Guild Wars 2

Doesn’t look like there’s a topic on the official forum yet so let’s start one. I’ve been following that thread on reddit and trying to get all the developer quotes. Here’s a summary list…

• A team of devel­op­ers is inves­ti­gat­ing the over­whelm­ing FoV com­plaints (cur­rently locked at 65, while most mod­ern PC games default to 90 and let play­ers to cus­tomize this value). No def­i­nite answer is given, how­ever, as they still don’t rule out that there may be a bug involved.
• Player culling (“invis­i­ble army”) issue in WvW is trou­bling the devs as much as us play­ers, and they reit­er­ated that the fix is not sim­ple and require much more work before a fix is pos­si­ble. And of course, no ETA of any sort, but it is work in progress.
• There is some­thing in devel­op­ment that will “greatly increase” num­ber of con­cur­rent play­ers in WvW. (!!!)
• Under­stand­ably, ANet is not shar­ing details on the process of detect­ing and remov­ing bots, other than reit­er­at­ing that they are ban­ning bots in waves. It is also said that play­ers should see a notice­ably decrease of bots in the next few weeks.
• Bro­ken SP chal­lenges: the devs are focus­ing on address­ing the root cause of the issue, which pre­sum­ably, once fixed, will ben­e­fit old and new con­tent alike.
• Mul­ti­ple trait set is on the “cool to do” list.
• There’s no plan to sup­port an offi­cial Linux ver­sion of the game, how­ever the devs has opti­mized its usage with Wine.
• The game is still largely CPU-bound. Opti­miza­tions are still being made for a wide range of specs. Though it seems the pri­or­ity is still to have the game run­ning smooth on lower spec PC.
• DX11 sup­port is still under review by the devs, and it is unlikely to include DX11-only fea­tures that don’t work on lower spec hard­ware. Anti-aliasing options are also being explored.
• The biggest chal­lenge in fix­ing bugs is the bro­ken dynamic events, as they are hard to repro­duce out­side of live envi­ron­ment. It seems that there are tools that are being devel­oped to tackle this issue.
• Pre­view equip­ment via trad­ing post is pos­si­ble, although it’s not a pri­or­ity at this time, and has things to do with API sup­port and more pol­ish to the TP system.
• A more enhanced LFG tool is likely trimmed in order for meet­ing ship­ping dead­line, and is now being looked into.
• Player char­ac­ter pro­files on the web fea­ture can be real­ized by using APIs, which is under development.

Wall of text of quotes are dumped in my blog post for anyone interested but don’t want to dig through the reddit thread. Given the large volume of text, it’s more than likely I may have missed something that should be mentioned, and even erroneous interpretations of the original quotes, which of course, is why I made this thread for

Last but not least, thanks anet for the very informative AMA session!

kgptzac.8419:

*1 A team of devel­op­ers…

Doesn’t effect me. Players just want to adjust it mostly and that should be standard.

kgptzac.8419:

*2 Player culling …..

I highly doubt we will ever see a fix for this implemented. It has been happening and “looked” into for a LONG time and still no word on it.

kgptzac.8419:

*3 There is some­thing in devel­op­ment …..

Interesting. I haven’t hit queue times as I am not on a WvW heavy server. At least they should be happy for this. Maybe some easy guild sieges soon.

kgptzac.8419:

*4 Bro­ken SP chal­lenges:…..

Ugh. Heard it before and again and again. It wouldn’t bother me if the last update was shifted to no changes to content. Finding the root cause is a needle in the haystack as it can be anything from player interaction/mob/enviorment (map layout). It has to be done on a case – by – case basis sadly.

kgptzac.8419:

*5 Mul­ti­ple trait set is on the “cool to do” list…..

Nice they actually agree with the players that stated this. I remember reading people who were against this 0_o.

kgptzac.8419:

*6 The game is still largely CPU-bound…..

It is EQ2 all over again. Nothing much is ever going to change. 32 bit PC’s seem screwed as well so deal with it mostly.

kgptzac.8419:

*7 The biggest chal­lenge in fix­ing bugs is the bro­ken dynamic events…

Well since DE’s are the majority of the content i’m surprised they don’t have these tools.

kgptzac.8419:

*8 Pre­view equip­ment via trad­ing post is pos­si­ble…..

