Guild Wars 2

I’m likely an outlier due to my connection and I’ve been experiencing things this last weekend that I’ve never seen before.

I have google fiber, I get about 940 Mpbs down and 960 up. My average ping in GW2 normally, and this last weekend, is in the 40’s, usually hovering around 46.

This weekend I had a few instances of what felt like missing frames for about a quarter of a second or less in bursts of about 3 or 4 in Lion’s Arch.

I also had instances of complete game lock-ups (lag) in WvW, Tier 2 on EB with no zergs that I could see though they could have been somewhat nearby. These lock-ups basically turned my game into a screen shot, no sound, no cursor movement, no keyboard response. One was around 11 or 12 seconds, one was almost exactly 17 seconds. When the game became responsive, the other person in my party had moved quite a bit ahead of me.

Teamspeak was completely unaffected, as I immediately was communicating with my party when this was happening. My voice quality there was fine. Possibly indicating a problem just with GW2.

Again, I’ve never experienced anything like this previously. I’ve experienced skill lag but not full client freezes.

I have a guildmate who’s “lately” experiencing weird lag issues, her estimation is that it started around the Mordrem event.

The reason why this might be correlated is that she has immense trouble with the lighting jump crystals in Dry Top. To be exact, the skill launches her way further than she targets it, to the point that she could barely make the very first jump at the start of Dry Top where you’re supposed to use that skill.

From the description of your technique I’m guessing that these types of skills are very sensible to these kinds of calculations. Especially because her ping is around 100 and therefor definitely in acceptable parameters.

My ping is normally within the 200-400 range and I haven’t seen a lot of skill lag, but I am having more positioning issues that I usually relate to lag. Characters are often moving and dodging relative to what direction they are facing on the screen instead of relative to the camera.
I rarely have an issue that is something new to me. I haven’t seen the skills lagging, but on weapon swap I have a blank bar with no weapon skills for what seems half a second to a full second. I think I am becoming a free loot bag when that happens. I do still have utilities which I can activate when this happens.

gw2 has become completely unplayable for me since 2 days , about 15 dcs in under 3 hours as a wvw player in a tier 1 server; you must be laughing your kitten of at the office.. FIX THIS; srsly dcs since release I DEMAND YOU TO FIX IT!

i’m having serious disconnect issues in the last days, getting kicked out of the guild puzzle tonight, and having random disconnects (had 3 dc’s over the duration of trying to do the puzzle.)

Hey Tech guys from Arena-Net,

Since 3 days I experience some serious ping issues. During game sessions, the ping itself changed from ~80ms to ~375ms in average. Those numbers aside, I actually do conflict some serious performance problems. Waiting a couple of seconds for an action (skills, etc.), over missplacement of movement due to rapidly changing enemies or characters to complete game freezes and disconnects, the gaming experience has changed into the worse.

Due to my last gaming sessions, my ping peaked every 3-5 seconds to ~600-~2000ms. Even though presuming to understand the post, containing the swimming pool-metaphor, I “hopefully” tried everything on my side, to rebuild a stable connection, without any improvement.

No complaining intended, but even though it is explained, that the higher ping-results do not stand in relation to the current, user-sided technical difficulties, there are multiple problems, as seen in this thread.

Seeing forward to expect new information about the whole situation.
Love your game

Although I know you put in your post that the Black Lion Trading Company was not intended to be changed performance wise with these test, I noticed how much smoother and quicker it is now then it has been in the past… It was clunky just yesterday, but suddenly it seems to be much quicker paced and less “sticky” (which helps my impatience on selling things through the TP). So, good change!

Pls stahhhp the experiments!

PvP has been skrit all day

So yesterday the game was working just fine for me all day, but today I can barely log in for about a minute before my game completely lags out until I disconnect. I tried logging onto my elementalist at first, kept dying due to the horrible lag that kicked in after a minute, then moved to my ranger in hopes that maybe having a pet may keep me alive if I lag. While she’s in a safer area, I run into the same issue – I lag horribly after about a minute until my game completely disconnects.

