Guild Wars 2

[VII] is recruiting core rangers and teefs. Send shiri.4257 an igm.

Try -modelsnapshotfix. Might break things. Use as your own risk.

It is not a bug specific to any one class. And you simply need to map hop to resolve it. No need to log out, no need to run the launcher ‘as admin’ (which doesn’t “solve” memory leaks, if that is actually what the issue is).

Nah, it’s been 50% reduction in the HP pool for some time.

Feel free to make recommendations! Remember these are guilds that [VII] has personally faced across our tiers (T2 to T4) which, if I recall correctly, includes every NA server in 2017.

[VII] generally raids late NA. This means we’re not going to include an OCX guild, for example.

[VII] has created a PoF: Top 10 WvW Guild Reference for new and returning players for those who are more interested in fights than PPT. These guilds prefer and are generally good at fighting. If that’s your thing, seek out one of these guilds and follow them. These guilds are spread out among many servers that Crystal Desert has faced since the beginning of 2017, from BG to TC. Each guild will have a specific recruiting method that may simply require you to have a pulse up to winning a 1v1 with a guild member.

Each guild has a linked Youtube video so you can watch how they fight. Hope you enjoy the list!

Mysteriax.6049:

Longtime GoM veteran here. I don’t remember ever seeing the [vX] tag on GoM, and if they were on the server on the past, they transferred to another server or don’t play currently.

Gate of Madness is a great place to be. Awesome community and a great environment. I heartily recommend giving us a try.

vX disbanded shortly before GoM was no longer paired with CD earlier this year. But if you were around in NA prime during the CD/GoM pair, they trolled /t and sometimes /m pretty hard.

GoM was the most toxic community Crystal Desert was ever linked with. That said, much of it was likely due to [vX] who provided quite the commentary on the Axis powers and what they should have done to people of Jewish decent, and other fairly horrid things to spam /team.

Pretty bad. Some of them even got a 48 hour ban…

I communicated with Chris directly on this particular issue and the WvW team isn’t responsible for the ‘bug’, but rather the engine team. There was one attempt with cleaning up some map loading code, but that didn’t fix the issue. I don’t see this getting fixed any time soon, no matter how annoying the issue is.

I’d love to be wrong, though.

Bigpapasmurf.5623:

One big reason why I left CD a long time ago…I have dealt with that for a couple of years. The fact it still happens (mind you same person too,lol…things never change) tells me that it wont change. I also showed him up as well with a 8 man group vs his 20 man. Same attitude. Sorry to hear he still exists. Should tell him to go back to PvP :P

Keep in mind these guys are on IoJ, not CD.

Crystal Desert Alliance [CD] is a server-wide community guild primarily focused on WvW. We’re currently in the process of building up our Guild Hall. Anyone who is on CD is eligible to join.

We have Discord as well as Teamspeak available. Send me an in-game mail or whisper (Ni In.6578) for an invite!

1-up, 1-down is in testing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/1-up-1-down-in-Testing

Wow, CD is one of the more friendly servers/environments. If you were on for reset, yes there was some toxicity from a specific individual, but you just need to put them on ignore.

As for sticking to a tier, it’s not going to happen until 1-up/1-down is implemented. This is why CD, which is a tier 4 server, is rolling tier 2.

It’s an engine bug that will likely not be resolved.

The existing tiers are a complete mess. CD facing Mag? Nope, not appropriate skill or coverage-wise. At least 1-up/1-down will put CD at the bottom of Tier 4 where the good fights are.

Can’t tank below CD, so don’t worry about it.

It’s more or less a for fun build. You can’t do anything useful with it (except not die).

Another bump for the cool VII peeps.

Camels. Definitely camels.

shiri – he took his loli to ride camels in RevO

We will be running reset today if you’d like to join us!

We’re still looking, gathering together our new comp. Message in game for more info!

[VII] Desert Spectre is a Crystal Desert WvW guild that operates in NA Prime/Late as well as SEA times. We’re looking for both new and veteran players who are more interested in PPK than PPT.

We are looking for players who are interested in getting better, run appropriate gear and classes, and all around have fun.

TS is required, although depending on class, you may not have to speak (but we’d love if it if you did!).

We have Discord, Teamspeak, and a level 63 Guild Hall with all the WvW upgrades required.

Contact me for more info!

Zavve.8205:

Alright thanks! I wanted to get good info before deciding to report.

I will not report it and just learn to dodge better!

