Guild Wars 2

Will the skill lag be fixed in WvW on the new build?

I doubt they know how to fix it. It actually seems worse than it used to be.

I think skill lag is becoming the new Roswell.

Lets hearken back to a time when culling was in the game. A lot of people went on the forums talking about how it could never be fixed and would never be fixed. As we know now, culling did get fixed.

Will the skill lag ever be fixed, only the devs know. I can say that almost no game out there has combat on this scale with this kind of skill diversity. Run a few hundred people together all slamming abilities and pouring on the AoE, that is a lot of data to process and disseminate.

Straegen.2938:

Lets hearken back to a time when culling was in the game. A lot of people went on the forums talking about how it could never be fixed and would never be fixed. As we know now, culling did get fixed.

Well yes but that’s a different thing entirely. Culling was a ‘feature’ that could be turned on/off with a single switch at any time. They tried to make culling work but in the end they gave up and turned it off.

Skill lag is a wholly different beast and to fix or at least mitigate it, ANET would need to buy a LOT of hardware and bandwidth. And all that ONLY for a couple of people (the few thousand that play WvW are a couple compared to the millions of other players) and ONLY for SM sieges when all players come to 1 spot. You can see why this is just not happening. It’s bad investment atm. And it’s sad, because WvW is the best aspect of GW2 and should become the main focus of the game.

Only then, when WvW becomes the focus, more arenas are created, and hundreds of thousands of ppl start playing it on these new arenas, only then can we expect ANET to invest into ultra fast servers that will mitigate skill lag. Right now the hardware is surely calibrated at medium load PvE events. That’s where most of the load is from most of the people. SM castle sieges are too rare a case for them to spend huge bucks and that’s the reality I’m afraid.

For them to invest now into better hardware for WvW would be like buying a ferrari as a cab in New York, you’d be stuck in traffic for 99.99% of the time, but very rarely you may get out of the city and speed a little. Bad investment :P

If that is the case, why don’t they just send out an official statement like:

We are sorry for the skill lag problems in WvW on major fights but we don’t have the resources to deal with this problem for only a few of our fans.
-

Keeping things Quiet isn’t a great way to communicate to be honest.

Just admit and say it cant be done, I can respect such an answer.

zerospin.8604:

Straegen.2938:

Lets hearken back to a time when culling was in the game. A lot of people went on the forums talking about how it could never be fixed and would never be fixed. As we know now, culling did get fixed.

Well yes but that’s a different thing entirely. Culling was a ‘feature’ that could be turned on/off with a single switch at any time. They tried to make culling work but in the end they gave up and turned it off

um… not quite brobeans. They spent a kittentonne of money and engineering hours to make it possible to run the game well without culling. It wasn’t a feature, itwas a necessity.

This is why you see and will see culling in other current and all near future mmos.

10 minutes ago fighting in SM

Unplayable

EDIT: I will explain why

I can move around just fine! I walk dance, chat normal.

My Nr 1 skill works just fine, and the other 2,3,4,5 have slight delay what Is doable.

But all my utility skills and heal and elite are not responding at all! This is not a client issue.

Please say if it can or can not be fixed, I feel so ignored LOL

OT: AOE loot is cool though! And my warrior can finally remove conditions!! Shake it off, Armor, remove condition on shout, longbow F1 Skill filled up by Heal skill full adr. remove 3, heal remove 3 specific condis too! Its awesome!

Straegen.2938:

I can say that almost no game out there has combat on this scale with this kind of skill diversity. Run a few hundred people together all slamming abilities and pouring on the AoE, that is a lot of data to process and disseminate.

This is going to take serious work to fix because unless they find a few things that are major contributors that can be individually optimized, it will involve major code optimization.

Given how thoughtless some of the recent changes are even conceptually in regards to game play, I do not put much faith in them getting this fixed without bringing in outside help. I am not they even have the motivation to fix it tbh, for some reason they still think sPvP is what is driving this game…..

covenn.7165:

I doubt they know how to fix it.

If they knew how to fix it, it would be fixed.

It’s called “problem solving”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

If you knew why skill lag exists, you’d know that it isn’t going to get fixed. I’m not saying that it CAN’T be fixed … only that it won’t.

Mif.3471:

covenn.7165:

I doubt they know how to fix it.

If they knew how to fix it, it would be fixed.

It’s called “problem solving”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_solving

Personally, I would say that it is more like fishing at this point.

wvwvw right now seems to be lagvlagvlag….

I rarely have issues with lag. I also have culling turned on and graphics settings to low. I am also not on one of the top 4 servers that have extremely high population where zergs are 60+.

zerospin.8604:

Well yes but that’s a different thing entirely. Culling was a ‘feature’ that could be turned on/off with a single switch at any time. They tried to make culling work but in the end they gave up and turned it off.

