Guild Wars 2

Last I checked, the fix was being tested against everyone’s account that was affected by the issue. The fix isn’t something that we can rush out in a hotfix, it’s really complicated and really risky. Sorry about the inconvenience.

-Bill

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Latency-Lag-for-EU-Players-merged/page/13#post4617165

We’ve been investigating this issue and have something for those affected by latency and disconnect issues to try out.

1. Locate your Gw2.exe file.
2. Right-click on the file and select Create shortcut.
3. Rename this new shortcut to Guild Wars 2 ClientPortTest.
4. Right-click on Guild Wars 2 ClientPortTest and select Properties.
5. Locate the Target line and add: -clientport 443 to the end. (Example: “C:\Games\Guild Wars 2\gw2.exe” -clientport 443)
6. Click OK.

This should help a good portion of those affected by high traffic times where their traffic might be messed with between your computer and our servers. Traffic between the game client and the game server is extremely time-sensitive. If the the flow is disrupted, the client will receive what is commonly perceived as “skill lag” or in extreme cases have the connection dropped entirely (error 7). Other traffic to/from your computer might seem fine, even if its being throttled.

-Bill

I’d be curious to see if starting the game client with the “-clientport 80” argument helps your PvP latency issue. There’s been a lot of talk that using that helps with throttling of your connection during EU peak hours.

-Bill

Remember, when you’re experience these spikes, please do a pathping to the server’s IP address. This gives us more information on the issue, and where packet loss is happening.

1. In-game, type: “/ip” to get the IP address of the game server
2. Open a command prompt by pressing: [WindowsKey] + R -> type: “cmd.exe” -> Hit the [Enter] key
3. Type: “pathping <game server IP>” -> Hit the [Enter] key

No, the changes we made to fix this were ~10-12 hours after the build went out. The WvW/World Boss large battles are still going to have lag across the entire map, so i don’t expect that to go away, but hopefully improve.

-Bill

Seka.5647:

Apparently it was a guild related issue – but nothing from my side. Still sounds a bit hilarious and odd and not exactly sure what it was, but oh well. I did get a heroic chest tho .. not that I would really like the skins but at least I got a new armorset unlocked without using gems for it

Hey, I want to personally thank you for tracking down that it was something with your character. I noticed an issue with a map you were in and literally minutes later someone pointed me to your post. I tracked it down to it being an issue with some data in your Guild being out of sync with one of your characters, and it also helped us find that several hundred other Guilds were also affected by this issue. We fixed these other guilds after we fixed yours, which should (hopefully) fix lag issues for hundreds, if not thousands of other players.

This bug has been around for quite some time, so it could have been causing people grief for the past year. It also can be less noticeable for some, and much worse for others (which you found out). Sorry about the inconvenience!

Thanks again,
-Bill

Were you playing on a Pvp, Wvw or Pve map?

Curious to see if people are seeing server lag in the past couple hours. We made some backend changes this evening and it should solve a lot of the really long lag issues people were seeing, including an issue that came up where certain players would cause any map they join to lag.

-Bill

Keep in mind that there are a few very different issues being mixed up here. “Skill Lag” as discussed in the original post here is referring directly to Game Server CPU usage. I want to ensure we are all on the same page, so here’s a little refresher:

• Game Server CPU usage (which is the #1 issue discussed here)
  • Let’s be honest, Guild Wars 2 has a lot of moving parts, and the Game Server is pretty much always in the thick of it.
• Player/Client → GameServer bandwidth
  • Most cases usually come from players having other heavy traffic going on while playing the game, weak WiFi signals, or their ISP is having difficulties.
• GameServer → Player/Client bandwidth
  • This can happen sometimes in our datacenters during peak hours or when hardware is having difficulties, but normally resolves very quickly.
• Client frame-rate
  • CPU and/or GPU bound hardware
  • Extremely heavy combat, dense populated areas, and/or effect spam (which causes a lot of overdraw, which can cripple even the beefiest hardware )

So how about what you actually want to hear… When are more improvements coming?

Like always, I don’t have a date to toss around (yet), but I do have a couple things that are well on their way, and hopefully will make it in the next few releases (fingers crossed). So, what can you expect?

