Guild Wars 2

We have no plans to ever support buying/selling things on the trading post outside the game.

What error did you get when you were disconnected?

BTW, shout out to “Flo Gets Mad” and “Buy Some Apples” for escorting me around the map.

Well – here’s a thing. My ping is reported at 0 right now – in fact, since I joined this map. That makes me not trust that number very much! I’ll have to look into that. (Just remembered to screenshot it because no one at work tomorrow will believe it!)

Pretty interesting. I just watched a zerg fest in t5 and I had no skill lag. But players chatting with me who were closer to the battle said they had skill lag. They said I need to get into the battle to experience it. I would, but I die in 2 seconds. The big difference between me and those in the battle is the amount of data being reported- closer to battle means more data sent to client so it knows what to draw. Hmm. Interesting.

This requires looking at a whole new set of perf graphs.

I’m going to join t5 to watch.

t5 EB EU now potentially lagging… and resolving.

Right now, I see that t3 EB EU has “server induced” lag.

I’ll keep repeating this: I’m looking at one specific problem this weekend. As near as I can tell from your posts (which I appreciate) is that the vast majority of lag problems y’all are experiencing is not from this problem.

Some other time (maybe even later today!) I’ll look at the huge variation in ping that people standing right next to each other have and how some people get such a bad ping they disconnect. But that’s a different problem, technically speaking.

I’m interested in that problem too, just not at this exact moment.

I believe you have lag, Nieny, but it’s not from the problem I’m looking at. Right now (meaning as I post this and for the last 10 minutes), nobody has lag from server lag. I was just talking to some peeps and one person with a 100 mps fibre connection was getting a 900 ping, then 20, then 900. That’s not the game. The people standing nearby had consistent 40 ping. I had 90. That’s not map lag. I don’t know what it is. People get mad when I suggest it is there ISP or their WiFi or someone in the house streaming Netflix. So I won’t suggest that.

briggah – I’ll look at your server. BTW, what actually happens is that you get DC’d but the client holds out hope more packets will arrive. You see increasing lag and then client decides its really not going to get an update and you get the DC message. “Lagged until you DC’d” translates to “DC’d when the lag started but the client was hoping for more messages to arrive before giving up”.

Hi; when I said “no lag” I meant at that exact moment when I posted. I’m looking for maps that are lagging so I can join them at the same time as I examine internal graphs. I didn’t mean to imply there is no lag anymore! I generally see heavier battles in EU but really these are just generalizations. Which map has the biggest battle varies greatly and can have a zerg fest at any time.

Now I’m observing t4 EU EB – I joined Piken Square.

That went really well. Tiny bit of spell lag. Now I’m dead and people are dancing on my anet corpse.

The t1 EB game is booking along at 90% cpu without lag (as tested by me hitting a skill) so maybe the timer tweak helped. Will move on to another server where there is more lag. (Maybe Far Shiverpeaks.) Wait! Epick battle just started in front of me!

Good Morning. This morning I’m observing Seafarer’s Rest WvW battles.

I also tweaked our map scheduling timer a tiny bit about an hour ago. We’ll see if it makes any difference.

There was a question about queue fairness. From my charts it looks fair.

I’m going to do an experiment on myself next time there is lag to see if I can induce the disco behavior. I had an idea about that last night. So far no lag though on my map. I see it at tier 5 though.

Yup, saw that one! I have to go now. Feel free to keep posting your experiences and I’ll catch up on them later. G’night!

My “lag graphs” and my own experience in the map tells me that we’re looking at a different problem now for the disconnects (or discos as I call them). Do you get any other error code than 7:11 ?

This is great information. The DC’s are a different problem (still important of course).

Thanks. I’ve been whispering with BATMAN in-game to compare his experience to the various graphs I can see. So far this is going way better than EU peak time, but he says there are a lot of disconnects. That would be a different problem – is anyone else seeing a lot of that in T1 NA?

Yo – turns out I can temp move myself into Blackgate and experience the lag level for myself! Don’t worry – I won’t actually play for points. I’m “Asuradly So”, a little Asura engi in-game hanging at Blackgate Hill, if you want to say “hi”.

Of course, now I have forums, graphs, and actual game to watch at the same time. Should be interesting! I think I need more monitors.

