Guild Wars 2

Or even increased much.

And it’s not because of balance, it’s there to keep the server and/or your CPU from exploding in huge fights… which already happens as is (skill lag and 1 fps). Limitations like this happen in every MMO with large scale fights. Or else unplayable server/client bottlenecks.

Without the cap, the processing would rise almost exponentially with an increase in players. More players casting AoEs x more getting hit by each AoE.

Example: 100 players each casting 1 non-pulsing AoE on 100 other players with no cap would be 100×100x(everything involved with armor, damage, conditions, procs, effects, traits, etc…)=10,000x(etc…) different damage/effect instances to be calculated. Not even counting AoE DoTs like conditions that are updated each tick. Doesn’t matter if it was done clientside or serverside, a real-time fight would be impossible except for a super computer.

I am well versed in Comp Science, Mathematics and Music and we can talk about scenarios. So this isn’t a “you suck and should go home” post….but more of a supporting one since [math] is your heading.

An idea for a solution is to reprogram the random number generator in determining random target selection in the form of a priority or deviation number (programmers like to call it weight.) An example would be to give all siege a deviation or priority number of .5 or 1.0, then have an algorithm to apply the random number that comes out to make siege engines easier to hit.

Basically when an AoE skill is used, have the target detection occur. Example…Cast Meteor Shower and in the casting the system receives data per tick saying the following:

“Are there more than five targets? How many of them are siege engines? Do we need the modifier?” Remember, the modifier is taken from the class itself, so each siege engine has its own modifier.

The weight or deviation of the target (like player characters will have a deviation/weight of 0 so that targeting does remain random [at least random enough to not guess where it goes]) However, Siege through its deviation of .5 or 1.0 will become easier to hit from AoE damage.

This is my solution to solve the problem of commanders (like myself) who call for 10 – 15 players to stack around siege knowing full well that the siege will be protected since more targets around an AoE = less chances for a siege engine to receive damage.

I find that siege engines should be easier to hit because of their size, sensitivity and power. If a siege engine has no target cap, then targeting such large and more sensitive structures should be easier to hit.

In programming it this way, one doesn’t have to increase the target cap or the AoE damage itself since the damage is being concentrated to where its needed most.

no need to remove the AOE cap.. just increase it to 10….. for now….

Setsunayaki.4907:

(cool idea)

I like the idea, but the issue is that ANet can’t simply impleement a “one size fits all” kind of a deal if they programmed this way. For example, maybe I would prefer to hit the players over the siege. Perhaps our strategy works better by damaging players instead of siege. Furthermore, and related to the first point, there may not exist a good objective standard on which to base the values assigned to different potential targets in the first place; it’s so situational, that it’s an extremely difficult idea to implement.

Don’t remove the AoE cap, don’t increase it either unless on melee attacks. Anything else would be folly.

calling out OP here for bs and lack of promised math.

1. damage calculations are not very clock cycle intensive. simple plus, minus, divide and multiply is not cpu heavy. im sure modern cpu’s have hardware mutltiplication/division.

2. gw2 has heavy cpu demands because there are lots of projectiles that have position, velocity, collision compared to mmorpgs without projectiles. all this data has to be sent to all the players after being determined by the server based on keyboard/mouse inputs sent to server through the game client.

3. hit detection for aoes is very simple. there are no projectiles involved in most cases. cpu must simply check position of players to determine if they are in the aoe and deal damage to them.

4. 5 man aoe cap requires algorithm to decide which 5 men are going to be hit. this is additional processing over simply dealing damage to all those that are inside the aoe radius.

5. lol at 10,000 number. 10,000 calculations is not very many for a computer lol. your computer runs significantly more calculations just to render graphics. 1920×1080 at 60hz is roughly equivalent to about 2 million commands to change a 24 bit pixel colour value 60 times per second….

Remove all Arrow Carts that deal damage to 50 guys! Problem solved

Pryda.8257:

Remove all Arrow Carts that deal damage to 50 guys! Problem solved

I remember alot of fights with absurd skill lag and without any siege.

Why not simply: siege is always hit, additionally to the 5-cap on players?

As the number of siege in an area is limited to five, this would be still caped, i.e. to 5+5.

Is also fair, as most siege themselves have a cap of 50.

Pryda.8257:

Remove all Arrow Carts that deal damage to 50 guys! Problem solved

This.

How is it that a dozen arrow carts hitting everyone and their mother every few seconds isn’t a problem, but my lava font is?

Is it because I’m awesome? It is, isn’t it?

What if I promise to be 25% less awesome? Will that help out the poor, struggling cores in their quest to calculate damage? It’d be a terrible burden, but I’d be willing to give it a go.

bartsimpsons.6135:

calling out OP here for bs and lack of promised math.

OP definitely over-promised and under-delivered.

Zephyrus.9680:

So stop asking for it.

