Guild Wars 2

After some heavy testing I managed to replicate Humanpony’s claim of the hung process. The sad part is that it was only once and I couldn’t get it to happen again. I did sniff around a bit with wireshark and it appears to be pinging what I guess is the login server, but not the ip of my server (Gates of Madness) or the eternal battlegrounds. I can’t draw any concrete conclusions from this info. Did anyone else manage to test it and have more luck?

covenn.7165:

In all fairness though, there have been numerous things that have already made it into production that shouldn’t have if there had been decent testing / QA taking place. Not only that, some of these issues have been in existence since release and still not resolved.

This is a good point. The state of the Necromancer class at launch was a good example of this.

covenn.7165:

Just keep in mind that even if your client is completely disconnected from the game server, it doesn’t automatically means that game server realizes it. Further more, it doesn’t mean that the code is handling it correctly across the board.

Unfortunately any amount of testing we do won’t prove that. That all has to be done on their end.

Also a good point. We can, however, verify that the client does indeed disconnect and shut down properly on our end. If it does not, as Humanpony suggests, then we can report this issue, and hopefully steps to replicate it, to A-Net to expedite a fix.

nalenb.1425:

I just jumped into WvW and then quit the game from there. I see no extra processes lingering around on my system. Granted, I am running the Mac client. I can check Windows later today.

I doubt that it’s an every-time occurance as that would never have made it past a decent QA session, and I haven’t personally seen it happen as of yet. My guess is that there are other contributing factors that would cause this to happen, if it is indeed happening.

The trick will be to first replicate it, then identify the steps required. At that point the problem can then be passed off to A-Net and the word can be spread on how to avoid it while A-Net works on an actual solution.

Porky.5021:

You are not stubbornly refusing to let a problem exist…you are stubbornly clinging to some theory which doesn’t hold water. I am surprised you don’t know the difference.

People who are stubbornly refusing to let a problem exist will be more than happy to abandon a theory on the cause of the problem should it seem that theory is not correct or the cause of the problem is most likely something else.

Donkeys will cling to their theory no matter what, eventually doing things like comparing themselves to Einstein to attempt to give their stance some credibility.

You are reading WAY too far into what I said if you think I was comparing myself to Einstein. That or this was a sad attempt at a straw man.

The fact is that until Humanpony’s post there has been absolutely 0 verifiable evidence contrary to my thoery. Even his addition doesn’t contadict mine or A-Net’s statements as it is an outlying factor and doesn’t cause a bug with the queues themselves, rather a bug with the number of players reported to be in a given battleground. To top it off, the frequency of this happening would be directly tied with Wv3 population to begin with and this mass transfers are still a contributing factor.

Before you continue claiming that I’m ignoring all statements to the contrary you should note that I dedicated hours of my time to testing the three major claims that have been made to the contrary, prior to Humanpony’s post of course which I will be testing this evening.

If this claim proves to be true, I will adjust the theory to account for it.

Cactus.2710:

Your first point about the GW2 process still running in Task manager is especially interesting. I wonder if it would be possible for someone with programming skills to track incoming data packets from ANet’s server to see if the usual warning about getting booted for inactivity is still being sent to the local client even though it is no longer being displayed on the monitor. Wouldn’t that be a hoot if so? Wouldn’t it be even more amazing if ANet hadn’t thought to try that from their end?

Some simple wire shark use can easily show if the hung process is still communicating with the A-Net servers.

Humanpony.4921:

Don’t know if it has been raised yet but this observation came from the Gandaran community forum;

- When exiting the game, the GW2 process keeps running in task manager (unlike earlier patch)
- When exiting the game from WvW zone, player still ‘appears’ online in party window/guild screen
- When exiting the game from WvW zone, mini-map dot still appears at a random location in zone

Could it be that players that exit the game in WvW aren’t registered as such and still registered as online? This would create a long queue as more people are indicated in a zone than are actually there.

If this is indeed happening, and happening on a large scale, it could very well be a contributing factor. Does anyone have any more data on this phenomenon? I’ll see if I can replicate it when I get off work.

covenn.7165:

Stubbornness and problem solving skills generally are mutually exclusive.

This is entirely incorrect.

• Stubbornly refusing to let a problem continue to exist is the very essence of problem solving.
• Trial and error, the essence and mode of most scientific discovery, is stubbornly trying different things over and over in the attempt to understand or achieve something.
• Nikola Testla and Albert Einstein, two of the greatest problem solvers in history, were often described as extremely stubborn.

Burl.9567:

GottFaust.5297:

Bunch of “stuff”.

There is so much wrong with your “testing” or whatever you want to call it and you make so many assumptions that I’m not even going to go into it with you. We will all just have to agree to disagree on this one with you.

• Petitio Principii
• Onus Probandi

I’ve decided to test some of the claims made in this thread. I’ll give you both my test results, and the test procedures that I undertook to get these results so that you can replicate them yourself. If you come up with different, legitimate, results by all means post them here.

First Claim: Tarnished Coast has both a queue and the outmanned buff.

Test procedures:
TC Players:

• Simply queue up for a battleground and see if you have the outmanned buff when you get in.
  Non-TC Players:
• Guest on TC.
• Ask a few individuals to queue up for a battleground of their choosing and then have them report back to you if they have the outmanned buff when they get in.

Results: None of the 20 indidivuals I contacted in TC’s lion’s arch had the outmanned buff when they entered the battleground of their choice, but they all had a queue.

Conclusion: There is no Outmanned Buff on Tarnished Coast while also having a queue outside of buggs with the outmanned buff itself.

Other Notes: The queue experienced by my volunteers was actually significantly shorter than most of the recent claims at only around 20-30 minutes.

Second Claim: Queueing from a different server than your home server will subject you to the queues associated with the guested server and use a slot for that server’s battleground rather than your home server.

Test procedures:

• Queue for a battleground on your home server. Note the queue time.
• Guest on a different server.
• Queue for the same battleground as you did on your home server. Note the queue time.
• Compare the noted queue times.
• For an additional test, get into an overflow server (Lion’s Arch is the easiest to do so) and then queue again. Note and compare the queue times again.

Results:

• Queue time to enter the eternal battleground while on Gates of Madness: 0 seconds.
• Queue time to enter the eternal battleground while guested on Tarnished Coast: 0 seconds.
• Queue time to enter the eternal battleground from an overflow while guested on Tarnished Coast: 0 seconds.
• Queue time to enter the eternal battleground from an overflow while on Gates of Madness: 0 seconds.

Conclusions: The server you are guested on has no affect on the queue time or which battleground you enter. This is direcly in line with the parameters listed by A-Net in both the guesting announcement and patch notes.

Third Claim: The green dots representing allied players on the minimap in Wv3 are not culled.

