Latency (definitely) and (apparent) Packet Loss at GW2 servers.

I have been on GW2 off/on for 9+ years and GW1 before that. I think this game and the company are fantastic but something seems to have landed in the gears of operations. Perhaps it is a technical problem that is impractically solvable. I get it if so. This stuff is not easy and it is anything but cheap. Here is hoping you resolve it but in the mean time the "diatribe" begins...

I have several family and friends that are in numerous US states on services from local cable to comcast to local dsl to century link. They all have the same problem. Dozens of random people in game have the same problem at the same time. Ad infinitum. This began many months ago but it is epic now and never to have been witnessed in the past outside major identified outages. The game, perhaps 70% of the time in a "group setting", is unplayable (can login but cant actually "play"). In many cases you outright get disconnected from the servers. I have a latency of 40-250ms depending on AWS regions (ie: aws asia gets as high as 280ms (avg 190ms) whereas in my country of origin I have pings as low as 38ms (avg 58ms). I work with AWS frequently for work with zero problems. Tests to EU, US, CA, MX all bring in pings of ~40-100ms with zero packet loss. My local connections are sub ms or close again with zero packet loss. No other "services" such as Amazon Prime video/audio, Netflix, Crackle and half a dozen others you may not have even heard of have zero problems on latency nor loss. I realize I am dropping what you have heard before but the fact is your services have major problems and at least from my personal perspective having an impact on your bottom line. Maybe that bottom line of those I know and myself is so insignificant it does not matter, so be it. Over the past dozen times I have been on I left the game because it's simply, without question, unplayable. I will never put a dime into this game again until this is resolved. I understand our current state of affairs is extraordinary to say the least but this is a time to shine or die. The game, for me, is dying because of this.

@"jniel.3581" said:I have several family and friends that are in numerous US states on services from local cable to comcast to local dsl to century link. They all have the same problem. Dozens of random people in game have the same problem at the same time.

The internet is vast and there is very rarely a direct connection to where you’re trying to go. This means your connection will hop between numerous servers before reaching the final destination. Not everyone follows the same connection route and some people’s route may be completely different. It’s very probable that there could be an issue somewhere along the way that impact people from different locations who share a similar connections that have an issue. For example, there are servers in Colorado that my ISP routes me through. If there were issues there, it could impact everyone that has their connection routes through there.

This began many months ago but it is epic now and never to have been witnessed in the past outside major identified outages.

The pandemic started many months ago with more and more people using the internet from home. This puts a strain on the ISP infrastructure and many have had difficulties coping with it. Many ISPs have been doing bandwidth throttling as well.

I work with AWS frequently for work with zero problems.

MMOs typically use a TCP connection which is most likely different from what you use at work. MMOs also send a lot of data back and forth and small interruptions can cause issues.

Tests to EU, US, CA, MX all bring in pings of ~40-100ms with zero packet loss. My local connections are sub ms or close again with zero packet loss. No other "services" such as Amazon Prime video/audio, Netflix, Crackle and half a dozen others you may not have even heard of have zero problems on latency nor loss.

As I said just above, those connections are all different from that of MMO games.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@"jniel.3581" said:I have several family and friends that are in numerous US states on services from local cable to comcast to local dsl to century link. They all have the same problem. Dozens of random people in game have the same problem at the same time.

Yep, trace routes indicate this. It wasn't "in between" on a hop.

This began many months ago but it is epic now and never to have been witnessed in the past outside major identified outages.

Again read on, you clearly didn't with that response.

I work with AWS frequently for work with zero problems.

Everything sends data back and forth and if you understood how the various pings and trace routes work you wouldn't have even bothered with that comment.

Tests to EU, US, CA, MX all bring in pings of ~40-100ms with zero packet loss. My local connections are sub ms or close again with zero packet loss. No other "services" such as Amazon Prime video/audio, Netflix, Crackle and half a dozen others you may not have even heard of have zero problems on latency nor loss.

