Guild Wars 2

Throughout the beta and the first month or so of launch I had no issues with it, at all.

Then in WvWvW I started noticing culling on large groups of players, and subsequently noticed it more and more as patches have been released. Is this intentional?

Since the last two patches however it’s become ridiculous. Players only load in when they are within 10 yards or so, and then disappear right before my eyes. Lions Arch actually feels empty because you can’t see 90% of the people there.

Which leads me to what led me to make (another) post about culling, as I really am not clear as to the intent of it. I loaded into Lions Arch last night (which on a side note, why has it started loading in in chunks with no floors since two patches ago?). I saw players, tons of players! My fps was fine for the 5 seconds or so it lasted and then culling kicked in and they where gone, I was practically alone.

Populating the world with some great guild quests and events is all well and good. But when you can’t see any of them because of how culling is implemented, what’s the point?

I agree, something has changed for the worst.

Like you, i never had issues with culling before the first patch, would ran around WvWvW and would never run into huge packs of people. After the first culling “fix” it all changed and now i get it all the time and its getting worst.

I’m wondering if anyone has actually seen an improvement since the new patches?

It’s gotten massively worse. As a heavy role-player, I can’t even stand inside of a tavern and see all the players anymore. People will blink in and out of existence despite being maybe 15-20 feet away in the same room.

Yeap it’s getting worse, sometimes players and mobs only appear when I get right next to them.

And I have tested it by backing away and watching when they disappear, and then running back and seeing when they appear.

more player’s = more sever loud. probably despite all the Doom threads the game is growing

I quess they thought “well if culling is bad for some people we should just make it bad for everyone to make it fair for all”?

Lol Just kidding, just my conspiracy theory mind going into overdrive. But who knows. O.O

Trust no one….

I’ve noticed it’s been getting worse as well. WvW is bad, but it’s been bad for a while (not at the beginning – I used to be able to see full zergs clash), but now it’s getting bad in PvE for me. I mean, I was in Snowden Drifts, which is pretty much as empty as it gets, and still the other few players I saw faded in only when I was a few yards away. In previous months, I could actually see players running around at a distance.

Built a 1800$ gaming computer last month..

Whats culling?

Where’d all the good people go? I don’t see them on the monitor no more.

Vinny.6924:

Built a 1800$ gaming computer last month..

Whats culling?

Culling doesn’t have to do with your computer – it’s mostly server-side, and how much information is being sent from the server to the client is what impacts how many player models are being rendered.

Rhysati.4932:

It’s gotten massively worse. As a heavy role-player, I can’t even stand inside of a tavern and see all the players anymore. People will blink in and out of existence despite being maybe 15-20 feet away in the same room.

This is exactly what I mean, even though I’m not into role-playing, entering the bank or walking past the mystic forge, I used to be able to see players losing their items in the mystic forge or sifting through their bank. Now all I see are ghosts that disappear as soon as they appear.

The worst part is it’s not just in zones with lots of players. I was running through metrica province on my asura getting a level for the daily. Another character appeared from nowhere, ran 20 yards past me and disappeared again.

It’s disappointing, I love the world, and I really want to feel connected to it, but it’s filled with vanishing ghosts instead of players and NPC’s

Culling is worse now than before the fix… not sure A-net do any testing on changes – it may be worthwhile setting up a test server and allow people to test the changes pre-patch to determine the impact.

DAOC had this with the Pendragon server – it should be done!

They tried out a test that split culling into two queues, one for allies and one for enemies. Everyone said it was terrible and they reverted it. Not too long after that, they put it in the patch, not as a test. Everyone, once again, said it was terrible. We haven’t heard much more since then, though we do know that they are still working on optimizing both the client and server to drastically lower and perhaps even eliminate culling.

Agree, i can understand that culling is in WvW with all the 100 v 100 fights and the insane data transfer the server has to do.

But in PVE? When i walk in Lions Arch or do large fights with other people i can only see max 30 ppl and when i move 5 meter 10 others dissapear and 10 newer ppl reappear. You CANNOT have this in a _ MASSIVE Multyplayer online ROLE playing game.

Example:

Logan: Zaitan where are you?!!

