Guild Wars 2

I think this guy from another thread said it right.

Heru.5427:

Obviously a fair number of people disagree with this. My biggest issue with the new system is how random and unpredictable it seems to be. Sometimes it works amazing, but just as often it’s way worse than the old system. The old system was at least predictable and you could plan around the eventuality of there being more people on the screen than you could see. With the new system it might just suddenly decide to stop rendering all your friends mid fight making it harder to keep cohesion within a group.

This happens to me sometimes. At moments it works way better then others but sometimes it can be way worse.

Why don’t they just remove the bloody thing altogether? Fear of wallhacks?

I’ve been getting hit by culling issues while doing map completion, not even in WvW. I just ran through a small camp, no players or anything in sight and the NPCs that I saw a second ago all disappear and reappear 5 seconds later.

Not to mention the fact that crates are invisible unless you look at them from a ridiculous angle (like in Snowden Drifts — by sticking your camera to the mountains that block off the perfectly rectangular map’s edges, they’re not visible from any other side).

I spent an hour today chaining events in PvE just to quantify things a little better. There were literally 12-18 friendly players (i counted) doing the events with me.

When the mobs started rushing in on the camps, for the first couple of passes, they all were showing up. After that, the mobs were rushing in their normal packs and you simply could not see them unless you were in the middle of them. By the end of the event, you couldn’t even see most of the mobs when you were standing in the middle of them and taking damage.

Is it possible that the corpses/loot on the ground are counting as well in PvE?

What about WvW? Are pets, npcs, corpses, loot bags, etc. all counting towards the cull? I am guessing everything but the loot bags are because I see pets, npcs, and corpses disappear/reappear as well.

This culling is a joke.

When roaming, enemies appear to be loaded faster than before. With some random model I don’t seem to place (placeholder, perhaps?). Once I assume the game is done loading the actual model, the player disappears entirely for a good 4-5 seconds before reappearing somewhere else entirely with a loaded model. You’ll miss fights completely, which is just insane. Can’t you just give us the option to STOP loading models altogether and just use placeholders? We don’t care about how our enemies look, but we care about their positions and actions.

I agree. It’s MUCH worse now. Can’t even tell how many people are there. None of them load until way too late.

The intention with this patch was not to “fix” culling, merely to make it better temporarily while they work on the longer term fixes.

I’m not sure if it really is any better, I think the December test was better than this. This one just seems weird and inconsistent. It might be because we’re not used to it yet, but the situations where it’s better seem to be few, and the situations where it’s worse seem to be many.

VakarisJ.5619:

Why don’t they just remove the bloody thing altogether? Fear of wallhacks?

I’ve been getting hit by culling issues while doing map completion, not even in WvW. I just ran through a small camp, no players or anything in sight and the NPCs that I saw a second ago all disappear and reappear 5 seconds later.

Glad to know I’m not the only one seeing this. I started having this problem around the 8th of January, and it still hasn’t gone away. I’ve actually ran INTO trees in several locations because they wouldn’t render until right when I was near them or hit them. And considering I never had any of these problems with rendering before January 8th, I’m fairly certain some update caused it.

Hope Arena read this thread.

Culling is really bad now for smaller groups. It seems to be working ok for larger groups but at the moment smaller group fights are IMPOSSIBLE.

Ever since the patch my group of 4 guildies and I roam around capping camps and killing dolyaks. Every single time we see a group of 3 enemies attacking a camp we capped or guard, we move in and start obliterating the 3 enemies. We then die very quickly and 10 people magically phase in on the 3 we were attacking.

Seriously. This happens every single time. This never EVER happened before this patch.

Sheadong.8217:

IMO the old culling was better. :s

same for me, as before I never noticed much. =XD

thanks for try though.=D

I really hated the culling “test” and I really hate the new temporary solution, no surprise there. The core issue is culling hasn’t gone away and now we have additional issues:

1. Can’t see your allies, when you can see them they appear/disappear randomly
2. If you target someone, like your guild leader, the target drops off if they randonly disappear or if they go more than 300 range from you.
3. Half the time I don’t see any weapons rendered at all. For a player who switches weapons a lot I can’t even see what weapon I’m using.
4. It can be almost impossible to co-ordinate movement as half the time you can’t see the rest of your group.
5. Enemy zergs still appear “en masse” out of the blue

As someone who can’t go more than 4 weeks without upgrading something in my PC I tend to think from anectodal experience that those with lesser/bare minimum machines are in fact sometimes seeing an improvement. For those of us who play games seriously enough to invest in our equipment – well, we get the shaft.

The current state of culling makes me look back fondly to Aion for gods sake.

Different dog with different fleas.

Its funny, GW2 is Lots of Culling so you can’t see the enemy you’re fighting..

SWTOR had no culling, but you couldn’t fight with more then 16 people without it becoming a slide show..

DAOC still trucking alone with zero problem….

amazing how new MMO’s are getting worse as they along..

Xsorus.2507:

Its funny, GW2 is Lots of Culling so you can’t see the enemy you’re fighting..

SWTOR had no culling, but you couldn’t fight with more then 16 people without it becoming a slide show..

DAOC still trucking alone with zero problem….

amazing how new MMO’s are getting worse as they along..

If in this day and age 16 players, that are loaded instantly, reduce you to a constant slideshow, you might consider getting a better rig or petitioning the devs to optimize their bloody game.

This morning I did a little test. Since I needed some event credits for daily before heading out.

It was 10 AM on a sunday morning. I met 6 enemies total. Every single one of them had culling issues at one point during the fight.

Most noteworthy is runaway enemies. At around max casting range (1200-1500 range) they seemed to pop in and out of sight. Perhaps because they hit a ranged cap on being important or not.

The silly part here is that there was in no way anywhere near enough numbers on the map to have any form of ‘culling’. It simply cannot be needed at such a time and place. Yet it still very obviously affected the gameplay.

This needs to be fixed or rolled back quick, or my game experience will drop day by day..

Here’s the bottom line of the problem:

The system is telling you who is more important that you see.

So if that Warrior that’s about to do 100blades on you hasn’t done any damage, but that low level sub 80 in the background has you peg’d, it will render the low level while those not doing damage, but CLEARLY MORE DANGEROUS, are not.

This fix took out our ability to decide who and what is more dangerous.

This is BY FAR, the WORSE update / proposed ‘Fix’ EVER in the history of MMO. (yes, i just went there).

We might as well all be playing on macro’s w/ set strategies and execution patterns.

Horrible.

We said it in December and we’re saying it now again.

HORRIBLE.

The Fix: Make it based on a Range (anything within 1200-1800 range is automatically cloned and then rendered), not ‘importance’.

Who are you to decide what is important and what is not?

I was running around with a group of 15 to 20 people last night. We all had to waypoint to Bay and stand around for a few mins while people were afk for a few.

I jumped up on the wall and looked down at the group I was with. 2 people were visible. Jump down on top of those two people and the rest start popping up while the few people up on the wall disappeared. I find it very odd (and quite honestly discouraging) that in 2013 a new MMO’s engine can’t handle displaying 20 to 25 people standing around doing nothing.

The fights are much worse than before. Before I was never sure how many people I was actually fighting. Now I’m not sure how many people I’m fighting against or how many people I’m fighting with. It’s like I’m running around in a world filled with ghosts that just flicker in and out every few seconds.

I’d much prefer the old culling system rather than this one. However, the fact that in 2013 a game can’t display more than 30 or 40 people is disheartening.