Run towards the illusions to avoid them.

jacksmith.6028:

Indo for TW is the only commander I know that reliably runs something other than a Guardian.

WarHawk from [WOLF] runs reaper. There’s an [AHMA] cmdr who runs a mesmer. But both of those guys are quite skilled and keep skilled guildies/allies in the commander party.

For those guilds which have competent guards in the party, I’ve seen commanders on extremely tanky mesmers and reapers. It works well for them and they seem to do as well as any other skilled guard.

That said, I personally would not start off on a light class for commanding.

Certainly possible. You’ll see in pretty much ever tracert in this thread there is a node on Level 3’s network that not only doesn’t resolve, but doesn’t reply (100% dropped packets). This is just a node that is dropping all ICMP traffic. That’s good and bad. Good because ICMP is handled by a very slow path and it doesn’t take many concurrent pings to cause high CPU usage (this is why sane devices will rate-limit ICMP and why you might seen random packet loss/high latency at a particular node in the path). Bad because it prevents you from performing certain troubleshooting.

It’s also important to consider that you’re going through network devices that simply forward the traffic. It’s… very unlikely that I’m only going through a dozen or so pieces of network equipment to get from Washington to Dallas, TX.

NCSoft’s own service provider is Level 3. Their services connect through it for all of their games. You cannot avoid Level 3, though your own provider may be able to find a better route than the one advertised to a different Level 3 hand off. E.g. it might be that a Central US hand off between your ISP and L3 is congested, but one in the West US isn’t.

But again, the issues in this thread don’t point to Level 3, just like WvW skill lag. It’s a server-side issue.

A route isn’t going to change based on the time of day.

That said, nothing in this thread points to Level 3 as being an issue, so it’s more or less irrelevant in this particular case.

I’m not seeing a tracert in this thread that doesn’t go through L3. And ANet has previously worked directly with L3, troubleshooting connectivity issues as it is their provider.

nottsgman.8206:

atheria.2837:

Anet as a whole needs to understand that having Level 3 in their networking path is a death knell for all gamers.

Period.

you need to understand that Anet has no control over the route your connection takes to their servers.

Period.

No, that’s incorrect. Level 3 is NCSoft’s provider. While NCSoft should diversify the service providers they use, that’s an expensive proposition.

No, that’s not an issue at all. That Level3 is a router is simply ignoring ICMP traffic. As long as the packet makes it to the final destination with a reasonable latency (64.25.40.114 in this case), you’re almost certainly fine (*see asymmetric paths below).

ICMP is very low priority (and usually rate-limited) for most routers and handled by a rather slow CPU, rather than the ASICs that handle your bog standard network traffic. Don’t expect a low latency or reliable ping to any specific network device. Again, as long as your final destination is reliable with acceptable latency, you’re good to go.

https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/tuesday_steenbergen_troublshootingtraceroute_62.49.pdf

Look at pages 33 through 36. It’s also important to note page 38, but there’s nothing you can do about the return path — it would be up to NCSoft to traceroute to you.

That said, if you contact ANet support, they’ll have you run WinMTR. They’ll base conclusions about latency and “packet loss” on unrelated network devices, e.g. Level3 equipment, but this is just a misunderstanding of the results traceroute/WinMTR is showing us. Again, as long as the final destination packet loss/latency is fine, you’re golden (again as long as that asymmetric path is a non-issue).

I’m also having issues at random. My wife and I play on the same local network and I’ll get disconnected while she doesn’t, and visa versa. This happens when either waypointing, attempting to get into WvW, or when at the character selection screen and attempting to log in.

Comcast is the ISP, Western Washington.

Tracing route to cligate-dfw.101.ncplatform.net [64.25.40.114]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms 1 ms <1 ms [10.10.20.1]
2 13 ms 14 ms 11 ms 96.120.101.121
3 14 ms 25 ms 12 ms te-0-4-0-8-sur03.everett.wa.seattle.comcast.net [68.86.98.41]
4 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms be-29-ar01.seattle.wa.seattle.comcast.net [69.139.164.217]
5 12 ms 13 ms 21 ms lag-16.ear2.seattle1.level3.net [4.68.71.73]
6 * * * Request timed out.
7 163 ms 56 ms 51 ms 4.59.197.34
8 52 ms 51 ms 59 ms 64.25.32-9.ncsoft.com [64.25.32.9]
9 69 ms 50 ms 52 ms 64.25.32-26.ncsoft.com [64.25.32.26]
10 52 ms 53 ms 54 ms 64.25.32-82.ncsoft.com [64.25.32.82]
11 186 ms 150 ms 58 ms 64.25.40-114.ncsoft.com [64.25.40.114]

Our next raid/havoc will be on Sunday @ 5 PM PST. If you’re interested in joining, message me in game!