And it’s not because of balance, it’s there to keep the server and/or your CPU from exploding in huge fights… which already happens as is (skill lag and 1 fps).

Without the cap, the processing would rise exponentially with an increase in players. More players casting AoEs x more getting hit by each AoE.

Example: 100 players each casting 1 non-pulsing AoE on 100 other players with no cap would be 100×100=10,000 different damage instances to be calculated. Doesn’t matter if it was done clientside or serverside, a real-time fight would be impossible except for a super computer.

Your theory does not take into account that people will have to move out of the AoE range and not stack up as much.

Not that I think the AoE cap should be removed, but your argument is pretty fail and really I wouldn’t use ‘math’ in the title for 100×100.

BTW: n^2 is called quadratic or polynomial and NOT exponential ( 2^n would be exponential) and I think the computation is in fact cubic (n^3) as each of the n^2 results have to be communicated to n clients.

Rednik.3809:

Pryda.8257:

Remove all Arrow Carts that deal damage to 50 guys! Problem solved

I remember alot of fights with absurd skill lag and without any siege.

When ANet bugged the siege deployment there was significantally less lag while there were still attacks on prime objectives (like bl garnis) going on. Also siege counts towards map cap (with no siege ingame more ppl could play on a border)(I’m not saying that the non sieging side can get more players in, just that if there was no siege player cap could be X+Y instead of just X+siege), now that the siege is 50 instead of players’ 5 cap, it’s quiet obvious what is a major cause for the lag problem.

Rednik.3809:

Pryda.8257:

Remove all Arrow Carts that deal damage to 50 guys! Problem solved

I remember alot of fights with absurd skill lag and without any siege.

Obviously yes. But Siege Weapons don’t help, that’s why they are capped mapwise.

Nobody who knows what they are talking about is really talking about removing the AE cap, OP.

They are really talking about increasing it. All games(I know of) have some cap here…

You just have to do a substitute and replace whenever you hear somebody talking about removing it… and not just for performance reasons. Any change to this cap will result in ArenaNet having to examine and every AE ability in the game…and potentially split them for PvP. A small change from say.. 5 to 10 might not have too many repercussions but 20? 30? Tons of splits….

You want to know why the AoE cap shouldn’t be removed?

Remember how they buffed ACs because ACs are the anti-crowd siege? Well, that would make players walking ACs.

It wouldn’t allow “skilled players to kill zergs” it would just make the DPS capabilities of Zergs exponentially higher.

bartsimpsons.6135:

calling out OP here for bs and lack of promised math.

1. damage calculations are not very clock cycle intensive. simple plus, minus, divide and multiply is not cpu heavy. im sure modern cpu’s have hardware mutltiplication/division.

2. gw2 has heavy cpu demands because there are lots of projectiles that have position, velocity, collision compared to mmorpgs without projectiles. all this data has to be sent to all the players after being determined by the server based on keyboard/mouse inputs sent to server through the game client.

3. hit detection for aoes is very simple. there are no projectiles involved in most cases. cpu must simply check position of players to determine if they are in the aoe and deal damage to them.

4. 5 man aoe cap requires algorithm to decide which 5 men are going to be hit. this is additional processing over simply dealing damage to all those that are inside the aoe radius.

5. lol at 10,000 number. 10,000 calculations is not very many for a computer lol. your computer runs significantly more calculations just to render graphics. 1920×1080 at 60hz is roughly equivalent to about 2 million commands to change a 24 bit pixel colour value 60 times per second….

It’s not BS, it’s a design issue with every MMO involving massive fights — and they always have these types of limitations or else server (or client) bottlenecks that make huge fights unplayable. Two factors that need to be optimized are processing (both clientside and serverside) and communication between client and server. Obviously clientside optimization is just as important.

I guess you never noticed “skill lag”, I rarely do but it happens in big fights. That’s a bottleneck in serverside cpu or bandwidth. I guess you also never noticed your PC struggling in these fights with your FPS dropping.

Damage isn’t simple arithmetic… Armor, effect procs, trait passives, conditions/durations. DoTs are updated in real time (implying serverside) with might stacks etc… If it’s not CPU it’s communicating the data on everyone to every player and the point remains.

I guarantee projectiles are not causing skill lag lol. I guess you didn’t notice almost the only projectiles that have “gravity” are catas and trebs. Everything else is just visual effects (clientside). ACs don’t even use projectiles. Cannons and ballistas don’t have gravity (except visual), same with arrows.

Niim.9260:

Your theory does not take into account that people will have to move out of the AoE range and not stack up as much.

Not that I think the AoE cap should be removed, but your argument is pretty fail and really I wouldn’t use ‘math’ in the title for 100×100.

