Guild Wars 2

Since about 9/1, I and others have been experiencing a frustrating problem both in PvE and in WvWvW: The occurrence of “pop-in”, in which large numbers of mobs or player characters suddenly appear out of nowhere after they’re well within draw distance range.

For example: In PvE, I went into a cave/tunnel near what was apparently an in-progress DE. The cave was empty, or so I thought. I was suddenly and inexplicably dead, in an empty cave. Then, about a second after I died, 10-15 mobs popped into existence right next to me. Clearly, they already existed, but were not visible on my screen.

Another common example is during WvWvW: Enemy players will appear out of nowhere, long after they should have been visible and well within draw distance range and attack range for both myself and the enemy. NOTE: I’m aware of the mesmer ability to make players invisible, and this is NOT the case here. In those cases, the players all appear at once, and are grouped tightly together near the Mesmer. In the cases I’m describing, it’s individual players, well spread out across (for example) the base of a garrison wall.

This is not a network issue: My latency, which I monitor routinely, is in the tens of milliseconds, with no packet loss. Nor is it a problem with my computer. It is quite well over-spec for this game:

Intel Core i7-2600 Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.8GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core
ASUS SABERTOOTH P67 (REV 3.0) LGA 1155
SPARKLE Calibre Series X580 GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 1536MB 384-bit GDDR5
CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 × 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600 (PC3 12800) CMZ8GX3M2A1600C8
2x Crucial M4 CT128M4SSD2CCA 2.5" 128GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
2x WD Raptor 10kRPM 74GB SATA HDD w/Vantec EZ-Drive racks
SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" HDD
CORSAIR Professional Series HX850 (CMPSU-850HX) 850W PSU
RAIDMAX SMILODON Extreme Black ATX-612WEB 1.0mm SECC Steel ATX Mid Tower Foldout MB
Windows 7 Home 64-bit

I am running the latest beta nVidia driver as recommended by ArenaNet, and have been since before pre-purchase head start. However, this problem didn’t start occurring until the morning of 9/1, after the 8/31 midnight Pacific server patch.

I’ve tried setting draw distance to maximum, medium, and low, with no change in the problem.

This type of character “pop-in” has been seen in other MMOs in the past, and was usually the result of an attempt by the developers to optimize framerate or similar performance characteristics for lower-end player systems. There was a period in vanilla WoW that was notorious for this, and they ultimately reverted the change because players were getting killed by “invisible” mobs in PvE.

I can attest to essentially having the same problems as the OP, but mine seem to occur more in towns (mine also include objects like wall and floor decorations and crafting stations popping up suddenly)

Just yesterday I was defending SMC in Eternal Battlegrounds and only saw a couple enemy players attacking one of the gates, so I did what any good guardian would do, I jumped down so I could get them nice and grouped up for our other players. Then I hit the ground, took less than a tenth of my health in fall damage and was almost instantly downed. About 2-3 seconds after I was downed, dozens of enemy players suddenly appeared on top of me just in time to finish me off.

General specs:

Intel C2Q Q9450 @ 2.66 GHZ
4GB DDR2 800
ATI HD6870 1GB

I am having the same issue, although it’s infrequent for me. It doesn’t always happen but when it does it’s extremely annoying. For instance in AC Explorable during the part where you have to operate traps to kill the mobs rushing Detha, huge packs of them would pop out of nowhere before I could trigger the trap. Also in WvW it’s VERY annoying, i’ll be travelling somewhere and then a huge horde of people will appear in front of me and i’ll be unable to turn and run.

M18XR2 (sponsored by GW2 ironically lol)
Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Intel i7-3720QM CPU
16GB DDR3 RAM
Dual 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7970M CrossFireX
512GB SSD SATA 6Gb/s

I have Dx11 and fully updated drivers. Playing around with graphics settings hasn’t done much of anything :/ And I don’t recall this problem in Beta.

