zealex.9410

Lw it self is fine if you take it for what it is, content between major releases (expansions). When you take expansions out of the equation lw has to carry years and years of no new class gameplay or systems and the rest of the game is hardly getting anything, so the cracks start to show. Gw2 woupd be in a much better state if after se4 we got an expansion (on clock for tye 2 year schedule that hot and pof had set prior).

Ff14 does that and its working really well for them. Gw2 has many environments and characters/models that could be used as enemies/bosses, all they need to do is add rewards and design the fights.

> @"Vangalter.5210" said: > So here's the thing, Apple's M-Series silicon is insanely good, GW2 performs decently under TWO layers of emulation: Rosetta2+Anet's, and this is the WORST silicon Apple is ever going to make for Macs. > > There's 2 posibilites: 1) Apple drops support for OGL in a macOS update or 2) Apple drops support for OGL in newer M-Series silicon. > For (1), i understand, the game hasn't been updated DX9 for windows, i dont expect it to be updated to Metal2 for the much smaller player base on Mac, i get it, but why not wait for the WWDC when it happens and announce it then? It's not like one and a half months is a long time; there's like 3-4 months between macOS dev beta and public release. > > For (2) is something similar; if it's dropped on the new architectures, i get it, you want consistency and if it doesnt work on one Mac, it shouldnt work in any bc it could confuse costumers, fine; but we don't know that and same as the previous option, it can be checked before release and communicate it when it happens. > > As far as i know, and apologies if im wildly oversimplifying, Anet just uses a wine wrapper for the Mac client, right? So it should be too difficult to just let continue to be for the time being since updates don't requiere a port to macOS. Or maybe they could delete the .dmg installer from the server and maybe block base game files from being downloaded from the Mac client and only allow updates to already-installed macs that are proven to work already? - this is probably too much hassle for the ROI it would produce, but still. :( > > Or is it that maybe i missed the point? Maybe it's bc of those OGL issues they mention? > > This is my favourite game of all time and now i wont be able to play it if it becomes a subscription-based game if i have to rent a computer just for it. :/ Wouldnt this be delaying the inevitable? In x time from now the same peoblems for you who wish to play the game will arise.

> @"maddoctor.2738" said: > Out of curiosity, which instances would you want to turn into visions? Would oike to see to have the breachmaker climax of se1 as a 1 to 5 person instance. I never got to play it and it looked cool so i would love to try it.

I cant but look at poe and feel jealousy that an arpg is being designed and updated with longevity in mind while anet seems to invest in gw2's future only in words. Poe is getting massive updates visual and engine wise while with no Gw3 on the horizon Gw2 only looks to further bloat what it already has and disregards its playability and optimisation. Chris Wilson says that they want the game to evolve and exist for decades and that shows, Arenanet on the other hand really just want to milk gw2 untill their other orojects are in a good place. Its been 8 years, if anet wanted to improve the game in any way that would say "this game is here to stay" they would have at least talked about it. Content is only half the equation.

Speaking of other ncsoft titles, both l2 and bns are getting engine upgrades. in the case of l2 i think the game is moving from unreal 2.5 to unreal 4 which is a huge leap in visual fidelity and performance.

What everyone wants here to for the game to continue to exist and get upsated for years to come. For that to happen the game needs future proofing. Even if its a 20 to 30 to 40% jump to performance, a robust system to hide and minimize visual clutter or even new lighting tech or a renderer. All these thing would massively improve the feep and quality of the game.

