Guild Wars 2

Guard/DH is worth a spin especially if you liked Guard previously. Main difference in play style is that you get a bow that can do a good bit of damage, and if anything gets close to you, switch to mace etc and be very solid.

Just the thing for HoT maps!

Additional getting the Hero Points for the Elite Spec is likely to be much easier as travel in HoT maps is no longer culled by massive mob numbers and fast re-spawns. You can also get them from WvW if you’re on an active server. HoT maps give 10 hero points per mode, WvW gives about 10 per rank increase. Core gives one per node.

Apart from the HoT maps and Elite Spec there hasn’t been much changed, imo – although quite a lot was broken (but has just recently been fixed again).

Moving from Dx9c to 12 on the client will have no effect on the server – you’ll just get better quality graphics.

MMOs games are essentially two threaded, there just isn’t anything sensible to do with a third thread.

GW2 handles massive 300+ fights extremely well in comparison to other MMOs. If you think otherwise check them out!

Certainly a relief to be able to use the map system within VB without getting extremely annoyed at the poor game design.

YOU SHOULD NEVER INCORPORATE DIFFICULY INTO A GAME BY EXPLOITING GAMEPLAY IMPERFECTIONS.

I think it’s called re-inflating the economy following the great HoT Crash.

Does show a degree of desperation though and faith in the gameplay quality of the HoT maps. So you buy HoT and immediately pop into VB.

Is that really going to do the game’s rep a great deal of good?

Better would have made the boost a reward for the completion of the first lowbie core map – as imo these maps are of the very best quality, whereas SW and VB are some of the worst maps in the game (they also highlight the crappy map UI and rather dated UI in general).

Just an opinion of course.

Ansau,

The area of disagreement is over any absolutism of saying that ‘all droops are client based’. I fully understand that droops can be caused on the client side for the reasons you have specified. I am well aware the character models on the servers are much simpler than those on the client.

My point is that the ONLY way of avoiding high pop droops is by provision of over-capacity.

On the client side you can achieve this with mighty CPU/GPUs. However I am almost certain that most players will fill any over capacity with more graphics rendering and improved graphics quality and come high pop events they will always hit capacity limits. Any improvements due to Dx11 or 12 or whatever are just going to be sucked up by people – quite sensibly – upping their graphics quality for the ‘normal’. Come high pop events you’re back to droops.

However.

The same principle applies on the server side. Anet clearly size zones for a given ‘normal’ max server loading. In 80v80v80 WvW close in fighting they will not size these zones for 60 fps. It makes as much sense to do this as it does to purchase a i7 + dual furies to play noughts and crosses on a PC. My guess is that such server loading is sized for 5 fps very worst case. And I suspect Anet know that the clients – giving human nature – will experience capacity problems ahead of the servers.

So my thinking is that no matter how high your PC spec is, you’re never going to remove the potential for droops. These capacity droops work concurrently, the higher you’re PC spec the more you will move towards server droops; those on low spec PCs may only ever see client droops.

With regard to server/client traffic, suppose a server is maintaining a zone with 10 characters, and for whatever reason the traffic to/from EACH character needs to increase by 10%. From the point of view of the server the load cost of that zone has doubled. Now I know servers will be maintaining many such zones and that this number will vary in real-time and if max capacity is approached they can shed zones to lower loaded servers – more likely they will inhibit any new zones being assigned to the server – but I am pretty sure each zone will be load capped in some way. My point being that although client rendering is exponential from the server point of view traffic is exponential.

I would also argue that MMO games are inherently two threaded, and that in this regard there is nothing special about GW2 – some non-MMO games can use a third/fourth loops for an AI (expect to see a big jump in the quality of these games in the future). There has been little improvement in core CPU processing over the last four years, even AMD Zen is essentially an Intel catch-up with regard to single core performance which hopefully will lead people to question Intel’s high-end prices for mighty four physical core products. AMD’s Trump card will be to stack 8, 12, 16 cores per processor, something that will make little difference to two-loop MMOs except with regard to construct of rendering instructions, although it does mean we’ll all be driving GW2 with i7s with prettier graphics in the future. But I am willing to bet you still be seeing sharp droops on high pop events.

All said and done, GW2 is one of the best performing MMOs going in my experience and likely to remain so for a good few years yet.

HeHe.

Now 60 loses in a row, bottom pip in Emerald. To be fair 1 of the last 10 games was winnable, making 2 to 3 over the whole steak.

Classic Example, last game tonight:-

Opposition 1 war 4 necros. Everyone on my team pretty much wipe on first contact. Watching the mini-map the same seems to be happening. Half way thru the game I decide to got far and cap, then mid and cap, then back to far – rest of team is getting hovered at front and close – the war is basically following me from cap to cap, I hide if I see him on the same path as me. I gained 65 points by adopting the `Rabbit` approach.

But here is the joke, one the necros notices that three of my team mates have zero points and offered to by killed. Kudos to them.

Pity Anet can’t display similar virtue.

Second last game tonight one of my teammates commented he had never seen a 500 – 50 score before. Whereas I had seen four in the last 5 games.

So yeah you do start feeling, `Is it me`, but even I couldn`t possibly be this bad.

One thing though, they should do away with individual scoring in ranked matches, just in case I am not the only rabbit in town.

@Ansau, you may well be right, however any PC spec sees sizeable droops on fps on high pop events. A good test would be to take a i7 + high level GPU and set the graphics to minimum – this would set the construction of rendering instructions to a minimum and creating lots of spare capacity for the two threaded loops.

If you still get a droop on such events, I am right, otherwise you would be.

Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand that peeps will max their graphics to the normal and come the pop spike they would get a droops, but I am pretty sure the servers will not be running at high spare capacity either – it just doesn’t make economic sense to load servers for the very worst possible condition.

As for Dx11 and Dx12 all you’re going to enable is higher capacity to construct rendering instructions and make droops less frequent and less severe, but you’re not going to stop them occurring, MMO games are always going to be two threaded because there isn’t much you can do with a third thread that is viable.

Ok if anyone predicted 31 you win the prize of being correct. Note, this was lowest possible GW2 settings, 4 GB of RAM, with res of 1920×1080. Lower the res could add up to 5 fps more.

That said when originally loaded the game had my main gaming PC settings – mixture of highs and low on a £450 low-mid gaming rig – fps then was 12.