Also have this problem. Happens in PVE at crowded Dynamic Events, or generally in W3 at towers or anytime there is a large number of people. It’s very frustrating since I can’t target people.

Win7 64-bit
12gb Ram
ATI 5870 x2, 12.8 Drivers

This happens to me on a regular basis in WvW and in crowded dynamic events also. It makes the game less enjoyable having to deal with invisible enemies.

Win7 64-bit
i5-2500k
16gb ddr3
Radeon HD 6970 driver version 12.8

Happening to me in most towns and out in the world as well.

Intel Core i5 3570K
ASUS Maximus V Extreme Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 16GB (4×4GB) DDR3
Corsair Hydro Series H100 CPU Cooler
ASUS GeForce GTX 690 4GB
Intel 520 Series 240GB SSD
Western Digital WD Green 3TB WD30EZRX
Corsair AX750 Gold Power Supply

Got the same problem.
Sometimes, players won’t appear at all (tested during a 15 min siege with LOD low-high) but I will still be able to see their shots and effects.

Intel i5 3750k
Gigabyte z77
AMD 5970
8GB ddr3

Happens A LOT in towns and WvW but also when I’m just out in the open.

Hello,

Same here, i5 3570k and GTX 560ti.

This happens to a lot of member of my guild (30+) and it is quite gamebreaking in the sense that you are never able to say how many enemies attack you, them being not rendered.

Once they render, then our allies/other enemies then turn invisible (not instant, rather after being a X distance)

Has to be fixed, please Anet please.

Yeah same problem here, with an i5 2500k and an HD6950, 8gm ram. Looks like the render of the players is too slow, sometimes in W3 I run into enemy zergs because I couldn’t see 90-95% of them

A funny moment with my guild, speaking on the mic I said somethin like “ok guys, there is just a put enemy server name here explorer here” then suddenly it happeared a zerg of 50-60 players just next to him and I was like “OMG LOLOLOL sound the retreat”

I’ve had the same happen, but it hasn’t been that bad for me (so far at least).

Oh man I thought this was just an AMD video problem initially

@InterSlayer: Nope, it would seem to be independent of the videocard type. It’s definitely some tweak ArenaNet made recently, probably in an attempt to improve performance..

I’m hoping we will get some feedback on this issue. If not, perhaps it should be moved to the tec support forum, even though I truly believe it to be a game bug.

I’m pretty sure what you are seeing is a feature. Not a feature made to please us, but a feature made to remove strain from the servers.

Remember, the server has to tell each player where every other player is. A formidable task if the “player view distance” is far. So I’m guessing that when an area is overloaded, the server turns our “player view distance”-knob all the way down – to save bandwidth and cpu time.

Ps. I don’t like it either. It’s not very immersive, and I’m hoping they can optimize it so we can get a better view distance.

It’s not just an issue of immersion: It causes death in PvE from mobs we can’t see, and makes things like WvWvW almost unplayable because we can’t accurately assess the number of enemy present.

For example, jump down off a wall into the battle when you see your team against the wall and only 2-3 enemy fighting them. Only to discover just before you die that there are not 2-3 enemy there, but instead 20-30. Not out of LOD range, but right there next to you; they just weren’t being drawn.

you think having 3 faction was a bad idea ? yes we have big map but seriously we need sto stop this zerg we need portals point ot divide the 4 map so that only ONLY 50 ppl can play on that map. so that what 150X4= 600 player at max can access to the total amount and place a smaller server that connect to the other smaller server as connector. Oh and reducing the Npc we don’t even need such as crafter one And leaver one repair one of each in a spot so that it doesnt strains the rendering properties. oh and get rid of banker guild bank guild registers. I feel like the Game they built was too far advance for the technology we have at the moment. on another logic that they wanna consider that if u have war going on you dont normally have animal sticking around to say hey what up they do actully run since you have a stampede of 100s of player most of the time animal will run in fear of that earthquake sense.

