Guild Wars 2

We’ve heard a lot of news about new features and map changes lately, but one subject that seems to have fallen by the wayside is the massive, crushing skill lag that still occurs in world vs. world.

This still remains a huge concern. Every map still breaks down into an unplayable mess when the middle keep is attacked. It’s particularly bad in Eternal Battleground, where a group of 20 to 40 can effectively ruin the entire map for about 30 minutes.

We had one patch mention “optimizations” a while ago. That didn’t appear to do much of anything.

So what’s next? Is this problem just too expensive? Is it going to be fixed?

Too expensive/time consuming. It might come in a huge update(expansion-sized). It’s a problem with how many calculations the server needs to do for each hit(nothing to do with the graphics BTW).
The good part is that you can at least see everyone.

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

I don’t really care about massive zerg skill lag, but recently I’ve had my heal skills go off and renewed focus not renew my virtues in like 5v5 fights. Wee.

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

Most WvW players have given up complaining and realized Anet is going to do nothing about it. I’ll speak with action. Any future game that Anet or related companies release, I will not be buying it. That’s how I operate. If I have a bad experience with a gaming company, I don’t invest money in them. Plain and Simple.

saiyr.3071:

I don’t really care about massive zerg skill lag, but recently I’ve had my heal skills go off and renewed focus not renew my virtues in like 5v5 fights. Wee.

I think something is wrong with the game since the last patch. I made another thread about it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Unresponsiveness

sostronk.8167:

Most WvW players have given up complaining and realized Anet is going to do nothing about it. I’ll speak with action. Any future game that Anet or related companies release, I will not be buying it. That’s how I operate. If I have a bad experience with a gaming company, I don’t invest money in them. Plain and Simple.

I don’t want to encourage people quitting or boycotting, but I can understand this mentality. Being completely unable to participate in zerg vs. zerg fights is terrible.

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

You Just mentioned a list of actually competitive games.Gw2 even if aspires(more like dreaming) it is not and never will be.

Wryog.5073:

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

Yes because it’s not like any other mmo before gw2 had massive scale pvp and free of lag /sarcasm.Funniest thing you can’t even pve for skill lag these days that’s how much this game is optimezed.You just don’t sell a game with it’s main feature being massive player participation(since competitive pvp it’s clearly not this game’s feature like gw1’s) Dynamic World events/World Bosses/WvW and have it not work.

Wryog.5073:

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

I think I’d have caused you an aneurysm if I used a more abstract analogy.

Your defense of Anet’s ineptitude is noble, but misguided. This is a partially defective product/consumer service (if we count online-based games as the latter). There’s no excuse for it one year after it has been released.

mini.6018:

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

You Just mentioned a list of actually competitive games.Gw2 even if aspires(more like dreaming) it is not and never will be.

Wryog.5073:

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Why, Anet, just why? Put your resources where it’s actually needed.

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

Yes because it’s not like any other mmo before gw2 had massive scale pvp and free of lag /sarcasm.Funniest thing you can’t even pve for skill lag these days that’s how much this game is optimezed.You just don’t sell a game with it’s main feature being massive player participation(since competitive pvp it’s clearly not this game’s feature like gw1’s) Dynamic World events/World Bosses/WvW and have it not work.

Understand your gripe. How the other MMO’s compensate is by turning down visuals like WoW and their Nintendo 64 graphics.

That said, GW2 really should have been written for Direct X 11 so that the game engine properly utilizes multi core processors which would alleviate some of the present issues.

No it wouldn’t, DX11 has nothing to do with crippling server side lag.

Jamais vu.5284:

Wryog.5073:

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

I think I’d have caused you an aneurysm if I used a more abstract analogy.

Your defense of Anet’s ineptitude is noble, but misguided. This is a partially defective product/consumer service (if we count online-based games as the latter). There’s no excuse for it one year after it has been released.

Ok, here’s the excuse:

No other MMO has done 300+ man battles without lag.

DAOC lagged
WAR lagged
Planetside lagged
Planetside II lagged
EVE lagged (now they force the lag with time dilation)

so why are we expecting Arenanet to solve a problem no one else has really solved yet?

Jamais vu.5284:

Imagine Starcraft where every match lagged like this as soon as there are eighty units on the map.
Or LoL. Or Dota. Or Battlefield. Or CoD.

