Guild Wars 2

I haven’t played much WvW because of all these complaints, but with my pretty fast SSD and 16GB of RAM, it shouldn’t be too bad according to HabibLoew… right?

Since the client already knows where other players are, why doesn’t it just use a placeholder model while the real one loads? It can use the basic pvp armor of each type with the player’s race, gender, and team colour, and their profession’s animations and this can all sit in RAM from when the map loads. An option to never load accurate character models for the opposing teams or all teams would also help low-end PCs with their framerates (because the CPU and HDD aren’t loading textures the whole time).

I use just 8 gigs at 1866mhz, but this game only uses 3.6 on average. Not sure that more ram matters. This is typical of most MMOs right now.

This is a huge huge problem, however I disagree that you need a lot going on in a given area for slow client reporting to happen.

I often run in a group of 5, and very often in the borderlands, I would be running up the road to the supply camp and oblivious to us, an enemy group could just run past us before our clients started registering. It’s even more hilarious when the enemy group is the same and then seeing about 5v5 turning around to attack each other.

I don’t even think network latency is the issue. I’m talking about situations where we are fewer than 10 people around and I have fiber-optic broadband.

If I can offer a suggestion. Why not separate the character textures from the “nameplate” in terms of what the system will cull. I don’t know much about programming but it would seem like that would be the best of both worlds. The culling system would remain with the majority of it’s benefits intact but no matter what people would be able to see those nameplates, at any visible draw distance, and know that there are players there even if they are being culled.

Who is this supposed to optimize performance for? The server? Or is this “optimization” supposed to be helping me?

I’ve got 10Mb download, lag is NOT an issue for me
I’ve got a high-end system that I built just last year, performance is NOT an issue for me

So why am I forced to have this “optimization”? It’s frankly ruining my WvW experience as I can’t see who I’m attacking.

An example: I was manning a cannon on our Garrison, yet I was firing blind into an attacking zerg hoping that I was hitting people, and apparently I was as despite no damage numbers coming up what-so-ever I was getting xp and loot bags popping up at my feet. I was largely aiming at the source of spell attacks or where my allies were attacking, and the only reason I’d know we’d succeed in defence is when my allies start leaving our keep and start chasing after the retreating zerg.

I’ve literally ran into a zerg and not know it, not only was I a free kill, it makes me look like an idiot whenever I do so.

If I need to “optimize” my gameplay let me, the player, have the option in turning down my settings, or give me a slider that lets me decide how many players I want to render that includes an unlimited option as well.

It makes it very hard to strategize in WvW when you don’t know what the true size of a zerg is, or where the invisible army is headed next, or seeing that a location is under attack yet you have to physically travel there to see if it’s a real threat rather than being able to gauge from a distance. Siege is a pain as well, not just the cannons but Trebs as well, it’s impossible to know if I’m hitting anything other than the walls or gate. I’ve been sieging from the Garrison in the past and a massive battle of our two zergs will clash between our keeps, I want to be able to see the players so I can actually fire into them, and not fire blindly to realize I’m hitting nothing in the end.

I remember shortly after the game release running around PvE maps and thinking “Wow I really love how I can see enemies way in the distance over there!” What ever happened to that?

I just made the following two suggestions in a related thread; prioritize rendering enemies over rendering allies, and/or display nameplates even for otherwise “invisible” players.

I also thought I’d offer the following suggestions here, even if they’re not really relative to the discussion.

Here’s a short list of a few alternative changes that could be made to improve WvWvW “balance”; 1) swap the current orb bonus with the current outnumbered buff; 2) remove the waypoints in WvWvW except in the respective spawn camps and in Stonemist (as a tier3 upgrade, ofc); 3) implement a wall/door health pool modifier which bolsters these values for realms being dominated, and which reduces these values for realms that are dominating.

I could probably come up with some more, but these seem worth exploring first.

It doesnt matter what your computer hardware is Pwnr, you will not see enemies just as everybody else because the game server will not transfer data about said enemies to your client. This is the worst part of this “feature” – not only their client was “optimised” (or rather, not optimised) knowing it will NEVER had to draw more than X actors on the screen, but their server too! Their server also relies on everybody only getting sent X actors update per tick. If you, say, remove this limit right now, not only game client will probably drop below 1fps for some people, but server will just hang up, making game outright unplayable. Not only they have to change client code now, but also rework server code or upgrade server hardware as well…

And yes I agree that having 5sec lag and finding yourself dead is worse than having enemies be invisible but retain at least control of your character. But both are unacceptable, and “at least its not like that” is not an excuse. At the current state of WvW, you can only play it in hopes of it changing, because “every other game has problems at release”.