The point is that the developers changed something on 9/1 that adversely impacted the number of mobs or players on screen at one time even though they’re well within LOD.

This change makes it very difficult to play PvE or WvWvW.

Thanks for your input, Dragoon, but this is a thread about a very specific bug, not about suggestions for changes to WvWvW.

If this was done to increase performance, please introduce a slider in the preferences were we can set to higher values if we so desire. Many have high-end machines that are well capaple of handling huge amount of players.

Just to add my voice. In town/pve etc it’s a non-issue, but in WvWvW it’s a killer, literally.

phooka.4295:

If this was done to increase performance, please introduce a slider in the preferences were we can set to higher values if we so desire. Many have high-end machines that are well capaple of handling huge amount of players.

It not an issue of client side performance. It’s server performance. Servers doesn’t have infinite cpu power.

The one place you can always see this happen is the ‘defend the bridge from centaurs’ dynamic event in kessex hills. It doesn’t seem to matter how few players are there, the vast majority of the attacking centaurs don’t draw – only a few in a tight bubble around you draw. you’ll move over a few feet and a new legion of centaurs will be drawn, most of whom will fall over in the death animation and be dead. Meanwhile the ones you COULD see a now gone.

this problem seems to go away once all the players are no longer fighting and flinging spell effects everywhere.

I have an nvdia geforce 560ti so it’s not like I have a terrible video card.

I started noticing this last night. It was never a problem for me until then.

I have also noticed you can always replicate this issue in the ’defend the bridge from centaurs" event in Kessex Hills.

This bug is particularly annoying and sometimes downright dangerous to my character’s health.

Atraleos.5849:

I have also noticed you can always replicate this issue in the ’defend the bridge from centaurs" event in Kessex Hills.

This bug is particularly annoying and sometimes downright dangerous to my character’s health.

This is actually where I noticed the bug. I never saw it anywhere else, but since that was what I was doing for the last portion of my play-time yesterday I didn’t realize or consider it might be specific to that area.

Always happens when there’s a lot of enemies on the screen in WvW for me.. I see a keep getting attacked, but only see 4 or 5 enemies, the other 50 are invisible.. Makes an interesting death.

I agree something must be done to fix this, its way to short the draw distance as it is currently. Add a slider to max it out more. At the moment i see npc popping up 10 meter s from me

phooka.4295:

If this was done to increase performance, please introduce a slider in the preferences were we can set to higher values if we so desire. Many have high-end machines that are well capaple of handling huge amount of players.

SIGNED

it’s lag. you don’t want to hear that, but that’s what it is. i’ve had it happen 2 or 3 times, but it was an obvious lag spike.

the people who will disagree think that FPS drop is lag.

but it’s lag

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

it’s lag. you don’t want to hear that, but that’s what it is. i’ve had it happen 2 or 3 times, but it was an obvious lag spike.

the people who will disagree think that FPS drop is lag.

but it’s lag

You’re wrong. It’s not lag. If it were lag my abilities wouldn’t hit visible enemies as soon as I cast them.

I too experience this issue.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit
AMD 6870 1Gb GPU
i5-750 Stock speed CPU
4Gb DDR3 RAM

A long with a lot of other bugs this needs to be addressed ASAP. I’ve tried turning my settings to their lowest with everything disabled and still i’ve experienced these pop-in’s. There’s not much difference for me in performance with maxed settings and lowest settings. In WvWvW it’s all the same but playable.

It’s not lag, and my FPS is routinely in the 60-80fps range, including in situations where it’s occurring.

It’s a common attempt by MMO developers to try to alleviate server load, and it almost always gets reverted because of the gameplay problems it causes.

