Terrible Lag Spikes....What's Happening?

Lags or no lags - I'm always amazed that the Guild Wars devs (or Gaile as their representative) actually talk to you. I've never seen a support-/dev-team that was so much in touch with their customers before.

And even though there were some lags yesterday of course I didn't stop playing - in fact I did the complete opposite and deleted one of my four characters so I could start fresh with a new one

Keep up the great support, Anet & thanks for thestatements posted above!

I had a few games in the german district today, and although there was absolutely nobody in the district itself, we had horrible lag once we started the mission. The way I understand the current system, all European language district are on the same server cluster, so changing inbetween those, won't help you.

As for server overload - I can't believe that. I can't see that the population of the European servers had a major increase in the last few days or weeks. Yes, I meet new players every day, but still, alot (~80%) of the buddies I started playing with, don't play anymore, so it should even out.

The LAG seems to be just on the client side.
I base this on the fact that after a while everythig that should have happened inthe time lagging will happen in a matter of 1-2 seconds.

Based on this i tried to continue pushing my skill buttons to see if i could still kill stuff or do things to stay alive ... it worked.

So if you are an ELE spamming flare or somthing ... continue to do so during the lag in the same way as you were used to. If the spike takes a long time .. press buttons like "c" to target e new enemy and start damaging it. etc etc

This is just an example off course. What i am saying is .. stay in the groove of button mashing that you were used to ... it may save your life.

To comment on somebody saying it will mess up the bots ... with what i noticed .. no i think it won't

The problem is the client not getting the much needed updates from the server while the server continues business as usual.

This explains another thing to me ... if it where a serverside problem anet would have an easy time seeing that it was. Being as honest as they have been so far i have no doubt they would have informed us about it.

Conclusion: The problem is communication specific and lies somewhere between the server and the client. It could be that a lot of the traffic is routed over a line with too little bandwidth to handle it all. (combined with extra traffic due to hollidays)
This is one of the reasons, i think, anet want us to do traceroutes and pathpings so they can identify the component most likely to be the cause of the problem.
When they find it .. solving it is another issue because anet is not the owner of those components.

The only thing anet can do on their side is to figure out a way that the server can detect when communication with a client becomes unresponsive. And then decide what to do with that situation.

Shaquira

You can experience these freezes (I heard someone on vent call it the "matrix effect". Very apt.) at any time of day or night. The other night I was playing up to 4am (yes I'm hooked), and was experiencing very bad freezing at the same time as friends over in America.

2-4 am in Europe is not exactly a time where people suddenly want to start playing GW. Also, how do you explain people from America who were in my group also experiencing this at the same time? It's confusing.

When the freezing started I decided to make a note of the next time it happened. That was during a weekday and just after 3.00pm. That made me think that servers were being overloaded by schoolchildren as they get home from school. Now i'm not so sure because freezing can also happen early in the morning when Europe is usually tucked up in bed.

To make things even more complicated, there have been times when the whole group has frozen apart from one or two...and these people live in Europe.