I think we, as customers, players and fans of ANet, still have to make a clear position. We, players who play for WvW or like doing WvW, love this game and we want to continue playing it and supporting developers, but if this “culling” is not removed (at least as an option for users with high-end pc’s and good connection to turn it off or allow more actors to be shown on screen), then eventually, we will stop playing WvW (and for those who play for WvW mainly, stop playing this game), because frustration from all the problems this “culling” introduces will overcome any pleasure we get from participating in WvW.

Everybody knows and nobody cares about “culling” since BWE1
The real problem in WwW is too much gold and karma, thats must be fixed.

Too bad not many understand the architecture of CPU/GPU/memory management and use, and as such, will never understand that getting something like big scale PvP to work flawlessly for every party involved, is pretty much impossible. I will gladly keep playing while waiting for a fix or workaround for this problem, because I know, no game has yet done it in a ‘acceptable’ way.

Making this issue worse is that some organized big guilds and alliances run deliberately in large groups and ball up together to exploit this engine deficiency. I don’t know if anyone can do anything about this. But this makes small groups less viable and encourages zerging. We need to see and judge enemy numbers from a much farther distance, at least 2 times skill range, 2500 – 3000. Another possible solution is to show enemy as red dot on minimap like the green dots of your allies in a range near you.

i love the pseudo tech-babble some people use on threads like that.

thanks for the update habib. considering how much smoother wvw runs compared to the bwe i have faith in you guys getting it to work sooner rather than later and getting that bug with the culling fixed will probably solve the issues most people seem to be complaining about.

@Habibloew (Dev)

Obviously I’m sure you guys are working on this but at least in WvW the way you load characters HAS to be improved. It is just ridiculous to hear on teamspeak “Our flank”, you look to your flank and no one is there….and then 5 seconds later there are 30 people 10 feet away from you. It hasn’t just happened a couple of times. It happens almost daily.

Is there a way to AT A MINIMUM load in the red “Defender” tag above everyone’s names? So even if they are invisible you AT LEAST can consistently see how many of them there are…That at least would help with the mass invisibility ambushes.

2 Hrist.8972
Woot? What do you mean “impossible”? Why “flawess”? Noone needs flawless (well, some do but majority does not). What we need is
- acceptable response time (in GW2 mechanic that must be pretty low, like no longer than 100ms ping)
- acceptable frame rate (anything above 20 fps in huge battles is fine)
- acceptable sound quality (not an issue, when the woooOOOOooooOOOOooo bug gets fixed)
- actually seing every meaningful object (actor, siege weapon,…) at least up to twice our ability range (2400)

Now what does make it impossible to achieve? There are hardware limits, but then, you dont make a fully 3d shooter with reallistic graphics and surround sound if the year is 1990. I dont see how modern hardware cannot support 500 players on one map, or 200 characters on one screen.

And once again, you can leave this throttling in place for people with poor connection/computer. So both can be happy – no need to screw it for some in order for it to work for others.

HabibLoew

This report limiting (or culling, as it’s also been referred to) is generally distance based and limits both the amount of bandwidth and client side processing (rendering, etc.) required to play the game.

Dear HabibLoew, culling characters after 40 people are visible isn’t a solution, it’s a dirty work-around. Please get it together.

i have stop played this game for now, 4h queue for RvR, for fight invisible people defending their keep, or die in a 60th invisible enemy groupe, bored me as hell.

this limitation sux, like your 650rvr slot per 40 000account per server, and ur free transfer sux too

add an option to allow players to determine the amount of “culling” under the graphics options

many of us have broad band connections and high end systems that should have no trouble rendering large quantities of people quickly

I have seen this in three places

1) Wuvwuv, obviously
2) The defend the bridge event in kessex hills
3) Underwater

In all of these situations, you’ll see the effects from someone within range of you long long before you see the person/npc themselves.

