Has game been laggy?

Anyone notice in increase in lag or is it just me?

Can you be a little bit more specific?

Edit:If you are getting increased ping, you can read this thread here : https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/16603/anet-switched-to-higher-ping-amazon-servers-since-2-weeks-ago/p3

Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

Lag does seem worse the past couple weeks.

The weird thing on my end is that my character's vector will randomly get stuck. It happens when I perform certain simultaneous actions, but basically my toon will continue running in an obtuse direction even when I'm not pressing any buttons. No, this isn't auto--run, because this will happen sideways.

It's nearly thrown me off a cliff a few times.

Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

Haven't noticed any lag recently, doing HoT metas mostly (no PvP).

Haven't noticed any lag in Europe (haven't WvWed in a while though).

@Blocki.4931 said:Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

@Donari.5237 said:I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

@Danikat.8537 said:Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

Wait, are we talking about FPS drops, cause these are common, especially if you don't have a really strong PC. I've also noticed that the newer maps tend to be less and less optimised.

@Eme.2018 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

@Donari.5237 said:I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

@"Danikat.8537" said:Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

Its lag lag... as in latency. The game has always been prone to spikes during bursts of activity, especially in WvW where the data volumes can increase exponentially as blobs move in and out render range..... but this is happening at random.

I've played several MMO-like games hosted on Amazon, and its been pretty obvious for years that Amazon's network is prone to massive overload during prime times hours in a given time zone. Considering what they're hosting, it shouldn't surprise anyone. Amazon is practically the largest online store in the US region (rivaled only by China's market in terms of sheer transaction volume), they host an HD video service, they have full service web hosting with Domain management, their EC2 cloud is cheaper then Google, and now they're hosting video games. Notice something about all of those though....... Games are the only only one that explicitly requires low latency to operate correctly. If the web store is getting slammed, then its just 2-5 seconds to load a page. But even 1 second latency in action oriented games (which Amazon is pushing hard thanks to the capabilities of Lumberyard) can be crippling to the player experience.

This is on top of a number of things GW2 does with skill queuing and server processing that, while not inherently flawed, does make it very janky when dealing with unstable connections. And I want everyone to be clear, I'm not about internet drop outs on the client side. Even when not frame synced, games have a low tolerance for inconsistent data flow (known as jitter). This stems from the "per frame" data processing from world state updates, and how it can delay frame rendering times when the volume can't be processed fast enough to meet the 16ms deadline for 60 FPS.

Software developers have devised multiple ways to deal with this.... but pretty much all of them are a form of trade of. Less time sensitive programs tend to use buffers to collect all the data before processing; but this is too inconsistent for anything that needs to execute on a schedule. This is where games start to do stuff like dropped updates; but this causes gaps in world state transitions, and is one of causes of warping. To combat that, they can use interpolation to fill the gaps; but this is essentially the game making educated guesses on the location of objects in between verifiable data. The above thus far is why Shooters tend to be very crappy past 80ms of latency.

When you start getting to MMO RPGs, which has less real time interaction under the hood with much higher volumes of data, most will resort to a form of queuing system. Queuing stores ALL updates in a buffer, to make sure the doesn't drop anything, and processes them at best effort until EVERYTHING is run through. This inherently adds a lot of latency when the queue gets bursts of activity, and for the most part ensures no skill, action, or damage dealing is lost. The slower the game, the more it can benefit from this. However, since GW2 has very high combat pacing, the order in which actions occur (down fractions of a second) is the difference between success and failure. So when the queue gets overloaded, anything involving a client/server loop immediately starts to misfire or is heavily delayed. In the case of WvW, a blob fight can choke the queue so badly, that the clients can't get a response from the server for skill that don't even have this requirement, but are completely stalling because the packet loss is so high, the client is getting almost zero data from the server.

There are at least 3 divisions of skill activation types based on how much server interaction is required to make it work.

Things like Autoattack, blinks (non-animated displacements), or fully decoupled attacks seem to be mostly or entirely handled client side.

Next slower are skills which are executed client side, but validated server side. These have little overhead, but still require a server response to resolve. Theres no real rules behind which skills do or don't, but I have noted most non-rooted seem to behave this way. I suspect it has to do with the attack or projectile being mostly independent once fired, so it doesn't need the server to loop back with a response to tell the client its ok to activate it.The third are skills with a full client/server loop in order to activate. These typically skills that need the client and server synced up to make sure the skills don't deviate on either side. Rooting skills, displacement with animation (leaps being the most common), Dual location effects (shades being a major one), picking up bundles (which is technically due to rooting), and Transforms. All of these will not even let you queue the skill under huge spikes, because the client isn't getting enough data from the server to know if the queue is being processed. Thats important to understand, because the client has a 2 skill queue depth in order to prevent a player from being locked into a sequence if they mash buttons. The active skill (if it has a cast time), and a queued skill (which fires next). If the second skill is ground target, things can get a little weird. Instant cast skills (which include most pure stunbreaks) seem to be client side. If the stun break is attached to another effect or process, then the other effect can make a stun break skill get delayed or misfire (like Ele Mist form, or Rev's legendary swap).

Anyway...... Amazon's network is currently not capable of handling the traffic volumes typical of a region's prime time. And unfortunately for us, its the same AWS/EC2 cloud Amazong uses for pretty much everything now.

