Guild Wars 2

Zylonite.5913:

The skill lag in WvW is not Anet’s fault. It is a core latency problem in distributed system and latency between network nodes and the client/server side.

Be glad that there is a game that allows 300 people on one map from 2-3 different continents all a the same time. Even a normal multiplayer game with 16 players on the map has lag on a 100Mbits network and dedicated servers.

So try to enjoy the game because the skill lag on a full queued map is not going to be fixed and it out of any software developer hands.

But the problem is it is anet fault for having servers that can not handle the limets they set. They can get better servers than can handle the load or lower the number of effects or numbers in WvW.

Gathslan.1870:

Zumy.6318:

How come Warhammer in its late state did not lagg in 200+ battles? It also had better combatlogs, more skills, more cooldowns, higher aoe caps and is from 2008.

I have no idea how you can compare Gw2 combat to Warhammer and think they can be put into the same basket like that.

In gw2 if you shoot a projectile directed at a target and another enemy just happens to get in between that one and not your original target will get hit.

The combat system here makes it so your hits land on enemies that projectiles/slashes come across in real time like it would really make sense for it to work.

Tab target combat where your hits hit only the one person you are aiming at (projectiles will go through other opponents and ingore them) and so forth is much more demanding that the simplistic bad combat of Warhammer(it’s combat was a wow clone, yet a thousand times less responce simple and required much less ability to play your class, warhammer combat was probably the worst i have seen in an MMO)

You cannot compare the most simple combat in an MMO to date to a MMO that has a very complex way of handling it.

You just cant.

But ofcourse there are things ANet can do to improve the current problem vastly, and they will do what they can(why wouldnt they XD)

What you say is true, however the issue still remains that “simple combat engines” are/were working and while ANET outdid themselves with a superbly designed game (in theory) the practical application of it fails at an alarming rate.

Lots of people have the ability to design very innovative, evolutionary/revolutionary things in all walks of life (not just gaming). But if the technology/engineering is not there to support it then it cannot hope to be successful.

My point: why are we concerned with how awesome this game’s concept was when obviously it cannot even be operated to its full design? I feel as though most people would have been happier with “more simplified” system that could be ran to 100% of its design.

nickiehu.1674:

Because it’s a cash-issue, such changes cost $$$, something ArenaNet doesn’t want to spend, it seems. They know this problem for months but nothing came out of it.
Besides – what’s Arena’s way of earning money? Right, selling stuff like special animated picks, costumes and so on, something WvWler don’t really need. So WHY invest in something, that is considered to give no money back? (Even though WvW is a big figurehead).

Yes, servers cost money, and the issues are mainly in WvW, but I have skill lag all the time when playing in the normal world also so I dont see why Anet isnt addressing this issue, they need to and fast, before all players are posting on the forums.

When WvW players start to leave because of this, skill lag might go away for PvErs, but what will PvErs do about all their free world bonuses that came from WvW that those players got for them and worked all week to get for them? Server bonuses will start to disappear as WvW players start to leave, PvE players will start to make less and less money, Gem sales will dwindle, Anet will fall, mhm, called it a long time ago.

Watch them scramble for an expansion release to try and save the game. Don’t see that helping, what with the skill lag killing the game play, why would more data to the servers help this issue? Lets see what happens…

Simonoly.4352:

Pre-season I experienced little to no lag unless I really felt like getting stuck in during an SM three-way at prime time. Now it’s just horrible and for the first time ever I had to stop playing WvW on Monday at around 12pm (GMT) because I was experiencing so much lag. You know what I was doing at the time I had to log out? Solo-roaming on my home borderland. That lag – it gets you wherever you are.

^ Ditto.

Day 7: No improvements.

Pre-season I experienced little to no lag unless I really felt like getting stuck in during an SM three-way at prime time. Now it’s just horrible and for the first time ever I had to stop playing WvW on Monday at around 12pm (GMT) because I was experiencing so much lag. You know what I was doing at the time I had to log out? Solo-roaming on my home borderland. That lag – it gets you wherever you are.

Seems like their tactic will be sitting this one out and hoping that after everyone has done the achievements things will go back to the way it was before season 1 started.
Almost a week of insane lags and still no comment, that just says a lot about how much they care…..

Last night in EB we killed this solo ranger in front of Bravost. I thought it was odd we didn’t see his pet anywhere.

So we go to flip Umber camp, which took like 10 minutes because of the lag(5 players vs all npc’s lol), and as soon as we flip the camp guess what we saw?

That ranger we killed 10 minutes ago, his pet bird was bobbing up and down on the road, frantically trying to catch up to his dead(and probably WP’d) master.

