Guild Wars 2: Impressions From The Closed Beta

[spitfires_son]

It was sort of recent (at least within the last year) that they added 7 hero parties. They're really decent with their Super Human skill interrupting

[Nekosan]

I'm with Bronze here...

Regardless of whether you're in Australia or right on top of the server, mass world PvP lags in The Old Republic and Age of Conan as well. Australian players seem to see oceanic servers as the holy grail, but if players from New York are always complaining about world PvP lag, I'm not sure what people expect local servers to do.

The problem is always pronounced in MMOs with a new engine, too.

Guild Wars 2 seems to be much in the same position as Age of Conan when it launched. Pretty engine, but very new. So I hope they're able to adjust quickly, rather than struggle with it.

Bring on The Secret World.

What you have to remember is that U.S. gamers don't really have a concept of what real "lag" is, in games like League of Legends i constantly hear American players whine about "lag" when they have 60ms instead of their usual 40ms, whereas most Aussies think that 220ms plays just fine.Often what Americans call lag doesn't even factor in for us, it's barely noticeable.

[psychofruiterer]

Can anyone enlighten me as to why mmo's always end up chugging like crazy in big battles?
I can remember 50 player servers of Quake 2 with most of those 50 in view, all flinging rockets and grenades etc at the same time with no slowdown and less than 20 ping (wireplay servers back in the day), all on a couple of 56k modems linked.

Yet a 50 player wintergrasp in wow chugs to a crawl once the main amount of those players are nearby, but not yet in combat range....

Obviously i must be missing something huge as to why having 80 players in a pvp situation in an mmo brings the server to its knees.
I apologize in advance if it is bleedingly obvious, but educate me!

Some text to chew on from an old q2 server setup guide.

"When setting up a server a good rule of thumb is one person per 8 MHz for Pentium and Alpha machines. So a PPro/200 can probably handle a 25 person game, and a Pentium II/450 can probably handle 50-55 players. The best single processor machine you can get to run a server is probably a 633MHz DEC Alpha box from Enorex or Aspen Systems -- can support 75 or so players. As for RAM, obviously the more the better, but a minimum of 64MB is reasonable."

"You will also need to keep in mind network bandwidth considerations. The number we've been using is 3KB/player/second, so a T1 which does about 200KB second should be able to support a 64 player game, but keep in mind that this will FULLY saturate that T1, and the minute you open a Web browser everyone will become lagged."

[Marius]

I assume it's something to do with that it's not the only thing the servers are tracking. Whereas a FPS server might only have to track one map at a time, an MMO server needs to track tens. Each needs their own resources and such an intense concentration of players in one spot all interacting is not what servers are optimised to handle.

[psychofruiterer]

Isn't that what instances are for?
And if it's simply a case of running too many instances on one server, you would think thats an easy fix, run less of them!
And make the instance servers optimized differently?

As far as i can tell it's just the same thing as an fps server really, hitscan and aoe weapons,health and position tracking...

[Marius]

I was more getting at you can optimise your game to run in specific situations.

If most of your players are going to be running around in groups of 5, then a group of 50 is a long way outside the expected situation.

[psychofruiterer]

I understand, but it still doesn't stop me scratching my head at how the old quake 2 servers handled 50 people in a small area just fine... with wayyyy less resources.

But to address that, ok, so the game is optimized to expect groups of 5, why let groups of 50 converge then?
It seems to be major design flaw if that is the case.
You would think if it lets 50 players into an instanced zone, it would be coded to handle those 50 players in the one place... well i woulda thought anyway.

Just seems that even in known limit instanced content designed for a certain amount of players, they still make it higher than the hardware can support, why?

[Bronze_D]

Isn't that what instances are for?
And if it's simply a case of running too many instances on one server, you would think thats an easy fix, run less of them!
And make the instance servers optimized differently?

As far as i can tell it's just the same thing as an fps server really, hitscan and aoe weapons,health and position tracking...

Correction:

The problem isn't too many instances on one server...

it's TOO MANY PPL in ONE instance.

any instance or segment of world hosted by the server is run by either the server or a portion of it's resources.

They have an upper limit of how many ppl can be held at once in this instance realistically while still maintaining normal operation.

And to answer your last question, because you can't always predict how ppl react and move within the MMO server world.

The only alternative is to enforce a specific hard coded limit to instance population and generates more copy of it as one instance gets overloaded.

But in most MMO this is generally frowned upon by the players because it defeats part of the whole point of MMO ie: Massive, where you see and interact with other players since instancing is the exact opposite of that, and further divide the players into smaller segments separated from the other.

