Guild Wars 2

King Amadaeus.8619:

Straegen.2938:

I completely disagree. There is no game (that I am aware of) that has complex combat (fields, boon/condi stacks, dodge mechanics, positional damage, etc) that can handle this many players. DAoC is probably the closest and it is more akin to a text based MUD compared to the combat in GW2. Basically no game (that I know of) has rich deep combat and 100+ players running around.

While I understand your sentiment, anyone can design something so overtly powerful that it is not practical in its application. I mean you could probably design a combustion engine so powerful you might not even be able to design a frame to withstand it…But at the end of the day what good is that engine if you cant even use it? Sure its awesome to say “look at this marvel of engineering”, but if it cannot be fully applied then what is the point?

Then the question(s) begs to be answered: Why make the game if it can’t be fully implemented? Why advertise massive open world pvp, then develop an incredibly rich combat system that cannot be implemented on a massive scale?
Why pack maps full of people and handicap all that developer work so that it is even remotely playable?

The answer is simple: Poor planning, poor testing, poor execution.

I’ve tried to make this same point before over the last several months. It seems quite clear that ANet has some very talented people working on various aspects of GW2, but whoever has been making decisions has been doing a HORRIBLE job of synchronizing and coordinating everything to make sure that it all fits together. Why would anyone choose a game engine that was incapable of meeting the design objectives of the content and game play?? Why is there so much disparity and lack of synergy between story lines and game modes?? Why would anyone structure the game design so rigidly that fixes and upgrades brought the resource pool to its knees??

It’s baffling, and you don’t need to know a thing about software design to grasp the failure of integration here.

Now I don’t think a completely uncapped AOE is a great idea as it will just lead to another issue (and this is coming from a necro main). But I have a real issue with the idea that because anets servers and engine are so outdated that we are just supposed to accept that zerg play is the lesser of two evils. So your telling me that individually tracking conditions and an aoe cap of anything more than 5 will be too much stress on the system. But hey…lets keep making content in every facet of the game the shoehorns upwards of 300ppl into a small area….Then expect them to make precise movement and recognize spell cast animations with 150 spell effects brighter than the desert sun all firing off at once. All while getting at best 20 fps because the engine can’t handle the basic gameplay it was apparently designed to incorporate? Sorry I really don’t follow the logic behind any of this.

kailin.4905:

Now I don’t think a completely uncapped AOE is a great idea as it will just lead to another issue (and this is coming from a necro main). But I have a real issue with the idea that because anets servers and engine are so outdated that we are just supposed to accept that zerg play is the lesser of two evils. So your telling me that individually tracking conditions and an aoe cap of anything more than 5 will be too much stress on the system. But hey…lets keep making content in every facet of the game the shoehorns upwards of 300ppl into a small area….Then expect them to make precise movement and recognize spell cast animations with 150 spell effects brighter than the desert sun all firing off at once. All while getting at best 20 fps because the engine can’t handle the basic gameplay it was apparently designed to incorporate? Sorry I really don’t follow the logic behind any of this.

Yeah … I don’t understand that either. If the game engine is too crippled to handle all the people and their associated effects, why keep coming out with content that literally forces lots of people to pool all in the same place??

Totally baffling …

UnknownFreak.2805:

Well the reason for the AoE Cap is due to the number of calculations to do.

…

I didn’t check the math but I share the same sentiment. Complaining about it reminds me of people who complain about traffic. I don’t think they realize they are part of the “traffic” problem. The immediate “fix” to this is pretty simple… stop complaining about it and transfer to a lower tier.

You could raise the AoE cap, and offset performance by lowering the number of other calculations. For example, lets say I increase the AoE cap and then I put a cap on how many enemies retaliation can hit. Or I streamline the way that players are selected to be hit by AoE. How about as the system goes through targets hit by AoE, instead of using RNG to select them it simply hits each player sequentially until it hits the cap. Server performance already falls greatly when two 40 man zergs collide. Consider this: Currently, the server performs 40 AoE attack calculations on 5 targets over and over for a 20 second fight with bad lag. If the AoE cap was raised, you would have 40 calculations on 10 targets over and over for 2 seconds with really, really, bad lag, until the server catches up, and look, the stack of people are all dead. Now, for all fights in the future, players avoid stacking unless they have no choice, like for a choke point which they try to pass through as quickly as possible. Less people standing in AoE, better performance. Any time you change the game to encourage more stacking, you are just adding more people to those two crashing, epileptic death blobs, which just serves to reduce performance further. If Arenanet could find a way to eliminate stacking as a viable option, WvW would be improved by leaps and bounds. The ruins were a fantastic idea to move the game towards less zerging. Hit the problem at its source. Make people spread out.

