Skill lag in large-scale WvW battles has been horrendous for over a month. I have an incredible, custom-built gaming PC. It’s not a graphical issue. I am just spamming my shouts and watching the button press but never activate the skill. I can hit the shout over 20 times in a Stonemist fight and have it never go off.
Every single person I have talked to in my guild and server (Sanctum of Rall – Tier 1) has been experiencing the same skill lag.
This is a wide-scale problem being experienced by a huge number of players. It is NOT 100% of the time in WvW – only when a huge battle breaks out with a lot of players (80+).
Has Anet acknowledged that there is a problem, and do they have any intention on fixing it?
I don’t get why no one seems to be talking about it, pretending it doesn’t exist…
There’s been a lot of talk about it but it’s no use. We all know the servers need upgrading for these things but it’s just not gonna happen. The lag is always so bad during big ZvZ fights that you even notice it when standing on the other side of the map. Basically the group with the biggest number wins the auto attack race cause healing is imposs too.
Probably because the lag is considered “fair”. You cant really abuse it and the enemies lag about as much, causing some rather amusing situations where epic battles should have ended ages ago but go on and on and on because no one can pop skills.
I think Anet is aware of the issue, but no solution exist.
It has been explained once by a dev. Skill lag is a serverside issue, its not your connection or your pc, its the server that is running that part of the game running out of memory.
So its not your fault and there is a way to fix it.
100% resource utilization on server side. unless they upgrade their infra, nothing much we can do about it…..
I mentioned it immediately after this latest reset when it seemed worse than it had ever been.
They have to address it.
They never have acknowledged it at least on the forums. I gaurentee you won’t see a dev answer anything about skill lag. They’re servers just can’t handle it and they are too cheap to upgrade the servers. Go figure after they made how many million?
Actually when there’s really bad skill lag, if you hold down number 6 instead of tapping it, the heal will go off. I’m pretty sure it works that way with other skills too, but if it’s an AoE clicking power, well then you’re kitten-outta-luck :/
Moaning on the forums doesn’t help.
It’s one of two issues: Either their servers’ hardware cannot handle a few hundred people hitting eachother or their server software is unable to keep up.
The first one is an easy issue; throw more hardware at it since it’s assuredly not a networking issue. The second one is more difficult and requires rewrites of core portions of the server.
I’d imagine it’s the latter of the two, as certain portions of the server’s activities have higher priority than others . Movement and auto-attacks seem to take priority over other player-cast skills, as there is nearly no rubberbanding during laggy portions of the game (there also doesn’t seem to be any client-side tricks for hiding rubberbanding, as you can still hit players with auto-attacks reliably).
tl;dr It’s out of our hands, it’s been an issue forever, and moaning on the forums doesn’t help anyone.
They acknowledged it unofficially through a forum reply and said it was server running at 100% capacity or something. Basically the server has to prioritise whose skill to register first.
No official response as to whether they are working on it (typical) but CJ posted in the thread re engineers and legendaries in crafting where he said that the people who could be working on the engi legendary problem are instead working on wider issues like skill lag etc etc. So they must be working on it but in typical Anet fashion they don’t see the need to put out a simple statement that says" hey guys we have noticed this issue and we are tremendously sorry if it is affecting your use of our services. We appreciate your custom and working on a solution asap to sort this out. Thank you for your understanding blah blah". Done and ppl would be happy..
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
most likely they are running on VMs….. but still they need to upgrade the hardware for the VMs to run better, and yeah they are not cheap…..
Huh? A thread pops up about it at least every couple of days. It’s never addressed though, and there’s only so many times you can ask before you just give up on it and hope it gets fixed before you reach the end of your rope.
Probably because the lag is considered “fair”. You cant really abuse it and the enemies lag about as much, causing some rather amusing situations where epic battles should have ended ages ago but go on and on and on because no one can pop skills.
I think Anet is aware of the issue, but no solution exist.
I don’t think it is fair. I can go into these fights and not be able to cast or use any attack whatsoever. Yet I can be killed? How is that fair? Sure it can go both ways, but in a single fight I don’t think that can be considered fair at all. Right now, fights in Keeps and SM are frequently decided, not by skill, but by skill lag and who has the biggest problem with it at the time.
My thoughts. Decrease the cap on players allowed in the server. I don’t think it can go any other way. Anet clearly won’t invest in new servers and most likely won’t upgrade them to the point where skill lag won’t be a major issue.
