Guild Wars 2

My fps drops so much even to 10 or so. Usually I have about 40-50 but when the any kind of action start i literally can feel how my actions freezes and fps drops to 20. The most irritating part is that in pvp tournaments where are only 10 ppl I still get lagg and fps drop. It’s so annoying. I have been playing gw2 since it’s early release and I did not have so much problems with fps, lagg, and freezing.

Spec:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Processor Intel® Core™ i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2501 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Vaio VPCEH3C5E
Nvidia 410M

Aza.2105:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Rampage: wow, your system must suck or something, playing L2 i never see lower then my cap of 60fps…….even in huge mobs of players with all sorts of effects going off…..

L2 at a constant 60fps? The biggest pile of bs I’ve ever heard. The game has been running the exact same since 2004, its so poorly coded that it doesn’t take advantage of modern cpus. The game runs just as it did when I had my Athlon 2500+. Rampage probably doesn’t have a bad system. You are good at telling tall tales.

Again i have high end stuff only i7 2600k@4.5, radeon hd7950, i also have an AMD system running phIIx6@4ghz radeon hd6950, L2 gets as low as 5FPS during sieges on both systems alike, i have no reasson to lie here, i played the game since betas and i can tell u it runs just as bad as it did on my pentium 4 back then. Unreal engine is terrible for an MMO it is desinged for FPS games the way it loads the assets onto memory is terrible it dosn¡t cache enoug info to keep up rendering large ammounts of ppl so it takes a huge hit when having 20 ppl on the screen fighting each other and totally unplayable with 100+
In fact GW2 engine is a lot better than Unreal 3.5 engine when it comes to huge PvP battles hands down, GW2 runs bad but not nearly as bad as Tera does when it comes to PvP or raids, even 5 man dungeons run like crap on Tera sub 15 FPS, that is a straight fact, i play Tera more than GW2 honestly, i know what i’m saying.

Rampage.7145:

Aza.2105:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Rampage: wow, your system must suck or something, playing L2 i never see lower then my cap of 60fps…….even in huge mobs of players with all sorts of effects going off…..

L2 at a constant 60fps? The biggest pile of bs I’ve ever heard. The game has been running the exact same since 2004, its so poorly coded that it doesn’t take advantage of modern cpus. The game runs just as it did when I had my Athlon 2500+. Rampage probably doesn’t have a bad system. You are good at telling tall tales.

Again i have high end stuff only i7 2600k@4.5, radeon hd7950, i also have an AMD system running phIIx6@4ghz radeon hd6950, L2 gets as low as 5FPS during sieges on both systems alike, i have no reasson to lie here, i played the game since betas and i can tell u it runs just as bad as it did on my pentium 4 back then. Unreal engine is terrible for an MMO it is desinged for FPS games the way it loads the assets onto memory is terrible it dosn¡t cache enoug info to keep up rendering large ammounts of ppl so it takes a huge hit when having 20 ppl on the screen fighting each other and totally unplayable with 100+
In fact GW2 engine is a lot better than Unreal 3.5 engine when it comes to huge PvP battles hands down, GW2 runs bad but not nearly as bad as Tera does when it comes to PvP or raids, even 5 man dungeons run like crap on Tera sub 15 FPS, that is a straight fact, i play Tera more than GW2 honestly, i know what i’m saying.

Oh don’t worry I believe you, you are telling the truth about L2. Its the person I quoted I don’t believe, he is a liar who attempts to tell lies to push his agenda.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Iruwen.3164/idiotlooser: dx11 could solve some of the problems, not all but it could help, and a 64bit client could allow them to cache more game data to ram, as well as giving a perf boost in general just from the nature of 64bit compiles.

Many people only have 4GB of RAM though, and a 64 bit client would also use more RAM, which may cause new problems.
DX11 does allow MSAA usage in defered renderers, yes, I don’t know of a good implementation though. In all DX11 games I know, it doesn’t really work well. Dropping FXAA and using the SMAA injector instead already works quite good, it only affects fonts and the UI too, I wish they’d switch from FXAA to SMAA internally. Forward+ rendering looks way more promising, but they cannot completely switch the engine of course. Ingame support for SMAA and/or SGSSAA instead of plain OGSSAA (supersampling) would already be sufficient (and more efficient).

spacecraft.4968:

DX11 DOES make better use of newer GPUs. Don’t act like it’s nothing because it can be pretty significant.
But yeah they really need to get the CPU usage fixed first.

Yes, it can be used to speed up some things, I didn’t say it couldn’t. I said it’s an advantage for some reasons, including this and the MSAA topic above. And I said it wouldn’t help at all as of now because we’re totally limited by CPU power, with a GTX 670 running at 30% utilization in larger battles, as you also said.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

did you all see…..they made major improvements to the game with the latest patch.
…
nice to see they are working hard on making the game run better…… pretty clear what anet are worried about……anything that will sell gems……to kitten with fixing the games perf, theres money to be made on gems!!!!