I know it’s not my internet or anything of the sort as that’s been working fine, however GW2 has been unplayable for me all day.

Just Dc’ed 3 times in 5min in EoTM, there was a laggspike so high that i had the error that my GW2 login was logged somewhere else but it wasn’t

Almost all of you don’t realize that there was no change in the game with the sending of data packets to the network, so there is no change in disconnects, lagspikes and all the other things that make your individual experience unplayable. The “latency tuning” is a module within the processing of the game logic that deals with packets already received by the server or the client.

It only adjusts internal timestamps of actions as seen by the game logic to make the game appear to run a bit smoother. If your game client receives an action from a player who has higher latency, that action is received on your client with a delay. The game now tries to subtract the latency from that delayed action to make it appear without that delay. It tries to display the action when it actually started. It’s actually heavy voodoo, because you cannot display an action before you received the notification that this action starts to happen in the first place. But the game tries to make it appear as if it does this.

This has nothing to do with how fast or slow packets are put on the network card of the server or the client, and also no Internet routing is affected. The number of lost packets is totally unaffected. If you experience sudden lag spikes, this is an unrelated problem that only by chance occurs at the same time as this thread popped up.

Silmar Alech.4305:

Almost all of you don’t realize that there was no change in the game with the sending of data packets to the network, so there is no change in disconnects, lagspikes and all the other things that make your individual experience unplayable. The “latency tuning” is a module within the processing of the game logic that deals with packets already received by the server or the client.

It only adjusts internal timestamps of actions as seen by the game logic to make the game appear to run a bit smoother. If your game client receives an action from a player who has higher latency, that action is received on your client with a delay. The game now tries to subtract the latency from that delayed action to make it appear without that delay. It tries to display the action when it actually started. It’s actually heavy voodoo, because you cannot display an action before you received the notification that this action starts to happen in the first place. But the game tries to make it appear as if it does this.

This has nothing to do with how fast or slow packets are put on the network card of the server or the client, and also no Internet routing is affected. The number of lost packets is totally unaffected. If you experience sudden lag spikes, this is an unrelated problem that only by chance occurs at the same time as this thread popped up.

You say this, and while i know you mean well there is a small chance that the issue could have been related.

Theoretically said module could have had a fault in processing which caused packets to be dropped or desynched. Heck the implementation of the new algorithm itself could have caused undo processing stress to their servers…Any factor of things could have gone wrong to increase PING across the board. That’s why it said although unlikely its possible.

I fully understand what Mike is saying, it’s just suspect that the problems happened at the same time.

I thank them for attempting to do some netcode clean-up and actually attempting to do some lag compensation.

Thankfully, L3’s issues in my area seem to have been resolved tonight, and i can say whatever background processes Anet is running for Lag compensation, i have not noticed (which is a good thing).

Strange that it’s only coincidence that when they start doing this I get abnormally high pings. Never before had this issue. Only the last few weeks.

Today(monday 22 sep) the things only getting worse, instead of get better. I counted more than 30 disconnections in every area.

I will give up the game if this issue continue for more than 20 days, if this get so long its a signal that will be permanent!

I played for over a year, and always found it a great advantage of the Guild Wars 2 does not have this kind of problem, it is now becoming like the others.

I, as well, have been getting some pretty big ping spikes. I have a 35 Mbps connection, from Brazil, and ping is usually stable at around 160ms ~ 200ms. Today, had spikes over 1000ms, and it varied a lot, from 160ms as usual, to 600ms, back to 300ms, then 1000ms, leaving me with pretty unresponsive skills and actions.

I know you guys said that trading post will not be affected but my god, it went into sonic mode since yesterday

I’ve been getting disconnected a LOT recently and that’s making it hard to do much.. Fixing this sometime soon would definitely be preferable. This won’t still be happening during HoT right? :/

Nemui.6753:

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

HaxTester.9816:

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

Yeah, both of you should go back and read the first part of the OP. It says something about unpredictable effects hint hint. Don’t blame other people when both of you are obivously not able to interpret this part.