Another round of Game Server optimizations

With most of the previous improvements to the Game Server, I’ve tried to focus on improving combat responsiveness. Its just not a fun experience when you try to execute a skill and either: A: Nothing happens, or B: It just doesn’t execute in a timely manor (which is arguably worse). The changes coming should make a nice impact on content that has large densities of creatures and/or zergs of players.

Though, not all “Skill Lag” scenarios are a product of the bullet points stated above. There are other causes of input delay, and a good example of this would be Ranger Pets. I’m sure plenty of you agree that their responsiveness has been arguably, well, next to none. I recently spent time working on improving the interaction Rangers have with their Pet using the Command Bar. I’d love to hear your feedback on this once it ships. Issues like this are something I definitely plan to continue improving upon (Necromancer Minions also come to mind).

Another similar issue that has been extremely frustrating in combat is trying to hit objects like Engineer Turrets (I’m still having nightmares of Graveling Burrows). Or, rather, turrets getting hit by attacks that seemingly shouldn’t have hit them, resulting in what seems to be “lag”. This is something that myself and a designer spent some time tuning, and the results are pretty self-explanatory. I believe some of these changes are actually coming as soon as the next release, though this will only affect attackable objects that don’t have navigation-blocking collision (turrets, some siege equipment, etc).

And, of course, there’s more non-performance/optimization related improvements well on the way that’ll increase the general experience and responsiveness of combat. An example would be Mesmer Illusions/Clones/Phantasms that unreliably attack their target – Warden, I’ve got my eye on you!

Lastly, client frame-rate and memory usage is still being actively worked on. I’ll have to follow up on when more improvements will ship, but I know there are some exciting things in the works.

-Bill

Thedenofsin.7340:

Were there any optimizations for AMD CPUs?

Theoretically everyone should see an improvement.

To follow up, the client optimizations that I mentioned before went out with the build today. Let me know if you saw improvements. Feel free to list your specs too!

-Bill

The fact that most of these items ever existed is just blatantly a bug. The decision to throw cooldowns on them were for server performance/stability as the patch notes said, not for balance. Period. This was something that was long overdue.

Think of it this way: Between the embers and whistle, those items were effectively doubling/tripling the amount of players active in a map.

As for the Charrzooka, I’m not sure what the reasoning behind that change was. That wasn’t part of the change to summons, or at least that I’m aware of.

The bringer of bad news,
-Bill

Quick update:

Happy new year everyone! Now that we’re back from holiday vacations, we’ve got more improvements that’ll be rolling out soon. A handful of client improvements will also be making their way (soon hopefully), that should see a drastic memory usage drop and client frame-rate improvements, especially for lower-end hardware.

I’ll make sure to update once I have a better idea of what release you can start seeing these changes trickle in.

-Bill

So during the November 12th release, we rolled out a couple of changes that significantly reduced skill lag. One mostly targetted PvP and WvW, whereas the other was more high creature concentrated PvE areas.

Curious to see if you, as players, have noticed the impact (or haven’t noticed it because the game feels as it should). Of course WvW will still see occasional spikes during large 3-way encounters, but those a significantly shorter and the server can now recover from them almost immediately.

Needless to say, more improvements are well underway.

-Bill

Carzor Stelatis.9435:

BillFreist.1527:

Some other assumptions I’m seeing is about our server hardware and inefficient use of communication between them and the game’s database. I’ll go ahead and put these assumptions to rest. Our server hardware was actually purchased new right around the launch of the game, rest assured its not out-dated.

The hardware can be as new and as powerful as you like. The problem for EU players is that you chose to locate your ‘EU’ servers in Texas, and no matter how powerful the server hardware you’re going to get more lag if the data has to go from (say) France to Texas and back than if it had to go from France to the Netherlands and back.

False. They are located in Germany.

How did you come to this conclusion?

Hello again!

I disappeared into my Bat-Cave again and finally emerged, and with some good news to share. I’ll start off with what exactly that is.

Since my last updates, we’ve been hard at work prepping some serious server-side optimizations to relieve the bottle-necks during heavy combat. We’ve made some large steps and are almost ready to start rolling out these changes. The first batch of changes have been in testing and we hope to have them start trickling in as soon as the release on Nov. 12th. We’ll know for sure once we’re closer to that date, and so will you.

I can’t stress enough how dangerous it is to optimize a live game. I know how upsetting it can be to be in the thick of a choppy battle, but things are going to be getting better, and soon. We’ve done some temporary things on the back-end to try to ease the influx of players in Wvw, but those changes only go so far.