Imagine 100+ players not units on a Starcraft map at the same time… same with Dota. LoL, CoD, BF… I bet GW2 flies with less than 50 players on a map and in some cases less than 25.

The game you are probably looking at is Planetside which can have more players, but the combat is REALLY simple by comarison. DAoC is probably the closest but it doesn’t have stacked conditions, heavy stacked boons, combo fields, dodging, etc so its combat is more static. To date no game exists (that I know of) that can field as many players as GW2 with such a high level of dynamic combat.

Like all things in life, there is a trade off. If a game wants to showcase larger fights, the combat engine generally speaking will likely be simpler. The more complex the fight the fewer the players that can effectively fight in one are at a time.

Lopez.7369:

saiyr.3071:

I don’t really care about massive zerg skill lag, but recently I’ve had my heal skills go off and renewed focus not renew my virtues in like 5v5 fights. Wee.

I think something is wrong with the game since the last patch. I made another thread about it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/pvp/Unresponsiveness

sostronk.8167:

Most WvW players have given up complaining and realized Anet is going to do nothing about it. I’ll speak with action. Any future game that Anet or related companies release, I will not be buying it. That’s how I operate. If I have a bad experience with a gaming company, I don’t invest money in them. Plain and Simple.

I don’t want to encourage people quitting or boycotting, but I can understand this mentality. Being completely unable to participate in zerg vs. zerg fights is terrible.

Id rather not be involved in zerg vs zerg fights at all. But sometimes your forced to. Like in T1 its common place on reset to end up with at least one 2v1 inside a garrison with the full map there. If your defending, there is no option to avoid. You have to be there or your letting your server down. I have actually got a very different setup that for these fights that I respec for that involves alot of regen because it still seems to work when healing and other skills do not.

Also the mentality. I don’t know why people don’t act this way when it comes to video games. I see so many times players getting upset with a developer and then when the developer releases a new game they are back in and buying the game. “IRL” people seem to have more common sense. If they are dissatisfied with a service or product, they don’t keep going back for more.

Except ArenaNet has worked and is continuing to work on the issue.

The problem is the general ignorance of people in general when it comes to the topic. There is no secret switch to remove lag. Every MMO with massive RvR type combat has the same issue, and none of them have actually solved it 100%.

So you shouldn’t buy any more RvR type games if you don’t want lag.

Its not about RvR. There are plenty of games out there without the lag that is in WvW.

Like?

I haven’t found any.

Draygo.9473:

Jamais vu.5284:

Wryog.5073:

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

I think I’d have caused you an aneurysm if I used a more abstract analogy.

Your defense of Anet’s ineptitude is noble, but misguided. This is a partially defective product/consumer service (if we count online-based games as the latter). There’s no excuse for it one year after it has been released.

Ok, here’s the excuse:

No other MMO has done 300+ man battles without lag.

DAOC lagged
WAR lagged
Planetside lagged
Planetside II lagged
EVE lagged (now they force the lag with time dilation)

so why are we expecting Arenanet to solve a problem no one else has really solved yet?

There are some pretty simple solutions to the problem. To give the most basic, once the map cap drops to around 60, skill lag ceases to be a problem most of the time. And although this seems unreasonable to some due to queue time, it seems as though its almost something that Anet is leaning towards doing, but not right now. Why? Because they are looking at releasing more maps in the future and will have more places to spread their server population.

The other alternative might be, as they have hinted, is map redesign in some way along with releasing of new maps. And I think this is what they are looking at.

The fact is the servers cannot handle the load they are running. But they released them that way either knowing or not having stress tested them thoroughly, so one way or another the ones is on them. We are one year in and as far as I can tell, the solution they are looking at, new maps, is a long way away yet.

DAoC’s combat was a lot more in depth but less action oriented and more traditional MMO based which tbh i kind of prefer, probably because i play from Australia. And trying to play an action based MMO that handles like an FPS on occasion with a latency anywhere from 200-400 can be at times pointless.

The engine doesnt handle latency at all well either, rather than just a delayed action and a full distance burning speed you get one that is delayed and 50% of the time runs all of about 150 units before it ends, complete with stutters. Not to mention updraft, this does not land 90% of the time with any kind of latency or bullrush that fails to knock people down just at random due to latency or puts you 200-300 units away from the target you just knocked down.

At least with DAoC you would still get the full effect of the action you were initiating(albeit a little delayed due to latency).

