Guild Wars 2

Kal Spiro.9745:

Is it ruining your play experience having a single line of text on your screen that can be easily ignored? It will probably stay up there for a while. What does it matter?

It matters that there’s an ad for the raid, an ad for the ESL and other pvp stuff – and at one point it was also showing my pvp rank up there. I have no interest in these things, yet I have no option to hide them.

Do you use any ad blockers when you browse the net? Or doesn’t it matter?

Kal Spiro.9745:

Is it ruining your play experience having a single line of text on your screen that can be easily ignored? It will probably stay up there for a while. What does it matter?

Speaking for myself…

Ruining? No. Talk about hyperbole.

An ongoing nuisance and reminder of how garbage the UI customization is in this game? Absolutely.

Wait – that’s it?

That’s it? Six minor tweaks now counts as a major update, enjoy and see you in January? The saddest part in this update is we’re so starved of Dev attention here that people are actually thanking you.

GW2 is becoming a tragic farce.

People don’t want PvE touched much because this current iteration has some of the highest amount of diversity ever. Every class can perform several roles decently or well and no class is really left out. Some are a bit lacking, but you can do any content and add to it now.

In raids, a very large amount of team compositions and strategies are very viable and have different strengths. So, while one skill (or trait or whatever) might be too powerful in PvP or WvW, it might just be pretty good in certain aspects of PvE. Then the Balance patch comes in and the skill is okay in PvP/WvW now, but completely worthless in PvE which could, in drastic cases, kill off a PvE build or make it so that class is dropped from the content (this is pretty severe and hasn’t happened much at all, but no one wants their main class to be unwanted in PvE).

Nausicca.6038:

Levetty.1279:

Nausicca.6038:

Levetty.1279:

You aren’t going to make the game worse for your paying customers just to appease a minority of players, who don’t want to learn how to play the game, when you can easily split the changes right?

Huhuhu, good try

Why should this skill be nerfed in PvE?

Who cares? You can afk111111spam and still win in pve. Actualy, chronobunkers and mallyx rev are making ESL pro league beyond boring to watch. They need to do something.

The old ‘who cares spam 1 in pve’ argument, yeah no. Not only is it not true it doesn’t matter. The majority of people who play this game play pve and we play pve to have fun, we are fed up of our classes being made less fun due to the whines of people who care about cringe inducing things like esports.

Quite frankly I honestly think the people who do run around events spamming 1 have a better grasp of the mechanics of the game then the PvPers. At least they are actually playing the game, pvpers just sit on the forums whining that ‘insert which ever class was used in the last tournament here’ is too OP for them to learn how to beat while waiting for a new build to go up on metabattle so they can declare that OP.

Godmoney.2048:

Levetty.1279:

Nausicca.6038:

Levetty.1279:

You aren’t going to make the game worse for your paying customers just to appease a minority of players, who don’t want to learn how to play the game, when you can easily split the changes right?

Huhuhu, good try

Why should this skill be nerfed in PvE?

I’m sure you’re not refering to the Chrono bunker’s shield 4 skill are you? Only somebody lacking common sense and reasoning would be using that in PVE.

I look forward to personally kicking the first chronomancer I see using shield in pve just like I would do if they’re using scepter.

But of course you weren’t referencing the shield’s 4 skill because that would be insane for somebody to actually be worried about pve balance in relationship to that particular skill which is entirely useless for pve.

This guy doesn’t take a chronotank into raids.
This guy doesn’t take alacrity support Chronos into raids.
This guy doesn’t run around the enemy aoe spam in HoT maps.

Yeah I don’t think anybody wants to group with you in PvE anyway.

Wow 4 changes to two classes, a change to a map and a bug fix on a rune set.

And it won’t all manage to make it into the patch.

Steady on guys, someone’s in danger of actually doing some work.

The fact that you felt introducing 1 class and 9 elite specialisations counted as a ‘balance patch’ when it put the balance into it’s worst state ever shows just how disconnected with class balance you guys are.

Nausicca.6038:

Levetty.1279:

You aren’t going to make the game worse for your paying customers just to appease a minority of players, who don’t want to learn how to play the game, when you can easily split the changes right?

Huhuhu, good try

Why should this skill be nerfed in PvE?

luzt.7692:

Are these all the balance changes for tomorrow?

Yeah, I was thinking that, too. But actually they said not all of those might be in.

I am… confused.

When they said “balance patch” I was expecting hundreds (not exaggerating!) changes. Not a handful. Or even a dozen or two. 100+.

