Guild Wars 2

I’m a little baffled.

Can anyone (preferably devs/mods) tell me why a new condition can exist in a game where current condi’s were claimed to be too excessive of bandwidth if it was changed/improved/given a cap increase/given a higher tick rate etc?
(I’m talking from a PvE standpoint in particular)

Now we’ve got a whole new condition.

Considering they needed to work on the base condi’s already in game and work on how they adapt for multiple players placing condis, I find it a little disappointing that the only way of improving that…was to add a whole new condition.

What you you lot think?

They need to fix condition stacking in PVE content, Id be happy even if they just limited it to dungeon/instanced content for players to be able to maintain their own separate stacks or raising the caps.

It does make me wonder a bit. I’m not to big on programming, but from my understanding all intensity conditions have several bits of information that is stored:

*Current Malice of User
*Current Level of User
*Identity of User
*Duration
*Order in which it is applied

With that information updated every second. I’m not sure how many bits each of these would require, but if I am to assume that all of this information can be contained in a certain hexadecimal:

Characters can be given an internal ID that identifies them, so in theory this can be stored in 16^X Bytes necessary for however many players there are in guild wars. I’m just going to assume it is at least 6 bytes, assuming that any one server can have 16 million accounts.

Malice, I imagine, would never exceed 4096 no matter how hard someone tried. However, I’ll try to be “safe” and assume that it is stored in 4 bytes, with 65k max.

Level is up to 80, so this is easily 2 bytes. Likewise, duration isn’t that long either, however I notice that the duration for each condition is rounded to the nearest 1/4th. Assuming this is pertinent information in the game’s processes, assuming a maximum duration of one minute this comes to 60 × 4 = 240 bits of information, or again roughly 2 bytes.

Order in which it is applied, given 25 stacks, also comes with 2 bytes. This is a total of (2 + 2 + 2 + 4 + 6 =) 16 bytes of information stored in each condition. With up to 25 conditions, this comes to 400 bytes of information on any one entity in the game.

Th really perplexing thing, however, is that in theory there should be no difference between adding a new condition with 25 stacks of intensity, and just giving 25 more stacks of intensity to the bleed cap. Those conditions will all store the same information, except with torment there’s an additional flag that increases damage with movement.

So I do have to wonder, with my extremely limited knowledge of programming, why it is increasing the caps are such a big deal, but adding a new condition with theoretically the same load isn’t a big deal. Maybe they’re just assuming that it won’t be stacked that high, and it’ll save information that way?

anyone link the where the devs talked about bandwidth and placing caps?

Hey Suddenflame –
For your viewing pleasure.
Comment and question about how conditions only stack to 25 and if you have more than one condition stacker that it becomes useless and if anything is being done to address it.
Colin: Currently, no. Interesting statistic for you – every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. We have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is, and what the stack is at. So the more stacks we allow, the more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. So, we could say that you could have infinite stacks. Number one, that becomes really imbalanced. But number two, it’s really expensive for us on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of backend server issues that can help make game design decisions regardless of what you want to do with it."

Full interview (spans 3 pages i think) can be found here:
http://www.guildwars2guru.com/news/1037-qa-with-colin-johanson-part-iv/

That explains why I never seen it lol Its not on these forums. Ok based on his explanation they are using stack based architecture probably using an array. Basically, it is cheaper on bandwidth to have more arrays rather then one big array. This is due to having to update the entire array at once each time. Having multiple arrays at set length allows them to be updated at random times. The set max is 25 due to the array size being around 25 and a magic number that if increased would use too much bandwidth at that exact moment.

Suddenflame.2601:

That explains why I never seen it lol Its not on these forums. Ok based on his explanation they are using stack based architecture probably using an array. Basically, it is cheaper on bandwidth to have more arrays rather then one big array. This is due to having to update the entire array at once each time. Having multiple arrays at set length allows them to be updated at random times. The set max is 25 due to the array size being around 25 and a magic number that if increased would use too much bandwidth at that exact moment.

I don’t know that much about game architecture or coding or what stacks are viable here but off what you’ve said, would it work if they change let’s say…how bleed works.

For example, if bleed goes up to 25, have an alternate multiplier stack called “hemorrhage” or “Life drain”, which would multiply the amount of damage that bleed outputs from it’s base amount. by something small like 0.05 per stack with a max stack amount of 12 or something. Would that possibly work?

Hopefully that made sense.

nethykins.7986:

I’m a little baffled.

Can anyone (preferably devs/mods) tell me why a new condition can exist in a game where current condi’s were claimed to be too excessive of bandwidth if it was changed/improved/given a cap increase/given a higher tick rate etc?
(I’m talking from a PvE standpoint in particular)

Now we’ve got a whole new condition.

Considering they needed to work on the base condi’s already in game and work on how they adapt for multiple players placing condis, I find it a little disappointing that the only way of improving that…was to add a whole new condition.

What you you lot think?

Maybe its easier to introduce new conditions (they did so with agony) than it is to give each player his own specific stack of condi.