Test procedures:

• Gather a party, ideally this would be a full 5 players who are capable of communicating well.
• Turn off “show allied names” so that only the names of allied players in your party will be visible. This makes for easier tracking of the test players.
• Enter the Wv3 battleground of your choice.
• Find a large zerg.
• Wait for the zerg to enter combat with an enemy zerg.
• Sit at the back of the zerg and have your party members run around the outside of the zerg (this makes them easier to track).
• Identify the blue dots representing your party members as they run around the zerg.
• Watch as the allied party members are subjected to culling as they move away from you (Their names will vanish as well as their models).
• Observe if the number of green dots representing allied players near the blue dots representing party members.
• When party member is culled, compare the number of green dots you see near their blue dot with the number of allied players that the party member reports visible to them.
• Repeat the last step multiple times with each party member.

Results:

• Party members consistently reported a larger number of green dots close to themselves than was observed near their blue dot after culling took effect.
• Green dots representing allied players constantly pop in and out of existance on the minimap relative to the proximity to the observing player.

Conclusion: Green dots are indeed culled in large zerg situations.

Other Notes:

• The green dots do not appear to update at the same rate as actual player movement. Green dots closer to the observer seem to move more accurately.
• The culling of green dots seems to be entirely independant from player model culling.
• Green dot culling seems to be far less aggressive than actual player model culling.
• Green dot culling seems to be far more proximity based than actual player model culling.
• The green dots representing allied players are very, very hard to keep track of and estimate numbers of. It took hours to compile enough data to have a good idea of what was happening. Unless you are a bot, a casual observation will not provide any accurate data of any sort.

Mikitten058:

So today someone brought up in TS:

If entering WvW while guesting on another server you taking that servers wvw spot as “count” goes however you are playing on your server.

Can Arena net confirm or deny this?

I highly doubt this as the queue is per battleground. You would have to be able to join the guested server’s battlegrounds to count towards the total. Were this the case you could completely avoid all queues and put thousands of people in a given battleground by queuing from overflow servers.

Burl.9567:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

I’ve been a software developer for 30 years in many different capacities and I don’t agree with the OP’s theory at all.

I’ll quote myself here: Care to elaborate as to why you disagree? Dissenting opinions with nothing to back them may well not be posted.

If you truely have 30 years of experience developing software you surely know the value and importance of documentation and clear statement of reasons and evidence when disagreeing with a problem assessment.

I was responding to this: “I used this information, some educated observation (I’m a Software Engineer), and some plain old common sense to formulate my OP”

My educated observation is there was little complaints about odd queues and strange populations, then a patch, and now lots of complaints. Years of experience has taught me that however unlikely it seems, there was probably a bug introduced.

Yes, there was a patch. The patch introduced the new culling system. On the same day they also cut off the free transfers which caused all the procrastinators and those on the fence to transfer en masse. The theory presented in this thread is not that the issue started on January 28th, 2013, which is obvious, but that the issue is not a bug with the queues or an unannounced decrease in Wv3 population cap. This theory is that the issues reported are a symptom of a couple of, seemingly, unrelated changes causing not only an increase in population, resulting in longer queues, but a lower number of allied players being visible in favor of displaying enemy players, thus causing the illusion of a decrease in Wv3 population.

Assuming that all changes that are viewed by the affected population as negative are bugs is a very ignorant stance to take. Especially when the individuals who have access to the source code and are responsible for its maintenance have stated that everything appears to be working as intended.

I know the three servers in our match up are experiencing this problem (tier 3) and none of us have reported any unusual numbers of transfers in. You don’t have any evidence that such last minute transfers happened.

And in any case, ArenaNet could easily query their databases and see. All they’ve said is they will look into it.

The simplest answer is that they introduced a bug.

As a software developer you should know by now that the simple answer is rarely the correct one when it comes to systems like this.

As to the server transfer issue: You are aware that they raised the population caps on the servers in general a couple of days before the transfers were cut off specifically because of all the complaints that people couldn’t transfer to servers like Tarnished Coast and Kaineng ( in your tier currently) due to their full status, and that Tarnished Coast received a subsequent volume of transfers so high as to put them back into full status during NA prime time right? You are aware that the only reason Kaineng is even in tier 3 is due to mass transfers to begin with right? You are aware that one of the main reasons they even reset the Wv3 raitings was due to mass transfers greatly changing the Wv3 populations of many servers right?

You are aware that most of those transfers were done a week or more in advance? You are aware that most of those individuals were playing already during the match prior? You are aware that they experienced NO issues at all until the patch went live? You are aware that your answer as to why we are all experiencing issues is that Anet addressed some culling issues (actually more they addressed rendering and not culling, they are really separate items), servers got mass transfers, too many people in the JP, too many people farming Skritt, Centaurs, Krait, etc., and that the player base is far to inept as to not recognize that there are 60-70 invisible players on the map causing them to believe there is a population imbalance?

Or the alternative answer is…..they introduced a bug causing some issues with population caps and queues during the last patch.

Sorry…I’m gonna lean towards the bug on this one…

A few of the statements that you made in this post fly in the face of logic, A-Net’s responses (both text and actions taken), and player reaction and documentation. I won’t bother pointing them out as they should be obvious.

As to the claim that there were no reported queue issues, Kaineng has been reporting them for weeks, yes even before the patch.

nalenb.1425:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

I’ve been a software developer for 30 years in many different capacities and I don’t agree with the OP’s theory at all.

I’ll quote myself here: Care to elaborate as to why you disagree? Dissenting opinions with nothing to back them may well not be posted.

If you truely have 30 years of experience developing software you surely know the value and importance of documentation and clear statement of reasons and evidence when disagreeing with a problem assessment.

I was responding to this: “I used this information, some educated observation (I’m a Software Engineer), and some plain old common sense to formulate my OP”

My educated observation is there was little complaints about odd queues and strange populations, then a patch, and now lots of complaints. Years of experience has taught me that however unlikely it seems, there was probably a bug introduced.

Yes, there was a patch. The patch introduced the new culling system. On the same day they also cut off the free transfers which caused all the procrastinators and those on the fence to transfer en masse. The theory presented in this thread is not that the issue started on January 28th, 2013, which is obvious, but that the issue is not a bug with the queues or an unannounced decrease in Wv3 population cap. This theory is that the issues reported are a symptom of a couple of, seemingly, unrelated changes causing not only an increase in population, resulting in longer queues, but a lower number of allied players being visible in favor of displaying enemy players, thus causing the illusion of a decrease in Wv3 population.

Assuming that all changes that are viewed by the affected population as negative are bugs is a very ignorant stance to take. Especially when the individuals who have access to the source code and are responsible for its maintenance have stated that everything appears to be working as intended.

I know the three servers in our match up are experiencing this problem (tier 3) and none of us have reported any unusual numbers of transfers in. You don’t have any evidence that such last minute transfers happened.

And in any case, ArenaNet could easily query their databases and see. All they’ve said is they will look into it.

The simplest answer is that they introduced a bug.

As a software developer you should know by now that the simple answer is rarely the correct one when it comes to systems like this.

As to the server transfer issue: You are aware that they raised the population caps on the servers in general a couple of days before the transfers were cut off specifically because of all the complaints that people couldn’t transfer to servers like Tarnished Coast and Kaineng ( in your tier currently) due to their full status, and that Tarnished Coast received a subsequent volume of transfers so high as to put them back into full status during NA prime time right? You are aware that the only reason Kaineng is even in tier 3 is due to mass transfers to begin with right? You are aware that one of the main reasons they even reset the Wv3 raitings was due to mass transfers greatly changing the Wv3 populations of many servers right?

nalenb.1425:

GottFaust.5297:

nalenb.1425:

I’ve been a software developer for 30 years in many different capacities and I don’t agree with the OP’s theory at all.

