Why is Performance Never/Rarely Addressed?

#1 - Aug. 27, 2013, 8:05 p.m.

I don’t have an amazing PC by any means (a Phenom II X4 @ 3.3Ghz, Radeon HD 7850, 8GB of RAM), but performance in a lot of cases is lower-than-expected, especially during world events and WvW. I’ve tried plenty of different drivers, OS setups, settings, etc. but I’m 99% sure my processor is the bottleneck.

The Tech Support forums has loads of posts about low performance on top-end both Intel and AMD processors, with or without overclocking. There’s posts about how ArenaNet “doesn’t care” about such performance issues either, talk of how the game was designed for consoles, never going to be fixed, ArenaNet refusing help from NVIDIA and/or AMD, etc.

Every time there’s a new patch, I eagerly check out the notes and look for any sign of performance changes, and usually end up disappointed with the lack of any.

I really want to believe that ArenaNet does care, and are secretly doing some behind-the-scenes update that’ll bring forth crazy performance improvements and other optimizations, but lack of any mention of anything performance-related is pretty discouraging I even tried asking about it on the questionnaire post on the official Facebook page recently (yesterday) but didn’t even get a “thanks for the question” response (other questions prior to mine did).

Does ArenaNet really not care about improving performance? Or is it secretly being worked on (a hint might be nice I suppose)?

Guild Wars 2 is possibly the best MMORPG I’ve played, and I recommended it to all my friends (who haven’t purchased it). The game looks beautiful, but I just dislike how it performs currently :/ I mean it’s playable to an extent I suppose, but it could be better.

I don’t really want a timeframe (one would be nice I guess if it could be given), just would love to see something stating that it’s at least being looked into currently…

ColinJohanson

#2 - Sept. 1, 2013, 4:44 p.m.

We have folks constantly working to improve performance, we’ve actually made quite a few perf updates this year. You’ll see more perf updates in the upcoming releases, we have a team working entirely on performance at all times that won’t be going away any time soon.

BillFreist

#68 - Sept. 2, 2013, 10:56 p.m.

In addition to Colin’s response:

As Colin mentioned we have dedicated resources to addressing performance (server and client side). We formed a small team back in Spring to get the ball rolling. Recently we’ve been upping our resources and have made policies company-wide to ensure our releases don’t have negative effects on the performance of the game. You’ll start noticing, as early as the release in 2 weeks, that we’re improving performance of the game.

Optimizing is an extremely dangerous thing to do, especially to a Live game. We can’t just push out these optimizations as we go, as much as we’d like to. They go through a testing cycle of a minimum of 6 weeks to ensure they don’t have a negative impact on the game. We have a great group of people in QA that are staying on top of reports on the forums as well as doing dedicated performance testing across the game while putting together information for our Engineers to address issues as they pop up.

As I mentioned above, the first round of noticeable improvements should be rolling out in a couple weeks. From then on, I hope to have some sort of noticeable gain every 4 – 6 weeks. I hope to have more information on this in the near future.

-Bill

BillFreist

#72 - Sept. 2, 2013, 11:14 p.m.

Don’t expect double FPS overnight . Also, the changes I mentioned will mostly only be noticeable in combat or in large groups of creatures/players.

-Bill