Guild Wars 2

Webley.1295:

Graphics and customisation is half the experiance in GW2. If you want garbage to look at, with some good game play hop over to Runescape and be gone with you

Maybe they will, and you can enjoy your painting yourself.

The primary focus of games, is gameplay (I know shocking). Not pretty images.

Graphics looks amazing in GW2 their engine rocks any other mmo out there.
The optimasation on the other hand is crap (sorry)

invisible enemy’s is gamebreaking….
last night i droped a Catapult Balista and we where building on the Ledge of Quentin Lake to attack it.
We had around 30 people there, within 1 min we where wiped out as we coulnt see their massive army comming in….

Thats gamebreaking and i realy hope its a small overlooked bugg that can be fixed soon, but kitten i have no interest to play WvW when i need to spend 10 gold for gear repairs a day

This has got to be fixed. I was just in a battle where I could not see one single player. I could not see anyone on my side, or the opposing side. WvW is basically unplayable like this.

When I first enter WvW everything is fine, but as time goes on everyone vanishes, and I do mean everyone. Not just some, and it has nothing to do with distance everyone is gone. Green dots on the map know theres a group of people there just can’t see them. I cant even see NPC’s. I can target them, but I have to constantly spam tab.

This just started happening last night was never like this before so whatever your team did fix it please.

I agree with the last few posts that 1) this needs to be fixed badly and 2) that it’s been much worse since the Oct 7, 2012 patch. I wasn’t as much as a problem before that patch, and the modifications made to the camera on that day made it unbearable in WvW.

never had much much problem with invisible enemy until after this patch. right after patch, i ended up invisible and every other player both enemy and ally are invisible. just now, not so much invisible enemy, just enemy that appear when they are within 1k distance of me. whenever its a decently large group of people say.. 15+ enemies, 80% of them wont load until they are within firing range. whatever this update did to the game, it screwed up the character loading massively

Guess it’s time to go doing jumping puzzles. Should be easier now with everyone invisible.

Need to have a default model to take the place of the current null one. Simply make a red figure for enemies and blue ones for allies. So you can clearly see them even if they havent fully loaded.

Also this game needs a forced player model for allies and enemies that makes them all wear the same gear and color, just like Quake III Arena.

I have noticed this too after patch, when I first started playing WvW right after launch I had almost NO problems with invisible enemies, it would happen rarely..

NOW, it’s invisible enemies everywhere, it’s ridiculous i can’t enjoy game like this. What’s next invisible buildings?

nonsense about EVE.. EVE is old game. At that time were less professional game devs in this sphere. Now EVE has Tidi. and thats the best choice for our weak connection.
i saw videos, where only young people were at ArenaNet office.

NCSoft has kittenload games with massive battles. They should have some advices for ArenaNet.

At least with my SSD i had better game experience in L2 and Aion and EVe.
GW2 www just a pure fail.

@Demitsuru: Eve isnt nonsense. The age of the developers doesn’t automatically mean its directly proportional to their skill or professionalism. The eve developers have a very good server cluster designed that several times has ranked on the world top list for supercomputers. The game also has had numerous graphical updates that now uses state of the art graphics. The networkcode for the game has evolved over time in their “war against lag” and now supports hundreds of playerobjects thats way more detailed than Gw2 models on the screen of the client at the very same time doing battle with plenty of options for the player to adapt this to their client hardware if it isnt powerful enough to keep up.

So EvE onlines networking code and server cluster performs way better than Gw2 W3 code. With a wide margin. And it handles over a hundred thousand players. Sure they have had time to develop and modify it over the years but why invent the wheel all over again when a new game releases?

The EvE developers developer blogs are also frequent and posted with information both for the very tech savvy with exactly what they are working on to sort X situation, not only generalist main streamed information of the “dont panic” variant that Gw2 devs have produced so far. In fact EvE devs even have video series with their blogs to personalise the contact with the community.

A lot of MMO companies have a lot to learn from CCP inc.

