The cap as an attempt to solve problems also creates problems.
I have seen several 500+ player battles even in games like shadowbane that at peak barely topped 1000-1400 players on a server at its height. Guildwars 2 in a very real way will have to face this head on and right out of the gate too boot.
WvW isnt for everyone, lots prefere the BGs or Arena style pvp. You guys make it sound like that the entire server is going to play WvW at the same time. And its just not going to be like that.
Some will Pvp, some will WvW and some will Pve. Even with a Power orb raid or something, theres always ppl that are doing other stuff. I really doubt that this will be an issue at all
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
I can only imagine the tears and rage if servers fail to hold 500 players in PVP and game crashes or runs horribly with so many players running around. A lot of MMOS have made tall claims before like WAR and AOC but never delieverd when it comes to large number of players in PVP zones.
To be fair, technology is contstantly improving and NCSoft published games do tend to have outstanding net and server code. I believe the claim is possible, but it's going to take some really skilled programmers to pull off. This is mainly to do with client-side coding I would think. Cloudifying servers can help significantly on the server side.
These are the people that made the 1000 player FPS recently and if you read through how they accompished it, it was with some pretty clever "cloudy" server code, placing single threads on multiple cores. The 1000 player FPS was done on a quad core server.
I can only imagine the tears and rage if servers fail to hold 500 players in PVP and game crashes or runs horribly with so many players running around. A lot of MMOS have made tall claims before like WAR and AOC but never delieverd when it comes to large number of players in PVP zones.
To be fair, technology is contstantly improving and NCSoft published games do tend to have outstanding net and server code. I believe the claim is possible, but it's going to take some really skilled programmers to pull off. This is mainly to do with client-side coding I would think. Cloudifying servers can help significantly on the server side.
These are the people that made the 1000 player FPS recently and if you read through how they accompished it, it was with some pretty clever "cloudy" server code, placing single threads on multiple cores. The 1000 player FPS was done on a quad core server.
Is GW2 using same technology? it might be possible but remember once you make a claim like this, it sticks for ever and todays MMO gamers have this habit of rubbing it in and not let it go. So IMO Anet should just not say things which they might regret later because i am really looking forward to GW2 release.
I can only imagine the tears and rage if servers fail to hold 500 players in PVP and game crashes or runs horribly with so many players running around. A lot of MMOS have made tall claims before like WAR and AOC but never delieverd when it comes to large number of players in PVP zones.
To be fair, technology is contstantly improving and NCSoft published games do tend to have outstanding net and server code. I believe the claim is possible, but it's going to take some really skilled programmers to pull off. This is mainly to do with client-side coding I would think. Cloudifying servers can help significantly on the server side.
These are the people that made the 1000 player FPS recently and if you read through how they accompished it, it was with some pretty clever "cloudy" server code, placing single threads on multiple cores. The 1000 player FPS was done on a quad core server.
Is GW2 using same technology? it might be possible but remember once you make a claim like this, it sticks for ever and todays MMO gamers have this habit of rubbing it in and not let it go. So IMO Anet should just not say things which they might regret later because i am really looking forward to GW2 release.
I doubt they're using the same technology, but NCSoft has had some pretty solid net and server code over time. L2 had some pretty huge keep seiges, although they were accompanied by lag (I didn't experience these, but a good friend speaks rather fondly of them). I'm just saying that it's possible that ANet actually has programmers that are clever enough to facilitate 500 person battles within the current level of technology. Only time will tell if that is actually the case or not, but I'm not writing it off as impossible.
However, GW2 does give me the "too good to be true" feeling, so I will contain my hype until I get to actually experience what ANet has built.
We have zero idea if the "caps" are soft caps or hard caps, or how a hard cap would be handled. All MMOs have a soft cap before performance issues become serious and server stability becomes an issue. Arenanet have been upfront about capacity expectations. I think the numbers they are throwing around are high enough to make it unlikely that the caps will be reached very often, if at all.
I think a lot of it depends on what the over all server population caps are intended to be as well. If it's the typical 3k to 5k range, it's hard to imagine WvW capacity being reached often, if at all. As much as many of us are salivating over WvW, there are still likely to be a lot more people who rarely enter WvW than people who frequently enter WvW. If there are hard caps and those caps are reached, those that are decicated WvW players may stick around in a queue, but those who are more casual about it are likely to just go do something else until the capacity issues resolve themselves.
