Guild Wars 2

It was recently stated by the developers that the progress they have made towards getting rid of culling make them optimistic that they could possibly get rid of it by the end of the year.

Am I the only person who doesn’t see this happening?

In fact, in my experience, the recent update that was supposed to reduce culling by using pre-rendered models has only worsened the culling in my experience. I’ve gone from being able to see every single person in a battlefield of more than 50 players….to suddenly not being able to spot a group of less than ten guys who pop out of stealth right behind me.

I’m not trying to bash the game or its developers here, but just basing it on my own personal experience, I’ve seen culling get worse, not better, as time goes on. So I’m not largely optimistic when the devs claim they’ll be getting rid of it by year’s end. But maybe it’s just me, which is why I pose the question to you: in your experience, has culling improved or worsened?

I try ro be positive. The said the models were for rendering on lower tier machines, nothing to do with culling. They also said the change back to what they tested early was the first step.
So i am hoping they knew it was a bad first step but maybe ine that had to be put in for the long term so they could move forward.

Fingers crossed.

I know wvw is unplayable for me until culling is fixed, hopefully sometime it happens :P

My favourite culling issue was while doing an a contest ToG event.

So while killing spiders at one end I can see NO ONE at the other. Then I go to that other end and suddently see aload of players at once and monsters that appear to have appeared then die.

And I was worrying if my computer was at fault.

critickitten.1498:

I pose the question to you: in your experience, has culling improved or worsened?

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch. The fact that Arenanet think they fixed things leaves me scratching my head and wondering what on earth they are thinking, and who do they have testing these things, because they are getting it terribly wrong right now.
I’m taking a break from WvW until this gets fixed, but there is nothing I can do other than sigh every time somone in LA pops up out of nowhere right next to me. It breaks immersion and makes the whole game feel sloppy.

Vavume.8065:

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch.

This culling issue can also be seen in dynamic events with large mobs, half the time you do not see the mob until they are on top of you.

critickitten.1498:

It was recently stated by the developers that the progress they have made towards getting rid of culling make them optimistic that they could possibly get rid of it by the end of the year.

By the end of the year!! Far far far too late. People are leaving the game now because of it. There’s posts in the WvW forum about severe declines in guild numbers because of people leaving.

wildcode.5403:

Vavume.8065:

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch.

This culling issue can also be seen in dynamic events with large mobs, half the time you do not see the mob until they are on top of you.

Yeah, I just made 2 examples, the game is plagued with it. It feels like the only safe places away from culling is in dungeons now.

wildcode.5403:

Vavume.8065:

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch.

This culling issue can also be seen in dynamic events with large mobs, half the time you do not see the mob until they are on top of you.

That makes event farming in Orr a disaster. I thought it was just the new players with the Orr rework, but I hadn’t thought of connecting it with the culling “fixes.”

In to report latest patch made PvE mob culling terrible. I can’t see most of the mobs while farming pent/shelt, making my income far lower because I have no idea where to throw my lava fonts :’(

Culling in PvE is major gripe for many players. I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but it really seems to have gotten worse since the last patch. I almost completely avoid Orr, specifically Cursed Shore, during prime time. Even then, doing the temple events late at night doesn’t help much.

For example: I participated in the Grenth event late (around midnight) the other night. There were only 3 of us, so I announced it in map chat and eventually, we were probably around 15 – 20 or so, with a few more joining as the event went on – not nearly as much as in the day. Yet, half of the time I couldn’t see the last waves of mobs spawning (the final part in the chain) until they are practically dead, and the spider champions stay invisible for so long! The only thing you can do is lay down AOE where you see particle effects going and pray for the best.

Lion’s Arch has always been a problem for me – even with overflow servers. I really, really dislike how players just suddenly fade in from nowhere right before your eyes. Even on less populated maps, I would often see a player just fading into view while running past. Why is this? It’s terrible.

I know there are technical issues to consider … but really. Also, why is this such a prominent problem in Guild Wars 2, when you have other MMO’s (some of them quite a bit older than GW2) where this type of problem is almost non-existent?

ANet saves money as they dont use high quality servers nor proper digit rate.

I have never ever experienced this in other games with even more crowded fights.

I went to do Grenth the other day, walked into the temple and all I could see were skill effects going off like fireworks and portals appearing on the ground. Move in closer and immediately get downed.. then the mass of shades that were attacking me materialized out of thin air. Whoops.

And Tequatl, possibly the oddest case of culling I’ve seen yet. None of his minions would show up even though I knew they were there, and then suddenly, all the players and Tequatl himself disappeared after I took a few steps back to use my pistol from a distance. IT CULLED THE DRAGON.
He appeared a few minutes later, as did all the players, and my game promptly crashed. When I logged back in, the dragon was gone (for real this time) and there was no chest.