I have seen quite a lot of this lately and here are my two cents on the topic:

It’s easy to forget that you have different people from all over the world playing together. One has to decide if it’s worth calling them names or making them feel bad about playing this game. I know i have to work on this myself, even though it’s in pvp where i tend to be more frustrated by mistakes that could have been avoided. At least i only complain about it on teamspeak or sometimes in guild chat not directly in the matches.

There are other human beings sitting behind every character in game (except for bots, let’s just forget bots) and we should extend the same courtesy and follow the same rules as we do in real life when interacting with people.

In the end i guess all i am trying to say is, if what you would say is negative at least try to just not say it.

Have you played leagues? That’s the place where the toxicity is at its thickest, as the worst players tend to bark the most when they lose their precious pips.

Aside that, I don’t really encounter toxic behaviour in this game. While I don’t doubt there’s some definitely out there, I don’t believe it’s of such a density as you make it out to be. Even the raids, I have not encountered any ill-mannered players, not even in some of these “hot stuff” teams. Are you sure you are not mistaking poor choices of words or jokes as a sign of toxicity? Even back when I played FF14, I was often accused of elitism in any mid/hardcore content if I offered advice or tried to scrape the group together, disregarded mostly by these “I play how I want” types. And I even use emojis to help people understand good intentions. :p

As I said, the toxicity is surely out there. But it’s most likely just a small minority of big barkers or misunderstood statements that seem to make it more apparent to some than others.

Stealth.8150:

what is the point in posting screenshots of fps u get in game where there is barely anyone on map. those just mean you in game and mean nothing.

if you want to post meaningful screenshots go into a at least 20v20 fight in wvw or a populated LA and post the fps u get.

Go to Shaman in Wayfayer Hills when the entire map is doing that world boss. There’s a good test.

what is the point in posting screenshots of fps u get in game where there is barely anyone on map. those just mean you in game and mean nothing.

if you want to post meaningful screenshots go into a at least 20v20 fight in wvw or a populated LA and post the fps u get.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

Ya want to say the devs are not competent enough to add this support or that arenanet/Ncsoft are too cheap to invest in the game fine. But please stop with the FUD. Honestly there is no reason to not do this. As it won’t hurt anything and it won’t force anything. It just adds options. Not sure why anyone is against options.

You can add ‘likely do profiling of their own’ to your two reasons.

“There is no reason to not do this” is also a terrible argument… there’s no reason to not do a lot of things for the game – more armor skins, more hairstyles, reviving WvW, OCE servers, even an addon system so I don’t have to write my own and risk a tampering ban for Read/WriteProcessMemory() for something as simple as an accurate personal DPS meter – all of which take up a portion of two limited resources: time and money. Knowing that DX12 won’t help performance and trusting that their art won’t gain from it either, a better question would be ‘what reason is there to do this?’. More options is fine as long as creating those options isn’t sacrificing resources that could be used to actually add or improve something.

aerial.7021:

The problem is quite visible if you look at it properly as a programmer I get it it’s a huge undertaking to re-write code, but that’s more of a microsoft problem they should be writing APIs that do NOT require complete re-writes of code period.

Some ideas 10 years ago may not be so great today, and get dropped (d3dx9). Likewise some ideas today didn’t exist 10 years ago, so you won’t inherently be taking advantage of everything new that comes around. Such is development.

1st and most important NO GO for DX12 is Windows 10.
An operating system that sells my data, can give all my data to 3rd parties and monitors everything I do on MY computer is NOT TO BE TRUSTED or ever used.

2nd and still important: I don’t think even the developers back at ANet know exactly how much of an improvement an updated DX version will provide. Players should stop blabbering about thing they have absolutely no idea. Pro or Cons.

3rd: we all want stuff fixed that is absolutely necessary:
Ability to join parties without problems.
Ability to complete Metas without crashes or disconnects.
Ability to skip cutscenes for Story achievements.
Skills, Sigils, Runes and alike that actually work as intended.
etc etc

I can accept a bit of lag and low FPS from time to time but getting sick of all these stupid broken pieces of code.

The problem is quite visible if you look at it properly as a programmer I get it it’s a huge undertaking to re-write code, but that’s more of a microsoft problem they should be writing APIs that do NOT require complete re-writes of code period.

Optimization is one thing, the art department of ArenaNET creating content the engine cannot cash is another which is the real problem you have. It’s one thing to have the best graphics (I’ve personally seen in an MMORPG) but what good are those things if the art department hasn’t a clue about optimizing the content they create, it feels and looks at times that the directors have just the art department go crazy and haven’t forced limitations on what they are allowed to create.

These thoughts come from someone who has ZERO problems playing the ‘core’ game on a laptop HD4000 with 8gb ram, but when it comes to Dry Top / Silverwastes & HoT it hasn’t a hope, because it feels / looks like they haven’t even tried to pull the art department in they need a reminder of what the minimum specs actually are I think.

