Guild Wars 2

Oozo.7856:

Porky.5021:

Oozo.7856:

In other games your graphics would lag in zergy situations. This game opts to make players invisible until your system catches up.

There’s nothing to catch up. The server has simply decided you need to see players A, B, and C, and you don’t need to see players X, Y, and Z. It has not told you about X, Y, or Z, so your computer has nothing to catch up on.

And they do that so people with outdated computers can play the game without their FPS dropping to under 5 when a ton of people load in all at once. I’m not defending the system. I never get huge FPS drops in this game. I do get a ton of culling under the new system.

that seems a convenient excuse to mask their inadequate hardware…

silvershadez.8421:

As much as I agree that culling got worse for alot of people (including me) since last patch I really have to ask you:

Do you really feel it’s ANets fault that you have such long que times now?

This would not only be naive but completely delusional. If there is someone to blame, then it’s those players that transfer on the high populated / winning servers only…

yes i blame Anet for queues. not just now but in general. not enough people can play w3 at the same time. noone to blame for that but Anet. queues and culling are a result of flaws in design or server limitations. as it is, only a fraction of the server population can play w3 at any given time.

it is not something that ‘could/should/might be improved upon’. queues and culling simply shouldn’t excist. nothing short of the totall elimination from queues and culling is acceptable.

16 GB ram + 2 GB of ram on the vid card ? otherwise it makes no sense whatsoever indeed :p and yes, i5 3570k is just as good for gaming as i7 3770k and saves enough cash for a cooling system that allows 4.5 ghz comfortably.

Oozo.7856:

In other games your graphics would lag in zergy situations. This game opts to make players invisible until your system catches up.

i can asure you it’s not my computer that has to do the catching up. if i don’t see people, it’s not because my computer has to load a texture or anything that i could possible notice, it’s because my computer isn’t told that it has to render something.

http://valid.canardpc.com/2658314

i have culling at 90+ fps at times. i don’t lag in a meaningfull way. some people have computers that can render 100’s of people and keep 30+ fps.

“This game opts to make players invisible until your system catches up.”

i think you are clueless.

foofad.5162:

Holdyir.2918:

Remember when you had to que up to get in to the frontier or Thid for DAOC? Yeah I don’t either…. Crazy to think that a game over a decade old could handle RvR so much better than GW2.

Rose tinted goggles. The lag was absolutely abysmal, too.

i prefer lag over queues and culling anyday. point is DAoC had no caps on population apart from 3500 people on a server at once. i have led 500+ in relic raids. and half of the lag issues in DAoC were caused by internetproviders using dodgy traffic shaping.

if there are queues, it means that the w3 area is not big enough, doesn’t have enough server resources.

make the kitten maps bigger and hold 500 people from each side instead of those small copy paste jobs that hold too few people.

my point seems unclear. i don’t whine about it being to hard or anything, contrary. i find it too easy, too meaningless, having nothing to do with w3, and one thing, the crafting, i simply can’t be bothered with. doing pve is bad enough, but crafting is a no-no.

i don’t expect culling to improve in a meaningfull way untill the shiny hardware upgrades Habib mentioned earlier are in place and the ‘magic number’ can be increased without bringing the whole thing down.

tkalamba.2541:

Every single one of those can easily be done in WvW….

Cap a tower? Bam, there’s one event done. How about taking a sentry? There’s another.

While moving between objectives, you can grab all your resources and take care of the gatherings, which on average give you 3 per node.

Dodge? I would assume you’re already doing this in WvW.

Veterans? Don’t camp guards, tower guards and whatnot all count as vets? Capturing a tower alone should probably fill that out pretty quickly.

yes, my point exactly. there is nothing in it that requires me to even see an enemy player, let alone kill one. and there is … crafting. i can only conclude that i thought that the laurel gear was the w3 gear they talked about but i was wrong.