I’d much rather see the invading horde right away than their shield of absorption O.o

Here is the worst video ever of Darkfall, a game that came out in 2009 using server tech built from 2003-2008. Please tell me you can do better. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oI42k0J99GE

Just want to chip in. On my server it is now standard operating procedure to stack on the commander away from an enemy zerg that has been sighted by scouts. We then run into the middle of them and aoe all around us because we know we will kill them all before they know we are even there. This is not how wuvwuv should be played but it is how it is going to be played until this issue is fixed.

This is an urgent problem and needs to be escalated to the highest level.

Thought I’d post some pictures I took that show this problem in the PvE world as well.

For this one I later found out there were about 5 other people below me attacking the champion. I had no idea and just saw the arrows and a few random effects from people I couldn’t see. They never did load in until I jumped down and was on top of them when the champion died. I could see all the NPCs around for a very long distance yet the PCs didn’t show.

how much of this throttling is “performance optimization” and how much is to limit bandwidth costs? we’re not paying monthly but bandwidth takes money to provide.

people need to stop posting their PC specs, it has NOTHING to do with your hardware it is all client/server side.
Anet really need to address it and let us know its gona be fixed or worked on, or as i fear its working as intended and at least tell us that t

Anet, what about giving us the choice if we want this “feature” in the options to put it on/off ?

so annoying.

Pwnr.4056:

I haven’t played much WvW because of all these complaints, but with my pretty fast SSD and 16GB of RAM, it shouldn’t be too bad according to HabibLoew… right?

Since the client already knows where other players are, why doesn’t it just use a placeholder model while the real one loads? It can use the basic pvp armor of each type with the player’s race, gender, and team colour, and their profession’s animations and this can all sit in RAM from when the map loads. An option to never load accurate character models for the opposing teams or all teams would also help low-end PCs with their framerates (because the CPU and HDD aren’t loading textures the whole time).

This, exactly. I already suggested that before. Using instancing graphic cards can render thousands of models incredibly fast, as long as the models are the same. Use placeholders, 5 models, one for each race, with same PvP armor, keep these in memory at all times, and display as soon as the position is reported, then queue loading of the actual model and textures in a background thread if the enemy is very close and there aren’t too many players/mobs around. If there are lots of players/mobs around, use simplified models, simplified textures, because again, none will even notice any details with 20+ people running around.

Noone cares what the enemy looks like in a huge WvW battle. There is no time to admire the details. All that is necessary is the location of the enemy, and enemy count.

Yeah, I am not sure what is going on at times, I have people blinking in and out from outta nowhere, you can tell when lag is a factor, but at other times I am on a trebuchet or some other siege and I am a long way from the action and there isn’t much real stressing of polygons happening at that range, and I have a very fast and reliable connection and you see people blinking in and out like christmas tree lights and my fps is rock steady on my locked fps limit.

There is something wonky going on.

Yoke.4671:

people need to stop posting their PC specs, it has NOTHING to do with your hardware it is all client/server side.
Anet really need to address it and let us know its gona be fixed or worked on, or as i fear its working as intended and at least tell us that t

They did address it, and they did say that they’re trying to figure out how to fix it.

This is really bad… I have a really good hardware and all event are : fadding people, mobs… It’s a really bad issue, you need to fix it.

I think some sort of prioritisation system for loading models would really help.

Terrible example:

IF MaxModels Exceeded THEN
DisplayAllLocalHostiles
ReduceLootedDeadModels
ReduceFriendlyPetModels – ExcludePlayerPetModel
——IF MaxModels Exceeded THEN
——ReduceFriendlyNPCModels
————IF MaxModels Exceeded THEN
————ReduceFriendlyPlayerModels – ExcludePartyMemberModels
——————IF MaxModels Exceeded THEN
——————ReduceNonEngagedHostileModels

Basically a system of prioritising which models to show and which to hide. I gave up grinding in Orr as I couldn’t see mobs till they were dead due to spammed AoE.

The prioritisation system for the Loot/Rez/Talk key is brilliant! That with Models and you’re set!

Hissatsu.3174:

I dont see how modern hardware cannot support 500 players on one map, or 200 characters on one screen.

That is exactly the reason I find it funny that people like you come demand everything to be fixed without actually knowing what goes around inside computers. The amount of data that transfers from hdd to cpu/gpu renderer and off to display is massive, which cannot be done easily no matter how ‘fast’ your computer is. To account to that there is the way how client gets it’s info about players, which is tied to networking which is also a very complex thing.

