Guild Wars 2

Well I am sick of skill lag in WvW, I have a lot of conversation with Anet about this on the support section. I will show the last post support gave me.
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Hello Mark.

I am sorry you feel this way but please do understand that we have a network engineering team monitoring the servers 24/7. I understand you are experiencing an issue here and I do understand that others may be as well. However, if you know of others experiencing an issue, please have them make a ticket regarding the issue. If we can find a pattern or show that there is in fact an issue with the server, believe me I will get that information to our networking engineering team immediately for review. However, what I can not do is just assume there is an issue because someone on the forum also said they had latency. We must diagnose where it’s coming from and to do that, we need people to create tickets as you have.

It’s just as easy to say that it can’t be the server because we have players playing without issue as it is to say it must be the server because you heard someone else say they had latency too. Antidotal evidence like this isn’t something we can rely on. Now, in your case, you were kind enough to create the ticket and assist us by running these tests and as you have mentioned, the proxy helped slightly but not enough to say the issue was resolved. As such, I will get this information to our network engineering team so they can look further into but again, if you have or know of others experiencing this issue, please encourage them to create a ticket. The amount of players that are willing to create a forum post versus the amount of players willing to report the issue via a ticket and run a diagnostic test is staggeringly different. We have to rely on the latter because otherwise, we have no way to know where the issue is coming from and without that information, we have no way of resolving the issue should it in fact be on the server.

I hope this makes sense and if I can be of any further assistance, please let me know.

Regards,
*******
NCsoft Technical Support~
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So please everyone with skilllag in WvW, please send a support ticket to:

https://en.support.guildwars2.com/

Please help them to find the problem! Do the test the give you, and try to help ty!

This is just normal support BS. They dont really know what is going on ingame. There is official confirmation by WvW lead guy saying that skill-lag is server side issue and it is known posted just a moment ago in other thread here, yet support gives you nonsense about problem at your ISP and other players playing fine when you send in ticket.

Can any Anet official acknowledge my post please, to stop guessing? Because I am talking to the support for weeks now. And I am trying to help the game with this.

Typical copy paste job. Am sure that same reply word for word has been sent thousands of times.

it is what it is

3-way fight in SMC on Gandara / Baruch Bay/ Aurora Glade for over an hour tonight.

It might actually still be going on.

After dying again to skill lag, because I couldn’t heal or use any skills to help escape auto-attacks, while trying to tag a Keep (not in SMC)…

… I quit.

Didn’t care to deal with an issue that’s been around since launch and never addressed. Don’t tell us the same story of how the lag is tied to the core of the game engine, needing to rewrite, lots of testing, etc… etc… please focus on an issue that when it happens, affects not just WvW, but PvE too.

Did you send a ticket to support about the lag? Because that’s what im trying to do here.

Yes it sounds like a copy paste, and it is.. They need to know the data, so they let you do some tests.. after 4 tests you will see they don’t only copy paste you.

Sending in support tickets isn’t going to help. The people at Anet who can actually do something about it already know about it. In fact, the ninja drop on the wvw map cap a few months back was done as a test to see if it would help with the skill lag.

All we can do is wait and hope they get it figured out.

They have ‘some’ support tickets about it:

I personally have no issues with you putting my comments or suggestions on the forums or merging them with other server based reports of latency. At the end of the day, I really do just want you to be able to play Guild Wars 2 without issue. If that means my comments being put on the forums will get more people to create tickets and run a few diagnostics as you have been kind enough to do, by all means, please do. Though I should note, I am not implying you are the only person to report this issue. We do have a few other reports but given the sheer amount of players per server, it’s not consistent with the amount of tickets we should be getting if the issue was purely server based.

So please don’t say : They know about it, just send your report to them.

The more ppl do the tests, the more date they get to fix this problem.

Yeah the lag is slowly killing the game we all love.
And i hate to see it crumble like SWTOR and other major games.
Yeah i have sent a support ticket with the test they made me do, attached.
Lets hope it does some good.

Well yea, I hope everyone will send in a test ( instead of saying its a copy paste ) ofc. its a copy paste, they want as much info from ppl as possible.

Skill lagg is a bad thing but at least now you can spot the badys coming from a mile away and run for your life that is if you dont rubberband or simply waypoint the kitten out.

OP is a fool that knows nothing of software engineering. My suggestion, go to a lower ‘tier’ aka lower population server. Get a better connection.

How come everyone says this is server side , but I have Never had any lag what so ever even in 150+ man fights

Mirage.2597:

How come everyone says this is server side , but I have Never had any lag what so ever even in 150+ man fights

you must be one of the lucky 0.00001% then…..

Just transfer to a lower tier. I get next to no skill lag here in T5. vOv

Been doing some tests with skills, warrior charge types (sword 2, GS 5, bulls, etc) in particular, and the lag literally breaks them. Not sure how, but they simply stop short by half or go in the wrong direction. This is in t1 with a solid 30 minute? 3 way, poor servers :/

Mirage.2597:

How come everyone says this is server side , but I have Never had any lag what so ever even in 150+ man fights

Educate yourself. Even Anet has repeatedly admitted that skill lag is a server side problem.

