Do ANet need more servers?

The past week the Euro servers ahve been diabolical. Constant game freezes all the time, for long times. Is this a temporary glitch or a long term inadequacy of the servers? Or rather, is there any fix in sight or is this game going to remain so damned glitchy for the forseeable future?

Last night was really bad. The game crashed twice, and the second time my computer actually restarted itself (though that might have been my fault, pressing CTRL+ALT+DLT and mashing the enter button probably didn't help).

It's really annoying, and I haven't really done any missions since it started happening because I'm afraid of being disconnected (happened at the end of Dragon's Lair...ugh). ANet said they're working on it, but they didn't really say how long it'd last.

I would think it unlikely that anet need new servers, they probably just lease a bunch from a large ISP anyways and I should imagine they use the same spec servers worldwide, and Korea and USA are lag free afaik this would suggest that server specs are not the cause of this problem.

Whilst I am sure anet are looking into the lag, it could take any length of time to fix. I have dev'd online games myself and connectivity is at best a total pain in the ass to establish and maintain across a network supporting many thousands of players at once. We will just have to be patient and endure the occasional frustrating death.

Look at it from anets point of view - It is likely that their service providers are the culprits here and anet probably have little to do with the problem, yet they are the ones whose business is suffering and whose customers (us) are getting annoyed and spamming them with streams of complaints. They want this fixed as much as you do I believe me.

Personally I find that playing after 11pm is the best option at the mo, since lag seems to vanish after this time of night.

ANyways console yourselves with the fact that however bad it is it will never comapre with previous generations of MMORPGs. Anyone remember the good old Diablo2 "You are 10,000th in line to create a game" |

Taken From GuildWars Guru's front page:

European Lag Official Response
Submitted on July 26, 2005 by THX

ArenaNet sent us an official response to apparent lag issues faced by some European players:


We wanted to share a bit of information about a recent problem that has shown itself to some players in the European regions. We have received reports of varying degrees of lag, where previously European Guild Wars players experienced excellent latency and great overall game performance. We are definitely aware of the situation, and are actively working on a solution right now. While we are not able to give a timeline for when the problem will be fully resolved, investigating and correcting this problem is a very high priority for us.

We would like to extend an apology for the current situation, and to express our thanks for your patience as we correct it.

One solution I've been thinking of recently - not sure how difficult this would be, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't do this atm, but quote me if i'm wrong

When there is a party outside a town (essentially doing a quest or mission, or just wandering around aimlessly) - and there is only 1 human player in the team, most of the processing could be done client side rather than server side, as there is no other human player to transfer the data too.

Atm, each of the players data get transfered to the server, which then processes the data, and calculates the responses for the AI, Items and other such things, then transfers this data back out to each client, as well as the data on all the other players.

Whereas, if there is a party with only 1 human player in, all the processing could be done at the client side (AI, Items and other such things), and the only data transfer would be from the client to the server, regarding player data, incase of a quit out or power cut before the mission is complete or before the party gets to a town.

As alot of people do the mission with henchies, this would decrease the load of the server dramatically, freeing more up for 'proper' parties.

Thoughts ?

Guys please read this dev update about this issue with the server. Simply put the devs need you report the problem to A.net support.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...5&postcount=29

Simply put you all need to stop complaining and help A.net sort this issue out, be interesting to know how many people complain and bitch, but are unwilling to take 5 mins to submit information to support.

So if you haven't, hop to it.

I didn't realise desv wanted hundreds of 'Lag, monday morning. Lag, monday afternoon, game freeze, Monday evening' posts! If the problem is that widespread everyone's suffering, posting individual system specs etc. doesn't strike me as very useful. But if that's what they want, that's what I'll do. I guess eharing whereabouts the problems start and when might help trace the spread of the problems.

You seem to not understand, they want system specs, your Internet Service provider name, connection speed, do you have firewall, when does lag tend to happen?

They don't want useless moaning support submits, which you seem to think is the order of things, they need technical information.

Go to the support site and it will tell you what they need, more then likely tell you how to get that information as well.

Maybe posting system specs may not seem useful to you, but then again you didn't program this game So lets leave it up to the makers what useful or not.

It would work in a functional sense and has been the basis for some older generations of net based games, but since everything is being done client side it is system very open to abuse and v easy to hack.

For example, if the client is generating all data about monsters, xp, drops etc then it would be a far more simple matter for them to catch this data and alter it before it was transmitted it back to the server, since there is no constant contact between the two, only one big dump of info at the end of discreet game sections.

Also it would probably not help out with player frustarion at long wait either since instead of player constantly trickling data to the server it would come in large bandwidth heavy chunks. Can you imagine sitting at the end of a mission with a game screen

"Uploading mission data to master server, this may take some time. Please go n have a cup of tea ...... or two"

Not fun

I agree that it does leave it prone to hacking - but I didn't mean just transmit the data at the end, sorry, if thats what it sounded like, but rather, still transmit it in the same way player data is transmitted now, trickling it through, as it were - thus any anomalies or fluctuations will be spotted instantly and dealt with. The if it did all go wrong, and you did have a power cut or anything like that, you wouldn't loose your progress.

Nor do we ~hint hint~

Maybe it's just me, but the game already seems to work like this for me....

I have V34 Dailup internet access due to the phone lines in my town being very old. We have tried V90 or V92, but it won't work....it ends up eating itself with massive error correction, so we dropped down to V34. When I play GW alone with Henchies, not much lag.....when I go into a coop area with other players, or join a PUG to do PvE, I get massive lag, and so do the other players in my group. This may be caused by something clientside with my computer or the way the data is shared between the players and server, I am not sure.

For now until they get the tower done that will provide wireless broadband to our town, I will be using just henchies. It's not fair to other players to have their game screwed up by excessive lag.