Guild Wars 2

Because mine aren’t working.

Also, local.dat now resides in “\Documents and Settings\User\Application Data\Guild Wars 2” for some reason, which resets all your custom settings on update.

Wait, what? Farming punishment?

I’ve been away for a while, what the heck did they do!?

And, um, yeah, the drop rates of anything are pathetically abysmal for a game that claims to avoid grind. Bleh.

Granted. Elementalists can now detect stealthed enemies in the general area of 1,200 units. It won’t tell you where they are though.

I wish GW2 was better-optimized.

Charr are incredibly poorly-designed. That’s it.

They’re not fun to look at – neither pretty nor threatening – they have stiff animation, they don’t feel any different, they have zero charm, and most armor looks awful on them.

WoW has a much more even distribution among its minority races. Gnomes, Trolls, Tauren, Worgen, and everything else share the even percentage of players (that’s only marginally less than people playing as generic elves/humans). And why’s that? Simply because they’re not simply re-skinned humans, they’re well thought-out and well-made.

I thought I’d main a Charr back when GW2 was nearing release, too. Shame.

Good!

I’d much rather see these sorts of technical balance updates than any temporary content or cosmetic fluff.

THEY’RE UGLY AS SIN IS WHY

Actually I’m playing a Charr right now, the problem of horrible ugliness seems to be somewhat solved by picking a female Charr and fiddling with the sliders a bit. Put enough effort into it, and you can come up with a cute little death machine.

Key words being “enough effort.” You really have to game the system if you want to look decent. Not a problem for humans, they’re actually some of the best-looking humans I’ve seen in any game.

I cannot scold Arena’s character designers enough. How hard can it be to hire a furry to design your cat people? It’s not like they’re hard to find. Sheesh.

10$ on fine trasmutation stones, since that’s mandatory if you don’t want to look like a spaz.

If the prices were more reasonable or the shop wasn’t offering exclusively on one-use, one-character, one-slot items, I’d be more willing to support it. As it stands, everything is literally a waste of your money.

Bank slot upgrades are probably the only thing done right. Fair is fair.

One of the worst offenders for me, since performance is so erratic anyway, is actually the frame limiter. Anyone know what I’m talking about?..

Okay, here, try to spot what’s wrong with this picture:

1. Random Map A.

Frame limiter disabled = 65 FPS
Frame limiter at 60 = 40 FPS
Frame limiter at 30 = 20 FPS

2. Random Map B.

Frame limiter disabled = 40 FPS
Frame limiter at 60 = 59 FPS
Frame limiter at 30 = 12 FPS

Spot the problem there?..

Funk was right, 250 is a common number just under 255/256 that needs the least bits to store in computer memory. 1 item or 250 items in one stack require the same amount of memory bitwise. Upping the stack size would require upping the amount of memory needed for ALL items in your bank/inventory, which is no small number.

Back at launch, it was very generous and more than enough.

Now it’s not.

Tiger.7506:

All game forums are full of negativity, because the people having fun ( 90% ) are playing.

A common fallacy. Simply put, you can’t know that.

Because ANet thinks if they charge more money, people will pay more money.

Logic!

What ANet have done there, is they not understood.

The reason WoW has vertical progression, and how it has vertical progression, is all due to Blizzard’s ideal of constantly trying to make the player feel better about themselves. Oh, sure, their other ideal is hooking the players so they pay continue to pay their monthly subscription, but it’s not the only one. Blizzard is very, incredibly, tediously meticulous about every single tiny thing in their games being rewarding somehow, somewhere, even for no good reason if they have to do it.

It’s not about there just being something you can grind towards.

It’s about being motivated to do so.

Most MMOs motivate the players by offering better stats on new gear. Scummy and unfair, but it works. Guild Wars motivated players with shiny new looks. That worked too. Ascended weapons accomplish neither. They don’t work.

Yes, same. Internal errors on forums, often more than 1-2 seconds of lag in-game.

I’ve seen some pretty bad lag just running around Wayfarer Foothills today. The forum is barely working right now, too. What’s going on?

