Guild Wars 2

This post probably explains it best:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Can-you-fix-it-culling/first#post758110

tl;dr – To limit use of bandwidth, character models are “culled” when there are an excess number of them within viewing distance. The server is currently unable to efficiently report player positions to the client. In WvW this means that you’re often fighting invisible enemies. You can experience this in PvE areas as well, during large events or simply while running around Lion’s Arch.

It seems that you’re more likely to be suppressed if you’re saying the same thing repeatedly. Not sure if that’s true or not. In any case, normal conversations are not supposed to be suppressed in such a way.

I’ve never once had my chat suppressed except when commanding in WvW, where spamming is sometimes necessary.

Pretty much everything in GW2 gives you XP. If you’re traveling a linear path through the world without branching off into other areas or types of content, you’re not going to be able to keep up with your personal story.

You can go from level 1 to level 80 in just a few hours with crafting, by the way.

They’re on the trading post – you shouldn’t have any trouble finding them. Make sure you don’t have any filters blocking the search.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/24725

The Dragonbrand Opossums, obviously.

My suggestion is that people do a lot of research on the guild they are joining, and make sure the leaders are okay with having members who may not be able to use VOIP. At the end of the day, it’s your own responsible to find a group that suits your play style or special needs.

There are a lot of guilds out there that don’t require it, and dungeons and other difficult content CAN be completed with text chat alone. I’ve ran 30-50 man raids in other games without any voice communication whatsoever. A lot of people have simply forgotten how to do that nowadays.

Unfortunately Dragonbrand and Henge of Denravi both were unable to field enough players in WvW last night to fill even a single borderland. Props to Ehmry Bay for having a devoted crew who ignored the new content in lieu of the rollover.

The battle was lost, but the war has only just begun.

If heals and buffs can be prioritized for party members, and set to ignore pets and npcs.. great. Otherwise? Ugh.

Yes, please do this A-net. My index finger is about to fall off from spamming F.

At the very least, please allow us to bind looting to a different key than every other “use” functionality. I’m so tired of picking up banners, talking to npcs, resurrecting pets, etc.. while I’m trying to loot one stinking bag.

Can’t say that I disagree with most of your opinions. I despise these guilds and entire alliances that forsake their servers and ruin WvW balance just for an opportunity to be “the best”.. but isn’t it a little late to be posting this? Bandwagoning has been happening for months, and the constant server transferring has actually died down in recent weeks.. Most tiers are having decent matches now. Plus the separation between high tier servers and low tier servers is -already- insurmountable.

WvW is all about server pride. If you’re thinking about transferring to a “better world”, don’t. Have some respect for your home server and help to build the community.

Even if you managed to get him below 50% health, a good thief can easily escape. They’re always a pain to deal with.. which is why you shouldn’t waste your time unless they are actually contesting a capture point.

2 people is rarely enough to take-down a thief geared toward survivability. If you get more than 2 people, stand on top of eachother and spam attacks. He has to hit you to maintain invisibility.

Player culling is still a problem in WvW, and is part of the reason why you had so much trouble with this particular character being invisible all the time. But based on the information given, even if player culling was fixed you still couldn’t have beat him in open combat.

Chat suppression often interferes with my ability to command efficiently, so I’m hoping some changes are made here.

Most of the time it occurs when I need to say “Portal on me” in say/team chat repeatedly so that people will see it. And then I’m suddenly restricted from saying ANYTHING for 30 seconds. Drives me nuts.

That said, some people should have their mouths sewn shut. So there needs to be a compromise somewhere.

At the moment this is a “working as intended” mechanic that most people despise, because it cheapens the WvW experience a great deal.

The best way to deal with a stack is to stay out of their range and build siege weapons to quickly dispatch them. You won’t have much luck spotting the mesmer if they’re invisible or under the effect of player culling, but you should always try anyway. Lack of mobility is the weakness of turtling in most cases, unless you have a highly organized group following a commander icon.

