Guild Wars 2

I had terrible skill lag lately (like the last 5 days) specially at the begining of my gameplays. Before my game was smooth. Dont know if its related to this changes, i’ll test it carefully today and see if there is any improvement.

Yulan.4069:

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.

I got them mixed up lol. The fps with the ping that is. It was 6 in the morning for me and these day I have been more tiered then normal since I work 7 days a week; working from Euro time to American time can be a bit harsh. Can happen to anyone :P.

The only problem I experience is during large scale fights. It can range from a few seconds of skill lag (flashing skill icon) to being completely unable to even queue a skill (skill icon activates and stops flashing immediately without going on cool down). I’m usually in team speak with 40 other people all experiencing the same issue.

That’s the only issue I’d like to see addressed. Generally I have a 250-300ms ping from Brisbane, Australia. Gameplay is smooth, enjoyable and I have no rubberbanding.

I used to get a lot of rubberbanding issues with my last ISP due to packet loss. They did everything to blame my equipment, guild wars and their wholesaler. In the end, switching to a provider with a better managed core network, adequate backhaul and good international peering/routes fixed all of my issues. I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of peoples gameplay issues are due to the rising network contention ratio of local ISPs.

I think providing a simple way for everyone to test and rate their connection themselves would be a good start. Providing useful details regarding packet loss, latency information and maybe even a user based grading of local ISPs. An offical page to view the health of arenanet services would also be nice.

ToffiKeks.6385:

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

Same here. My ping was 50-90ms, but since the last patch (September, 15) i was noticed an increase in about 2 times, with some spikes & uncomfortable skill lags. Also a FPS drop, especially in large scale fights.

Hope everything will return back to normal after these experiments with servers.

I’d like to add to this in stating that I have had significant lag spikes (specifically with skill lag) and visual lag. For example, on Mai Trin I will follow a friend of mine (because he always gets so kitten lucky so I wanted to make sure he had to work for it lol) but over the last few days I won’t be anywhere near one of the cannon circles on my screen but I’ll just start taking damage as if I were. My guildies have just accepted that I will go down durring the cannon phase because I can’t physically do it with the lag lately, and just res me after it finishes.

I’ve been getting higher ping since Tuesday’s patch. Usually around 70 or so, now I’m getting up into the 90s and 100s, with spikes up around 500 at times.

for me it does not matter if iam on my wifi or if iam connected to my modem . it takes about 3 to 5 minit,s to load the game up. and then while iam playing and going from town to town via the gates . it takes about 3 miniuts to load up again before i can go do what iam doing. my ping rates trend to run around 90 on 6omb cable . be nice if this was fixed for every one

Between 10-12 EST things were really bad latency wise. We had to skip a dungeon boss that we usually steam roll over because things had gotten to the point that the game was uncontrollable.

Skills and dodges were lagging out, or being dropped entirely!

A dungeon mini-boss was killing the entire party because the animation of his attack wasn’t happening at the same time that the attack was actually happening. The actual processing of the attack happened a second after the animation had finished playing.

People and monsters were bouncing all over the place from one second to the next. This was really bad in crowded scenes.

This persisted through Arah Story, AC3, and COF1 with 3 different parties all reporting the same thing.

As a WvW-Player (EU-Servers/Living near Frankfurt in Germany) I can say that there’s so significant improvement.

I do get randomly high ping spikes but their occurrence has definitely reduced when comparing it to the past 2-3 months. Probably related to some Level3-Network things you can find all over the forums. There are still a lot of people regularly complaining about lag in our TeamSpeak and the need of a VPN Service to avoid them so maybe I’m just lucky.

What I’m now experiencing is a growing number of random disconnects or losing connection to the server for a short amount of time. Ingame it looks like everyone just keeps running straight into the direction he was before. Most of the times this happens at the start or in the middle of a bigger fight, I can’t tell if it doesn’t happen while simply running around.

Most of the time the game can recover from this, resulting in what I’m calling a replay in superspeed. Everything that happened in the past few seconds you spend disconnected from the server is now registered by the game and shown to you as if you pressed the fast-forward button on your tv remote.

If the connection interruption is to long you’re simply thrown back into the character screen with a disconnect message.