I’ll quote myself here: Care to elaborate as to why you disagree? Dissenting opinions with nothing to back them may well not be posted.

If you truely have 30 years of experience developing software you surely know the value and importance of documentation and clear statement of reasons and evidence when disagreeing with a problem assessment.

I was responding to this: “I used this information, some educated observation (I’m a Software Engineer), and some plain old common sense to formulate my OP”

My educated observation is there was little complaints about odd queues and strange populations, then a patch, and now lots of complaints. Years of experience has taught me that however unlikely it seems, there was probably a bug introduced.

Yes, there was a patch. The patch introduced the new culling system. On the same day they also cut off the free transfers which caused all the procrastinators and those on the fence to transfer en masse. The theory presented in this thread is not that the issue started on January 28th, 2013, which is obvious, but that the issue is not a bug with the queues or an unannounced decrease in Wv3 population cap. This theory is that the issues reported are a symptom of a couple of, seemingly, unrelated changes causing not only an increase in population, resulting in longer queues, but a lower number of allied players being visible in favor of displaying enemy players, thus causing the illusion of a decrease in Wv3 population.

Assuming that all changes that are viewed by the affected population as negative are bugs is a very ignorant stance to take. Especially when the individuals who have access to the source code and are responsible for its maintenance have stated that everything appears to be working as intended.

Burl.9567:

It’s likely related to the new “feature” introduced that allows players that crash to rejoin in the dungeon they were apart of. The system is probably giving them “X” amount of time to get back in before it counts them as logged off completely and unable to get back in the dungeon. Well that system clearly isn’t compatible with WvW now is it? If you get off/crash/DC/AFK, you are off, let the next guy in.

This wasn’t happening before the patch. Now it is here after the patch. Common sense says it was the patch that caused it. HINT HINT ANET!!!!!!!! You being an ostrich on this whole issue isn’t helping you any. A simple acknowledgement that you screwed up and will fix it or you are looking into the issue will shut most of us up. The fact you say nothing only makes it worse. At least pretend you read the forums…

That capability has been in place for all dungeons except for FotM since launch day. The patch on the 28th simply implemented it for FotM. Wv3 and FotM do not use the same queueing system. Therefore, changes to FotM did not and cannot affect Wv3.

nalenb.1425:

I’ve been a software developer for 30 years in many different capacities and I don’t agree with the OP’s theory at all.

I’ll quote myself here: Care to elaborate as to why you disagree? Dissenting opinions with nothing to back them may well not be posted.

If you truely have 30 years of experience developing software you surely know the value and importance of documentation and clear statement of reasons and evidence when disagreeing with a problem assessment.

New word from A-Net on the future of Wv3: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Upcoming-WvW-Updates/first

Issues 1 and 4 are worded in such a way as to support my theory:

• Issue 1 implies that culling is indeed a problem, and that they are steadily working towards a fix, or fixes.
• Issue 4 implies that the long queues are inherit to large player population and demand through interest in Wv3. Furthermore they are expecting them to get worse with the coming Wv3 enhancements. This also implies that they are looking at ways to make them more efficient and maybe provide some sort of time or position feedback to the player.

covenn.7165:

@Gott

Well first of all, you are making a rather large assumption that what he posted is accurate despite the evidence mounting against it. Looks like you need to start completely over in your examination of this issue and remove that assumption.

Start here as it absolutely has not been ruled out and cannot be unless it is your software and you intimately know how it works. Consider the possibility that there may be an issue with how players totals are being reported on maps. Being completely hypothetical, lets say a minor change or rollback to a prior build in a class introduced/reintroduced a bug where disconnected clients weren’t getting cleared from the active player totals correctly. Is it plausible that this same property is being referenced by whatever monitoring code that our responding dev used? Could something like this also explain why sometimes things appear normal and other times they do not, using normal behavior player in how they leave WvWvW zones (exiting game vs. Zoning out) as well as normal functionality like the object being cleared if it was cached (or the property being reset directly from code)?

Yes, I was being completely hypothetical here, but it should be enough to get you started on thinking about this situation a little more clearly.

So, what you are saying is to throw out everything that one of the developers who wrote and maintains the queue code is saying in favor of what is most likely emotionally-exaggerated, due to frustration with the long queues, claims? I’m sorry, but I will not do that.

If you want to be completely hypothetical, there is a more simple solution. Given the operational parameters of the queue supplied by the aforementioned developer, the system is possible to abuse to your advantage. Lets say you are on Server A and you want to dominate Servers B and C hands down. All you have to do is grab a large number of accounts (say 100 for each borderland and battleground on each server you’re facing), transfer them to the target server(s), and have them jump in the queues and then re-queue when they get the popup to enter. This would be easy with a simple bot, and a bit of money. If the bots do get in for whatever reason you can simply have them run around in some far corner forever. At this point you have hundreds of bots taking up legitimate player slots and bogging down the queue thus keeping your competition to a minimum and creating all of the symptoms reported. Again, this is entirely hypothetical and very unlikely.

covenn.7165:

Unfortunately you are ignoring many of the symptoms because you are stuck on your theory. I would suggest taking a step back and taking a look at the symptoms again. Simply put, you are ignoring a large part of the information and not adjusting your theory to compensate for it.

And no, it wasn’t a veiled insult at you directly, but one towards the industry as a whole. This is why I feel that so much bad software gets designed. Even the cutting edge things I am doing with some of the best developers in the country, there are examples of that. The consequences of poorly designed and written code in the gaming industry are relatively minor compared to other areas…. Billions of tax pay dollars and lives aren’t lost when ANET screws up.

Which legitimate symptoms, pray tell, am I ignoring that have not already been debunked by the A-Net dev post that has been referenced multiple times in this thread so far?

covenn.7165:

GottFaust.5297:

Plato.6128:

As a mathematician, I think the key mistake you are making Mr. GottFaust is not understanding the difference between a conjecture and a theorem. The title of this topic is “The real reasons for the queue bug;” however, you present speculation not proof. If the title were “A theory on the queue bug” I am certain that people here would be more receptive to your ideas.

This is a very valid point. I have made the suggested change. As an engineer, I am very literal-minded. Given the fact that no one can prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that their theory is more than based on observation until a definitive answer is given from A-Net, I assumed the fact that this is a theory would be obvious, and that the old title would be fine.

Sadly, this is the exact reason why many software engineers are horrible at what they do. I have experienced it first hand in both the public and private sectors. The truth is that designing software well requires a different mindset than the classic engineer stereotype. Of course, some of this is only relevant to the type of software you typically design because the classic mindset does work well enough in some cases.

Anyways, I am a subject matter expert as well and I disagree both with your theories and your reasoning behind them.

I’ll ignore what could be construed as a thinly veiled personal attack in this post, and assume it was meant as a commentary on the industry as a whole.

Care to elaborate as to why you disagree? Dissenting opinions with nothing to back them may well not be posted.

