Guild Wars 2

Dear Development Team and who ever else reads this,

Today I finally got mad about something so extremely amateurish, which had never actually bothered me that much before. Something which is so extremely shocking to me, since Guild Wars 2 has a huge player base which is ever-growing.

I’m talking about the maximum player cap on the PvE maps. The maps just “close” themselves after reaching about 120-somewhat people, which is such an evidently tiny number.

I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs, in which I’ve never encountered something as shocking, amateurish and annoying as this. I mean, the smaller realms in World of Warcraft have a player cap of 4000 players online at a time, and the bigger realms even have caps of 7000-8000 players online at a time. Even Runescape can handle 2000 players per world at a time! Looking at the game of Guild Wars 2, you could easily hit 250 players, and with a little effort maybe even 1000 players per map at a time!

I think that I’m not alone in defending my statement: “Guild Wars 2 PvE maps need at least a player cap of 250 active players at a time.” I also believe there are no words you could bring up against this statement.

I hope the development team will live up to this statement and fulfill this wish. It’s not just for the satisfaction of your your players, it’s also for the image of the game and its developers.

Thank you for your time and understanding,

Nubcaker

I agree,I never saw “overflow” in any game and here is vary annoying

I think they painted themselves into a corner somewhere in the software architecture. They can’t maintain condition damage by player and they can’t collocate a raid-sized group of people. That’s bad enough, but they compound the problem by promoting large scale events that simply don’t work. Because there has been no fix in over a year it would indicate a significant problem and I wouldn’t look for any change anytime soon.

saalle.4623:

I agree,I never saw “overflow” in any game and here is vary annoying

True, in those games we saw queues instead, which made it impossible to play at all.

Personally I prefer the overflow version.

lordkrall.7241:

saalle.4623:

I agree,I never saw “overflow” in any game and here is vary annoying

True, in those games we saw queues instead, which made it impossible to play at all.

Personally I prefer the overflow version.

I never said I wanted to take the whole overflow out of the game. I said I wanted a bigger max player cap per map. This would make the whole fun more fun for everyone.

Raine.1394:

I think they painted themselves into a corner somewhere in the software architecture. They can’t maintain condition damage by player and they can’t collocate a raid-sized group of people. That’s bad enough, but they compound the problem by promoting large scale events that simply don’t work. Because there has been no fix in over a year it would indicate a significant problem and I wouldn’t look for any change anytime soon.

If Guild Wars 2 would be run on anything near professional servers, the player cap per map could easily be increased. I do not know why they would not be able to change the cap. I’ve gotta say, it just looks very amateurish, that we are able to play together with a maximum of 120 players only.

Nubcaker.7314:

I never said I wanted to take the whole overflow out of the game. I said I wanted a bigger max player cap per map. This would make the whole fun more fun for everyone.

And yet people are already complaining about lag and such on with the current limits.
Increasing said limit would just make it worse.

And I am rather sure that if 150 people were in the same place (or small area at least) it would lag quite much in most games.
I have personally only seen in in LotRO but that was more or less completely unplayable with those numbers.

I’m not an expert in programming, but it seems to me if they toned down the particle effects, which are way over the top anyway, they’d be able to allow more people per map.

saalle.4623:

I agree,I never saw “overflow” in any game and here is vary annoying

Devil’s advocate here: pretty sure massive lag and servers falling over would be even more annoying. Even Blizzard struggles with it.

Nubcaker.7314:

I’ve played a lot of MMORPGs, in which I’ve never encountered something as shocking, amateurish and annoying as this. I mean, the smaller realms in World of Warcraft have a player cap of 4000 players online at a time, and the bigger realms even have caps of 7000-8000 players online at a time. Even Runescape can handle 2000 players per world at a time! Looking at the game of Guild Wars 2, you could easily hit 250 players, and with a little effort maybe even 1000 players per map at a time!

Not even wow can support 1000 players in the same area. Physical server architecture simply doesn’t work that way, each server has a maximum capacity it can process, with cloud computing or grid computing you can share workload over a number of machines but you still have issues of physical latency between servers (either because of limited bandwidth, resource locking while waiting for a response (limited parallelisation I believe) from another server, or even just poor optimisation of workload balancing) . When all players are in the same area, all doing things, it’s impossible to process all of that on a single server, so either you bring in more servers or increase the capacity of the cloud instance (depending on if you’re using cloud or just boring old clusters… not that practically there’s all that much of a difference but lets not get into leaky abstractions). The more servers you spread the workload over, the more those servers need to communicate, share data etc. (especially if the players are in the same area, for example dpsing the same boss, since all that data needs to be collated and disseminated back to the players) and the larger the physical delay becomes. WoW probably has a very interesting architecture since it allows for non-instanced open world, but at the end of the day they still need to spread the workload and that’s a lot easier to do when players are in different locations since that way you can easily spread the workload out without having to worry about sharing data between servers too much. (Or that’s my opinion, if I’m wrong I’d love to know where and how).

But to be constructive, I’d rather prefer a tiered overflow system. That way you can move up the ‘ladder’ from less populated to more populated overflow servers (same concept can be used for underflow servers), one of the issues with overflows tends to be the lack of people. I’ve noticed this several times in the marionette encounter that we just didn’t have enough people per lane).

lordkrall.7241:

Nubcaker.7314:

I never said I wanted to take the whole overflow out of the game. I said I wanted a bigger max player cap per map. This would make the whole fun more fun for everyone.

