Amazon Web Services is ruining the game for Over Seas players.

[Crinn.7864]

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

@Fatalyz.7168 said:

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

@Vegeta.2653 said:ArenaNet decided to move to Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Nani?

Are they running significant portions of the game infrastructure in AWS, or just leveraging it for API / periph applications?

The former doesn't sound like a thing you'd do for a mmo.

Running the game in AWS.

When you do a /IP in game, a lot of the higher ping maps are returning IPs that belong to AWS. Doing pings, I've noticed that the increase in latency for me, is when my traffic hits the Washington (Seattle) area (it's still registered to AWS), it adds 100-200 ms on my ping, every other hop all the way to Virginia, seemed good to me.

That sounds.... less than optimal.

I'm willing to bet AWS has better DDoS protection than the old NCsoft servers. Which given how much DDoS problems the game had last year, might be part of the reason.

[Zaklex.6308]

The other thing about switching to AWS from NCSoft is that the servers themselves are newer and faster, and most likely AWS has a built-in contract to keep them constantly top of the line. As for being lower cost vs NCSoft, if the equipment is newer and faster, and costs are spread out over more customers then yes, costs would be lower. Besides, problems with lag and latency almost always have to do with routing and almost never to do with the server(s).

[Hibiskus.8294]

europe here...i thought it was just my pc getting weaker since it is older, but then i realized that this not the real problem, before i had never problems with gw2, now i have longer loading times.... and i have map loading issues and some ping problems...sometimes even my skills wont work (instead the pressed button flashes the whole time...when the lag is over the skill is casted...)....i set all options exept one to low....before i could play with options on medium.... good that these lags with the pressed buttons are just in larger events.....and not every time....

My ping was constant but now i realized it sometimes go up to 2000 - 5000....also my fps before was constant 26 - 30, now most time it is between 15 - 26....(ok, that with the fps could have something to do with the pof release since games are getting updates, but the ping is not normal...)Well anyway, i currently save money to get a better pc.....so i hope that these problems are gone when i get it...

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

If you are having problems, please use pingplotter and ship its data to ANet via a support ticket. If they or Amazon/AWS are at fault (and it's entirely possible they are not), they need those details to address the issue.

It's fine to rant here, but we literally cannot do anything other than speculate. It's not enough for ANet to be aware that your latency is painful; they need to diagnose the origins of that pain. Make it easier for them by starting a support ticket even before posting on the forums/reddit/map chat.

[ReaverKane.7598]

I'm in EU, and in average i haven't had any changes in my ping.There have been, however, several occasions since PoF launched where the game had higher, or extremely high latency (ranging from 200ms to 4000+) for long, but isolated, periods of time.Also, not long after PoF i've noticed a change in casting, the game stopped registering some of the key strokes if done fast, like i'd do my regular rotation and a skill gets missed out. I find myself having to pace slower than pre PoF.

[Lexi.1398]

I live in the UK and haven't noticed any difference, tbh.

[Ayumi Spender.1082]

I just want one question answered...Was the move before Halloween?

I'm only asking as I've been seeing loading/lag issues starting around Halloween and "almost" gotten used to it by now except when I see loading taking like 2 minutes sometimes to the point I've caught myself going "It's not supposed to take this long! Here! I just loaded a perfect image of the map in my damn head and random people in weird infusions! Why are you taking this long?!"

[Menadena.7482]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:I'm a bit confused how Texas (mid-US) is closer to the EU than Virginia (East Coast). Likely, many EU players use the EU servers, anyway, which only moved a block or so.

Network paths speeds do not bear much of a relation to geography. While VA traffic would be near several trunks going to the EU, it does not directly go through that trunk to the final destination (also remember their may be traffic congestion). Conversely, other parts of the country may have more direct paths to how they get to the EU (as well as less competition to use those paths).

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

@Menadena.7482 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:I'm a bit confused how Texas (mid-US) is closer to the EU than Virginia (East Coast). Likely, many EU players use the EU servers, anyway, which only moved a block or so.

Network paths speeds do not bear much of a relation to geography. While VA traffic would be near several trunks going to the EU, it does not directly go through that trunk to the final destination (also remember their may be traffic congestion). Conversely, other parts of the country may have more direct paths to how they get to the EU (as well as less competition to use those paths).

Then, the OP makes little sense when he claims the servers being moved closer, (or farther) made a difference.

[Menadena.7482]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:

@Menadena.7482 said:

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:I'm a bit confused how Texas (mid-US) is closer to the EU than Virginia (East Coast). Likely, many EU players use the EU servers, anyway, which only moved a block or so.

Network paths speeds do not bear much of a relation to geography. While VA traffic would be near several trunks going to the EU, it does not directly go through that trunk to the final destination (also remember their may be traffic congestion). Conversely, other parts of the country may have more direct paths to how they get to the EU (as well as less competition to use those paths).

Then, the OP makes little sense when he claims the servers being moved closer, (or farther) made a difference.

