Guild Wars 2

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes people (including me) will adjust their graphics settings and not realize they have made permanent changes

This may be for a very small few players, but most of us do not change our settings at all and we still get lag. So I dont see this fix fixing the main issue.

But as someone pointed out, maybe it is graphics settings causing the lag. Perhaps starting a second thread asking people what settings they use for WvW would help give more information.

Or could it be a tracing problem? Maybe have another thread with trace routes to the server IP whenever there is a problem occurring??

Yesterday evening, Gunnars hold/Aurora and drakkar matchup ni EB i had such high ping ( between 1.5 and 2 seconds) it was unplayable to me.
Went to test another game and steady ping for hours of around 28ms.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes people (including me) will adjust their graphics settings and not realize they have made permanent changes This is because the game continues to draw existing characters at the old setting and only new characters get the new higher (and potentially slower) setting. Then they map travel and suddenly the game is slower because all of the characters (players and NPCs) have been loaded at the new, higher graphics level setting. But it’s not obvious that the earlier setting change caused things to run slower later. We could “fix” this by doing a big graphics refresh every time you change a setting. That might annoy players but eliminate this problem. -prefereset will also ‘fix’ this problem by resetting your graphics settings which might be what you experienced.

This DEFINITELY is not the case, most people are complaining about SKILL lag, which is indicative of a connectivity or server side problem.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

BTW, the ping number we show in the client on the options screen is probably different than you see in other games. We should name it something different. Traditionally the ping time is the time it takes for a packet to get to a server and back. In our case, it is the time to get to the server, get processed by the game map you are in, and then sent back. So our misnamed “ping” is much more variable than most ping numbers because it includes game processing time.

Call it “ping pong” instead, since it includes ‘ping’ time and ‘pong’ is a game.

Is it too much to ask that WvW matchups be put on their own blade? It seems fairly clear that sharing the CPU power across WvW / PvP and PvE VM environments is too much for one blade to handle.

GrandHaven.1052:

This DEFINITELY is not the case, most people are complaining about SKILL lag, which is indicative of a connectivity or server side problem.

Also to piggyback this post… this is the single BIGGEST cause of frustration. Video Lag is understandable. Skill Lag, where you either mash your button 10 times before a skill fires… or worse as an Ele, are failing to change attunements, is the lag most/all of us are requesting to be fixed.

On reset nights, the lag can sometimes be unbearable. IE; I’ve waited 5s before attunments to change, and forget about casting anything but your ‘1’ skill, because it isn’t firing.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

The WvW matchups are isolated right now but it’s only for our convenience in analyzing performance. Because of the way Megaservers works it doesn’t really matter in terms of CPU load.

Gotcha, thanks for the clarification on that. Now if we can isolate the skill lag issue in my aforementioned post. There definitely seems to have ‘some’ correlation to the amount of people on a map… but I’ve also noticed skill lag (albeit reduced amounts ~1 second ish) on nights where there aren’t queues.

Demarca.4062:

GrandHaven.1052:

This DEFINITELY is not the case, most people are complaining about SKILL lag, which is indicative of a connectivity or server side problem.

Also to piggyback this post… this is the single BIGGEST cause of frustration. Video Lag is understandable. Skill Lag, where you either mash your button 10 times before a skill fires… or worse as an Ele, are failing to change attunements, is the lag most/all of us are requesting to be fixed.

On reset nights, the lag can sometimes be unbearable. IE; I’ve waited 5s before attunments to change, and forget about casting anything but your ‘1’ skill, because it isn’t firing.

It’s definitely skill lag me and my guild get in WvW. In PvP haven’t had lag for ages, in WvW… every few days.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

BTW, the ping number we show in the client on the options screen is probably different than you see in other games. We should name it something different. Traditionally the ping time is the time it takes for a packet to get to a server and back. In our case, it is the time to get to the server, get processed by the game map you are in, and then sent back. So our misnamed “ping” is much more variable than most ping numbers because it includes game processing time.

