Guild Wars 2

And some people just don’t want to upgrade to Windows 10. Free or not; they might not like the interface, or the fact that MicroSoft wants to assert more control. Some can not afford to upgrade their hardware. Gamers come in all varieties, and from all levels of economic tiers.

Do remember, ArenaNet wanted the game to be available, and playable, to a very large cross-section of ‘gamers’.

Swagger.1459:

It’s always interesting to read computer tech stuff because I’m a complete noob about it.

All I know is that the devs designed the game to put many players in one space, so stronger steps need to be taken to make improvements because it’s far from smooth playing at times.

I run a 3.5k machine, live in the US and have great internet, but still suffer from performance issues when the masses gather… Just saying that things could be better here and we all know it.

Where there is a will there is a way, so it’s not beyond the scope to make more improvements. Businesses reinvest all the time and it’s just what it is. I’m assuming that making improvements will also give the devs better tools to work with in the end and remove some limitations for themselves.

Players also have to make their own upgrades as well because y’all can’t sit there on 5-10 year old machines and expect miracles.

I just tried to explain and show ppl they might want DX 12, but the hardware is available since 2011-2012 and unless you SPECIFICALLY bought a PC for DX 12 in the 1st 2 years afterwards you can actually have a PC from 2013 or 2014 whcih cannot take advantage of DX 12 at all !!

SO the window could be 2-5 years actually… and not 5-10…. Does this change your view?

Stephanie wise you are wrong.

• Multithreading is not one or two lines of codes, but a general way to code an entire program. That’s why they generally recommend to code the program in multithreading from the start, because patches can be more harmful than helpful.
  With a game like Gw2 that includes millions of codes of lines multithreading is not an easy task.

• In heavy situations the API is not an issue, but the main thread in the cpu.

From here you can repeat yourself as much as you can, but know you’re repeating lies and fooling yourself.

I can’t believe that it hasn’t occurred to the devs to just compile with the -dx12 switch.
How daft must they feel now?

Next you’ll be telling me that they don’t use the -run_smoother and -make_it_real_purty switches.

stephanie wise.7841:

. but to say there is nothing to be done does not help. when they started to talk about making game multi thread I was there also. to do this it is only some line of code that needs to be added to the end of the existing code. why not put a dev on it? after why not optimize the game to dx 12 and solve the dx 9 limitation?

Devs have said it, in heavy situations the API is not the bottleneck. It is the main cpu thread that renders all the calculations. It has nothing to do with the graphics.

And here nobody says there’s nothing that can do. The problem is to solve it you need money, time and devs. You are completely wrong if you think multithreading a code just takes some line here and there…

Will you also give all the ppl running this on “legacy computers” a computer with Directx 12 GPU’s then, or are you and the minority with high end systems going to keep this game going?

If you cut out 50-70% of the player base due to the shift to directx (10/11/)12, the lost income must be compensated or you’ll end up with a even smaller playerbase. no players to pay for developers/servers = no game. Even with DX 12…

As for starting on GW3 if they start now and get DX 12, in 3-4 years when it’s finished we’ll be at DX 14 or 15 and ppl will be whining as well, or maybe Vulkan takes off and ppl want everything in Vulkan… and are stuck with DX 12… choices must be made. DX 12 didn’t exist 3,5 years ago. understand you cannot program a game on non existant code or guesses.

I like my 3 yr old i7 3930K (@ 4.0Ghz) with my 2 GTX 780’s. Most games will work perfectly. Graphics for gw2?

NP, I’m at 30-45% GPU or maybe 45-50% if everything hit’s the fan…. I’m running 60 FPS cap most of the time cause I tend to want to save the lost computing power, the ambient temperature and the needed Watts. Oh and that’s on Ultra/High with supersampling, on a windowed screen… while watching HD stream/ series/ movie on 2nd HD screen.

My CPU however is at 33-40% max… squeeezing everything through 3-4 threads, the other 8-9 are idling or doing background services and other applications.

I do not mind If they make the game 4 core, NP, I don’t even care if they make it mandatory 6 core. But I do like playing with others, including friends on duo core i5’s with HT (e.g. laptops) and i3’s

And this will be a problem if I ask for 4+ core support. There are limitations. Mostly because the game is limited by the average player base and not build to be only playable on your or my OP 1337 Hyper Fiberoptic Artificially Inteligent System, just because others who want to play as well, and they’ll pay for my new content, and new expansions as well.