On to answering some of the common questions.

A lot of you have noticed what seems like an increase in skill-lag in Wvw since the beginning of Season 1. Really, this is just a large influx of players playing Wvw, mostly in servers that usually don’t have queues to get into the map. A lot of the higher tiered servers are pretty used to large battles running into this issue, but obviously that isn’t a valid excuse for it happening. We’ve only increased the focus on relieving this since the season start, and rest-assured, its a top priority.

Some other common suggestions/questions is about a method other games used, which is known as “time-dilation” or “time-scaling”. Well, for starters, this method is extremely risky. We’ve discussed this, among quite a few other alternatives, and it has boiled down to causing more problems than it’ll solve. I know you might ask, “but the current experience is bad enough, how could it be worse?”. Well, to be completely honest, it would just open another can of worms that would end up breaking the game and causing things much worse than a couple seconds of input delay. We opted instead to focus on fixing the issue by simply making the game run better, instead of sweeping it under the rug by watering down the experience. Internally we have the ability to slow down time-scale of the game, and it just feels terrible. Not to mention breaks key mechanics of the game, such as the physics simulation.

Some other assumptions I’m seeing is about our server hardware and inefficient use of communication between them and the game’s database. I’ll go ahead and put these assumptions to rest. Our server hardware was actually purchased new right around the launch of the game, rest assured its not out-dated. And you can sleep at night knowing that our combat doesn’t connect out to the database for information. All of the information it needs is already loaded into memory. The game database is simply for storing persistent character and account information, which is for the most part only accessed when loading in/out of a map or periodic saves which are handled asynchronously. I suggest checking out the links below for more information on our servers.

As far as skills just not executing (noticed some people claiming utilities are more susceptible to this), its mostly just a race-condition as far as processing on the server. You’ll notice that your auto-attack skill seems to process more reliably than other skills. This is mostly due to the fact that we process things like auto-attack timers before player input. Obviously that sounds like a bug (and honestly now that I think about it, I want to look into doing something about it), but the reality is that under normal circumstances, the player input would process before the auto-attack timer triggers. Something you can try to verify this is disabling your auto-attack and see if your other skills become more responsive.

For you tech savvy folks, here’s some good links to help understand our server infrastruture and some other pretty neat things: Link – Another Link!

Well, that’s it for today. I’ll be sure to update you all on our progress and when you can start looking for major improvements. Like I mentioned above, we’re pretty optimistic that this could be as early as our next release. Have a good weekend!

-Bill

Part 3:

So what am I working on besides ensuring player skills are efficient? Well with our two week release cadence, I work along-side our shiny new Technical Design team and Living World teams to ensure their content is efficient. I’m also constantly exploring other ways to improve the game, which led me to something that I literally just finished wrapping up today. This change will go directly into testing early next week, which will then help us determine how significant it is and when we are comfortable enough to push it to the Live game. I’m really optimistic about this change in particular; seeing massive drops in server load .

In closing, I want to let you guys know what the release plans are for optimizing the game server. To put it simply, the plan is changing almost every day. We have the ability to ship changes whenever they’re ready. And because of our current release cadence, that means that we can literally get these changes out to you guys in a matter of 2 weeks. That being said, optimization is dangerous, especially to a live game. Ideally I will continue to sneak in changes every 6 weeks or so, and when there are changes that players will notice, by all means there will be a release note to call them out.

-Bill

Part 2:

Moving onto a few specific questions:
Q: My 1st question is : Can you be more specific of what “optimization” means and will it affect the skills as we know it by any negative way ?
A: These changes will go unnoticed functionality-wise. The only changes will be positive in that skill usage will be constantly more responsive.

Q: My Second question is : Wasn’t all these problems caused because you have to broadcast every single condition/buff to everyone which is currently pushing your systems and servers/internet to its limits ?
A: This is a good question. Buffs are a large part of Guild Wars 2 and at first glance you’d definitely think that telling everyone about them would be really expensive. In reality, this is only a hit with server->client traffic, which has been significantly improved with the handful of bandwidth optimizations that have already gone out. As far as server processing, its pretty minuscule (thankfully).