And yet people are already complaining about lag and such on with the current limits.
Increasing said limit would just make it worse.

And I am rather sure that if 150 people were in the same place (or small area at least) it would lag quite much in most games.
I have personally only seen in in LotRO but that was more or less completely unplayable with those numbers.

I personally never have any problems with handling huge numbers of players at a time. For instance, two zergs in WvW fighting.

I do not think that the quality of one’s computer should become a problem for the community. And let’s say that the server is the problem, that it cannot take the load, then ArenaNet has very bad servers or is very bad at programming their software properly.

@CureForLiving, do not get me wrong here. I indeed meant a total playeyload of 7000-8000 over an entire realm, which is exactly what I wrote. And of course, it’s hard to make something like this function well. But I must say, with everything ArenaNet has at hand, I do believe they can increase the player cap per map. I love how high the detail of everything in the game is, but I’d have more fun if I’d be able to interact with more people at a time.

I do also feel something for the tiered overflow system you mentioned, it sounds quite good to me.

Nubcaker.7314:

And how many are huge numbers?
50?
150?
300?

Unless every single player have the exact same computer setup there will always be issues. (unless the game is offline and text-based).

I don’t think the issue is either servers or programming, I simply think it is due to the amount of information that needs to be calculated for every single entity at all times, and thus no matter how good servers they buy (for all we know they already have the best ones available, which would seem rather likely seeing how little downtime we have) there will still be issues with too many people running around.

WvW holds something like 100 players per side, so they could increase the caps if they really wanted to. Each additional player however exponentially increases the amount of bandwidth and processing required by the server and each visible player to the user increases their bandwidth and lowers their FPS.

Large scale events (teq, wurm, marionette) are balanced around the map population cap. If they further increase the cap, they would also have to rebalance these events, which would make it that much harder for lower pop servers.

Also, if a few hundred people show up and look at each other in WoW, or less if they’re fighting, the entire continent they’re on crashes. People have done this on purpose to crash servers, which results in a permanent ban.

lordkrall.7241:

Nubcaker.7314:

And how many are huge numbers?
50?
150?
300?

Unless every single player have the exact same computer setup there will always be issues. (unless the game is offline and text-based).

I don’t think the issue is either servers or programming, I simply think it is due to the amount of information that needs to be calculated for every single entity at all times, and thus no matter how good servers they buy (for all we know they already have the best ones available, which would seem rather likely seeing how little downtime we have) there will still be issues with too many people running around.

I’m not able to count all the players but I believe the average is between 100 and 200 at a time.

If I’m not experiencing any lag with this pc, which is far from the best around, and this internet connection, which ain’t that great either, then why would everybody but me experience such huge lags?

Healix.5819:

Large scale events (teq, wurm, marionette) are balanced around the map population cap. If they further increase the cap, they would also have to rebalance these events, which would make it that much harder for lower pop servers.

Also, if a few hundred people show up and look at each other in WoW, or less if they’re fighting, the entire continent they’re on crashes. People have done this on purpose to crash servers, which results in a permanent ban.

They could easily balance events on the number of players present at the event, which they do for a lot of events already(for example: Grenth).

I also never said that in WoW, thousands of players could stand next to each other and fight or whatever, I said that the WHOLE server(realm) could hold this number. Making map caps at about 200-250 can be acceptable, for both the server and the player. Look at world versus world, where each server can bring 100 players to battle, making it a 300 man map. All I am asking for is 200-250, which is evidently less.

lordkrall.7241:

saalle.4623:

I agree,I never saw “overflow” in any game and here is vary annoying

True, in those games we saw queues instead, which made it impossible to play at all.

Personally I prefer the overflow version.

No, you don’t ever see queues to enter zones in contemporary games. Can you name a major title that uses this mechanism to handle instanced zones in the open world? Contemporary games do use instanced zones, but if they are well implemented, you would never know you are in one.

But, I would like to know the games you are referring to so I can make sure to avoid them.

Raine.1394:

No, you don’t ever see queues to enter zones in contemporary games. Can you name a major title that uses this mechanism to handle instanced zones in the open world? Contemporary games do you instanced zones, but if they are well implemented, you would never know you are in one.

But, I would like to know the games you are referring to so I can make sure to avoid them.

Not specifically instanced zones, but rather the game itself.
If the server is full, you are unable to even log in and play and are forced to stay in a queue which can last for hours.

lordkrall.7241:

Raine.1394:

No, you don’t ever see queues to enter zones in contemporary games. Can you name a major title that uses this mechanism to handle instanced zones in the open world? Contemporary games do you instanced zones, but if they are well implemented, you would never know you are in one.

But, I would like to know the games you are referring to so I can make sure to avoid them.

Not specifically instanced zones, but rather the game itself.
If the server is full, you are unable to even log in and play and are forced to stay in a queue which can last for hours.

Yeah, the subject at hand is not the inability to log in to the game. The issue is overflows when you play in-game. Setting up queues as an alternative to overflows is a false choice as queues are not used in this fashion.