The Best Solution To Virtually Annihilate Lag

[diamondgirl.6315]

@Iozeph.5617

 

I pretty much agree with everything you said. I by no means think the game mode is operating at 100% potential. I just think that the player solutions that involve penalizing players as a band aid are only going to accelerate the decline of the mode.

[Iozeph.5617]

> @"diamondgirl.6315" said:

> @Iozeph.5617

>

> I pretty much agree with everything you said. I by no means think the game mode is operating at 100% potential. I just think that the player solutions that involve penalizing players as a band aid are only going to accelerate the decline of the mode.

 

You're right about that. And I didn't mean to drag the discussion off topic. What I was driving at is that the only changes possible have to come from Anet as players are notoriously, and historically, bad at policing themselves. That said the last changes they made were graphically to character abilities and it made combat so much uglier, particularly if you played an elementalist. I'm not a fan of the newer ground target circles either something has to give.

 

They could go through every asset in the game in an effort to trim unnecessary polygons from their models. But given the age of the game I don't know that they'd want to spend the hours or the moneys to do that. More, even without the addition problem of graphic fidelity, I feel it's still a matter of the limits of bandwidth, which is why, in spite of connection speeds improving, they still have limits on players within respective battlegrounds. More, it isn't necessarily down to individual player bandwidth or their ISP. Chances are you'll find we're being bottlenecked by Anet's isp and their hardware.

 

It comes down to pings/function calls. Everything we do and see is a matter of back and forth communication from you, to the network, to anet, to the network, and to your enemy and that's just one way. These have to go back and forth to give you the illusion of seemless action, combat, movement etc. to the tune of hundreds of thousands if not millions per second and we're only adding more and more of them as the game expands.

 

Now we've pings to see if you're gliding, or gliding in a restricted space and need to be dropped from height as well as the damage for that. This holds for combat as well, so that you see your health, and they enemy sees it reflected when they view you. Mitigation through toughness is a large chunk even in the condition meta.(and probably why we haven't seen it changed to affect incoming condition damage) We have additional calcs for stealth-triggered healing or condition clearing effects. There's the lessening or increasing of certain conditions over time due to stacks or resistance and the opening of conditions to twenty five stacks as well. Also we've added in barrier mechanics and that's another layer. And players are talking about wanting mounts. As it, is anything you do affected by a rating via your weapons armour is a separate calc every time you use it. This only gets crazier with boon sharing. Now we have the added consideration that we have effectively three times the professions as when we began the game, every one of their unique hot bar icons, abilities, and new trait interactions is an additional set of assets/functions called upon. And even outside combat, there's increased stress every time additional items are added to the store and loot databases. No end in sight.

 

It comes down to money and time. If the architecture is still more or less at an early game state or even HoT level and hasn't been upgraded to account for these increased stresses on the system there isn't much to be done. Either more capacity/power is added or fewer players put stress on the system. Then there's Anet's contract with their isp as well and whether or not they get soaked for overages, and this isn't going to be helped in the united states by the end of net neutrality. Does Anet have the money to spend for this. Do they want to do this so late in the game? Is not doing something going to solve the problem on its own by driving players away? Who knows?

[Mysteriax.6049]

How about ANet decreases the max amount of players that can be on a map? Less players on a map = less lag.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

> @"dzeRnumbrd.6129" said:

> Zerg splitting is never going to happen. People actually like playing in zergs. If you want small scale then go play sPvP.

Basically that, yeah. People zerg because they enjoy it and because it's the most effective way to use a disorganized group of people. You _can_ make zergs split up, but not by punishing the players. Only making content that _forces_ them to split up in order to succeed seems to work. They've been doing it in PVE for years (just look at the Silverwastes or any HoT map, for example), it just doesn't translate readily into WvW.

[Pikka.6023]

One important question that needs to be asked for the design of WvW is at what size of zerg does the way people play stop changing? So, if you fight the same way 25 vs 25, as 50 v 50, then no one loses anything by game mechanisms that naturally encourage smaller zergs. Or, perhaps even better if you naturally incentivize zergs to be a little smaller than that boundary size, zerg composition will be more varied and interesting. In other words, you can almost certainly shrink zergs significantly, thus reducing lag, while simultaneously improving game play.

 

Certainly the key is the design of objectives in WvW encourages zerging, because a large zerg is the most efficient way to carry the supply to quickly capture an objective, either before a significant defense arrives, or to win the ensuing zerg fight when one does. WvW is based entirely around holding capture points. Camps, guard posts, towers, keeps: everything is a capture point. WvW is modeled on a single player RTS. That model doesn't work, which is clear to everyone now. The result is the most common way to capture is to blitz, or sneak, an objective, and cap it essentially unopposed; in other words, avoid interaction. I think it's pretty unambiguously bad to strongly incentivize lack of interaction.