Q: My 3rd question is :If you ever have a solution to this are there any plans to lift the AoE Limit for both WvW/PvE/PvP because thats why this AoE limit exist in 1st place Isn’t skill delay in big battles (WvW or PvE like Taco) a direct result of those?
A: <<< The AoE hit limits exist for more than just performance reasons. We already have a lot of places in the game where AoE limits are extremely high (WvW siege) or uncapped (monster skills). The last thing we want to do is relieve one problem only to introduce it somewhere else.

Q: When you say “optimization”, do you mean making your engine more compatible for multi-core systems? Right now your game’s engine runs primarily on single-thread, which Intel CPU’s seem to thrive on; while at the same time your game’s engine is poorly designed for multi-thread CPU’s, which AMD is best at.
A: As I outlined above, this is mostly server changes that I’m involved with, but there are client optimizations in the works, but we don’t know when those will go out. Optimizing is extremely dangerous and requires a lot of testing. The server side changes are more controlled in the sense that we don’t have to worry about testing on different hardware configurations like with the client. Its unfortunate, but necessary to ensure that the changes don’t end up doing more harm than good.

The engine isn’t as single-threaded as you might think. It will only use as many threads as your machine can support. if you have a 4 core processor, you may only get 2 threads plus an additional 2 worker threads for processing things like animation. Though I we are definitely looking at other ways to improve other game systems to take better advantage of using multiple threads while they’re not in use.

Q: You said that when that patch note comes through, expect a very different WvW experience. should we expect to see these optimization on 15th October? or was that just writer’s freedom of speech?
A: I Apologize for any misunderstanding here. But the answer to this is no, there isn’t really anything of note coming next week. Though I did I have large hand in the skill and combat related changes coming in that release . We definitely do have a few things that’ll help, but most likely won’t be noticeable.

Q: Thank you but what about client side optimizations? We were promised some major engine/client side optimizations to improve our fps in WvW 6~ months ago, has this project been dropped because I haven’t seen anything regarding client performance since then
A: Again, like I mentioned above we are working on client changes, but they are on a much slower release cadence and have to go through a rigorous test cycle before ever being on deck for release. Patrick, the slayer of culling, is a large part of these changes that’re being cooked up.

To respond to the large response by Demosthene.2195:
The idea for having some sort of central location or “issue tracker” as you mentioned, I think there’s definitely something there. I think that central location would make sense to be on the Guild Wars 2 launcher itself, which from what I understand is going through a makeover. I think that’s definitely something for the Community team to investigate.

The rest of your post starting going off-topic. I will say that I want to make sure that people realize that we don’t always have the time to respond to every question, concern and issue that arises, even though we would love to. I constantly say how I try to be more involved and transparent with you guys, but obviously I don’t have the ability to spend time on the forums every day. We love our player-base and appreciate how passionate they are. Your feedback doesn’t go unnoticed, even if it seems like it does.

Also, thanks for the links, that’s really cool to see other developers be so open with their player-base about issues.

Part 1:

To clarify some common questions:

• What does optimization mean in terms of the original post?
  • I’m working primarily on server-side (as mentioned in the title) optimizations. Not to say that this doesn’t have some smaller impact on the client, which I mentioned in posts elsewhere that there will some client-side gains as the changes rollout. Client-side changes are being worked on completely seperate and will release seperately and, sadly, slower. I’m not going to get into the client-side portion of our optimization initiative, because I’m not directly involved with what we have going on there.
• What exactly do these server-side optimizations do?
  • As pointed out above, they will mostly be noticeable with latency in skill execution in heavy battles. I mentioned WvW being a benefactor because that has one of the most consistently dense battles going on. That’s not to say that this won’t be noticeable in other parts of the game; it most definitely will.
  • Though server CPU usage is the biggest factor here, there are other optimizations as part of the changes going on. Bandwidth is another thing that plagues players with slower internet connections. That is something that we’re actively rolling out changes for, with the next set of changes coming at the end of October.
  • Removes the bottleneck in almost all of the game systems. Most of what goes on in the game is processed on the server, including combat, skills and movement. When this bottleneck is relieved, the changes will pretty much speak for themselves. A common example goes back to skill usage where in heavy battles, you press and skill key, but that skill never fires or your auto-attack skill fires instead.

(reserved)

There’s a fix for this and kill announcements. If we do another hotfix build before our next release, it’ll be included.

