Guild Wars 2

This only appears to be happening with GW2, but I need guidance on what to look for.

For the past week, I have been experiencing problems with skill lag where the game acts almost as if I’m disconnected. However, I’m still able to read/chat in local and map chat, I can still take damage (and see the numbers) from mobs, and other normal things, but I am completely unable to use any skills or swap weapons.
This problem will happen for approximately 10 to 15 seconds, and then appears to resolve itself after I’m out of combat (this is not verified though.)

Starting out on tracking this down, I’ve rebooted our router a few times, verified through testing that our connection is solid, and also tested by disabling a number of programs in order to see what might be causing the issue.

My first question, since time-wise this seems to be consistent: Is it possible this has something to do with the graphics drivers? I updated my nvidia drivers around the same time this started happening. Has anyone else had issues with the latest nvidia drivers?

https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a good guide to tracking down network issues, and it can sometimes find issues (like intermittent lag) that simpler tools can’t. (Alternately, mtr does the same thing, and is FOSS.)

What you describe sounds like outbound traffic to the “world” or “map” server is being held up, but inbound traffic from it (eg: monster hits you) is working, and connection to the chat service (separate system) is working.

It’s not technically impossible that graphics drivers have something to do with this, and it’s definitely worth trying turning off NVIDIA ShadowPlay if you have it enabled, to see if that helps … but other than shadowplay it’s pretty unlikely compared to network issues.

To help narrow it down, answer this: does the game client notice your key presses?

That is, do you get the flashing “i’m casting” indicator on the ability you tried to use, but it never activates or goes on cooldown?

SlippyCheeze.5483:

To help narrow it down, answer this: does the game client notice your key presses?

That is, do you get the flashing “i’m casting” indicator on the ability you tried to use, but it never activates or goes on cooldown?

Not always. Sometimes it’s almost like I’ve completely DC’d, but chat and such are still working. In one instance in Silverwastes the Vile Thrasher I was fighting vanished after a couple seconds (but kept hitting me, though it might have been it’s goo path).

From what I’ve tested so far, I’ve got the following info:
It does not appear to be the Nvidia driver. With no other programs running (but without killing any extra system processes like DropBox), I experienced only a minor bit of dips/drops in my FPS which could easily be attributed to other factors. However, when running Firefox along with GW2, I had one small, but definite, burp. At this point I suspect it is firefox, but there’s only been 10minutes of testing there.
What really has my attention is….somewhat strange. To the point that I’m choosing at this point to simply file it as a fringe possibility, but …this only happens on my Daredevil/thief when using dual pistol. I ran around quite a while on my necro last night (finished half of Mt. Maelstrom) and didn’t have any issues (note: Firefox was not running at this time).

At this point, as I said above, it looks like a problem with Firefox. How that would interfere I don’t know, but I also need to test a bit more before making any solid conclusions.

Thank you for the information on network traffic monitoring though, I’ll see if I can find anything there.

It is most certainly a case of “sample size too small”, but so far, it really really is only when I’m using dual pistol on a thief/daredevil, and it only goes away when I get out of combat (actually looking forward to proving that wrong, because not only is it silly, I really don’t want to have to file a bug report on something that obscure).

I completely understand that hesitation. At the end of the day, anet support are equipped to help you out, but … don’t forget to point them here.

uh, silly question, but … it’s not that something is saturating your outbound (or inbound) connection, or close to it, and so when combat starts (and, presumably, as a result we see an uptick in traffic to the server compared to less busy running around), it just starts to lag?

I’m not really sure there. The problem seems to have resolved itself. It appears that the skill lag issues were specifically due to the Nvidia driver released around the 6th of April. Since installing the one released on the 25th, the problem hasn’t shown up.
I had that one burp when I had Firefox running, but it is entirely possible that it was just my connection there.