(edited by nirvana.8245)
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
You need to take a math course. ANet has sold 3 million copies of the game at an average price of at least $50. I don’t honestly know how many hardware servers ANet runs to handle all the various realms, but we’re probably talking something on the order of 1% of sales even to totally replace them with top end hardware. The ability lag may indeed be due to insufficient hardware, but I’d bet that the barrier to fixing it has far more to do with the software side … game engine or whatever software they use to merge server capacity for WvW (which they in fact do). Either that or the active WvW population is so low relative to the rest of GW2 that Anet has decided even 1% of sales isn’t worth it to keep us around.
HEY GUYS! i just found this really cool trick that completely gets rid of skill lag it’s called transfer down tiers. After tier 2 skill lag is almost nonexistent no sympathy towards tier 1 servers complaining that there are too many people.
tried using tunnel service ?
i m from SEA region, we always get these lag on all games when its crowded, tunnel is the only way we go with the problem.
I have noticed the skill lag issue improve since the last ninja patch. Lets see what today’s ninja patch brings.
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
You need to take a math course. ANet has sold 3 million copies of the game at an average price of at least $50. I don’t honestly know how many hardware servers ANet runs to handle all the various realms, but we’re probably talking something on the order of 1% of sales even to totally replace them with top end hardware. The ability lag may indeed be due to insufficient hardware, but I’d bet that the barrier to fixing it has far more to do with the software side … game engine or whatever software they use to merge server capacity for WvW (which they in fact do). Either that or the active WvW population is so low relative to the rest of GW2 that Anet has decided even 1% of sales isn’t worth it to keep us around.
you forgot the monthly overhead cost of maintaining the server man, especially the electricity…. running a managed service is not a easy and cheap as people thought….
Arena-net dev had acknowledged it in that engineer / legendary thread but who knows how much priority they give it.
Initially when they implemented culling fix, the lag was occasional & sometimes not prevalent in all large battles. The duration was also relatively short & intermittent. Subsequent patches have made it really bad … the lag seems to affect everyone on voice comms and it persist for a long long time especially in keep fights.
Maybe they wont fix it on purpose so other people are changing to lower tier servers, and make them compete too!
Its a conspiracy!
They’re aware, yes it sucks, but whining on the forums isn’t going to fix it. As long as Anet knows how close they are to having the best large scale PvP by getting this fixed.
Because in 80-man doom zergs, who has time to look at their skill bar, let alone have time to fire off skills before the enemy is dead? And if you’re not in an 80-man doom zerg… well, then you’re just not meta bro.
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
You need to take a math course. ANet has sold 3 million copies of the game at an average price of at least $50. I don’t honestly know how many hardware servers ANet runs to handle all the various realms, but we’re probably talking something on the order of 1% of sales even to totally replace them with top end hardware. The ability lag may indeed be due to insufficient hardware, but I’d bet that the barrier to fixing it has far more to do with the software side … game engine or whatever software they use to merge server capacity for WvW (which they in fact do). Either that or the active WvW population is so low relative to the rest of GW2 that Anet has decided even 1% of sales isn’t worth it to keep us around.
Yeah, because the one-time purchase of hardware is the ONLY cost a company like Anet will incur, right?
Stop blobbing and be happy? I barely get any skill lag. Only in Stonemist if 3 servers fight with whole force at once, but thats pretty normal.
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
You need to take a math course. ANet has sold 3 million copies of the game at an average price of at least $50. I don’t honestly know how many hardware servers ANet runs to handle all the various realms, but we’re probably talking something on the order of 1% of sales even to totally replace them with top end hardware. The ability lag may indeed be due to insufficient hardware, but I’d bet that the barrier to fixing it has far more to do with the software side … game engine or whatever software they use to merge server capacity for WvW (which they in fact do). Either that or the active WvW population is so low relative to the rest of GW2 that Anet has decided even 1% of sales isn’t worth it to keep us around.
Yeah, because the one-time purchase of hardware is the ONLY cost a company like Anet will incur, right?
Well, they probably spend quite a bit on plastic cups to hold all the tears this forum spews out from time to time. I imagine they accumulate these cups of tears and bring them to a special room at the end of each day. This entire room is dedicated to gallons of tears with details on where and whence they came, neatly placed in test tubes / containers of varying sizes and quantities.
Other than that, I heard ANet employees work for free.
What I do not understand is this… At a full zerg vrs zerg vrs zerg fight in WWW, there are maximum 450 players (I’m being generous here). And another -say- 150 pets, decoys, phantasms, what not. Let’s add another 20 NPCs or so.
So, 620 things doing their thing, with the serve having to calculate what they’re doing.
But… that is not THAT much, now is it? 620 of such calculations on a high-end server is nothing. A top-top-top server can nowadays have 32 CPUs each with up to 8 cores. Obviously, ANet does ot have this. But even on a lower-end server, with 8 CPUs with 4 cores, that should be plenty of calculating power!
