Guild Wars 2

Title: The real problem here is invisible enemies. Give their algorithms time to match servers properly.

This forum is full of people complaining about balancing WvWvW. Give it time, guys. Let them at least have a chance for the data to accumulate and for them to decide how best to match server vs. server vs. server. Maybe they’ll end up looking at peak hour and off hour population and start matching us up that way. Maybe they just need more data and the match-up logic they are currently using will even things up.

Whatever the case, it is very possible that time will solve the current balance issues.

The REAL problem in WvWvW is the invisibility issue. I don’t care how unbalanced the match is if I’m getting killed by enemies who are not on my screen until they are right on top of me.

1. We need to be able to see enemies at a greater distance. Trebuchets are currently “fire and pray” siege weapons. Shoot, even cannons can fire to a distance where the enemy is invisible. It’s no fun to have all these defensive or offensive weapons if we are just firing at empty ground and hoping there are actually enemy players there.

2. Many times I have been running along minding my own business or heading to a fort that is under siege only to suddenly be surrounded by a swarm of enemy players and killed instantly. Sometimes I’ve even had warriors and guardians already hitting me as they just appear out of this air. If I had been able to see them, I seriously doubt I would have just charged in and died.

3. Occasionally, upon pushing back an assault, the enemy team will receive reinforcements. All we can see is the same players we’ve been routing so we press on. 30 additional troops start appearing on the screen and kill a bunch of us before we even realize we have become the hunted instead of the hunters.

This is what will kill WvWvW. We can’t fight an enemy we can’t see. My computer can handle this game on the highest settings in the most insane battles without ever dropping a frame (and it’s not a user problem anyway) so the idea that There is no distance slider or ability to adjust the number of players visible at any given time is ridiculous.

This is what needs to be fixed. If you want to complain about something, please make it this.

Seconded. My guild will attempt to secure supply lines or strike an enemy force from behind while they are on a gate or wall, only to suddenly have 30 more enemy players seemingly appear out of thin air all around us.

Please fix, ANet.

Third, this does need fixing. Hard to gauge how far you can push. Had an issue were enemies further away from me i could see so i ran into a middle of a huge group of enemies that i couldnt see at all, needlesss to say i was dead in a matter of second trying to figure out wth killed me. When i got spiked by the invisible man i realized i was surrounded cause players started to apear out of no where

Yeah it’s horrible, and the draw distance is pathetic too. Here’s an screenshot I took 30mins ago defending a tower: http://i.imgur.com/paFTL.jpg

MajorKong.8095:

Yeah it’s horrible, and the draw distance is pathetic too. Here’s an screenshot I took 30mins ago defending a tower: http://i.imgur.com/paFTL.jpg

Best screenshot ever. lolcats ftw

I had the invisible enemy problem myself, wasn’t so bad until I updated to the latest Nvidia drivers (thought this might fix it but it made it DRASTICALLY worse). I then unchecked the ‘High-Res Character Textures’ box, and it seems to have helped a lot. Actually the last couple hours I haven’t had the issue at all even though I’ve been in a huge zerg on zerg battle.

Best screenshot ever. lolcats ftw

Thanks. I do try :>

It’s not a client-side issue or a driver issue. It’s a server-side optimization. This is, I believe, the 25th thread on the issue, and they haven’t acknowledged it yet. See https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/BUG-Mobs-and-players-suddenly-appearing-pop-in

I actually think there are 2 things going on here. Whenever people have talked about invisible enemies I have assumed they were talking about the culling, which for me isn’t bad at all. But now that I am looking at a screenshot I can see that the problem people are having might be something else.

Are people on high end graphic cards having this issue?

is a 550ti even considereed highend?

What I was actually trying to ask was, Is this issue happening just to people with low end computers?

im on a kitten computer and i have this problem. When I dont lag at all. Its not user side its deff server side.

They need to support faster rendering server side so this stops happening.

/thread

they won’t even touch this issue. I don’t think they can fix it for whatever reason. Which means ultimately this game’s pvp is a joke.

Does anyone know if it has anything to do with the engine decided to use? UMBRA engine? Did anyone play any of the other games that used the umbra engine…is this a common problem?

I would point out WvW is awesome but the ghost fighting kills everything good about it.

Just so you know though, there are most likely a lot of us that do not have that issue.