I’m not going to argue technical trade-offs in a thread like this. We fixed a bug in our game scheduler and as a result we’ve found another bug in WvW that was previously hidden. It’s as simple as that.

I don’t post a lot but this seemed like an opportunity in real-time to correlate the player experience with a big pile o’ graphs.

Also … it is sometimes an ISP. Things are rough at peak time in some parts of Europe right now. Amazon and Netflix have expanded their streaming offerings and the intertubes in EU are sometimes a bit clogged up at peak time. This is gross generalization because the EU is a big place and YMMV. The thing with connecting to our game is that there is your ISP, one or more other ISPs in between, and then one of our ISPs (we have three I think). Usually the trouble is with one of the ISPs in the middle. That’s why it is hard to fix; you call your ISP, we call our ISP, but it’s hard to get someone to call the ISP in the middle and then get the ISP in the middle to do something about it when they are just trying to make it through a night of lots of video streaming.

I don’t think it is the skill change. I do think the thing we did to reduce PvP (and also some PvE) lag made WvW lag worse; or, put the opposite way, WvW lag was bleeding over into the other map types, and we fixed that. The silver lining as they say is that the perf counters are more accurate than they were and I think I see the problem now; it’s going take some engineering to fix properly but I have a band-aid in place now that reduces the occurrences (at least as I perceive them via my graphs).

T1 EU EB must have just had an epic half hour fight. Holy moly. Seems to be recovering now.

I’m not forgetting about NA. It’s just less busy at this time of day. I can see a big spike 17 hours ago in NA which would be … kitten … 7:00 p.m. Pacific time?

Whatever I do to help EU automatically helps NA. T1 definitely lags more often than other tiers – at least on my graphs. But your experience may not match my graphs, which is the tricky problem I face – which graph is the most informative and will help find the problem? We collect hundreds of thousands (maybe a million?) perf samples every minute so figuring out the ones that matter is key. And we, as a team at ArenaNet, have already looked at the obvious ones, and it’s not correlating. One thing with the recent server fix is that some perfs are more accurate now, which is a huge help, as you can imagine.

It’s correct that the server lag (skill lag) will be map-wide. You don’t have to be in the big battle but the big battle is the source of the lag if it’s in the same map as you.

Yup, it’s bad for EU tier 1 Eternal Battlegrounds right now. The cool thing I just discovered is another perf counter that correlates better with the lag than total CPU. Y’all in a big fight right now? I guess if you are you’re not posting to the forums.

The best thing you can do to help is keep playing while I try to correlate lag with the root problem. I’m now watching the t1 EB CPU specifically and while I don’t see 100% I see CPU in excess of 90% still and that seems to correlate with lag spikes. Hmm.

What changed with this patch, and why I’m watching on a Saturday, is that we reduced PvP lag (a lot) with a scheduler change. In testing we saw that WvW got worse, so we reserved extra server capacity for WvW – we dedicated hardware to WvW battles that isn’t shared with the rest of the game. But that seems not to have fixed it for really big battles. I will say I think the lag spikes resolve themselves faster than they used to, but they might also spike up faster, which is when they are most noticeable to a player.

Things are stable again. My working hypothesis is that there is a bug in the “catch up” code. It’s not really necessarily bad for a map to exceed 100% CPU for a short period of time – the game is very tolerant of small lag even in WvW battles. But I’m wondering if sometimes a map starts working hard to fix a tiny blip which actually makes things worse for several minutes. If that’s the case it would certainly show up in big fights. I’ve lowered the map cap to keep CPU below 85%-ish to see if there are fewer lag spikes.

… and it’s resolving itself. That one lasted six minutes.

Oops. There goes another one in Eternal Battlegrounds. Dang.

At this exact moment all looks good. For me, it’s a bit like looking at all of the green characters dropping down the screen in The Matrix movies and then inferring your experience. Let me know on this thread how it goes the rest of the night (Europe time). I’ll keep watching graphs.

I see another spike on a borderlands map now. Hmm.

