What is up with this skill lag?

[Dadnir.5038]

39 minutes ago, Aeolus.3615 said:

The issue with the lag is blobs minstrells and spam all perma boons, what Anet wants to excell is the problem...

Nope, skill lag is created by "visual effects" amongst which the number of characters involved in a fight. Each minion is a load in itself. Each new spec bringing new visual effects also tend to worsen skill lag.

The truth is that we are in a cycle where the devs introduce new visual effects that create skill lag and ping issue. Then they spend time to optimize and reduce the visual effect enough for skill lag and ping issue to no longer be crippling before introducing new visual effects.

[Aeolus.3615]

1 hour ago, Dadnir.5038 said:

Nope, skill lag is created by "visual effects" amongst which the number of characters involved in a fight. Each minion is a load in itself. Each new spec bringing new visual effects also tend to worsen skill lag.

The truth is that we are in a cycle where the devs introduce new visual effects that create skill lag and ping issue. Then they spend time to optimize and reduce the visual effect enough for skill lag and ping issue to no longer be crippling before introducing new visual effects.

yeah i just experienced huge drop in fps  on 15 vs 15 its certain skills that completelly kill it  that's true, when that burst happens game client feels gona crash.

Altough quickness with stealth on /off/on and so on with f** up rendering on the enemy side when used in larger scale with all the all skill clutter laggin.

Expect more boons and spam lol... sux all this spam gameplay with all perma boons and the lag.

Edited January 30 by Aeolus.3615

[ZenDrake.8316]

On 1/30/2024 at 9:37 PM, Dadnir.5038 said:

Nope, skill lag is created by "visual effects" amongst which the number of characters involved in a fight. Each minion is a load in itself. Each new spec bringing new visual effects also tend to worsen skill lag.

The server has nothing to do with visual effects, your client does the work. The server only tells your client which spells have been cast since the last tick. Skill lag = server lag, as in your skills just don't get cast (and keep blinking, for example). Stuttering or FPS drops is something different.

Skill lag is this bad partly because Chrono is very strong in the meta. Their clones create new entities that the server also has to handle (AI), increasing the load and reducing server tick. The more skill effects (not the visual part, the actual damage/barrier/boon/whatever part) the server has to calculate per tick, the longer the calculation of each tick takes.

Learn your terminology, people.

Edited February 3 by ZenDrake.8316

[Lucy.3728]

I didn't have the problems with lags I've been having now for about 2-3 months. In beta it was worst and sometimes affected most of the squad.

Today I had to leave a squad because of it. Unplayable for me.

And it happens so randomly. Except that many players are involved there is no pattern, as in it is not always when many players are involved.
I can have 3 servers fighting for and within sm on ebg just fine but then on the homeland of some enemy in their homekeep I get those lags. In the first beta week we got this on red borderland fighting for the spawn tower. Otherwise it usually happens in some home keep.

And the lags are of different variety too. Pressing/spamming skills gets ignored, skills get queued, having a ping of like 4500, having people moving very jumpy.

I can play with low fps if I have to, but not with above problems. And adjusting my graphics to minimum doesn't help. Leaving the area with many players helps.

Edited February 3 by Lucy.3728

[Widebody.5071]

On 1/21/2024 at 1:23 AM, Widebody.5071 said:

Skill lag and colored dots bouncing around, along with cannons spinning around like tops, and losing max range on your weapons.

I guess the cannon spinning is to keep players from spamming cannon attacks. If you hit a cannon attack before the cooldown it starts spinning like a top, then you'll have to leave then reuse the cannon. Another plus for attackers, but at least I know what happening now.

Edited February 5 by Widebody.5071

[Widebody.5071]

On 1/26/2024 at 1:33 PM, Leger.3724 said:

It's great and no one will be punished. They just accidentally decided to stack their roster with it. Clearly not intentional.

Is that what happened with Cele? Dang...

