Guild Wars 2

I know…yet another thread about culling. However, this issue is really destroying WvW. It has gotten to the point that teams are now exploiting culling. We are now told by commanders to keep out mini pets as this will be yet another thing which the servers have to deal with when choosing which objects to send to clients for rendering. Mass Invisibility, Veil and other stealth abilities continue to compound the problem.

The entire culling system is a failure. We should be able to simply turn off character rendering and see only names or some very low level form that represents enemy players. At this point, I wouldn’t care if the entire map was populated with stick-figures! This would provide a solution for people with low-end computers and a fall back solution for everyone in times of extremely populated battles.

Drizzzle.5847:

The entire culling system is a failure. We should be able to simply turn off character rendering and see only names or some very low level form that represents enemy players. At this point, I wouldn’t care if the entire map was populated with stick-figures! This would provide a solution for people with low-end computers and a fall back solution for everyone in times of extremely populated battles.

Absolutely agree. If you can see names, then you know where they are, how many they have (approx) and you know whether you should retreat or not. I suspect it will be very difficult for anet to swallow their pride and do something like this since they have a lot invested in cool-looking stuff.

I have to agree with OP, I for one won’t be playing GW2 for much longer if the Culling/Rendering/Lag issues aren’t sorted out pretty soon. I love WvW and it plays a big part in why I login most days but it is becoming less and less enjoyable.

Colly.4073:

I have to agree with OP, I for one won’t be playing GW2 for much longer if the Culling/Rendering/Lag issues aren’t sorted out pretty soon. I love WvW and it plays a big part in why I login most days but it is becoming less and less enjoyable.

Same. I do 99.9% WvW. I also will be taking a break if things aren’t improved soon.

The culling is miserable. It’s kind of bizarre that a game released in 2012 has such a low limit of how many characters you are able to see and such a bad algorithm for determining those characters. It’s not like we’re talking hundreds or thousands of people at once….the culling is terrible with a couple dozen people. That’s just sad for a modern game, honestly.

Combined with the lag that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent, I am simply enjoying the game less.

Good thing is, there is no monthly fee, so I can put the game down for a few months and check in at some point to see if it’s gotten better.

ANET listened to everyone about the ratings reset. Will they listen to everyone about the culling or just think everything is ok?

All I hear about at the moment from my Oceanic guildies is lag issues. A lot of them have stopped playing WvW at peak times. This of course is a slippery slope.

Sat in SM we started building golems, I could see everyone most of the time.
Headed to keep for more supplies & it was like being surrounded by ghosts.
This culling “fix” was awful in December & is just as bad now.

Sure on the rare occasion you may see a pre-loader of someone/thing, assuming you`re both stood still trying to guess if something/one is near, but generally not because you`re running, not RP walking across these maps, but to have both enemy & friendlies nipping in & out of reality, isn`t remotely humorous.

Low quality upload, wasn`t going to clog my internot whilst playing other online games

This should of been reverted (or properly tested) within a day or three of release, not leaving it until March!

Kony 2012.
Culling 2013…?

I don’t even play this game anymore but come to the forums every month or two but are some of your reading what your typing. Or are you people just stupid do you really think they culling is such a simple issue that they can fix it instantly if enough people complain. There isn’t a culling on and off switch, they are trying to figure out how to fix it and wont for another 1-6 months i suggest u take a break.

Culling was one reason I stopped playing as having 50 reds spawn ontop of my player killing everyone around me within 2 seconds was terrible and was the worst pvp probelm i have every experienced in a mmo (so bad that it actually made me quit).

Generalizing encounters from my point of view (since January patch):
01. Enemies start appearing, prepare for combat!
02. Approaching.. I’m nearly ready to attack these unaware dudes!
03. They DISAPPEARED! Was there a thief… NO!
04. kitten my health is going down FAST, there were only two dudes?!
05. Ah there they are! These two dudes finally re-appeared!
06. Oh crap, they aren’t attacking me, my health is still going down hard?!
07. More people spawning in?! There are 6?!
08. “Would you like to respawn at a waypoint?”
09. Complain a lot on guild channel.
10. I’ll be back tomorrow, maybe, and see if a ninja-patch is in place.
Repeat every other day or so.

1. see 2 guys
2. run towards them
3. boom dead
4. 20 people appear over about 5 seconds

I would say that even faded out shadows resembling each race would suffice or if that’s too much make them human shadow like figures.

Monoman.2068:

I would say that even faded out shadows resembling each race would suffice or if that’s too much make them human shadow like figures.