With way point travel and the extensive system of portals, it's not like you'll waste twenty minutes getting to Lion's Arch, only to find entry to The Mists barred and yourself facing another 20 minute voyage to get back to your PvE content.
Another missing piece of the puzzle is exactly how one enters The Mists and where they arrive. We know there is a portal in Lion's Arch, but does it transport you to a single, safe hub from which you can make use of waypoints to travel to friendly destinations? Can you directly chose a particular waypoint whenyou first enter the portal?
If waypoints are available in The Mists, it may be possible to bypass areas that have reached the population cap, rather than being bottle necked by an invasion to your server's borderlands.
There are too many questions at this point before the potential concern the OP raised becomes an actual concern.
u will never see 500 players next to u in the map. first the map are extremely Big,
there is event everywhere down to 1 player to 100 all sprend out over the map, while u battle 20 player on a event , there is probably 100 other player attacking the keep with siege weapon and while other player are doing smaller event somewhere else.
its wont be a showdown in the middles or else u will just lose,
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
I can only imagine the tears and rage if servers fail to hold 500 players in PVP and game crashes or runs horribly with so many players running around. A lot of MMOS have made tall claims before like WAR and AOC but never delieverd when it comes to large number of players in PVP zones.
To be fair, technology is contstantly improving and NCSoft published games do tend to have outstanding net and server code. I believe the claim is possible, but it's going to take some really skilled programmers to pull off. This is mainly to do with client-side coding I would think. Cloudifying servers can help significantly on the server side.
These are the people that made the 1000 player FPS recently and if you read through how they accompished it, it was with some pretty clever "cloudy" server code, placing single threads on multiple cores. The 1000 player FPS was done on a quad core server.
Is GW2 using same technology? it might be possible but remember once you make a claim like this, it sticks for ever and todays MMO gamers have this habit of rubbing it in and not let it go. So IMO Anet should just not say things which they might regret later because i am really looking forward to GW2 release.
It's likely that Arenanet are using something similar. If Arenanet has managed to bring the server technology for GW1, which allowed for no downtime for maintenance and hot patching, into GW2 with it's persistant world shards, then that would signal a very robust and adaptable server infrastructure. (The fact that WvW transitions at the end of each two week period do not appear to take place during a scheduled maintenance window, but rather occur in a matter of minutes, lead me to believe that they have indeed ported over and improved on the GW1 server technology and that this will be a game with out regularly scheduled maintenance windows. This is only possible if game servers can be efficiently moved around between physical servers).
I guess it then comes down to how fine an area can be broken off and moved around in such a way. Is it a region? A zone? Or is each zone broken into smaller pieces that can be load balanced individually?
A lot of people who are interested in GW2 are going to be playing for the pve and e-sport pvp, to think you are going to get 500 per 4 zones in the WvWvW, I think would be more on the rare side to never. This is not going to be DAOC where the "end game" was the frontier pvp, GW2 will have pve and e-sport pvp in addition. Plus they stated this is ball park figure and has not been optimized yet they may be able to get more.
A lot of people who are interested in GW2 are going to be playing for the pve and e-sport pvp, to think you are going to get 500 per 4 zones in the WvWvW, I think would be more on the rare side to never. This is not going to be DAOC where the "end game" was the frontier pvp, GW2 will have pve and e-sport pvp in addition. Plus they stated this is ball park figure and has not been optimized yet they may be able to get more.
Long term it may be rare to get 500 per zone for the WvWvW but short term people tend to ride the bandwagon of testing a games various features. Any and all problems should be considered now rather than the first month the game launches.
There is a maximum of 500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...
On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone... which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones... I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...
Also, their is no infomation as to how the battle is decided by the end of that week. Due to that you may march your army to take that one area but still lose because taking it is worthless compared to doing other things. Since it is a week long contest, so you may win that one battle but lose the war when the other 2 server decide to only focus on killing your server. A week long 24/7 battle means that controling areas will vary depending on how many people are on at a specific time.
There is a maximum of 500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...
On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone... which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones... I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...
They made every single dynamic event grief proof by painstakingly testing every aspect many times. I'm 100% sure they spotted that glaringly obvious potential flaw in WvW.
There is a maximum of 500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...
On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone... which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones... I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...
The issue has plagued MMOs for years and is still current.
It's the main reason why new MMOs focus on BG/Warzone/Warfronts, where controlling populations is managable. Cause nobody wants this:
Yet BG warzones and war front do not hold anything up to DAOC/ DF or shadowbane style pvp. People want more then just the 10 minutes rush. They want the planning, the hard work, the stradegy, the politics, the crafting logistics arm, the community ect. ect.. When you have all that your 10 minute battles are something a whole lot more then a team death match.
