Guild Wars 2

NoTrigger.8396:

Leaa.2943:

Oh my god NO, no instanced raids. I been raiding in mmo’s for so long and got out of it and are so happy with GW2. I am still raiding, but in wvw as it should be because GW2 is a pvp-game with pve content hence the name GUILDWARS-.
Please do not make pve-raids. More world content and maybe even harder content, is highly appreciated, but raiding you can do in any other mmo-game, we don’t need it here, we have endgame already. WvW is endgame.

The stress of raids, of gear grind, or keeping buffs up, having dedicated healers, tanks, counting every little dps you put out there and to grind reputation just to get 5 dps/hps more it is just not what i want with this game and also the reason why i choose this when i quit Rift, the most grinding, elitist (and yes i was in top tier of raiding) money hungry game i ever been in and i was there for 3 years. Never again!

people like you are the reason why gw2 has become so stale and boring

mind explaining what
-gear grind
-having dedicated healers and tanks (trinity)
-grinding reputation
has to do with raids?

i do hope the mods will do a good job and keep the raid cdi clean from the anti-raid faction

I am 100% fine with end-game raids that are built for the hardcore player.

Under 1 condition:

They add no new “best in Stat” gear. Gear progression stops with Ascended/Legendary like they intended.

That still leaves you with new unique cosmetics as rewards for raiding, new only obtainable via raiding skins and minis, AND possibly Legendary weapons or guaranteed precursor drops, and I think that this is a possible way to add another method of precursor acquisition not tied to RNG.

I think part of the issue is the relationship between condition damage and might. Causes twenty five times the server calculations per character just to calculate their damage. Kinda seems idiotic now that I think about it…condition damage should be static after the condition is applied, rather than retroactively scaling with might.

Collector Terksli isn’t giving credit for the shiny foil wrappers I have turned in or his coding broke and he is not displaying them. So far I have handed in 18.

Either way, its not showing my contribution, which I would like to know.

Screen cap of him not showing any attached.

Sorry for the late additions to this party, I’m a military guy so times are hectic.

I’m going to be doing some major work on this post so to start:

Instanced vs Open World – This is largely a matter of opinion, however, with all the talk about GvG and guild activities I think we would be out of sorts if we didn’t discuss making an “uber” map for guilds. With that in mind, I suggest a standalone map/instance built off of each region borrowing the architecture from that region. For instance a guild instance in Kryta would borrow architecture from humans, with a mixture of the ecosystems appearing in those areas: plains, hills, forests. In general using the same tile sets to build the areas. The map is only accessible to non-guild members via an Asura Gate in a specific map (for instance I would like my instance in Mount Maelstrom because I like the feel there). Guild members can access an upgrade that allows members to purchase a tele-stone similar to the home instance one. Guild members exiting via the portal are returned to their original area, circumventing using the stone as a freebie wp. Once entered you start out at the south area of the map, the map at start has nothing in it. It’s a blank slate. This is where things can get interesting.

Guild Upgrades – We all build them. They need to have a physical impact on our guild maps. So we divide them into several categories.

• Architecture – Allows structures to be added to the zones, from defensive fortifications to amazing keeps. These objects require resources (think ore, wood, cloth, leather, tier’d mats) and time to build.
• Politics – This is where PvP and Wvw bonuses are, as well as specific building functions. Gives bonuses to WvW resources. I.E. Banners, Guild themed gear, bonuses to point cap times, build times, etc. Allows for alliences with certain races ( I.E. Fully upgrading a “Iron Legion” research option nets you a roaming Charr warband to take on people entering your area. Upgrading “Asuran Technologies” to max level could get you Golems, Laser Turrets, Laser traps etc. Crafting stations, repair stations, etc all fall under this category.
• Dungeoneering – Grants bonuses to certain dungeons, for instance, leveling a research under this category for AC can offer small increases to drop rates within the dungeons (time gated research, not resource gated) For instance it increases the number of tears you get for a run. Make it so that the initial buy for a given dungeon uses influence, and crafts an Asuran gate to that dungeon. Only guild members can access the portals, when guild members use the portals they grant the bonuses I’m talking about, the only way to level the research after the initial buy in is by having members run that dungeon to completion.
• Beastiary – This entry is similar to the slayer achievement line. This tracks the slayer achievements of all members, when a certain percentage of your guild has completed the relevant Slayer achievement you can add those monsters to your instance. The monsters only drop bags related to their respective races, and are allied to the guild whose map they are in. With all these defensive options I am sure you can see where this is eventually heading.