My guess is that they have like really low-end servers.
Together with two design choices (no skill queue and no global cooldown), this really hurts performance.
The problem is, ofcourse, money. You got to look at how many people WvW, how many leave because of the (let’s be honest, occasional) lag and how many dollars these players spend on gems.
The questions is: how much does it cost to make lag go away. And how much money are we losing because of lag. Sure, ANet has other costs too, but that is not the issue here, those costs are independent of the hardware cost.
My guess is that ANet did this math, like every profit-based company would do. And then said ‘sorry, not worth it’.
(edited by Tallis.5607)
Until ANET fixes the issue I strongly encourage everyone to stop grouping up into 70+ size blobs of #1 spammers. Skill lag typically occurs when two big blobs collide on some part of the map. If you reduced the size of your zergs you will in effect reduce the number of times fights will get large enough to trigger skill lag.
What I do not understand is this… At a full zerg vrs zerg vrs zerg fight in WWW, there are maximum 450 players (I’m being generous here). And another -say- 150 pets, decoys, phantasms, what not. Let’s add another 20 NPCs or so.
So, 620 things doing their thing, with the serve having to calculate what they’re doing.
But… that is not THAT much, now is it? 620 of such calculations on a high-end server is nothing. A top-top-top server can nowadays have 32 CPUs each with up to 8 cores. Obviously, ANet does ot have this. But even on a lower-end server, with 8 CPUs with 4 cores, that should be plenty of calculating power!
My guess is that they have like really low-end servers.
Together with two design choices (no skill queue and no global cooldown), this really hurts performance.The problem is, ofcourse, money. You got to look at how many people WvW, how many leave because of the (let’s be honest, occasional) lag and how many dollars these players spend on gems.
The questions is: how much does it cost to make lag go away. And how much money are we losing because of lag. Sure, ANet has other costs too, but that is not the issue here, those costs are independent of the hardware cost.
My guess is that ANet did this math, like every profit-based company would do. And then said ‘sorry, not worth it’.
Please list how many MMO games you know that can support non laggy 450 players combat, preferable action oriented one where server needs to track all projectiles etc. as GW2 to.
(edited by Preacher.9018)
Until ANET fixes the issue I strongly encourage everyone to stop grouping up into 70+ size blobs of #1 spammers. Skill lag typically occurs when two big blobs collide on some part of the map. If you reduced the size of your zergs you will in effect reduce the number of times fights will get large enough to trigger skill lag.
That’s like asking an addict to stop looking at pornography.
It doesn’t happen.
snip
So, 620 things doing their thing, with the serve having to calculate what they’re doing.
But… that is not THAT much, now is it? snip*
using your numbers and what you said this is 620 separate things. That is not the case though, it is 620 different things interacting with each other and each of those different skills is anther different thing that is interacting with the environment around it.
People that jump on here and carry the banner for ANET make me roll my eyes more than the ones that constantly complain….You paid money for a game, it should function accordingly….They have business analysts/accountants/etc that forecast numbers, if ANET wasn’t going to turn a profit off of this game they would have never made it….Now on the other hand if they lost money and now the game is not functioning properly, well guess what? Ignoring problems isn’t gonna “make them more money”…
ANET made a great game, they undershot their servers though, it is apparent…They will have to upgrade them soon, I guess you guys better start buying more junk from the gemshop pronto.
- The skills lag is far beyond being %100 capacity. While i get almost no skill lag on 50vs50 i get skill lag on 20vs20vs20
- Sometimes certain skills always lag but not others. Not talking about auto-attack. My staff air 4 is the first skill always skill lags when the skill lag happens but i can execute other 4 just fine.
- When skil lag comes, even bundle skill lags, like placing ram which use zero percentage of server resource compared to auto-attack which hits 5 enemy and grant coniditon in a zerg.
- Your chat never lags, your movement never lags, your auto attack never lags.
I hope those informations will help them to figure out the problem of the skill lag.
So, 620 things doing their thing, with the serve having to calculate what they’re doing.
Let’s say even this is 620 things, it is only just for one player. You need to calculate 620 things for 620 player/npc which is named n-square problem. But yeah it was much more bigger fights in aion
The perma quickness after the battle is funny though, you better not have any paper gates as they just melt lol
This skill lag topic should be above all other topics. This is killing the game. Culling was bad aswell but this is worst and need to be fixed asap an not in 4 months.
I dont really get the complaints – skill lag was always there since they raised numbers of players cap in wvw. So what makes it so critical now? People starting to run in huge blobs only after culling patch?