P.S. would turning on enemy nameplates help? IE do those render for you? Or are they already on?

Setch.2398:

Just so you know though, there are most likely a lot of us that do not have that issue.

P.S. would turning on enemy nameplates help? IE do those render for you? Or are they already on?

not really, being able to see nameplates still doesnt allow for gauging proper distance as a melee character. You end up burning abilities and just to see miss,miss,miss,miss pop up. This one of the main reasons i stay away for seiging keeps and towers during heavy zerg times. i mainly stick to 2 group attack teams to cut off supplies and snag towers far away for the zergs.

I just aoe and pray in sieges in the hopes of hitting people…but since the numbers never seem to render for me I dunno if I actually hit or miss half the time

I have a top end machine that runs the game on max setting at 40-60 FPS at all times (even in huge battles) and the disappearing players is just ridiculous.

Pretty artwork and cool graphics are neat and all but getting killed to invisible people gets old pretty quickly.

Maybe start a WvW bugs thread, like the classes forum have done.

People on high end computers, with high end cards from nVidia AND ATi/AMD have this problem. It’s not anything to do with anyone’s computers except the servers GW2 runs on.

I find it happens a lot with popular DEs too. Is latency likely to exacerbate the issue?

Habib -
Thank you VERY much for taking the time to not only acknowledge the problem, but to provide a detailed explanation as well. I and I’m sure others who have had this happen to them are glad to know you’re aware of and looking at possible solutions to the problem.

Thank you!

Haha, MajorKong, my man, that screenshot made me laugh. Thanks for posting it.

Big props to HabibLoew for the long, informative and good post. I’m glad you’re working on it. This is pretty much all that I expect from developers – saying “We know”, and “we’re working on it”. I couldn’t be happier when I also hear details on how you’re tackling the problem

About dynamic events: This problem also occurs during popular dynamic events. A major offender is “Defend the bridge from the centaur workers” in Kessex Hills.

Im not so sure that “loading from disk delay” is causing this. I run the game strictly from high end SSDs and have a high end processor, high end GFX card plus 16 gigs of high end RAM and theres absolutely no difference between me and guildmates on HDDs and mediocre computer hardware when it comes to when we see enemies and when we don’t.

I thought the purpose of “Blue Defender” was to save on textures. There should only be 3xNumber of Races textures to load — light norn, medium norn, heavy norn, light human, medium human, heavy human, etc.

If we’re loading up every person’s individual hats then A) it’s not necessary especially since B) I can’t say I’ve really paid that much attention to what “Blue Invader” is wearing.

Simplify the textures if you think that’s a problem. I will load up stick figures if I get to see them all.

If content loading takes too much time, create a stub until the content has been loaded. I don’t care whether it’s a small floating red cube, floating names, or a basic playermodel. I understand that it takes time to find the best solution here, but a quick fix to get through that period would be much appreciated.

Second, reporting enemies should have a higher priority than reporting friendlies. Not that I don’t want to see my buddies, but I’d rather have an invisible force that helps me out, than an invisible force that kills me. Since friendlies often fill up the allowed number of people to be updated, the entire enemy army may be invisible right until the murdertrain hits you.

Sorry to say it but you “Culling” process, is what causes a ton of issues for people in WvW.
You’d do better by creating an option in game to turn off skill/skin animations(Or lower them), for those who want to lower their “lag” and allow all players within xx range to be shown imediatly.

Right now it reminds me of Lineage 2 where 90% of the characters do not load at the same time, but load over time. Unfortunately GW2 is not L2 therefore it makes a much larger difference in WvW when you have this.

I could understand not being able to see 1-10 enemies, but when it starts effecting large numbers is when it creates a problem.

HabibLoew, that optimization just flat out doesn’t work right now. I’m half sure it introduces a memory leak to as if you move away from large battles to quiet areas you’re still getting very crappy FPS until you reset the renderer by porting to waypoint or completing a vista or something.

But seriously, that has to get a lot smarter or be removed and just have people accept that bad FPS is part of it, because having invisible zergs wiping your zerg before any of them load in is just flat out broken. If it can’t be fixed, consider halving the WvW players caps and doubling the amount of borderlands or something, because it really isn’t worth playing if there are invisible enemies ANYWHERE within viewing distance of you… enemy positions are vitally important intel, your game currently obfuscates enemy positions, most importantly, large groups of enemies.

