Guild Wars 2

A bunch of anecdotal threads complaining about increases in the occurrence of skill lag do not help ANET very much in their isolation and correction of the problem. Plenty of us theorize that the main reason we are seeing increases in skill lag have to do with behind the scenes increases in WvW map population caps but ANET does not share those numbers with us so it is a lot speculation without more data.

I would love to hear from commanders on what they estimate is their maximum size of followers has been these last couple months and if they have noticed any changes in that number more recently. It is easy for me as a small scale roamer to say the maps feel a lot more full lately but that isn’t something that is easily measurable.

I’d also like to get more specifics from folks on the kinds of situations they were involved in when being hit by crippling skill lag and how long it took for it to clear up for them along with maybe what else was going on across the map that they were aware of. It would also be interesting to know what server you play on, what class you were playing and which skills were most effected at the time (besides skill 6, since everyones heal has always suffered the worse skill lag for compounded data packet complication issues). We all know that pc specs and settings do not really have an impact on the occurrence of skill lag but you can add that information if you like.

I generally do not play in situations where I would regularly notice skill lag since I try to avoid EB for its infernal hell of a lagger SM and do mostly small scale skirmishing with guildies. I keep my WvW Character Limit on High and Quality on Low for maximum sight distance. My pc is one of gamer average performance, more than adequate for GW2 but friends with top of the line hardware experience similar issues. We’ve all noticed an increase in the performance of lagdar and our ability to feel when a zerg is approaching and have used it to escape or avoid a few wipes lately so that is a bonus. Skill lag can at times make the game un-enjoyable and those instances seem to be increasing.

At last reset while playing my warrior we got bogged down in a three-way lords room invasion of Bay on SoR’s borderland map. That was probably some of the worse skill lag I have experienced to date. There were times when nothing would fire, not even the auto attack but you could run all around the place, living much longer than you should since no one could attack you either. Every now and again some action you tried to perform a few minutes before would go off or you would warp a bit. The battle lasted much longer than it should have, long enough for 2nd waves of all sides to make back into the fight and for map chat to fill with a lot of cursing at the skill lag gods. ><

After death our little group of guildies decided not to go back and instead tried to head to the opposite corner of the map. None of us could get our speed boost skills to fire and most of our utility skills were problematic at best for the next 5 to 10 minutes. Once the fighting spread back out across the map there was still noticeable skill delay even for those who joined the map after the massive three way clogged everything up. I expect the problem to go away much more quickly than it did and not to be affected in smaller battles later in the nite but no such luck.

We experienced the same thing the next day at Hills on BGs borderland map under similar circumstances but this time I was playing my guardian and it was even more frustrating since so many more of my skills were tied to being heal related and simply would not function anywhere on the map for a short time. In both of these cases the maps had queues to enter and likely did for the other sides as well so I am assuming we were playing at max WvW map population cap. I really wish I knew what that was. I am pretty sure just lowering the WvW map population cap would help a lot. I know the best solution is to move to a lower tier server but that is not an option for our guild as we chose JQ back in beta to stick with the realm pride folks through thick and thin. <3

We also encountered three instances of RI not dropping from the camp supervisor after the timer had expired due to assumed lag issues as he continued to beat on us for up to 30 additional seconds and in one case this delay lead to us getting overrun by defenders. There were also a lot of instances of lagged out and invulnerable warping supply yaks but that is becoming increasingly common to the point no one remarks on it anymore.

Any further skill lag and WvW map population cap data you can add to this discussion could be useful to someone somewhere one would hope. There are already too many short raging skill lag topics out there so I hoping to give people a place to vent and collect some stats at the same time. Thank you for your time & help. Cheers,

TLDR………….

Anet has all the data they need from the server farm that maintains their game.

Anet,“Hi server farm, can we have this weeks logs on server strain?”

Server Farm,“Sure. Hey, there are some serious slow downs during prime time on the WvW maps, have you considered upgrading the servers…”

Anet,“K, thanks, bye.”

Respawn.6802:

Anet has all the data they need from the server farm that maintains their game.

Anet,“Hi server farm, can we have this weeks logs on server strain?”

Server Farm,“Sure. Hey, there are some serious slow downs during prime time on the WvW maps, have you considered upgrading the servers…”

Anet,“K, thanks, bye.”

Or:
Anet: “Upgrading servers for a few thousand people that play WvW? Good one, almost as good as your suggestion to create 121 skins of pokemon themed legendaries all in shades of pink. No, thanks, bye.”

The lag comes from the fact that too many people use too many AoE effects on each other. That info has to be transmitted to everyone involved, which, if everyone is in the same spot or closeby, means the servers just can’t handle it.

And they won’t upgrade servers as long as WvW is just a side game and a not a main focus as it should be. I don’t see how we can change that though, it’s up to them to realize that WvW is the best part of this game.

CPU on the servers are overloaded with a certain amount of players on the map concentrated into particular battle points (like Stonemist and other map keeps.)
It looks like skill lag starts to kick in when there’s 50+ players in the same general area at once on the map. It gets worse to unplayable when you get to 100 players or more. Can’t even get your heal skill off…..
It’s not uncommon to get these amounts on major keep assaults, but even open-field battles you’ll get it.

We know what causes skill lag and what we can do to avoid it (transfer to lower tier servers and stay away from busy three-way battles but now that apparently includes staying off any map with big fights on it) along with some of the things ANET could do to help, throw money at the problem (bigger server farm) or lower WvW map population caps. I was more looking for data to help understand why the problem is getting worse instead of improving while ANET claims to be working on it. Is it really just more skins and animated wings on corpses that are lagging out all our skills or did they increase the WvW map population caps thinking things were better than they actually are?