Guild Wars 2

Insanely bad tonight, finding it hard just to wander round cities.

iv had this annoying lag at peak times again for about 4 days now, i am wondering if anyone else is being affected by it?

trying this version now, seems to work slightly better, more dps for 0.5k hp
http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQNAseWncfC9filfCufCEgilZjyMEGmWqMAutkp+WD2jF-TVCBABCu/gWKzQTJIAnRBLV/xMlGbcIAC4BFonemAAHA/23gv/+7vXe5lXe5lb5fX+3lXuUAUsMC-w

It is very much a work in progress but here:
http://de.gw2skills.net/editor/?vhEQNAseRncfC9filfCufCEgilZjyMEGmWqMAutkp+WD2jF-T1RBABVq+Tg7PAyZUILlfnpEMP9NA8oCCAcA8bf77v57v/+7lXe5lXe5W+3l/d5lLFAFLjA-w

Iv been told that i may want to swap the greatsword for the staff so that i get the escape skill + chaos armour.
I also tend 2 swap 2 of the wells with decoy and blink alot and then back again when i need them, The wells are normally better as a support skill while blink/decoy are better for roaming.

I would argue that they are the most powerful class in the game at the moment.
I run a close combat chronotank build, 27k hp 3k armour, drops aoe buffs and heals constantlyand has a high dmg output.
There’s also that wvw bonus atm…..

No thanks.
I like making my own gear for www and I like the fact that people can’t keep changing there builds.
Also wvw gives endgame gear a use as wvw is the only real endgame content so yes chances are everyone else has equally fancy gear but it’s nice to put that gear to use.

A net could just enable gliders in www for both hot and non hot player.
Could add in anti air defence’s.
Gliders would be fine so long as you can’t glide over walls.

I have tried both clients, still can’t use it, all of my cores are enabled.

-Describe a typical hour for you in the Alpine Borderlands in the past. For example, What size of group were you running in? What kind of tasks did you run? What activities did you do?

I tended to scout/keep an eye on keeps/defend, i would sometimes lead teams to take back lost land. Plain scouting would normally be 1-3 people, taking land could be anywhere up to 50.

-Compare your experience described above with a typical hour spent in Eternal Battlegrounds, if you went there at all. Does your style of play change between the 2 maps?

I dont spend alot of time in eb, it tends to just be people rushing at each other.

-Compare your experiences described above with an hour spent in the new borderlands.
Describe the nature of combat in the borderlands in the past. How have the new borderlands impacted this paradigm for you? What style or build changes might it cause? For example, knocking people off cliffs or into lava might play a more important role.

There isnt really anyone in the new bl, it takes a long time to navigate aswell, the combat tends to be slow as a result as you have no scouts and just 1-5 people taking land. The Oasis event also causes alot of lag and makes defence less viable (as a zerg just ruches the event and then walks through teh open gates)

-In your experience, compare the time it takes take a structure or objective here, then it did in the past.

It takes about 5 timess longer to take an objective and thats when the new ones arnt being defended.

-How is the loot and wxp for you compared to in the past? Will it be able to sustain whatever you are doing? Did it take a hit, or was it improved? If you are planning to unlock an elite specialization, do you think you were helped or hurt in these regards?

The wxp rewards for scouting and defending have always been terrible but they are even worse now as tehre is no one to fight. It actually costs alot of money to defend and now that its so rare to get attacked its costing even more as you arnt getting any loot.

-Do you think you could pursue any other in-game goals just by playing WvW?

I play wvw for the game mode itself, like i said wvw has always costed resources its not profitable. It would be nice to have some sort of wvw reward track. And it would be nice if scouting/defending was rewarded.

-How will the map change impact the long sessions (multiple hours) you spend in WvW?

At the moment it is very slow and to be honest i am starting to get bored, no fights are going on.

-In 100 words or less, describe how the new BLs could be improved.

Remove the oasis event
remove auto-upgrade(keep it free but make it use sups again)
fix the waypoints, at the moment you cant use them
create some sort of system to make getting around the map faster(ie gliders)
add in the autoloot system
Reward scouting and defending

-In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a new WvW player.

They tend to get lost which people find very off putting.

-In 100 words or less, describe how the borderlands work to a veteran WvW player that is new to the maps.

It has taken some time to get used to, there are things that need to change but if they get changed it would be fun again.

-Which map am I most likely to find you currently, if you’re on Gw2?

Desert borderlands in the hope that i get some wvw.

Im using a 64bit os with an 8 core 64bit cpu and i cant use it either.
I have no idea how anet detect if your pc can run it or not.

annddd my main attack is now a peanut gun.

They should have an option for people to use the shiny super particalled effects.