The new gear that one can buy with laurels. great, another way to get that shiny fractal equivalent gear that w3 players can only dream of. but oh woe, it doesn’t come at the cost of badges. as a mather of fact you need a new currency. you need to do dailies for this currency.

today it says :

5 veterans
15 attacks dodged
10 items crafted
20 gatherings
5 events

what a joke. 4 pve tasks and … one crafting ? nothing w3 related ? this clearly is not the gear they promised we would be able to get via w3 and it certainly is not a w3 based character progression system but a completely unconnected set of gear.

now that that misunderstanding is gone, i can only say i am looking forward to the w3 gear and char progression in february.

Acelerion.6820:

Anet just needs to get it over with and put “arrow cart” in the class selection list.

or make it a weapon selection … i’m switching from dagger/dagger to arrow cart. reminds me of an armsmen who claimed to have specced 50 rams/50 pour oil /26 dodge oil. :p

killeraled.1950:

oh take a look at this guys this is just an ordinery camp :P

i don’t get it. one necro and maybe a second or even a third player ? explain pls.

ofc there is w3 ballance.

there is nothing your enemy can do that you can’t do yourself if you would play the same class. the enemy doesn’t have races or classes or abilities that your realm doesn’t have.

Cradorell.3941:

I think your thinking is broken of course there’s going to be a limit! So there will be a queue. Ofc if u don’t like it move to a lower tier! Lmao

why ’ofc there is going to a be a limit" ? from a player pov i find it unacceptable. i payed for this game.

just imagine for one second that on every server there could only be 25 fractal instances at the same time and only 125 players in totall could do fractals at the same time at any given time and that there are queues to enter fractals. i would find that equally unacceptable.

Embrace The Bold.7619:

Ninein.4782:

Be interesting what queue times are for the T1/T2 servers during Friday reset.

I’m on SoS and EB can take up to an hour for que BL take less than 10 minutes if there is a que. But that’s just me others are not so lucky.

As to your Q.Q about queue (hehe) OP, it’s not that bad if you’re doing pve or playing around in the BL waiting for EB. My only gripe is having to be queued only for one area >.>

logging on, finding my guild spread over the 4 zones and unable to bring them all together and having queues for all 4 zones is a game killer.

FACT is that only a small percentage of the totall player base of all but the dead servers can play at the same time in w3.

cesmode.4257:

muylaetrix.2096:

when will they be removed ? as long as not every player on the server can be in w3 at the same time i consider it broken.

can you imagine the game telling you you have queue to enter a fractal or other dungeon ? would you find that acceptable ?

and don’t get me started about culling…

They won’t be removed. They have said time and time again, player experience above all…noone likes a laggy game.

And get ready for massive queues for Tiers 1 through 3. Massive..2hour+ like the ones we saw when the game first launched. When I was on SBI, I remember queueing at 8pm, and when I signed off near 11pm, I still hadn’t gotten into wvw.

You can thank the paid transfer announcement and all of the guilds that jumped ship. Massive queues and zergs incoming…I’ll enjoy being outmanned on my server, but getting into WvW whenever I want, and having more strategical, team work based gameplay…

I don’t want to go through the effort of posting a pic, but if you have seen the remake of “The day the earth stood still” with Keenu Reeves…the micro-robotic swarm at the end, GORT, is what all of these servers will be like. Regardless what they say “Oh we work as a team”…as one bigass group. I call it a zerg!

having to queue kills my game experience. i’m sorry you don’t like zergs, but i do.

Waffler.1257:

muylaetrix.2096:

Waffler.1257:

Except that WvW isn’t instanced.

i thought that everything in this game is instanced. every single zone is an instance as far as i’m concerned. being able to walk from rata sum to iron marches without zoning would be an open world.

Sorry, but you’re mistaken. If you leave a zone and re-enter it, it doesn’t reset. All the same events are going on, all the boss monsters you killed are still dead, all the resource nodes you mined are still empty. It is a persistent world (the same conditions that were in place when you left will continue to persist when you return), which is the opposite of instanced. WvW is no different.

ok, according to your defenition, i would call it a huge lump of persistant instances, but not an open world.

in my ‘phrase book’, any location that has a limit on the number of players is an instance.

