New to GW and getting extreme lag

Hey guys,
I had played and beat prophecies as soon as it came out and then took a huuuuuge break from the game and forgot about it. Now after many years I came across the trilogy + Eye of the North (Didn't even know expansions were out for it) and bought it and am very excited to play after how good prophecies was.

After much reading I have decided to make a Ritualist (downloaded the game overnight using the -image trick) and soon as I logged in to create my character I was experiencing huge freezes when changing features and picking dye colours.

Now after confirming my character the game was "loading" for a good 10 minutes so I closed it and re-opened it. After logging into my new character it only took about 5 seconds to load and I got the the intro video with the subtitles. When I was actually able to move my character around I could move maybe 4 or 5 feet and then my character would freeze on the spot for a good minute or so and this repeated until I couldn't take it anymore. My average ping said it was 2000.

My PC is good enough and my UK connection is fine for everything else:
AMD Phenom 955 Quad Core
ATI 5850 gfx card
4gb RAM
Interenet connects at 8mbit

Is anyone else having these issues or have any ideas what is causing this?

I have not encountered any issues myself.

I'm no expert but here a few possibilities:

• Guild Wars hates you.
• Your Internet Connection being unstable. This includes possible problems with wireless dropping out.
• Are all of your ports open? I remember on the university network I couldn't play because they blocked off some of the ports. Bah student accomodation.
• Antivirus messing with you?

Your hardware should definately not be an issue since I have a rig with similar specs and everything runs super smooth.

Thanks for the reply Tyris.
[*]Guild Wars hates you.
This is the most likely
[*]Your Internet Connection being unstable. This includes possible problems with wireless dropping out.
My internet is fine for everything else, no disconnects and I am wired.
[*]Are all of your ports open? I remember on the university network I couldn't play because they blocked off some of the ports. Bah student accomodation.
I opened the ports yesterday just incase, they are 6112 and 80 if I remember correctly.
[*]Antivirus messing with you?
I have just recently wiped the computer, there is no anti-virus installed yet.

I tried to run a ping on the server and I got "request timed out" and tried it again a few times just incase.

*nvm...reading the full OP helps

You said its a fresh install so most likely its downloading files in the background for armors,weapons,mini's and everything else in the zone you're in.
It will download all the files of a certain zone whenever you map out of town aswell.
To alleviate this you should use the -image command
This will tell you how
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments

That will download all the files your .dat is missing so you dont have to load them in game.
Wiki recommends you create a new shortcut but i just add -image to my existing shortcut to update,then remove once complete.

He already did the -image trick. However, i recently came back after a 3 year break myself, and for the first 2 weeks I had insane lag...then 3 weeks of good play...followed by a weekend from hell of lag again=( I have had a ticket open with Anet for quite a while trying to work things out.

In the end, the things i have tried which occasionally do help..for some odd reason...

- defrag the gw.dat file (search for contig gw.dat or something along those lines for an article on it).
- Anet also recommend a latency trick from a WoW article...not sure if that really helped. I would open a support ticket with Anet to get this advice as i personally would want you to get the exact link from them.
- Use pingplotter to check the connection between your internet and there servers. Sometimes i have a good route to there servers, and sometimes i get unlucky and get a bad route. (bad thing about centralized servers - some people will have better routes)
- One thing that worked for me really well was hard resetting the modem(not just unplugging but actually using the reset button). That worked the first time and actually fixed my lag for about 3 weeks...most likely i was assigned a new ip address which gave me a better route to the servers. Using pingplotter you can check how this affects you.
- Now one major issue for me and playing guild wars is that i have a monopolistic internet provider that has a contract signed with the apartments i am. This means that for a 600 unit complex they can get away with only a 40 mb backbone, overpricing, and rate limiting at peak hours(.5 mb connection at peak hours) plus silly service....it is horrible which means during peak hours, lag will be increased as i am sharing a connection with maybe 200-300 people that is smaller than the connection that Comcast provides my friend...and then on top of that they set a limit....which means i have a sorry connection and I am unable to get a better provider since the apartment complex does not allow it.

However, for the most part i can play GW fairly well now after working with Anet through there support line and digging up some research on ideas to fix bad lag/high latency.

For most of the fixes, opening a support ticket through ncsoft will get you down the right track...

Also since it's a fresh install you may want to update your video driver, and get the latest direct x driver.

Is it that the game freezes or that you just can't move?

The later is gw losing connection to the server. The earlier hints more to a hardware issue.

With the 1000 ping it sounds more like a short disconnect. That can be that: Are you on a Wireless with bad reception?
If it's a internet path problem you can try to switch between euro and US servers.