Yeah, I've seen some. I've also figured out why, in my (Windows PC) case:

GW2 is using significantly more memory now than it used to. There's also a "memory leak" in the game that kicks in when the game is running, but the system goes into screen saver or is task-switched to some other application. It's inconsistent, though.

To check if this is your problem, use Task Manager to watch your memory usage. If it hits around 2/3 - 3/4 of your available memory, Windows can start thrashing, which is expensive in terms of computing power.

If you see 2/3 - 3/4 of your memory used, try closing other windows. Also, you can change GW2's settings to ones that use less memory.

However, if the memory leak has hit you, no amount of closing apps will help. Restart the computer. (Logging out and back in MIGHT fix it, but I haven't tested that theory yet.)

I saw a HUGE amount of lag last night....

But I was also farming Istan with full graphics, and a full map :P So..... That's to be expected for me :3

I have noticed that if I craft a huge number of items, the game will eventually start lagging out as the little item pop up cant keep up with the items being crafted. It has not always been that way, so I do suspect something somewhere made a "memory leak"

You have to define laggy. Gw2 always has random drops but as far as lag idk. It honestly could be your internet. A wireless internet is not recommended for online gaming.

Lagging when you press 1- 10 and the skills aren’t being used? People are skipping around? People running in places? Mouse not grabbing the screen to move? You have to give detail.

But as gw2 is heavy on pc, you should state specs to see if your ok. It all depends on your set up.

had some severe (skill) lag yesterday in wvw. Was jumping around, people were rubberbanding, things moved without animations, no reaction to key presses, etc pp. But Saturday and today were fine. shrug On the plus side, the lag saved my ass several times.

I should clarify: a "memory leak" is where a program inadvertently marks some memory as its own, but then doesn't return all of it. It's never purposeful (except for hackers doing it), and always a bug. But, it's a whale of a problem figuring out where it is. I get tired just thinking about it. (Which is why I haven't opened a ticket on it. I suppose I'm just being lazy.)

I'm going to chime in too because this has been affecting me a lot! I made a post on the PvE forums about doing orbs at Artsariiv, but honestly it's the same for other mechanics like orbs on dhuum too. Don't even get me started on doing pvp with 350 ping, gold 3-plat 1 avg and I've dropped to a silver 3-gold 1 average. QQ

i guess im not the only one then, playing from SEA region here, after moving to AWS ping increase from 250 to 300, still playable for me so im fine with it. but the problem is recently AWS server spiking a lot, ping spike from time to time and its only getting worse since last week, game unplayable right now. sometimes its lag only in wvw map but no lag in pve map, sometimes everything is lag. i tried winmtr from anet and from what i see everytime the hop with ip statrting with 52, 54, etc(from google search its Amazon ip) i see around 5% loss from 3-5 hops and 50-70% loss from at least 2-3 hops. all from amazon.

@Eme.2018 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

@Donari.5237 said:I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

@Danikat.8537 said:Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

At least I was talking about skill delays. You press a button but the skill doesn't happen until like 2 seconds later, while movement and damage are all still real time.

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Eme.2018 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

@Donari.5237 said:I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

@"Danikat.8537" said:Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

So, for anyone looking to debug this, arcdps includes a "statistics" thing that also shows the server "tick rate" -- essentially, the rate at which it processes the simulation. That will highlight if there is a slowdown in processing on the server side, which might help clear up the question of where, exactly, this is coming from.

Skill lag could be caused by latency between the client and server - you press the button, the server only hears about it two seconds later - or in server-side processing. Step one would be identifying where it is.

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Eme.2018 said:

@Blocki.4931 said:Had a lot of skill lag in WvW today, but I blame the 60 vs 60 vs 60 fights we had for 3 hours straight

@Donari.5237 said:I have a guildie who's been suffering horrid lag, only in GW2, for many months, to the point she's about quit of the game. She's talked exhaustively with Support and they can't find anything wrong so they opine it's on her end. But again, it's only this game.

For my part I am lucky enough to only get lag on rare occasions and fps drops only in large active zergs.

@Danikat.8537 said:Can't say I've noticed anything more than the usual occasional spikes. I thought I was getting horrible lag when I went to Southsun yesterday, then I realised the karka queen was up just outside the settlement I'd started in and there were about 100 people just off screen.

Yes, that's one of the symptoms I've seen, too. Only a second or two, but in combat that can really hurt.

Yes, i my self been laggg this 2 week, my ping now at a range of 300 to 400 sometimes more, before this my ping is 220 to 250 and that was ok for me to play for so long sincei start playing from the start, i always check my ping went i play. something must have gone wrong, it all started went there was an issue someware 2 week ago during PVP people cant Q in pvp or even log in the game even it give error massage, that time alot of people in pvp having this issue, that where the ping issue started.

@"Riz.9521" said:Yes, i my self been laggg this 2 week, my ping now at a range of 300 to 400 sometimes more, before this my ping is 220 to 250 and that was ok for me to play for so long sincei start playing from the start, i always check my ping went i play. something must have gone wrong, it all started went there was an issue someware 2 week ago during PVP people cant Q in pvp or even log in the game even it give error massage, that time alot of people in pvp having this issue, that where the ping issue started.

Can you follow the (badly named) guide to finding out if this is network related and see if we can separate out the possibilities of server-based lag and network-based lag? That'll help get ANet on the track to fixing it as fast as possible.