Rubber Banding

Anyone else getting lots of it? I'm constantly warping back behind objects, corners, invisible monsters and players, getting stuck in cracks in stairs, etc.

It's almost like the network rates are set for 28.8k users. It'd be nice if there was a network connection slider or something. The warping's a pain for melee characters, especially.. literally every fight I'm bouncing/getting stuck in between players and monsters. Sometimes by the time I start swinging my guildmates have already killed everything.

But hey, I don't really have room to complain since GW was retailing for 39.99 CAD with a free t-shirt over here =p

I got news for ya...if sometimes your mates have killed things before you attack it...its not the server, its you.

See if something funky is going on with your connection.

I hope it isn't like that when I start. Make sure theres nothing downloading or transfering over the network that might be slowing down your game performance. Are you dial up?

I'm on a 5 meg down/3 meg up cable modem.. pinging an average of 52ms up to the plaync.com/GW servers.

Rubber banding doesn't really affect ranged characters' abilities to attack.
Melee characters have to run between players and monsters, get stuck and stand there doing nothing, etc.

Also, what's with the pathing/follow/attack mode randomly stopping, or whenever I touch another player. It's like I find myself constantly spamming spacebar, because whenever anything moves or I move, or I touch another player the attack/follow stops.

Anyway here are some other experiences people have with it:
http://www.nurfed.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=2442

This sort of thing has been quite common at the start of every BWE, and apparently launch is no different - I think a lot of people with preorders who did not get their order in the mail yet are downloading it through their client, clogging up servers for the time being. It should improve/disappear in the coming days.

Try taking off your firewalls and stuff it sometimes helps me. Also, If it keeps on going try getting a better connection

I've experienced a bit of this "rubber band" effect. But only when I was sharing my dialup connection with another computer and it was using it to browse webpages, send email etc. It's just lag caused by your own connection.

I was experiencing some pretty bad lag, rubber banding, frozen, etc...

Not a good idea. While disabling any anti-virus software as long as you are playing isn't a problem, disabling your firewall=bad.

Once your firewall is set up to allow access to GW, it shouldn't be the problem. Maybe 9 times out of 10 you'll be fine. It's that one time that somebody scans your open ports that you get screwed.

Just my .02.

I experianced major rubber banding and burst of lag when the west coast got home from school/work, call it primetime if you will..

Doubt it had anything to do with my connection but rather the influx of players. I'm expecting that the 28th will be worse since so many more people will logon, but that is what to expect of a release day.

This is the only issue I have with the game so far. That's not lag, it's horrible game coding. The game has major, major issues if you click to move somewhere with an object inbetween your char and the target. Try standing right infront (as close as you can get) of a NPC, then clicking a point behind them. You warp there, then get stuck for a few seconds as the server tries to figure out WTF just happened. Sometimes the game seems to just give up, and you'll have a few minutes where you can't move at all. But you'll still be able to fight, or change equipment, or chat... it has nothing to do with lag.

I've learned to use all 4 methods of movement the past 24 hours. Keyboard is the most stable, if you are in a situation where you are bumping into things, use your keyboard to move around. Clicking and holding both mouse buttons is the next least buggy, then clicking a point on the ground and holding (left button). Point and click movement is almost broken.

I'm almost certain warping/rubber band/teleport is lag. It has always been associated with time rather than where in the game you are. If it was not lag (either overworked connection or overworked servers), then you should get lag each time you go to the same place in the game. That doesn't happen.

Some times using the keyboard is faster than using the mouse, again it seem to be time rather than space. I suspect the client can do more through the keyboard without asking the server.

im only lagged in the cities... but it goes away in time with me.. in Ascalon theres like 80 people grouped together in one area... silly people!

This definitely is lag, not something personal. If your entire party gets stuck in-game (apparent through an unlagged Teamspeak conversation), that's a clear indication the problem is on the ArenaNet side. It's not 'crappy game code', if anything the rubberbanding is an excellent way to deal with connection issues since it'll flawlessly cover up small hickups. People aren't reporting rubberbanding as a pathing issue around NPCs (this sounds like an entirely different problem, and if it bothers you - this is the first time I hear about it, never experienced it myself either - go write a comprehensive bug report about it).

In other games nothing happens when you lose connection (i.e. you immediately can't move), in Guild Wars you can move a fair bit clientside, and if your movement clientside corresponds with your requested movement serverside, you won't get rubberbanded and likely won't even notice anything unusual.

-edit in response to spiritofcat below- That shows what rubberbanding really is - a connection interrupt. If the interrupt continues long enough, your character will be unable to move, i.e. the rubber band is stretched to its limit. The moment the connection is reestablished, some funky things will happen while your character resynchs with the server, and you're on your way again.

On a related note, sometimes when walking along, the character just slows down and then comes to a complete stop and you can't move or do anything, and then after a little while it goes back to normal.

Yeah this has happened to me several times. I thought it was a severe lag issue (and maybe it is), but white "stuck" standing there I opened a web browser and everything seemed snappy. Perhaps next time it happens I will ping Anet's server directly and see what I get...

Sorry, I've yet to experience any actual lag so I assumed everyone who was reporting "rubberbanding" was just seeing the pathing errors. They can cause effects similar to rubberbanding, which is why I posted. Such as when you glitch up you get locked in place, and sometimes after the server fixes it you get warped 20 feet forward. Yes usually one would assume that type glitch is just lag, but I have been "stuck" in place for up to 2 mins before, and actually fought and killed several mobs, then looted what they dropped, all while I was stuck. That's simply not possible if it's just lag.

So far this game has been very smooth other than that, and as I said above I've yet to get any real lag. And I have been playing for about 30 hours straight now.