I’m so gald its not just me haveing this problem as it REALLY annoying me to the point I quit playing 30 mins ago due to this very problem. I attack a one mob thats seemingly alone only to get mobed by a the large number that where there but I could’nt see. This is much worse underwater as showen in the pic link below

GTX 570 1280MB
I7 2700k @ 3.7Ghz
16G DDR3.

heres a pic of what I mean http://img111.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=05280_gw018_122_1lo.jpg

There actually appear to be several threads on this issue, none of which have any official response. Here is one:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Invisible-non-rendered-people/first#post54277

I’ll try to keep the list updated.

EDIT:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/draw-distance-for-players-npc-s/first#post47356

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/NPC-Players-appearing-out-of-thin-air/first#post47329

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Too-many-players-on-screen-players-not-appearing/first#post14828

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/WvW-Enemies-Not-Displaying-Until-In-Close-Proximity/first#post6297

EDIT: Yet another thread on the issue: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Invisible-enemies-and-players-during-PvE

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Disappearing-players-in-WvW/first#post58844

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/massive-encounters-fighting-ghosts-in-EU-servers/first#post58717

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/WvW-new-mechanics-causing-lag (the second half of this post — the part NOT about lag — deals with this “pop-in” problem)

EDIT: Even more:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Randomly-loading-in-players-when-near-them-this-is-ruining-WVW/first#post79599

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Culling-in-WvWvW

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/ArenaNet-can-we-talk-invisible-players-in-WvWvW

AND STILL MORE:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Clipping-makes-WvW-bad/first#post87737

Yet another thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/reduced-SFX-in-WvW-please

Kratuln.9608:

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

it’s lag. you don’t want to hear that, but that’s what it is. i’ve had it happen 2 or 3 times, but it was an obvious lag spike.

the people who will disagree think that FPS drop is lag.

but it’s lag

You’re wrong. It’s not lag. If it were lag my abilities wouldn’t hit visible enemies as soon as I cast them.

I too experience this issue.

Windows 7 Home Premium 64Bit
AMD 6870 1Gb GPU
i5-750 Stock speed CPU
4Gb DDR3 RAM

A long with a lot of other bugs this needs to be addressed ASAP. I’ve tried turning my settings to their lowest with everything disabled and still i’ve experienced these pop-in’s. There’s not much difference for me in performance with maxed settings and lowest settings. In WvWvW it’s all the same but playable.

it’s lag. your settings affect framerate/fps, you do not understand the difference in lag and fps drop. if it takes an extra .3 seconds to send info to the server and get info back, you’ll notice that everything seems to stop for a second. that lag feels like time freezes a second, it’s not when you turn fast and the game gets choppy, that’s fps drop

i saw it again today and then lagged out and died because while on my screen nothing was going on, on the game’s server the wolves ate me

it’s lag. seen it in every MMORPG i’ve ever played.

mcl.9240:

It’s not lag, and my FPS is routinely in the 60-80fps range, including in situations where it’s occurring.

It’s a common attempt by MMO developers to try to alleviate server load, and it almost always gets reverted because of the gameplay problems it causes.

lag has NOTHING to do with framerate

NOTHING AT ALL

this is why i know it’s lag, because most people have no clue what lag is. if there is a delay in how long it takes information from the game server to reach you, the game is still going on but on your screen you may be standing there staring at a mob that is standing there too

or you may walk into a zone that hasn’t rendered on your screen yet because the information to render it hasn’t made it to you, but the information from you to the server

fps has nothing to do with lag whatsoever

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

mcl.9240:

It’s not lag, and my FPS is routinely in the 60-80fps range, including in situations where it’s occurring.

It’s a common attempt by MMO developers to try to alleviate server load, and it almost always gets reverted because of the gameplay problems it causes.

lag has NOTHING to do with framerate

NOTHING AT ALL

this is why i know it’s lag, because most people have no clue what lag is. if there is a delay in how long it takes information from the game server to reach you, the game is still going on but on your screen you may be standing there staring at a mob that is standing there too

or you may walk into a zone that hasn’t rendered on your screen yet because the information to render it hasn’t made it to you, but the information from you to the server

fps has nothing to do with lag whatsoever

I realize that. You said “people who disagree will think it’s FPS”. I don’t think it’s FPS, and I was pointing out that, in fact, my FPS is fine. The direct quote of you is:

“it’s lag. you don’t want to hear that, but that’s what it is. i’ve had it happen 2 or 3 times, but it was an obvious lag spike.

the people who will disagree think that FPS drop is lag."

