Guild Wars 2

For some weeks now the TP has been experiencing a lot of timeouts similar to what one would see during a denial of service attack. Many requests either don’t go through or are heavily delayed, causing issues within the UI as an older request overwrites another. This happens around the clock, no matter how busy the actual game is.

It so happens that I have been working on leveling crafting lately, and I’ve observed behavior that has been reported before but which for me has been difficult to confirm. Now, however, bot activity has become fairly blatant and overt. If you look at low-volume crafting components you will see sell listings where the lowest price has a stock of 1-3 items. No matter whether you buy 1 or 3, these items are instantaneously restocked. As in, between the time that you place the order and the resulting refresh of the listings, they will still be there as though you never bought them.

To accomplish this level of speed, it seems to me that A. a bot is certainly necessary, and B. it is using a query rate on the order of 10ms. Presumably per item that the bot is watching. So my concerns and questions are:

Is Anet aware of these use patterns? And if so, do they actually represent a factor in the current QoS issues that the TP is experiencing? And lastly, if they are a problem, is there a solution in the works?

(I will also point out that the API servers, though supposedly unrelated to the live TP, also experienced stability issues recently due to a spike in usage and had to be brought back with query limits.)

It is more likely that the issue is somewhere between your client and ANet’s servers and not the TP itself. Your best bet is probably to create a support ticket and work with ANet to identify the connection issue you’re experiencing.

For some weeks, you have experienced timeouts; other people have not. The API is indeed unrelated to the TP, precisely to avoid these sorts of issues.

Which low-velocity crafting components are you concerned about? It’s likely that these are being constantly ‘restocked’ at low-volumes, since people tend to offer the few that they acquired using as few clicks as possible.

Regardless of what either of us believe, if you want ANet to take a closer look, you’ll need to provide more specific data. There are a couple of ways you can do this:

• Use the in-game /bug reporting function as often as you see the issue.
• Alternatively, save up a list of dates & times to include in a support ticket (with or without screenshots, if relevant).
• Include which items you were listing to sell or offering to buy.

If there’s a large scale issue affecting the entire TP, ANet would already have the data and already be investigating. By custom and long-standing policy, it’s very, very unlikely that they’d tell us about it, especially if the issue is botters or DDoS. If the issue is small scale (affecting only handfuls of people, such as yourself), they really need all the details you can provide, the better to troubleshot.

tl;dr there doesn’t seem to be a general problem, otherwise we’d see far more reports. Start a support ticket; there’s a good chance ANet can help you reduce latency for your TP transactions.

If your assumptions about Anet’s studiousness were true, the API servers wouldn’t have gone down. They also had the server logs there, but didn’t respond to what the data was telling them until it was too late. I am extending the discussion to the TP, both to ensure that it is on their radar as you are merely assuming, and otherwise to make it a matter of public record should they choose to ignore it.

Also, I’m not the only person to have reported this issue, as per Wanze’s comment in the API thread:

Trading Post performance has gone way down for me in recent weeks and months to a point that it sometimes takes a couple of seconds for an item info screen to load. Not sure, if this is somehow related, as the game is laggy in general.

TLDR your assumptions are demonstrably false.

Leablo.2651:

If your assumptions about Anet’s studiousness were true, the API servers wouldn’t have gone down. They also had the server logs there, but didn’t respond to what the data was telling them until it was too late. I am extending the discussion to the TP, both to ensure that it is on their radar as you are merely assuming, and otherwise to make it a matter of public record should they choose to ignore it.

Also, I’m not the only person to have reported this issue, as per Wanze’s comment in the API thread:

Trading Post performance has gone way down for me in recent weeks and months to a point that it sometimes takes a couple of seconds for an item info screen to load. Not sure, if this is somehow related, as the game is laggy in general.

TLDR your assumptions are demonstrably false.

If you think there’s an issue, provide some data to ANet so that they can address it. If you are correct and ANet has fallen asleep at the wheel, it isn’t enough to just say there’s an issue — they need a place to start looking.

(And it would help your claim if you didn’t confuse the API system with that used for other systems. Read the API developer’s own posts about what happened. Alleged issues with the TP are unrelated to the specific issues with the API.)