Guild Wars 2

lioka qiao.8734:

I would have assumed that it’s a network bandwidth issue. The calculations for boons, conditions, and combat cannot be anywhere near as intensive as they say simply because these calculations happen in other games without any problems for large numbers. It gets worse for a RTS than for an MMO. The problem is how to funnel all of the data they want through the average user’s DSL line. They’re synchronizing animations at probably 10hz (maybe faster) including all of the combat data that comes across. If they used all 32 bit floats for the data here’s what we get. Each float is 4 bytes.

Position: 12 bytes
Velocity: 12 bytes
Animation: 1 byte ID, 4 bytes timing
Every damage indicator: 5 bytes per tick up to 50x for an arrow cart (200 bytes) 4 bytes amount, 1 byte type
Boons/conditions and timers: 4 bytes boon active flags, 4 bytes per boon (x9 for boons, x12 for conditions) plus flags and timers for class specific buffs and debuffs, makes out to about 150 bytes
healing ticks: same as the damage indicators but only up to 5, due to current aoe cap: 25 bytes

I’ll add 150 bytes for ??? data i didn’t cover. This makes out to 600bytes. For one player.
Now multiply that by expected server caps (80 per server I would imagine, or 240 total) makes out to be 141kb. How many frames of that can you get into a 300kbps DSL connection? 2 maybe.

That’s why you get skill lag. They shut off all of the AOE abilities and particularly the utilities. If they shut off aoes they save 240*5*5 bytes per frame just in damage ticks. They’re also pushing information for projectiles and sfx animations over that pipe and most of the data for that is used in AOE attacks. They save some minor server calculation time as well (manhattan distance calculation costs 6 multiplications and 6 additions and one less than comparison, that’s childs play for any CPU today) but it’s mostly bandwidth.
This especially if they’re trying to drive 20fps worth of data. That adds up to quite a lot of data to push over a gigabit ethernet connection. This also assumes they have gigabit internet with the ISP that serves their WvW servers (which is doubtful cause that costs $$$).

Why you should look forward to the LoD for special effects is in that statement above. If they do server-side LoD they save bandwidth by not pushing to you the AOE effects that they used to and they can put more of that bandwidth towards keeping skill lag effects at bay.

This is also why they’re not upping the AOE cap. Previous MMOs didn’t have such a high framerate for data so they don’t have to push so much over the connection. GW2 has a higher data framerate and needs to save bandwidth where it can and thus you get an AOE cap. If all aoes were allowed to have an unlimited cap they would take up too much bandwidth in a 50v50 fight. Maybe they’ll be able to expand the aoe cap when they clean up some more bandwidth hogs that are unnecessary (like SFX).

-My background on this idea:
I’m used to working with IP video systems where bandwidth is a significant issue (especially with megapixel MJPEG streams). I’ve also thought of the way to transmit and store MMO data or simple multiplayer data. The design above is how I would have done it. This isn’t necessarily how Anet did it. They probably have a more optimized approach to handling data. The thing i do know is that their server’s processor has much more power than they’re letting on.

This definitely incorrect, it is NOT the bandwidth that is tapped during server lag…the server CPU is maxed out…it simply cannot process the information fast enough and therefore cannot send a response to your client…therefore you click a button..nothing happens, because the server can no longer register events until resources are freed up. That’s pretty much it….all there is too it….when massive amounts of people start spamming abilities in unison, whatever calculations are run on the server tax the CPU…when CPU gets taxed…they stop processing input until the server catches up…once resources free up…you can click a button again…

Your crazy byte calculation has ZERO to do with bandwidth, those numbers are space taken up in memory on the server (or whatever machine is doing the calculation). Much different than what is sent over the wire in a packet…the information is FAR FAR less and very much compressed.

Straegen.2938:

DAoC solved their problems by implementing heavy crowd control so if a fight of 500 people broke out about 450 of them were turned completely off. I won’t argue that DAoC did more players in an area but their condition/boon system was simpler, it was far less action based (no kind of dodge mechanic) and the run times were yawn worthy… even dying had a nice lag on it if you missed the 5 minute window.

Did you even play NF? Porting would put you into action very fast…and porting was established like in Omaha Beach, by heavy fighting, not by something as dull as protecting yaks

Straegen.2938:

You cannot possibly be serious with this one. They had to remove Frontier Wars because it was completely unplayable once 100 people showed up. The lag in this game was far worse than GW2, the bugs were horrible and the class balance atrocious.

They first tried (and mostly failed) to introduce something really CPU intensive…collision detection. They didn’t remove frontiers, just final stage (forts). lag
was often worse than GW2, bugs were indeed horrible, balance was atrocious…but PVP was way more fun, too

lioka qiao.8734:

I would have assumed that it’s a network bandwidth issue. The calculations for boons, conditions, and combat cannot be anywhere near as intensive as they say ..