When you say game crashed, its important to note if you got a Server disconnect error dialog (and post the error, you can CTRL+C on the dialog to copy it) or a client crash that pops up a crash report. Please copy the crash report contents and attach it to your post.

Thanks

I’m pretty sure I fixed this for the October Balance/Combat update. I’ll double check on Monday.

This will be fixed in our October balance/combat update, along with other skills like Roll For Initiative.

Regarding the post that Jon Sharp made on the topic, he was talking about an improvement to the combat log that’s already in early stages of testing. We’re not sure when it’ll be ready to ship because of the sheer number of moving parts in our combat, not to mention the thousands of skills and buffs in our game that will be flowing through it.

The improvements mentioned in the OP are part of this revamp, and then some.

Regarding >>>Leaving a Transform – no heals/until buttons for 1sec + lag.

I remember this popping up not too long ago, but can’t remember where we left off on it. I’ve been playing Necro a lot lately and it has been bothering me, too. I’ll talk to the guys on Monday and see what this is all about, and see about taking care of it.

I think it was mentioned at some point there was a cooldown added to prevent unwanted skill executions when leaving a transformation. But again, I’m not sure if this was intended for Death Shroud.

-Bill

What is the size of the Gw2.tmp file? If its > 0kb, that means that the patcher isn’t able to clobber the old Gw2.exe. In which case leads me to believe that either Windows UAC or an antivirus program is blocking it.

A few things you could try:

• Whitelist the Gw2 files in your antivirus like I mentioned above.
• Move your Gw2 folder into a folder such as: “C:\Games\Gw2”
• Ensure Gw2.exe and Gw2.tmp aren’t set as read-only

Also moved to Tech Support subforum so Tech Support can help you resolve the issue.

Could you post the crash details if you get one when it crashes? Just paste the entire crash report details from the prompt. It’ll probably be more than a post will allow, so you attach it as a text file

Thanks,
-Bill

Its probably failing to relaunch the new .exe after that initial patch. Make sure you’re running it as an administrator.

Also, what files do you have in your game folder? if there are Gw2.000→Gw2.999 files there, that indicates the patching process is failing. Usually indicative of the above issue or an anti-virus program that’s preventing the patching process from completing. You could try adding Gw2.exe and Gw2.tmp to allowed exceptions in your anti-virus software.

-Bill

Espionage.3685:

StinVec.3621:

AMD released the 13.8 beta drivers earlier this month. Though it doesn’t list any fixes related to Eyefinity (it was mainly to address micro-stutter in single monitor, dual GPU DX10/11 games with frame pacing), is it possible you installed those beta drivers and that something related to it is the cause for Eyefinity working properly for you now?

Hmm, not entirely sure if it was the drivers or the OS. I was on Windows 7 with the 13.8 Beta 2 drivers, and the HUD was properly set in the middle of the screen.

Went to 8.1 RTM with a slightly-more updated OpenGL 4.3 Beta Drivers (latest drivers with 8.1 support), and my HUD is stretched across all displays :/

Must be this. The game is probably failing to load the AMD library. I’m assuming you’re using official AMD drivers? If that’s the case, I think I know what the issue is.

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill

Are you running in Windowed mode? It only works in Fullscreen or Windowed-Fullscreen.

Eidola.9148:

The extra keybinding doesn’t really work for me as I have my middle mouse button set to the Interact binding. Which means that I really like it if “Search” became “AoE Search” when the AoE Looting checkbox was enabled!

I’m going to be talking with Design about this issue this week. I like the idea of changing the text to “AoE Search/Loot” when you use that option and having AoE Loot trigger when that prompt is up (but only when the search version of that dialog is up).

-Bill

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

I put together a fix for being rooted to the ground last week. This will probably make it into the game later this month. It also fixes things like blinking skills, persisting skills effects and animations, etc.

-Bill

I was investigating this late last week. I have a pretty good understanding of what the issue is and hope to have a fix this week sometime. Assuming that I can get a safe fix put together, we’ll probably try to sneak it into a hotfix later this week. Can’t make any promises at this time, though.

-Bill

Client optimizations are in the works along with server side improvements to reduce skill lag, I assure you that. There isn’t really a time-frame set for when these will start rolling out (hopefully in the next month). I hope to have more information on that soon.