In short, irrelevant comment. If you would prefer I will list the 30+ other "services" which include MMOs and others. ie: PoE, Eve, dozen or so steam peer to peer and server based games, Zoom, Teams, Jitsi, etc.

Anyhow take it or leave it. They just lost numerous players and hence the "complaint". How this works is you go to the services that work. Their's doesn't hence it's no longer used. Simple economics of customer experience.

There are posts on the forums going back years where people have complained about lag spikes and ping problems since the game was moved to AWS.. so on that I believe that the pandemic situation isn't the cause of these problems as some suspect it is but has instead only exacerbated a problem that has existed in this game ever since it moved to AWS.

There's a lot of talk about ISP's and other factors but for a lot of us these online issues are only effecting GW2.. I myself have hundreds of games installed on my computer, many of which have online features and multiplayer and several of those games are MMO's as well.. Gw2 is the only one suffering from this lag issue as far as I can tell.

I'm no programmer nor do I know jack about servers but i'm pretty sure there is something wrong with how Gw2 communicates with AWS.. whether that's on Amazon's end or Anets is anyone's guess.But I seriously doubt this has anything to do with peoples personal internet connections or their ISP's.. if it were this issue would persist in many other games, especially mmos but Gw2 is the only game lagging like this for me, and from what I can tell it seems to be at it's worst in PoF, LW4 and IBS maps most of all though I have not done extensive testing on this because much like OP when the game starts lagging this badly I completely loose all will to play the game and I log off to play something else instead.

@jniel.3581 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@jniel.3581 said:I have several family and friends that are in numerous US states on services from local cable to comcast to local dsl to century link. They all have the same problem. Dozens of random people in game have the same problem at the same time.

Also be aware that a ping done through traceroute is treated very differently than actual data packets. You often can get 100% packet loss at the server when that’s actually not accurate as not all servers respond to ICMP requests.

Also keep in mind that the same route that your data takes to reach the servers is not necessarily the same route that the data from Anet takes to reach you.

This began many months ago but it is epic now and never to have been witnessed in the past outside major identified outages.

I did. There’s really nothing to “read on”.

I work with AWS frequently for work with zero problems.

There’s a big difference between the types of connections and what you’re doing. Someone browsing the internet could have no issues but then they could when they play online games which require a more stable connection.

I’m not the one who is lacking understanding here.

Tests to EU, US, CA, MX all bring in pings of ~40-100ms with zero packet loss. My local connections are sub ms or close again with zero packet loss. No other "services" such as Amazon Prime video/audio, Netflix, Crackle and half a dozen others you may not have even heard of have zero problems on latency nor loss.

All those services connect different and don’t all follow the same touting. Reading up on the internet infrastructure and such may be very valuable to understanding what I’m trying to tell you.

Below was one such research paper that I read among the many others and articles. It's one of the few that I could find that was specific to MMOs.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijcgt/2014/602403/

And another research paper from some people in Taiwan.

https://www.iis.sinica.edu.tw/~swc/pub/tcp_in_games.html

@Teratus.2859 said:There are posts on the forums going back years where people have complained about lag spikes and ping problems since the game was moved to AWS.. so on that I believe that the pandemic situation isn't the cause of these problems as some suspect it is but has instead only exacerbated a problem that has existed in this game ever since it moved to AWS.

There's a lot of talk about ISP's and other factors but for a lot of us these online issues are only effecting GW2.. I myself have hundreds of games installed on my computer, many of which have online features and multiplayer and several of those games are MMO's as well.. Gw2 is the only one suffering from this lag issue as far as I can tell.

I'm no programmer nor do I know jack about servers but i'm pretty sure there is something wrong with how Gw2 communicates with AWS.. whether that's on Amazon's end or Anets is anyone's guess.But I seriously doubt this has anything to do with peoples personal internet connections or their ISP's.. if it were this issue would persist in many other games, especially mmos but Gw2 is the only game lagging like this for me, and from what I can tell it seems to be at it's worst in PoF, LW4 and IBS maps most of all though I have not done extensive testing on this because much like OP when the game starts lagging this badly I completely loose all will to play the game and I log off to play something else instead.

