Guild Wars 2

theres got to be more to it than just a server problem becaus that would mean the server is treating players differently but maby it is maby they have it set up to throttle based on some algorithm because i have almost never had culling problems(only in the truly epic sized fights 120+players same ones that start to lag server) although I have not been able to play the last month so I didn’t get to test the trial

The culling change “felt” better to me, i.e. I wasn’t counting allies and enemies and when they popped, but it seemed I had a better feel for how many enemy players I was facing.

The trial system was great. I have take a lot of pleasure in WvW during the trial. Please keep it permatly.

How do I fight if I don’t see the ennemy ? Can’t play like that…

Old culling means its back to being unplayable in large fights, especially when in the new breakout events.

I hope this all will be an old Halloween horror story we share with the young’uns after the Feb patch…

i prefer the test system. seeing my ennemies > seeing my allies.

" unless u count on the culling to plan ur game play".

Horrible → Best → Ok → Horrible

I am still under the opinion that this has been rolled all the way back. There first attempt at tweaking it has been the best overall performance gain. The trial was a slight downgrade from that, but still playable. Now it is just pure garbage.

Thanks for the clarification. It really doesn’t seem like it to me though.

However if this is 100% the case, then I will have to amend my prior statements and say that the trial has been the best.

Suun.2856:

…What data are we talking about? Data is all the details that allow the enemy to be displayed on your screen, before your client (on your PC) knows that there is anything to display (draw). Obvious details like;
Character race, height, weight, colorings (the things you set at character creation),
Guild and server, along with health pool,
Each individual armor piece and its selected dye colorings, … so I culled it.

Culling can not be affected by your PC, because it happens at the server.

It is a way to reduce network data requirements from their server, and to the client. This would reduce the need to have a very fast (a relative term) internet service for the customer, reduce the outgoing bandwidth requirements from the server, and most likely reduce Anets running costs as well. It just happens that it stops a lot of us from seeing the enemy in a timely fashion.

That would be silly, clients don’t need to know what equipment opponents wear, they actually don’t even need to know what race, gender they are, nor what their customized armour looks like, you need none of that and they certainly don’t need frequent updates on those.

All the client needs is: position (int³), velocity (int³), health (short¹), animation (short¹), animation_time (short¹) and buffeffects (int¹ (flags)).

These would be enough to render the kittens in combat, all the kittens including vital info about their state and what they’re doing. Enough to render and fight them.

Then, if that works, maybe add an identifier (long¹) to reference more detailed static information (all of the armour details, race, gender and all the customizations). Alls this static information is send/updated to clients at opportune times, like when entering the zone, maybe even from other servers (here’s a thought). The client can link that static info to the dynamic combat info, as they please and their system permits.

You could easily pack basic combat info on 30-60 players into a single ip packet (<1.5 kb) and you’d at least see the zerg of kittens.

I have done some WvW in the past week with the new culling configuration and in my experience it was beter. I have seen several medium sized battles (30+ vs 30+) and was able to get a good view of enemies from the moment I walked into an area and saw incomming zergs. Before the trial change it would take 10 seconds or more before a battle would become visible. We also ran in to some stealthing thieves and they did not stay hidden excessively long, but before the change I never directly noticed issues with this before but that could be because the just stayed hiiden. I didn’t notice any detrimental effects during the test.
So I would like to see the changed configuration to come back.

Trial was better, at least I could better judge the size of an enemy force and didn’t run straight towards 1-3 guys who suddenly morph into 20-40.

The trial worked great for me. No additional lag occurred and strategy worked out for the better. I hope that the change is successful enough to warrant re-implementation.

… I want the new trial culling mechanism back!
I almost never ran into invisible zergs, when it was inplace, and having invisible allies could be countered by looking at my mini-map.

Now I lead my squad into hordes of invisible players again, which is outright silly and renders (haha, pun intended) any tactic useless!

Yesterday i literally crossed a zerg with my zerg before they destroy us from behind …
Want the trial system back :’(

trial was better.

I don’t understand the developers here at all. There are two very obvious solutions to this problem, implemented by every other game on the market:

-If you cull the model, you still show their nameplates. Grats, no more invisa-zerg.
-Give players a slider and default the game to the current settings. Players can leave it as-is if their performance suffers, and increase it if they can handle it better. Instead of YOU telling us what we can handle and trying to balance for everybody at once, let us do it.

Then just continue with whatever optimizations you are doing to the back end.