The last thing we want to do is alienate the player base that doesn’t have hardcore gaming machines. As Colin mentioned, there are benefits to using the graphics settings for character models coupled with the removal of culling.

-Bill

BlackBeard.2873:

Bill (and team),

I really appreciate the very measured, data-driven approach you have taken here with trying to fix the issue. I understand it can get very-much into the nitty-gritty, and probably required development of some kind of profiler-type tool to understand most what areas of your code were hogging resources. Optimizing takes time, and it is great that you guys have been working at it like this. Keep up the great work, and I can’t wait to see the results!

Ah, so I was right! There is somebody with binoculars spying on me at the office.

Here’s a copy/pasta response i made the other day on the topic.

BillFreist.1527:

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear

First off, I do realize that I kind of ninja’ed in a response in a post that had nothing to do with addressing skill delay. The reasoning behind that was simply that I wanted to make it clear of why I wasn’t spending much time on the issue that I was addressing there. I’d like to say that I pride myself in keeping things as transparent as possible with you guys.

That being said, I know that seems contradicting since I haven’t really said anything on the matter since. I’m doing my best to lurk in the shadows here in the forums more often and chime in where appropriate. Frankly, I just don’t always have something to update you guys on .

But! I do have a small update for you today.

Over the past several months (boy time can really fly by), we formed a small team (myself, with the help of a couple others at times) around addressing the issue of skill delay in large groups of players. It’s actually a part of our Skills and Combat team that are responsible for balancing and, in the near future, introducing new skills, traits and other combat improvements. When tackling such a large project, you don’t just dive in and start shooting from the hip. It takes a lot of research, data and planning to really start addressing the issue at hand. The past few months have mostly consisted of these things (referring to data gathering).

As of recently, really as of just a couple days ago, we’ve gotten to a point where we have the data we need to take the bull by the horns and get down to business. Meaning that I hope that the results start speaking for themselves in the coming months. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean we haven’t already made several improvements, just sadly that they weren’t really noticeable from a players standpoint (but have made a significant difference).

It’s not just skill lag that we hope to start resolving in a more noticeable way, and even eliminating one day, but getting PvE culling disabled game-wide. These two projects are beasts that really go hand-in-hand, which is why we’re working on them simultaneously.

Now this brings me to another seemingly tight-lipped change; PvE culling. You may have noticed that we temporarily disabled it in Frostgorge Sound for a short duration. That was us, lurking in the shadows, gathering extremely vital data. We’re making great strides in getting that removed, and hoping that happens really soon.

That’s all I have for today, but hope to have some great news in the near future. Ideally moving forward I won’t need to update you all, as the results should start speaking for themselves.

<3 Bill

So assuming you didn’t skip all of that…We are chipping away at it and hope that you, the players, start noticing an improvement soon. But to answer the initial question, no, there aren’t any significant changes coming in the August 6th release. There’s mostly client-side goodies in that build.

-Bill

Hi

So a few things about the latest DS changes:

1. Death Shroud incoming damage
   • You now take the correct amount of incoming damage. Before this change (and it wasn’t always like this, either) you would takes the same damage twice.
   • Your Life Force pool is still the same as it has always been. 60% of your maximum health while alive, plus an additional 0-30% of that base value for Traits, meaning you can have a maximum of 78% of your max health.
2. The change to having damage spill over to your health pool was indeed to resolve falling damage, but was also how Death Shroud was, from a Design standpoint, intended to function. Obviously making these changes simultaneously was to help decrease any sense of buff/nerf to the mechanic itself.
3. Thirdly, we are testing a new way to reflect your Life Force energy pool in the UI using real-life numbers! .

-Bill

Some pretty interesting ideas here. I was actually spit-balling some ideas on how to address this today. This has always been something that has bothered me, too.

For example:

• Have kits respect the existing back item flag. If you have a back item and you want to show it, hide the kit. If you don’t have a back item or choose to hide it, always show the kit. Obviously this makes it a little harder than usual to tell what kit you are using, so:
  • A nameplate icon similar to Elemental Attunements would be a good addition (I may add this regardless if we can get the art )
  • Move the kit somewhere else on your body. I know, crazy right? For example, who doesn’t like a sweet fanny-pack?

Hopefully this finally gets resolved soon, and I’ll do what I can to see that happen. Keep in mind, as Colin mentioned before, that there are some pretty beefy projects going on that are consuming our engineering time. But that doesn’t exactly mean we can’t sneak stuff in here and there .