Yeah, because the core engine programmers clearly work on the gemshop and content at the same time, ANet only has 10 employees as we all know…

No dude u are kind of wrong about Dx11, lets see, it can boost CPU performance by doing 2 things, basically multhithreading is much better on DX11 protocols which means it could potentially be more efficient rendering the game by using 4 core CPUs, not going into details here, just watch some new dx11 engines and how they perform on games like BF3 and Crysis 3, don’t tell me BF3 is not a CPU instensive game cuz it is a FPS, that is not true, it is actually way more CPU intensive than any MMO out there due the complex models, advanced lighting and physics, full destructive enviroments (do u have any idea how CPU intensive that is and why no other games does something like that????), a multiplayer 64 players map in BF3 is about twice CPU intensive than any WvW scenario the diference is the engine optimization for dx11. Also by adding new features as tasselation u can create more complex models with tons of poligons and make em easier and faster to render by the GPU, but ofc this kind of stuff would requiere a full revamp of 3D models which is not gonna happen.

Sure a cosmetic implementation adding AA filters won’t do anything but making the game runs slower, but i don’t think that is what ppl means when talking about dx11 support.

Why was the word ‘Lousy’ removed from my thread title? deleting the word lousy won’t fix the lousy fps

Originally was “Will the lousy fps be fixed”? now someones renamed it “will the fps be fixed”

omino.4302:

Why was the word ‘Lousy’ removed from my thread title? deleting the word lousy won’t fix the lousy fps

Originally was “Will the lousy fps be fixed”? now someones renamed it “will the fps be fixed”

LOL, i guess they could just make a propper statement about the issue, instead going editing the thread titles don’t u think?

Rampage.7145:

No dude u are kind of wrong about Dx11, lets see, it can boost CPU performance by doing 2 things, basically multhithreading is much better on DX11 protocols which means it could potentially be more efficient rendering the game by using 4 core CPUs, not going into details here, just watch some new dx11 engines and how they perform on games like BF3 and Crysis 3, don’t tell me BF3 is not a CPU instensive game cuz it is a FPS, that is not true, it is actually way more CPU intensive than any MMO out there due the complex models, advanced lighting and physics, full destructive enviroments (do u have any idea how CPU intensive that is and why no other games does something like that????), a multiplayer 64 players map in BF3 is about twice CPU intensive than any WvW scenario the diference is the engine optimization for dx11. Also by adding new features as tasselation u can create more complex models with tons of poligons and make em easier and faster to render by the GPU, but ofc this kind of stuff would requiere a full revamp of 3D models which is not gonna happen.

Sure a cosmetic implementation adding AA filters won’t do anything but making the game runs slower, but i don’t think that is what ppl means when talking about dx11 support.

WoW is cpu limited yet dx11 gave substantial performance boosts. So you could be right. GW2 engine is entirely different though and it has a lot of odd things going on. Like reflections being rendered via cpu instead of gpu…..

We probably won’t see any performance fixes until the next expansion game, unfortunately.

I just want to let everyone know that they should watch what they post here and make sure that they follow every single forum rule.

Forum moderators are really watching this thread for infractions so stick within their rules. :P

Ps All Hail Jorlag, dragon of the North.

Rampage.7145:

No dude u are kind of wrong about Dx11, lets see, it can boost CPU performance by doing 2 things, basically multhithreading is much better on DX11 protocols which means it could potentially be more efficient rendering the game by using 4 core CPUs, not going into details here, just watch some new dx11 engines and how they perform on games like BF3 and Crysis 3, don’t tell me BF3 is not a CPU instensive game cuz it is a FPS, that is not true, it is actually way more CPU intensive than any MMO out there due the complex models, advanced lighting and physics, full destructive enviroments (do u have any idea how CPU intensive that is and why no other games does something like that????), a multiplayer 64 players map in BF3 is about twice CPU intensive than any WvW scenario the diference is the engine optimization for dx11. Also by adding new features as tasselation u can create more complex models with tons of poligons and make em easier and faster to render by the GPU, but ofc this kind of stuff would requiere a full revamp of 3D models which is not gonna happen.

You’re mixing up a lot of things here and DX11 is not a protocol, anyway it’s true that it introduced multithreaded rendering which can help in some situations. BF3 as a relatively limited and straight forward shooter isn’t more CPU intensive than an open MMO though, the latter is far more complex and the load probably doesn’t even increase linearly with the large number of players. Also the environments in BF3 are fare from being completely destructible and there is no DX9 renderpath you could compare the performance to on equal hardware and so on. If ANet could make full use of DX11’s multithreading capabilities (multiple threads assembling deferred contexts and then combining them into a single command list), I agree that this could relieve some burden from the CPU. If they only switch to DX11 without utilizing these capabilites, the performance could even be decreased though (which is actually the case with a lot of DX11 compatible games where the DX9 renderpath is still faster). WoW is actually a good (and unfortunately rare) example of how it’s done right, although I don’t know how much of this gain is due to multithreaded rendering because iirc the DX11 version has been out and performed better before such support was added to NV’s and AMD’s drivers. Afaik Civ 5 was the first game to actually use this.
GW2 already supports traditional CPU multithreading of course, the main goal should be to reduce the general CPU load though.

General

The chests that spawn for The Claw of Jormag, The Fire Elemental, and the Volcano Destroyer Boss are now only lootable once a day per character.
Fixed a bug where Daily Rewards were sometimes not being granted after completing five daily achievements.
Fixed a recently introduced performance issue.
Fixed various crash bugs.

