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WvW Performance and Map Cap Testing


Cal Cohen.2358

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It is good to see you focusing on things that matters. Thumbs up.

My only reservation is the same that Panicbutton put on page 1. Even if he put it in rather aggressive terms I would say it is a post well worth reading. There are alot of fences to be mended with this mode and even if it is really good to see you guys focusing on things that can improve performance: Performance is only one of three-four very fundamental and rather sizable issues that this game mode has been bleeding from for years.

  • Performance is fundamental
  • Some sort of tolerable balance is fundamental
  • Being able to play with your friends, form guilds and recruit is fundamental (Alliances)
  • Having scoring actually reflect outcomes in balanced encounters (rather than who has more players, covering more timezones) is also fundamental

While very nice to see, I really hope that these initiatives towards a balance effort that finally also takes WvW into consideration and a look at performance is not something that you or the company that you represent now believe to be enough to mend those fences. This mode has been overlooked for so long that all these problems are, well, fundamental.

None of these things or something equivalent would be acceptable in any of the other game modes in this game. If PvE had 15-second desynchs, entire classes that were not let into groups regardless of build, friends/guildies couldn't get onto the same maps without paying gems or if rewards at the end of an encounter were given to the wrong people or group, then you would surely be hearing of it and I doubt that it would take you year upon year to remedy.

It is embarrasing to see the extent to which they have been accepted for WvW.

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@Rasp Sabreblade.5421 said:Lower map cap- unlink servers and groups who can’t get in will move to server’s they can play on

Are you on EU by any chance? Just saying from the perspective of an NA player, there is NOT enough population for this to be viable. Some of the biggest server pairings on NA will have maybe 1 map queue during primetime (not counting reset). Separating servers will kill the game for a large number of people.

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@Sombike.6291 said:As far as lag, in big fights the server who initiates the fight wont have lag, the one who reacts will have lag, all the damage (mostly condition ticks) calculationsSomething only loosely related to this: I remember before the february changes that I suggested looking into conditions and boons on a per-skill level. One thing that distinctly differs vanilla from present-day balance is that there has been so much effect-inflation on abilities. Things that in vanilla applied one condition now apply two or three, or a combination of direct damage, a condition and a boon. That has to be so much more information to send back, forth and process in a short timeframe between clients and server. I don't pretend to know how GW2's infrastructure looks but it would be a logical assumption that such an inflation in calculations needing to be both sent, received and processed or stemmed off on two ends can cause alot of bottlenecks. Assuming that to be true, then sheer balance could actually have a significant impact on performance as well. Not to mention that less of a spam of conditions and boons or more of a frugal application of them would also be more fun (or were).

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Addressing lag is nice. How about looking into ways to avoid hour plus queues?

Edit: I've been 1 in queue for nearly 40 mins with a discord of people still wanting inEdit 2: I've been 1 in queue for 60 mins with a discord of people of still wanting in. At this rate some people are on track for multi hour queue.

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@Simo.6819 said:EOTM and OS are a thing for fights bvb etc , reality is that noone wants to go there cuz theres no reward , those bvb in OS actually had better server performance than the ones on border...

Yea totally.

I remember when Scrapper rework WvW update, people were packed on everymap that there were huge skirmishes on EotM.It was fun as heck but yea no pips.

They should put pips back into EotM tbh.

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Player caps need to be reduced all the way down to 40-50 per side on every map, especially EBG. You should never have more than one squad's worth of people on a map. If people want to play with each other they can go to another map.

It sounds harsh, but you can't guide balance around people's feelings, thats how we ended up here. There's plenty of maps in the game mode and only like 1-2 get played at any given time, and that's not even taking into account possibilities like reviving EoTM.

The solution to maps being full is to add more copies or more alternatives, just like PvE, not keep trying to shove people in.

Please take extreme actions to fix this game mode instead of "a little salt here, a little sugar there".