It’s as simple as that. And quite honestly, it’s pretty unacceptable for these things not to be in the game 4 months after launch. They aren’t exactly innovations.

@Celeras
If it was that easy, dont you think they would have done it by now ?
It is not that easy, in fact its not easy at all.
They went with the culling option at start, now they have to fight their way out of it again which is messy and takes a lot of time and hard work. There are no easy solutions.
It is not an issue about whether your computer can handle seeing enemies, it obviously can, your end has almost no bearing on the culling issue at all.

I’m sorry, but yes. Displaying nameplates regardless of model culling is ridiculously easy, and has been a staple of MMOs since the beginning of the genre. DAoC, Aion, WoW, Warhammer, SWTOR, Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Age of Conan, Tera, Rift, FFXI, FFXIV. I cannot even think of a game in the MMO genre, besides GW2, that does not implement this feature when there are too many players on the screen.

There is no excuse for players being completely invisible.

DAOC did not have culling Celeras.

SWTOR ultimately failed because they couldn’t fix their culling and the community wanting large open world fights left the game.

DAOC managed to have massive open world fights by optimizing how models displayed. You got a very minimalistic, low detail view of an enemy player at first to minimize lag. Amazing how they could handle huge fights with all the models on screen and playable lag, despite the hardware limitations at the time.

Just goes to show you that current game developers are sacrificing performance and playability for shinies.

In my humble opinion I prefer the trial system. However, I would not split the culling pool 50-50. Rather 65-35 favoring rendering enemies over allies. Also prioritize rendering the commander’s icon on people’s screens. This way players on your server can stick with their commander in the big fight, and you can see the enemies in front of you….for the most part. Just the 2 cents from the large guild leader perspective.

Two important responses:
1) The trial was better. Yes there were still issues, but gameplay was improved overall. WvW is about the engagements, and the trial increased engagement quality. Any real major issues related to mass zerg vs zerg. Funnily enough this rewarded, and encouraged smaller forces and skirmishing. Never the less, you could still see, target, and fight something in a zerg. You might have just had to stand back for 10 seconds to let the majority show up.

2) I’d like to hear if anyone else has experienced this but I feel that thief stealth/culling related issues were reduced under the trial. They happened less frequently, and the culling duration after a stealth when it did happen was dramatically lessened.

Two good reasons to switch to the trial version for the time being.

Two separate pools of allies and enemies for culling was a far superior system. I can think of a number of instances where the single pool system ‘cheated’ both for and against me. As a front-liner, having full info on the entire zerg behind me is worth less than the locations of enemies in front. As it stands now I need to idle for 20s to get the measure of the opposition, by which time my contribution may be irrelevant.

I’d like a system that gave me a red dot for each enemy in view distance, with other info coming in as available. If this is too much bandwidth, how about grouping enemies within a 5 degree arc and showing a dot with size proportional to numbers?

Agreed with the commander that their icon should get priority.

Well, there seems to be differing opinions as to why there is culling.

I, for one, find the new/old culling to be six of one, half dozen of another. It is just as important to see your enemy as your allies. How is one supposed to know where to lay heals/boons/cleanses if you can’t see your allies?

One of the things beyond me is why we can’t see the nameplates.

If it is an artwork issue, why can’t every detail about an enemy be loaded into memory when they zone into a map? But we don’t really know what’s happening on the programming side, so it’s silly to speculate on possible solutions.

I am strictly not in favor of any kind of dumbing down of character models. It is very important for me to use the visual ques of what’s going on. I can differentiate what’s happening in a large fight. Character models provides me with crucial information many times.

Having more information about this, especially since ArenaNet enjoys banning people for “trolling” for simply disagreeing with people, would have been nice. Like… in the news section when you log in. Due to how easily it is to get banned for being innocent here, I stopped using the forums. But… I just ended up dead because an enemy zerg appeared right in front of me. This kind of crap needs to go.

I’m glad we’re back to the old system because of one reason:

Running ten man zerg busting groups was the most obnoxious kittening kitten bullkitten I had ever seen with the new culling. Being able to quickly move and follow the group leader is absolutely essential, and you can’t see them when they disappeared.

If the new culling system was set up to include priority for guilds, then it may be better than the old system that we’ve reverted to.

In large scale fights (like in tier1 EU), there is many large blobs of players (30+) going around the map.
I think the problem of the old system is that if you are not in very organized guilds with scouts to “find” ennemies outside the zerg, it can be very frustrating to see you are dead before you see the ennemy…
At least, the trial system allowed you to see if ennemies are nearby, even if you don’t know the number, and in my opinion, it was better (and funnier) to defend myself against an unknown sized ennemy zerg than just lay down without having done anything.

