What kind of issue are you specifically having that could be related to lag?
Skill lag, rubber-banding, etc
Skill lag (no rubber banding for me yet)
What server are you on?
Blackgate
Has there ever been a time when you or a friend are experiencing lag, while others in your party are not?
Yes, and interestingly we were all playing from the same house on the same DSL connection behind the same router. We were grouped together, and playing together in a Borderland.
The one person with a hard disk experienced skill lag while the three of us with solid state disks did not.
Has there ever been a time where one party in a map is experiencing lag, while other parties in that same map are not?
We always play together, so don’t know.
Do you experience the lag at very specific times?
The more players (or more particle effects) the more likely. Just as in DAoC 10 years ago and Rift 2 years ago, 100 players can be standing (or slowly moving) waiting to start an encounter, without lag, but when combat begins performance collapses.
- For example, when 1 zerg is facing another zerg.
- If so, can you estimate how many players are in each zerg?
Note to the programmers: as a 35 year veteran of the tech industry who used to write and debug low level code in real time systems, and who as a customer/user tried to chase a similar problem in DAoC a decade ago (before the rules that customers couldn’t look at things like this), it appears to me that this issue is happening client side, because the client is prioritizing something (I would guess loading and unloading spell effect objects) (or possibly loading and unloading textures related to spell effects from the graphics card’s texture cache) ahead of simply draining the queue of location updates coming from the server. While this could be TCP packet drops happening near the server (ie some sort of policing by the router to the internet where the servers are hosted) I think it’s happening client side.
Can we please get some client side counters/instrumentation of events such as fetches of textures from disk, loads of textures to the graphics card, loads and unloads of objects to the client engine, per second? This would go a long ways toward tuning.
If there is a low level action in the client engine which is spin waiting while it goes to disk to get textures to load, that would explain the drastic performance improvement I saw going to solid state disk…and means that the game should perhaps load the entire library of particle effect and player armor textures to memory, so this low level action doesn’t ever block the main client thread waiting on disk
In the case of DAoC a decade ago, my conclusion was that each time a spell was cast, the game called a heavy weight call in the client engine to instantiate the spell effect as a separate object, executed the spell effect, and then called a heavy weight call to remove the spell effect object. This is in my opinion an architectural blunder, because it results in O(n^2) heavy weight calls to instantiate spell effects…on every client. Even if GW2’s limit of 5 affected players or mobs, not counting boss-casted spell effects which land on everyone, makes this O(n), it’s O(n) with a very large coefficient. Sorry for use of programmer jargon.