There is no reason for such system to exist, because other games show entities on screen without “culling” of sort and no problems. Seriously, i’d rather have more latency and less FPS but see my enemies, than good latency and fps and die from invisible Thief jumping on me.

Your main competitor, WoW, could render 40v40 battles on one screen just fine in my days when i still played it, and i bet it can do even better now. Yes, the more people there were, the more lag / less fps, but i didnt get invisible people sneak behind my back and kill me without me understanding what happened. I saw exactly what happened and could react accordingly.

Problem is even worsened by the fact that this system is not about being “far” from the character, but being “far” from the camera. If you look forward, you’ll see the allowed amount of units that are in front of you, close to you and far from you, but then you turn around, and you see NOBODY at all. Like, you need to run now, you turn around, and you wont see anything until all enemies and friends behind you get unloaded and whatever is in front of you starts loading.

This is a stupid system that has to go, period. No excuse. Maybe it can remain as an OPTION for player to limit amount of objects loaded, like “view distance” etc, but the mandatory “culling” system has to go.

If it doesnt, you will lose a lot of people because of simple frustration. People will stop WvWing because it is NOT FUN to get owned by invisible enemies, it is NOT FUN to have to blindly fire foward in hopes of hitting someone, it is not fun going down with full endurance bar and all defensive cooldowns on and THEN seeing that someone was attacking you all along. Even PVE is becoming ridiculous because until i memorize DE by heart, i cant get loot. Best example is Grenth temple – if i dont know by heart when spiders come at the back of the room (with skillpoint), i will not be there in time to tag them! Sometimes even waves i know are coming will not draw on my screen in time- they’re already dead by the time i see them. And i do have 8gb ram and SSD.

The further i play this game, the more i’m getting frustrated rather than enjoying the game because of this one feature. And i know i’m NOT the minority, everyone in our whole server Alliance is disgusted with this.

I dont know what you do to resolve it, you can rework your netcode, you can reduce amount of effects or detail dymaically when more people are on screen, whatever. But this way, WvW game is hardly playable, and people are still playing it ONLY because they hope you will fix it, not because they are content with fighting invisible foes.

So is this the bug or the thief invisibility skill. Notice the two enemy attackers right next to me. One a player the other a beast. They were damaging me and never reappeared until after I was dead. Plus they weren’t far away, but were right up on me. I had plenty of time to snap pictures of it. It’s much worse when it happens to be a mob of enemies that just magically appear.

HabibLoew.2590:

MajorKong’s screenshot doesn’t immediately look like the situation I just described so it may be that there’s some kind of bug lurking in there as well. We will certainly be looking into that possibility.

Surely, you can’t be serious, that after 3+ weeks of people reporting this issue daily that you’re not aware of any bugs involved.

I’ll be watching this thread. I would love to hear some feedback on my pic. At first I thought I just needed to L2p, but then I realized I really was getting hit by something that wasn’t there. Then I tried to snap pics, and finally manged to.

@HabibLoew, what spatial data backing are you guys using? Do you have your own R-tree-esque implementation? Or do you use off the shelf spatial data store implementation? If you guys implement it on your own, what algorithm do you use to do nearest neighbor search? Do you do result set caching for a known location, say a fort or camp?

This problem + a very annoying camera which is zoomed in too much + BLTC down on regular basis without an ETA (could be for days again),… just made me stop playing for a while, sadly enough…

I love the game itself, but for me personally, the game still has too many big flaws to be enjoyable.

I guess i will follow twitter and FB on how you guys are doing on these matters!

Thank you for taking the time to reply to us. While i understand the reasons behind this kind of system the fact is the game was playing flawless for me before last week when you guys issued a new patch. Since then WvW has been almost unplayable with large amounts of enemy players appearing out of nowhere. Half the time myself and many others are forced to use aoe attacks on the ground where we assume the enemy is because we can’t see them.

Whatever you changed seems to have had a massive negative effect. Oddly enough your change has also caused my FPS to drop drastically in large scale battles instead of increasing it as one would think.

