Guild Wars 2

For the last two days ive noticed big lag spikes and ping issues fps keep dropping and raising too, ping has even gone has high as 1000 becoming pretty unplayable.
checked my connection to with no issues at all from my provider’s end.

Might this relate to the “1 file remaining” bug?

Yeah, I’ve had similar issues with latency lately- I’m on a 50 megabit connection and other programs don’t have the same latency GW2 does. I hope this improves! 300 ms latency is rather noticeable. I’ve found that restarting the game does help a bit, at least. I’ve been getting 400ms latency for most of today so far.

MikeLewis.7496:

Movement problems on slow/laggy connections should be improved visibly – rubber-banding, popping, stuck animations, and other symptoms of bad connections should be mitigated somewhat.

Sadly GW2 has never had rubberbanding for me. Even with the worst lag i can
run and run and often only realize i have lag when i want to harvest something
and it doesn’t work.
While in other MMOs with real rubberbanding you are reset to your old position
every few seconds and so realize quickly that you have bad lag.

Glad to see the developers always working to improve the game. HATE to see instantly people complaining just to be complaining and not providing details about the problems they are experiencing, such as results of speedtests, hardware specs, their isp, their region, aspect of gamemode, ect

In the recent past, I’ve noticed a much longer load time; at the loading screen, and rendering once in the map.

I’ve no idea if this has any relevance, but am reporting it….just in case.

Good luck.

I believe this has something to do with Daredevil. Just speculation.

Have had very few latency issues in the recent months. Those I did have were short lasting, usually manifesting in the form of slight skill delay and other players warping around maps in 3-10 foot leaps.

Glad to see improvements nonetheless!

i5 4690k@4.1ghz, r7 260x 2gb 1175/1680, 8gb G.Skill RAM,Gw2 and Win7 Ultimate on an SSD.

East Coast with Time Warner Cable.

I’ve been having terrible pings lately. So I guess this is why. Go back to what you had before. This is terrible. And yes dramatically varying. Up to 4K ping then back down to 90.

Kain Francois.4328:

Might this relate to the “1 file remaining” bug?

That should be completely unrelated to this as the servers that distribute files should be separate from game servers, plus the fact that this has to do with things actually in the game, not outside it. Also, it technically might not even be the servers that are to fault for that, it might be the client.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

In the recent past, I’ve noticed a much longer load time; at the loading screen, and rendering once in the map.

I’ve no idea if this has any relevance, but am reporting it….just in case.

Good luck.

That’s client-side most of the time. Defragmenting your hard drive if you have it on one (not on an SSD) and seeing if anything else is accessing and transferring to/from your drive constantly would probably be what I’d try first. Re-installation may help.

I seriously thought my computer was overheating! I was about to run heat stress tests. PLEASE let us know when you are about to START these ‘experiments’. For those of us who are easily panicked, sudden framerate dropping on what is normally a over 60fps rig, with no network problems, freaks us out.

Not cool A-Net. Not Cool.

Will it stop that thing where if I take my Engineer to fight Karka Queen, and I try to hit one of my many ground targeted abilities like grenades, the icon will pulse for a second or two, and then just say “no, I don’t feel like actually firing, what else you got?” That is super annoying.

Syviren.7086:

I seriously thought my computer was overheating! I was about to run heat stress tests. PLEASE let us know when you are about to START these ‘experiments’. For those of us who are easily panicked, sudden framerate dropping on what is normally a over 60fps rig, with no network problems, freaks us out.

Not cool A-Net. Not Cool.

If you’re talking about FPS problems, this is completely unrelated to FPS as noted in the OP.

Millillion.5914:

Kain Francois.4328:

Might this relate to the “1 file remaining” bug?

That should be completely unrelated to this as the servers that distribute files should be separate from game servers, plus the fact that this has to do with things actually in the game, not outside it. Also, it technically might not even be the servers that are to fault for that, it might be the client.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

In the recent past, I’ve noticed a much longer load time; at the loading screen, and rendering once in the map.

I’ve no idea if this has any relevance, but am reporting it….just in case.

Good luck.

That’s client-side most of the time. Defragmenting your hard drive if you have it on one (not on an SSD) and seeing if anything else is accessing and transferring to/from your drive constantly would probably be what I’d try first. Re-installation may help.

My computer defrags daily, so I’m guessing that’s not an issue. This loading issue has come and gone throughout the lifespan of the game. I hope whatever is causing it clears up soon.

Interestingly, the last several days I’ve been experiencing a very … odd … sort of hitching. Very subtle, like micro-freezes (sometimes followed by micro-bursts of activity), but very noticeable and consistent throughout the last several days. Something which has never happened in the game for me before like this.