So from all of this we arrive at our actual destination. What’s the point of all these upgrades?

The answer, Guild vs Guild combat. Entering a guilds portal drops you at the southern end of the guild instance. The guild hall is in the very north of the instance. You now have to battle your way through all the mobs, traps, difficult paths etc to reach their hall. Capping the hall disables all of the guilds bonuses until they retake the hall, OR 12 hours have passed. They can’t use guild siege pieces, can’t use banners, and any guild armor/flags/finishers show the capturing guilds symbol instead of their own. This will be a significant investment however as fighting your way through mobs (ranked vet. – champions) plus fending off the opposing guild members in an area where they decided the builds (for instance making part of the area a jumping puzzle where you can set up knockoffs etc) would add an entire new combat dynamic for guilds, separate from what currently exists.

And that’s my idea…. I think it’s entirely feasible, with some man-hours as all the tile sets exist minus the ability to add structures. The difficult part is designing the map and implementing the systems, which nothing I’ve mentioned here should be beyond the limits of the engine. One thing to note about the map is each map needs an inaccessible valley beside the Hall. This allows the “last line of defense” so to speak to be very much in favor of the defenders. Basically, this should be a cliff with a jumping puzzle from one side to the other, in order allow for desperation plays, area control, knock backs, etc.

I don’t want to rage, not gonna do us any good to rage either. I’m making this thread with two purposes: one is to ask for a Dev Response, on the drop rates of the Gauntlet Chances. Are they supposed to be as rare as they are, if so, why won’t you at the very least confirm that it will take us a very, very, very large number of chances.

The second and main purpose.

What all have you guys gotten from Gauntlet Chances??

So far, on 1,500 chances for me:

1 Favor of the Pavilion
1,499 Festival Tokens

That’s my drop’s so far, using that as a basis, the drop rate on other items must be well below .001%.

Couple quick idea’s.

Since you advertised the Megaserver system as keeping parties together, keeping guilds together, and making it more likely to match based off of shared language, friends list, and homeworld, why not actually have it function that way, or give us another menu option, with drop-down boxes so we can choose the order of preference. For instance, I would prefer to always be in the same instance as my party members and guild mates, it shouldn’t be hard to add us to instances that way. Sure if you can’t find an empty enough instance for us, drop us into a lower pop instance thats fine and dandy. But when we go to do guild bounties/missions and can’t because we all can’t get onto the same map, theres a problem here. Rather than bringing us all together, your forcing us to play with strangers and not the friends we want to play with, also, add a “Roleplaying” tickbox to the same menu. This one change right here, would solve most of peoples complaints about the Mega-server system. Best part, its only a few hundred lines of code, since all your doing is making the search criteria manipulable. And its a high ticket item. I can’t even get into the same instance to do events with my real life wife half the time, because the system moves us to different instances, rather than throwing us together, even if we are in a party.

So there, two suggestions that would completely fix this issue, also, talk to us a bit. Sooner rather than later, your house is on fire, fixing that would be a swell idea.

Other than that one complaint, I’m good to go, really enjoying most of the changes, the boss schedule feels forced, but if the rest of the Mega-server system worked it wouldn’t feel as crappy.

They could yank the leveling system, and add a skill based system in its place. Instead of allowing us to do everything with our weapons from the start add in a leveling system for those, you gain weapon xp as you use the weapon unlocking better skills (this would be a good system to add weapon skill swapping so we don’t have the same 5 skills all day e’ry day). Do the same for profession skills/mechanics. Add different mechanics that can specialize in as you become a better Engineer or Elementalist.

They could also add stat points to the maps, much the same as skill points, so that you could better fine tune your characters, make em a pain to get so we have to work for them. Further along with that, pull the waypoints, so that we actually have to explore. Lock trait points behind personal story, or areas on the map. Theres a lot of things they could do with this.

In my opinion, the overall trait changes, and gear changes means the game needs a pretty hefty rebalance. Two major area’s of concern stick out.

Class balance: a few classes are balanced around having access to grandmaster traits, the only one I know of for certain (as in, I have played the class) is the Engineer, though I’ve been told that Mesmers, Rangers and Necromancers are as well. Everything the Engineer can do is related to heavily investing in traits, which is now much more difficult. This seems like it may or may not need need to be rebalanced around the base stats now, rather than the “traited” stats.