That and also because it often complicates effort by players in a group to gather or act together.

note as well that unlike an FPS server where one instance of an FPS map is entirely unrelated to another, in an MMO each of their instances are still related to an extent and shares some amount of data. This pose further limitation on how you distribute the server resources... in an FPS server you don't exactly care if you host 2 separate map in 2 different machines not connected to each other. But in an MMO world where players continue synchronizing their various data with the world and need to quickly load another segment when they move between the world parts this is not an option.

[psychofruiterer]

I'm kinda thinking of the old wow wintergrasp issue, where they eventually did limit it to a certain number of players in the instance, and it made a difference indeed.

But i get what you are saying...

[Tas]

Large scale stuff in MMO's is a little different to FPS games. You have far Far more pixels being drawn an updated, you have a massive amount of tracking being done by everything going on around you. Not to mention the entire area is loaded into memory. It can be done, but if you take EVE Online for instance, the record so far is (I believe) about 2200 ships in local at once fighting,now I have a top of the line machine nearly 7 grands worth ... an for me I get 3-4 fps in those battles.
Thats on a reinforced node too. So it can be done. I think that normal MMO's have alot more going on than EVE though.

Personally I can not wait for GW2, I new they had finally ditched that wow rubbish, in favor of proper MMO standards again an it's good to see that t hey are attempting to bring back DAOC quality pvp.

[Bluefire]

What gets me with all modern mmo's.. is realms.. why realms ?
They all instance the **** out of the worlds anyway..
Make one realm then each instance gets metered out to a different server.
Take wow for example... why have 50+ realms half of which are empty.. whats wrong with 50+ instances of org/sw ?
Want to run a vanilla 40man raid?.. well instead of having 100 people in trade you have 5,000 spread over 50 instances.. chances of 40/100 people wanting to do a lvl 60 raid ? ... 0 or close enough to 0.. instance it rather than split it into realms 40/5000 pretty good chance ?

I mean with swtor they have SOOOO many loading zones.. no reason at all you couldnt hand off to a different server for each zone.
I tried to play a dps on swtor last night.. 150-175 people on fleet 2 hours at lvl 19 LFG as ranged dps for a lvl 17 dungeon.. only interest was from lvl 16's who could tank or dps and never more than 1 tank 1 dps at a time, they would get bored while LFM and drop group...
Sure rep players are more likely to group than imps.. but still.. instanced I would have had a player base of over 2000 in fleet to ask.

And no cross realm grouping aka WoW is not the answer imo, Yes it helps casuals get groups (and I consider myself a casual player now) the problem is it also allows totally useless players and /need on everything they can players get groups as well.. nothing worse than playing wow.. Im rolling as tank pulling 15-20k dps.. wife is dpsing pulling 25-30k dps without even trying.... random heals keepin everyone alive.. and then you have the other two dps.. one pulling 8k and the 2nd pulling 15k.. and you CANT KICK THEM!!!!!

So how is GW2 going to handle it? Have they learnt anything from other mmo's or not ?

[Marius]

What you have to remember is that U.S. gamers don't really have a concept of what real "lag" is, in games like League of Legends i constantly hear American players whine about "lag" when they have 60ms instead of their usual 40ms, whereas most Aussies think that 220ms plays just fine.Often what Americans call lag doesn't even factor in for us, it's barely noticeable.

I disagree.

If in a normal situation the game is completely responsive, and in a mass world pvp situation it feels like it is at 1,000 ms, it's not the distance to server that suddenly introduced a one second delay.

You're basically saying here that when Australians go to a world pvp they and they alone get an 800ms penalty. Which doesn't make technical sense.

[Giblet1]

All this talk about lag, go try vs an American in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat while here in Australia and watch your arse get handed to you simply because of the lag (unless they are terrible). Games such as this will not work unless they put in local servers.

[Marius]

All this talk about lag, go try vs an American in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat while here in Australia and watch your arse get handed to you simply because of the lag (unless they are terrible). Games such as this will not work unless they put in local servers.

I do agree that normal lag in a game like this will be a big factor.

But am simply saying that distance lag can't account for every little thing wrong with a game... which is the position that many Australian gamers seem to take. When TOR Australian servers come out later this year, I'll bet good money that Illum will be just as bad.

It's very, very hard to do a dexterity skill mass world pvp game.

[Giblet1]

But am simply saying that distance lag can't account for every little thing wrong with a game... which is the position that many Australian gamers seem to take. When TOR Australian servers come out later this year, I'll bet good money that Illum will be just as bad.

Yea I agree. It's only 8 days till SW:The Old Republic Aussie servers though! so we shall see.