Guild Wars 2

I was wondering how our small zergs were wiping much bigger ones haha. I started running for my life until someone in mumble was telling me to turn around because we were wiping them. All of a sudden a bunch of allies appear out of no where.

I like this system better though. I’d rather be surprised by wiping an enemy instead of being wiped.

Culling got worse since this patch.

These changes have made things worse, not better. Others have explained better than I.

I’m not sure why you’re culling. Is it to keep an equal footing for graphics hardware? If so, you should be able to use low-geometry models like spheres to represent entities that would otherwise be culled.

If you’re doing it because you’re sending around UDP packets, or something, and you only have so many bytes to work with for serializing player info; well then, you’re going to have to rethink your protocols. Send less data per player. I would rather see a blob that’s the correct color of the enemy (or ally) than see nothing at all, so don’t bother sending me the bytes to tell me what armor they’re wearing.

Whether you’re doing this for graphics performance, network performance, or both — you’re missing the point, I think, with this update. We want to be more aware of the numbers and position of folks around us. Not more aware of group X v. group Y.

Right, this test failed. Please don’t wait until Friday to remove this.

I got really much ability lag while im alone. My Windborne Speed speed is just refused to be fire off…

I find the new system aweful. I never noticed a problem before and all the sudden I’m experiencing it and realizing how terribly it affects our strategies and tactics as an organized group who uses vent to play. Its difficult to plan when you have no idea how many are right outside your tower attacking you because the game now chooses not to bother rendering them. It negatively affects one of the most awesome aspects of gw2 wvw… the strategy. .. the tactics. ..

Don’t fix something by making it worse.

RuneEX.8612:

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.

Since when does any serious company run tests on a live environment before having it tested anywhere else? Doing this just shows how cheap they are and how little they care.

If there’s no other way of getting it tested then do it during a weekday first and have people and admins sit there and test it correctly. On top of that be ready to roll back to the old version when it doesn’t work.

This weekend I saw guild members cull when they were standing next to me, had enemies randomly disappear and reappear a couple seconds later, had to confirm that our team was still there over voip/look at minimap, …

ANet obviously has some very smart and talented people working there and I think everyone is glad you’re looking into it. But the mistakes made here just look like beginner mistakes.

Considering how little positive feedback there’s in this thread it looks like it’s time to roll back this horrendous change and start over. If you’re unable to get this fixed then just tell us.

Haven’t read alle posts but it’s impossible to play effectively if you can’t even see your own raidlead (not commander, marked with Ctrl + T) running in front of you…

Could you guys potentially just remove the culling system altogether, or at least add variable settings in the options panel? For me, this one feature really damages the immersion and feel of the world. It’s bad enough seeing a dozen plus people suddenly render at the TP when I’m standing on top of them, but in WvW it’s downright game breaking. Having the sort of draw distance like you guys had in beta would be a godsend. Example: http://youtu.be/kMh6K-8M_Gw

I understand that the whole system was probably added to help the game run better for some, but why should the rest of us have to suffer? Adding more options for draw distance & details / effects could alleviate the whole problem for many. I mean, the game is great. And it’s easy to tell a lot of love was put into it, but issues like this kind of bog down the overall experience.

It has gotten a lot worse for me. I run solo very often and in the past would never have any issues with culling when solo. However now, I will see some player shapes pop up before seeing tags and then bam the rest of their zerg pops on my screen.

I hope this fix is taken out again next week, this is by far the worst culling I have seen since launch.

as per people already mentioned before, please rollback the changes
the culling is even a lot worse than before

Habib, you should really explain (in the OP of this thread or another sticky) how culling works, why it exists, and what factors affect its performance.

There’s a lot of ignorance and confusion on the forums, with people saying things like “I have a high end PC, please just allow me to turn off culling” etc.

My assumption is that culling is actually network related (a limitation to the number of entities the server can tell a client about) rather than graphics related (a limitation to the number of entities the client can display, even though it knows about them all.)

However, I’m just guessing here as well. Some enlightenment on this very important issue would go a long way to managing player expectations and helping them provide more meaningful feedback.

(there might have been previous statements on how things work, but since they’re not in a sticky or here in the very thread talking about culling, it’s hard to find and few will know about it.)

Hey.

I was willing to buy a new computer for this game. Let’s say we make a real solution, like make all players visible if they are within 1200 range.