Sunlyte.3768:

That may be your problem, but it’s not the only possible problem. What I explained is a phenomenon that many people attribute to an underpowered CPU or GPU when in reality it’s not enough RAM.

Mistaking lag spikes caused by swapping for low framerate is completely impossible even for a novice user. You’re being ridiculous.

Sunlyte.3768:

See, now you’re making concessions about screen resolution. I play at 2560×1440 on a single display; multi-display systems can have even higher resolutions.

You lost the trail of discussion. I was making a point about how changing resolution does not affect GW2’s performance, you were trying to make a point about how you supposedly need gigabytes of RAM just to hold the rendered frames.

For most people, it doesn’t matter what resolution they’re running or how much RAM they have with GW2. Neither changes performance in any noticeable way.

And your calculations are still bogus, as was explained earlier already. Quit it.

Sunlyte.3768:

Just a few posts ago you believed that VRAM was included as part of the total system memory available to the program…

IT IS. HOW COULD IT NOT BE?

Sunlyte.3768:

It’s not one or the other, it’s both. You obviously don’t know what GW2 “needs” because you’re complaining that the performance sucks, yet you insist on believing that it’s not because of your hardware.

And you have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. Frankly you have amazingly strange ideas. Everything that’s wrong with that was proven shown earlier with proper data from recognized hardware enthusiast websites.

Your way of arguing about it isn’t respectable either.

Sunlyte.3768:

You’re obviously not playing this game at a high resolution with maxed-out effects.

Haha!

I am.

GW2’s tech is horribly outdated. It’s not bad-looking, no, but the technology on display is extremely basic by 2006 standards.

The fun part is that it DOESN’T MATTER what graphical settings you use when you have a good enough GPU. It’s the CPU that makes the most difference thanks to all the horrible random bottlenecks.

RAM and GPU only come into picture if you want to turn up the graphics to see just how poorly you can implement deferred shading on the old GW1 engine (which is what GW2 is based on). Thanks to the poor post-processing implementation, you’re often better-off leaving it on “low”, too. The world is less of a tinted blur that way.

And the killer irony is? The reason GW2 was made with outdated graphics tech from the get-go, and the reason people were willing to tolerate it, is because the developers promised it would run well even on extremely outdated hardware by the time of release. Ha ha. Hah! Hah… Ha…

Geemo.6018:

A 64bit client will utilize a 64bit cpu which in turn will have twice the computing power.

God Of Fissures.8627:

agreed 100%

What the fluffy kittens, guys.

NO.

Sunlyte.3768:

At least one person in this thread is only using 2 GB, possibly 4 GB.

That would be me. I use 2Gb RAM and I do not experience any swapping issues. The game doesn’t need any more. It’s very obvious when the engine reads from disc, and it’s never the source of bad performance.

Sunlyte.3768:

Framerate is not the only factor that affects the “playability” of a game.

It’s what the problem is though. Low framerate. Not swapping.

Sunlyte.3768:

32 MB per frame minimum, plus loading textures and geometry data for the scene, plus keeping partially rendered frames in memory to help improve rendering efficiency.

32Mb maximum at high resolution and high shadows and super-sampling AA for the output frame (total overkill for most systems), plus 2 to 3 pre-rendered “frames” without any of these if the GPU power allows. So, to be incredibly generous, that’s 64Mb.

I don’t know where you get these ideas from. The bulk of GPU memory has always been used for storing textures/shaders. Rendered frames can’t possibly require 2Gb worth of space. Does your desktop wallpaper require 2Gb worth of space to render? Of course not.

High resolutions don’t require more memory, they require more bandwidth. It’s the textures and assets that need a lot of RAM/VRAM space. GW2 doesn’t use that much.

Sunlyte.3768:

On paper, my system isn’t that much different that what a lot of guys here are listing, and yet the game runs really smoothly for me.

Why?

Because you’re lucky.

There are tons of people with completely overkill rigs that still barely average 40 FPS on a good day. People with 32Gb of RAM. People with twin overclocked GPUs. People with cutting-edge i7s.

You’re just lucky. Your rig isn’t some divine gift. If anything, investing in large amounts of VRAM and high-end CPU are both wide-spread rookie mistakes.