1. have default placeholder / texture / whatever already loaded in memory to be rendered at a moment’s notice

2. send my client information about enemy players in order of their proximity to me

3. send my client information about enemy players before sending information about friendly players

4. put at least some red dots on my minimap so I can see the giant blob of red that I’m about to walk into

5. if you’re not sending my client information about an enemy player, don’t send him information about me either!!!! might as well keep things fair

6. when players are far, I don’t need to know their exact position or what profession they are. send my client a close enough position for the whole group and how many they are. I’m sure that in my client’s renderer you can randomize some locations for each enemy in that group that is close enough to their real location.

thanks

The one problem with placeholder textures is that it makes identification of enemy professions difficult/impossible unless and until they use their skills. And if they’re close enough to use their skills, it’s too late for that information to be much use (and by then the real textures probably will have loaded as well).

Being able to scout an enemy group and make a decent guess at least in terms of ele/mesmer/necro vs. guardian/warrior/engineer/ranger/thief before they’re on top of you is helpful. Only part of that can be determined via pets. The rest is armor and weapons, and race can sometimes help as well (e.g., there seem to be a lot of asura engineers and elementalists).

I havnt witnessed this just yet, certainly strange indeed i remember this happening with Aion too at launch.

thanks for adressing and aknowledging Anet.

“That is exactly the reason I find it funny that people like you come demand everything to be fixed without actually knowing what goes around inside computers. The amount of data that transfers from hdd to cpu/gpu renderer and off to display is massive, which cannot be done easily no matter how ‘fast’ your computer is. To account to that there is the way how client gets it’s info about players, which is tied to networking which is also a very complex thing.”

Except it’s been done before & better. Displaying more than 30 players in a battle is not a new, difficult problem that ArenaNet is pioneering a solution for.

Vehementi.1094:

Except it’s been done before & better. Displaying more than 30 players in a battle is not a new, difficult problem that ArenaNet is pioneering a solution for.

But not with the graphical fidelity that’s present in GW2. All games I’ve seen having large battles run smoothly and players shown from long distances, have been with very mediocre graphics and models with hardly any complex animations. You either take outlook of a game from 5 years back and have large battles without problems, or you take this what we have now until it get’s some adequate fix.

HabibLoew:

Hi all,
For a variety of performance reasons

……..

Also, MajorKong, that really was a great screenshot even if it does show a bug and bugs make me sad.

Thanks for replying, HabibLeow. I love that Programmers are actually allowed to reply in the GW2 forums rather than it only being PR employees. It says something wonderful about your company. I’m not sure if you will continue reading this thread so far in but I figured I’d respond to you anyway.

I will start off by saying that I love this game too much to ever even think of quitting. WvWvW is amazing. The combination of a high paced combat between 3 servers lasting up to 2 weeks and the concept of supplies, siege weaponry, commanding officers, upgradable fortresses, and potential NPC allies is genius and more fun than I’ve ever had playing an MMOG. Even with this particular problem, I still enjoy WvWvW, as well as the rest of Guild Wars 2, and will continue playing it.

I will also point out, just in case, that it definitely has nothing at all to do with the client side computer. My rig can handle anything the modern gaming world can throw at it and I have yet to find a game that cannot be played at max settings. Anyone wondering if it’s a matter of processor speed, graphics card capability, drive speed, or RAM quantity/speed can stop wondering. I built my machine in March with near top-of-the-line parts. It can handle it.

That being said, I would suggest you guys all rethink this culling system. The idea that an enemy should fade at X distance when you have a siege weapon that can fire Y distance becomes flawed inherently when Y > X. I, being a software dev, understand that some things can become almost unchangeable once they are coded into the core functionality of a system (without taking the whole system down for a fresh round of debugging and extensive testing) but I really hope this isn’t the case here. In this day and age, and with high to extremely high speed internet being the norm for players of this particular game, I feel like it’s somewhat of a waste to limit our visibility so drastically.