I am not gonna make a support ticket when Anet already knows about the problem, and even told us that it was servers side. I remember a dev saying on the forums that it was because of the server being on 100% CPU. Really no point in running diag tests for support here.

EDIT: quoting Habib Loew:

" should clarify here again that the culling fix will have minimal impact on skill lag. Skill lag happens because the server too busy to process everything that’s happening (e.g. it’s at 100% CPU). The removal of culling addresses issues experienced by the client but those changes don’t really impact the skill lag situation. They are fundamentally different problems that will need different solutions."

see thread https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Decrease-lag/first#post1662663

And Devon Carver:

“Skill lag, as many here have pointed out, is a server side issue. Your PC’s components will not have any impact on it.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Something-has-to-give

Thanks for theses posts, but then why does the support person tells stuff differently? And not just say to me like:

Hey it are our servers, they cannot handle all the load, but we are trying to fix it.

They keep saying there is nothing wrong with their servers lol

Kirito.8796:

About a week ago in EBG the skill lag was so bad that after the fight died down everyone had perma “quickness”

I’ve had a few cases in a 3 way T1 garrison fight where I will spike a downed player (apparently the finisher move isn’t inhibited by the skill lag), only to have him get back up, run around like a chicken with his head cut off at super speeds, and end up on dead on the other side of inner Garr with my rabbit-finisher banner in his face.

And then there are conditions persisting beyond their stated duration. I will run outside the portal door to safety only to have my hp continue to slowly tick down despite the conditions having 0s listed as the remaining time. All the while I am watching dumbfounded as my character slowly bleeds out from my hidey-hole, safely away from the zerg-v-zerg-v-zerg.

I’ve put myself on leave from the game until a resolution is implemented.

They gotta be kittening kidding me, EVERYONE is complaining when zergs meet about skill lags and it gets worse every day. They had better be fixing it pretty kittening soon or players will drop by kittenloads no doubt!

World vs World went Lag vs Lag, may the least laggy one win!

As someone who uses ground targeted aoe, I suffer badly when this occurs. These days when I see I have skill lag, I just log off.

I`ve started running into others suffering from it too, enemies who cant fight back. We know it occurs when the server hits 100 percent capacity, as has been stated by arenanet, so surely its time to upgrade. As it is, those servers are now crashing and may even be taking damage from the pounding they are getting.

We know that skill lag is a server-side limitation of some sort, which means it is some function of the game engine, server hardware, and server-side network bandwidth. ANet has also said that they merge server capacity for WvW. That means that there is is some software to handle that but since we don’t know whether that function that is separate or part of the game engine lets just lump it in with the game engine for the sake of this discussion.

So why hasn’t ANet been able to fix the problem of skill lag by now? Let’s look at some of the possibilities (all hypothetical):

-1. The game engine isn’t capable of handling enough data no matter how many servers it is running on. I’m not sure why this might be, but I’m just tossing it out as a possibility.

-2. The game engine (or whatever software handles the merging of server capacity) isn’t capable of effectively handling more servers than ANet already has in place. Let’s just imagine it’s due to the same kind of under-scoping that limited DOS to 640K.

-3. ANet simply doesn’t have enough servers and is reluctant to buy more.

-4. ANet’s servers are old or slow and it would be prohibitively expensive to replace all of them.

-5. The hardware/software that connects all of the servers to the internet (not necessarily the same software that merges the computational capacity of all the servers) is complex and prohibitively expensive to modify or increase.

-6. ANet can’t afford to purchase more network bandwidth.

-7. ANet’s system is so tightly integrated that they can’t make major modifications to anything without shutting down the entire system for a period of time.

Number 7 sounds the most plausible to me. If you watch this ANet video presentation (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/180776/Video_Guild_Wars_2s_programming_tricks_revealed.php#.UTPsClded4M) you’ll see some explanations of how their system works. If I understood things properly, pretty much any dev can drop a live patch and trials are performed via scripts that run on the live system. We all noticed weird things and ninja changes happening in the weeks before the March WvW patch … probably because they had to test things live in small increments to keep the whole thing from shutting down. Making smallish software changes is one thing, but adding chunks of server hardware and/or modifying the capacity sharing software may simply be impossible while keeping the system live. Keep in mind that if they had to shut down the game to make the changes, they’d have to shut down the entire game … not just WvW.

Just some speculation on my part …

I don’t believe support tickets will change it. As for skill lagg: 10 seconds nothing happening for the last 2 times I went WvW. It only occurs on maps with 80+ people per side.

Hmm if your having skill lag just send in a support ticket, so they can gather more data, because some people have more lag then others. So it cant hurt to send a support ticket and do some tests for them so they can get data.

Don’t only bark, help them too.

The game just wasn’t designed to handle large scale battles. They chose graphics over performance

I don’t think that at this point they can do anything but tweak the performance a bit.

