Guild Wars 2

Since the ‘’culling improvements’’ patch the lag in WvW has been substantial when ever any two zergs meet. At first it was manageable, annoying, but playable. But esp over the last week or two it has been getting worse and worse.
Tonight in Eternal Battleground, if any two zergs met there was a delay of at least 10s before any ability went off (if you were not dead from invisible opponents).

Yes, I am sure we all know about it, but now it has become game breaking. This is not just me and my PC btw (somebody will say it) or my connection, as just about everybody was cheesed off about it tonight.

If the servers cannot handle this number of people in EB at once – then can we limit it please – less players may mean less people getting to experience it, but at least the ones who do will get a reasonable experience. At the minute it is just unplayable.

Oh – EU server Desolation, in case it makes a difference :-)

So – shall we have a bet on how quick somebody will blame either my pc, my connection, or say that I have just been steamrollered by somebody. (well, I have been many times today, its rather the nature of the place, but a death is only a death – respawn and kill, FTW!)

Yes, I was in Stonemist castle lordroom the other night and all 3 servers had players battling inside. The culling was actually quick good, but the ability lag was unplayable.

Hoping it was simply testing they did.

Its actually really sad that this even happens. We can go to the moon but we can’t have a game server that can handle 150 people fighting in the same vicinity without mass culling. Am I the only one who is astonished by the lack of technological advancements made in gaming, especially this game which came out in 2012? We should be having 1000 people battles without even the inkling of lag.

The skill lag is unplayable. I just logged off because my heal skill wouldn’t fire even after 5 seconds. Mind you this was on the open field.

The big question I have is, what changed? Back near release, we had servers like HoD and JQ in T1 with huge queues, thus 4 full maps for long periods of time, and there were massive amounts of players clashing into each other. I don’t remember any reports of server based skill lag back then. Sure there was culling, but there still is. Culling just prioritizes friendlies and enemies differently now. So that can’t be it, unless they’re currently testing the upcoming removal of culling on live servers behind the scenes.

Is it related to the weird bugs that have been occurring where players find themselves in another server’s WvW map? Have they reallocated server resources? Is the guesting system putting too much strain on server throughput? Is the database growing beyond server capacity?

My questions above come from the standpoint of knowing absolutely nothing about mmo game design or the hardware systems required to run things, but they’re questions that initially popped into my head.

Liquid.9672:

The big question I have is, what changed? Back near release, we had servers like HoD and JQ in T1 with huge queues, thus 4 full maps for long periods of time, and there were massive amounts of players clashing into each other. I don’t remember any reports of server based skill lag back then. Sure there was culling, but there still is. Culling just prioritizes friendlies and enemies differently now. So that can’t be it, unless they’re currently testing the upcoming removal of culling on live servers behind the scenes.

Is it related to the weird bugs that have been occurring where players find themselves in another server’s WvW map? Have they reallocated server resources? Is the guesting system putting too much strain on server throughput? Is the database growing beyond server capacity?

My questions above come from the standpoint of knowing absolutely nothing about mmo game design or the hardware systems required to run things, but they’re questions that initially popped into my head.

Before we were not even able to see an enemy if he was more then like 20 feet away. Now we can see them from a very far distance, but can’t see most of our allies. I am fine with this but if its whats causing the lag then its not worth it.

Too little server-side data capability, whether it be server capacity, game engine capability, or in/out bandwidth, is what causes lag. Culling was instituted to reduce lag by restricting the number of character’s data that the game had to track and transmit for client side rendering. Given enough players active in the same localized area you can theoretically have lots of lag even if you have lots of rendering culling because some player actions need to be transmitted even if some of those players are visually culled. It all depends upon the relative magnitudes of the packets involved.

I strongly suspect that ANet is stealth experimenting to determine just how little server-side capacity they have to add to follow through on their pledge to eliminate culling, and they probably are stealth experimenting with different rendering algorithms as well. There have, after all, been a couple of small undocumented patches lately.

Should have been with us on JQ BL today.

All three T1 NA servers represented en masse at Hills…the whole map was lagged including all timers on wp’s, skills, wep change…on the whole map.

I’m sure our conterparts on Sea of Blackgate and Sanctum would report the same issues.

Yay progress!

Cactus.2710:

I strongly suspect that ANet is stealth experimenting to determine just how little server-side capacity they have to add to follow through on their pledge to eliminate culling, and they probably are stealth experimenting with different rendering algorithms as well. There have, after all, been a couple of small undocumented patches lately.

I can definitely buy that. Let’s hope they get things figured out soon because players are getting frustrated with the lag, particularly in T1.

Cactus.2710:

Too little server-side data capability, whether it be server capacity, game engine capability, or in/out bandwidth, is what causes lag. Culling was instituted to reduce lag by restricting the number of character’s data that the game had to track and transmit for client side rendering. Given enough players active in the same localized area you can theoretically have lots of lag even if you have lots of rendering culling because some player actions need to be transmitted even if some of those players are visually culled. It all depends upon the relative magnitudes of the packets involved.

I strongly suspect that ANet is stealth experimenting to determine just how little server-side capacity they have to add to follow through on their pledge to eliminate culling, and they probably are stealth experimenting with different rendering algorithms as well. There have, after all, been a couple of small undocumented patches lately.

That would make a lot of sense considering that just a few weeks ago, they made huge changes to the borderland population limits without telling anyone. Hundreds of comments about new numbers and unbalanced populations being let in as well as a myriad of other issues and not a peep till recently. It seems they hold there wvw population a little in contempt, how else can you explain the lack of communication regarding these rather serious cobcerns

Whatever the patch is it is not very good at all

Same in FA/KN/SOS matchup.we lag soo badly I can even tell when the enemy approaches a keep 10 secs before they hit..Can barely walk up the stairs due to the lag and the heal is not working at all.We used to clas into nnk zergs that are massive and didn’t have any lag at all.I think Anet is testing something out or mad queues shorter and now more people are on the maps than the servers can handle.

yeah, its a joke.

Cactus.2710:

Too little server-side data capability, whether it be server capacity, game engine capability, or in/out bandwidth, is what causes lag. Culling was instituted to reduce lag by restricting the number of character’s data that the game had to track and transmit for client side rendering. Given enough players active in the same localized area you can theoretically have lots of lag even if you have lots of rendering culling because some player actions need to be transmitted even if some of those players are visually culled. It all depends upon the relative magnitudes of the packets involved.

I strongly suspect that ANet is stealth experimenting to determine just how little server-side capacity they have to add to follow through on their pledge to eliminate culling, and they probably are stealth experimenting with different rendering algorithms as well. There have, after all, been a couple of small undocumented patches lately.

The patch will be off-loading a lot more work onto the player’s computer. They’ve likely rewritten and/or rebuilt an underlying part of the game’s engine (hence the need for a specialized programmer) and how it handles data to do this as this has not been a capability in the game as of so far (I’d imagine they’ve also streamlined the data compression methods to better optimize the engine in general and how it sends data and at what sizes it sends said data).

Their servers have been handling a lot of the data to allow for toasters to play this game, but this is 2013 and the sooner we move away from toasters, the better. A lot of people may soon find the game very brutal on their computer, though…