Monster AI: with the nerf to overall damage, as in, a net decrease in damage, there is a need for better monster AI. Simply because now we have less raw DPS, this increases the need for meaningful monster AI. Prior to this change, we had to raw DPS (zerg) world bosses, champions, whole dungeon paths, fractals, etc. The whole system was based around players maximizing DPS, while largely ignoring control and support, due to mob immunity to control skills, and the very small use of support builds. However, with the damage reduction, dungeons and fractals will become much more damage centric, to the exclusion of non-top tier classes and builds. This is due to the decreased ability of zerkers builds to DPS the mobs down while carrying those with subpar damage builds, due largely to the monsterous HP pools on most mobs, and the abnormal amount of one-hit kill skills. To correct this, AI and mechanic based encounters need to be reworked all around. No more of this boss control immunity (resistance would be ok) and more meaningful fight mechanics.

Any input on this from other players? Or am I smoking lots and lots of herbal substances?

We started getting the same thing when connecting to the US servers from Okinawa Japan. Been around 4-6 days since it started being so bad that WvW, and PVP are now completely unplayable, as are Fractals and Dungeons.

nate.5108:

It’s time for some action ArenaNet.

As paid-up and active residents of Tyria, this issue has literally become a game changer and demands developer involvement and a community statement of intent.

Whilst ‘lag’ will always be an ever-recurring issue intermittently, since after Southsun ended, Guild Wars 2 has had a serious issue.

From Amsterdam to Australia, players have a had a trace routed, -debug’d, ticket and post-fest that has ended in (to the poster’s mind) some kind of ArenaNet server/client problem being treated as a player-end technical issue.

Some transparency is required here. And a direct line from the support and technical staff to the development team should be shown in what is now a dire issue in terms of gameplay.

Rubber-banding, skill-stall/fail and damage engagement lag are simply unacceptable now.
It’s a core issue. not some bug. Players systems and connections are varied, but when a wealth of people from all over the world are having the same issues AFTER your updates, it’s time to hold your hands up and fix the problem yourselves.
We’ll help, just ask!

We should not have to:

Turn off firewalls
Turn off antivirus
Edit registry
Purchase Tunnelling or VPN
Trace (do your jobs for you)
Update/remove updates from OS
Post/rant in vain
Quit playing for weeks/months till it’s fixed
Quit Guild wars 2 altogether (it certainly wouldn’t be rage quitting)
Live in hope that the next update will change things

As of last night’s update, and with the problem persisting it’s time to engage and get this sorted out.

Give us:

Recognition it exists
Assurances it’s being looked at as a priority outwith monthly updates
Updates on this specific issue
Respect for our knowledge of our systems
Staff to engage on the forum more than once every 3 weeks on the issue
A forum board on connectivity?

We appreciate your work, and workpace, we love the game.
It’s time to use some of that 3 million copies sold at around $50 a pop and store cash to sort things out.

Regards…

(please sign or comment constructively)

Just a note on performing a tracert for ANet, you almost definitely have to perform one yourself, because they cannot do a tracert to YOU specifically. A tracert is determining where your packets are going missing at, ANet tech support cannot ping your home pc specifically from their terminals.

abomally.2694:

Syndrilious.9632 -

Looks like your very first hop after your router is dropping packets. It’s a reserved network address, so it’s probably your modem. Try powering down both the modem and router. Power up the modem first, then the router and see if that resolves the issue.

2 21ms 3/ 25 = 12% 0/ 25 = 0% 10.104.128.1 <— Internal network address (modem?)

That’s actually my local ISP I believe. The military installation maintains an on base ISP, that then connects to the outside network.

I will try resetting the modem and such a second time though and see what happens xD

I do want to note that prior to the last patch, we didn’t have these issues.

[Edit]However it does look like all of my packet loss is happening somewhere in Japan.

Amazing what you notice one day after a post.

Hello,

Myself and my wife are currently playing, and enjoying the game, however over the last 20 or so days our connections to the servers have degraded a great deal. Prior to this, we averaged around 150ms of latency, due mostly to the fact that we live on a us military installation in Okinawa Japan and so our connections take a few extra hops and tend to bottleneck at the connection point from Okinawa to the mainland (Tokyo) prior to its retrans to the states, I’m very aware there is nothing that can be done to get us under 150ms. However we are both currently averaging 250-400ms. Below is what the diagnostic gave me in regards to tracert’s to the servers, are all the issues on my isp’s end, or is there anything wonky elsewhere in the network?

