Guild Wars 2

Last night the lags become absolutely unbearable again, and in a bit of desperation, I dove deeper into the problem. Tests based on proximity to my wireless router have revealed that the problems all but disappear when I’m playing right up against it. The other people on my network are physically closer to it than I am, which would explain why they’re not suffering any of the issues.

Pinging my router 1000 times with 2048 byte packages has revealed that my packet loss is no greater than 4%, which is not good but within a tolerable margin for gaming purposes. I noted one spike where every other packet was lost for about 10 seconds. This may account for some of what I am experiencing, but it does not explain:

1. Why much more timing-critical games like dota2 and planetside2 handle this without issue. (granted these two don’t use draconian state updates like gw2 does, but I play a lot of action games and this is the only one I have had such severe problems with)

2. Why I was able to play gw2 without issue since beta until just two weeks ago.

Now I’m an amateur netcode engineer in real life, and the only times our packets break 1kb in size is when we toss the entire state ghost, though I can see how massive updates from WvW might occasionally hit these sizes. If only it were that simple, though, because the spikes happen even in sparsely populated instances.

In conclusion, whatever you did to the netcode in the recent maintenance updates has made it extremely intolerant to poor but not unreasonable network conditions.

EDIT: Ok, whatever you did in today’s update has made it 10x worse.

Hey guys, just letting you know, that although yesterday’s maintenance did mitigate the issues to the point of making the game reasonably playable, it did not solve them. I still get frequent spikes of up to 5s, rarely more than that, and still a couple disconnects here and there.

I’ve noted that even if I disconnect, I’m standing exactly where I was on my client screen when I log back in. This suggests that my packets are reaching you fine, but yours are repeatedly lost on the way back, and in large bunches apparently, since 200ms ping should allow the client to recover within at most half a second from a single packet loss.

I’d also like to point out again, that people in the next room are playing on the same server with none of these issues.

Good luck and feel free to contact me if you need to run some tests.

Hey guys, playing on Whiteside Ridge here, having the same constant delay and frequent 5-15 second spikes. Occasional disconnects to char select. Started about 3 days ago, gets better or worse throughout the day with no apparent pattern.

Interestingly, other people running GW2 from my network are not experiencing any of the symptoms. However, no other application on my PC has the same issue. Just to be sure, I did a quick malware hunt and inspected my personal traffic to find nothing of suspicion. Therefore, it’s definitely something on your end.

Please fix it soon, it is quite unplayable. Thanks.