Guild Wars 2

Jamais vu.5284:

Ducking Frunk.5127:

From what I have been reading so far the best way this issue can be resolved is to spread people out over the map, so less interactions then occur with each other.

People aren’t dumb mathematical constants though. If a commander determines that a massed assault to overwhelm the defending force is what’s needed, he won’t equally distribute his men among the “other objectives”, he will take his entire zerg to the keep/SM because no matter how skilled or bunkered in, once the keep is open 20 people won’t stand a chance against 60. And if he does that, what is to stop the other commanders to call in most of their people on the map as well?
Unless they make the maps much bigger (much bigger than feasible, I’m thinking fifty times bigger) no amount of secondary objectives will resolve megablobbing in centerpiece keeps.

Sure but megablobbing isn’t the special strategic exception, it’s pretty much the norm for everything, even supply camps. How often does a commander send 1-2 players to take a supply camp to collectively save hours of the zerg’s time while the rest of the zerg does something “important”? Almost never, because then the zerg will miss out on the camp rewards and the few that were sent to take it might miss out on the big objective.

It would be false to assume it happens because of strategy; really they do it because they want to. And I’m guessing a huge part of this permanent metagame is because essentially if you work harder (doing the same with less people) you actually get less rewarded (same reward but takes longer) than if you just tagged a hit or two in the megazerg.

Not that it’s inherently good or bad (I don’t like it personally), but the very design has always strongly pushed massive zerging as the solution for every tangible benefit (PPT or fun from smaller fights is of course intangible). The new ascended mats (as little as you get in WvW) still reinforce the “blob for maximum rewards” intention of the devs. And of course, skill lag remains then as a persistent problem.

Of course we would still like to get an answer from Devon that if your current servers are not able to handle the calculations per second needed, why don’t you buy/rent bigger and faster servers?

Someone in marketing calculated that it’s more profitable to lose a “few” players than pay for the extra hardware?

Niim.9260:

Seems like the simplest solution to skill lag is stop rewarding people for balling up into giant lag producing blobs. You could, crazy as this sounds, reward people for being more strategic, tactical and skillful.

ANET created packed server issues by ignoring the obvious impact coverage had on PPT, then they went out of their way to do everything they can to reward blobbing in every aspect of WvW.

Surprise, we have skill lag!

This. There are design-based solutions, they choose not to use them.

The other thing is their server tech appears to be pretty basic, 1 instance = 1 physical CPU. More advanced MMOs have server tech that dynamically partitions the world into separate areas that are served by separate CPUs, which dramatically improves server performance of players clustering in a single area, eg: SM takes.

There are a bunch of games using this approach these days; Darkfall for instance, I’ve personally played in battles with ~1000 players in a single area the same size as_SM, with minimal lag.

There is a solution to skill-lag…instead of the outmanned buff,introduce the opposite,simply a debuff when you are more than e.g. 50 people from a given server within 20.000 units.
This will also have another positive sideeffect=breaking the megablobs and push the game towards more competitive wvw action.