Guild Wars 2

Since 2 patches ago every player character I see seems to be replaced with a black model that looks like a shadow with some messed up armour on. I ran the repair tool, same problem. Screenshot attached, all characters look like this. (But the model changes to represent the race as usual)
Help appreciated please.
Edit: Drivers updated, no improvement. I should also note that npcs dont look like this, they look fine

That’s the culling “fix”. What was once your WvW character settings for other players are now game wide. I suspect you are on Lowest and Lowest (or is it just low?). Bump those up and these “placeholder” characters are replaced with the player’s actual model.

Oh, how stupid of me. Well thanks for the advice, I didn’t realise that. What an awful “fix” :P I’m mostly new to the game so I never saw these placeholder models before.

when they released the ‘culling’ fix game wide, everyone’s Graphical settings for Player Culling Models were Low and low. (meaning the place holders were not used, but the number of players was set to 10-15?). You will want to mess with those settings in a populated area, as if you put them to high/high its going to really slow the game down for you, and you wont see the slow down until you are in WvW or a populated Zerg (Champ Farming)

Intelliraptor.5328:

Oh, how stupid of me. Well thanks for the advice, I didn’t realise that. What an awful “fix” :P I’m mostly new to the game so I never saw these placeholder models before.

Well before you didn’t see people at all based on some server criteria. Now it’s at least player settable. Problem now is after you zone into a player populated area it may take a few minutes to change the placeholder generic with the actual character. Lion’s Arch around the Mystic Forge is a prime example of genericville.

The notion is a placeholder is quicker to render, uses less memory to represent more players and in crowded conditions can improve the frame rate which suffers in crowds of players. Downside is you might as well color them white and put bar codes on them. They could have at least have gender specific models and in crowds even a mesmer’s illusions turn generic.