DAoC has/d an open world moddel. you can walk from one side of the world to another side of the world without ever zoning. servers used to have a 3500 player limit and guess what, it could get all 3500 players in the same sub-square of the world map.

in GW2, instead of 1 open wold map consisting of multiple map squares that are connected without zoning, that can contain the entire player base, you have 1 + (1 × 3) individual maps, each with a player cap.

Waffler.1257:

Except that WvW isn’t instanced.

i thought that everything in this game is instanced. every single zone is an instance as far as i’m concerned. being able to walk from rata sum to iron marches without zoning would be an open world.

when will they be removed ? as long as not every player on the server can be in w3 at the same time i consider it broken.

can you imagine the game telling you you have queue to enter a fractal or other dungeon ? would you find that acceptable ?

and don’t get me started about culling…

makes you wonder if culling exists because Anet is soo kitten cheap on THEIR hardware or because they don’t like the popularity of w3 and want us all to crawl in instances that are resource friendlier for their hardware.

My guess,

-February,
-It will cost a gazillion badges and
-Anet will consider character progression for w3 ‘done’ instead of giving a real character progression system (aka not gear based).

shadowsoul.2134:

in my opinion, the biggest problems are free transfers and nightcapping!!

But it’s still an amazing game!!!

my reasoning why they are not problems.

a) free servers allow w3 players to leave dead servers or servers with a mainly pve crowd that can’t offer the kind of w3 experience they want without having to pay for it. it would suck to make a character, invest time in it, and then find yourself severely limited in your play options because you chose the wrong server at start and had to make a new character on a different server or had to pay for transfer. but i’m sure it has a lot of bad effects as well.

b) the moment you leave a tower / keep / camp, you forfeit everything you did there. you do a one time investment to buy an upgrade and it stays there as long as you defend it, and if you are lucky it might even stay there for some time. if you are not willing/unable to defend them, that’s it, simple. i upgrade stuff that i know i will defend untill i log or get kicked out. if i upgrade something and move away from there for whatever reason, i forfeit my upgrades in my opinion.

Zeroumus.5402:

i agree that in general, game programmers seemed to have dropped the ball with being able to handle more players with equipment that is much better than it was 10-15 years ago.

to be fair however, one must consider that just because a machine is 10X faster than one 10 years ago, does not mean that can translate into 10X more players if they keep all game features the same. The problem is actually an exponential one

if we simply give servers a 10X increase in network bandwidth, could they handle 10x more players? The answer is both yes and no.

yes if you consider running 10x more instances where players have no interactivity with each other.

but the answer becomes NO if you want them all to be in the same room. This happens because the bandwidth needs increase on 2 fronts. the first need is from the extra players themselves, but the 2nd is that the server needs to send more info to each client about the state of those extra players. so if each player generates about 5k/s of info inbound and there is 100 players near by, then the server needs to send each player upwards of 500 k/s of info, or 50 meg/s total. if we increase the players to 150 while still at 5k/s, total server output could peak at 1.1g/s. at 200 players, server output would be around 2g/s. Every time you double the player count, your bandwidth usage could go up 4×.

5k of info for each player ? that seems like an extravagantly large amount of data when you consider that for a character standing still and doing nothing as little as 8 bytes (2 bytes for ID, 2 bytes for x, y and z location) could be enough. the first time your computer learns about a character, it probably needs to be told more stuff like the skins and dyes, but that data only has to be send once. all the rest are just updates to location, boons, curses, action being undertaken, wounds.. an amount of data that probably is closer to 50 bytes than to 1 k.

if i remember well, there was a cap of 200 people in a chat group in daoc. we once had to start a third chat group in Odin alone because the first two were full. it filled half, that means Albion had roughly 500 players in Odin at that moment. add the Hibernia and Midgard players and you had about 1k players in that zone. that was in 2002. raid leaders were yelling constantly to people to disable their guild cloacks to reduce the amount of textures used even with only a small amount. most people had to play with spell effects set to ‘self’. (for the EU players) Add the woes of the horrible Open Transit in France that routed people all round Europe in incomprehensible ways towards the servers in France … it worked.

it’s hard to understand why 10 years later Anet seems unable to do a fraction of that.

Suun.2856:

How to Reduce Culling.