I was not necessarily thinking of network bandwith, but rather of the internal communication complexity of GW2’s data structures. That is, whenever an event happens (such as AoE damage), which and how many data objects (the targets) do have to trigger an action (loosing health). Such typical “everybody tell everybody” situations do have a quadratic complexity, hence my assumption. In such a case, a 50v50 situation would be about a hundred times worse than a 5v5 situation, and not just tenfold.

Gamadorn.2659:

That’s because the technical limitation is a BS response.

The original reason back months ago: http://gw2.junkiesnation.com/2012/05/01/dev-tracker-jon-peters-on-aoe-target-caps-for-all-skills/

Don’t get me wrong, even “just” a quadratic growth might be a problem. In the context of real time systems, you always want to be “as close as possible to linear” (or, preferably, sub-linear). I just wanted to point out that it seems Devon Carver was most likely speaking of exponential growth “figuratively”, and not literally.

Also, keep in mind that Jon Peters is a game designer, and not a systems guy (if I am not mistaken). Hence, I am not surprised that he was giving an answer from a game design perspective. However, I wouldn’t overestimate his statement with respect to the problem of making actual network code work.

~MRA

MRA.4758:

Don’t get me wrong, even “just” a quadratic growth might be a problem. In the context of real time systems, you always want to be “as close as possible to linear” (or, preferably, sub-linear). I just wanted to point out that it seems Devon Carver was most likely speaking of exponential growth “figuratively”, and not literally.

Unless they are running a many-body system, I doubt they’d have true exponential growth.

I think the problem in our basic analysis is that we’re looking at it like:
1 person targets 5x → 6x
2 people target 10x → 12x
ect…

When in reality, increasing 5x → 6x doesn’t just add one to a damage tick, it also adds one to several other procs that would have been limited to 5x but now work on 6x like blasts on fields. Likewise you’re also causing allied things to now tick at 6x rather than 5×. Not exponential, but is the rate of growth constant at that point?

I’m in a lunch rush to think any further, and my brain is defaulting to trying to look at this as a semi-lattice of one cell given X NN to interact with. Scaling that X isn’t fun on computational time.

If it’s a CPU issue then they are definitely not using an optimized engine. Hell they probably are doing all the calculations in Python if it’s that bad. There is no reason the calculations for skill interactions should be that taxing on a computer. If I were to propose a hypothetical scenario of the damage from the cluster bomb skill.

Cluster bomb:
First we get projectile physics until it hits. This is for each frame about 4 addition/subtraction actions. 1 for accelerating the z direction in the projectile’s velocity, 3 for combining the velocity components with the projectile’s location. Next we get a collision detection. This is 12 multiplications and 6 additions up to 36 for collision against the triangles in an expected collision range from the bomb. Add another 6 multiplications and 4 additions, and 1 comparison for Manhattan distance to pick the triangles in range.

If you get 15 triangles on average near that projectile you end up with on the neighborhood of 1500 flops (floating point operations).

When the projectile explodes:
For every actor in the map (NPCs, players, etc) calculate the range from the explosion epicenter vs the effective radius of the explosion. This is 12*240 flops. (average server capacity and yes this one is made up but it’s what I expect there to be on any given WvW map). Now pick 5 targets from the list that are in range of the explosion. This lets them stop short of the 12*240 flops to detect targets in the range of the bomb. For worst case secnario the 5 targets are at the end of the list of targets it tests.

For each target then:
1. damage vs defense calculation. We’ve seen the formulas and they’re short. This is 10 flops, maybe 12 at the most. If they calculate everything on the fly you can say 64 flops.
2. condition application: Apply 1 bleed to the stack of bleeds on the target. Now each bleed is tracked individually so for each target has a running stack of 25 bleeds ticking. Each bleed does direct damage for 1 flop, and each adjusts a timer for 1 flop per frame. This is memory on the server but does not tax it otherwise. Applying a bleed is as expensive as it is to push an instance of bleed on to the target’s bleed stacks. Each bleed has the guid of the actor that applied it, the bleed id (if they’re not optimized), and the duration in ticks. 4 iops at most.

Per target about 12 flops and 4 iops. Now if they’re having to Marshall memory to do these calculations they need to recode their entire engine cause whoever did it before had no clue about optimizing performance. That would certainly cause some bottlenecking on the processor side.

Ticking GT-AOE (necro wells) is cheaper since it doesn’t have to do a projectile physics calculation. It does the target pick flops, then does the damage and condition apply operations or the boon removal operations.

These estimates should be in the ball park of what their calculations for skill damage, condition application, and other calculations. Even if it costed 1000 flops per character it shouldn’t matter because of this:

http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei7/sb/core_i7-3700_d.pdf

If they built an I7 server they don’t measure in flops, they measure in gigaflops. 108 billion floating point operations per second. This assumes they built an i7 server (and they better kitten well have, it’s not that expensive). It would take 1 million characters fighting at once to tax that. It’s basically impossible to tax that processor with MMO calculations. If they’re taxing the processor with that they need to use Intel’s compiler and they need to optimize their code a LOT. I’m talking multi-threading where possible.