I dont really get the complaints – skill lag was always there since they raised numbers of players cap in wvw. So what makes it so critical now? People starting to run in huge blobs only after culling patch?
I believe so yes, and WvW seems to be growing in popularity. But I do know that lots claimed to be returning to WvW with the removing of culling.
I dont really get the complaints – skill lag was always there since they raised numbers of players cap in wvw. So what makes it so critical now? People starting to run in huge blobs only after culling patch?
From my experience, skill lag got worse after they “fixed culling”. It could just be the scenario in my server. Im from JQ and there is SOR and BG, both of which have picked up dozens of guilds and players around the same time. We are regularly seeing 100v100 zergs fights going on. It wasn’t that big in Tier1 until recently from my recollection. I can’t recall seeing much more than about 60vs60 prior to culling being removed. But then who knows, maybe it was 100vs100 and I just couldn’t see it :p
Google how much AMD opteron/Intel Xeon cost (especially the faster models). Then realize this game doesn’t have subscription. Where do you think they find this amount of money for 50 servers? I’m afraid it won’t happen. The problem is just to small for Arenanet to pay this much money for. (with small i mean, for me i get this skill lag for about 5-10% on a global scale, although some days are really bad, like weekend).
You underestimate how much money a cash shop can bring in. It tends to be a much better monetisation method for games than subscription.
skill lag is awful when fighting a blob… it is bad when in a 3 way zerg fight but the blobbing makes all skills useless.
I personally think it has become a lot worse recently. The other day a deso v viz blob fight on the other side of the map prevented me using skills and changing weapons in a 1v1 fight underwater. It was very annoying.
Why is no one talking about skill lag?
…
-Types ‘skill lag’ into search box-
“Found 1607 results.”
I can’t even walk when there is two zergs fighting. The WvW experience was never so frustrating for me as it is now.
Growing pains. Any large scale PvP game has them, DAoC was unplayable during relic raids the first few years the game was even out, most of the times the server crashed.
That being said, it’s particularly worrisome in GW2 because they don’t have an assured revenue stream to upgrade their servers, which are in desperate need of an upgrade. Really they need to introduce 3 new servers and another WvW tier as most servers are Very High these dayss, as well as upgrade the existing servers.
I dont really get the complaints – skill lag was always there since they raised numbers of players cap in wvw. So what makes it so critical now? People starting to run in huge blobs only after culling patch?
From my experience, skill lag got worse after they “fixed culling”. It could just be the scenario in my server. Im from JQ and there is SOR and BG, both of which have picked up dozens of guilds and players around the same time. We are regularly seeing 100v100 zergs fights going on. It wasn’t that big in Tier1 until recently from my recollection. I can’t recall seeing much more than about 60vs60 prior to culling being removed. But then who knows, maybe it was 100vs100 and I just couldn’t see it :p
It does seem worse now, which would make sense, that is a good point.
We have no skill lag in Tier 3. I believe this is an Oceanic phenomenon in Tiers 1 and 2, so I recommend those poor, afflicted souls transfer to Maguuma where they will enjoy no latency whatsoever. May their every keystroke be swift, devastating, and (of course) satisfying in the eyes of the Grub and Great Lord Flame Ram.
Be a dwarf.
Hmm.. I don’t have any skill lag.
wouldnt it be better if they just Merged server and then use the left over server as a re-routing memory leak. Or you know they could get rid of some of the unimportant animals in the wildlife that is taking up memory space. they could Change the landscape polygon Actully they need to Ask how LoL manage to upgrade their visual while at the same time reducing the amount of polygon to load for better FPS and less memory leak. Im just talking theory’s I don’t know enough about server hardware at all.
Hard to notice skill lag if all you do is roll around in a 50 man ball pressing 1?
Honestly, Anet brought this upon themselves via a lack of foresight and/or lack of action when it could have made a difference. They failed to understand human nature as it applies to competitive gamers. They assumed players would balance things out on their own, and they assumed wrong. Now they’re faced with a situation that really only applies to the top one or two tiers in WvW in a meaningful way but requires the expenditure of both time and capital to remedy the situation which impacts the entire game.
The fact is, the population limits they set for each side on a WvW map should never exceed their server’s ability to handle every single player on that map within 600 units of each other pressing skills. So they either need to increase processing capacity and/or implement game engine improvements, reduce the map population limits, implement features that discourage large numbers of players clashing in a small area, or some combination of the three. They’ve already tried reducing the map population limits and it had less than desirable consequences (enter that buggy non-transparent queue system), so that’s probably not an option at this point. This leaves either fixing things server side and in game mechanics, which mostly impacts 6 servers, for a game format who’s players represent a vast minority of the overall player base.
Not a great situation.
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