Plato.6128:

As a mathematician, I think the key mistake you are making Mr. GottFaust is not understanding the difference between a conjecture and a theorem. The title of this topic is “The real reasons for the queue bug;” however, you present speculation not proof. If the title were “A theory on the queue bug” I am certain that people here would be more receptive to your ideas.

This is a very valid point. I have made the suggested change. As an engineer, I am very literal-minded. Given the fact that no one can prove, beyond a shadow of doubt, that their theory is more than based on observation until a definitive answer is given from A-Net, I assumed the fact that this is a theory would be obvious, and that the old title would be fine.

Genev.2450:

“Aggressively culled allied players” does not mean you can’t see people on the minimap anymore, and it only really should happen when you’re in large encounters or very large zergs – not when you’re running around on your own or in very small groups trying to find out where other people are, as people have reported doing.

Culling does not mean that suddenly you run around on your own, just thought i’d let you know.

Edit: Highfive to the 2 people above me

And yet both of those issues were reported multiple times during the trial run of this new culling system… I’ll let you draw your own conclusions from that.

Ruprect.7260:

GottFaust.5297:

Ruprect.7260:

I dont beleive this. The mumble is constantly being advertized in /m chat. It is very well known that we have it and is for anyone to use. This is besides the point.

It is not hard to gauge the the number of ppl on a map. Can you tell me where 120+ people are hiding on the map when we have a queue. Im sorry but you can run to all towers/keeps/JP and keep an eye on the fighting and know where most ppl are. We are just not seeing enough ppl on a map to constitute a queue. I would be fine with the queue if the maps were actually full, that is expected. This is not the case, there are instances of queues for hours while the server inside has a outmanned buff??? Please explain this to me.

Also
“We’ve watched the queue numbers a lot and generally it’s only a few slots that are in this reserved state at any time.”

If the above was the case there would never be less than about 150 on a map when there is a queue depending on what a few slots actually means. I can gaurantee you I have not witnessed 150 ppl on a map since reset.

Back to my initial point. You aren’t seeing them because the new culling system aggressively culls allied players in favor of enemy players.

Lol, have you even experienced the new culling system? If there are no enemies on the screen I can see my whole zerg, when we all go to our keep to stack up and get ready for a big push are you telling me that I am only seeing 25-30 of my allies and the other 100+ are there but invisible?
And when we are running around in the world as a group of 5-10 taiking camps and there are no enemies around there are a buch of invisible groups that we cant see.

Not only that but the culling system is a whole nother thread. Most ppl think it’s worse than it was before.

I agree, I also dislike the new culling system as I had gotten used to the old one and its limitations. That being said it is well known and heavily documented that it, as I have stated, aggressively culls allied players. I’m surprised you’d even dispute that after acknowledging it yourself.

Cactus.2710:

Gottfaust, when the real reason for all of this shakes out you are going to look like even more of a clown than you do now. It’s one thing to not even acknowledge the problem that so many other players experience, but to portray your theory as fact is far beneath your supposed technical credentials. Everything you have written is rank supposition, most of which doesn’t even fit the breadth of evidence at hand.

Bravo, you’ve resorted to argumentum ad ignotantiam as well as base name calling. Both sure signs of having lost an argument and having nothing to contribute.

Ruprect.7260:

I dont beleive this. The mumble is constantly being advertized in /m chat. It is very well known that we have it and is for anyone to use. This is besides the point.

It is not hard to gauge the the number of ppl on a map. Can you tell me where 120+ people are hiding on the map when we have a queue. Im sorry but you can run to all towers/keeps/JP and keep an eye on the fighting and know where most ppl are. We are just not seeing enough ppl on a map to constitute a queue. I would be fine with the queue if the maps were actually full, that is expected. This is not the case, there are instances of queues for hours while the server inside has a outmanned buff??? Please explain this to me.

Also
“We’ve watched the queue numbers a lot and generally it’s only a few slots that are in this reserved state at any time.”

If the above was the case there would never be less than about 150 on a map when there is a queue depending on what a few slots actually means. I can gaurantee you I have not witnessed 150 ppl on a map since reset.

Back to my initial point. You aren’t seeing them because the new culling system aggressively culls allied players in favor of enemy players.

Ruprect.7260:

GottFaust.5297:

I’m ignoring most of those claims as they have been directly debunked by a developer already. Yes, people are fallible and developers are people, but I trust them much more than random people, rightfully annoyed by long queues as they may be, making obviously exaggerated claims.

Where was this debunked?

If you are referring to the post in this thread:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/page/3#post1379180

This was posted before most of this started happening to the extent it is now. Last week it was a little noticable throughout the week as we had queues but it would seem the BL was actually full and this degraded over the course of the week untuil at the end of the week we would have queues and not a full BL.

After the reset last Friday this was extremely noticable as every week there was a queue on reset night obviously. This time it was very different. Times before we would have 2+ zergs covering a map and you could plainly see there was a ton of ppl there. After the reset on friday night, we had queues and not anywhere near 166 ppl on the map. This was made very obvious to us as we coordinate with the other guilds on our server through a serverwide mumble. We maybe had 50-60 players on the whole map and a very long queue, up to 4+ hours for some. As the night progressed and ppl started logging out we noticed no one was getting in and the numbers were steadily decreasing. The servers that had big groups on and no one logging off still had a lot of ppl on the map, our server who had a lot log off while I was on lost players that never were replaced.

We are very coordianted and close knit. We all noticed this problem and it was made very clear in mumble.

You probably don’t have a serverwide mumble or nearly the coordination we do based on your t7 presence so it does not suprise me this has gone unnoticed by you.

Considering the fact that he debunks every symptom listed, continuing to list them doesn’t make him wrong. You should know that…

What I suspect that you are referencing is a symptom of both growing pains and the ratings reset. let me explain: TC was listed as full for all but the earliest hours of the morning for a long time. Many people were complaining that they could not transfer to TC during the time following the announcement of the end of free transfers. As a result of this they actually raised the server population cap, note I said server not Wv3. So many people transferred in after this that it’s STILL listed as full during NA prime time. I’m willing to bet that very few of these new individuals know, care to know, or care at all that you use a “server wide” mumble let alone what the server info is or even what mumble is. This issue will correct itself in time as the information disseminates through their ranks, assuming you make it publicly known. This ties into the second cause, the ratings reset. As more and more people figure out that the ratings have been reset, they naturally want to go out to Wv3 and make their mark. These are often new transfers and people who don’t normally participate in Wv3. They didn’t care prior because the tiers were largely static with advancement being rare outside of mass transfers, and they see it as boring to fight the same people over and over. Now that this is changing they suddenly care again. For example: Gates of Madness could barely field 2 30+ man zergs in EB on a given day before the raitings reset. The interest just wasn’t there. Since word of the reset has gotten out we consistently have 2, and sometimes 3, very large zergs running around and many smaller groups taking camps and the like.

Basically what you have is a bunch of new transfers and newly interested players who don’t know about your established communication channels, and may not care to know, who are clogging up your Wv3 and creating queues for the rest of the established community.