And there are players that have no issues as all. There are also players who have been making the same complaints as GW2 players about their respective games.

I copy and pasted a post of mine from a few weeks ago showing that other MMOs have been having similar complaints. I also posted articles that covered how the pandemic was affecting the internet.

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:It's not a GW2 thing nor is it an AWS thing.

WoWESOFF14BDO

I can keep going on and will likely find the same results for just about every single game online which doesn't have a dedicated network connection for its players. All of them will have the same complaints as the ones being made against GW2. I guess the servers for every online game are failing...

I also found an article about how terrible Germany's infrastructure is; this is where the servers are located. In Europe, several ISPs were hit by DDoS attacks. Obviously this would affect those there. Another online gaming company has reported that the COVID pandemic has affected their players' pings. NY Times did an article about how COVID is affected the internet.

So it's kind of weird for people to dismiss and just go "oh it's the servers". Sure, it could be; there's always a possibility. Unfortunately, there's more evidence pointing elsewhere. I actually got some lag spikes for the first time last night and it turned out to be originating in Colorado when I traced it.

Still strikes me as fascinating that the PoF maps are all a lag fest to me ever since the move to AWS. And I really mean it date-exact.

@Ray Koopa.2354 said:Still strikes me as fascinating that the PoF maps are all a lag fest to me ever since the move to AWS. And I really mean it date-exact.

The servers moved which caused the routing that players took to get to it to change which could have an impact.

One thing that I'm wondering, and will probably never get an answer to, is how a map from Queensdale is different from an LS4 map when it comes to data sent back and forth between the server and client. Are LS4 maps somehow programmed differently from core maps in such a way that players with weaker connection are more susceptible to latency?

@Ray Koopa.2354 said:Still strikes me as fascinating that the PoF maps are all a lag fest to me ever since the move to AWS. And I really mean it date-exact.

You never played a Path of Fire map without lag?

That's a shame. I don't recall many lag-related posts at launch.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:One thing that I'm wondering, and will probably never get an answer to, is how a map from Queensdale is different from an LS4 map when it comes to data sent back and forth between the server and client. Are LS4 maps somehow programmed differently from core maps in such a way that players with weaker connection are more susceptible to latency?

Maybe POF and Core run on different (physical) servers? Like using the /ip command leads to different ips if you play in Core of POF. That's the only logical explanation, other than being programmed differently. Which to be honest doesn't make sense, why would they program their latest and greatest in a worse way.

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:One thing that I'm wondering, and will probably never get an answer to, is how a map from Queensdale is different from an LS4 map when it comes to data sent back and forth between the server and client. Are LS4 maps somehow programmed differently from core maps in such a way that players with weaker connection are more susceptible to latency?

The servers are all in the same location though, on the same network, so that shouldn’t be an issue.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:One thing that I'm wondering, and will probably never get an answer to, is how a map from Queensdale is different from an LS4 map when it comes to data sent back and forth between the server and client. Are LS4 maps somehow programmed differently from core maps in such a way that players with weaker connection are more susceptible to latency?

It shouldn't be an issue if it's a network error, however if the servers where POF runs have the "problem", whatever that might be, then being on different machines will lead to different results. Of course this begs the two questions:1) if it's indeed the hardware, why did they use inferior/faulty hardware on the latest content, I'd understand if they used less capable server instances for less populated maps, but to have lag on the latest and greatest is weird2) since they already know about these issues, why haven't they changed the hardware to begin with, or allocated POF to different server instances.

Both questions are impossible to answer by us. Maybe they'll make an announcement when the problems are completely fixed and tell us what happened

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:One thing that I'm wondering, and will probably never get an answer to, is how a map from Queensdale is different from an LS4 map when it comes to data sent back and forth between the server and client. Are LS4 maps somehow programmed differently from core maps in such a way that players with weaker connection are more susceptible to latency?