However, I disagree that it’s lag, and I do not think that FPS drop is lag, nor do I have a problem with FPS (i.e., I’m not even suffering from FPS drop). As I stated in my OP, I routinely monitor my packet RTT to various sites. It is always in the tens of milliseconds.

However, feel free to continue to insist it’s lag. Nobody else in this thread is having lag-related problems, nor in the other 5 threads related to this exact problem. It hasn’t been lag-related in any other game that has instituted this SERVER-SIDE ATTEMPT TO OPTIMIZE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE FOR CUSTOMERS…which is exactly what this particular problem happens to be. It’s a poor optimization and needs to be reverted because it has detrimental effects on play.

I’m sorry you keep getting disconnected due to lag, but this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with lag. I suggest you post a separate thread, in the Tech Support forum, to get help with your networking problems.

To be excruciatingly clear: None of us are seeing “freezes” of the players or graphics in the game, but you are. None of us are experiencing lag spikes or getting disconnected due to lag, but you are. All of us are discussing an issue that’s entirely different from the one you’re experiencing. You are unfortunately not understanding the problem I and the rest of us are discussing, and you are — for some reason — insisting on shoehorning the issue we’re discussing into the problem you’re having.

here is what is happening and it’s simple. you’re moving forward from a safe area with no/dead mobs, you only render so far ahead when it comes to npcs, but you keep going and since nothing is around, you aren’t gonna notice it because the landscape HAS been rendered. the “pop in” that you’re seeing isn’t like when your graphics settings are up too high and it renders them later than it should, or they’re low and draw closer to you than they do when on high, this pop in is all the NPC/mob data being fed to you at the same time after a brief period of nothing due to the lag spike.

the best i can tell, guild wars will even draw NPCs in the distance and then it will assign more data as you get closer, which is why you can see NPCs with high settings but can’t target them yet. it’s a way to make the world look better without sacrificing what is in the distance because that is very noticeable and annoying.

mcl.9240:

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

mcl.9240:

It’s not lag, and my FPS is routinely in the 60-80fps range, including in situations where it’s occurring.

It’s a common attempt by MMO developers to try to alleviate server load, and it almost always gets reverted because of the gameplay problems it causes.

lag has NOTHING to do with framerate

NOTHING AT ALL

this is why i know it’s lag, because most people have no clue what lag is. if there is a delay in how long it takes information from the game server to reach you, the game is still going on but on your screen you may be standing there staring at a mob that is standing there too

or you may walk into a zone that hasn’t rendered on your screen yet because the information to render it hasn’t made it to you, but the information from you to the server

fps has nothing to do with lag whatsoever

I realize that. You said “people who disagree will think it’s FPS”. I don’t think it’s FPS, and I was pointing out that, in fact, my FPS is fine.

However, I disagree that it’s lag. As I stated in my OP, I routinely monitor my packet RTT to various sites. It is always in the tens of milliseconds.

However, feel free to continue to insist it’s lag. Nobody else in this thread is having lag-related problems, nor in the other 4-5 threads related to this exact problem. It hasn’t been lag-related in any other game that has instituted this SERVER-SIDE ATTEMPT TO OPTIMIZE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE FOR CUSTOMERS…which is exactly what this particular problem happens to be. It’s a poor optimization and needs to be reverted because it has detrimental effects on play.