Ubi.4136:

Hate to quote myself, but this isn’t exaggerated…this was last night around 9 pm central.

When you do a test with 5 people trying to log in to the same BL spaced 1 minute apart. Person 1 straight in, person 2 straight in, person 3 – ques, person 4 straight in (3 still in que), person 5 straight in (person 3 still in que), 30 minutes later 3 is still in que. Random members of your test group have logged in and out of the borderland a few times and gotten right back in…this is not a “we have too many people trying to WvW” problem.

Please read my response to your previous post concerning this issue. The timing you mention matches with the timing of the symptoms I reference.

Ubi.4136:

When you do a test with 5 people trying to log in to the same BL spaced 1 minute apart. Person 1 straight in, person 2 straight in, person 3 – ques, person 4 straight in (3 still in que), person 5 straight in (person 3 still in que), 30 minutes later 3 is still in que. Random members of your test group have logged in and out of the borderland a few times and gotten right back in…this is not a “we have too many people trying to WvW” problem.

Based on the previously referenced developer post, if individual 3 is experiencing connection issues, particularly packet loss which interrupts communication to the server, they MAY be removed from the queue until communication is restored and thus be in a later queue position. Individual 3 may want to check their connection to the server in question, you can get the IP by typing “/ip” in chat, to verify that this isn’t an issue. I can speak from experience that there is currently a Level3 Communications routing node in Dallas Texas ( where the NA servers are located) that’s currently having some sort of load issue during NA prime-time. I am personally affected by this issue resulting in a 10-20% packet loss to the A-Net servers during peak hours. I have contacted my ISP and had them put a routing exception to keep me from hitting the affected node and thus fixing my issue. I can get you the IP of this node when I get off work if you’d like?

Genev.2450:

GottFaust.5297:

Genev.2450:

I hate to repeat myself 3 times, so i’ll just mention that there is plenty of proof that Something at least is wrong, we jsut don’t know exactly what the problem is and THAT is the wild speculation, not that something is wrong.

Yes, something clearly is wrong. I haven’t argued against that point. I’ve simply provided a logical explanation to the perceived issue in hopes to stem the tide of wild misconceptions. Were the issue the fault of A-Net soley (the culling change IS their fault while the transfers are the fault of the community), I would be calling for a fix. As it stands, the only fix for the long queues of heavily populated Wv3 centric servers is for people to transfer off or quit playing. Both of those eventualities have to be decided by the individual players. A-Net can’t easily do anything about them.

You are blindly ignoring the reports of other people though, the symptoms.
While some of them might be exagerated, not all of them are and in some cases are confirmed by other servers (case in point: TC) observing it and supporting their confusion/outrage.

Normal queues would be grumbled over, but there wouldn’t be this type of reaction – the game has been out for quite some time now and queues, while disliked, are accepted as a reality in the game.

The problem isn’t the queues themselves, its the actual Population (or lack thereof) inside While there’s a queue, and the lottery system the queue is, isntead of the claimed FIFO. (The same lottery system they acknowledged and said they were looknig at in september)

I’m ignoring most of those claims as they have been directly debunked by a developer already. Yes, people are fallible and developers are people, but I trust them much more than random people, rightfully annoyed by long queues as they may be, making obviously exaggerated claims.

Burl.9567:

GottFaust.5297:

Sunspots.9861:

Yeah, wrong on all counts bud.

Unfortunately you cannot possibly know that.

The only official response has stated that the queues on TC are acceptable, intended, and that all the “missing” players are indeed present. You can see this response on the first page of the following thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first he even goes on to explain exactly how the queues work. I used this information, some educated observation (I’m a Software Engineer), and some plain old common sense to formulate my OP. where’s your proof outside of wild speculation and anecdotal claims?

Why is it when anyone ever gets called out they all the sudden become an expert on the subject after getting called out? (I’m a Software Engineer)

In this instance, I actually am, though my work recently has focused more on GUI work and inter-system communication of data rather than networking queues and the like. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to. I won’t be providing you any “hard proof” because that would make my work/contact info publicly available, which is a stupid idea. Suffice to say I graduated from USC, South Carolina, with a Batchelors in CompSci in 2008 and have since been working for a DoD contractor in Charleston SC as a Software Engineer.

Genev.2450:

I hate to repeat myself 3 times, so i’ll just mention that there is plenty of proof that Something at least is wrong, we jsut don’t know exactly what the problem is and THAT is the wild speculation, not that something is wrong.

Yes, something clearly is wrong. I haven’t argued against that point. I’ve simply provided a logical explanation to the perceived issue in hopes to stem the tide of wild misconceptions. Were the issue the fault of A-Net soley (the culling change IS their fault while the transfers are the fault of the community), I would be calling for a fix. As it stands, the only fix for the long queues of heavily populated Wv3 centric servers is for people to transfer off or quit playing. Both of those eventualities have to be decided by the individual players. A-Net can’t easily do anything about them.

Sunspots.9861:

Yeah, wrong on all counts bud.

Unfortunately you cannot possibly know that.

The only official response has stated that the queues on TC are acceptable, intended, and that all the “missing” players are indeed present. You can see this response on the first page of the following thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first he even goes on to explain exactly how the queues work. I used this information, some educated observation (I’m a Software Engineer), and some plain old common sense to formulate my OP. where’s your proof outside of wild speculation and anecdotal claims?

Kimbald.2697:

How can you even remotely present this as ‘how it really is’?

You’re speculating to the extreme, nothing more.

Culling being a reason why people think their server has less capacity? Seriously?

What official message or data are you basing you assumptions on?
I agree many of the speculations about reduced capacity are assumptions without proof too, but you present theories that are just as unlikely and unsupported to be honest…

And yet you blindly subscribe to the even wilder speculation that A-Net secretly lowered the population cap in a conspiracy to cause Wv3 to be terrible for top-tier servers and thus force them to pay money to transfer.

For the record: Gates of Madness, a low tier server by all accounts, managed to have 3 30+ man zergs running around EB at one point on Saturday. This is well above the speculated 50-man limit thus debunking this claim.

Edit – I forgot to mention that we don’t have queues, and have not had any in months.

First off, it’s not a bug or a change to the total population caps to a given battleground made by A-Net. It is a symptom of two unrelated changes that went live on the January 28th:

• The end of free transfers.
• The “new” culling system, tested in December, was implemented.

Now here’s the breakdown:

I’ll start off with free transfers ending. This one is to blame for the queues on top-end servers being so rediculously long. Longer, even, than they were in the time since the end was announced. I’ll explain this one with one simple term: procrastination. Here’s an analogy: Have you ever forgotten a Christmas gift or the Thanksgiving meal until the day before? Do you remember how insanely busy all the retail stores are on Christmas Eve or how hard it is to find a turkey the day before Thanksgiving? This is because a large subset of people wait until the last minute to do things. The same thing happened with free transfers on the 28th. That same subset of people all transferred at the last minute. A large portion of them went to Kaineng or another top-end Wv3 server thus spiking their queue times through the roof while leaving servers like Gates of Madness and Henge of Denravi with absolutely no queues at all.