The Athlon 5350 rig cost £155 – base unit only – and is near silent (even on full load).
I am really starting to like it, and have now purchased another 4GB of RAM for £16. I would expect roughly a 20 to 30% improvement in graphics as a result.

FWIW, the 3DMark06 (Direct 9.0c) benchmark was 4155, as a comparison a i7-4770 (HD 4600) gives around 8600. My low-mid gaming rig -with a 260x – yields >19K and has fpss > 40. If you equate these numbers to the ability of the CPU to construct rendering instructions, you should see that moving to Dx11/12 isn’t going to be a big deal in terms of fps. All that will happening is peeps will fill any extra capacity with more rendering instructions only to cry on a pop spike again – peeps are not going to run their PCs with high spare capacity giving the low frequency of the droop events..

Correction: Turns out that the auto-detect had initially set the settings off minimum possible yielding 12 fps. Actual low-mid gaming rig has all settings at high etc. and on core zone the fps was normally in the range 50 to 55. The >40 comment comes from another rig that uses a A8 7600 APU only.

If you max out the client CPU and GPU you will almost certainly see the Game Server as the bottleneck. Looking thru many report and my own small experience clearly indicate that the dips caused by WvW population and other similar events are mostly server side.

If so, moving to Dx11 or 12 or whatever will make little difference in FPS dips for these specific events, will however improve the pretties.

Having more threads available client side to fully utilise more cores will only improve FPS dips IF the server can step up and deliver more throughput. I doubt this would be the case; the CPU cores on server are unlikely to be any more powerful that top-end desktop and I am pretty sure currently these will be maxed out already. I certainly can’t believe that the GW2 servers currently run at low CPU utilisation in large WvW battle, clearly they would have scaled the battle caps to make best use of the server cpu cores.

I would also like to express just how good GW2’s gameplay is in handling massive battles events – try out some other games before you write off Anets ‘old technology’.

As regards ‘AMD crap’ I have found that even low end APUs produce playable gameplay, indeed the massive battle FPS dips appear to be wholly independent of client specification – hence why I suspect peeps are seeing server bottlenecking under these high dynamic conditions. As far as I can see low end processors yield lower quality graphics – or more accurate put a cap on the degree of rendering possible – but have a much less significant effect on the dynamic elements of the gameplay.

This is actually very good news as you want the game to be available to the most players – even if the graphic quality varies a bit.

Anyway here is a test for peeps, a fun test.

I am currently assembling a AMD 5350 / R3 + AM1-I mobo computer, no discrete GPU.

Assuming the game is bootable take a guess at the static FPS in LA?

My bet would be 10 to 15 fps on low settings/default, in short not really playable

If I get more than 20 fps I would very very impressed as the graphics are bare minimum to run Dx12 (although I am kinda hoping Dx9c might not be too big a problem). Note, the four physical CPU cores are the exact same used on the PS4 and Xbox One!!!

Go on make a prediction – I honestly don’t know the answer.

Celtic Lady.3729:

They really need to fix their false advertising problem. People are never going to get their money’s worth for HoT now if they at all expected to have that legendary weapon content.

Sorry, but canceling content you advertised and then killed AFTER everyone paid for it and now will never get the content they paid for or even a refund is just all kinds of LAME.

Then again maybe they HAVE to cancel some content in order to remove the gating/grinding on the existing HoT content. The assumption being that little of the new HoTcontent is actually being utilised and that there has been a significant drop in population playtime and ofc $$$ spend.

It’s like leprosy, sometimes you have to cut bits off to save the rest of the body.

I certainly feel that on the Vabbi server there are far fewer people around now than pre-HoT – by a very long way! And note, Vabbi was a low population server pre-HoT!

I also feel that the only game in town nowadays is sPvP but really that is never going to work for casuals in the EU with it’s X language system. Maybe things are fine in the The States but there does seem to be a lot or broken – or undesirable or unenjoyable etc – content for a four year old game.

Was pre-HoT really that bad?

I didn’t think so. The thing that stuck me as odd about HoT was the complete failure to update the game architecture, something I have come to kinda expect from MMO expansions.

(A) Don’t allow doubling up of classes in teams, i.e. two of class X within the same team.

It’s clear you definitely can’t balance class pairing.

(B) Have an OP Button. Each player will be able to select ONE class they do not fight against. Thus:- (1) If there are OP classes they will end up fighting less or have longer queues, and (2) the developers will be giving a clue to where to actually balance things with at least SOME input for their customers, and (3) those players that do think there are OP classes have some from of rage-absorber.

© Split solo joiners from fixed teams, i.e. ranked random and team leagues.

I would also suggest that more evidence is provided that the match-ups are honest!

Well here is my experience.

1 pip away from Green – Emerald – lose 18 games in a row. In those 18 games with only one exception all the players were trying to win.

The really interesting thing was the PATTERN of the losses.

Starting off the game were iffy, maybe with better play maybe with more communication maybe with better this or that the team I was playing in would have won. In short there was decent gameplay. Some where between the 6th and 12th loss there was effectively no point in playing – you got kitten d. In fact the quality of the opposite team got steady better and better till I almost thought ‘stuff pvp’ and Akitten myself!!!

Clearly what is happening is that the game play time of soloist is much shorter than those of ‘usually winning teams’ the result being that the organised teams end up farming the soloist teams.

The current system is just kitten soloist-joiners out of the pvp game – unless the soloist is prepared to tolerate very long losing steaks.

Skill, knowledge and effort has nothing whatsoever to do with it. If you’re in a ‘fixed’ team wait/play long enough and you will get to farm soloist teams because in time there will be far more soloist fodder than fixed teams available to play against with each subsequent game.

Anyone ever heard of a 6 / 12/ 18/ 24 etc game losing steak for fixed teams?

Dual Channel will not effect dynamic performance – much – but can effect graphic quality as you’re essentially doubling the bandwidth between the CPU and GPU cores. Most graphic cards over the last few years will consume all the bandwidth the processor can supply, so it’s best to go with dual for 3D games as there is little difference in initial cost.

I would also recommend going from 4GB to 8GB RAM for fps performance improvements of around 20 to 30%. Reason appears to be within the GW2 coding.