I want more content, I like the game, I need thers to play the game as well… for money flow (income for A-net) so more content can be build, and maybe engine improvements if they -have time to spare- . But I highly doubt ppl would pay for dx12 development if they would no longer be able to play the game.

I would like more performance, but in the end for a modified dx 8 engine upscaled to dx9 it does remarkebly well. Maybe we’ll be lucky and a patch comes which allows for many CPU cores and better GPU utilisation, But I do not see the direct need, yet.

GW2 has more that one thread, 3 major ones actually and a slew of lesser ones (this is in terms of overall CPU %). It’s just the renderer thread isn’t the slowest. And the slowest thread governs framerate and a thread’s performance is limited to the performance of a single core. Doesn’t mean a thread is tied to a specific core, just bouncing between cores won’t make the thread run any faster than if it ran only on one core. Which is why people keep saying single core performance matters, not that the game runs on a single core, but like any program, it’s overall performance is limited by it’s slowest thread which is determined by the performance of a single core. It’s just other game engines that slowest thread is the rendering one where the GPU factors the threads overall performance.

papry.8096:

Falanu.4289:

“We want dx12!” – That’s a “we minus me”.

Make it two.

Three here, If they ever add DX 12 to Win 7 i might enjoy it.

No one is disagreeing that DX12 has better stats than DX9, and more modern features. The problem is that the GW2 engine can’t take advantage of those modern features, and that DX isn’t the bottleneck(for GW2) in the first place. You should have read the linked reddit post rather than just rabidly posting more DX9 vs DX12 stuff. DX12 will not solve the problem, no matter how much anyone wants it to.(without the GW2 engine being majorly reworked)
IMO they need to forget expansion 2 and move on to GW3, with a totally new engine.

Skill “Thread Necromancy” activated!

Description: Summon a deceased thread to attack foes with outdated posts.

Damage: 20% of number of days since the last post.
Stun: 2 hours.
Number of targets: Unlimited.

Cooldown: 6 months.

stephanie wise.7841:

I also agree that dx 12 would help this game(gw2) a lot. any one saying the opposite do not know what they are talking about. face it dx12 brings all core and thread can be use. new pc have 4 core and 4 thread. other dx version where all using 1thread of 1 core. so it can use 8x more of the cpu power. also dx 12 can use all the graphic card on the pc as one what ever size or brand. and new pc have often have 2 or more now. so of course it would help the game a lot. it would free the cpu and send the job to the gpu. no more bottle neck. means higher fps and more constant.

DX12 itself will not provide the improvements that you think.

I feel like I may be able to clear up some things here.

GW2 stays on DX9 and 32bit client which kinda.. lags a lot, and sometimes even crashes on huge battles/worldbosses (i see you Tequatl).

For the vast majority of players, the lag is unrelated to both of these.

All software have a thing called threads. You can think of each thread as a highway lane: They run in parallel, and they each perform different tasks simultaneously. They are what applications use to scale with multiple cores on CPUs, as each thread can only run on one CPU core at a time.

Each application has a thread known as the main thread. For games that thread is usually the thread that’s in the driver’s seat of the frame. It determines what to process and when on a higher level, such as “process OS messages”, “update the game state”, “process animations”, “send state to the render thread”, etc. All the different things that go into a game frame. The majority of game engines do some of these on a different thread, but in many cases the main thread still determines when it should happen.

So since threads are useful for scaling things, you’d think that you could simply create more threads and get more work done. But while it’s true that you have more computing power with more threads, threads also have downsides. For one, you cannot modify data in memory while another thread is reading that same data. In order to do this one thread has to wait for the other to stop using the data, meaning work is done in serial even if the code itself is running on multiple threads. To make matters worse, the OS is not guaranteed to put a thread back to work the very moment the other thread has finished. It can actually take a long-ish time (long being a very relative term). Due to this, software engineers are forced to properly design their applications to work well in parallel. Doing this after the fact is usually on the range of non-trivial to very hard.

Which brings us to GW2. GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it’s a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say “Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you’re too busy”, but sadly this is not that world.

As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn’t buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can’t do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best.

And about crashing on Tequatl: Here’s one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

Shivan.9438:

Pepsi.8907:

The time it takes to rewrite a game so that it adapts to newer graphics is insanely high.

They had 10 years.

Pepsi.8907:

In fact, the only game I’ve ever known to go to such length and stay up to date is Eve Online.