That…is some crazy lag.

I don’t think is due to higher populations. Reset night on FA generally has had all three maps queued all night since release for example, and there was never lag this bad before.

I wonder if it has something to do with the new way boons prioritize party members. More calculations for the servers to make?

It’s really not fun to play once I get into WvW I play for 20 minutes skills don’t work, zergs drop fps like crazy. I’m on an i7 with a gtx 770 card. So I log out and play on my Ps3 which is solid lol Sorry anet but it’s not enjoyable. I feel bad for classes that rely on combo skills and such. That’s why everyone plays tanks.. run around hitting #1 and hoping for the best.

titanlectro.5029:

The queue issues are due to more people playing. There is nothing wrong with the queue, it is working just fine.

Um Devon Carver has admitted there is a problem with the queue system. Mike Ferguson admitted it on Reddit 8 months ago. This should have been a near top priority to fix and wasn’t. It is a major stuff up by anet and speaks volumes about their lack of regard for WvW.

And I strongly suspect the Edge of the Mists map will not be an actual fix for the bugged queues but merely a way to deflect it because players will be in the new map.

styx.7294:

clint.5681:

gidorah.4960:

if you want a quick fix for the skill lag however you are welcome to transfer to a bronze league server they don’t have it.

Bronze servers have had tons of skill lag since the leagues started. Get your facts straight.

Tons of skill lag? We streamed all reset, which included a queued borderland, and didn’t have any (people can check it themselves). Haven’t had enough people to have skill lag for months, including since league.

Apples to oranges. SF had 4 maps queued at reset, then and since then have gotten quite a bit of skill lag at the larger siege events (expected to have it there somewhat). Obviously it is a direct correlation to the influx of players with leagues going on, but the point(s) was that do not assume because “bronze is smaller” that skill lag is not going on quite a bit.

Skill lag is one of the signs that ArenaNet doesn’t really know how to manage a AAA title. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that if skill lag was so bad in, say, Tol Barad or Wintergrasp, Blizzard would fix it in the next patch. (Obviously those zones had some lag when they first launched, but it was never hours-long unplayable lag like has always been the case for active world vs. world.)

If it’s really as un-fixable as some people insist, then, honestly, world vs. world shouldn’t exist or, at the very least, the season idea should have been scrapped.

It seems to be a consistent issue with ArenaNet: When they run into a technical limitation — whether it’s bleed cap, lag, queues or even culling — the developers ignore it and let it stand for far too long instead of designing with the limitation in mind.

gidorah.4960:

if you want a quick fix for the skill lag however you are welcome to transfer to a bronze league server they don’t have it.

Bronze servers have had tons of skill lag since the leagues started. Get your facts straight.

Thor.1756:

Terrahero.9358:

Bullkitten. There was skill lag all along. The only reason we didnt have much on Deso for the past month or two was because people were throwing the match ups to drop to Silver league.
And despite being a Full server we had outmanned on all but EB during primetime.

But before that, skill lag everywhere. Its always been there, it hasnt magically gotten worst. It seems that way because WvW population dwindled a bit, and now has a massive surge of PvE heroes in it for the achievements. Take the exact same situation 6 months ago and skill lag wouldve been just as bad.

Just not true. I’ve been on JQ, been in tier 1 since day one. I’ve had full queues against two other servers with full queues constantly. There’s certainly been a lot of lag over time fighting in t1 wvw.

But this lag almost always occurred in 3-way fights, almost always in keeps where npcs and siege were adding to the calculations, and almost always involved 120+ players.

Since the launch of season 1, every server on every tier is reporting massive, unplayable lag, resulting from minor zerg fights of 30v30. Something DID magically change. I don’t know if its the achievements, or some kitten spilt coffee on the wrong computer. Whatever it is, Anet kittened up. Bad.

From my experience in ebg in the past, the 3 way keep/SMC fights would cause skill lag. Now the whole map gets skill lag if 2 servers engage each other, they don’t even need to be the map zerg…we don’t even need to look for swords to know a fight is happening somewhere. It’s significantly worse…

Terrahero.9358:

Bullkitten. There was skill lag all along. The only reason we didnt have much on Deso for the past month or two was because people were throwing the match ups to drop to Silver league.
And despite being a Full server we had outmanned on all but EB during primetime.

But before that, skill lag everywhere. Its always been there, it hasnt magically gotten worst. It seems that way because WvW population dwindled a bit, and now has a massive surge of PvE heroes in it for the achievements. Take the exact same situation 6 months ago and skill lag wouldve been just as bad.

