WvW Performance and Map Cap Testing

[DemonSeed.3528]

Dismal performance right now in EU T1, getting 2-4k pings

[MarzAttakz.9608]

Last night on EB (Eu Desolation) anywhere near a meta blob and my ping would skyrocket between 3000 - 4000. Move away from the blob and back to 200ms. Fucking ridiculous that you would build classes that literally shit boons non-stop. You want to fix the lag? Absolutely gut every single boon-share / corrupt / condi spam meta build there is. Your hardware just can't handle it.

[Klypto.1703]

Yeah I'll just say the game was fun while it lasted but its pretty much done and over with now the whole send of season 4 was basically the game coming to a close. I'm just not big on playing another version of condi wars 2 with massive lag the first few times was enough but I'm not about to keep playing this trash.

[Svarty.8019]

@Limodriver.4106 said:time to bring out more wvw maps to reduce the Q size. Time to make eotm one of the wvw map.

I was never a fan of EotM, and having recently taken a little walk around in it (I got killed by some random, surprise champ), it felt SO old no mounts. It's really amazing what mounts did for the game.

[Very Offensive Name.6472]

@Cal Cohen.2358 said:Hi Everyone,

We know skill lag is an issue in WvW. We’re actively investigating performance improvements and optimizations, but this is not a quick process and is going to take some time. While these investigations are ongoing, we want to see if there are other opportunities for some short-term improvements.

We’re planning to run some tests to see what performance gains we can get by reducing the total number of players on the map. The current target for the initial test is with EU reset on this Friday, July 10, where we’ll be temporarily reducing the map caps in WvW for both NA and EU by 21 (7 per team) and monitoring the impact on performance over the next week. The key feedback that we’ll need from all of you is to get a sense of how the maps feel with fewer players. We still want WvW to feel like WvW, and we realize that any reduction to player counts will have a negative impact on the overall gameplay experience. We will be weighing that negative impact against the positives of any performance improvements to determine if it makes sense to move forward with lower map caps beyond this initial test. If we do move forward with lower map caps, we will also be keeping a close eye on queue times and will increase the number of tiers as needed.

This is not a long-term solution. Even if we find that reducing map caps leads to big performance improvements and the impact on gameplay is minimal, we will be continuing our investigations into performance with the plan of incrementally restoring map caps as improvements are made.

Que times have pretty much killed my desire to play WvW waited 35 minutes to get into EBG last night I normally just play 45 minutes to an hour after I get off work. When I am in I do not see a performance difference however I have have very little performance issues in GW2 any game type. East coast USA decent PC & about 150mbp internet service hardwired to LAN not wireless. I often wonder how much of these complaints are user side or something ANET can actually do about the games performance.

[DemonSeed.3528]

Hello, any word yet on this? Please?

[DemonSeed.3528]

Thank you for the update!https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/111982/an-update-on-game-performance-issues

[CrimsonRise.7650]

Reset on Green BL in T3 EU was like playing wvw before the player cap change.

It was literally unplayable, with the same skill lag you would get when two zergs clash, with a third Zerg standing nearby, who doesn't even use any or little skills.

[DKRathalos.9625]

T1 Is nightmare, as soon as you see blob you immediately got skill lag and can't cast anything.

[DemonSeed.3528]

Lag is reverting back to the "pre-performance testing" kind of lag. This is really bad. Please. Do. Something. Unplayable.

[krz.1327]

maybe it's amazon trying to get rid of mmo competition

[kamikharzeeh.8016]

shouldn't lags rather get better? they should slow but steady try to add more server capacity for the steam start, or do i understand sth wrong here thaha

[CrimsonRise.7650]

Once again, Reset was really, really bad tonight on the EU side, mostly in T3.

[DemonSeed.3528]

I felt it both eu (T1/T4) and na, right now na (T2/T3/T4)side hitting 1k pings.At time of this post, lag in T2 is kind of clearing up a little.

[DemonSeed.3528]

EU T4EB, server ip 18.157.214.248So far it feels much smoother this reset. I am not experiencing the lag hell of the previous weeks, even in 3 ways. Will keep checking my other matchups too when I get to them.

[Omel.5204]

Im pretty sure that since the target cap was reduced the skill lag has diminished a lot, even on 3-way blob fights. But reset still seems to have problems handling the large amount of players and we saw it yesterday as many persons got disconnected around 30 minutes into the matchup (NA servers), strangely from across all the servers. Maybe we should consider increasing the tiers in order to make reset less crowded, or something like a 2 hour event at EoTM to encourage guilds going there on resets.

[Strider Pj.2193]

@Omel.5204 said:Im pretty sure that since the target cap was reduced the skill lag has diminished a lot, even on 3-way blob fights. But reset still seems to have problems handling the large amount of players and we saw it yesterday as many persons got disconnected around 30 minutes into the matchup (NA servers), strangely from across all the servers. Maybe we should consider increasing the tiers in order to make reset less crowded, or something like a 2 hour event at EoTM to encourage guilds going there on resets.

Considering NA has two servers linked that are both ‘full’ maybe we do that with a decreased threshold for ‘full’ and if a server goes full, relink immediately.

[Dawdler.8521]

@Omel.5204 said:Im pretty sure that since the target cap was reduced the skill lag has diminished a lot, even on 3-way blob fights. But reset still seems to have problems handling the large amount of players and we saw it yesterday as many persons got disconnected around 30 minutes into the matchup (NA servers), strangely from across all the servers. Maybe we should consider increasing the tiers in order to make reset less crowded, or something like a 2 hour event at EoTM to encourage guilds going there on resets.Resets are resets, but you are still limited by map cap. Reducing server size wont matter. I mean Anet could just map cap to 10 too... but it'd be pretty boring.