Unless Anet had recieved zero funding from NC Soft or sat on their butts… if Eve Online can put forth the effort, so can Anet.

One of Anet’s common replies to not having what other games offer is “It’s not in our skillset.” Really? In 10 years a company can’t hire people to do the job or be picked up by a parent company that can offer them support and make the game better and take care of a 5+ year old franchise?

Bull-kitten.

DirectX 10 was released in late 2006, and they started to develop Gw2 in 2007. Investing time in a newer api would have meant delaying the launch. Later, they preferred with the continuous temporary content release over spending time in a newer API. Then it came the expansion.

About EVE Online, same story as always. Different game, different publisher, different situation and different internal politics and perspective. When people will stop doing these unreasonable comparisons…
Its developer has nearly twice the amount of employees than anet. First API upgrade in EVE came with directx 9, 4 years later, and directx 11 came 10 years later (not that you can relate to the same 10 years from Gw1 Factions).

Hmm,

It occurs to me that with a significant monetary investment and the assistance of a friend, one can already achieve what the OP seeks given a relatively short amount of time.

A stockpile of teleport to friend devices and a friend, with all waypoints unlocked, willing to port all over the map for you would allow you to unlock all WP far more quickly than running to them yourself.

So, OP, you can already buy this. Go for it.

I cant think of a MMO which allows you to totally delete your account.
Most even make it hard to delete your characters, and thats to stop rage quitters who change their minds and come back crying to the game company to restore all their deleted characters, and give them back their original names.

TheNecrosanct.4028:

Right. I guess most people didn’t read the part where I said I’m not for this unlocking WP thing at all. I’m with BrotherBelial on this one: get off your kitten and do the work! All I was saying is that people still deserve rewards for doing 75% of the content, just not the same reward as people doing all 100% by themselves. And that was in direct reply to someone who said people shouldn’t get any rewards for map completion at all if their WP’s are all unlocked automatically. That just makes it sound as if said person doesn’t think they deserve it because they didn’t do all the work he/she did. Doing 75% of a task is still getting off your kitten , and still deserves a reward, not no reward at all.

Nope. Doing 75% of the work needed is not doing 100% and shouldn’t get 100% of the rewards.

Unlocking waypoints on alts should be a convenience for those who don’t want to do map completion on alts and can’t get themselves out to grab waypoints because it’s too boring/takes too long/whatever. It shouldn’t be an option for those to bypass doing a substantial portion of the work, which 25% is, yet get full rewards.

Another “I’m too lazy to play the game” thread. It takes no time at all to grab waypoints. I grabbed every non HoT HC in around 6 hours with my rev. It would take a lot less to grab the important waypoints in game. If you want it, go get it. Stop being lazy and asking people to do the work for you. Next thing you’ll be asking for is a a button you press that will instantly kill any mob you encounter, because you’ve killed over 15,000 why should you kill it again?

Can’t tell if OP is serious.

The player already has control over this by deleting all of their characters. The names will be freed up after a short time (I believe in 24 or 48 hours?). Creating something like this can only backfire for Anet – Players who regret their decision may expect to be able to restore their characters, and even if the request is denied it creates additional workload along with creating the system in the first place.

No, no account deletion for those who rage quit (and might regret it after they cool off) or for those who are gone for a while but might return later, but not if they have to rebuy the game and start completely over from the very beginning.

Another really bad idea, brought to you by the forums.

I feel that Anet got a bit excited about JPs because they were being proud of adding jumping after GW1. While I appreciate not having to run around a fallen log, I’m not enthusiastic about JPs. Still, I don’t mind the dailies, especially since you can get ports for most, and I did PvP the day the Malchor’s Leap one was a daily. (Note: I did that JP once and never want to do it again.)

What I do object to is gating other content behind JPs, like collections. More specifically, I object to bundling other content with JPs — if you wanted to have a legendary backpack/wings for someone who does every single JP in the game, go ahead. Let people who like JPs show off their accomplishments. I’m okay with that. (In fact, I think there would be people who would be excited for it.) What I don’t like is what happened with Winter’s Presence, where I was excited to do the steps, then realized that the JP was the biggest obstacle — I was doubly shocked when I realized that I had to do it 3 times, not just once. (I did eventually get it, but — ow — my painful wrists after.)

My biggest fear for the game is that they will require Mad King’s Clocktower for a Halloween meta-achievement and/or collection. Please don’t. It’s own achievement is fine, but please let us skip it for the meta-achievement, like in past years, but unlike what happened last Wintersday.