I don’t mind eventually I’ll get a rig that will run GW2 in all areas fine, here is hoping a GTX970 4Gb DDR5 will put the game in it’s place with the aid of an i7 6300, and if that doesn’t do it, well it’s time to pack my bags and just live under a rock.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

Ayrilana.1396:

DX12 also requires Windows 10 so any players who would want to see any supposed benefits from it would have to upgrade if they don’t already have it.

Comments like this prove that you are just full of it. Adding DX12 does not in any way mean that players are forced to use it, which would lead to your idea that players are forced to have win 10. Many games have multiple support for dx versions and when they add support for a new version there is not one that I know of that no longer supports the original version. The only reason it would become a win 10 exclusive is because arenanet are morons. Which I don’t think they are.

Ya want to say the devs are not competent enough to add this support or that arenanet/Ncsoft are too cheap to invest in the game fine. But please stop with the FUD. Honestly there is no reason to not do this. As it won’t hurt anything and it won’t force anything. It just adds options. Not sure why anyone is against options. I don’t expect it today but if they allocated just alittle bit of resources it could happen 4th quarter 2016 or some time 2017.

DX12 is Windows 10 exclusive. Do see any benefits from DX12, players will have to be using Windows 10. That exclusivity is because Microsoft made it so. Take it up with them if you have an issue with it rather than blame Anet.

http://m.windowscentral.com/directx-12-will-indeed-be-exclusive-windows-10

I also do not get where you got the idea that players would be forced to use DX12. Nobody has been saying that from what I can recall.

Also changing the system to allow DX12 has costs. Not everything is worth it and especially if adding DX12 will not solve the problems that people have been complaining about.

City of Heroes was OpenGL. It was a forum support nightmare because both AMD and especially nVidia had issues with their OpenGL in the home drivers rather than the professional series of video cards. Times when it was working only to get broken again during the next beta version, which players switched too because new Dx game that came out so they had to choose between latest driver for latest Dx game they got or a stable OpenGL driver for their MMO. Trust me, it wasn’t fun times. Too many gamers upgrade drivers as reflex reaction as soon as a new set comes out.

DX12 also requires Windows 10 so any players who would want to see any supposed benefits from it would have to upgrade if they don’t already have it.

That ol noob.7083:

Has anyone noticed that gw2 seems to rely much more on the CPU than the GPU? Are you noticing a lack of multi-core utilization? Wish gw2 could run a bit better? There is an answer to these questions…
Vote for DirectX12 support!
Too long has gw2 been confined to the ancient limitations of dx9. It is time to make your voice heard! If ANET were to rewrite gw2 in dx12, we would see massive performance gains! Why confine the game to a single core when we can use all the cores? Dx12 has massive gains over dx11, imagine what the gain over dx9 would be!
I want to see the marvelous world that ANET has sculpted better than ever before. I want to be able to use the full power of my system to make it sharp as it can be.
Are you with me?

You know that you can’t just throw GW2 on DX12. They’d probably have to rewrite the game they’ve taken 3 years +5 years of pre-launch to create.

Would DX12 even touch any of the real performance issues?

Not to mention the server issues..

Forgot to add to my post above – making your engine compatible with DX_ was only step 1. Step 2 would inlcude change/redesign and retest again for each new feature of DX_ that you want to take advantage of.

That ol noob.7083:

Objects aren’t thread-safe? Well then rewrite them to support multithreading!

Thread-safe doesn’t mean faster or more efficient. On one hand, it can be used across threads without worrying about race conditions, but on the other, the semaphores and locks used to make this happen can result in serious performance penalities even when threaded.

Likewise, for everyone wanting GW2’s workload to be spread over more than the 3-4 cores it is now (just look at processexplorer while playing…), ANet knows (reddit):

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.

Think of each frame like a dependency tree… you have to calculate what you see to know what to draw, you have to know what to draw to know what assets to load, you have to know what to draw to know what effects can be culled etc. No amount of crying about threads and cores will change that. Those dependencies must be done in that order, and in the case of GW2, that’s a pretty tall (serial) tree compared to something wide (parallel) like video encoding. Yes, sometimes things end up on that tree that don’t need to, and if they happen to be on the longest path, can result in some small gains after being moved off. I’m sure they also have ideas for better parellel designs than what it ended up being. But, like shipping with a new DX, design changes of that scale are not likely to be worth the effort this far into a game’s lifespan.

beefjus.9347:

So THIS happened today. It just reaffirms my vote for DX12. I don’t get why GW2 is running like crap, but Witcher 3 (high, hairworks off, low shadows and water) still runs at 60fps… SMH

So how many big zerg fight with or against other players over the internet are there
in the Witcher where you still have that performance ? Oh … wait … there are none .. right ?

