I have played multi user games on the internet for more than 20 years. I am used to playing multi player games on servers around the world, and I am used to playing with ping 10 and ping 240.
I have never played an online multi user game that suffers from the performance issues that I have encountered in GW2 WvW.
I don’t know where to start, because there are so many issues, so I will just go ahead and list my issues in a random order. I will probably forget to list half of them, but I am just so irritated right now, especially because I tried to bug report this ingame, but the game kept shutting down (updates/new build) with not enough warning. So all my typing was in vain. And btw, the bug reporting edit widget is bugged – and I reported this multiple times, and it is still bugged – but let’s safe that one for another time.
Performace issues / bugs in WvW:
1) When many players are in the same are, my frames per second drops to 1-6 fps. This is the most annoying issue. Why can’t I turn off all the unnecessary eye candy? I don’t need to see explosions, I don’t need to see flames, I don’t need to see smoke, I don’t need it. Just draw the red circles for aoe. Give me the option to disable the rendering of explosions and special armor and weapons on players. Hell, disable displaying the npc/player models entirely. I only need the label of the players/npcs. Which brings up another issue ‘Why can’t you click on the label of a player/npc and select that player/npc?" – ah well – yet another issue (this worked fine in gw1).
2) When someone starts hitting my character, I don’t see them hitting it, before they have hit it 10+ times. Then my client starts to show me that something is happening.
3) If a message is displayed, it is always displayed with a delay, making it impossible to get a kill stump, if any other players are near by.
4) If I try to turn around, it is impossible to determine in which direction I will end up looking in, because the game stutters too much.
5) If I activate a skill with an activation time of ‘1’, then I can watch the skill activate for 4-5 seconds, and nothing happens. Then my character dies. Yes, it was the healing skill.
6) If my character jump from one cliff to the next, then often the game does not register the jump/button-click. This does not happen in other games. I also have the same issue with ‘auto run’ which drives me crazy – I press R, then wait for it to start running, but it doesn’t. Then I press R again, and it still doesn’t start running. Then I press R again, and then it starts running then stops, because somehow my 2nd R-press registered a little late AND the 3rd press canceled it !!!!
7) When someone invisible attacks my character, the attacking character does not become visible immediately. Some seconds pass 2-4, before the attacker becomes visible. The only thing I can see, is the damage my character receives. I play Mesmer and thief myself, and if I attack with any of these characters, then MY character becomes visible immediately.
8) Sometimes when my character runs forward, and targets a blink/jump a little further in front of the character, the attempt to blink/teleport/jump, then the character telports TO THE SAME LOCATION THAT IT IS ALREADY IN.
Suggestion:
a) Please make it possible for clients to disable the rendering of all the unnecessary stuff. Explosions, player models, whatever. As much as possible.
b) Please make it possible for the client, to only process what is happening within a certain radius of the player. Make it possible to make the radius ridiculously small.
c) Please let GW2 take advantage of all the unused clock-cycles on my graphic card !!!
d) Lower the number of players allowed per map in wvw.