Guild Wars 2

Condensed version: What’s with all the lag?

Long version: For about three weeks now I’ve been noticing steadily heavier latency when going up against large groups. Skill lag, health lag, and a few times total unplayability. I’ve had to bail on a few BLs because the lag was so great that I couldn’t go two minutes without a client disconnect. Now my machine isn’t terribly beefy, but my bandwidth is either cable modem or fiber (campus net, no bandwidth limiting for this type of traffic before any tech-heads ask). I’m fairly certain it’s not my computer causing this kind of slow-down, and like I said, it’s only been happening in the last few weeks. So,

1) How much of this lag is server-side?
2) Is this server-wide, or does it only affect certain instances?
3) Is flooding an enemy server with an overwhelming amount of soldiers some new strategy for zerg-wiping?

Server’s JQ for the curious.

DR server here, and I have been noticing the same. It’s not just WvW though, it seems to be all aspects of the game.

I got 1min lag non stop this morning in wvw. Since I wanted to play, I ended up using the mortar… but I shot only once every 1 to 3 min. It got too tedious and I had to leave.

Back in LA, everything was fine again.

give everyone only 3 skills (#1, heal and 1 utility to keep variability) not more is needed in zerg WvW actions
problem solved

There seems to be several issues at play at once and I am sure someone more knowledgeable on the issues of latency lag, skill lag and ISP connection problems could better explain how it is all inter-related but here is the general gist as I understand it (some of this is a bit of extrapolation and assumption).

First yes, skill lag (the server side problem of abilities taking too long to calculate) has been getting worse for most users lately. Different people seem to point to different things as when they started to notice increases in skill lag.

Some things we know, GW2 has always suffered from skill lag, especially in larger scale battles. BWE 3 was so bad I almost lost faith in the game launching with functional large scale WvW but then they did all those bonus test events and figured some stuff out which ultimately led to the introduction of culling that everyone hated so much. In order to turn culling off so we got to see the enemies we were fighting, skill lag had to get worse and back in March was on their radar to be improved upon over the next “several patches”.

You only noticed skill lag in large three way battles around Stonemist for the most part for awhile there so I suspect some of those improvements actually helped. In the same time frame we’ve also had a lot of turn over in the game, people come and going more frequently which is the wonderful thing about a buy-to-play MMO model, you can step away for a time and return when things of interest to you are going on. This lead to some world population instability as people came and went while at the same time, new players continued to join the game.

Flame and Frost along with the Living Story in general created some buzz and added a bunch of new goodies and particle effect skins. The fluctuations in world populations along with some of the improvements to skill lag may have been responsible for ANET deciding to increase the world population caps by a large amount some time in May. It feels like around this same they also increased the WvW map population caps to help accommodate the increase in players while keeping queues low. They have blog posts talking about how changes to those caps are something they can set dynamically on fly from their end and we have experienced a few of these up and down changes already in the games history. There was a noticeable increase in skill lag frequency around this time but not much of a public outcry over it. This is also around the same time the new WvW scoring system came into play.

The dragon bash stuff in June also seemed to tick up the occurrence of skill lag a decent amount and threads on the topic started popping up more often. There were some jokes about all the flapping halo wings on dead bodies in WvW being the cause of a new kind of butterfly effect. We started to see more complaints of skill lag outside of Eternal Battleground and beyond the top tier servers.

It is hard to be sure when the meta in WvW became more zerg focused but I think it is safe to say that in the background of all these other smaller changes taking place, the increase in frequency of the whole WvW map getting together to run smack into the other 2 sides with their own blobs was steadily increasing. We all know first hand the effects of this on skill lag as 1 key spam sessions became a new element in the meta, so much so that some servers and commanders actually start to plan for it as staff guardians become even bigger darlings of the zerg.

Then the DC and ISP junk with some major networks doing some re-routing and construction that started happening the beginning of July piled onto this already compounded problem of skill lag and too many bodies in one place. So currently a lot servers, not just those in the top tiers regually get to be engaged in battles where all anyone can do is spam the #1 key and stack more people on the pile in hopes of winning the day. Those battles are not the least bit interesting to me but once one starts on a map, players across that whole zone can feel the effects.

The ISP problem is due to be fixed soon and is something out of ANET’s control but the underlying issue of skill lag is not going away without some seriously dedicated resources. The biggest thing ANET could do today to help with this issue to lower the WvW map population caps but every time someone brings that up there is a back lash of fear over the queues and split up communities that could result from such an action. Hopefully ANET is working hard behind the scenes to bring us lower WvW map population caps in a manner that will satisfy every one because I think it is pretty safe to say this game cannot handle the size of battles we’ve been throwing at it lately and if we can’t accept that then maybe we let our expectations get too high.

That’s my story and I am sticking with it. Hope it gets fixed soon!