Guild Wars 2

This is not a troll or a whine thread, I’v been a DAoC player (and some WAR) for years and so have most of my community. From 32 players we are now down to 3 due to wierd lags, 3W queue and Clipping issues. Tho most of my friends consider GW2 is the best product since DAoC and are willing to play again if at least clipping problem is solved.

Now I know this a commercialy hard question but Anet has proven before that they are slightly over commercial issues in term of communication and game design.

Q: Will clipping in WvWvW be fixed one day? Can your graphic engine (servers) actually make it work? (When?)

Achilles.2950:

What you’re speaking of is an issue Guild Wars 1 had too. The fact it was never fixed and made it’s way into GW2 makes me think it’s just part of the engine and there’s nothing to be done.

They have to fix this, as frankly, it’s becoming a complete and utter game breaking issue.

Everyone who posts in these forums will have numerous stories of ‘that invisible zerg that hit us’, or the time they wiped at 10% on the final gate to garrison because a defending zerg turned up and couldn’t be seen. There’s a ton of youtube videos showing this stuff, screenshots, the works.

It’s compounded by the fact that the higher you go in the WvW tiers, the worse it gets (as the zergs get larger and more numerous).

This must be fixed or people will stop taking part. Our guild had another frustrating night in WvW last night; nothing but invisible zergs and culling problems.

Achilles.2950:

What you’re speaking of is an issue Guild Wars 1 had too. The fact it was never fixed and made it’s way into GW2 makes me think it’s just part of the engine and there’s nothing to be done.

Well, I am afraid all the players interested into WvW will stop playing at some point if they dont communicate on this. Im not saying the game is bad, its probably the best mmo since the last 8 years, but if its down to sPvP and PvE the RvR community will give up.

innocent ouarior.1954:

<snip>Im not saying the game is bad, its probably the best mmo since the last 8 years, but if its down to sPvP and PvE the RvR community will give up.

Especially with PlanetSide 2 coming out soon with large scale warfare as well.

They can’t fix it. It’s the engine. It’s not a matter of a patch or two.

This is honest reply. You will not get ANet reply on this issue because for obvious reasons they can’t post replies that would hurt sales.

At the very least they could mitigate the problem a bit:

- The server alreakitteneps track of which players your client is aware of.
- Any players your client is NOT aware of, cannot damage or affect you.
- On their screen, they get the “invulnerable” message, like a PvE monster that can’t path to you.

I’m talking about the “culling” issue (where the server has not had enough time to send information about all nearby players to your client.) If there is a seperate “rendering” issue (where your client doesnt draw players it already knows about) then that can probably be fixed by placeholder models or something like that.

Ianervan.3415:

They can’t fix it. It’s the engine. It’s not a matter of a patch or two.

This is honest reply. You will not get ANet reply on this issue because for obvious reasons they can’t post replies that would hurt sales.

Of course they can fix it. Engines aren’t immovable things, they’re software, and all software is malleable.

We just need to keep pressing how much of a game breaking issue this is. This is literally the single most important issue in the game for a huge portion of their customers. It can and should be fixed.

Well, there are some physical limits that might prevent them from doing a full fix.

I’m going to invent a hypothetical situation that illustrates this. I have no idea whether it’s the real issue or not. (in fact, I assume it is NOT.)

Let’s guess that the problem is that the player data is large and is streamed seperately from attack data. Thus, in the real life internet, there will always be a case where you’re receiving attack data when the player data has yet to catch up, due to people’s bandwidth not being infinite.

This results in something that can only be “fixed” with some sort of compromise:
- Break the player data into pieces, and send some initial data through first, faster than the attack data. —> You might get player locations, but no data on their appearance or animations. So you’ll get placeholders onscreen for a while.

- Dont accept attack data for players that are not recognised yet. —> You get the compromise I suggested in my previous post.

etc.

I have no idea what the real problem is and whether it’s fixable, but I’m just saying that in Real Life Software sometimes there are problems that cannot be fixed perfectly no matter what, until the world or technology changes.