Finally it is worth remembering that GW2 is perfectly playable at 20 to 30 fps on low settings with a AMD A4 + 4GB set up. I have about a dozens PCs of various specs and upping the spec definitely yield better graphic quality but really the dynamic improvement is poor for the cost.

Those on a low budget should definitely consider the AMD A4/A6/A8/A10 series as best value for the money preferably with 8GB of RAM – the higher frequency the better, although don’t knock yourself out. Intel remain poorer value for the money in this range, imo.

Also note that Anet appear to be driving the game towards pure PvP where graphic quality is of low concern. For what it’s worth I haven’t found any difference in MY game results between a i7 or A8 processor, but that could just be me, however I suspect it’s the nature of the PvP game.

You can move the Guildwars2 folder all over the place, the main problem is it’s size.

Everything you need is in the folder – except passwords and IDs, they are stored in your user folders.

“Note, currently I am testing a bare A8-7600 with GW2 for game-playing. It’s low settings, but 40fps is easy and its all very playable (in fact my higher spec game machine gives better visuals and maybe another 5fps – very minor imo). I am hoping to add a R7 240 (!) in dual graphics mode to the low spec machine to checkout the difference – ~£20 to £30 second hand.”

Cancel the comment regarding using a A8-7600 + R7 240 to obtain dual graphics; turns out there would be no improvement with GW2 because it’s Dx9 based – didn’t do this but taking AMD’s word for it:-

“AMD Radeon™ HD R7 series graphics, found in both AMD A-Series APUs and discrete video cards, are designed to deliver the best possible DirectX® 11.2 experience. As such, the dual graphics performance increase is applicable to select DirectX® 11.2- and DirectX® 10-enabled applications. For DirectX® 9 applications, the combined performance will be disabled and the fastest graphics engine will perform those tasks; however, users will still experience the speed and performance of AMD Radeon™ graphics.”

One of the slight drawbacks to playing an older tech game.

Would still argue that peeps should be very wary of spending lots of $ to improve GW2 graphics IF their existing system is generally fairly decent. No hardware vendor is going to be optimising their Dx11 hardware for Dx9 games (and there was heck of a a lot of optimisation going on for specific games in the Dx11 era). With a bit of luck Anet might just be working on taking advantage of some CPU features to improve frame rate variation on their servers with the new hardware due this year – hence the introduction of an optional 64-bit GW2 version.

The main graphical problem GW2 can suffer from is temporary server saturation, and that hits everyone irrespective of their client hardware.

Would concur with Ansau.

R7 260x seems sufficient imo (GPU I use, chiefly because of it’s lowish TDP ~110w). You can get a £60 cpu that would give you ~40fps (med to high settings) – the four core Athlon X4 860 and there is a two core Intel that is similar which is slightly cheaper.

Adding CPU power will get you to 60 fps, but is it worth the £s on a Dx9.0c game?

Imo, would save the pennies for the new processors coming out this year or early next, at which point the R9s GPUs etc will be a third cheaper and still compliable with Dx12.

Note, currently I am testing a bare A8-7600 with GW2 for game-playing. It’s low settings, but 40fps is easy and its all very playable (in fact my higher spec game machine gives better visuals and maybe another 5fps – very minor imo). I am hoping to add a R7 240 (!) in dual graphics mode to the low spec machine to checkout the difference – ~£20 to £30 second hand.

Whatever, I most definitely wouldn’t break the bank to buy a PC to run GW2.

“On medium settings i get around
20-40 fps in lions arch
50-60 in other low populated maps like gendarran fields.
wvw and world bosses can get to 8-10 fps
I play in 1080p at this moment”

Seriously there is nothing odd about these figures. Best bet is to aim to improve your cooling – the cost of that isn’t going to be more than £50 at worse (you might also want to try re-seating your cooler first, the AMD ones are not great noise wise but they will cool the CPU to the design limits without massive case airflow being required).

Bought this about 18 months ago:-

HP 15-g094sa 15.6" Laptop – Purple A8-6410 Quad Core – 8gb DDR – 1tb Hard Drive

Runs Gw2 fine on low specs without excessive cooling. FPS didn’t seem all that different from my main low spec desktop – roughly 30 to 40. Graphics is the R7 mobile version incorporated into the cpu.

The more recent processor is the A8-7410 Quad Core which might be 10 to 15% faster.

No idea regarding the Intel equivalents. But a laptop of the scale above should be in the price range and give you decent GW2 gameplay.

Would also advise 6 to 8 GBs of ram – seems to help graphics a good bit compared to 4GB and I wouldn’t worry too much about the speed of the HD better the quality or feel of the keyboard and remember you need a mouse – although a trackball might be more handy.

Avoid HPs Steam 11 and 14 etc as these are not meant for 3D gaming.

I have a business machine with uses a i7-4770, not overclocked, no discrete graphics card, 8GB (1600MHz). That is pretty close to your gaming machine without the graphics cards.

Running GW2 from a USB 3.0 memory stick I get a very stable fps of 25-30 in crowded zones, raising to 35 to 45 in low population zones. CPU loading average is 25% max 50% at start-up, cpu max temp is just over 60 C – as a business machine there is only one 60/70mm cpu fan operating (pretty quiet) and there is little or no variation in CPU fan sound over the PSU fan noise (also very quiet but the loudest).

I left GW2 to automatically set the graphics quality, this was constant; res1920x1080 settings low – similar to your pictures – except for animations and models which are both set high. Frame Limiter setting is ‘default’, not capped.

It has become clear to me that fps rates are heavily dependent on zone population – even when you don’t see that population. And I suspect that is what you are actually seeing – i.e. the same zone is not necessary the SAME zone.

You could confirm this by leaving the Frame Limiter at ‘not capped’.

For what it’s worth I recently performed this experiment – for a much longer period – using a lowly A6-6400 (two core and again no discrete graphics card) and got pretty similar results as the i7-4770 business machine. The latter appeared to be capable of higher fps but only in lowly populated zones.

As I said, my conclusion was that zone population controlled the fps far more that the graphics card (which on the surface only controls the quality of each frame).

Big discrete graphics cards only allow high fps IF the zone – to be more exact the client or more likely the server – allows it.

Yes.

