Increased latency during high-population local events.

[windbliss.3158]

As of the start of this week-long event "World Boss Rush", I have been experiencing an unusually longer-than-normal latency in regards to skill responses and other functions. However, when reviewing Resource Monitor, I am not experiencing local lag. I am to assume the servers maintaining these maps are at a higher load than previously expected.

Nothing can be done on the local end, as even the boss telegraphs are also delayed in the view of the player. Reactions to these telegraphs are also delayed, which is detrimental to those who have difficulty adjusting to these changes.

This issue was also apparent at the first few weeks of Living World S4E3, but notably the Inquest Mk.II Golem at Mt. Maelstrom, as the defeat of the world boss carried a crucial component to the Roller Beetle. However, it was not as severe as it is now, since the high load is taxing the map capacity.

[Ayrilana.1396]

Check your internet connection to make sure it's performing as it should. Pinging the GW2 servers couldn't hurt as well. Pay attention to any packet loss.

Edit: Found this: https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/201862998

[LordEnki.9283]

I'm afraid you may be experiencing the best that Amazon servers gets you. The fact of the matter is, and yes fact, is that ping and latency increased for many after GW2 changed server farms quite a while ago. Unfortunately MO made it clear they had no intention of rectifying that move.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"LordEnki.9283" said:I'm afraid you may be experiencing the best that Amazon servers gets you. The fact of the matter is, and yes fact, is that ping and latency increased for many after GW2 changed server farms quite a while ago. Unfortunately MO made it clear they had no intention of rectifying that move.

On the contrary, average ping and latency decreased for the community (even as it increased for some, it decreased for more people). Additionally, in many cases, the increased latency originally wasn't due to using Amazing/AWS, but because of the transition; apparently some networks are slow to update to recognize the change.

---

There's a lot of internet between you & ANet; the net is built in a way that multiple companies handle your traffic and any one of them could be dropping the ball. So regardless of what others are experiencing (good or bad), your situation needs its own troubleshooting:

• Open a Support Ticket
• Run PingPlotter or something similar to collect data for ANet and add that to your ticket.
• Optional: also post screens/results on the forums (sometimes a fellow player can diagnose the issue)
• Optional: try your own troubleshooting

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

Previous comments by ANet Support about thow they troubleshoot.

GMMagister wrote on Reddit (emphasis added)one of the first things support does for connectivity/lag issues is run a ping test which shows the speeds and packet loss on every step of the way from your computer to our servers. If this test shows the AWS servers behaving poorly, the agents should be escalating the tickets to me in the main office so I can chat with the server team.

However, if they are giving you other instructions, then there's probably high ping times or packet loss on the hops within your network that we're trying to resolve first. Even if it's not the only thing at work, we still need to remove the possibility first since it can muddy the data that we get from the servers further down the line.

I can't speak for every agent since we get newbies occasionally who might still make mistakes (yes, we employ human beings - please be nice to them!), but in general this is the process that should be followed.

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Further Reading

• Stephen Clarke-Wilson, on his own ping from Seattle (spoiler alert: his route goes through Dallas (location of old datacenter) on the way to Virginia (location of Amazon AWS) )
• Same guy, on ping for ANet devs](https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/7doj1l/anet_can_we_please_get_an_actual_way_of_checking/dq0g4ax/)
• Also same guy, explaining why the change to Amazon is temporarily affecting people's connection (ISP/backbone issues, not the servers themselves or their location)

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Stephen Clarke-Wilson commenting more recently about ping (on r/guildwars, but the ideas still apply) (poster's note: I made some minor formatting changes)

We moved to AWS. The AWS servers are awesome - they are the latest generation. In addition, we spun up more than we should really need, based on CPU. In spite of all that, two things have happened:

(1) a bug in [Guild Wars 1] since launch seems to show up more often than it did, which causes some lag. Extra servers help but does not fix that.(2) Anytime we move datacenters internet routing gets messed up and it is substantially out of our control. When we moved Guild Wars from Los Angeles to Dallas, our own routes from the studio still went down to LA and then to Dallas! It’s like the internet has some kind of memory and is slow to adapt.

The best thing you can do is try a free VPN (like ProXPN) and see if it improves your connectivity and ping. Using a VPN seems to get around the bad routing effect (which also gets better over time). The internet is a complicated beast; I heard recently that about 1,000 routing changes a minute occur around the world. Oh my.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

Just an educated guess from my site: I think the problem is not bandwidth but the CPU usage of the server itself. This gets a massive spike when a huge amount of players start to spam every skill they have at the same time when a world boss appears during this event.