Here’s what I’d suggest based on my experiences and the comments of others in this thread:

1. First things first, allow nameplates to be displayed at great distances, up to maybe 2 times as far as a trebuchet can shoot (I think that would be 20,000). This is far from perfect but it would pretty much completely solve the main issue: dying to invisible enemies and being unable to properly defend forts, castles, and supply depots. It wouldn’t be a pretty solution but it would solve it nonetheless.
2. Retool what is rendered first. Many people, myself included, can see attack effects at great distances. We would all rather see people running around than the attack sprites. Those don’t have to render until we are much much closer. Using siege weapons at great distances is a fantastic feature and we should be able to use it to the fullest. Likewise, when the enemy is building siege equipment outside our castle or fort, we should be able to see it and how strongly it is defended well before it is completed and smashing down our gates and walls.
3. Add a slider to the options menu allowing us to decide what is more important, latency or information. I would rather have my framerate decrease and lag increase in exchange for being able to gain this valuable information. Standing on the ramparts of a castle, I can handle a little, or even a lot, of lag if it let’s me know where to aim and to see what’s coming my way. It would also stop me from running full tilt into a swarm of enemies and I would be able to turn around well before the detrimental effects would be catastrophic.

This is really of paramount importance to WvWvW. As you can see, some people are already using it as strategy; gather a large force and slay their enemies before they are even visible.

I hope you guys can figure it all out and update it as soon as possible. It’s certainly not ruining my enjoyment of the game but it is definitely making strategic play impossibly in given scenarios.

Thank you, again, for replying and I wish you luck in solving this particular problem.

Hrist.8972:

Hissatsu.3174:

I dont see how modern hardware cannot support 500 players on one map, or 200 characters on one screen.

That is exactly the reason I find it funny that people like you come demand everything to be fixed without actually knowing what goes around inside computers. The amount of data that transfers from hdd to cpu/gpu renderer and off to display is massive, which cannot be done easily no matter how ‘fast’ your computer is. To account to that there is the way how client gets it’s info about players, which is tied to networking which is also a very complex thing.

Most games use a degrading detail to solve this problem. My computer is powerful enough to handle pretty much anything this game can throw at it. I’m not sure how it would deal with a 100v100 battle complete with attack and movement animations but just not rendering enemies is not the answer. I’d rather see 199 names bouncing around my screen until all the player models finally render in that situation than 50-100 out of 200 players with the rest doing who-knows-what who-knows-where.

Granted, many people don’t understand what it takes to fix an issue like this. Kittens, I don’t even really know because I don’t know how deeply the culling code is founded nor do I know how many functions are dependent on it. What I do know is that they should definitely figure out a temporary fix while they seek out a more permanent fix.

Ok. First off, this issue is mostly not to do with how fast or powerful your computer is. As habit states, it is the server limiting how many updates are flying around between players. There is a PC specs factor in that once the game shows you a character, and you don’t have that character’s model and attributes cached it can take a while to load, but even on an i7 with 16gb and the fastest SSD money can buy, I am still seeing this issue.

Player culling is done to reduce lag, by reducing the number of updates sent to the client. When player culling was not in effect, WVW frequently ground to a halt. Inefficient netcode is to blame.

I also think that reducing bandwidth costs might also be a factor here, as bandwidth is not cheap. However I don’t think arenanet are so cheap that they would dial down gameplay to save money.

It’s pretty clear that the limit before players are culled is set far too low, and has the wrong priorities, preferring to cull enemies before it culls allies. I think this is fixable in the short term.

Longer term I think super efficient net code could allow them to raise the cull cap or even remove it entirely. I believe in these guys to deliver this… Eventually.

I don’t think replacing player models with generic ones in a game where the whole point is to get better armour and look cool is a great solution, and actually probably would not help anyway, at least on systems with super fast HD and lots of RAM anyway. Imagine if you had a legendary and wanted to show it off in WvW. Would you be happy with enemies seeing a generic sword model?

Chamone.6890:

Imagine if you had a legendary and wanted to show it off in WvW. Would you be happy with enemies seeing a generic sword model?

Definitely not.

Hrist.8972:

Chamone.6890:

Imagine if you had a legendary and wanted to show it off in WvW. Would you be happy with enemies seeing a generic sword model?

Definitely not.

I can understand that completely but they don’t see it if you are invisible either ;-)

Judas.5432:

I can understand that completely but they don’t see it if you are invisible either ;-)

And that is why we are waiting for a fix, instead of moaning about the issue when it’s already acknowledged. ;-)

DAOC handled it this way, They loaded all the player models well outside your clip range, This is why you could be standing somewhere, and “feel” the lag and know that something was coming. They certainly didn’t handle the way GW2 does, because I never had a problem with 8mans or 100 man zergs just magically appearing on my screen, I saw them coming..

I mean, I could understand if it was a distance away, But when I’m eating 100B from a Warrior standing next to me, and i don’t even see him cause of the lag, Something is bloody wrong with the system..