> @"Infusion.7149" said: > Well that's not really the fastest CPU in terms of IPC right now, the Ryzen 7nm+ 5800X / 5900X / 5950X are. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/2143-ryzen-5000-ipc-performance/ ) > > There's something called Amdahl's law so even in a perfect scenario unless _most_ of the code is parallelized (we're talking over 90%) it will be losing per core efficiency past 6 cores. (see https://www.techspot.com/article/998-cpu-performance-amdahls-law/ or the wikipedia article) > > Even in practice there's severe diminishing returns as seen in this recent study on WoW's DX12 implementation: https://rk.edu.pl/en/analyzing-world-warcraft-multi-core-scaling/ > > As you can see the game FPS decreases nearly linearly with decreasing CPU clock frequency with some gains to Dazar'alor. Those charts show that the game is still managed by the main thread working on one core and only in some edge case scenarios when there is more GPU work than other logic it can scale bit better. Single core frequency and efficiency (IPC) are the king while stronger GPU comes into play only if you want better looks after you provided the CPU power to achieve good FPS. > > For a less MMO-type game, we have statements such as the following from Ubisoft: > https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/rainbow-six/siege/news-updates/6VFn74oMO2nVQGZxvFhBb5/vulkan-api-testing-on-live-pc > > WHAT IT DOES: Dynamic Texture Indexing helps us **reduce CPU overhead** by issuing fewer draw calls (a call to the graphics API to draw an object that will appear on screen). This is accomplished by having the GPU dynamically select the texture used in the shader, instead of binding it by using the CPU. The result is less pressure on the driver, and the **freed CPU cycles can then translate into better CPU performance overall**. > > WHAT IT DOES: AsyncCompute is a hardware capability that allows us to execute tasks in parallel on the GPU, thus providing more tools and opportunities for better and improved optimization. Since the launch of Siege on consoles, we have been able to utilize AsyncCompute for console players to optimize graphics techniques such as Ambient Occlusion or ScreenSpace Reflection. Graphics Cards previously supported AsyncCompute, however the DX11 API did not allow us to utilize it. With Vulkan it is now possible to do so. > > EXPECTED RESULT: With Vulkan and dynamic texture indexing, players who are CPU-bound should see better and more consistent frame rates. > > What about a CPU bound game like from Stardock? > https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BradWardell/20191007/351772/Living_with_Vulkan_and_DirectX_12.php > > In the most oversimplified sense, the biggest difference between the two new graphics stacks and DirectX 11 are that both Vulkan and DirectX 12 **support multiple threads to send commands to the GPU simultaneously**. GPU multitasking. Hooray. i.e. ID3D12CommandQueue::ExecuteCommandLists (send a bunch of commands and they get handled asynchronously). > > In DirectX 11, calls to the GPU are handled synchronously. You could end up with a lot of waiting after calling Present(). Don't get me wrong, DX11 is still way better than DirectX 9. **In DX9, the main thread had to call the GPU**. > > > _The real world of game development_ > > Which brings us back to the question: Why didn't Stardock's new games stick with DirectX 11? And the answer is: The performance gain you get from Vulkan or DirectX 12 comes down to the type of game it is. > > > > Case in point: Stardock has DirectX 12 and Vulkan versions of Star Control: Origins. **The performance gain is about 20% over DirectX 11**. The gain is relatively low because, well, it's Star Control. It's not a graphics intensive game (except for certain particle effects on planets which don't benefit much from the new stacks). So **we have to weigh the cost of doubling or tripling our QA compatibility budget with a fairly nominal performance gain**. And even now, we run into driver bugs on DirectX 12 and Vulkan that result in crashes or other problems that we just don't have the budget to investigate. > > > In the past there was the introduction of the 64 bit client which if I remember correctly is the only drastically major GW2 upgrade client-side that we know of. That update (which was not the official client , it was labeled beta for the longest time) resulted in fewer crashes due to 4GB VRAM + RAM limits. So there are changes that would benefit all, not just the people with the latest hardware. > > Due to the fact that both D912pxy and DXVK both have FPS drops, I would hazard a guess it's down to the parallelization of the code that relies on _networking_ and also _client-side_ sequential calculations of anything from damage , conditions, range, LoS , etc (everything not visual). The "servers" are actually Amazon AWS elastic compute instances , EC2 presumably with the auto scaling functionality. > > You can test your connection to AWS servers via sites such as https://cloudharmony.com/speedtest-for-aws and check reachability via Amazon directly https://ec2-reachability.amazonaws.com/ > > ---- > > See also statement from the Lead Engine Programmer for GW2 5 years ago https://old.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n/ > > GW2 does a lot of processing, and much of it is done on the main thread. That is also where its bottleneck tends to be: The main thread. There are conscious efforts in moving things off the main thread and onto other threads (every now and then a patch goes out that does just this), but due to how multi-threading works it's a non-trivial thing that take a lot of effort to do. In a perfect world, we could say "Hey main thread, give the other threads some stuff to do if you're too busy", but sadly this is not that world. > > > > As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn't buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck. Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit also does not really buy us a lot performance-wise. There are some optimizations the compiler is able to do with 64-bit that it can't do otherwise, but the actual FPS gain is minimal at best. > > > > And about crashing on Tequatl: Here's one case where a 64-bit client could actually help. Many of the crashes happening on Tequatl (which are still quite few, mind you) are cause of memory fragmentation. The bigger memory address space of 64-bit apps could help prevent that. This becomes more of a problem the longer you keep your client running. So stardock had an increase of 20% from dx11 to 12 and thats supposed to mean that gw2 wont have a noricable increase? For a number of ppl 20% is gonna be absolutely noticable and i will be surpised if gw2 only experiences a 20% jump koving from dx9 to 12.

