Guild Wars 2

Turn problem into an opportunity to push for better broadband standards globally.

Make a test bed in Kansas City, Chattanooga or Korea where everyone is on fiber where culling isn’t needed and use this as an Clearly we are hitting the limits on current tech and for everyone that says “there’s nothing that needs fiber”, this could be one of the obvious cases aside from things like 4k, and UHDTV

Obviously you can’t design for people to have fiber, not even in the next 3 years, it will take at least 5 but you could help speed this along in a small way much like things like Napster drove demand for broadband, you guys could play your part so the US doesn’t fall that much further behind Europe and Asia.

There is a lot of costly developer/engineering time going into rearchitecting around this mess is holding you back from expanding the game that wouldn’t otherwise happen if we all had better connections.

As the technology (web traffic and computer hardware) improved, I thought the gaming would improve. And, although some of the graphics have, I think it is safe to say that we have hit the limit on what they can send to us. Culling is a product of that, although I still think they should just send us all the information and let out own computers sort it out, instead of sending just bits and pieces.

The problem lies with Netflix, Amazon streaming, Youtube, etc. I think that the available bandwidth is just “gone”. Sure, there had been some improvements, but streaming content has set us back some.

Other countries, Korea is a prime example, have amazing internet speeds. The comparison I think was the slowest household in Korea is equal to the fastest connection in the US…or something like that.

I don’t think you understand the dynamic here. It is not simply the availability of bandwidth that is the issue … it is the COST of that bandwidth for ANet and the COST of the support for the servers required to process it all. There are thousands of players who already have far greater bandwidth than would be necessary to run GW2 without limit … the problem is what it would take for ANet itself to service them.

It isn’t the technology that is holding back anything … it is the economics (which of course includes flawed initial decisions made by ANet on things such as the game engine itself) and the contortions required to deal with it that are causing the problems.

Yup I do understand that about 80-90% is a server side issue, but a) would have to wonder if in a place like that, their data costs would plummet b) they have to design for minimum spec DSL connections which more and more are completely inadequate. A rising tide would lift all boats as far as bandwidth headroom goes. Cable upload is also unreliable depending on how much downstream is going on and also how your cable provider prioritizes its tv/data channel split. Fiber is the only thing that doesn’t have any of those common issues and starts us all off on a better foundation.

Amazing that a decade ago a MMO I played was able to handle several hundred players on screen at once. Even more amazing, that it was still playable for me on the old hardware and crappy, low bandwidth internet connection I had.

Cactus.2710:

I don’t think you understand the dynamic here. It is not simply the availability of bandwidth that is the issue … it is the COST of that bandwidth for ANet and the COST of the support for the servers required to process it all. There are thousands of players who already have far greater bandwidth than would be necessary to run GW2 without limit … the problem is what it would take for ANet itself to service them.

It isn’t the technology that is holding back anything … it is the economics (which of course includes flawed initial decisions made by ANet on things such as the game engine itself) and the contortions required to deal with it that are causing the problems.

Anet already said they received the go-ahead to upgrade all of their server bandwidth so now all that is left is to optimize code so min spec users and min spec internet users can still handle the game with culling turned off. The game is highly successful so it makes sense they have the budget to throw money at their servers in order to handle no culling.

BroScientist.9875:

Anet already said they received the go-ahead to upgrade all of their server bandwidth so now all that is left is to optimize code so min spec users and min spec internet users can still handle the game with culling turned off. The game is highly successful so it makes sense they have the budget to throw money at their servers in order to handle no culling.

Yes, of course I also saw that announcement. However, somebody at ANet clearly made a decision prior to launch to cut corners and save money on bandwidth. You can’t even say that they underestimated the demand for WvW because they set map caps at a level that the bandwidth couldn’t support and implemented culling from day one. Whether or not Anet actually buys enough bandwidth to make the game play right remains to be seen. In any case, ANet doesn’t need fiber to the household to fix that, and changing to fiber doesn’t do a thing to make the game playable for low spec machines anyway. As you say, Anet needs to fix the highly non-optimized way they handle textures and visual effects for low end machines to handle the game no matter what the incoming bandwidth is.