I also noticed that the game stops loading a map when something like that happened. So this might be correlated. You might get back to Lions Arch after you were kicked into the character screen but while entering a borderland map the game while just stop loading when in world load state. (-maploadinfo isn’t showing any progress anymore)

I’ll attach a picture that shows the PingPlotter results of a few of this evenings. The first 3 pictures show those connection losses when they are happening you can see a few percent packet-loss when reaching the ncsoft servers. The last one shows a whole evening. I simply used the “/ip” command to get the ip of the borderland I was playing on.

Reikou.7068:

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.

Because that’s literally what this technology is for. It makes sure things are lined up on all ends, and the only way to do that on your client is to mess with animations since your client gets no say in what actually happens aside from sending your information and inputs.

When your client receives the information that something is happening, it actually already started some milliseconds ago due to the fact that it takes time for signals to travel and be processed, so using this technology, the server tells your client to start the animation part way through so that it progresses in time with the actual events, even if it didn’t start at the exact same time.

Please go back and read the last 3 paragraphs of the OP if I didn’t explain this well.

My wife and I play together, and we had drastically different results yesterday. I encountered no real issues, but her experience was much worse than usual.

She normally has no latency problems (the busy Mordrem Invasion this last week worked fine), but now even in low population areas she is lagging. We were rubber-banding across each others’ screens, her skills were not firing, moving an item in/out of her inventory sometimes took up to 8 seconds to complete, events/enemies would be completed/killed on my screen but still up on hers, etc.

My ping showed 30-40 average as usual, but hers was insane:
Ping: ~35 (Avg: 2000+)

Maybe this is related to us playing through one router at the same time?
(If it makes a difference, I was hard-wired and she was Wi-Fi.)

What they did in GW2 is superior to what League of Legends has. If you have high latency in LoL, your movement and skills are both delayed. In GW2 there’s no delay in your skills, or atleast the delay appears non-existent. When you activate a skill, it registers immediately in all the clients. One thing that still has delay though is the location of character when they are in motion. This results in missing your targets because what you are seeing in your screen is slightly delayed. I don’t know if this was a remnant from the code of Guild Wars 1. They have evidently improved this, as seen in the video I posted before.

One thing I’ve noticed before was that map chat almost has no visible delay. Party invites don’t have delay as well. Are those using IRC? Maybe use what those components are using in the movement updates.

Hi guys!

Whatever you have done to the netcode/network, please roll it back! Since 3 days or so I’m unable to play PvP! Horrible lags, skill cast takes 1-2 seconds and everything feels crippled. This is now getting really frustrating, cause all the years before, lag was of no matter…

It is aweful. Please change it back! Never had an issue with my ping (30-40ms) now jumping between 120-500ms. It’s hard to emjoy playing GW2 right know,

No, please don’t roll back. These people don’t know what they are talking about and have no evidence to back them up aside from subjective conclusions based on emotions. These people don’t want to lose their unfair advantage over those with high latency. IT’S NOT THE FAULT OF THE NET CODE IF YOU HAVE 123781265112312857162831282312 MS PING DOG kitten IT! BLAME SOMETHING ELSE, BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE INSTEAD!

Tests I made showing improvement with melee attacks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpU8nzJGmhw

Before 2-3 days ago had no lag or latency issues until large zerg fights in wvw now the game has gone to barely playable even in pve. wvw pvp are out for me until u guys fix it please sort this out

Been having huge issues with ping for the past few days. Usually it’s 40-80, but lately it raises all the way to over 1000 reaching 4000! I hope this is fixed soon as pvp is completely unplayable. Every time I log in my ping is normal but after a few minutes it will spike up to those crazy numbers and the only fix is to re-log back in, but even then it’s a fix that lasts very few minutes.

Ohhhh so that explains the really weird lag, ping spikes and disconnects over the past little while…thanks for the heads up just glad to know it’s not a problem on my end

I didn’t play yesterday, but today the game is almost unplayable for me. The skill lag (in PvE) is so bad I keep getting killed. And I keep disconnecting. It’s not my internet connection; I’ve checked. Only GW2 is running this badly.

I live in the same state as the servers so my ping was always fantastic, like ~20ms. The last day or two has been absolutely awful, my ping averages 150ms+ and everything skips arounds and seems to drop frames, my skills lag, other characters seems to teleport around the battlefield, and I can’t react to fights because things register too late due to the microlag. it constantly gets me killed and makes GW2 a frustrating and unenjoyable experience.

I have also crashed at least once due to the game lagging so badly, which hasn’t happened to me in over a year.