GW2 runs a combat engine optimised for complex small group (max 5v5) PvP.
Then this same 5v5 combat model gets used in larger scale WvW (and PvE).

WvW will be much better when Anet starts to tweak the GW2 combat system to better accommodate larger scale battles.

In particular, the condition system, which grows exponentially with the scale of the battle, needs to be simplified for large scale combats. Doing this will reduce thelag problems and free up capacity for things like raising the 5 target cap on AoE.

Some suggestions on how to reduce the condition system’s impact on larger battles can be found here.

sostronk.8167:

Draygo.9473:

Jamais vu.5284:

Wryog.5073:

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

I think I’d have caused you an aneurysm if I used a more abstract analogy.

Your defense of Anet’s ineptitude is noble, but misguided. This is a partially defective product/consumer service (if we count online-based games as the latter). There’s no excuse for it one year after it has been released.

Ok, here’s the excuse:

No other MMO has done 300+ man battles without lag.

DAOC lagged
WAR lagged
Planetside lagged
Planetside II lagged
EVE lagged (now they force the lag with time dilation)

so why are we expecting Arenanet to solve a problem no one else has really solved yet?

There are some pretty simple solutions to the problem. To give the most basic, once the map cap drops to around 60, skill lag ceases to be a problem most of the time. And although this seems unreasonable to some due to queue time, it seems as though its almost something that Anet is leaning towards doing, but not right now. Why? Because they are looking at releasing more maps in the future and will have more places to spread their server population.

The other alternative might be, as they have hinted, is map redesign in some way along with releasing of new maps. And I think this is what they are looking at.

The fact is the servers cannot handle the load they are running. But they released them that way either knowing or not having stress tested them thoroughly, so one way or another the ones is on them. We are one year in and as far as I can tell, the solution they are looking at, new maps, is a long way away yet.

Keep in mind in beta people didn’t run around in tightly packed stacks of players fighting other tightly packed stacks of players. If the action is more spread out the servers can handle it. Sure they can lower the map cap and eliminate the lag that way, but for most of the time there isn’t one big 300 man battle.

So again,

What game has 300 player battles that doesn’t lag?

Zenguy.6421:

GW2 runs a combat engine optimised for complex small group (max 5v5) PvP.
Then this same 5v5 combat model gets used in larger scale WvW (and PvE).

WvW will be much better when Anet starts to tweak the GW2 combat system to better accommodate larger scale battles.

In particular, the condition system, which grows exponentially with the scale of the battle, needs to be simplified for large scale combats. Doing this will reduce thelag problems and free up capacity for things like raising the 5 target cap on AoE.

Some suggestions on how to reduce the condition system’s impact on larger battles can be found here.

I do think the condition system is one of the major contributing factors to lag in large battles. However all the solutions are not simple and are far more reaching than just WvW. So I wouldn’t expect too much drastic changes. We might see changes on the backend to simplify the servers responsibility, but they will be minor, and we probably wont notice them often as players.

Draygo.9473:

No other MMO has done 300+ man battles without lag.

DAOC lagged
WAR lagged
Planetside lagged
Planetside II lagged
EVE lagged (now they force the lag with time dilation)

so why are we expecting Arenanet to solve a problem no one else has really solved yet?

Because ANet has earned a lot of trust and raised pretty high expectations with the high technical quality of the first Guild Wars. GW1 was the technically most robust MMO in the market. (~8h downtime in 7 years? ‘Nuff said.) This was, of course, made possible due to the solely instanced architecture of the world maps, but the robustness of GW1 is still a very impressive achievement and don’t I know of any similar example in the market. If you had asked me 18 month ago which company would be able to pull off an absolutely problem free MMO launch, I would have answered ArenaNet without a second thought.

Ironically, from my (outside) perspective, it seems to be the heritage from the GW1 engine that is the primary limiting factor for solving many of the performance/lag problems of the game.

Straegen.2938:

The game you are probably looking at is Planetside which can have more players, but the combat is REALLY simple by comarison. DAoC is probably the closest but it doesn’t have stacked conditions, heavy stacked boons, combo fields, dodging, etc so its combat is more static. To date no game exists (that I know of) that can field as many players as GW2 with such a high level of dynamic combat.

Quoted for truth.

~MRA

I played planetside for 7 years.

When planetside had that bug that let you get people into the maps above the pop cap, oh boy were there lag issues.