The trial culling system was way, way better for me. The whole last week it was just pure horror for me regarding culling.

There was an older online game, Phantasy Star Universe that did something that I figure would help in this situation.

Silhouette. This only ever happened with allies, as when I played there was no PvP whatsoever, but when there were more people in an area than the game could reliably render or the server could send data for it would only send location and heading. And the game client would place a glowy humanoid silhouette there, a running one if the data indicated they were moving, a standing one otherwise.

That system could work wonders here. Allow players the ability to see that there is a full zerg behind those few rendered people, even if the details are obscured. Once there is time the servers can send the rest of the important information as it currently does, replacing those silhouettes with actual renders when it can.

P.S. Hell it could even be stylized, PSU had a whole thing with glowy photons and lightsabers and stuff. We have an painting style, make them look like quickly painted single color detailess figures.

This week the culling appears to be at an all time high for me. I remember last week as being better than this week, but worse than the week prior -go figure.

If the same config is in place as there was 2 weeks ago then:
(2weeks ago>last week>this week)the randomness of human perception = I’ll log in next week and check again

Whatever the hell you guys are doing with the culling system, it’s not working.

Each time an enemy comes into view, I’m immediately hit with massive lag with skills firing off 3-10 seconds later, that’s assuming I don’t disconnect.

Worst of all, this only happens in WvW. Where I spend the majority of my time.

PLEASE fix this.

I feel as if most players would agree that until culling can be completely fixed, function supersedes form. I realize Arenanet envisioned a glorious battle field with absolute chaos and epicness, but it is beyond frustrating to attempt to execute a battle plan and watch your team die to an invisible army. Even in Lion’s Arch, culling is an issue. Sometimes characters do not render until I have almost walked past them. I can run across a room and if I stop, suddenly I am surrounded by 10-20 toons. It seems like this shouldn’t happen. It takes away from the realism of things. Specifically, in WvWvW I would rather see an army of names or identical toons than nothing at all.

Been extremely horrid this week in WvW, PvE, and even running around Lion’s Arch at 2AM PST

@Colin:
Reworking the structure for a complete culling overhaul is indeed time consumeing and “binding” lot of resources & manpower, I would agree.

But players asking for a fast & simple fix to culling, just to be able to eliminate the Tactical problems they get with invisible players. In short:

Some ugly tag/nameplate/indicator shown is better compared to haveing to deal with invisible enemies.

this, look how they fixed this in AION. just give us an options to turn off characters(allies\enemies\both) and leave only nameplates.
there was 500vs500 fightings in AION with no problem from server side.
it’s much better than fighting against invisible foes with invisible allies.

i liked the change better then the orriginal, seeing allies is less of an issue then seeing foes, as allies dont try to rip off your face when invisable and spamming aoe dmg. i think alot of people would prefer if u switched it back untill a more sound solution is found to reduce the occurances of being taken to pound town by 20 invisible foes when you turn down the wrong ally way in WvW

I play my thief a lot, and I preferred the trial culling. As it is now, when two large groups clash, I can go quite deep into an enemy zerg right now without being seen to chase that squishy target that shouldn’t have been out front in the first place, so I’m sure they really don’t appreciate the current system. More than anything though, once I dispatch my first target, I don’t want to have to turn around and run back to the front lines of the fight where all the AoE is being dropped just so I can see another enemy to target when I know I’m completely surrounded.

The change was better at least for me. Didn’t see all my team mates if I was in a big zerg but enough to know where to place my heals and stuff and I could see the enemy 90% of the time even in big zerg clashes. The only time I saw enemys disapper or invisible enemys hitting me was in a hugh 3 way zerg clash in stonemist castle.

With the change back it really puts me of as I get caught way more offen by invisibel stuff again.

Why not simply remove the random mobs and PvE events from WvW servers? That would save a lot of server space in and of its self. There is no reason to have random PvE in a PvP environment.

By removing the 100+ random mobs that have no purpose at all that would have to give Anet some additional resources and use those extra resources to reduce issues with player rendering.

I am only talking about the random mosquito and trash mobs that just sit there all day taking up resources that could be better allocated to the primary purpose of the server PvP.

Laiboch.4380:

Why not simply remove the random mobs and PvE events from WvW servers? That would save a lot of server space in and of its self. There is no reason to have random PvE in a PvP environment.

