Guild Wars 2

2 Hrist.8972
Wait, so you’d rather not see enemy at all, than see “crap” model?

But I do see the models and so will most when it gets fixed.

Nameplates guys. Show the darned nameplates.

The problem here people is ArenaNet forces you to receive all information regarding a character’s armor, dye, weapon, size, facial configuration, etc. before showing you the player. Until you get all the information for my character size, race, face design, dye colors, weapon choice, skills used, and so on, you will not see me. This is compounded with switching weapons and executing attacks during a zerg where the combat data is prioritized.

Think about these invisible Zergs. You still take damage at a normal rate. You can dodge and evade attacks normally. AOEs go down without lag spikes. The only single problem is that you don’t know what color the enemy’s armor is. So the game doesn’t show you the player. Because if they showed you a default model, you will then see armor pieces and weapons popping in during play as each piece gets updated, breaking immersion.

At the same time, we want to represent our special armor colors and guild tags to the enemy, so you can’t just go with a default model. You have to stream in that customization data to make it work correctly. But you don’t want to break immersion by armor and weapon pieces showing up randomly on the character models. The only fix for now would be to show the nameplates.

You do receive enemy positions in the zerg, and you do receive damage from them, and you can damage them as well. The issue is getting their fancy armor across to show up on your screen.

Tie the positions to a nameplate, and you fix a lot of the problem. It’s not a final fix, but will alleviate people running into a zerg dying instantly due to just not seeing the group.

Eventually, we should have the ability to turn on an option which shows default Invader model sets for enemy players, so they appear at whatever range. Right now, the PvE customization is what is ruining this aspect of WvW.

Yes, please fix this. I get way too tired of dying due to not being able to see the 30+ enemies coming at me.

I think you guys need to make this issue your top priority. Nothing else is quite as broken as this is.

I love world vs world and while there are some issues (which I am sure will be fixed over time) this is the single biggest issue I have with the game as a whole. I have a great rig and an awesome internet connection and find it frustrating to to wandering about and suddenly be in the middle of a zerg.

Huh. I’ve never had this happen to me. Whenever I get kicked out of WvW for an imminent patch, sure not everyone shows up, but the 50-100 that are closest to me do. I’ve never had problems aiming ballistas, and only very rarely problems on the extreme edge of cannon range (on the eastern keep in borderlands maps). Trebs are another issue, but I can understand not being able to see the health of a wall 10k units away. That’s what spotters are for.

I’m running a GTX470, 8gb of ram, and a SATA3 SSD though. Have a feeling HDD seek times might have something to do with this.

myr.8642:

Huh. I’ve never had this happen to me. Whenever I get kicked out of WvW for an imminent patch, sure not everyone shows up, but the 50-100 that are closest to me do. I’ve never had problems aiming ballistas, and only very rarely problems on the extreme edge of cannon range (on the eastern keep in borderlands maps). Trebs are another issue, but I can understand not being able to see the health of a wall 10k units away. That’s what spotters are for.

I’m running a GTX470, 8gb of ram, and a SATA3 SSD though. Have a feeling HDD seek times might have something to do with this.

And I have had this happen to me. And I have SATA3 SSDs as well, with both the OS and game installed on them.

Not to mention the developer stated in this thread that it’s a problem with an optimization they made on the server side, which means it does not have anything to do with your computer.

Just fought an army of ghosts yet again and for the last time. WvWvW is meant to be a massive part of this game but atm it’s a running joke. Fix invisible zergs please or I’m done with WvW.

I just had this happen with a downed player last night.

Not even that big of a battle, but there was no indication of their presence whatsoever save from something plinging me and a “FINISH THEM!” notice.

agree 100%.
this is a very serious gamebreaking issue.
in fact, many of my guildies and friends agree that this will kill the game if not fixed.
we all agree that the game should not be taken seriously if this is not fixed.

its not a balance issue or a bugged skill or something.
its 1/3 of the game (WvW) being broken.

This happens to me only when I’m trying to take Stonemist after server reset. Or when defending. It’s crazy crowded in there, yes, with 3 servers converging, but it makes it impossible for a less powerful server to take Stonemist when a bunch of us are fighting invisible enemies left and right. Half the time I think this is what wipes our pushes to take the keep. Sometimes I’m surprised I’ve managed to stay alive as long as I have during these Stonemist pushes.

And like others have said, it’s not my computer.

If there can be some kind of option to render these players at incredibly low textures, or just geometric shapes, when there are too many people, I’m totally fine with that, because at least it means I’ll be able to do something – anything – when I run into a mire of invisible players in Stonemist.

This problem got to the point of riddicilousness yesterday when SoS pushed ET out of the spawn area last night during OCX wvw event. most of the times enemies were invisible. Infact I could go into mist of enemies and they themselves could not see me, so I was killing them without any problems.