It would be entirely random. The servers being moved geographically nearer the OP might be a shorter network path ..... but they might be an even shorter network path for someone much further away geographically.

[Healix.5819]

@Ayumi Spender.1082 said:I just want one question answered...Was the move before Halloween?

Use of Amazon's servers was first seen in June, but it was only for a few HoT maps at first, then random ones. PoF is when they really started using it, as the entirety of PoF's open world was launched on Amazon, with the story instances still at NCSoft, which showed their old limitation. Amazon only became more common after, and I personally rarely saw the old servers by Halloween, though a few still remained.

[Rennie.6750]

If anything, my experience is better. I rarely had any latency spikes, now, I never have any.

AWS runs top tier servers. Among the best in the world, probably much better than what ANet could possibly afford. If there's an issue, it's probably not the servers or the game's code since it's running well for many of us. If the servers were the problem, everyone would have a bad time, as the servers do not have favourites and pick one guy and say "hey let's allocate more resources to that guy, I like him!". No. It's the typical ISP issue. Your ISP may not like Amazon enough to put big enough cables to connect to Amazont's infrastructures. That seems far more likely than some conspiracy theories about servers becoming conscious beings and electing a few of us for an incredible experience.

I just pay for a good ISP and I know they have excellent peering for the most part. That works well enough for me. Rarely have any lags in online games.

[Draconerus.9867]

I live in Utah and have been noticing large lag spikes periodically as well. I am on a 200mbs connection with Comcast and this did not occur until recently.

[AliamRationem.5172]

I don't know when it started exactly, but I recently started noticing when there are a lot of players around I get lag that never happened before. It's most noticeable when entering combat while mounted because it will do the mount engage animation, then rubberband me back and then forward again. Sometimes it actually bugs my bar out, too and I find myself dismounted, in combat, but with the mount's ability bar instead of my own. It doesn't go away until I take enough damage to kill the mount's health bar. Very strange.

If I had to guess, this all started happening in the past few weeks.

[Zedek.8932]

@"Archdevil.1748" said:I am from Bulgaria EU and the game is pretty much unplayable for me. The assets load very slowly and I usually bump into invisible obstacles that have not loaded yet. Maps take forever to load and not to mention LA and DR take usually between 3-7 minutes. And I am sure my ISP is ok and the problem is on Anet`s side :( I am going back to Gw1 until we have some solution. And please someone in Anet to explain what is going on!!! All these problems started a month ago!

Excelsior.I have the same problems, but it's not connected to my connection, it's just the game's really bad state when it comes to performance. The loading screen vanishes and I literally start in space with only a skybox. Every tree, every bit of texture, everything has the typical Unreal Engine "from washed out to HQ" transitions of textures (on-the-fly loading) going on. I have hard drive access all the way and still the game pumps me out into the game too early. Opened a support ticket, nothing happened. Started with PoF... Of course I also bump into things and suddenly a whole road with 5 buildings (and the one I ran into) pop up, but still I see my HDD lamp not even flashing or flickering, it's just on 100%.

[ham.8209]

just a idea to maybe help some of you people out with your lag problems over seas and in the EU and Na sides too. the best way to fix this problem is get your self CATE6 Ethernet cable . if you not got it already and then to top it off put your fire walls to super high and block all unneeded ports threw your windows fire wall settings

here is the amazon link to buy the CATE6 cable https://www.amazon.com/RiteAV-Network-Ethernet-Certified-Tested/dp/B0026HSQ3I

hope that helps you all out to enjoy the game more better good luck :3

[Rennie.6750]

@Zedek.8932 said:

@"Archdevil.1748" said:I am from Bulgaria EU and the game is pretty much unplayable for me. The assets load very slowly and I usually bump into invisible obstacles that have not loaded yet. Maps take forever to load and not to mention LA and DR take usually between 3-7 minutes. And I am sure my ISP is ok and the problem is on Anet`s side :( I am going back to Gw1 until we have some solution. And please someone in Anet to explain what is going on!!! All these problems started a month ago!

Excelsior.I have the same problems, but it's not connected to my connection, it's just the game's really bad state when it comes to performance. The loading screen vanishes and I literally start in space with only a skybox. Every tree, every bit of texture, everything has the typical Unreal Engine "from washed out to HQ" transitions of textures (on-the-fly loading) going on. I have hard drive access all the way and still the game pumps me out into the game too early. Opened a support ticket, nothing happened. Started with PoF... Of course I also bump into things and suddenly a whole road with 5 buildings (and the one I ran into) pop up, but still I see my HDD lamp not even flashing or flickering, it's just on 100%.

That would be solved with having the game on a SSD. Loading times are under 20s for me (and it's still too long to my taste lol).

