Colin Johanson on Guild Wars 2 in the Months Ahead (2013)

[Karizee]

What is the meaning of culling in WvW? Can anyone describe it to me? Im not familliar with the term in WvWs.

Anyhow. Sounds good. I just want to see it. To be very honest I'll see what they come up with in Feb, that will kinda dictate the direction it's really going (and my direction as well).

Culling is the distance in which you can see other players. It's my only gripe with the game.

I'm not quite sure I understand why it happens, I've seen them talk about keeping the game to where people with less than optimal computer systems can run it and others have conjectured it's an issue with the game engine and even others with how many players are being added to existing servers.

All I know is when I stand in Lion's Arch, I use to be able to stand on the bank steps and see people running up the ramp to the old lion statue.
Then the culling was increased and I could only see people run across the the small arch bridge over the canal on the way to the ramp before they blipped out of existence.
Then culling was increased again and I couldn't see people standing around the Mystic Forge. Yet again and I don't see people until I am practically standing on top of them.

Out in the world I often see spell effects going off in the distance so I know players are over there, just can't see them until I get closer. It's a big issue in WvW with the "invisible zerg", you don't see you are running into a massive amount of people until it's too late.

So I'm really excited that they are getting close to finding an answer for this - YaY!

[Deleted]

Yes, and guesting was talked about all through beta as something that was going to be a part of the game at release, and here we are, 5 months later. Understand technical difficulties occur, and rarely do things ever go according to plan. Would rather ANet released a smaller blog post telling us what we can reliably see and what their priorities are set on, and get more of them throughout the months as things release, rather than one big post and then wait months to see what comes out when.

First: that's why I used the word 'should'.

to your second point about smaller, specific blog posts: As they want to release things on a monthly basis, I do expect more specific news about the respective patches. It's not mutually exclusive. As january is already nearing it's End, I suspect a post about it's content will come up in the next two weeks. As it is a smaller patch, It probalby won't be much, but I also expect another more specific post about the february update in...february.

[Deleted]

What is the meaning of culling in WvW? Can anyone describe it to me? Im not familliar with the term in WvWs.

Anyhow. Sounds good. I just want to see it. To be very honest I'll see what they come up with in Feb, that will kinda dictate the direction it's really going (and my direction as well).

Basically, it's like every player in the game have rerolled Thief.

Culling is mainly an issue in WvWvW. It's how far away, and how fast your computer can render an object (how fast the object will appear on your screen.) So if a zerg runs, it can collide with another zerg group without knowing it. This is 'abused' in a way that Zerg Group A, can see Zerg Group B, but Zerg Group B can't see Zerg Group A, so Zerg Group A runs in and kills all the people in Zerg Group B without Zerg Group B knowing what's going on.

It's like getting attacked by Thieves who are in permanent stealth.

[Zeek Daniels]

Man u guys get so butt hurt about guesting. There is clearly an issue they did not foresee and my guess is that it had to do with WvW. Also remember WvW was supposed to be 2 week rotations and they took awhile to get it to 1 week. Also guesting wasnt that big an issue because they had free server transfers plus you could move to overflow maps with ppl from other servers if they were in ur party.

There are other ways you could have put this. "Butt hurt" is unnecessary, and this post has been infracted. --Kel

[Valeron]

Other people have theorized that there is some kind of possible exploit possible with guesting and they just haven't found a solution for it on the technical level. Shit happens but I'm still a bit disappointed there. However, I thought their overall plan seems pretty positive.

[zito]

I don’t even know what a Chauncey von Snuffles III is, but I want one.

You don't want a chauncey von snuffles III, chauncey von snuffles III chooses his caretaker.

Don't disrespect!

[The Darkitecht]

Think about guesting, and think about the problems the game had when server transferring was free with no cooldown.

Mine Tier 6 nodes on every server, every day.
Swap servers til you find one that has the instance open that you want to do - instead of just dong the events.
^ Same could be said for things like temple of balthazar, or the other orr temples. No motivation to do them when you can spam xfers til you find it randomly open.