Three reasons:-

(a) DirectX 12 games will be coming to the PCs before the Xbox One

(b) The Xbox one will be replaced in 2017 at the earliest. Giving you’re PC spec you’ll can have a fairly decent PC for the next 2 to 3 years. Even if you stop gaming on it, you’ll have plenty of uses for it – video steaming/surfing/e-mails/office are pretty much peanuts to today’s PC – I use an Intel 1037u 17 watt cpu for all these tasks.

© Can’t see GW2 changing much for the next two years, i.e GW3 must be at least two years away at a minimum.

I am also pretty sure that Xbox One will remain a DirectX 11 machine, but who knows.

BTW: $ for $ there isn’t much difference, maybe the PC would have the edge.

As I reported elsewhere, almost by accident I ran GW2 on my HTPC.

Spec: AMD A6-6400 (two cpu cores), 8GB RAM (1600MHz), loading GW2 via a USB 3.0 memory stick.

Settings: 1920 × 1280, quality set to low (settings were automatically determined by the game)

Got FPSs in the range 20 to 30 – as determined by the options page – playing PvP and running around VB for about two hours with a smallish zerg event chasing. LA took around a -5fps hit though.

No judder, no stutter, no halts on spinning around visual or audio, (even did the flying bug bubble hero quest in VB twice); all very playable, imo.

Very impressed I can tell you, as I didn’t even expect GW2 to load!

Might also say that the drawback of GW2 being on a memory stick was quite minor, loading took longer but not excessive, and once in a zone, I only saw render loading in VB in the far distance – something you have to watch for rather than notice really. BTW Windows 10 will use any unallocated RAM as a Write Cache, max physical RAM loading was 41% with 8GB. There was a big graphical hit for using only 4GB RAM. Note also that the A6 reserved roughly 750MB for it’s GPU cores (has 6). GW2 32-bit was used. Data suggests you would be wise to run GW2 with more than 4GB if your using an APU and no discrete GPU.

The long and short of it is that if a two year old A6 can deliver playability under these circumstances I wouldn’t get too picky regarding much more powerful CPUs and graphic cards.

I am building another HTPC based on the Athlon 5350 (zero fan PC – hopefully), if I get the chance I’ll give that a go as well – unfortunately I don’t have the Win 10 licence and planned on using SteamOS for some older games gameplay, or as a Steam client to my more powerful gaming PC (a X860 and 260x, 8GB, loading from a 2TB SSHD).

Oh on the latter I get 30 to 40 fps on what appears to be max settings (I leave the game to configure these). Apart from a more ‘fuzzy’ picture, imo, and quicker loading (which doesn’t matter much anyway) there wasn’t much difference when actually playing. I can tell you I give this PC a few ‘dirty looks’ after finishing with the A6 machine – from DirectX 9.0c benchmarks the former is three times more powerful.

Futuremark have an old DirectX 9.0c benchmark called 3DMark06 which is freely available. Try running that with different settings.

This should enable you to determine if your card is faulty.

Note, takes up to 3GB to download.

There is also a monitor program – plenty of alternatives – called HWiNFO64 which will allow you to monitor your graphics card’s temperature and fan speed via time-series graphs – freely available. Usable while running GW2. Very small program.

Necrotic.7820:

I would recommend going with an Nvidia card for graphics. I’m running a 650 Ti and have no issues.

Reports at the moment indicate that Nvidia cards are going to struggle against AMD cards (even older ones) when DirectX 12 games hit the streets. Initial benchmarks are indicating a 20 to 50% boost on supported DirectX 12 AMD cards with existing Nvidea cards showing little benefit. Early days ofc, but still it’s very significant especially giving the lack of counter attacks from Nvidia.

For that reason I won’t go slashing out a lot of money on a Nvidia card till the reports improve.

You’ll get 30 to 40 fps no problem on high settings for 1080p and +10 fps at least for 720p.

Weakest point is the R7 240. So I would aim to upgrade, most important thing therefore is to check that the power supply has a 6 pin PCIe power connection and that it is rated above 400watts say (higher the better). Without that connection you would be limited to a R7 250 or the 3xx equivalent. Problem here is that the cost is iffy – imo – for the benefit gained over the 240 if you don’t have the connection.

A simple and cheap upgrade would be a second hand 260x – cost around £50. Needs the PCIe power connection however but most certainly quite a big bump in graphics capability.

There are of course many other options but I am only mentioning cards I have first hand experience of. Also generally I don’t think it is worth while spending a lot of money on graphics cards to play GW2, a Direct9.0c game. Just an option of course.

The bit about the PCIe connection IS important however.

Also note that most comparisons of graphics cards are for DirectX 11. This can be very misleading as GW2 puts nothing like the loading on a modern cards as DirectX 11 can; example being many recent First-Person-Shooters.

FYI: I use a X860 + 260x as my main gaming computer – I am a casual gamer but have no complaints regarding GW2 performance. I would like a 370 but not at the £100 price tag (just can’t see it being worth it). Frankly I am waiting on a some Direct 12 game coming out that would justify the £100 expense. Note btw AMD have said that the 260x will be supported for Direct 12.

Also note that I have recently commented on GW2’s performance utilising a A6 6400 APU only. You’re PC is significantly above that.

I was actually going to upgrade my HTPC today, but as result of this thread I tried to run GW2 on it.

Spec is a A6-6400 with 8GB of 1600MHz Ram (was 4GB) and a 64GB SSD. Prefectly fine for HD streaming and audio – which all it was used for. The A6 has two cpu cores and 6 gpu cores, and I think it runs from a base of 3.1 to a turbo of 3.9. It’s not a processor I would select for 3D gaming.

Loading Gw2 from a USB 3.0 memory stick on a USB 3.0 port, resolution 1920×1080 on low settings:-

Pvp Lobby/VB/WvW: 20 to 30 fps. Only LA caused fps to drop too 15 to 20. Fps were determine from the GW2 options page.

I played a single round of Pvp and spent about 90mins playing in VB – including two rounds of the bug hero thing where you fly around popping bug bubbles and a half complete small zerg event chase. The game was playable and the graphics where fine – there was no stutters at all. Even I was a bit surprised!!!

Average cpu load was 80%, Av cpu temp was 64, max 68, physical memory usage was 41%.

What was even more amazing was that the HTPC remained quiet. It turned out this was due to a fan fault – thing never shifted from minimum 25% loading. This meant that AMD must have been trolling the CPU to keep temps below 70. The case was completely open thru all the game play as I was intending to switch the cpu out after giving GW2 a try. HTPC has only one fan, admittantly it’s way over spec-ed at 150 watts for the 65 watt APU.