[windbliss.3158]

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:Check your internet connection to make sure it's performing as it should. Pinging the GW2 servers couldn't hurt as well. Pay attention to any packet loss.

Edit: Found this: https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/201862998

My connection to the game turns out to be fine. However, a lot of the problems I am experiencing is delayed responses once the map area reaches high population. Everywhere else, I experience no issues at all. I have checked my ping via resource monitor and I am not getting any more latency than I should be getting on the client side of things.

To iterate on the other end, yeah, the loading times on the server seem to affect more than just me. Just recently, we had a slew of people face dropped skill inputs due to the server latency. So I know it isn't just me with this.

Premise: I generally experience 40-50ms. During high-pop, I might hit 70-80ms, but I can still use my skills without any problems. However, in these cases with the world boss rush, despite my 70-80ms, it sometimes takes me 2+ seconds (if this were a client-side problem I'd be facing 1500+ ping, which isn't the case) to even execute a profession or utility skill.

So it's not me. It's them. And yes, the server is processing a LOT of requests.

[Blocki.4931]

I played for 4 hours yesterday and my ping never went above 60. Just saying. Servers dont selectively decide that you will suffer because of them. There are many potential causes and blanket statements like "Welp, amazon servers" don't make much sense.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

this is just what wvw players see on a regular basis. The servers can not keep up. It is not a matter of the user's connection. In fact after intel's SPECTRE and MELTDOWN screwup and all the cloud vendors panic patching, performance took a big hit - and never recovered.

[Ayrilana.1396]

@TheQuickFox.3826 said:Just an educated guess from my site: I think the problem is not bandwidth but the CPU usage of the server itself. This gets a massive spike when a huge amount of players start to spam every skill they have at the same time when a world boss appears during this event.

It’d be affecting all players and not just a percentage of that were the case. I have no experienced any skill lag.

[Ayrilana.1396]

@altermaven.7385 said:

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:Check your internet connection to make sure it's performing as it should. Pinging the GW2 servers couldn't hurt as well. Pay attention to any packet loss.

Edit: Found this:

https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/201862998

My connection to the game turns out to be fine. However, a lot of the problems I am experiencing is delayed responses once the map area reaches high population. Everywhere else, I experience no issues at all. I have checked my ping via resource monitor and I am not getting any more latency than I should be getting on the client side of things.

To iterate on the other end, yeah, the loading times on the server seem to affect more than just me. Just recently, we had a slew of people face dropped skill inputs due to the server latency. So I know it isn't just me with this.

Premise:

I generally experience 40-50ms. During high-pop, I might hit 70-80ms, but I can still use my skills without any problems. However, in these cases with the world boss rush, despite my 70-80ms, it sometimes takes me 2+ seconds (if this were a client-side problem I'd be facing 1500+ ping, which isn't the case) to even execute a profession or utility skill.

So it's not me. It's them. And yes, the server is processing a LOT of requests.

Im in the same maps as those claiming to have skill lag but I’m not seeing it. How is it that I’m immune to it but everyone else isn’t? On the flip side of that, why can’t it just be on your end between your PC and the servers?

I’ll point out that you can have decent latency but still experience packet loss.

[VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.]

and I can point out that up to Frankfurt I do not see any packet loss and still have severe skill lag.

Question Ayrilana, are you using skills that need to be channeled?

[Ayrilana.1396]

@"VAHNeunzehnsechundsiebzig.3618" said:and I can point out that up to Frankfurt I do not see any packet loss and still have severe skill lag.

Question Ayrilana, are you using skills that need to be channeled?

Just did SB with staff ele and the channel skills (Meteor Shower & Fire Overload) went off without any delay.

Edit: May not be much of a test since they updated the map capacities today. I was using rev last night and none of those skills had issues activating but then I don't believe any of them were channels. Typically when players have skill lag, it affects pretty much all skills but auto attacks. Even then, sometimes auto attacks are impacted.

[AnonBackStabber.8536]

I can be in EB, and get horrendous lag (3-10s+) in zergs, then immediately switch over to a BL and ping is great in zergs - long term. If I then switch back to EB, guess what - ayup, 3-10s+ pings...

Hell, I can get lagged out in my empty home instance, as well as in the empty guild instance - here the lag is significantly less, but a sort of constant 300ms-1s spiking. Problem started about the time of the warclaw mount intro - never had these issues before, and speedtests to east coast servers are fine (60ms). This does seem to be a server side issue, especially if these Amazon servers require some sort of special new connectivity which isn't completely implemented yet (network updates yada yada)...