I’m sorry you keep getting disconnected due to lag, but this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with lag. I suggest you post a separate thread, in the Tech Support forum, to get help with your networking problems.

your reply even mentioned FPS. if you knew what lag was, you’d never bring up FPS to “prove it’s not lag”

i’d appreciate it if you’d just get whatever last word you wanna get and then move on, you’re wrong, me and you both know it, now we can move on

this is a network issue. i’m sure they know about it. i’m sure they’ll fix it. that’s why they haven’t touched it because they’re way ahead of that point.

it’s not even a bug

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

mcl.9240:

Sulmith Greysin.5124:

mcl.9240:

It’s not lag, and my FPS is routinely in the 60-80fps range, including in situations where it’s occurring.

It’s a common attempt by MMO developers to try to alleviate server load, and it almost always gets reverted because of the gameplay problems it causes.

lag has NOTHING to do with framerate

NOTHING AT ALL

this is why i know it’s lag, because most people have no clue what lag is. if there is a delay in how long it takes information from the game server to reach you, the game is still going on but on your screen you may be standing there staring at a mob that is standing there too

or you may walk into a zone that hasn’t rendered on your screen yet because the information to render it hasn’t made it to you, but the information from you to the server

fps has nothing to do with lag whatsoever

I realize that. You said “people who disagree will think it’s FPS”. I don’t think it’s FPS, and I was pointing out that, in fact, my FPS is fine.

However, I disagree that it’s lag. As I stated in my OP, I routinely monitor my packet RTT to various sites. It is always in the tens of milliseconds.

However, feel free to continue to insist it’s lag. Nobody else in this thread is having lag-related problems, nor in the other 4-5 threads related to this exact problem. It hasn’t been lag-related in any other game that has instituted this SERVER-SIDE ATTEMPT TO OPTIMIZE GRAPHICS PERFORMANCE FOR CUSTOMERS…which is exactly what this particular problem happens to be. It’s a poor optimization and needs to be reverted because it has detrimental effects on play.

I’m sorry you keep getting disconnected due to lag, but this thread has nothing whatsoever to do with lag. I suggest you post a separate thread, in the Tech Support forum, to get help with your networking problems.

your reply even mentioned FPS. if you knew what lag was, you’d never bring up FPS to “prove it’s not lag”

i’d appreciate it if you’d just get whatever last word you wanna get and then move on, you’re wrong, me and you both know it, now we can move on

this is a network issue. i’m sure they know about it. i’m sure they’ll fix it. that’s why they haven’t touched it because they’re way ahead of that point.

it’s not even a bug

My reply mentioned FPS because you pre-emptively decided that anyone who disagreed with your answer that the problem was lag-related would think lag has something to do with an FPS drop.

At this point your responses are counterproductive to this discussion, and I’d politely and respectfully ask that you post in the appropriate forum (the Tech Support forum) to get assistance with your networking problem. There is no network-related problem being discussed in this thread.

Please fix this issue. It makes being an underdog server in WvW be even more brutal when a large portion of the enemy forces are invisible to you until you are at point blank range. It completely ruins the ability to scout and thus engage in asymmetrical warfare tactics when you cannot see accurately where the enemy is and their numbers.

GHOSTING*

was okay til one of the builds went live some time last week… now it happens in WvW(mostly) and in crowded areas like LA

how are we supposed to WvW when you can’t see any targets

I started topic about this issue (mcl pasted in his updated post) and I want to add few things:

1. I don’t have any network problem. No lags, no dc, no long logins.
2. I don’t have this problem in PvE or at least I didn’t noticed it.
3. In most cases it work in a way that group of our world kills something that is invisible whole time. Players from other world doesn’t “pop-in”. They mostly stay invisible until they die.
4. If it was normal lag then if I would stand long enough right beside fight everyone should appear. But it’s not working this way. I’ve tested this because there was some fight and I didn’t know whats going on, why my world is fighting with air. So I stood there for a while.

I’ve added yet more threads about this same problem to the post above. Hopefully someone from ArenaNet will at least acknowledge that this is a problem soon. Including this thread, there are at least 11 threads about this problem posted so far.