This is really irritating for me because I regularly lead our guild’s dungeon groups and some events and I can’t do that when I can’t tell what’s going on and I get killed every fight. From what I see in this thread my complaint is pretty common amongst others and people who had issues already aren’t reporting any improvements.

I hope this experiment ends soon so I can return to having a game I can actually play.

@Akhet, can you do a tracert please and post the results here?

The last few days I have been experiencing random immobilization of my character while in combat, without having the Immob condi on me. I’m not sure its related to the latency experiments but its ruddy annoying.

My skills have been feeling more responsive, but at the same time, I’m seeing a lot more rubberbanding from other people. I play from Sydney, Australia and usually play with 250-350 ping. It’s hard to know when to cast my skills in relation to other people when I’m seeing them warp everywhere

Also getting random immobilisation in game in the last day or two, very frustrating. I play from New Zealand.

Hey, Im from Germany. Im playing guild wars 2 since the release and I really enjoy it! It is a great game… Im coming home from work feeling bad just logging in and playing with my friends and guildmates. BUT NOW… there is this problem calld ’’PING’’ … …….. since the last patchD. Its amazing you try to test something but please if it doesnt work for your players … when stop it plz :L Its annoying just GW2 have a insane ping and isnt playable. If im logged in I can not even talk with ppl in TS3.

Change it please so fast as possible.

Cuz this isnt the way WHY I WOULD BUY UR HoT!

Cheers Tai

Played all day from EU (Belgium). I’m on Seafarer and mainly doing PvP.

I noticed the skill lag is “worse” now, what I mean by worse if it’s not as smooth as before.
Might come from my end, but I wanted to let you know in case it’s a result of your experiment. Ping is fine (40).

Me: german player
Ping before: 50~ ms
Ping since Friday: 90~ ms with PingSpikes and worse skill lags
Problem: level3 hotspot / routing (kitten this kitten)
Solution: VPN (pls no….)

And A-Net, stop doing experiements on Live-Server! Use Beta/testing Server for this. Invite people to play there and test it out (like some other company cough RIOT Games cough do).

My conclusion: experiement failed.

I’ve been getting ping spikes of up to 2000 from my usual ping of ~48. How long is this experiment going to last because PVP is literally unplayable and +1 for test servers for testing stuff like this that has a huge impact on playing the game.

Since this experiment i am having problems with the game:
Ping Average: 25-40, FPS: 60

• Random skill problems in any game mode:
  Often it’s the low cast time skills that wont activate at all (less than 0.75s).
  Also skill 5 (guardian GS) shows the “activating animation” from time to time, that wont stop until i really activate it (weapon switch just animates the new skill 5 (guardian focus)).

• Next thing i never had before is, rubber-banding enemies!
  Happens from time to time, that enemies jump when i start attacking them.

Poor Mike .. you should have never posted this because now nearly everybody
expected from you that you fix the whole internet to work like a local are network.
And of course you will fail badly at doing that

Well the way this will end is, they do some tweaks. Nothing changes and they stop replying to this thread. That’s why WvW will always be the same, the most fun clashes ( 3 way wars ), are not playable, skill lag, can’t heal up XD Most times it takes about 10seconds after spamming your heal button for it to go. The Europe servers just seem really bad and unstable, ping jumps from anywhere from 20 to 100+, you notice it alot once a zerg comes up into your screen. where other games atleast got a stable connection.

Aight >.< lets stop whine and hope everything will be like before!

Soo if we change the topic…

Beldin.5498 may wanna meet and go for a date??
Im sure we can have some fun together sniffel

…

What ever the kitten you try to improve, stop it.
It’s not getting better it’s getting worse from day to day.
Last week i had an avg ping 70-150, now i get an avg ping from 100-600 and thats while standing in heart of the mist and switching weapons. What the kitten?
Every game i start, world of warcraft to a kitten free to play 08/15 korea grinder on an private server hosted by an 14 year old kid named Timmy, my ping is between 20 and 60.
Only gw2 is that terrible.
I tried verything:
Run on a fresh windows 7 with every driver up to date
W-lan
Lan
D-Lan
(just marginal differences)
VPN’s (some work 100-200, some have dc’s after some minutes)
etc.

The game makes fun in it’s playable form, but i can’t even remember how it is to play with no lags.

Zaruna.3812:

Stop whining, i’m all for experiments, even if they don’t work. Atleast they’re trying to solve it.