LOL Pretty soon we’re gonna be at Ultima IV style 2-d graphics.

http://hardcoregaming101.net/ultima/Ultima%20IV%20Quest%20of%20the%20Avatar/ultima4%20-%20FMTOWNS%20-%2015.png

I am fairly sure I understand why they introduced the culling system. When I played AION, fort battles and other heavily populated events were also dreadful. In this case, AION servers sent all information about your environment to you at once and let your computer handle it. It was very processor intensive and GPU intensive depending on your settings. Essentially, instead of people appearing and disappearing, you froze for a second or two (sometimes much longer) depending on how quickly your computer was able to process all the information that was just thrown at it. This was obviously just as annoying as culling in that instead of not being able to see what was happening, you simply couldn’t do anything at all until your computer had finished figuring out what was going on around you. To ease this effect, they allowed you to turn off character rendering by pressing SHIFT-F12 and all you would see is a bunch of names running around. When you selected a target, that person was rendered, etc.

Now, this could cause problems on a few different levels for Guild Wars 2. First, the game relies a great deal on visual cues. You react to an opponents skills by watching their tells and keeping an eye on your debuffs. AION had a very intense system log that would spam written information about what was happening around you. This wouldn’t necessarily be a huge issue for me in WvW because there are so many visual cues happening that I mainly watch for AOE circles and my debuffs, but other players may not agree.

WvW was conceived as a massive battle with hundreds of players. The awe and amazement of such scale were intended to be a very large part of what would attract players to it. However, I am not so sure that hardware exists (both server side and client side) that can fluidly support such an epic vision. In the end, we aren’t seeing half of the battle as it is anyway due to culling and players are really starting to get angry when battles are lost because of it. Even worse, culling is being exploited(more or less) and even my teammates are disappearing in front of me making it aggravating to simply try and coordinate movements.

I know it isn’t the most attractive solution to Arenanet, but please give us more options with regard to character rendering. Function first – then form!

Drizzzle.5847:

It was very processor intensive and GPU intensive depending on your settings. Essentially, instead of people appearing and disappearing, you froze for a second or two (sometimes much longer) depending on how quickly your computer was able to process all the information that was just thrown at it.

Correction; AION has a deferred loading system in place. The stuttering you’d experience was due to the character information packet which would cause each model piece to be selected and added to the character instance. The actual loading and combining of the model was done on a deferred basis, but that game could load a large volume of information from the file disk at once. AION also created caches for models completely decompressed and thus devoid over file seeking and decompression (as opposed to GW2). The amount of bandwidth consumed was very intense due to character states being re-send at regular intervals, which was much worse due to Chanter mantras spamming the line. In Gelkmaros it often happened that you’d encounter one another with 200 on 200 (without exaggeration, as damage tracking tools clearly highlighted) without as much as stuttering.

Seems ten times better for me than old system?

Cullin is much better. I’d much rather see enemies then all my allies

Well, it’s not just worse in WvW…it’s worse everywhere. The “hey look 30 people just killed me…where did they come from?” is still happening. But it happens when it’s 5v5 and 1v3 too. Watching both friendly and enemy players just vanish in and out (so losing target on them) is ridiculous.

Underwater seems to be the worst, and this affects PvE as well. Go fight krait or inquest underwater in some of the lower zones where there will be maybe 3-6 guys to fight. Find one, wait 20 seconds before engaging…yep only 1 guy. Start fighting and now there are 2, 4, 6…haven’t killed any yet but 2 are almost dead…now there are only 3, without killing any. Kill the 3 that are left, and still nothing. The 3 just vanish, not one else kills them, no loot, no XP. Start the fight again with another and get similar results. Sometimes you get to kill them all, other times, some just dematerialize mid-fight as if Captain Kirk had them beamed up mid combat to save them. Wait around…they are just gone.

I’ve been killed by npc mobs that didn’t render before, during or after the fight…and not the mobs with stealth…regular ones. Start getting hit with map open, close map look around, nothing. Hit closest enemy, nothing. Check combat log, yep getting hit. Start hitting aoes and kiting off, no damage to anything, than dead. Wait 5 minutes to see if what hit me would render…nope.

They seriously need to come up with something. Lag is one thing, but I should not be able to get hit by something (WvW or PvE) that the server never bothered to tell me is there (meaning I can’t fight back).

Deathspike.1870:

Correction; AION has a deferred loading system in place. The stuttering you’d experience was due to the character information packet which would cause each model piece to be selected and added to the character instance. The actual loading and combining of the model was done on a deferred basis, but that game could load a large volume of information from the file disk at once. AION also created caches for models completely decompressed and thus devoid over file seeking and decompression (as opposed to GW2). The amount of bandwidth consumed was very intense due to character states being re-send at regular intervals, which was much worse due to Chanter mantras spamming the line. In Gelkmaros it often happened that you’d encounter one another with 200 on 200 (without exaggeration, as damage tracking tools clearly highlighted) without as much as stuttering.

Thank you. I honestly didn’t know the process went that in-depth. It would also explain why AION ran much better on an SSD.

I would love to hear an update on the situation from Anet.

nudge