@Rasp Sabreblade.5421 said:Lower map cap- unlink servers and groups who can’t get in will move to server’s they can play onThere's not enough people on NA to unlink servers, if anything we need triple links on T2/T3 and T4 eliminated entirely. We hit a map queue about once a week, around reset time, and only on EBG and maybe one Borderlands. And being a link server, I've been linked with something like half the NA servers, and trust me it doesn't change much through the tiers.

Aside from a few really active servers like Mag, WvW is mostly dead on NA.

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@"Hannelore.8153" said:Player caps need to be reduced all the way down to 40-50 per side on every map, especially EBG. You should never have more than one squad's worth of people on a map. If people want to play with each other they can go to another map.

It sounds harsh, but you can't guide balance around people's feelings, thats how we ended up here. There's plenty of maps in the game mode and only like 1-2 get played at any given time, and that's not even taking into account possibilities like reviving EoTM.

The solution to maps being full is to add more copies or more alternatives, just like PvE, not keep trying to shove people in.

Please take extreme actions to fix this game mode instead of "a little salt here, a little sugar there".

@Rasp Sabreblade.5421 said:Lower map cap- unlink servers and groups who can’t get in will move to server’s they can play onThere's not enough people on NA to unlink servers, if anything we need triple links on T2/T3 and T4 eliminated entirely. We hit a map queue about once a week, around reset time, and only on EBG and maybe one Borderlands. And being a link server, I've been linked with something like half the NA servers, and trust me it doesn't change much through the tiers.

Aside from a few really active servers like Mag, WvW is mostly dead on NA.

I think if players stack on one server with less map cap, then, they will spread on other servers. Because they can't play with their fav commander on a queued bl.

But I suppose your correct in reducing tiers, simply so eotm gets love again maybe give it same rewards as wvw but cut by half.

Ideally for fun a team ought to have 50 players per server at all times. Not per map. 50 is good enough and fun and then from there people can sort themselves

I remember in the past we had commanders specializing in alpine or eb or desert.

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any sort of major fix to lag will have to include an aoe overhaul. theres way too much of it and the expacs made it worse and worse. i suggested something a while ago where you reduce the duration of normal 5 sec aoe to 2 sec and increase potency. someone else theorized that watchtowers were causing some lag. if they are remove the anti stealth mechanics from towers and sentries, and gimmicks from castles. fix the actual stealth builds at their source. remove multi hit aoe entirely or reduce it severely on most skills (such as whirling wrath, barrage etc.) i would aim for nothing over 3-5 or so hits, and try to make most normal aoe not hit more then 1 time per sec. thats just for starters. then you can think about aaaallllll the bloated multi effect skills, the ones pumping out condis, boons, damage, aoe, heals all at once. that stuff is horrid. for some aoe maybe even go so far as completely remove damage or support aspects to them, the biggest example and offenders are guard symbols. make them do one thing or the other and make them good at it. the point is that they won't do aoe checks for both allies and enemies at the same time. thats pretty much it, good luck man this game can be a lasting legacy with the right pair of caring hands.

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@Stand The Wall.6987 said:any sort of major fix to lag will have to include an aoe overhaul. theres way too much of it and the expacs made it worse and worse. i suggested something a while ago where you reduce the duration of normal 5 sec aoe to 2 sec and increase potency. someone else theorized that watchtowers were causing some lag. if they are remove the anti stealth mechanics from towers and sentries, and gimmicks from castles. fix the actual stealth builds at their source. remove multi hit aoe entirely or reduce it severely on most skills (such as whirling wrath, barrage etc.) i would aim for nothing over 3-5 or so hits, and try to make most normal aoe not hit more then 1 time per sec. thats just for starters. then you can think about aaaallllll the bloated multi effect skills, the ones pumping out condis, boons, damage, aoe, heals all at once. that stuff is horrid. for some aoe maybe even go so far as completely remove damage or support aspects to them, the biggest example and offenders are guard symbols. make them do one thing or the other and make them good at it. the point is that they won't do aoe checks for both allies and enemies at the same time. thats pretty much it, good luck man this game can be a lasting legacy with the right pair of caring hands.

