Guild Wars 2

Does anyone else ever experience this issue where for a few days after a new patch comes out, you have horrendous skill lag. I have had this issue pretty much since launch and a rough guess would be that I have experienced it about 30-40 times.

I only ever play WvW in GW2 and in general I can have zerg fights without skill lag. I do get lag during 3-way SM fights, but I think that is normal. My server is EU Silver League and under normal conditions my game experience is fine, even if two full zergs clash. The problem only ever arise when the game gets patched and lasts for 2-3 days after the last of the small patches have been done. During this time, I have skill lag in excess of 20 seconds even during smaller fights. I once tested my skill lag by doing an empower and then running from Red EB Spawn to Keep and I only received my might and the animation just in front of the portal.

A few things about my setup:
- My PC is pretty decent and I don’t experience any lag or issues in any other games I play.
- I do have more than usual latency in GW2 due to being located in South Africa, but my game experience is fine except for after the patches.
- EU Server
- Run TS, but no other programs that might take resources while playing.
- The issue exists even if I am not where the fights are happening.

Any help would be appreciated.

Lag after patches? Yes. Horrendous like you’re experiencing? No.

Appears to me that there’s some aspect of the server which has to get tuned into correctness after each patch, rather than being correct by construction as it is in most other games.

As a technologist, I’d speculate that the network is imposing traffic shaping and policing on the traffic coming out of each zone instance (each Virtual Machine on each server), and that under load the shaper is holding back packets from server to client (causing rubber banding and catch-up) and the policer is dropping packets (which is the likely cause of the horrendous lag).

Meaning you likely can’t fix it. Good luck.

Thanks for the response. I just needed to confirm that there is in fact increased lag after the patches. I don’t always experience it as bad as I described, since I tested it one day when it was very bad, but it always makes the game unplayable. I think that skill lag gets exponentially worse if you are further away from their servers, which in my case is a lot.

This also confirms that I probably can’t do anything about it, I’ll just have to accept that I can’t play the game if a patch happened. ANET’s inability to address this issue that has been there since launch does not inspire a lot of confidence in them.

There is always a little excess lag after a patch, but most of my guildies that usually have no lag are now getting lag and crashes. It’s unlikely Anet will read this on the weekend, and Chinese release means all of our problems are irrelevant until that’s up and running (they’ve essentially said so).

last few days iv been getting real bad lag but only when im fighting the lag feels like a stone mist 3 way yet im just 1v1 then i just get disconnected and have to restart

my net is fine everything else works just seems to be gw2 around the same time 6pm+ aus timezone anyone else been getting this when in combat since the patch

Just an update. The skill lag has not subsided as I have hoped. It would appear that it is not just the patch that was causing it. The lag is now as bad as it ever was. Last night in WvW, I had 20+sec skill lag and rubber-banded in the same spot for 4mins straight before I DC’ed. Afterwards I was running around the PVE map and everything was working 100%…no skill lag. I also checked my internet speed online and it was as good as it has ever been.

My question to ANET is this: I was able to play the game fine in big battles before with the same PC and internet connection, but now it lags way past the point of playability. What changed?