Guild Wars 2

for a lot of people w3 is not casual,
for a lot of people it’s not the end game,
for a lot of people it’s the only game.

you can do pve casually, you can do a dungeon in a speed run or casual way WITH people, all fine. but in w3 you will be up AGAINST people who don’t play casually and who hold the edge in experience and teamwork.

Anet can say what they want about how they intended people to do this or that, but that’s not how it happens. Anet was clueless when they made something like rvr and considered it a casual diversion.

oh, how often i would have liked to have been able to kill traitors and spies on your own side in this and other wvw type games in the absence of a ban or other official intervention.

wookie.8934:

Learn to limit your frames people.

this !

my graphics card (ati6970) is able to do the most intense and huge battles without issues, but when i was in an area that had little players or actions, it’s framerate would go into triple diggit numbers, the gpu temp would get alarmingly high and the fans would start scream out loud. i had to limit my framerate to 60 or i think my graphic card would have died.

strange that scenes that didn’t tax the card stressed it way more that the biggest explosions in the paint factory onscreen.

lettucemode.3789:

No, not really, I’ve done some graphics work and so I know what the term means :P Whether I meant the technical term or the Arenanet-WvW term, either way you are drawing less stuff, I chose simple (admittedly ambiguous) words because I’m lazy.

server side culling (the server only tells you about xx objects because if we try send all relevant info to everyone, we might not have enough bandwidth to send all data and some clients might get no data at all) and client culling (the client doesn’t render stuff which you can’t see) are two different things.

lettucemode.3789:

Source for this? Otherwise I’m sticking with my theory. Habib made a post about the changes they were going to make to fix it a few months ago, and the only network change he mentioned was getting the higher-ups to approve using more. They were never anywhere near the cap.

i think we are speaking about the same post. i read it as “we don’t have enough upload bandwidth. to send all data to everyone we need more bandwidth. this will cost money as we need to upgrade our connection”

the culling used by anet was a cost saving measure to compensate for their insufficient bandwidth.

….

ofc, i could be wrong :p

did Habib get fired, got promoted, moved to another department, told Anet to xxx, or found a job somewhere else ? (did i forget any options?)

lettucemode.3789:

Culling is – how can we not overwhelm our clients’ computers with drawing too much stuff?

that would be graphic culling which is something different (confusing isn’t it ?) graphic culling is the client that doesn’t calculate or render things that are behind something that is closer and obstructs the view. there is simply no point in calculating and rendering players/mobs/objects behind, say, a wall that would completely block the view.

the culling used by Anet was something where the server had a maximum number of players that the server would tell each individual client about to cut down on their outbound network traffic.

lettucemode.3789:

Bandwidth was never an issue – they have the same servers now as they did three months ago, after all, and in terms of showing me everyone’s locations they are doing just fine.

i think you are wrong again. Anet’s outbound/upload capacity was the main issue that was responsible for them using culling. as far as i can tell they were able to disable culling after they upgraded their internet connection.

Cactus.2710:

Ability lag (aka skill lag) is strictly a server-side problem caused by more load than the engine/servers/network can handle.

while generally true, other things CAN affect skill lag like a ISP, traffic shaping by ISP, overloaded internet connections between 2 different ISP that rout your packats via alternating routes due to load balancing etc…

i used to play an other mmo where the servers were in france and i’m in Belgium. at times when there was cripeling lag, i saw that my packets didn’t go from my place to brussel to paris to the server but that one packet went from home to brussel to frankfurt to paris, next went from home to brussel to london to paris, the one after that went from home to brussel to amsterkitteno lyon to paris, … this had as an effect that the messages i typed sometimes didn’t come on screen in the order i typed them, people rubberbanded allover the place and there was horrible skill lag.

…

just saying that there are other sources of skill lag than just sub-par servers even if it might not apply to the current situation.

Cactus.2710:

Habib Loew.6239:

I should clarify here again that the culling fix will have minimal impact on skill lag. Skill lag happens because the server is too busy to process everything that’s happening (e.g. it’s at 100% CPU). The removal of culling addresses issues experienced by the client but those changes don’t really impact the skill lag situation. They are fundamentally different problems that will need different solutions.

