Please Fix Lag Instead of Implementing Non-Essentials.

[Redseven.3985]

Can you please fix the skill/server lag already? Your servers are terrible when maps are full. Is it so hard to do this? It seems like its not hard. It just takes money.... Please spend money on this instead of random mounts we don't want. Thank you.

[Sarrs.4831]

Server stability and content development are different disciplines, one does not come at the expense of the other

[zinkz.7045]

> @"Sarrs.4831" said:

> Server stability and content development are different disciplines, one does not come at the expense of the other

 

Actually from a budgetary point of view one can come at the expense of the other.

[Dawdler.8521]

Mere minutes later someone, somewhere on the WvW forum will post a 10 point bullet list of pointless and far overcomplicated changes they want to have happen in WvW.

[joneirikb.7506]

Oh I agree, reduce map cap on all wvw maps to 50!

 

(especially right before the rattlecat release!)

[CrimsonNeonite.1048]

They really do need to fix or upgrade their servers, before adding more things; that may well put more load on the servers.

Or the worst case scenario, is they might aswell lower the map caps, so there are less models and other calculations for the servers to handle.

[joneirikb.7506]

Realistically speaking, they're quite limited in what they can do.

 

* Considering how their servers work, and offload work to each others so no server is ever over-worked, and sits in one of the better internet connection hubs available. The problem is 99% not the servers themselves (except a random freak accident if a server rack blows a hd out of its nose, it happens).

* The coding changes are likely at this point to be pretty integrated into the core engine/networking engine of the game. Which probably means a partial or complete rewrite of the game code at this point.

* They might be able to shave of a few percentages here and there by radically going through and removing stuff that does more actions/graphics/info than needed, but the result of that would likely mean a simplification of many class skills among other things (And I can imagine the chalice of salt for that one on the forums).

* Which only really leaves "Reduce map cap" as a viable option, since it is the only thing they can do, fast, that will have any clear effect.

 

tldr: my previous post.

 

Now my horrible sense of humor would laugh myself silly if they did this and reduced from approx 80 to 50 players max on each wvw map, the day before the RattleRat was released...

 

But realistically speaking, if they where to reduce the number of max players in wvw, they would also have to figure out a way to add more maps to WvW as well, to compensate. And I can't see players going to be very happy about being split up on even more maps. (Which leads to one of my favorite topics, about having dynamically changing map numbers according to player activity, but I'll save that for another time. You may thank me for that).

[Redseven.3985]

Why they can't just upgrade their servers ?? ESO has battles in open world of 500 people and they claim their servers can handle up to 2000 players... It is more expensive to implement and maintain these better servers. That is the only reason, it's not a technical inability at all. Please Anet if you are reading this, start with the basics and get that right first.

[derd.6413]

> @"Redseven.3985" said:

> Why they can't just upgrade their servers ?? ESO has battles in open world of 500 people and they claim their servers can handle up to 2000 players... It is more expensive to implement and maintain these better servers. That is the only reason, it's not a technical inability at all. Please Anet if you are reading this, start with the basics and get that right first.

 

because in all likelihood the lag is caused by software, not hardware

[Gemnaid.4219]

They are losing players everyday. That’s their solution.

[Straegen.2938]

If you want lag fixed the solution is easy, they just need to gut every AoE in the game. As long as AoE attacks are dropped constantly, the engine is going to get hammered.

 

No MMO ever built has a system that can handle this much action combat from this many skills hitting this many players. GW2 is pretty much at the limit of what an engine can do over the internet with this style combat. "Upgrading Servers" also is not a realistic fix most likely. The issue an engine like this struggles with is concurrency and threading. This isn't as simple as more RAM or CPU.

[Ben K.6238]

Their server hosts would be far better placed to address networking problems, and even then, there's only so much you can do.

 

Unless we're talking about the skill calculation delay due to overloading, in which case, congratulations on still experiencing that. I haven't seen zerg fights big enough to bring the servers to their knees in two years.

[joneirikb.7506]

> @"Redseven.3985" said:

> Why they can't just upgrade their servers ?? ESO has battles in open world of 500 people and they claim their servers can handle up to 2000 players... It is more expensive to implement and maintain these better servers. That is the only reason, it's not a technical inability at all. Please Anet if you are reading this, start with the basics and get that right first.

 

> @"joneirikb.7506" said:

> Realistically speaking, they're quite limited in what they can do.

>

> * Considering how their servers work, and offload work to each others so no server is ever over-worked, and sits in one of the better internet connection hubs available. The problem is 99% not the servers themselves (except a random freak accident if a server rack blows a hd out of its nose, it happens).

> * The coding changes are likely at this point to be pretty integrated into the core engine/networking engine of the game. Which probably means a partial or complete rewrite of the game code at this point.

> * They might be able to shave of a few percentages here and there by radically going through and removing stuff that does more actions/graphics/info than needed, but the result of that would likely mean a simplification of many class skills among other things (And I can imagine the chalice of salt for that one on the forums).