So what kind of number is considered normal in wvw? I see around 65ms on average but it can spike up to close to 800ms from time to time. Not sure what it looks like in the middle of a fight where I’m guessing a lot more processing is going on.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

BTW, the ping number we show in the client on the options screen is probably different than you see in other games. We should name it something different. Traditionally the ping time is the time it takes for a packet to get to a server and back. In our case, it is the time to get to the server, get processed by the game map you are in, and then sent back. So our misnamed “ping” is much more variable than most ping numbers because it includes game processing time.

Could be, but I see a steady 40ms now in EB WvW. When fighting it gets higher to perhaps 200ms but still playable. Not like the 2 seconds yesterday.

Has the ‘new stability buff handler system’ been fully vindicated? People have been asking if there is an increased processing load associated with this new system.

I ask again because the ping isn’t a true ping, but a ping with processing. As someone cleverly renamed it, the ‘ping pong’.

So, when you are standing in a group and the ‘ping pong’ is varying, could it be the stability buffs expiring/refreshing and changing the processing time and hence the ‘ping pong’ time?

Why would it be stability any more then any of the calculations on every condition in the game?

They made the change so that the less the 1 full tick or stack of any condition applies now. Every build on every profession has at least some conditions. Anything that is not a dead even number now adds an extra calculation. With all of the conditions in the game, and a new calculation for nearly every one of them with some exceptions of coarse, it baffles my as to why everyone latched onto this stability change theory. In my opinion, it was simply a lame excuse to argue to revert it. With the changes in that update, stability is 5th on the list at best, of load additive issues.

Yeah, not so much the quantity of calculations, but the algorithm behind the calculations being buggy.

HoD BL extremely laggy for me tonight. Others in the guild I asked said it was fine for them. Ping was good (60-70ms)

Lag is back. GOM all BLs. :-(

Terrible lag and disconnects tonight, with low ping in Piken. Game was unplayable and logged out

Lag Wars 2

16/04 – primetime EU

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

… except we have a report of a person using -prefreset and their problems went away …

What is this prefereset you mentioned?

I picked up the game last December and never experienced lag until the stability patch that was released in late March/early April. Since then I have had lag every day, terrible unacceptable lag, not only in WvW but even in PvE. I have skill lag to the point that it is making it impossible to survive in WvW.

This is ruining the game for me and I wanted to add my voice here with the others having similar issues. Whatever was changed with the stability patch needs to be removed if it’s causing this many problems.

lolol, I feel so sorry for the devs that have to deal with this.

Wednesday Aurora Glade/Gunnars Hold/Drakkar Lake, Eternal Battlegrounds was pretty laggy.

But I’m just going to go out there and say I’ve been experience skill delay more so than ever since the stability changes. So I’m doing the easy thing and just blaming that.

Cheers for trying though.

@Stephen ClarkeWillson

Since we have no clue how megaservers works and what info is needed for you to troubleshoot this properly.

Can you give us an idea of what we can give you to help?
Should we for example find the IP of the server we are currently on and provide visible “ping”?
Would you like to know time, place(borderland or whatever) and situation? Large zerg vs solo roaming or small group.
Would you like us to give you an idea of the map population during the time of the skill lag?

Help us, help you, to help us in turn.

Here’s what I notice about lag:

As an ele, necro or mesmer, any lag results in you being less effective, strong lag makes it impossible to play in or survive any fight, as you are more dependent on your skills to damage/stay alive.

In the same battle, staff guardian won’t even notice the lag as they can spam 1 all day long, and regen will keep them alive.

Warrior just laughs as heal sig and regen outheals the incoming damage and chops up all the squishies.

When the lag gets bad, I switch off my ele and log into my guard called ‘Boredom Tanking’, and suddenly I no longer notice the lag.

Another interesting thing. Last night I was playing on my NA account on Blackgate, there were a few NA players complaining about lag, whilst there I was an EU player and I didnt notice a thing. Was on a necro not guardian as well. And was at around 12-1am UK time.