Since I’m throwing out the idea that it’s network bandwidth, which is a lot easier to clog with data on the server side, then they’re doing it for balance reasons and they can up the target maximum as much as they wanted to.

DevonCarver.5370:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Simple question. Why is there an aoe cap? And no, please do not come up with that “technical limitation” lie. There has been thousands games before this with massive pvp and no aoe cap, why would your engine be somehow so infernior to that of these older games?

What you seem to be missing is that technical limitations are not about the fact that a solution somewhere may have existed for some other thing. Our game is using an engine that has these technical limitations. We could, for instance, display everything as text, which would solve the problem quite nicely, however we’ve found that our graphics offer something a text-based MMO couldn’t quite deliver. The point is, it is very much a limitation of our engine. The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially. We continue to seek out ways to squeeze more performance out of our game and our servers, but it is highly unlikely we would ever make a change to the AoE limits on player skills.

Sorry but I can’t understand your way of thinking.

You know there was a techinical problem with AoE, but you decided to create a game heavily based on AoE.

It’s just absurd and also meaningless, because the disproportionate number of aoe in Guild Wars 2 do not help quality of the game.

DevonCarver.5370:

What you seem to be missing is that technical limitations are not about the fact that a solution somewhere may have existed for some other thing. Our game is using an engine that has these technical limitations. We could, for instance, display everything as text, which would solve the problem quite nicely, however we’ve found that our graphics offer something a text-based MMO couldn’t quite deliver. The point is, it is very much a limitation of our engine. The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially. We continue to seek out ways to squeeze more performance out of our game and our servers, but it is highly unlikely we would ever make a change to the AoE limits on player skills.

This is such a joke lol. A game released in 2012 with huge funding can’t handle something games were doing perfectly fine more than ten years ago. So much of the pvp in this game is a step back from games of the past, and for what?

Edeor.9720:

DevonCarver.5370:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Simple question. Why is there an aoe cap? And no, please do not come up with that “technical limitation” lie. There has been thousands games before this with massive pvp and no aoe cap, why would your engine be somehow so infernior to that of these older games?

What you seem to be missing is that technical limitations are not about the fact that a solution somewhere may have existed for some other thing. Our game is using an engine that has these technical limitations. We could, for instance, display everything as text, which would solve the problem quite nicely, however we’ve found that our graphics offer something a text-based MMO couldn’t quite deliver. The point is, it is very much a limitation of our engine. The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially. We continue to seek out ways to squeeze more performance out of our game and our servers, but it is highly unlikely we would ever make a change to the AoE limits on player skills.

Sorry but I can’t understand your way of thinking.

You know there was a techinical problem with AoE, but you decided to create a game heavily based on AoE.

It’s just absurd and also meaningless, because the disproportionate number of aoe in Guild Wars 2 do not help quality of the game.

It is really hilarious when you think about the fact that the game is designed behind combo-fields, stacking buffs, and stacking conditions, etc….All of which go into the pile of things that “bog down the servers” more than likely as it has to track these, and perform said calculations.

King Amadaeus.8619:

It is really hilarious when you think about the fact that the game is designed behind combo-fields, stacking buffs, and stacking conditions, etc….All of which go into the pile of things that “bog down the servers” more than likely as it has to track these, and perform said calculations.

I don’t think it is funny, I actually think that is why combat in GW2 is A LOT more fun than in the old style use skill, get rooted, watch timers on skill bar. The trade off is that combat in massive groups has limits but all MMOs with massive player combat have limits somewhere.

People keep bringing up games that have relatively static combat or essentially FPS as an example of large scale combat for comparison. Also most don’t understand multi-threaded programming and thread synchronization which often have little to do with processing power or number of servers. I can say this, if it was a relatively easy fix they would have done it long ago.

Straegen.2938:

King Amadaeus.8619:

It is really hilarious when you think about the fact that the game is designed behind combo-fields, stacking buffs, and stacking conditions, etc….All of which go into the pile of things that “bog down the servers” more than likely as it has to track these, and perform said calculations.

I don’t think it is funny, I actually think that is why combat in GW2 is A LOT more fun than in the old style use skill, get rooted, watch timers on skill bar. The trade off is that combat in massive groups has limits but all MMOs with massive player combat have limits somewhere.

People keep bringing up games that have relatively static combat or essentially FPS as an example of large scale combat for comparison. Also most don’t understand multi-threaded programming and thread synchronization which often have little to do with processing power or number of servers. I can say this, if it was a relatively easy fix they would have done it long ago.

Hilarious was sarcastic in that sentiment….Like I said the “uniqueness” of this game’s design is what is likely making it unplayable in certain instances. (WvW large scale fights, something it was also designed around/for)

Sorry but I am not sure of your sentiment, but no one can defend the fact that something was designed in such a manner that it cannot be fully implemented to its full capability.

Saying that people “do not understand” is entirely accurate, but you do not have to be a programmer to understand that if something was ambitious in design, and now does not work properly, well it is either disappointing at best and a failure at worst. Just depends on where the individual falls along that spectrum of judgement.

