Sts.1459

This bug has still not been fixed. For me, it happens about 5% of the time overall, but there are specific areas where it happens consistently: the first time I mount in Lion's Arch or Divinity's Reach, or every time when I'm in some map instances. On one occasion, a few days ago in a high-player-count instance of Silverwastes, I waited a full two minutes before my character finally mounted. But having a map with a high player count is not necessary for this bug. A couple of weeks ago, I stayed in an instance of Auric Basin long after the 'low player count' warning appeared; even when I seemed to be the only remaining player in the map, I was still seeing large (average five seconds) mount delays every time I mounted.

Guild Wars 2 has a bug in its measuring of the duration of key presses. Most of the time, the duration error is at most about 100 milliseconds, I estimate. So, if I press a key (such as the 'move forward' key) for 300 milliseconds, GW2 might interpret that as a keypress lasting anywhere from 200 ms to 400 ms.One place this is obvious is in jumping puzzles. I've played a lot of platformers on my current computer with my current keyboard, and I'm quite good at them. My personal timing is good enough that I can generally hold a key down with an uncertainty of no more than 10 ms, I estimate. But, when I do jumping puzzles in GW2, I find my character often moving too far forward or too little forward, not matching the duration that I actually hold the 'move forward' key down. To my timing instincts, it is obvious that my keypress times are being randomized.But this problem is not unique to jumping puzzles; it happens everywhere in GW2, all the time. It's usually subtle, but it happens for every keypress.One situation where it is not subtle is when playing in a high-lag map instance. There, the maximum duration error grows, and I've seen it as high as two seconds. Yesterday, playing in a very laggy instance of Verdant Brink, I watched my character continue moving forward a good two seconds after I released the 'move forward' key on five or so different occasions, and smaller but still large timing errors were common. I've seen this happen in other laggy map instances too, generally instances with lots of players.Of course, this is not necessarily a single bug. It may be that GW2 has several bugs, some related to input event handling and others related to network communication, that together or individually cause keypress duration errors. Fixing one such bug may not fix the overall problem.

I just discovered Guild Wars 2 a couple of weeks ago, and I've been playing it for free, until last night. I reached level 80 on my first character a few days ago, but I haven't finished the personal story because I find it too challenging. I need better gear (my gear is typically around level 70, masterwork quality), and I need to develop more personal skill, in order to finish the personal story, I think. I've liked the game so much so far that yesterday I decided to buy it, thinking that the developers deserve my money, even though I'm far from finishing the free-to-play content. But, as soon as I bought it, this pop-up started appearing, every time I exit combat. Apparently I can make it go away by completing the first chapter of either expansion. But I doubt I'm strong enough to do either of those chapters; I'm so wimpy I can't even finish the personal story! So I expect it will be at least a hundred hours of play before I can make this pop-up go away. I now regret buying this game. It was more fun free-to-play. I have an offer for ArenaNet: I will fix this bug, if you let me. I'm a very experienced programmer, and I'm very good at finding and fixing other programmers' bugs. I estimate it would take me about two hours of work to find and fix this bug (a very rough estimate). Just give me an NDA to sign, give me the source code, and I expect I'll be able to give you a patch in less than 24 hours--for free.