Aion and Warhammer Online both solved this by loading the names of players before loading character models. Often in Aion you’d see a swarm of red names but no actual character models. Basically what’s suggested in Rieselle’s post. It works alright, although it’s still pretty frustrating.

This problem also is exponentially worse for slower computers. WvW is literally unplayable for several friends of mine because of this.

Ianervan.3415:

They can’t fix it. It’s the engine. It’s not a matter of a patch or two.

This is honest reply. You will not get ANet reply on this issue because for obvious reasons they can’t post replies that would hurt sales.

Well the thread subject was already moderated… not a good sign.

There is something I dont understand. The game is beautiful, the artwork is amazing, but the 3D engine isnt that wonderfull. The shapes, the mesh… are not perfect, its far from BF3 or even Unreal Engine. Why using this engine? We know since beta clipping is an issue. You seem to imply that it was already an issue in GuildWars 1.

Or why making large scale PvP at all if the client cant handle it? It has to be fixable, it has to be a server issue, something they couldnt plan… that couldnt have been that wrong.

World of Warcraft’s atempt to make world PvP (Winterspring) was a complete failure, a huge lagfest, such a catastrophy they ended up instancing the place with limited population. But Warhammer and DAoC managed to offer honest world PvP, the games had major issues (horrible game design, poor class balancing, the list is endless, everything so far from GW2 extreme polishness) but at least it wasnt unplayable on every keep battle.

I’d like to point out that culling issues weren’t such a problem in the beta… either that, or nobody seemed to notice. Some patch that was introduced in the live version caused this to get much worse, and A-net can’t or won’t roll it back for whatever reason.

There likely is no “fix” for a problem that effects large-scale PvP combat in basically every MMO. But there’s always a compromise to be had.. and displaying character names as a placeholder until the model can be loaded would be largely beneficial.

at least with name plates or something the zerg would not be invisible, just hard to see..

sorry to say but some players like me have never really had problems with culling outside of maby player popping out of stealth will have a small delay if you are with a zerg
and 1 or 2 stonemist battles where all 3 servers have EVERYONE there 180+ players and even there the serverside skill lag is more of an issue than the temporary nonrendered players that at closest pop into sight 1000ish units away for me even still

I thought they had a “fix” for this coming tomorrow? That’s what I heard, or read.

I have a pretty good computer. Culling only happens in SM for me. I’ve waded into a 40+ zerg on numerous occasions there with less than 5 actually visible.

Though I have friends with lack luster computers who experience it in the BLs. I’ve seen my friends charge into a 30+ zerg and I’m like “what the hell” and they’re like, “What killed me?”

Arbacus.8296:

sorry to say but some players like me have never really had problems with culling outside of maby player popping out of stealth will have a small delay if you are with a zerg
and 1 or 2 stonemist battles where all 3 servers have EVERYONE there 180+ players and even there the serverside skill lag is more of an issue than the temporary nonrendered players that at closest pop into sight 1000ish units away for me even still

I just dont believe you. I run 5 to 20men groups since release on a daily basis and we encounter MAJOR clipping issue VERY often and everyone on the vocal is having the same problem. It is so predictible that we often turn it into a strategy: move to a large distance than rush the attacked door throwing blind AoEs, it kills people you dont see and who cant see you, even outnumbered you still get a ton of kills.

(i7, 8GB RAM, GTX 590, euro servers)

there were no culling issues during BWE1. zero. i have no kittening clue why this hasn’t been fixed yet

innocent ouarior.1954:

Arbacus.8296:

sorry to say but some players like me have never really had problems with culling outside of maby player popping out of stealth will have a small delay if you are with a zerg
and 1 or 2 stonemist battles where all 3 servers have EVERYONE there 180+ players and even there the serverside skill lag is more of an issue than the temporary nonrendered players that at closest pop into sight 1000ish units away for me even still

I just dont believe you. I run 5 to 20men groups since release on a daily basis and we encounter MAJOR clipping issue VERY often and everyone on the vocal is having the same problem. It is so predictible that we often turn it into a strategy: move to a large distance than rush the attacked door throwing blind AoEs, it kills people you dont see and who cant see you, even outnumbered you still get a ton of kills.

