Guild Wars 2

I think someone else brought it up, would being able to adjust spell effects help ? Several games have this option, and seemed to help people with rigs that are not quite up to par. You still get some effects, but the flashy pin point perfect graphic is not there.

I used to turn mine down on my PC that was more then capable of running everything max because I find they can interfere with game play when your screen is full of blinding lights and what not.

I don’t recall seeing this feature, spell effect reduction, not graphic reduction.

Burl.9567:

mcl.9240:

Just turn off culling. If you didn’t pay the price to have a decent machine and/or connection, you pay the price in-game due to poor performance. This has been a simple fact of PC gaming for as long as there have been PC games that were capable of taxing the systems they ran on.

If you want everyone to have an identical gaming experience, then everyone needs to have identical hardware. That’s one reason why consoles exist. If you want a console experience, lobby ANet to create an MMO for consoles.

So you want ANet to essentially exclude a large portion of the gaming population from participating in WvW (face it most of the people that play are casual) so you can look at pretty graphics? Bad business decision. I’m not saying it doesn’t need to get fixed, but this definitely isn’t the long term solution either. A slider for the short term would be OK, but long term this would destroy WvW.

No, I want ANet to allow those with min-spec computers to continue experiencing what we’re all being forced to experience now (invisible enemy forces in WvWvW), while allowing those with better machines to have the choice to see the enemies and play the game as it was originally intended to be played.

You’re making an unfounded assumption (“a large portion of the gaming population”) about how many people have machines that can’t handle rendering the enemy forces currently invisible due to culling. Culling is implemented to cater to the minimum spec required for this game. Go look at the min-spec for this game: That’s a computer that’s 3-5 years old, with no upgrades. The min-spec CPU is almost 6 years old, and the min-spec graphics card is 7 years old. Are you seriously arguing that a “large portion of the gaming population” is running on hardware that old? I sincerely doubt it.

I’d wager a very SMALL portion of the GW2 playerbase is using hardware that old. And if they are, that’s their choice, and part of that choice is being aware that most games are going to suffer performance-wise on that equipment.

I’ll say it again: There has ALWAYS been a schism in the PC gaming world between those willing to spend the money to have a top-end machine, and those unwilling to do so. Those willing to spend the money get better performance than those who aren’t. It’s a simple fact of life in PC gaming. Always has been. Always will be.

I don’t think its a case of willing to spend the money, some just cannot afford it, and GW2 being F2P is a perfect game for lower income folks. Its runs decently on low settings on lower end machines, and has no monthly fee, just because some people are not well off does not mean they should have something that makes them happy stripped from them because they are lower income.

The other issue I have found is those that can afford it, upgrade their rig and 6 months later there a new patch and they need to upgrade again, and so on and so forth.

I’ve spend a small fortune over the last 12 years upgrading for games, and while I understand that gaming companies don’t want to fall behind the times, the frequency at which many require upgrades is appauling.

Ok now that was off topic.

Burl.9567:

mcl.9240:

Burl.9567:

Agreed. Creating a game where the “haves” have a clear advantage over the “have nots” is bad for business and bad for the game. People will just tune out and quit playing if their system wasn’t “up-to-snuff”.

Explain, please, how that’s preferable to having the entire player base suffer from invisible enemies, making both the “haves” AND “have nots” tune out and quit playing?

I’m not sure why I need to explain human nature here. When one side has an advantage that the other can’t achieve, they will quit. The culling isn’t bad to the point of unplayable either. Quit making it out into this huge issue. I have it happen maybe twice a week where I walk into a zerg (and sometimes through it). I can cough up the silver for now…

I’m happy you believe you have so little trouble with culling. Many other people view the current culling situation as making WvWvW unplayable. When you can’t see the enemy you’re standing in the midst of, when you can’t even see an enemy from the wall to target them with abilities or siege weapons, the game is, in my opinion, unplayable. Lots of other people agree, and have in fact quit the game, or at least quit trying to play WvWvW, with culling in its current state.

Given that WvWvW was a centerpiece of GW2, and that the game was touted to be the spiritual successor of DAoC, whose protracted success was due almost entirely to their own version of WvWvW, leaving WvWvW in this state since launch is driving players away.

If they won’t turn off culling, they should reduce the WvWvW population caps back down to launch levels. The queues won’t be as bad since the playerbase has dropped off significantly since launch (that’s not a dig against GW2; it’s a natural occurrence in all games post-launch), and the cap at launch at least minimized the impact of culling for everyone.