Will it fix anyhow

Spend 160$ on this game and I can’t run it at lowest settings in cities. I drop below 20 FPS. Not to mention I can’t do WvWvW or any event as my FPS just drops to 5 or below. Thanks for taking my money and not optimizing your game Anet.

thewho.5841:

My fps drops so much even to 10 or so. Usually I have about 40-50 but when the any kind of action start i literally can feel how my actions freezes and fps drops to 20. The most irritating part is that in pvp tournaments where are only 10 ppl I still get lagg and fps drop. It’s so annoying. I have been playing gw2 since it’s early release and I did not have so much problems with fps, lagg, and freezing.

Spec:
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit
Processor Intel® Core™ i5-2450M CPU @ 2.50GHz, 2501 Mhz, 2 Core(s), 4 Logical Processor(s)
Vaio VPCEH3C5E
Nvidia 410M

I think you are gpu bottle necked nvidia 410m is a really bad card

Beta was set at a ridiculous low resolution

think of 800×680 resolution low

mellondog.2973:

Spend 160$ on this game and I can’t run it at lowest settings in cities. I drop below 20 FPS. Not to mention I can’t do WvWvW or any event as my FPS just drops to 5 or below. Thanks for taking my money and not optimizing your game Anet.

most $600-700 laptop can run gw2 these days

Are you sure your not gpu and cpu bottleneck at the same time?

410m is as slow as the integrated GPU inside intel CPU… pretty bad card indeed man :S

spacecraft.4968:

Yeah I’ve just come to accept that they will never say anything about the horrible performance and that arenanet really isn’t the company I thought it was. We’re not going to see improvements, all we’re going to see is more junk added to the gem store.

A game like guild wars 2 needs a monthly subscription. Micro transactions don’t work for a game of this scale.

what a crock….you must not have played many f2p mmo’s, many have worlds as large or larger then gw2, many have switched form p2p to f2p because it makes more money then a monthy sub based system.

do some research as to why so many games that where still doing ok on subs went f2p….hint, they wouldnt do it if it didnt make them alot of money.

Stormcrow.7513:

PS: Guys be very careful when posting here. I notice mods started deleting posts, it will not be long before this thread gets locked….

At least Anet isnt as bad as EA lol.
If Anet admits that there is a problem and they are trying to fix it then that would be good enough for me but the disheartening thing is the silence.

I was doing a dragon event today lol
Everyone was complaining about the lag.
Jormag is now Jorlag.

It really is too bad because I felt that Anet did a great job with GW2, but in it’s current state much of the game is unplayable

they are removing posts people report, some of mine have been removed because somebody who didnt like what I had to say reported it…..

just be aware, if you say something somebody dosnt like, no matter how useful your post, it may be removed.

Iruwen.3164:

Many people only have 4GB of RAM though, and a 64 bit client would also use more RAM, which may cause new problems.

the game can be designed to look at how much memory a system has and fit itself in that allowance, 64bit dosnt mean it has to use a ton more ram, but it would allow better use of the memory that many gamers already have 8-16 or even 32gb are becoming more and more the norm for gamers…even people I know who play WoW tend to have at least 8gb ram….even if the rest of the systems pretty crap..

DX11 does allow MSAA usage in deferred renderer, yes, I don’t know of a good implementation though.

so one must not excist….

Dropping FXAA and using the SMAA injector instead already works quite good, it only affects fonts and the UI too, I wish they’d switch from FXAA to SMAA internally.

one of the dev’s i think on reddit said they had tried smaa and would have used it instead of fxaa had they known about it, he also said they would love to implement it withing the game but they where not given the time to do so.

Forward+ rendering looks way more promising, but they cannot completely switch the engine of course. Ingame support for SMAA and/or SGSSAA instead of plain OGSSAA (supersampling) would already be sufficient (and more efficient).

the in game “supersample” setting is not true super sampling, its just higher res textures(they even say such if you read the description of it in game and in the wiki last i checked) it can cause problems for some systems because it uses to much vram/system ram.

spacecraft.4968:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

did you all see…..they made major improvements to the game with the latest patch.
…
nice to see they are working hard on making the game run better…… pretty clear what anet are worried about……anything that will sell gems……to kitten with fixing the games perf, theres money to be made on gems!!!!

Yeah, because the core engine programmers clearly work on the gemshop and content at the same time, ANet only has 10 employees as we all know…

thats not the point, notice they dont have a bunch of info about fixing the lousy fps?

notice they dont really have anything about overall perf improvements for the game?

yet they got tons of news about gem shop items….

good example of where their priorities lay if you ask me…

omino.4302:

Why was the word ‘Lousy’ removed from my thread title? deleting the word lousy won’t fix the lousy fps

Originally was “Will the lousy fps be fixed”? now someones renamed it “will the fps be fixed”

Rampage.7145:

omino.4302:

Why was the word ‘Lousy’ removed from my thread title? deleting the word lousy won’t fix the lousy fps

Originally was “Will the lousy fps be fixed”? now someones renamed it “will the fps be fixed”

LOL, i guess they could just make a propper statement about the issue, instead going editing the thread titles don’t u think?

because somebody reported the thread complaining about the word lousy im sure, same reason so many posts in this thread go missing.