Nobody would say against the testing stuff to solve problems, but this way of A-Net is absolutely crap. No announcement nor testing on Beta/testing-server.
Before you change something or need some experiments, use testing area (like Virtual machines for example) and NOT the live-Server.
Do the same Way like A-Net in company without announcement, your boss will slap your kitten when he is unfriendly. At least will get some problems.

First of all, kudos to Anet for trying to reduce lag and all the work done towards a more responsive game!

Speaking about the WvW side of things only, currently the game allows to start skills more quickly (accepts the commands and most of the time executes it), so more can be cast. This is the plus side. The bad part is that is more frequent the teleporting around and instant being hit with huge damage, and this in large zerg fights of over 120 players or more in a WvW clash.

So while we can do more miracles, we are also being hit with more such miracles, out of nowhere. But this is most likely related to the servers being overloaded in such moments; it’s very clear that the servers can’t handle a clash of 120+ and you allow about 80×3= 240 three way fights. In such fights is worse than was before, because it’s not better than was (nothing works, we can just walk, rarely we get any numbers on skill 1), but now we are randomly teleported around more frequently (it’s rare though). You have to ignore these moments and tune to normal server load. Allowing 120+ on a map its’ very much company policy related to spending on WvW hosting, or you just want huge “epic” fights (we want too, even larger fights), but the current server hardware (and software) won’t allow it. Either reduce players skills in WvW (special builds), player numbers to 40 max. on each side or get 2015+ hardware (year 2100 or 2500, with quantum processing) or we will have to “enjoy” lag.

Ok! A test !? At this time when HoT is near !? When new players need experiment the game and veteran players need to ensure your investment in the update !? Are you serious !? This look more a ridiculous mistake with your customers. This can slow down a lot the HoT sales and generate doubts with the buyers. I usually play normal this game and now is barely playable. I was having 150-180 max ping now I have to play starting at 220 to 1.5k!!!. Test!? Rollback and go test this in a controlled ambient away from customers.

Since the last update, so it seems, i have had really bad latency issues. I used to have a ping of 10 – 40 now it is more like 80 – 900. This makes the game unplayable. I hope that this issue can be resolved very quickly.
And yes, i have run tracert to see if the problem is on my end, but it is not and i always have a high latency on the ncsoft servers.

The latency was around 40-60ms before that i had Telia as Internet nodes in Frankfurt.

Now…
mostly way higher than 200-3000ms including enormously skill lag with the Level 3 as Internet Nodes in Frankfurt.

I am very disappointed and angry at the same time. They have to told us before to take an action on latency tuning experiments. But the Devs didn’t. Well done. WE ARE NOT MARIONETTES because we are not on a beta servers and such.

EDIT:
Btw… if you want to improve it… then please tell us what we can do something with the latency tuning experiments.

MikeLewis.7496:

Hi all,
A quick clarification on ping times and latency compensation
I should have explained this clearer initially, so I apologize for the confusion. Ping time is not affected by the latency compensator and there is no correlation between ping time and the experiments we’re doing.

The way you mentioned it in the OP should be enough, but most people seem to not bother reading it properly or just don’t understand it anyway. Kind of sad

Have never had lags before, but some days now I have lags. The game is still kind of playable, since the lag is just sometimes noticeable, but it is not much fun in PvP or WvW with a ping from 100-800ms.

MikeLewis.7496:

Hi all,

Thanks for the feedback thus far, and please keep it coming. Your experiences are very valuable in calibrating the experiments we’re doing and helping us narrow in on the optimal settings for the latency compensation system.

A quick clarification on ping times and latency compensation
I should have explained this clearer initially, so I apologize for the confusion. Ping time is not affected by the latency compensator and there is no correlation between ping time and the experiments we’re doing.

Traditionally, ping is a measure of how long it takes a message to get from your computer to the servers. In GW2, we actually combine this data with a second statistic, which is a guess at how long it will take the server to actually process and respond to your message. So ping measures two things for us: network health and server responsiveness.

A longer ping time in GW2 terms means either your network/Internet connection is slow or losing message, or the server is busy and can’t respond quickly (or both at once). However, the system that monitors ping is completely outside the system that handles latency compensation, so any adjustments we make to the compensator will have no measurable impact on ping times.

