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Open Letter to ArenaNet regarding Server Latency


TheSun.4321

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skill lag in 3-ways has been in the game for years.anet will not acknowledge this.anet will not do anything to fix this.

whether it them not caring enough to address this, or technical limitations (in 2020 lulw) the lag is here to stay until this game is no more.

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@"Oxylus.7985" said:I assume this has been covered before at some time, but we know that condi heavy builds cause server lag. We are in a more condi-heavy meta ATM which means more lag. I don't think Anet can just get faster EC2 instances to make it better.

See this from ancient history for some background on the problem.

My (only slightly tonue-in-cheek) proposal : nerf all condis in WvW and make it a power meta. Problem solved. :)

Just to highlight a part that was stated from ANet back in 2013...

We’ll be going through almost every skill in the game over the coming months and optimizing them one-by-one. This in itself will make an extremely large difference, that when that patch note comes through, expect a very different WvW experience.

I don't think they ever did this for HoT or PoF skills to fix the issue.

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@"Vegeta.2563" said:Anet was looking into this a while back, but not sure what happened since..

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/cuikws/this_is_the_sort_of_thing_the_wvw_community_has/exvuufi/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/cuikws/this_is_the_sort_of_thing_the_wvw_community_has/exvqaqx/More from the ANet employee which points to code inefficiencies with skills:

Interestingly, we switched to more powerful servers (easy to do at AWS!), not less powerful. But then we configured them in a way that told our load balancer they were more powerful than they actually were which led to this problem. Sorry.

But we fixed that configuration a couple of days ago; so if this is a recent video we have another problem. Looking at our perf graphs shows there isn't any skill lag right now (and they definitely showed skill lag a couple of days ago).

[Edit 2019 08 26: I went into Blackgate and watched the CPU and some fights; pretty sure this is a problem with too much CPU requirements and it only happens in big battles with lots of skills flying. Sometimes players, who are clever and amazing, figure out a new way to use a skill that is expensive so we'll be evaluating skill performance.]

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I'm not sure if this has been even brought up, but does the game need to dynamically update Conditions? I remember that tweaking conditions was the solution to lag in the past.

What I mean is that in GW2 individual Bleeding tick damage, for example, (as I see it) checks character stats every time damage is supposed to occur. Guild Wars 2 combat mechanics, introduced so far, wouldn't be drastically affected if the calculations were done only on application (aka snapshot) and it would likely help reduce the strain on numbers of individual calculations game has to do in big fights drastically.

Again, I don't have insight into what exactly is causing the problems, but suggestion above could be a factor and proposed change could help.

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I have noted a few different types of server latency issues in recent times, and have a few leads (thanks for posting about this issue, so I didnt have to start a new thread :)

I noticed that by standing at spawn I had normal latency (roughly 100ms for me), but when I stood close to an enemy zerg it increased to 3600ms and became pretty much unplayable. But, I noticed it depends on what type of zerg (class compositions). It seems there is a class that causes so much extra data packets to be thrown around in the system that it causes havoc with everyones bandwidth.

1. My immediate suspicion falls upon the necro/scourge ofcourse. They have so much "micro damage" going on around the place, and that might work in 5vs5 PvP, but in WvW we have like 50x50x50's, you can imagine how much of this type of "insignificant micro damage" is actually causing a huge increase in network packets having to be transmitted all over the place. No matter how small the damage is, it still has to be interwoven into a compatible network packet for it to be propagated to the clients. (Also more recently the Engi/Scrappers almost constant "AE micro healing" is prolly also causing abit of extra network battle traffic, and prolly should also be reworked to make it more large network friendly).

They should take a look at the numerous "micro damage" skills, and pack that damage more efficiently into dealing more of a significant amount, instead of constant micro damage all across the entire battle. This, would help clear alot of "battle lag" and generally keep the gamemode design much more large scale network optimal.

2. The Covid19 issue. There are specific times of day when kids havent quite gone to bed & love streaming the favorite cat videos & stuff. This is ofcourse not Anets fault, and out of their scope to fix. Usually leads to a general increase in the minimum latency at ur specific geolocation & time of day.

