Guild Wars 2

Alright so I’m looking for advice from anyone, doesn’t matter whether you’re from the USA but it would probably help if you have had experience with my particular ISP and issues that I have.

So I’ll give a little background on myself and current situation – my lag is legendary for being pathetic no matter what I try and it’s not always just on GW2, but because it’s the current only game I dedicate any significant of time towards, it’s what it affects me the most.

I play on EU servers, but my account originated on NA servers because I live in the US. I absolutely cannot swap back to NA servers due to the fact that literally all of the people I play with are here and I’m a part of the competitive dungeon and fractals community, and an officer of the guild that I’m in. I am aware of the fact that I have no choice but to put up with higher latency – this has always been something I have dealt with since I made the choice to transfer here in 2013. However, my problems only worsened recently in the past month or two when for several months prior there wasn’t nearly as awful of lag.

So yeah contrary to the region that I play in on GW2, I live in America and I have Time Warner Cable, specifically their signature home service which is the best they offer for residents. If I want to pay for anything better like business-class internet, it would cost ~$300 a month and they probably wouldn’t offer it to me anyways as I’ve asked a few different representatives and said that they couldn’t do that for me.

I have been calling them dozens and dozens of times in the past year, sometimes receiving garbage help and sometimes talking to people genuinely trying to help me.

I have tried two different VPNs in the past, Cyberghost and WTFast specifically. Neither showed significant improvements and both were semi-unreliable due to the fact that they could randomly kick me off at times and even on one occasion I’d lag more with WTFast than without.

The lag in particular that I suffer from by far the most is packet loss. I verify by running traceroutes and check via task manager’s resource monitor to track network activity on a regular basis, and I also run pingplotter tests to see what specifically is causing the lag that I experience all the time.

I have dozens of screenshots to show the results. Normally, they’re always like this:

http://i.imgur.com/swz5sHs.png

Okay so anyways, as evident in this screenshot, hop 3 I’m having about 7% packet loss, indicating the wireless router is having some trouble at the time. This isn’t very irregular, it happens (risk of being wireless afterall) and if it persists it’s easily resolvable in worst case scenarios by resetting my wireless adapter and rebooting the modem along with it in that order.

The real issue, as seen in this image, is that I’m being routed to the ncsoft servers in an undesirable way, where at hops 7 8 and 9 you see 72% packet loss at level 3 communication in Texas or whatever, along with hops 8 and 9 completely timing out (which is why there are blank lines representing the information).

I’ve called my ISP numerous times about this, and the many different people I’ve talked to declare that once the connection leaves their services, which is shown as hop 6 and I think is located in Chicago, they apparently can do nothing about it.

One guy in particular sent a ticket for me, providing all of my screenshots, my router and modem models, and all information he had in regards to me to them but there was no guarantee anything would get done.

I’ve once tried ethernet cables before and there was no difference at all other than having a more stable connection from my router— it did nothing in regards to the lag-related problems that I have, which is packet loss.

As stated before, I’ve tried two different VPNs but they weren’t reliable. I’m really hesitant to try paying for one because of a really awful experience I’ve had in the past with a proxy service that I had to pay a monthly fee for and it took me over a year to get them to cancel it including refunds for all of the money they took from me in the time that they ignored my requests to cancel the subscription. I want this to be my last resort option to try again at this point.

Basically, I’m running out of ideas to try.

I can’t go back to NA. I’ve tested on a friend’s alt account and I get around 60 ping there (which is beautiful), so it only confirms the fact that I’m being routed poorly.

I’ve gone through 3 modems in the past year, along with two different routers. I currently have a Netgear R2650 that’s within 8-10 feet of my laptop and is only a few months old.

I have called my ISP and spoken with dozens of different representatives.

I have searched through different options in hopes of finding better providers, but Time Warner Cable has a monopoly in my area.

I would be able to get AT&T Uverse, but they offer even worse speeds than Time Warner does.