Warriors or other classes with stability and temporarily invulnerability can get inside of their group and wreak a little bit of havok. Other classes can cast AoE spells and then get out of the line of fire. Abilities which reflect projectiles are highly recommended. As long as you’re anticipating the stack you should be able to avoid their attacks.. but with player culling issues you often won’t see them before it’s too late.

A good stack will have permanent stability, permanent sanctuary (for knockback), walls of reflection, etc.. which is nearly impossible to deal with unless you create your own turtle or have well placed siege weapons at the ready.

I’d like to point out that culling issues weren’t such a problem in the beta… either that, or nobody seemed to notice. Some patch that was introduced in the live version caused this to get much worse, and A-net can’t or won’t roll it back for whatever reason.

There likely is no “fix” for a problem that effects large-scale PvP combat in basically every MMO. But there’s always a compromise to be had.. and displaying character names as a placeholder until the model can be loaded would be largely beneficial.

Pretty sure this has been discussed to death already.. we all know that it’s a problem. I’d like to give an example of an experience that I’ve had on more than one occasion while trying to capture an enemy Garrison.

Our zerg has broken through the water gate.. we have 30-40 people in the capture circle, the keep lord is dead, and all visible enemies have been pushed out of the circle. But wait? The capture bar isn’t moving?

The organized part of this group recognizes what’s going on and begins stacking and throwing AoE around, to no avail. PuG players will never stack properly, so the thief is able to maintain stealth without issue. This goes on for 3 or 4 minutes.. while enemy reinforcements are growing in number and we’ve become completely surrounded. At this point everyone has to focus their attention away from the thief, and our fate is sealed. The garrison is only 1 minute walk from the citadel, so a player holding this capture circle for even a short amount of time has a huge effect on the outcome of the battle.

Inevitably we’re pushed from the garrison, knowing that it was a single enemy which caused our downfall.. and the loss of many siege golems.

Obviously the thiefs who manage to survive while holding a capture point against a zerg this size are pretty skilled, and they CAN be countered, but that doesn’t change the fact that this is a huge problem. The “learn2play” comments are completely unnecessary, as are the comments which condemn a developer that obviously recognizes the issue and is taking steps to fix it (albeit not fast enough). Culling issues aside, stealth-capping is a broken mechanic in WvW. And for now we just have to deal with it.

If I recall correctly, a dev mentioned that the upcoming patch may address the culling issue in sPvP, but not WvW – as that’s a much more difficult issue to deal with.

I didn’t find the post to confirm that, so don’t take my word for it. But it’s a safe assumption that the patch isn’t going to fix the culling issue.. otherwise they would have mentioned it.

We all agree that it’s getting ridiculous. I witnessed one thief prevent 35+ people from capping a garrison the other day, for at least 5 minutes straight.

Dragonbrand was in the same situation for 3 or 4 weeks after a mass server transfer. Now we’re finally in the right tier(s) and having great fun again.

I can’t argue that A-net should have nipped this problem in the bud.. but rest assured that things will get better once ET and HoD fall to the proper rank.

I’d have to agree with the above posters, this has been one of the best weeks of WvW since launch. 10/10 – would fight again.

Stay classy folks.

I don’t know why I bother replying to your threads… honestly man, lol.

When your server is getting completely beat down on one map, they are always going to consolidate and move to another map where you do have some presence. That’s what we do. They don’t need the points to be “turned off” for that to happen, it happens naturally.

Thanks for organizing this, Phuriok. Had a great time with the event, and we did some awesome work in WvW afterward.

Keep it up folks!

Shajin.5492:

I have to say, Dragonbrand, that night time Taiwan zerg is such a pain to deal with. At a time when we have maybe 10-15 people on that huge group can train all 3 maps. Frustrating, but really helps you guys keep the score close, and making sure both DH and Mag dont have any upgraded structures left come morning. They are like the night time cleaning crew haha.

They’re certainly a force to be reckoned with!