I don’t understand why people all the time compare apple with oranges. Has noone
ever played for example Lineage 2 with Unreal Engine or AION with CryTech Engine
and seen how this o so good single-player / shooter engines suddenly give you only
a slideshow as soon as you have massive amounts of players in an MMO ?

And to your problem .. make sure your GPU uses all 16 PCIe lanes. Reseating you
GPU mostly helps.

SkyShroud.2865:

im not greedy

i only want anet to have multi core support, the rest can wait

They have multicore support, only not for more than 4 cores.

It won’t happen anytime soon simply because Windows 10 isn’t even widely used yet. If only a small percentage of people wants to upgrade to Windows 10 (even if it’s mandatory downloaded in the background offered for free by Microsoft) then logic dictates that they don’t even care about DirectX 12.

It’s not practical to throw resources on tech that doesn’t cater to majority of your target market.

beefjus.9347:

So THIS happened today. It just reaffirms my vote for DX12. I don’t get why GW2 is running like crap, but Witcher 3 (high, hairworks off, low shadows and water) still runs at 60fps… SMH

More a problem with your computer than the game.

Main issues for a console port are royalties in game sales, upgrade system with a lot of difficulties with anet upgrade policy and the fact you have to use Sony and Microsoft servers, which would be separated from pc/mac (that means eu and na also for each console).

JediYoda.1275:

But what really is required to update a games DX version? Just update the DX API’s or the game engine itself as a whole,? I want links to said information not speculation, Because few game are set to get DX12 in patches.

Seems you’ve forgotten one of the most important links on your crusade about DX12’s glorious performance…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with Direct, such as Direct3D, DirectDraw, DirectMusic, DirectPlay, DirectSound, and so forth.

As that implies, you don’t just ‘replace some files and recompile something from DX_ to DX12’. You refactor or reconstruct everything that has any reference to functionality provided by DirectX (not just graphics) that’s changed or deprecated, then ensure that no other component in your entire system behaves differently after doing so. Turns out in a game engine more complex than Minesweeper, it’s an incredible amount of work.

For performance; it was already said. Everyone arguing DX11 (and 12) knows one of the most noticable improvements comes from multithreaded rendering – or being able to keep deferred device contexts on many threads instead of just one. Turns out you can use this knowledge for some basic profiling. Doesn’t take much more than some creative thinking and a debugger to start on this.
http://i.imgur.com/dgwY5Es.png

In practice it takes a bit more work than the above as D3DCreate9 will only get you a device context. What you need to do after is find and put breakpoints on ::BeginScene or ::EndScene routines in that context which are guaranteed to be called once and only once per frame in the renderer loop. Or find yourself a proxy/debug D3D9.dll to skip that part. When you find the thread that does the drawing, you can compare it’s ID in something like ProcessExplorer and see that, like Johan said, it is not the bottleneck. It’s the 2nd or 3rd thread on that list. Which means that, if you consider a super simple pipeline like this,
http://i.imgur.com/L2H4Aky.png
reducing the DX9 GPU drawing overhead will have zero impact on how long the underlying CPU calculations that prepare the frame take, and therefore, zero impact on your observed FPS in the CPU-bottlenecked case of GW2.

So please… can we let these DX11/DX12 threads die already…

Ayrilana.1396:

From someone with knowledge about the game engine and what it can and can’t do.

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

Or just read that if you have no understanding of what I typed out above.

JediYoda.1275:

Ayrilana.1396:

GW2 is not the same as GW1. It’s more complicated so will take many more resources than its predecessor. And all this for minimal mprovements.

You also need to realize that not all games are designed the same. When games have upgraded to a higher DX version, have they all received the EXACT same percentage boost in performance? No, they did not as evidenced by the numerous benchmarks in the past. What may boost performance greatly in one game may barely do so in another. It comes down to how it was designed (remember that GW2 is CPU intensive). And as the dev stated in the Reddit thread, going to DX12 will provide minimal improvements as the issue people are experience resides outside of the render thread.

The dev is an expert in their field with years of experience. They do not need to cite a source and especially since they were talking about GW2 specifically which there will not be a source for. Well not unless they released the source code but good luck with that.

Because he is an expert or have experience it doesn’t mean he is 100% right!

He does with how this game was built which is what I was getting at. I was not talking about just his experience with the subject matter alone. Not all games receive the same boost in performance when upgrading to a higher DX version.

….Why? I see this trend of people going for higher numbers and most not even realizing they don’t mean anything unless those features are used.