Top complaints (Essentially all about Vabbi)

[battledrone.8315]

this is what happens, when they finally make the HARD OW content, that some people want

they really dont want to do hard content..they just want better loot

if they nerf the event, they have to nerf the rewards too

[elrin.4750]

ArenaNet is they are aware of performance issues, but still prioritize good looking maps at the expense of performance. A lot of the issues in performance does not have to be fixed in the engine, they can do it by optimizing assets (models, textures, etc), and map design. Unfortunately, they seem to want the game too look good on screenshots at the expense of ingame performance :-(

[Nutjob.9021]

I use minimal settings all the time out of habit because I used to play in large WvW zergs. I got decent frame rates. However, as noted here, even with minimal settings, I'm seeing abysmally low frame rates, basically a slideshow during the big event in the branded area of Vabbi, especially when hunting the branded just before the boss fight.

[Wolfheart.7483]

> @Ashantara.8731 said:

> > @sevenDEADLY.5281 said:

> > Just makes it easier for Anet to completely ignore you when its clear you're making stuff up.

>

> Accusing people of "making stuff up" is rather insulting and ignorant.

>

> Many people are experiencing severe lags in PoF (I am _not_ one of them, but know quite a few). It's a fact that GW2 is not optomized to modern standards, and it is also a fact that a lot of gamers know nothing about configuring their OS properly (and given that many of them are using Windows 10, that makes matters only worse, because that is one kitten OS that requires plenty of configuration to avoid lags, freezes, program crashes, and games not running smoothly).

>

> Next time maybe think about all those things before accusing people of lying, and instead try to point in them in the right direction.

 

Windows 10 runs smoothly without much tweaking/configuration at all, in my experience. Perhaps you are having issues that are caused by some specific piece of hardware or software rather than Windows 10 itself if that is the kind of experience you have had with it. I play GW2 excessively on Windows 10 with no lags, freezes or crashes.

 

Next time maybe don't generalize and state that the entire OS is completely "kitten" when that simply isn't true.

[Ayakaru.6583]

I'm currently on a budget pc but I've seen vabbi on power pc's, there is a raster like line over the branded filter

[Bast.7253]

> @Redfeather.6401 said:

> > @maddoctor.2738 said:

> > I run a I7-6700K, so it's a perfectly fine CPU for this game and is NOT a budget system. I run the game at steady ~60fps (with the limiter on, so it doesn't go higher) on most cases, it only drops to 40-50fps in huge blob fights (SM with 3 blobs, some world bosses etc)

> > During Serpent's Ire I have 4-6FPS. This is totally unacceptable and unplayable. Especially when the Hydra boss is using the breath weapon attack that covers the entire screen, fps seems to drop even further to 1 or 2.

> > For Serpent's Ire specifically the problem is the reflecting surface on the ground, which forces the game to render every player twice, it's like having double the amount of players at once, and when I did Serpent's Ire we had nearly 2 FULL SQUADS, that's 100 players, x2 for the reflections = 200 players that need to be rendered at once.

> >

> > Now that bright mind that decided to have a fight with 100+ players on top of a reflecting surface needs to re-read how graphics rendering works.

>

> omg thank you for pointing out reflections. I am wondering now if just turning that off can get me though serpents ire without thinking my computer is dying.

 

> @Redfeather.6401 said:

> > @maddoctor.2738 said:

> > I run a I7-6700K, so it's a perfectly fine CPU for this game and is NOT a budget system. I run the game at steady ~60fps (with the limiter on, so it doesn't go higher) on most cases, it only drops to 40-50fps in huge blob fights (SM with 3 blobs, some world bosses etc)

> > During Serpent's Ire I have 4-6FPS. This is totally unacceptable and unplayable. Especially when the Hydra boss is using the breath weapon attack that covers the entire screen, fps seems to drop even further to 1 or 2.

> > For Serpent's Ire specifically the problem is the reflecting surface on the ground, which forces the game to render every player twice, it's like having double the amount of players at once, and when I did Serpent's Ire we had nearly 2 FULL SQUADS, that's 100 players, x2 for the reflections = 200 players that need to be rendered at once.

> >

> > Now that bright mind that decided to have a fight with 100+ players on top of a reflecting surface needs to re-read how graphics rendering works.

>

> omg thank you for pointing out reflections. I am wondering now if just turning that off can get me though serpents ire without thinking my computer is dying.

