The ONLY time I experience skill lag is when 2 huge blobs/zergs/groups are in the vicinity i.e. 50-60+ on each side. Perhaps it is Anet’s way of saying it – Don’t Blob
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Gunnar’s Hold www.gunnarshold.eu
Everyone keeps saying this is the same old, same old. While yes we have all seen examples of lag, something has changed.
I personally noticed this prior to even the leagues coming out. I feel like they changed something. The main difference between then and now is that the lag isn’t just bound to being near the zerg.
Before.. Zerg vs Zerg vs Zerg, skill lag, generally unplayable for those nearby – people far away experienced the lag, but to a much lesser degree.
Now.. Zerg vs Zerg vs Zerg the entire map lags everywhere. The nearby folks are lagging the same, but you can be completely away from the fighting and have similar skill lag.
I guess from the perspective of those who commonly zerg, there is almost no difference – but for me, someone who roams, the difference is dramatic.
I remember that at the beginning of the game there were no lags. It all started with the introduction of fractals. First appeared culling. Along with it – lags. At first everyone thought that lags because of culling. Then A-net removed the culling, lags does not gone. They made a new options. Nothing has changed.
Ok. Now, what is the most logical to assume – A-net just allocated significant part capacities from WvW to fractals.
Hands down, after over a year in live play, I have no idea how a company like this can allow this to go on for so long.
This is flat out unplayable. For over 5 minutes I had a fight in a 3v3 and we spent the entire 5 minutes singing 1’s from out keyboard cause that is all it allows. On top of that the skill lag is NOT effecting both parties at the same time. Repeatedly I have ran into groups that use entire combos flawlessly while I, and my other guildies, are forced to resort to spamming 1s or SITTING there for 15 seconds just to start a heal.
Hands down this is unplayable in any way, shape, or form. And if you all complain about how it only effects some of you, or to get a better computer?!?! Remember it is all about location, location, location. You are closer to a server access point or closer to a server hub—so please just shut the hell up and move along.
For the rest of us that are not this lucky… and to those that say adapt…. it is not an issue of map location either. The ENTIRE map is like this. It is physically unplayable.
Technically it would be no problem to have 100K of players on a map not showing a single noticeable skill lag (not talking lag in rendering though). It could be as smooth as when you are alone on a map all the time.
Eve Online probably has one of the finest pieces of server coding there is, and even they had to resort to a weird variant of Pythonand time dilation in order to pull off 60K . While 60K is a very different number to the 200 we see in-game do not forget that GW2 is a very different beast to the MMOs that came before it (and that the nature of Eve allows the servers to hand off players to each other in the much the same way that cellphone towers do).
I challenge you to write an actual MMO server. While I am sure you have experience in distributed systems (the only other area outside of MMOs that is genuinely massively parallel is real time trading, so I’ll assume you have experience in that field) games blow absolutely everything out of proportion. Even CPU cache hits/branch mispredictions become important when it comes to games – the rest of the development community can blissfully ignore issues like that for the entire careers and never have a problem.
Auroraglade Epistemic.8013: Guys this is bullkitten a sentient plant creature is hitting these
wooden doors with fireballs and it’s working.
TBH I don’t think anything has changed on their end. Its just the constant stress the servers are under. Even in Tier 1 there were less than capacity times like EU and Oceanic, but now its under pressure 24/7 with no break.
Lag all over the map? Seen this at least since I am playing. Just depends on how many people are actually on the map doing stuff thas causes more lag. Large zerg comes to map, instant lag when they land or starting to fight.
But I know what you mean. I had it yesterday evening. It was a skill lag I never experienced before. I was capping Spledan in a 1vs2 figth when a 100 man fight broke loose in SM. It was very strange. Did not come up again so far an never before in this way.
But it is just another symptom of an underlying root cause. So move on, nothing new to see.
Best case: they are currently trying out certain things with the live population to get live metrics on it and test some adjustments and they did not work out yet. Read work in progress.
Worst case: they screwed up somewhere else making the problem even worse. Read: business as usual.
Yesterday (after last major update) i was actually experiencing skill lag for the first time.
Even dc ing and reconnection issues.Maybe these new features they updated are too server intense to processes resulting skill lag.
Now when facing a Zerg i can spam any skill button that i want and nothing happens.
This really ruins the gameplay.
This is not just with zergs though if you would all listen to what is being said. This is flat out all of the map. It happens in small 1v1 or 2v2 fights too. The game physically cannot be played as is. Period.
