Guild Wars 2

Is this a global rendering change to the engine or is it an exclusive setting to WvW?

It feels like I keep seeing more invisible friendlies in PvE as well, even in low pop zones where there is 1 player in front of me only visible by weapons fire, until he pops up 10 seconds later O.o

But it might just be placebo.

New culling patch isnt working. It lags us out and isnt rendering the enemies like it’s supposed to.
I say revert to old way and start over.

I take back my diplomatic words from earlier. Whatever you did has made the game almost unplayable. Even 10 enemies are taking seconds to render. How is Anet having so much trouble getting this solved?

It managed to cull half of my allies when we were in our own keep…no enemies anywhere near. When we were on the move it was impossible to even tell where our own people were, or how many we had.

And the lag, oh the lag.

Swiftfury.7140:

With this change, I effectively can no longer play in World vs World. Even groups of 3 people do not appear until half way through the fight.

I’ve never experienced anything remotely resembling this until this new culling system.

I sincerely hope it will not be like this all weekend.

Yeah, that’s the most incredible thing – even playing solo it seems very crippling overall.

I don’t know how did you came up with this idea and thought it is good in any way.
Right now I have no idea how many allies are with me so I have no idea if I should fight or run from invaders. I can’t tell when I should try to help someone because I don’t see him.
Really bad move. Culling is bad in any way but when previous one was active at least I knew how big my group was so we could make tactics based of our number. Right now it’s horrible experience.

Seriously it’s so bad i wanna start playing single player games again after 12 years…

Its strange seeing all these negative feedbacks, pre “fix” i had terrible culling/lag issue but now i have no issues what so ever

Terrible fix.
Im feeling that i blind.

Draghmar.2594:

I don’t know how did you came up with this idea and think it is good in any way.
Right now I have no idea how many allies are with me so I have no idea if I should fight or run from invaders. I can’t tell when I should try to help someone because I don’t see him.
Really but move. Culling is bad in any way but when previous one was active at least I knew how big my group was so we could make tactics based of our number. Right now it’s horrible experience.

I second this.

I feel that with this culling fix, all my commands are lagged especially in semi large battle. (worst than before the fix). Otherwise, all my commands are speed up (like i got quickness, but actually not) >>> when you do hitting key 1 manually.

Other issues: this fix make my command for shooting treb (holding), release in the middle.

I think this issue because server give priority in sending message to client rather than receiving message from client.

Major issue: I cannot see my allies. I cannot see enemies (far away 1200 range).
minor issue: enemies are rendered correctly (for melee range) but no name tag on it (make it hard to identify the enemy)

Suggestion for fix: its best to not rendering enemy first in large number (limit it to several number from the nearest) and make sure all name tag of enemy displayed first (thus even though we cannot see the enemy, we still can see their tag). Or, you can make simple enemy model (same model for every race and gender (like player default model in PvP), kinds of armor, and weapon (except legendary)).

What I want to know is if the game was developed for DX11, would we still have this issue?

I think we were all surprised that the game would only support DX9, it’s seriously outdated! Even today I can go to a PC store and buy a DX11 graphics card for £30.
The game should have been DX10 minimum. I’ve read posts about people saying the game hardly uses their graphics card.

The game still needs a lot of work and I hope the February update brings a lot of changes for the game, and hopefully for the better.

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

What I want to know is if the game was developed for DX11, would we still have this issue?

I think we were all surprised that the game would only support DX9, it’s seriously outdated! Even today I can go to a PC store and buy a DX11 graphics card for £30.
The game should have been DX10 minimum. I’ve read posts about people saying the game hardly uses their graphics card.

The game still needs a lot of work and I hope the February update brings a lot of changes for the game, and hopefully for the better.

Err… How do you think games handled rendering in the past? DX version has little to do with it. If you go buy a DX11 card for £30 and think it will outperform a £200 top of the line DX9/DX10 card then your are delusional.

But this issue isnt about hardware performance, its about the basic functions of the engine.

As I said above, when there is one (as in 1, a single) player in front of you and his player model is being culled by the engine when the game can run at 200+ fps… Something is wrong. Seriously wrong.

This new method is bad. Far worse than before. While I still don’t drop below 25fps in large fights, I typically don’t see enemies as quickly and have disappearing allies. I did find that turninf off post processing under graphical settings resulted in some improvement.

