Guild Wars 2

As you may have read in today’s update notes, the decoration restriction in the upper area of the Gilded Hollow guild hall has been removed. This means that you will be able to address any issues that your guild hall had with decorations being accidentally embedded in the topmost areas of the hall.

However, you should know that in order to retrieve those decorations, you’ll need to use the “Clear Decorations” option for your guild hall. This will remove all decorations and allow you to reposition each of them. The team investigated other ways to address this issue, and programmatically, the “Clear Decorations” option is the only one that is feasible. We apologize for any inconvenience that this change may present you.

Nemitri.8172:

Hey Gaile, any news, or plans on eliminating the decoration limit in areas? it really stifles creativity

I believe the limit on decorations is a practical matter, just as storage and other things also have limits. If you think about it, having no limits might result in huge “bloat” as someone acquired 5 gazillion items or 3.4 bazillion storage slots.

I will ask, to be sure I’m speaking accurately, but I believe that limits are required on a lot of different things as a practical element of development. Or… are you asking about limits within specific areas of the map? Before I ask, I should get clarification on your question. Thanks!

Based on another thread which asks specifically about area and not overall limitations, I’ll see if there’s information to provide on this subject.

Editing to add that the “area limitation” question is also the first in this thread.

insanemaniac.2456:

there is a definite area limitation similar to how wvw siege is capped at 5 pieces in any ring of radius 1500ish. the limit on decorations is more like 15-20 in 1000 radius or so, but it is a frustrating thing to fight against when trying to go crazy with building jps or other things. (speaking from experience!)

But let’s be fair! We don’t want you blowing the heck out of your enemies by using that lethal potted plant!

More seriously, though, I understand about the area limit. We’ll see what there is to learn about it.

I’ve been talking to the team on the question of object limits and hope to have some info on this tomorrow, if at all possible.

Thanks for your patience.

Here’s a message about the subject of Guild Halls from content programmer Alina Chadwick:

During a live stream, while we were still in development for Heart of Thorns, we reported that the maximum number of guild hall decorations would be 2000. As the system went through further iteration we found that this number was not possible and in order to ensure the stability of the guild system we needed to reduce the maximum to 1000 before ship.

The reason for the limits on the placement of specific items within a certain radius is two-fold. In the arena, turrets and other such active obstacles run scripts that consider the players and obstacles around them. Having too many of these in close proximity to one another is detrimental to server performance. For this reason, those obstacles have their own special density limit that is separate from that used by static obstacles and decorations.

For decorations in the guild hall proper, and for static obstacles, care must be taken to prevent too many models from being visible on the screen at a given time, otherwise framerate can degrade significantly on less powerful machines. Without specific limits it would be possible for a member of your guild to place decorations in a way that works perfectly well on their powerful machine but which makes your guild hall unplayable for your guild mates with less powerful computers. The limits prevent significant performance issues but are high enough to allow a wide range of creativity.

I hope that info is helpful, and thanks to Alina for the details!