So, I have been encountering this issue (along intermittent severe skill lag) since Friday night. I have spent a bit of time looking into it, and I am not entirely convinced it is limited to only Anet. Here is what I have attempted and found.
1. Both Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2 are experiencing the issue.
2. In guild wars 2, in low-population zones, the issue seems to occur far less frequently if at all.
3. I have tested two accounts on different servers (JQ, SBI) in PvE, WvW and EotM and all experience the intermittent severe skill lag and possible disconnection.
4. I have made no changes to my network in several weeks.
5. I powered off my modem for approximately three hours and the issue did not go away when I restarted it.
6. I attempted the standard client port, port 80, and port 443 with no change in behavior.
7. Several other games do not seem to experience the lag issue. However, I have encountered a couple non-gaming servers which seem to experience similar issues. One is an IRC server I occasionally hang out on, the other is my guilds teamspeak server. On the IRC server, I get random disconnects, while on my TS server I periodically “turn into a robot.” Other IRC and TS servers don’t seem to have the issue, but I might not have spend enough time on them to guarantee that.
8. Using Private Internet Access, when I set exit servers to either US coast, I seem to get rid of severe skill lag and random disconnects. However, when I chose a central-to-US exit node, the issues come back. While running PIA I do experience a consistent higher skill lag (approximately 1-2s), but I assume that is normal. I typically only use PIA while travelling or on public wifi, so I don’t have any prior experience with its performance while gaming at home.
9. I attempted a few traceroutes but it appears several hops block/ignore ICMP traffic so the results were not informative. I was in my ISP’s network (comcast), several hops with no info, then I was in NCSoft’s network.
Since I experience similar issues in other programs, but on a very limited basis, seems to indicate there is an internet routing issue. If you happen to be routed through one of these nodes, you end up with issues. I am hoping this is issue is of limited scope and not several issues piled on top of each other.
Hopefully, this information helps.
Cav