Nuzt.7894:

I don’t think its a case of willing to spend the money, some just cannot afford it, and GW2 being F2P is a perfect game for lower income folks. Its runs decently on low settings on lower end machines, and has no monthly fee, just because some people are not well off does not mean they should have something that makes them happy stripped from them because they are lower income.

The other issue I have found is those that can afford it, upgrade their rig and 6 months later there a new patch and they need to upgrade again, and so on and so forth.

I’ve spend a small fortune over the last 12 years upgrading for games, and while I understand that gaming companies don’t want to fall behind the times, the frequency at which many require upgrades is appauling.

If they can’t afford it, they should understand that they can’t expect top-end performance from a low-end box. A video game is not an entitlement; performance is not welfare.

Oh oh ..i want to go to track days in a Bugatti Veyron…oh wait ..i cant afford it.
But thats ok becouse we all know that everyone should be able to do what they enjoy even if they cant afford it…. -.- ..oh wait. .no the world doesnt work like that.

Point taken i hope ?

Those with computers that cant handle it ..cant play it ..simple as that ..
Trying to pander to them and make the game work for them ends up making said people stick with there old slow machine even longer putting the next game they get in the same position. If all gaming companies did was desgin games on the same old machines then there would be no development ..no increase in quality.
Computers need upgrading every handfull of years ..its part of computing and pritty much everything else in the world. Deal with it.

I agree, they should not, my point was more … making the game completely unplayable for them and to address the not willing to spend the money comment.

The ones I have played with fully expect to have lag and poor performance, but they can still get on and play.

As for those with computers that can handle it remark, I’m talking about the people who are CURRENTLY playing and can handle it (even if they have poor performance) not some poor soul that has a commadore 64 sitting at home. Basically they can play right now, and if the fix is not addressed correctly that could be stripped from them.

You won a ticket to the Super Bowl, oh I’m sorry you couldn’t afford an armani suit (sp) to wear to the game so we’ll be taking your ticket away now.

I’m still trying to figure out why it’s so difficult to have a client-side “draw distance” slider like most MMOs in the past 10 years.

For the people with toasters.

EasymodeX.4062:

I’m still trying to figure out why it’s so difficult to have a client-side “draw distance” slider like most MMOs in the past 10 years.

For the people with toasters.

Agreed, this is all I’m trying to get at. Just some simple tweeks to allow those playing to continue playing without having to go buy new rigs.

I’m confident that Anet will come up with this type of solution.

mcl.9240:

PC gaming has always been like this: There are people who buy or build top-end systems who have higher framerates, better rendering, larger FOV, better sound (and sound localization), more accurate mice, faster texture load times, more bandwidth and lower latency, faster memory and disk access, etc. etc. etc.

And then there are people who buy mediocre or low-end systems, or just never bother upgrading their years-old machine. And they have low framerates, stuttering, high latency, dropped packets, slow rendering, slow disk and memory access, crappier sound, poor mouse tracking, and so on.

It’s true in all games.

Most of which is utterly irrelevant and untrue, outside of niches like competitve FPS (which is a very different market from a casual MMORPG like GW2), all a better PC lets me do when it comes to most games, is play with prettier graphics, have lower loading times, run multiple screens & run other software whilst playing.

Which is a very different thing from invisible opponents, I’d rather beat someone fairly than through them not being able to see me just because I have a better PC.

Nor is it simply the PC has stated, it is also the connection, people are limited to what connection they can get by where they live, as long as they meet the specified requirements, it is Anet’s duty to provide the product they paid for.

mcl.9240:

If they can’t afford it, they should understand that they can’t expect top-end performance from a low-end box. A video game is not an entitlement; performance is not welfare.

I’m sure they don’t, but then if they meet the specified requirements then they are entitled to expect it to be playable.

Nuzt.7894:

EasymodeX.4062:

I’m still trying to figure out why it’s so difficult to have a client-side “draw distance” slider like most MMOs in the past 10 years.

For the people with toasters.

Agreed, this is all I’m trying to get at. Just some simple tweeks to allow those playing to continue playing without having to go buy new rigs.

I’m confident that Anet will come up with this type of solution.

This is something I’m ok with. I was referring more to the above poster saying essentially, “Turn it off, if they can’t play that is their problem”. As long as everyone has the ability to play the game at a functional level I’m good.

