Guild Wars 2

Hello Devs,

Firstly, I’m a huge fan of the game and since release the other games in my collection haven’t got much of a look in. It’s clear your programmers, artists and designers have crafted a beautiful world full of detail modelled to the nth degree. I play as an Elementalist on the EU server – Desolation, sadly however certain aspects of the game are simply broken due to unplayable lag and culling.

Huge epic events that your teams have crafted are completely broken at the moment as they are simply impossible to enjoy. Take the dragon encounters, these are almost a slide show where frustratingly you are trying to perform an action and nothing will happen due to the lag. You will then have mobs, friendies constantly disappearing and reappearing from view due to the excessive culling and these events that should be epic in scale are just broken moments that people turn up to for loot.

Sadly this has been getting worse and worse and then you read rumours that EU game servers are actually based in Texas and that the cause of all the extra lag recently is due to guesting accounts. It’s certainly not imagination that since the recent patch that any encounter that involves a lot of people are simply unplayable as myself, the rest in our guild and the complaints in the main chat channel all state the same.

Can any developer please clarify what are causing these issues and whether we are going to see the back of them? Are these teething issues based on newly added features? Will encounters of this type be constantly broken, to the point where people will simply get too frustrated and choose not to do them? Should the game suffer for the masses to appease the few people that may choose to guest (if indeed this is part of the problem)?

I’m a huge fan of the game and I really want to enjoy the content you have created as it’s very clear to see a lot of effort has been poured into it, but parts are simply impossible to enjoy at moment as the game can be incredibly frustrating to play due to the reasons above.

Thanks.

Same here, only for me it lags everywhere (Gandara server) for the past 3 days, they say its due to guesting, but I don’t care much why, the game is unplayable that’s it. Right at the time when I was thinking about getting myself a couple of new char slots, but what’s the point in investing your money in something they may break anytime?

Same here. I am playing on Seafarer’s Rest. The lag seems to be only map specific and only occurs, when too much players are on one map. Due to the excessive amount of lag my client disconnects. This is really annoying, because depending on what you are doing (personal story or instances for example) the lag is really disturbing.
I never had these problems before, however they occure since the last patch. And just to mention, I only suffer from this lag in GW2. All other programms are working fine and without lag (my ping to google.com is 23ms, to the LoL servers its 17ms and to servers hosted in my country about 7-10 ms).

It would seem Piken Square (EU) is having the same kind of lag issues. Just on some maps, and mostly during any kind of event. Regardless of how many players are present or not. Thou it is worse the more players are around.

No idea where my other post went, but the lag for me on Desolation is always with the events. Usually stuck in an overflow as those guesting are farming chests for rares .. it’s ridiculous at the moment sadly. Can’t properly play the game I bought.

The dragon encounters especially were never great and always lagged a little, but since the guesting was introduced it’s been at a whole new level. And now that the loot has been buffed, they are getting heavily farmed.

Please keep guesting accounts to overflows. It isn’t right that those whose accounts reside on the server are consta stuck in overflows when these events are about to take place.

Same issues here on Desolation.

Coinciding with the release of the guesting functionality, I just haven’t been able to enjoy any large scale events due to every one going from server to server farming chests.

You can tell that an event window is up because as soon as that window comes up you’re over in an overflow straight away. Go back 1 minute after the event, the area is lowly populated once more.

Guesting benefits a few people, whereas not having guesting on benefits the majority.

Please turn it off and concentrate on removing the culling, fixing the broken dungeon routes (just had to abandon Ascalonian Catacombs path 3 tonight after the path bugged and couldn’t get past the Warmaster bit), and we’ll all be happy again.

Thanks for the great game though. Love it.

These same problems exist on Kaineng.

I run 50-60 fps on med-high settings, but while doing any event with large amount of people. I experience exactly what Daddypig is describing at the top.

This isn’t just cause of the new guesting feature. In wvw I have been lagging even more than before. I think this is related to the new patch. I can’t even enjoy wvw because anytime a zerg gets near me I go down to less than 5 fps and get skill locked.

Me and a friend just “tried” sPvP. It was lagging so bad it was literally unplayable. As for the guesting it would be nice if they limited it to dungeons atm until they can get server load balanced. I would agree it’s more than the guesting, this patch has crippled my playing experience a significant amount. I really hope they do bugfix/performance patches asap before they think about dropping more content patches.

Turned up to do the Shadow Behemoth this morning 15 minutes before the 30 minute window was due to open and was put into an overflow.

Now I know that a lot of people say that guesting isn’t responsible, maybe it’s not solely responsible, but it’s certainly a contributing factor. I’m on a UK server and the main chat is always in English, however the chat was full of French speaking people.

Just prior to doing this event I had just completed The Frozen Maw and lots of people in chat admitted they were guesting on our server. It may not be the sole problem but it’s certainly a contributing factor! Have a look at the attachment for an example of the main chat on EU Desolation during the Behemoth event, I’ve blurred out names for privacy.