My bad, maybe I shouldn’t post here at 3am XD

zwierz.9012:

If the “magic ocean and ley lines being currents” theory is correct, Scarlet would have to make sure that there are no major intersection nearer to Mordremoth, and when it was proven that LA is in fact nearest, then disturbing the flow of magic in any way in that spot would inevitably cause magic to flow straight to the Dragon, without any additional calculations needed.

Thanks to the Thaumanova Fractal we already know that there is a closer intersection. Scarlet says something to the effect of “at least we know not to build on top of a major intersection next time” during one of her little talks.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Thaumanova was not built to utilize ley lines. And Infinite Coil Reactor is not either – the former was built to utilize chaos magic; the latter was used to utilize dragon energy.

Thaumanova, was in fact built to harness Dragonic Energy, aka Ley Lines: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Thaumanova_Reactor_Fractal read Scarlets dialogue.

I believe Scarlet did a lot more footwork than we give her credit for. That statement equates Dragonic Energy and Chaos Energy, meaning that if we accept Dragon Energy as the source of the majority of the magic in Ley Lines, Thaumanova was explicitly built for the purpose of using it, only under an assumed name.

Something I wanted to note, the whole Ley Line concept is strikingly similar to the Life Stream concept from FFVII (minus the conscience of its own, and granting that they are both based off of real world “Ley Line” theory), including the way it likes to rupture at points where large events occur. With this in mind, I wonder if the Ley Lines didn’t predate the ED’s and that they are, in fact, parasitic organisms which where introduced into Tyria in some manner.

lordkrall.7241:

They were added simply because being able to solo a world boss just because you have enough time is silly.

There should always be a way to fail events, and before the timers it was impossible to fail most of them.

Ok then why such arbitrary low timers then. If they are there to keep them from being solo’ed, then wouldn’t more time make sense with the HP buff they got? The only one without a HP boost thus far is Shadow, hell Fire Element isn’t killable without at least 15 people that I’ve witnessed.

I see, well that rules out it being a gear check, so what is the point of the timers then xD

Out of curiosity, since I didn’t see much of a debate on the matter, what was the purpose of adding timers on the world bosses? Was it just as a shameless gear-check? Was it to more tightly control the spawn windows? What was the purpose?

I never have trouble making and clearing most of them, occasionally Teq doesn’t drop in his window, but TC has a nice success rate, otherwise it just seems that the timers are there to provide a false sense of difficulty to make up for the bosses complete lack of otherwise good mechanics.

Vanthian.9267:

The information in this thread is solely for the purpose of informing the populace of the game. More so, the people who continually spread false data.

As stated in the first post, it is for those who continually attack people with negative comments that they have no data to back their 10-16% damage increase claims while they spew the “currently available ascended gear only increases damage by 5% overall”. This is proof showing them they are wrong. Yet still, some continue to say it is not true because “Math doesn’t match my experience”.

I did not create this thread to flame Anet as it has turned into. I created it for information and for peaceful discourse on Ascended gear. That invites a lot of opinions, I know, which is why the thread can spin off in many different directions.

I never asked for Ascended gear to be removed from the game, as that would not be wise at this point. The only option they have left is continue to push through with the gear. The only thing I ask of them, is to stop “backtracking” their statements and trying to hide behind cleverly posed sentences. I understand not everyone can read between the lines, but a lot of the Guild Wars 1 player base can and hence why they are angry. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that they pulled Ascended gear out of the air while they said they had planned it all along. It is insulting to your clients to pull such a move.

They are not our friends, parents, relatives or any other type of close familiarity with us. They are our service providers. We have nothing more than a business connection. We pay them to provide a service and I expect honesty, integrity and some small amount of respect from them. That is not much to ask when you are paying for a service, or in this case, already paid for it.

I understand that they aren’t friends, parents or the rest, they will be more receptive to ideas that don’t flame, and I think that the community as a whole is the issue.

I enjoyed that you took the time to prove the point using math that people that say it isn’t an issue are wrong. They needed put into their place, however, they were right in regards to WvW, it will never be balanced around 1v1, and outside of that there are too many variables for Ascended to make a huge impact in WvW. Will it make an impact? Yes, undoubtedly. How much of a difference it makes is going to be different for all players.