TL/DR: A person does not have to know why something is failing, to understand that it is indeed failing.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Sorry but I am not sure of your sentiment, but no one can defend the fact that something was designed in such a manner that it cannot be fully implemented to its full capability.

Why not? It’s not like you have unlimited resources to achieve anything. Trade-offs is is an everyday life of large complex software projects. Any of. Ever heard of the project management triangle?

Saying that people “do not understand” is entirely accurate, but you do not have to be a programmer to understand that if something was ambitious in design, and now does not work properly, well it is either disappointing at best and a failure at worst. Just depends on where the individual falls along that spectrum of judgement.

Again, trade-offs. It is not like GW2 engine fails all over the place. You’ve said that (if I read you correctly) what makes this game great is also what leads to facepalm-worthy failures in certain circumstances.

Depending on a match-up, time of day, or any number of other factors, you may not hit skill delays at all and have a blast playing the game. Which shifts the conversation from “OMG someone did that 10 years ago and you cannot LOLz!” to “this game is great but has its limitations that developers either underestimated, accepted the risk during dev cycle or simply overlooked”.

TL/DR: A person does not have to know why something is failing, to understand that it is indeed failing.

Sure. There’s no question game is failing. Under certain circumstances. The question is if we are to dive into conspiracy theories or to accept that it is primary focus for developers to make the game that we’d play hours on end and have a blast. Which is tedious task considering the amount of contradicting requirements users have for entertainment.

For the record, GW2 for me is the best MMO I’ve played so far. It has a lot of issues some of which just drive me nuts, but if you take a look at bigger picture – daym, that’s the best thing in online gaming I had, like, ever?.. For me it is about being fair in assessment. Granted, I find joy in many things MMO provide, not only [mass] PvP.

I don’t buy it. There never used to be a cap on AOE healing skills and the same calculations had to be done. When they put a cap on that I didn’t see lag much affected at all. And there used to be stacks of 80 people all aoe healing. Also remember when they said they couldn’t fix culling because of technical problems with how the game was built?

Sorry this answer is a cop out… The cap is in the game for another reason, one which they don’t want to discuss here. Lets face it, having the cap increase to 10 or 15 would do wonders for zerg busting in this game. But that would cause a lot of casuals to get rolled by much smaller skilled groups and lets face it, they pay most of the bills spending $$ on skins and legendary’s before they have full exotics.

Cap shouldn’t be removed but should be increased to be more in line with the amount of people they allow on a given WvW map.

Thanatos.2431:

I don’t buy it. There never used to be a cap on AOE healing skills and the same calculations had to be done.

Exactly the same as what? As offensive AoEs? Really? Is there anything major besides geometry and targets being poisoned that affects healing from the target side?

I would argue that defensive AoE cap was a balance decision, but that was dictated by introduction of offensive AoE cap which was due to engine limitations.

Yaro.3251:

For me it is about being fair in assessment. Granted, I find joy in many things MMO provide, not only [mass] PvP.

The only problem is that this is a post in a forum about mass PVP, so the context almost fully relates to that facet of the game. In which, the said “failures” (don’t really like that word, as I believe the game just performs “subparly”) are occurring.

Yaro.3251:

Thanatos.2431:

I don’t buy it. There never used to be a cap on AOE healing skills and the same calculations had to be done.

Exactly the same as what? As offensive AoEs? Really? Is there anything major besides geometry and targets being poisoned that affects healing from the target side?

I would argue that defensive AoE cap was a balance decision, but that was dictated by introduction of offensive AoE cap which was due to engine limitations.

There WAS NO AOE cap back after the game was released. There were many more people, there were no limits on AOE offensively or defensively…they placed the AoE cap for exactly the reason everyone was saying…it was only taking 5-10 people (specifically elementalist’s at the time if I recall) to absolutely wreck a much larger group, then, the groups got smart and started stacking retaliation, where light fields blast finishers were the normal until that got nerfed as well.. originally it had nothing to do with server limitations, it worked perfectly fine prior to the AoE cap…that excuse is B.S.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Sorry but I am not sure of your sentiment, but no one can defend the fact that something was designed in such a manner that it cannot be fully implemented to its full capability.

Capability and capacity is a moving target for all systems with limited resources which includes all MMOs. Sure they could scale back the number of players on a map, reduce the AoE cap even further or implement any number of simple mechanisms to limit message stack resolution but WvW mostly works without lag now. The bouts of lag we do have in T3 and lower are relatively short in their duration. Clearly they want to improve capacity but the low hanging fruit has likely been picked. The changes left are likely tough to implement or limit players in some way. The old adage you cannot have your cake (fluid, complex, dynamic combat with few limits) and eat it to (no lag) applies here.

King Amadaeus.8619:

TL/DR: A person does not have to know why something is failing, to understand that it is indeed failing.

I think for someone to believe WvW in GW2 as a failure has unrealistic expectations of a game in this genre. I would recommend trying a competitor game that probably doesn’t have this level of complexity but can host more players. The total number of AAA titles still going that might fall into this category are in VERY short supply.