-Bill

Speak of the devil, and he shall appear

First off, I do realize that I kind of ninja’ed in a response in a post that had nothing to do with addressing skill delay. The reasoning behind that was simply that I wanted to make it clear of why I wasn’t spending much time on the issue that I was addressing there. I’d like to say that I pride myself in keeping things as transparent as possible with you guys.

That being said, I know that seems contradicting since I haven’t really said anything on the matter since. I’m doing my best to lurk in the shadows here in the forums more often and chime in where appropriate. Frankly, I just don’t always have something to update you guys on .

But! I do have a small update for you today.

Over the past several months (boy time can really fly by), we formed a small team (myself, with the help of a couple others at times) around addressing the issue of skill delay in large groups of players. It’s actually a part of our Skills and Combat team that are responsible for balancing and, in the near future, introducing new skills, traits and other combat improvements. When tackling such a large project, you don’t just dive in and start shooting from the hip. It takes a lot of research, data and planning to really start addressing the issue at hand. The past few months have mostly consisted of these things (referring to data gathering).

As of recently, really as of just a couple days ago, we’ve gotten to a point where we have the data we need to take the bull by the horns and get down to business. Meaning that I hope that the results start speaking for themselves in the coming months. Don’t get me wrong, that doesn’t mean we haven’t already made several improvements, just sadly that they weren’t really noticeable from a players standpoint (but have made a significant difference).

It’s not just skill lag that we hope to start resolving in a more noticeable way, and even eliminating one day, but getting PvE culling disabled game-wide. These two projects are beasts that really go hand-in-hand, which is why we’re working on them simultaneously.

Now this brings me to another seemingly tight-lipped change; PvE culling. You may have noticed that we temporarily disabled it in Frostgorge Sound for a short duration. That was us, lurking in the shadows, gathering extremely vital data. We’re making great strides in getting that removed, and hoping that happens really soon.

That’s all I have for today, but hope to have some great news in the near future. Ideally moving forward I won’t need to update you all, as the results should start speaking for themselves.

<3 Bill

Just keep in mind there is a seperate keybinding for AoE Loot that will always work, regardless of Interact prompts.

From the release notes:

but will only trigger the AoE Loot functionality while none of the forms of the interact dialog are visible.

In short, the interact dialog (literally any form of it “Greet”, “Talk”, etc) cannot be on screen. We have it this way because of internal feedback. The functionality stems from an issue people were having while, for example, harvesting. It was really awkward to harvest something and have your inventory fill up by other junk.

I do realize that it isn’t really communicated well in-game, mostly because of it being a last minute change (we also increased the range!). That being said, I’ll probably revisit this feature in the near future and see about giving it that extra spit shine polish .

-Bill

Iceflame.5024:

One shudders to imagine what inhuman code lies behind our class.

:D

This made my day.

Guess what? This is fixed. I’m not sure what release it’ll make it into since I just fixed it today. Its a pretty risky change, but I’ll do what I can to get it out asap.

A couple notes about the bug:

• It can affect ANY Necromancer (doesn’t matter when they were created)
• It can happen in ANY game type, PvE and WvW were just waaaaay more common because of certain circumstances
• This particular bug ONLY affects Necromancers. I noticed there was some speculation that it could affect a couple other professions

Thanks for all of the info and sorry that I didn’t look into this sooner. Also thanks for keeping on top of this issue in the forums, it keeps us in check

-Bill

This is something that I miss dearly from GW1. Definitely something I’d love to explore and possibly add in a future update.

You’re not alone

-Bill

From a few weeks back:

Fixes included in the build tomorrow (and I’m not sure if there are release notes):

• UI placement is now semi customizable for surround/eyefinity users.
  • Start the client up using “-uispanallmonitors” to have the UI spread across all monitors. We may make this a graphics option in the future (I made it an argument passed to the game so we could get this out asap)
• UI scaling is now fixed for surround/eyefinity users

-Bill

To fix the UI so that it doesn’t show on the wrong screen, you must set your center monitor as your “Primary Display”. There was supported added for AMD Gpus, which enabled multi-monitor support that has been there all along to kick in, which condenses the game UI onto the center screen so you don’t need to turn your head constantly.