I remember when that was first stated on the “cool things to add list” (and the TONS of posts about it) about 1 week after launch. /taps foot.

kgptzac.8419:

• 9 A more enhanced LFG tool is likely trimmed in order for meet­ing ship­ping dead­line, and is now being looked into.

Yeah……

So no deadline on that? This should be in the 22 patch=/.

kgptzac.8419:

• 10 Player char­ac­ter pro­files on the web fea­ture can be real­ized by using APIs, which is under development.

I totally forgot about this. This still doesn’t work?

kgptzac.8419:

Last but not least, thanks anet for the very informative AMA session!

As much as I like GW2 it really wasn’t informative other than “we see the posts and are looking into it”. No dates. No real answers other than the couple things you can find them say on this forum (were taking care of botters etc). =/

It’s funny how a massive AMA like that can yield such little real information.

I know the trolls were saying things like “we’re looking into it”, “it’s currently under review” etc. etc.

Why do developers bother doing AMAs when they really don’t have anything to say?

kgptzac.8419:

• There is some­thing in devel­op­ment that will “greatly increase” num­ber of con­cur­rent play­ers in WvW. (!!!)

This is disappointing to be honest. Servers with less players will get stomped even more and the larger ones will just have more zerg power. They should spend more time focusing on making sure the servers have equal populations interested and participating in WvW first and lessen the amount of bandwagoners. Increasing the number of players able to be on a WvW map is just going to cause more problems. Not to mention the maps weren’t designed for larger amounts of players so I wonder how that will work out strategically.

Dee Jay.2460:

Why do developers bother doing AMAs when they really don’t have anything to say?

Because people keep having kittens because they aren’t communicating… do people not realize that if they had something to say on the issue they would announce it?

Of course not, they keep pressuring the devs to “say something” and accuse them of ignoring the bugs and other issues… so the devs say “working on it but not done yet,” and people complain because they did say something, when there was nothing to report…

There should be a semi-balanced player cap which won’t let player disparity reach 50-75 between the highest and least populated servers to be honest.

Leiloni.7951:

kgptzac.8419:

• There is some­thing in devel­op­ment that will “greatly increase” num­ber of con­cur­rent play­ers in WvW. (!!!)

This is disappointing to be honest. Servers with less players will get stomped even more and the larger ones will just have more zerg power. They should spend more time focusing on making sure the servers have equal populations interested and participating in WvW first and lessen the amount of bandwagoners. Increasing the number of players able to be on a WvW map is just going to cause more problems. Not to mention the maps weren’t designed for larger amounts of players so I wonder how that will work out strategically.

I think increasing player cap on existing wvw maps without rebalancing is not smart, but that’s not exactly what’s being said. I’d imagine there may be new wvw maps or something.

People complain that devs don’t talk enough, when the devs do talk they complain that they didn’t answer the question good enough.

People can never be happy.

Hey, the fact that they’re still trying to optimize makes me happy. =D

Thank you very much for posting this together like this!

“There’s no plan to sup­port an offi­cial Linux ver­sion of the game, how­ever the devs has opti­mized its usage with Wine.”

I’m guessing the bolded word should have been “have”?

If that’s the case I say bullstuff! It runs pretty bad IMO.

thanks for mining that thread, kg. much appreciated-

What’s the bet #3 happens before #2 is resolved?

I sat there for almost 3 hours and read everything.

It was very good and I appreciate the way Anet gets into all the geeky little details on things especially the programming side of things.

It was a very good post imo. They went into details on a lot of stuff.

I hope to see DX11…not for pretty things but for the “real proven” performance increase cards that support DX11 get.

Same goes for the many other features, WvWvW changes, enhanced LFG tool etc etc that are in the works.

I am done complaining and have a better outlook.

Its a new game almost 2 months old…geez give it a break…stop complaining go outside and see the sun, workout or do something or play something else….

Give it some time.

Game has great potential.

I wonder what kind of ideas they have for the enhanced LFG tool. I definitely would like to know what they have in mind. I suppose the simplest way to do it is to make an automatic dungeon finder found in almost every MMO released in the last year; but knowing Anet, I would expect it to be somewhat different than the norm.

No news on the precursor skins? Oh well… I am happy it will be WINE optimized though.