You’re absolutely right, it is a business arrangement, as such you are free to terminate it at any time, and that really is the issue, by further contributing to the game you are giving legitimacy to the way the game is going. I am by no means saying to quit, but until the player numbers take a hit, they will continue to do what keeps them up. In the mean time, we are left with PR-ish answers to any concern we bring to them. They give us the PR answers because we latch onto anything they bring us as though it is 100% set in stone in the game. Thus they have to maintain plausible deniability in case something doesn’t make it in.

Sure they have flip-flopped. What game company hasn’t, especially with the internal strife ANet has dealt with. Should they be more honest with the player base of course, but we should stop attacking them on every little thing they changed stances on.

I’m just trying to play devils advocate here and looking at every side of the issue. I largely view the player issues as justified but believe that we are going about making suggestions for change and in roads with Dev-Player communication the wrong way.

So if, as some of you have indicated, the point is moot, and that there will indeed be some degree of vertical progression; why not stop talking about the vertical progression, and push them to go for more horizontal progression. They’ve admitted the roll-out of Ascended gear wasn’t the best idea, nor was it done in the best way. They have also made it abundantly clear that there will be some vertical progression even in the future, level cap increase etc. Furthermore, we know that they will not remove Ascended.

With those things in mind, instead of complaining about what they are doing, push for more HP and push for more methods to getting Ascended, hell push for a materiel reduction to get Ascended. Do anything but complain. Making worthwhile suggestions is more likely to produce a positive reaction from Arena Net,posting threads about removing the gear from WvW isn’t going to work, neither will saying its dumb etc. Even a well thought out post about the statistical differences aren’t going to work, because those differences aren’t as big as the differences from Rares to Exotics and to this day I run rare sets in WvW and have little trouble unless I am 1v1’ing someone and many other people are like this and I even think that was mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

My advice, to get them to take your posts serious, is to make suggestions that get massive community support. If an idea is good, the community will support it, rather than fracturing and arguing like there is here. The community has multiple facets, thus you see people that like VP, as well as those that want HP. Find the middle ground. Same with WvW vs PvE vs PvP, though WvW and PvE will likely never get separate traits and skill balance, those two should be separate from PvP.

As for the actual issue of Ascended gear, it’s necessary because there are players in game that like vertical progression. Since forums are rarely indicative of the game population as a whole, I would go so far as saying its likely a 20/20 percent split between HP vs VP, with an additional 60% that don’t mind one way or the other. Arena Net has a very disparate group of players, and won’t always please the whole lot of us. I DO think they should start working on more HP as soon as possible, I would like more skills and traits, and viable builds. I would also like Ascended gear to be less of a grind than it currently is; and I think that is ANet’s ultimate goal. To strike a balance between the two. Threads like this may be well intentioned, with the intent to inform the playerbase, but they also add fuel to a rather nasty fire. The forums are coming to be a place where you come to rage and attack other players, when in reality a compromise is needed to sort this issue.

So why not make this a thread about it, instead of another Ascended are ruining the game, and since I can’t have my way 100% of the time, I want them removed thread.

NevirSayDie.6235:

The PvP section of the game would have a much higher population if we could stop spreading misinformation to the rest of the playerbase. Bunkers have never dominated PvP except for a couple months last year; you’ll usually see a couple people per team running a highly defensive build, but that’s it.

The specific skill in question, warrior signet, may be a bit on the strong side. I’m not talking about balance, I’m talking about PvP in general.

The skill “Healing Signet” itself isn’t too bad, I run it on a Hammer/Mace/Shield Warrior. My regen on that is around 600 per tick, the danger doesn’t come in until I start running my Adrenal Healing which is another ~400 per tick plus food. And I’m not geared 100% for healing either. Keeping in mind, I do mediocre DPS, I auto for around 1.4k-3.6k depending on the enemy. But I run that for the stuns and interrupts for my group, not for the insane damage.

The OP is both wrong and right. If traited for 100% heals, and taking the kitten damage, that Warrior could be difficult, especially if running Healing Shouts and a set of soldiers runes for the cleanse on shout. That same warrior will never kill you though. Ever. In fact, if he did kill you, you failed very very hard at whatever “killer” build you were running.

