#11 - Sept. 23, 2012, 1:34 p.m.
Hi all,
An encounter with Lagzilla is always rough and it’s a tricksy beast that can manifest for a variety of reasons. Ultimately the experience of lag comes down to one or more of client performance, network issues, and server performance. If the lag you’re experiencing is a result of client performance issue then turning down your graphics settings, running at a lower resolution, etc. can help. If not then there’s unfortunately very little you can do. Let me explain a bit more about the different issues that can cause lag:
Client Performance
When your client is trying to do too much work (usually this comes down to animating and rendering the game world since that’s the bulk of the work done on the client, though it can be other tasks as well) the time it takes to create each frame goes up and, thus, your frame rate goes down. When the frame rate drops a little the game just doesn’t feel as smooth but when it drops a lot (say, into the single digits) then the experience can start to feel like lag in that you have to wait longer to get feedback about your actions. Mostly though, this situation just feels choppy. You can check your frame rate in Gw2 on the options menu and if it’s unacceptably low then changing your client settings may help.
Network Issues
The internet is a big, complex, self-healing network. It truly is a marvel of the modern world. Despite that it’s designed to be fully redundant and self healing the internet still runs into problems sometimes. Sometimes the server you’re connecting to is just too far away and thus it takes your packets a long time to make it to the server and back. Other times a fault with some portion of the network along the path from you to the server can introduce delays or cause packets to simply be lost. Any of those issues can cause a feeling of lag by increasing the time between when you try to do something and when it happens on the server as well as increasing the time between when something happens on the server and when you see it on your client. While some amount of latency is just a fact of life on the internet (nothing is instantaneous, curse you speed of light!) serious issues with the network are relatively infrequent. When they happen it’s no fun at all, but thankfully there are lots of people at lots of network providers who spend their time preventing these issues and fixing them when they occur so they’re usually fairly short lived.
Server Performance
Server performance is a lot like client performance in terms of lag. The work the server is doing is different, of course, but fundamentally it still has a limited amount of time to present any given frame of the game and if it takes too long doing that work then things start to back up and everyone on the server experiences lag. In large WvW fights, such as when the majority of the players on the map are fighting over Stonemist Castle, this is most likely what’s causing you to experience lag. When a lot of players are in relatively close proximity to each other the server has to do more work because all the interactions (or, in some cases, potential interactions) between those players need to be calculated. This is the N-squared problem that you may hear computer scientists going on about all the time, assuming you hang out with computer scientists. Of course we’ve done what we can to optimize these processes but at the end of the day more work is more work, no matter how you slice it, so there will always be some player density that’s just too much for the system to handle in the time allotted. Ultimately we end up in a balancing act between trying to allow the maximum number of players into WvW and minimizing the amount of lag that players encounter.
I hope that this information is helpful when trying to determine if changing your client settings will have a positive impact on lag you may be experiencing. All of us at ArenaNet are also gamers and, believe me, we hate lag just as much as you do! We are constantly looking for ways to improve performance and the work of optimization never stops.