Just not true. I’ve been on JQ, been in tier 1 since day one. I’ve had full queues against two other servers who also had full queues constantly. There’s certainly been a lot of lag over time fighting in t1 wvw.

But this lag almost always occurred in 3-way fights, almost always in keeps where npcs and siege were adding to the calculations, and almost always involved 120+ players. I never complained about this lag, I accepted it as a natural result of such massive fights, and, frankly, our own kitten fault for running such large zergs and for forcing 3-way fights.

Since the launch of season 1, every server on every tier is reporting massive, unplayable lag, resulting from minor zerg fights of 30v30. Something DID magically change. I don’t know if its the achievements, or some kitten spilt coffee on the wrong computer. Whatever it is, Anet kittened up. Bad.

King Amadaeus.8619:

I agree with your sentiment but while I readily admit I never played with the settings too much…I was not aware that you could “turn culling back on the way it was before the removal patch”, I know you can do somethings to reduce quality/reduce number of players that show up, and not show anything but name plates. But did/do not think that is the same as the culling that we had before when enemies (name plates and all) simply did not render do to culling.

Again I may be totally wrong (wouldn’t be the first time).

I’m not sure whether putting it on lowest settings will stop nameplates from appearing. My understanding is that culling wasn’t about nameplates, but rather your computer trying to render all the character images at once. Options allow you to limit both the quality of character models and quantity of character models loading at once, to likely lower levels than was set automatically in the days of culling.

It really doesn’t matter. The point is, prior to season 1, including after the removal of culling, all players could run wvw and, for the most part, avoid lag unless its in very large fights. People on lower-end PC’s could set their settings very low and still participate in 50v50 fights just fine. This magically changed after season 1 began.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Skill lag is an issue that was likely worsened by the removal of culling, and will probably only be “fixed” if they lower the map caps and move more people into the new queue maps they are working on.

Culling only affects client-side latency issues. This can be removed by turning culling back on in your options, which any player can do.

The lag being experienced universally is server-side. It is not the traditional lag wvw’ers are used to experiencing, typically only in fights involving 100+ people, usually 3-way fights. Since the launch of season1, players (myself included) across the board are reporting 20-30 second skill delays in fights involving ~60 players. It’s not very fun to get ganked while unable to use skills because theres a 30v30 fight happening halfway across the map.

This is unacceptable. Anet needs to at least come out and admit they kittened up something serious.

there are ppl who partecipated to wvw on their server since launch and now they cannot play it because of queue and lag.
Devon’s post doesn’t reflect what’s happening ingame, and frankly it says nothing but the fact that ANet can’t deal with numbers and blames its users for their choices.

They ask us to report bugs; they ask us to help them with suggestions; they warn us to not be rude with them but they don’t answer us when we ask and they don’t communicate with us.

According to me they are enstablishing a univocal relationship.

Meanwhile we are overwhelmed by unrequested PvE content…

gidorah.4960:

Zylonite.5913:

Hi Anet, still waiting on developer feedback on all these queue times and skills lags/ etc that have been brought up since the Seasons started? In other words any news on removing all JPs from WvW maps on the next patch?

you got your response before the season started. don’t stack on server’s. feel free to look it up in devon’s post history.

Nice try, I am on the lowest tier and it’s unplayable at times. You can even feel the difference in playing without encountering a blob.

Im on a T1 server, and the Q times have dropped down now its not the weekend, maybe at night there is a Q times from 5-30 mins but nothing OTT, the weekend it was hours,

I think some people seem to forget or have overlooked that the massive lag was a problem before the apparent server stacking, and your claim that just move to a lower server does not work either, because it just takes 1 big WvW guild to move from a higher Tier to the lower one, and that server because super stacked and will role anyone they come across, and it will generate lag, then you will be back on here crying about how your WvW lags when it didn’t before yadda yadda,

Point is, they new before they started the season 1, the servers could not handle the clashes on the map, but they went ahead anyway knowing that people would move up, and the dev’s claim of if you move up expect lag/delays is a BS way out, its like there way of saying, its not our fault our servers cannot handle the battles its the players fault.

If they cannot fix it, id rather they just came out and said it, that way everyone would know nothing will get better, and move on, be it they leave the game, or be it they put up with the lag, rumor has it they are trying to launch this game in Asia, can you imagine what there WvW battles will be like……

Laurelinde.4395:

Obsidian.1328:

Laurelinde.4395:

If you want to control all the variables and units in a game, then you’re going to have to play a single-player game. In an MMO you are always going to be at the mercy of other people and there will inevitably be some that you don’t like/aren’t good/clash with your ideas.