By removing the 100+ random mobs that have no purpose at all that would have to give Anet some additional resources and use those extra resources to reduce issues with player rendering.

I am only talking about the random mosquito and trash mobs that just sit there all day taking up resources that could be better allocated to the primary purpose of the server PvP.

Yes please!

I would +1 this post all day long if I could.

DemonCow.5328:

Laiboch.4380:

Why not simply remove the random mobs and PvE events from WvW servers? That would save a lot of server space in and of its self. There is no reason to have random PvE in a PvP environment.

By removing the 100+ random mobs that have no purpose at all that would have to give Anet some additional resources and use those extra resources to reduce issues with player rendering.

I am only talking about the random mosquito and trash mobs that just sit there all day taking up resources that could be better allocated to the primary purpose of the server PvP.

Yes please!

I would +1 this post all day long if I could.

double yes please.

The trial method was considerably better. Not sure why it was reverted, as there shouldn’t be any new data to be gained from using the old method and the trial method was quite functional.

Please implement the trial method again until a better fix is available. At least in the upper tiers the meta has become “move in groups of 20 or more and stack+portal to exploit culling”. Fighting invisible armies isn’t fun.

In this screenshot, there were tons of invisible enemies…. somewhere….. lots of pretty spell effects, but no idea where, who or how to fight….. (notice how the sword that costs several hundred gold is visible? hm, me too…..)

InSomNiaC.6315:

In my humble opinion I prefer the trial system. However, I would not split the culling pool 50-50. Rather 65-35 favoring rendering enemies over allies. Also prioritize rendering the commander’s icon on people’s screens. This way players on your server can stick with their commander in the big fight, and you can see the enemies in front of you….for the most part. Just the 2 cents from the large guild leader perspective.

Exactly. Culling is evil, trial is less evil. Trial would have been much better if you could see the commanders on both teams.

I wish you guys came out in support of the trial when a bunch of people were saying that it was terrible.

Its never good to keep positive feedback silent.

Suun.2856:

How to Reduce Culling.

To reduce culling, or even remove culling, Anet need to reduce how much data is needed to be sent to the client. The following are some examples;
Enemy are seen as a single type of creature (a single race type),
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s dye selections,
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s armor,
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s weapons.

Make all the enemy the same creature model (while accounting for class) without all the pretty details (that each individual selects and modifies to their own taste) that we currently have.

I would say that race should be included but that shouldn’t really need to be repeated very often. All enemies can be represented by a standard class armor and weapons similarly. This data can be temporarily stored locally until the culling stops.

I certainly don’t want to see someone’s nice Legendary Greatsword but then I don’t have one, an option to cull the effects would be nice.

There is no point in sending data concerning enemy dye selection anyway, they are uniformly colored red by the system.

Culling the quantity of data rather than the number of characters displayed should be the priority, beyond that friends should be culled before enemies. As has been said they aren’t going to kill you and are noted on the local map.

The data listed in the quote is data that only has to be sent once, and is irrelevent to the reasons culling exists.

While there can be client options for texture caching reasons to help lower end pc’s it is actually irrelevent how much one time data is sent to each client overall.

Culling exists because the bandwidth loads of sending updates about X number of people (where X is the current culling limit) is taxing the server to its maximum capacity before lag really kicks in at crushing levels.

The perishable data (someones position, velocity, and direction, plus their actions) is what loads the system.

The unperishable data, what armor set, what colors, what weapon, only needs to be sent once, and thus isnt taxing. The difference here between not sending and sending it is probably only a couple of bytes per person.

This is much better than the trial. The trial only helped zergs which already get a ton of help from your questionable game mechanics.

Basically Anets Game engine is not up to the job full stop they have based it on CPU rather than GPU and they are continuing to focus on CPU as the way to go which is now so out of date it’s being linked to MSDOS status.
I have just been into WvW with a now fully upgraded machine:
3.6ghz AMD Bulldozer Quad.
16ghz Ram
2ghz 650 GTX
and my speedtest
Yep lag spikes death by invisible enemies to boot.
Sorry Anet your game engine is at fault and your servers are way out of date.
Get it fixed or see the game die very swiftly that even carrot dangling updates won’t even save it.

Culling is worse than ever. Yesterday all 3 servers in my matchup were battling it out in the Stonemist Lords room, I ran around for at least 5 minutes with no enemies or siege rendering at all, they didn’t begin to render until I finally went down. It was just ridiculous.

Trial was better,
being able to see the ennemies asap is the top priority.