Guild Wars 2

Alright.

I usually never post anything on these forums, but the situation in wvw is getting to a point at which all the fun is being destroyed by serious skill lag. I’m in a guild on Far Shiverpeaks created for the sole purpose of playing wvw in a tactfully and coordinated way, with no more than 30 active people. Previous and current match-ups against high populated servers made and make us face massive groups of enemies grouped together in what is popularly called a “blob”. And i don’t mind that, i get why people group and move together. However, when we engage these groups and want to tactfully encounter their movement and attacks, the game and/or your server infrastructure can’t handle the amount of people on a certain spot and causes a massive amount of skill lag. Skills we could use tactfully to engage a blob (other than auto attacking) simply won’t work and as a result we get killed and danced on. This skill lag causes the situation in which we can’t use tactics and skill to outsmart a blob, and it just gets down to who can spam 1 the most. Again, I don’t mind the a size of the enemy groups, but at least give us the opportunity to counter them in a way in which skills at least work. So i’ll round up with a question. Dear people of Arenanet, what are you planning to do about this skill lag?

tl:dr – Fix the skill lag in wvw.

You know what would take away skill lag? Culling.

But no one likes culling, so skill lag it is…

I’d prefer culling really. It’s much less frustrating than dying to upscaled PvE players because they just have 3 times the amount of people.

Celly.5912:

I’d prefer culling really. It’s much less frustrating than dying to upscaled PvE players because they just have 3 times the amount of people.

You must be forgetting the part about culling where you get wiped all over the floor by an 80 man full-map zerg before your comp even rendered them.

Skill lag really, really needs to not be in the game. If it starts happening, I pretty much immediately log out of WvW because it’s just not fun for me.

We had terrible skill lag before culling was removed so it won’t help. The skill lag we have no seems different to what we have had in the past. I believe they are tweaking settings to see what works still, like they said they would. But, I don’t think its going to work unless they reduce the map cap.

Yeah, culling has nothing to do with skill lag, except that both involve large amounts of players. If anything skill lag seems a little better than before, when culling also happened to still be in the game.. it’s still quite bad though, and yeah, it basically ruins the experience for me.

Such bullkitten in this thread. Skill lag and culling have NOTHING to do. They are completely separate issues. Non culling introduced general lag because of a lack of optimisation, now it’s done and it’s very good. Anyone not recognizing it is lying or completely kitten.
Skill lag is due to massive skills being used at the same time, with many animations. That’s the problem and it’s insanely complex to polish that.

KratosAngel.7289:

Skill lag is due to massive skills being used at the same time, with many animations. That’s the problem and it’s insanely complex to polish that.

They can easely put the player cap down again or just get some better servers (its not cheap tho but still if you want to have a good game you need to do kitten for it), its hell playing agenst german servers the only thing they do is blob.. i run in a tactical guild group and you cant do any strategic kitten what so ever with them, you will have to BvB, and thats something i will refuse to do. Its always nice to see how much attention PvE gets but if you look at WvW.. still alot of things that can and must be fixed in my eyes.

I get the reactions about culling. That was somewhat of a temporary solution until some improvements were made. And I have to say, the improvements were proper. The one day we could play without culling and the old playercap was the smoothest wvw ever. Yet they increased playercap and these last few months skill lag and random disconnects increased. I get why all of this is happening. What I don’t get is the mentality or approach. Yes we want large scale epic battles with as much as people as possible. but have the infrastructure to back it up. Correct me if i’m wrong here, but I’ve been brought up with a simple rule. “Do it properly or don’t do it at all”

tl:dr – Get the player cap to a level at which skill lag is non existent until infrastructure to back up more amounts of people is ready.

Proximus.9760:

tl:dr – Get the player cap to a level at which skill lag is non existent until infrastructure to back up more amounts of people is ready.

There are a ton of players who agree with you Proximus and this forum has been flooded with threads about skill lag over the last couple of months but there are also a lot of messy facts that making stating this opinion strongly with support very difficult to do and we all know how people treat Truthiness on the internet, pick it apart piece by piece till it rolls over and dies or gets stuffed with straw.