Sylosi.6503:

mcl.9240:

PC gaming has always been like this: There are people who buy or build top-end systems who have higher framerates, better rendering, larger FOV, better sound (and sound localization), more accurate mice, faster texture load times, more bandwidth and lower latency, faster memory and disk access, etc. etc. etc.

And then there are people who buy mediocre or low-end systems, or just never bother upgrading their years-old machine. And they have low framerates, stuttering, high latency, dropped packets, slow rendering, slow disk and memory access, crappier sound, poor mouse tracking, and so on.

It’s true in all games.

Most of which is utterly irrelevant and untrue, outside of niches like competitve FPS (which is a very different market from a casual MMORPG like GW2), all a better PC lets me do when it comes to most games, is play with prettier graphics, have lower loading times, run multiple screens & run other software whilst playing.

Which is a very different thing from invisible opponents, I’d rather beat someone fairly than through them not being able to see me just because I have a better PC.

Nor is it simply the PC has stated, it is also the connection, people are limited to what connection they can get by where they live, as long as they meet the specified requirements, it is Anet’s duty to provide the product they paid for.

mcl.9240:

If they can’t afford it, they should understand that they can’t expect top-end performance from a low-end box. A video game is not an entitlement; performance is not welfare.

I’m sure they don’t, but then if they meet the specified requirements then they are entitled to expect it to be playable.

Slower disk and memory access coupled with a weak GPU and CPU will mean that characters in MMOs do not render in a timely manner. Particularly when there are a large number of textures involved, and particularly when some of those textures are large. Textures rely heavily on disk access speed as well as GPU memory and system RAM, both quantity and access times.

Toss in particle effects and an engine that relies more on the CPU than the GPU, and you will have a vast difference in experience between a low-end and a high-end machine. Warhammer was a good example of this: Framerates would drop through the floor in large battles unless you disabled all the particle effects, even on high-end machines. Even then, when there were a large number of players in a small area, the display would stutter, and some characters wouldn’t fully load.

You saw similar behavior in DAoC: Weaker machines simply couldn’t render everything.

In Aion, they disabled models altogether to help low-end machines.

Even in WoW (prior to the engine overhaul several years ago), you’d have some toon pop-in when areas were crowded (Ironforge was a good example).

Irrelevant? It’s absolutely relevant. Every game I just listed is a popular western MMO, and every single one had hardware-dependent performance issues, that were resolved in various ways by the various development teams.

As for your “playable” comment: Do you think WvWvW, with all its current culling problems, is “playable” now?

Hey guys, some kid plays on a 56k modem, we should throttle everyone’s latency to that of a 56k modem cause its unfair for us to have an advantage! OH THE HUMANATEE

mcl.9240:

Sylosi.6503:

mcl.9240:

PC gaming has always been like this: There are people who buy or build top-end systems who have higher framerates, better rendering, larger FOV, better sound (and sound localization), more accurate mice, faster texture load times, more bandwidth and lower latency, faster memory and disk access, etc. etc. etc.

And then there are people who buy mediocre or low-end systems, or just never bother upgrading their years-old machine. And they have low framerates, stuttering, high latency, dropped packets, slow rendering, slow disk and memory access, crappier sound, poor mouse tracking, and so on.

It’s true in all games.

Most of which is utterly irrelevant and untrue, outside of niches like competitve FPS (which is a very different market from a casual MMORPG like GW2), all a better PC lets me do when it comes to most games, is play with prettier graphics, have lower loading times, run multiple screens & run other software whilst playing.

Which is a very different thing from invisible opponents, I’d rather beat someone fairly than through them not being able to see me just because I have a better PC.

Nor is it simply the PC has stated, it is also the connection, people are limited to what connection they can get by where they live, as long as they meet the specified requirements, it is Anet’s duty to provide the product they paid for.

mcl.9240:

If they can’t afford it, they should understand that they can’t expect top-end performance from a low-end box. A video game is not an entitlement; performance is not welfare.

I’m sure they don’t, but then if they meet the specified requirements then they are entitled to expect it to be playable.

Slower disk and memory access coupled with a weak GPU and CPU will mean that characters in MMOs do not render in a timely manner. Particularly when there are a large number of textures involved, and particularly when some of those textures are large. Textures rely heavily on disk access speed as well as GPU memory and system RAM, both quantity and access times.

