Guild Wars 2

We’ve all heard, and seen first-hand, the lag caused after the patches. Especially during dragon fights. But I’ve noticed a strange after-effect of partaking in large fights recently.
After finishing up one, everything moves at twice the speed. It’s like quickness for the entire game. Everyone runs twice as fast, attacks twice as fast, mines twice as fast, gets attacked twice as fast by mobs, even mystic-forges twice as fast! I figured it was the lag catching up to all the time warps but… it just happens after a large group, not even involving mesmers at all! And sometimes it lasts for half an hour or more before dissipating.
It’s certainly not cheating in any way, but there’s no way that the entire game, players and all, should move twice as fast for half an hour. Something’s just not right here at all.

What the hell is happening?

Really? Has nobody else run into this problem?
It’s can’t be possible that the latest patch made my computer so good that it can speed up the entire game, players and all.

I’ve seen it once, and it seemed to only affect attack speed, but not movement.

I had the same problem once. After killing the Claw of Jormag everything went on speed mode. Especially the auto attack was funny. There was no cast time on it which means fire balls as fast as you can push your mouse button.

=> Enemies dead in 2 secs by simply using your auto attack. I am pretty sure this it not how it is supposed to work. :P

Well, I’ve run into two versions of this, really:

- Zone-wide quickness. Everyone attacks, moves, gets hits twice as fast by enemies that move twice as fast. This generally changes when you leave the zone, and wears out within a couple of minutes.
- Self-quickness. Everyone else is normal, but you and the mobs you’re fighting move twice as fast, but you do not attack twice as fast. Sometimes that lasts for quite a while, even though death, zoning and relog. Makes it tough to use a thief right.

I’ve received this bug 3 times in the last couple of days. Each time after very laggy world events (twice at Jormag, once at Teq.) I’m thinking maybe it’s just all the quicknesses from Time Warp finally stack up and apply, leaving me with perma-quickness for ~5 minutes. I’m not complaining. Taking down champs with auto-attack in ~10 seconds is kinda fun.

I experienced this game speed up in the past couple days since the last patch on my warrior and elementalist. It occured while in normal pve doing my dailies. It seemed to be like the server connection suddenly sped up and everything was occuring quicker. NPCs were quicker, my character was moving and attacking faster . . . everything just sped up as if I was directly connected to the Anet server experiencing no latency. It actually felt enjoyable and pleasing to me to be able to play GW2 “turbo” mode.

I wouldn’t mind if we can actually experience the game in this faster mode over normal internet connections with greater frequency in the future when the game matures.

Jason King.2647:

We’ve seen this happen before, but have never been able to consistently reproduce it. Is there anything else you know of, besides getting into large-scale fights, that can cause this to occur?

Thanks!

It appears like the server suddenly ticks with double speed. I assume you are using a watchdog to launch a new server thread if the old one crashes?

This problem usually occurs right after a server side lag, it appears as if you had accidentally launched a second server on the same database because your watchdog interpreted the non-responding server as dead, but it didn’t bother to actually kill the “dead” server prior to launching a fresh one.

Try overburdening your local testserver by an excessive amount, you should be able to trigger the bug that way.

I might add, that I also noticed an even more extreme version of this bug, where the simulation speed was not only doubled, but tripled after a lag.

Its pointless to look at a live server and waiting for the bug to occur in such cases. As a developer, you need to analyze the problem and make assumptions about possible causes.

In this case, it is most likely a bad implementation of a watchdog (they sure have one, considering how often the servers crash!) which triggers prematurely if the actual game server fails to respond for a few seconds. This is the correct behavior, but a watchdog should not only START a service, but ensure a CLEAN START. This includes killing the broken server instance if it is still running.