Zaitan: Dude! Im standing 10 meter away from you!

Logan: But.. oh here you are, you have invisibility cloak?

Zaitan: no its culling brah.

And the fact that its 7 months now makes me wonder if it even can be fixed.

It definitely went worse the last 2 patches. Before i had culling only in WvW, and on big big events.. now even LA feels like im alone there.. sometimes not even the npcs in the bank appear for a while.

Pants.8315:

Throughout the beta and the first month or so of launch I had no issues with it, at all.

Then in WvWvW I started noticing culling on large groups of players, and subsequently noticed it more and more as patches have been released. Is this intentional?

Since the last two patches however it’s become ridiculous. Players only load in when they are within 10 yards or so, and then disappear right before my eyes. Lions Arch actually feels empty because you can’t see 90% of the people there.

Which leads me to what led me to make (another) post about culling, as I really am not clear as to the intent of it. I loaded into Lions Arch last night (which on a side note, why has it started loading in in chunks with no floors since two patches ago?). I saw players, tons of players! My fps was fine for the 5 seconds or so it lasted and then culling kicked in and they where gone, I was practically alone.

Populating the world with some great guild quests and events is all well and good. But when you can’t see any of them because of how culling is implemented, what’s the point?

This is true many times i seen loads of people running for maw but by time i get there i see about 5 people and am like were is everyone knowing there standing right next to me in large numbers. It makes me feel alone rather then a part of a large group working together for a task!

Agreed, culling for me got worse with Jan patch but this latest Feb one made it really bad. I was doing jormag event and there were 4 commanders there. I was passing right by them, could see the commander icon but nothing else. Then suddenly a whole group of players materialized right before my eyes.

Magnetron.5823:

Agree, i can understand that culling is in WvW with all the 100 v 100 fights and the insane data transfer the server has to do.

DAoC managed huge fights without culling, so I’m at a loss why the data transfer should be so much worse in GW2.

Magnetron.5823:

Agree, i can understand that culling is in WvW with all the 100 v 100 fights and the insane data transfer the server has to do.

100vs100?

culling already kick in in a 20 vs 20 -_-’

This probably explains why so mnay zones feel empty, because we cant see each other.

After defeating Claw of Jormag the other day, I moved up and down just a few meters near the treasure chest. While moving, nearly all of at least 30 other players, who were standing around relatively still, disappeared, and only started reappearing again when I stopped moving. I have not noticed it as bad as in this situation before.

The culling has gotten much worse. There needs to be a way to fix this. If it’s to lower lag/connection delays, then let us take responsibility for our own computers and turn settings down if we have an issue. Why do I have to see everyones spell effects? Especially considering I don’t see the players who are casting them!

Culling was not a problem after release last year., I remember running around low level zones with TONS of players at the same time. Everything seemed to render as it should, then gradually i noticed more and more culling approaching the end of 2012, and today culling has become a major annoyance. The problem kicks in allready at around 10-20 players.

Sadly since patch which was supposed to help with culling it got worse for me too. maybe it improved in WvW but pve suffered. It gets ridiculous and ANet should do something with it. It feels like the core of the game is broken and sadly they won’t get any money from me ever again if they won’t fix it.

Ive noticed since the patch, culling is way worse. Ive never really noticed it before, until now. Its terrible.

We killed claw of jormag last night..i am there for nearly the entire event. After looting the chest, 30 people appear out of thin air. What is this sorcery?

I’m glad culling is effecting PvE maybe now they will add more resources to fix the situation. Sorry not to rain on anyone’s parade but lets face it they weren’t going to fix it anytime soon if it was just a WvW thing, look at the empty orb holders

QSatu.1586:

Sadly since patch which was supposed to help with culling it got worse for me too. maybe it improved in WvW but pve suffered. It gets ridiculous and ANet should do something with it. It feels like the core of the game is broken and sadly they won’t get any money from me ever again if they won’t fix it.

unfortunately the last culling patch didn’t made it better for WvW too… it made it better for a part of the wvw player and worse for another part… so in the great scheme it is not generaly better (many argue that the part of WvW that got better is minimal against the part that got worse but this is a personal evaluation…)… it simply ADDED a problem to PvE while not solving the problem for WvW… so a total loss-loss

Culling in PVE is a nightmare. Events are now insible MOBS and even Players in a massive lag where all you see is effects and try to AOE everywhere to hit something.