The closest description I can come up with is… it feels as if the server and client are almost constantly trying to synch up with each other, causing these ongoing micro freezes and lurches in attempts to correct itself. Thus, the result is “very not smooth”.

Suffice to say, the micro-freezing/lurching has NOT been a desirable gaming experience for me. So if this is at all related to the tuning experiments, for me, its made the gaming experience worse.

Its been subtle (micro) enough that its not been easy to pinpoint exactly the behavior, but I’ll make a more concerted effort to do so, and post in this thread with more information as I have it.

This might explain the bump in latency I’ve been getting over the past week.. I was pretty stable at around 60-80ms until recently, where every time I check my latency through the options menu, I see an average of 150+. Bullets were coming out of my engi’s rifle before I was even animating to shoot them, and other weird things too.

Had very unusual disconnects, ~5 second freezes and other stuff over the last ~2 weeks. I was blaming my internet provider but now this could be the reason as well.

I’m an Australian player whose used to 300 ping, but lately I’ve been experiencing up to 900 constantly and only in Guild Wars. I’ve had frequent disconnects, to the points of unplayable. It has nothing to do with my internet provider since I rock a steady 2-300 in other games (on NA servers ofc). I’m really not sure what kind of details I can provide to be helpful and not whiny.

The actual algorithm would take a proper academic whitepaper to explain in detail, so the following is a highly simplified look into how it works. In a nutshell, the compensator in GW2 tries to guess how long it took a player’s input to reach the server. Based on this information, it plays some tricks with time to make it look like the action happened immediately instead of many milliseconds ago, when the input was first sent. Imagine an action that takes 1 second, or 1000 milliseconds. If the compensator on the server guesses that you actually started that action 100 milliseconds ago, it fast-forwards the action and says “start the action at 100ms in and play for 900ms” instead of the usual “start at 0ms and play for 1000ms.”

Not to complain at your experiments, but wouldn’t this be a significant disadvantage for players at higher pings play PvP? For example a player uses dodge. Instead of a 1000ms dodge, he only gets a 800ms dodge. Or if Someone uses Mesmer distortion, they only get a 800 ms distortion instead of a 1000ms distortion…

I guess it could be advantageous on the offensive side of this however, with cast times of skills being cut, and in effect allowing players to attack slightly faster.

Reikou.7068:

Not to complain at your experiments, but wouldn’t this be a significant disadvantage for players at higher pings play PvP? For example a player uses dodge. Instead of a 1000ms dodge, he only gets a 800ms dodge. Or if Someone uses Mesmer distortion, they only get a 800 ms distortion instead of a 1000ms distortion…

I guess it could be advantageous on the offensive side of this however, with cast times of skills being cut, and in effect allowing players to attack slightly faster.

This has to do with the appearance of skills, not the actual durations of evasions and such. It simply makes sure that animations end on the screen when the effect actually ends, and by consequence, that the animations are lined up with the portion of the skill being represented.

Hey some issues that I’d like to point out while you’re working on this that I’d LOVE to see considered, a lot of Aussie/SEA players I know have issues with the same things:

• Any skill that involves movement and a dodge will warp back and forth from it’s end location over a second or so. Extremely irritating. Happens on every Daredevil dodge. Please fix this for at least Daredevil or I will simply walk away if I see a Daredevil coming to fight me when HoT comes out. I aint about that life. They can have the kittening point.

• Any teleport can’t be used as effectively as there is a maximum CLIENT SIDE range, but the actual skill won’t go off for an extra 400ms or so. The net effect of this is that if you are moving in the direction that you’re teleporting, you can’t go as far as someone with low ping. Small issue for instant teleports but a huge issue for thief, as SB5 (potentially the most important skill on the thief skillset) has a cast time as well. Given that you typically chain 2-3 SB5’s for map mobility, a small difference will add up. A potential fix for this that’s not very related to latency at all would be skills outside maximum distance always being used at maximum distance.

• Hit mid-dodge. There’s admittedly no real solution to this that doesn’t sacrifice something on the low-ping user’s end and they should (also admittedly) probably have an advantage, but I just wanted to whinge about how kittenoff annoying it is to prepare for impale/pindown/SoSpite 10 seconds in advance and STILL get pulled by it because you didn’t have the superhuman reactions to dodge within 30ms (+300 for latency). I think it would be fair to have lag compensation in PvE as AI monsters aren’t going to complain about their attacks missing on laggy players. Subtle quick animations (That one achievement where you had to not get hit by a sand pool from a centaur was literally hell incarnate) are mostly undodgable. You just have to take it, dodge in advance (possible for a lot of predictable creeps), or use something like endure pain to cover the 3 seconds. The margin for error is a hell of a lot lower for high ping players in PvE.