So how can an EU player not have lag on a NA server whilst a NA player does???

Orochimaru.4730:

Another interesting thing. Last night I was playing on my NA account on Blackgate, there were a few NA players complaining about lag, whilst there I was an EU player and I didnt notice a thing. Was on a necro not guardian as well. And was at around 12-1am UK time.

So how can an EU player not have lag on a NA server whilst a NA player does???

Different routing. It’s as simple as that.

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Different routing. It’s as simple as that.[/quote]

Except… Not so simple, right?

Network Engineer here.

Just a note of interest, I mentioned before about disconnects when queueing or upon queue pops. I forgot to add the error code I get.

1055:5:1:874:101 is the code I get, it only triggers when trying to queue or when accepting a map transfer.

If this isn’t fixed by the time HOT is released i won’t be purchasing HOT….Simple as that.

Colly.4073:

If this isn’t fixed by the time HOT is released i won’t be purchasing HOT….Simple as that.

You don’t need to purchase the expansion anyway to play the new WvW map.

Orochimaru.4730:

Another interesting thing. Last night I was playing on my NA account on Blackgate, there were a few NA players complaining about lag, whilst there I was an EU player and I didnt notice a thing. Was on a necro not guardian as well. And was at around 12-1am UK time.

So how can an EU player not have lag on a NA server whilst a NA player does???

I have had similar experiences in which I was not getting lag, or others in my particular guild or group were not, when others are . I shared those experiences here. The funny thing is that other posters were so dead set on claiming the servers were to blame, that the tried to shout me down as it were. In my experience, there can be a plethora of problems that cause issues.

I have not experienced really bad skill lag in 3 way zerg fights since some adjustments were made, but in bigger fights some “lag” or “packetloss” is still there. It mainly shows when I try to use “point and click” aoe skills. I would say that there is like 50/50 change will they activate or not… This is rather annoying because you’re basically playing in lottery mode.

Zerg vs zerg fights really won’t become enjoyable before game stops dropping packets.

The last several days I have been playing my guardian and going frontline against map blobs, and the skilllag is back, it is very frustrating being surrounded by so many enemy players and suddenly realizing your heal/utility skills are not going off. Have not noticed the same bad lag on ranged professions, but on my war/guard going frontline its like russian roulette on skills going off.

TC BL hills has been very laggy this weekend regarding skilllag because of the heavy blobbing.

For me the lag comes and goes but my main problem is with the constant DC’s.

I DC when I meet a large blob, I DC when I am in a 3 way in garrison and I DC when I try to leave the game. The queue times are usually quite high in T1 so this can turn a minor inconvenience into a MAJOR PAIN IN THE KITTEN very quickly. I have sent in numerous reports to ANET when it happens and yet it continues. At this point I could care less if we get new maps when it is apparent you need to fix the ones we have currently.

And yes this is a bit of a rant post but you would rant too if you got DC’d every time you wanted to join up with your guildies for a bit of fun!

So testing phase over? Can we have the old map caps back now? Again it is much more fun playing with lag, than it is sat in Q’s only to log in and have lag anyway.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

The map caps are about 10% lower than when I started looking into this. I’m not comfortable raising them higher right now. Sorry!

Hey, any news about that? time pass quickly and queues are annoying.

Since it’s been already more than 14 days since the map cap has been reduced, we have to assume this is this going to be a permanent change?

GrandHaven.1052:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Different routing. It’s as simple as that.

Except… Not so simple, right?

Network Engineer here.

That’s funny, because I’m a network engineer as well. If some players have a perfectly fine connection and some don’t, it’s almost certainly not the fault of the software. Instead I’d recommend that those people do a tracert to the server as well as analyze their net traffic when connected to see how it’s traveling back and forth to the server. What would be your first thought?

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

GrandHaven.1052:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Different routing. It’s as simple as that.

Except… Not so simple, right?

Network Engineer here.

