#174 - Oct. 5, 2012, 3:22 p.m.
(Continued from the previous post…)
I’d like to take a moment to briefly address a few of the points of serious contention that have come up in this thread and hopefully clear up any confusion:
This is a multi-faceted issue that involves both reporting from the server to the client and client asset loading. Much like a super villain team-up these two parts of the issue are combining to make an unpleasant situation worse. We’re pursuing both parts of the issue and hope to see incremental improvements as we get fixes in and tested.
The reporting issue is really all about performance tradeoffs. Every decision that the server makes about what to report to which client consumes resources, as does the act of reporting itself. These resources (server CPU, network bandwidth, etc.) are finite and are the same ones that are used by every other aspect of WvW as well. How we make use of those resources determines the number of players we can support in a given map and how smooth the simulation feels. The system that we have in place now constitutes an attempt to strike a balance between a perfect simulation that handles all the details and makes them available to every client immediately and a simulation that supports a reasonably large number of players while maintaining smooth performance under most gameplay situations. This is a true dilemma because we really want to achieve both of those goals completely and simultaneously but that just isn’t possible at the moment.
Could we throw more hardware at the problem? Maybe, but the servers that we’re running on now are Serious Business™ and simply buying faster CPUs likely wouldn’t gain us even a linear increase in performance. With today’s hardware I believe that we’re likely to gain far more improvement from code changes than we would from slightly faster CPUs. As you might imagine the way that we manage client/server communication is pretty well core to the way our game works so making changes to that system is a tricky affair that must be undertaken with great care and much testing. Further, since we can’t really create any more resources (CPU, network) every substantial change involves making a hard decision about performance, scale, and completeness of the various aspects of Gw2. Some of the most robust, correct, and appealing solutions to this issue are also the ones that will take the longest to implement correctly, thus adding response time into the mix of factors we need to consider. In a situation like this, sadly, there are no easy answers. That said, we’re evaluating possible changes to reporting even now and are committed to making WvW into the best experience we can.
The client issue relates to the way that we load assets when preparing to display characters. WvW hits this more than most other parts of the game because players are pretty much the most complicated characters that we have and, especially at higher levels, they tend to be quite varied (so things like texture caching don’t help us as much as they might elsewhere in the game). WvW tends to have much higher player densities than the rest of the game so that’s why we see these issues coming up in WvW more than elsewhere. This asset loading issue will be influenced by client hardware (kind of like saying water is wet, I know) but we see this issue crop up on even high end systems so it’s clear that hardware is not the major determining factor. So, while better hardware may improve the situation a bit it won’t make the client issue go away completely. At this point we have a solid repro of the client issue and we’re aggressively pursuing fixes.
All of us who have worked on WvW (and many of those at ArenaNet who have not) are deeply invested in making WvW the best it can be. I personally have dedicated over a year of my life to developing this game type. Other have spent even longer. I know it can be terribly frustrating to deal with these issues (I’m a gamer too, I’ve been there!). I also know that frustration can make it tempting to believe that our silence on the forums means we’re ignoring issues with the game. Please believe me when I tell you that is simply not the case. We must always balance our time on the forums with our time spent working on the game. If we go silent for a while it’s generally because we’re busy working hard so that the next time we post we can have something substantial to tell you.
TL;DR: The issue is real, we’re aware of it, we’re working on fixes/improvements, the fixes/improvements are complicated and I can’t provide you an ETA.
Keep fighting the good fight and we’ll be back to let you know when we can share more details.