 

Add events to WvW that score without capture points, and need players accomplishing simultaneous objectives in multiple locations.

 

 

[joneirikb.7506]

Some random thoughts:

 

* Set larger restrictions for how much siege can be placed at any one place. If you can only build 1-2 rams or catas on a gate/wall, you wouldn't need 50+ people to carry supply. (Requires some changes to siege and walls/gates)

* Alternatively have things scale a LOT more after 20-30 players. Including walls/gates, and (dare I say it...) AC damage. Oh and the lord could scale some more damage. (would strongly encourage zergs to split off groups to open up objectives for them first)

* Another alternative entirely to actually reduce LAG a bit and a few other things: Do some changes to the maps, basically cut out a keep, 3-4 towers around it, and some camps, and make that a own map about 1/4th the size of existing maps. Reduce map limit to 50. And you have a map where it is easier to find fights, as everyone is going to focus on the 1 keep, and 50 players will be plenty for that small a map. Constant action, attack/defend, fast movement, zerging non step. And less lag because max 150 players on map instead of 240.

[Jaruselka.5943]

“The Best Solution To Virtually Annihilate Lag”

 

Alt-F4?

[godofcows.2451]

How do you propose arenanet do this? Anet never told wvw players to zerg. It was the players themselves who started it.

[XxsdgxX.8109]

Agreed somewhat

 

They do need to incentivize running much smaller but multiple groups all over the map.

Blobs/Zergs are bound to **always** have huge balance issues.

 

Who would have thought that having 30-50 people spamming everything over a small area would ever create issues, right? /s

[Pelto.9364]

We need invisible walls or invisible cubes to split the zerg to smaller parts. The game then holds these cubes of 10 people wide separated, they never overlap. Just joking.

 

Actually, adding collision boxes between friendly characters would make some difference in combat. And in tower capping, some people would have to stay out of the circle, maybe fighting with defenders or maybe cursing their bad luck on not fitting to circle.

 

[Strages.2950]

> @"Pelto.9364" said:

> We need invisible walls or invisible cubes to split the zerg to smaller parts. The game then holds these cubes of 10 people wide separated, they never overlap. Just joking.

>

> Actually, adding collision boxes between friendly characters would make some difference in combat. And in tower capping, some people would have to stay out of the circle, maybe fighting with defenders or maybe cursing their bad luck on not fitting to circle.

>

 

Collision boxes means more calculations, more strain on the server, laggier WvW. Its already bad with the amount of boon/condi calculations the server has to make.

_____________________________

 

There's two ways I can think of that would encourage groups breaking up (be warned there are propably huge holes and oversights in these ideas):

 

1) Rewards per damage upon an opposing player / rewards for healing an ally (they've been working on something so healers get better rewards, its a matter of expanding it).

 

Basically, a player who's been killed by 10 ppl gets lower chances to drop something / gives less wxp than a player who's been downed by a single opponent. Rewards based players would be encouraged to roam in smaller groups than to ball up and train. Maybe an extra pip per tick can be given after X amount of Wxp earned within the tick. (this also would promote less afk farming)

 

2.) Objective captures should require more than one capture point (currently lord or supervisor); add some (PVP) conquest mechanics.

 

• Camps 1 capture point

• Towers 1 or 2 capture points (depending on tier)

• Keeps 1-3 capture points (depending on tier)

 

We'd need to establish a minimum number of players and time needed to cap a point. I personally dont think 1-3 players should be able able to take a T3 keep on their own.

 

Lets take T3 Bay as an example:

 

Outer bay has 2 supply depots, one in the south and one in the north. Make a capture point near/on them that must be capped within x amount of time of each other before the lord capture point becomes available (like shrines to get bloodlust, only capped and not held).

 

When either is captured these will provide debuffs to the defending force in the Keep region (disable defender keep buff, lower structural defenses, disable siege in region, disable tactivators, disable wall repairs), hence it'll be in the defenders best interest to NOT let them be capped. These buffs/debuffs will remain active for x amount of time (dependant on the debuff chosen), then would have to be re-capped to maintain the advantage. We could even implement a "choose debuff" UI (like the guild claim camp/tower mechanic) in which a specific advantage can be chosen by a group depending on what the situation calls for.

 

This would effectively force the attackers to split up into 2 groups which would arguably force the defenders to split into 2 groups. The key is to make the buffs significant enough to discourage the defenders from ignoring either of the caps. The attackers are already forced to take both to activate the lord capture point. If defenders are smaller, they can fight one group at a time this way forcing respawns. If the attackers are smaller, they can choose the buff that would make their attack more effective.