Ari Kagura.9182:

I wonder what kind of ideas they have for the enhanced LFG tool. I definitely would like to know what they have in mind. I suppose the simplest way to do it is to make an automatic dungeon finder found in almost every MMO released in the last year; but knowing Anet, I would expect it to be somewhat different than the norm.

There are more benefits to a system like what was done in Aion than an automatic dungeon finder and I think the GW2 community would probably like an Aion type system more, anyway than anything like what WoW did. Hopefully that’s the route they go.

@Leiloni.7951

I have actually never played Aion so I’m not sure how I could relate to it.

On the other hand, I personally like the idea of a cross-server centralized staging area for running dungeons, perhaps similar to the staging area for sPVP content. That way, you have a much larger pool of players to recruit from, AND you can meet them face-to-face before engaging in the content in question. In an automatic dungeon finder, you really don’t get to know your people until after you get ported into the dungeon with them.

Ari Kagura.9182:

@Leiloni.7951

I have actually never played Aion so I’m not sure how I could relate to it.

On the other hand, I personally like the idea of a cross-server centralized staging area for running dungeons, perhaps similar to the staging area for sPVP content. That way, you have a much larger pool of players to recruit from, AND you can meet them face-to-face before engaging in the content in question. In an automatic dungeon finder, you really don’t get to know your people until after you get ported into the dungeon with them.

Here’s the Aion system (full description and screenshots of how it works in the link below). It basically just gives you one central place, accessible from anywhere simply by pressing a hotkey, to advertise for groups you’re making, search for groups to join, or advertise that you want a group. It has some nice searching, posting, and joining features and puts an automatic message in chat for people to see, with a link they can click to request to join your group.

http://gameguide.na.aiononline.com/aion/Grouping+in+1.9

I think it’d work well here. The only thing we’re missing is a global chat channel but I don’t even think that part is necessary because people can just open the window and look.

Phy.2913:

People complain that devs don’t talk enough, when the devs do talk they complain that they didn’t answer the question good enough.

People can never be happy.

If you aren’t answering questions with a full response then why bother to attempt to answer it. Not only does it annoy the person who asked it but everyone else who is waiting on the answer.

I’m not a fan of hosting a Q&A and then beating around the bush and or simply not answering questions.

To everyone saying that they werent giving much information, maybe its because they were not developers aka designers..they were PROGRAMMERS!! Its like asking a technician about an engineering order..he has no idea, he just performs the task and makes the machine work..he doesnt design the machine.

They were doing the best they could, they even said that they could not answer most of these questions because they are not designers and a different team entirely handles most of the questions that people were asking.

nobody asked how Magic find works?
would of liked to hear an offical reply on it from the people who programmed it.

@Lorana

I believe I saw at least two replies asking, but didn’t see an official answer.

ArenaNet is notorious for not wanting to release information about anything that is not completely set in stone, and I find that understandable and don’t have an issue with it, even if it can sometimes be a little frustrating.

I also find it quite reasonable as to why they don’t want to release details about algorithms/concepts behind certain systems, such as DR, and perhaps even magic find(although nothing was asked about that from what I saw).
From a certain perspective, it would be unintelligent of them to release the details behind certain systems. There is valid reasoning behind keeping certain details hidden.

Ditton.3149:

To everyone saying that they werent giving much information, maybe its because they were not developers aka designers..they were PROGRAMMERS!! Its like asking a technician about an engineering order..he has no idea, he just performs the task and makes the machine work..he doesnt design the machine.

They were doing the best they could, they even said that they could not answer most of these questions because they are not designers and a different team entirely handles most of the questions that people were asking.

Nitpicking on terminology here – programmers are developers. It’s also not uncommon for designers to be referred to as developers as well, as they are indeed further developing the product.

Nitpick all you want, its obvious that their duties were not in the design phase, they talked about it several times being a different animal altogether than what they did. One programmer said he liked working with designers because they thought about problems differently than the programmers did.

I can see where a technician would also be the engineer of a project as well, that being said, in larger operations it isnt common. It is more efficient to split the job tasks and assign teams. The design team is not the same as the programming team, they made that clear.