OK we’re not talking amazing graphic quality here, although I was very surprised at this as well, but the game is very playable, imo.

My point is for a very low 3D gaming rig, I saw nothing like the variation in fps I would have expected – the fps was fairly consistently in the 20 to 30 range thru quite a wide variety of activities. My conclusion is that large drops in fps are mainly server side in origin., caused by bottleneck due to high population processing.

BTW: I noticed from running a Direct9.0c benchmark – 3DMark06 – that adding the 4GB RAM caused a 50% jump in measurement – HQ Graphics but default res of 1280x 960. There was no similar improvement with a Direct11 benchmark – Unigine Valley – HQ graphics but much higher res.

SRoode.7318:

Almighty Dervisher.6720:

Well this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c-0pmSxiEE

Shows that 980 TI SLI is capable of running GW2 at 4k Resolution, at 60fps. Probably a problem with Temperature, PSU, or GPU. The problem may also be running the triple monitors, as optimization for running a game in multiple monitors is hard to come by and a very niche environment.

I can get 60+ fps too. The video shows the player playing with nobody else around. When I play with nobody else around, I get 60+ fps. I drops off the table though in populated areas, like the mists lobby. Also, I have the same drop off whether using 1 or 3 monitors. Again, that’s what is making me think it is a client server limitation.

I have the same experience. I have a range of PCs with a wide variety of GPUs/CPU/APUs.

It is clear to me that in terms of GW2 you can have a fairly low specified CPU and retain playability; having a very high specified CPU will not protect you from SUDDEN drops in fps under certain conditions in GW2 – pve Boss fights being the most obvious.

Giving that the server has a limited process power for a given time cycle, and that the load will be dependent on the number of peeps requiring processing, a most obvious solution to dealing with saturated loading is to reduce the rate of information transmitted per peeps. This would have no effect on the quality of each frame displayed by the client but will reduce the frame rate processed by the client. Very few people are capable of noticing the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps unless there is a little number on the screen telling them otherwise – however everyone will notice the difference in single frame qualities (although some aspects are certainly not worth it imo, giving the increase in wattage required!).

The alternative to this approach is to DS peeps (old style method). GW2 – aside from the known a RAM problem (3GB anyone?) – very rarely DSs peeps. Additionally I have never seen any evidence of rubber banding in GW2. For an MMO game, GW2 is extremely stable.

You tend not to see the server doing this as often there will be other bottlenecks on the client that kick in on high populated areas – although in general I would say these are minor compared to the effect of varying the population. Clearly the lower your ‘normal’ fps is the more likely you will run into client bottlenecks under such circumstances.

Regards the Intel/AMD core arguments, I would in general say that GW2 has a fairly low single/dual core requirement – in terms of recent low wattage processors – and that very recent GPU cards don’t add all that much increased prettiness (for the wattage, noise and cost). As such the AMD APUs are very impressive when playing GW2, and hard to beat on a low budget for casual gaming, imo.

For example, a A8 7600 will on it’s own give you >30fps ‘normal’ playability in GW2 for £45 to £70 – and you won’t lose much – about 10% – if you toggle it down to 45watts operation.

I took a break from GW2 within a month of HoT release – as I was getting quite angry with the game; seemed incomplete to me and the massive gating on almost everything purchased clearly was intended to cover up that fact, imo.

On retuning I have noticed some small changes but essentially the same unenjoyable game as far a HoT maps are concerned. Way too many irritants seem present, the map system is poor, you have little sense of direction, looting is problematic as well – do I really need to stop playing for 5 to 10misn to clear my bags? I am also getting the distinct feeling that there is a cash element to the expansion design – i.e. to enjoy it you need to spend cash (a bit like those kitten games on iPads/Phones etc).

However the thing that gets me is that at the end of every significant session of 1 or more hours on HoT maps is that I get this ‘Hamster On a Treadmill’ feeling. Which doesn’t encourage me to return. It is also appears I have no hope of completing the 240 experience bar levelling’s any year soon and that the ‘abilities to be acquired’ are indicating a complete ‘fun-bypass’ by the game designers, I suspect they may have wanted to put far more fun abilities/items in there but due the delivery date most got dropped in favour of any-old-mush-will-do-as-this-doesn’t-sell-the expansion.

moonstarmac.4603:

The major issue I have seen since the game launched is the persistent negativity a small portion of the players show. Some argue that fighting this mob or completing that event to progress is “grind”. I played games like Everquest years ago and I know what real grinding is. Sitting in Dulock dual boxing with guildies to get XP and gold for hours so I could get that next level so I could begin my epic. The closest thing GW2 has to this is working on a legendary, but that is even easier than EQ.

I am a very casual player, usually playing 2-3 hours a day if not less. I still love the game and I am looking forward to what comes next.

I also played EQ but the nature of that game is/was entirely different from GW1/2. With EQ you pretty much knew what you were getting by level 5 or so. And when an expansion came out you pretty much knew that the entire content would be heavily gated initially.

What the GW2 devs did was stick an EQ expansion onto a very casual friendly game; peeps are going to happy trot thru 80 levels of GW2 only to meet ‘grindy’ EQ pve gameplay. As is, many casual people feel robbed into paying for an expansion they don’t or can’t enjoy.

Personally I was quite happy that GW2 didn’t have an ‘end game’ as such, I was quite happy dipping into this and that for a few months, moving on when I felt things were getting boring or tiresome. GW2 had plenty of this VARIETY – and I might say one of the few mmos that did. Now I feel that variety has gone; subjectively I feel I have to play HoT pve content to progress and I find that content annoying. Prior to HoT I wasn’t all that interested in ‘progress’, just enjoyment with a certain knowledge that in the background ‘progress’ was occurring – however slowly.

At the end of the day, IF you do find HoT content and changes annoying – for whatever reason(s) – you’re not going to invest time in those areas you once found enjoyable because you NOW know the endpoint is not going to be enjoyable. So what’s the point?

HoT really is ‘an end of game’ for some.

Great another Anet ‘gem’ to look forward too …

Agreed.