Next lets look at the “new” culling system. This one causes the seemingly deserted maps issue. If you remember the way it was described during the initial test, search it out if you don’t, this new system aggressively culls, hides, allied players in favor of showing enemy players. The thought process behind this is that seeing the enemy is more important than seeing your allies. This allows you to get a better count of the enemy strength, works to lessen the impact of tactics that abuse culling like portal bombs, and keeps you from running head-first into enemy zeros that you don’t even see all while keeping your performance stable and at a some-what acceptable level. This is all well and good except for the fact that it hides allied players to do so. It’s so aggressive, in fact, that it can sometimes cull up to fully half of the allied players you would normally see. This leads, understandably, to the illusion that there are far fewer allied players than there used to be. It also leads to underestimation of allied strength which leads to larger zeros running from, and thus getting killed by, smaller enemy zergs more often than it used to.

I hope this explanation helped clear up a few misconceptions that are floating around.

Convenant.7092:

GottFaust.5297:

I’d like to bring your attention to a quick couple of points:
* Tiers 3, 5, and 8 are currently so lopsided in total points that the winning server has more points that both the other servers put together.
* Tiers 2 and 7 are being soundly trashed by their current leader to the point of no hope for a change-up any time soon.

Current potential points aside 5 out of 8 of the current tiers are NOT good match-ups. If the points reset expedites a solution to these issues. I’m all for it.

Do you even play WvW? If you’d actually play, you’d know that the goal is to have a fight, to be able to achieve something, to put up a fight. Those tiers give the servers the ability to put up a fight. It’s a FUN tier. Most WvWers agree. You probably just look at the points without even going in-game to play.

So… Let me get this straight… You think that 3 out of 8 tiers getting completely destroyed to the point that the winning server has more points that both the other servers put together is a “good fight”, and that 2 of the remaining 5 tiers getting beaten to the point of being very close to the aforementioned 3 tiers is also a “good fight”? I’m confused now…

Also, I really shouldn’t bother to list the logical fallacies in this post, but I will:

• argumentum ad hominem
• argumentum ad populum
• argumentum ad ignorantiam
• reification

I’d like to bring your attention to a quick couple of points:
* Tiers 3, 5, and 8 are currently so lopsided in total points that the winning server has more points that both the other servers put together.
* Tiers 2 and 7 are being soundly trashed by their current leader to the point of no hope for a change-up any time soon.

Current potential points aside 5 out of 8 of the current tiers are NOT good match-ups. If the points reset expedites a solution to these issues. I’m all for it.

Musty.3148:

I can see two things to help the situation.

1) Make guilds movable without penalty.
2) Make transfers to low pop servers free. (conversly very high cost to go up)

I agree on point 1.

Unfortunately point 2 will result in the same issue that is the very reason for payed transfers to begin with. Many top-tier guilds will all transfer to the same bottom-tier server. The server will face-roll its way back up the ranks to where the top-tier guilds transferred from gaining bandwagon players along the way until it’s the same as the other top-tier servers, long queues and such, and then they’ll repeat the process. Kaineng is a huge example of this issue. It was ruined for the original players by this. It also ruined the Wv3 matchups in the tiers it was in for weeks after the fact. No one wants this to repeat, and it happened multiple times under the free transfers system.

Vohnnyan.4058:

GottFaust.5297:

Vohnnyan.4058:

GottFaust.5297:

Mona.4576:

A new official statement would be nice!!

They’ve given you plenty of official statements. The queues are the result of a large number of people transferring to a small subset of servers. Hell, they even referenced this fact as one of the reasons they did the ranking reset.

Where can I read this official statement?

There’s a nice big one on the first page of this thread.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first

There are also many more scattered around.

Thank you for the help, so this is why we have queues on every server with active population, even tough maps are empty compared to the last week, its because people are messing with the queue system, waiting for the travel to borderland timer to go down before re-entering the queue, and if they do press to travel, the massive duration and strain that all this causes on the servers prevents 30-40 other players from getting a pop in 1 hour, when in the previous week they had to wait 5-10 mins to enter a full map.

If people are indeed using the queue system to troll your servers that’s unfortunate. However, I doubt that it’s happening on such a scale, on every T1-3 server, to cause such a huge drop in potential battleground population. That being said, one of the contributing factors to the fact that people seem to think that there are less players on their side in a given map is the “new” culling system they implemented. If you remember from the December trial (where we had many of these same complaints) the system that is now implemented since the Monday patch aggressively culls allied players to allow you to see the enemy. While I agree that this is preferable so as to lessen the instances of culled enemy zergs causing unexpected wipes, it also greatly lessens the number of allied players that a given individual can actually see, thus contributing to the issue at hand.

As a quick test you can try the following: Join up with a zerg. Count the number of players that you can visually identify while the zerg is in transit to a location and not in a fight. Then, count the number of allied players you can identify during a few different fights. If your results match mine you should only be able to really see 1/3 to 1/2 of the allied players present in a given fight under this new culling system. This factor is contributing heavily to the perceived issue of Wv3 population.

BroScientist.9875:

GottFaust.5297:

Vena.8436:

GottFaust.5297:

Considering how none of the the 3 other threads I’ve read in the last hour referencing the same topic has the word “outmanned”, “out manned”, “out-manned”, or “out_manned” anywhere in it, I’m calling bull on the fact that it was “otherwise mentioned” by anyone but yourself, in this thread, in your previous post.

You really must not be looking very hard because (1) there are six such threads, you seem to have missed three of them, and (2) it took me all of one minute to find https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/WvW-Que-1/1361099.

The rest of your post is playing at statistical fallacy, while also completely ignoring the statement of “people who respond are also the only people you find” and, in more words than previously, “top tier servers do not usually have mute players because communication and quick reaction is key”, unless you mean to claim that culling culls every one except the chosen few who respond in chat. Just trying to guestimate and assume against the established points presented based on some loose precedent for whatever reason, is a baffling stance to hold.

Ok. You found a claim in a misspelled post in a thread I skipped due to a misspelled title. I don’t give much merit to that claim honestly.

First, I ignored your quoted statements due to the fact that they are based on pure conjecture. There is a large body of data spanning years of game and social interaction that states that the most vocal of a given group will often be a small portion of said group. Hence the often-used term “Vocal Minority”.

Second, nice attempt at trying to sneak a Straw Man argument in there. I’m going to take that to mean that you are either a troll or not familiar with the concept of a logical fallacy. Speaking of which, this entire topic is a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Third, the queue is working as intended. For more information see the dev post on the first page of the following thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first

Then tell me why aren’t there queue timers or position notifications? If everything is working perfectly like you assume then I don’t see the problem in adding this. It’s what, 6 months after release and a feature that any online game has is missing in action?

Or is it because the queue system is so deeply askew that they simply cannot add it without exposing their imprecise system?

Whoa, argumentum ad ignorantiam contained in a thinly veiled straw man.

I’ll humor you anyway. Because they didn’t think to implement a position count, and timers are inaccurate by default as they are based on average data from previous queue times. This isn’t some huge conspiracy to hide a flawed truth. Nice attempt at trolling though “bro”.