For the record, our NA primetime crew is also getting consolidated and we did a lot of work on the Maguuma Borderlands tonight, as well as the other maps. Was great fun.

I plan to be there!

We’re just now beginning to rebuild our server identity after the change to free server transfers. Blowouts in WvW were killing morale, but now that the orbs are gone and we’re gaining some momentum this is the perfect time to bring the community together.

Hope to see a lot of people at the event!

Understand that the “strength” of many servers exists in being able to come online in the wee hours of the night to take back all of the stuff that they lost during the day, effectively balancing the match. Not every community has a plethora of players in the same timezone that you do.

Bottom line, it’s a 24/7 war. You have to learn to deal with that. If you have the outmanned buff on a borderlands, that means that your forces are concentrated elsewhere.. and your enemy has the outmanned buff on THAT map.

^

People are prone to listen to commanders for advice and information, but as you say.. they are often too busy to provide the proper “training” needed for newer players. Knowing this, it’s important that the Commander has a network of guild members or friends willing to take on that task. The commander can say “Hey, Hexin will be speaking for me much of tonight, so please listen to him for squad orders and information.”

You and the commander would ideally be communicating in voice chat. You would then reference the commander in most of your communications to the server (in team chat). For example:

“Hey folks, Grit is regrouping at Arah’s Hope to hit Dreaming Bay from the North. Please gather there for some action! And remember not to take supply from the garrison. We need that for upgrades.”

Too often I see a commander taking on the role of communication all by his lonesome, which can be very difficult when you’re trying to lead a group. Especially with the short attention span of some players.. they won’t stand still for 5 seconds. Keeping the server organized is really a group effort – the commanders can’t do it alone.

I can’t speak for Blackgate, but my experience with team chat is that it DOES work just fine… when people actually read it. Spam suppression gets in the way sometimes, but that’s only when a Commander doesn’t have anyone else helping him to communicate. Or when you have to spam local chat for a sudden portal bomb.

Some worlds have organized giant mumble servers that everyone is welcome to use. This comes with it’s own downsides, but it seems to work well for them. When you create something like this it’s important to get the word out in team/map chat on a regular basis, otherwise nobody will use it.

If people are spamming team chat with nonsense, everyone should be telling them to shut up (or just block them). Map chat can be handy for random information, but you have to keep in mind that many people simply turn map chat off in PvE (to get away from the spam), and then forget to turn it back on in WvW.

As a commander, I don’t use squad chat hardly at all. My guild is already in ventrilo with me, and I have to drop my icon on a regular basis (which disbands the squad), so getting people to re-join is a royal pain. On top of that, joining a squad makes the other squad icons on the map disappear.. which is generally not a good thing if your commanders are working in tandem.

As things stand, I get no use from commander status aside from the icon. It really needs to be re-worked so that you can turn the icon off without disbanding your squad.

Hey now, this is a topic for Dragonbrand.. please don’t use it for your own recruitment purposes – DH and Maguuma have their own threads for that.

As a fellow commander on Dragonbrand, I can confirm all of what Phuriok mentions in the OP. Despite losing a lot of people to free server transfers a while back, we’re still a strong server that’s simply lacking numbers at this point – specifically during mid-day NA time. Evenings tend to be better, but queue’s are practically non-existent most nights.

We don’t support guilds uprooting themselves from low-tier worlds to come here.. you would be doing your community a great disservice by doing so. But if you’re looking to escape the queue on high-tier servers and make a name for yourself in WvW, Dragonbrand is a great choice. We know how to have a good time.

The damage does stack, but there are factors that limit the ability to “instagib” with a pile of arrow carts. Depending on the fortification, there are a lot of places that you can’t even place siege weapons. Mostly those are pieces of the wall that are destructible… areas such as the north inner gate of the Borderlands Hills Keep have an extremely limited amount of decent siege locations. You would be a fool to ever attack the front (western) gate for this reason.

