Guild Wars 2

I’m pretty sure this isn’t so much a bug in the code as it is just an accidental oversight…

If shadows are set to “medium” (or “high”, presumably), you can see your shadow on the ground while you’re falling, which you can then use to determine how long you can wait to deploy your glider so that you don’t splat. However, if you have shadows on “low” (or “none”, presumably), your shadow doesn’t get drawn in the same way, so you don’t have that altitude clue, so you (or at least I) splat a lot more (or deploy too high and overshoot your intended LZ, which can be just as kittenplatting if the terrain is just wrong).

If Anet intends for the occasional splatting to be “just one of the risks in gliding”, that’s fine (I doubt, for instance, that this shadow “trick” would be useful in a cave), but I don’t think that being able to afford faster hardware should give people a “feature-level” advantage like that.