[Azure The Heartless.3261]

@"ham.8209" said:just a idea to maybe help some of you people out with your lag problems over seas and in the EU and Na sides too. the best way to fix this problem is get your self CATE6 Ethernet cable . if you not got it already and then to top it off put your fire walls to super high and block all unneeded ports threw your windows fire wall settings

here is the amazon link to buy the CATE6 cable https://www.amazon.com/RiteAV-Network-Ethernet-Certified-Tested/dp/B0026HSQ3I

hope that helps you all out to enjoy the game more better good luck :3

Changing the type of ethernet cable from a cat 5e (the standard) to a cat 6 (you use to connect to your router will do very little to reduce lag if it is not your bottleneck. The majority of people having spontaneous lag issues are having them because the path to the game servers, which is outside of their internal network, has deteriorated in some way.

If you were playing fine before, and now suddenly lag, changing the cable closest to you won't do much, if anything.

[Morlhach.4521]

Players in Belgium have suffered of huge lags problems since that migration but it could be solved by the Internet service provider. The most difficult was to pass through the call center. Once a network specialist could examine the route over the internet he quickly could solve the problem. NB : providing a traceroute to the ISP or at least the IP of the server is a requirement to be helped.

[costepj.5120]

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:

@"ham.8209" said:just a idea to maybe help some of you people out with your lag problems over seas and in the EU and Na sides too. the best way to fix this problem is get your self CATE6 Ethernet cable . if you not got it already and then to top it off put your fire walls to super high and block all unneeded ports threw your windows fire wall settings

here is the amazon link to buy the CATE6 cable

https://www.amazon.com/RiteAV-Network-Ethernet-Certified-Tested/dp/B0026HSQ3I

hope that helps you all out to enjoy the game more better good luck :3

Changing the type of ethernet cable from a cat 5e (the standard) to a cat 6 (you use to connect to your router will do very little to reduce lag if it is not your bottleneck.

Maybe they had the idea of running Cat 6 all the way to the new DC? :)

[Vayne.8563]

I used to sit at around 220-230 ping. I'm now sitting at 280-300 ping, on the average. This itself wouldn't be a problem if I didn't get lag spikes of over 1000 ping. Not often but often enough to concern me. It happened twice while trying to do Palawadan and I had to just log out completely.

[Leablo.2651]

@Zaklex.6308 said:The other thing about switching to AWS from NCSoft is that the servers themselves are newer and faster, and most likely AWS has a built-in contract to keep them constantly top of the line. As for being lower cost vs NCSoft, if the equipment is newer and faster, and costs are spread out over more customers then yes, costs would be lower. Besides, problems with lag and latency almost always have to do with routing and almost never to do with the server(s).

If Anet had secured a service guarantee better than or even equivalent to what they had in Texas, they would have already said so in the Reddit threads by now. As a cloud/virtualization service, it is largely irrelevant what hardware AWS has anyway because it's being split across multiple applications and you're only guaranteed the service level that you contracted for. Problems with lag and latency were traditionally issues with routing because industrial servers were traditionally running on dedicated hosts; with AWS and the cloud market in general, it will only become increasingly true that lag and latency are problems that will exist on the server as well.

[OneYenShort.3189]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:If you are having problems, please use pingplotter and ship its data to ANet via a support ticket. If they or Amazon/AWS are at fault (and it's entirely possible they are not), they need those details to address the issue.

I miss the old version of the freeware version of pingplotter. You could have several plots to different sites active all at the same time. Great for trying to determine home, ISP, network hope, or server related issue.

[OneYenShort.3189]

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:If you were playing fine before, and now suddenly lag, changing the cable closest to you won't do much, if anything.

That is dependent upon your home. True story: Friend of mine always had problems playing this game but streaming video and the like seemed to act just fine. Well one day his kids did something and that is when he noticed his network cable. Sucker was beat up frayed in spots, pinched under stuff.... So he got rid of that one, fixed the running of the wire, and suddenly the game played great. No more drops, better ping rate, etc.

I agree with your premise of cat5e to 6 will do very little, however, doing a double check of your cable is something cheep to do and should be done from time to time, depending. In my case, I've got a cat that will chew wires to get attention. So yeah, some of the more obvious lines are wrapped in conduit for protection.

[Khisanth.2948]

@OneYenShort.3189 said:

@Azure The Heartless.3261 said:If you were playing fine before, and now suddenly lag, changing the cable closest to you won't do much, if anything.

That is dependent upon your home. True story: Friend of mine always had problems playing this game but streaming video and the like seemed to act just fine. Well one day his kids did something and that is when he noticed his network cable. Sucker was beat up frayed in spots, pinched under stuff.... So he got rid of that one, fixed the running of the wire, and suddenly the game played great. No more drops, better ping rate, etc.

I agree with your premise of cat5e to 6 will do very little, however, doing a double check of your cable is something cheep to do and should be done from time to time, depending. In my case, I've got a cat that will chew wires to get attention. So yeah, some of the more obvious lines are wrapped in conduit for protection.

Streaming anything is also a poor canary. :)