That’s funny, because I’m a network engineer as well. If some players have a perfectly fine connection and some don’t, it’s almost certainly not the fault of the software. Instead I’d recommend that those people do a tracert to the server as well as analyze their net traffic when connected to see how it’s traveling back and forth to the server. What would be your first thought?

There is far too many people with the same problem for it to be a routing problem or with individual players ISP/Connection.

I was just in EB Piken square and whenever 2 zergs approached each other every single member of our server suffered severe packet loss and warping over the area, The same was happening to the enemy zerg.

The problem lies squarely with Anet.

Colly.4073:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

GrandHaven.1052:

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

Different routing. It’s as simple as that.

Except… Not so simple, right?

Network Engineer here.

That’s funny, because I’m a network engineer as well. If some players have a perfectly fine connection and some don’t, it’s almost certainly not the fault of the software. Instead I’d recommend that those people do a tracert to the server as well as analyze their net traffic when connected to see how it’s traveling back and forth to the server. What would be your first thought?

There is far too many people with the same problem for it to be a routing problem or with individual players ISP/Connection.

I was just in EB Piken square and whenever 2 zergs approached each other every single member of our server suffered severe packet loss and warping over the area, The same was happening to the enemy zerg.

The problem lies squarely with Anet.

Correct. I was speaking to the poster who said that his and others’ connections were fine but some people on his server were having issues, not when everyone on a server or multiple servers experiences those issues.

Baldrick.8967:

Here’s what I notice about lag:

As an ele, necro or mesmer, any lag results in you being less effective, strong lag makes it impossible to play in or survive any fight, as you are more dependent on your skills to damage/stay alive.

In the same battle, staff guardian won’t even notice the lag as they can spam 1 all day long, and regen will keep them alive.

Warrior just laughs as heal sig and regen outheals the incoming damage and chops up all the squishies.

When the lag gets bad, I switch off my ele and log into my guard called ‘Boredom Tanking’, and suddenly I no longer notice the lag.

Sounds like someone is doing Guardian wrong. Every class is dependent on their skills to stay alive. Guardian just as well, let alone positioning. Lag sucks, it hurts everyone. It’s not been TERRIBLE recently, but it makes it hard to do anything as any class. I2Guardian

Side note, Dev interaction is mucho bueno. Kudos.

It’s really bad.

I’m getting a consistent 5fps in big groups and on top of that, lag to an extent that I think I’m running straight, but it then turns out I’ve been running into a wall.

Smaller groups are OKish.

Most people would probably still think the fps I’m getting in them are bad, but I can cope; but, in big groups, it’s basically suicide.

To be fair, it was even worse a few weeks ago (2 or 3fps), but still.

As far as FPS goes, even in the largest fights, I never seem to drop below 23. When it comes to FPS, your cpu and your graphics card and setting tend to have the greatest impact in that respect. Your isp, your router/modem, also have some effect. What are you running, equipment wise, on your gaming computer?

Ark Bladesteele.2943:

If some players have a perfectly fine connection and some don’t, it’s almost certainly not the fault of the software. Instead I’d recommend that those people do a tracert to the server as well as analyze their net traffic when connected to see how it’s traveling back and forth to the server.

I did this last week, using Anet’s utility and PingPlotter. Anet Support was very helpful, btw, and went through several steps to try to pin down the actual problem. The result their engineers came up with was as follows:

“Looking through your Pingplotter report, honestly, it doesn’t look that bad. I don’t see any Packet Loss that isn’t explained as a server blocking diagnostic network traffic (would not affect your gameplay at all). In addition, your ping also never goes above 50. I see a little bit of jitter, but it doesn’t look like it is causing any real issues. As far as your network connection is concerned, you shouldn’t be seeing any network latency.

That leaves a variety of different causes. I do know that when you are playing WvW, if three large zergs come together, you can experience delay in your abilities (I experience this myself). This is not network latency. This delay is caused by the servers and your computer processing so much movement and ability data. This often manifests itself as ability latency. Again, this is not the network, this is computer hardware. It does not manifest itself usually as a drop in FPS.