I spent over 30 seconds running and TRYING to use a heal skill. Any of them. Nothing works. Ever.
And don’t say go play PvE. The entire reason I play this is WvW. On top of that I have wasted over 10 hours of my Birthday Buff for only a rough 1.5 hours of actual WvW time.
This is not just with zergs though if you would all listen to what is being said. This is flat out all of the map. It happens in small 1v1 or 2v2 fights too. The game physically cannot be played as is. Period.
.
Agreed, don’t need to have players around.
Sometimes I feel skill lag soon as I zone in. Other day I was escorting a dolyak and even they were lagging with the 2 second freezes inbetween their slow walks to their destination.
Yea. I just flipped a camp. The camp vets and guard died…. but they stood standing. For about 20 seconds. I couldn’t take the camp cause their “zombie state” corpses where there. Then they disappeared after 5 seconds… everything speed up for a sec… and BAM, 2 dolyaks, a vet, and a guard spawned full health. Lol.
Well i know they are working on it, but these problems are already more then a year old, and it makes me wonder if the tech department is capable enough to adress these problems..
I mean, if i had a job there and i am assigned in a team that need to deal with this game breaking problem and after a year there is still no noticeable progress i can tell you, i will be fired lol. ( not that i want that for you ppl )
So when will we see noticeable progress? 2014? 2015?
Setting up many achievements in wvw and not expecting more people to join is kinda weird from Anet. It should have been expected, unless they did and do not care. :/ But I doubt that, the amount of “wvw” players is pretty awesome now.
I can live with 1 day lag or a hour a day, but now its just all week, every hour in every borderlands. Even 30v30 causes the whole map to lag.
Can’t roam, can’t raid, pve is boring. Game is kittened.
GG on this patch, only kitten came with it AGAIN…
Had to laugh last night in a Gold game match, we were tying to “escort” Dolyak into our Garrison. We were standing ON the vision of the Dolyak moving trying to speed buff it (nothing worked), but another guy across the realm kept telling us where the ACTUAL Dolyak was on the map, because its pin was further up the road than the actual “ghost” image of it we were seeing and trying to buff.
The ONLY time I experience skill lag is when 2 huge blobs/zergs/groups are in the vicinity i.e. 50-60+ on each side. Perhaps it is Anet’s way of saying it – Don’t Blob
It happened to us while roaming with 5 people in the afternoon with nothing going on on the map….
I challenge you to write an actual MMO server. While I am sure you have experience in distributed systems (the only other area outside of MMOs that is genuinely massively parallel is real time trading, so I’ll assume you have experience in that field) games blow absolutely everything out of proportion. Even CPU cache hits/branch mispredictions become important when it comes to games – the rest of the development community can blissfully ignore issues like that for the entire careers and never have a problem.
Yup, have a background in high frequency arbitrage trading. There you usally deal with a median latency in microseconds. An order must be processed within 1ms, that’s the upper limit. Left when 100 microseconds was the standard a couple of years ago.
It is a different animal for sure. And you are right, you can get away with sloppy code in most applications.
But everything that tries to do stuff in real-time needs to be carefully designed and to be implemented with thought put into it and the ability to scale in the future as you want to protect your development investment. Can be done with different methods.
And to be frank, I do not agree that “games blow absolutely everything out of proportions”. There is a lot of more critical stuff out there in the world. But it is right compared to let’s say an timesheet application games are a killer.
Writing an MMO engine? Would be an interesting project. But then you have something lying around that can process stuff very fast and can’t do much with it. You can’t even sell it as there is no market for it.
This is new behavior since friday patch. It isnt just skill lag. Positions are completely fubar. As soon as i get anywhere near a large group, where i am and where everyone else is becomes completely confused. I often end up dead at the bottom of a cliff i was nowhere near. I can deal with some skill lag, but this is completely unplayable.
Reddit post from intigo that has a very good analysis of some of the issues that are happening and why the population growth at the time was bad for wvw. Hadn’t seen it posted so I thought I would go ahead.
Summary for the lazy: the current issues with wvw are nothing new, but they are highlighted by the increase in population across all servers. They should postpone leagues until these issues have been dealt with so players (both old and new) can have a much better experience. At the moment, more players for wvw is a bad thing because of the issues at hand.
I can live with 1 day lag or a hour a day, but now its just all week, every hour in every borderlands. Even 30v30 causes the whole map to lag.
Can’t roam, can’t raid, pve is boring. Game is kittened.