Demitsuru.9361:

i saw videos, where only young people were at ArenaNet office.

but all game developers are young at heart

also you are dumb

ofcource Arena should fix that problem ( and i think it is possible). But right now if you have problem with invisible man near your leave game and run it again and you can play couple of hours as before last update…

Columb.3572:

ofcource Arena should fix that problem ( and i think it is possible). But right now if you have problem with invisible man near your leave game and run it again and you can play couple of hours as before last update…

Unfortunately, there are queue times that make this kind of thing impossible for some of us. I’m not going to wait another hour to get back into WvWvW. I already waited an hour the first time…

I like the weapon effects and all, but it gets quite boring when that’s the only thing you see.

http://imageshack.us/a/img9/1272/gw070y.jpg

Dear all,

it’s funny because GuildWars2 only uses max. 4 GB of Ram and they want tell us the problem is loading textures from HDD?

I use a i7, GTX680, 16GB ram and a SSD, I can tell you it has nothing to do with the client hardware or client Internet connection.

Its all about the crappy engine which allows me only to have 20 – 25 FPS in Battles.

So is it fixed?

kuro.4638:

Dear all,

it’s funny because GuildWars2 only uses max. 4 GB of Ram and they want tell us the problem is loading textures from HDD?

I use a i7, GTX680, 16GB ram and a SSD, I can tell you it has nothing to do with the client hardware or client Internet connection.

Its all about the crappy engine which allows me only to have 20 – 25 FPS in Battles.

Funny thing is I use to get 40-60 fps in a 25 man raid in WoW as meele dps but In Gw2 with effects only and no models sub 30 fps.

So, Im at work…. curious how it is after the posted patch notes.
How’s it looking (yeah good word for invisible enemy’s)?

Seems to be ok now, just played a 4 or 5 hour session and there was no invisibility. So a tentative thanks to all at ANet for getting this fixed, good job.

YAY! thanks for the update achilleez for all of us at work

I’ve been hearing that it’s just back to the way it was before. I’ll try it out tonight but what I’m hearing is that the recent acceleration of the issue is solved yet the original topic of this post is still valid.

Again, we will have to test it (I hope it’s totally fixed) and post updates then.

While this is a serious problem, please people, do the Math onle one time.
Difference between Eve and GW2 realtime battle is, that GW2 relies on very accurate movement and hitresponse.
In a spacegame its easyier to hide negative effects of mass battles, because its possible to use very low resolution data
to do the movement. In a spacegame you work mostly with distance weapons, which allows the developer to manipulate the hit
registration a lot more without noticing quirks as a player.

And during a big battle in Eve, a lot of big ships do not move very fast, so even less movement data is required.
So called position overshooting as a result of low move prediction isnt a big problem there either.

Ok now back to GW2. In GW2 player’s movement direction can change VERY fast, whcih requires a higher update between client<->Server.

When we asume N is the amount of data required to update the player between the server and clients and we have a 30vs30vs30
close combat battle. This means we have 90 players BUT to update, everyones data has to move from the server to all clients,
which results in an incoming data stream of 90N and an outgoing stream of (90-1)*90, so a total of 8010N

if N = 1KByte/Second, we used nearly 8MByte outstream. Doesnt sound much? well this is the RAW DATA. The header overhead
per package is 42Bytes. as we send 1kbyte per second, it means we split it up into multiple packages. Lets say we use 10 updates per second,
this requires 420Bytes per second just as additional overhad per player which results in additional ~3MB. So we have 11/12MB of data as planned outstream

Now down to the TCP/IP protocol and the world wide web.
When we send data, the package is send to the target, the sender waits for a response. if it receives the response, its all good.
SO additional overhead are the so called ACK packages to signal that we received a package. But what happens of the sender does not receive a response,
because its send package or the ACK-Paket got dropped/lost on their way through the net?(Thats very common)
It sends the package again. SO instead of our 11/12MB pure data, we have to send parts of it, sometimes multiple times. The droprate increases with the amount of data
flooding the net. This is caused by different reasons, one of them being packet collision between receiver and sender which results in corrupted packages. When packages are send more frequently and in a higher mass these collisions become more comon. Imagine it as a big star wars battle and a lot of ships crashing and exploding. SO the Data we have above raises up pretty fast, to a number i can not
exactly specify here, as i dont know the average droprate on the arenanet side(its not their faults, thats networking )

Okay, but what if we do 50 players per side so 50vs50vs50?