Culling was and is not a feature. Culling is something done to a stack to make it more efficient. In this case, it was done to allow the client to render efficiently. To remove culling most likely took a lot of developer hours and re-engineering of the code on the client. It was probably easy to remove from the server however.

zerospin.8604:

Skill lag is a wholly different beast and to fix or at least mitigate it, ANET would need to buy a LOT of hardware and bandwidth.

For them to invest now into better hardware for WvW would be like buying a ferrari as a cab in New York, you’d be stuck in traffic for 99.99% of the time, but very rarely you may get out of the city and speed a little. Bad investment :P

Buying more hardware and bandwidth probably won’t resolve this issue. My best educated guess is that they have latency, locking/versioning and stack resolution performance issues. Bandwidth is capacity which would not help if it is latency. Hardware (CPU and memory) have limited and diminishing effect in a multi-threaded environment. Sure they can process the stack a bit faster but often the problem lies in resolving the in memory stacks. This requires a locking or versioning architecture neither of which can be sped up much with hardware. It is likely they would need to re-engineer the stacks and the way they are processed, but they are most likely already very efficient. Ultimately there is a limit and that limit is why few MMOs (and none that I can think of) can process this amount of data much less more of it.

IMO the solution at least in part is probably a design one. They already limit AoE most likely to keep the stack sizes smaller. Making changes that have users sending less data or receiving fewer updates is likely an easier (and cheaper) place to start.

Disclaimer, this is all theory since I haven’t seen their system and I am presuming an awful lot.

anzenketh.3759:

I rarely have issues with lag. I also have culling turned on and graphics settings to low. I am also not on one of the top 4 servers that have extremely high population where zergs are 60+.

Your local graphic settings are irrelevant to the problem being discussed here.

Straegen.2938:

IMO the solution at least in part is probably a design one. They already limit AoE most likely to keep the stack sizes smaller. Making changes that have users sending less data or receiving fewer updates is likely an easier (and cheaper) place to start.

I agree with you about the problem being a core design problem barring any significant issue with poorly written code. Sadly, the server side lag is vastly worse now than it was during the initial months after release….

One has to wonder what actually creates more calculations, cut and dry determination of who is within an area of effect…. or which 5 people within an area of effect actually gets hit by it. Depending on their code, it could actually cause more load to limit AoE.

Hell, games have had massive fights with uncapped AoE and no server lag for a decade+ ….(client related issues are a different situation).

Straegen.2938:

Culling was and is not a feature. Culling is something done to a stack to make it more efficient. In this case, it was done to allow the client to render efficiently. To remove culling most likely took a lot of developer hours and re-engineering of the code on the client. It was probably easy to remove from the server however.

Actually you can look at culling as a feature. Just not as ‘player’ feature…. remember that ANET can turn it on, off, and adjust its settings (and did over many months). Removing it was a matter of the proverbial flipping of the switch. What you are combining into culling is the impact of it being turned off, and the work required to eliminate or minimize that impact on both ends.

Anet is silent on this topic.

Such a game ruining effect, yet no fixes.

And I agree, it has gotten a lot worse in the last month. I have 5 minutes of decent play, then the skill lag starts, then friend and foe players are teleporting around. Just now, a couple dozen people got DC’d from client crash.

Maybe it’s time to dust off my Steam account and play some TF2.

covenn.7165:

Actually you can look at culling as a feature. Just not as ‘player’ feature…. remember that ANET can turn it on, off, and adjust its settings (and did over many months). Removing it was a matter of the proverbial flipping of the switch. What you are combining into culling is the impact of it being turned off, and the work required to eliminate or minimize that impact on both ends.

A software feature is generally considered a positive option or attribute in a system. If an attribute, switch or option of a server is limiting, that is not a feature.

Culling was a fix for a client performance issue. There is nothing positive about server side culling in the system today so if it is a feature it is one with zero benefit. The client side culling options added when culling was removed are indeed a feature.

Anyway I have helped drag this into OT territory and for that I apologize.

EDIT: Desolation server, everyone have skill lag. Is it still our ISP?

Still skill lag fix please i paid for this game.

I also have the feeling that skill lag has worsen lately.
I was used to have lag when approaching a big zerg (in BP generally) but now, I have lag even in 2V2 situation, with no zerg involved in the area.
I find it totally 4ssinine, because I remember playing games with far more people involved (AION for exemple, with 600 vs 600 fights) and having very little lag.

I was not expecting to feel like I miss culling => it was messy, it made me rage sometimes, but at least I could use more skills than my 1…..

Lag is currently THE game-breaking issue for me, I tested several VPN, did some optimization on my line, but heck, no improvement at all (and no latency on other games/web-app, I have like 30ms steady everytime).

Come on, ANET, stop developing the new quaggan backpack or new troll pet and just fix this, this game deserve better.
And please, dont evade the question, you communicate about almost every bug in the game, trying to muddy the waters is not the solution, I think 3W-only players like me need to be reassured and not blatantly ignored.

