Guild Wars 2

During my first Tequila fight none of my abilities fired for the entire 15min. After much experimentation I have been able to significantly improve my situation (although not eliminate skill lag altogether). Any advice given here is obviously taken at your own risk entirely.

WiFi: Seriously, buy an Ethernet cable.

Nagle’s Algorithm: Nagle’s algorithm works by combining a number of small outgoing messages, and sending them all at once.

I disabled this as a cautionary measure. There is a good chance that GW2 is setting NODELAY on the socket (meaning that they have effectively made this change already). Changing this will affect all applications, undo the change if you do not notice an improvement.

http://b.rideekulo.us/2009/09/windows-7-nagles-algorithm-and-gaming/

I had disabled this before my first Tequila fight, but it’s still worth trying if you are having latency issues.

TCP offload engine: TCP offload engine or TOE is a technology used in network interface cards (NIC) to offload processing of the entire TCP/IP stack to the network controller.

This is not supported by all NICs, so you may not be able to enable this (most Intel mobo built-in NICs should support it). The idea is that you delegate most of the responsibility of network communication to your network card (instead of having your CPU do it). My first Tequila fight nearly pegged my CPU at 100%: enabling TOE in those circumstances may (and in my case did) decrease packet loss. Some applications really don’t like TOE (from my testing GW2 doesn’t have an issue). Also some TOE implementations are dreadful, so enabling it may worsen the situation; basically YMMV.

1. Print out these instructions or save them to a .txt document on your desktop.
2. Open My Computer/Windows Explorer
3. Right click on Computer (Windows 8 ) or My Computer (Windows 7).
4. Select Manage
5. On the left select Device Manager
6. On the right locate Network Adapters and expand it.
7. Locate the NIC that you use to connect to the internet under Network Adapters.
8. Right click the NIC and select Properties.
9. You will need to dig around in the tabs (the buttons at the top) for a list of enabled features on the NIC (you will usually find it under an Advanced tab).
10. Within the features find any feature that has the word “offload” in it. Take note of the current settings. If you don’t have any offload features (or a feature tab) skip to step 13.
11. Enable all offload features on the NIC, specifically for IPv4.
12. Press Ok and close device manager.
13. Open an UAC-elevated command prompt.
    1. If you have UAC disabled: press WINKEY+R, type CMD and press Enter.
    2. If you have UAC enabled: press WINKEY, type CMD, right click on it in the results and select Run as administrator.
14. Type in the following: netsh int tcp set global chimney=enabled
    1. To revert the change: netsh int tcp set global chimney=disabled
15. Restart your PC

Test GW2 and see if the lag situation improves. You should do an apples-apples comparison (e.g. do a Tequila fight) If it doesn’t revert all the changes made (it’s best to leave TOE off if it doesn’t help because of aforementioned incompatibilities).