Guild Wars 2

Why is there a condition cap? And if so, why isn’t that cap set per source?

MrDmajor.7084:

The same reason why there ISN’T a particle effect slider.

Be nice …. light blob ftw i guess.

The condition cap is there for technical reasons, from a programming perspective a condition is essentially data packets constantly being sent back and forth between each participator and the arenanet servers. That constant back and forth costs ANet a lot of server resources, and they have to limit them to make the game play smoothly and stay under budget.

Still, that does not excuse the now 16 month streak that ANet has refused to even speak a single word on the issue. Especially after stating that there would, without a doubt, be improvements coming at some point.

Colin Johanson

Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could, say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it.

JonPeters.5630

We have a number of solutions that we are talking about and when we are able to figure out which one will have the least impact on balance, performance, and testing we will put that solution in place as soon as possible.

It is true that letting each player have a stack is unlikely to be the solution, however we do intend to solve this problem.

… back in the day.