Severe ping spikes, sometimes when no zergs are around. Anyone else?

[Shroud.2307]

To preface, this has been a problem for a few months now, but I also took a break that was a little over a month long and recently came back. Prior to my break, I was having random ping spikes, seemingly unprovoked by zergs, wherein my ping would skyrocket in to the thousands for a few seconds. It wasn't unplayable before I took my break but it certainly had an impact.

Since I've come back, the issue has worsened. I've been trying desperately either to resolve the issue or to at minimum locate the source. I've uninstalled and reinstalled, I've cleared my cache, I've reset my router, I've asked questions here in the technical support sub, I've spoken with friends in game, I've tried reinstalling on different drives, I tried creating new shortcuts with renaming tricks, etc. So far nothing has worked or changed the situation.

Today, by recommendation of some people here on the forum, I tried using PingPlotter ( a program that tracks ping activity ) to get a better idea of how my ping is behaving and to share results with those who understand what they're looking at. I've still yet to come to a conclusion, but because I've been told by various friends in game that they're experiencing similar issues, I'd like to also ask here;

Has your ping been behaving abnormally as of late? Do you get sudden, seemingly random spikes, that last for 2 - 4 seconds? Does it get worse when zergs are around and does it still happen when no zergs are near, but less frequently?

I ask these questions because it's driving me up the flipping wall trying to figure out what's wrong. If I can't resolve the problem, so be it, but at minimum I want to know the source. Is it ANet? Is it GW2? Is it my connection, or something to do with my computer/files? If I can figure this out I'll be a lot less stressed. I trust the words of my friends that they've been having similar problems but I'd like to get confirmation from a larger group. Asking here could also ( unlikely as it may be ) bring it to ANet's attention. Apparently they have been investigating some kind of problem recently but I don't know if these problems are related.

Anyway, if you're having similar issues please let me know here. Maybe someone with more knowledge on the situation can chime in to help with what I ( we, if it isn't just me ) am experiencing.

[Aeolus.3615]

Load balancers and processing managegement spreading love.

[XatraZaytrax.2601]

I had one last night when was spiking a downed character. Made it seem really dramatic in slo-mo.

[DemonSeed.3528]

I still have my lag spikes and unstable ping as usual, except now I have random d/c from timeouts [of which I can go back to char select no problem].

[Bigpapasmurf.5623]

Haven't had anything noticeable myself

[avey.4201]

I've been having these from time to time, but one thing to remember these are nothing new, Anet for the most part works out a lot of bugs, and gets the servers pretty stable, then when they do work on big content the servers would get low FPS "server fps not your client fps" with this comes some random lag spikes, but it can also be remnants of the latest content/added mechanics/bug fixes.It's typically a sign the devs are working hard.

[Tinnel.4369]

Yep, yep.....

[ais.2547]

I've been having this sudden ping spike since arena.net moved their server to Amazon.

[Vayne.8563]

I feel like this happens often before big Tueday patches. I'm guessing they're doing something behind the scenes. I've been commenting on it to my guild for a long time.

[DemonSeed.3528]

The ones that happen before the big patches or releases most probably have to do with server configurations before deploying, adjusting load stuff or whatever. It was like that time a few months back where they had to adjust the server for the lag caused by the high cpu spikes.Note: I'd have to say though, this current lag has been going on for weeks on eu/na

[Dawdler.8521]

Not only WvW, the last weeks I've noticed ~2s hiccups in PvE as well that I havent seen before.

[Sleepwalker.1398]

Try Teq at reset, it's fun.

[Famine.7915]

It can be unplayable during prime time. Never used to be this bad even back in wvw's hayday.

[LetoII.3782]

Whole game chokes up at pve reset. I've even noticed it in my guild hall, alone. Seems when people log in for dailies it chokes the whole game up.. I suspect it's a access limit from aws, likely money related.

[Ransom.1362]

I normally have around 50-80 ping, but whenever I'm near a large group of players it skyrockets up to 2500+. I'm not having any issues with other games or watching videos, for example I can jump in a 150+ player fight in planetside 2 and have no ping problems whatsoever. I'm not sure why i have such problems with GW2 but it's killing the game for me

[RisingDaewn.8703]

If your the only one with ping spikes, then there may be a hop on your route to the server which is at fault or a problem with your ISP if everything else is slow, which means you'll have to wait for it to be fixed.

If it's skill lag it's the Anet wvw servers which aren't coping with the load.

[DemonSeed.3528]

It's always like this when something new comes out like episode or big patch most of the time. Atm some servers on specific ip pools only give me trouble, but the majority of the ones that affect me seem to be the NA ones.

[Riba.3271]

I had my ping spike to about 1k in the past that, it had something to do with my NVIDIA drivers, there was mildly upvoted reddit thread about it. The Graphics card in question was NVIDIA Geforce GTX 970 but there could be other issues with other cards. I basically had to run older drivers for little over a year else I would get massive ping spikes.

It has been fixed since then tho, so if you haven't upgraded your graphics card drivers recently, I recommend it. If you have, then you can try going to older drivers.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

Keep in mind that because ArenaNet uses AWS, they can't completely solve lag even with very clean code; that's on Amazon. The game had alot less lag and was more fluid back when they used the NCSoft servers, but it was too expensive to maintain I guess?