Guild Wars 2

Quick comment: It seems like consistent frame rate was chosen to be more important in GW2 than rendering all visible character models. Maybe this is okay in some situations, but it seems like this is the wrong approach in WvW (invisible armies are a serious issue there).

Longer discussion: I was thinking about another MMO I used to play, Perfect World International. This game, when it was popular, would occasionally have massive PvP battles around the major cities with hundreds of players running around killing each other. PWI had fashion (“town clothes”), customized character models, custom weapons, dyes for armor and clothes, etc. Even with all of this customization, invisible armies were never a problem no matter how many people showed up. Yes, there was some lag when hundreds of people showed up (150-200 ms with a lot of people there) but the game was still playable and you got a real sense of just how many people there were. It was, in a word, “epic”.

In my opinion, showing the players and their positions is more important than maintaining a high frame rate. I’d rather have a sense of enemy location (and ally location) in WvW than low pings. What does everyone else think?

For the devs: Is this something that can be tuned on the server side, or was this design decision coded directly into the networking infrastructure of the game?

In Aion they had also massive battles. There they completely dropped the character models of the different players. I guess this should severely reduce loading & rendering times in GW2 also.