Guild Wars 2

“…we’ll be releasing updates to structured Player vs. Player and World vs. World,..”

This?

Don’t.
The game crashes and kicks me off WvW servers in the full heat of battle whenever it is overpopulated and someone else joins the queue, and I don’t even know what prioritises a newcomer over someone already in a fight, except for systemic inefficiency.

I lag whenever there are 2 zergs on a map. What is the actual, non-lagging, usable capacity of any given WvW map? Hardly able to carry 50 v 50 plus several roamers, apparently.

Now you will attract more players into WvW with your reward carrots.

Pips, mips yadda yadda is all very cute and PvPée, but secondary in comparison to your hardware speed and capacity.

1. I’d rather you spent my money on fixing the base code and increasing both capacity and connectivity power of your actual servers than superficial UI coating that I can remove from sight and fight without.

2. Oh, and if you want anyone to take WvW seriously outside of WvW (which you probably don’t, since GW2 is a PvE-minded game in its foundation),
A:
Enable In-Game WvW Rank/Achievement Titles that anyone else in the game can see. Just like PvP. WvW Rank, Kill Rank, Res/Heal Rank, Build Rank, Scout Rank.
B:
Hold Tournaments. That Dolyak Statue’s gotta change. Publicise the finals as they happen. Show WvW off.
C:
Stop the ‘reward the higher population’ mentality: you are not prepared for the influx of people, and it will kill off already dying servers, and degrade the awards for the roamers/scouts we have. Enable a Scout tag, with rewards per tick/capped building presence/in-out of combat state. Scouts don’t necessarily belong to a squad, as much as the whole server. Their information is vital.

If you insist on this, then release the actual population numbers of WvW servers. Not just, ‘High’, ‘Very High’. Let us compare and jump on the bandwagon you’ve made for us. More transfer gems for you, more rewards for us, right?

D: Turn the Obsidian Sanctum into what it is meant to be: an Arena.
Guild vs Guild, Server vs. Server. Guestable in Guild vs Guild mode, to borrow from an idea previously stated in the forums by Aitadis.

That the servers for wvw arent top noch is a known issue but you sir might need to look into your hardware or even provider. Sure carrots might not be the best thing ever for some but i remember well when Blacktide in like a week or so was a ghosttown because of all the commanders and guild quiting because no new content and the existing content didnt reward anything.

Might be your hardware/internet service provider albeit yes – ANet servers when it comes to anything upwards of 40v40 becomes an utter lag fest especially in SMC.

I religiously live day to day with a ping of ~250-300+ being in Australia and I’ve had moments where I’ll be running just fine able to use skills etc yet half my zerg + commander aren’t even able to get off a heal skill or anything other than AA’s. It’s very sporadic and bizarre.

Despite rank meaning nothing to some, it wouldn’t hurt to have the option to display yours outside of WvW akin to PvP badges yet I hope it wouldn’t pose as more screen clutter… have it toggle-able.

Yeah something needs to be addressed in the form of a functioning/adequate sized GvG arena… OS just doesn’t do it sometimes.

You just said it yourself… “Let us compare and jump on the bandwagon you’ve made for us.”

I don’t think there is a way to hinder the bandwagon effect/rewarding 1st place mentality with more rewards anytime soon… it’s human instinct to bandwagon onto a specific server for the possibility of better rewards/easy mode. Sigh.

Anet stated a while ago Tournaments were part of the reason why players got burned out frequently + intent/ambitious regarding bandwagon effect. Please correct me if I’m wrong there, on a crappy laptop atm at work so can’t go fishing for the actual thread it was in but it’s out there.

Uh the servers’ hardware isn’t the problem in regards to lag. Issues lie in profession design mostly these days due to the massive amount of computational difficulty in performing so many inter-connected calculations all at the same exact time. Spam Wars 2 and the rise of resource-heavy builds like condi and boon spam are what lag the servers out. ANet has said this repeatedly and it is also why things lag in larger fights.

It’s only gotten worse because the blobbiness has gotten bigger. There used to be more people on the map not blobbing and those in the blob playing low-spam, low-boon power builds which are less resource-intensive than condition/boon spam ones in large scale. It got exacerbated largely with HoT for the former reasons.

Until they overhaul professions, this game will be laggy. Period. You can’t fix parallel systems issues with a “better engine” or buying more expensive/faster servers. The former is also insanely expensive and time-consuming to even make slight optimizations with because it pretty much operates on the hardware level in very complex codebases designed for parallelism. And the latter… well. it’d probably run a couple million dollars at least to make any noticeable dent, on top of some major code changes to reflect that new hardware, which is also expensive in both time and money.

Tourneys also burned people out a lot. Granted, they were also way too long.

At the end of the day, people aren’t playing WvW because the PvP in the game is no longer fun. The builds are boring and cheesy. It doesn’t “feel” good to play. People are not interested in playing for the sake of playing, and winning at a game not worth playing is meaningless.