You know very well what people want to know when they talk to developer and for the most part its not what programming language you use, what proprietary software do you use to script events etc…its why cant thieves do this, why doesnt wvw do that..etc and the people who were answering had nothing to do with the design side of the equation, they just made the ideas the designers had come to life via code.

kgptzac.8419:

Doesn’t look like there’s a topic on the official forum yet so let’s start one. I’ve been following that thread on reddit and trying to get all the developer quotes. Here’s a summary list…

• Player culling (“invis­i­ble army”) issue in WvW is trou­bling the devs as much as us play­ers, and they reit­er­ated that the fix is not sim­ple and require much more work before a fix is pos­si­ble. And of course, no ETA of any sort, but it is work in progress.
• There is some­thing in devel­op­ment that will “greatly increase” num­ber of con­cur­rent play­ers in WvW. (!!!)

Should of copied Daoc system, they had unlimited numbers in their WvW (RvR) zones and they had no problems with invisible players. Such a shame, the game had great promise but this is a massive problem which will make a alot of players leave. The only way i can see a way around it, is too make the cap smaller but have multi overflows running or copy Daoc’s 3 massive frontier zones.

" he just performs the task and makes the machine work..he doesnt design the machine.."

And what happens when the machine doesn’t work? How about those bugged DE’s/Skillpoints? How about the client crashes? That’s why we aren’t super hyped about the answers. They have said the exact same thing before so it isn’t any “new” information.

We already know what the systems do and how the devs want them “played out” (DE’s/SP’s/WvW), were playing the game atm.

Dead is spot on with the answer.

All the Q&A is, Is rehashed information.

LoTRO has a good grouping system; however, the AUTO-grouping feature in their dungeon finder was bogus. I think once you have discovered/explored the dungeon you should be able to enter it from anywhere.

Dead.7385:

I highly doubt we will ever see a fix for this implemented. It has been happening and “looked” into for a LONG time and still no word on it.

No one word has been said on it, but here’s 549:

The issues with invisible players in WvW comes down to a couple of factors. One is to do with when the servers notify any given client about other characters in the game (I’ll call this reporting/culling) and the other deals with the time it takes the client to present the character on the screen after it has received that notification (I’ll call this asset load).
The asset load issue is all about how quickly the client can show you something it knows it should show you. We’re looking in to ways that we can make that process faster, but it’s always going to take non-zero time. However, that’s not where the bulk of the invisible players come from. For that we have to look at the reporting/culling side of things.
In the situation where the local population density is relatively low, when another character comes in reporting range of your character the server sends a notification to your client with all of the data that it will need to track and render that character. That includes appearance data, race, gender, profession, weapon sets, etc. etc. It’s an easy model to think about and works well, until the local population density goes up. When there are a lot of characters in reporting range we start to get into a situation where, under the current system, there’s an overwhelming amount of data to send to the client (hello n-squared problem!) – after all, resources like client CPU/Memory/etc. and bandwidth are finite. In order to deal with this situation we elected to change the criteria for reporting characters slightly. Rather than just using a fixed range we instead also limit reporting to the closest N characters. By doing this we help to ensure that we’re not overwhelming the available bandwidth and, since clients clearly can’t draw or process characters they don’t know about, we get some savings on client performance “for free”. This works out pretty well in PvE and doesn’t seem, at least as far as I can tell, to have a detrimental impact on gameplay.
Unfortunately in WvW, where large battles are quite common, we find that players are bumping into these limits quite often and the effect has a real, and unfortunate, impact on the gameplay experience. Do I like the state that it’s currently in? No, honestly I don’t. WvW has been my baby (though not mine alone!) for quite a while now and I really want to see EPIC battles play out in all of their glory. If there was a switch I could flip to just make this work then I would have flipped the hell out of it by now, believe me. However, when you’re dealing with resource utilization issues like this there are rarely any easy answers. I’m currently, actively looking into what exactly our options are in this regard. The fix is likely to be large-ish in scope, with changes on both the client and server, but we have some ideas that look like they may work out. So, will it get better? I can’t make any promises because we’re still experimenting and building new tech, but as a person who works on this every day I certainly believe that it can and will do everything in my power to make that happen.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa/c6nv7o2

Dead.7385:

And what happens when the machine doesn’t work? How about those bugged DE’s/Skillpoints?

Addressed here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa/c6nxvce

How about the client crashes?

You’ll have to be more specific, but addressed here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa/c6nw4pe

What specific information were you looking for in these topics that were addressed?

I find that list simply amazing.

More skills!

I only read about the big issues like FoV and culling, I missed the bits about the TP preview and LFG system. Thanks for posting this summary, I would have missed those.