To reduce culling, or even remove culling, Anet need to reduce how much data is needed to be sent to the client. The following are some examples;
Enemy are seen as a single type of creature (a single race type),
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s dye selections,
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s armor,
Stop sending data relating to each individual enemy’s weapons.

Make all the enemy the same creature model (while accounting for class) without all the pretty details (that each individual selects and modifies to their own taste) that we currently have.

After that, Anet only needs to tell me about ’playerXXXX" given the low amount of players on each map, this can all be reduced of 1 byte of information (for the purpose of identification) as the amount of players your side has on the map is lower than 255 or 2 bytes if all players of the 3 servers are in one pool.

Anet’s priority seems to display a selection in full shinny glory above displaying everything at lower graphic settings. is the fear for non impresive screenshots which might hurt sales bigger than the game experience of current users ? is it more important to clearly show the legendary weapons than to show everyone ?

culling should not exit ! Anet seems to fiddle around with some settings and hope that people one day say “hey, this is slightly better” and the people grow complacent about culling while Anet should be trying to get rid of culling.

sounds good.

now give me a w3 character advancement system and 2 replacement maps for 2 of the 3 identical borderlands in february and i’ll be impressed. a bit of variety in the terrain would be nice. something like a forest covering half the map would allow for some completely different sorts of play instead of the small open places between cliffs and funnels that make roaming hard and zerging easy.

papacooldown.9482:

… but are we entirely sure that the bottleneck is on the server or network side? Has anet come out and stated such?

i can think of reasons why Anet would never explicitly say so.

papacooldown.9482:

The reason i ask is because this type of information is very easy to serialize and/or compress before being sent to the client. In fact when you compare the task of getting game data to thousands of players to something we are familiar with and happens every day like getting a video stream out to millions, the overhead (both network and system) does seem pretty minuscule.

getting 1 stream out to millions of people at the same time is not the big(gest) deal. getting millions of different streams to millions of people at the same time is a bigger issue. the overhead of every single one individually is neglectable.

papacooldown.9482:

From my understanding the bottleneck is at the client end between receiving the data and attempting to load textures and render. Culling is just the workaround to otherwise super low fps in large encounters afaik.

in 2001-2003 there was such a thing as ’incomming lag!" yell on teamspeak when some of the group members could notice a slight stutter for half a second when their machines loaded textures. this lag happened BEFORE the enemies came in visual range and people with decent machines never noticed it. having someone with a bad computer in the group gave a sort of 5 second warning before you ran into the enemy (or never found them). that was then. and yes, like Habib Loew says, there is a non zero time needed to load a texture. non zero is very, very small.

an i7 3770k is 100 mhz faster than an i5 3570k at standard clocks (it’s a almost a crime imho to leave those beauties at standard clock speed anyway). ‘maybe’ a game exist where the i7 has a more than 3 % framerate lead on the i5 (the 100 mhz diff) at the standard clock speeds, but i haven’t heared of a game like that yet and i don’t expect any game to do it anytime soon.

go with the i5 3570k, save 100 bucks on the cpu and spend it maybe somewhere else like an (bigger) ssd, more expensive graphics card, better cpu cooler (than the standard intel one), …

the w3 jumping puzzles are one of the most fun things in GW2.

“schadenfreude”

i clocked my 3570k at 4.8 ghz (1.485 volt) … and temperature stays below 95 °C over the course of 12 hours of prime95 (ivvy bridges throtle at 105 °C). ingame (gw2) the cpu is at 65-70 C°. i wouldn’t advice to try this with a standard cooler.

the termal grease instead of solder used by intel to make contact between they cpu die and the heat spreader (i think it’s that what you are refering to) has raised some eyebrows on some of the hardcore pc hardware review sites but i consider it a non issue.

http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=2585881

a) i5+ > amd
b) ghz > cores/threads

i5 3570k overlocks slightly higher than i7 3770k.

afaik, for the prupose of GW2, i5=i7, when all other conditions are equal.

as long as Anet runs the servers on C64’s who are hooked up to the ’internrz" via chimps with morse code…

Suun.2856:

@ muylaetrix.2096
So my suggestion, just above yours was not a good one?