(i7, 8GB RAM, GTX 590, euro servers)

well if you want we can arrange a stream session i can show you but thats troublesome i really dont get it to tell you the truth because your graphic card and processer are a small margine better than mine i use SSD HD tho do you have that? hell ill even come to your server and play with you for a day we can do a direct comparison

It cant be just the hard drive. Everyone in the group I use to be is having the same issues at the same time (not sure about the same scale).
I dont think its my server since it really seems (cant be 100% sure) enemies have the same problem considering the lack of reaction when you run into the sideof a zerg trail. Maybe is euro servers, lets hope so because it would mean its not the Engine.

Basically if you defend a door you dont see anyone coming in before you are dead (if they do AoE, if not they just run by), if you are at keeper’s Bridge in BL central keep you dont see attackers who just broke P2, if you are at your portal and run to defend the closest keep you dont see the attackers on the keep doors…

Or you actually see some of them slowly loading in but you cant have any idea of the size of the group, and forget about smart dodging specific attacks and such. That means if you dont run with oversized teams you will pretty much get crushed because you cannot evaluate when its managable to fight, when you back off, or what is smart to do anyways since you hardly see half of the players you are fighting.

There seems to be some confusion about this, and some people bleating on about how they don’t get the culling problem and their computers are good, etc etc… this issue is there for everyone. It’s not about how many people are outside a gate, or in SM, or how many characters you can see on your screen at once.

It’s about how the server makes a decision over which players it’s going to tell you about, and which it won’t. That’s why 50 people portalling is a problem; because suddenly the server has to tell you computer about 50 new people, as opposed to simply telling your computer that the 50 people it already knows about have moved. One requires a lot of data from the server as well as time for the client to process it, the other considerably less so.

If your computer has already been told about a group of players you’re golden. If the server’s logic on when it should tell you about a group suddenly evaluates to true then the invisible become visible; it’s that logic that needs addressing.

There are so many things Anet could actually do to improve this with the technology they have. Unfortunately who knows if and when we’ll get a fix; a potentially amazing PvP framework is being kittened over by a poorly thought out server optimisation.

They should just make enemies a default model/armour for each class/race

@Parthis

Then why does the players in my guild with higher end computers experience the problem -significantly- less than those who are using sub-par computers? We’re all on vent when we run WvW, so there is no mis-communication. I’m talking to them as the report only seeing 5-10 people where I can see 40+, and we’ve discussed our rigs.

And as another example, I was running the game on a laptop in early september, and the culling issue was a common problem of mine. It occurred whenever 30 or so people gathered together. It even happened in Orr. The game’s performance on my laptop was about 30fps on the lowest settings, in regular PvE. After I built my new rig, the culling issue has disappeared almost entirely, except in the largest of battles. I now run the game at 50+ fps with everything but shadows maxed.

So are you saying that all of this is insane coincidence? Or is there a correlation between good rigs and liars? The problem does not exist for -everyone-, just the vast majority. I’m not saying it is entirely a personal computer problem, but it does mitigate the problem.

I have a great gaming computer. I experience the culling problem. It’s not about your computer; you’re confusing two separate issues.

Culling; the logic employed by the server to decide whether your computer needs to know about players in your area. That is server logic; your computer’s specs are irrelevant.

Client performance; the time it takes for your computer, having just received information for a large group of players, to render them on screen.

The fact you’re mentioning things like your FPS shows you don’t understand the problem; regardless of your computer’s specs guild wars (the client) cannot render players it isn’t aware of.

It’s a server side problem. EVERYONE experiences it, just to varying degrees as the performance of your computer mitigates it somewhat.

For the record your post is needlessly hostile and overly obtuse, particularly the final paragraph.

