Guild Wars 2

Tyrantis.8640:

[…] I think too many people care about number crunching rather than just playing and having fun.

^ This!

I bought GW2 because it’s not WoW (or so the reviews made me believe).

I was looking for this myself…

firebreathz, just to clarify, i’m not saying that the second monitor is what is causing the problem. I was just listing my set-up in case it is relevant.

Is there a confirmed bug related to multi-monitor setups and mouse pointers?

This doesn’t happen enough for me to easily confirm whether or not disabling my other monitor has en effect. It’s a random occurrence and I’ve only had it happen a few times so far. I just know that it shouldn’t happen if GW2 has mouse focus.

Salvo.8290:

When I totalled the price for 4/5 of the things he was interested in, I found the finished product on the BLTC at a cheaper price than the ingredients.

It sounds to me like your gripe isn’t really with crafting, but with the fluctuation of market trends/prices. If prices stayed constant, and assuming the player who crafted the finished item sourced the materials from the trading post, then the price of the finished product should always be higher than the price of the materials if a profit is to be made. But prices change constantly and not everyone buys their mats on the TP. I don’t think that’s any fault of the crafting system.

As far as the TP goes, I do wish more players understood how they are affecting the economy by flooding the market with cheap items. I’m seeing lots of low level gear selling for less than vendor prices. I’m really hoping the TP becomes more profitable at higher levels.

One of the reasons I stopped playing WoW and decided to stop buying game cards is precisely because I reached a point where it felt like I could not progress unless I joined up with a successful guild and did raids on their schedule.

GW2 won me over because it promised that I could play the game on my own time, if and when I could, and that I would not be disadvantaged by not having access to content and gear that raiding players do. That, and the lack of subscription fees, are very important to me because I’m at a different stage in my life where I cannot devote bundles of time whenever a guild demands it. I think those things will help to attract some of the more mature (age-wise) players to GW2 also… not just the young crowd.

Even though you might not ‘have-to’ participate in raids, just having them in the game and not being able to do them makes me feel cheated. It makes me feel like I am paying for content that I am precluded from.

Now if they could implement raids in GW2 that didn’t require an elitist guild and could be done with a large PUG… that would be interesting, as long as they figure out a way to get PUGs to communicate better and actually form strategies. That would be fun.

Plus the guns ago along with the ‘steampunk’ kind of theme that the Engineer is centered on.

I think it would detract too much from the Engineer profession if Rangers were to get rifles. As it stands I think there’s a lot of overlap between the two professions. My friend (a Ranger) and I (an Engineer) are in a situation currently where we are debating which crafts to take up so that we can help each other. There’s too much similarity; we both use leather and we both need either guns or bows which are made through the Hunstman craft (which we both want). In gameplay, we both use ranged abilities. The only thing that separates us is pets and turrets… which I don’t use because I prefer an elixir build for my Eng. So in many ways I already feel like I’m playing a Ranger, minus the pet and AoE. The guns vs. bows thing just helps add some separation, at least in terms of look & feel.

Cardstar, thanks for that. I found the thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/An-option-to-disable-right-click-targeting/first

I responded to it with a point about how right-click targeting could be a bad experience for customers who don’t have the best motor control of their fingers (people with slight tremors, for example). If they miss-click almost any other button, they are at least still in the fight. It’s not a huge problem to accidentally move the camera or to double-press an ability key, but it is a problem to lose the target.

I’d like to register my +1.

This is affecting me because I use both mouse buttons to move around and I’m frequently losing my targets.

Also, this would not be a friendly experience for customers with twitchy fingers (essential tremors and other nerve conditions). Think about this for a second. If your fingers twitch and/or you don’t have complete motor control of your fingers, this bug makes the game unplayable. It’s okay to move the camera a bit when you didn’t intend to, or to accidentally double-tap an attack key when you’re in combat; you’re still in the fight. It is NOT okay though to lose your target. That’s debilitating.