The day this experiment went ‘live’, a ton of people suddently experienced a load of connection problems (not disconnects but rather network issues without the connection being terminated). What a coincidence, huh? Did it not come to your mind, that the client-sided tuning could’ve possibly gone slightly wrong? Or that the tuning could’ve caused an unexpected amount of load on the servers? Of course not. I know that the Latency Tuning has nothing to do with the network-frames. But however, an unfortunate series of events could very well cause a serious network problem for some clients, even without the tuning being involved.

Also, this is not about bashing Mike or any other member of ArenaNet. I’m pretty sure you’re doing an excellent job. But looking into the recently reported problems would be a charm as a lot of players seem to be affected. And I hope that the source is found and fixed asap.

I play WvW a lot arround 100 ping, i play guardian as main class (melee) and i do feel i can connect better with my gretasowrd autos on a moving zerg than before, also the animation looks way more responsive aswell (faster response key stroke/animation). The only negative thing i have noticed (and i am nor sure if this is related to the changes u made) is that i do get stucked in place sometimes mid fight (completlelly unable to move like i had immobilize on me), i reccord my gameplay most of the time and even checking the recordings i can see i have stability and no immobilize on me, and my character still wsn’t able to move from that spot. It is a rare issue, really sporadic, and really don’t think it has something to do with your tests, but stuff like this never happened back when the game was new (i have played WvW since launch, i rarelly do something else). So at some point you changed something that created what we WvWers call “the stuck bug”.
Anyway the game feels great responsive now, specially compared to other MMOs like TERA or archage, this game just feels great for melee combat, mainly the reasson i still play it after all this time (even while u kittened up WvW mechanics in general, but that is a different issue).

Did they turn this “experiment” off yet? PvP is unplayable.

Gotta love this kind stuff on your day off. QQ

I have experienced that the lag get’s worse the closer the primetime comes.
Starting off with normal ping (60ms) at around 12pm (CEST) then it’s getting worse until around 8pm (~200ms). That’s where the peak of lag is from my experience. Afer that it starts falling very slowly.

Anyone has same observations?

MikeLewis.7496:

Hi Tyrians!

We’ve been experimenting with some fine-tuning of our servers lately, with the goal of improving the feel of gameplay and minimizing the impact of “skill lag” and other server-based latency. You may be noticing small changes to the feel of the game, ideally for the better. Please keep in mind that these tweaks are experimental, and we can’t always fully predict the effects. As such, if you experience markedly worsened latency or significant gameplay smoothness issues, please do let us know.

There are a few things that this will hopefully impact and many things that it will not change.

• Disconnects and other game errors will not be affected by these changes.
• Slowness with game features like the Black Lion Trading Company is not meant to be affected by this work.
• Frame-rate (FPS) problems will not be impacted in any way by this effort.
• Ping times are unrelated to these changes in general, although dramatically varying pings may be related.

On the plus side:

• Skill lag should diminish slightly, with things responding a tiny bit quicker in general during periods of high server latency.
• 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.
• Gameplay over connections with a high ping should feel smoother and more responsive.

The goal of this experimentation is to find a sweet spot that delivers the best-feeling experience possible to as many players as we can. We appreciate your understanding if the experiments are not immediately (or dramatically) successful. Feedback is welcome as always.

There are only limited things we can do to tell what this feels like from the player perspective. Of course we’ve done internal tests and have people monitoring the game; but our capacity to test various kinds of connections and gameplay styles is naturally limited, and since the results are so subjective, it’s not really fair for a small number of us to decide “hey this feels good.” We’d love to hear if you’ve noticed any changes and if they feel better, worse, or about the same as before.

Thanks for reading and I hope you continue enjoying Guild Wars 2!

For the technically curious: the specific changes we are making are to a system known as latency compensation. The goal of this technology is to try to hide the delay of sending an electronic signal long distances through complex network circuits. The speed of electrical signals is not unlimited, and extra complications in the network can slow signals down even further.

Guild Wars 2 uses a fairly complex latency compensator. This has the advantage of yielding a lot of good experiences even on slow connections. It has the disadvantage of being very tricky to fine-tune and adjust.

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.”