There is a bunch of issues, technical and mechanical with the ability to constantly xfer for free with no cooldown. A large oversight on their part, and I'm glad they took their time to hopefully pound out some solutions.

[zito]

Think about guesting, and think about the problems the game had when server transferring was free with no cooldown.

Mine Tier 6 nodes on every server, every day.
Swap servers til you find one that has the instance open that you want to do - instead of just dong the events.
^ Same could be said for things like temple of balthazar, or the other orr temples. No motivation to do them when you can spam xfers til you find it randomly open.

There is a bunch of issues, technical and mechanical with the ability to constantly xfer for free with no cooldown. A large oversight on their part, and I'm glad they took their time to hopefully pound out some solutions.

A friend is required to guest, though that's not hard to exploit.

They prob will restrict the amount of nodes you can get. Such as orch nodes will be restricted for X nodes a day but copper will probably be unlimited.

[Fencers]

Seems like the achievement reward system is exactly what some players were asking for in so many words.

Pretty great idea as I see it; satisfies Casual Charlie, yet is mostly ignorable to anyone else.

[Deleted]

I like that they're focussing on improving their strengths, rather than bending to every little trend that comes along. That should improve the unique flavour of the game. Plus I guess it means no expansion in 2013 so plenty of focus on free updates and probably cash store content.

But the dynamic event system holds a lot of promise. The Hinterlands area already almost feels like a war zone which to's and fro's, with assaults going both ways, sieges and so on. If they can expand on that to produce some genuinely epic series of events, like a real war with heroes on both sides, or a cult that starts out with a few arisings, then some Cult champions appear to expand its holdings, various plots start to unfold and in the end they threaten a major noble like a Duke or a Prince, they could create a much more dynamic world state. Which would be very cool.

[mafao]

I'm not quite sure I understand why it happens, I've seen them talk about keeping the game to where people with less than optimal computer systems can run it and others have conjectured it's an issue with the game engine and even others with how many players are being added to existing servers.

If I understand the problem correctly (from what they have been explaining): the server and the client has to keep their state in sync, but if the state changes very quickly, it can become problematic simply because of the shier amount of information which has to be transferred. In another words, for each visible player the server has to send you a bunch of data each something happens to them. In a big WvWvW battle, a lot of data must be transferred, which stresses both the client and the server (and especially the network connection). So their solution was simply to limit the data sent to the client. Unfortunately, the consequence is that you won't be able to see some enemy players (the ones your client still doesn't know about), but they could see and attack you. This is essentially the 'invisible zerg' problem many are complaining about.

Bo be honest, I don't quite understand why they are having a problem like that, as a properly designed hierarchical (send important data first) entropy-optimal (make more frequent state codes shorter) communication protocol should solve it, but what do I know...

[Deleted]

A bit more tech detail: the problem is that the basic at-a-glance descriptive data for a character model - race, height, armour types and dyes, essential body information like body type and skin colour, weapons - is still a big chunk even without the fine detail (most of the facial data). Which means that sending it is bandwidth-intensive and so it gets aggressively culled. And in order to use a shorthand like "this is your enemy player nr6", both client and server have to keep a synced cache of player aliases, which requires quite a bit of maintenance and so extra server CPU cycles, although that's probably the solution you'd have to adopt if aggressive culling isn't giving you the results you need.

[Meledelion]

Can't they use "place holders" say sylvari1, norn1.... as "naked" models and just send those through instead. I really don't care if my enemy is fighting in full t3 cult or in heritage armor...
Meaning that the only info that needs to be sent are race and profession?

[Drakhar]

Some people must be reading a different blog post than me - that was a whole lot of nothing.

"Here's a jumbled list of vague ideas about things that are cool in theory that we might be working on for some time in the future which you may or may not actually see!"

An exaggeration, yes, but that describes about 60% of the blog post. And 35% is just pure PR fluff. The other 5% is shit you already knew about if you paid attention (culling/guesting/etc). No details whatsoever about what's actually coming in the Jan/Feb/March updates.