I’m sorry for the lengthy flustered-sounding post, but I currently am dealing with monstrous amounts of lag with inconsistent and unpredictable delays such as…

Well, this happening: https://youtu.be/__Vta9WXdT0?t=10s
(not me talking in it, it’s my friend… but you can clearly see when I use about face to do burning retreat, everything freezes up/stops responding for a few seconds then all loads at once)

And an even more extreme version of it happening here: https://youtu.be/Ucv6tY-kNo8?t=50s
(In this clip you can truly see everything freeze for up to 10 solid seconds before everything loads realtime…)

I’m looking for advice or maybe just experiences from any of you who might have had problems like I currently do and have. Maybe someone’s tried something that I have not have. I don’t know.

Anyways, thumbs crossed. :x

To better put it into perspective some of the really awful consequences to this packet loss can be, here are a few other saved videos of it happening though they are kind of old.

https://youtu.be/e1F4rjuwr3E?t=50s

https://youtu.be/y5A97TrxCmI

I’ve had this problem happening on and off for such a long time, but it’s been much better for the past few months up until the summer started.

If any of you know of a way to help with this, be it an actually reliable VPN (not like WTFast which was unreliable and apparently can get people banned on here so I’m told?) I would greatly appreciate it!

I use wtfast, and that trouble you had with it disconnecting you from the game can be fixed if you manually select the server you want to connect it with. To select the best server you click on the “sort by ping” button then it will test the pings from all avaliable servers, then you go and select the server with the lowest ping avaliable.
Me for example, i’m from Brazil and usually the server with the lowest ping is BR3 so i usually just select that one.

After i started manually selecting a specific server wtfast stopped kicking me out of the game.

Sadly I’ve tried exactly what you’ve suggested with about 5 different servers and the problem persisted on all, but not consistently. It would sometimes work for up to an hour or so, then suddenly get really awful.

The worst part was that every single time I needed to change servers, I’d need to close out of everything and reopen it every single time. The inconvenience aspect of it was very extreme.

Additionally, my free trial expired for it. I could probably mess around with registry values to try to reset the trial (think I’ve done that with something else long ago), but yeah.

Are you sure it has nothing to do with the servers?

I live in The Netherlands, play on EU servers, have 120mbps internet with a perfect connection, and I still experience the same things as you quite often.
Especially at night (between midnight and 4-5AM GMT+2) I get horrible delays, pingspikes that go well above 1000 and things completely freezing for a few seconds, and then teleporting to real time like in the videos you linked above.

I never experience this in other games, its a strictly guild wars 2 related issue, and I have no idea why its occurring, because while GW2 is acting like I have some kind of connection loss, I can browse the internet or play other online games just fine.

bladex.9502:

Are you sure it has nothing to do with the servers?

I live in The Netherlands, play on EU servers, have 120mbps internet with a perfect connection, and I still experience the same things as you quite often.
Especially at night (between midnight and 4-5AM GMT+2) I get horrible delays, pingspikes that go well above 1000 and things completely freezing for a few seconds, and then teleporting to real time like in the videos you linked above.

I never experience this in other games, its a strictly guild wars 2 related issue, and I have no idea why its occurring, because while GW2 is acting like I have some kind of connection loss, I can browse the internet or play other online games just fine.

Did you look at any of the links the OP provided. It clearly shows where the issue is, and it’s not on Anet. Posting the picture you did shows nothing except you are having an issue. And it could very well be the signal going into your house.

Ellieanna.5027:

bladex.9502:

Are you sure it has nothing to do with the servers?

I live in The Netherlands, play on EU servers, have 120mbps internet with a perfect connection, and I still experience the same things as you quite often.
Especially at night (between midnight and 4-5AM GMT+2) I get horrible delays, pingspikes that go well above 1000 and things completely freezing for a few seconds, and then teleporting to real time like in the videos you linked above.

I never experience this in other games, its a strictly guild wars 2 related issue, and I have no idea why its occurring, because while GW2 is acting like I have some kind of connection loss, I can browse the internet or play other online games just fine.

Did you look at any of the links the OP provided. It clearly shows where the issue is, and it’s not on Anet. Posting the picture you did shows nothing except you are having an issue. And it could very well be the signal going into your house.

Yes I did, I even quoted them but apparently reading is too hard.
All I was trying to say it might be a server related issue, together with the packet loss, because a lot of people are experiencing the same issues

bladex.9502:

Ellieanna.5027:

bladex.9502:

Are you sure it has nothing to do with the servers?