I’m running an i7, 8gb ram, amd radeon HD 7770 2gb dedicated ram rig, and I routinely find myself surrounded by an invisible zerg that only loads up on my screen after it’s too late for me to escape. Those of you saying you don’t experience this issue, congratulations, but you are far and away the significant minority.

@Parthis

Thanks for clearing that up, though you could afford to be less derogatory in your posts, intentional or not.

with WvW being the main staying factor for Gw2 they really should have a fix for culling soon, or atleast tell us that there is nothing they can do about it short of making a new engine

ThaOwner.7560:

with WvW being the main staying factor for Gw2 they really should have a fix for culling soon, or atleast tell us that there is nothing they can do about it short of making a new engine

Telling us something would be the least minimum indeed.

Hey guise, since you wanted a response, I called up the Arena.net offices and they told me to tell you this:

“We have listened to your feedback, and want to let you know these are hot topics around the office and local bars/nightclubs. We are working on some changes to the modifications but the alterations are not quite there yet. We will let you know when we have something to say…
Soon.”

As said before the culling issue is mainly on the server side. I have done simple tests to see if what everyone said is true.

If I am on scouting duty on a tower/keep and I’m basically alone I will have no problem seeing the 50/60/70 turtle zerg pop in with a portal (surely I will miss a couple but I can see the majority of them popping the moment the portal opens up).

If however I am running with a zerg of 30 people and we run into another zerg of 30/40 people I will see some but not all.

I have noticed a difference between running in the main ball of the zerg and running slightly ahead of the zerg. Which has been making me feel that it might have something to do with proximity aswell (completely hypothetical). I also notice more players pop up whenever I shadowstep into a mainly invisible zerg and dagger storm.

Anyone else tested this?

Apart from that, if ANet doesn’t fix this or atleast give a proper statement about it people will stop playing WvW and this game will die. sPvP/tPvP isn’t for everyone and the game simply lacks proper PvE content to survive.

Supposedly it’s being fixed today (or whenever the big patch is) from what I read before, but I’m not holding my breath. Last time they tried to fix it made things 10x worse.

It’s playable right now, but it’s still really annoying when thieves take a good 5-6 seconds to appear on your screen. By that time they can already stealth again.

Portal bombing is also an issue because of this.

Lol. People are going to start complaining again if they fix this and your PC just frez when a 50man Zerg take on another Zerg….. Don’t think many system can handle 100 man doing AOE all at once.

So u wan invincible enemy or got kick out of WvW.

Darx.6798:

Lol. People are going to start complaining again if they fix this and your PC just frez when a 50man Zerg take on another Zerg….. Don’t think many system can handle 100 man doing AOE all at once.

So u wan invincible enemy or got kick out of WvW.

If it’s a choice between the game struggling to support multiple 50 man zergs on screen, and actually seeing a 50 man zerg on screen, i’ll choose the latter, regardless of lag.

Get killed by invisible enemies is, frankly, pathetic.

The by product of the situation you’re describing may in fact be a good thing; if the mindless zerging playstyle becomes a lag fest it’ll encourage people not to do it.

Secondly, there are again other things Anet can do improve client performance; as players ramp up, tone down the spell effects, ground details, etc etc.

You can only optimise this stuff when you know it’s a problem, and the pre-cursor to knowing the extent of the problem is to solve the culling issues.

Parthis.2091:

Darx.6798:

Lol. People are going to start complaining again if they fix this and your PC just frez when a 50man Zerg take on another Zerg….. Don’t think many system can handle 100 man doing AOE all at once.

So u wan invincible enemy or got kick out of WvW.

If it’s a choice between the game struggling to support multiple 50 man zergs on screen, and actually seeing a 50 man zerg on screen, i’ll choose the latter, regardless of lag.

Get killed by invisible enemies is, frankly, pathetic.

The by product of the situation you’re describing may in fact be a good thing; if the mindless zerging playstyle becomes a lag fest it’ll encourage people not to do it.

Secondly, there are again other things Anet can do improve client performance; as players ramp up, tone down the spell effects, ground details, etc etc.

