Skill Lag in WvW [Merged]

[Towelie.9504]

Past week~ or so the skill lag in this game on zerg fights has gotten a lot worse. These aren't even the 3 way SMC zerg fights and often times not even a 2 server map queue vs map queue.

Did Anet drop down the tier level on their AWS instances or something? It's gotten way worse.

[Egorum.9506]

Really? I thought there's been less lag than usual this week. Took this video last night and none of us were lagging at all

[Sugar Min.5834]

I agree with TC. Lately I have been experiencing high ping (800 to 2.5k) quite often. Sometimes the lag got so bad that it's impossible to play even in a small group fight.

[Slick.7164]

Less talk, Less stacking and go fight js

[Luna.6807]

yes. Sunday night in EB everyone DC'd and I've not been able to have working skills when i get close to zerg. What the heck is going on. It's insane and I'm very unhappy.

[CrimsonRise.7650]

It's not happening on EB alone anymore. You can have two zergs clash on a border and another standdng nearby, without setting off a skill and the whole map starts rubber banding.

[Turk.5460]

It was awful on Sunday. All 3 zergs were in or around Bay - and as a roamer trying to pick off reinforcements I had almost 2 seconds from the time I pressed my actions to the time the skill went off. The moment I got far enough away (south sentry island) the lag disappeared. Came back the moment I ventured back to that side of the map while the zergs were blobbing around...

[Player.9621]

run pingplotter next time it happens and try to identify the hop thats failing and forward it to support

[DemonSeed.3528]

Btw, you won't get the lag if it's just around even your own Zerg, but the moment you meet just one enemy player it kicks in, at least for me. Sucks big time.

[hunkamania.7561]

it's not that bad at all these days. They've done a good job with skill lag tbh

[Kaiser.9873]

The T2 match has been really laggy this week. Seems it comes and goes week to week also, which is quite odd.This week has been much worse. Many players in my guild have mentioned it. Far more than usual.

[Bigpapasmurf.5623]

I just want the WvW DC to stop lol

[Gex.9574]

Skill lag in pvp and weapon swap delay and rubberbanding has been happening to me and many others since the sept. 19th patch... this seems to be an ongoing issue and anet seems to not give a shit.

[hunkamania.7561]

It's def getting worse everyday that goes by

[Ni In.6578]

@"Player.9621" said:run pingplotter next time it happens and try to identify the hop thats failing and forward it to support

Not a good measurement. ICMP is processed by a slow data lane or even the controlplane. ICMP is often dropped when the CPU cannot process it or the device just outright ignores ICMP.

ICMP response times are only valid from the final hop (given it responds) and to have a complete picture, you must have responses from both ends of the wire (to determine if the route is asymmetrical or not). For more reading material, see https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/tuesday_steenbergen_troublshootingtraceroute_62.49.pdf.

The key point from the above PDF is: "If there is an actual forwarding issue, the loss or latency will persist across ALL future hops as well."

That is, if you have a hop with 200ms and the hops/destination after that are >200ms, then that hop is a problem. But often what we'll see is a hop that times out and then subsequent hops (or destination) that have more or less acceptable latency.

[Shroud.2307]

It has been random spikes for me since before the WvW event started. Maybe a week or so. Every now and then my ping will spike to 500 - 1k for just a couple seconds then it'll go back to normal. Only happens in WvW and doesn't seem to have anything to do with how many players I'm around. Fortunately it doesn't happen all that often but it's enough to piss me off, especially when it happens just as I begin a fight and I either die or lose 90% of my health while I can't do anything.

I've obviously considered that this may be an issue on my end since I seem to be experiencing something a little different than some other people are but, I'm also apparently not the only one. So I'm assuming it has something to do with one of the recent patches.

This kind of stuff happens sometimes though and seems to usually go away after a little while with nothing said from ANet and everyone forgets about it. So hopefully it gets fixed soon.

[Lonecap.4105]

The sheer amount of times you get skill lag during large fights is NOT acceptable. Atm the game mode is barely playable on reset nights especially, you can practically hear the servers creaking. It's not just me, it's everyone on my server - people on the opposing server. This is entirely down to ArenaNet and the servers they're using. Sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse and right now it's completely broken.

[Archeia.8905]

It's not due to the servers, but the engine having issues handling all the calculations from people smashing buttons last I checked.

[Pelto.9364]

Does your frame rate drop during the lag?

[CrimsonRise.7650]

He's talking about Server lag, not framerate.Either way this game doesn't perform that well, it will drop alot of frames in large scale fights, no matter what CPU you have and the game Servers will start rubberbanding during 2 way fights, with one server standing nearby.

[geist.4126]

It's not the fps that drop but the pings that spike and the skill lag that comes with it. On a normal alpine borderland I'm running with a ping of about 40-50. As soon as I am in EBG and come close to a zerg fight that spikes up from 80 to 200+ and skills don't go off.

[Lonecap.4105]

@Pelto.9364 said:Does your frame rate drop during the lag?

I use an option inside ArcDPS which shows you three metrics: FPS, Ping and Relay Response. My FPS is fine, my ping is on average 80-100ms, but my relay response time often goes down to single digits during these moments of skill lag, even if my ping is fine, which clearly shows the issue is with ArenaNet's servers.

[Zero.3871]

yeah last Friday i simply went offline after couldnt cast just 1 skill in any fight. it is unplayable and simply unfun. but the worse is that skilllaggs are not for everyone the same. there are ever People that can cast nearly every skill without Problems, and other cant cast anything. sometimes i have Problems, sometimes everything is fine on me but 30 other People have Problems. and it is not even symmetric betweens ervers. often 1 Server can freely cast while the enemies Server cant cast anything. wvw is a joke with that.

solution would be so easy, reduce Player cap per fraction to 40-50 per map and skilllaggs would be less often. if you fear for Queues->join a smaller Server, done.

[Blocki.4931]

3 way blob fights aren't very enjoyable because of it, that's true. They're rare enough for me to disregard the issue at least, but the times when it does happen I tend to lose all fun in the mode for the day.

I also don't remember it being an issue in the past, it just recently got worse, no?

[Dawdler.8521]

@Blocki.4931 said:3 way blob fights aren't very enjoyable because of it, that's true. They're rare enough for me to disregard the issue at least, but the times when it does happen I tend to lose all fun in the mode for the day.

I also don't remember it being an issue in the past, it just recently got worse, no?This has quite literally been an issue since the launch of the game in 2012. When 2 regular zergs clash (50 vs 50) the skill queue can usually keep up good enough with minor lag, when three entire zoneblobs clash at the same place however (~200 players) it all falls apart and the entire instance start suffering skill lag.

Is this really all that surprising though? What game do you know of that dump 200 players down on an area the size of just a flag cap in a game such as Battlefield, lol.