That’s play style. Not a very good design if the game only works when people are playing a certain way…

The math tag is because the justification is mathematical. You didn’t get that the 100×100 is an abstract example. It’s 100×100x(whatever calculations, processes, latency and bandwidth is involved with 100 players’ skills interacting with 100 other players). Whereas now it’s 100×5x(etc…). That was the point.

Just pointing out that as long as skill lag is still a problem, AoE cap won’t be removed or probably even increased by 1 or 2.

Zephyrus.9680:

I guarantee projectiles are not causing skill lag lol. I guess you didn’t notice almost the only projectiles that have “gravity” are catas and trebs. Everything else is just visual effects (clientside). ACs don’t even use projectiles. Cannons and ballistas don’t have gravity (except visual), same with arrows.

False. Grenades have physics-based flight paths, can be obstructed, and can proc 15 times simultaneously per throw (once per second).

They most definitely create lag both server-side in big confrontations and client side for the rendering of the models and the explosions. One of my guildies actually asked me to roll non-grenades in Fractals about 2 weeks ago because his frame rate was dropping so drastically every time I would start chucking.

So please, if you are going to be snarky about what you perceive to be a general misunderstanding of the mechanics of lag and the causes thereof, get your facts straight.

All projectiles can be obstructed, something by nothing visible at all. Projectiles are costly in this game there’s no doubt.

Pets might be another problem too. They got pathfinding to do and the like.

lunyboy.8672:

Zephyrus.9680:

I guarantee projectiles are not causing skill lag lol. I guess you didn’t notice almost the only projectiles that have “gravity” are catas and trebs. Everything else is just visual effects (clientside). ACs don’t even use projectiles. Cannons and ballistas don’t have gravity (except visual), same with arrows.

False. Grenades have physics-based flight paths, can be obstructed, and can proc 15 times simultaneously per throw (once per second).

They most definitely create lag both server-side in big confrontations and client side for the rendering of the models and the explosions. One of my guildies actually asked me to roll non-grenades in Fractals about 2 weeks ago because his frame rate was dropping so drastically every time I would start chucking.

So please, if you are going to be snarky about what you perceive to be a general misunderstanding of the mechanics of lag and the causes thereof, get your facts straight.

Nades and thief’s clusterbomb too. But that’s all I can think of, there’s very few real projectiles with physics. There is collision obstruction but that’s not gravity.

Also what you’re describing is clientside which is corroborating my response (if you read what I was responding to). What’s being called ‘skill lag’ is a serverside cpu/isp bottleneck and nothing to do with clients. You’re claiming projectiles are calculated clientside (I don’t know if they actually are, though it makes sense). Then the server only needs to treat them as a normal ‘attack’ and clients do the rest. If it [projectile path] is calculated serverside it’s still one instance no matter how many people there are. The AoE hits are not.

If it were not against the rules I would name another MMO with much much cheaper development than GW2 where instead of an AoE limit, they made it so AoEs hit everyone but the more targets they hit, the less damage it did each target. Makes sense balancewise… But the mechanics just didn’t work for the server in big fights. 30vs30 would literally lag for 1 minute+. In extreme cases it would be 5 minutes, just standing and not able to do anything while waiting for your command to hit the queue of server processes.

I’m not calming to know how things work on GW2 but from a mathematical standpoint, some things have to scale a lot harder in terms of cpu power and communication when there’s more players. Projectiles don’t. The server is not communicating a projectile’s position in the air in “real time” to players. 100v100 will be 100x more projectiles than 1v1 and that’s all.

AoE has nothing to do with 100v100 fighting.

People zerg because it’s is benefical system over having small tactical groups. If you increase aoe cap ppl just come and complain their ball was nuked and it’s unfair like it actually is, in fact.

Here’s couple points:

1) waypoints allow zerg to move around map lighting fast and overrun any small group they spot
2) there’s no real need to defend objectives on map, just keep steamrolling with zerg
3) even if there was need to defend some objectives there isn’t enough objectives which can be taken by small force so it actually hurts. sure you can flip camps but that hardly has any effect.
4) lack of logistical concerns i.e. who is going to defend while you attack

etc.

if anyone of you know someone who has played eve-o ask them how well thought mechanic near unlimited aoe from titan was. this is what would happen with no aoe limit too.

People would just start one shotting themselves on retal if they removed the aoe cap anyway. It seems like a great idea till you think about it for 5 secs or so

It doesn’t matter anyway they say they cant because of technical issues so its not going to happen even if it was a good idea

Anet starts losing a mass exodus of people, you really think they won’t change the Aoe cap? Lol business wasn’t your major was it?

Jscull.2514:

Anet starts losing a mass exodus of people, you really think they won’t change the Aoe cap? Lol business wasn’t your major was it?

And logic isn’t your thing, is it? Apart from the fact that there’s no proof for that claim, those things are completely unrelated. And “losing a mass exodus” doesn’t even make sense.