This REALLY needs to be addressed somehow!

I guess this thread must be stickied or something, seing people create similar threads to complain about the same issue.
ArenaNet, please acknowledge the issue and fix this! We need to see dem enemies to pvp with dem!

Today I even had a few times where the enemies and I ran past one another. Nobody essentially noticed cept when told by others.

Thanks for looking into this arenanet, as it’s starting to be used as a tactic for defenders and is actually game breaking to WvW. You can’t break a siege that you can’t see, but they can see you just fine.

This seems to be at least partially a memory problem.

After playing for a few hours I ran a personal story mission that involved a mob of people moving off into the distance, and they would clip out VERY early. The game crashed hard, later in the scenario, and I restarted.

The second time through, everyone displayed as they should.

Its not just in WVW, same thing happens in PVE zones and towns, a players a just a few feet away and I can not see them at all.

on big wvw fights even grp members getting culled(invivible)
and even your current target getting culled(invivible,no stealth)

i do not care if i see ppl from my world,but my grp and my current target are a no go to be culled.

option in menu: “Show all enemys in basic skin”(1 skin per class,fast drawing)
option in menu: “Show all other in basic skin”(same,only player sees his real armor+weapons)
option in menu: “Show only effects from me/my grp”(only red enemy aoe rings stay)(improves Bandwidth and perfocmance)

(if zerg gets so big basic skin does not help,switch to LOD level of basic skin)

cull other friendly NPC, than friendly players
so if all pets/klones/illus,all npc,all other friendly players are gone this would be the only time to clip enemy players and never clip grp members.

This problem seems to be interacting with stealth in some very strange ways; it can take 2-3 seconds for unstealthing targets to actually appear for me. Not sure whether this is a local problem, an Australian problem or everyone’s problem. Kind of wondering whether it would be feasible for stealthed enemies to remain in memory for the client but hidden from the player; not really good enough at computers to articulate a solution.

Finally a response this has only been happening since BWe1

Nothing like running from a 40 man zerg, and realizing the empty area you ran to had 40 more people and your now sitting in the middle of them…. gg lol.

Could there perhaps be a generic placeholder for characters that are being rendered? No doubt it will look awkward, but at least it would give people an idea of what they’re supposed to be seeing.
Or is the problem that our clients aren’t even being told there are people to be rendered?

Thenoob.1480:

Could there perhaps be a generic placeholder for characters that are being rendered? No doubt it will look awkward, but at least it would give people an idea of what they’re supposed to be seeing.
Or is the problem that our clients aren’t even being told there are people to be rendered?

I dont know I run SSD in Raid I highly doubt that my pc isn’t keeping up, im gonna say there is a bug somewhere.

Namu.5712:

I dont know I run SSD in Raid I highly doubt that my pc isn’t keeping up, im gonna say there is a bug somewhere.

Thus why I suggest the problem might not be on our end, but its a guess.

i agree. invisible enemies are really hurting the game. whats worse is when teams/guilds/servers exploit the issue further. things like mesmer portals where 40 enemies suddenly go through it but you can’t see them as they appear and the next thing you know you are being slaughtered is just not fun. I accept mesmer portals as a viable strategy but its an unfair advantage when you can’t see the enemies coming out of it until its too late.

HabibLoew.2590:

For a variety of performance reasons we limit the number of characters that are reported to any given game client. 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.

Is distance based the best method? Surely this could be changed to prioritize clusters of enemies in the vacinity or a cone infront of the player. Next I’d ask how this reporting works, is it just when a player intersects a radius around my position or do you guys cluster nearby players (e.g. a player enters my reporting range, so I also get everything in their reporting range)

Also, what’s the bandwidth limit? Is this dynamically calculated or do you have a set threshold for everyone, or is it based on player cap and your available bandwidth?

HabibLoew.2590:

In WvW one of the things that we see exacerbating the issue is this: From the moment a character is first reported to your client to the first moment that your client is able to render it a non-zero amount of time passes. During this time your client is doing things like loading textures from disk, which can be (at least in computer terms) fairly slow what with all that accessing of spinning, physical storage media. So that means that a character who is moving towards you can potentially appear first at a much closer point even than the one at which they were reported because, of course, they were still moving during that load time.

Why not load standard models into memory for each race and use those until the client can catch up?

Oh and lastly, when you clever chaps figure it out, any chance you could do a write up of it. I’m sure there are plenty of nerds like me on here that would enjoy reading it.

I know you guys are trying to save money on bandwidth and this an that but there are some very valid suggestions in this thread. I really think you guys can make it work with what you have.

The biggest issue seems to be priority’s I think if perhaps you switched some of what renders first alot of the problems will be fixed.