To circumvent this issue you may decide to place a bunch of arrow carts right on top of eachother.. but then you risk losing all of those carts at the same time from a single coordinated attack or treb/catapult shot. Or even just one die-hard elementalist attacking you from the side.

The other limiting factor is coordination of said arrow carts. Unless you’re on teamspeak and/or marking targets, it’s tough to create an “instant kill field”.

This “bug” of being able to hit enemies through gates helps the attackers just as much as the defenders. Get enough people hitting a gate and it’s practically impossible to repair from the inside. Especially if you’re using catapults of your own.

There’s no band-aid for this issue. Either A-net overhauls the game code or they don’t, but it’s really a minor thing in the grand scheme of WvW right now. And the current mechanics are relatively balanced for both parties (especially when people just stack on gates with stability anyway).

Beating Lupicus for the first time came with a great feeling of accomplishment because he was so much harder than most bosses. That’s what is great about him.

After downing him a few times, he becomes a cake-walk that you can practically solo. Except if you get really unlucky and he shifts to phase 2 with no indication (which can happen sometimes) then blasts your team with AoE when they aren’t expecting it.
Lupicus requires planning and practice.. if it’s your first time through Arah explorable, leave yourself plenty of time because you’re probably going to be stuck on him for a while. And feel free to do some research about him first.. watching a youtube video may help.

I also recommend food that increases endurance fill rate, as dodging is your best friend.

They should be account bound, however there’s a good reason they can’t be traded.. you wouldn’t want people mailing siege blueprints to people on the front lines. Siegemasters are a keep upgrade for a reason.

Never once seen two servers actively work together against another one, unless they’re trying to rid them of a substantial lead. You couldn’t get all of the Commanders and PuGs to agree to such a thing, anyway.

This is how WvW goes. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to attack the same target.. in fact, that’s almost always the case. Taking advantage of those situations is important.

Explorable mode – Repetitive, and a little difficult if you haven’t faced Subject Alpha before. Remember that only one player will be hit by the ice-spike attack which comes from the ground, even though circles appear on everyone. Only that person should bother dodging the attack (which is followed by an earth attack which is avoided by standing in place). This strategy doesn’t necessarily apply to all paths.

Story mode – Haven’t done it! Probably a lot easier.

iirc, there may be a second entrance to the chantry of secrets. As I haven’t been there I couldn’t tell you for sure where it is myself (maybe from fort trinity). You’ll want to try there as well.

At the bloodtide coast entrance, make sure you talk to the npc to take the portal into the back room.

Did you friend transfer servers recently?

There is a 2-week (or match?) down-time before you will begin receiving WvW buffs after transferring server. Though some people are reporting that this is bugged, and they never get their buffs at all.

It’s been a bug since beta – we’ve all experienced it. This is one of the reasons why orbs needed to be removed for the time being.

Last I checked the queue system is still not working as intended.. though A-net is supposed to be working on it. Admittedly my server doesn’t have to deal with queues anymore, so I couldn’t say if there have been any recent improvements.

Generally speaking, you have no place “in line” – anyone in the queue has an equal chance of getting into the map when spots become available.

Ideally we’ll have a system where you can see your place in line AND an estimated wait time. This would make the queues much more bearable.

1. Rendering issues. No question.

2. Effectiveness of “stacking”, especially on gates. We all do it, but it makes for really lame gameplay.

3. Thief damage output and almost perma-invis, which is more of a problem with rendering than the class itself.

Great fighting out there Friday evening.. that GOON (Maguuma) stack on Darkhaven Borderlands was tough to deal with, but we (Dragonbrand) successfully held our portion of the map during primetime hours. I’m curious to see how things went overnight.

Unfortunately these screenshots don’t provide sufficient evidence of exploitation.. But I highly encourage you to keep an eye out for these guys, and, as Maniac mentioned, get a fraps video. Dragonbrand doesn’t stand for cheating – we’ll be happy to report anyone on the server who is doing so.