Sorry, but this just doesn’t sound right. One of your earlier posts even states that culling was instituted to avoid server-side overload, and that would make sense. I don’t believe for a second that lag and culling are independent issues. Culling was only partially a client side crutch for underpowered computers … it was primarily put in place to regulate how much data the server had to process and force feed through the pipeline. The server doesn’t even really know whether something has rendered yet client side, but it does know when it is getting bogged down trying to process too much data internally.

If lag still exists after you drop culling it’s either because your game engine is too limited and you don’t have the resources to fix it, or you backed off on your earlier promise to buy whatever bandwidth you needed to fix the problem.

In any case, it’s pretty clear that we’re being BS’d here.

culling was there because their internet connection was ‘excrement’ and unable to upload enough data to all clients. it seems they upgraded their analogue modem to adsl (ok, bit of a joke but you should get the idea) and were able to switch of culling as a result.

skill lag is there because their servers are ‘excrement’ too. now they need to upgrade their C64 to something more recent and skill lag will be a thing of the past too.

The more this game steals/copies from DAoC, the better it gets.

copy/steal mooaaahr !

First ofc the culling.

Finally it’s gone. Awesome. the w3 experience for me just became far more enjoyable. good job (it should have been like this from the start, but hey…). i was a bit afraid about the effects of lag and framerate that it would cause but it seems that on my hardware it doesn’t impact framerate in a percievable way. from what i can tell from the friends i have who play the game, and having watched it play on their computers too, that the added graphic options make up for the increased GPU/CPU load.

i would rate this as a “good job”.

Then the character advancement.

first impression was “finally they also copied the realm ranks from DAoC, huzzah !” and then i went to the tab with the bonuses and thought “now that’s a bit worthless, let’s scroll down to the good abilities” .. and found i couldn’t scroll down .. those are the abilities and i wasn’t sure if i had to start laugh or cry.

i can understand (but don’t like) that they didn’t want to add active abilities but no stat increases ? i absolutely expected to find stat increases. +20 (so, +100 at 5th level) to each of the 8 stats or something like that. comparable to the bonuses that the best foods give for a maxed stat tree. something that allows you to tailor your character a bit more than what is allowed by gear. considering that character creation (what do you mean, i can’t spend points on character creation ???) or race (an asura has the same strenght as a norn or a shar ? a shar is as proficient with technology and magic as an asura ?) have absolutely zero effect on your character and only gear makes a difference i was really hoping … nah, EXPECTING that the realm ranks, erm, i mean, the w3 ranks would allow us to tailor our character’s stats a bit in order to make them a bit more unique.

so, this leaves me a bit baffled and disappointed (to put it mildly) about the character advancement part.

i would rate this as “showing potential, but inadequate in the current state”

the new gear.

it’s good to see we can now get more or less the same weapons and armor (stats) as the people who do pve. the jewelry section is a bit underwhelming though. no purple jewelry :/ one could argue that with the changes to dailies that it is now possible for w3 players to get purple jewelry with laurels, but that it will take longer for a w3 player to get his jewelry than for a pve player. oh well, too bad, but that’s not the end of the world (to me).
a lot of people seem very unhappy about the lack of different skins available to w3 (but i can’t say that that matters to me)

i would rate this as “sufficient”

negative :
no ascended gear.
no decent rank bonuses. (+20 to stat in 5 tiers for +100 in total would have been what most people wanted, not the things there are now)

positive :
different stat sets armor + weapons available in w3

who is the biggest group of players in absolute numbers ? the euro or NA servers ?

Karizee.8076:

Reaver.9256:

You guys should really read this:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/473/feature/7169/Guild-Wars-2-What-Marchs-WvW-Patch-Will-Bring.html

Nice!