Long, drawn-out reply wherein I explain to a forum primarily comprised of non-IT and non-programming folks how I understand the ins and outs of a company’s closed-source code and IT infrastructure better than the people who built it based on speculation and guesswork.

Straegen.2938:

I think for someone to believe WvW in GW2 as a failure has unrealistic expectations of a game in this genre.

Or maybe people who think it is successful just have low expectations. That is the problem with opinions, everyone thinks theirs is right.

My point was they have to implement these controls (AoE Cap for example) just to make the game operate within acceptable parameters. All the while people were saying “you do not understand the technological limitations involved”. Lets say you engineer a new sportscar, the thing has so much power it cannot keep tires on the rims. Sure you have successfully engineered a marvel, but to make it functional you have to throttle it back just have it operate properly? So why did you spend the time engineering “10” when you knew it would realistically only perform at a “8” level.

My point was merely why not make a game that can be 100% functional/operational while losing some of the “bells and whistles”, rather than this awesome game that has to be throttled back (again just to what extent is based on opinion) just to be “functional”.

Korsbaek.9803:

how will you cap retaliation as my retaliation only ticks 1 time but thats the same with all the other 79 players so if you can find a cap that dont stop all 80 players from trikering when they take damage im up for it

There’s a ton of ways to make retaliation work in fights bigger than 5mans. Example:

A player can only take 5 retaliation hits in the first 5 seconds, then one new retaliation hit per second after the first 5. Any retaliation hits beyond limit simply don’t happen.

Now range could actually aoe a melee hammer-train without having to stack those ranged for mutual healing vs retaliation, unstacked ranged makes them less of a sitting duck target for the hammer-train.

Hardware never keeps up with software. As soon as the “next gen” hardware comes out, software is made that taxes the heck out of it so that it doesn’t seem that much faster even though just looking at the stats, the hardware is way better.

How about lowering number of stacks from 25 to 10 just in wvw as a measure against lag? As condition necro, I’d rather be able to hit more enemies, even if I could not stack 25 conditions on them

King Amadaeus.8619:

Or maybe people who think it is successful just have low expectations. That is the problem with opinions, everyone thinks theirs is right.

Do thousands of players log tens of thousands of hours playing a failed game? No. The fact you are here on some level has you agreeing that the game isn’t a failure. SWToR mass PvP was a failure as in they had to remove it from the game. Arguably Warhammer Online is a failure as well.

King Amadaeus.8619:

Lets say you engineer a new sportscar, the thing has so much power it cannot keep tires on the rims. Sure you have successfully engineered a marvel, but to make it functional you have to throttle it back just have it operate properly? So why did you spend the time engineering “10” when you knew it would realistically only perform at a “8” level.

When a sportscar is on the open road, the user can open it up and it runs like a beast. As soon as it gets into traffic, lag hits and the car cannot go akittens fastest. The focus should not be on the car but the traffic. Its like saying traffic lights are a failure because cars can go faster without them.

King Amadaeus.8619:

My point was merely why not make a game that can be 100% functional/operational while losing some of the “bells and whistles”, rather than this awesome game that has to be throttled back (again just to what extent is based on opinion) just to be “functional”.

ALL MMOs have limits… both physical and functional. The best games out there limit their player counts on maps, simplify their combat, etc. Limiting AoE was one design decision to help with skill lag (and I would argue class balance). They could remove stacked conditions, fields, etc and it would probably solve the skill lag problem but won’t make the game better.

Straegen.2938:

Do thousands of players log tens of thousands of hours playing a failed game? No. The fact you are here on some level has you agreeing that the game isn’t a failure. SWToR mass PvP was a failure as in they had to remove it from the game. Arguably Warhammer Online is a failure as well.

Once they make Warhammer F2P, I’m going back…hell, if they do it with DAOC, I’ll go back there…only thing keeping me here is because its free

Nikola.3841:

Once they make Warhammer F2P, I’m going back…hell, if they do it with DAOC, I’ll go back there…only thing keeping me here is because its free

I think you will be waiting a LONG time before either goes truly F2P (War is F2P at T1). Even still the combat in GW2 is far superior IMO than either War/DAoC but that is highly subjective. Sadly the PvE in all of them is boring course I have played too much Borderlands (1 and 2) which skews that perception.

Straegen.2938:

Do thousands of players log tens of thousands of hours playing a failed game?

Yep they do it every day on many F2P games, population does not decide skill in this game but it will get you a “win” on Friday. The same goes for judging by “thousands” of players equating success. Thousands of people kill themselves each day, not sure if that equates success.

The game is still relatively new, if thousands stopped logging in at this stage it would truly be a failure for the record books. So in that regard it is no surprise. I think that many of us are pointing to the fact that more and more people are growing frustrated with the game as WvW-goes. Lots of people who only spend a fraction of their time likely think the game is “great”….Most of the people that are disgruntled are the ones that have been fighting the same issues for 1 year now, and are 100% WvW players.