As you said having the viewable amount of players locked to say 50 doesn’t help when there’s 100 or so on screen. All players within X radius should be always visible. Instead of limiting the amount of players you can see you should scale the range at which you can see all of them. The range should be smaller with large zergs in front of you and longer when you only have a handful of players.

If you really must cull the amount of players on screen i suggest you do not load player models at all. Instead you should load the information you need and a nameplate allowing you to target and attack them. Simply seeing a nameplate and being able to target the nameplate would prevent alot of the major issues.

While we’re on the subject can you guys put a cap on the amount of effects you can see on screen? It would probably help this issue your trying to fix. When there’s 50 aoe effects on screen you can’t see anything anyway. I’d much rather see my own attacks and say 20 other peoples than having a massive light show that completely hinders my view.

This is a major problem…

First of all i recommend that you allow people to have a character draw distance in the options menu. Allow people to change that however they want and then give us a option to decide how many players should be shown within that radius.

Me? I would take max distance and unlimited actors. But hey i know my computer can handle it O.o

this doesn’t happen very often to me but it does occur. i remember once when i was running after our commander and a zerg of ~30 people on our way to the next objective when suddenly poof…the entire enemy army of 60+ people load onto my screen. and i’m in the middle of it.

Loading stock skins for everything instead of every custom height/size/armor/weapon would go a long way toward solving this, I think, but there is also a bug there somehow causing basically no models to appear at all when numbers are over a certain amount.

For some reason minions and skill effects appear when there are no players visible at all (Lion’s Arch during WvW reset, probably over 50 players there but couldn’t see any of them):

It’s good to hear some word from a ArenaNet guy, but I have to agree with Hissatsu!
I have complained about this issue since the BWE and think there shouldn’t be a maximum number of players on your screen. Players that disappear when they reached a specific distance (which should be chooseable in graphic options) is one thing, but if there are 200 players close to me, than godkitten I want to see them. Even if this would be handled by default low quality character placeholders or such things, but keeping players on my screen in the dark, that’s a no-go! If there are specific numbers allowed on a map, than I should be able to see those amount of characters + possible NPCs on my screen!

And this counts for WvW and PvE, because there have been events where I didn’t see players and even event bosses at all until I moved along!

So, how much I enjoy this game (if there are not lags, zerg fests or bugs in the way to enjoyment!) and really hope for it to be a very successful game for years to come…These things has to be taken care of and for this issue here, the solution shouldn’t be less then all players/NPCs are visible on my screen…

Here’s another shot of this effect, same place as the one above:

2 Thrashbarg.9820
Yeah, that too. At least give us naked people without textures running around (as a togglable option) rather than invisbile enemies. Hell, even names and a red box would do! I’d rather have an indication of “somenone there” than nothing.

2 SteepledHat.1345
Its not a thieves bug, but rather with Thief its most obvious, because when warrior runs up to you, charges you and 100blades you, your client has more time to “load” him, or for him to get into that spot amongst things rendered on screen. Thief can appear the moment he de-stealths, by stealthing beyond 1200 range, dodge in, firing immobilizing arrow, then shaodwstepping to you by stealing. So, he will appear “near” you the moment he starts attacking you in melee.

Btw, i was thinking and I now understood why this problem is even worser in GW2 than other games.

1) If you played WoW, you know GW2 combat is WAY faster. In WoW you are limited to basically 1 ability per 1/1.5 seconds, your gameplay in PVP revolves around positioning yourself (while having constant running speed) and using correct cooldowns in correct situations. In GW2, you take way more actions per second with all the dodging/swapping weapons and class weapon sets/actions usable while doing other actions/some abilities taking half a second to cast. The combat is much faster and much less “forgiving” to delays (for example, in WoW, when rogue stunlocks you, you have 4 seconds to think “What am i going to do when stun ends” but in GW2 when thief jumps on you, you have to react immediately by either CCing and nuking him or going defensive and evading him, or you lose, in that very first second… same goes for elemenatlist nuke combo or warrior nuke combo, didnt dodge bola/rush – gg, down in 1 second under his haste)