Habib sounds confident that they’ve discovered the solution, looking forward to March!

more like they upgraded their internet connection at last :p

Farsided.5248:

As for siege being expensive, you’re right. But it’s also soulbound. And again, somebody not interested in WvW is not going to use them and they will be unable to give them to somebody else.

you can not ‘trade’ siege, but you sure can ‘give’ them to people. i got more than one guildie giving me their siege. all you need to do is equip it and then drop the bundle on the floor (the ‘tilde’ buttone) where someone else can pick it up (only works in a w3 zone i think). if you have no guildies to give them to simply drop them on the floor in the warcamp at the zone-in point. plenty of players there who pass there (as they zone in) and who woul be delighted to find a piece of siege they can use.

and in case you wonder, this has been asked in this forum if that is legit or something that can be considered an exploit and Anet has replied it’s perfectly fine to do drop it on the floor so someone else can pick it up and use it.

Ubi.4136:

deracs.1762:

you can release to spawn point and any bags that drop after releasing will actually appear at your feet. Had a massive 3 way fight yesterday, and after I was dead I stayed to watch the end of the fight. Had probably 20 bags taunting me lol. If I had released probably would have gotten half of them at least at spawn point. truthfully was more fun watchng the fight

Was this added with the new patch, because I have had multiple bags inches from my body (on many occasions), released immediately and have never had my loot follow me back to spawn…ever.

it’s only for loot bags that still have to apear. so if you release before they apear, they will pop up at your feet in warcamp. it doesn’t take the loot bags that already apeared with you to the camp.

but it would be nice if you didn’t have to loot stuff and that loot went automatically to your inv. i lost soo much loot due to moving to fast and/or dieing :/

Oldsarge.5609:

So why be the guy that cant let someone complete the puzzle, just asking?

a) ‘cause in war psychology is a very powerfull tool. breaking the enemy’s morale is good !

b) cause i want to deny the other server resources that can be used against my server

c) cause killing people is fun

d) i have more chance in the JP to get a one vs one than in the open field.

….

i can probably use the whole alphabet.

someone died in a pvp zone ?

:p

sostronk.8167:

MikeFerguson.8921:

Culling is absolutely a fixable problem, and as Habib mentioned in his MMORPG interview, we are planning to completely remove it from the game in march.

Why is it taking so long? Well, I think the best way I can describe how we’ve had to approach this problem is that it’s almost like changing a flat tire on a car that’s still moving. That’s a really rough analogy, but hopefully it helps illustrate just how difficult this would be in terms that are easier for everyone to understand.

Something like the way players render is extremely core to the engine and any change to that sort of thing could cause all kinds of other issues throughout the game. There are a lot of really complex technical problems that we needed to solve, then make sure that our changes don’t actually cause any of those odd side effects.

That being said, we’re confident that been able to solve those problems on the technical side. We still have a bit more testing to do, but we’re not expecting any major issues to pop up at this point, so we’re really looking forward to flipping that switch and getting rid of culling for good!

We’ll have a blog post coming up sometime in the next month to go into more details about the culling fixes and what you can expect.

Ill be straight up and to the point. I do not believe your servers can handle this game without the culling issue. Unless you intend on upgrading them, I don’t think you will ever fix culling.

i think that is exactly what is ment with “we can make culling go away by throwing money at it”.

Jiiub.7135:

Awesome Anet, thank you

muylaetrix.2096:

morrolan.9608:

muylaetrix.2096:

so they made the game even far more zerg friendly. /facepalm

does Anet really want to reduce w3 to 3 groups from 100 players, occuppying 50 square meters and only seeing 10 % of the players while not being able to pick up the loot fast enough at the same time ?

So you’d rather no loot and going broke.

no, while i like a bit of zerging (but not in this game), the rewards for zerging are far too good compared to the rewards for soloing or running in a small group.

you want 5 bags to drop from one kill because you only fight 1 person just because i get 5 bags for killing 5 people while in a zerg?

hm, yes. in ‘another game that gets mentioned often here’ killing someone solo would get you +-2000 points, killing someone in a group of 8 people would get each person in the 8 man group about +-250 points, and killing someone in a 100 man zerg would get each person in the zerg about +-20 points each.

that ment that playing solo, even if you only got to get a few one vs one fights and got zerged to bits in 90% of the cases, you would still a decent amount of points over a given time.

here, the amount of points you get increases significantly with the amount of players you are with.

i’m not argumenting that it’s bad that they increased the gains from w3, i’m argumenting that it is very unrewarding to try play solo or in a small group compared to running in the largest zerg possible and that therefore it encourages zerging over solo or small group play.

