Guild Wars 2

Hello everyone. I spent the last few hours trying to pinpoint the failure that is giving me constant severe packet loss against GW2 servers (and ONLY them, no problems whatsoever on any other game or online service).

I gathered some server IP addresses in the game, using the /IP command as instructed previously by the support people, then I ran several traceroutes to find out which routers my packets were traversing, I also plotted a graph with Scapy (I was using port TCP/80 for that particular trace, but I also tried common ICMP trace).

As you can see, the last few hops were consistently 206.127.157.102, 206.127.157.94 and 77.67.71.122, so I concentrated my tests on these, I found out that while 206.127.157.102 had some serious packet loss, 77.67.71.122 was in the 0% range:

Ping statistics for 77.67.71.122:
    Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 299,
    Lost = 1 (0% lost),

Ping statistics for 206.127.157.102:
    Packets: Sent = 300, Received = 260,
    Lost = 40 (13% lost),

77.67.71.122 is an IP address for Tiscali international carrier and the problem seems to be between Tiscali (NOT my provider, Fastweb) and NCsoft datacenters.

Also, during the traceroutes I received some strange answers (but the IP addresses were collected yesterday, maybe these NCsoft-internal routes are expired):

# traceroute -n 206.127.159.225
traceroute to 206.127.159.225 (206.127.159.225), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
...
11  93.57.68.69  91.649 ms  90.767 ms 93.57.68.1  50.940 ms
12  141.136.97.141  46.880 ms  46.633 ms 213.200.68.213  46.048 ms
13  89.149.185.105  61.777 ms 89.149.184.157  57.680 ms 141.136.108.33  60.750 ms
14  77.67.71.122  58.323 ms  56.032 ms  55.409 ms
15  206.127.157.94  57.450 ms  62.601 ms  60.511 ms
16  206.127.157.102  37.115 ms *  38.930 ms
17  206.127.157.102  38.573 ms !X * *

# traceroute -n 206.127.159.86
traceroute to 206.127.159.86 (206.127.159.86), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
...
11  93.57.68.65  51.733 ms 93.57.68.5  51.542 ms  48.740 ms
12  213.200.68.213  52.012 ms  49.228 ms 141.136.97.141  49.929 ms
13  89.149.184.157  63.029 ms 89.149.183.146  60.003 ms 141.136.109.245  64.311 ms
14  77.67.71.122  62.090 ms  58.301 ms  60.709 ms
15  206.127.157.94  64.045 ms  63.105 ms  63.079 ms
16  206.127.157.102  54.358 ms  41.866 ms  40.918 ms
17  206.127.157.102  40.786 ms !X * *

# traceroute -n 206.127.159.211
traceroute to 206.127.159.211 (206.127.159.211), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
...
15  77.67.71.122  80.178 ms  77.992 ms  78.138 ms
16  206.127.157.94  67.469 ms  57.871 ms  55.091 ms
17  206.127.157.102  48.628 ms  44.495 ms  41.529 ms
18  * * *
19  * * *
20  * * *
21  * * *
22  * * *
23  * * *
24  * * *
25  * * *
26  * * *
27  * * *
28  * * 206.127.157.102  26.537 ms !X

NCsoft tech support suggested that I adopted a VPN to eliminate the problem. I can and probably will do that if the problem persists, but it looks like a common networking problem to me and I hope it could be solved by getting ANet/NCsoft networking people to talk with Tiscali’s.

Just got kicked from Gandara and logged back to an overflow where of course the event wasn’t playing. Fix this please…

I think merging EU/US populations is a good idea and would remove the problems with “nightcapping”, but Jedahs, I’m concerned for you health.

Please, try to take a step back: this is a game and in games you sometime lose (I know it sucks! I hate it too) and the community can’t (and shouldn’t) hold YOU or your officers responsible for it.

Glicko-2 could be a good algorithm, but I don’t like how it is applied: it rewards servers with coverage around the clock instead of fun.

