25 Hz
one update every 40.0 ms
What this test sends:
25 packets per second of 100 bytes, matching Guild Wars 2 rather than a generic ping.
estimated
ArenaNet publishes no tick rate; 25 Hz is a community estimate from packet captures. Note that the game's own gameplay traffic is TCP, so this is a rate, not a protocol match.
A note on what this test sends: this test uses UDP, and Guild Wars 2's gameplay traffic uses TCP. That is deliberate and it does not weaken the result - loss and jitter are properties of the path, and this measures the path directly instead of through TCP's retransmission, which hides loss by paying for it in time. If anything, loss you can see here costs you more in this game than the number suggests.
Run the test above for at least 60 seconds. Here is what each
number means for this game specifically.
Packet loss (multiplied by TCP)
One percent loss here is not one percent of your gameplay. Every dropped packet stalls the stream until it has been retransmitted and acknowledged, so a single loss event costs you at least a round trip of frozen game state. This is why Guild Wars 2 players describe hitches rather than warping.
Jitter (the skill queue's enemy)
Your skill presses are queued and sent; the server confirms them. Uneven delivery makes the confirmation arrive in clumps, which is what produces the pattern of pressing three skills and watching all three resolve at once a beat later. That is not skill lag in the World versus World sense - it is your own line.
Ping (comfortable range)
Under 80 ms is comfortable for open world and instanced content, and dodge timing in raids and fractals stays honest well past that. High ping alone rarely breaks Guild Wars 2 - it is the combination of high ping and loss, where every retransmission costs a full round trip, that turns unpleasant quickly.
What you see in game, and which number on this page explains it.
Almost every game in this catalogue sends its gameplay state over UDP, because UDP lets a late packet be thrown away. In a shooter that is the right trade: a position update from 200 ms ago is worthless, so there is no point retransmitting it. Guild Wars 2 made the other choice and runs its gameplay traffic over TCP, which guarantees that everything arrives, in order, no matter what it costs in time.
The consequence is that loss converts into latency rather than into missing information. When a packet is dropped, TCP detects the gap, requests it again, and holds everything that arrived afterwards until the gap is filled - a behaviour usually called head-of-line blocking. Your client has newer data sitting in its buffer that it is not allowed to use yet. That is the freeze, and the rush that follows is the buffer being released at once.
This is why the same one percent loss produces such different complaints across games. A Counter-Strike player at one percent describes shots that did not register; a Guild Wars 2 player at one percent describes the game hitching every few seconds. Both are correct, and both are describing the same line. It also means the usual reassurance that low single-digit loss is tolerable does not hold here.
Skill lag in World versus World is a genuinely separate problem and worth keeping apart from the above. It scales with the number of players fighting in one place, it affects everyone on that map identically, and it happens on connections with no loss at all. The practical rule is that anything you can reproduce alone in the open world belongs to your connection, and anything that only happens in a three-way zerg belongs to ArenaNet.
If the chart above shows packet loss or high jitter, work through
these in order.
Why does Guild Wars 2 freeze instead of rubber-band?
Because its gameplay traffic runs over TCP. A lost packet is retransmitted rather than skipped, and the rest of the stream waits for it. The result is a short stall followed by a rush of catch-up, instead of the sliding and snapping you see in UDP games.
What is skill lag in WvW?
It is server-side congestion, not latency. When a World versus World map holds hundreds of players in one fight, the map server cannot resolve every skill activation promptly and everyone present sees the same delay. If you get the same delay alone in the open world, that is your connection instead.
Does packet loss cause the network error disconnects?
It is the most common cause you can act on. Sustained loss eventually breaks the TCP session, which is what produces the numeric error and the return to character select. Run this test for a few minutes and see whether the red lines are there.
Will a VPN help my Guild Wars 2 ping?
Rarely, and it can easily make things worse. A VPN adds a hop and cannot recover packets your own line dropped. It only helps in the narrow case of a genuinely bad route from your ISP, which is not what this test measures.