Reliably crashing every 2 minutes since update.
I can’t even fast travel without it crashing right after

Well i thought i might as well point it out…
Why invent a new system to solve this problem when someone else has already gone away and worked it out ^^.

Hopefully anet will add something like this, i guess we shall see.

Ok so a system i have seen used in other games is this.
The guild hall costs scale, so small guilds pay less and big guilds pay more.

But each time your guild hits a size boundry i.e. a guild recruits more people and hits 250 players, the guild stations etc get disabled until they are upgraded to the new guild size tier.

Small guilds can start paying toward the next size tier upgrades before they hit it so that those features dont get disabled when they hit the next size tier.

I have seen many skilled mentors and many bad ones, personally i dont have any problem with mentor tags themselves. It would be nice if they were lower down on the pact commander mastery.
What does annoy me a bit is that mentors get a pre name in chat when tagged up.. which is a feature commanders have wanted for a while and still dont have.
More than anything I would like to see Com added as a pre name to commander tags in chat.

p.s. i know this is unlikly but a coloured symbol that matchs your tag colour would be even better.

so i could be:
[purple symbol] kusaku: said blah blah in chat

I think mentor tag is fine but should be unlocked at Advanced Logistics level and not mastery level 1.
I also think commanders should get [Comm] infront of there name in chat cause thats a handy feature that would benifit wvw.

According to the BT guy I talked to at EE ?^^ we should see some improvements now.

GM supporting vpn…. nice
Any ideas on a good vpn client for gw’s 2?

I would like the old upgrade system.. just without the need for players to pay silver/gold

I would like it if every wvw map was different.. so green could have a forest map, red could be desert and blue could be the old bl map.

But but the entire reason i grinded the pact commander was for autoloot in wvw.

Sorry for the double post.
I have been having strange connection problems with the forums recently as well as the game.

Finally gained permission to delete the duplicate post.
Has anyone else had trouble with these forums during peak times?

I do not personally know how much attention anet pay to internet traffic.
It is possible to deduce with 99% certainty if a vpn client or similar such product like hotspotshield is in use. However If anet bother looking at tcp communication this closely and ban people for it, i personally doubt they do.
However I hold no responsibility if anyone uses these tools based on this information.

I would personally talk to a anet gm through there tickets to see if you can get there ok.

Kiwifruit.5904:

Hey guys.

So today’s update, he called and said they were still “monitoring” the line. He also said he checked all the landline numbers I gave him and none of them had called to report a problem, to which I replied that most people were either switching to another ISP or couldn’t be bothered to get through their call centre because most were so unhelpful. I got quite angry with him and said I felt like they weren’t taking the problem seriously because only 2 people had reported it, to which he basically said yeah that’s right, if only 2 people call in then only 1 person will work on the problem, if 15 people call in the team will be much bigger.

He suggested trying to get you guys to call in but I said to be honest no one can be bothered, is there a direct line I can give them so they can contact you and you actually believe that this is a widespread problem. He’s given me an email address, it seems fairly generic but I urge anyone still interested in getting this problem solved to email customer-service@ee.co.uk – he said make sure to mention your landline number, the time you are experiencing the problems and the game you’re experiencing them with, i.e. Guild Wars 2.

Hopefully if we do that, they’ll start taking it seriously.

P.S. Hype for tomorrow!:D

what? he said none of us called? i spent like 5 hours every day for a week with ee.
I will try the email you gave me but it seems pretty generic i realy dont think it will help.

Thx
Kusaku

EU servers here

I’m hoping if enough people contact EE many they will do something about it.
I know the internet is complex but problems can be solved and its normally the isp who has to do the work to solve it.
A good example of EE fixing a problem like this was the one with sky vegas.
Although a lot of people had to complain to get it fixed.

Thx
Kusaku

Every other game I have works fine,
As far as I can see this is an issue anet should be working out with their isp as it looks like it is an intermittent issue that they have had with telia for a year or so now.

You could try:
Running Guild wars 2 with “-clientport 80” or “-clientport 443”

Or you could try HotSpot Shield which has helped a few people.

Thx
Kusaku

Hi all

I have talked to Telia, EE and Anet now for almost a week with little luck.
EE and Telia continue to refuse to believe there is any sort of issue and if I try to get a supervisor I get cut off.

I recently had the idea of asking Anet to talk to EE on our behalf in the hope that EE would pay more attention to Anet than one of EE’s users.
Unfortunately, Anet have refused to help us on this.

It is looking like I will not be joining you for HOT as none of the work a-rounds work for me and I am unfortunately tied to my internet provider.
I will continue to check the forums in case you guys work out any solutions.