Cactus.2710:

I’ve tried to make this same point before over the last several months. It seems quite clear that ANet has some very talented people working on various aspects of GW2, but whoever has been making decisions has been doing a HORRIBLE job of synchronizing and coordinating everything to make sure that it all fits together. Why would anyone choose a game engine that was incapable of meeting the design objectives of the content and game play?? Why is there so much disparity and lack of synergy between story lines and game modes?? Why would anyone structure the game design so rigidly that fixes and upgrades brought the resource pool to its knees??

It’s baffling, and you don’t need to know a thing about software design to grasp the failure of integration here.

I’ve been saying something similar for a long time, their project management of the game as a whole is really really poor.

I love all these posts about “well anet just upgrade your hardware” I’m so glad you guys are offering to pay for it.

King Amadaeus.8619:

And I will say again:

It is utter BS that if 7 people attack me I can only hit 5 of them at a time, whilst all 7 of them can all hit me at once….

While I completely understand that the AoE cap “is needed so your servers don’t implode”, there is also no question that it gives a noticeable advantage beyond that of just having more people.

What I am saying is: If I can only hit 5 people at once, why in the world can more than 5 (five) hit me at once?

Easy answer: you can hit all 7 of them at once. What you can’t do, is hit all 7 of them with one skill. Drop 2 AoE skills, and you’re fine.

Actually, not even that. If your AoE skill pulses (or otherwise hits multiple times, like Meteor Storm), you can hit all seven with 1 skill – you just can’t hit all 7 with 1 pulse.

Maximillian Greil.1965:

I love all these posts about “well anet just upgrade your hardware” I’m so glad you guys are offering to pay for it.

Actually isn’t it kind of expected that a share of the money from box sales and more-so in game purchases will go towards served upgrades and maintenance. So in a way we are offering to pay for it. Still it seems to me like they started developing this game 6 years ago now and never really kept up with the current tech during that time resulting in a game that is using outdated tech at release. I mean really….DX9. Terrible thread optimization for multiple cores. Even the amount of culling at release makes me wonder if it was put there just because they knew how bad the engine performed and had to find a way to pad fps so they wouldn’t be torn apart by the community. They had to know that if you make content putting hundreds of ppl in an area pvping that players would kinda wanna see who was killing them. I know when they started answering questions with “our server/engine can’t handle the calculations for that” it threw up a huge red flag for me. A lot of the things they are saying this about are standard fare in mmos of this generation. Even in the f2p ones. I do think the devs themselves are REALLY trying to work with what they are give, but the corporate machine has a lot of influence in how this is playing out.

Remember that the AoE cap doesn’t just impact offensive skills, it also affects support abilities.

For example, if you have a group of five vs a group of ten, obviously the advantage is with the group of ten, BUT:

Assuming the group of five has one player built for group support, the group of five is going to see much better and more reliable support from that player, because they know that all five of them are going to get ALL of the support in all cases.

No matter how many supportive players the group of ten has, it is always an unknown whether the player that actually needs the support is going to receive it, because you have ten people randomly selected for five effects (per skill). As the game is right now, that group of ten needs at least two, if not three, supportive players to make sure they’re applying enough support for the entire group.

[side note: This issue with the ten-man group will no longer be the case for Elementalists in the upcoming patch, since our buffs will prioritize party members. I’m not sure if that change will also affect other classes’ support abilities. Hopefully it will.]

If the AoE cap was removed, one supportive player could easily support an entire zerg. Take Healing Rain + Cleansing Water, for example. You could have one supportive elementalist traited properly, place a Healing Rain and mass remove conditions and heal 50 or more people simultaneously with one skill. That doesn’t even take into account the combo finishers that could be used with the same field. It wouldn’t matter if the smaller group could do more DPS due to the AoE cap being removed, because support would receive the same benefit.

At some point, it would just spiral out of control as to how many players each skill could potentially affect. I would much prefer limits on skills with decent server performance (esp considering how bad lag is as the game is right now anyway).

Honestly, I’m not sure if removing the AoE cap would be good or bad.