It's just PoF maps that players are primarily complaining about which doesn't make much sense for it to be a hardware issue. I've seen some core maps that have had the same IP as PoF maps (not at the same time, I believe) so PoF maps are not isolated to specific IPs.

EDIT:

I went to each map and recorded the IP that it gave me. There are more IPs than these as I'm sure there are multiple instances for many of the maps.

• Verdant Brink and Queensdale both shared the same IP.
• Dragonfall and Thunderhead Peaks both shared the same IP.
• Domain of Kourna and Siren's Landing both shared the same IP.
• Kessex and Jahai both shared the same IP.

What this shows is that multiple maps can have the same IP and it doesn't matter whether it's a POF map or not. Also, if the issue was tied to a particular server, you should also be having the same issue with any other maps associated with that IP. So it being a hardware issue is unlikely. This is also because not everyone is affected.

• Black Citadel - 52.44.29.227

• Plains of Ashford - 18.213.92.165

• Diessa Plateau - 3.234.68.137

• Fields of Ruin - 34.194.48.1

• Blazeridge Steppes - 35.153.76.204

• Iron Marches - 34.193.114.156

• Fireheart Rise - 54.208.129.57

• Divinity's Reach - 34.192.159.6

• Queensdale - 35.169.27.155

• Kessex Hills - 34.200.115.152

• Gendarran Fields - 18.210.91.41

• Harathi Hinterlands - 35.175.67.177

• Lion's Arch - 54.163.31.99

• Bloodtide Coast - 35.175.81.138

• Southsun Cove - 18.209.216.118

• Sparkfly Fen - 34.239.218.195

• Rata Sum - 18.204.174.54

• The Grove - 34.230.183.89

• Caledon Forest - 34.235.4.68

• Metrica Province - 34.237.22.62

• Brisban Wildlands - 34.199.192.252

• Hoelbrak - 34.230.183.89

• Wayfarer Foothills - 34.202.116.10

• Lornar's Pass - 54.147.238.97

• Snowden Drifts - 35.169.158.36

• Dredgehaunt Cliffs - 52.203.251.203

• Frostgorge Sound - 35.168.222.99

• Timberline Falls - 18.210.69.163

• Mount Maelstrom - 34.235.183.140

• Straits of Devastation - 18.210.91.41

• Malchor's Leap - 18.204.174.54

• Cursed Shore - 35.168.33.139

• Dry Top - 18.215.201.146

• The Silverwastes - 54.208.129.57

• Verdant Brink - 34.192.159.6

• Auric Basin - 54.147.238.97

• Tangled Depths - 18.215.201.146

• Dragon's Stand - 34.235.4.68

• Bloodstone Fen - 34.232.91.180

• Ember Bay - 52.44.29.227

• Bitterfrost Frontier - 35.169.158.36

• Lake Doric - 18.213.92.165

• Draconis Mons - 35.168.81.98

• Siren's Landing - 35.168.50.178

• Crystal Oasis - 3.228.152.102

• Desert Highlands - 34.237.117.122

• Elon Riverlands - 18.209.187.182

• The Desolation - 3.219.113.40

• Domain of Vabbi - 18.209.187.182

• Domain of Istan - 34.201.97.124

• Sandswept Isles - 3.211.101.69

• Domain of Kourna - 35.168.50.178

• Jahai Bluffs - 34.200.115.152

• Thunderhead Peaks - 35.173.141.14

• Dragonfall - 35.173.141.14

• Grothmar Valley - 34.196.255.149

• Bjora Marches - 18.213.109.17

• Drizzlewood Coast - 35.171.180.220

gw2 become lag since move server to aws . 2k ping everyday.

• Crystal Oasis - 3.228.152.102
• Thunderhead Peaks - 35.173.141.14

Crystal Oasis is also 35.173.141.14The IP can be any IP at the moment depending which instance you are in. From what I see is that all those GW2 map IPs belong to Amazon servers out of Seattle. It seems they pair up busy maps with not so busy maps on the same IP. Every click of Volunteer's Blessing will move you to a different IP, but the server location remains the same.