I’m not even going to talk about the problems I have in wvw. Ugh.

I am so glad knowing that I’m not the only one having issues with culling now! I keep complaining to my boyfriend on how bad that culling has become since the last update but he’s insisting that it’s better, or at least it is for him. I know that on my computer, which is much better than his, that the culling has gotten a lot worse for me; the game culls everything now, mobs, enemy players, friendly players, the terrain! It’s almost to the point where I don’t even want to log in because of the culling -_-

I’m here to report culling issues as well. Since the January update(s), my issues with culling have gotten progressively worse -

- players in LA randomly “pop” out of nowhere at different intervals (instead of all spawning at once, a few may spawn followed by a few more, ect)

- Player heavy events such as dragons and Orr refuse to render enemies until the player is within mere feet of them. Two things to note about this – the dragon events are unplayable now. If not issues with culling, then it is with the horrendous amount of lag that makes using skills practically worthless since they don’t seem to fire when you command them to and, if they do, they don’t seem to follow the cooldown shown on screen. Secondly, it is becoming harder, and harder to spot enemy mobs in Orr events (especially the Cursed Shore); you literally have to be standing RIGHT next to them to render properly.

- I already believe someone has commented on how terrible culling in WvW has gotten.

The odd thing about this is that culling was never a problem for me before. I have forged a legendary since launch, making frequent participation in the events above absolutely mandatory, and during that time I’ve had no issues felling dragons, having mobs spawn properly, and spotting zergs in WvW. I normally don’t post in forums, but the issue is getting out of hand, and fast.

After all, why bother with WvW or epic confrontations with dragons when they are so fundamentally broken at the moment that they damper my enjoyment of the game?

right now in pve, culling is awfull.
but mostly only lions arch.
and dragons (but they are boring anyway) and orr, now that it is a farmland (boring too imo).

so, dungeons are allright and levelling up in zones is also free of culling! (aside when you arrive in farmland cursed bore full of players, i mean “risen” farmers, but i can deal with that, its only one zone for them, im happy they are confined there)

I definitely have noticed culling got a lot worse since the last update that was supposed to make things better…:(

oh, so that’s what changed.
I have a nice computer, so I’ve never had any rendering issues even on max settings (fps drops to a low of 15 in the most intense wvw battles).
but lately I’ve noticed I’m not seeing as many characters on the screen. in high density areas (such as claw of jormag battles), I used to see nearly everyone – a lot of them, across the entire distance of visibility. now, it only shows something like the 30 closest people (and mobs). and the fps have the same decrease!
it’s really funny to watch the stream of people running back from the chest. reminds me of /Mostly Harmless/ (sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), where there is a regular stampede of animals that appear out of nowhere, run a short distance, then disappear into nowhere.

Culling is noticeably worse for me now than before. I’ve begun using lower pop worlds for Orr so that I can actually see what’s happening during an event.

I haven’t played WvW since the patch, but I can tell you that in open world PvE culling is far, far worse after the patch. Prior to the patch it was episodic outside WvW—a minor annoyance. Post-patch it borders on gamebreaking. Given the nature of culling, I didn’t think I was alone experiencing it and I asked in map chat in a few times whether others were having a problem with it. Everyone was experiencing culling. Orr is probably the worst. Prior to the patch I don’t remember it happening with any regularity but now it’s constant. It would be nice if Anet addressed what went wrong and when we can have a playable game.

Since the changes, invisible zergs still pop out of nowhere, and people still take ~3 seconds to render after leaving stealth.

In addition, friendly players and mobs now get culled into oblivion at even semi-crowded events.

Survey says: fail.

ArenaNet, I realize that there are more culling changes in the pipe that are supposed to make it ‘better’, but given the recent changes, I’m not sure ‘better’ means the same thing to you as it does to me.

Whatever process or metrics told you guys this latest version was ‘better’ should be considered highly suspect at this point.

Farming orr is where I see the issue. I never had it as a problem until the Jan patch.

The forum monster ate my longer reply.

I’ll shorten it.

GW2 uses Umbra middleware for visual and sound culling. I had zero culling issues during beta with Umbra turned off via the shortcut command line. If Umbra can’t be brought to heal, maybe it’s time to cut their losses and refine their in house culling routines, rather than trying to make something work that just doesn’t want to.