I have a dual-monitor setup, though I only use the primary monitor for gaming. I play at the monitor’s native resolution, 1920×1200, full screen. I like to navigate with the mouse and I use both mouse buttons to run while turning the mouse to rotate/steer my character. I’ve noticed on occasion that while doing this my mouse pointer will suddenly lose its focus in the game and shoot across my screen onto the other desktop (because I’ve been moving in that direction). The best way I can describe it is that GW2 has lost possession of the mouse pointer, almost like the app has been minimized or backgrounded, and Windows has taken over the mouse pointer again. When I bring the pointer back over to the primary monitor and click anywhere in the game window, the mouse comes back into focus in GW2 and works normally.

Windows 7 64-bit, SP1
Radeon HD 7950 3Gb w/ Catalyst 13.1 release

I wasn’t sure if these are bugs but they’re problematic enough that I think they are. I apologize if they’ve already been covered. If they’re not bugs then I’d really appreciate a lesson on how the combat system works so that I can avoid these issues.

After targeting a mob and engaging, often times the auto-attack will suddenly stop all on its own and I have to manually re-engage it. Other times I will lose my target completely and I have to hunt for it again between all the other mobs on screen, and again, re-engage the auto-attack.

I don’t believe that I am mistakenly hitting any keys or undoing my target with the mouse. I can’t say 100% it’s not my fault, but I didn’t have this issue with some other games I’ve played.

Thanks

Have you tried running a test on www.pingtest.net? It’ll give you a score that you can use to compare the two providers, taking into account things like ping time, jitter, packet loss, etc. The closer to a score of “A” the better for online gaming. You can try to choose a test server closer to the physical location of the GW2 servers (though I don’t know where they are).

+1 for dueling, please. Do want.

If they are working/planning on a fix, I’m sure they aren’t going to discuss it here without an official statement (after passing PR, marketing, legal, etc.) They probably won’t prepare an announcement until they have something they feel good about.

Seems to me that Hyperthreading is also an issue, or at least, GW2 has an issue with it. In my other thread I wrote about how I got a decent performance boost in PvP just by disabling HT. I have never had to do that with any others games that I’ve played on this system.

Given that consoles are (currently) not multitasking machines like desktop PC’s but instead they’re meant to run a single game at any given time, I don’t see them using HT cpu’s in the consoles. It wouldn’t make sense and it would increase the cost for no reason. So whether or not anything is ever done to fix the HT issues in GW2 probably doesn’t depend on the next console release, IMO. It would have to be a targeted fix for PC’s and laptops.

I appreciate the suggestions to try Radeon PRO instead of vsync. Although I’m not really noticing much input lag, I bet it is there to some degree. Whether or not it makes a difference for me though, I’m not sure. My IPS panel has a 6ms response time, so I’m already behind the curve compared to others with faster TN-panels.

OC’ing isn’t an option for me. My case is too restrictive and I don’t have adequate cooling. I did upgrade the CPU cooler to a Hyper 212 EVO, but the temp still hovers around 54C idle. I did not see an improvement over the stock cooler, so that leads me to believe the ambient inside my case is the problem. I wasn’t able to OC much past 3GHz without running the CPU in the red, so I decided it wasn’t worth it atm.

I was about ready to give up on PvP since my performance wasn’t acceptable in combat and I did not want to upgrade my CPU. The i7 920 exceeds the requirements so I shouldn’t have to, right? Right!

The problem:
During combat in PvP my game would slow down significantly. It wasn’t choppy, just slow… almost like I was playing at a lower framerate, but I really wasn’t. I fired up FRAPS and confirmed that my average FPS was still in the mid 30’s while this slowness was happening.

What it is not:
1) This is not a GPU bottleneck. In PvE and just about any other situation outside of combat in PvP my framerate is consistently high. I use vsync and the average FPS more or less stays pegged at 60, and dips no less than 45 in most cases. I’m very happy with that. Also, as I mentioned, the FPS is decent enough during PvP combat, so I know that’s not it.