Although I appreciate the team trying to make things better, this new culling trial is much worse than before. I’m personally getting tired of dying to teams of enemies I unknowingly run through while roaming and can’t even see nor target until after my death. My skills are also lagging more often, even in locations that don’t have a high amount of players. So please consider reversing it as soon as you’ve gathered enough information to help with further fixes.

Well the person saying his graphics card isnt being utilized and sitting idle means it’s not rendering as efficiently as it should right?

But anyway, I also like to add how hugely terrible this “fix” is.
In WvW I’ve seen pugs run away when a large enemy zerg appears, but now they will see even greater enemy invaders and less allies, this will therefore think they are even more outnumbered than before and run a lot more.
Yes you can see the green dots in the HUD, but on screen they will see a different thing and most likely base their actions on that. Even if they do realise they were wrong, that’s like 10 seconds wasted which is enough time for the enemy zerg to flatten those who stayed to fight.

So if you ask me this will make things worse for less experienced wvw players.

I haven’t noticed an improvement, but I have noticed vanishing teammates. This is especially a problem when it’s your commander that has vanished by walking all of ten feet away from the group, or the commander waiting to launch an offensive because he doesn’t see his group is already with him.

Although I really appreciate Arenanet working on the WvW rendering issues, this fix made it impossible for me to play WvW the way I did before the patch.
Playing in T1 and running in a ~ 20 man zerg, most often 10-15 though.

- half of the enemy players wouldn’t appear, so you engage a fight with the wrong strategy, get massively outnumbered/flanked/cc’d and wipe.
- commander (not in my group but our zerg leader) character, commander icon and group target mark gets culled out and you can’t see where he is going, so you end up some random place on your own and get killed.

Roaming alone was ridiculous also.
Before the patch I could be sure not to be jumped by 10+ enemies because I could see and avoid them. Since the patch I get ganked out of the blue regularly. And this is definitely not a stealth ability, LoS or portals being used (different realms and different guild constellations). Its open field and before the patch I never got in situations like this.

Before the patch it was possible to get jumped by enemy forces that wanted to keep you from entering a tower by them using clever strategies/flanking, so you set up scouts to counter that, but after the patch it doesn’t matter if you watch your back, because you don’t have enough time to turn around or get off your siege anyway, because they already destroyed half of your zerg and you still can’t target them.
I’ve been running in melee range, parallel to an enemy player and tried to click him or tab target him but couldn’t and he didn’t attack me either, so I assume he had the same problem (of course I could be wrong and he was just typing in chat), or didn’t see me at all.
Also, in big ‘random people’ battles, some people depend on seeing the mass of players (move) to not get caught on their own suddenly.
Roaming without my guild, before the patch I could see the ‘swarm’ moving and could adjust accordingly, now I see people get picked off on their own, or being picked off on my own, because they/I didn’t notice the mass falling back.

Random people also gain morale out of seeing that they’re not on their own against enemies. Now if a situation looks as if almost no allies are around, people would fall back and the fight swings to the enemies advantage.
Now this encourages sitting in a keep and doing nothing (or playing a different game, or doing the dishes), which can’t be the developers intention, right?

TL; DR:
- Can’t estimate enemies numbers and adjust strategy, skill application properly anymore in any setting (solo, zerg, random)
- Can’t follow your leader because he isn’t rendered consistently, i.e. tight teamplay and application of intended game mechanics (for example regroup for boon application, combo fields, healing, portals, veils, strategic movement, distraction of the enemy) is rendered (pun intended) pointless

I’m sorry to say, but for me the fix turned the game into more of a random mess than it was before. In my opinion, massive numbers are favored now, because if you’re a 60+ people zerg it hardly matters if half of the 20 enemies in front of you do not render. But if you are 20 people and half of the 60 enemies do not render it is game breaking (numbers just pulled out of my kitten to bring the point across).

Cover Girl.2580:

New culling patch isnt working. It lags us out and isnt rendering the enemies like it’s supposed to.
I say revert to old way and start over.

This^^
on top of that its crashing more as well now,and stuck on the loading screen a lot.

Cover Girl.2580:

New culling patch isnt working. It lags us out and isnt rendering the enemies like it’s supposed to.
I say revert to old way and start over.

^This.

Was in WvW yesterday and none of them enemies rendered until they were ~800 range away from me.

ok so yesterday, I realized that this culling trial is horrible. Please fix it.

