Guild Wars 2

So the meta up in T1/T2 has become to run around with a huge “map zerg.” Basically everyone running around following a single commander. It is still possible for an organized guild to take these “map zergs” out. However, there are three things that seem to be causing major issues.

One thing is the knockback on level up. The bigger your “zerg” the more chance you have of people getting this level up and knocking back everyone in the vicinity. I’m not going to suggest that groups or guilds are gaming this “ability,” but sheer weight in numbers means you have a much greater chance of getting a few of these in a battle. Can we get the knockback removed? At the very least not have it affect players.

The second thing is ability lag. I only ever got this before on reset night in big SM battles. Now, however, it seems to happen regularly during NA time, in many cases making the game unplayable in large battles. It is obviously caused by large numbers clashing on a map. With the current meta of “map zergs,” I don’t see this problem decreasing without a change in meta. Also, on the eve of the removal of culling, which will tax servers even more, I see this only getting worse. I know anet recently played with the idea of changing the map size from 110 players per side down to 80 players per side, to be met with a huge backlash about huge queues. Unless the optimization that removes culling also fixes the ability lag issue, I think maybe adding a 2nd EBG map along with a smaller map size might be the best idea. 110 people times 4 maps vs 90 people times 5 maps.

Third issue really is disconnects. This game is extremely lacking in fault tolerance of a millisecond loss of connectivity. I’ve run ping plotter as suggested by anet, only to find that I get disconnected from game due to less than a second loss in connectivity. I’ve gone back to play other MMO’s briefly (they all suck in comparison really,) and I get the same connectivity spikes and those games are able to catch up very quickly. In this game, I will suddenly get abilities not working though I can still see players moving around in a natural manner and no loss from our Teamspeak server nor the mumble server that I use occasionally. I will see some packet loss on ping plotter that lasts less than 1 second but the game just can’t seem to catch up, and if it does it takes about 20-30 seconds. How does this affect wvw? Last reset we got 22 out of 42 people in from our guild. After about an hour, more than half had disconnected and been forced to requeue. So we were down to about 8 people and had to wait 45 minutes before the queues started popping for the people who had been waiting. It seems to me that the fault tolerance of small amounts of packet loss gets much worse when all 3 sides have filled a map.

Anyway, those are my 2c. Thanks for making such a great game!