I’ll turn down my graphics if it’s a problem. But I don’t think it will be a problem. You want a solution players like me are satisfied with? Let me decide which culling I want.

ive had the worst wvw experience in the last 24 hours. b4 was the sudden zerg in your face, now its worst. its 3-5 sec delays when pressing a skill. constant lag and freezes its like playing on dial-up feeling when my internet is capped.

As someone else suggested, you could start by normalising all the racial models or at least LODing them right down, then perhaps consider normalising armours as well.

If DAOC could manage 100v100 keep battles in 2002, then it’s not really a technical problem, it’s a design problem.

this is a bad fix, band aid, whatever you want to call it. i have an extremely high powered PC and i am having issues seeing both enemy and allies most times. there is increased lag on skills and abilities too.

i am also noticing enemy disappearing even if not dead. for example, i start to kill a warrior 1v1 and then he disappears then a few seconds later i am taking damage from an invisible enemy.

please for the love of god COMPLETELY REMOVE this culling crap.

i think a lot of people would rather the extra drop in FPS or slight increase of lag, as in the way it was before than the mess arenanet has made the game into now. you are killing your own product here

i play the game with everything on high/ultra, after this update i have even tried everything on low/off and it has zero effect on the game at all and i have the same problems

i think a better fix would have the enemy all have the same gear look, i dont care what gear they are wearing i just want to see and kill them. by showing all enemy in, lets say invader’s gear (since thats what WvW gear is called) in thier team colors it should reduce the information required to load the players. having 200 people with all different gear looks = more information needed to be obtained and then needing to be rendered seperately. if, lets call it, “simple enemy character models” was done instead then you can have it preloaded into memory and this lowering the time needed to get information and render. i could be wrong but its just my guess.

you can have it that allies show thier own looks/colors but enemy use “simple enemy character models”

Rieselle.5079:

Habib, you should really explain (in the OP of this thread or another sticky) how culling works, why it exists, and what factors affect its performance.

There’s a lot of ignorance and confusion on the forums, with people saying things like “I have a high end PC, please just allow me to turn off culling” etc.

My assumption is that culling is actually network related (a limitation to the number of entities the server can tell a client about) rather than graphics related (a limitation to the number of entities the client can display, even though it knows about them all.)

However, I’m just guessing here as well. Some enlightenment on this very important issue would go a long way to managing player expectations and helping them provide more meaningful feedback.

(there might have been previous statements on how things work, but since they’re not in a sticky or here in the very thread talking about culling, it’s hard to find and few will know about it.)

Funny to see you post this, which I totally agree to, and then directly afterwards people post the same thing again (“I have a high-end PC…” and so on).
I thought Habib wrote an understandable, extensive post about this here, which boils down to:

Even so, the bulk of the issue remains with the server-side culling as it doesn’t matter how fast your client can load and draw a character if it hasn’t even been told that character should exist yet.

So yes, apart from the performance issues with different hardware, this probably is primarily a network issue. 10kB multiplied by 100000 (numbers completely made up but probably conservative) already means 8GBit. Per second.

I don’t like this new culling methodology.

For some reason, my health just went down straight to 10% even though on the screen, my character was not getting hit.

My skill lags. I can’t see allies therefore affecting my judgment to move forward in the battle.

Unfortunately culling is a failure. Appreciate the effort, but it is worse then previous.

I will give you a suggestion, get players to test your stuff previously to releasing it, it will save you alot of time.
Culling I am sorry to say has been a disgrace for too long of a time now. Me, a person who WvW about 30 hours a week, barely goes in there anymore because it isn’t fun and it isnt a challenge.
Fighting what looks to be 5 people which is actually 25 is ridiculous and just when you thought it wouldn’t get worse, you made it worse.
This should be 1st priority and over a month now you are still not close

Pretty sure some1 already suggested this, but what about having a base graphic version of enemies to render?
Of course that would be a setting in Graphical Options.

Please stop catering to toaster users and just display everyone.

Iruwen.3164:

Funny to see you post this, which I totally agree to, and then directly afterwards people post the same thing again (“I have a high-end PC…” and so on).
I thought Habib wrote an understandable, extensive post about this here

Ah, thanks for the link. Yes, that post probably should be linked in the OP or at least made sticky somewhere.

So it feels like there are 2 fixes that need to be done, then:

- When a client knows about an entity, implement a way to instantly draw it on screen.
eg. Just show the name first, or some 2D placeholder silhouette.