They have put so many gates on things that something will trip you up and become a ‘grind’. For me atm it’s the EXP/MASTERY Bar. I have 8 Masteries of which four have been activated, but getting the fifth is gated by experience. Thing is getting Exp within HoT maps just isn’t much fun, so the chances of small groups forming is very low.

The drawbridge has been pulled up and casual players are stuffed. I suspect that peeps unlocked their masteries etc then went elsewhere to farm experience.

This weekend HoT has not been worth playing, Halloween has been much more enjoyable.

The EXP gained from killing mobs on HoT Maps just doesn’t scale with the difficulty involved in killing them – unless you’re in a Zerg when really you’re farming the Event Exp.

You log in, see all the contested WPs and logout —> Empty VB Maps.

The developers didn’t learn anything at all from pre-nerf Orr*. So you just have to wait till the penny drops.

*In pre-nerf Orr your experience was measured against your level bar, so the pain was not as high. In HoT it’s measured against you exponential Mastery Exp Gate Bar. At which point you go ‘stuff-it’. What’s the point of playing in HoT for all the ‘goodies’ when everything is going be gated by exponential Exp requirements?

Phy.2913:

How is this game anti-social? mobs, loot, chests, even resource nodes are all shared. There’s no tagging mobs or stealing nodes from other players. You’re not forced to group with people, you can just run in and start hitting things and get the same rewards.

What am I missing?

Not forced to group with people.

Rienrodrys.7493:

Test.8734:

warbignime.4610:

Pretty well thought and insightful review

This one more is more insightful:

http://www.gamerevolution.com/review/guild-wars-2-heart-of-thorns

Although I think the game deserves a somewhat lower score than what they gave it.

Yes and pigs fly.
Don’t make us laugh, a review from a guy who wrote:
" Aging engine has surprisingly poor performance"
AGING?
“Group-focused content in an anti-social game.”
ANTI Social Game ?
“I have an 80 Engineer and 80 Revenant. I’ve spent plenty time in this game.”
Wow 1 class in 3 years before HOT.
Rofl.

He’s right about the aging engine.

Having a very modern GPU and a top end CPU doesn’t help much with GW2 because the performance optimisation for Dx9.0c was completed years ago in the era of songle or duo core processors; this effectively means there is almost no CPU scaling for GW2, i.e. gameplay on a G3258 is pretty much the same as on a i7 4790 most of the time for a giving graphics card. CPU scaling only helps with character population scaling it doesn’t allow the game to be more prettier.This is not true of a Dx11/12 engines.

At the end of the day, the very best graphics GW2 can deliver is only ever going to be the very best deliverable 10 years ago. That current bottom end hardware is capable of delivering excellent 10 years old graphical performance is of course very good news for casuals. However there are strong hints to the age of the engine in the game architecture if not in prettiness – menu system, map system, keyboard based, slow zoning, the game isn’t much different from EQ/EQ2.

HoT Maps are not solo-able because you feel cheated at the experience you get from fighting very difficult mobs.

Clearly they have scaled it for ZERG Gameplay – which is not to everyone’s taste (well not ALL the time anyway).

With ZERG Gameplay it doesn’t really matter where you are, so if you have just ZERGed outside HoT you’re not really all that interested in ZERGing inside HoT. There is only so much of ZERGing a casual player is going to find enjoyable.

With Orr – pre-nerf – you could struggle thru the maps because you got a sense of progress with the level bar. But with the MAstery Bar in HoT maps there is essentially no progress at all. You’re efforts seem pointless.

This is a serious failure for the Expansion. Anet essentially can’t give a lot of EXP for killing mobs because that would leave the maps too open to easy progress via ZERGing gameplay. When the ZERGs decrease the maps are empty, as people realise the pointlessness of anything else.

I’d rather play Alts in core for an hour of two, than struggle in HoT achieving nothing for the same time. Doubt I’m anything special in this department.

I have three frustrations that result in the game not playing well:-

[A] The Map System

Whereas fine for core maps with HoT it is frustrating to use. A map is a means to indicate how you get from A to B, clearly the HoT zones were designed to make this difficult so why have a map at all? And yet you can’t play without the map system as it is used to indicate the location of HPs etc which otherwise would be completely missed unless stumbled on (not very likely with many of these points).

The mini map is of course completely worthless so it’s full screen map.

A Selectable Homing System would have been better.

[B] Baggage

The blue/green loot flows freely to such an extent that your bags fill up very fast. This means a lot of your time is spent clearing space in your bags – every one to two hours in my case. I have actual reached the point where I will avoid an event because I can’t be kittened with the baggage. Baggage alone makes events less enjoyable.

Dealing with baggage of course blanks out most the screen.

I would estimate that approximately 30% of my time in these ‘beautifully designed’ zones is spent on A & B with the graphics effectively blanked out. I am sure that without A & B the HoT experience would be far more immersive and consequently more enjoyable.

© Xp Gained.

Seems way too low. I am well ahead on HPs, PS etc but I am held back by slow moving Xp Bar. The only alternative seems to be to mindless tag along with zergs which I am not going to do just to creep the Xp bar – this is not enjoyable and I consider grindy.

PS: I also don’t like the way my elite weapon pings off when I jump back to WvW/PvP or core maps. Again more routing around in bags to kitten find it the moment you pop back to HoT – that is if you remember!

IF you move to a HoT map and select the Elite Spec for one of your three traits, you will be able to equip your elite weapon and play it.

You’ll get the five weapon 1 to 5 keys and any trait bonuses you can activate. Not the FULL spec of course but it’s a reasonable starter if you have Core Map coverage.

Took me three days to work this out as on Friday I tried to equip the newly received elite weapon on a Core Map and found I couldn’t. Didn’t realise the equipping is map dependent. Doesn’t work in WvW.

I should say I completed chapter three of the Personal Story – reward was an elite weapon – maybe that was the difference!?

Frankly it’s as clear as mud as to when you can use your elite abilities…

They may have been changing this or there was a bug, but currently I believe once you have the first trait ability ‘Proficiency’ you can equip your elite weapon in any HoT map.

European times:

Friday and Saturday I logged into VB on many occasions to find dead maps.

That changed on Sunday when I got a playable map, and of course I stuck with it

Last night I was jumping in and out and for the first time ever got a notification.

There was something most definitely not right on those first two days, imo.

Fine with dual graphics AMD A8-3820 + HD 7570.