If you want an idea who could have been to blame, look at who have been White Knighting for Anet in this thread, that should give you an idea whos likely to blame for missing posts and editited thread titles

If they continue to ignore this game breaker issue I’d rather they delete the full thread instead of us hoping for a fix with no answer, that way we can move on and keep away from expansions. Seriously disappointed they took time to edit the thread title and no response there trying to fix the game.

omino.4302:

If they continue to ignore this game breaker issue I’d rather they delete the full thread instead of us hoping for a fix with no answer, that way we can move on and keep away from expansions. Seriously disappointed they took time to edit the thread title and no response there trying to fix the game.

ummm, i been reading your post. Anet acknowledge that culling and fps is a major issue a long time ago. The problem is that there is no simple fix for this scaling problem.

GW2 is not alone. Planetside 2 also has this problem, but GW2 has it worse because people are closer together. Tracking people is a N^2 problem. You have to realize that Anet is the only company that truly tries to stimulate war in modern MMORPG. I am happy that they made WvWvW because other game companies will not touch it.

yes Anet care greatly about the performance of the game, just not enough to put any time, effort or even lip service into fixing it…..

Anet care so much about how poorly the game runs that they keep us up to date on all the gem shop items they add to the game, or are going to add, but dont say a single word about performance for months on end….

good to know the WK’s are on the job defending anet from those of us who are unfairly upset at the performance of the game……

after all no other game in the history of PC games has had massive battles with large player counts……

Tribes1 back in 1998-1999 didnt have 256player servers run by home lan federation and home lan alliance.

Tribes2 didnt launch with 128player server support in 2001(64+64 players) and get 256 player servers again hosted by homelan…..

Planetside didnt have massive battles full of real people blowing the crap out of eachother….

I could go on but, the fact is, no other game has ever EVER managed to have massive player counts and pulled it off smoothly……..

oh yeah, and I didnt play tribes1 and 2 on 56k on those very servers…………oh wait……I did…..and it rocked.

loseridoit.2756:

ummm, Anet acknowledged that culling and fps is a major issue a long time ago.

They said they were investigating why SOME high end computers were having performance issues with the game. As if only a few computers had problems when is well known the game performs terribly for everyone.

Pardon me, but that doesn’t sound like they were acknowledging there’s a problem with the game, much less any major anything.

Anet care so much about how poorly the game runs that they keep us up to date on all the gem shop items they add to the game, or are going to add, but dont say a single word about performance for months on end….

Though I agree 100% with you, I fear for your safety. Keep speaking the truth and you might end up banned !!!
Didn’t you get the memo ? …They…are…watching…

Well after them "fixing"things my game just works bad now. 5-6 patches ago i had around 40-60 fps in wvw (30 was the lowest i saw). Now im having drops to low 20, not to mention ppl are loading even slower then before. Its not just me as all my guildies droped in terms of fps. Last big patch made smtn bad with particle efects. Now things like fire, catapultas etc make my fps drop from constant 60 on high settings to 20-30 for a second… that never happenede before.

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

You said it yourself. This is why most MMORPG does not have such huge battles as WvWvW. Most of the game plays fine since they limit the amount of player and what they can do. Many of mesmer abilities does put a huge load on the servers. I couldnt use feeback, massivibility, portal, null feild, and temperal curtain due to server lag.

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

yeah they really should remove all magic/casting classes because that would fix everything…

funny, in zergs my gpu usage drops like a rock same with DE’s, but cpu useage when monitored with process hacker(like process explorer but open source) shows my cpu being the bottleneck…

the same is true for everybody playing this game, the game for whatever reason puts a MASSIVE load on your cpu when there are more then a couple people around at any given time.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

yeah they really should remove all magic/casting classes because that would fix everything…

funny, in zergs my gpu usage drops like a rock same with DE’s, but cpu useage when monitored with process hacker(like process explorer but open source) shows my cpu being the bottleneck…

the same is true for everybody playing this game, the game for whatever reason puts a MASSIVE load on your cpu when there are more then a couple people around at any given time.

I never said they should Remove the effects..The quality can be enhanced,or they can give us a slider to increase/decrease the intensity/amount/quality of the particle effects.

loseridoit.2756:

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

You said it yourself. This is why most MMORPG does not have such huge battles as WvWvW. Most of the game plays fine since they limit the amount of player and what they can do. Many of mesmer abilities does put a huge load on the servers. I couldnt use feeback, massivibility, portal, null feild, and temperal curtain due to server lag.

yeah no game can handle large battles with massive player counts.

in 1998/1999 we didnt have tribes servers with 256 players battling it out.

in 2001 tribes 2 didnt launch with 128 player support….(and later get 256 player servers)

planet size didnt have massive battles with tons of people in them….

I could go on but, the point is, its possible, anet just cant manage it with their “optimized for 6-8ghz tricore” client.