I think the reason they don't want to reduce AoE is because GW2 has a bad single-player targeting system. Because of this the devs have used area skills as a crutch ever since the game's release, especially in healing skills. Mechanics like stealth make the existing single-player targeting system even worse than usual, creating artificial difficulty in fights that should be relatively straightforward.

Compare it to any other PvP/RvR game, it has 10x the area skills compared to single-target. Though I will say area skills are necessary for zerg-busting, but in GW they don't work for that because they're too weak and have target caps (another story..).

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@Hannelore.8153 said:I think the reason they don't want to reduce AoE is because GW2 has a bad single-player targeting system. Because of this the devs have used area skills as a crutch ever since the game's release, especially in healing skills. Mechanics like stealth make the existing single-player targeting system even worse than usual, creating artificial difficulty in fights that should be relatively straightforward.

Compare it to any other PvP/RvR game, it has 10x the area skills compared to single-target. Though I will say area skills are necessary for zerg-busting, but in GW they don't work for that because they're too weak and have target caps (another story..).

maybe you didn't fully read what i said, single target is not part of the equation.

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Just finished Reset. No one really noticed any lag. HOWEVER, we had massive queues. Half my Guild ended up in queue. same with the other guilds across all maps. No possibility to switch maps as all had huge queues. People had to wait over an hour before even one person in queue was able to come in. Add to the fact that many people wait 30-60 minutes before reset for reset. This is what really needs to be addressed and fixed. Many people were upset and frustrated about the queues.

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In terms of the queues, it's only 7 less players, so the issue is; how stacked certain host servers may be, combined with their linked population, but the queues generally die down after reset.

I doubt the change will make 3 ways on EB, any better though. I didn't have that many 3 way fights in EU T4, I only had a couple of 3 way fights where one server was not a full blob. So while it wasn't laggy, it wasn't the worst case scenario.

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Just courious, but what about redoing boons and condis in wvw, like reduce the number of them to 5 of each instead of 14 condis and 12 boons we currently have, the servers can't process all the calculations needed, or am i wrong in thinking that would help. As they have made WvW changes in the past that have not affected PvE then it could work, just tag the ones removed from WvW as PvE only.Not sure how it all works, just a thought :). I am not a techincal person so please don't flame to much XD

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I wonder where people get the idea from, that mounts might be responsible. I mean, we don't know the code, so of course anything is possible, but look at what is likely: Where would a mount lead to additional calculations on server side, especially calculations that would need to be executed every tick?No, the problem lies with the AoEs, boons and condis, and maybe on top of that, that you need to track each instance of them separately, because one specific condi is not like any other specific condi, and a boon is not like any other specific boon. Each of them has modifiers attached. They might last longer. They might have more impact.Same goes for areas. You can't just say "there is a shade here", because some of them might be bigger, some smaller, their effects are controlled by attributes. You can't just look at "what player is inside the area", because the powers have target caps. For each area you need to track the targets separately.

There is likely a lot of room for improvement in the code, hopefully we can get to that, while we examine the current temporary workaround.

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@"Widmo.3186" said:How to deal with problems - guide by ANetn1gWXlt.jpg

This, so much. Reducing the cap is a complete joke. How about you stop using the worst servers from Amazon and actually start using the decent ones that can handle more load?Servers can't even handle 2-way blob fights decently these days.

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@CrimsonNeonite.1048 said:In terms of the queues, it's only 7 less players, so the issue is; how stacked certain host servers may be, combined with their linked population, but the queues generally die down after reset.

Sure it clears after reset, but part of that is guilds logging off earlier than they normally do from queue times being longer. When Anet links two servers together that are both stacked in NA timezone, that's not really the players doing.

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I remember there was a fix long time ago (?) for lag and latency improvement in pve world boss or large scale living story event before hot. Eg server client response and local client response.. can similar fix be done for wvw?I don't think reduce players cap will help. It creates more frustration in many ways.

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