I live in The Netherlands, play on EU servers, have 120mbps internet with a perfect connection, and I still experience the same things as you quite often.
Especially at night (between midnight and 4-5AM GMT+2) I get horrible delays, pingspikes that go well above 1000 and things completely freezing for a few seconds, and then teleporting to real time like in the videos you linked above.

I never experience this in other games, its a strictly guild wars 2 related issue, and I have no idea why its occurring, because while GW2 is acting like I have some kind of connection loss, I can browse the internet or play other online games just fine.

Did you look at any of the links the OP provided. It clearly shows where the issue is, and it’s not on Anet. Posting the picture you did shows nothing except you are having an issue. And it could very well be the signal going into your house.

Yes I did, I even quoted them but apparently reading is too hard.
All I was trying to say it might be a server related issue, together with the packet loss, because a lot of people are experiencing the same issues

1) You didn’t quote anything.
2) Did you bother looking at this picture? http://i.imgur.com/swz5sHs.png

If you had, you would see his issue is at hop 7 (8 and 9 are fine, they don’t accept traceroutes so they will always be 100%). And hop 7 isn’t owned by Anet. So his issue, isn’t server related. It really is hop 7.

He’s not trying to cause problems for me Ellieanna.5027, no need to get defensive on my behalf/target him. I appreciate literally anyone trying to help me out here, doesn’t matter whether or not the advice is perfect or useless to me as long as they’re genuinely trying to help out.

@bladex
Despite them being really blunt (and arguably way too rude) about it they were correct in asserting that if the problem was actually GW2 itself, then you would see problems around hops 11, 12 and 13 but the issue is the “everything in between” from where my connection leaves my ISP’s services up to when it reaches the ncsoft servers.

I’ve tried VPNs before and have experienced some relief for these problems, but they were inconsistent and sometimes made things even worse so I’m not sure if it’s just WTFast and Cyberghost being terrible quality VPNs or if there’s something more that I can do or maybe more that my ISP can do to help.

I’ve talked to a friend that has Verizon who says similar things to me when he asked his ISP if there was a way he could avoid being routed through telia and they supposedly gave similar kind of answers that Time Warner gives me.

I don’t know what to do about it but there must be something that I can do besides giving up and not playing on EU.

Despite what they say, a VPN will not improve your ping (unless they have private networks). If your connection has no issues, a VPN will actually increase your ping due to adding another layer to the network. The point of a VPN and why it can improve your ping is to avoid problems on your normal route.

Normally, you can’t select how you travel across the internet; it’s handled automatically. By using a VPN however, you change your destination to the VPN, which then acts as a middleman to your real destination. When selecting a VPN server, don’t look at the ping, trace them to find one that will allow you to take a detour. Depending on your location however, avoiding some of the problems might not be possible. You will always have to go through your ISP’s connection for example. When going overseas, you also don’t have a lot of options.

The problem with looking at packet loss from pings is that it’s not all real. Pings are not important, so they may be dropped, delayed or entirely ignored on purpose. Hop 8 and 9 for example are just ignoring them and 7 is probably limiting them, since an actual ~73% loss would be killing your connection and affecting all future hops.

Another problem affecting the EU servers specifically is the bad network in Frankfurt. If you happen to be going through it, it will cause major packet loss during certain hours. For now (until that network upgrades), this problem can only be avoid by routing around it.

As for getting banned using WTFast, any VPN can potentially get you banned. The problem is that anyone could be using it. What happened with WTFast was that it was being used by malicious accounts, so ArenaNet simply banned them based on the IP. Everyone else that was caught in the net was unbanned shortly after.

Your trace is NA fyi.

I was using a free GPN/VPN when I was playing AION NA before it came to EU and my problems weren’t a whole lot better until a friend got me a pretty good deal on a paid VPN. Might be worth a try, or even to sample a few with the cheap/free month deals.

Purple Miku.7032:

He’s not trying to cause problems for me Ellieanna.5027, no need to get defensive on my behalf/target him. I appreciate literally anyone trying to help me out here, doesn’t matter whether or not the advice is perfect or useless to me as long as they’re genuinely trying to help out.