Fix professions and the design of the combat to reflect more of core GW2 and we can talk. Until then, it’s pointless to make any other changes.

DeceiverX.8361:

Uh the servers’ hardware isn’t the problem in regards to lag. Issues lie in profession design mostly these days due to the massive amount of computational difficulty in performing so many inter-connected calculations all at the same exact time. Spam Wars 2 and the rise of resource-heavy builds like condi and boon spam are what lag the servers out. ANet has said this repeatedly and it is also why things lag in larger fights.

It’s only gotten worse because the blobbiness has gotten bigger. There used to be more people on the map not blobbing and those in the blob playing low-spam, low-boon power builds which are less resource-intensive than condition/boon spam ones in large scale. It got exacerbated largely with HoT for the former reasons.

Until they overhaul professions, this game will be laggy. Period. You can’t fix parallel systems issues with a “better engine” or buying more expensive/faster servers. The former is also insanely expensive and time-consuming to even make slight optimizations with because it pretty much operates on the hardware level in very complex codebases designed for parallelism. And the latter… well. it’d probably run a couple million dollars at least to make any noticeable dent, on top of some major code changes to reflect that new hardware, which is also expensive in both time and money.

Tourneys also burned people out a lot. Granted, they were also way too long.

At the end of the day, people aren’t playing WvW because the PvP in the game is no longer fun. The builds are boring and cheesy. It doesn’t “feel” good to play. People are not interested in playing for the sake of playing, and winning at a game not worth playing is meaningless.

Fix professions and the design of the combat to reflect more of core GW2 and we can talk. Until then, it’s pointless to make any other changes.

I played WvW long before HOT and it still lagged in large scale fights. I avoided SMC fights for that reason.

Since that time they have in fact improved the code and optimized the same but they have also added all of those new calculations.

If I had to speak in comparative terms, it my feeling it is marginally better given I do not run into the use a skill and watch nothing happen as near as much as I did a few years ago.

I won’t start searching now for quotes but many Anet devs, already acknowledged many times, that lag comes from the game engine limitations. Of course the extra condi & buff calculations post HoT made things even worse, though they also optimized the code many times, including a major rework about 1 year ago or so.

Based on experience, playing in huge battles, it’s 100% sure that maximum player limit in WvW should be under 120, even 90 or 60, depends on how condi & boonshare heavy is a fight, which means 20 to 40 on each side (3×40 = 120)

The current limit is about 60 to 80 per side, so a 3 way SMC fight could have 150+ easily, which leads to a total skill lag and strange things, like condis not expiring and so on.

But as you all can see, there are many complaints on WvW forums, and skill lag is rarely a top issue. The players want huge fights and Anet wants to allow as much as possible, so the “blame” is on both. I want it too, but not above the skill lag limit. There are devs who would agree with me, but it’s not up to them to decide the upper player limit. Likely there are economic reasons behind this, which is okay, and a juggling on this fragile line: allow many to play at once until the red line of skill lag happens. Total player numbers per side & map are adjusted dynamically, so in case of sever skill lag likely less players are allowed in… though it’s already too late then. Again, BOTH sides want to push the limits this far. This is not about server hardware, not your hardware or internet, though could be, but isn’t in majority of cases, so can’t be solved. And there isn’t a single MMO engine out there that can handle massive numbers without this kind of lag… at least one is in development though, had to be built from nothing.

What choice we/Anet have:
1. limit maximum player numbers per map to ~90 (30 each side)
2. keep it at ~180 (60 per side) and live with what today’s tech can offer, it’s not like skill lag is permanent

Of course boonshare & condition codes can be further optimized, but realistically one can’t expect that to be done in a short time, and would mean a complete redesign of many things, so this is the least likely to happen.

Note that there are many kind of lags, this was about server side lag related to game engine limitation, as in handling requests above the limits. You still need very good CPU, fine tuning your settings, great internet (no packet loss, decent bandwith, low ping, no problems on the route), decent GPU, and so on… but no matter if you have all that, server side skill lag won’t be solved, not even with server upgrades, but with a new game based on a proper engine.

The limitations of the game engine are the source of the CPU bottleneck causing FPS lag. I’d be hard-pressed to believe the engine has anything to do with the server lag, as it is highly unlikely the engine is running at all on their back end.

As of even the last WvW blog post they outright said it comes from condition and boon calculations overloading the servers. The death of small-scale has resulted in more players blobbing which means even more calculations happening in the same fights negating any optimizations done. The engine itself – responsible for a lot of what we see client-side, shouldn’t be running on the back end or will play a very minimal role; this is all highly-streamlined netcode. The problem lies in the very nature of limitations of parallel computation and how subdivided their network architecture is.

It could definitely be cut down with specific optimization towards large-scale fights, but this is a massive undertaking for what would still be only imperfect gains, and could negatively affect performance in other scenarios outside of ZvZ.