Toss in particle effects and an engine that relies more on the CPU than the GPU, and you will have a vast difference in experience between a low-end and a high-end machine. Warhammer was a good example of this: Framerates would drop through the floor in large battles unless you disabled all the particle effects, even on high-end machines. Even then, when there were a large number of players in a small area, the display would stutter, and some characters wouldn’t fully load.

You saw similar behavior in DAoC: Weaker machines simply couldn’t render everything.

In Aion, they disabled models altogether to help low-end machines.

Even in WoW (prior to the engine overhaul several years ago), you’d have some toon pop-in when areas were crowded (Ironforge was a good example).

Irrelevant? It’s absolutely relevant. Every game I just listed is a popular western MMO, and every single one had hardware-dependent performance issues, that were resolved in various ways by the various development teams.

As for your “playable” comment: Do you think WvWvW, with all its current culling problems, is “playable” now?

Do you not remember what you could do with DAoC graphics ? Hint … Classic/Catacombs. Most companies should give these types of options, after all they want to make money so making the game playable for all walks of life would be a very smart move.

Imagine if a game released with the option of three different graphic types, old block minecraft type models, semi decent but not detailed models and blow your mind models that you could swear were RL people inside your screen. I have no idea how easy or hard this would be to do but to corner every aspect of the market like that would be the smartest thing any gaming company could do.

Heck part what made WoW so great was at release you could literally play it on a toaster, so all these young kids playing on mom and dads home computers with no graphic cards ect found a game they could play. Its half the reason why WoW was so successful.

But regardless I think were getting way off topic and arguing over something many will not see eye to eye on.

Nuzt.7894:

mcl.9240:

Sylosi.6503:

mcl.9240:

PC gaming has always been like this: There are people who buy or build top-end systems who have higher framerates, better rendering, larger FOV, better sound (and sound localization), more accurate mice, faster texture load times, more bandwidth and lower latency, faster memory and disk access, etc. etc. etc.

And then there are people who buy mediocre or low-end systems, or just never bother upgrading their years-old machine. And they have low framerates, stuttering, high latency, dropped packets, slow rendering, slow disk and memory access, crappier sound, poor mouse tracking, and so on.

It’s true in all games.

Most of which is utterly irrelevant and untrue, outside of niches like competitve FPS (which is a very different market from a casual MMORPG like GW2), all a better PC lets me do when it comes to most games, is play with prettier graphics, have lower loading times, run multiple screens & run other software whilst playing.

Which is a very different thing from invisible opponents, I’d rather beat someone fairly than through them not being able to see me just because I have a better PC.

Nor is it simply the PC has stated, it is also the connection, people are limited to what connection they can get by where they live, as long as they meet the specified requirements, it is Anet’s duty to provide the product they paid for.

mcl.9240:

If they can’t afford it, they should understand that they can’t expect top-end performance from a low-end box. A video game is not an entitlement; performance is not welfare.

I’m sure they don’t, but then if they meet the specified requirements then they are entitled to expect it to be playable.

Slower disk and memory access coupled with a weak GPU and CPU will mean that characters in MMOs do not render in a timely manner. Particularly when there are a large number of textures involved, and particularly when some of those textures are large. Textures rely heavily on disk access speed as well as GPU memory and system RAM, both quantity and access times.

Toss in particle effects and an engine that relies more on the CPU than the GPU, and you will have a vast difference in experience between a low-end and a high-end machine. Warhammer was a good example of this: Framerates would drop through the floor in large battles unless you disabled all the particle effects, even on high-end machines. Even then, when there were a large number of players in a small area, the display would stutter, and some characters wouldn’t fully load.

You saw similar behavior in DAoC: Weaker machines simply couldn’t render everything.

In Aion, they disabled models altogether to help low-end machines.

Even in WoW (prior to the engine overhaul several years ago), you’d have some toon pop-in when areas were crowded (Ironforge was a good example).

Irrelevant? It’s absolutely relevant. Every game I just listed is a popular western MMO, and every single one had hardware-dependent performance issues, that were resolved in various ways by the various development teams.

As for your “playable” comment: Do you think WvWvW, with all its current culling problems, is “playable” now?

Do you not remember what you could do with DAoC graphics ? Hint … Classic/Catacombs. Most companies should give these types of options, after all they want to make money so making the game playable for all walks of life would be a very smart move.

Imagine if a game released with the option of three different graphic types, old block minecraft type models, semi decent but not detailed models and blow your mind models that you could swear were RL people inside your screen. I have no idea how easy or hard this would be to do but to corner every aspect of the market like that would be the smartest thing any gaming company could do.

