Guild Wars 2

Hello! With the recent red post, I started thinking about how they can try and solve that issue and, I can see a couple of solutions:

1. Standardize models
I don’t CARE how awesome “red invader’s” sword looks or how fancy his hat is. Give us an option to use the same simple model for every player of a single race.
Just like some Korean MMOs do for towns, you can tick the box and every player will look “the same”, still gives you an illusion of living town but without huge lag. Its easier to draw 50 copies of the same character that 50 different.
It can give as much as 2 times more FPS in a scene with minimal difference in looks. I can’t see enemies unless I’m in melee range anyway.

2. Use sprites
Yes. I’m dead serious. Have you ever played Total War series? Its using highly detailed models for every unit in grand scale 200+ vs 200+ battles.
But here’s the catch: as soon as the unit is far enough(Like couple of millimeters of my screen), it turns into flat 2D animated image which reduced the load on the system.

This may be something what will take some time to implement, but it may be worth it in my opinion.

Please, I’d like to hear the opinions on this matter.

completely agree, as long it’s an ‘option’

I haven’t collected my awesome set for nothing, people should see it.

On a more serious note: I doubt they would implement this. I’d rather have them make the max character in screen an option. My internet can easily handle thousands of players at the same time and my computer can handle a simple WvWvW battle of a few hundred as well.

I agree with a small part of your post: there’s no reason for them to force stuff on us, make everything optional.

The issue here seems to be both server and client side; it’s not only that each client has to receive all the information about all the 100+ enemies around him, but also that the server has to process and send all this information to all those 100+ players. There are a number of ways to reduce the strain on both sides:
- like the OP suggested, an option to use standardized models for enemies
- another solution which worked rather well in another mmo that had huge fights was the option to turn models for enemies off altogether, showing only the name (which in this case would be generic), meaning that the client and server would not have to transmit any model information at all for enemies and the client wouldn’t need to load anything from disk; I’d add some form of indicator (like a circle on the ground) to show the location more accurately in this case.

I’m not much in favour of sprites – I assume changing this after release would be a lot of work if it wasn’t planned from the beginning. a lot of work to make something look worse than currently.
but standard models I completely agree with. even 3 models per race would make a difference (cloth, leather, heavy armor) and still would give you enough visual feedback.

anyway, the models not loading isn’t that bad. the real problem is, the players themselv don’t get loaded. otherwise you would at least see their names/healthbars, which would be enough to run away from a zerg instead of only realizing there are enemies when you’re already surrounded.

so my first priority would be to show names always as long as they are in range of any of your skills (especially when you’re on a trebuchet or cata). the model loading can still be delayed like now to improve performance.