Caedmon.6798:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

yeah they really should remove all magic/casting classes because that would fix everything…

funny, in zergs my gpu usage drops like a rock same with DE’s, but cpu useage when monitored with process hacker(like process explorer but open source) shows my cpu being the bottleneck…

the same is true for everybody playing this game, the game for whatever reason puts a MASSIVE load on your cpu when there are more then a couple people around at any given time.

I never said they should Remove the effects..The quality can be enhanced,or they can give us a slider to increase/decrease the intensity/amount/quality of the particle effects.

what you fail to understand is that only low end videocards are going to bottleneck with these effects, put msi afterburner up on a 2nd screen, enter a zerk and watch what happens, your gpu will likely drop in usage sometimes to the point it will auto clock down to 2d clocks……because the cpu is the bottle neck not the gpu.

the effects you talk about will kitten a low end videocard, but anybody with one of those cards will almost certainly have such a low end cpu that its bottlenecking so that even without the effects they arent gonna get decent fps.

something people dont get is, gw2 isnt even bottlenecked on the likes of a 7770 or 5770 even in most cases, the gpu ends up dropping in use in zergs and DE’s due to cpu bottleneck.

ask some of the people in this thread who have watched it on their high end overclocked i5 and i7 systems…..

this is the ONLY game that does this for me, even ps2 dosnt have this problem for me…..

in some other mmo’s what you say is true, and in gw2 the slide show can make spell effects quite anoying because they make it even harder to see/target, but its not because they are overloading most gaming videocards, its because the game needs a 6-8ghz tricore cpu to run properly even with a lower end gaming card when in a zerg/de.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

loseridoit.2756:

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

You said it yourself. This is why most MMORPG does not have such huge battles as WvWvW. Most of the game plays fine since they limit the amount of player and what they can do. Many of mesmer abilities does put a huge load on the servers. I couldnt use feeback, massivibility, portal, null feild, and temperal curtain due to server lag.

yeah no game can handle large battles with massive player counts.

in 1998/1999 we didnt have tribes servers with 256 players battling it out.

in 2001 tribes 2 didnt launch with 128 player support….(and later get 256 player servers)

planet size didnt have massive battles with tons of people in them….

I could go on but, the point is, its possible, anet just cant manage it with their “optimized for 6-8ghz tricore” client.

tribes 2 is not a good comparison…….A first person shooter is alot less complex than a mmorpg. MMORPG is one of the complex pieces of software out there

http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3507295&threshold=1&mode=thread&pid=43046697

I’ve always said that an MMO is literally the most complicated piece of software one can make. Take every single problem that exists in software engineering, and you have it in an MMO.

A) Every problem from a normal game.
1) Resource streaming for an open world.
2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware
3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it’s not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)

B) Every problem that a business app would have.
4) High availability clusters
5) Billing systems
6) Massive databases
7) Customer Support back end
8) Call center support

C) Every problem that ‘internet companies’ have
9) Latency kills
10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces

D) Some nice unique problems for MMOs only
11) Cross server object replication
12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.

i dont think they will even read these posts but posting em any ways..

Anet if you read this.. please tell me what would you do with that fps in wvw? and thats the case for many people who see 30 + people in wvw (thats like 70 % of the people in wvw) all we can do is use one aoe ability and hope they walk into it thats all no skill nothing . Hard to even swap weapons.

if you think i am raging i am sorry you gave a good game to play but its not enjoyable like this. Please optimize the game and give it #1 preference than giving preference for new content.

This may sound like a threat but its not and i know you wont care. But if its the same case even after an expansion i am out of this, because i don’t see any point in it..

(hope you saw those 2 to 5 fps screen captures i have attached)

Procop.1579:

i dont think they will even read these posts but posting em any ways..

Anet if you read this.. please tell me what would you do with that fps in wvw? and thats the case for many people who see 30 + people in wvw (thats like 70 % of the people in wvw) all we can do is use one aoe ability and hope they walk into it thats all no skill nothing . Hard to even swap weapons.

if you think i am raging i am sorry you gave a good game to play but its not enjoyable like this. Please optimize the game and give it #1 preference than giving preference for new content.

This may sound like a threat but its not and i know you wont care. But if its the same case even after an expansion i am out of this, because i don’t see any point in it..

(hope you saw those 2 to 5 fps screen captures i have attached)

If you want an offical response, then send a support ticket. Anet rarely frequent the forums

i did that and i dont think ncsoft has the answer for anet’s problem

loseridoit.2756:

1) Resource streaming for an open world.

no worse then 256 players in tribes, or having 256 slots with some used up by bots, DE’s and WvWvW are not really any more complex to setup then having 128 or 256 players running around wacking on eachother, I would agree if you where talking about a game that had no bots or scriptable events.

2) Particle system running on 5 year old commodity hardware

not an issue here, we are talking about lousy performance on modern top end hardware not min specs(that really get a false impression thinking they can run this game worth a kitten)

3) Physics system to handle projectiles (Even if it’s not havok you still need something for the characters falling from the sky.)

tribes1 and 2 as well as many other games do have physics systems, infact, for tribes titles this includes flight support, tribes isnt a typical fps, its fps+z, meaning you have to add another detention to the complexity of not only coding and processing the game but to the maps as well.