I also have a AMD Athlon II X4 680 + R7-260X (about three times the graphical power).

There isn’t much difference between the two, latter is slightly more pretty.

Oh I don’t feel any difference between HoT and Core, key is the number of characters around you. Seems to be the main choke point in most MMOs in my experience.

For laptops, runs fine on a A8-6410 (no discrete GPU).

Maybe wrong here, but it seems to me that if you’re in a HoT Map and equipped with your Elite Spec Weapon (longbow in my case), you do more damage and consequently gain more experience.

Anyone think the same? – could have changed very recently?

Also – just in case anyone else has made the same mistake – I initially thought that the Elite Spec was un-useable till you had completed unlocking (that is ALL your masteries etc) – after all it does say ‘your profession does not allow this weapon’ and you can’t equip it – however I have ‘discovered’ if you’re in a HoT map AND you select the Elite Specification as one of your three trait lines THEN you can equip the Elite Weapon. Of course you don’t have the full trait line but if you had core map coverage you get approximately half way from the off.

Maybe silly of me to not realise the above mechanic but I wonder who else has been as foolish That said, I do think it’s as clear a mud, imo (since when has equipping a weapon been dependant on location?).

The gameplay is fine, you get all the weapon skills – five all -and Fx changes – three in my case – but of course not all the bonus trait effects. Seems OK to me for making progress in HoT.

Fade.5904:

Got Master Daredevil yesterday, played 3 days. Spend less time whining and more time playing – because that’s all i did, play the game (not grind)

Personally i think its awesome how Anet implemented this, felt great when i finished the spec circle and got the last reward. It’s something to aim for and gives a sense of accomplishment when you finish, rather than being handed everything on day 1

Would you have been so happy if your HoT maps had been empty?

Here is my experience:

Friday, VB is empty on 5 out of 5 occasions I logged in.
Saturday, VB is empty on 7 out of 7 occasions.
Sunday, VB is reasonably active and I played PvE HoT – 7 hours worth (quite happy but annoyed about a few minor things).

Now it may have been ill luck or a bug or a bias towards fully populated home servers, but that is not good experience for a expansion launch – totally contrary to anything I have ever seen.

I happen to think the main reason VB was empty* was because of people’s disappointment with the Elite Spec gating and that they couldn’t immediately play the new specs – I btw have no problem with it, it would have been nice but fine, whatever. If VB is lowly populated, VB is a grind (entirely subjective I know) to casuals, it’s as simple as that.

Empty HoT maps however I am not fine with! This is gating of a horrid sort.

Surely if people are preferring repeative WvW zergs and/or CoF sessions, or just simply logging out or switching to core content instead of playing entirely new expansion content, something must be wrong with the game design.

And if doesn’t take three days to work that out, it was obvious by the end of day one!

Imo – as stated repeatedly during Beta – it was not a good idea to make the HoT Maps so heavily depended on population count.

All said and done, giving the advertisements I can fully understand why many people are disappointed with not being able to use the Elite specs from the off. It was very cruel to gate these specs for WvW and PvE so harshly without significant warning BEFORE purchase. Afterall there is nothing ‘Elite’ about them – that said the gating may be required for performance issues (they are pixel high to say the least), hence the late decision.

*There is also the possibly that for the launch a fixed number of HoT maps were provided – rather than the normal dynamic load scheduling – and given the low uptake many of these were empty. If you played early you map got full, later and it never got off the ground. Whatever.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Hey folks,

Lots of passionate feedback and discussion in here on either side, and a friendly reminder that constructive feedback helps us make better games (please do keep it constructive!) We don’t always get every detail perfect the first time, but I like to think one of our strengths is we’re always open to and listening to feedback from our community and making good decisions based on that feedback.

Ultimately, we’re thrilled with the parts of HoT everyone is enjoying. Your passion is awesome, and it’s part of why we all love creating this game. In particular, in game we’ve seen a really positive reaction to the game from folks who are busy playing, which has been really cool to see.

While we never like to rush and make snap decisions, in particular with a game that’s basically been out less than three days; I think there are some fair points in here for us to discuss. Much like other feedback about HoT, we’ll be discussing this as well!

Thanks again!

You need to IMMEDIATELY free up the Elite Specs, the rest you can chew over.

I have played MMO’s for over 20 years – starting with EQ Beta – and this is the most customer hostile expansion I have ever seen.

Throw a bone while your customers are still willing to play.

Suggestion: For various reasons.

Drop XP Buffs from trash mobs in GoT Maps. You can vary this dependent on the population present, and/or if need be decrease over time. You could make ‘Nighttime’ XP Buffs rich. something of this order.

Give casuals some hope, kitten .

BTW: The current speed buffs seem designed to train people. Why on earth do you have such speed buffs in these zones?

Grind is un-enjoyed playable content that the customer feels forced to do. Clearly what people find enjoyable is highly subjective.

Anet very heavily sold Gates of Thorns on the Elite Specs – we actually saw little of anything else prior to launch; the chief bait for GoTs was Elite Specs. There was little mention of the scale of the gating on the Elite Specs.

The cost of that scale obviously depends on the customer’s play time or at least wiliness to devote an initial large hours over a short period.

The vast majority of GW2’s customer base is casual.

It’s a no brainer that a significant number of Gates of Thorns customers are going to perceive – initially at least – that the expansion is a grind fest.

Imo, they should have giving their customers a founder’s bonus with the gating cost initially lower then slowly jacked up as time progressed – i.e why not sell the expansion on customer enjoyment rather than advertisements. AS IS the gating feels like robbery to many – they have paid in expectation, giving the advertisements – for something they can’t easily enjoy giving real-life commitments AND player numbers.

I suspect ‘Raids’ will be the new advertisement bait to keep playing, and who knows what gates will pop up then!

There has been a lost of trust, the scale of the gating comes over as disingenuous.

PS: I have no problem with the gating, but I do have a problem with empty zones making gameplay a pointless endeavour – i.e. effectively adding a timing gate*. Those that are rushing thru content now should have an eye on the future of the game. Would it really have hurt so much to have giving ALL customers an initial bonus (or a joy factor) on purchasing the expansion? AS IS everything ‘feels’ gated and to many casual GoTs is poor value for real money. That may of course change in time.