There is one way that ping and latency compensation interact, however. If ping time is steady, the LC experiment should make the connection feel a bit smoother. However, if ping time is unsteady or very high, there will be no noticeable improvement, because the message response time will be higher regardless.

Suppose you start with a ping of 100. Our adjustments to the latency compensator should make that ping “feel” more responsive. If your ping goes up to 200, however, the difference made will sort of be swallowed up by the doubling in ping time. If it spikes to 500, as an example, the half-second delay will be impossible to totally hide from view, and the connection will feel worse.

You can think of it like a teaspoon of sugar. If you add the sugar (latency experiments) to a small glass of water (good pings) you get sweet water. If you add the sugar to a swimming pool (bad pings) you won’t even notice the sugar. Also, drinking a swimming pool is bad for you, don’t try it ;-)

It is in some ways unfortunate that so many players are having ping time spikes during this experiment, because it makes it hard to tell if the fine-tuning is working. However, based on our data, it looks like there is an improvement, it’s just subtle, and again it gets swallowed up by the ping problems.

We’re examining our server responsiveness constantly, and there are separate efforts underway to improve that.

The latency experiments are carefully designed to control for ping time spikes and other complications. Suffice it to say it is tricky to sort out the real effects of these experiments, but they are working and making a positive difference. In the spirit of doing good science, I unfortunately can’t reveal all of our testing methods, without risk of introducing bias into the data we collect. So I thank you all for your responses, whether you’ve been benefiting from the experiments or otherwise.

Please keep it coming!

this is the only game iam having any problem with . with other stuff i do there is no problems at all be it streaming or playing xbox . or web surfing that stuff is all fine and good. but when i play this game this weekend so far it still takes me a good 3 to 5 minutes to get on or go from town to town . and that is connected or even using wifi . just will be glad when you get this fixed soon. we all hope

Last 3-4 days my ping averages at 300-400 when before it was averaging at 80 or so, I’m also getting 1 to 2 seconds lag spikes and sometimes my char gets stuck as if I’d been immobilized. Also to be noted this is the only game I’m experiencing lag with.

Okay since 3-4 days i have in WvW, PvE and PvP skill delay with 1-4s. BUT i can move in realtime (verified throught TS3) and can see everything else in realtime. This never happened before and i only had minor lagg problems in the prime time.

I’ve also experienced pings around 250ms (60ms normally).
Hope that it’s getting fixed soon.

Edit: Lags are gone now. Thanks!
Edit 2: Lags are back now. They were gone from 11am-4pm (CEST)

Quick question
For the past week, since the latest patch to be specific
I’ve been getting Connection error 7:11:3:191:101
When I ent r “sPvP, Fractals, Dungeons”
Open world works fine, no lag or disconnects
But since last week, I haven’t been able to pvp, do fractals or dungeons
Because whenever I join an instance I get disconnected.
Can your tests/changes cause this problem???
Because I’ve been sending/receiving emails with technical support for the past -12 hours regarding this stupid problem

Take it easy Mike, you know what they don’t understand and what you do know. Keep up the great work.

Silicato.4603:

I had terrible skill lag lately (like the last 5 days) specially at the begining of my gameplays. Before my game was smooth. Dont know if its related to this changes, i’ll test it carefully today and see if there is any improvement.

Yesterday was bad. What i feel now, and i didnt felt before is like speed ups, the game stops, or people go to walls and suddenly all go in fast pace to the real position. I nvere experienced nothing similar. Making wurm x 3, guild missions, and tequatl it is anoyingg cause of those issues.

It is obvious that you are touching a little bit here and a little bit there, but my honest opinion is that it is not working, sorry. I had an smooth gameplay before these experiments.

THe – GW2 has experience a serious error crash is now a prominent issue for me this past few days as well as random disconnects when opening things like bank tabs or crafting stations. However more noticeable when swapping mps.. you get into map go to move then get a dc or a serious crash.

Add to this soup bowl the dreaded 1 File remaining issue is hitting quite a few players in the past few days including myself after reinstalling everything in an effort to cure the other issues… seems mighty coincidental that this thread is pooped into the general domain right around the same time all these issues start to become prevalent.

A quick update.

I’m not sensing the micro-freeze/lurching sensation as I was a few days ago. One thing remains though: often, when I attempt to move forward, my character doesn’t. I have to let go of the key (or mouse button, depending) and try again.

I’ll continue to monitor things and update as necessary.