2) This is not the random micro-stuttering issue that is affecting Radeon cards and is fixed in the 13.2 beta Catalyst. I have that issue, yes, but it’s not limiting my performance. The slowness I’m talking about is an average/overall slowdown, not an instantaneous spike.

3) This is not network lag. I’m not referring to the choppy movement of other players. Also, I have 50Mbps broadband with an “A” line quality rating according to pingtest.net.

The theory:
Convinced that my hardware is sufficient, and that it’s not a bottleneck in graphics or network performance, I figured it had to be the CPU. The CPU is above the requirements so I shoudn’t have to OC it. I was reading some articles about “core parking” and how that affects performance. Not wanting to disable core parking, I decided to disable Hyperthreading from the BIOS which would also have the effect of curing core parking and minimizing CPU overhead.

Results:
I immediately noticed two things: 1) my average FPS in PvP combat went from mid-30’s to 50’s… a nice boost. 2) Combat felt significantly more responsive. I would say that it’s now playable.

Note: average CPU utilization seems to be around 50-60% during combat.

Downside:
I just effectively turned my i7 into an equivalent i5 and forfeited any benefits of HT for multitasking.

My system:

Windows 7 64-bit w/ 6GB RAM
Core i7 920 @ 2.67Ghz (stock)
Radeon HD 7950 3GB (stock) w/ Catalyst 13.1 release
24" display @ 1920×1200 native, 60Hz refresh, 6ms response grey-to-grey

I play the game at 1920×1200 with auto-detected graphics settings, except I turned shadows to “Medium.” Higher shadow settings hurt my average FPS quite a bit.

I just noticed that I got a decent FPS boost by reducing (or disabling) shadows in the game’s graphics settings. Flonkz, did you give that a shot?

I understand what you’re saying, and am not trying to say that you don’t have a point. I do notice that GW2 runs more or less the same no matter what resolution I put it in (however, changing quality settings has more of an effect). This game is definitely CPU bound.

Your post before made me think that you wanted to see a consistent 60fps at all times. Now that you clarified that it should be possible with lower settings and lower resolution for people with adequate hardware, then I agree. I just don’t think that it takes away from the game experience if the framerate dips below 60. Isn’t it adequate to have an average fps above 30 (ideally with no dips below 30)? I’d be happy with that.

WoW isn’t a great benchmark to judge GW2 by. The game is over 8 years old. When WoW first came out I couldn’t play it anywhere near 60fps. I can now, but that’s after a couple upgrades and many patches from NVidia and Blizzard.

60fps constant, as a minimum, for every player? Wow.

They can do that… but the game would look like super mario brothers from 1985. That’s the only way you’re going to guarantee that everyone gets that kind of consistently high performance considering most people don’t own high-end rigs.

Or, you could keep the game looking really nice and only sell it to the 100 or so kids whose parents buy them $3,000 gaming rigs and the game would cost more than the rig.

So which one sounds better?

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

oh yeah and once again a link for the “amd cant game” crowd
http://pctuning.tyden.cz/multimedia/hry-a-zabava/26208-crysis-3-open-beta-test-hardwarovych-naroku?start=6

Must be a lot of Czech-speaking AMD haters out there… ?

When are these expected to go to release status?

I’ve been skimming through the link posted by Inhibitor above and am left wondering whether the frame latency spikes are an issue with the GPU/drivers, or the game engine. nVidia and AMD seem to have taken different approaches in solving it. It seems as though nVidia have chosen to make their GPU play smoother (albeit with slightly lower average framerates) across the board, whereas AMD is targeting fixes to specific games like Skyrim and GW2 with this beta driver.

Is AMD just testing the water before making these changes more broadly, or do the targeted fixes highlight issues with specific game engines and/or the GPU’s handling of them?

The article mentions that AMD is looking to incorporate latency testing into their strategy going forward, so that is further evidence that it’s likely a GPU/driver issue. I don’t understand why the article then (and AMD’s beta driver) focus on Skyrim and GW2.