But it’s not that bad, some seconds and it all loads.

Culling will be solved soon. when people will have 100/88 mbps connection.

The culling problems seem to have been getting worse with the last few patches, which is ironic as the last few patches supposedly took steps to improve the problem. Now, when I turn my back on players at a crowded event, they vanish and take 5 or more seconds to appear again when I turn back to look at them.

Have to wonder why the game was designed in a way where just being able to see other players causes the game such stress that this is necessary.

It’s not like this is the first MMO that had a lot of people in places. Those MMOs seemed to figure out a way to let me see them normally.

Minion of Vey.4398:

Have to wonder why the game was designed in a way where just being able to see other players causes the game such stress that this is necessary.

It’s not like this is the first MMO that had a lot of people in places. Those MMOs seemed to figure out a way to let me see them normally.

It is odd because some (but not all) MMOs really seem to struggle with this issue. TERA and Final Fantasy XI, for example, have always been plagued with the same culling issues as GW2. And FFXI has been out for 10 years now and hardware and bandwith on the player’s end has improved tremendously since it launched, and yet it can take minutes for the population in a very crowded scene to fully render.

I for one don’t mind culling at all on big towns. Previously I couldn’t visit Lion’s Arch without my graphics cards going nuts at all the rendering it has to do.

More players rendered → more work for GPU → more heat generated → faster speed for GPU fans → louder noise → unenjoyable experience for computer user

Culling is entirely server side. There’s nothing that you can do on your end to reduce this effect.

Zenith.6403:

I for one don’t mind culling at all on big towns. Previously I couldn’t visit Lion’s Arch without my graphics cards going nuts at all the rendering it has to do.

Actually, I find that with the recent changes, I can’t even see the bank of Lion’s Arch for many moments upon loading in there. I see vendors floating in the air and have to guess as to where the steps and doors are. This is a picture of me standing just outside the bank, looking in (minus the white block where my character is). No walls.. no floors.. eventually it all shows up but it can take a bit.

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Arimahn.3568:

DAoC managed huge fights without culling, so I’m at a loss why the data transfer should be so much worse in GW2.

I never played DAoC but I think it doesn’t have the same combat system as GW2, so that’s probably why.

Since movement/positioning is really important in GW2’s combat to actually see if you hit or miss, this information must be sent for everyone in the area for accuracy.

Take WoW for example, as soon as you press Skill, it goes out and it’s pretty much a hit (the server will calculate the hit/miss according to stats and that’s it).
It doesn’t matter where you are or the opponent, because the skill will only go off if you’re in range anyway.

So positioning in WoW doesn’t take much importance and that can lag since it won’t affect combat this much. You can also notice this by playing with someone else, and as you move together with or without a zerg, you can check by asking “Where are you right now?” or “Who’s leading?”. You’ll always get different responses than what you’re seeing because of lag.

For GW2 though, massive battles means sending positioning information every millisecond about every player in combat to every player.
That’s a bunch load more info than just “Player A has cast skill. Hit! Dealt 100 damage, send 100 damage info to Players”.

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Sounds encouraging if accurate. Eliminating culling is a pretty big claim. I worry because he just talks about seeing other players though, and not being able to see mobs in PvE is a big part of the culling problem as well.

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Nice!

Habib sounds confident that they’ve discovered the solution, looking forward to March!

Look at the bright side. With culling this bad, we can all be thieves in WvW

Culling used to be only an episodic experience outside WvW. After the 1/28 patch it has been a persistent and universal experience throughout the game. Is guesting a factor? Who knows, Anet is not addressing the issue either by fixing or talking about it. I wouldn’t be too hopeful about March as Anet also led us to believe that 1/28 was the “culling” patch. The patch that was to improve culling only made it worse.

Curious to find out if the fix to culling is due to ArenaNet finding a breakthrough to optimizing their code and hardware, or if they are simply adding new tech/more capacity to handle more players and their interactions.

Either way, it will be good to see it go away. It was starting to feel like a low budget MMO. Actually, I haven’t seen culling this bad in even f2p MMOs.

