Pay for better servers

[XenesisII.1540]

4 hours ago, Puck.3697 said:

WIth due respect

WoW brought 12 million in its Peak.

GW2 brought 12 million in its Peak

Guild wars was also a Established IP. Lets not forget the fact this game was very much living, WoW prints money because it knows how to print money. WoW never aimed to be consumer friendly, Guild wars 2 went too far in COnsumer friendly. and because of this, WoW got a crowd of players who will Pay for entertainment, while GW2 grabbed People who would scream at the idea of game costing more then absolute bare minimum.

Its nothing to do with anything else lol, WoWs model generates More money. GW2 doesnt, its that simple,

WoW inflated its costs, and Let boosting go mad to Print money thorugh its gold buying systems, While gw2 ensured gems were Achievable by f2p players and prevented them breaking the market to the same extents the average player in WoW, wont get anyway Gold wise without buying Tokens. lol, They then make it worth 1 months sub or £10 for a £17 input. so they managed to make Subs more Expensive Lmfao.

Im sorry, but its obvious why WoW prints money, even if its lowest form. GW2s monetization is to cost the absolute bare minimum. and if u pay the bare minimum you can only expect to recieve the bare minimum. 

Some mad statements there.

WoW was built off a decade old franchise, from a developer that had multiple award winning franchises under it's belt, and set the high standard for games development that earned them a lot of trust and loyalty from their fans/customers in that era (they've turned into absolute garbage these days). It also came out on the tail end of Everquest spiraling down due to Sony incompetence, releasing buggy expansions and broken raids, a lot of raiders moved to WoW. WoW was definitely aimed to be consumer friendly, it was a vast improvement to EQ, and the mmo genre in general that had the mantra that even the UI had to play a part in a games difficulty, while also keeping a very healthy competitive raid side and expanding on multiple pvp areas(open/arena/battlegrounds) that barely existed before it. 

But let's be real, WoW got away with it's sub model because of all it built up before GW2 even hit the market, which by the way it was already on the decline from it's 12m, at the time a lot of other mmo's came through and most of them had to start as f2p, or had to convert themselves from sub to f2p to stay alive, daoc, warhammer, conan, swtor, rift, archeage, star trek, etc. WoW prints money, yeah it also has been living off it's name and rep the past decade, the last few expansions have been bad, funny enough it took f2p emu servers to force blizzard to make a classic reboot to keep people playing and paying for subs.

WoW and GW2 also started out as two different games, catering to two separate markets. One was all about leveling, raiding, and vertical loot progression, the other had no raids, ran living story events, horizontal progression, it wasn't the typical mmo model and attracted mostly casuals. Then in year 3 when they couldn't maintain just the living story model they had, they switched it up and tried converting the game back to the typical mmo with a two year expansion model with raids and trinity classes. I will say this from a player perspective, anet always looked like they were mismanaged, right up to their marketing department, down the explosion that had them cancel a bunch of projects and layoffs.

Also back when I played in legion/bfa, tokens in wow could be bought with gold, not much different than gw2 gem/gold system, and you could use that to pay for the monthly sub, I probably have a token or two still laying around to use. WoW has started to ramp up it's other avenues of revenue, mount skins and other shop items, because their sub count has fallen so much. Their new shtick to keep classic alive, season of discovery, pretty much stolen from emu servers again lol.

But anyways, ok so WoW printed money, doesn't mean Gw2 is not making enough money to maintain itself, within in the last two years it's maintained a higher than average monthly gem sales, released on steam, and 2 new expansions.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I always have pings in the 30s-40s. Playing from ZeelandNet/Delta ISP in The Netherlands on EUR servers. I think the servers are great.

No lag, no packet loss. No disconnects.

Edited November 17 by TheQuickFox.3826

[geist.4126]

16 hours ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

But let's be real, WoW got away with it's sub model because of all it built up before GW2 even hit the market, which by the way it was already on the decline from it's 12m, at the time a lot of other mmo's came through and most of them had to start as f2p, or had to convert themselves from sub to f2p to stay alive, daoc, warhammer, conan, swtor, rift, archeage, star trek, etc. WoW prints money, yeah it also has been living off it's name and rep the past decade, the last few expansions have been bad, funny enough it took f2p emu servers to force blizzard to make a classic reboot to keep people playing and paying for subs.