Straegen.2938:

ALL MMOs have limits… both physical and functional.

EVERYTHING HAS LIMITS! This is nothing new….The problem is that if you thumb through the pages of this thread you will see time and time again people claiming that ANET designed a game that cannot be ran with their current setup.(paraphrasing)

So my point is, and always will be: Why not design a game that is 100% functional, instead of one that is 90% and has all this untapped potential that we can never see?

Why make a game that promised open world massive pvp, and then throttle it to where it essentially is 5v5 10 times over in a 50 on 50 fight?

This game was not designed for WvW, WvW was far more popular than they ever anticpated. It’s as simple as that really.

For a WvW game you need to simplify alot of things to make the servers and bandwidth be able to keep up. Graphics are also typically lower to help computers be able to play it effectively. GW2 did not do these simplifications because this was not the game type they were aiming for.

At this point there is relatively little they can do. The framework of the system is not built to handle what you are asking of it and they simply do not have the option to completely rebuild, nor would it be financially wise to rebuild for a relatively small % of situations.

The fact that WvW works as well as it does, which is better than Warhammer Online (I hate you EA for ruining that), is a lucky accident. Be happy it works well enough for you to be this invested in it and like it this much. It means this game style will be made better by a new game in the future one day. (Possibly Camelot Unchained).

Ralathar.7236:

This game was not designed for WvW, WvW was far more popular than they ever anticpated. It’s as simple as that really.

Agreed 100%

I’m pretty sure when they designed the system they were going for one that could handle as wide an array of technical specs as possible and as such designed it to do a lot processing that is normally done on the client to be done on the server instead. However this greatly increases the server workload and bandwidth usage, which does create the possibility of limiting factors among those two places.

Ralathar.7236:

This game was not designed for WvW, WvW was far more popular than they ever anticipated. It’s as simple as that really.
…

Well said.

gaspara.4079:

I’m pretty sure when they designed the system they were going for one that could handle as wide an array of technical specs as possible and as such designed it to do a lot processing that is normally done on the client to be done on the server instead. However this greatly increases the server workload and bandwidth usage, which does create the possibility of limiting factors among those two places.

I think doing combat resolution on the server is a fundamental requirement of any competitive MMO. Anything that is offloaded to the client for resolution is easily hacked.

King Amadaeus.8619:

So my point is, and always will be: Why not design a game that is 100% functional, instead of one that is 90% and has all this untapped potential that we can never see?

Why make a game that promised open world massive pvp, and then throttle it to where it essentially is 5v5 10 times over in a 50 on 50 fight?

For the same reasons I stated earlier. Anet wanted to create a dynamic and somewhat deep combat system. The cost of adding this level of complexity is fewer players in the same area at the same time without skill lag compared to some other games. They could have simplified combat but at the expense of PvE/sPvP which is vastly more popular. They could further limit the number of players on a map which would likely be less popular than skill lag. Any number of things could remove skill lag or even the AoE cap but sacrifices have to be made somewhere to achieve that. Right now they have a decent balance with a reasonable AoE cap and minor skill lag in most tiers.

Straegen.2938:

Ralathar.7236:

This game was not designed for WvW, WvW was far more popular than they ever anticipated. It’s as simple as that really.
…

Well said.

gaspara.4079:

I’m pretty sure when they designed the system they were going for one that could handle as wide an array of technical specs as possible and as such designed it to do a lot processing that is normally done on the client to be done on the server instead. However this greatly increases the server workload and bandwidth usage, which does create the possibility of limiting factors among those two places.

I think doing combat resolution on the server is a fundamental requirement of any competitive MMO. Anything that is offloaded to the client for resolution is easily hacked.

King Amadaeus.8619:

So my point is, and always will be: Why not design a game that is 100% functional, instead of one that is 90% and has all this untapped potential that we can never see?

Why make a game that promised open world massive pvp, and then throttle it to where it essentially is 5v5 10 times over in a 50 on 50 fight?

For the same reasons I stated earlier. Anet wanted to create a dynamic and somewhat deep combat system. The cost of adding this level of complexity is fewer players in the same area at the same time without skill lag compared to some other games. They could have simplified combat but at the expense of PvE/sPvP which is vastly more popular. They could further limit the number of players on a map which would likely be less popular than skill lag. Any number of things could remove skill lag or even the AoE cap but sacrifices have to be made somewhere to achieve that. Right now they have a decent balance with a reasonable AoE cap and minor skill lag in most tiers.

And then people started Zerging

Daecollo.9578:

Straegen.2938:

Ralathar.7236:

This game was not designed for WvW, WvW was far more popular than they ever anticipated. It’s as simple as that really.
…

Well said.

gaspara.4079:

I’m pretty sure when they designed the system they were going for one that could handle as wide an array of technical specs as possible and as such designed it to do a lot processing that is normally done on the client to be done on the server instead. However this greatly increases the server workload and bandwidth usage, which does create the possibility of limiting factors among those two places.