Here’s my thing: If they want to keep making money, the best way is to keep the players happy, or to use the same to terminology you did, they have to bend to the players. That is the plain and simple of the issue at hand. They want to succeed as a company they then need to keep the game fair and balanced. New Shiny stuff only works for a while.

Currently Guild Wars 2 isn’t going to last as long as Guild Wars did; nor will it be remembered as fondly.

I believe the issue’s with Living Story are purely pacing and polish related. Much like the needed mechanic and bug fixes. The whole game needs polished. Bugs have been in since Beta and still are not fixed. The game servers are so in-optimally set-up at this point that they have crappy mechanic limits like the condition cap. They need to go to 1 LARGER Living Story release every 2 months, with a mix of temporary and permanent content and an increased focus on polished and thoughtful bug fixes.

Cutting the bug list in half would make a lot of the game just “feel” better. Additionally resolving the mechanic limitations by shifting where some of the damage calculations occur to the client, and resolving class balance issues would make the game feel 20x better than it currently does. Separating PvE/PvP/WvW traits and skills will also make the game feel more finished, and making maintaining balance easier. They just need some subtle changes to the whole system to make the game feel much better, RNG removal and moving to a better drop system for instance would resolve some of the zerging issues. Removing zerg friendly AI limitations, etc would improve PvE. It’s actually gonna be fairly easy to knock out a lot of the game issues, just by slowing the living story pacing, to allow more time to polish the game up.

I would like to think that less Waypoints would lead to player appreciation of the graphics, but then, I remember the casuals. Casuals don’t like spending half their available time online walking. I love it, but I play a minimum of 20 hours a week.

Umut.5471:

pvd and lack of pk/pvp action is the main problem in wvw. let us earn points for our world by directly killing other players, not by ramming doors all day. 85%+ of the time you spend in wvw is pvd and walking between objectives. no this isn’t fun, pk/pvp is currently a secondary thing not the main objective in wvw. this is the main problem for many players. we also need better rewards like leaderboard ranks, rank emblems for our characters to keep up playing. you play for nothing after you unlock buffs you want in wvw. ppl don’t even know your rank level or experience in wvw. also skill lags make it impossible to fight in great numbers which discourages many players to play in wvw.

I never thought WvW was sposed to be 100% about PvP. I thought it was entirely intended to be a game mode of capture and hold.

As a player that plays both PvE and WvW I feel like most of the issue is class balance and the whole risk vs reward ratios everywhere in the game. It consistently pushes all players into a select group of classes, that do uber damage so that they are more efficient. This causes the other classes balance to get ignored due to the smaller number of players on them. Additionally, WvW requires better infrastructure on ANets side. The only other game I’ve ever played that encouraged this kind of cookie cutter build setup, and abysmal drops like this is MapleStory. Because it is designed around the cash shop.

The number one contributer to the lack of balance is the Living Story update pacing. Bug creep, profession imbalance and things that need fixing in general, condition cap in pve, are ignored because the company believes that Living Story is keeping players satisfied because everyone logs in to do it. They also then go back to ignoring the game because it focuses on grinding, poor risk vs reward, temporary content, and in general “noob” level gameplay (zergs everywhere!)

Didn’t ANet say shortly after the Ascended crafting for weapons was announced that they plan on making them obtainable in other ways? Perhaps it just went to a back burner because we keep them so bloody busy all the time, what with demands for balance, the obvious need for server optimization, and the living story pacing?

Voland.5862:

zamalek.2154:

Sounds awesome!

One thing I noticed is that when the Scarlet events released I didn’t have any skill lag in the Scarlet events (WvW remained much the same). It looks like you’ve already finished with this thread; still I am interested to know whether WvW and PvE share the same server architecture and whether you have thought about capitalising on any of the improvements they have clearly been made in PvE.

Voland.5862:

Does Arena-Net have any intention of investing in upgraded (Newer/Better) Server hardware and related solutions?

Not all problems can be scaled vertically – quadratic problems like game servers are particularly poor candidates for vertical scaling. This is because, e.g. if you double your CPU speed you will only get a 50% speed improvement instead of the 100% you would expect. To compound the issue it may not even possible to get a system that is twice as fast as the current ones (because they might be close enough to the bleeding edge that only, say, a 0.3ghz jump is possible).