Never had this issue with DAoC, and there were just as many, if not more people in one area.

Magnetron.5823:

Will the skill lag be fixed in WvW on the new build?

Skill lag will NEVER be fixed!

Bill Friest Posted months ago that he was making Skill Delay his number 1 priority but if they had made any kind of progress or had any positive news to tell us they would have posted about it by now if only to alleviate some of the frustration.

I don’t think they even have a clue what’s causing it let alone fix it.

Magnetron.5823:

EDIT: Desolation server, everyone have skill lag. Is it still our ISP?

That one is easy, Desolation always run in 1big Zerg so separate your Zerg in to 3-4 smaller groups and vola.

On a update day the servers have more work so that day it will lag more.

We got more skillag since more ppl were asking for “culling” effect to take care off..
Now ppl qq’ing (as myself) for the skillag.. I never minded culling though..

Oh well

Previously skill lag seems to have been restricted to large 3-way fights, which generally kept it contained to SM and Garrison battles.

Since the patch I’ve been noticing it (with slightly decreased severity) in large 2-way fights at tower and keep fights. Which are quite frequent.

Skill lag is getting worse because they’ve been fixing it! And every time they do something to fix it a little bit, they up the WvW map population caps and we get even larger battles (seriously the battles I’ve seen over the last 3 weeks are much much bigger than anything we’ve had for the previous 6 months).

So the way for us to feel the effects of all the work those guys have been doing is to lock down the WvW map population caps to something much lower like say where it was back in January after the free server transfers ended and everyone went bat kitten crazy about how awful the queues were. Many threads put the estimate at that time around 60 players per side per WvW map with EB maybe having a higher cap in the 75 range. It is not that we have suddenly gotten better about getting all 60 of our guys in same spot for big keep takes but that there are a whole heck of a lot more of us out there. This is only feeding into the super stack at the top mentality we’ve got going on where everyone is always feeling outnumbered and needs to get more guilds.

Lets go back to queue town and force us to spread our numbers out across the servers so we can have smaller more manageable battles using all our skills instead of just smashing our #1 ability over and over. ><

PariahX.6970:

Skill lag is getting worse because they’ve been fixing it! And every time they do something to fix it a little bit, they up the WvW map population caps and we get even larger battles (seriously the battles I’ve seen over the last 3 weeks are much much bigger than anything we’ve had for the previous 6 months).

So the way for us to feel the effects of all the work those guys have been doing is to lock down the WvW map population caps to something much lower like say where it was back in January after the free server transfers ended and everyone went bat kitten crazy about how awful the queues were. Many threads put the estimate at that time around 60 players per side per WvW map with EB maybe having a higher cap in the 75 range. It is not that we have suddenly gotten better about getting all 60 of our guys in same spot for big keep takes but that there are a whole heck of a lot more of us out there. This is only feeding into the super stack at the top mentality we’ve got going on where everyone is always feeling outnumbered and needs to get more guilds.

Lets go back to queue town and force us to spread our numbers out across the servers so we can have smaller more manageable battles using all our skills instead of just smashing our #1 ability over and over. ><

I actually had an idea of having a slightly lowered cap on every borderland on all sides (around 10 less per side per map) to alleviate the lag on the WvW servers.

The problem is the impact this would have, provided the higher tiers have every map queued they will have an even longer queue, or perhaps get fed up with it and rampage on the forums. It might even get some players to quit all together, a move A-net would rather not have to face. SO…here is my idea.

If they ever were to implement a reduced cap, it would have to come out ahead of time in an announcement. But, if they say…for instance that transferring to a low-medium population server were half-off or even free….

It might be a sleazy move, but considering how imbalanced the populations are right now, looking at the standings the tier 1 servers might not change too much, but T2-T3 servers might get some people coming in while the majority funnel into the lowest brackets, perhaps to servers who DESPARATELY need manpower.

There are probably a lot of other issues that I haven’t addressed with the idea but skill lag and rendering issues would probably be much better off if the cap were reduced even slightly.

Sykper.6583:

There are probably a lot of other issues that I haven’t addressed with the idea but skill lag and rendering issues would probably be much better off if the cap were reduced even slightly.

And that is the thing, just a simple reduction in WvW map population caps would actually help with so many other problems WvWer’s have been fussing about lately (zergs, skill lag, rendering, off peak hours caps, PvDoor, lopsided matches, ect. . .) that it seems a no brainer. The queue problem and server transfers is where everything falls apart so at the risk of upsetting a vocal bunch of temperamental short attention span gamers we all get stuck with sub-par performance to slog though. ><

I like idea of giving everyone one free world transfer ticket, locking off the top 2 tiers to transfers in and keeping the bottom 2 tiers free to transfer to for a limited time. Lower WvW map population caps and a more spread out player base will be better for everyone in the long run but it is obviously not something we will do by choice without some kicking and screaming.