B) Every problem that a business app would have.

um…..no….not really…..you dont have businesses whos lives depend on the stability of gw2…even anets dosnt……if it did……dont get me started on that….lol

4) High availability clusters

huh?

5) Billing systems

this dosnt effect performance no mmo i know of has the billing built into the client, you use the website to pay for stuff not the client.

oh and most mmo’s tend to have a seperate team that deals with website/billing stuff, as thats really not the focus of the client developers or server developers.

6) Massive databases

i doubt the guys building and updating the client are the ones who have to maintain the database……and if setup like a typical mmo, they use another companies database app, mysql or mssql, some do use internally developed database software, but most in my exp use one of those 2.

http://alternativeto.net/software/mysql-workbench/

lots of db options that are well established and stable.

7) Customer Support back end

again as you have pointed out, anet have more then 1 team, I guarntee their developers are not the ones handling support…..if they are, anets got some serious internal issues with resource allocation.

8) Call center support

do they even have a call center? if they do, do you really think its developers who are answering the phones?

9) Latency kills

yup and gw2 has issues with latency, they also Im quite sure have a seperate team who deal with server and connection issues that arent client related….

10) World wide datacenters mapping 1:1 and 1:many architecture pieces

all of anets servers are in texas, im sure this is to avoid complications with hosting and distribution in the EU….cant blame them if you know how kitten dealing with international issues can be.

11) Cross server object replication

this shouldnt be an issue, I use to be co-admin of a UO shard that actually had 3 shards running at once 2 of them had 2 facets each and where kept in sync item wise(one was all pvp the other was RP on one facet and pvp on the other, the 3rd was our test server), our worst problems where with item scripts that against all logic conflicted with other item scripts……thats why we had a test server and let people play it to earn rewards

12) More hackers targeting it than they would some banks.

thats why im sure anet contracted with a decent processing handling company/service and again, this isnt something the client developers are going to be creating/fixing/working on.

yes mmo’s have some uniq problems overall that other games dont have, the problems with DE’s and WvWvW are not part of that outside the fact that many mmo’s dont properly test and optimize for large player counts in alpha and beta…..

I have been in hundreds if not thousands of beta’s over the year(im in 9+ at the moment), and this stuff should have been cause to delay launch, infact, I think launch was rushed to counter MoP/pandokemon……

I love GW2 as a game but, its far less enjoyable when the game bogs down whenever many people are around…..

this being especially true when games like tribes 1 and 2 where able to handle much higher player counts over a decade ago……even with what at the time was some pretty cutting edge gfx and features.(for their day the tribes games looked amazing)

IMHO gw2 would have sold more and gotten more good press AND more good word of mouth had they launched it dx11 on vista/7 with support for dx9/10/11 hardware, and with proper threading, yes there would have been some lost sales to xp users, but you would also have alot less complaining that somebody well above min specs cant get the game to run worth a kitten, and there would also be less support issues with people running 32bit xp who get told to upgrade to 64bit to get around the error/issue…..

honestly……2012 and they went dx9 with poor threading…….the ONLY excuse is that somebody had dreams of an xbox 360 port…..that didnt pan out…..

the only excuse for these problems not being commented on and fixed is, anet just dont care…..they dont give a kitten because, they are still making money off people who blame their systems for the problems……..

the only excuse for these problems not being discussed and fixed is, anet just dont care…..they dont give a kitten because, they are still making money off people who blame their systems for the problems……..

My hero !!!
Can I use this as my signature?

IMHO gw2 would have sold more and gotten more good press AND more good word of mouth had they launched it dx11

What are you talking about ?
Didn’t you hear GW2 was the best game of 2012 … according to Anet…

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Caedmon.6798:

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

Caedmon.6798:

The quality of all effects going around when its zerg vs zerg is the main cause of people lagging out ( fps drops ),i can stand near 50 people and Not lag,nor my fps being low,but when all ofthem start using skills..Kittens will happen.Imo the effects from mesmers,ele’s are WAY too much,especially those bubbles etc.They are massive lag fest creators.

yeah they really should remove all magic/casting classes because that would fix everything…

funny, in zergs my gpu usage drops like a rock same with DE’s, but cpu useage when monitored with process hacker(like process explorer but open source) shows my cpu being the bottleneck…

the same is true for everybody playing this game, the game for whatever reason puts a MASSIVE load on your cpu when there are more then a couple people around at any given time.

I never said they should Remove the effects..The quality can be enhanced,or they can give us a slider to increase/decrease the intensity/amount/quality of the particle effects.

what you fail to understand is that only low end videocards are going to bottleneck with these effects, put msi afterburner up on a 2nd screen, enter a zerk and watch what happens, your gpu will likely drop in usage sometimes to the point it will auto clock down to 2d clocks……because the cpu is the bottle neck not the gpu.

the effects you talk about will kitten a low end videocard, but anybody with one of those cards will almost certainly have such a low end cpu that its bottlenecking so that even without the effects they arent gonna get decent fps.

something people dont get is, gw2 isnt even bottlenecked on the likes of a 7770 or 5770 even in most cases, the gpu ends up dropping in use in zergs and DE’s due to cpu bottleneck.

ask some of the people in this thread who have watched it on their high end overclocked i5 and i7 systems…..

this is the ONLY game that does this for me, even ps2 dosnt have this problem for me…..

in some other mmo’s what you say is true, and in gw2 the slide show can make spell effects quite anoying because they make it even harder to see/target, but its not because they are overloading most gaming videocards, its because the game needs a 6-8ghz tricore cpu to run properly even with a lower end gaming card when in a zerg/de.