In the past CPU usage would cause server lag – 100% CPU usage is not good. However we’re not seeing that now so I’m not sure lowering the map capacity will fix it (but I might try it). Instead now we’re seeing “lag curves” (server side) that grow over about a five to ten minute period and then resolve themselves. For instance I see an Eternal Battlegrounds map right now in Europe just had one of these spikes. Over a two minute period the server fell behind by 40 seconds (yikes!) and then caught up in the next 2 minutes; the server CPU did not exceed 80%.

Hi all – we’re aware of the problem and working on a solution.

I might be able to figure something out Monday. Unfortunately that error code is pretty generic and doesn’t tell us much.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Enko.6123:

Chris Cleary.8017:

This restriction should have no effect on items sent through mail. If there is, it’s unintended and most likely a bug.

http://i.imgur.com/EEN2wbW.png

Testing results:
Mailed an item with no merchant value (Divine Lucky Envelope): unable to pull it out of the mail.
Placed Divine Lucky Envelope in Guild Bank: Was able to withdraw from the guild bank.
Unable to withdraw gold from guild bank.

I’ve found the bug, looking into the issue now.

Going to have to wait for a fix on this one until sometime next week. Items wont dissapear, they just won’t be claimable until the restriction resets or we fix this. This only applies to mail that is sent to someone already at the cap that contains coins and items.

Editing: Fix will come next week (Week of April 13th)

Enko.6123:

Chris Cleary.8017:

This restriction should have no effect on items sent through mail. If there is, it’s unintended and most likely a bug.

http://i.imgur.com/EEN2wbW.png

Testing results:
Mailed an item with no merchant value (Divine Lucky Envelope): unable to pull it out of the mail.
Placed Divine Lucky Envelope in Guild Bank: Was able to withdraw from the guild bank.
Unable to withdraw gold from guild bank.

I’ve found the bug, looking into the issue now.

This restriction should have no effect on items sent through mail. If there is, it’s unintended and most likely a bug.

Interesting. Try waiting 15 minutes until the match is over.

We just regenerated the tiles; the updated ones should appear in a couple of days as the CDN caches expire.

DarkAsher.6520:

My friend has been trying to re-download Guild Wars 2, it worked in the past on said computer, but now whenever she tries to, it gives her this message about 10-20 minutes into downloading it.
I don’t know how to help her, but maybe someone here does. Thank you!

Hi there! I’ve been seeing this a bit in our crash reports and would love to get some more info from people. If you’re experiencing this crash while updating, can you try a few things for me and see if it helps? Try each of these separately:

- Run Windows Update and install any required updates.
- Update your antivirus and do a full system scan, then run GW2.exe and try patching again.
- If you’re still crashing, turn off any antivirus programs you may have running and try patching.

If you still crash, could you please submit your email address with the error report so I can get in touch with you directly? That particular error code means that there is an invalid parameter being sent to a C-Runtime library and requires some MATRIX STYLE debugging

Thanks!

-Dave

Gold Mail and Bank Restrictions are now enabled for everyone on both NA and EU.

Hey all,

We just heard from our Server Team Lead, and the team has done some magic in the background that should have addressed this issue for everyone.

Naturally, if you continue to have an issue of this nature, we want to know about it. But the team believes this should be cleared up now.

So… go take a few licks at some beasties for me, eh?

This appears to be a sporadic set of issues related to the forums and/or the game, with some unable to join, some getting booted out, etc. It doesn’t appear to be widespread, but we’re sorry if you’re having issues.

The team is on the case!!

Yeah, that’s totally broken. Sorry about that. I’ll try to push the fix to live on Monday :<

Malkavian.4516:

Here’s my main concern so far. One of my characters has experienced the flawed version of the PS and since you can’t rewind the progress back, I’d have to reroll another character. While I could just grind for gear, I practically invested a heavy amount of gold on my previous character and it just wouldn’t be fair on my part to have to grind again just to get gold again to re-gear my character. Is it possible to request for duplicates of my character’s existing armor so that when my rerolled copy hits level 80, I can just set him up after? Same goes with the fact that I used a styling kit on him.

I’d contact Customer Service if you have questions or concerns that aren’t covered in the original post or F.A.Q.

Rym.1469:

I’m thinking… If we have Steve…. Would the Leviathan’s name be Steve Junior?

We’d call them Little Stevies, of course. They hate that.