Anyone who paid for the game and is not actively griefing (and no, being clueless or disorganised or not speaking your language is not griefing) has as much a right to be there as anyone else, like it or lump it.

You’re talking about PvE. In which case I would totally agree with you.

PvP is a different ballgame. Those that want to try to win should be there, and Team synergy and cooperation are arguably the most important factors in a match. Why bother with having PvP at all if you can’t coordinate anything? It doesn’t make any sense to say you can’t form teams in a competitive environment…

I’m talking about WvW. You are free to try to form teams but ultimately it’s not a team, it’s a world (server.) There’s no signups, there’s no tryouts, you get who you get. My overall point stands: we do not control the parameters of GW2 or WvW no matter how invested we are (or aren’t) in it. PUGs are a fact of life. The only way around it is to leave the open MMO environment and move into something where players can set more of the parameters.

Eh…it’s not really an open environment though. I’d agree it was ANet’s intention with W3 to be a casual PvP game-mode, but that’s not how it turned out. The reality is that W3 is primarily controlled by the various guilds that have put the time and effort into creating a competitive server. Most, including my own server, welcome new players who are interested in large-scale PvP. But we do so with the agreement that cooperation and planning supercede individual interests in the Borderlands. It’s not because we want to control you, it’s because that’s how you win: teamwork. Any team-based professional athlete would agree to that.

Our “team” as you put, isn’t just everyone on the server, but rather those on the server that actively participate and cooperate in W3 together. Why would someone who’s never set foot in W3 before this week expect to have the same rights and respect as someone who’s been doing it over a year?

When I first set foot in W3 I was a nobody. I didn’t expect to just walk in and be on par with all the other Rallians. It took me months to earn the trust of everyone else in there. That’s how team-based PvP works. And quite frankly, that’s how it should be. Otherwise, your server, or team, would never succeed.

There are really just 2 issues here: lag and achievements. The lag may never go away, which is incredibly unfortunate, but the achievements can simply be removed. Anyone who wants to PvP can stay, and the farmers can go back to PvE. Easy.

As far as the high tier queues go, they were bearable before this week. Reset night sucks, but it always does and we’re used to it. We don’t mind having queues, it’s an acceptable inconvenience for getting coverage. It’s the incredible length of the queues now that irk us. Some are nearly 5 times as long…we need to sleep sometime.

It is worthless to put the blame on pvers, kitten, Twhatever… the issue is WvW was not ready for this kind of influx, we already had queues and skill lag before rewards or season…

ANet knew about it and they should had foreseen it would get much worse with season and rewards. The new instanced map for people in queues should have been a priority before season, the skill lag issue that they already working on should be high priority.

So instead of accusing each other we should focus on asking ANET for a solution, I would ask them to cancel season and bring it back after those issues are solved at least the new map for queue.

The season and rewards ideas are great and I tottaly support it, but WvW was just not ready for it right now…

tluv.5821:

1) Queue Times, should be expected. It just means that a lot of people are in the map and a lot of people are waiting to get in. Something different, and new. PvEr’s are going to check it out. Don’t like the queues, join a lower pop server.

2) Skill Lag, it’s brought on because of lots of things going on in small area.

None of these issues have been brought on SINCE the Season started. Those issues have ALWAYS been a problem.

1) spot on; agree and all the QQ over the queues is distracting from the real problems like #2 & population imbalance issues.

2) not so much; yes skill lag has always been a part of the game in huge 3 way battles around SM and Gari. I can deal with that and avoid those areas or types of fights if I want to use my other 8 skills but it can be extremely frustrating at times. Now though? There is no escape from the lag monster.

1v1 fights in out of the way areas turn into slide shows for no apparent reason. Even sometimes your skills seem to behaving normally so you think to yourself “alright I got this, time to spike this pesky thief” and bam . . . your spike wont fire and suddenly none of your other skills work either so you try to dps them down with the 1 key while they play trickies with their downed skills (if working) until 5 of their friends come along to roll you. Yeah that is not your normal run of the mill skill lag. It comes and goes in waves in odd places and you can’t do anything to avoid it.

Whatever changed there needs to addressed but there are those who theorize it is somehow related to having massive queues, like the number players waiting to get into WvW are some how lagging out the map which would be weird to say the least. We had some random weird skill lag while being outmanned late last nite but I can’t comment on what the other servers queues were like at the time. All I know is something needs to be done to at least get back where skill lag was before the last patch cuz it is getting silly goofy out there. ><

Hule.8794:

Come on, you are not new on these forums. You had to notice all those transfer topics.
And should I meantion your post about not moving from FoW?

btw. nice prophecy form you, you were right

I don’t read the forum that carefully, to be honest. And I don’t read it regularly. And the guy who convinced me, took 2 weeks of convincing work for me to even consider changing. But when he said, he would even try to farm money to buy me a precurser, I saw how badly he wanted us to change the server. I didn’t take him on that offer. I changed, because I expected, as stated, more action.