Your ideas about memory bandwidth fall flat when turning down textures, shaders, shadows, resolution and, in fact, ALL settings to lowest OR highest doesn’t impact performance AT ALL in most circumstances. That’s been my experience, and experience of most people with decent rigs.

GW2 isn’t a looker, either. It uses next to no resources at all, and it definitely shouldn’t considering it’s tech and fidelity would be laughed off back in 2006.

The engine is throttled. It’s BAD. It should be sent back to the drawing board.

Awful.

No gear treadmills was one the central promises of Guild Wars 2. It’s not gone. It’s been a lie.

Sure they try to mitigate it by saying “Oh, it’s not a lot”, “Oh it’s just one set”, “Oh it doesn’t really matter” – well if it doesn’t matter, IT SHOULDN’T BE THERE!

When you’re making the mechanics you’re just introduced obsolete in the next patch, something isn’t going right.

Namely, you’re not thinking your updates all the way through.

Tyria is a wasteland.

Not the greatest piece of game design there. Arguably world bosses and champion loot do something to alleviate it, but all that accomplishes is herding people into a specific spot on the map for two minutes.

Easily improved with minor adjustments to, let’s say, Daily requirements. To fix it, though, you’d need to rethink your entire game. You know, something you claimed to be doing right from the start, but didn’t.

Performance seems to have only gotten worse since release.

But they finally added a way to throttle the amount of player models on screen, so that helps in large hordes of people.

GW2 has notoriously bad performance, so you’re looking for trouble either way. A new and fast CPU is the best bet to avoiding it, but that is no guarantee. Expect frames in the low 20s otherwise.

If your GPU is lacking (again, poor optimization, so it’s more demanding than you’d think), you can easily pull down some settings to compensate.

RAM is a non-issue as it’ll work fine with as low as 2Gb RAM (field-tested between my two home PCs, really not an issue).

Neat. Always nice to see what people with some taste can create. In-game it’s mostly just one big blur, unfortunately. Not helping is the fact that all customization items cost a ton.

I’m not sure what’s in my set. I think it’s Vigil chest and boots, plus some random common armor, and black/gold dyes from back when you could actually buy them with your pocket change.

I swear almost every single armor type in this game comes with a mandatory skirt.

Sunlyte.3768:

Right, but Windows uses segment caching and not file caching, meaning that it stores frequently accessed file segments in memory.

Interesting.

Sunlyte.3768:

Maybe the people with 8 GB of RAM or more can chime in and tell us their experiences. I have a feeling that people running a decent CPU and GPU will not have many issues with this game if they have at least 8 GB of ram. Anyone sporting 4 GB or less is probably angry at ANet right now.

That’s the whole point. Everyone has at least 8Gb RAM these days, even older rigs. The issues of performance have nothing to do with it – and why would they? RAM size helps to alleviate caching/swapping issues, but has no effect on frame-to-frame performance.

Sunlyte.3768:

Seriously obsolete information, boss. Let’s do some simple math…

Your math came down to needing about 32Mb of VRAM in absolute most demanding scenario. That’s about right. You don’t need more than that.

The bulk of VRAM will be taken up by textures and shaders, not rendered frames.

RAM is usually used to buffer non-texture information (sounds, meshes, scripts, etc.), so it matters even less.

The need for more memory comes when the game is using more assets within a given location. If those assets don’t amount to much more than 1-2Gb, the extra memory space won’t be used to try and speed up render, it’ll simply be left unused.

Sunlyte.3768:

The game runs well and like all games has some issues, but none that are a deal breaker. Get a system that’s up to the task and it will run fine most of the time.

I don’t think you understand how dire the situation is, because you happen to have a rig that somehow works well with GW2.

Every day since beta people with absolutely killer rigs were reporting abysmal frame-rates, and every day since people with much, much, much lower specs than theirs assured them that GW2 runs “just fine” on theirs.

This is the problem with poor optimization: your stuff runs well on one rig, but not another that’s only different in one tiny obscure aspect.

If you’re getting the rough end of the stick, you know GW2’s performance is truly ATROCIOUS. Not just bad, not just annoying, but unforgivably horrible for what it is.