You can only optimise this stuff when you know it’s a problem, and the pre-cursor to knowing the extent of the problem is to solve the culling issues.

Indeed. In early DAoC many groups were avoiding the mass because 100+VS100+ turned into lag orgies. The problem with culling is that since you cant be sure how big is the player group you face is you cant take strategic decision whereas to go for it or fall back. At the end of the day the only solution is to ensure you are 20+ people.

Guys, I rarely get this problem and I WvW allot, I have my sound turned off and graphics set to best performance reason I do this, when I played EvE Online this was only way I could get large scale battles to load allot faster.

I’m not sure if this works but over teamspeak I always hear I can’t see them while I can see them.

I’m personally guessing that culling might have something to do with the amount of bandwidth or processing power available on the servers. So the fact that culling wasnt a problem in the BWE is probably due to the total number of people on the servers being much less back then.

As far as I know, GW2 is CPU bound and therefore does not utilize your GPU (video card) like other games do. The result of this is the delay in rendering objects like other players in a speedy fashion. Do you notice that you don’t see custom dyes on opponent armour in WvW? This is to further reduce the rendering (culling) delay.

ANet needs to push more of the video processing off the CPU and onto the GPU but this requires a substantial re-write of the gaming engine.

When you think your fighting 2 players and actualy theres +30 of them.

Xavi.6591:

As far as I know, GW2 is CPU bound and therefore does not utilize your GPU (video card) like other games do. The result of this is the delay in rendering objects like other players in a speedy fashion. Do you notice that you don’t see custom dyes on opponent armour in WvW? This is to further reduce the rendering (culling) delay.

ANet needs to push more of the video processing off the CPU and onto the GPU but this requires a substantial re-write of the gaming engine.

This sounds completely wrong to me, but I’m sure my guess sounds equally as wrong to you.

I won’t mention that I’m a software developer, because as we all know everyone on the internet is a 12-year old girl pretending to be a software developer.

Yes, Anet doesn’t like to talk about this for obvious reasons and you are risking infractions for participating in this debate.

Underlying technical problem is not graphic engine, this is not texture load delay or stuttering you see in other games. GW2 engine is solid (but can use customization option to reduce spell effect bling bling) and up to the task.

What is not up to the task is underlying distributed server infrastructure. Have you noticed that when people load, they load mostly all at once, and fully, so you see entire model, with race, type of armor they have and so on…

Well this culling issue is almost entirely about how long it takes for update to get pushed to your client. Way they designed GW2 back-end they apparently have no ability to get some data to you right away, only all of it at once, and only when it is ready. So they can push about ~10 characters to you at once, fully loaded. Anything above that and system get bogged down. They currently can’t for example show you 50 generic invaders right away, then load rest of information at the later time.

I think this issue is unresolvable. You can’t throw hardware at it, you only going to see marginal improvement. I am willing to bet database performance itself is not a problem, and if it can be improved (at a great cost, mind you) it will be only marginal.

What they need to do to fix this is redesign how they do their distributed computing. The same technology that allows them to dynamically allocate more servers to busy zones is the technology that doesn’t allow them to load placeholders quickly to you.

Now, following is couple things that I guess they could do to somewhat help:

#1. Incoming damage seems to be separate data stream, you know you are taking damage before you load your attackers. You could expand on this, and have client show you generic attacker before they load. This way at least you will be able to fire back on enemies before they load.

#2. Cut down on speed buffs and limit portals to ~5ish people at a time, pulsing every 1-2 seconds to let more people through. If you slow down rate people get on your screen, then you make this issue less acute. No technology exists that would allow you to instantly load potentially unlimited number of enemies on the screen coming through a portal all at once.

I personally think #2 is more realistic approach. I know I can handle slower speed buff (always 30%, in and out of combat) and nerfed portal if that means culling issue are mostly solved.

Parthis.2091:

There seems to be some confusion about this, and some people bleating on about how they don’t get the culling problem and their computers are good, etc etc… this issue is there for everyone. It’s not about how many people are outside a gate, or in SM, or how many characters you can see on your screen at once.