Not everything in WvW is quadratic, but “skill lag” is the symptom of one area that it is (everyone dropping AOEs) – so pulling out the wallet and improving the hardware would probably only make a marginal difference that us players wouldn’t really notice.

The best thing to do always is to improve the efficiency of your algorithms (or I would rather say, decrease the inefficiency). At the time you would hypothetically get more hardware you would have more bang-for-buck because of previous optimizations.

FYI, Arena-net hasen’t exactly been very transparent in terms of their infrastructure.

Worst Case Scenario: They are doing what blizzard did/still are doing. They snatched up a good deal of outdated hardware and put an MMO on it.
Best Case Scenario: The hardware is up to date enough that all they need is some serious effort into optimization and restructuring to resolve the issues full stop.

The most likely scenario
They have decent hardware but the poor choices made in terms of how the game as a whole was implemented both client and server side will be a time sink that will eat optimization efforts while only yielding minimal improvement.

I think most of the issue is poor optimization and a lack of virtualization. The combat system alone needs an absurd amount of number crunching per player. Take conditions for example. The condition system currently calculates and recalculates every single condition you apply in real time in order to account for stat changes from boons/food, additionally, it calculates condition damage on the server side, rather than the client side, and has to track the damage across stacks. It does that per active character, including for mobs that cause conditions. It also retroactively buffs already applied conditions to account for things like Might. This is one of the reasons the condition cap exists (that and the whole wvw/pvp balancing with pve issues). It also actively knocks the lowest damage condition stack from the total stack when in a group.

This means per 5-man party, the game could be accounting for a total of 5-15 conditions per attack (including sigil and skill condition adds) plus the already applied conditions, calculates and recalculates the whole group in case of stat change, re-applies and has to repeat that process every single tick of every single condition, and every single attempt to apply the conditions. Now think of the zergs we get occasionally get on champions, in wvw, or on world bosses. That probably accounts for 10-15% of the server side skill lag we get. Guild Wars 2 is the only game I’ve played that does all condition calculations server side, or updates already applied conditions based off new buffs, or makes players conditions over-write each other, most games use a player individualized stack to make balance of conditions easier.

1: Drop Rates/ RNG – Drop rates on all items across the board need adjusting, especially precursors and ascended items/mats. Material drop rates need massively adjusted, it’s nearly impossible to farm some mats. RNG needs removed from all drops, chests or monster or collection. Fixing this actually takes care of the gear grind complaints, i.e. mats are more readily available, therefor items are easy to get, even for casuals. This also includes Risk vs Reward for boss, temple, event, and dungeon drops. Many events are not worth the effort put into them. Temporary content drop rates should be higher.

2: Living Story – Living Story needs to be slowed. If you guys don’t want to do expansions, then you need to slow the Living Story release, and make them feel more akin to expansions (permanent content, more polished, more story. The living story isn’t really changing the world that much). The temporary content is nice some times, but the pacing is ridiculous. More Quality Assurance on Living Story additions, and in general, is needed, some events are terribly buggy.

3: Balance – This covers everything from the condition cap, which massively nerfs condition builds, especially in PvE content, to PvE vs PvP vs WvWvW profession balancing, you have to seperate the 3 areas, and skills balanced for wvwvw will not be balanced, or balance-able, in PvE or PvP. To monster vs player difficulty across the board.

I think this is an issue with latency. I play at around 150 ms ping, and I get similar issues, except mine are things like being in the middle of a platform, and just randomly porting back to the beginning. It’s counting the green mist as catching me, even if my graphics show it a good two platforms lower than I am. Additionally, its not my pc, I’m on a pretty hefty rig. I’ve also tried it on low settings to make sure that was not the issue, and it still persists.

I also get one where I start in “water” under the rest of the instance. ANet needs to sort server latency issues out before they add more content haha.

Morrigan.2809:

rhapsody.3615:

It would be nice if they could do something like deactivating accounts after X days of not logging in (90 days would be good IMO). After 90 days of no activity, you’d be taken to an account activation page, and asked to re-select a home server. If something like that can’tbe implemented, then close a few of the lowest population servers and give those people free transfer to a medium or high (not very high) population server. NA servers are all listed as high or very high, and I don’t believe that is a true representation of each server.

I would say no to this simply because people are inactive for various reasons- I would hate it if for some reason I can’t log in and then find myself locked out of my home that I chose in the betas.
on my server I have never seen a population problem- I am on Gunnar’s Hold and we fluctuate between high and medium, there are people everywhere really.

