Guild Wars 2

I just wanted to ask a simple question. Has anyone tried to lower ther latency in gw2. e.g i am getting around 250 ms ping game runs good till i dont get overcrowded in a map . Once i am i start getting lagspikes and delays in casting skills.

If anyone has tried to lower their latency can you please share it here. Thankyou very much.

Sorry for the long answer. If you mean you are monitoring the latency while you are actually playing the game, the 250 ms is normal latency based on the TCP stack used in the game for someone playing in NA on a NA world. I don’t have an EU copy of the game; but, I would suspect for an EU player playing on an EU world the 250 ms latency is normal. The 250 ms is the round trip time of packets transmitted to/from GW2 client to the world server and then from/back to to your GW2 client, which is transmission delay but also includes propagation delay of the signal. Some of the packets will travel roundtrip under the 200 ms and some above. You will see it fluctuate, sometimes excessively. You won’t be able to lower your latency in the game below 200 ms with the way Anet implemented the TCP stack server side. The reason is when a retransmission occurs, (they happen a lot) due to out of order segments from congestion/packet loss between your game client and the Anet servers, the communication between them timeouts for 200 ms by default. This timeout is on purpose and by design based on standard TCP congestion control mechanisms. You might get disconnected (error 7) from the server though if the communication link is not re-established quickly enough immediately after that 200 ms timeout. Trying to play across continents just adds to the latency because of longer propagation delays and greater roundtrip times. That’s why I would recommend players stick to playing on the continent closest to them.

Cross our fingers that some day Anet will purchase more peer bandwidth from the carriers serving their CDN and re-write the game’s network stack or use a customized one better suited for gaming that offers a more pleasurable playing experience for everyone, especially those trying to play from far away from NA or the EU.

Thank you warder your answer is quiet helpful and yes it did explain alot of my questions ^^

I’m sorry, but that simply doesn’t make sense to me. A quarter of a second is pretty high latency for an online game.

Are you saying that the server software is set up to provide 250 ms latency to every client? Is that in addition to the normal network latency (increased by distance and the number of network nodes)? – Or does the server measure latency to each client, then adjust the total latency (for each) to .25 seconds?

For one thing, it would be a software nightmare to do the latter; so I think we can rule that one out.

If it were true (which I highly doubt); the delay every time a skill is activated would be very noticeable. In other online games that I’ve played, some have a latency meter. The difference between 100 ms and 250 ms (regarding skills, etc.) is huge.

I’ve only had a couple of times where I noticed considerable lag. Normally, the game is very responsive for me. This is even in group events. I did Jormag 3 times this week and noticed no skill delay. I did have a low framerate, but that is just my old PC.

OK, just checked it and the 250 ms figure is incorrect. The game will show 250 ms to 270 ms latency when sitting on the opening screen (before entering the world).

However, after entering the world, my latency hangs around 60 on one GW2 IP address and varies between about 80 ms and 150 ms on the other GW2 IP address. The top IP address (login server?) is at 270 ms in the picture.

How do you know which server in that Resource Monitor screen is the gameplay server? Sometimes I see 3 or 4 connections for GW2.exe. I am confused as to which is the game server, the server that would affect my gameplay, and which are servers I can ignore?

according to this site – http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/ – I’m ending up in germany in my trace route – im on the us east coast! there may be more to this story than I thought! ^.^

I am in Japan and my traceroute sends me to Texas, even though I’m on an EU server. What’s with that!? I have huge latency at the moment, in excess of 550.

I was checking mine last night. /IP gets the server and PingPlotter had me at 70-75ms.

Ricky, if you simply do a host trace to anything (google, espn) you see it always starts in Germany. Doing a proxy trace first goes to Germany and then back to your target. It’s a cute tool but pointless.

I get around 50ms avarage to The server both via cmd and resorce moniter

chris.9142:

I get around 50ms avarage to The server both via cmd and resorce moniter

you’re ping says 240. the server ip is the one that starts with 64.

Rcox.4076:

chris.9142:

I get around 50ms avarage to The server both via cmd and resorce moniter

you’re ping says 240. the server ip is the one that starts with 64.

if I do /ip on The game get The one higlighted not The 64 one

The 64 one is based in The US I am playing on a eu server I highly doubt a eu server is based in The usa
the 64 will probally be The login server

Yes it is. I tried this and went one step farther to see which port had all the game traffic on and it was the one with, for me, the 90ms ping and not the 240/280ms ping which had only a few hundred bytes transferred in total.

How do you find the server that is the game server?

/IP in the chat bar will give you the server IP address.

Packets going the long way round has nothing to do with GW2. Its the routing that your ISP uses. I connect from SEA. There was an undersea cable issue recently after which traffic to Australia was routed via the US. So if you see unusual routing patterns try asking your ISP about it.

Also I noticed that every time you change zones, you are on a different server/IP (makes sense). Also ping times are very variable. I saw it bounce all over on the IP I was connected to (90-240ms).