I think doing combat resolution on the server is a fundamental requirement of any competitive MMO. Anything that is offloaded to the client for resolution is easily hacked.

King Amadaeus.8619:

So my point is, and always will be: Why not design a game that is 100% functional, instead of one that is 90% and has all this untapped potential that we can never see?

Why make a game that promised open world massive pvp, and then throttle it to where it essentially is 5v5 10 times over in a 50 on 50 fight?

For the same reasons I stated earlier. Anet wanted to create a dynamic and somewhat deep combat system. The cost of adding this level of complexity is fewer players in the same area at the same time without skill lag compared to some other games. They could have simplified combat but at the expense of PvE/sPvP which is vastly more popular. They could further limit the number of players on a map which would likely be less popular than skill lag. Any number of things could remove skill lag or even the AoE cap but sacrifices have to be made somewhere to achieve that. Right now they have a decent balance with a reasonable AoE cap and minor skill lag in most tiers.

And then people started Zerging

That is kind of my thoughts too…All the above logic is fine in a certain atmosphere, but it all goes to hell in a handbasket as soon as 50man zergs start running into everything.

Straegen.2938:

Xsorus.2507:

A. the zergs in DAOC were massive, and completely blow this game away in size…To give you an idea… Whenever we did an ML raid on Midgard Merlin, we had to run 2 Battlegroups, that’s 500 Players, all in one area… stuck together… That’s one Faction… When Frontiers were attacked, the zergs that poured out were massive….Now what kept most of the massive zerg battles in check though was the fact that an 8man could run by and blow an entire zerg up in seconds.

DAoC solved their problems by implementing heavy crowd control so if a fight of 500 people broke out about 450 of them were turned completely off. I won’t argue that DAoC did more players in an area but their condition/boon system was simpler, it was far less action based (no kind of dodge mechanic) and the run times were yawn worthy… even dying had a nice lag on it if you missed the 5 minute window.

Xsorus.2507:

B. Warhammer Online, Is also comparable to this game, When did it lag? Not during open field or running around, The Major Complaint when it lagged was when you stacked the entire server in a small area that was comparable to EB Center Keep. That’s why they introduced the cap, Because the game couldn’t handle that many players (Neither could GW2, hence why you have a cap on the Maps)

You cannot possibly be serious with this one. They had to remove Frontier Wars because it was completely unplayable once 100 people showed up. The lag in this game was far worse than GW2, the bugs were horrible and the class balance atrocious.

They didn’t remove the Frontier Wars, the Open World PvP lakes were still the most played thing in the game, even today..What they had to do was put a Cap on the Fortress’s and eventually just turn them off completely because it unplayable to stack a whole server there (Seriously, think if EB didn’t have a cap, and you had an entire server fighting in the middle room, GW2 would croak)

Also I think you really over estimate how long CC lasted in massive zerg fights… AOE mez lasted right up until you got hit, Which in a zerg fight, was very very quickly.

This was taken in 2012

when the zergs were considerably smaller then they use to be.

Xsorus.2507:

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiZk2lnkJgY

This was taken in 2012

when the zergs were considerably smaller then they use to be.

The video does a nice job in showcasing how much simpler combat systems are in older games. Skill use by number games are certainly a step up from the old *nix MUDs but feel just as antiquated to me. It is much easier to resolve a stack without combo fields, trait/armor/weapon triggers, bouncing weapons, heavy pet resolution, dodge, block, condition stacks, boon stacks, etc but those are reasons GW2 combat is more fun at least to me.

I think what the dev was saying was that they made a better trade culling or more than 5 target aoe and they made the right choice hands down.

Straegen.2938:

Xsorus.2507:

…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiZk2lnkJgY

This was taken in 2012

when the zergs were considerably smaller then they use to be.

The video does a nice job in showcasing how much simpler combat systems are in older games. Skill use by number games are certainly a step up from the old *nix MUDs but feel just as antiquated to me. It is much easier to resolve a stack without combo fields, trait/armor/weapon triggers, bouncing weapons, heavy pet resolution, dodge, block, condition stacks, boon stacks, etc but those are reasons GW2 combat is more fun at least to me.

DAOC gave people freedom to spec and spellcraft in so many ways, all other games after it were very simplified…GW2 has millions times less weapon/armor/jewelry combinations, as everything is dumbed down and preset…of course, that made a lot of problems, specially after TOA expansion release. GW2 were smart enough to dumb it down so we have just 20-30 viable armor/weapon specs, unlike millions in DAOC

lordkrall.7241:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Simple question. Why is there an aoe cap? And no, please do not come up with that “technical limitation” bull crap. There has been thousands games before this with massive pvp and no aoe cap, why would your engine be somehow so infernior to that of these older games?

Please show me all these “thousands games” with massive PvP, all I can think of is DAoC and that game was quite “weak” compared to GW2.

I would say that technical limitations is actually a rather good and logical answer, one can also assume that it might have to do with balancing and such as well.