 

Whoops. No, it won’t matter most likely. I set mine to the absolute lowest possible and only got up to like 7 frames most times. With the same settings in a three versus Zerg war in the middle of stonemist castle on those setttings I would get at least 25 or 30. It’s just something insane about that area. The reflections, the lightning, something. I stopped doing the event after the funerary completion because I don’t even want to test it out.

[Coulter.2315]

> @Fengzhou.9853 said:

> > @sevenDEADLY.5281 said:

> > > @Coulter.2315 said:

> > > > @Ashantara.8731 said:

> > > >

> > > > Accusing people of "making stuff up" is rather insulting and ignorant.

> > > >

> > > > Many people are experiencing severe lags in PoF (I am _not_ one of them, but know quite a few). It's a fact that GW2 is not optomized to modern standards, and it is also a fact that a lot of gamers know nothing about configuring their OS properly (and given that many of them are using Windows 10, that makes matters only worse, because that is one kitten OS that requires plenty of configuration to avoid lags, freezes, program crashes, and games not running smoothly).

> > > >

> > > > Next time maybe think about all those things before accusing people of lying, and instead try to point in them in the right direction.

> > >

> > > He was refering to people claiming Serpent's Ire was "impossible," which is making stuff up.

> >

> > Exactly, claiming Serpents Ire is an "impossible" event is 100% making stuff up considering many people have accomplished it. So like next time maybe think about all that stuff man, or like, you could totally hurt someone's feelings man.... and that's not cool and like, I'm totally offended and everyone needs to know how offended I am so they can see my righteous indignations man!

>

> While it may not be impossible, it has more failures then successes and I can tell you the group you magically found that was 'no problem' was a sign of pure luck of the draw for you. I've tried doing it and with a full 50 squad and a good commander who had everything marked and groups divided etc well ahead of time? It still wasn't enough. Scaling is definitely broken and the longer it remains broken? The less likely people are going to want to even attempt it.

>

> I'd love to collect the gear but until things are fixed? I don't see much point. Most people in my guild don't even bother with PoF maps anymore which is a shame.

 

Actually it required my friend and me to hang around, form a group and then provide a strategy (split into 3 groups, kill 3 quickly then overwhelm the last 2). Luck didn't really feature.

[Chadramar.8156]

Luck absolutely features into it because you have zero control over what others players do. Or don't do, meaning use CC. I "only" tried this event a few times, but every time it was the same: no matter how much multiple people emphasize the need for CC, too many don't take it seriously.

[Deepcuts.9740]

I haven't had such issues (1-2 fps) but I must say performance could be a lot better.

I just upgraded from a GTX 970 to a GTX 1080 Ti and the performance difference is abysmal with a i7 4770K @4.2 Ghz

[Ace Woodlink.1863]

Man, I would LOVE to have a simple FPS drop in the Brand. Tired of guaranteed client crashes any time I'm with a group on skimmers with the Fury of the Brand effect on all of us.

[Coulter.2315]

> @Chadramar.8156 said:

> Luck absolutely features into it because you have zero control over what others players do. Or don't do, meaning use CC. I "only" tried this event a few times, but every time it was the same: no matter how much multiple people emphasize the need for CC, too many don't take it seriously.

 

That's because when people complain about the Eater of Souls it gets nerf'd. Anet have consistently failed to provide an educated playerbase through hard blocks until they grasp a concept. No one should be allowed to get past certain points in the story until they prove they know what a break bar is and what to do, for example. But people cry on forums and they nerf anything which requires such knowledge.

[starlinvf.1358]

> @elrin.4750 said:

> ArenaNet is they are aware of performance issues, but still prioritize good looking maps at the expense of performance. A lot of the issues in performance does not have to be fixed in the engine, they can do it by optimizing assets (models, textures, etc), and map design. Unfortunately, they seem to want the game too look good on screenshots at the expense of ingame performance :-(

 

I don't think you understand what "Optimization" usually means to a game developer..... and if you has been paying any amount of attention to Xbox games the last couple of years, you'd know exactly what I'm taking about.

 

The Irony here is that when a players complains about either performance or visuals, the majority of the time its more a distraction then a game breaking impact. But other areas of the game, the Brand is an outlier where the "good looks over performance" argument you make is incorrect. Not the sentiment (which is still flawed, but for different reasons), but your presumption of the technical implications of the situation.

