Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to drop by here since I was suffering huge lag in GW2 for the past 5 days and it felt like GW2 was lagging out my whole internet giving me 10 second skill delay in prime time and 600-900 ping. I’ve been in touch with support who did an amazing job trying to isolate the problem and I also did a lot of googling in case it was my ISP throttling GW2.

The major factor for me seems to have been the update of Realplayer on 6 August (For Windows 7 & 8 | Version: 17.0.13.2 | Updated: 06/08/2014)

To me it felt like the problem was 100% GW2 in prime time not being able to handle it since my internet ran fine for the rest of the day (including GW2) during the day.

However, after a few netstat results indicating I had something eating away at my latency causing background noise I pinned it down and uninstalled Realplayer and now have an amazing connection to the game steady back down at 150 ping with no lag in prime time when it was 600-900 ping since the Realplayer update essentially attempted to take over my PC.

Just wanted to post this in case others were searching for possible causes for 10 skill lag/delay switching maps/huge ping so they can check any P2P/Cloud software on their PC. I see people complaining and I understand why, however my ping plots still failed with support last night and yet my connection is great now to GW2 so make sure to check your own PC for anything unusual. If this post helps even 1 other with their issues it’s worth it.

Yeah, other internet programs can interfere with online gaming.

There are times when I’ve been doing downloads at the same time as playing GW2 which resulted in some lag. Of course, I knew the downloads were causing the issue and I generally don’t play when doing that.

I understand running other programs or downloads is not good and will effect latency but the main thing is I never really used Realplayer and 99% of the time had it turned off through the task manager along with other random updaters. Since the 6th August update it seemed to have developed a mind of it’s own and was opening all sorts of connections in my netstat without my permission while closed. I’m not sure if it was trying to share my internet/space/Cloud me with others but last few months going from 200 ping whilst downloading/watching Twitch when playing GW2 and a bit of skill lag compared to post the 6th Aug Realplayer update causing 600-900 ping, 12 seconds skill lag, 10 second map changes, enemies unable to stomp me becasue I was so far behind the game definitely indicate it was causing issues even when Realplayer was closed down.

I been telling people this all along that most of there lag issues are stuff running in the background using the internet. I would like to thank the OP and give credit for taking the time to track down the issue instead of just ranting on how bad Anet’s servers are and it’s not on our end I can almost guarantee that over half of all lag issues are caused by something running in the background grabbing their internet.

Realplayer acts pretty-much like spyware, in my opinion. I haven’t used it in over a decade as I consider it to be bloated garbage.