> @"sammokdadd.3602" said: > Imagine Making a full topic about something that is not out yet.. Just imagine how a tryhard are you. Jeez Laughs in legendary runes/sigils

Expansions were never enough it wasnt enough after hot nor was it enough after pof. Alongside with expansions we also need anet to get their shit together (for the lack of a better word) and coke upbwith a solid direction and plan for what the game is supposed to be and how its supposed to be evolving moving forward. I think its pretty clear that ppl overall want expansions as well as lw rather than exclusively one or the other, which seemingly took anet a while to understand. The game will be in a bad state and innevitably bleed players if after eod they decide to not release anymore expansions, the same will also happen if they go the other way (like we've seen over the course of last year).

Oh man its going for less than 800-1k gold now? Hell its gotten quite cheap nowadays.

For me the big problem with festivals is how recycled they are and while thats good in a way they still treat them as content updates on part with new content like lw, raids, fractals, strikes etc. They just have them be there with minimal to no new additions (festivals getting new content is the exception not the rule) yet thats all the game will be getting 6 times a year. They have replayability and thats all really they got going for them (gold beats any other incentive for replaybility and they give it in spades). It was really cool the first time it dropped but x yeads later is just padding.

> @"kharmin.7683" said: > > @"zealex.9410" said: > > Combat in wow get a bad rep, yes gw2's is supperior but at least wow releases new content for the combat to be used in. > WoW is a subscription based MMO and, I would guess, has a lot more financial resources with which to produce content. GW2 is F2P/B2P with no subscription. > > I really wish people would stop trying to compare these business models. They are not the same. Im not saying gw2 can or should putt out the same amount of content as wow does but it can and should put out content that justifies it combat being called the best in the genre. Plus im not so sure wow gets an insanely larger amount of funding. Their team rages on the 300 ppl mark and the developers at blizzard are paid close to the minimum wage for this kind of work (similar to anet). I think the difference in cintent is because of the diff aproach to management and planning both ff14 and wow seem to have but gw2 lacks.

> @"Jilora.9524" said: > First you compare GW2 to 2 $15 a month games but lets take FF14 and it's you will play at our pace kitten. > FF14 is nothing but a gear grind then wait 3 months for that gear to become obsolete to gear grind again. It is also time gated af. You can only earn so much per week and get 1 or 2 pieces per week. They release everything in the same order. Beast tribe then you grind dailys then craft grind and gather grind. Not to mention the forced story to progress with hard group encounters to easily get stuck with bad luck which can prevent you from going to the next zone. Then the cutscenes where if 1 person in your group wants to watch it adds 5-10m each dungeon with you sitting in a box waiting. > It's fun at first because so much to do but it is so repetitive and forced no choice which path you take. > Gw2 blows right now ngl. These Drms and chopping this episode into 4 parts and depending on festivals to carry them is bad but still better then $15 FF14 and I can casually play GW2 but never will touch FF14 and that progression system again. Yet gear grind in ff14 takes very little time and its a pretty neglegable part of the game. Yes a couple months later you will have new gear to go for but its easy to get it and at the end of the day its there instead of gold.

