Guild Wars 2

It really annoys me.

I have a SSD and I spend 10+ seconds on loading screens. That ninja forever-loading screen is also pretty annoying. Not sure why they brought it back. ._.

I am around 10 seconds too, why… they cant even load 50 players on 1 screen.. why to load so long?

I take it you guys never played games like Everquest….

CMF.5461:

I take it you guys never played games like Everquest….

EQ has no bearing on this, in this day and age there is no reason for the horrible load times we get.

On my laptop the load times are pretty bad I’ll admit. I have a nice SSD in my desktop though and loading times are very short. I don’t have a complaint at all.

Ok before you all comparise this game..

Its a 2012 game

You can always check out Tor. There the load times were over a minute to certain planets(maps) :P

10 seconds is nothing.

Gives me time to get a quick drink, stretch, hit the bathroom fast, see whats going on tv, talk to the woman, pet the animal, scratch my butt, adjust myself in chair, do 10 jumping-jacks, participate in Scrabble, etc.

It’s because it doesn’t stream in the background. Usually a game especially an open world game will stream the next zone that you are approaching. At least some of the content.

I guess to save money because it’s F2P this game does not.

the amount of loading doesn’t bother me as much as the time it takes to load.
our character probably save much more information on every maps compared to other mmo where they save none other than position.

My statement was not to justify but to put perspective on the situation. I am more patient because of the gaming history in the past these (to me) 10 seconds are fairly quick.

When the game has issues and loads for 20-30 seconds, that’s when I begin to get annoyed and I have had that happen to me.

When reaching a loading screen you are in essence connecting to a new “room” with different chat, textures, models, sounds, and what ever other hidden things that may go on with loading. This is a smart thing to do because it allows your computer to stop running things that are not needed, thus reducing the data being used/stored by cutting the fat and only holding things that are pertinent to the current gaming situation.

Now, I used to be on a SSD Raid 0 configuration till one of my SSDs died on me, so I switched back to a HD for space/stability. Load times, surprisingly enough are about the same. What this is telling me is that it is not the hard drive spin that is slowing down load times, but the CPU/Memory and the network that are slow.

CPU/Memory you have some control over by upgrading, network…you are prone to the effects of the great Internet.

Other than that, optimization of code could help prioritize things to load onto the player and then let them load into the game “faster”.

The other option is streaming zone loading much like WoW does. You may not notice it, but wow has zones and there is a bit of load time when you cross zones. Why did they not choose to go with streaming instead of this physical zone separation?

My only guess would be: better manipulation of zones separate from each other, in the event that an update is needed or a zone needs to go down they do not have to take down the whole world.

Also, WoW zone transition art is horrible in my eyes… at first its bright red, then it turns all lush green with like maybe a foot of transition. By splitting zones like this then you are able to make your game art graphics very distinct without having to worry about area transitions breaking up your theme.

about the time that I realized it would be faster to run to a waypoint across my map than wait for the load time, I was a little disappointed.

interesting video I watched a while back but good insight to this same issue we are taking about with loading times.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=A3oIiH7BLmg#t=467s

I remember load times used to be much faster, then some patch swung around and load times overall took a dive, for me atleast.

LA load times for the first time are awful haha.

wow a whole 10 seconds your time has really been wasted there.

Taking a look at the OP’s post history, I think he is talking about loading things in respects to other players and graphics which cause culling issues.

Yes culling is annoying, but the game does this to minimize load on your computer. Again WoW does this with large clusters of people, and I notice you do a lot of WvW. Again in a large cluster of people.

They do need to optimize how they cull things and/or give us the option to cull more or less depending on how good our computers are.

With culling you can limit the amount of different characters there are on your screen (i.e. polygons and textures) which will take a load on your graphical frame rate and memory being used. This is a very high graphics game so in order for it to run smoothly, culling is needed. Most likely it needs more culling than other games of lesser graphical quality.

Can they make it better? Yes for sure. Do they put time and effort into making it better? I have to believe that they don’t want a game where you can’t see people because of culling, they have addressed the issue publicly, so I believe they will do what they can to fix that.

My problem with the game wasn’t the occasional 10 second loading screen here or there, but the overall amount of loading.
Following my personal story, it easily added up to 5+ loading screens right in a row with just opening the map to pick another WP or walking 10 meters to i.e. a door inbetween them, which was way too much for my patience.

Boomstin.3460:

You can always check out Tor. There the load times were over a minute to certain planets(maps) :P

10 seconds is nothing.

I think I spent more time loading in SWTOR than I even did in Classic EQ. It was ridiculous. They were so long they actually influenced whether I bothered doing certain things or not.

I have noticed that the load times have increased for me too.

falling back on some reminiscent memories, I still have the EQ song stuck in my head to this day because of all those loading times.

Also the random blurbs they put on the loading messages like, “Teaching snakes how to kick….”

Magnetron.5823:

I am around 10 seconds too, why… they cant even load 50 players on 1 screen.. why to load so long?

10 seconds?

Too long?

This generation, I tell you.

…try the load times without a SSD…think these kids would kitten themselves (excuse the language even though its prolly gotten get turned into “kitten” )

You aint seen long loading times until you’ve played SWTOR. Hell, one can almost cook and eat one’s dinner then clean up afterwards in the time it takes to load the zones/planets in that sorry game.

The loading times in GW2 are nothing.

I’m not used with that Loading Times in a MMO, Lions Arch can take 1 Minute of Loading Sometimes, what frustrates me becuase I already try to avoid to go Lions Arch for save some time.

Meeooww.3742:

I have a SSD and I spend 10+ seconds on loading screens. That ninja forever-loading screen is also pretty annoying. Not sure why they brought it back. ._.

What would you suggest? price size cost location? pm if on here with the answer or post (not sure the policy on saying which hardware one has).

Max Lexandre.6279:

I’m not used with that Loading Times in a MMO, Lions Arch can take 1 Minute of Loading Sometimes, what frustrates me becuase I already try to avoid to go Lions Arch for save some time.

I am totally the same way, I don’t have a whimpy computer in the slightest and yet I have to wait an entire minute between regular zones as well. It couldn’t possibly be just the hard drive either, there’s alot of chatter that their login servers must do before placing you. It’s too much really someone should streamline that chatter and log people faster to get them to where they need to be especially when there isn’t an overflow server involved at the time.

It usually takes me 5-10 secs to load anywhere. So the sad point is, the game is badly optimized so you need a really good computer to run it

Max Lexandre.6279:

I’m not used with that Loading Times in a MMO, Lions Arch can take 1 Minute of Loading Sometimes, what frustrates me becuase I already try to avoid to go Lions Arch for save some time.

I believe (pure speculation by the way) that the load times are so long a LA due to
1) in being the high end hub of the game
and
2) most severs are at the “should I sent him/her to the main server or overflow server” point and the routing program is most likely arguing with itself

The loading screens aren’t limited to when you zone; it also happens sometimes when you take a waypoint to somewhere else on the map (even if its just a floor down). Other times, it doesn’t. I suspect it has a lot to do with texture loading since the GuildWars 2 executable is 32-bit and therefore can’t use much system memory.

It would be nice if there was a 64-bit client.

I don’t mind the loading times, though. I come from EQ, where loading times were often measured in minutes instead of seconds.