[Vintoleth.6170]

same here. with the exception of EoD metas when they launched (which has since been fixed), i've never had problems with lag since launch. 

but for about the last 3 weeks or so WvW (only!!) has been pretty much unplayable. when a fight happens, things just start lagging. skills wont activate, and by the time any thing moves, the enemy has teleported across the screen to me and im dead. 

is there a special reason why this is happening now when its never happened before? i know we had a wvw bonus event recently. was that related?

really would like to go back to playing wvw cause its sorta fun, but yeah, pretty much unplayable atm 😞

[Leger.3724]

On 2/5/2024 at 1:51 PM, Widebody.5071 said:

Is that what happened with Cele? Dang...

There's an obvious difference between building a team comp to intentionally cause the GW2 engine to lag because of how it handles player abilities and a group using specific armor types. If someone is pressing their buttons and they have celestial on and beat me it is what it is, I can put on celestial. If a group of players knows they can't beat another group of players and lags out the GW2 engine at the start of a fight to make it a dice roll where they have an advantage because they know what they're about to do..... and it doesn't matter if I press buttons outside of WASD because my abilities won't go off because they're in the game engine queue buffer... that's bug exploitation and it should be something that gets people banned.

I do wonder how many people here participated in abusing it given how contained the response seems to be when you compare it to the pages about willbender or boonball.

Edited February 7 by Leger.3724

[RaveOnYou.2819]

yeah lag is serious issue, but i think its not just lag. i mean i dont see ping in my arcdps metrics or ping spikes. game just doesnt respond, skills doesnt respond even mouse input behaves strangely. is mouse behaviour also relevant to you guys?

[SweetPotato.7456]

Skill Lag! Happens this whole day 9th February 2024, finally was kick off the game. 

 

Edited February 9 by SweetPotato.7456

[Lucy.3728]

This reset was awful (riverside, eu).

Zerg vs zerg vs zerg on green borderland and half of the squad gave feedback that they can't get skills out. Me too.
I set graphics to lowest and then could at least get the skills of my current weapon (gs) out but couldn't switch the weapon nor did the F-keys trigger and so I didn't get any new energy as rev and was useless.

We avoided a threesome then but even just vs blue or just vs green many had skill lags.

Commander asked in teamchat and blue borderland had similar problems, ebg seemed fine.

[SweetPotato.7456]

12 hours ago, Lucy.3728 said:

This reset was awful (riverside, eu).

Zerg vs zerg vs zerg on green borderland and half of the squad gave feedback that they can't get skills out. Me too.
I set graphics to lowest and then could at least get the skills of my current weapon (gs) out but couldn't switch the weapon nor did the F-keys trigger and so I didn't get any new energy as rev and was useless.

We avoided a threesome then but even just vs blue or just vs green many had skill lags.

Commander asked in teamchat and blue borderland had similar problems, ebg seemed fine.

same ET NA

[Dawdler.8521]

15 hours ago, Lucy.3728 said:

I set graphics to lowest

Not gonna change a single thing. 

It's quite simple: Boonballs are strangling WvW. They are the primary cause of lag because Anets combat design philosophy since HoT has been kitten and it's just gotten shittier with every expansion. It doesnt matter if you are engaged in a 1v1 on the other side of the map, if there is a boonball doing their boonball thing anywhere outside of rolling over 2-3 PUG randoms (which granted, is alot of the time), it'll lag.

[Bhrutei.5937]

Call it skill lag, skill queue... whatever it is. Last night was near unplayable on blue map. Before this, skills would usually flash to show they at least acknowledged being activated. Last night clicks/presses were just getting ignored when in a big fight, and the lag was so bad there was a couple second delay in summoning mounts in spawn!

[RisingDawn.5796]

Seemed fine today in T1, Blob vs Blob, but in T5, we couldn't even weapon swap, for at least a few minutes.

[Vintoleth.6170]

had it happen in pvp once today today, but thats the only time its ever happened in pvp, and it never happens in pve/ow.

Its just annoying because wvw becomes unplayable and it doesn't matter the location. i can be running around an empty borderland nowhere near a point, or i could be in a massive battle at SM.  