Heck part what made WoW so great was at release you could literally play it on a toaster, so all these young kids playing on mom and dads home computers with no graphic cards ect found a game they could play. Its half the reason why WoW was so successful.

But regardless I think were getting way off topic and arguing over something many will not see eye to eye on.

I agree with you. More options to tweak graphics would solve some problems.

mcl.9240:

Irrelevant? It’s absolutely relevant. Every game I just listed is a popular western MMO, and every single one had hardware-dependent performance issues, that were resolved in various ways by the various development teams.

No still irrelevant, you do not require a top end hand built PC for a MMORPG to be playable (unless you want to alienate most of your market), the tiny advantage someone may gain from being able to run at 60 FPS compared to 40, FPS or having a screen with 2 ms response as a opposed to 5ms, is in no way comparable to the disadvantage people would be under playing an incomplete game where some people could see the opposing players and others could not.

I could go and dig out my old PC from the cupboard and would still be able to PvP fine in WoW, LOTRO, etc on it on lower settings or using a low res download and not be faced with a disadvantage like you are suggesting people should play with in GW2 (invisible players).

mcl.9240:

As for your “playable” comment: Do you think WvWvW, with all its current culling problems, is “playable” now?

Not especially, which is why they are working on it, much better they actually solve the issue properly, rather than band-aid over it, but then WvW has more serious issues than culling…

Sylosi.6503:

No thanks, my system is way above min specs, but giving me and anyone else the option to turn it off and thereby creating a two tier PvP system with those that can see other players and those that can’t, is simply a bad idea. (nor for that matter would it necessarily solve the issues)

By that rationale we should all suffer because some people’s systems can’t keep up? That makes zero sense. It’s like saying the game should be capped at 10fps because some peoples systems can’t get more fps. A person with 10fps has a distinct disadvantage over someone with 60fps in pvp, but no one would suggest giving them 10fps to compensate. This is what’s currently happening with culling however.

I don’t that that is practical, or even desirable. If anybody who didn’t want to use culling could just turn it off completely, ANet would have no control at all over how much bandwidth was being required at any one time for their servers. Habib said that ANet was willing to buy additional bandwidth (which they OBVIOUSLY really need), but he didn’t said that ANet was willing to buy infinite amounts of it. If ANet was not able in some manner to dynamically control the volume of input/output data being required from their systems (which is exactly what culling is there for), the game could literally lock up as if ANet was the target of a denial-of-service-attack.

He already said that the plan is to turn off culling completely. If it’s turned off for everyone that would obviously be the maximum bandwidth consumption possible. If people could either have culling on or off that would mean less bandwidth consumption than they’re planning for, since people with culling on consume less bandwidth.

Agreed. Creating a game where the “haves” have a clear advantage over the “have nots” is bad for business and bad for the game. People will just tune out and quit playing if their system wasn’t “up-to-snuff”.

That’s rather over-dramatic. A huge number of games have “draw distance” in the graphics settings so that people with slower computers can run at a decent fps by not rendering the players/objects that are further away (similar to culling). People who kept culling on would notice zero difference from what they have now, they would have no reason to “quit” over anything.

CrassBippy.4619:

OH THE HUMANATEE

Is this a new WvW only playable race? A cross between humans and manatees, something I want to try. Maybe a cousin to the quaggans.

Burl.9567:

I’m not sure why I need to explain human nature here. When one side has an advantage that the other can’t achieve, they will quit.

Kind of like how everyone quit over the last few months because of invisi-thief wvw?

Look, I love the ‘think of the pooors’ appeal to emotion but adding a controller to give people with better systems the ability to actually see the players is ummmmm what’s it called? Oh yea, the way a game is supposed to work.

I think we should just have all video settings at low since some people can’t run them at high as well. Great idea.

Burl.9567:

The culling isn’t bad to the point of unplayable either. Quit making it out into this huge issue.

lol que? It’s kittening horrible.

Sylosi.6503:

mcl.9240:

Irrelevant? It’s absolutely relevant. Every game I just listed is a popular western MMO, and every single one had hardware-dependent performance issues, that were resolved in various ways by the various development teams.

No still irrelevant, you do not require a top end hand built PC for a MMORPG to be playable (unless you want to alienate most of your market), the tiny advantage someone may gain from being able to run at 60 FPS compared to 40, FPS or having a screen with 2 ms response as a opposed to 5ms, is in no way comparable to the disadvantage people would be under playing an incomplete game where some people could see the opposing players and others could not.