As it stands right now Animations/Allies/bags of loot all render before players do. Perhaps switch this around to players render first then allies animations then bags of loot.

Something needs to be done soon. People are not going to wait around for this. This problem has existed since Bwe1 and you are just now getting around to commenting on it after a month of sweeping it under the rug.

Stop dropping the ball.. I cant pvp I cant pve wth am i suppose to do in this game?

In addition to the invisible armies which I’ve just adjusted to constantly shooting when I run because you never know when there is a zerg out there.. the thing that annoys the hell out of me is the INPUT LAG when you get into a big fight.. nothing like slamming your heal button and it going off like 30 seconds later. Half my skills don’t work when I get into a huge 3 faction battle in Stonemist. Invisible armies are one thing, my character not responding to my commands is just kitten in this day and age. It’s killing WvW guys.. gotta fix it.

There are guild, who shall remain nameless, who are taking advantage of this weakness in the code by stacking large numbers of players together and compounding the issue by applying stealth. This is a game-breaking issue and needs to be addressed. Increasing queues will not fix the problem.

I bought a video card with 3 gigs of DRAM, dropped 16 gigs of RAM in there and have an SSD that is being largely underused due to design decisions like this.

Please give the client a culling slider and let us decide how much bandwidth we want the client to consume. As far as limiting client side processing goes, you’ve erred on the far side of too much. The amount of culling and processing limitation going on here is an unnecssary software imposed bottleneck to players who built a monster rig.

Please let me take advantage of my computer’s specs. She’s begging you to put her to the test.

show me every living thing on the map, my computer can take it without breaking a sweat.

also for those who cant just add a slider in options for it, how for to render them, i say 10 kilometers

The problem with showing everyone in LOS is that it is impossible for the server to handle that amount of outbound traffic.

PoiSonPeZ.4286:

The problem with showing everyone in LOS is that it is impossible for the server to handle that amount of outbound traffic.

If that is truly the case, then they should have scaled back the graphics until it could handle hundreds of players simultaneously. From concept they had planned on having massive WvWvW battles.

Not being able to see the entirety of both armies seems like a major oversight to me. I can hardly call it a war when at any given time the majority of the enemies army is hidden behind a magical invisible field.

Interesting enough I do see inc large armies “zergs” so I can report their inc. But I do have really good PC that runs game smoothly even in most demanding situations. But only time I have experienced “invisible” enemy is when two zergs clash. Then its just unplayable and since I am melee warrior, I cant do much as if I run deeper into enemy line, I get killed before I see my attacker.

I would rather chose that game show me some “basic” model with invader/defender color armor than no enemy at all.

Any updates to this? It’s seriously affecting how fun WvW is. I’m not sure what has happened since beta but it seems a lot worse now than it did back then…

Warhammer had a decent fix. Everything would be grey character models with no animations. Sometimes it took 30 seconds for everything to load but you could see everyone and react. I don’t mind everyone looking like old Atari models if it means I can see them.

As long as I see and target my enemy, I really don’t care about how he looks. Whenever I enter WvW I select “high performance” settings. Yet still culling occurs even though I don’t have an outdated GPU.

EDIT: Btw some claims it’s a server side problem. I don’t agree on that. Changing graphics settings changes how severe Culling is. Also server responds on other stuff like animations or damage numbers. So I don’t think it’s not sending location of characters to client. I’m pretty certain it’s a rendering (GPU optimization) problem.

@Kazim: “some claims (sic) it’s a server side problem.”

Yes, some do. Including the developer that posted in this thread, explaining it was a server-side problem.

You’re welcome to disagree with him, but…er, he really is the authority on the matter.

Perma name tags, no? Why not?

It seems like much of the data that has to be sent to the client from the server is information on exactly which pieces of armor/weapons (and colors), faces, bodies, heights, etc. the characters have. And it definitely seems to me to be unrelated to the client’s processing power.

I mean, I have a pretty good rig and can use high graphics setting, but I tested running through lion’s arch with both minimum setting and my normal high settings and saw no difference in how late characters appeared before I was on top of them as I ran around.

So I wonder if perhaps the game could prioritize sending the locations of players so that we see more of them onscreen and sooner, and make up for this increase in bandwidth by lowering the priority of sending data about their looks. Just give them a default set of armor, etc., and let them become more detailed as the real data is sent. Maybe just send their color scheme so they at least don’t change colors completely as they load.

Or is it possible that each individual player’s equipment loadout can be saved in a cache the first time the player is seen during a session? And then the next time that player is seen, the client can load the player’s graphics based on what they had last time they were seen (which is unlikely to change drastically in a single session), and the server can prioritize sending data only for players that haven’t been seen yet in the current session.

WTB update from Anet.