GG on this patch, only kitten came with it AGAIN…
+1
Everything is so laggy, i can’t barely 1 vs 1, i can’t barely switch between my attunements, i can’t barely do something in WvW …
Do something Anet
80 Human Elementalist – Dagger/Focus
Last fair fight before Orbageddon was against Itkoviana
Reddit post from intigo that has a very good analysis of some of the issues that are happening and why the population growth at the time was bad for wvw. Hadn’t seen it posted so I thought I would go ahead.
Summary for the lazy: the current issues with wvw are nothing new, but they are highlighted by the increase in population across all servers. They should postpone leagues until these issues have been dealt with so players (both old and new) can have a much better experience. At the moment, more players for wvw is a bad thing because of the issues at hand.
I quite frequently play on fully queued maps, the skill lag as we all call it has been a known issue and prior to friday was my biggest complaint. Since friday patch the behavior is different. They have introduced a bug with position vectors imo.
I can live with 1 day lag or a hour a day, but now its just all week, every hour in every borderlands. Even 30v30 causes the whole map to lag.
Can’t roam, can’t raid, pve is boring. Game is kittened.
GG on this patch, only kitten came with it AGAIN…
+1
Everything is so laggy, i can’t barely 1 vs 1, i can’t barely switch between my attunements, i can’t barely do something in WvW …
Do something Anet
Yeah, this has just been a huge blunder. I try to constrain hyperbole about this stuff because it’s just a game, and devs are people who put in a lot of work on making it fun. But whoever was involved in making the decision to entice even more users to play WvW when servers were crushed on reset nights anyway needs to have their hand slapped or worse.
WvW is unplayable for me. Not literally unplayable, but it is not fun to play. The lag is out of control. I was trying to defend a yak, for example, and couldn’t fire off any skills against just a single player. This was near garrison. The zergs were at south camp/lake/briar.
Either call off the season, fix this immediately (i.e. don’t wait for the next scheduled release) by whatever means necessary, or people like me who play a few times a week and buy gems twice a month won’t be logging back in because there’s nothing fun to do.
Reddit post from intigo that has a very good analysis of some of the issues that are happening and why the population growth at the time was bad for wvw. Hadn’t seen it posted so I thought I would go ahead.
Summary for the lazy: the current issues with wvw are nothing new, but they are highlighted by the increase in population across all servers. They should postpone leagues until these issues have been dealt with so players (both old and new) can have a much better experience. At the moment, more players for wvw is a bad thing because of the issues at hand.
I quite frequently play on fully queued maps, the skill lag as we all call it has been a known issue and prior to friday was my biggest complaint. Since friday patch the behavior is different. They have introduced a bug with position vectors imo.
Same, I play on a T1 server and have for some time now. The issues are similar because they come from the underlying server infrastructure. Rubberbanding was always an issue, but never to this extent. I don’t know whether the issue is a bug with position vectors, but all I know is that it started happening all the time after leagues started.
Yeah, this has just been a huge blunder. I try to constrain hyperbole about this stuff because it’s just a game, and devs are people who put in a lot of work on making it fun. But whoever was involved in making the decision to entice even more users to play WvW when servers were crushed on reset nights anyway needs to have their hand slapped or worse.
rubber banding and skill laaagggg…. cost of armour repairs should be withdrawn.
Just 2 of us running to supply no zerg in sight i have to watch the guy in front of me rubber band all over the place, my skills don’t work, hmmm and the nail in the coffin long queues.
I can live with 1 day lag or a hour a day, but now its just all week, every hour in every borderlands. Even 30v30 causes the whole map to lag.
Can’t roam, can’t raid, pve is boring. Game is kittened.
GG on this patch, only kitten came with it AGAIN…
+1
Everything is so laggy, i can’t barely 1 vs 1, i can’t barely switch between my attunements, i can’t barely do something in WvW …
Do something Anet
Yeah, this has just been a huge blunder. I try to constrain hyperbole about this stuff because it’s just a game, and devs are people who put in a lot of work on making it fun. But whoever was involved in making the decision to entice even more users to play WvW when servers were crushed on reset nights anyway needs to have their hand slapped or worse.
WvW is unplayable for me. Not literally unplayable, but it is not fun to play. The lag is out of control. I was trying to defend a yak, for example, and couldn’t fire off any skills against just a single player. This was near garrison. The zergs were at south camp/lake/briar.
