Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty sure if this was in the poll everyone would have voted for this. With alpine borderlands returning and the server linking already in place WvW activity is going to increase.

As much as I like alpine returning and Anet looking at long standing issues with WvW the biggest of those, for me, is skill lag.

Skill lag is the great diety Internet Reality smiting you for blobbing too much. What you’re asking for is a per-map population reduction.
Wasn’t that long ago 20v20 was a huge deal.

LetoII.3782:

Skill lag is the great diety Internet Reality smiting you for blobbing too much. What you’re asking for is a per-map population reduction.
Wasn’t that long ago 20v20 was a huge deal.

You are aware that if I am roaming around and there is a huge blob fight in garrison or something that I will still get skill lag? Are you new to WvW?

Sird.4536:

LetoII.3782:

Skill lag is the great diety Internet Reality smiting you for blobbing too much. What you’re asking for is a per-map population reduction.
Wasn’t that long ago 20v20 was a huge deal.

You are aware that if I am roaming around and there is a huge blob fight in garrison or something that I will still get skill lag? Are you new to WvW?

Me new?
Didn’t you make the thread about this thoroughly beaten horse?

LetoII.3782:

Sird.4536:

LetoII.3782:

Skill lag is the great diety Internet Reality smiting you for blobbing too much. What you’re asking for is a per-map population reduction.
Wasn’t that long ago 20v20 was a huge deal.

You are aware that if I am roaming around and there is a huge blob fight in garrison or something that I will still get skill lag? Are you new to WvW?

Me new?
Didn’t you make the thread about this thoroughly beaten horse?

Ok let me explain it to you.

Anet are finally listening to the community. They are making changes based on what we vote for. Bringing up a topic about a dead horse at this time seems worthwhile right? Because everytime in the past this topic was brought up it was during a time when the devs did not listen to us but if you are not new you would have known that right?

Well i can say this, from when they have started to fix WvW, yes after they reuploaded the Desert BL’s the lag has been pretty bad. But I would cut some slack to Anet at the moment. To improve the lag, generally you improve your code again and again, when they can bring the wvw to a ‘’pretty good’’ point, then maybe then we shall get something that will improve the lag.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Another argument to shut down passive procs and increase cooldowns of extremely powerful abilities is what I’m seeing, which is the opposite of what we’ve been seeing in recent profession design.

Really, though, if this is attributed to proc effects, please, let’s just push to remove them. Big emphasis on restoring high WvW populations to only be redacted by these performance issues as a result of proc effects (which have been scrutinized by the competitive PvP scene for ages) is going to get the game as a whole nowhere fast.

PvP, regardless of context or game mode, should be calculated with cost/benefit to every action and conservation of resources being a big concern, not rolling one’s face across the keyboard watching tons of things happen automatically.

If I had to wager a guess, the stability changes are likely flooding timer requests and taking up a lot of resources. As great as the change is conceptually, it may need refinement if the code’s already been heavily-optimized for performance in this context, or if getting performance here is a problem.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Question is the skill lag engine based or server based? I can understand having issues correcting skill lag caused by game engine, but skill lag caused by weak servers is inexcusable.

just get rid of quickness

DeceiverX.8361:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Another argument to shut down passive procs and increase cooldowns of extremely powerful abilities is what I’m seeing, which is the opposite of what we’ve been seeing in recent profession design.

Really, though, if this is attributed to proc effects, please, let’s just push to remove them. Big emphasis on restoring high WvW populations to only be redacted by these performance issues as a result of proc effects (which have been scrutinized by the competitive PvP scene for ages) is going to get the game as a whole nowhere fast.

PvP, regardless of context or game mode, should be calculated with cost/benefit to every action and conservation of resources being a big concern, not rolling one’s face across the keyboard watching tons of things happen automatically.

If I had to wager a guess, the stability changes are likely flooding timer requests and taking up a lot of resources. As great as the change is conceptually, it may need refinement if the code’s already been heavily-optimized for performance in this context, or if getting performance here is a problem.

You could also make the same argument that having all skills in the game having some type of aoe is a problem. So say thf 1 skill it realy should not have an aoe to it or ranger attk that can go though targets and hit more the one person etc.. Most of the big skills do have “long” cd and long cast times compared to the skills in GW2. Its just every thing has some type of aoe effect to it even the lower cd / cast time effects such as all 1 skills. So if you want to come from the point of view of removing aoe and add longer cd to deal with skill lag your going to get more reduction to the 1 spame effects from all classes that are aoe then say the few big spells that tend to be on a 5 skill.

DeceiverX.8361:

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Another argument to shut down passive procs and increase cooldowns of extremely powerful abilities is what I’m seeing, which is the opposite of what we’ve been seeing in recent profession design.

Really, though, if this is attributed to proc effects, please, let’s just push to remove them. Big emphasis on restoring high WvW populations to only be redacted by these performance issues as a result of proc effects (which have been scrutinized by the competitive PvP scene for ages) is going to get the game as a whole nowhere fast.

He’s believe saying lag is fundamental to the game engine. Nothing short of making a new game would solve it.

I doubt increasing cooldowns wouldn’t stop it happening. When two zergs first engage everything is off cooldown and that is when the main problem is going to occur. After they stack everything is usually off cooldown again for the next engage.