• Melee skills are weird. I’ve played on a low ping connection during my holiday in les frances and I didn’t know this was an issue until I noticed how much of an insane reach melee skills (sometimes? not enough testing, but it doesn’t happen all the time) have on low ping. It’s especially noticeable when you’re chasing someone – IE, trying to melee hit someone who is running away from you.

• Minor but the BLTC is annoying as kitten to use because you have to wait for every step to load.

1 month ago updated my internet to fabric optic wire to get faster internet. 289.35 Mbps of download and of upload 30.33(This is a test with the speed test page of http://www.speedtest.net/en/). The ping I started to get after the upgrade was around 250 fps to around 350 before the upgrade my ping was around 600+. What a change it was.

As for the tests in-game ping ranging from 500 to 800 fps skills triggering with sometimes a delay of 2 to 4 sec. Character rubber banding quite often. The others around me I also see them rubber banding as well in long skips. These tests were I have been playing at are “Ogre Wars”(which broke today in an ip I was in and reported it ingame) and “Silverwaist”.

No changes at all with the BLTC. No changes in loading into zones.

This playing from Spain to the american servers.

Vostroyan.9214:

The ping I started to get after the upgrade was around 250 fps […] As for the tests in-game ping ranging from 500 to 800 fps skills triggering with sometimes a delay of 2 to 4 sec.

Just so you know, fps is “frames per second” and has nothing to do with network latency, it’s a measure of how many frames your computer can render in a second (changing graphic settings and your hardware directly affect this, not your connection). You can have either 10 or 1000 fps and your network ping will remain the same.

We need more devs like you. Thanks for the very detailed post.

Good stuff.

Hey Mike, is this change live yet?

I just tested this with a 240ms ping using Disabling Shot (Thief’s shortbow #3 skill) about 50 times and while the skill activation seems more responsive, I rubberbanded exactly to half the distance travelled 100% of the time. I belive this is a great skill to measure this fix as it’s basically the reason I’ve stopped playing my thief.

I’m currently looking for other skills to test, but so far I haven’t seen a significant difference in my case. Will also test with Zephyrite Crystals and its skills later, as those are also a completely traumatizing experience.

Yes, I would like to know the time when the changes went live. I just moved to my other place and haven’t tested the new system since 4:00PM EST or so, and was just wondering if the new system had remotely any effect on my latency.

I’m not sure if or when these changes went “Live” but as of 2 days ago i have been suffering with latency issues which i believe is a Level 3 issue. However, i’m not entirely sure due to this.

Confirmation on when the change went live would help narrow it down.

Millillion.5914:

This has to do with the appearance of skills, not the actual durations of evasions and such. It simply makes sure that animations end on the screen when the effect actually ends, and by consequence, that the animations are lined up with the portion of the skill being represented.

I am not sure where in the dev’s post you got the impression it would only affect animations.

Recently my client has begun throwing a lot of exception errors, malloc errors and other random, game-crashing errors, (dtsBits error today was new) especially in areas where there are a lot of activities like the Silverwastes. I’m going to go out on a limb and blaming your experiment.

I use the Mac client. It’s been rather stable during the past year. Still, since about BWE2 it’s been crashing every time there are massive numbers of models on screen. I attribute this a lot to the memory leaks that peak when there are a lot of models on the screen. The model errors were present earlier; but, infrequent. Over the past week, I’ve lost event credit and Vinewrathe chests due to disconnects from client crashes.

Some of my guild members have also mentioned frequent disconnects, though they are using PC. The erratic pings that cropped in around early summer are persistent now.

On the plus side, while running with a laggy player today, I did notice that rubber banding was reduced. I think that guildie was happy with being able to keep up (though not thrilled about the lag).

My experiences from a Saturday morning West Australian perspective is that things are terrible when there’s any higher player count around. Ping doesn’t change much, sitting around 300ms average rising to 350ms when player count is high, but that’s not what this change is about. Also for reference my internet connection is ADSL2+ at 20mbit downstream 1mbit upstream, sitting around 18ms ping to my ISP.

In a Jormag fight this morning, I was frequently being feared for the entire duration of that fear, all while hitting Armour of Earth 20+ times. The skill never activated, and even after the fear wore off, it still did not activate. I’m quite adept at recognising the animations and prior to today I’ve never really had problems with not countering the fear.. so sadly I think today’s change might have made it worse for me at least.