We end up with 150 players and (150-1)*150 = 22350N
As you can see, we didnt double the amount of players, but the data went ~3x higher.
Again 1KB per second for an update results in ~22MByte as raw outstream. Using the previos 10 updates/second with an overhead of 420bytes
adds ~9MByte of data overhead. We just ended up in ~31MByte data we want to send in a close combat battle form the server.
Now add the noise inside the network as described above and you pretty fast end up
at a point of VERY big network problems.

And this is calculated with just 1KByte of upstream per player. If its more(which is very likely), multiply the calculated data above.
Ofcourse, there are many ways to optimize it, but this is the first wall you have to manage as a network(MMO) programmer. And its absolutely no easy task.
Its a VERY hard walk between accuracy and network stability.

Greetings
Memnarch

Memnarch.1327:

And this is calculated with just 1KByte of upstream per player. If its more(which is very likely), multiply the calculated data above.

Actually it should be less than 1KB because with so many actors you only want to send the input changes, make the logic completely deterministic and simulate everything separately on each client. My quick prediction is 64-128 bytes
But of course that’s just updates, when you already have the starting information about all the other players, but you have to first get them from the server when you first see them, and that could be much much more data.
It is also very unlikely that a game like this would use TCP because, as you mentioned, it has a lot of overhead and is pretty slow, most developers come up with their own protocols.
Other than that, great writeup, good to see someone so well informed

There is still a delay for enemy to appear. Many times, I see 5 enemies, rush in and like 5-10 sec later, i am in the middle of 40 people.
This is in no way acceptable.

If the engine cannot support it, than their is no point in having massive battle in open pvp

NOT FIXED!

Wiping constanlty due to not seeing 50+ zergs that is in our face

Netsu.3769:

Other than that, great writeup, good to see someone so well informed

Thanks
Iam developing in my sparetime and doing an apprenticeship as Softwaredeveloper.

Netsu.3769:

My quick prediction is 64-128 bytes

Mh no, that wont fit. a 3D position is determined by the values X,Y,Z

If we declare s truct which holds this 3 values, using plain integers for positions(depending on the engine, floats/doubles are used), we need 4 byte per value.

So we need 12 Bytes for 1 position, 10updates a second = 120 bytes raw data. This implies a simple movement system, which sends the absolute position over the network, so the client calculates speed and direction between current and new position of the other player by itself.

But this still has overshooting, rubbbanding and other possible quirks and doesnt work well with fast direction changes of other players, as a players action isnt as regular as the updates

Memnarch.1327:

Mh no, that wont fit. a 3D position is determined by the values X,Y,Z

If we declare s truct which holds this 3 values, using plain integers for positions(depending on the engine, floats/doubles are used), we need 4 byte per value.

So we need 12 Bytes for 1 position, 10updates a second = 120 bytes raw data. This implies a simple movement system, which sends the absolute position over the network, so the client calculates speed and direction between current and new position of the other player by itself.

But this still has overshooting, rubbbanding and other possible quirks and doesnt work well with fast direction changes of other players, as a players action isnt as regular as the updates

Usually it is the speed and acceleration that get sent (or even just the acceleration) and the client calculates the position based on that and the player input (he knows the starting position), but anyway, I thought you meant only 1 update per second, that’s where my prediction came from.

I’m glad to see they are actively working on this, but I don’t envy the development teams task. I reckon this is an issue plaguing a lot of games. If there was an easy fix, we’d have seen it somehow.

I used to siege in Aion with clusters of players and, frankly, they didn’t solve it there either. They implemented a ‘work around’ at best, where you could turn off character rendering completely and just see the ‘names’ of players around you. It wasn’t ideal, but it was better than nothing.

So I wonder…

As an interim workaround, whilst looking for the all-singing-all-dancing solution, is it an option for Arenanet to make a change that allows character names to always be rendered, regardless of whether their character has been rendered yet? It would at least allow us some visibility and stop the accidental ‘leeroy’ moments when we run into a cluster of players we didn’t know were there.

Just my suggestion