Anet have to reduce data sent (as suggested above) AND turn off server side culling.

Things to get rid of in data sent to clients;
Race
6 x armor items (from a huge selection)
4 x dye selection per armor item (from a huge selection)
1 to 4 weapons (from a huge selection)
Multiplied by the number of enemy in location

Replace with;
No server side culling
1 single enemy model per server (all enemy from a server looks the same)
Standard weapon models (1 per type)
Multiplied by the number of enemy in location

Think that reduces network data requirements.

Anet has to disable culling. performance optimization (adjusting graphic settings) should happen on the client. Anet should not try to ‘best guess’ what characters that are close it should tell me about. They should tell me about EVERYONE close.

the main REAL reason for culling (imho) is that without culling there happen situations where ALL the relevant data for everyone exceeds the output capacity of the servers/Anet internet connection. therefore they allocate a sort of max of bandwith on the amount of data send to each individual player. with current test they try to fiddle around in what exactly is send to each client, but they didn’t chance the totall amount of data send to each client.

untill they can increase the amount of data they send to each individual player (which might require upgrades to their server park/network connection), culling is here to stay.

in situatations where a huge number of players are involved, the servers needs to send significantly more information than when the same amount of players are not close to eachother. let me try to illustrate with numbers (the numbers are totally made up). first let me define a ‘piece of information’ as all the date your client needs to display a player, this includes amongst other things a person x,y,z location, his facing, his speed, his visible equipment, the action that he is performing, the buffs and debuffs on him, etc …

when you have 200 players spread out in 20 instances of 5 vs 5, the server has to send 10 pieces of info to 10 players, multiplied by 20 instances = a totall of 2 000 pieces of info for the 200 players. the hamsters happely run in the hamster wheel.

when you have 200 players in w3 or on a dragon or one time event the server has to give 200 players 200 pieces of info. that’s a totall of 40 000 pieces of info the server has to send to 200 players. the less said about the demise of the rodents, the better.

a lot of people still don’t seem to understand what culling means and how it works. culling is what happens if the client is not notified of a player’s presence when the client should see the player. you can’t put ‘only a name plate’ or ‘a simple model’ on something that doesn’t exist according to your client. there is a limit to the amount of players that the server tells you about. current trial fix was nothing more than changing the ratio of friends / foes that server tells you about, but the server still only tells you about XX players. culling can only go away by vastly increasing the amount of players that the server tells the client about and might require infrastructure upgrades from Anet side. only after that the server tells you about ALL the players you should be able to see, does it make sense to use options like ‘only name tags’, ‘simple moddels’, ‘spell effects self only’ etc.

hm, first you down him, then you kill him (yay, nice animation, jumping in the air and staking and all that), then you should be able to force respawn him (i can only shiver in joy at graphics of brutally ripping the corpse in pieces, yes, yes)

;)

Account.9832:

What he said was the the problem would only be fixed “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and / or network bandwith upgrades”.

hm

>>can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ?

hm

english isn’t my first language, but your representation of my phrase seems a bit ‘off’ in my apreciation. let me try to clarify. i used a rethoric question to state that it is my opinion that the core issue with culling can be found in the inability from the Anet server side of the equation to send out all the requiered data to everyone during events that have loads of players in them, and that fixing it might involve upgrading their network bandwith and/or switching and/or load balancing and/or processing power.

>>>>>Then he said the game never uses more than 1% of his bandwidth (which seems a number pulled out of some anal cavity, but let’s ignore that for now and assume he actually measured it accurately, that the packets didn’t get chopped up and resequenced by some node along the way, that the bandwidth wasn’t averaged out over several seconds, etc.).

even the less tech savvy amongst us can do some simple checks. windows taskmanager tells me that i use around 0.02 % !!! of my network bandwith to play GW2 and it goes to 30-32 % when using a torrent at full capacity (3.3 mbyte/s). do you really want me to measure the amount of kb that my client receives over a fixed period in a way that could withstand your scrutiny ?

>>>>>…Since there are noticeable delays and culling problems even in battles with less than half that many players, that can only mean (if his statements are correct) that Arena Net’s servers have half the bandwidth of his residential connection (or less).

your logic and mathemathics baffle me.