[Valeron]

Perhaps we'd rather see the glass half full rather than half empty, Drakhar

[Drakhar]

Perhaps we'd rather see the glass half full rather than half empty, Drakhar

ArenaNet lost the credibility to have their glass viewed as half full months ago for many players.

[BlairPhoenix]

Some people must be reading a different blog post than me - that was a whole lot of nothing.

"Here's a jumbled list of vague ideas about things that are cool in theory that we might be working on for some time in the future which you may or may not actually see!"

An exaggeration, yes, but that describes about 60% of the blog post. And 35% is just pure PR fluff. The other 5% is shit you already knew about if you paid attention (culling/guesting/etc). No details whatsoever about what's actually coming in the Jan/Feb/March updates.

I'd say the expanded achievement system was actual news, and the fact they had a pic up with some of the rewards involved shows that it's actually being worked on. I'll agree that a lot of what they said was PR fluff and vague ideas, but do give a little credit.

[Karizee]

Some people must be reading a different blog post than me - that was a whole lot of nothing.

It sounds like what you want is patch notes or maybe the event calendar for the patch launch (like they've done for each content release)?

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-ga...december-2012/

January is still locked so we don't have details yet but I imagine we will have it very soon. What Colin gave us today was the direction the game is moving towards.

[Zilong]

ArenaNet lost the credibility to have their glass viewed as half full months ago for many players.

As it happens with 95% of any company out there. Or Blizzard's D3 and even WoW is like overflowing juice in the glass (and pardon me for using Bliz as the point, but it's just "broader", but you could name any other there)? I literally think that the MMO industry is just full. Individualism is what everyone expect, and if the company listens and even if it doesn't listen, glasses are spilled, thus making the whole thing always near "empty".

Gw2 was a game that was built in a big hype, but despite the hype, many many mmo-players were already looking down on it. Suffice to say, the glass won't fill itself at any point because of that view thus any and all problems with the game (that recently launched) is just "omg". MMO plays out differently than the regular games on consoles but I think we already know that and still we think like it doesn't.

I have many gripes with gw2 and I'm expecting those promised features and everything else. But I'm not actually worrying about it o.0, I give them a little credit like Blair said and that's it. While Im waiting on more details, I enjoy the things that came along (Halloween and Xmas was beautiful) and I while I enjoyed 50% of the Lost Shore content I think they actually learned alot from it shown on Decembers patch.

All in all, just because they are not giving us an ETA on those things they talk about doesn't mean isn't coming. I think they probably do not talk about so it doesn't backfire in a much worse way.

[carnifex2005]

Here's some more info from Colin about the crown tokens in the picture I posted above...

"Just want to quickly point out to get out ahead of it since those numbers are wildly off. You receive 1 crown per daily, and 20 per monthly. (We’re also still tweaking the costs of the items shown in the screen shot, and will continue to adjust them until until the system is released.)"

More quotes from Colin in the thread...

"You won’t lose any achievement progress and will get full credit for all that kind of thing, absolutely. The only stuff that might need to be capped are achievements that extend infinitely that a handful of people have taken to extreme levels, we’ll discuss other options as well but I think if an effort to be transparent, it’s better to get out ahead of expectations so no one is surprised."

"Yeah we’ll need to figure out something for folks who do fall into that category, I just want to make sure to get out ahead of expectations so people don’t all feel they should now go rush off and have to do this (or other infinitely repeatable achievements.) We don’t want people to feel they need to play the game that way and have it be the best way to be rewarded."

"You will be yes, no reason to change your play habits in any way when it comes to anything other than if you’re collecting achievements points by progressing massively down an infinitely repeatable achievement. Map complete away! We haven’t finalized a solution for those in that specific category, I just want to get out ahead and warn this probably isn’t the best use of your time if you were considering it."

"You will still receive all the same rewards you currently get for your daily and monthly achievements, this will be an additional reward on top of it to make it more rewarding."