Here’s the tricky part: instead of just doing this on the server, we also do this on other players’ clients. So if the server relays the action to another player, and that relay takes 50ms, the final action as seen by the second player will look like “start at 150ms and play for 850ms.” This can lead to significant popping and other visual artifacts. A few milliseconds is not typically visible to the human eye, but 150ms is absolutely noticeable.

What our experiments are doing is controlling how much time the latency compensator will mess with. In particular, the client-side secondary compensation is our current focus. We’re working on finding out what numbers result in the best game experience for the most people we can.

Hey I just want to throw my two cents into the mix here and say whatever changes you guys did to the trading post within the last couple days, must of quickened it’s response time for me by at least a few seconds(which makes a huge difference)! I honestly haven’t felt a dramatic increase while playing but that was never a problem. Thank you for these changes and to whomever optimized the system, well done!

Sol.6213:

I’m likely an outlier due to my connection and I’ve been experiencing things this last weekend that I’ve never seen before.

I have google fiber, I get about 940 Mpbs down and 960 up. My average ping in GW2 normally, and this last weekend, is in the 40’s, usually hovering around 46.

This weekend I had a few instances of what felt like missing frames for about a quarter of a second or less in bursts of about 3 or 4 in Lion’s Arch.

I also had instances of complete game lock-ups (lag) in WvW, Tier 2 on EB with no zergs that I could see though they could have been somewhat nearby. These lock-ups basically turned my game into a screen shot, no sound, no cursor movement, no keyboard response. One was around 11 or 12 seconds, one was almost exactly 17 seconds. When the game became responsive, the other person in my party had moved quite a bit ahead of me.

Teamspeak was completely unaffected, as I immediately was communicating with my party when this was happening. My voice quality there was fine. Possibly indicating a problem just with GW2.

Again, I’ve never experienced anything like this previously. I’ve experienced skill lag but not full client freezes.

Quoting my own post to update.

Last night in Tier 2 WvW on EB at about 8:30 central, with no zergs in sight (and very few commanders on map) I had 6 to 7 second skill lag ONLY on shatter skills for mesmer. Strangest thing I’ve ever experienced in GW2. Rest of the skills seemed fine.

I’ve experienced skill lag before but it’s usually all of my skills. Not selective like this.
Ping was fine, around 42, which leads me to think it’s some kind of client server issue.

BroDTlordTV.1247:

I have experienced that the lag get’s worse the closer the primetime comes.
Starting off with normal ping (60ms) at around 12pm (CEST) then it’s getting worse until around 8pm (~200ms). That’s where the peak of lag is from my experience. Afer that it starts falling very slowly.

Anyone has same observations?

Yes. I can usually stop playing around 7 pm CEST, as the lagspikes get out of control then.

Whenever I play either WvW or PvP my average ping is between 300 and 500.
0 network usage, perfectly fine ping everywhere else.

I can’t play zerker like that.

BroDTlordTV.1247:

I have experienced that the lag get’s worse the closer the primetime comes.
Starting off with normal ping (60ms) at around 12pm (CEST) then it’s getting worse until around 8pm (~200ms). That’s where the peak of lag is from my experience. Afer that it starts falling very slowly.

Anyone has same observations?

I noticed this as well. Our time differs though but this high latency issue as if it is being scheduled.

I live in SEA (GMT+8). My observation is I have a normal ping right after midnight hits and it seems to be normal for about 8-9 hours. The terrible lag returns in the afternoon and goes back to normal again after past midnight.

I got this to and I’m from Europe.
When in spvp my ping jumps to 600+ sometimes and makes me crash.
It definatly has to do with this Latency experiments going on.
Nothhing wrong with my internet

Im from Quebec-Canada

My gameplay is in the hell zone now..
I could play normally before and now every 5 secs the game slightly freezes and come back again.
I can’t even do Dungeons properly.
Sad…

The two days that I can no longer play normally .
after the game updated my ping has varied over +1000 , impossible to play, I know it’s the game because I had no problems with other games , I am very sad because I had never had problems before.
I play almost two years and never saw it coming .
I hope they hailing repair

It’s getting worse every day instead of improving. I entered today in the hope that everything would be normal, but the sintomes were worse than yesterday.