The rendering of nameplates by themselves is a really good idea actually. That should allow you to see and target enemies in real time or close to it without the massive lag involved in loading a potentially huge number of character models all at once. If the character models don’t show up for 30 seconds it isn’t ideal but being able to see and target them in that 30 seconds is a huge improvement.

mcl.9240:

@Kazim: “some claims (sic) it’s a server side problem.”

Yes, some do. Including the developer that posted in this thread, explaining it was a server-side problem.

You’re welcome to disagree with him, but…er, he really is the authority on the matter.

If you check his post he’s talking about 3 different (but related) things

1. Report/information coming late from server
2. Loading/rendering time at client after report
3. A possible bug

I’m claiming the real problem is actually at client side as different graphics settings make a real difference on this “invisible enemy” problem.

Seems the solution isn’t really gpu related after 50 guys already on screen
upgrading and overclocking cpu have help a lot with invisible raid incoming when already 50 people on screen

It has nothing to do with GPU, CPU or Hard drive. I am running 12 GIG RAM on a quad core 4.0 processor with two 5870 video cards together and a vertex 4 256 GiG SSD hard drive. The invisible army still exists. It has nothing to do with the client computer or it’s ability to process. This is entirely on the shoulders of how the game is set up to render character models.

Kazim.2043:

mcl.9240:

@Kazim: “some claims (sic) it’s a server side problem.”

Yes, some do. Including the developer that posted in this thread, explaining it was a server-side problem.

You’re welcome to disagree with him, but…er, he really is the authority on the matter.

If you check his post he’s talking about 3 different (but related) things

1. Report/information coming late from server
2. Loading/rendering time at client after report
3. A possible bug

I’m claiming the real problem is actually at client side as different graphics settings make a real difference on this “invisible enemy” problem.

As tested and reported by numerous people, different graphics settings make no meaningful difference on this invisible enemy problem. Across different speeds, core-counts, and manufacturers of CPUs, across different makes, models, and manufacturers of graphics cards, across different speeds, makes, models, and capacities of system RAM, and across different speeds, makes, models, configurations, and kinds of storage devices (both SSDs and hard drives).

You need to re-read his post. His explanation is simple: They changed the behavior server-side to reduce the overall bandwidth used per server, and to reduce client processing load (implying that they did it to improve perceived playability on older and/or weaker customer machines).

He then attempts to place some, very small, amount of blame on texture load-in from disk. Given the number of people, myself included, with homebuilt high-end system using the fastest available SSDs, GPUs with more than enough memory and pipelines to handle large textures, and a very fast CPU<→memory bus, that’s a red herring. It was a weak excuse when he wrote it, and I think he knows that. But he had to throw something out there.

Yes, it’s trivially true that it takes non-zero time to load textures from disk. That’s identical to saying water is wet. The delta from zero is what’s at issue there, and for those of us with extremely fast SSDs, we’re seeing the same problem people see with 10kRPM, 7200RPM, or even 5400RPM hard drives. Case in point: I’m able to do a side-by-side comparison with two toons in the same location, in the same BL map, at the same time, on two different computers of vastly different relative power in terms of CPU, GPU, and disk. EXACTLY the same problem is seen on both systems.

That puts the lie to the claim that texture load-in from disk is even partially implicated in this. On systems with fast SSDs as well as machines with slower platter-based drives, the load-in time is so negligible as to be a non-issue here.

I wanted to share with you my piece of mind: CPU is also involved in packing and unpacking network packets in TCP/IP communication.. maybe, and I underline maybe, the delay we see is the sum of the extreme “packing” overload in the server, summed to the “unpacking” time in the client.
This would explain why the problem happens in WvW only (extreme server overload) and why lowering the graphic quality has a good impact on reducing the problem: the client’s CPU has more resources to “unpack” the incoming packets.

@funforums (sorry, the quote function keeps mysteriously disappearing): that’s not true these days. almost any modern NIC uses TCP offload, and Windows has it enabled by default. Even if it weren’t, the amount of packet data being received per second by a single client wouldn’t be enough to create a noticeable increase in CPU load. Not only are there several research papers published on this in general as well as on the specific offload algorithms used and why they increase performance in this case, I deal with EXTREMELY high volume network performance testing and tuning on a daily basis as part of my job. Things that can saturate a GigE or 10GigE connection, as well as the switch backplane the load generators are connected to.

As for the server: It’s actually a cluster, and each machine in the cluster would also be using TCP offload (all major *nixes have it enabled these days as well). Which is probably one culprit here (or at least a tweak they’d want to look into), since using TCP offload when you’re dealing with a very high number of simultaneous connections and a high traffic volume is actually inefficient for a number of reasons.

Yeah… this is annoying. I would like to see this fixed. Honestly, it is the only thing in WvW that has really been a letdown for me.