It’s about how the server makes a decision over which players it’s going to tell you about, and which it won’t. That’s why 50 people portalling is a problem; because suddenly the server has to tell you computer about 50 new people, as opposed to simply telling your computer that the 50 people it already knows about have moved. One requires a lot of data from the server as well as time for the client to process it, the other considerably less so.

If your computer has already been told about a group of players you’re golden. If the server’s logic on when it should tell you about a group suddenly evaluates to true then the invisible become visible; it’s that logic that needs addressing.

There are so many things Anet could actually do to improve this with the technology they have. Unfortunately who knows if and when we’ll get a fix; a potentially amazing PvP framework is being kittened over by a poorly thought out server optimisation.

high end overclocked processor/ssd mitigate it quite well for me as i outlined the point at which i believe the server problem takes over everything under that is client side could it be worse based on internet connection/distance from servers?

Look at it this way (100% speculation to follow):

To load 20 people it takes: 0.5s for ‘threads’ running 20 people to push data into your instance, add 0.2s if it happens to be located on physically different machine, 0.1-0.2s for your ‘thread’ to push update to client , 0.1s-0.2s (depending on computer) to render it.

Difference between the best PC on fastest connection vs. worst PC on mediocre connection is 0.8s vs 1.0s

ok thanks sini i figured it couldnt be tha tmuch cause i have friends who live in texus and i live in alberta canada and they have huge issues when i dont have any i have to actually constantly count and report the people for them/call out portals and all that stuff

They could reduce the number of mobs, pets and minions running around in WvW for starters.

That alone should help with culling.

But then again it happens in sPvP too. I had a Daggerstorming Thief just 10 yards away from me yesterday. I could see the spell-effect, but couldn’t actually see the Thief.

i have a rather nice gaming machine (i3570k@4.8ghz, 6970@1ghz, ocz ssd,…) and i get killed in ultra smooth 60+ fps by 20+ bands who pop up after me and my friends are dead.

culling and (fps) lag are two different things. people with good machines have little or no (fps) lag, but culling is the same for everyone afaik. culling = server issue. fps (lag) = client issue.

i think anet did huge miscalculations in what would be popular in this game and how much server resources would be needed for it. Anet wants the spvp to be the endgame, which is something that probably uses a fraction of the server resources PER PLAYER INVOLVED of w3. i don’t think Anet really anticipated that w3 would be such a hit. i don’t think their server capacity is up to the task.

for a 100 man battle the server needs to send 100 players location to 100 players= 10 000 pieces of info that need to be send.
for 10 10 player matches (the same amount of players), it needs to send 10 pieces of info to 10 players each (100) * 10 instances = 1000 pieces of info that need to be send.

that’s my 2 cents on the issue.

if thats true and the machine makes no diff then some clients are favored over others for some other reason or there wouldnt be such a difference for some players

I have a i7 920@ 3.6GHz, SSD’s and xFire 5850’s. Rendering issue is a problem not just for large groups, but single stealth thieves whose build is based around the rendering problem.

Zilm.8459:

I have a i7 920@ 3.6GHz, SSD’s and xFire 5850’s. Rendering issue is a problem not just for large groups, but single stealth thieves whose build is based around the rendering problem.

Its not going to be long till players massively exploit culling issues. Im not talking about just thieves or random small groups.
And when you will have commanders leading massive pieces of zerg exploiting culling it is going to be invisible man all over the place. Not to mention side rush, blind AoE and Teleport bomb arent good strategies because they are smart or effective, they just strong because culling make them so.

HabibLoew,

Thanks for the answer.

Has me wondering why the current system was never considered a potential problem. Didn’t this occur during beta/alpha testing?

I’m really curious about that too, adding a game mode that is designed to have many people in one place and not considering this is pretty… ahem.

Lowpoly enemy models is the solution, arrayed would be great too, do you think when i am fighting 30+ players i would pause for a moment and admire how smooth the polygons on the 30+ enemy models? It’s just a Functionality VS Visuality issue.