Also planetside in my mind was lagging all the time the way the netcode was designed, which is why lag-strafing was really really annoying. (spam strafe keys in such a way to abuse the netcode to cause your character to warp from side to side). So in a way planetside always lagged. And all sorts of high latency abuses that let that player hit still targets, even though the target should have been moving. (Client side hit detection).

It’s pretty bad lately, escalating even to unplayable heights.

And it impacts all areas of the game. I have noticed unresponsiveness in PvP, WvWvW and PvE (dungeons). Sometimes it’s just a skill not triggering when I expect it to, sometimes it’s 3-4 second delay before a skill goes off. Latter case has made me stop playing a couple of times.

I didn’t have such issues before a couple of patches ago, so I don’t suspect anything from my side.

It became a lot worse since the last patch. If we have the Outmanned buff, there are no battle markers on the map and 3/4 of the guild are rubberbanding then something is wrong. All this while skills work fine.

Lag is the glass ceiling that sits on top of all internet comms.

There’s a limit to the speed you can send and process data, no matter what you do or how much you spend.

As soon as we get a technical improvement it gets swallowed by the demand for more players, bigger maps, finer detail, more impressive textures and animations etc. etc.

I’m pretty amazed at what Anet have achieved with GW2. No complaints here.

Jamais vu.5284:

Wryog.5073:

Because their engine isn’t made for this. I won’t explain the details because that’s already been said over 9000 times.
Also because StarCraft doesn’t calculate boons, armor, buffs, might, vulnerability, weapon damage, crit chance, crit damage, traits and distance from the center of AoEs.
And it’s not the 80 people being on the map, it’s the 80 people FIGHTING on the map.
It’s pretty much impossible to get that amount of people/AI fighting at the same time on 1 map in a MOBA.
Please don’t compare shooter calculations to RPG calculations. Shooters like CoD and Battlefield(as far as I know) don’t have armor, crit chance, crit damage, boons, power scaling and probably other things that I can’t remember right now. At the same time GW2 has projectile calculations like a shooter.
BTW aren’t shooters always limited to 64 players or even lower numbers? I remember interviews discussing 64 players in Battlefield 4 being a big thing.

I think I’d have caused you an aneurysm if I used a more abstract analogy.

Your defense of Anet’s ineptitude is noble, but misguided. This is a partially defective product/consumer service (if we count online-based games as the latter). There’s no excuse for it one year after it has been released.

Oh, I’m not defending them. I’m just explaining the problem in the most simple possible way so that people would understand why it’s not an easy change.
I still think that the game’s engine should be fixed ASAP and make it run on dx11 instead of delaying it until a “bigger patch or expansion”. Releasing the game in Asia is not an excuse.

I think it’s time we all came to terms with the fact that ANET simply cannot, for whatever reason (manpower, technology, game engine, etc) fix many of these problems. They are an inherent part of the game, and the “we are working to improve things” just keeps people holding out for something that is never going to really happen.

I am sure they will make some tweaks, but in the end, if three servers pile into SM at a peak time: Count on pressing 1.

GW2 has the best performance of all MMo´s on the market. compared to the launch of GW2, it´s night and day. 100+ players and the game runs very well for me. No lag on invasion what so ever. the overall performance gets better every month.

complaining about nothing in my opinion.

Celle.2716:

GW2 has the best performance of all MMo´s on the market. compared to the launch of GW2, it´s night and day. 100+ players and the game runs very well for me. No lag on invasion what so ever. the overall performance gets better every month.

complaining about nothing in my opinion.

With all due respect it is a very large issue, one that you seem to know nothing about. No offense to you, but you must be playing solely on a BL in the lowest tier in history.

Even in NA T8 we got skill lag on 3-way SM fights. True, it doesn’t occur on a day-to-day basis on the lower tiers, but the game is basically unplayable when it does occur.

I’m pretty sure it’s not a networking problem. Skill lag looks to be server chug to me. I believe Anet has cited the exponential increase in cpu demands from enough people/skills going off in one place. Improved server hardware can help, but possibly only marginally, depending on the nature of the problem. The nature of the chokepoint and how it could be addressed are impossible to determine from the outside.

Can’t play today. I have big freeze followed by what hapenned in fast movie.

Thyfealor.1972:

Can’t play today. I have big freeze followed by what hapenned in fast movie.