As usual, we had an awesome time running WvW with our pride of LIONs last night. If you’re looking for a semi-casual guild that still gets together for all sorts of events on a regular basis, the Irregulars may be for you!

Please remember to read through all of the content on our website before submitting an application.

The guard bug is common, though there are still some cases of hacking. Usually this is obvious, because the orb won’t just drop and despawn.. it will appear at an enemy keep almost instantly.

In any case, orbs really needed to be temporarily disabled a long time ago. This issue has been killing player morale and fueling hatred between servers instead of healthy competition. Plus we all know that orb bonuses are exacerbating the severe imbalance with current matches.

Agreed.

The fact that the “Kick from Guild” option even comes up when you right click on someones name is pretty silly. You should only be able to do that directly from the guild roster.

Even servers that are relatively evenly matched end up in this position if one of them makes an extremely strong showing in the first couple of days. Then the rest of the week is just snooze-ville.

Of course, there are very few tiers that actually have evenly balanced matches right now.

It was disappointing, to say the least. Obviously we wouldn’t be hacking away at his toes with an axe or anything like that.. an airship was the logical way to do things. But the whole fight was rather boring and uneventful. I didn’t mind the rest of the dungeon, and the part where you’re shooting cannons at smaller dragon minions was actually pretty cool.

Explorable mode is better in the sense that you have at least one epic and difficult boss fight (who shows up in every path).

I see no issue with camps. They’re meant to be defended by a handfull of PLAYERS, not NPCs. And a camp with fully upgraded guards certainly cannot be soloed. Even if you somehow manage to pull them apart, they’ll start respawning before you can finish off the last one.

Video or it didn’t happen.

Radiodread.8469:

Typically these stacks hit gates. Correct me if I’m wrong but a catapult behind the gate firing on the gate should pretty much break that up, no? Any structure that doesn’t have a catapult behind the gate is not one that is looking to be defended.

A catapult certainly helps, but when people stack in this fashion they’ll usually have constant stability and healing that will easily off-set the damage and knockback.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t catapults limited in the amount of targets they can hit as well?

A lot of great points here, though you didn’t speak too much on the subject of tower/keep upgrades, which is one of the biggest sources of snowballing.

Once the winning team controls the entire map, all of the supply camps and the orbs.. they have ample supply going to every single fortification. These forts are quickly upgraded to the point where the losing team has no hope of mounting an offense. Reinforced walls, gates, cannons, oil, extraneous siege weapons, upgraded guards, siege vendors.. etc. Even if the losing team controls a couple of supply camps, breaking into a fully upgraded tower may be nearly impossible because there are no safe positions to build trebuchets to attack from a distance.

Should this be changed? Not necessarily.. but it’s just another reason that WvW tends to snowball.

This will be a difficult thing to fix, as we all know that allowing AoEs to hit an unlimited number of targets would be disastrous.

From my observations, the best clumping tactics always take advantage of the player culling problem and almost always involve a portal. If you can see a huge clump of players running toward you.. there’s plenty of time to prepare. When that huge clump is suddenly in the middle of your force, buffed out the wazoo and invisible due to player culling, then a proper counter is nearly impossible.

A fix to the player culling issue would help a lot.. then it would be easier to see the Mesmer running in and knock him down, or to see the zerg suddenly appear on top of you.

After that we could determine if portals still need to be adjusted to limit the number of players who can use them. One portal.. one single mesmer should simply not be able to transport 50 people. We all do it, but it’s a mechanic that’s been detrimental to WvW from the very beginning. Portal bombs should still be useable, but they should require much more coordination from multiple mesmers to get everyone to the target location. Just my opinion.

Do keep in mind that the magic find won’t do you any good if you’re unable to get consistent kill-credit in the most popular events where you’re dealing with huge zergs of people. Over-stacking of MF while neglecting your damage output can have this affect.

Grouping is always highly recommended.

I believe you may have to return to the chantry, even if you’ve been there already.