As mentioned, i too tried turning everything to low and it basically had no effect. 

some lag takes so long that tonight a T1 tower gate went from 100% to 0% while i was waiting for the game to catch up. obviously when it did, i was insta dead from the team rushing in.

people saying boonballs (i don't know what that is) or other things that make it happen and saying its been going on ages, this new lag has only been effecting me for 4 weeks or so, so is  it the same thing?

and the video linked a couple posts up is exactly what is happening to me, but also as mentioned above, now its not even giving the flashing icons to say the skill is queued up to use! 😞

[Zenriwko.2105]

Bro, the game doesn't work, 50 vs 50, and you get 3s skill lag; I cried over it like two years ago already; why the duck is ANET doing nothing about it? Makes you leave the game

The game is unplayable. 🖕

Edited February 18 by Zenriwko.2105

[TheGrimm.5624]

Anet, I would reach out to AWS and ask for a refund or tell them to update the virtual server resources. 

[RisingDawn.5796]

On 2/18/2024 at 12:07 AM, Zenriwko.2105 said:

Bro, the game doesn't work, 50 vs 50, and you get 3s skill lag; I cried over it like two years ago already; why the duck is ANET doing nothing about it? Makes you leave the game

The game is unplayable. 🖕

Yeah, it still is a problem, especially in this meta, outside of Reset night.

[Sleepwalker.1398]

Thank you Anet for another reset with massive lagfest REB BL NA T3.

[Bhrutei.5937]

Anet, fix skill lag please. 

Tonight was UNPLAYABLE on green map GoM/FA/DB.

 

[RisingDawn.5796]

It feels like we've  gone back 7+ years, with the skill lag, that we are experiencing .

Edited February 29 by RisingDawn.5796

[Dawdler.8521]

7 hours ago, RisingDawn.5796 said:

It feels like we've  gone back 7+ years, with the skill lag, that we are experiencing  

Yeah it was pretty horrid yesterday. 

Got to keep PvE servers fully going after the patch so guessing WvW servers are now powered by hopes and prayers.

[Lucy.3728]

I can recommend playing outside of prime time.
I now play from 4pm to 7pm (8pm is prime time) and if I happen to get up early myself, I play a bit before 6am. And since others are doing the same, I've found content and allies to play the usual wvw (no big zergs, but who needs them).
Before I usually played wvw from 6-9pm.
The only time I played during prime time this week was 2 days ago and I had skill lags again.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

On 1/26/2024 at 3:59 PM, SlateSloan.3654 said:

there is nothing such as "skill lag". this term was invented by community to describe something they didnt understand.

for real its only happening that the skill queue is running full and new skills casted during this cant be queued then. Thats why some players can still cast sometimes and others not, the one who can cast just catched the next free queue slot for their skill the others are pressing into a full queue so the skill buttons dont work and it looks like "lag".

there was a time when that happened arcdps gave a queue error message because of that one could literally see that there was a queue overload.

anet tried to solve it with cutting down player numbers per map in the past and called it "test". that was never solved so far and they never gave another update to this. so the "test" is still running after 3,5 years....

 

On 2/3/2024 at 3:44 PM, ZenDrake.8316 said:

The server has nothing to do with visual effects, your client does the work. The server only tells your client which spells have been cast since the last tick. Skill lag = server lag, as in your skills just don't get cast (and keep blinking, for example). Stuttering or FPS drops is something different.

Skill lag is this bad partly because Chrono is very strong in the meta. Their clones create new entities that the server also has to handle (AI), increasing the load and reducing server tick. The more skill effects (not the visual part, the actual damage/barrier/boon/whatever part) the server has to calculate per tick, the longer the calculation of each tick takes.

Learn your terminology, people.

These two quotes here have it correct. It has to do with some kind of que for skills, and the way they get calculated. What makes it better or worse is hard to say...and explanations vary from having to deal with target caps, to number of players...to specific skills...

but the advise I was given when running around with fight guilds was to simply mash your buttons faster and more times than the other side, so that you have a higher likelihood of getting into this que.

Personal observation is that at reset, during 3 way blob fights, is when the skill lag hits the hardest. It seems to sometimes be better on days that aren't reset, but this is just my personal observation and not a hard fact. 

Edited February 29 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684