Complex landscapes (which ARE Model, textures, etc) have rarely been a problem for this game's engine. Lighting effects on the other hand, regularly are. In fact, the engine (as of late) has been much smarter in doing line of sight LOD and culling for the larger spaces, when their detection system (which I'm assuming is ray casting right now) get its right. Core Tyria maps get a lot of their details from more complex object construction, and gets away with it due to shorter line of sight. POF maps seem to use more modern techniques to avoid the need for LOD shifts on large mesh objects, more apparent use of object instancing, and a more careful use of mesh geometry for terrain. If you pay attention, areas outside of towns in POF, clusters of objects have a much higher ratio of terrain geometry to additional geometry compared to previous maps. If you want to know what I'm talking about, go to Metrica Province and note how much is natural terrain, and how much is embed objects.

 

That said.... asset optimization has very large limits on performance gains, since you an only compress information so much before its meaning is lost. I'm starting to wonder if people are too young here to know this.... but "Will it Play Crysis?". Crysis was often lambasted for poor performance on launch, but was also THE best looking game for the next few years, and had comparable visual quality to NEWER engines for up to a decade. As hardware got stronger, the game simply ran better; and on hardware today it only looks like a 6 years old game. With its piss poor performance, you could claim it was unoptimized... and you'd be right... and completely miss the point. The Gen1 Crysis engine was specifically set up to take advantage of whatever hardware it was given, with the game produced to such a high visual quality standard (hi res textures and models), that it took 3 years before there was even hardware strong enough to tap into its highest settings. It was written for DX9, and pushed the API to its absolute limit with numerous shaders, insane amount of texture data, and an internal optimization strategy that enabled it to do things that shouldn't really be possible in DX9. The reason for its poor FPS performance is that the game doesn't corners for its visual effects, and will brute force calculations to maintain information integrity. The result of this is the Engine being able to age well visually, in a way that non-stylistic games normally struggle heavily with.

 

Looping back around again, Optimizing assets has a huge cost in consistency if you're engine isn't designed to execute the trick your using. Thats why its nearly always better to update the engine with new methods, then it is to try to shave more raw information off the assets to make them less costly. A mixture of both is ideal, but more often then not, a change on the engine level can improve performance across all assets for zero extra work, while optimizing just an asset only affects that asset, and must be repeated for all assets to run better. The only reason the latter is done more often is it being a less complicated task (ie just grunt work) and less expensive upfront. But over time causes an every increasing curve of upkeep costs, and the limitation of the engine eventually forces you into the ceiling as your content continues to expand.

It was less of a problem in years past, when game titles were fixed products (ie new content was a separate game), games needed fewer assets, and 3+ year development cycles could allocate early production time to engine upgrades and modifications, while content works on per-production. But with the new biyearly development cycle, engine modifications are happening along side content production..... and changes to one can invalidate progress on the other very quickly. Mass Effect Andromeda was a worst possible scenario, where you had a team working with an engine they had no experience with, none of their assets or existing methods were compatible, and the engine itself was never designed to do what they needed it for. It was practically having to do everything from scratch, and modify an engine beyond its design scope - something thats incredibly difficult and time consuming, and often harder then making a new engine from nothing.

 

For GW2, the engine was a cluster of bespoke solutions to various problems, with little internal framework or modularity to keep it organized. Their current engineering team had spent most of HOT's development untangling the game's physics code to enable things like gliding, better object tracking, improved path finding, more diverse projectile physics, and collision detection..... some of which are still buggy from the transition. Mounts required changes to the animation system, skeletal and rigging for models, at least some improvements to IK behavior, and a couple of changes to entity handling (because mounts and characters both "are and aren't" the same entity under the hood). Their experiments for these were manifested in the Living Story content, especially season 3 containing unique game play mechanics, some of the side story content, and on through the expansions. Some of it gets back ported when useful, but not often. Thats really a nightmarish situation when you consider how much legacy behavior they have to maintain..... and on a couple of occasions just outright had to abandon in order to move forward (See the history of SAB).

 

Why does any of what I said apply? Because that particular set of problems is something inherent to the state of the engine, and no amount of asset of optimization (short of removal) will adequately resolve the issue. We're also in late 2017.... we should not be suggesting ideas that lead to the Dark Ages of the Xbox360 era of games.