@Carnius Magius.8091 said:

• Crystal Oasis - 3.228.152.102
• Thunderhead Peaks - 35.173.141.14

It can’t be Seattle otherwise my ping would be substantially lower. Every IP I have tested goes to Virginia.

But yeah, many maps can have different IPs and I was only willing to record the first map instance that I landed on. It was mainly to back up my argument that the servers which host PoF maps are not isolated from other maps such as from the core game.

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Carnius Magius.8091 said:

• Crystal Oasis - 3.228.152.102
• Thunderhead Peaks - 35.173.141.14

I used WHOIS to find out who owns the IP. I used a different site and I get Virginia too. Maybe I will try my VPN to a location near Virginia to see if I get better results as far as the disconnects I've been plagued with.

@Carnius Magius.8091 said:

@Ayrilana.1396 said:

@Carnius Magius.8091 said:

• Crystal Oasis - 3.228.152.102
• Thunderhead Peaks - 35.173.141.14

That shows who owns the servers but not their location. To find out where the servers are you’d have to ping them and trace the IPs.

I am a returning player after being gone for years. Bought the latest Expac and all. I think it would be awesome if I actually got to play through PoF. But every time I go into a story line instance, I get through to the end and it drops connection and I have to try again. It is extremely aggravating, disappointing, and discouraging. I also don't remember the game being so laggy and disconnect heavy the last time I played. And before you jump on the "it is your provider, or your machine." it isn't. I have played and do play other online games just fine with no issues.

Please fix your stuff. Sounds like plenty of people are getting tired of this, ArenaNet.

@"Deydron.2681" said:And before you jump on the "it is your provider, or your machine." it isn't. I have played and do play other online games just fine with no issues.

Those games likely play on different servers located elsewhere. This means that the data sent back and forth most likely follow different routing than for GW2. Other games have had similar complaints that players have particular issues with that game but not others. Other thing that’s important is the type of game. Not all games are the same.

So I understand that games have servers located throughout different places. But if I'm understanding your message is that, this is just the way it is and I don't like it, stop playing? Is that what I'm reading? Just curious.

@"Deydron.2681" said:I am a returning player after being gone for years. Bought the latest Expac and all. I think it would be awesome if I actually got to play through PoF. But every time I go into a story line instance, I get through to the end and it drops connection and I have to try again. It is extremely aggravating, disappointing, and discouraging. I also don't remember the game being so laggy and disconnect heavy the last time I played. And before you jump on the "it is your provider, or your machine." it isn't. I have played and do play other online games just fine with no issues.

Please fix your stuff. Sounds like plenty of people are getting tired of this, ArenaNet.

'Storyline Disconnects' are a different issue, and go back much further than the current lag/packet loss/etc. issue now.You can try the tips/workarounds found in the Dev-posted thread, 'Storyline Disconnects', and, perhaps, find a solution that works for you.

Good luck.

@Deydron.2681 said:So I understand that games have servers located throughout different places. But if I'm understanding your message is that, this is just the way it is and I don't like it, stop playing? Is that what I'm reading? Just curious.

I’m not saying to stop playing. If a lot of people have their connections going through a specific hub, and that hub is having issues, it’s kind of out of their hands. When I say connections, I mean the connection that is used from your PC to the servers and the connection used from the servers to your PC. They’re not necessarily the same.

One option is to use a VPN and hope that it routes your connection better than your ISP which makes up for the additional latency.

What do you use to ping ANET servers? The online tools I've tried don't get a response to ping.

@Carnius Magius.8091 said:What do you use to ping ANET servers? The online tools I've tried don't get a response to ping.

I use pingplotter but others use MTR. You may not get some server info along the route and you may even get 100% packet loss. This doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s an issue as they could just not be accepting ping requests.