- Implement a reduced-bandwidth way of communicating entities to the clients:
eg. Entity location & name/type data is seperated out and sent with the highest priority. Other types of entity data is culled as needed.
So you can always see where other entities are, and who they are, but you might not be able to see their character appearance, animation or health/condition state.

I hope that the longer-term fixes Habib mentioned includes such measures. Or maybe there are some even smarter ways to fix the problem that I can’t imagine.

Yeah, I’m done playing WvW until they revert this change. Being able to watch friends and foes get culled out is something that should never happen.

I came for this game for nothing but WvW and now there are no updates to it and most of the time I can’t even see most of the enemies?
NO THANK YOU

great work ANET. THX alot.

The new culling method is hilariously terrible and hardly does what was advertised.

Just today, I ran into a supply camp, alone, seeing a lonely enemy ranger pet attacking the guards.

No large scale explosions, no flying projectiles, no hit flashes (being at the mercy of this engine for months, I kind of know what to watch for by now), nothing... just a lone pet attacking some guards.

"Okay", I’m thinking "I guess I’ll just look for your master somewhere over those sheds as I run past you".

And oh boy, so I did.

The moment I’m in the middle of the camp, 10 to 20 enemies start rendering all around me, AOEs blasting everywhere, projectiles of every single type flying in my face, and I find myself in the middle of a warzone. A warzone now slowly becoming directed solely at me.

This after I’ve been walking to the camp for good 20-30 seconds, watching a sad, lone pet exchanging blows with a group of guards.

Absolutely surreal.

Absolutely surreal for an MMORPG PVP game 4 months after release.

Please remove this trial, I love playing www but I can’t even bear 5 seconds of playing it because I can’t even render the zone fully and npcs.

Grit.9061:

Unlike many folks, I actually saw noticeable improvement with this change. When an enemy zerg came up behind my allied zerg, I was able to render most (if not all) of them.

I have a fairly high-end rig, so that surely has something to do with it.

I have a decent rig (play on an Alienware M17X R4), but I still have not notice any significant improvement. I am a thief player and I even want the culling issue to be addressed asap…

I would like to add my vote that this experiment isn’t working. I preferred the previous culling issues to the ones this patch introduces. This makes it even harder to figure out how many people there are in an area. You’ll run up to a supply camp and see say 4 people. Take 3 steps closer and then there are 20.

Also, it appears the names of people render last. So we have this 2-3 second delay where we can see someone, but we don’t know if they are friendly or an enemy.

Thank you.

I didn’t notice any changes the other day, because I didn’t really go where the big zergs were. But today the Germans decided to invade our keep with as little as five Alpha golems.. It made the entire server lag so much that our skills had a recharge delay of up to 10 to 15 seconds.

Perhaps this is an unforeseen addition to the game caused by the culling trial?

I can’t imagine it’s impossible to add a slider for culling…

I’m playing the game with an i5-3570K and a GTX 660 Ti — standard fare for a committed gamer — and I doubt I’d have problems with FPS if culling were completely gone. I had no FPS issues with an i3-540 and a GTX 460, actually.

…and why wasn’t this trial optional via a command line switch as things like this usually are with ArenaNet?

buki.3108:

Did you even test this…?

They don’t have a test server.

Yeah this is worse for me and a few of my friends as well.

One perfect solution would be to send less detail. We don’t need to know their shoe size, just race, team, weapons. There must be a way to automatically have the servers reduce to this information once a certain number of items are being sent in each packet. I don’t need to know about whats at the other end of the map, but I do need to know why I can see mesmer illusions before the mesmer, why I can see ranger pets before rangers, why there is no delay loading the 50 people, once i’m dead…. But why they don’t appear when it would actually be useful.

I applaud you for trying ANet, but now it’s even weirder.

Now I can see some of my guys and some of theirs but I have no way of assessing the strength of either force. At least before I could see all of my guys so I knew how strong we were and whether we should push or run.

Kind of a side question: I’ve noticed that although I can’t see models, I can always see downed/defeated/cmdr/sentry icons, so often I aim for those.

Why not show a small red/green icon next to a player name so at least if the name/model isn’t rendering, you at least know where to aim and how many there are?

The Problem
GW2 is an action game.
WvW has lots of action going on.
We all have to act and re-act, but currently we dont have the info on our screens to re-act to.

Do we really need to see character models?
Do we really need to see that the enemy is a charr, or an asura, or a human, etc?
Do we really need to know what dye they have selected for each piece of armor their toon has?
Weapons? Really, we have to see all those different weapons as well?