>>>>>>And that (along with the notion that the issue can be magically fixed “by the financial department”, that presumably refuses to do so due to greed) strikes me as a very silly theory, coming from someone who doesn’t have much (or any) experience in networking code development.

having tried to further explain some of my view, i scincerely and humbly await any further sign of that indeed such need for even further clarification exists and can only hope that more people share valuable insights.

Visiroth.5914:

No, he’s suggesting that the maximum bandwidth of the server allocated to an individual client is nowhere near saturating his somewhat standard broadband connection. Habib even explicitly states that they are limiting bandwidth consumption by BOTH server and client with the sever side culling. To me that sounds like it is both an optimization for the client resources, as well as the server resources.

cripling every client by not sending the required info to everyone seems like worst possible idea to resolve issues that might affect a few people, asuming ofcourse the server is able to send all that data.

if they send not enough info, 100 % of people are afected.

if they send all the ‘info’ , then, maybe, some clients network bandwith will be flooded and he will experience lag, framerate loss,… , but for most people who don’t rely on manual morse code for their networking needs, this is a non issue.

there are of course the chances that some low spec clients would be unable to process/render all the info that it receives. unfortunately this game has so few graphic options that allow us to degrade the visuals, that tuning the performance from the client side is not as usefull and efficient as it could be. i think loads of people their game experience would increase a lot if there was the possibility to downgrade the quality of the models, turn of spell effects, turn of all ambient things (especially that cursed, loot bag hiding grass !) etc… from a minimum spec, frame rate is life, point of view, if i see the target is A) asuran b) wears cloth c) has two daggers, then i don’t kittening care about the rest ! i don’t need to see the details of his face, i don’t need to see the exact colloring of his skin, i don’t need to see that he is a slightly below average length but fat representative of his race, as long as i can see it’s an asuran. i don’t need to see exactly what skin of armor he is wearing as long as i can see it’s cloth and not plate. i don’t need to see what dungeons he has farmed to get the skin of his weapon, as long as i see it’s a dagger and not a 2h sword. why will Anet not allow low spec users to downgrade their graphics that far ? are they more concerned with bland screenshots and ‘yikes’ comments from low spec user screenshots on the internet than by the player experience they are trying to offer ?

for the record, i have a decent gaming computer, i get rolled by invisible zergs at maxed out settings in glorious 60+ fps. large groups of people who rush in my direction can sometimes have dozens disapear while moving to me and reapear many seconds later over my dead corpse without even dropping a frame, which is even stranger because these are guys that my client was aware of and then loses awareness of while they never went out of my ‘view’.

>>can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ? […] Anet has never come close to 1 % of my downstream capacity (a modest 15mbit).

<<So what you are saying is that, if there are any delays in battles with less than 100 players (and there are), then Arena Net’s servers’ connection must have lower bandwidth than yours.

>>no, that’s not what i am saying.

<<I have a feeling that’s not the case. And I have a feeling you don’t have much experience writing (semi-)real-time multi-client netcode or profiling the impact of data spikes on things like firewall CPU usage, etc..

>>i admit i have absolutely no experience with programming real-time multi-client netcode. i do have ccna1-4 and many other networking related certifications and have worked for 20 years in IT and IT related bussines. don’t be condecending about people you know nothing about.

<<In short, even a small increase in allowable bandwidth peaks can have a significant impact on performance and network choke (which can require resyncing, and so on), and there’s very little that the “financial department” can do to fix the WvW issues (other than maybe headhunting some programmers with more experience in the field – but it would probably take them a while to find their way around GW2’s current code, so that’s not a short-term solution, either).