Either call off the season, fix this immediately (i.e. don’t wait for the next scheduled release) by whatever means necessary, or people like me who play a few times a week and buy gems twice a month won’t be logging back in because there’s nothing fun to do.
Some people are already trying to find a game to play while the issues get fixed, and if they don’t get fixed they’re already started on a new game.
Some people are already trying to find a game to play while the issues get fixed, and if they don’t get fixed they’re already started on a new game.
This exact same thing happened to Warhammer around launch, server lag causing issues with RvR and Scenarios. A lot of people went to another game to wait until it was fixed along with outlandish balance issues.. most never came back and the problem itself was only mitigated some what.
Right now is pretty critical if you follow the issues/history with other MMOs out there most never recover from such things especially when other alternatives are close at hand. Player psychology comes into major play here things like shiney new toys/expansions etc.. isn’t going to be enough to bring people back in as most of the predecessors have tried this tactic as companies end up developing a stigma from the hearsay and half truths from people that left. If there even ends up being any kind of mass exodus of any kind happens, however things kind of hit critical mass with all of this.
The best chance at retention for people affected by the issues is for them to explain themselves “completely” about why it wasn’t high priority and why they have waited so long be it issues with finances, personnel, or nc soft etc.. whatever it may be and be specific about it.
I haven’t played in over a month but when i was last in WvW it doesn’t matter if the zerg is around you or not, There can be a 3 way fight at Mendons and you will feel the lag down at Klovan.
It got progressively worse and will continue to get worse, Will they ever fix it? I very much doubt it
For people that have played other zerg type PvP games, they know there will be lag. DAoC and WAR both had slideshow lag (much worse than this) a lag in which you really don’t know what you are doing. Seriously, the other games I have played during big fights, I would go slideshow and die not knowing how I died! A keep defense battle and you lag spike and end up outside dead…. Targeting enemies was a skill! Not cool! I know, no lag is the best lag. This type of lag I can deal with. Atleast you can move around and get out of harms way. Anet does have to realize if a similar WvW/RvR game comes and is cleaner, players will move to it. So they have to figure out what is going on and fix it to keep us.
Currently the lag including skill lag is horrible compared to last week. It was nothing like this. If a battle occurs somewhere on the map, the whole map starts lagging and people start warping or experience other kind of stuttering. If you ask me, the WvW update is kind of a disaster.
Personally i had 2 times, my skillbar locked up where i couldn’t use my skills 1 to 5, even when there was no lag. The skills no longer seemed to work, while 6 to my elite skill and the F1 – F4 worked. This happened after a lag battle.
Only quitting the game and launching seemed to work, but we all know what happens after that when you try to get back in WvW (que’s)
Also multiply crashes occur during WvW, which seems tied to graphics. I used be able to play WvW with most things on high, now i put all settings on best performance to make sure i dont crash and kinda seem to work.
In it’s current state it is unplayabe, this is beyond anything I have ever experienced in any game. Even in the outside plain open field the lag is unbearable. It’s so bad that your mouse is gone, targeting does not work, anything besides skill 1 does not work.
It is terrible.
fix it fix it fix it!!!!! fix the kitten ed skill lag issues already, its been a freakin year! sick of it, huge battle in sm in wvw just lost cause of f’ing skill lag, its the same issue over and over… FIX IT!.
And still nothing from anet on this. Even if you don’t have a solution at the moment, knowing that you are working on it, looking into it, aware of it make the players feel better because they feel they are being heard/understood.
Funnily enough though, I don’t think they are aware of the issue since last night there was someone with an anet tag in LA saying he had a blast in wvw when he got in.
Yea, we had an ANet tag in our loss of Hills last night. We gained the point lead and the opposing forces all turned on us. Predictably. We knew this was coming so we had sieged the living kitten out of the Hills and our home tower. Problem was, none of the siege would reliably fire. Kinda hard to hold of the JQ and SoR map zergs with seige that wont fire and skills that dont work. We figured out a little work around. Omega golems seemed to work ok. Their 1 skill would fire and do damage respectfully from the top of the ramparts down onto the zerg.
Lag is horrible. Its killed every other large scale PvP game I’ve ever played. I really hope ANet can fix it. If they don’t a massive portion of the population will leave for the next game that comes out that has large scale PvP….
Here’s to hoping ANet gets this one right…for now I’ll wait till the PvX’rs get thier chevos then Ill start spending money agian.
Since no one liked my seperate thread I’ll just post it here.
What if everyone turned off autoattack?