 

That's a good point a lot of people are missing. As WoW released a normal sub model was the way to go for mmorpg. There wasn't a single successful mmorpg out there without a 12,99€ (or more) subscription model. Going free2play back then meant "your game is dead. good luck". And this mindset still is out there. A lot of people never would touch free2play or buy2play games because they think those are filled with terrible micro transactions and pay2win mechanics.

The other point people don't see when they talk about "the failed mmorpg" is that you cannot leave "your WoW" for another game easily. There is a strong sense of community, when you basically lived with a guild 4-8 years, hang up in voice chat, do stuff on a daily basis together AND have created, geared and played characters over those years.
The first thing is a psychological thing of social cohesion, friendship and fomo (fear of missing out). Don't you want to see the new raid in the next expansion with the people you played with? Don't want to try out your new level 90 warrior in pvp with your group? You can't leave 8 years of fun, friends and games for a new game that may be dead in a year.
And you can't leave an account you invested 2000+ hours over the last years, can you?
That's why SWTOR, Age of Conan, Rift(?), Warhammer, etc, more or less failed. They couldn't create the momentum of enough people to be happier there than they were in WoW, so they and their friends would stick to those products.
This doesn't mean those games were bad or the games can't survive, because quality isn't the only reason for success and games don't need 12 million players to be successful. GW2 is a very successful mmorpg and it will be for a while, because it's now 12 years old and people have invested time, made friends, etc.
So it's not a question of money when your server lags or the game lags.

[Lorelei.3918]

On 11/17/2023 at 10:25 AM, geist.4126 said:

Don't want to try out your new level 90 warrior in pvp with your group? You can't leave 8 years of fun, friends and games for a new game that may be dead in a year.
And you can't leave an account you invested 2000+ hours over the last years, can you?

Which is why MMO's in particular need to switch to a "stakeholder" business model, treating their player base like they do their investors. Like for instance having open accounting books so we can all see where the problem is, and decide as a community what the solution should be. Of course, keeping people in the dark is the best way to manipulate them for your own ends (like high profit margins and big CEO bonuses), so that is what these companies will keep doing.

[Justine.6351]

Try downloading moar ram?

[DeceiverX.8361]

On 11/11/2023 at 11:42 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

With all due respect, this game use to run better just a year ago, so I don't think it's too much for players to expect better performance than what we have now. They keep adding new skills, new effects, new procs, more spam, and it doesn't seem like they care what it's doing to the game, are they even auditing the effects to see if everything is working as it should. It's been more than 6 months of lag, first it started with rise spam that was producing lag spikes that lasted up to 30secs, now it's a constant level of lag through blob fights.

Like do we need to start spamming the forums up with videos of every lag fight to get their attention?

Saturday night, on alpines map, in the middle of open space.

I mean yeah, that's the problem.  The servers themselves are fine.  The game's systems are what's crippling them.

When there wasn't so much processing for event handling on so many targets happening at the same time with a validation check going on for each of them to prevent hacking, it'll bog down a lot.

I recall there being a dev post some years ago around when we first started seeing it post-HoT explaining the problem being largely caused by boons and conditions ticking at increased stack counts and with the increased target caps and they were working on a fix.  Which I think they later implemented.  But even then, parallel computing in terms of locking algorithms in real-time systems has its performance limitations.

It may have worked then, but the state of the game is just so much worse now in terms of the sheer volume of this kind of stuff where it makes sense it's a problem.

Unfortunately there's not much to be done outside of ANet cutting back.  And, well, we've been asking for that most of this game's life at this point, so I wouldn't expect any changes.  It only affects WvW, so they don't care.

Edited November 24 by DeceiverX.8361

[XenesisII.1540]

30 minutes ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

I mean yeah, that's the problem.  The servers themselves are fine.  The game's systems are what's crippling them.

When there wasn't so much processing for event handling on so many targets happening at the same time with a validation check going on for each of them to prevent hacking, it'll bog down a lot.

I recall there being a dev post some years ago around when we first started seeing it post-HoT explaining the problem being largely caused by boons and conditions ticking at increased stack counts and with the increased target caps and they were working on a fix.  Which I think they later implemented.  But even then, parallel computing in terms of locking algorithms in real-time systems has its performance limitations.

It may have worked then, but the state of the game is just so much worse now in terms of the sheer volume of this kind of stuff where it makes sense it's a problem.

Unfortunately there's not much to be done outside of ANet cutting back.  And, well, we've been asking for that most of this game's life at this point, so I wouldn't expect any changes.  It only affects WvW, so they don't care.