Over the last few days, this has been getting worse and worse, last night i dropped dead (of a heart attack i thought initially :P) and had four centaurs decloak three seconds later!

A response from Anet please?

Players that are clipped out should have placeholder graphic that is not hardware intensive take their place.

This placeholder indicator should be selectable and attackable.

This should have been in the game from launch.

This!

It’s really annoying and kind of a game flaw if you want to help allies or want to fight enemies, but you can’t, just because of the fact you you don’t even see them!

No matter if in WvW or PvE, I experienced such things quite often.
I remember for example one case in PvE in a boss event in the starting zone of the Sylvarie… I saw the boss on the mini-map, but not in the world. I saw arrows and fireballs flying at his position, but that was all…
Couldn’t participate in it because of that. And as said, that was just an example…

Getting killed by players in WvW that you didn’t see or just too late because of such systems isn’t better at all! That’s a no-go!

I wonder, does the client downscale/upscale rendered objects on the screen depending on PC hardware?

I have some marginal evidence that it does upscale:

Yesterday I was in a massive raid with my guild. Our gang was so big that mobs would not come on screen for me as well of many others but some people (like guild leader) was saying that there are mobs all over the place around us, we just can’t see them and told us to AoE all around. Low-and-behold some time later lots of mob dead bodies started appearing.

From this incident I can garner that some PCs are able to render more objects on screen (as our guild leader was able to see the mobs).

I decided to alt+tab our of the game and overclock my GPUs from 857 Mhz -> 900Mhz. Some more mobs started appearing on my screen(not all), ALTHOUGH this might be because some of the people in our guild group had left by this time.

Note that I don’t have a bad PC, specs:
Intel 3960X Sandybridge-E Hexacore processor
Asus Rampage IV Formula x79 Motherboard
x2 GTX 580 Graphic cards in SLI
32 GB RAM

This has happened since one of the patches to “fix” performance after the main release and I think its just some artificial limit that was placed on the number of characters/npcs/mobs being able to be rendered at a time in that patch update. After all less things being able to be rendered at a time = better performance.

It really does need to be either modified, be able to be modifed, or outright removed since it interferes so much with the gameplay in highly populated events and areas.

I’m rather hoping ArenaNet can address this. We’re up to at least 14 separate threads on this problem; it’s clearly affecting a large number of people both in PvE and WvWvW.

Two weeks without an acknowledgment of this problem.

This is really problematic. Ran into it last night when we were assaulting a garrison. Got the gates down, rushed into the keep, slaughtered the lord….

…why are we all dying in this room where there aren’t any enemies? Map chatter: “How are they waypointing in?” “WTF just happened?” “Who’s killing us?”

I’m not going to call it an exploit, because it’s just a mass of defenders trying to defend — but when you get to the point where you cannot defend yourself because you cannot see any enemies at all, it’s not playable. Granted, we may have been killed by overwhelming forces anyway, but it would have been so much better to say, “Oh, wow, that’s a whole lot of enemies!” instead of just being easy/free kills with no ability to target our attackers.

I don’t know what they can do to fix it, but any solution that grants invisibility to enemies should be treated as a bug, not a feature, because it adversely effects users and is not the intent. The intent is smooth FPS, not ‘unplayable situation’. At least let me choose if I want my system to chug at 5 FPS, instead of looking beautifuly unplayable.

I know you guys are getting slammed, but please, Anet, this is a huge, huge issue — can you give us some acknowledgement that you understand that this is a problem and that you’re working on it? Otherwise, I’m afraid to WvWvW, because I never know when it’s going to pop up. And I’m pretty sure that’s not your intent. As it is, it turns the monthly into a chore instead of being fun, because it turns into trying to find a lone guy to 1v1, or a small group to zerg with a larger group, because there’s just nothing you can do against enemies you can’t see.