Vena.8436:

GottFaust.5297:

Considering how none of the the 3 other threads I’ve read in the last hour referencing the same topic has the word “outmanned”, “out manned”, “out-manned”, or “out_manned” anywhere in it, I’m calling bull on the fact that it was “otherwise mentioned” by anyone but yourself, in this thread, in your previous post.

You really must not be looking very hard because (1) there are six such threads, you seem to have missed three of them, and (2) it took me all of one minute to find https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/WvW-Que-1/1361099.

The rest of your post is playing at statistical fallacy, while also completely ignoring the statement of “people who respond are also the only people you find” and, in more words than previously, “top tier servers do not usually have mute players because communication and quick reaction is key”, unless you mean to claim that culling culls every one except the chosen few who respond in chat. Just trying to guestimate and assume against the established points presented based on some loose precedent for whatever reason, is a baffling stance to hold.

Ok. You found a claim in a misspelled post in a thread I skipped due to a misspelled title. I don’t give much merit to that claim honestly.

First, I ignored your quoted statements due to the fact that they are based on pure conjecture. There is a large body of data spanning years of game and social interaction that states that the most vocal of a given group will often be a small portion of said group. Hence the often-used term “Vocal Minority”.

Second, nice attempt at trying to sneak a Straw Man argument in there. I’m going to take that to mean that you are either a troll or not familiar with the concept of a logical fallacy. Speaking of which, this entire topic is a classic example of post hoc ergo propter hoc.

Third, the queue is working as intended. For more information see the dev post on the first page of the following thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first

Vohnnyan.4058:

GottFaust.5297:

Mona.4576:

A new official statement would be nice!!

They’ve given you plenty of official statements. The queues are the result of a large number of people transferring to a small subset of servers. Hell, they even referenced this fact as one of the reasons they did the ranking reset.

Where can I read this official statement?

There’s a nice big one on the first page of this thread.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Any-Tarnished-Coast-citizens-agree/first

There are also many more scattered around.

Mona.4576:

A new official statement would be nice!!

They’ve given you plenty of official statements. The queues are the result of a large number of people transferring to a small subset of servers. Hell, they even referenced this fact as one of the reasons they did the ranking reset.

Vena.8436:

GottFaust.5297:

Something else to note. In my experience, the VAST majority of players will never actually type anything in chat. You will never get an accurate head-count by relying on chat activity, just a count of vocal players.

It may well be true but there are other issues in this, such as the otherwise mentioned outmanned buff with hour long queues. So, yes, possibly everyone is hiding from chat, and culling is culling everyone out of sight… but even the game has no idea where these people are because its buffing people as if they were outmanned.

Moreover, people don’t usually engage in chat but they will often speak up for simple things. This is particularly true on big tier servers where calls are important things. If someone asks for a head count, most people will usually respond. You can also compare names responding to people you see… and usually you see only the people who responded.

Considering how none of the the 3 other threads I’ve read in the last hour referencing the same topic has the word “outmanned”, “out manned”, “out-manned”, or “out_manned” anywhere in it, I’m calling bull on the fact that it was “otherwise mentioned” by anyone but yourself, in this thread, in your previous post.

As to your second portion. History shows that a small minority of players will respond to headcount calls, and an even smaller count will respond to these calls while in combat. Given that the vast majority of the time a player spends in Wv3 is in combat you cannot use a headcount call as an accurate representation of player population in a given borderland or battleground.

Vena.8436:

Culling doesn’t cull chat too.

Which is what many of us have started using a metric for people present.

Something else to note. In my experience, the VAST majority of players will never actually type anything in chat. You will never get an accurate head-count by relying on chat activity, just a count of vocal players.

Something huge that you people keep missing. They put in the “NEW” culling system with Monday’s patch. You know, the one that aggressively culls ALLIED PLAYERS to allow you to see the enemy faster. As a quick experiment I jumped into EB and joined up with a 30ish man zerg. During the average fight I was only able to see 10 or so of my allies. That’s a full 2/3rds or 20 allied players that I COULD NOT see.

The queues are due to a large number of people playing Wv3 on your respective servers. The fact that you don’t see many allies is due to the fact that a full 2/3rds of them aren’t rendering for you on account of the culling changes.

We’re still looking for new members! Don’t worry if you aren’t on Gates of Madness, we’re not opposed to helping with transfer fees when necessary.

MarzAttakz.9608:

Just a quick note to those accusing people complaining about playing on bandwagon server, take your kitten some place else. There are MANY loyal people who have been on a server since beta who are now subject the atrociously bugged queues. Why must we leave a community we’ve built up from the ground because other people joined the server?

Fix your game ArenaNet, it’s in a bad place right now.

I understand you had nothing to do with the state your server is currently in, but that’s not A-Net’s fault either. It’s the fault of all the bandwagoneers who jumped on your server and screwed it up. Unfortunately the only way to fix this is for either them to leave or you to leave. Good luck convincing all the idiots to leave the server, especially with payed transfers as they are now.

There’s nothing wrong with the game. A-Net can’t fix it if there’s nothing wrong. There IS something wrong with the community though…

Josh.8154:

What is the deal with these super long Ques for WvW on Kaineng? I can see maybe a 15-20 minutes but over an hour? The forces that can actually get in are outnumbered because over half of our forces are tied up in the Ques waiting. I have been one of those. Now that we have a good matchup I WANT to WvW again but can not get in.

Word to the wise: If you don’t want queues, don’t play on a bandwagon server like Kaineng. There are plenty of servers with 0 queue time. Maybe you should have transferred to one of those instead of the server that every bandwagoneer and their mother transferred to.

Ireniicus.2167:

Hello ANet,

As you can see from this Fridays reset queues have now trumped culling as our, your WvW communities highest priority.

We would like to understand:

1) Is the queue ordered fairly so the player who clicked first gets in first or is it random as subjective evidence appears? If not are you working on addressing this?

2) If the answer to 1 is yes it is fair, can you advise if there is work ongoing to implement a counter showing what number in the queue a player is in? If not could someone explain why not?

3) Waiting times seem to be increasing on many servers. Is this a technical issue as players are stating whereby the server still has players that have logged out of WvW maps counted as active? If so, are you working on fixing it and if not could you provide an explanation why not?

4) Now things have settled down after a large number of WvW players have congregated to just a few servers (for the record I am not on one of those servers and still waited 2 hours to log in yesterday), could a senior member of the team outline ANet strategy to reduce waiting times? Please also include your thinking on next month when we have a WvW centric patch implemented. This is likely to increase WvW populations significantly if you do it right but could spoil your plans and your disappoint regular WvWers if queue times increase still further for everyone.

Thank you ANet for creating a popular fun game. Your player base just like you want it to continue to thrive and feel these questions are important to that end.

1 – They have already said it is first in first out.
2 – Many players have suggested this.
3 – This is NOT a technical issue. It’s an issue where all the transfer babies all transferred to a small subset of servers and now wonder why all 20,000 (exaggeration) of them can’t join the same battleground at the same time.
4 – They aren’t going to do anything to “reduce the wait” that’s up to the transfer system to take care of. Don’t like the long queues? Find a new server.

I still can’t figure out why you people think the Necromancer profession is under powered.