Asglarek.8976:

I think everyone here should read this and learn exactly what culling is and know that by “turning it completely off” means and what it doesn’t mean. In short they could just allow more optimization by the client to fix things for the most part on a per user basis.
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/graphics-programming-and-theory/geometry-culling-in-3d-engines-r1212

This turning it off measure is exactly what I knew they would do I believe I compared it to removing orbs from wv3.

erm, geometry culling and character culling are two completely different things.

with geometry culling, the computer realizes that the side away from the player from something isn’t calculated and drawn on screen. say, you stand before a mountain, the computer realizes that only the part of the mountain facing you needs rendering and not the other side. the part of the mounntain facing away from you can be completely ignored and not rendered with no ill effects to what you see.

with the character culling Anet uses, the server tries to make a selection of which players it should notify the client about and has a max number of players that it will send information about to the client to reduce their outbound volume of data which might otherwise saturate their upload bandwith.

i’m gone shake some numbers out of nowhere to illustrate. say that the upload capacity of anet is 1GB / sec (yeah, rediculous number, i know) which has to be shared between all the users. for most purpose, this is enough to send everything needed to each person, especially if most players are in some sort of instance where there are only the player + 4 extra players that the server has to send data about. but during some large scale pve events and w3, the server doesn’t have to send data about 4 players and some other stuff to players but potentially data about 100+ players and thousands of effects, spells, buffs, etc. in that case the totall outbound volume needed to send all the data might easely surpass the 1 GB limit of their internet connection which would result in some players not getting any data at all or some other things that might be very bad. therefore they impose a limit on the amount of players that info is send about so that their 1 GB is not exceeded. the only way to fix that is to upgrade their internet connection to say 10 GB /sec. after doing that, they can remove the cap of players that the server can send data about to the players.

this might not be totally accurate, but hey, it’s my best try to explain :p

that they delete 2 of the identical borderlands and they double the size of the existing ones.

Diashame.6328:

Can you imagine how many people will come back to W3 and give it another go if they see reports that it is fixed. It’s gonna be the cause of an all new mass server exodus. Awesome!!

fear the queues :/

kash.9213:

They intended WvW to be a casual weekend warrior excursion for dungeon pve players, so they assumed you would have all of your dungeon gear to show off out there.

guess they were wrong there :p

for some people it’s not a diversion, for some people it’s not even endgame, for some people it’s the only game in town.

Laika.8795:

So the fact that they have stated that they are allowing client-side culling toggling in March’s update hasn’t even come up yet, why?

i didn’t read/understand that.

>>Habib Loew: Hah, yeah we have seen a lot of the skepticism on the Internet. The change we made in January was really just a tweak to the system. It changed the priorities of Culling but did not eliminate it. The change in March will turn off Culling completely. You will now see every character within range of you. There will be several different options for how other players are presented to you, on the client side that you can choose from so you can control how it works for you.<<

i asume you refer to the part i put in ‘bold’. to me that reads ‘there will be more options to tune down your graphics settings’ and not necessarily ‘you will be able to change culling settings client side’. maybe you refered to something Habib said somewhere else. but who knows, you might be right.

EnRohbi.2187:

I just think it’s ridiculous that people call the game completely unplayable because of culling, don’t trust Anet to ever fix it, but they’re still here playing the game.

i bought this game for w3, w3 is the only reason i bought it, i don’t care for spvp (understatement) and i dislike pve (understatement). at te moment this game is the only game that gives that kinda gameplay so i put up with culling to get my large scale open world pvp fix.

but claiming that culling is not game breaking, especially in w3, untill they fix it is “insert explicit word”

Kuldred.2436:

muylaetrix.2096:

talk is cheap, seeing is believing.

if true, Anet REALLY deserves respect.

