can have random spikes and ping over 100. If I play from Central EU I get around 20-60 ms ping on EU and 600+ on NA. I’m sure this is also ISP and location specific and VPNs can help.

^this.

I used to play on 70mb, had no problem NA for the first year.

Now I go back there on ~9mb, and there is a slight bit of latency. It’s manageable though, and your connection is probably much faster. NA players I know that have swapped recently haven’t noticed any difference.

If you’re making the swap to EU though, PM Perdix.8641 your details.

A guild is being started specifically for competitive NA players jumping ship.

I have two accounts: T2 NA and T9 EU so my lag could be affected by the server size as well.

I don’t lag on the EU server (playing from UK).

My NA account is on Sea of Sorrows and most of the time I have a very slight delay, I notice this especially when using keep/tower portals or shortbow teleport or with some thief combos – they don’t connect. On some days or on reset nights it gets a bit laggier and I just don’t play my thief cos of this.

Haven’t noticed the lag with other classes (mesmer/guard), except the keep portal lag.

Jayden Ennok.3687:

I have two accounts: T2 NA and T9 EU so my lag could be affected by the server size as well.

I don’t lag on the EU server (playing from UK).

My NA account is on Sea of Sorrows and most of the time I have a very slight delay, I notice this especially when using keep/tower portals or shortbow teleport or with some thief combos – they don’t connect. On some days or on reset nights it gets a bit laggier and I just don’t play my thief cos of this.

Haven’t noticed the lag with other classes (mesmer/guard), except the keep portal lag.

Erm this is PvP subforum. WvW and PvP are hosted on different servers and population has nothing to do with latency in PvP.

Paragon.5479:

servers are in Texas so u can play on europe doesnt matter

Oh, I didn’t know this! So in theory an NA player should have the same ping whether he’s play on EU or NA servers? For some reason I thought they had local servers in the EU (Paris or someplace, I remember reading somewhere…)

If what you say is true though, that’s good news for the pvp community: it means that, some time down the line, they could decide to make pvp global, like it was in GW1, and it wouldn’t seriously affect anyone’s ping! That’d be a nice shot in the arm for the community – much bigger player pool, leading to shorter queues and fewer instances of top-100s being matched against rank 1 newbies!
Sadly it’d probably need a lot of backend changes and I understand there’s only 1 network programmer working on pvp so it would probably take 6-12 months even if they did agree to do it…

DanyK.3842:

Depends on your connection. From the UK I can play EU and NA no problem but both can have random spikes and ping over 100. If I play from Central EU I get around 20-60 ms ping on EU and 600+ on NA. I’m sure this is also ISP and location specific and VPNs can help.

Yeah that IS pretty weird! You reckon it’s just a matter of your ISP on the continent having a worse transatlantic pipe than your ISP in the UK? If it weren’t for what Paragon said above I’d have just guessed the EU servers are located somewhere in Europe, which would explain it…

Phaeton.9582:

If you’re making the swap to EU though, PM Perdix.8641 your details.

A guild is being started specifically for competitive NA players jumping ship.

Thanks, but I was actually thinking of going the other way – I live in the same city as you actually! And I wasn’t thinking of switching for competitive reasons, but simply because most of my gaming time is really late at night and the EU pvp scene is pretty dead around then.
Plus I might be competitive in my attitude but I’m not competitive in my results… :p

If you don’t mind me asking, how come you switched to NA? Is the population better or is that just where your guildies are?

Swapped to NA at launch, following ‘the guild’.

Then just did spvp, stayed there, got lag, had an eu account anyway so just have turned it into my main.. yadda yadda

NA scene compared to EU is like night and day though, cant say I’d recommend swapping IMO

Oh and that’s awesome you’re living in Leeds haha

NA is LESS populated??? I thought EU was bad! :o

It varies wildly depending on what interchanges you get routed through on your way to the server.
If you go through poopy interchanges, you can expect a bunch of lag and packet loss.
You can run into desync issues alot with high ping as well, since the netcode isnt exactly what I’d call great.

I play on US from Australia, normally connecting to a server around Texas Id be expecting around 300, to 400 ping.
In gw1 you can actually check ping and I range from 300 to 3k, which isnt that bad given how the game worked, I’d say I float around the same area, albiet with worse spikes with gw2.

In pve its no big deal, but in spvp you can go from 100% to 0% without the client even reporting damage to you.
So it can range from ‘a mild annoyance’ to ‘completely unplayable’.

Nah that’s not really fair dude, ANet’s netcode is probably the most efficient in the industry! You probably just had a bad connection. One of our monks in GW1 played from Australia and he was a god with an Infuse! (Which is the twitchiest monk build you can play for anyone not familiar with GW1, cause you’ve got to land that infuse during the enemy’s spike to save someone, you can’t precast stuff on who you think is going to get focussed like a prot monk)

Anywya, my ping in the UK was between 50-200 in gw1, much better than any other MMO I’ve played!

As a european:
Playing on NA gives me 150-200ms ping → unplayable
Playing on EU gives me 20-50ms ping → barely playable