I disagree with about everything you just said.There needs to be something like i said in my previous post,period,high end system or low end system,20 mesmers spamming bubbles Will create a lagfest.You unwilling to accept this fact is not of my concercn,since its a suggestion to anet.You are being selfish,thinking about high end gamers only and neglecting Many people with low end systems,saying the slider or enhancement of the quality effects of particles is not necessary,since people will be bottlenecked by cpus anyway ? I find this statement hilarious,since it doesn’t even make sense,and even though you are bottlenecked by your cpu,minimizing the quality/amount/intensity of these effects can take a huge load of the cpu.

@A-Net
Please fix the current lag issues. Playing 1280×800 with everything set to none/lowest/off and I still experience massive lag even in PvE areas with very low population (read: only me and a few mobs there).

You can’t actively play that way in the means, that you can’t avoid damage, can’t use your skills properly and so on.

Add in the culling issues —> it’s really terrible. C’mon – 5 years of development, an ultra-long beta-test and like 6 months after release we are talking about the basics here?

Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but it is really THAT BAD.

I really can’t put across in words how infuriating it is to not be able to heal or use skills when needed, sort this out please.

I really love this game, its fantastic, I quit other games to focus on this one. However when I cant play due to Skill Lag … as OP said, you can stick it.

IvanHoe.3468:

the only excuse for these problems not being discussed and fixed is, anet just dont care…..they dont give a kitten because, they are still making money off people who blame their systems for the problems……..

My hero !!!
Can I use this as my signature?

yes you can use it, if you really want to, perhaps it will lead anet to do something…..i mean something useful….you know, rather then the useless move of editing thread titles that offend the white knight squadron!!!!

IvanHoe.3468:

IMHO gw2 would have sold more and gotten more good press AND more good word of mouth had they launched it dx11

What are you talking about ?
Didn’t you hear GW2 was the best game of 2012 … according to Anet…

well lets be honest, gameplay wise it was the best of 2012 but that dosnt say much, since there wherent alot of great mmo’s that came out in 2012, and the game runs like kitten poo…….

Caedmon.6798:

I disagree with about everything you just said.There needs to be something like i said in my previous post,period,high end system or low end system,20 mesmers spamming bubbles Will create a lagfest.You unwilling to accept this fact is not of my concercn,since its a suggestion to anet.You are being selfish,thinking about high end gamers only and neglecting Many people with low end systems,saying the slider or enhancement of the quality effects of particles is not necessary,since people will be bottlenecked by cpus anyway ? I find this statement hilarious,since it doesn’t even make sense,and even though you are bottlenecked by your cpu,minimizing the quality/amount/intensity of these effects can take a huge load of the cpu.

you really dont get it, and you clearly havent read what i have said from the start, I think the game should get a minimum of 60fps for everybody who meets min spec and up, you should be able to choose to lower your settings to gain performance, but this game dosnt work like that.

people at min specs could disable everything run the game with effects strait out of the 90’s and it would still run like a slide show, because their cpu is the bottleneck, my cpu is the bottleneck, your cpu if the bottleneck, solarnova’s is the bottleneck, i could go on and on.

the effects used dont matter at this point, they should let you disable everything, so you cant see any effects at all, just so you could see that you dont know wth your talking about…….

and partical effects are done by the gpu not the cpu….if anets rendering them on the cpu they are even more frelled up then i think they are…..

honestly, if you would just read the faq’s and what anet themselves have said….this games cpu bound to an insane degree….

if they would offload some of the work to the gpu that could help, if they would fix the threading of the game to use threads more efficently and use more threads period, the bottleneck could move over to the gpu, then asking for sliders for every effect type may make logical sense…..but as the game stands now…..even my buddy whos running it on an old 4850 is cpu bound……..we know this because his gpu use drops to below 50% in zergs…..mind his cpu is a i7-980X@4.56ghz under high end water…

hes only using the 4850 because his 690 is under RMA……yet, hes found that, in zergs even its useage drops showing the cpu as the bottleneck……WTF…..the 4850 is a pretty old card…..yet its bottlenecked by a very very fast cpu……i bet a 4770 would be bottlenecked by his cpu to……

I do agree with you that its crazy but, sadly the only people these sliders would help at this point would be people running systems that really shouldnt be gaming, people with high end cpu’s using integrated video or media center/htpc videocards on high end cpu’s…….

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

64bit dosnt mean it has to use a ton more ram

Not a ton more, but memory usage increases since e.g. pointer size doubles.

the in game “supersample” setting is not true super sampling, its just higher res textures(they even say such if you read the description of it in game and in the wiki last i checked) it can cause problems for some systems because it uses to much vram/system ram.