When did the last event (Mordrem Invasion) were disconnections in space of 1 hour or more.

After the disconnections were frequent only on Fractals and WvW, but in the open world was still playable. In the meantime, thinking it might be my network, I redid the infrastructure here, taking advantage of 100% of broadband.

But the continued disconnections, and not only that, but became more frequent, here was rare to see other players complaining.

Then was forbidden to teleport to Lions Arch, I was guaranteed disconnect when trying to go there. I started using Divinity Reach to avoid Lions Arch. The number of other players complaining of the same problem has increased.

So disconnections were frequent in any city, in Lions Arch, in the open world, and the other involving private instances.

Today to inaugurate the “new phase”, now the TP has “blackouts”, as the game continues to run. Disconnections in hundreds of home in a few hours of play. At some times, it is almost impossible to log in.

With each passing day, it looks more like a race to the total blackout.

Definitely felt the spikes earlier tonight, 4000ms ping or so apparently and I didn’t lag out. (I run qos fyi >_<)

terrible skill lag right now. are you still experimenting? if thats the case, what you are doing now, please stop XD

Since the Experiments the Skill lags at WBs e.g. worm and svanir are gone at me

thx anet and gj

and not its not sarcasm! for me your changes helped a lot

Ok, lag has nothing to do with this experiments, are you guys kittening kittened o wat? Blame you ISP for any lag you guys are getting unless is something every single person on the server is experiencing.

No Lag Here With The Exception Of Zoning In Guild Wars 2 But It’s An Issue I’ve Always Had.

Rampage.7145:

Ok, lag has nothing to do with this experiments, are you guys kittening kittened o wat? Blame you ISP for any lag you guys are getting unless is something every single person on the server is experiencing.

It doesn’t make a difference if it’s every single person experiencing it, sometimes you see people dcing and others are fine. I don’t know if it’s due to routing or connection to the server, but it definitely happens.

Dodges and skill activation are not in sync. It seems dodges use the same channel as movement (ie. there some lag with what you see on screen and what’s happen resulting to some weird effect).

@MikeLewis

Optimize? Gimme a break!

When IP-traffic enter’s US digital domain there’s a persistent ’delay’ known as the N2A-bug in non-anglosaxon countries, something I’ve given up on tracking and solving, becoming a fact of life, online.

Thus, in GW2, if you find it to be perplexing; we don’t play PvP -- because opponent’s get three strike’s before we even react, likewise we avoid fractals and non-NPC combat in WvW, we don’t do JP -- because we freeze in mid-air and then fail the jump’s, we triple-click to *really target NPC (client/server-side) in PvE and then spam the heck out of the target to survive.

Other than that, it’s an excellent MMO.

.
.
4 40 ms 2/ 25 = 8 % 0/ 25 = 0 % some-link.my-ISP.net [x.x.x.x]
0/ 25 = 0 % |
5 40 ms 2/ 25 = 8 % 0/ 25 = 0 % some-link.my-ISP.net [x.x.x.x]
6/ 25 = 24 % |
6 142 ms 8/ 25 = 32 % 0/ 25 = 0 % some-link.my-ISP.net [x.x.x.x]
0/ 25 = 0 % |
7 172 ms 8/ 25 = 32 % 0/ 25 = 0 % some-link.my-ISP.net [x.x.x.x]
2/ 25 = 8 % |
8 --- 25/ 25 =100 % 15/ 25 = 60 % ncsoft-ic-307708-dls-my-ISP.net.x.x.x.in-addr.arpa [x.x.x.x]
.
.

//P -- 7K hrs GW2

Please can somebody explain me this? I already contacted my ISP, even though I highly doubt it is really his fault. I use optic cable internet. The best in our country. But this picture also shows 100% packet loss at NCsoft – is it normal or should it be 0?

It would be very nice to get an update on how the experiments are working and how long they will go on.