I’m a player who tours world bosses daily, so this has always been a significant issue. I’m very happy that it is being looked at in a hope to improve big events, especially since HoT is going to be packed for a while.

Edit: since some wouldn’t have experienced it, I thought I’d create a video just running around LA using Ride the Lightning: https://youtu.be/EYJMLyImYGc

I noticed some extra startup lag on my skills last time I played. It seemed like they completed with the right timing, but the delay was just enough to bother me a bit. Not to the extent that I couldn’t tell how to time a black powder heart seeker combo, but enough to make getting four off really hard.

As somebody in oceanic with 250 ping…… im realllllly excited and happy about this. The devs at arenaNet are the best.

EU player here. I actually wondered and called my ISP yesterday telling him that they should check the connection as the game got horribly unresponsive since like thursday morning CEST. Skills, dodges, harvesting and the likes go off on an approx. one second delay, which is extremely difficult to deal with. Ping is ranging from 80 to 2200 instead of the 40-50 I’ve been having before.

I really appreciate the effort you guys put into this game and I hope you’ll look into that and fix it asap…

And I was wondering why ever since yesterday I had terrible delays similar with the skill-lag I faced during early 2014 (https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1vjnea/delay_while_playing_need_help_for_solution/cetb7v3)

Basically when there’s a zerg (e.g. world bosses), the skill lags by 5s~10s and basically you just stand there and… cast nothing.

Hi Mike,

not sure how much this helps in case of gw2 netcode but maybe you can get some good ideas out of it http://fabiensanglard.net/quake3/network.php in quake3 it really did not matter that much if you had a ping of 20 or 200

Is there a way to activate something in the client so it would display more info ?
I think there is something like map load times but that is not really that helpfull
it would be much easier to report something via youtube video with on screen showing details of ping fps and packetloss or what ever you need instead of just reporting how it “feels”

would it be possible to introduce something like a global skill cooldown of 0.5 seconds so you cant activate more than one skill at once ? I think that would help with client side skillspamming “killing” the servers in big fights

oh and a little bit of topic for the fps problems please give us an option to turn of backpacks on all players as only reducing modelquality and modelcount often is not enough in WvW

Haven’t been able to log in and test out yet. But I’m happy that you guys are implementing more ways to help with higher ping. Hopefully I’ll be able to actually complete Sanctum Sprint now, instead of always overshooting on the #3 into my death, on the multiple platforms this is needed. Also, Hopefully SB3, SB5, on. Thief will feel better, and. RtL on. Ele won’t trigger multiple teleports during the distance.

I know it’s unlikely I’ll receive a reply to this question, and if I do, I know the likely reply will be that we have too small of a population, but is there any chance of implementing servers in Australia, specifically for instances & pvp? In the open world it’s not as much of an issue, but being able to atleast feel competitive would be nice.

Love the game, but I know that I myself, and many people in Australia have quit multiple times due to the fact it is borderline unplayable.

GL with the changes. .

When I lag and get ~1k ping (normally around 170), tracert shows that some telia.net node is dropping up to 50% of packets. It’s noticeable even at 5%. Most lag is on the ISP side.

I just went to Dry Top and tried using the lightning pull with my 250-300ms ping, it still either overshoots the target and then turns me around when I land or undershoots the target and puts me in a rolling animation that also tends to take me a bit too far (unless I tried to land on an object or far away ledge like the skill is normally meant for, then I just fall short and roll against the object or fall down and fail the jump.)

Reading posts here i see people don’t understand what you are doing so i don’t think you can get feedback on forums when something this technical is involved

Bambi.2609:

Reading posts here i see people don’t understand what you are doing so i don’t think you can get feedback on forums when something this technical is involved

I agree. Don’t think It was a wise idea to share this with us. It will be hard for them to find the right reports among all the false posts with incorrect information. Would’ve been better if they did It without posting about it. Then they could’ve looked for created threads during the testing period.

TexZero.7910:

I’m not sure if or when these changes went “Live” but as of 2 days ago i have been suffering with latency issues which i believe is a Level 3 issue. However, i’m not entirely sure due to this.

Confirmation on when the change went live would help narrow it down.

Level 3 issue has been my problem for more than a month now. It seems my route can’t communicate to level 3 and I’m not getting responses for 2 hops.

As someone who live in SEA, I’m normally getting 200-230 ms which is basically playable for me. But right now, it’s ranging from 250 to 350+ (in-game option ping gives different range of 300 to 1k+) with constant lag spikes, delayed skills, people rubber-banding and occasional delayed chat. This happens almost throughout the day.