If you think DAOC was weak compared to GW2 I would love to know what you are smoking. DAOC was and is the all time king of RVR. GW2 has nothing like the glory of relic raids.

Kwll.1468:

If you think DAOC was weak compared to GW2 I would love to know what you are smoking. DAOC was and is the all time king of RVR. GW2 has nothing like the glory of relic raids.

As have been already explained: Weak as in less complex (both in ways of combat and in ways of the actual engine of the game).

Lol then why are you don’t you guys play it and for that matter why don’t the rest of us?

lordkrall.7241:

Kwll.1468:

If you think DAOC was weak compared to GW2 I would love to know what you are smoking. DAOC was and is the all time king of RVR. GW2 has nothing like the glory of relic raids.

As have been already explained: Weak as in less complex (both in ways of combat and in ways of the actual engine of the game).

RVR compares to WVW as Bachs fugues to Lady Gaga

Nikola.3841:

RVR compares to WVW as Bachs fugues to Lady Gaga

And yet I can almost guarantee that more people play WvW in GW2 than people playing RvR in DAoC at this time.

IF DAoC was so superior, why don’t people simply play it?

lordkrall.7241:

Nikola.3841:

RVR compares to WVW as Bachs fugues to Lady Gaga

And yet I can almost guarantee that more people play WvW in GW2 than people playing RvR in DAoC at this time.

IF DAoC was so superior, why don’t people simply play it?

1. Its 12 years old
2. its not f2p
3. EA controls it, do I need to elaborate?

So it is not superior then?
If it were the age, business-model and publisher wouldn’t really matter.

lordkrall.7241:

So it is not superior then?
If it were the age, business-model and publisher wouldn’t really matter.

Did I say it is superior? I said it WAS superior. I’ll repeat, just in case…it WAS superior

Nikola.3841:

Did I say it is superior? I said it WAS superior. I’ll repeat, just in case…it WAS superior

And yet now it is all but dead, so clearly it never was especially superior.

lordkrall.7241:

Nikola.3841:

Did I say it is superior? I said it WAS superior. I’ll repeat, just in case…it WAS superior

And yet now it is all but dead, so clearly it never was especially superior.

I bet you $1000 that after 12 years, GW2 will be in way worse shape than DAOC today.
Also, its pretty obvious that, unlike me, you never played both, so your opinion is based on nothing

daoc rvr in its prime takes a dump on gw2 wvw

DevonCarver.5370:

Master of Timespace.2548:

Simple question. Why is there an aoe cap? And no, please do not come up with that “technical limitation” lie. There has been thousands games before this with massive pvp and no aoe cap, why would your engine be somehow so infernior to that of these older games?

What you seem to be missing is that technical limitations are not about the fact that a solution somewhere may have existed for some other thing. Our game is using an engine that has these technical limitations. We could, for instance, display everything as text, which would solve the problem quite nicely, however we’ve found that our graphics offer something a text-based MMO couldn’t quite deliver. The point is, it is very much a limitation of our engine. The load on the server CPU would be quite simply unsustainable if we were to increase the AoE cap as the more players hit by skills the more calculations it has to do and it actually starts increasing exponentially, rather than sequentially. We continue to seek out ways to squeeze more performance out of our game and our servers, but it is highly unlikely we would ever make a change to the AoE limits on player skills.

Break down the maps into overflows to have smaller player caps and enable friends etc to que up for a certain one if they want to be together. Maybe create smaller maps.

Less zergs.

More rewarding for organized groups.

You know very well that zerglings have -and will continue- to abandon the game, anyway. Only the dedicated player base is a sure shot.

No more stress on the CPUs.

Exclude SM for this so angry bird -siege- lovers and zerglings can happily descend into a lemming mentality.

Allow this as an option. Hell! Don’t even put points n it! Just make it for fun! No one is forced to go there and you can impliment rules like no downed state, remove aoe cap . Give it a month and see the feed back. No loss there and you can salvage some of the players on the edge of quitting.
Also use this new server/zne to test wvw stuff like say making special squads mmade out of 10 ppl that can see where each other are at etc. This will be more rewarding for close knit non zergling guilds.

lordkrall.7241:

Nikola.3841:

RVR compares to WVW as Bachs fugues to Lady Gaga

And yet I can almost guarantee that more people play WvW in GW2 than people playing RvR in DAoC at this time.

IF DAoC was so superior, why don’t people simply play it?

Only reason anet didn’t go that way in gameplay was to cater to a casual -bad pvper- crowd. Unfortunately this resulted in boring gameplay and is leading to people ditching the game -casuals 1st- , anyway.

The touted technical limitations to AOE caps etc is just a silly -but true- excuse hiding that fact, I’m sure. If they wanted to, I have the feeling they can work around the AOE cap through other means.

That point in time when all the nerf cryers on the forum start to realize that the game just needs fixing….Seriously check all the posts in WvW Discussion. Sure there are still some mouth breathers QQing about thieves, but everyday there are more and more posts wondering just what (if anything) is being done to bring WvW to its full capability.