I have seen it suggested that Anet creates underflow servers for PvE maps- this seems a better solution to me.
on the other side there is always guesting

I feel your pain, but for somethings guesting is not a fix. I think it is time for them to lock the very high servers and force players onto the lower pop servers.

Cactus.2710:

Skyline.3480:

This is a very sensitive issue for Anet, or any other MMO company for that matter.
They will not adjust the world population indicator to reflect active accounts instead of registered accounts for two reasons.

1) Doing this will reveal real population levels for each server.
If the population levels are low this can cause players to move to another server causing further unbalance. It can also give the game a bad PR if all servers have lower than expected population levels, stopping new players from trying out the game and even causing some players to abandon it.

2) It will use developers time for something that, for the reasons stated above, they feel is unsuitable for the game at this time, and perhaps anytime. This most likely was a decision taken deliberately. If they wanted otherwise it would have been so from the start.

So basically you’re saying that ANet built a game around mechanisms that are critically dependent upon server population (WvW, dragon events, farm trains, etc) but aren’t willing to provide any details because the information wouldn’t be healthy for the game. Got it.

This is my main issue, because it feels like this is exactly what they are doing. That information is pretty important to the “world” in each server. Withuut that information it is really hard to determine if your server can do certain events.

Skyline.3480:

This is a very sensitive issue for Anet, or any other MMO company for that matter.
They will not adjust the world population indicator to reflect active accounts instead of registered accounts for two reasons.

1) Doing this will reveal real population levels for each server.
If the population levels are low this can cause players to move to another server causing further unbalance. It can also give the game a bad PR if all servers have lower than expected population levels, stopping new players from trying out the game and even causing some players to abandon it.

2) It will use developers time for something that, for the reasons stated above, they feel is unsuitable for the game at this time, and perhaps anytime. This most likely was a decision taken deliberately. If they wanted otherwise it would have been so from the start.

And that is the issue, by doing that they are further alienating players on those low pop servers. I’m really close to just leaving gw2, just because I can’t enjoy the game when there aren’t enough players to do a good portion of the games activities.

I had a question, an issue, and a suggestion. All three are around the same subject, as evidenced in the thread title, and all three revolve around a Dev’s willingness to answer. Players can offer feedback, but only a dev could actually answer this. Let me add some background.

My current home server is Devona’s Rest, we are currently listed as a high population server. I believe I’ve read elsewhere that the server pop is based on the number of accounts that call the server home, not the number of active accounts; this leads to a couple of questions I had.

Why not come up with a better metric for server population? From my point of view, as an active player (3-4 hours per day minimum), this server is dead. I can run through Lion’s Arch and never see more than 15 players at a time, I’ve seen 2 overflows the entire 9 months I’ve played, I can literally run through whole area’s, including starting area’s or normally high traffic area’s, such as Frostgorge Sound, or Queensdale and count the number of players I see or find in /map on my fingers and toes. The LFG tool more often than not groups me with people from other servers. WvWvW is the same 30 people every time I log in, and I have never seen more than 50 people there. How is this server classed as a high population server? Is there any way to do the number of active accounts, rather than the number of total accounts? Active being defined loosely as an account that has more than 1 hours worth of activity in a week. As a player I feel like some content punishes me for being in a lower population, or activity server, i.e. Tequatl Rising. And I feel like we will see more content in the future will need activity and cooperation from a community like the Tequatl event. This is going to cause a bleeding effect, which someone told me happened shortly before I joined, of active players abandoning servers in favor of higher activity servers. I can guest to other servers and see large numbers of people 24 hours per day.

So, those were my questions. My suggestion is to add soft server caps, or to at least display better metrics of server population. This is a big issue. I understand you don’t want to show your servers are emptying, or that you are bleeding players, but for the players you do have, you need to let your current playerbase know what they can expect of the server they are on so they can make informed decisions, i.e. whether to change servers, what servers to go to, and what to expect from a server. This is especially important for new players. A new player that joins Devona’s Rest is going to have little to no support from the playerbase, because there isn’t one. This is going to discourage those people, and cause yet more lost players.

These are just my opinions, and please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong about the state of this server, or other servers in similar positions.

Flock of Smeagol’s is recruiting. Really laid back group just looking for folks to play with, we are on Japanese Time as I’m us active duty in japan, respond here if interest.