What I find weird is during a certain time, around 2:00 AM (GMT +8) my gameplay returns to normal and my traceroute result shows I’m still not connecting to level 3, but my latency is normal and the game is playable around that time. This only last for a few hours though then it goes back to constant high ping.

As a nontechnical person, I really find all these confusing.

Beldin.5498:

Even with the worst lag i can
run and run and often only realize i have lag when i want to harvest something
and it doesn’t work.

That’s probably precisely because they try to compensate your latency. As long as you act in a predictable fashion (running), you don’t notice the lag. But as soon as an unexpected user input is triggered, the server can’t go back far enough to compensate it.

MikeLewis.7496:

The actual algorithm would take a proper academic whitepaper to explain in detail, so the following is a highly simplified look into how it works.

I really miss that whitepaper :-)

If you read this, one question on the technicalities : does the algorithm and the numbers you’re trying to fine-tune are the same for every aspect of the game (movement, skills and actions) ? Because a 250ms delay (fairly easy to reach with two slow connexions) on a 1+ sec cast time would not be too much of a problem, but it will be difficult to interrupt a <0.5s cast (even if the interrupting skill is compensated too, otherwise we’re looking at a 4x delay).

Midgard.4239:

EU player here. I actually wondered and called my ISP yesterday telling him that they should check the connection as the game got horribly unresponsive since like thursday morning CEST. Skills, dodges, harvesting and the likes go off on an approx. one second delay, which is extremely difficult to deal with. Ping is ranging from 80 to 2200 instead of the 40-50 I’ve been having before.

Same for me, but Level3 is dropping some packets (~5-7%), hadn’t any problem the last couple months, so I never checked if it was always the case, but probably not. How ever, Anets Servers were dropping some packets as well (~3%). I was on a normal map, not WvW or SW or something, so it felt pretty weird that my skills lagged behind a bit.

Anyway: atm my pings are pretty normal, most of my skills feel pretty good, how they should work without any high delay or something. Except “Burning Retreat” from my Elementalist. This one is giving me some rubberbanding, sometimes.

Bainos.1643:

Beldin.5498:

Even with the worst lag i can
run and run and often only realize i have lag when i want to harvest something
and it doesn’t work.

That’s probably precisely because they try to compensate your latency. As long as you act in a predictable fashion (running), you don’t notice the lag. But as soon as an unexpected user input is triggered, the server can’t go back far enough to compensate it.

Nope .. thats missing client-server synchronisation. Normally in an MMO the client
and server synchronisize the positions of the player every second or whatever and
if the client is at a position different where the server thinks he could have run to
in the time since the last check, the server resets him to that position. That is the
so called “rubberbanding”.

In GW2 i always had the feeling that they simply don’t have this implemented and
that was also the reason for all the teleport hacks that seem to exist here.

The only thing i can imagine is, that they have some problem with the waypoint
system that maybe makes it hard to calculate how far a player could have really
moved in the last seconds.

I had a hard time playing melee weapons in PvP since the start, I noticed my attacks weren’t connecting and my suspicions were confirmed when I did some tests a month ago. I did some tests again today, and WOW, it’s alot of improvement. I can actually hit things now in PvP with melee weapons. People with high latency connections were at a disadvantage when using melee weapons. I have to do some guess work to compensate for the lag, and sometimes that wasn’t enough. Actually there’s almost no delay in skill use. The problem is the delay with character position updates to the clients. That’s why even though our targets seem to be within range of our attacks, they are actually farther away, and we are just hitting their shadows so to speak. THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, ARENANET! Job well done. You deserve some cupcakes.

Tests I made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpU8nzJGmhw

When playing pvp today it seemed like lag spikes were sort of… better hidden. Things I attempted to do actually occured with much less of a delay. The disadvantage of having reactions delayed was still there, but less problematic and far less frustrating.

Anyway, hopefully that subjective observation is useful – it definitely seemed better though! (I generally get a ping of 260 as I’m in melbourne, but lag spikes above 400 happen quite a bit)

Me and my best friend always play together. He lives like 3,000km away from me. Sometimes he gets a sudden lag spike and freezes, his ping goes up to 800ms-900ms, then suddenly drops, but it’s weird that my state is far away from Miami international link and his state is way closer. That might be some routing issue with his state though. We both play from Brazil.

Too bad we still lag in WvW when the map caps are around 90-100 by what it looks like :/
I really liked it when we had lower capacitys.

The last three Days i had a ping between 100-2000 ms. Before 30-40ms