Thx
Kusaku

Alot of this is sounding like the EE problem just not as severe which is pretty much what I thought was going to happen.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Severe-lag-during-peak-times-with-EE/page/2#post5618497

I think there is some sort of server issue which is causing long replies that fall outside of the tcp timings.
This causes connection breakdown and high ping.
As the traffic to the server goes up the problem actually seems to get worse.

I have attempted to talk to anet about it via tickets but they do not understand how WinMTR works or how to do network diagnostics which normally ends up with them saying their servers are fine it must be your isp or it must be the Telia servers. This is not really the gm’s fault as they can’t be expected to know how everything in their company works.
What doesn’t help however is that I am handled by a different gm each time I send a reply.
This means that because they don’t read the email history I always have to start at stage 1 again.

Anyway I have spent a lot of time trying to solve this issue without any progress and for the most part I give up. If anet really do think there’s a problem with the Telia servers, it would be nice if anet could contact them on the community’s behalf as Telia and the ISP’s seem to pay little attention to me.

biznitchash.7963:

The only reason I have fervently suggested HotSpotShield is because you guys won’t GET a fix. Hell I was paying for 35Mb optic fibre with EE for 3 months and was only getting 1.1Mb, took them 3 months to fix THAT. Having to work with another company to fix an issue? That’s not EE’s prerogative as much as they like to try, the engineers will just keep asking for more to escalate it. But as I said, I’m STILL experiencing the troubles so I switch to HSS to play. If you guys actually do get Anet and EE to fix this, Nice one!

Hi

We have seen your post and I am thrilled for those of you that this helps however it does not help in all cases and it does not actually solve the problem hence me continuing to try and find another solution.

We are very very grateful for your input however and I’m sorry that we have given you the impression otherwise.

Thx
Kusaku

It actually seems to be getting worse with time.
The intervals that I have recorded issues with the the tcp timings are as follows all times are in GMT.
7.00am-10.00 am, 12.00 noon-1.30pm, 6.00pm-1.00am

7.00pm-11.30pm is when the connection is at its worst and most people can’t even load a character.

The common trend with these times is that they are the Times in which you expect players to be at there highest.

My theory is that EE users are on the longest route to the game servers. So when we get to the servers we are the last to be served. This longer serve time push’s the response out of the tcp timing and causes connection issues.

So as traffic to the game servers increase we get pushed further back.

I am a programmer and not a network analyst so I could be wrong but it’s the best theory I have at the moment.

Its cause you were using linux servers and packet traces that I presumed you might be interested in this trick I meant no offence ^^

Either way all the information we can gather is good information ^^

MTU 1500 is the international standard for tcp.
Kitten Kong.6384, I am presuming this is a trace log to the various gw’s servers?
If so the BT server will not always respond to trace pings as it has better things to do and I would take that packet loss with a pinch of salt.

If you are feeling techy you can try this:
Start up a program like wireshark and trace your internet device.
While it is doing this start up gw’s and do /ip to find out which server you have.
Then start a ping using cmd to this server using:
ping serverip -w 1000 -t
then play the game till it crash’s

Then you should get a comparison of ping to tcp traffic.
it should end up something like this:
http://www.kusakudesign.co.uk/Files/GuildWars2ServerPingTCPTest.htm

Thx
Kusaku

Hi, I have a follow up message from anet and EE:

Here’s EE’s message:
With the logs that you have provided and the tests we have run we do not think there is any issue with your internet connection, the packet loss is under the required %. Also seeing that you are only having issues at specific times of day with a specific game the issue can only be caused by load on their servers.

Here’s Anet’s follow up message:
If the issue always occurs at the same hour every day, the issue can be on your ISP side.
Please contact your ISP and if the issue persists, please contact us again to continue investigating this issue.

I shall go back to poking EE and see what the say but they havnt been very helpful so far.
In fact there users have given me more information than EE……

p.s. it would still be interesting to know what people’s mtu/os is

Hi all, i got a reply from anet which i shall attach bellow:

Thanks for getting back to us with this info. I see what you meant by the longer response times. It appears as though you may be experiencing a disconnect from your client to our server that’s timing out. The Error code is a generic “connection lost” type of error. Generally these are resolved by waiting out some time, then logging back in. it’s something of a soft-reset to connect to the game server.
I made sure to check, and we aren’t currently experiencing any server-related issues. There have been reports regarding packet loss between .5% and 5% on average with Telia service. I would suggest that you try going through our Knowledge Base and try all of your home network troubleshooting steps, then try speaking with your ISP about the Telia.net packet loss.