And even If you say that this isn’t the reason for the lags that people get… Please fix it!
I don’t know what the problem is, maybe the experiments are the reason maybe it’s the amount of new F2P players coming into the game and the servers can’t handle it or w/e
The one thing I know is that this is going one for a week now! A week filled with 300ping and nothing else.

BroDTlordTV.1247:

It would be very nice to get an update on how the experiments are working and how long they will go on.

And even If you say that this isn’t the reason for the lags that people get… Please fix it!
I don’t know what the problem is, maybe the experiments are the reason maybe it’s the amount of new F2P players coming into the game and the servers can’t handle it or w/e
The one thing I know is that this is going one for a week now! A week filled with 300ping and nothing else.

This, so very much exactly this.

I don´t have any idea why this issue exists. But devs saying its not their fault and they could do nothing about it and players white knighting, bad mouthing or flaming people like me for beeing annoyed is not the way to deal with this crisis.

Dear Anet get more answers out. Explain it. And what ever you do: do not ever let other players flame concerned users until they just shut up. the problem does not go away. the annoyed consumer does.
I pre ordered HoT, the 100 bucks edition. I played this game for 4k hrs. I have 3 hours~ time for gw and I do not want to spend my time lagging with a avrg 532 ping. And when I am concerned I do not want to be attacked for my concerns. I think i am not the only one here. So please Anet give some quality feedback why so many lags and the test coincide. And to all the white knights that think users that don´t understand the situation: please calm your kittens, thank you very much.

206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com

has too high Jitter, random ping spikes over 600ms and regularly 100% packet loss

whatever you are doing, it is killing me.

Amka.8069:

206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com

has too high Jitter, random ping spikes over 600ms and regularly 100% packet loss

whatever you are doing, it is killing me.

are you sure your packet los is at anet servers and not before on an node as always?

Zaron.1987:

Amka.8069:

206-127-157-102.ncsoft.com

has too high Jitter, random ping spikes over 600ms and regularly 100% packet loss

whatever you are doing, it is killing me.

are you sure your packet los is at anet servers and not before on an node as always?

yeah, i ran ping plotter for last few days. its mostly that specific server from nc soft.
my ISP guy did the same, we both got around the same results. it was worse 2 days ago with ping spikes up to 2-3k ms to exactly this specific server ip. it has remarkabely high jitter compared to other ncsoft servers, it seems to be always positioned as the “middle” one.

the in game effect is eigther a DC after a long lag (every character continues it’s last action like running in a certain direction) or just a 1-5 second lag, where everything runs in super speed to the “up to date” location and actions pass all at once.

fyi: im in central europe using cable internet

Not sure if this fit here but:

haven’t been playing all summer and I’ve been trying to do the new JP in LA for the last two days when I noticed that my toon do not stop when I stop pressing W but only after 3-4 more steps. It’s impossible to do anything that way; when I jump on a ledge he keeps walking and fall, I have to stop walking way before the end of ledges and stuff and then go step by step…
Not sure if this is because of this experiment but thought you should know.
Thank you.

Little experience from CHINA… —> normally playing EU in Germany with around 20-30 ping.

I was the last 6 weeks in china visiting family. Cause of so much to do and higher Ping and bad internet I refused to play PvP —> not that bad tbh, more time for other things

I was still looking into the game to speak to friends, a daily here and there, looking a bit into beta-weekend, etc.
At the beginning I had always around 350-500 ping with some (like every few min) spikes reaching interesting numbers. But I blame the internet here (living in a Diplomatic Resident Compound —> still better connections than most)
After I saw the post here in the Forum I wanted to observe the development and I really had a positive conclusion. Mostly the ping were around 250-300 with definitly smoother and more reactive skill-triggering.
While I´m glad that I will be back in Germany next week, I think that information could be interesting

Any new news or breakthroughs in latency compensation? And correct me if I’m wrong but does it mean that if I have 50 ms ping , the latency compensation will make my action start 50 ms earlier into the action? What about for actions that are near instantaneous like dodging?

I had a good run surprisingly but on borderlands alpine yesterday. Then tonight in EB the lag again. I wonder if theres an issue with EB?

Please do not post to old threads this is against forum rules.