After finding out that our conditions are being capped partly because of how expensive it was to keep track of, I wonder if culling was because they were too cheap in their bandwidth allocations.

For reference, here’s the comment on conditions being too expensive for them:

(Question) "There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?

Colin: Currently no. Interesting statistic for you: every condition in the game costs server bandwidth. ‘Cause we have to track how often the condition is running, what the duration of that condition is and what the stack is. So the more stacks we allow them more expensive it gets because we’re tracking every additional stack on there. And so we could, say, you can have infinite stacks. Number one: that becomes really unbalanced. But number two: it’s actually extremely expensive for us, on a performance basis. That’s one of those weird, kind of back-end server issues that can help make game designer decisions regardless of what you want to do with it.

Karizee.8076:

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Nice!

Habib sounds confident that they’ve discovered the solution, looking forward to March!

Remember that he is only addressing WvW. When they talked about culling in January that patch was for WvW and would be rolled out to the rest of the game eventually. We have no idea when they are targeting open world PvE.

i dont rly remeber a time when culling has been accaptable…. this has always been a big problem in wvw and big events….
how can u anounce a game with big events and stuff but dont manage it to make it enjoyable? all big events has nothing to do with fun…. its pushing a few buttons to flag the mobs/boss and than loot the mobs/chest…..
just ridicolous….
whats the point of having events with 300 ppl but u can only see 30 max and its just not enjoyable since gameplay is not smoth and there is no skill needed at all….
anet should just place some chest all over the world that ppl can loot every day…. these events r pointless….

maybe anet should buy 3 times more server to give ppl an acceptable gaming experience? maybe all server r just overcrowded???? this hole overflow thing is a joke…. without gw2lfg…. this game would have probably died already…. or they had to rename the game “citadel of flame wars”

I’ve noticed issues with culling myself. The new living story DE’s seem to have issues with dulling due to the large number of participants. Many times, mobs show up on my screen after they’ve already been dispatched.

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Thanks for posting this!

Shame it’s not available on here. Would be nice to have a sticky thread containing a list of interviews/articles that can be found on external sites.

Hint hint. ^^

Pants.8315:

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Thanks for posting this!

Shame it’s not available on here. Would be nice to have a sticky thread containing a list of interviews/articles that can be found on external sites.

Hint hint. ^^

Yeah I thought it was really weird that it wasn’t on the GW2 site. If I didn’t have a phone app that reads reddit I’d have probably never seen it. That just seems like some really big news that people should know about.

Yeah I never had issues with culling in beta and at launch+, or at least noticeably until January/February patch. I may of had a bit, but it wasn’t noticeable before then. Pretty sure I didn’t though.

For me:
January patch = monster culling. Can’t see majority of “waves” in bigger events. Especially if there is a lot of players around.
February patch = can’t see majority of people in a populated area. Even sometimes in a lower populated area.

Even in WvW before Jan/Feb I didn’t experience the dreaded culling everyone complained about so hard. But then again my servers WvW is not near as densely populated even in the biggest of events. So I imagine PvE content has more players then WvW in my experience.

Randomly appear dead corpses. Invisible stuff attacking you, etc. Culling is really unfortunate (and annoying). I hope they can figure out some way to deal with it soon.

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Hopefully this will address culling in PvE as well. But I guess they have to “test” it out somewhere, right? >.> And I imagine WvW has more population for most servers anyways.

MMORPG: Back in January, one of the fixes for culling went into place, and it seemed to help a bit. But how will the changes coming in March eliminate this completely? There are a few skeptics in Bill’s (Murphy) guild that think it can’t be done.

Habib Loew: Hah, yeah we have seen a lot of the skepticism on the Internet. The change we made in January was really just a tweak to the system. It changed the priorities of Culling but did not eliminate it. The change in March will turn off Culling completely.

I have absolutely no faith in this claim.

Why?

Because this is the same dev team that claims that the January patch was supposed to “help” with culling, and it only made culling clearly and measurably worse.

Hard-hitting journalism there, though. “The Jan patch seemed to help”, eh? MMORPG’s staff clearly hasn’t played the game at all since January.