> @"maddoctor.2738" said: > > @"DoomNexus.5324" said: > > Guild Wars 2 does not really stand out in any aspect on the MMO market and it's kinda sad. > > I think the tab target + action combat is rather unique in Guild Wars 2. The event system is (was?) unique although many mmorpgs are copying it nowadays. Not having to grind for higher level caps, the build system, picking your skills, weapons defining your skills, weapon swapping are also not features you see in every game. Gliding and the excellent mounts are also not seen in most games in the market. Sure if you want to see what's unique in GW2 compared to every game out there you might be hard pressed to find anything, that's true for every other game as well. > > > PvE is vastly outperformed by FF14 and WoW for example and I think that's pretty much all I have to say. > > Well I dislike the PVE in WOW and find it garbage, always chasing the next big carrot on a stick to improve your stats. Always becoming invalidated with each expansion. yawn. And let's not talk about the atrocious combat of WOW. So no GW2 isn't outperformed by WOW, not even close, it's of course your opinion if you think it does, if you are into constant gear progression and endless gear treadmills and boring combat, that's up to you. Combat in wow get a bad rep, yes gw2's is supperior but at least wow releases new content for the combat to be used in. Unless we consider the ow(or drms) content gw2 gets as content that utilises the combat. The ow content is balanced around aa and dodging occasionally, that type of gameplay would put gw2 way bellow even wow in terms of combat. The combat in gw2 has so many unique mechanics (more cc than stuns and slow, blinds, reflects etc) but the content they keep releasing only requires you to be able to press one and the occasional dodge).

> @"memausz.7264" said: > > @"Cynz.9437" said: > > I would be against it. I have an alt account that doesn't have xpac (got it before GW2 became f2p). I enjoy playing it for fun and do some ranked on it as well. I don't think one need to limit pvp for f2p accounts just because of few hackers. I think it would be better if Anet support actually spent more time banning few hackers than limit experience of thousands of players. It shouldn't be THAT hard. Also, pvp community is small as it is - why make it even smaller? > > But it IS that hard for them because they never put an ounce of effort into a meeting to sit down and ask "Okay guys, so if one person uses VPNs and MAC address spoofing and constantly makes F2p accounts with throw away email addresses, what can we do?" > > Nope instead they met over Zoom and were like "okay, how do we best ignore the problem?" Generally speaking going after the hackers is the prefered course of action if your game is small and niche. When yiur game is ow or vallorant you nee to go after the cheat maker which is harder. Thankfully anet is the former so the easiest solution is to make competitive pvp inaccesible to hackers and i believe the best bandaid until better solutions are there is gating f2p from ranked and at. Total gate for ats, the pinnacke of gw2 pvp and maybe rank gate for ranked if not b2p gate there as well. f2p trail should still retain its trial nature, which means, allowing f2p to try unranked.

> @"Fearless.3569" said: > Either up the rank require to get in to Ranked and ATs. Or make people buy at least buy the game. Competitive modes should not be a hacker/bot fest. If they do that. I'll definitely make a return to GW2's PvP. If not I'll just continue to call it a loss and do my PvP in Smite and ESO where that's not a issue. Oh yeah eso doesnt have f2p pvp