> * Which only really leaves "Reduce map cap" as a viable option, since it is the only thing they can do, fast, that will have any clear effect.

>

> tldr: my previous post.

>

> Now my horrible sense of humor would laugh myself silly if they did this and reduced from approx 80 to 50 players max on each wvw map, the day before the RattleRat was released...

>

> But realistically speaking, if they where to reduce the number of max players in wvw, they would also have to figure out a way to add more maps to WvW as well, to compensate. And I can't see players going to be very happy about being split up on even more maps. (Which leads to one of my favorite topics, about having dynamically changing map numbers according to player activity, but I'll save that for another time. You may thank me for that).

 

Yeah, repeat.

 

Basically, just stacking more hardware on top of each others, doesn't remove lag, it doesn't work like this: 

[Kaiser.9873]

They could go in and tone down the spell effects when population is over X, as they do with minis.

Kinda the same as all these people griping about too much damage. They could go in and fairly easily make no attack hit for over Y damage, but they don't do that for whatever reason.

[Kunzaito.8169]

Ugh. I hate to always be jumping into these threads as "tech dose of realism guy," but this kind of stuff annoys me to no end in my job. I have participated in many performance optimization projects and fielded tons of complaints about system "slowness," lag, etc. over the years. The reality is there are a whole ton of bottlenecks between you and Arenanet's servers that can and do affect your performance:

 

1. Your computer - how well does it handle the game's graphics and

2. Your connection to your router (not generally an issue for hardwired, but definitely for wifi)

3. The type of internet connection you have - not only your speed, but if your connection is pooled with your neighbors or throttled for some other reason

4. Your ISP itself and its infrastructure

5. All of the rest of the hops your data takes between you and ANet's servers. For one thing, distance plays a huge factor in internet latency, and there is absolutely nothing that can be done about that in a compute environment that can't have multiple mirrored datacenters around the world (like an MMO). Even if they could get actual processing time on the server down to nanoseconds, if you live in Australia you are going to see lag. Even in less extreme cases, if your ISP has you hopping all over the place you could be seeing bad performance. We had a case once where people in the home office were seeing terrible performance but the Shanghai office thousands of miles away was zipping along. It was discovered that Shanghai had optimized their routing and was hitting almost no roadblocks between their server and the home datacenter, whereas our corporate office's ISP was routing traffic some crazy way.

 

Unless you are a network topography expert and have packet sniffed your way to a flawless connection between yourself and ANet's server and you can precisely point to the computational slowness on their end that's causing all the trouble, again, I call BS. There are far too many variables that can cause issues and Occam's razor suggests that the multi-million dollar company that makes a game played over the internet and thus employs many network infrastructure engineers to make that happen is far less likely to be the source of the issue.

 

But as for personal anecdotes, I play on a hardwired gigabit connection in Chicago with an older PC that is completely leaned out just for gaming and has always run GW2 well. With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights. Apart from occasional bad days I haven't had consistent problems with rubberbanding or skill lag or anything related in 4-5 years.

[Dawdler.8521]

> @"Kunzaito.8169" said:

> With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights.

Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

 

[Kunzaito.8169]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

>

 

1. Yeah, that was simply meant as an additional detail insofar as I don't get any kind of issue with fights - FPS loss, lag, etc. Not specifically/exclusively lag. Sorry I wasn't clear on that point.

 

2. Skill lag (or the perception thereof) is not necessarily server side, as I said. Once again I go back to my example before of Australia. Hell, ask any Aussie in game what their ping is - I'd bet you won't find anyone < 300. Lag is lag is lag from a client point of view - latency is just a fact of networks, and it can be high or low based on tons of factors. Without delving into exactly what's happening with the packets and where they are experiencing issues you cannot say that it's categorically a server problem.

[Korgov.7645]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> Mere minutes later someone, somewhere on the WvW forum will post a 10 point bullet list of pointless and far overcomplicated changes they want to have happen in WvW.

 

* Profession and skill balancing by PvE needs

* Manual rating adjustments

* World linking

* Gliding & zones

* Golem Rush event

* Portable Cannons

* Mega laser

* WvW rank gains from EotM

* Vertical map design and movement gimmicks

* PvE grindy guild upgrades

* PvE crafting for WvW armor

* Living story NPCs

* Repair Hammers

* Infusions overhaul

 

Oops, that's more than 10. Nevertheless, all are to the point and simple changes that will boost competitive WvW.

[Straegen.2938]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > @"Kunzaito.8169" said:

> > With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights.

> Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

>

GW2 client side is CPU bound to the network stack due to the single threaded nature of their design. Single threading the GW2 client made the client processing easier to manage and fixed a lot of hacking issues but overly hamstrung the client to the network stack processing.

 

Pro-gamers often reduce their graphics settings because every millisecond counts. Monitor refresh rates, input lag, etc all contribute to game lag. GW2 doubles down on this by putting the graphics and input processing in the same thread and the network processing generally speaking. So lowering graphics settings does indeed impact.