3. [uSER TWEAK] Turn off your smartphone's ability to use WIFI to make calls/send msgs. Sometime after 2017 they enabled this feature in android, iphone etc. And altho u might have 4G, it will use your WIFI to adhoc connect your mobile and use your wifi bandwidth instead of the telecompany's base station to route your side of the call (but you still get billed ofc). Every competitive gamer has this setting turned off naturally :-) (I think this is kinda naughty of telecompanies.. but please dont quote me on this. I head it from someone else. "Cant remember his name" etc.).

4. Thunderhead Keep. This map has an issue that causes a zonewide network rubberband issue for everyone in it for 2-5 seconds usually then eases off, seems to repeat indefinately until map change. Been there for atleast 3-4 patches, but was ok before that. Not all instances are equally bad.

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I hope this issue doesn't get overlooked as part of the covid crisis with more online. My internet and home network far exceeds what most people have as does my gaming pc. I frequently run dslreport tests. I don't have or expect to have network issues but I do in wvw and it's not just since covid. I'm on Maguuma and when we are matched up against Jade Quarry, I can't play wvw. I can't get near a small group of them without lagging out completly. People have told me it's because so many on that server are overseas but I have never had any real explanation or fix for it other then to wait for the next matchup. When we have all 3 of any assortment of servers together, the game is unplayable. No utility or f skills work. If you can move a little and press 1 maybe you get lucky but it is just fighting lag. No skill or strategy just whoever gets 111 off in the overwhelming lag. lag lag lag. Not my home, not my isp, just in wvw mostly. Sometimes pve but, who cares about that lol.

If you can't fix this right now, please make some suggestions of what might help users of your game as far as settings in game or computer that might help mitigate the lag. I have seen users post their setting solutions but have never seen any official recommendations from anet on this issue and you must have server metrics that you could interpret to give users a way around the lag is it can't be fixed right this second. Please!

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@"hugeboss.5432" said:I have noted a few different types of server latency issues in recent times, and have a few leads (thanks for posting about this issue, so I didnt have to start a new thread :)

I noticed that by standing at spawn I had normal latency (roughly 100ms for me), but when I stood close to an enemy zerg it increased to 3600ms and became pretty much unplayable. But, I noticed it depends on what type of zerg (class compositions). It seems there is a class that causes so much extra data packets to be thrown around in the system that it causes havoc with everyones bandwidth.

1. My immediate suspicion falls upon the necro/scourge ofcourse. They have so much "micro damage" going on around the place, and that might work in 5vs5 PvP, but in WvW we have like 50x50x50's, you can imagine how much of this type of "insignificant micro damage" is actually causing a huge increase in network packets having to be transmitted all over the place. No matter how small the damage is, it still has to be interwoven into a compatible network packet for it to be propagated to the clients.

They should take a look at the numerous "micro damage" skills, and pack that damage more efficiently into dealing more of a significant amount, instead of constant micro damage all across the entire battle. This, would help clear alot of "battle lag" and generally keep the gamemode design much more large scale network optimal.

I think it's been a long standing speculation all the extra calculations in the background have helped build the extra lag over the years. Things like conditions(especially since they were uncapped right before before HoT), and boons like retaliation could also be a factor here since it also has a lot of "micro damage" going out, along with the increase in spam of both over the years, not to mention boons like alacrity allowing even more spamming of skills. Not sure what can be done there as the problem existed since day one before all that so...

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True. Those fights with 3 not-even-full squads in Stonemist are sooo far more bad than i can handle..Latency spikes to 10 seconds in the nightmare of hundreds of retaliations and condies and heals and fields everywhere.Not even mentioning fps drops to 10. That is it. 10 fps and 10 seconds of latency. Impossible to have any large-scale fun.All you can do without lags is capturing camps in small group.Though I guess the issue can not be completly solved until game is totally reworked to a different engine :/

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What you need to improve is the infrastructure to support connections from different parts of the world, different continents. You are broke? Do not know. The game is dying? Do not know. I only know one thing, if it continues as it is, soon most players who are passionate about the unique feature that the game has will look for something better and migrate to another better game and dont look this commentary as a negative aspect. Look how a constructive criticism of those who really like the game.

Regards

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