It’s important to make the distinction of what “lag” means. I know you’re referring to skill lag…

ANet support will have you use WinMTR. You might see packet loss at an intermediary node between you and NCSoft’s services (in my case, the Comcast → Level 3 handoff). This is not properly defined packet loss. It is the control plane of the network device dropping packets. This can be made clear by using ping (ICMP) to that specific device that shows packet “loss” to the specific intermediary node.

A great in-depth presentation on traceroute can be found at https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/tuesday_steenbergen_troublshootingtraceroute_62.49.pdf.

Take a look at page 33, especially the last bullet point. And again on 36, pay special attention to the first and third bullet points.

So while your WinMTR trace might look something like:

MyISP – 0% packet loss
Level3 – 50% packet loss
NCSoft_service – 0% packet loss

What ANet support, and by extension NCSoft network engineers, will tell you is that you’re experiencing packet loss and there is nothing they can do about it as it is “your” issue. Of course, this doesn’t indicate packet loss what so ever. We’re not dropping packets at NCSoft’s services. We’re dropping them, in the above example, at Level3 because traceroute packets are just not a priority for those network devices — nor should they be.

If we were having true lag, say for example you had a poor network connection and were overseas, you would see “rubberbanding”, no skills executing, possible disconnects, and so forth.

And another indication that this is not a packet loss issue is that Skill #1 never fails to go off. Skill #6 (heal) will most often go off. It is all of those other skills that are a toss-up of whether they’ll go off with a delay or simply outright cancel execution. You won’t see rubberbanding, character movement is fluid (sans FPS drop), Skills 1 and 6 work…

This is indicative of a server-side prioritization and potentially performance issue. Of course saying “performance” is too generic as we don’t know what the back end looks like. They could possibly have the best performing servers money can buy, but if the GW2 server software isn’t designed for these massive 2 to 3-way engagements, it’s not going to perform well regardless.

In the end, there’s nothing you nor I can do. It’s not a network issue, despite what NCSoft network engineers indicate. But as they’ve been insistent it is a network issue, there’s nothing to resolve. It’s simply a lack of understanding of how traceroute functions and not understanding how traceroute works.

Rambitshouse.8712:

Try being on CD this week bud lol

CD has never been out there to ‘win it’, though. The big guilds are after fights, and that’s about it. We get that regardless of tier in NA, and to some extent SEA, which is great.

But this thread will be closed as a match up thread soon enough, so I guess I’ll stop there.

This is what I use: https://en-us.sennheiser.com/gaming-headset-pc-363d

I also play games like Elite: Dangerous, where that 3d-ish sound is helpful (I turn it off for GW2, obviously). Anyhow, the quality has been really good over 1+ years. You should be able to find it cheaper elsewhere.

For ease of use, I would just grab what ever random USB headset w/ mic fit your budget. Give us a budget range and perhaps we can be more specific :-)

Namer, my point was ANet disagrees with that stance and wants to see WvW commanders/guilds be inclusive. I do get your point about pugs doing something you don’t want (going through a door, revealing yourself at the top of the stairs, etc.), but you’ll never stop that in all cases regardless of circumstances.

Heck, maybe they don’t even know English to follow /say chat directions.

Gaile, I know that this thread was completely derailed, and I agree with your points that you originally raised, but I hope you can see why this thread was derailed — you’ve got that shiny ANet logo next to your name and those who love WvW are begging for attention from ANet.

While I’ve just derailed your thread even further, I hope that this craving from attention from ANet doesn’t go unnoticed by community staff such as yourself, or developers.

ANet has already said no as it doesn’t foster inclusiveness so they will not do it. I tend to agree.

Looking to [ROAM]? Come join Crystal Desert Pugs Dont [ROAM]! We’re a brand new guild starting with the goal of enemy supply disruption to camping Tier 3 objectives to scouting enemy zergs and providing effective callouts for CD tags.

An adult-focused guild, we operate during NA/Late NA, PST. We’re looking for highly mobile classes with players willing to get on TS and follow a regular raid schedule. You don’t have to be experienced, just willing to learn! Discord also available for chat and scheduling.

