Guild Wars 2

Before I continue to slate this game, I can understand precautions and measures in place for obvious technical reasoning but it’s simply not good enough when it comes to biting the bullet.

The loading capabilities (server-side not client-side) with regards WvW in particular where real time strategy and response is… dare I say it fundamental to gameplay poses a serious issue. I would be lying if I said I didn’t experience the issue on every BG session I’ve participated, across several time/location/situations. To varying degrees of affect course.

Let me give some examples:

The Latest and most poignant occurrence happened moments ago causing this very post. Pretty much the entire of our BG was taking down the majority of the opponents keeps and garrisons. While taking the main Garrison together, we reached right to the inner Guards. Right as we all broke through we continued to take down the 3-4 enemies in the surrounding area. After which we started dropping like flies. From my point of view all allies loaded before we were attacked stayed loaded ( i was near the front of the group so only a handful), from this point on no other models of players loaded unless they where dead/downed and even then it was not complete. All enemy players in the keep,* including their name tags did not fully load* Until approximately 30-60 seconds after the initial collision of forces… but i kept taking damage from nontargetable sources.

My point: I can understand its not an often occurrence that this amount of players are collected but in a map where it is statistically possible why cant data be transmitted fast enough for the amount of players present. I dare think of the damage if all three forces met in a centralised location.

So why have this allocated amount of players when the servers clearly cannot handle the processing of such a large amount of throughput necessary to keep all clients up to date? Unless of course there is another issue at play here but the point still stands firm why are players not been given the data necessary to play the game in various situations?

Point of thread, since apparently I must state my intent with everything I do to ensure its not deleted in case I form dumbledores army on the forums (not a dig in the slightest :p <3)

• Discuss any issues you’ve had with the technical limitations of large data loading in WvW

• Input your example situations with numbers, figures and captures where possible.

P.S Apologies if this is the wrong forum but although a technical issue it lies outside of my hands and so figured it would best be placed here, Mods feel free to move it if you feel it should be more appropriately located else where, thanks.

Examples: Every single time I run into a group of 30+ enemies.

Sometimes wondering why the entirety of our force stopped and I’m the only one still running forward, I notice the enemy force only by the time they completely surround me and start popping up all around from every direction. This has been happening from day one, so by now I’m kind of slowly used to that and play the game accordingly, usually tailing behind few selected people who I know can see the enemy force properly.

I run a 10 Mbps connection completely dedicated to GW2 and I maintain all my routers and the local network, so any kind of latency issue is out of question. There is (figuratively) only a single thing that at that moment runs over the network and that is GW2.

I have also reasons to believe that despite you claiming a server-side problem, this problem is actually very much client-side and very CPU bound, but as at this moment I have no relevant data to back it up, only some observations and comparisons, I’m just mentioning it for completeness.

There could well be an issue with the way the client pieces together the data provided by the server assuming it can throw around all the information necessary to all clients present. I’m interested to know what makes you believe its client side, particularly CPU related?

Personally I can run GW on ultra/high/all during WvW and only on select occasions do i see any major issues with FPS drops. I’m running a 60mbs connection here which is more than capable to handle any data. What’s interesting is… There is no drop in Frame rate or lag with abilities… only in rendering capabilities.

hmm which now that you mention it could suggest the clients inability to display all information that actually exists… But i doubt its a factor that lies within our control. i.e written into the processes which display the characters and abilities in game nor related to CPU issues since it appears that a lot of people out of the group experience the issue regardless of set-up?

EDIT: I wonder if its related to the changes they made on the LOD in a recent patch… i’ve only really noticed it after it was changed?

Its a very known issue. The official statement is “working as intended”. And a “viable tactic”. Not to mention "part of the gamign experience.

Issue is called culling. My favourite one is here:

But i believe those quotes are from the answer to the Mesmer skill stealth issue, and not part of the culling/occlusion issue; two separate issues.

"I’m interested to know what makes you believe its client side, particularly CPU related?"

Well, to put it bluntly, it’s an indisputable fact by now that the current client-server implementation is pretty much of a prototype-stage level of quality and that the game has been released way too early and unfinished. There are literally thousands of posts in the tech support section of the forums from people having _major_ performance issues on HW configurations that can easily run latest flagship titles in ultra settings, easily even few at the same time. Yet those people on occasions drop to single digit framerates when playing GW2, which, visually, really isn’t a state of the art technology here. You see more and more exploits popping up each day, people speedhacking, flying, teleporting, bots running in trains in front of everyone’s eyes so we can party like it’s 1997 again - this showing the server will happily accept anything the client sends without much sanity checking. You see, daily, tech support being unable to restore, or even know what kind of stuff people lost due to one of the million of server bugs, because there was clearly no basic journaling and logging put into the place. And that could go on and on...

Now why do I mention all this. Among all the many bugs, I think there is something very seriously flawed in how the current GW2 threading model is implemented. Reading through the "FPS problems" threads, you can see this mostly affects AMD CPUs, especially those that don’t push the raw GHz-per-core performance, even for machines that can otherwise run state of the art game titles flawlessly.

I’m one of the people affected, running GW2 on an older Phenom X3 and another Athlon 64 X2. So it’s easy to see how bottlenecked on CPU the game performance is, while the both GTX 560 Ti 448 and GT 240 basically idle through the game. Comparing this to a last generation AMD Bulldozer running with a budget GT 640 (which is despite the two-generation gap basically only marginally faster to a GT 240), that computer doesn’t exhibit any issues at all. All enemy characters appearing instantly, at any distance, always.

Also other thing to notice is how there are no more issues with the characters that already squeezed through the queue and got displayed once. No performance or network issues, like them getting stuck, disappearing, or jumping from place to place... From that point, everything works as it should. Now let the 30-man party jump through a mesmer portal, *pop*, you instantly lost the game, because you won’t see them rendered for the next half a minute.

My (very simplified, for the sake of readability) guess is that the particular thread or threads that manage character appearance, or at least queueing it, run either completely unmanaged, or at unintentionally low priority to the rest of the game mechanics (you can also see it in the constantly broken sound system how puppied up the entire threading model is). I just assume that a slow CPU makes it more easily observable, but this clearly frequently happens even to many of the still relatively modern CPUs. For some reason, not so much with Intel, based on many reports I’ve read.