2) GW2 is a lot more about reacting instantly to animations of enemy player model. For example, in WoW (again, i’ll reference WoW since thats an MMO i played most) you react to cast timers that appear on screen, you can make them look like you want and position them where you see fit, or even have warnings on screen like “Player X is casting Hex on Ally Y” with a bell sound, so you can react to that. This both gave you more time to react and you had to watch some simple UI element.
In GW2, you have faster casts, and you have NO cast bars whatsoever. Its great! However, it is totally screwed by this “invisible enemy” thing. How am i supposed to dodge a warrior’s bull rush, shield bash or bola, when i have to actually watch him turn around (or his shield to disappear) in order to react to that? And if i do not, i get 100bladed and eviscerated and dead in 1 or 2 seconds – not because Warrior is op – but because the pvp revolves around me dodging his initiation move, so that he cannot do full 100blades on me (since that locks him in place).
And there is a LOT of stuff like this. GW2 is basically built on it. If i’m finishing a guardian, i need to dodge his aoe knockback – for that i must see his HAND! His whole body animating with hand rising and making this aoe! When i’m finishing necro, i must see his model and his hand rising and fearing me. And so on. If i dont, then i get hit by ability i should not get hit by if i’d play it right.
And how do i see where thief blinked with his 2 in downed state if i do not see his model? And thief’s downed state is BUILT around the fact that if he can slow you by 2 seconds or so, he will have his 3 avilable to deny you second stomp.

Yes, you may argue, that in large scale WvW it doesnt matter much that you dodge specific abilities of specific enemies, but then this dumbs down the game significantly. This would work in WoW where you just heal by nameplates, and aoe into enemy crowd, and it did in AV 40v40’s, but it dumbs GW2 down significantly with all its mechanics based around fast paced action, RE-action and quick reflexes.

Maybe just render in nameplates first as the rest slowly renders by the client. My rig shouldn’t have isssues with rendering, yet I come across this with just 8 players on screen in pve areas.

[HabibLoew, that optimization just flat out doesn’t work right now. I’m half sure it introduces a memory leak to as if you move away from large battles to quiet areas you’re still getting very crappy FPS until you reset the renderer by porting to waypoint or completing a vista or something.]

I admit that, same problem. FPS crap after huge battles even if I run away then somewhere empty place without players.

I’ve heard this compared to DAoC, which I never played, how did DAoC deal with this issue? Were graphics not a limitation for it?

I’d take the render nameplates as a quick fix. Though I’ve got used to the problem and I’ve learned to adapt: move more cautiously. Too many times do I see a zerg just going forward with no regard to anything, no caution, no scouts, full speed & only interested in getting to kill something.

Thrashbarg.9820:

Here’s another shot of this effect, same place as the one above:

Wait, how did you get a wider fov? Is it Windowed mode with the window taking up a smaller area on your desktop trick?

DAoC didnt “deal with it”. The “lagdar” was a commonly used term for what happened when you ran into range of an enemy zerg, and your computer started rendering it. Sure, there were no invisible players, but on the other hand you would instead (if you were unlucky) lag for 5 seconds and then find yourself a stampeded corpse when you got out of the lag.

SteepledHat.1345:

I’ve heard this compared to DAoC, which I never played, how did DAoC deal with this issue? Were graphics not a limitation for it?

They used placeholder models and textures. This technique should be at least a start for GW2, but I don’t think there are that many DAoC veterans at ANet some people claim. Considering much better hardware options today, this shouldn’t be a problem at all. I can see more people on screen in BF3 and there is a lot going on too.

Some of the suggestions here are already implemented

• The game does already reduce the special effects in large fights (I run an aura-sharer build on my elementalist and it’s pretty obvious if an aura is not displayed)

• The game does already display nameplates, if the enemies are reported but the model/textures are not ready.

That said, it changes nothing for the fact that the current culling limit is too low for WvW and even PvE zerg events. There should be a hard range limit (1600-2000 range?), within everthing is reported (although I can imagine the lag spike when a 50 enemy zerg arrives…)

@Hisssatsu
You are right with everything you have said, the combat system of GW2 actually is fast-paced and your success often depends on seeing what your enemy is doing and how (fast) you react to it… If you don’t see your enemy, you can’t react whatsoever…
The same happens with lags, you can’t block an attack with your shield, if your block skill takes 1+ seconds until it eventually triggers… You take the damage, your skill triggers to late and the cooldown kicks in, couldn’t be worse!

So, invisible character models and lags are both game breaking issues with how GW2 combat is built and really should be taken care of! Both are things I and others recognize frequently since launch!