How do I know it was 100B? Because My life dropped fast as hell and I booked it, I then scrolled back up in my combat log and saw what was beating on me…

Why are immediate friendly and pets/corpses/objects/resource nodes/friendly NPCs rendered before enemies on a WvW map? Why can’t WvW maps have specific client/server load settings?

What is even worse is large enemy fields (combo fields/multiple arrow carts) not being rendered either (basically “known” death zones that renders so slowly that you can’t react until red numbers starts flying off of you). I’m looking at you tower/keep door sieges.

I mean, seriously, what information is being passed to clients, coordinates, direction someone is facing, speed of movement, what type of attacks. There is a lot more passed between client and server that the server needs to know about, how much info do other player clients need to know about? DAOC eons ago could handle a 1000 participant battle with dialups with the dodgy quality of the internet back then.

There shouldn’t be that much information that needs to be passed to clients in general that should causing these issues. We are talking a string of variables for each participant and WvW is locked at something low like 130 v 130 v 130 or something like that, my kitteny router with its $2 processor and next to no memory can handle passing more information to more simultaneous connections.

There must just be some sloppy code in there somewhere.

2 Vehementi.1094
This. I didnt knew Darkfall supported that many people on screen, but it did. It came out WAY before GW2 and it had more complex combat system, in a sense that weapon collision was true (not like in GW2 where its part reallistic collision, part still direct targeting like WoW does) for both melee and ranged weapons, magic had complex effects (drag you towards a black hole, kick you upwards, knock you back, levitate you and hold you in place, etc) and so on. And yet, no limit on amount of people, and huge zergs clearly supported without disappearance.

And btw, Darkfall: UW (aka Darkfall 2010 aka Darkfall 2.0) is releasing 20 november this year, and i doubt it will intoduce ridiculous “culling”, you can bet your money it will display all players on screen. It features rich 3 faction pvp too, btw. Wink wink

Hissatsu.3174:

2 Vehementi.1094
This. I didnt knew Darkfall supported that many people on screen, but it did. It came out WAY before GW2 and it had more complex combat system, in a sense that weapon collision was true (not like in GW2 where its part reallistic collision, part still direct targeting like WoW does) for both melee and ranged weapons, magic had complex effects (drag you towards a black hole, kick you upwards, knock you back, levitate you and hold you in place, etc) and so on. And yet, no limit on amount of people, and huge zergs clearly supported without disappearance.

And btw, Darkfall: UW (aka Darkfall 2010 aka Darkfall 2.0) is releasing 20 november this year, and i doubt it will intoduce ridiculous “culling”, you can bet your money it will display all players on screen. It features rich 3 faction pvp too, btw. Wink wink

It also looks like crap, no thank you.

If you want to argue about how GW2 deals with this vs. how other games dealt with it, you should at least be arguing based on games that used the same engine as GW2 but didn’t suffer from the same problem.

Aion handled this same issue by at least loading the models label/name first.. so you atleast see the red leeters

I prefer the DAoC method. Loading them outside and inc range as well. I rather lag and see something than die to something I cant fight, see or target.

This system affects more than WvWvW – I couldn’t even find my own friend near the bank at Divinity’s Reach when he wanted to check out my new gear! A similar system like this exists in Second Life, but at least in SL, it has an icon to show an avatar is there with a nameplate but loading unlike GW2 which gives no indication of any player existing who hasn’t yet loaded and as a result, makes the entire world look empty despite all the beautiful work you put into implementing NPCs and making the world feel “alive.”

In Second Life as well, there’s a check-off option to turn this on/off or prioritize avatars loading over other things and it makes life easier – those who want more FPS and less lag can have just nameplates above where avatars will load (and for those who REALLY want FPS and never have those avatars load, there’s an option to create phantom avatars to replace the high-quality version of the characters around), and those who want to see the world for as populated as it is despite any potential FPS loss too can win and have their way.

I know SL isn’t GW2, but I think it’s even more important in a MMORPG world to make it feel alive and make players feel like there’s a community existing in front of their screen instead of seemingly invisible. This breaks immersion in large cities and is honestly frustrating to not find my friends who stand literally beside my character on the map.

So glad everyone is finally speaking up about this, even more glad that a dev has confirmed that this was an implementation. I’m still wondering why though. Waiting for the day that Wvw becomes playable again.