Rama.6439:

I think the games performance compared to 6 months ago is horrible.

Huh. And here I thought I was imagining it getting worse over time. Hard to tell.

I use the “lowest” character culling settings and, by far, this has done the most to alleviate performance issues. Just like everyone knew it would.

Blix.8021:

What activity in particular is not farming? Because according to you dungeons, world events, and killing champions are all farming.

You keep missing my point. I don’t know how to make it any clearer, honestly. I think I’ll just drop it if you don’t mind.

Blix.8021:

What is not considered farming to you in pve? Just curious.

Not following some pre-set goal that results in your earning specific loot or the most amount of gold, is not considered farming, I think.

Blix.8021:

It is incredibly easy to get 10g a day.

If you’re willing to spend your day farming, sure.

Personally, I do not appreciate doing a second job in my spare time.

Vespirisa.1497:

It could be that I play a LOT compared you. I’m on pretty much on all Friday-sunday. I can earn up to 20g but I usually rake in 10-15. 30 X 12.5=375. But I didn’t play everyday.

Could be.

I used to play often at launch. Back when precursors costs no more than 80G. I ended up with 40 G from all my adventures towards 100% world exploration.

Maybe I’m just not accustomed to taking grind for granted, and going for farming instead of going where I want. I’d rather not get accustomed either.

I’m gonna go with “No” to that one as well.

Unless, of course, what you want to do just happens to coincide with the best-paying farming activities performed for hours every single day. Even then 200G is way too much without a really good prior set-up.

Blix.8021:

by that logic everything in the game is farming. play wvw – wxp farming, play spvp – glory farming

I was talking about how you described specifically hunting down the content worth the “most” in the most efficient way possible every single day and… That’s farming. It just is.

Vespirisa.1497:

I don’t play it like I’m farming, I like to explore and champion hunt with a few friends on these maps while gathering everything I need.

I’m gonna go with “Hell no” on this one because that’s actually how I tried to play the game, and I barely had 50G to show for it after six months. Specifically hunting down world bosses, high-tier mats and running dungeons is a calculated and time-consuming motion. What you’re describing is farming specifically for the sake of maximizing your gains.

Vespirisa.1497:

I havn’t grinded for hours ONCE in this game yet I still have full ascended trinkets and a legendary.

…But what you just described is hours upon hours of every day dedicated solely to very meticulous and calculated farming.

Although substitute models do a great deal to alleviate the zerg problems, I can’t help but feel performance actually got WORSE since first release. It’s hard to tell because it’s so random and unstable to begin with.

They lied.

Ha ha! You spent 50 euros!

No, seriously, they just lied.

I’ve assigned the “Draw/Stow weapon” to a dedicated key, works well as a kind of a lousy temporary fix…

But, actually, there’s a certain degree of understanding for this kind of locomotion you acquire after a while. I mean, they’re cats. Why NOT use all fours?

Guild Wars 2 needs RAM like WoW or Everquest need RAM. That is to say, it doesn’t. Not on modern machines.

There’s never enough variety in assets on-screen – unless you’re looking at a hundred-player zerg in WvW – to justify occupying more than it actually does – which is 2Gb of SHARED memory at most (“High” textures), as mentioned earlier.

Windows can’t do anything to prefetch it either – GW2 uses a singular 15Gb file, which never, ever belongs in your RAM. There’s going to be swapping one way or another, and often.

The persisting performance issues have never been linked to RAM, so using more RAM won’t do anything to alleviate them.

Similarly, having more than 1Gb VRAM on your GPU will not accomplish anything unless you’re running a multi-monitor setup with “High” textures and shadows, and Supersampling instead of FXAA. There’s just not enough stuff that would need it, outside of aforementioned dense groups of players.

All persistent problems with performance are ultimately tied to the CPU clock speed and instruction sets (and incredibly outdated shadow implementation on the side of GPU).

Basically, this means the game is plain old poorly optimized.

A disheartening and absolutely spot-on essay on the subject, good sir (or madam).

It’s a fluffy-kitten shame just how incompetent ArenNet is about so many issues, considering they clearly wanted to do better and put a lot of effort into doing better (even if they’re now busy betraying those ideals as well).