Problem for me is all those effects from other sources, with an older machine I’d like to be able to turn that stuff off if I want to. It’s just slowing stuff up for me anyways.

In general the game needs more options to improve performance on older machines.

I was traveling alone towards a supply camp and out of thin air an axe was thrown at me. 1 sec later, the ranger who init the attack was then rendered. Obviously, I was rendered on his comp atleast several seconds before me, allowing him to head towards me and start attacking before I even realize that he is there. I wasn’t even in a zerg when this happen.

This kind of unfair advantage due to culling has to stop.

In Aion, the way they handle culling is that, names are always shown first, then characters will start to load. That is, you will see a sea of names coming at you, even if you can’t see the characters. It is much better than invisible.

Is it possible?

At the reset, culling of enemies seemed much improved. However after about 3 hours of play culling became as bad as it ever was, and in some ways worse. Everyone had gotten accustomed to how culling was working before and were re-adjusting. We seemed to have less dc’s in the guild though, but more “ability lag.”

However, it has been funny watching guilds use portals solely to take advantage of culling which no longer works with this new system. If you saw them pre port, you’ll see them post port. As a guild that makes large use of portal tactics correctly it has been amazingly fun wiping other guild over and over who have been doing it wrong all along, simply because it worked due to culling.

All that being said, culling gets worse with time, and where rebooting my PC used to fix it for me, now it doesn’t, which points to server side memory leaks, imho.

Also, using ffsplit to record video will spike all 4 processors to 100% in large fights, it used to be high but not full 100%. During these fights, my fps will dip to 5 and I won’t be able to go through doors or use some abilities. Only time I’ve seen this previously is during large 3 way fights over sm after reset.

I’m running 2500 i5, 8gb ram, raptor 320gb OS drive, 128gb ssd for game, 640gb for capture, and a 6850HD. I always run TS, ffsplit, and GW2, but that’s it. AV/FW disabled while gaming.

I think with this a bit short term test the culling is much better for me. I run WvW with 15-30 fps at ‘best performance’ settings/lowest graphics so we are not exactly talking about new computer here.

Thank you anet for the effort! Even though this is only a smallscale fix. I’m really looking forward to the actual WvW improvements in february if we would finally have something new to WvW.

The playing has been absolutely terrible as of late, the skill lag alone when mass numbers of players hit each other is enough to make me log out of WvW. This will probably be deleted but honestly, do you guys even have an internal test server to actually play these things out on your end before releasing them? It seems you guys drop the ball EVERY time it comes to testing something before release..the game has been out for months now get it together already.

This new culling patch is a fail
Play in open pvp it’s horrible since the patch.. you can see nothing ,enemy appear 2m before us .. by pack of 15…

Absolutely terrible change because I can only assume that the recent skill lag and general lag goes along with whatever you changed for culling. It would still have been a bad change because although it was bad not being able to see your enemies not being able to see your allies is often as bad – if not worse.

This isn’t a fix, it is just moving the deck chairs around on the titanic. Pointless.

This “fix” didn’t work and made things a lot worse. Our group of 5 used to walk around and fight other small groups. Now it’s next to impossible because EVERY SINGLE TIME we’ve attacked one person in an open field, 8 more people would load 20 feet behind him.

We would always circle around and wait a bit to make sure everyone loaded before engaging a group, but now that doesn’t even work. The only way his friends load in is if we’re right on top of them.

Small groups of players and even single enemies aren’t loading until they are in our face. This means we cannot plan out anything or use any tactics since it’s all luck. We don’t know if this single player in a field is alone or if there’s 10 people a few feet behind him.

This is stupid.

XxTAFxX.6741:

Cover Girl.2580:

New culling patch isnt working. It lags us out and isnt rendering the enemies like it’s supposed to.
I say revert to old way and start over.

This^^
on top of that its crashing more as well now,and stuck on the loading screen a lot.

3rded or 4thed, like previous solutions this doesn’t work.

Again I say revert to the way it was in beta where there weren’t such issues.

I don’t think it is much better.

I was able to see the zerg pop into view but I was still kind of close to it when it did. That was when they were attacking a supply camp. I was running into the camp when I saw them pop. After I saw them, I got brave and thought I would cut them off from retreat by myself. Many on the ledge also were not visible. I got one of them at least.

I think that attackers should be processed and visible before I get within ranged weapons.