As I understand, right now the algorithm gets applied on the ending score, so on a corner case you can take 3 servers, having their respective “prime time” at 0:00, 8:00 and 16:00 with them crushing far weaker opponents in turn and the game would consider that match “balanced”, but we do know that participating in that kind of match would be pitiful and boring.

I think (mind you: I’m throwing ideas at you here, didn’t think it through) it could be interesting to have Glicko applied to events instead, maybe tuned to take account of number of participants (and maybe level/gear too): more points are gained or lost for a successful keep conquest or defense against a worthy opponent than against a weaker one.

It would feel awesome to be rewarded for beating the odds and defending a keep against superior forces and the score would reflect the in game fight balance instead of the server capability to cap points round the clock. At the same time, servers being “night capped” would be less penalized.

I have no problems with thieves in WvW, I just click the button and get to the nearest waypoint

Seafarer’s Rest has consistent 20-40 mins queues on primetime

Back in September or October someone from ANet posted some handy charts detailing WvW queues… would it be possible to have something like it posted again? (hey, it would be amazing having it each week like the WvW results, but maybe it requires too much effort)

It’s very hard to try and find a server with a balanced WvW population: say 20 to 50 per faction per map. At least enough people to start the breakout event and at the same time not so many people to have long queues and transform the WvW in an endless 50v50 zerg battle…

I was impressed by Piken Square back when we fought them (I was on Gunnar’s Hold at the time): they had very tight ranks and they did pull off some impressive tricks. Kudos

enabling the range bar used by all other skills would suffice

Errtu.8276:

But dont worry i already kinda solved the problem its all because i dont buy gems with real money right ? because it unlocks a limitter on magic find and luck right ? thats what i will believe till i think every player in this game is equal but they are not and never be …

that’s paranoia.

I got gems for money and I still have terrible drop rates in Orr

I stopped trying with GS4 nerfed as it is… the only reason I sometime can catch a runner is by focus pulling and then Sword 3 immobilizing… it’s effective, but it consumes two cooldowns to get in range

I’ve considered switching my main from Warrior to Mesmer until the GS nerf/bugfix/mess.

So far, I had a worst experience compared to the old method: in different occasions I’ve decided to attack a small group only to find out they had 50 more friends just behind them

Moved to GH 15 days ago with some friends, in search of a good balance between queues during prime time and underpopulation in WvW. Found a great server: I was amazed at how hard the players fight, even when they are on the losing side.

Definitely the best server I’ve played on!

It would be awesome if we could get in touch with some US guilds to cover the late night/early morning shift…

While I understand your motives, I fear the deep implications this change will have on WvW. Hopefully we’ll still see people going for the Garrison and epic battles at the mid map keeps…

stefanplc.5234:

Swiftness and Warrior’s Sprint do not stack. I recorded a video running in a straight line with Swiftness and the Warrior’s Sprint trait, then walked backwards so I’d run exactly the same path and tried running it just with Swiftness. I compared the 2 videos and the 2 runs were identical.

I don’t think they are supposed to stack. As far as I can see, in game only the higher speed buff is applied.

You aren’t doing any damage at all? Warrior support spec(s) are still quite capable of damaging their opponents.

Oxe.6142:

ColinJohanson.2394:

As for the question about PuG’s for explorable dungeons, we’ve said all along that explorable dungeons are intended for highly organized/skilled groups of players. That is absolutely the case

Forcing the overwhelming majority of dungeon content to require this level of competency and cooperation will hurt the longevity of this game. There are only 8 dungeons, 3 max level and the scaled down versions don’t give proper rewards. Dungeons are the only thing that you can do as an organized group outside of PvP. Having 3/4 of the dungeon content unpuggable severely limits peoples options to just pick up the game and play. If all explorable modes are this difficult and require this much synergy to complete the overwhelming majority of the community won’t do them. There isn’t much else to do. Arena Net should take a serious look at their design philosophy and ask themselves if they really want to be the “best MMO ever” because a game that nobody plays due to of lack of accessible content won’t be.