That’s just it. He’s not helping. He’s laying blame on Anet’s servers, when in this case, and most cases, it’s the same issue as you. If he wants to prove his point, he needs to do what you did, and show it’s occurring on the hops that belong to Anet. But him, and most people only show screenshots of their in game ping, and think they can blame Anet and Anet will fix it.

Ellieanna.5027:

Purple Miku.7032:

He’s not trying to cause problems for me Ellieanna.5027, no need to get defensive on my behalf/target him. I appreciate literally anyone trying to help me out here, doesn’t matter whether or not the advice is perfect or useless to me as long as they’re genuinely trying to help out.

That’s just it. He’s not helping. He’s laying blame on Anet’s servers, when in this case, and most cases, it’s the same issue as you. If he wants to prove his point, he needs to do what you did, and show it’s occurring on the hops that belong to Anet. But him, and most people only show screenshots of their in game ping, and think they can blame Anet and Anet will fix it.

I like how you’re blaming me for not helping, and then start purposefully derailing the thread to start an immature discussion, while you haven’t said 1 helpful thing towards the OP yourself.

Go flame people somewhere else, and try to be actually helpful here

Just pointing out that if you have connection/latency issues that appear to be time of day related, you are likely being switched to a different routing profile by your ISP (or one of THEIR providers). Those profiles are usually designed to “intelligently” throttle connections (to save the ISPs bandwidth charges at peak hours) but can often have routing mistakes that send your traffic half way across the world OR there can be a defective piece of equipment in the route that only happens on specific profiles.

While only effective in testing inbound route, TRACRT is your best bet to identify those potential problems. Run it when connection is good and then when it is bad and compare the 2. It is also hard evidence you can send to your ISP to try and get them to stop the practice with your connection.

bladex.9502:

Ellieanna.5027:

Purple Miku.7032:

He’s not trying to cause problems for me Ellieanna.5027, no need to get defensive on my behalf/target him. I appreciate literally anyone trying to help me out here, doesn’t matter whether or not the advice is perfect or useless to me as long as they’re genuinely trying to help out.

That’s just it. He’s not helping. He’s laying blame on Anet’s servers, when in this case, and most cases, it’s the same issue as you. If he wants to prove his point, he needs to do what you did, and show it’s occurring on the hops that belong to Anet. But him, and most people only show screenshots of their in game ping, and think they can blame Anet and Anet will fix it.

I like how you’re blaming me for not helping, and then start purposefully derailing the thread to start an immature discussion, while you haven’t said 1 helpful thing towards the OP yourself.

Go flame people somewhere else, and try to be actually helpful here

Next time you have lag issues in game, do what I said in the post (I know, read is hard, just like you said) and actually TRACE ROUTE your connection to Anet’s servers. You will then see where the issue is (whether it’s one of the hops, or actually at Anet’s servers). If it’s at Anet’s servers, send the report to them so they can fix it. If it’s in between, contact your ISP for assistance.

There, happy? Pretty sure I said so what he did. Which is show the route your connection takes from your modem to Anet. Then you will see where the issue is.

Healix.5819:

The problem with looking at packet loss from pings is that it’s not all real. Pings are not important, so they may be dropped, delayed or entirely ignored on purpose. Hop 8 and 9 for example are just ignoring them and 7 is probably limiting them, since an actual ~73% loss would be killing your connection and affecting all future hops.

Another problem affecting the EU servers specifically is the bad network in Frankfurt. If you happen to be going through it, it will cause major packet loss during certain hours. For now (until that network upgrades), this problem can only be avoid by routing around it.

As for getting banned using WTFast, any VPN can potentially get you banned. The problem is that anyone could be using it. What happened with WTFast was that it was being used by malicious accounts, so ArenaNet simply banned them based on the IP. Everyone else that was caught in the net was unbanned shortly after.

Your trace is NA fyi.

Yeah Frankfurt seems to be the biggest problem.

So based off of what you say there seems to be nothing that I can do other than keep trying VPNs. Do you have any suggestions on those? Like I’ve said already, tried Cyberghost and WTFast and they ended up failing to help in the end.