They deserve respect in what way? That it took them 7 months to fix something that should never had made it out of beta? Culling is worse now than at release, and thier ‘minor fix patch’ actually made things worse.

There are parts of this game that are unplayable because of culling, and you want to bow down and kiss thier feet because they ‘might’ have an improvement after 7 months. Wow.

if they fix it, it means they threw (a lot of ?) money at their server infrastructure. that would impress me, and i totally agree that culling never should have been there in the first place.

talk is cheap, seeing is believing.

if true, Anet REALLY deserves respect.

Xirin.8593:

muylaetrix.2096:

Habib said in a post somewhere that culling can be fixed by ‘throwing money at it’.

Culling is here because it allows them to use sub standard networking infrastructure

I don’t know if you simply didn’t understand Habib’s post, don’t remember it accurately, or are just trolling (purposely oversimplifying). But your restatement of Habib’s post is quite inaccurate:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Update-on-Culling/first#post1137307

yep i’m refering to that post.
what other ways are there of reading point 1 ?
point 2 is nonsensical as the box states that broadband is required and even on the most modest broadband in situations where culling occurs, less than 1 % of client bandwith is used. this game is playable with no negative consequences on an analogue modem.
point 3 is nonsensical because any other game i know counters it by allowing you to downgrade your graphic settings far more than GW2. but oh noes, cry me a river, anet seems to find it more important to only show 20 players with all their legendarie glory than to display all players. is it really more important to show the grass bend away from my necrotic grasp missile than to give options that might produce screenshots which might hurt further sales ?

morrolan.9608:

muylaetrix.2096:

so they made the game even far more zerg friendly. /facepalm

does Anet really want to reduce w3 to 3 groups from 100 players, occuppying 50 square meters and only seeing 10 % of the players while not being able to pick up the loot fast enough at the same time ?

So you’d rather no loot and going broke.

no, while i like a bit of zerging (but not in this game), the rewards for zerging are far too good compared to the rewards for soloing or running in a small group.

Jscull.2514:

If culling doesnt improve, 1/3 of the pvpers (not spvpers, open pvpers) will leave the game end of march.

well, that would solve 1/3rd of the problem. then they only need to make the other 2/3rds quit and there is no more culling problem.

Zumy.6318:

Culling will remain an issue due to server quality limitations and ANet not willing to improve them as this would lessen the profit.
As simple as that.

Habib said in a post somewhere that culling can be fixed by ‘throwing money at it’.

Culling is here because it allows them to use sub standard networking infrastructure.

i don’t expect culling ever to get fixed tbh.

the backup plan is “if enough people quit w3, there is no more culling problem”.

so they made the game even far more zerg friendly. /facepalm

does Anet really want to reduce w3 to 3 groups from 100 players, occuppying 50 square meters and only seeing 10 % of the players while not being able to pick up the loot fast enough at the same time ?

MerlinGamer.7410:

by T1/T2/T3 do you mean it like white, blue, green, yellow items?

no, the tiers they refer to here are server pairings. say, if there are 24 servers, there are 8 pairings of 3 servers. at the launch of the game those pairings were random, but currently they more or less represent the ‘level’ of … hm… w3 power.

tier 1 in theory holds the 3 most ‘powerfull’ servers and tier 8 has the 3 ‘weakest’ servers.

the higher (numbers 1,2,..) tiers in theory have the strongest guilds and the most hardcore players and the most players in w3 at any given time.

so, the higher tiers ‘might’ be a bit more unforgiving for new players.

to me it’s all bovine excrement, i wouldn’t even know what tier i’m in and i have no idea what guilds are in the tier above or below my own. it’s all irrelevant to me, the only think that matters to me is the current fight and next fight.

i have no issues in grouping with guildies or people i encounter on the battle field who are not 80. but those people are still better of behind the fighting line using long range attacks, an arrow cart or balista, than in the front line taking the beating

Ambushbug.3146:

muylaetrix.2096:

Lalnuir.4957:

muylaetrix.2096:

so at times i have a (potential) 95 % reduction in healing now. Not cool. (locst swarm + well of suffering + well of corruption + marks = potentially 20 hits a second).