ANET will not release hard numbers on what their WvW map population caps are or have ever been and I don’t blame them for that but it makes it really hard for those of us in favor of lower WvW map caps to to present the evidence that clearly shows fewer players allowed into WvW will decrease skill lag even when it is a complete no brainer in terms of logic. The best we can do is estimations from Commanders based on their use of /squad info and I’ve seen things that range from assuming the WvW population caps are somewhere around 80 per side on the borderlands to 120ish but when those numbers have changed and the effect that has had on the occurrences of skill lag is not well documented. I would love to see more information on that even if only being notified when increases or decreases in WvW map population caps happen.

Some players on some tier do not experience the same level of skill lag as others under the same conditions and this could be for a myriad of reasons but most accept the fact that skill lag happens when you get battles larger than 50v50v50, especially within keeps and towers (due to increased calculations of line of sight checks I would imagine). Simultaneous ISP connection problems, millions of combinations of user side configurations, lots of new code and patches and a whole host of other problems outside of ANET’s control like Blizzard’s voodoo doll and magical my little pony curses (ok maybe not the last two but who the kitten knows anymore) all contribute the issues and make it difficult to pin down.

The problem is largely one of perception of personal experiences and until ANET can hear its player-base with a unified voice expressing their displeasure with skill lag and demanding something to be done about it there is a good chance we will get to continue with status quo. We need more people giving very specific information about their experiences with skill lag and less knee jerk responses from the peanut gallery. Yeah, I know good luck there but hey sometimes miracles can happen . . . statistically speaking and all.

KratosAngel.7289:

Such bullkitten in this thread. Skill lag and culling have NOTHING to do. They are completely separate issues. Non culling introduced general lag because of a lack of optimisation, now it’s done and it’s very good. Anyone not recognizing it is lying or completely kitten.
Skill lag is due to massive skills being used at the same time, with many animations. That’s the problem and it’s insanely complex to polish that.

You were quite correct right up until your last comment. It isn’t complex, insanely or otherwise, to fix skill lag, and if you really believe it is you don’t understand what causes skill lag. It might be expensive and it would take some effort, but it isn’t complex. It’s purely a server-side hardware and bandwidth issue that could be fixed if ANet was willing to do so.

Easy to fix ? Definitely not. They have to look at the whole coding and redo it completely to do some optimising you know ? That takes a hell lot of time. Just don’t act like you know the code of the game …
And as for the other “solution” of reducing the player cap, just no, would only be a bandaid not really effective and temporary solution encouraging no optimisation.
Just wait for improvements, seriously, it was already reduced a lot, it doesn’t happen so often anymore and is not so.
The culling was much worse, now it’s gone, players are spoilt and want everything immediately, not realizing what they’re asking for …

@ PariahX – I think you are right. That reply made sense. Though on our server the skill lag is getting increasingly worse and annoying now we face higher populated enemy servers more often, causing our guild to swap borders in the hope to find smaller groups fighting or just stop playing.

@Kratos – Players might be spoiled but there’s a proper reason for it. This part of the game gets advertised as “epic battle with lots of people etc” then when they find out it doesn’t work properly it just feels as bad advertising. Again, for me it’s more the mentality behind being off than anything else. In the end anet created this problem for themselves.

Re: the complexity of fixing skill lag.. Dark Age of Camelot has been out since 2001 and has had WvW (RvR) from the beginning, also with 3 realms. DAoC has always had one giant RvR map which is overall larger than any single GW2 WvW map and probably larger than all 3 WvW maps combined for that matter.

I never noticed any skill lag on DAoC, and when I first started playing it I was on a modem, or maybe 64k ISDN (it’s hard to remember that far back..). DAoC had similarly large amounts of people, particularly in the olden days with the classic RvR map at the good ole Emain mile gate. I think there was some rendering lag with that many people, but you could turn down your settings. Oh, I never noticed culling back then, either. I don’t think it existed (or exists now on DAoC).

DAoC actually has more abilities overall than GW2, although it does lack the ‘realtime’ combat style. DAoC also doesn’t have any sort of ‘dodge’ mechanic, which I think is really what would make the combat more complex to handle (no computer game has genuinely ‘realtime’ anything, it’s always divided up into chunks one way or the other).

