Guild Wars 2

I’m having problems with events in PvE where there are a number of players nearby. I just participated in an event in Wayfarer Hills, with five or six other players. The event was to kill the grawl east of the Grawlenfjord Waypoint as they were trying to reclaim their food sacks.

What I saw was a number of players, and… a few grawl. Two or three grawl at most, and the shamans holding the portal open were invisible. Yet I was being attacked anyway, by invisible grawl. Fun!

The followup event was to kill the winged horror. This monster didn’t appear at all through the event, making it impossible for me to target it. But I got to watch other players fighting it. I got a bronze medal for the event with my warrior, simply because I used a few AoE skills in the general area.

I have not had significant issues with events in other starter regions, so my random speculative guess is that the culling is looking at overall region population rather than the number of players in the immediate area — with the new events, Wayfarer Hills is quite busy. But of course that’s just a guess.

I’ve noticed culling a lot more in pve since the recent changes. Before I would only see during large-scale events with lots of players around (the highly farmed Orr events and dragon champ meta-events), but now I’m seeing in with less crowded events and more often during the larger ones.

Just a few minutes ago, I had an interesting fight with an Alpine Skelk in Frostgorge. It would stealth, attack me while still stealthed, but have a noticable delay before reappearing. I don’t recall them having such a delay in their de-stealthing before. I think it might be culling similar to the widescale compaints of thief stealth culling in wvw.

Since the 1/28 patch I’ve noticed persistent, universal (well, harathi hinterlands, cursed shore) culling issues. I don’t see a natural living world. I see friendlies pop into existence when I’m on top of them and must often infer the presence of enemies by witnessing friendlies beating the air. Pre-patch the problem with culling in open world PvE was episodic and mildly irritating. Post patch it makes the game border on being unplayable, certainly un-enjoyable.

Edit: btw, on TC server.

A couple more bad instances of culling today.

The Champ Risen Abomination just outside of Caer Shadowfain (end of Plinx chain) was up, and I saw a couple people asking for more to kill it. I was in the camp, standing by the wall closest to the event. I hopped up onto the wall to check the situation before jumping into the fight, and what I saw was the champ running around obviously aggro’d onto players but attacking “nothing”. There were only 4 other players there, but I had to jump off the wall and get very close to see them.

The second was in Frostgorge again, near the WP/Heart area northeast of where the Claw event is. I was running south from the WP, back to the road, and jump down from one of the short icy hills. I landed in a ‘clear’ area, but less then a second after I landed a few culled enemies appeared. I continued running from them, and more culled mobs appeared rather close to me as I ran towards the road. This was not the usual load-in/pop-in distance, they were appearing barely outside of attack range. The Claw even was not up when the above happened, and I had seen no large groups of players in the area. There is no reason for those mobs to have been culled.

I’ve seen the same thing with allies several times today. The most noticable was after Tequatl was killed in Sparkfly. Culling would sometimes be noticable with a large number of players, especially when they all rush to the chest, but this effected every player that moved more than (I’m guessing) 1500 units away. As I ran back towards the WP, players were appearing right in my face, instead of the normal several thousand units.

These are new changes since the 1/28 update. Culling has always been there, but it was very minimal in pve. My PC can comfortably run GW2 at max settings, so there is no need for this overly-aggressive culling. Even with a low end PC, having enemies appear already in aggro range (and even already attacking) is not an acceptable trade-off for game performance.

Yes, I’m noticing the monsters in Orr events are bad enough where I don’t see monsters until they die. My “recommended settings” are near-max with my rig, and I even turned it down to best performance… I think it was a little better? It’s hard to tell. Either way, I find it surprising that even the invincible period where they run up isn’t enough time for them to show. :/