This type of latency is something we are aware of and while there isn’t a simple fix, we are always looking at improving the GW2 experience in all aspects, including issues in WvW like this one. Unfortunately there are no steps that Arenanet Customer Support can suggest to solve this for you."

So… not my network. I do suggest that people who are curious about the source of their latency/lag contact Anet Support, and be prepared to run the Anet utility and 30 minutes of PingPlotter (the free trial version), to find out if it is your network or not.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes people (including me) will adjust their graphics settings and not realize they have made permanent changes This is because the game continues to draw existing characters at the old setting and only new characters get the new higher (and potentially slower) setting. Then they map travel and suddenly the game is slower because all of the characters (players and NPCs) have been loaded at the new, higher graphics level setting. But it’s not obvious that the earlier setting change caused things to run slower later. We could “fix” this by doing a big graphics refresh every time you change a setting. That might annoy players but eliminate this problem. -prefereset will also ‘fix’ this problem by resetting your graphics settings which might be what you experienced.

i noticed in some friends who had various problems with game like no working mouse key binds or problem to change some settings in options that the gw2-cache(numbers) in temp folder was double . after the deletion of the two files while the game was closed the game client worked correct and it created only one gw2-cache(numbers).

i also suggested to them to disable the ipv6* ( unchecked in network settings ) and set static local ip / dns and uncheck the Anti-aliasing in video card option ( all had amd vga cards ) in game and they stopped have lags and skill lags in wvw .

.* not all personal adsl routers work correct with ipv6

Yesterday i have had at least 2 dc’s again and some huge delays.

I am getting the idea that the issues some people are experiencing are NOT server related.

I would like to just guide people on how to check this with a few very simple test.

The following are tested in Windows 7 Command prompt, to get the.
Click Start > type cmd > press Enter.

Testing latency and packet loss independent of ANET servers :
Type the following :
ping [website] -t |||||||||||||||||| For example ping www.example.com -t

After a while you can hold CTRL and press C to cancel this.

Your average ping should not fluctuate wildly, there should be less than 7% packet loss, preferably less and around 200ms ping to international websites should be fine for WvW to avoid skill lag or DCs.
If you have packet loss(excessive amount of packets failed to return or timed out) then the issue is your internet connection, not ANET.

Testing bandwidth :

Since there are A LOT of different types of internet connection out there, the simplest way to do this is just to go speedtest.net and run the test.
You should have at least 2MBps down and 0.4Kbps up for a decent experience in WvW. Anything less and you will have issues.

Checking your latency to ANET server : (This does NOT equate to in game ping as mentioned before by ANET network guys, but should give you a more accurate idea of how far traffic needs to go and how reliable your internet connection is to ANET server).

In game use the /ip command to get the IP of the server you are on.
Use that IP and follow the below instructions in cmd just as we did before.

ping [ip] -t |||||||||||||||||| for example ping 197.214.33.21 -t

Hold CTRL and C to cancel again and see the results.

If all of this is normal (if you are not sure, ask me) then you can be relatively(not 100%) sure that the problem server side.

Having very much lag in EB now.

Stephen ClarkeWillson.1802:

One thing I have noticed is that sometimes people (including me) will adjust their graphics settings and not realize they have made permanent changes This is because the game continues to draw existing characters at the old setting and only new characters get the new higher (and potentially slower) setting. Then they map travel and suddenly the game is slower because all of the characters (players and NPCs) have been loaded at the new, higher graphics level setting. But it’s not obvious that the earlier setting change caused things to run slower later. We could “fix” this by doing a big graphics refresh every time you change a setting. That might annoy players but eliminate this problem. -prefereset will also ‘fix’ this problem by resetting your graphics settings which might be what you experienced.

I get lag with an ssd drive, an extremely fast internet connection and graphics settings set all the way to low.

The excuses keep rolling.

It’s not us.

It’s the pipe that is being given to us that isn’t wide enough to allow for spikes at all.

Lot of lag this evening on MAG/DB/SI matchup. Please fix!