There’s a separate option for texture resolution and if you don’t see the effect of supersampling vs native, try setting it to subsampling which makes it pretty clear. It also says this in the tooltip.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

i think the answer is “only if amd and intel come out with massively better cpu’d then they have now before the expansion”

Wait what? My graphics card is sitting there idly on a dragonfight when supersampling is turned off and only starts to work with that option on.

They could just shift some of the spell effects and other visuals to the graphics card instead of making this game completely cpu bound. I have higher fps in the witcher 2 and crysis 3 than I have in Gw2 and that’s just because of their bad cpu coding.
Mmo’s in general rely quite a lot on cpu power ( to reach a broader audience) but gw2 isn’t even trying that since everything below i5 series can’t even play the game on a decent framerate in certain situations on low graphics.

How hard can it be to code most of the lower settings into the cpu and shift all the rest to the gpu so we can finally put our money to work

Joric.5376:

@A-Net
Please fix the current lag issues. Playing 1280×800 with everything set to none/lowest/off and I still experience massive lag even in PvE areas with very low population (read: only me and a few mobs there).

You can’t actively play that way in the means, that you can’t avoid damage, can’t use your skills properly and so on.

Add in the culling issues —> it’s really terrible. C’mon – 5 years of development, an ultra-long beta-test and like 6 months after release we are talking about the basics here?

Sorry if that sounds a bit harsh, but it is really THAT BAD.

Connection Lag is unrelated to low FPS. ( We don’t call FPS lag but Shutter or drop FPS ). If you are lagging on skills, there is nothing we can do, blame your ISP, or someone is streaming on your network.

DJRiful.3749:

Connection Lag is unrelated to low FPS. ( We don’t call FPS lag but Shutter or drop FPS ). If you are lagging on skills, there is nothing we can do, blame your ISP, or someone is streaming on your network.

Have you been playing recently? I suggest you go check out the dragon fights, since the latest patch many old users have started playing again, and those fights are having so much server wide lag.

Most of the dragon fights during primetime you can’t even do anything except autoattack.

There is the issue of what we call low fps, but that’s more related to the amount of players on the screen and the cpu bound coding.

But all the skill lag during dragon fights is simply a problem on Anets end because their servers can’t handle that many players in one area.

You surely must have heard of the new dragons’ nicknames: Tequatl the lagger, claw of jorlag, the lagger etc.

the game runs flawless…during PvE but then you enter a large scaled DE or WvWvW and you’ll see a slideshow.

wait…massive action goes on = FPS drop? sounds like something never happened before!
oh no…it happens…in every game i’ve ever played.

i dare everyone complaining about the low FPS in WvWvW to open a PC game with a console window.
let’s take skyrim as an example:

spawn 50+ elder dragons at whiterun. (why whiterun? because we all wanted to see it burn deep in our hearts)
then tell me your FPS.
repeat that with other games.
try to complain again and i bet you’ll fail.

my complain is, such thing as massive battles, sieges, etc should never be in a game in the first place, if the technology isn’t ready, which obviously is not the case now.

if anet manages somehow to bring us the holy grail of patches and ensure mid-end or higher PC’s to get 50-60FPS during zergs, they would have done something nobody was able to do yet.
and i do not believe in miracles, so if i ever feel the need to enter WvWvW, i’ll do what i always do when entering zergs in a mmorpg: lowering the graphics.
30+FPS during massive mmo fights on max graphics is something other dev’s and game companies can just dream about.

i used to be a complainer just like you, but then i started to think realistic.
iI’m usually not optimistic…but imagine how much more fun WvWvW is when there actually is optimisation potential left for this game.

-no fanboy

yes iruwen i know about the subsampling, alot of people here think the in game supersampling is a form of AA, when its just higher res textures, and sub sampling is lower res(game looks very retro in subsample mode…LOL)

i had some screenshots of it……same places game maxed vs min….talk about difference in looks with no boost in perf….

Soul.6572:

DJRiful.3749:

Connection Lag is unrelated to low FPS. ( We don’t call FPS lag but Shutter or drop FPS ). If you are lagging on skills, there is nothing we can do, blame your ISP, or someone is streaming on your network.

Have you been playing recently? I suggest you go check out the dragon fights, since the latest patch many old users have started playing again, and those fights are having so much server wide lag.

Most of the dragon fights during primetime you can’t even do anything except autoattack.

There is the issue of what we call low fps, but that’s more related to the amount of players on the screen and the cpu bound coding.

But all the skill lag during dragon fights is simply a problem on Anets end because their servers can’t handle that many players in one area.

You surely must have heard of the new dragons’ nicknames: Tequatl the lagger, claw of jorlag, the lagger etc.

Have you been staying on topic in this thread? He has been experiencing lag since the beginning and he thought it was his graphic setting. So he decided to lower it and it still doesn’t fix it. (duh).

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

yes iruwen i know about the subsampling, alot of people here think the in game supersampling is a form of AA, when its just higher res textures, and sub sampling is lower res(game looks very retro in subsample mode…LOL)

i had some screenshots of it……same places game maxed vs min….talk about difference in looks with no boost in perf….

That truly is sad indeed that there is almost no performance difference with other settings.

I have also noticed that on sub sampling the game really looks ‘retro’ as you say :p It reminds me of an 800*600 version of gw1 :p