What is shown here is extreme lag and please before people are up in arms with 'Shields Up!' (gw1 joke sorry) take a look and read the rest.

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/02/the-guild-wars-2-beta-weekend-ends-in-chaos/

The lag was bad enough with somewhere around a hundred members of the press and assorted ArenaNet staff bunched together in one spot. Add a giant or two and things went completely to hell. I crashed right after the giant killed me the first time, logged back in, and then crashed again. Somehow I was able to capture this video before my machine attempted to explode.

And from a commenter

Did you even read the video description?

World of Warcraft is the same. I never have connection issues, I raid and pvp and I never get lag as the result of a connection problem. Two days ago however, on Frostmourne, this douche named Daish decides to organise 6 x 40 man raids to destroy Orgrimmar…. I crashed twice and then spent half an hour spamming my explosive shot button on targets that had died 10 minutes ago.

TLDR – WoW has been around for 6+ years and still doesn’t have servers strong enough to handle 100+ people in one area.

Please forgive the naysayers who will undoubtedly use this as an excuse to bash WvW.

What I see here is ArenaNet already testing the capability of their engine, network optimization on current (and wildly varied) computer setups. I believe they have a solid grasp of what metrics are important and they are gathering hard numbers on their system before release with this minor stress test. I speculate now they will retreat and keep working on what is already pretty impressive. Once those optimizations meet their standards we may see the open beta stress test.

I want this game. More importantly I want this game to run well. Gw 2 fans WILL wait until it's ready.

I think current servers and hardware are just not up to the task yet to alow 1000 players to stand toe to toe without any lag.

There are so many variables within connections and hardware that it will take at least 10 years to get to the point of no lag.

And even then you would still have a little delay :)

As long as its good enough iam satisfied :)

Two things to consider in this regard, not targeted at OP specifically, but as a reminder for this discussion:

1. It doesn't matter at all whether other games can or cannot do 100v100 battles. GW2 set out to do it, so they need to find a way to make it work. Refrain from making comparisons with other games that don't add anything to the discussion except cause fanboys to burst into flames.

2. Beta is beta. Consider that while there were several journalists with similar experiences as Fahey, there were also quite a few were the problems were much less severe or didn't come up at all. What we're seeing now is a mix of actual large-scale performance problems and simply hardware incompatibility/optimization deficits. Please be very carefull when drawing conclusions from just one video.

You want to know TotalBiscuit's opinion on Kotaku? You want to know hardforum's opinion on Kotaku? You want to know overclock.net's opinion on Kotaku? 

The same event as seen on Curse's PC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeojYbozu8&list=UUs1JJL6EDOOExrueuDscBJA&index=12&feature=plcp

As much as i hate /endthread expression I think it's warranted here.

And as far as I'm concerned, Kotaku are inept morons.

This has already been discussed here: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/341711/I-think-that-Kotaku-may-have-done-something-wrong.html

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

The same event as seen on Curse's PC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeojYbozu8&list=UUs1JJL6EDOOExrueuDscBJA&index=12&feature=plcp

As much as i hate /endthread expression I think it's warranted here.

And as far as I'm concerned, Kotaku are inept morons.

Oh awesome! Nice XD

Alltough i am pretty sceptical about GW2, this is normal when soo many people are in one place in ANY game.

Does not mean it will always lag.

Originally posted by Diovidius

This has already been discussed here: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/341711/I-think-that-Kotaku-may-have-done-something-wrong.html

/facepalm@self

Originally posted by Alot

You want to know TotalBiscuit's opinion on Kotaku? You want to know hardforum's opinion on Kotaku? You want to know overclock.net's opinion on Kotaku? 

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1632971

http://www.overclock.net/t/1104937/kotaku-deus-ex-human-revolution-is-this-generations-crysis/40#post_14763485

TotalBiscuit: "Don't read Kotaku, it's trash"

Originally posted by Pilnkplonk

The same event as seen on Curse's PC

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VeojYbozu8&list=UUs1JJL6EDOOExrueuDscBJA&index=12&feature=plcp

As much as i hate /endthread expression I think it's warranted here.

And as far as I'm concerned, Kotaku are inept morons.

Exactly

And before kotaku starts making assumption, they should check with others or change their rigs

VERY unproffesional of them

Ty for extra links folks, it's been a little hard to keep up with all the videos and reading the impressions too.

(I know there's a compilation thread somewhere here too and it's probably sticky but I have been too lazy/distracted by IT course/excited by the flood of previews/replying to all these comments! to follow it all coherently.)

-edit 20th Feb thread flashing in front of face.

Just to add to this, here is an article from tap repeatedly that basically states that the game ran very smoothly (60 FPS) on max settings:  http://tap-repeatedly.com/2012/02/impressions-guild-wars-2-beta/

Here is the quote:

Having already configured my video settings at the login screen to the highest possible (FXAA, high detailed character textures, depth of field) it surprised me, after some video card tweaking on my part, just how flawlessly the game ran. Admittedly my PC is brand new (see my specifications below) but achieving a consistent 60fps was even more surprising, especially when Jon said they were still working on optimising.

Trying to record video + Tons of people + in a major city

This would bog down any computer. I Guarantee that if he turned off the recording it would be a lot better.

So they gathered everyone up into one area for a stress test of their servers eh? WvW is suppose to be about 20x the size of AV in 4 seperate zones with around 300 people per zone. So yes they will be instances were some PC will drop in fps in large scale combat but I perfer that they work out the issue they have in beta than have them on release.