Haha yes that happens alot now, your running along everyone about you dissapears and then you speed up to 100 miles an hour and everything happens at once, fun isnt it/game breaking.

I am not expecting any fast fix to this.

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area. The 5 man AoE limit is actually implemented to battle this problem. Instead of checking if the large AoE can hit up to 100+ potential targets, the game engine needs to check 5 targets and can ignore the reset. However even with this system, the amount of computations required is very heavy indeed.

If there is a lot of players from 2 or 3 servers in same place e.g. fighting over Stonemist castle or a keep, this will incur gigantic increase in calculations and probably leads to an entire map wide lag and several disconnects and crashes as well.

There are few ways to combat this problem:

1. More processing speed at the server end
- Arenanet probably already has powerful servers
- as the computational requirements grow in power of two, we would need to wait a long long time = many years, maybe a decade to have powerful enough hardware to solve this problem with brute force approach
- if the original server code was written multi-threaded it is then limited toonly one server. It would probably mean a complete rewrite to make it distributed / cloud computing (process + sockets based distributed system with multiple servers doing the computations). Not a small task!

2. Reduce amount of players per map
- I don’t know what are the current player quota limits, but it seems the game allows circa 120 players per side at EB. That would mean a total of 360 players at worst case. Reducing this number to 80 would mean more queues for certain servers but would drop the computational requirements to roughly half. Reducing player quota to 60 would reduce the computational requirements into one fourth, probably making really huge lag a rarity.

3. Reduce the incentives for blobbing / zerging
- If players are far away from each other e.g. at other sides of the map, several algorithms can be used to do the computations so that only those players who are in the same map area affect the calculations
- unfortunately current meta heavily favors blobbing and zerging and the suggested changes (in last week’s dev live stream) would just snow ball more advantages to the server with more players / better coverage, thus wrecking the game balance even more

Sorry for getting a bit too technical for some readers.

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

~MRA

DevonCarver.5370:

MRA.4758:

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

~MRA

It is not misinformation, it is the reality of our system.

then your techie’s picked a pretty bad system for a game with this kind of game type attached to it.

No they didn’kittens just reality.

Vesir.1546:

then your techie’s picked a pretty bad system for a game with this kind of game type attached to it.

Not really. Multi-threaded development must be synchronized and very very few systems can be designed to eliminate this. All heavy processing systems have this basic problem and struggle with wait states between I/O systems.

We run an enterprise database system (TBs of data) in a multi threaded environment processing over a billion dollars… wait states kill us as well despite having a relatively high budget for hardware. Just a fact of development life.

For me, I know it’s a bandwidth issue, as everyone else I’m playing with can still fire skills and not rubberband everywhere in most cases. The best connection I have available to me is .5 megabit. That was enough to play the game reasonably well for a long time, other than 3 way smc battles. Things just seem to get progressively worse though, and I get that skill lag/rubberband everywhere feeling whenever there’s probably more than 70 people colliding at once. I don’t know if it’s due to more people playing wvw in general, or map caps increased, or something else. I know I’m going to be useless when a map zerg shows up to attack/defend garrisons, and I used to be able to do that.

I just don’t understand why this game needs such a huge constant bandwidth requirement. I think I still had dialup when I played daoc.

because state updates for 200 players does take a sizeable chunk of bandwidth.

.5 mb/s is only 62.5 Kilobytes per second, which is pretty small… And that 62.5 Kilobytes is sharing its bandwidth with other applications on your computer. You can check to see if you can stop/clear up other applications from using that bandwidth.

DevonCarver.5370:

MRA.4758:

I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential

It is not misinformation, it is the reality of our system.

With all due respect, but then I am really, really interested in learning more about what you are actually doing. I cannot imagine a single scenario where n nodes (players) interact, maybe using a simple node-to-node model of communication (a maximum of time O(n^2) per node necessary to exchange all available information) and solve pretty well formulated and straightforward computational tasks (adjusting health, checking spacial coordinates, interact with the condition queue, etc.) where the individual tasks should by no means take more than polynomial time, each. That is, if you are not solving some unrelated NP-hard problem out of in curiosity in your idle time.

Please remember: Exponential growth means that if you add just one player to the scenario, then the complexity of computation scales up by a full constant factor. (Such as: 100 players fighting takes up twice as much computational resources as 99, or four times as much as 98 players, or 8 times as much as 97, or…).

I am really curios to learn more about the “exponential” challenge you seem to face in the game, and I am hoping you are willing to shed some more light on it.

