Guild Wars 2

I’d like to create a central place for you all to get the current state of where we stand on optimizing the servers and relieving what most of you have come to know as “skill lag”.

Over the past several months we’ve had a small team working on ways to relieve some of the load from the game server while there are large concentrations of players. Most of the work thus far has gone pretty much unnoticed from the player’s perspective, but there have been pretty large steps made towards the issue. This continues to be a large and high priority issue for us so we can continue to make improvements to make this a thing of the past.

The various teams, or as we call internally “Feature Teams”, are now subject to performance reviews both client and server before they can ship. This is one of the many things we’ve put in place to stop the bleeding. Preventing further issues has been the main focus up to this point to ensure we aren’t introducing new issues and constantly cleaning up behind them. Now that we’re to a point where we’re confident that we’ve plugged the holes, larger strides to actually make noticeable optimizations are in the works.

I mentioned sometime last month that I’d like to be more transparent about what steps we’re taking to address the issue. To give you more of an insight of where we stand, we’re starting with taking the bull by the horns. We’ll be going through almost every skill in the game over the coming months and optimizing them one-by-one. This in itself will make an extremely large difference, that when that patch note comes through, expect a very different WvW experience.

I’m going to leave this thread open for discussion, but I urge you to be respectful of one another and keep things civil, otherwise I’ll be forced to lock it.

-Bill