We’re looking to start WvW guild missions next week and start the long process of building a guild hall. So come join us in Tier 4, plenty of commanders are looking for precise, accurate, effective callouts and capturing small objectives.

If you want to be perma-stuck in tier 4, come to Crystal Desert. If you look at our stats week over week, we’re primarily in it for the PPK, more so than our matchup opponents.

Most of our pugs will follow tags and only tags. I’ve just started up a roaming guild to hopefully work on fixing that over time. CD’s EU is the weak link, with NA/Late NA and SEA being quite strong; not always strong enough to win a skirmish, but organized groups perform well regardless.

CD does have a dedicated TS and some guilds have their own TS. TS involvement with pugs is fairly miserable. You’ll get those dedicated to playing WvW on TS easily, but the “weekend warrior” types will almost never jump on.

CD can map queue usually at most 2 maps. Usually EBG will map queue in NA/Late NA if one of the organized guild groups is running or we hold SMC (and yes, we’ve taken heavily defended T3 SMCs from NA SBI, YB, SoS). Just don’t expect that CD will hold onto SMC for any great period of time.

So if you’re in WvW for the fights, CD isn’t a bad place to be. If you’re PPT/Ktrain type, you’ll want to look elsewhere.

Ah I see, poor wording on my part. The latency/‘packet loss’ I’ve seen anywhere and everywhere. The skill lag I’ve only seen in close proximity to blob v blob, never when blob v blob activity is happening but one is some distance for it.

I’m not disputing your experience, don’t get me wrong. I’m just relaying the behavior I’ve seen and those on TS have seen with regards to these large scale fights.

That’s kinda my point, the issue does not occur if one is some distance away from the blob v blob. We all die in this game and of course want to get right back into the middle of SMC. Respawning at spawn/keep and there’s no skill lag/lag what so ever until you’re approximately at the outer walls of SMC.

Hmm not sure I understand your standing at spawn comment. These “skill lagfests” only occur in close proximity to blob v blob (v blob), not when there just happen to be 2 or 3 blobs on the map.

I also edited my post with regards to ICMP from a net eng standpoint

So the path everyone using North America servers will take is at least as follows. Your personal ISP -> Level 3 Communications -> NCSoft. There’s no way to avoid L3 as they are NCSoft’s ISP. The “lag” (latency) appears to be at the 2nd hop within L3’s own network, something you nor I have any leverage over as L3 is not our ISP.

That said, I’ve contacted Comcast and we’ll see if I get anywhere. I’m just not hopeful that we’ll come down to a resolution on an ISP backbone hand off. I pay $100/month for service… backbone handoffs are tens of thousands per month between ISPs (or free, depending on their agreement, with tens of thousands if not more invested in equipment).

It’s understandable that ANet/NCSoft would ‘blame’ your ISP if the latency occurred entirely within your ISP/network, it just doesn’t seem to be the case here. And the fact that it happens to so many people across North America just doesn’t sit too well with me. It’s certainly possible that the handoff between everyone’s ISP and L3 Communications is extremely poor, I wouldn’t dispute that, but then there’s not much we can do about it beyond NCSoft changing ISPs.

For what it’s worth, when I worked internal IT, we had a variety of ISPs for a significant amount of traffic and L3 Communications was the absolute worst of them in terms of performance.

And yes, this may not even be packet loss or latency issue whatsoever. But it is the only ‘evidence’, we as players, are able to collect. Heck, I’ve seen this same “issue” when standing at spawn no where near blob v. blob fights.

EDIT: I think it is also important to note, on a properly configured router/firewall, that ICMP 0 is, and should, be deprioritized compared to other traffic. Routers/firewalls will, under load, drop ICMP messages, either in part or entirely. 100% packet loss does not mean 100% of all packets are being lost — simply that it isn’t responding to ICMP 0.

But at this point, NCSoft via ANet Support has told me (and all of us who have ever experienced Skill Lag) that it is a problem with our ISP. It doesn’t matter what ISP you have or where you live, it is now up to you to negotiate with your tier 1, at best tier 2 support agents at your ISP of non-preference to get this ‘worked out’. As individual consumers, it is very difficult, if not impossible to not only get our issue across to the support agents at ISPs (reboot your modem, anyone?), but to actually get an ISP handoff issue resolved would be near impossible. Think of it like the peering between Netflix (Level 3) and Comcast. Imagine if I, as a consumer, attempted to contact Comcast asking them to improve that service at the peering/handoff. It simply would not happen. No, it will take the company, in this case NCSoft, to resolve that peering/handoff issue (even though it doesn’t appear as if that is the issue, again the problem lies within Level 3’s own network). NCSoft has significantly more leverage than we as individuals do with our own ISPs.