I could go and dig out my old PC from the cupboard and would still be able to PvP fine in WoW, LOTRO, etc on it on lower settings or using a low res download and not be faced with a disadvantage like you are suggesting people should play with in GW2 (invisible players).

mcl.9240:

As for your “playable” comment: Do you think WvWvW, with all its current culling problems, is “playable” now?

Not especially, which is why they are working on it, much better they actually solve the issue properly, rather than band-aid over it, but then WvW has more serious issues than culling…

So, in these games in the past where people had to turn off spell effects (many of which clued you into as what spells/builds they were using) to get a playable game, there were no disadvantages?

enji.7459:

So, in these games in the past where people had to turn off spell effects (many of which clued you into as what spells/builds they were using) to get a playable game, there were no disadvantages?

In most of the games I’ve played where that is an option it was mandatory to have it off to be competitive. Fancy spell effects throw out tons of useless information when all you need is the lowest setting to get the graphical indications on what is going on. Unless, of course, giant glowy balls of light are the only graphical indication anything is being done.

Completely ignoring culling and even though my system can handle it, I’d still turn off spell effects if it was an option because it’d be easier to see more important things like red circles on the ground

Tulisin.6945:

enji.7459:

So, in these games in the past where people had to turn off spell effects (many of which clued you into as what spells/builds they were using) to get a playable game, there were no disadvantages?

In most of the games I’ve played where that is an option it was mandatory to have it off to be competitive. Fancy spell effects throw out tons of useless information when all you need is the lowest setting to get the graphical indications on what is going on. Unless, of course, giant glowy balls of light are the only graphical indication anything is being done.

Completely ignoring culling and even though my system can handle it, I’d still turn off spell effects if it was an option because it’d be easier to see more important things like red circles on the ground

If you had a crappy rig. Kind of hard to “block/dash/dodge/etc. when you see him cast x spell” with them off. Many games, like this one, have you waiting to see them cast their big attacks to dodge/block/etc. How many times do I hear how easy xxxx class is to beat? “Just wait for them to cast xxxx and dodge noob” In this game I don’t usually dodge the largest attacks by looking for red circles. I have enough toughness aoe isn’t an issue.

enji.7459:

If you had a crappy rig. Kind of hard to “block/dash/dodge/etc. when you see him cast x spell” with them off.

I’ve never played a game (at least not one with action based combat) where changing spell effect settings made it impossible to see ability tells, it just got rid of extra random crap. Turning them down always made it easier to see what was really important. Most of the most important dodges in GW2 don’t involve a great deal of particles, for instance.

Thanks for the update Habib.
I guess GW2 has become a victim of it’s own success.. GW2 is not Aion (thank god), but at least that has options to show tags only,reduced LOD and failing all else the big red blob in the mini map.
Other titles I play use a cache for skins etc.that save the graphics details client side when a new player logs in. That could at least solve some of the network issues .
GW2 is the first mmo I’ve played that doesn’t suffer from “enemy lag”; though I think that would be preferable to the current culling situation.

press a skill and 30 sec nothing happens…….. everything else in screen is moving tho. its like dont release a game until its finished building, thats how upset i feel bout it, when in wvw, drives me kitten insane

Burl.9567:

So you want ANet to essentially exclude a large portion of the gaming population from participating in WvW (face it most of the people that play are casual) so you can look at pretty graphics?

Since when is seeing an enemy player “[looking] at pretty graphics?” This is the most essential thing in PVP. Trying to say that culling is not a huge issue in another post is astounding. If you only run across it a couple times a week you must not play WvW much or run into groups of enemies, because I WvW every single day and culling affects me multiple times a day. There are also literally dozens of threads complaining about thieves “permastealth,” several of which claim that people are quitting the game over the issue.

I have never seen a PVP MMO where there wasn’t some kind of draw distance slider for players or nametag only option. I can’t even recommend GW2 to my PVP friends because culling is absolutely horrible. I can still enjoy WvW, but if this was a subscription game I’d drop it till culling was fixed.

Something I wonder… even when I don’t see any enemies, I can still tab through them. This’d indicate to me that the client does know that the enemies are there.

Wouldn’t it be of great help, until the issue is solved, to at least place clickable circles or anything alike on the ground? Gives us some idea of what enemy force we’re facing and where they are?