Straegen.2938:

Multi-threaded development must be synchronized and very very few systems can be designed to eliminate this. All heavy processing systems have this basic problem and struggle with wait states between I/O systems.

We run an enterprise database system (TBs of data) in a multi threaded environment processing over a billion dollars… wait states kill us as well despite having a relatively high budget for hardware. Just a fact of development life.

True, and I am not arguing against the practical difficulty of the problem. But you are talking about systems that usually aim for quasi-linear time algorithms (or even sub-linear algorithms, using special data structures). What problems do you face that scale exponentially?

~MRA

The problem is the simplistic approach to scaling the GW2 combat system.

The only scaling build into the combat system right now is the 5 target AoE cap and the 25 stack cond cap. All these caps do is kill off large parts of the combat system and by doing so cause mindless zerging. Instead of retaining the richness that is GW2’s combat system, all that happens in larger battles is AoE and conditions are nerfed to irrelevance. I bet the designers never intended all the great work on AoE and conditions to be lost when it comes to large battles – but that’s all the current scaling rules do.

It’s time ANet took the GW2 combat system, which is optimised for small scale (max 5v5) PvP), and came up with a better scaling system to handle battles involving more than 5v5 (or 5 v Boss) players.

MRA.4758:

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

Sorry for my bad wording. I actually meant O(n^2) behavior, where N is the number of players. What I wrote in the rest of my message should however still be true. If e.g. player number increases from 50 to 100 the computational requirements increase by 2×2 = 4 fold. The AoE cap limit tries to circumvent it, but I feel that only applies to damage + area heal etc. type of calculations. Anycase the game engine needs to check at server end whether certain AoE skill (beneficial to allies or hurting enemies or both) collides with certain players. There are some old school tricks to reduce calculations e.g. no need to calculate square root, which is a slow function, but I would assume Arenanet programmers know this stuff better than me.

I would not be surprised if the server code is multi-threaded and currently doing computations in just one machine e.g. one server computer per each overflow and per each WvWvW map. To change it into processes which communicate over the network, so the work load could be spread over a farm of server computers is no small task.

I am also guessing that the computational requirements depend on amount of conditions and skills used. Probably a grandmaster grenadier engineer spamming ’nades non-stop and using both short fuse ( lower cooldown) and shraphnel traits (15% chance to bleed) and sigil of earth (more bleed stacks) would be close to the optimal heavy load for server. Luckily for Arenanet engineers are the rarest profession in both pve and WvWvW. I could imagine that just 10-20 grenade spamming engineers could indeed generate as much computations as 100 man zerg, thus 25 vs 25 engineer guild vs guild showdown in one tight space all throwing grenades would probably bring down the entire server. Anybody else noticed that grenadier engineers bring more lag? (I am playing one of them )

This is just an educated guess. I do not have any inside information from Arenanet nor access to their source code. I have however a background in both game design and game programming. In recent years I have been teaching this topic at university level. I am also teaching cloud computing and how to do that distributed programming stuff. But I do not claim to be ant sort of leading expert in either topic.

DevonCarver.5370:

MRA.4758:

Deniara Devious.3948:

The amount of computations needed at the server side e.g. which targets your AoE or cleaving attack hits grows exponentially with the number of players in the same map area.

Please stop spreading this piece of misinformation. I know that this is a direct quote by Devon Carver, but there is no sane reason to believe that the need for computational resources is indeed exponential. As I tried to explain in another thread, it is much more likely that the growth is quadratic. While this still may be to much to find a viable real-time solution, quadratic growth is substantially different from exponential growth.

~MRA

It is not misinformation, it is the reality of our system.

The worst algorithm which is brute force runs on n-square complexity and if your algorithm runs worse than n-square, then there are really really bad things happened there.

Without any algorithm, n people is needed to be calculatef for other n-1 people which makes it n-square problem at worst.

Edit: I’m wrong, your right

Basically

For each player
  otherplayer = player->get_visableplayers()
  For each otherplayer
     otherplayer->sendupdate(player)
  endfor
endfor

There is pretty much no way around the O(n^2) problem here besides putting a limit on the n-1 via culling.

Edit: I’m wrong

Yes, I concur, rabble rabble rabble rabble. Can we all just agree that this issue is more complicated than we think, and that Anet really does do the best they can to fix/optimize it?