I would love for them to stop gating character/account advancement or content behind jumping puzzles. I understand they’re proud of their jumping puzzles but let them be optional content, not required to advance your account or character.

No.

You want map completion? Go do it.

If mapping in GW2 is such a hassle that you’d be willing to PAY for it to be done, I’d love to see you go map in GW1.

(For the record, I’ve done map completion in GW2 18×.)

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Ayrilana.1396:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

Ayrilana.1396:

DaikonSamurai.6714:

You’d still have to complete all the hearts, jump to all the vistas, find all the POIs… So you’d still have to cover a lot of the same ground and the same content anyway. Maybe if it were like the jump to lvl 80 item we got in our free shared slot and only unlocked 1 waypoint in maps so you still had to uncover those maps. I’d be fine with all WPs unlocked though if it required you to have done map completion at least once before. Repeating map completion on multiple characters seems kinda silly to me (especially if you’ve done it 10+ times) and doesn’t really prove any accomplishment so I’d be fine with an item like this.

You’d do map completion in less time if you had all WP’s unlocked.

Which you’d already proven you can do if you’ve gotten world completion already.

Which would be made faster if all WP’s were unlocked.

So?

How would you feel about Anet allowing players to purchase a consumable which unlocks everything in their wardrobe? After all, it would just be saving the player time.

Having all WP’s unlocked significantly reduces the amount of time spent doing map completion.

Sird.4536:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Sird.4536:

STIHL.2489:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Yes, it’s just that simple. I don’t think raids are “bad” necessarily, but anytime we get this type of content, in any game, it does seem to bring out the less than savory side of people. It just highlights how terrible a lot of people are.

I have to totally agree with you on this one, It’s weird, and to be honest I have no idea why it happens, but this kind of content really seems to bring out the worst among people as opposed to the best in them, and all it ends up doing is divide up the community, as opposed to bring people together.

Because everyone that can’t do the content comes out complaining and wanting easier content which then brings out the other side saying it’s not hard find a guild or friends.

Many of the people, myself included, that haven’t been able to get into it, or haven’t been able to do it, aren’t asking to make it easier. (We are asking for people to be a bit less kittenhole-ish) You say it’s not hard to find a guild or make friends, and that may be true for you; however, it’s not for all people. Don’t generalize, and don’t judge. You don’t know what they’ve been through or where they are in life.

I only mentioned both sides of the argument. Retread what I wrote and you will see if never generalised or whatever you are accusing me of. Though since you generalised and called me out let me reply in kind.

The people that tend to be ‘kittenhole-ish’ are pug groups. Guild members don’t behave like that and if they do then you are in the wrong guild. I get a feeling that everyone that comes here to complain about elitism is coming on here after a bad pug experience.

If you can’t find a guild or group to raid with because of real life then it isn’t anyone’s fault, you play when you can but those people should not come here to demand content because of it.

The point you missed is that even the people that aren’t whining “make it easier” are getting the flack too. We still get people being kittens, and accuse us of being lazy, etc etc. Thus, the don’t generalize and don’t judge. It wasn’t necessarily directly explicitly “at” you. I use “you” in a general sense a lot, and I probably should qualify it.

And bullkitten, guild members don’t behave that way. I agree, if they do, you may be in the wrong guild. Or maybe, it’s the kitten content that’s trying to be done. I forget which podcast was discussing this in the last couple of weeks, but they were discussing on how a guild member can be an absolutely sweetheart 99% of the time, but as soon as kitten starts going downhill in raids, they turn into essentially a Bridezilla. Not the first time I’ve heard people share such stories (in this game or others).

And again…whose demanding content?

Vinceman.4572:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

You might want to take a step back on slinging that “lazy” term around. The vast majority of players no not use the forums. And players do ask questions, here and in game, and do you know what people tell them? Go wiki it. Go youtube it. Go research it. There is a reason people stop bothering after a while. Its the exact same kitten we saw in dungeons and in fractals.

Sorry, but to use youtube, the wiki, doing “research” on google, look for guides is what you have to do. You won’t get everything from the silver plate. Same thing like in real life. If you have a guild it can help in every aspect of the game. There is so much information out there, we are playing an online game so the rest of the big internet is just some klicks away. Why can’t people explore for themselves or just use simple guides which explain very much faster and better how to get certain things done?
And do you know how hard and often frustrating it is to teach decent or bad players some of the content like fractals and dungeons? I am helping in my guild in about 25% of my playtime. It’s a thing I like to do but some of those days I am in a bad mood because players cannot listen and react to the simplest things.