There’s a whole world outside of dungeons, with events that anyone that doesn’t intend to spend 15 minutes setting up a group can join.

As a support-oriented warrior with healing shouts, I’m going with Hammer + Longbow in explorable dungeons. The first for control and decent damage, the second for lovely AoE.

For outdoor PVE (farming events, etc) I’m rolling on Sword main hand + Axe offhand and Longbow.

In WvW (the main aspect I’m focused on), Sword + Warhorn and Longbow.

Regen effects gain way less than direct heals from +healing. At the moment I think +healing is useful only for healing shouts builds.

go to the heart of the mists and experiment, you can change your traits for free and get free weapons to try out

Not sure if a bug or working as intended, but when interrupted while casting the Battle Standard, the skill will go on his 240s cooldown (not the 3 second cooldown I get on other skills when I get interrupted).

Not sure if, as Gab said, underwater skills damage is bugged, but I’ve surely felt a bit underpowered with both spear (aside from skill 5) and speargun, considering sometimes barracudas will spawn “out of thin water” and join the fight.

The worst thing is that this immovable object (unless you pick it up) grants swiftness for 3 seconds. It’s like, the most useless thing it can do
Protection or Aegis would be far better.
Or restore full endurance to the people being resurrected…

1192 vs 1990 for each shout means a lot, I won’t say +healing is wasted on a warrior if you are playing it as a support role… (and with 6 runes of the soldier, the shouts build is even better).

I found the hammer quite effective in PVE instances alongside the longbow, but the immobilization for skills 3 and 4 renders it quite awkward to use in PvP. It’s ok to give visual cues to CC skills, so people can avoid them in PvP, but giving hammer skills both a long cast “visual cue” AND a root effect? I find it’s a bit too much

I think it would be really useful for guilds considering to switch server to have a bit more informations about them.

Aside from the answers to the obvious “are there WvW queues and how long are them?” and “are there already WvW focused guilds or alliances on the server?”, the most compelling and hardest to find information I had to seek is the breakdown of server population by country and timezone (I think part of the “secure” authentication does a GeoIP check, so these info should already be present in some form).

Let me give a bit of context: before the headstart I was searching for a server to play on for me and my friends. We wanted to play on a server with an international community, but we also wanted to have at least a few (dozens) more italians to eventually group with (sadly, spoken english in voice chat is not an option for many of us).

At the same time we didn’t want to end up on a server where the most spoken (written) language was totally alien to us: one thing is to land on a server where you can at least understand 80% of the general/map chat, a whole different thing is to find yourself “isolated” by not having the faintest clue what the other people are saying.

As discussed elsewhere, servers with populations that encompass a wider timezone fare better in WvW, so this kind of informations would be really precious for a guild considering to switch: smaller guilds could try to find a good place to play alongside many others and bigger guilds could seek uncovered timezones where they could shine having slots for all their members.

Based on these info ArenaNet could also implement an in-game server suggestion system for new players or random players (not organized guilds) that open the server selection panel.

I’m enjoying this build in WvW.

It’s heavily support oriented, but can dish out a decent amount of damage. Key points:

• Sword: gap closing, cripple, immobilize
• Horn: swiftness AND crippling removal, endurange regen (useful both in offensive and defensive situations)
• Longbow: ranged immobilize, ranged AoE blind, nice AoE damage

• Huge survivability
• Nice support (heal, condition removal, faster ress, ranged/AoE ress)
• Decent control (immobilize, blind, fear)

I tought it was a bug: swiftness is pretty useless

ArenaNet effectively removed the holy trinity. In GW2 you will do damage, control your foes and support your allies. You depend on your allies, and they depend on you. Everyone must do his part to ensure victory.

If you are getting damaged in melee, roll away from danger and heal up, or switch to ranged if you don’t have your heal ready. Or ask for someone in your party to help you heal or regen.

Also, make sure your group is using blind, aegis, crowd control skills (stun, daze, fear, immobilize) and condition removal (shake it off is huge) properly.