The Solution
Make some standard enemy models, easy and fast to display. 1 model per server, for server uniqueness.
Make some standard weapon models, easy and fast to display. 1 model per weapon type.
A single character model can sit in Random Access Memory for quick use.
The use of Level Of Detail settings can improve client draw times at distance.
I don’t really know how much data that would cut down on, but it would have to significantly reduce it.

Oh, I almost forgot the very important thing – TURN OFF SERVER SIDE CULLING.

The Conclusion
Give a good base that allows players to see the enemy, and allies, around them in a timely manner. Then you can adjust, in small easy to manage increments, to make it all pretty to look at.

a lot of people still don’t seem to understand what culling means and how it works. culling is what happens if the client is not notified of a player’s presence when the client should see the player. you can’t put ‘only a name plate’ or ‘a simple model’ on something that doesn’t exist according to your client. there is a limit to the amount of players that the server tells you about. current trial fix was nothing more than changing the ratio of friends / foes that server tells you about, but the server still only tells you about XX players. culling can only go away by vastly increasing the amount of players that the server tells the client about and might require infrastructure upgrades from Anet side. only after that the server tells you about ALL the players you should be able to see, does it make sense to use options like ‘only name tags’, ‘simple moddels’, ‘spell effects self only’ etc.

i died 4 times today from npc’s (Veteran guards … etc ) with stealth up … not sure how new culling works but since few days npc’s keep hit me in stealth

This trial has made the problem alot worse than before. Can you please revert back to what you had because this is really bad.

morrolan.9608:

buki.3108:

Did you even test this…?

They don’t have a test server.

They do, we are the test server. This is a $60 beta product.

@ muylaetrix.2096
So my suggestion, just above yours was not a good one?

Anet have to reduce data sent (as suggested above) AND turn off server side culling.

Things to get rid of in data sent to clients;
Race
6 x armor items (from a huge selection)
4 x dye selection per armor item (from a huge selection)
1 to 4 weapons (from a huge selection)
Multiplied by the number of enemy in location

Replace with;
No server side culling
1 single enemy model per server (all enemy from a server looks the same)
Standard weapon models (1 per type)
Multiplied by the number of enemy in location

Think that reduces network data requirements.

I liked this version better then the previous based on tonight’s game play. Zerg rushing up showed up for once even though it looked to me like i was with 1/2 the number i know was there. If nothing else it should increase the “There we were 5 v 500 and we won” stories.

Appreciate the effort, but please revert back. I had to log out of the game when we were invading SM. Not ideal.

I was also having trouble seeing members of my own zerg when no one else was around us.

The old implementation was better.

I do not like this version.

Please revert back the culling trial asap, my latency during zerg fight in wvw shot up and it is totally unplayable for me.

Its a total failure, and you should run this trial under test conditions, not live play, this is not a beta.

Habib Loew.6239:

….Guilds are not favored in the current system.

That’s ridiculous. I run WVW with my guild and there are normally only about 15 to 20 of us max, but on two occasions last night they completely vanished in front of me, yes it’s great that your party will never be affected by culling, but if you have just started a third of 4th group (IE only two in the party) and your guild get culled then you are screwed.

Either fix that or introduce Warbands (25 to 30 man groups) and have that “larger party” not be affected.

I really appreciate the work that Anet are putting in to fixing the issue, but I can speak for my guild when I say we all agree that the culling issue is much worse now than it was, enemy players are still be vanishing from sight and now guildies are too.

Culling has become much, much worse for me since this last patch. I see even less people on my screen than I could previously, large groups of enemies completely disappear as we run towards them. It’s terrible. The old system was orders of magnitude better.

Wonder if we should make a thread in a different forum about this.

It’s Tuesday now and still no update from anyone from ANet.

CULLING IS KILLING WvWvW either get your game engine fixed or pull the plug on WvWvW and go back to GvG.
Nice idea but the rendering is just not on and I’m not going to be killed by something I can’t see.
I don’t mind dying if it’s from something I can see but invisible enemies is just not on.
It’s really sad as I did enjoy WvWvW and still do but when there is a massive zerg of 30 plus that are invisable meh sorry it’s not for me.

Much much worse. I have a high end pc and hardly had issues at all with culling before, but now im constantly watching allies and enemies both fade into view after several seconds of nothing. It happens all the time too, not just when around large groups. Really frustrating. Why cant you guys just give us a slider that lets us configure the number of visible players in wvw so that it can be customized?

Sorry Anet, its gotten worse. Nice try though.