Guild Wars 2

Observed since tonight’s daily reset on Drakkar Lake:

Every time the event timer API shows “Monastery requires assistance” for the Behemoth meta-event and the monastery event is completed the timer resets to 2 hours. This seems to prevent the actual Behemoth event from starting as several people have reported waiting in excess of 2.5 hours with no underworld portals appearing at any point.
Apparently the time given out by the API is indeed correct and helping out the monastery “ends” the Behemoth meta-event.

We have this exact situation on Gunnar’s Hold for over a week

That is a problem with the website …
The API doesn’t give any time at all.

Nope, I can definitely say that the problem is not with the website. I use the gw2stuff site/overlay and it does give a time. Also, a problem with a website can not prevent an event from happening as is the case on Drakkar Lake (and apparently on Gunnar’s Hold, too).

The API does not provide anything time related, this is easily seen in the data it provides https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/events.json?world_id=1001 . It only reports the current state of an event.

The website has to record the time between state changes. It is true that a problem with the website would not prevent the event from happening but have the wrong time on the website is also not because the API is sending the wrong time. Having the wrong time on the website can also mean people are there at the wrong time.

I had my eyes on the area for roughly five hours straight, always clearing Greatheart Weald and the monastery when there were events. One would think that some time in that span would be the right time.
To state it very, very clearly: The Behemoth does not appear.

Also, the API gives the correct state of events for other servers. Did the event on Aurora Glade and the timer was right on the spot. So far, this problem seems to be limited to two servers.

Just to be clear I am not saying there isn’t a bug, only that the bug is not where you claim.

Just to be clear, I am stating the symptom that the API starts the event countdown anew after the monastery is cleared. That is what is different on servers where the Behemoth does not appear compared to servers where he does, and so it might help in locating the cause for the real problem, which is that the Behemoth does not appear.

For this observation to be true it is completely irrelevant if the API directly gives the time for an event or if it just receives a notification about the state of an event and starts the countdown associated with the event after receiving an “event complete” (which seems to be the case with the monastery event).

So, it might be that the API “thinking” that the Behemoth event had been completed correlates with the server behaving as if that were true and, correspondingly, not starting the actual event.

Yeah, I also noticed that yesterday on Drakkar-Lake.
I assume the next update/ server reset will fix it automatically, but for how long?
^^

The timers, as far as I know, are not returned by the GW API. They are part of the website that provides the “best guess” times. If the event bugs then the websites will be useless as they assume that the event is still running normally.

Correct, but this has nothing to do with the described bug.
The event bugged, but for some reason the API did not, as expected, just shrug and continue the countdown, no, it reset to the 2-hour time after the monastery event as if the Behemoth meta-event had been completed.
And it does that only on servers where the Behemoth event does not start.
For that reason I suspect that the same thing that makes the API go “Oh, the Behemoth is dead. Let’s start the countdown from the beginning.” might tell the server “Behemoth was just here. No need to send it out for another 2 to 2.5 hours.”

Fixed on Gunnar’s; ty Anet