You can believe me or not. Not everybody suffering from queues is guilty of the “I want more stuff”-syndrome^^ Not every thread about queues is a imple QQ thread. I have suggested changes in one of the threads hear, the response wasn’t that good and I leave it at that for now. We can through now the “you are guilty yourself”-accusation arround, or we can work on a good community and try to resolve the issue. I mean ANET working on an overflow map is a nice idea (a bit late but still nice). Now it is our turn, to give them suggestions what we as a community would like to see in such a map and stuff.

I don’t want to repeat my reasons for changing server again and again. I have stated them, you can believe me or not. That is totally on you.

1. Queues
   I would like queues to be shorter (who doesn’t?). Also, if you have a DC while WvWing, you should have a window of maybe 5 minutes to reenter WvW without loosing ur spot. If the dc happens within 30 min again you will loose the spot (cuz a not so good connection shouldn’t punish you, but it shouldn’t also punish the server, so I thought a compromise would be good)
2. Skill Lag
   Not an easy one, I think only stronger servers can handle that. Also an icon like in GW2 who indicated your ping would be appreciated.
3. More Alt friendlieness
   Well, making WvW ranks account bound would be still my favourite option.

1. Transparency of current game / world server architecture (specifically WvW). Let us know stuff like server load, how you monitor performance, what’s being done to address performance or lack there of.

2. Give your customers some sense that you are aware of issues and efforts are being made to address them. Issue tracker available for public consumption. Every developer already has this, just make it less granular on an open sub section of your website

3. Stop suppressing commander in map chat, you have no built in voice comms it’s nice to get non guildys in voice comms which is impossible if you’re suppressed when communicating a TS or Vent address

if you want to have some degrees of success in any activity, be it a sport event, a work interview, a multi-million IT project there is an important phase that needs to be completed before starting.
Preparation.

you can hope to win a sport competition without training
you will never get that job is you are not prepared to answer some key questions and properly dressed (tip of the day, sometimes dress code is still a key factor)
you will never go live with your new IT global platform if you don’t analyze all the impacts in terms of training, hardware needs, support, resource availability and achievable deadlines.

wvw League.
good, excellent idea with very poor planning.
If you know that you have an environment with limited resources available and limited storage space (lagskill due blobs and max number of players per border), before thinking of a new activity that will overload even more the environment, a good planning should advise you to see if there are solutions.
the space per map is fixed, before the league some servers (out of a total of 51 servers how many? I suppose between 9 and 12 (USA T1 and EU T1-3) experienced queues.
Last time that there was a major change in wvw with WxP the queues were in server down to T5 / T6 EU.
So, planning a League with new achievements with the goal to bring more people to wvw should have raised a very simple question. What about the Queues?
Unless you think that doing something else while waiting for a queue is the best gaming user experience, you should know that the top priority for a successful Leagues would have been addressing the queues first.
Most of the people play in a guild, and guilds tends to enjoy playing together with guildmates, how longer queues would affect guild’s gaming?
In short the question that should have been on A.net top list is: unless there is a method to increase map population, is it a good idea to launch a League System that will increase the number of wvw players while we don’t have the resources or space to manage them? Are we providing the best possible experience to our customer with this move?
In my humble professional opinion (it happens I’m a global IT service delivery manager for a multinational company), the answer is NO.
Longer queues do not improve user gaming experience
Lag skills will decrease the trust of players in Anet ability to manage wvw

Solution that should have been taken "let’s postpone the Leagues until we are sure that we have the proper environment to manage them.

With PVE events is easier, there is overflow: it worked very well at Launchtime, for Scarlet events and for Tequatl, but there is no overflow for wvw, not at least until sometimes in Q1 2014, a long period in the game life cycle.
What I’m noticing speaking with my and other wvw guild members is a trend to “let’s wait the newcomers to fulfill their achievements and if we can’t www, meanwhile let’s try some other PVP games (I won’t put any name ofc)”

In short, the main achievement of the League Planning so far has been to have thousands of frustrated players that instead of waiting in queue for hours are now looking for something else to play with.

I believe this was not Anet scope.
I hope corrections will be made soon to enable players and guilds to have the appropriate wvw experience that Anet is expecting to give us.