 

This, combined with a lower siege cap, would actually force people to fight each other and not hide behind walls and siege, would provide need for better coordination, make current roamers and fight teams play a role in objective captures.

 

There are holes in these systems im sure (I'm writing this at 2 am, sorry) but something like this might help the current situation of sieged up inner keeps being such a gigantic pain in the butt and blob fighting in general. It's also based upon currently implemented mechanics (albeit within other game modes). Finally, it has the benefit of not adding extra "per player" calculations.

[Dawdler.8521]

> @"joneirikb.7506" said:

> * Alternatively have things scale a LOT more after 20-30 players. Including walls/gates, and (dare I say it...) AC damage. Oh and the lord could scale some more damage. (would strongly encourage zergs to split off groups to open up objectives for them first)

 

No it wouldnt, it would encourage defenders to bring 50+ to scale up the lord so attackers die to it without a fight, lol.

 

Scaling counts *everyone*.

[Fiddle Irk.9710]

"People actually like playing in zergs" .............Sure, some people do I imagine, mostly so that they don't get turned into road-kill by an enemy zerg; who are running in a big 'ol zerg so that THEY don't get turned into road-kill. It all started when Johney got beaten by Bobby, so Johney brought Ralph along next time and they beat Bobby together, so then Bobby brought Frank and Terry and they beat Johney and Ralph, and it escalated from there. Without an impacting reason to fight with approximate equal numbers, people quite often choose to fight with as many allies as possible, simply because they want to WIN. Yet at the same time NO ONE enjoys not being able to use their skills or suddenly find themselves 100->0 because of lag spikes.

 

So what would be a good impacting reason to fight in smaller groups, say 20-30? How about applying some type of scaling "agony" for every "x" number of allied players over "x" (let's say 30) in combat within a certain area? They already have half the mechanics to do this with the battle markers (orange swords) and even perhaps diminish slightly for players in the squad. I think this could encourage multiple squads of more manageable numbers facing off in multiple areas of the map versus 60 vs 60 trying to spam their auto attacks at each other in the middle of SMC.

[videoboy.4162]

The Desert Borderland was supposed to be an attempt to lessen zerging, but everyone seems to hate it because the zerg can't move across it fast enough.

[Swamurabi.7890]

1. Reduce Boons

2. Reduce Conditions

3. Reduce Stacks

4. Reduce Calculations

5. Profit

[Strages.2950]

> @"videoboy.4162" said:

> The Desert Borderland was supposed to be an attempt to lessen zerging, but everyone seems to hate it because the zerg can't move across it fast enough.

 

I love the desert BL. Best map for roaming.

[videoboy.4162]

> @"Strages.2950" said:

> > @"videoboy.4162" said:

> > The Desert Borderland was supposed to be an attempt to lessen zerging, but everyone seems to hate it because the zerg can't move across it fast enough.

>

> I love the desert BL. Best map for roaming.

 

I actually like it too, but I hear a lot of complaints about it in chat when I play. I'm eager to see what third BL would look like.

[Musty.3148]

> @"videoboy.4162" said:

> The Desert Borderland was supposed to be an attempt to lessen zerging, but everyone seems to hate it because the zerg can't move across it fast enough.

 

This, I wish (I know I'll take a bunch of kitten for this) would make all the BG's into this style. Alpine sucks it's boring as kitten. I love Desert, small man teams can use terrain more efficiently and it's harder for zergs to stay together and on target. I LOVE DESERT! #flamesuiton

 

[DeceiverX.8361]

> @"Swamurabi.7890" said:

> 1. Reduce Boons

> 2. Reduce Conditions

> 3. Reduce Stacks

> 4. Reduce Calculations

> 5. Profit

 

This. ANet has come out and said repeatedly that boon and condition stacking as well as passive procs are the biggest things that cause the lag.

 

Ironically, it's also the source of most of the complaints about gameplay and balance, too.

This would kill multiple birds with one stone but the question is whether or not ANet wants to look into that boulder because while necessary for the sake of the game, these changes are big.

[ImperialWL.7138]

No. Go to PvP if you want to play small scale. WvW is a nice niche of large scale PvP and there isn't anything else like it with a combat system as good as GW2's.

 

I remember when stability stacks were first introduced and immediately after the skill lag got exponentially worse because the server's had to start counting for the separate stacks of every single player on the map, the same thing happened when resistance was introduced and then when condis no longer had a cap.

 

So ye, short term solution invest in better hardware long term solution fix balance boom problem solved.