I run a nearly full Berserker set (karka shell, lunaria, and solaria) on my warrior for 98% of the dungeon/fractal content. I’m usually one of the last to die, not that we die a lot, and I rarely down in a fight. It’s all about skill and understanding the encounters. That being said, I still carry a full soldier set around for certain fights, I’m looking at you Graal shaman final fight, because some fights just have too much huge AoE damage flying everywhere.

Edit – Also subject alpha is a joke once you learn to dodge his attacks. A good group can basically AFK him to death without a single down.

kreese.9461:

Actium, it has been some fun matches but i don’t think you guys will be down here for too long in a few weeks you guys should be up a tier an maybe ioj or someone else will be down here – glad you guys are doing better people on HoD know how hard it can be to rebuild so hats off

TeamBattleAxe did you join RH?
kudos to GoM for their efforts in WvW and rebuilding – in the end I think GoM and us are going to get some transfers when pay for transfers go live as we should be cheaper – looking forward to the fights GoM always brings it

oh duh sorry actually started writing this so give you the score
DH 39.7K
HoD 25.2k
GoM 20.8k

If the only thing they took into account was Wv3 population I’d think you’d be right. The unfortunate part is that they’re probably going to take total population into account, and sadly GoM has a HUGE PvE population. We’re one of the few servers that’s still listed as Very High 24/7 even with the recent pop-cap increase.

You’d think that there’d be a way to get some of these PvE’ers out into Wv3 more consistently.

Hey all you guild-seekers, the Iron Bound guild on Gates of Madness is looking for new members.

At a Glance

What we have:

• A private Ventrilo server.
• A community-driven website with forums

What we do:

• WvWvW
• Dungeons of all kinds.
• Fractals daily runs (10 and 20 currrently)

Requirements:

• 21 Years old or older
• Be somewhat mature
• Have a thick skin and a sense of humor

About Us

We’ve got players with experience with all aspects of the game who are willing to lend a helping hand to those who have questions or are looking to learn something new.

We are a mature (21+) gaming community, that values team spirit and collaboration above all else. We have been around for years, and have kept a stellar reputation for maturity, common sense, and of course, gaming prowess!

We joke, we kid, and we’re anything but a PG group, but at the end of the day, we’re about building a community of gamers. Quality over quantity has served us best.

We believe that who you play with matters more than what you play, that how you play and how you act matters more than the end result, and that skill through teamwork and achievements through effort are worth more than exploits and shortcuts. If you’re a mature gamer, and you share these values, then we might be the group for you.[/indent]

Contact Info

Website:

• http://iron-bound.enjin.com/

In-Game Contacts:

• GottFaust.5297
• stygian.1952
• helosie.4781
• humbaba.3469

Honestly, unless SbI and IoJ lost as many people as they claim, GoM is going to end up in tier 8 within a couple of weeks. We’ve been steadily losing guilds for months now, and there’s no sign of that changing before the free transfers cut off on the 28th. Hell, it’s actually gotten worse the last few days as more and more fair-weather guilds jump ship at the last minute before it costs money to switch.

Hunter.6950:

GottFaust.5297:

Hunter.6950:

Don’t get me wrong I loved the make-over feature in the first game and used it alot and see myself using this one aswell, I just feel as if there were more important issues out there than changing my headband from green to blue.

You DO realize that there are multiple teams working on multiple issues in A-Net right? You DO realize that they have openly stated that there is an ENTIRE team dedicated to that issue alone right? You DO realize that it may not be a quick and easy fix right? You DO realize that there are people who specialize in new implementations and people who specialize in fixing old implementations and they can’t always do eachother’s jobs right? You DO realize that trying to make them do so would be like trying to get a CAD Artist to do an Auto Mechanic’s job right? You DO realize that you sound like a child right?

Nope, was just confused, I’m not in the industry so I wouldn’t know how it all works,. I’m just sharing my concerns and experiences, that’s what I thought the forums are for. If anyone sounds upset, it’s you, have a good day.

“Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.”

Sorry if I came across as too rude there, it annoys me to no end that people, who have no idea what they’re talking about, complain about things they don’t understand. I posted that in such a way as to make a lasting impact on the reader and thus alleviate some ignorance.

Hunter.6950:

Still confused why this feature was released before one of the biggest bugs still hasn’t been fixed, Fractal Disconnections…

Don’t get me wrong I loved the make-over feature in the first game and used it alot and see myself using this one aswell, I just feel as if there were more important issues out there than changing my headband from green to blue.

You DO realize that there are multiple teams working on multiple issues in A-Net right? You DO realize that they have openly stated that there is an ENTIRE team dedicated to that issue alone right? You DO realize that it may not be a quick and easy fix right? You DO realize that there are people who specialize in new implementations and people who specialize in fixing old implementations and they can’t always do eachother’s jobs right? You DO realize that trying to make them do so would be like trying to get a CAD Artist to do an Auto Mechanic’s job right? You DO realize that you sound like a child right?

As a player with 4 80s ( Necro, Warrior, Thief, and Engineer) all in full exotics, a couple of ascended pieces, and over 600 hours played (~300 on the Necro) I can safely say that the class is not under powered, but that common Necro builds you run into have serious problems. I’ve tried every common build. Hell, I have 2 full bank slots dedicated to holding my multiple spare Exotic sets for my Necro in case they ever decide to buff some of the builds I’ve experimented with. I’ll give a quick breakdown of the three most common builds I’ve run into, some things to note about each, and the problems inherent in them.

Conditionmancer (by far the most common)
PROS
- Solid AoE damage when given time to ramp up.
- Good counter to boons.
- Very resistant to enemy conditions.
CONS
- Little-to-no access to DS and thus poor access to the boons and survivability it grants.
- Slow ramp-up of damage, especially against enemies with good condition removal.
- Very weak to melee and burst damage.
- Little to no self healing outside of a single 30-second lackluster skill.
NOTES
- Thieves, Rangers, Elementalists, and Mesmers put out more damaging conditions much faster and more reliably.

Well-o-mancer
PROS
- Good area denial.
- Great damage if the enemy sits in your wells.
- Somewhat tanky.
- Solid access to DS.
CONS
- Immobile by design.
- Weak against targets with superior range.
- Weak against targets with good mobility.
- Generally weak to CC.
- Long cooldowns and thus issues with excessive downtime (Though this is often mitigated with DS).
NOTES
- Guardians, Engineers, and Elementalists are better at what this build is attempting to do.

Minionmaster
PROS
- Very good focus-fire damage (once you learn how to control your minions).
- Good access to DS.
- Less demanding than other builds and thus gives the luxury of watching for enemy tells.
CONS
- Weak to AoE.
- Lack of condition clears.
- Limited access to AoE if you want to aim your minions reliably.
NOTES
- Minions tend to target what you are currently damaging, not necessarily what you have targeted. In AoE situations the minions tend to have a hard time deciding on a target due to the aforementioned fact. This is why you see a lot of complaints about minions idling or attacking “random” targets. The main issue with this is that most Necro weapons have some form of inherent AoE.

I personally run a Dagger/Warhorn build with a focus on self-healing, DS, and CC.