Just from being in high pop areas and seeing the performance in the client drop significantly, what you mentioned should help a lot. Thanks for the actual response.

Bring back the red dots on the radar like in gw1. Better than walking into mob of the enemy when you are just exploring the map.

Habib Loew.6239:

Thank you, Grit, for posting that link. It points to a post in which I describe the culling issue in some detail and discuss a few of the issues involved with changing culling. An even more in depth explanation of what culling is can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-problem-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-properly/page/4#post356817 (be sure to read both that post and the next – my description exceeded the post size limit).

As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:

1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)……..etc etc

I want to say two things about this.
1. Stability issues. I have a pretty good computer (Intel i7, Nvidea Geforce). But so very often when big zergs load the client will crash completely.
2. Lessons from others. In Tera I seen them load quickly the outline of characters, then the character is build up while it is loaded on the screen in a Star Trek holodeck kinda way. That looks really good and you see the other people quickly, you won’t be surprised by a zerg. Lineage 2 is a much older game, but recently they add a selector circle on the ground. That probably is an easy solution. Quickly load these circles and at least you will be warned and you can start selecting a target already.

Fights and battles are being lost because of culling… not because of lack of skill or tactics. Thieves appear to have permanent stealth in WvW…. they don’t really, but culling makes it appear that way.

I’m glad that Arenanet is taking this seriously as it’s the biggest Negative for PvP players right now. As a few people mentioned, having more flexible graphic options can help as well. Reducing spell effects to group only or having a slide bar for clip range/graphics while in game could help.

Anyone else think the reasons Anet have given are just excuses?

On the PS3 you have a game called MAG, in some maps you can have 256 players, never had an culling issue in that game.
We have culling issues with groups of less than 100, but there are tonnes of games out there where 100 players may be in the same area than each other, and again those have no culling issues.

Could it be that the engine GW2 uses just cannot handle so many players due to bad programming?

Omaris Mortuus Est.2738:

Could it be that the engine GW2 uses just cannot handle so many players due to bad programming?

Of course it is, its bad design and bad programming.

Seems like the devs post was broken into 1) short term goal, 2) mid-term goal, and 3) long term goal. Who knows what the time frames are but it’s good to see a plan is in place.

Habib Loew.6239:

Thank you, Grit, for posting that link. It points to a post in which I describe the culling issue in some detail and discuss a few of the issues involved with changing culling. An even more in depth explanation of what culling is can be found here https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-problem-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-properly/page/4#post356817 (be sure to read both that post and the next – my description exceeded the post size limit).

As you know we’ve been working on this problem for a while but what I think we haven’t ever said before is that our goal is to remove culling completely from WvW. In order to remove culling completely we have to address three issues:

1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would increase without culling)
2) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also increase without culling)
3) Client performance issues related to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec clients. We don’t want to stop anybody being able to play the game after all.)

Here’s something to think about. I Worked on something similar and this was the concept we came up with. Hopefully I can explain what we came up with, and maybe you could do something similar. Our objective was to have thousands of players in one spot at the same time, on the same map (which was spread across multiple servers across the world, so…)

create free form dynamic groupings (of player entities) based on nearest distances. you can play with the entity to entity thresholds to optimize it but entities within a group are placed in what would be an “update bubble” based on where a player is within the world and where they are in relation to other players, but when you analyze player actions in the world not all of them are worthy of world updates (other than for rendering purposes and then not all, all the time), if you can aggragate them into a group collective you essentially compress the number of updates and allow them to be a procedurally generated bilboarded on the client’s machine (based off of info you pass from the server about what the group was doing in general).

so if you have 50 players running around a map create a simple group around them and send a single update that a massive group is moving around the world.

say you have a group of 500 players running around the map doing combat. you could partition it into multiple update groups, but the fact remains that for clients (even in the group) you still don’t need to send everything to everybody all the time, and by partitioning you can eliminate unnecessary traffic. worst case scenario—players stack and suddenly expand beyond the maximum container geographical size, repartitioning into n-number of new groups where n is the number of actual players (i.e 0 optimization) at some far distance and you have to spend the bandwidth to update all those clients. In a tightly packed arena, you can re-aggregate groupings based on your quadtree rather than making it dynamic. since most weapons are limited range, most groups (with the exception to seige and they don’t move only animate) aren’t going to be interacting with one another.

Great post, Habib. Thanks.