Are these constantly spamming autoattacks clogging up the server? Maybe Anet should turn off autoattack in WvW and see if that helps.
Also, when I experience skill lag, I’ve noticed that if I just hit a skill button once, it will go off with a slight delay. At first I was impatient and just kept hitting it – then it seemed to never go off.
So everyone turn off your autoattack and just hit a skill button once.
Having an out-of-body experience in WvW isn’t so unusual these days… but I actually found yesterday my bug of the week in LA: logged in, my chara was invisible to me and I couldn’t move (like I know it from WvW), after a few minutes, my chara jumped/ ported to the canal south from mystic forge and was stuck in the wall xD
Even normal PvE has become a challenge to me (for maybe 3 or 4 days now) comparable to WvW. Had a guild mission with my guildies (and we aren’t that many, even 1 zerg in EBG has larger numbers) and skilllaggs, I didn’t know before – I was literally dying to an ascalonian soldier, because I couldn’t move or defend myself xD I now always think a zerg is passing by.
The skill lag in WvW is not Anet’s fault. It is a core latency problem in distributed system and latency between network nodes and the client/server side.
Be glad that there is a game that allows 300 people on one map from 2-3 different continents all a the same time. Even a normal multiplayer game with 16 players on the map has lag on a 100Mbits network and dedicated servers.
So try to enjoy the game because the skill lag on a full queued map is not going to be fixed and it out of any software developer hands.
How come Warhammer in its late state did not lagg in 200+ battles? It also had better combatlogs, more skills, more cooldowns, higher aoe caps and is from 2008.
Thief | Zumy [Buka]
Legendary counter: Twilight, Bolt, Incinerator, Incinerator Nr. 2, Meteorlogicus, The Dreamer
The skill lag in WvW is not Anet’s fault. It is a core latency problem in distributed system and latency between network nodes and the client/server side.
Be glad that there is a game that allows 300 people on one map from 2-3 different continents all a the same time. Even a normal multiplayer game with 16 players on the map has lag on a 100Mbits network and dedicated servers.
So try to enjoy the game because the skill lag on a full queued map is not going to be fixed and it out of any software developer.
Except for the fact ANET has already taken the blame and admitted it is their fault…
I personally look for them to reduce the Map Caps in an effort to reduce the skill lag issues, likely after the new “overflow” maps go live.
The skill lag in WvW is not Anet’s fault. It is a core latency problem in distributed system and latency between network nodes and the client/server side.
Be glad that there is a game that allows 300 people on one map from 2-3 different continents all a the same time. Even a normal multiplayer game with 16 players on the map has lag on a 100Mbits network and dedicated servers.
So try to enjoy the game because the skill lag on a full queued map is not going to be fixed and it out of any software developer hands.
Apparently you don’t understand skill lag or you would know, it has nothing to do with coordinating where people are or distributed networks and latency, it is purely a CPU processing/memory issue. When a lot of people get together and start to try to use a number of abilities at the same time….there are a lot of calculations that get run, (Position coordinates for each player, who gets hit by what, who dodged what etc.) Along with all the damage calculations….hard damage, condition damage….etc. When that happens, it causes a strain on processing power of the server…at a certain point the server can no longer register new abilities because it’s overloaded….thus everyone who is connected that box/server (aka people on the map) cannot use skill abilities until the resources are freed up…nothing to do with people in different countries etc.
Edit: While yes, getting the coordinates from the client and relaying it to the server does take a minuscule amount of time..it is not the bottle neck that ends up causing the skill lag
Anet has already said skill lag (not lag itself) is from the server processors hitting the calculations limits, so again how is it not a failing of the system run by Anet?
Apparently you don’t understand skill lag or you would know, it has nothing to do with coordinating where people are or distributed networks and latency, it is purely a CPU processing/memory issue. When a lot of people get together and start to try to use a number of abilities at the same time….there are a lot of calculations that get run, (Position coordinates for each player, who gets hit by what, who dodged what etc.) Along with all the damage calculations….hard damage, condition damage….etc. When that happens, it causes a strain on processing power of the server…at a certain point the server can no longer register new abilities because it’s overloaded….thus everyone who is connected that box/server (aka people on the map) cannot use skill abilities until the resources are freed up…nothing to do with people in different countries etc.
Edit: While yes, getting the coordinates from the client and relaying it to the server does take a minuscule amount of time..it is not the bottle neck that ends up causing the skill lag
What you are saying actually makes sense. I hope that I am wrong and this can be fixed in the future.