Simple solution let AOE damage all it hit then you cant run in a big zerg becase 10 AOE on that zerg will kill it not just damage 5random players.

Ommu.1649:

The game just wasn’t designed to handle large scale battles. They chose graphics over performance

I don’t think that at this point they can do anything but tweak the performance a bit.

Jesus. These comments always remind me how fracking computer illiterate people are today. Computer Science should be integrated into K12 curriculum so we have less idiots who can’t understand server vs client.

Skill lag is also being seen on any dragon event with lots of players. It’s not just a WvW issue.

really bad server problem, they should fix that but doubtful

It does appear to be a server problem, but I think there’s more to it than that.
I play in a small guild on T4 and have experienced skill lag. I’ve noticed it even when in a small group far away from any zergs.
However, the reason I say “there’s more to it” is because in Teamspeak, some of my friends are complaining of severe skill lag at times, when my game and others is playing perfectly well and we’re in the same location. In this case it can’t be JUST server lag or I would be affected too.

I would encourage everyone to send a ticket and do the tests as Anet suggested.

Anet has two choice now:
1) Fix their server to get rid of skill lag (I think they need to upgrade their servers => cost wise)
2) Implement something that force people not to clump together as one big ball of 70+ ppl zerg. Things like increase AoE cap to 10. Or Debuff that increase dmg taken if more than 30 ppl stacks together etc, Or increase defense of normal gate so that people just cant big ball normal hit zerg the gate… (This way it might flavor AoE class but make single target class useless)

I’m sure skill lag is not really that simple with the culling or the spell graphic. It is the calculation itself, things like crap tons of debuff calculation on crap tons of 100 ppl zerg. Also it happens to the entire borderlands, evenif u stay at the spawn camp, if there is a big fight with 150+ ppl fighting together, there will be massive skill lag. Thus,there is no way to fix easily as long as people still stack together as one tight group. You need to “Change the metagame” of WvW in order to solve this skill lag problem.

But really something need to be done. Nobody enjoy play with skill lag. Nobody enjoy getting their keeps wiped repeatly by one big ball of zerg that just normal hit the down gate…

No real issue over here other than once and this was before the culling was removed. Never have had a problem. Plus I am on a Tier 3 server that can have some pretty big fights during NA prime time.

Cactus.2710:

Keep in mind that if they had to shut down the game to make the changes, they’d have to shut down the entire game … not just WvW..

I wouldn’t mind not being able to play for few days, if they needed to shut down servers to remove this annoying skill lag

Talmor.9048:

No real issue over here other than once and this was before the culling was removed. Never have had a problem. Plus I am on a Tier 3 server that can have some pretty big fights during NA prime time.

I guess that “big fight” you said isnt big enough to make a skill lag :P What we’re talking about is like 70+ vs 70+. Sometimes, it’s even become 70+ vs 70+ vs 70+ in one BL. That happens every single time the fight occur cause it’s become a trend at least in tier1/2 that more stacking in one big zerg ball is “pure win”.

Tajz.9826:

Talmor.9048:

No real issue over here other than once and this was before the culling was removed. Never have had a problem. Plus I am on a Tier 3 server that can have some pretty big fights during NA prime time.

I guess that “big fight” you said isnt big enough to make a skill lag :P What we’re talking about is like 70+ vs 70+. Sometimes, it’s even become 70+ vs 70+ vs 70+ in one BL. That happens every single time the fight occur cause it’s become a trend at least in tier1/2 that more stacking in one big zerg ball is “pure win”.

Maybe, but I could have sworn that I have been in fights this large, but maybe it is a tier 1/2 issue. It could also be that I have avoided the zerg most of the times and have not seen the issue that is prevalent at the top.

Lol, I’ve forgotten more about Comp Sci than you will ever know. Maybe try being usefull instead of posting a random flame.

Game performance isn’t entirely server side. Its a combination of server code, connection speed / latency, and client. Its obvious that they focused most of there development budget on graphics, and now have crappy game engine code on both the client and server side.

To fix it they would need an entire re-write of the server side code, and you really think that is completely independent of the client and network?

Jacklo.4230:

It does appear to be a server problem, but I think there’s more to it than that.
I play in a small guild on T4 and have experienced skill lag. I’ve noticed it even when in a small group far away from any zergs.
However, the reason I say “there’s more to it” is because in Teamspeak, some of my friends are complaining of severe skill lag at times, when my game and others is playing perfectly well and we’re in the same location. In this case it can’t be JUST server lag or I would be affected too.

I would encourage everyone to send a ticket and do the tests as Anet suggested.

Not necessarily. There is nothing that says that the merged server capacity bogs down uniformly. There is nothing that says that the portion of the capacity you are talking to is exactly the same portion that your friends are talking to … server capacity is not like some physical space you both are trying to occupy. Besides, when you try to get into a crowded nightclub or restaurant you might have to wait a long time, but others (either before or after you) might have gotten in as quickly as if the place was deserted … it all depends upon the instantaneous demand versus capacity and I’ll bet that the merged server capacity dynamically readjusts itself pretty quickly.