>>i all too well realize that the amount of data that the server has to send us when 100 players are fighting eachtother is substantially larger than when you have 10 instances with 10 people each. in the first case, 100 players have to receive data about 100 players. to make it easy, the server has to send out 10 000 pieces of information for those 100 players. now, in the case of the 10 times 10 players, the computer has to send 10 player infos to 10 player, multiplied by 10 instances, for a totall of 1000 pieces of info. so, during the same amount of time the 100 players in w3 will (.. /can at times) consume 10 times the server upload resources than the 100 players in their 10 × 10 instances.

to me it ‘seems’ that the Anet serverpark can cope with the small instances fine and is ‘underpowered’ to cope with large scale events (both pve and w3). to compensate for insufficient upstream from the ‘server’, the server tries to make a selection of ‘relevant’ info to send to each client in order not to exceed it’s ‘quota’ of available upstream, and it’s that ‘selection’ of info creates most of the culling issue… imho

<<It’s mainly a software (netcode / game architecture) issue. Throwing more hardware at it on Arena Net’s end wouldn’t magically fix things.

>>what i do is ask questions and phrase thoughts, being very clear that they are asumptions and educated guesses. you state ‘facts’ with the certitude of revelation.

i’m trying to make up my mind if this post is serious or not.

anyway. i think the network bug you describe can be traced to the client of the downed player where the user pressed alt-f4 by accident at that very moment.

… reminds me of the first time i got wtfpwnd in Emain by an aparantly helpless Defender … ( daoc had a w3 ‘ranking’ system where someone who had never ever received the equivalent of a single badge got the tag ‘invader’ or ‘defender’ above it’s head, depending whetever he was in a home or enemy zone. somehow that tag/title reset to that status when you exceeded cap rank… untill they increased the cap and added an extra rank, providing much anguish and hilarity. completely next to the point and only relevant on the subject of being misguided/deceived by the tag above someones head etc, but it is sure was WTF ! back then :p

Account.9832:

muylaetrix.2096:

can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ?

Unless they can also upgrade the hardware and ISP connection of every player, as well as the hardware and bandwidth of every node between every player and the game server, no.

It can never be 100% “fixed” because there’s always the possibility that the amount of data generated by a large battle will exceed the bandwidth and processing available to the server and / or some of the clients and / or some of the intermediate nodes.

But it can be improved and made “fairer” by changing a few things (see my post above this one).

intermediate bandwith : in 2001, ’02, ’03 intermediate nodes were an issue for a lot of players, true. now this should no longer be an issue for people in Central Europe playing on an European server. these days, if you log in from a banana republic via dial-in, too bad if you expereince some lag/warping, for almost every other user, it is a non issue.

client bandwith : i think it’s safe to asume that 95% of the players no longer play with an analogue modem and that the downstream i received from Anet has never come close to 1 % of my downstream capacity (a modest 15mbit). for almost every user, this is a non issue

Server side bandwith/capacity : the thing Anet will never ever discus.

cllient side rendering : that’s where graphics options are for.

can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ?

Choppalong.3284:

..In saying that im sure ive probably left 1000 bags laying around ..seriously like im going hunt for my bag in the thick of war ..Loot systems sorta suxs nuts

This !

80 necro, 8k kills, would have been about 1500 badges if i had not spend so much on siege :/ i can not think of a slower way to get into full exotic gear than playing w3.

whatever class with stealth or permanent speed will do.

i roam with my necro, but i need the warhorn for locust swarm, spectral walk and some traits to increase duration and/or reduce cooldown to get non stop overlapping speed.

i think content works a bit differently in wvw than for pve. in terms of pve content, people think about new maps, new dungeons, new gear,…

new maps in wvw ? i think REPLACING 2 of the 3 identical maps would be a good idea, having them very specifically themed like having a half map covered in a huge forest would be neat, … I’m not sure i want MORE maps, but getting 4 genuinly different maps instead of 1+1x3 isn’t too much to ask imho. and i’m not asking that anet shuffles the location of towers and keeps a few pixels. different maps.

new dungeons in wvw ? i wouldn’t mind a Darkness Falls or Passage of Conflict or Labyrinth of the Minotaurs type of dungeon (those were w3 dungeons in dark age of camelot. brutal places)

new gear in w3 ? i strongly dislike mmo’s that introduce generation of generation of new gear that makes all old gear obsolete. i wouldn’t mind new gear with odd stat combinations like a 2h weapon that only had ,says, power stat on it instead of, says, power/prec/ cit%, or some new sigils and runes.

so, what is the sort of content that i am missing and that i would like anet to add to the game ?