The new composer is definitely a great addition to the gw2 team and i cant w8 to see his work on Eod. I hope Deimer will also have some tracks. I would really really be excited tho if Lena Raine Also came back for a track or 2.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > > @"zealex.9410" said: > > Content creators outside of gw2 that tried pvp have posted clips of the hackers. Do you think that helps the gamemode grow? Would you rather see it slowly die out due to hackers and other poor choices rather than potentially hurt it for the shortterm but improve it in the long term? Lets not forget a new exoac is underway so even if the pop dropped rn due to the removal of f2ps it would still have a spike in 2021 due to eod. > > Right now, there are only two choices in this argument: > 1) a rapidly increasing decline due to cutting of f2p players, and still having hackers and bots who actually paid for expansion > 2) the slow decline as it is now > > There is no other choice. By cutting of f2p player you aren't hurting the mode only in the short term, you also contribute to an increased decline in the long term. > > > Hackers and bots should decrease if you make getting back to ranked pvp a big deal. Most hackers wont keep buying acounts and then get banned, some will but after some point for more of them enough time/money is enough and they will move on. The increase of the population is on the hands of anet, with eod we will have a spike, if theres another expac planned after eod then we will have another. Its been 3+ years since the last expac so alot of ppl dropped pvp because of that.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > > @"Vancho.8750" said: > > I don't there are that many F2P people that play ranked for that to happen though. > There aren't "that many" people playing ranked in general, so losing the f2p players likely will have an impact. > > Content creators outside of gw2 that tried pvp have posted clips of the hackers. Do you think that helps the gamemode grow? Would you rather see it slowly die out due to hackers and other poor choices rather than potentially hurt it for the shortterm but improve it in the long term? Lets not forget a new exoac is underway so even if the pop dropped rn due to the removal of f2ps it would still have a spike in 2021 due to eod.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > > @"Vancho.8750" said: > > > @"Fueki.4753" said: > > > > @"zealex.9410" said: > > > > Maybe f2p contributes to the bad quakity of pvp, like free updates contribute to the quality of pve. > > > > > > It definitely doesn't. > > > It's mostly the "balance" decision that keep making PvP worse. > > > If they were to remove f2p players from PvP, the queue times and difference in ranking each match would increase. > > > I don't think anyone would want that to happen. > > > > > > > > I think people would be fine with that as long as they don't see many Flying People or Roombas in pvp. > > > > And others would leave the mode behind completely, because the difference between skill levels and the needlessly increased queue times are too much. And thus, the skill level difference and queue times increase even more, causing even more players to leave. > This circle would continue until Arenanet officially axes the mode. > > Removing f2p players and accelerating that circle simply is not worth to get rid of hackers and bots. > And even if they got rid of hackers, bots, hackers, f2p players and queue times below 10 minutes, there still would be the pestilence of players that are doing random things in the spawn, which significantly more detrimental to the mode than bots are. > > What actually should happen is Arenanet deploying a team to monitor reports and act upon them. For all we know the unchecked existence of hackers for years may have the same effect and continues to do so. Word of mouth that hackers have been reduced and that games arent ruined by them could very well improve the view of pvp that outsiders may have.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > > @"zealex.9410" said: > > Maybe f2p contributes to the bad quakity of pvp, like free updates contribute to the quality of pve. > > It definitely doesn't. > It's mostly the "balance" decision that keep making PvP worse. > If they were to remove f2p players from PvP, the queue times and difference in ranking each match would increase. > I don't think anyone would want that to happen. > > They dont have to necessarily kick f2p out of ranked, someone suggested upping the rank req, if they lets say had ti get to rank 50 or 60 to unlock ranked that could also make hackers have to put alot of time getting to that point.

> @"Fueki.4753" said: > > @"Vancho.8750" said: > > @"zealex.9410" > > Here is a better reason for Ranked and tournaments being locked to buying the game, Arenanet is losing money on this, there is no reason to buy the box if you play PVP all of PVP content is available to you in F2P. I find it kinda weird since PVE is more locked out then PVP, the TP is locked out , the mail is locked out and the better farming spots are locked out, the best gold on T4 fractals is locked out for a long time till you get Ascended gear and doing that on F2P costs allot. So for F2P, PVP has easier access to gold and ascended gear then doing the same in PVE. > > F2P should be just a trial which lets you see the game on its basic level, so you decide to buy the game not a way to play the game for a long time. Arenanet is business and they should make money, but they seem terrible at giving incentives for people to give them money that feel fair, they either overblow it by giving too much like the F2P or too little like the Build templates. > > Noone would buy the game for it's terrible PvP. > Even FF14 has better PvP than GW2. Maybe f2p contributes to the bad quakity of pvp, like free updates contribute to the quality of pve.

> @"Ayrilana.1396" said: > > @"zealex.9410" said: > > > @"Cynz.9437" said: > > > I would be against it. I have an alt account that doesn't have xpac (got it before GW2 became f2p). I enjoy playing it for fun and do some ranked on it as well. I don't think one need to limit pvp for f2p accounts just because of few hackers. I think it would be better if Anet support actually spent more time banning few hackers than limit experience of thousands of players. It shouldn't be THAT hard. Also, pvp community is small as it is - why make it even smaller? > > > > Apparently some hackers have been banned multiple times but getting back in to resume is as easy as making a f2p acount. > > > > In wp's vid the hackers had 19 ap (the baseline for new acounts) so its obvious that they are using f2p throwaway acounts. > > Or they had recently purchased the game. You can't really prove whether an account is F2P or not; only Anet can. True, but why would you purchase the acount when you can just use a free one instead? This just feel like a weird arguement. Not to mention, from the gameplay they seemed quite knowledgable about the game and they were using builds that compliment their hacking tools. Doubt many 19 ap players would be able to perform at that lvl.

Tbf lw rn doesnt really warrant money, thats certainky rude to the developers but i dont think anyone would justify paying for the content we get rn. But thats the issue, the are making free content so the scope of the update is already piss poor compaired to paid updates in other mmos.