SO, overall, I know Arenanet could fix this skill lag issue with modern CPUs and coding techniques since Mythic had it figured out 12 years ago. Whether they are willing to do so, I don’t know. They did say months ago that they are working on it, but.. months ago. It’s entirely possible that they have done the financial math and have decided it’s just not worth the investment.

It really makes me wonder how they programmed their things. When there is lag on a T1 server it doesn`t mean that there is on other servers. When there is lag on 1 map there might not be any on the other map. So, it seems that the lag is created because there is too many players fighting on 1 specific map and that the lag is only in that map.

If the lags is caused by too many calculations, it`s probably that they are brute forcing or using some other inefficient algorithm to calculate all the things that 1 specific skill will hit. It was said that AoE cap was there because of technical limitation. Which probably means that when an AoE is cast, they just run over all the list of possible target for that AoE and stop as soon as the AoE hit 5 targets. So, they save a few calculation because they stop before the ran over the whole list.

When I say brute force, I mean every possible target on the map. That means that when you cast a spell the game will check for the every players on the 2 opposing servers PLUS every NPC on the map PLUS every environmental things that can be attack (including mosquito, wall, gate, siege and supply depot (for some reason))

Other alternative to brute force is to split the targets in region. For example, you can divide the map in 4 regions: NE, NW, SE and SW. The advantage of that technique is that if you are casting an AOE in SE region then you only have to check for only the targets that are in the SE region. Hence, you can reduce the number of calculations because you don`t have to check for every single targets across the map. This solution unfortunately come with a couple of drawback. If your region are too big and all the population of the map is in the same region then your regions are useless. On the other hand if your region are too small you will need a lot of calculation to keep track of which region every players is in.

There is no perfect solution for the AoE problem but I hope that at least they put the NPCs and the environmental things in regions because these things barely never change region so you can save a lot of calculations.

sparklevision.8109:

Re: the complexity of fixing skill lag.. Dark Age of Camelot has been out since 2001 and has had WvW (RvR) from the beginning, also with 3 realms. DAoC has always had one giant RvR map which is overall larger than any single GW2 WvW map and probably larger than all 3 WvW maps combined for that matter.

I never noticed any skill lag on DAoC, and when I first started playing it I was on a modem, or maybe 64k ISDN (it’s hard to remember that far back..). DAoC had similarly large amounts of people, particularly in the olden days with the classic RvR map at the good ole Emain mile gate. I think there was some rendering lag with that many people, but you could turn down your settings. Oh, I never noticed culling back then, either. I don’t think it existed (or exists now on DAoC).

DAoC actually has more abilities overall than GW2, although it does lack the ‘realtime’ combat style. DAoC also doesn’t have any sort of ‘dodge’ mechanic, which I think is really what would make the combat more complex to handle (no computer game has genuinely ‘realtime’ anything, it’s always divided up into chunks one way or the other).

SO, overall, I know Arenanet could fix this skill lag issue with modern CPUs and coding techniques since Mythic had it figured out 12 years ago. Whether they are willing to do so, I don’t know. They did say months ago that they are working on it, but.. months ago. It’s entirely possible that they have done the financial math and have decided it’s just not worth the investment.

sparklevision.8109, I’m really glad you brought up DAoC and the fact that it supported more people with way more ability affects and never experience ability lag, or rather not being able to execute an ability. There may have been general lag, but it was in 2001 and we were able to still kill stuff. WAR followed in those same steps and improved upon DAoC shortcomings in the lag department. I played WAR for a few years and almost never experienced lag, and as a combat healer, I was usually in the thick of it. The only time lag became a problem was after one of their latest patches when they increased the amount of people who were fighting in the capitals, but I think that was due in large part to rushing and not fully planning, which became a symbol for Mythic after EA purchased them.

This issue is fixable, and if ANET spent the six or so months they stated to re-code the culling issue, they can do the same for this, which is in my opinion of the same level of importance to fix.

Cheers,

I agree, skill lag is ridiculous and has no place in any competitive environment.

Still cant understand how can they add rubbish updates every month while fundamental for the functionality of an MMO stuff remain unsolved…

BTW there are serious issues in every side (WvW, PvP, Pve all have serious bugs for months) of this game that remain unsolved.

Even though, i still have good time and love this game