For me, a graphics enthusiast, the biggest reminder of all the wrong decisions in this game is this little artsy brushstroke-like line at every edge of the screen.

Yeah. Most people don’t even know it has a name: it’s called “Vignette”, and it’s used as a framing device to draw people’s attention towards the center or side of the frame… and it gives an illusion that the world you’re looking at is smaller than it really is. What a wonderful way to ruin so many hours’ worth of environment design.

Oh, and it induces fatigue if used for long stretches of time. Good job there too.

TexRob.5183:

I thought this thread was a joke, or that you were going to get railed, but I’m surprised to see people with similar issues.

I have a Radeon 6970 running at 1920×1080, a core i5 2500, 6gb of RAM, and the game installed on an SSD, and it runs amazing.

That’s the kind of fluffy kittens this is all about. I have a rig with a GPU slightly meatier than yours (650Ti) and the game runs like a pack of skritt. Then there are tons of people with overclocked i7’s and they report even worse things.

Agaetis.4518:

1.1% increase in effective power

So… with a full set of ascended armor and trinkets, that’ll be about 10-15% increase in power.

Brilliant.

Sunlyte.3768:

The GW2 client is subject to a “2GB limit” as 32-bit applications cannot address more than 4 GB…

Well, yes. But the game STILL doesn’t use more than 2Gb of shared memory. Pretty much no game does.

Sunlyte.3768:

These operations write to and read from memory, and in doing so can bump a game file out to swap even if the operation itself didn’t need a lot of memory. If the game needs it, this will manifest itself as lag but it’s not “dropped frames” or lag that occurs due to an underpowered GPU.

Excessive swapping is simply not the problem for GW2. It’s extremely obvious to any user when it happens – it will occasionally on any system – but it doesn’t manifest in lower FPS, but large lag spikes.

Sunlyte.3768:

Streaming just means that you see stuff on your screen before the entire scene is loaded.

Actually I was referring to streaming assets in an out of memory, which is what modern developers use to avoid swapping mentioned above. That ties into the point about anything more than 4Gb being pointless, because (competent) streaming of assets from HDD to RAM mitigates it anyway.

Sunlyte.3768:

No, it’s used for quite a bit more than that. The operation of the program relies on ram, and the underlying OS has many processes running in the background that require a share of the RAM and can cause sluggish performance if you don’t have enough. VRAM is used by the GPU for the textures and related data to rending the scene, and it is not connected to or shared with system memory.

Well, yeah. Just working on the assumptions that lots of background processes slowing down the game isn’t really the issue for most people suffering from poor performance, even though it would technically be a factor. I think any competent gamer knows how to run a “clean” system.

Obviously if you have a ton of kittens on your PC it will impact the game. But you’d have to have a LOT and a LOT and a LOT of stuff running against GW2 for it to become an issue even on a 4Gb system.

Sunlyte.3768:

More outdated info. The bare minimum anyone should be considering is 8 GB, but I maintain my recommendation for 16 GB if you want butter-smooth performance. You’re apparently claiming that 4GB is enough and yet you also seem to believe that GW2 doesn’t run as well as it should on your system.

That’s because you’re confusing how games behave when they run out of memory: it doesn’t cause sluggish performance or low FPS, it causes huge and obvious lag spikes (not to mention HDD noise) anytime the game needs to load a big chunk of data from the disc to continue.

In fact, I work on graphics design and I run cutting-edge AAA games on my rig without a single hint of swapping, ever. My RAM size?

2Gb.

Sunlyte.3768:

And hey, I did say that GW2 runs smooth for me …

The hallmark of any poorly-optimized game is erratic performance. GW2’s biggest problems stem from CPU usage issues, which affect low-tier and extremely high-end CPUs alike.

The bottle-necks seems to be about how and, more importantly, why mundane calculations are delegated to CPU. The most common drain of performance is simply the amount of actors – NPCs, moving objects, players, weapons – in your general vicinity, even if the game displays nothing more than nameplates.

The memory usage doesn’t even begin to enter the picture of performance issues, even if it’s poorly-handled. It’s simply that everyone – I do mean everyone – has more than enough.