From a comment on a youtube vid showing culling issues:

this is the limit they put on umbra to keep perf reasonable on lower end systems(from what ir ead its 30players on the screen at once max the rest dont get rendered)
the problem apparently is that umbra is running on the cpu due to some issues with the gpu version, umbra? is blaming nvidia/amd/intel and expecting them to make their drivers work with the gpu code they already made, rather then fixing their code to work properly(not hang up and cause poor fps) with current drivers……

Its been said numerous times, the new culling sucked the first time and it still sucks now. Yet they haven’t ditched it … I sometimes wonder if Anet plays their own game.

critickitten.1498:

It was recently stated by the developers that the progress they have made towards getting rid of culling make them optimistic that they could possibly get rid of it by the end of the year.

Am I the only person who doesn’t see this happening?

culling WILL have fixed ‘itself’ by the end of the year due to lack of players to cull in the first place imho. if enough people give up on w3, the problem is fixed from the pov from Anet i guess.

Wryscher.1432:

I try ro be positive. The said the models were for rendering on lower tier machines, nothing to do with culling. They also said the change back to what they tested early was the first step.
So i am hoping they knew it was a bad first step but maybe ine that had to be put in for the long term so they could move forward.

Fingers crossed.

Habib Loew.6239:

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.)

Until all three of those issues have been dealt with we can’t turn culling off because doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.

Issue #1 WAS (why past tense?) the easiest to deal with because we can basically just throw money at the problem. When we first started down the road toward removing culling from WvW I took a bunch of bandwidth measurements and then went to the executives and said, essentially, “Hey, if we disable culling OUR network traffic will increase by X%. Are we ok with that?”. The answer I got was a clear and unambiguous “yes!” So issue #1 isn’t a problem after all.

issue # 1 .. we are waiting… still. most of my guildies patience ran out … long ago and they quit.

issue # 2 is an … not-truth. requirements on the box say broadband. the actually data flow in the client is low enough to make it possible on a 56k analogue modem.

issue # 3 … that’s why you have graphics settings client side that you can change (not nearly enough, but hey).

Vavume.8065:

wildcode.5403:

Vavume.8065:

It has become far far worse than it was before, in both wvw and places like Lions Arch.

This culling issue can also be seen in dynamic events with large mobs, half the time you do not see the mob until they are on top of you.

Yeah, I just made 2 examples, the game is plagued with it. It feels like the only safe places away from culling is in dungeons now.

Actually, I had culling in AC the other day. Two scavengers disappeared from my sight and then reappeared on top of me. Same thing with the party members sometimes. Meaning nowhere is safe.

Culling is way worse than before the patch.

I’ve said it before & I’ll say it again, culling should just be removed from the game. As Fiontar mentioned, it can be turned off. So for the love of all that is good, just do it already. The fact that GW2 can’t get something as essential as being able to see friend & foe correctly is embarrassing. The only other game I can think of with rendering issues this bad is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

I understand they are trying to help out people with lower systems, but that is why the graphic options panel exists. Heck, most of the time when my framerate hits the gutter, it’s because of the fountain of particle effects on screen before any models render. So how does culling even remotely begin to help that?

It’s funny to be in a group at a boss battle or wvw and have the ‘charm pet’ appear. when clicked, nothing happens.
I’ve reasoned this happens because you can see the pet but not the owner, so you think it’s available for the charming, then when you try the game says “NO!”

I have said this already before in these forums and my patience is running thin:
Arenanet, please revert back to the original culling immediately!

The new “improved” culling makes the gaming experience much worse.

ANET PLEASE !!!
Give me the option to TURN OFF culling.
just an option, nobodys forced into it, and nobodys adversely affected by it

I mean if you don’t i guarantee somebody will just change the game coding and disable it themselves……

Yes. I still never see thieves when they attack. Due to culling, they remain 100% stealthed.

I’m not at all saying i don’t have problems with culling, i do ! But i don’t have the severe problems others seem to have. Really the only time culling is bad for me is when i stumble on a 40 + man zerg ball. Other than that it’s not that bad for me…

IDK what the answer is or what the problem is but i hope Anet fixes it.

( side note )
I upgraded my CPU and that’s what really made a huge difference for me.

What i hate about this new culling is that it’s more random then before. Sometimes the culling is better then sometimes it’s much worse. When it worse i sometimes see people disappear right in front of my eyes just out of the blue and there is no stealth going on.

I like when I’m chasing 1 guy and he disappears.

I really don’t understand the need for culling.

I’m sorry..it’s 2013…bandwidth is cheap. If you can’t afford the bandwidth so people can see a few dozen or even 100 players on screen at once, something is very wrong with either your bandwidth contract or your finances.

As far as culling so all systems are on the same level, that’s a terrible idea. There’s a reason most games have grahics settings that can be configured on the client side. No reason for people running 2013 computers to be saddled with people fading in and out at random because some people are still using 2004 computers.

I bought the game for the 3-way WvW. Culling makes it nearly impossible to enjoy. If I could get a refund, I would in a heartbeat and never look back.