Guild Wars 2

For 4 years, for us OCX and SEA folks we play on 250-350 ping and we’re okay and used to it. But recently for everyday over the past 2 weeks, in every timezone that all the SEA and OCX players i know try to play in, we get horrible lag spikes of up to 1k to 2k ping for minutes at a time which more often than not leads to a disconnect. It happens randomly but frequent enough to the point that it makes the game unplayable at times.

The lag I’m talking about here is not frame lag or skill lag, it’s ping lag. Everyone I know has either had to deal with playing at 500-700 ping or had it shoot up to 2000 ping and stays at 2000 ping for a few mins while everyone teleports around or walks into wall.

In short, we feel helpless about the situation, and as such, I plead with Anet to look into this lag. The lag is making it impossible for my friends and I to play together, and enjoy the game because of the frequent disconnects that comes along with it.

Nothing to do with anet, that is solely ISP’s issue, go and complain to your ISP.

I initially suspected it was an isp issue. but i don’t think you can just write it off and say that it’s an isp issue when people in 6 different countries around the same region experience the same problem at the same time over the same week.

It’s an ISP issue in the sense that network infrastructure is the only way to resolve it. Really, it’s just the nature of being far away from datacenters and having no localization to the region (I.E., you play on server hardware located across the world).

ANet can’t do anything about it without setting up infrastructure there (AKA millions of dollars in hardware, new offices, employees, etc.) or seeing big advances in network infrastructure in the region (AKA billions from ISP’s).

Obviously neither wants to spend the money on that buy-in; ISP’s are stingy and there’s major construction involved just to reduce some gaming latency, and ANet is already facing one of their worst financial earnings rates in years.

:( So my friends and i from 6 different countries are jumping an extra 200-300 ping from our normal 250-350 ping just solely based on ISP? that.. sucks :/

I don’t have such issue while I have guildies of same country reporting such issue. This has to do with the routing that your ISP has. There are more than one way to route to USA from SEA/OCX and of course, there isn’t unlimited ways to route there. There will be ISPs using the same route and that route is congested or something, is nothing new.

If you play games long enough, you should experience cases where you can’t connect to servers on normal connections during some major internet outrage but using VPS you can. The reason is because the normal route is down somewhere and VPS is using another route.

To put it technical, it is a backkittenouters issue, anet can’t do anything about it. Only your ISP can do something about it like pressuring their associates to fix those problematic routers or setup a new route for you (provided they have business agreements to use those).

I was operating under the assumption it had been diagnosed as region-wide based on multiple claims from different ISP’s like the OP said. I can’t speak for OCX’s routing because I don’t live there :P

I guess it depends on how far away you are from the others within the region. If all localized to one country or nearby area, it could be something greater than the ISP, particularly for those in Australia/NZ, since there are going to be even fewer available routes out of the country.

If you can find people who play from the same general area or portion of the country as you, you might be able to get a better answer, If they’re fine, it’s an issue with the ISP and routing, which you may be able to get solved by giving them a call. If they’re not, it’s probably either bigger infrastructure or firewalls/misc processing getting in the way. It’s not something ANet has the control over (realistically) in either case, though. You need to be a game company the size of Riot to be able to set up the infrastructure globally to reduce latency.

When I encounter such slowdowns I run a utility called ping plotter (which is free) .

99 times out of 100 it has nothing to do with ANET. It will identify the Router that causing that lag and if you do a search on that particular router you will have thousands of posts claiming that router leads to issues on their end no matter what they using the computer for.

I have used it to determine the issues caused by a router right at my local ISP and when I call them they indicate they aware of it and wrking on a fix. When it further down the line it can be much harder to get a fix for as sometimes even your ISP has little say in the matter.

Pingplotter allows to you monitor in real time and all you need to do is type in the destiantion of where you are trying to reach and it measures every hop along the way. When i was having my own issues it was always the same Router somewhere in Texas and the ping would go way up at certain times in the evenings.

You can do this through other means but this a lot easier and gives nice graphical feedback and does not require you to type in commands.

The last time few times when it went up so high in ping for any of us, it was caused by cuts to the underwater cables, haven’t seen any report about it recently. Oh well, anyway, that sucks then, i guess there’s nothing much i can do. Thanks for the feedback.

install WTFast or your preferred VPN, that way it will remove that lag spike during blob fights though it wont lower your ping significantly
(that lag spike is the packet loss)

culprit
“telia.net”

tracert guildwars2.com

….see for yourself

i was lag free even on 80+ vs 80+ without wtfast @ 230 ping, but suddenly a few months ago that 1k ping happened, and playing feels like your on a slideshow
outside blobs it comes back to 230ish but when the red names appear and the red circles pops, it a snapshotwars2 game

I sit on a comfy 250 ping 24/7 in Australia… so I dont see an issue