Sunlyte.3768:

There is no reason to limit yourself to 8GB believing it’s enough when in reality, 16 GB or 32 GB would make your system a lot more responsive in general, and ensure that the game can keep all of its assets in memory.

Nothing of the sort. Even the most demanding games/software currently on the market do not go beyond 2Gb of SHARED – RAM, VRAM and Swap altogether – memory. Not for any particular reason, but simply because that’s where it’s at right now.

Uploading 15Gb worth of compressed data to memory is not only absurd, it would do nothing to increase your performance because a competent engine: a)Won’t try to cache this much stuff in the first place because it’s never needed; b)Will know how to smoothly withdraw and retire assets between RAM/VRAM/HDD whenever possible. It’s called “streaming”. We’ve had it since forever now.

Keep in mind that RAM is used for lower-tier assets and cache. Anything to do with graphics – the actual chunk of the work – will reside somewhere in VRAM. Textures, frames, shaders, everything. Everything done there is lightning-fast by necessity of being displayed 60 or 30 times per second.

tl;dr – You don’t need more than 4Gb RAM in any case. GW2 doesn’t know what it’s doing.

I like the designs, actually. Subtle and sophisticated, a lot better than most other gear out there in my humble view.

Granted I’ll never see them.

Because what the fluffy kitten tails.

Markadis.9012:

Name ONE MMO that doesn’t have grinding?

Guild Wars 2, according to its developers from a couple of years ago.

Apparently game developers and politicians have a license to lie these days. Why not.

Markadis.9012:

It takes me 2 hours to get an exotic.

May your forked tongue be chewed on by a horde of angry kittens.

It’s the Ascended that’s the problem.

Exotics were barely manageable. Ascended is just an insult.

Actually it’s rather simple.

If we “Don’t need” ascended gear because its stats are only marginally better, then… IT SHOULDN’T BE MARGINALLY BETTER… IT SHOULD BE THE SAME!

Sorry for shouting, but how more obvious could it be? Just because you try to jam your vertical progression into 50 points instead of 500 doesn’t make it go away, it just makes the upgrade be incredibly less satisfying.

The whole excuse of introducing something to work on – oh hey, WORK, that’s just what I want when I sit down to PLAY something – along the path to Legendaries is absurd. To get the obvious out of the way, why do Legendaries require so much grind to get to? Just so that very very very very few players have them? Why!? But, going with that, if you introduce something along that path – rares, exotic, ascended, colorful skins, whatever – then you’re not helping along. You’re just delaying the process even further.

So basically it’s just plain grind. Like in every other MMO. Even though the main reason people bought the game is NOT to have to do all this. Lies, lies, lies, kitten ed lies!

This is the problem with building your game around loot rather than good atmosphere and fun gameplay.

Shiny trinkets cannot replace enjoyment.

Super Adventure Box just makes it that much more obvious how WRONG this game is made.

What kind of excuse can you conjure when your game runs at 0,05 FPS looking at a couple of scraps from Minecraft’s Creeper?

It’s awful, awful, awful.

This is the kind of performance most developers expect in their Alpha builds – when they haven’t bothered to do anything about it yet – not the gold product.

And – hey wait! – wasn’t the sole reason for having deliberately outdated graphics so that most people, even with older rigs, could play your game? You know, for sake of having a larger audience? Did you just completely do away with that fun idea?

It seems that it now costs more to get to, let’s say, 100% magic find with the new system than it would by buying a full gear worth of MF bonuses.

That’s fantastic. That’s what we always wanted in a game where you NEED Magic Find gear to earn a meager amount of money to do anything.

Good job.

Why not add a terribly grindy expensive new set of weap… oh, looks like you’re ahead of the game there already, ANet!

Liars, liars, liars, liars.

Glad I read the forums before bothering with this.

“Here’s your new content! You only need to do 12,000 sit-ups to get it!”

I had about 120% magic find on my main.

I also had the foresight to buy up a couple hundred fine/masterwork items on the trading post before this release, and I just salvaged them all looking to get my stats back up to reasonable amount.

I now have 40% magic find.

GOOD. KITTEN-GOBBLING. JOB.