Anyway, these months I've definetly noticed a distinct reduction in the warp and skill lag, but on the other hand you really notice the fps drops because of that. There's still lag with skills being slow/speeding up too.

[CrimsonRise.7650]

Yeah, it's definitely not great on reset night at least.

[DemonSeed.3528]

It is somewhat backwards for me, where on resets it's kind of smooth but as the weekday starts it progresses back to skill lags.

[vonhellsing.2819]

Why the DOLAR of the smaller server Player worth less than the DOLAR of the full server player?Simply terrible the bad idea of ​​changing servers traffic, in the name of the BEST GAME EXPERIENCE.Where smaller servers can only get half slots as big servers, low bandwich huge lag in any RESET, and I have 1mbit of internet, and all reset after this new BEST GAME EXPERIENCE in WVW give a huge lag, where is the BEST GAME EXPERIENCE IN THIS?WVW servers allows a limit of 200 players, if a full server enters with 80, another with 80 and the smaller ones just will have 40 slots and already have queues before starting to enter players all reset is same huge queue without players inside server.Would you like to understand where the SF player's DOLAR for example is worth less than YAQS, MAGUMA, or other FULL SERVER?the name this is COST REDUCE, no BEST EXPERIENCE in GAME PLAY! I dont know why i back with my guild to GW2, why we expend 2,8K gems month per player to support company, if WVW player all time are punished per ARENANET, As the game's worst rewards, try survive just of WVW, i hate PVE, i hate JUMP PUZZLE, i dont like farm, grind, i dont have time to living inside GW2. I love play WVW but if i dont stay in FULL server, if we help small servers dont die, Arenanet punish us with 1/3 some times 1/2 capacity to put players in WVW. Any smart IT eng, said thats if you have much traffic in one, is this thats u need control no servers thats have low traffic, but arenanet people loves get small and sufocate this servers, of course small servers 500 gems transfer, very high 1,8k gems, more money.

Sugestion:A) MERGE: get all small and make one big tooB) LIMIT BIG SERVERS PLAYERS INSIDE WVW: to same capacity of small or half of small servers.

[Talindra.4958]

there is a lot of queue and the waiting time is not healthy for the game.

[hugeboss.5432]

Game feels much more smooth & responsive to me. Even in the few 3-way battles i've been in recently, i cant actually claim to have noticed any of the old type of rubber-banding, latency spikes or responsiveness issues. (Feels like it can prolly handle more stuffs).

[corwin.8356]

@Woop S.7851 said:

@Cal Cohen.2358 said:The key feedback that we’ll need from all of you is to get a sense of how the maps feel with fewer players. We still want WvW to feel like WvW, and we realize that any reduction to player counts will have a negative impact on the overall gameplay experience.

@"corwin.8356" said:tldr: it's most likely server-side influx traffic and the servers can't compensate fast enough to keep from having delayed packets back to the clients. What we see as users are skills "blinking" and what the client is waiting for is the packet from the server to say it got the skill "send", once this cascades (as in big fights with scores of players sending bundles of skill activations) it gets worse until one side is dead. Once the fight is over, the packet queues clear and the latency returns to normal.

Thanks for the tech analysis Corwin! :) Since packet delay or loss has become exacerbated by software or hardware issues, what do you think of the below scenario where instancing & population control are borrowed from

Edge of the Mist

(legacy map design & code)? Would that alleviate issues in terms of packet bloating & server relay latency spikes?

Current EBG Map:

• Server resource fixed due to map on 24/7
• No instancing
• No timer for matches
• Players wait for Queue during peak times
• Skill lags due to Blob clashes

Current EOTM Map:

(from wiki)

• Each match is 4 hours in duration broken up into 5 minute ticks.
• The scoring portion has a duration of 3 hours and 52 minutes when a winner is decided.
• This is followed by a 5-minute grace period to allow players to finish up.
• Players are removed from the map while the map is resetting. The next match starts 3 minutes afterwards.

Questions from a packets' perspective:

• Based on the current EOTM's map design where focus is on divide & conquer + capping points instead of blobbing, would instancing with a timer minimize packets loss & relays from the client side?
• Would server resources then be easier to balance with micro-'instances'? (some minimal server-side coding probably required)
• In terms of Amazon's servers, would a 50 vs 50 (something Amazon is using for their own upcoming game for example) segmented in instances with 4 hour durations run better while decreasing packet loss?

Any thoughts welcomed! :) thanks!

TBH, I have only been in EotM a handful of times.

But from a purely networking/server standpoint the problem is a simple in/out queue issue. The Virtual Machine (instance or VM, you pick) has a specific allocation of resources which is in part determined by the Tier of server they are paying for. Reallocation of those resources is handled by software which must also use those same hardware resources, so there is innate latency there. So you have the star network where a single interface or group of interfaces (Link Aggregation) is talking to every client out there. When they all "hit" the server with inputs at once it queues each request and resolves it as it can. It also has to compute everything that request creates on the world and then return those back to the clients. So obviously AOE bombs create a much heavier load from both a computational and return standpoint (part of why target count on Shade Savant was reduced, IMO).

The optimization comes down to how many individual calls can they process at any point in time reliably? You have to either slow down the rate or reduce the number of inputs. This can be handled any number of ways. Longer cast times, fewer players in any instance, few targets on all AOEs or possibly no AOEs at all. I think the hard work is trying to balance the existing skill set, and player population to maintain that "epic" feeling of large scale battles while still having them run smoothly with their setup.

Hopefully that helped?

[SLOTH.5231]

We should be getting pips while we wait in que.