Hi all

So i have done more tests.
So if we look at the first 2 trace logs i posted:
http://www.kusakudesign.co.uk/Files/GW2PacketLog.htm
http://www.kusakudesign.co.uk/Files/GW2PacketLogLowPing.htm
You can see there is an issue with ping and packets, however with help from a network expert we have decided that this isn’t significant enough to cause these problems.
The dataloss in question being at its worst at 3%.

Also it turns out that the real problem which i am 90% sure i have found now was actually exaggerating the dropped files issue.

So I have spent several hours today with my network expert analysing all of the communication data a summary of the problem can be found at:
http://www.kusakudesign.co.uk/Files/GuildWars2ServerPingTCPTest.htm

And we ran a test, what we did is we ran a repeating ping to the same server gw2 was talking to.
As you can see the ping request gets a response quickly, from this we can assume that the connection to the guild wars servers is actually very good, this ping continues to be stable even when the tcp messages from the server get heavily delayed.

What appears to be happening is that the responses from the server are becoming very slow which causes the guild was application to get confused and communication starts to break up, this causes excessive lag, an inability to cast skills or do anything server side, and ultimately losing connection.

This suggests that the problem is with the GW2 server and not with EE in my case.
It would be interesting to see if anyone else could find similar results.

As always all of my information is there if people want to add information or help prove/disprove my theory.

I have contacted anet with this information so i shall see what they say.

thx
kusaku

If any of you are comfortable with regedit can you tell me what your mtu is for the device you are using to connect to the internet.
It can be found under for windows 7:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Tcpip\Parameters\Interfaces\[Adapter ID]]

It would also be intresting to know which os you run.
Ty

If you arnt comfortable DO NOT touch regedit please.

There is a known problem with british EE users, there is a forum for it.
This may not be relevant but it may help some people.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Severe-lag-during-peak-times-with-EE/first#post5605692

Are you a British EE user? If so it’s a known issue and anet can’t do anything with as it is a problem on EE’s side.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Severe-lag-during-peak-times-with-EE/first#post5605692

So its looking like the problem is with a host the EE is contracting out owned by Deutsche Telekom in the ip range of 62.157.249.202.

-Update on my end:
It is likely that your phones 4g connection gets transferred through a different exchange and host path to separate out mobile broadband and landline broadband for easier management.
I have been talking to a useful volunteer on the EE forums and it looks like the problems might be caused by a host under EE contract for use and maybe an EE host also.

-For those who have been told by EE to disable/remove your firewall:
I also advise ignoring anyone who says to disable your firewall permanently, for starters in this case you can track the problem down to a remote host and not a firewall so it wont even help.
If disabling the firewall did help you, you would be better and safer making an exception for gw2 although in this instance it wont do anything.

-Link to EE forum about the issue
http://community.ee.co.uk/t5/EE-Home-Broadband/Recent-severe-lag-during-peak-times-gaming/m-p/356387/highlight/false#M13517

-Link to a program that you can use to trace where the packets are being dropped:
http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/
-Note that you may need to enable packet tracing on your firewall temporarily to use this program.

It might be that case that by ip forwarding you are bouncing it off a different host and evading the bandwidth shaping.
Just a theory although my knowledge on bandwidth shaping and network traffic is limited.

im amazed ur mobile phone can get a good enough connection to play gw2 ^^ ahh the power of 3.. wish my contract hadnt run out now.
Presuming its an unlimited 3 sims or similar anyway.

From my experiments it actually looks like EE have changed there bandwidth changing and its not a knock on effect of the server changes by GW2.
Not that this is immensly important as this is a problem with EE eitherway but it does look like theres nothing anet can do to help.
I have tried adjusting ports and changing communication routes but i cant seem to get round the bandwidth shaping.

I have done some more tests and this is partially theory but it looks like the problems are created by EE’s peek usage bandwidth shaping.
I havnt gotten much more out of EE yet i will update if i hear anything or find anything else out.

I have done alot of tests the problem is at ip: 213.1.114.142 for me
I have linked ee to a set of trace tests so hopefully that will help.

I am a UK user of EE and like clockwork at 7.00 pm every day i get a ping between 2-9k rendering the game unplayable. this lasts till 12.00 midnight.
I live in the sussex area.

I have already contacted my isp once and they say there isnt an issue but the staff at anet have given me some evidence so i shall try talking to them again.

The problems started 4 days ago approx

Some other people under:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Ping-Issues-merged/first
Seem to have similar issues.

Ok so i have done some tests with the very helpful staff at anet.
In my case it appears there is a problem somewhere with EE so i shall have to nag them.. again.

I have done a few tests just now and i have a download speeed of 35mbps and a ping latency of 44ms to my isp.
At the same time i have a packet loss of 95% to the guild wars server and a ping of 4479.

I have submitted a ticket with this information and shall update if i get a reply.
#1847838