 

[Dawdler.8521]

> @"Straegen.2938" said:

> > @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > > @"Kunzaito.8169" said:

> > > With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights.

> > Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

> >

> GW2 client side is CPU bound to the network stack due to the single threaded nature of their design. Single threading the GW2 client made the client processing easier to manage and fixed a lot of hacking issues but overly hamstrung the client to the network stack processing.

>

> Pro-gamers often reduce their graphics settings because every millisecond counts. Monitor refresh rates, input lag, etc all contribute to game lag. GW2 doubles down on this by putting the graphics and input processing in the same thread and the network processing generally speaking. So lowering graphics settings does indeed impact.

>

Not the skill lag though, ie when the skills just blink and wont trigger or when nothing happens when you push them because the server isnt responding to your clients calls - even when the game is otherwise performing smoothly with movement. That has nothing to do with milliseconds, input lag or monitor refresh rates. Just like when the server starts to rubberband all over the place, but the skills actually work fine. Two different systems working in the background and they both have to do with the server not handling the stress.

 

[DemonSeed.3528]

> @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > @"Straegen.2938" said:

> > > @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > > > @"Kunzaito.8169" said:

> > > > With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights.

> > > Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

> > >

> > GW2 client side is CPU bound to the network stack due to the single threaded nature of their design. Single threading the GW2 client made the client processing easier to manage and fixed a lot of hacking issues but overly hamstrung the client to the network stack processing.

> >

> > Pro-gamers often reduce their graphics settings because every millisecond counts. Monitor refresh rates, input lag, etc all contribute to game lag. GW2 doubles down on this by putting the graphics and input processing in the same thread and the network processing generally speaking. So lowering graphics settings does indeed impact.

> >

> Not the skill lag though, ie when the skills just blink and wont trigger or when nothing happens when you push them because the server isnt responding to your clients calls - even when the game is otherwise performing smoothly with movement. That has nothing to do with milliseconds, input lag or monitor refresh rates. Just like when the server starts to rubberband all over the place, but the skills actually work fine. Two different systems working in the background and they both have to do with the server not handling the stress.

>

 

I also notice when skill lags happen, they almost always prioritise heals. So for example, no other skills will work with exception to heals, but when there is clearly a bigger overload, then nothing will work besides movement.

[Dawdler.8521]

> @"DemonSeed.3528" said:

> > @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > > @"Straegen.2938" said:

> > > > @"Dawdler.8521" said:

> > > > > @"Kunzaito.8169" said:

> > > > > With graphics turned to "Best Performance" I get minimal to no skill lag even with the largest zergfights.

> > > > Which doesnt really makes any sense from a tech dose of realism point of view as your graphics setting have no correlation to skill lag - that particular issue occur when the server skill queue get totally clogged up and can no longer handle all the player requests in time (ie it doesnt matter how fast your network or your computer is, the procesing is delayed serverside). We know this because the devs have said so.

> > > >

> > > GW2 client side is CPU bound to the network stack due to the single threaded nature of their design. Single threading the GW2 client made the client processing easier to manage and fixed a lot of hacking issues but overly hamstrung the client to the network stack processing.

> > >

> > > Pro-gamers often reduce their graphics settings because every millisecond counts. Monitor refresh rates, input lag, etc all contribute to game lag. GW2 doubles down on this by putting the graphics and input processing in the same thread and the network processing generally speaking. So lowering graphics settings does indeed impact.

> > >

> > Not the skill lag though, ie when the skills just blink and wont trigger or when nothing happens when you push them because the server isnt responding to your clients calls - even when the game is otherwise performing smoothly with movement. That has nothing to do with milliseconds, input lag or monitor refresh rates. Just like when the server starts to rubberband all over the place, but the skills actually work fine. Two different systems working in the background and they both have to do with the server not handling the stress.

> >

>

> I also notice when skill lags happen, they almost always prioritise heals. So for example, no other skills will work with exception to heals, but when there is clearly a bigger overload, then nothing will work besides movement.

We dont know how it works on a technical level (and I've never programmed a serverside MMO) but from the dev description, it's basicly one big skill queue that the server is constantly chewing through. I can imagine that some priority takes place and that's why stuff like autoattacks and heals often work somewhat when other skills just keep blinking. Normally it keeps up with the fast gameplay but when three 50 man zergs clash... well lets just say I feel that even if I'm doing a 1v1 clear across the map, lol. Could be wrong, we are unlikely to get further insight of how GW2 actually works.

 

[tippolit.3591]

One fix to the lag you are experiencing … get rid of the mickey mouse computer and invest in a better one if possible. I have very few issues with lag, and typically they are short lived. This is truly a case of "you get what you pay for" .. IMHO.

[mauried.5608]

Sometimes a simple fix like running GW2 off an SSD will improve lag immensely, even if you have a low end video card.

 

[CrimsonNeonite.1048]

What you two describe aren't solutions for skill lag, due to the Servers.

Those are just solutions for bad Performance/FPS drops, due to the Game engine, which won't fully resolved through by upgrading your hardware, unless your PC is really old.