Who said anything about asking for anything on a silver kittening platter?

You ask why people can’t read guides and such, lets flip that around. Why can’t people be bothered to help with something as simple as a question in a game that’s supposedly supposed to be “mulitplayer” with a great community? This isn’t a solo RPG where the only available resources are guide books, wikis, and youtube. If people have to resort to those methods and only those methods, why the hell should they bother with a MMO?

Why do you assume they haven’t watched a vid, or read a guide, or checked the wiki? People can do those things and still have questions. Twitch is an excellent example of this. People watch, and learn, and still have questions.

I’ve helped bad players, I know how frustrating it can be. And yet, they can also turn into some of the best people to play with because those people (that want to learn, and know they’re bad) can have some of the best attitudes. Its the ones that suck that don’t want to learn that tend to be the biggest headache.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

You might want to take a step back on slinging that “lazy” term around. The vast majority of players no not use the forums. And players do ask questions, here and in game, and do you know what people tell them? Go wiki it. Go youtube it. Go research it. There is a reason people stop bothering after a while. Its the exact same kitten we saw in dungeons and in fractals.

True. That term is apply and generalize wrongly most of the time. I know you don’t really seem to use that term, but the same is true for toxic. People on both side are using lazy and toxic to demonize the other side. But in reality, you have guys that worked hard to get where they are in term of experience and success in raid and they want to play with like minded, experienced players so their run go smoothly. Some of them are happy to help others in practice run, others aren’t, which is ok too.

And on the other side you have player that have difficulty going into raid. It can be for a lot of reason. They can lack the gear to get accepted, they can know nobody doing raid, they can have less experience in dungeon/fractal, they can like to play a build or a profession not that popular, they could have miss the initial training train when raid appeared, they can have difficult work schedule, etc. They are not lazy, they just don’t know what to do to raid at this point and nothing seem to work.

Of course some are lazy and other are toxic, but I doudt they represent the majority in either side. But whatever happen in the game, this division will alway exist. There is a reason why, it was like that in dungeon, then in fractal and now in raid. People want to succeed and they will do whatever they need to do to achieve it. The reason why it doesn’t really happen anymore in dungeon and it never really happen in low level fractal is because they are so easy that a lot of people just don’t care about people not meeting standard. When I dungeon, I usually 3 or 4 man it, and when I pug I often get a 600 AP new players, not level 80 and I don’t care, we carry him all the way because it doesn’t even make a difference, which wasn’t really the case before. But I won’t gonna do that In high level fractal or in raid.

You can’t police the community attitude because most of what people complain are done with good reason. It just clash when both attitude meet.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Yes, it’s just that simple. I don’t think raids are “bad” necessarily, but anytime we get this type of content, in any game, it does seem to bring out the less than savory side of people. It just highlights how terrible a lot of people are.

I have to totally agree with you on this one, It’s weird, and to be honest I have no idea why it happens, but this kind of content really seems to bring out the worst among people as opposed to the best in them, and all it ends up doing is divide up the community, as opposed to bring people together.

Jhoul.6923:

I see 13, and I almost puked. I want every Legendary and the fact that I have to do map completion for every 2 legendaries give me pain all over my body.

There should be a way to get the gift, without getting the map completion of every individual map.

BTW, I have deep respect for you (for real) I have done it a few times and I just can’t anymore.

I’ve done it 16-18 times…I can’t even remember anymore and I know folks who have done full map completion many more times than I have.

Honestly, I don’t see the point of asking for just the WPs unlocked…you’re going to pass by them getting POIs and doing the hearts. It’s not like they’re hard to get or find.

If a player wants map/world completion then they earn it by actually doing it and not by buying part of it.

TheNecrosanct.4028:

Ayrilana.1396:

No. What I meant was that if you have all WP’s unlocked on a character automatically, you can never get map completion or world completion credit on that character.

A very short and simple question: why?

Because you’re paying to have a good part of map/world completion done for you. Why not just ask for all of it to be done? Besides, you’ll hit the vast majority of WO’s when doing map completion anyway.

No. What I meant was that if you have all WP’s unlocked on a character automatically, you can never get map completion or world completion credit on that character.