Now that I ran across this thread I think I understand what’s been happening. While I appreciate the efforts of Anet and trying to do something about the issue, one drawback is that my allies are retreating a lot more. This leaves me in the front lines more often than I care to be. While I can survive quite a lot, I think that everyone thinks their allies have died or retreat, therefore, they retreat. Also, I’ve found myself yelling quite often in VoiP, “Where the heck is everyone? Get over here!” type of thing. I wonder how many times they actually did flank/retreat compared to them just not rendering.

Since the trail of this new culling system I have not noticed any improvements with the rendering of my enemies whatsoever. I have however noticed my allies being invisible to me. Overall my experience has not really changed. The rendering of people in my FOV is still very poor although playable by tabbing much like a blind man with a walking cane.
Myself and my Guild-mates have however noticed a new phenomenon that we all experienced simultaneously on multiple occasions. Silence… when wading into a fight, of generally only partially rendered enemies we all noticed all our game sounds were gone. Generally the sounds start to fade in bit by bit usually starting with just my own combat sounds and then others and all the other effects eventually start to play again. I have also noticed my sounds not always being present when first loading into a map in WvW.

This new culling system is a lot worse than the previous one. Please revert it back to the original one as soon as possible.
I’m dying at least twice as often as i used to because by the time i see the enemy zerg they’re already withing melee range and its too late.
I apreciate that you guys are trying to solve this but this new culling trial is a step in the wrong direction

I agree, it’s worse.
Groups of enemies half the size and twice as close take twice as long to load.

Revert please. We don’t see 1/4 of the enemies.

Did you even test this…?

I haven’t noticed any difference. I think its a matter of streamlining the data sent (same armor/weapon skins perhaps?)
Fireworks seem to still have an effect too

I would say things ‘seem’ worse then before, perhaps the size of forces is just larger this match? Overall it certainly has not improved anything.

The culling is far worse now than it ever was before. I have a low end computer, and before this I could still reasonably see people. Now, enemies don’t load until I’m right on top of them. I’m not just talking zergs either, even small numbers of people aren’t loading anymore. Please turn it back.

buki.3108:

Did you even test this…?

Did you read the first topic post explaining this is the test run? (it’s smarter to do this way too, by the by, since they will have a controlled but large focus group)

Anyways waiting for the ’top to come back and will be able to check low end and high end differences.

Does arenanet even have enough people working there to populate a single wvw map? (300-500 people, caps have never been confirmed to my knowledge)

Edit: Wikipedia lists them as having 270, so even if they had everyone stop what they were doing and log in and play on one map they couldn’t test any culling solution properly. That and they are likely on the same lan, so even if they had the people any latency issues wouldn’t arise as they would in a real world situation.

As far as this not being an issue in beta, they also had a much smaller player base which didn’t require nearly as big of a internet pipe as they do now. They’ve already mention that the size of their internet connection and bandwidth is partly to fault and they are in the works of upgrading their infrastructure.

I appreciate your trying, but this fix is just not working and for me its been worse.

Sopeople see their enemies but don’t see their allies. How are warriors supposed to know how far to push if they don’t know where the front line is? How are squishies gonna stay behind if they don’t know where back line is?

You might as well make everyone invisible like some time ago…

Well, with the new culling implemented I can deal with small scale battles easier and I have less lag in huge battles but I need party members to call targets or I run blindly into zergs only to have them appear after I’ve been stomped, looking forward to improvements XD

I feel blind, now. I do not see my teammates, and can not accurately judge whether I am engaging with a team or by myself. It is much more difficult to keep track of your team position, while enemy rendering doesn’t feel much different than before. I’ve had solo instances where I die to an enemy I can not see, relatively distanced from the pack, which had not happened before this new trial

I play a warrior. I am on the front line. How can I make informed, split decisions if I can not see my team? How do I know how far or hard I can push, while still able to disengage safely? The change has effectively destroyed the ability to see where the lines are being held in a decent sized battle

I don’t like this change. I feel it is worse for both enemies and allies …

This is very interesting to me, because it has not just greatly increased my chances of running into invisible zergs for this new culling trial, but it has also greatly increased my chances of lagging and crashing.

This is the freaking worst situation till now.
Change it so culling does not affect Guildis! its important for the gameplay to see your group or everyone will randomly move like a blind chicken between enemy lines
and this also affects targeted player, you often lose the target cause of culling same for commanders

It is absolutely horrendous now….insanely frustrating, before this patch it was not so bad