Not cool? What did you expect? The food was op, anyone who used it knew this less than a month after launch.

some classes have more healing than others. i just lost my most important tool for survival against enemies that greatly outnumber me.

And what makes you think you should survive if you are greatly outnumbered?

let me rephrase ‘survival’ to ‘survivability’. more like living a (few) second(s) longer.

it was helpfull to (try) run through a bunch of people hammering a gate to the entrance of a tower or to run away when jumped etc.

remove AE cap and place AE-drop-off (reduce damage the further away from center of the AE) instead. it would break the nonsensical ‘ball’ formations without creating a complete slaughterfest.

Lalnuir.4957:

muylaetrix.2096:

so at times i have a (potential) 95 % reduction in healing now. Not cool. (locst swarm + well of suffering + well of corruption + marks = potentially 20 hits a second).

Not cool? What did you expect? The food was op, anyone who used it knew this less than a month after launch.

some classes have more healing than others. i just lost my most important tool for survival against enemies that greatly outnumber me.

Straegen.2938:

EnRohbi.2187:

And you are not very good at reading.
I said it wouldn’t put significantly more drain on the server, not that there would be no extra calculations.

There is simply no way of knowing this without seeing their architecture. However it is pretty likely that there will be a noticeable performance price from upping the limit when the server is loaded. For example during a big SM attack, it is likely additional AoE targets will cause more lag and reach saturation much quicker. If the server isn’t being taxed already, you are correct it probably won’t have any effect.

I am sure they use some queue system for updating clients and the more damage going into that stack means more aggregation in the queue and more registers being hit on the server. As transactions per second increase server I/O pays a price likely in memory for buffering, CPU for calculating, disk for storing the data, etc.

I work in n-tier transactional systems using a proprietary network protocol that do thousands of transactions per second in near TB sized databases. CXPacket waits (CPU) in SQL are my current life.

muylaetrix.2096:

it’s a disgrace that in a game you gave to pay for, the server infrastructure is such a pile of dung in the first place.

Not many games can process large scale real time warfare on this scale. There are a handful but most suffer from issues like these. It should be better but ultimately there are limits to hardware and resources.

some games did way better already 11 years ago. unacceptable

Lalnuir.4957:

muylaetrix.2096:

Darxio.5672:

Omnom Pies and Ghosts have a 1 or 2 second internal cooldown now. I used to love the pies on Thief Shortbow.

and they didn’t even bother to put in the delve of it there is a cooldown now.

Early testing puts it at a 1 second internal cool down.

so at times i have a (potential) 95 % reduction in healing now. Not cool. (locst swarm + well of suffering + well of corruption + marks = potentially 20 hits a second).

Sureshot.6725:

The game already has performance issues server side with regard to culling and you really want to place additional burden on the processing capacity….really??

you find it acceptable that there is culling and all this other abyssmal server infrastructure related issues in the first place ?

Darxio.5672:

Omnom Pies and Ghosts have a 1 or 2 second internal cooldown now. I used to love the pies on Thief Shortbow.

and they didn’t even bother to put in the delve of it there is a cooldown now.

Gisei.5749:

EnRohbi.2187:

I didn’t take the patch notes to read “Retaliation used to be able to affect 25 players in an area and now only 5” so much as “For every individual player, Retaliation can only stack duration 5 times now instead of 25”.?

Both are incorrect.

Let’s say there are 25 players with retaliation attacking a mob. The mob casts an AoE that hits all 25 players once. Because of the retaliation on each player, the mob would take damage 25 times. Now, post patch, if the mob hits the 25 players, only 5 of the retaliations will hit him back. The other 20 buffs will not tick.

i wish i had ae’s that could hit 25 people at once.

Sureshot.6725:

EnRohbi.2187:

Sureshot.6725:

However, I do know for a fact that removing the AoE cap will force the server cluster to process more damage calculations and cause a performance hit this game can ill afford.

I know for a fact that your knowledge of networking is not as much as you like to pretend it is. (See how annoying it is when people state “facts” that they have no way of proving?)