- a pvp advancement system that is NOT a gear threadmill. something like the Dark Age of Camelot realm ranks.

- updated user interface/chat log. the chat log is utter rubbish and crap for w3 purpose.

i want to be able to see every single point of damage and healing that i take or do in it. not just a little selecection of it. i have been killed before in w3 in open field with an empty chatlog. according to chatlog i had not taken any damage. rediculous.

i want to see in the /m " player X was killed by player Y" for every death that happens in the zone in a ‘random’ place and “X was killed by Y in/near ZZZ” where ZZZ is a notable terrain feature like a fort / tower / suply camp.

i want to see in /m “the forces of ‘server name’ have taken control of ZZZ”

i want to see in /m “(guilndame) has taken control of ZZZ” EDIT/ADDITION : after a guild claims a tower/fort/keep.

i want to see in /g “a guard of (location name of place claimed by your guild) was killed with ‘number’ of enemies in the area”

- i want more grouping options. combining 4 groups of 5 man each in to a 20 man warband like in Rift was very neat and usefull.

- the ability to make alliances of guilds that share an /alliance channel would be apreciated.

- the abililty for players to make private chat channels that need to be joined and/or can be locked would be great. especially for commanders.

-the ability to identify enemy players.
you target ‘playername’
your ‘effectname’ hits ‘playername’ for xxx damage
’playername’s’ ‘effectname’ hits you for xxx damage

etc

because the puzzles are resources worth guarding and worth fighting for. they offer unique landscape that offer very interesting options to fight. from a camper’s point of view, the puzzles are ideal camping locations. they offer far more chance on one vs one or very small scale fighting than ‘out in the open’. i like fighting there. why should one not fight there ?

edit, and it reminds me a bit of Darkness Falls… oh, the good times in Darkness Falls

oh DAOC had it’s new frontier and new-new fronteer.

i can only hope that the 3 identical zones were a place holder that was ‘good enough to launch’ and that we’ll get 2 brand new remplacement zones any time soon.

just like i can only hope that we’ll get a w3 advancement system (realm rank like !, not gear grind pls) anytime soon. seen how the advancement systems in almost any other game after DAOC have been horrible, i can imagine that ANet decided to launch the game without it and collect 3 months worth of data to calculate what the effects would have been in gains and advancement speeds of people if it would have been in place. that would prevent having to drastically alter some variables in it if some of their guesses would have proven wrong. avoiding the sort of mistake like "we expected noone to reach max rank in less than a year, but now we found that after 2 weeks some people reached max rank and now we need to change everything because it’s having unballancing effects’ is important.

repairing siege with supply would be great.

also, in daoc, if you destroyed a warmachine, it ‘dropped’ some of the supply that went into building the warmachine. that would be another fine concept they could borrow from daoc :p

and as someone else mentioned above, give a use for karma in w3 as currency !

i’m all for beinga ble to identify the enemy i have targetted and all that (just like any other game i have played). i never understood why i could talk to my enemies in this game (unlike any ohter game i have played). give names and disable chat with enemies. that simple.

and i see a lot of time “yes, but this is gw2, get used to it”. that almost sounds like religious statement. noone is infalible, not everything arenanet does is without mistakes. nothing should be a dogma. everything must be open to scrutiny. everything can be changed. not everything in which GW2 wanted to be ‘different’ than the rest is ‘better’.

They took a lot of inspiration from Mythic’s DAOC. i aplaud that. they should have borowwed just a few more things from it. you can not imagine just how much ANet took inspiration from DAOC to make w3, without having played DAOC.

people seem to forget that in DAOC AE damage spells could a) only be casted while standing still, b) had base casting time of 2.5 – 3 seconds, c) were interupted if you took damage, d) had AE-dropoff (reduction in damage the further of the center of the target/cast).

and yes a handfull of AE damage specialist casters with some suport could wipe zergs. it was not common, but it was always spectacular to do/experience, or read in area chat :p

… and only 30 people fights, lol. “a guard was kill at Bledmeer Faste with 500 enemies in the area”.