I believe he’s saying lag is fundamental flaw of the WvW game engine since day zero and it’s virtually impossible to fix without rewriting the entire game and its mechanics.

TL;DR – You’re stuck with lag forever.

It’s a refreshing change having devs communicate with our group so frequently and honestly. Thumbs up from me. Thank you Tyler.

Skill lag used to be endemic in SM especially, but whenever there was a blob v blob fight.

In the last 6 months or more I now very rarely experience it even in T1 EU, with 2 full map blobs. And I run in 3440×1440 resolution with all prettiness turned up! It does, happen very, very rarely (months in between) so then I put it down to any of random internet slowdowns, or my PC needing a reboot or, maybe sometimes Anet do have some server-side temporary issues.

So, and I know this can be irritating, if you still see this regularly I would look to either your PC or your ISP, not Anet.

You could also remove some of the unnecessary stuff from the maps like all the random animals, dbl gimmicks (stealth storms, pop up walls, etc), and refrain from adding new unnecessary junk like the sparkly wxp trail.
You said it’s not any one thing causing it, why not get rid of some of the clutter and see if it helps?

Personally I’m a fan of EvE or Max Payne style time dilation.
When a fight gets too big, or the server gets overloaded for whatever reason, slow game time down a bit. Everyone goes into a slow motion version of gw2 with skills, effects, movement all taking twice their normal value to complete.

Cindas.6149:

Two words:

Portal Storms

In an old MMO, Asheron’s Call, when too many people gathered closely, a Portal Storm would teleport some a short distance away. This was part of their design to keep the game running smoothly.

In GW2, why not have drakes pull people out of the crowd and bounce them some distance away. This could improve performance and keep zergs more balanced . . .

HEY! Hold it right there…
Are you suggesting pve stuff for WvW???
Time for your FLOGGING!

XD

I cracked the code! See parentheses!

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale co(m)bat involving high target player skills. Of co(u)rse high target ski(l)ls are exac(t)ly the preferred sk(i)lls to use in WvW. This starts to be(co)me especially t( r )u(e) as (s)kills start activating faster and doing more things (o)n each activation: traits/runes/sigils/f(o)od/quick(n)ess/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

“Multicore soon”

Multicore soon folks!!!

Tyler Bearce.3427:

By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills…
… there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

At least ArenaNet understands that correctly, nothing to add.

(It’s server lag we talk here specifically, as in the server CPU being overloaded.)

Optimizations are nice, but there always will be a limit where the lag makes the game unplayable. Currently 3-way 60×60×60 fights are way beyond that level. The server barely can handle a 40×40×40 battle – if everyone is spamming skills of course, not just stand there.
You should consider reducing maximum numbers allowed per server per map, though that won’t please everyone, “we want 80 players without lag”, make it happen… right. New games start building custom engines to support large battles, GW2 engine was not made for that, and should stick with a number that can play without extreme lag.

“Stop blobbing” is not a solution. We are looking to play a large scale team based war game, not small scale… 200k vs 300k or even larger battles happened in the samurai era. 200 soldiers it’s a small contingent… so we are far, far away from really “large” scale fights. EVE Online comes closer, but that’s a space ship affair.

Either limit numbers to 40 or so per side, or… let there be extreme lag in really big fights. Since there are almost no calls at all to limit max. numbers – seems that the players prefer having 60-80 blobs… so they can have reasons blaming Anet because lag. Indeed, we all are to blame, because both sides: Anet and the players — want the impossible.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Skill lag is a perpetual battle. By far the biggest contributors is large scale combat involving high target player skills. Of course high target skills are exactly the preferred skills to use in WvW. This starts to become especially true as skills start activating faster and doing more things on each activation: traits/runes/sigils/food/quickness/alacrity etc. So we continue to make optimizations skills and combat, but there’s no single big offender, it’s a combination of thousands of smaller parts.

Tyler, if you were to optimize the overall game code, wouldn’t that a positive effect downstream on all other aspects of the game? It would put less strain on server CPUs, and lead to less melting of motherboards.

What’s frustrating, is when one group can put down marks and wells, while you can’t never mind pop heals, so you’ll u might aswell pirate ship or die pushing.

Flamealchemist.2681:

Well i can say this, from when they have started to fix WvW, yes after they reuploaded the Desert BL’s the lag has been pretty bad. But I would cut some slack to Anet at the moment. To improve the lag, generally you improve your code again and again, when they can bring the wvw to a ‘’pretty good’’ point, then maybe then we shall get something that will improve the lag.

Or use the servers that do HoT meta events and don’t lag you at all with 120 people constantly casting meteors and icebow….. when you are right in front of them with max graphics…..

It’s been a much bigger problem since the beta server linking occurred.

LordEnki.9283:

It’s been a much bigger problem since the beta server linking occurred.

Possibly because increased number of players in WvW.

yeah the lag, and i got lag only in ebg, anywhere except ebg is fine,…already send a ticket and got responded and suggestion but none of em works, i think its because the large population in ebg, but i had the same huge fight in BL’s and no lag, but in ebg, even when theres no tag, no huge zerg, i got 3k ping and ended up dc…

:’(