Some amount of more damage numbers is not going to put a significant amount more drain on a server than is already there (And let’s be clear, the server would only be sending the results of the calculations back. Bandwidth is unrelated to the speed in which the server can calculate damage, only to the speed in which the server can tell the client how much damage it calculated.)

LOL….you really don’t understand how an increase AoE caps will not result in more damage calculations server side?

The server still has to process additional damage calculations as well as send and process additional packets across the wire to the clients. You can’t get around basic math and their are no free rides.

Edit: I’m quite sure my knowledge of networking is superior to yours. I’m betting you don’t even know the difference between packet latency and bandwidth given your statement.

it’s a disgrace that in a game you gave to pay for, the server infrastructure is such a pile of dung in the first place.

Elvis has left the building !

DeadlyRush.1620:

Why dont we just stop playing WvW all together. I find no reason to play lately also. PvE is so MUCH more rewarding then WvW. Why are we playing this stupid gamemode?

if we all stopped playing w3, i guess some people in Anet would be jubilant about having fixed culling and pat eachother on the back for the job well done.

Vena.8436:

Except that was not what he meant, and you’re being obtuse for the sake of being obtuse. He’s referring to creating, from scratch, a well tweaked, well tuned map for a competitive environment. This isn’t like map-o-generator SSC where nothing matters, we’re talking about maps that have to be meticulously tested for siege placement, defense vs. offense balance, chockes and holds, etc…

i won’t deny that a map can take a lot of work, but i do question if it is nescecary. would maps created by a random generator be worse than those maps the ‘team’ spend six months on ?

is it really nesc that a treb placed in location x,y on the tip of feature z can hit something while a treb placed 2 units of distance further can’t ? do towers/keeps have to be within just the range that some warmachines placed at their tips can hit the other feature or would it be better to have them all just apart far enough that it can’t happen ?

i think the current maps are too ‘artificial’, too ‘designed’, too ‘staged’, they leave extremely little place for different tactics. the terrain and the features create a permanenet funnel effect where there are very few ‘roads’ from feature A to feature B and there is almost no room where a group can get ‘lost’ and pass another group without the groups noticing eachother.

would a flat map (or only with minor elevations) that has 5 keeps and 10 towers placed at random by a generator in 2 seconds be worse than what we have now ?

a bit of open space large enough for 2 groups to be in it and still not be within visual range from eachother would be nice.

i think the current maps are ‘overdesinged’.

i wonder what people would think from a experiment where the lake in the middle gets landfilled into a big central plain with almost no features, apart from maybe a piece of dense forrest.

what a disapointing load of crap, as expected.

nekos.2584:

Anet is literally running this game into the ground and i have a feeling it’s intentional. GW2 is a box sales game and the less people that continue to play the better / cheaper it is for Anet. All hey need to do is keep some people interested and hype up the next expansion to reel customers back in.

it doesn’t cost them anything to lose players who already have the game, but it would cost them a lot to ‘fix’ culling. therefore i don’t expect to see an end to culling anytime soon. and if enough people who bought the game stop playing, culling ‘fixes itself’.

silkysoft.6749:

OP if I could kill you in a lions arch overflow I would

haha, agree, sometimes i wish for an option to kill ‘treacherous’ players from one’s own server just to make a point.

SpookyBiscuits.7534:

Myself and many of the EBG JP portalling mesmers I’ve known prefer to work together with their opponent servers’ mesmers so that …

Treason !

when i am solo, i, ‘mostly’ leave a non level 50 player i see running to a nearby POI/vista to get his POI/vista, running after him but not attacking him, standing next to him as he watches his movie, making it very clear that it’s only my ‘mercy’ that allows him to get it, after which i (try and most often succeed in) kill him. no quarter is ever given to a level 50 and certainly not in a jumping puzzle where the enemy can get siege to be used against my server.

when i’m not alone, it’s mostly kill on sight even on the lowbie(s) going for the POI/vista, unless everyone i am with is on the same voice com. simply no point in holding back when the person next to you is unlikely to do so and can not be told to hold back fast enough.

w3 is war, totall war.