Its just baffling, I don't know what changed other than not facing BG, but I haven't been getting rubberband/skill lag issues this week against BP and DB, even in smc fights. Weird.

[TheGrimm.5624]

20 minutes ago, XenesisII.1540 said:

Its just baffling, I don't know what changed other than not facing BG, but I haven't been getting rubberband/skill lag issues this week against BP and DB, even in smc fights. Weird.

Lets see how reset goes, agree no latency in three way SMC fights last reset or during the week.

[Darkbeefy.5729]

GRRRRRRRRRRRR.  Server side garbage. ADDRESS YOUR PROBLEM ANET!  This rubbish is Anet mainly... way too many calculations flooding and bottlenecking. Boons all over the place, skills with way too many addon boons or condi. Btw folks... this is not routing and not your computer or line speed that determines this rubbish, it is what Custodio has informed you. SERVER SIDE and poor dev work.

[DeceiverX.8361]

On 11/24/2023 at 12:46 PM, XenesisII.1540 said:

Its just baffling, I don't know what changed other than not facing BG, but I haven't been getting rubberband/skill lag issues this week against BP and DB, even in smc fights. Weird.

I was under the assumption it was never actually fixed from when the latest expansion made it particularly egregious.
May very well depend a bit on the group comps being run.  There's clearly a point that we're teetering on the edge on regularly though that makes things go from running fine to definitely not.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

alot of this is just amazon being bad, (their servers aren't meant for gaming), but alot of it is also trying to shoehorn an action game into a pvp setting. players have been requesting the game be slowed down dramatically in pvp/wvw for many years, and yet arenanet has only sped it up more and more.

 

the game currently plays at around twice the speed that it did at release (if you don't believe me, check old youtube videos).

 

we're to the point where with quickness you can cast like 2-3 skills per second by overlapping instant cast skills with skills that have cast times. everything has low cooldowns, alacrity is further lowering those cooldowns and then we have no global cooldown on top of that, along with no energy mechanic on most classes. this results in the majority of gameplay being just press all buttons and see what happens from inexperienced players, and i can only imagine the load on the server that causes.

 

this is why you get less skill lag in fights with alot of experienced players like organised gvg, because everyone is saving their skills for the right oppertunities. they also don't run minions or other mechanics that place additional load on the server.

 

the game is never going to run good in any game mode, either lag or frame rate wise, until it is slowed down. in pvp this causes major skill lag due to too many things going off at once, too many players running and teleporting around at light speed, and so on. in pve it causes skill effects to just be dumped everywhere, constantly, resulting in extreme visual noise and artificially low framerates even with everything turned down.

 

i love the combat in this game but i also wish they would stop treating it like a 200 player quake-style arena. other games don't have this problem, they are unique to guild wars because of how it wants you to be the living embodiment of the flash, without having the technology to support it.

Edited November 26 by SoftFootpaws.9134

[Virdo.1540]

I have literally 0 problems on fights with 50vs50vs50 regarding getting skills through. Maybe your connection is the issue

[TheGrimm.5624]

13 hours ago, DeceiverX.8361 said:

I was under the assumption it was never actually fixed from when the latest expansion made it particularly egregious.
May very well depend a bit on the group comps being run.  There's clearly a point that we're teetering on the edge on regularly though that makes things go from running fine to definitely not.

There isn't actually one answer to this issue which makes it complicated. Examples of potential issues:

• Server side
• Client side
• Interconnections
• Hardware
• Software
• Hackware
• Malware detection
• DDOS attacks
• Routing Issues
• Drivers
• Firmware

and household bandwidth constrictions on top of all the other unnamed potential issues. I don't think its an issue of just one thing that would fix it all personally.

[DeceiverX.8361]

16 hours ago, TheGrimm.5624 said:

There isn't actually one answer to this issue which makes it complicated. Examples of potential issues:

• Server side
• Client side
• Interconnections
• Hardware
• Software
• Hackware
• Malware detection
• DDOS attacks
• Routing Issues
• Drivers
• Firmware

and household bandwidth constrictions on top of all the other unnamed potential issues. I don't think its an issue of just one thing that would fix it all personally.

I mean yes, all of those things contribute to latency.

What I'm referencing is allegedly the difference-maker because pretty much the whole list should still be occurring even when not in the major clashes which generate the lag.