Apologies for the wall of text, but I thought I’d let everyone know the state of where NCSoft stands with regards to WvW Skill Lag as it has impacted a significant number of us at one time or another.

Hopefully this doesn’t violate any rules or cause much friction. And TL;DR: It’s each of our ISPs, not NCSoft/Level 3.

I opened a support case for WvW Skill Lag. We all see it, at some point, often times when fighting in SMC blob vs blob. It’s something people who have been playing WvW for a lot longer than I have complained about with no resolution. I decided to open a support case on the issue. As many of you are aware, NCSoft is the hoster for GW2 and their servers are located in Texas (Dallas, if I recall correctly). This in and of itself isn’t the issue.

Level 3 is NCSoft’s ISP. This appears to be the core of the problem. My ISP is Comcast (Comcast Business class). That said, my guildies are using a variety of ISPs from all over the United States, Canada, and the world. We all experience skill lag (or outright lag) in a variety of ways. One of my guildies from overseas even only experiences lag in EBG, the map as a whole, under the right conditions. Borderlands are often lag free for this person.

But that said, ANet Support is of course our gateway to any issues regarding GW2. And this post isn’t a reflection on ANet Support’s response. They’re the voice of those who can provide a resolution when we’re discussing network or underlying service issues. ANet Support has been extremely supportive and patient looking into this and raising the problem to the right individuals within ANet/NCSoft. I do want to give them props for taking this particular ticket as far as they did; they did everything in their power to examine the issue with the data I was able to provide. Primarily, this consisted of providing rough timeframes for skill lag as well as traceroutes using their tooling of choice.

This ticket was open for almost 1.5 months and has come to a ‘conclusion’. ANet Support, per NCSoft engineers (service and/or network, I don’t personally know), have laid the blame at our ISPs, in as much as the email was almost templated as the first paragraph blamed Comcast, and subsequently went onto say “For the majority of you […] packet loss spikes are occurring at the point when Comcast routes your data onto our network, not after”. It went on to say “If you are not on Comcast, you are likely still being affected by similar problems on the part of our ISP, either right at the point when the data is being handed off from your ISP to ours, or even before then”. Again, this feels a bit templated, but I can understand why as NCSoft cannot blame one ISP as this occurs on ISPs across North America (and beyond).

Of course, the commonality between all of these users across all of these ISPs is the Level 3 hand off and of course NCSoft network/services. In fact, my WinMTR traces showed the packet loss occurring within Level 3’s network. Examples below, and they’ll be formatted poorly, so apologies in advance.

Columns are:

Resolved Address/IP | % | Send | Recv | Best | Avrg | Wrst | Last |

The percent is for packet loss percentage, while Best through Last are the round trip response time (RTT) in milliseconds.

Example #1:

|         <my rough location>.comcast.net -    2 |  263 |  260 |    0 |   20 |  169 |    0 |

|                              4.68.71.73 -   91 |  263 |   26 |    0 |   18 |   38 |   32 |

|                            4.69.210.141 -   97 |  263 |   10 | 24192 | 24870 | 25728 | 25278 |

|                             4.59.197.34 -    2 |  263 |  259 |   37 |   60 |  208 |   45 |
|                   64.25.32-9.ncsoft.com -    3 |  263 |  257 |   40 |   60 |  200 |   47 |

Example #2 (the ‘no response from host’ is the Level 3 handoff):

|         <my rough location>.comcast.net -    0 |   58 |   58 |   11 |   14 |   40 |   13 |
|                   No response from host -  100 |   58 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |    0 |
|                            4.69.210.141 -   99 |   58 |    1 | 24633 | 24633 | 24633 | 24633 |
|                             4.59.197.34 -    2 |   58 |   57 |   65 |   74 |  164 |   67 |
|                   64.25.32-9.ncsoft.com -    0 |   57 |   57 |   65 |   74 |  172 |   75 |

Both of these examples are within the Level 3 network. Not on the handoff from my ISP, not on the handoff to NCSoft. Right in the middle.

You can jump between WvW maps, but yes, there is a potential fix in active testing right now.