*Some people may not just have limited hours to play they may have limited SPECIFIC hours they can play.

Fun factor: 1/10

Main problem is that VB is empty, I know from Beta Weekends that the zone isn’t really playable/enjoyable as solo (initially at least), so what do you do? It’s frustrating that the product you paid for is essentially completely gated by numbers (a factor you have no real control over).

I do like the new WvW maps but again they are empty or feel so.

Like no expansion I have ever seen, tbh. Doesn’t feel like an expansion at all, the game feels smaller! ‘Gates of Thorns’ is a more accurate title for this expansion.

Update: Day 4.

Fun factor: 6/10

After an initial two days of empty VB the last two nights have had playability.
Also failed to understand you could equip your Elite Spec Weapon from the off, but only in HoT Maps (and I believe PvP).

Got six masteries but only two utilised due to gating on ExP.

Still, looking not bad at all now.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with heavily gating the Elite Spec, but I certainly think that by additionally gating it with particular PvE content behind a paywall is a very poor design decision – as it goes against the ‘play your own way, in your own time’ design of the previous three years.

Some people at Anet should be losing considerable sleep tonight.

The Halloween events are far superior to the HoT events.

The vast majority of players are casuals – the fun factor with HoT is very low.

Avlaen.7241:

the problem about finding a group aswell is so much of the maps require masteries to easily navigate, if you dont have the masteries and others do you get left behind in the dirt. Or if you kitten up and miss a jump/glide you get left behind or you get lost and seperated….

Yes, it’s this aspect of HoT that makes it suck, the PvE element of the Xpac is essentially anti-social. To be more accurate, it’s the introduction of this aspect post level 80 that sucks. If for example the aspect had been present say post level 20 then many PvE peeps would have gone, ‘Mmmm, maybe it’s simpler to just play Aion’.

I like GW2 because it’s a casual game that is interesting and varied enough to continue playing. I grind at work, I work very hard at work. I stopped playing Aion because it became work, and I will stop playing GW2 for the same reason.

Go to your Personal Story and start the HoT path (see message above)

Must admit this wasn’t exactly obvious to me either, an e-mail would have helped!
The whole of the PvE Xpac is gated by the personal story, yet Anet never thought the customer needed to be told this – d’oh.

If you find that Windows 10 boots up slower than Windows 7 the most likely cause is your AV software.

One of the major reasons for moving to Windows 10 is the increased security features – it was the lack of these features that caused Windows 7 to boot up slowly in the first place. Some AV vendors will be ignoring the new features – as they are pretty much MS controlled – and causing slower boots up as a result.

I doubt if any OEM vendors are specifically developing drivers for Window 7; it’s days are numbered, two years if I recall correctly.

“nauseating swath of color”

Pretty much sums up any group fighting in GW2 – you get to take on the boss or the champ and the result is you see SFA till it’s dead. What is designed for 10-man PvP spectator viewing sucks mightily in group PvE. This is particularly bad in HoT as the backgrounds can be extremely dull, the contrast is often jarring.

They should have an option in PvE to display only your and the mobs color spews.

The developers need to seriously attend to this problem, as the start of HoT will be continuous hours of zerg-splat after zerg-splat after zerg-splat as peeps grind up masteries.

My 2 Cents:-

I have a number of PCs spread over a ten year period.

Regard the OPs problem, it should be borne in mind that a SDD only effects the speed of the FIRST loading of a zone – and nothing else esp. gameplay. This is because Windows operates a cache system within the computers RAM. The overall size of GW2 is a problem best solved by buying a new additional SDD and putting only ‘games’ on it. The other reason this is advisable is that SDDs work at an optimum level when only half full – so having GW2 on the main drive will slightly slow everything else.

As to general performance there are really only two factors – giving that GW2 runs on a DX9.0c graphic engine no matter how powerful your graphics card is and is essentially single core.

(a) Quality of Display
(b) Number of people in zone.

Now (a) is very subjective, me I am happy with >30Hz some will insist on 60Hz, but whatever. Choose your graphic card as you like, but remember with 9.0c there is little point in splashing out lots of cash for a super fast graphics if your only purpose is GW2.

Now (b) is the key factor imo, as this affect gameplay. It is clear that the most important factor is your processor. If you amble around PvE areas you’ll have little need for a powerful processor. The key gate is when there are lots of people within the same area – a WvW zerg for example. However bear in mind that Anet can reduce the loading here at HoT launch merely by reducing the population cap on the zone instances and spawning more. Something they are very likely to do as the initial HoT zones will be heavily used.

My overall advice therefore is too ‘wait and see’, give HoT a few months before making any changes.

Also note that the minimum spec – a Intel Duo 2 Core 2.0GHz – is really for this game – fairly powerful even though it’s about 8 years old*. There are plenty of modern processor around that are not as powerful – albeit they will be a lot cooler and less expensive to run!

All in all my best advice – if you must prepare – is to replace the fans in your computer! If the fans are two or three years old this will be worth while at a pretty low cost and may benefit all aspects of computer’s performance – then again maybe not, but at least you should have a quieter computer!

In my experience an 8 year old PC will run at half the performance of a modern PC costing at least half the original price – and be cheaper to run. Giving that, I wouldn’t spend too much on ‘upgrades’.

*The drive over the last few years have been for more power at lower running temperatures, so with low end desktop processors you basically get the same power but at lower temperatures which affect the noise levels somewhat!

As commented elsewhere.

In pve zerg like fights the targeting system is poor, when you have mass mobs and the only indication of your target is a red arrow above a red tag you have little idea at time – especially with fast dying mobs – who your target is.

Better would be to make the target arrow a different colour from red, or at least allow the player to select the colour or symbol separately, example being a blue diamond.

I would also advise against the need to heedlessly run around in such zone – not only is this boring you’re trashing the original content. One idea may be to allow commanders to ‘drop’ temporary – and free – WPs. The name of the WP would go with the commanders name tag (there is actually an item in the game that allows you to port friends to your location so I don’t see this being to OOT). No useable outside core PvE zones. This would also encourage commanders to split reducing the sizes of zergs, maybe, as only commanders would have to do all the running about otherwise.

I would also suggest that mobs always drop XP. To lvl 80s this is not big thing but to lower level players/characters it’s a big boost – especially if you’re tired of solo grinding Hearts you have done X times before.