I would assume the sides are capped so you can't steamroll simply because your server has more people (this would also encourage people to not stack up on one "uber pvp" server) So that means roughly up to 166 people of your "team" in each zone.
Also siege weapons. In the WvWvW their are suppose to be long range siege weapons. They are like the ones in 5v5 only with a much larger range. The 5v5 trebuchet I have seen were 1-2 shotting people for 9k damage or so. The WvWvW siege weapons should be able to take out any large clusters of people.
I would assume the sides are capped so you can't steamroll simply because your server has more people (this would also encourage people to not stack up on one "uber pvp" server) So that means roughly up to 166 people of your "team" in each zone.
This is not battlegrounds. You will face unfair odds in the wvw. That is why there are 3 sides, if one side gets too big the other 2 clash against them. This is not competetive pvp, this is world pvp. unfair odds and playing them to your advantage is part of the game.
They will likely cap each faction, but if you are only bringing 50 to the battleground and the other server brings there 166 you better seek some allies.
There is a maximum of 500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...
On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone... which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones... I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...
You really haven't been reading properly.
On Reddit AMA they have said AT LEAST 500 people for EACH SIDE.
Where the hell did you get idea of 500 pop cap in zone?
There is a maximum of 500 players allowed in each of the 4 areas, now imagine that me and my friends march intoo a zone with an army of 400. .. then none of the 2 other servers can get enough people in that zone to defend anything...
On top of that most people will probably want to fight in the middle zone... which makes that zone easilly overpopulated... and when the zone is full, noboddy can tresspass through it to other zones... I think the 500 people/zone max will call out for a lot of frustrations, when there is an important battle going on and people can't join it...
My understanding of how WvWvW works in Guild Wars 2 is that its an OBJECTIVE war game
Meaning, if you can get 500 players of one server into the middle zone, others can split up and destroy your undefended border zones. So lets say you happen to get 400 and leave 50 to defend and 50 in other areas, all they really needed to do is get 100 to destroy your keep, and another 100 to take over all supplies. And thats with the other 2 factions only at 100 players each. So even if you hold Middle, you will have no supplies to upgrade your keeps, nor enough to defend the other areas.
And thats saying that in that 2 weeks time, the two other servers won't rally enough players to destroy your zerg, and hold all other objectives and wins the war. Which demoralized your 500 troops that you have spend weeks gathering.
This is assuming 500 players per zone.
And Besides, even if you are able to win for the first 2 weeks, the rating system they have, will match you with other Servers that was able to rally 500+ players as well, so your strategy will probably only work on the first few matches. And you will have to keep that strategy going, because its only gonna get harder and harder to control all those 500 players weeks after week fighting against other similar minded guild masters in their own servers.
But i really want to see how their engine will handle all the players and destructable worlds. If the lag is playable, then it will be a wonderful addition to the MMO market.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
This is pretty much what WvW will look like. i know this is just outside the Divinity"s Reach and not the Mist but iam jus saying that you probably never gonna see 500 player in 1 spot but all scatter everywhere .
This pic was Linked Feb 17 by the Dev .its showing where people are in the beta,
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
Comments
The cap as an attempt to solve problems also creates problems.
I have seen several 500+ player battles even in games like shadowbane that at peak barely topped 1000-1400 players on a server at its height. Guildwars 2 in a very real way will have to face this head on and right out of the gate too boot.
WvW isnt for everyone, lots prefere the BGs or Arena style pvp. You guys make it sound like that the entire server is going to play WvW at the same time. And its just not going to be like that.
Some will Pvp, some will WvW and some will Pve. Even with a Power orb raid or something, theres always ppl that are doing other stuff. I really doubt that this will be an issue at all
The way mmo's were: Community, Exploration, Character Development, Conquest.
The way mmo's are now : Cut-Scenes,Cut-Scenes, solo Questing, Cut-Scenes...
www.CeaselessGuild.com
To be fair, technology is contstantly improving and NCSoft published games do tend to have outstanding net and server code. I believe the claim is possible, but it's going to take some really skilled programmers to pull off. This is mainly to do with client-side coding I would think. Cloudifying servers can help significantly on the server side.
http://muchdifferent.com/?page=game-pikkotekk-pikkoserver
These are the people that made the 1000 player FPS recently and if you read through how they accompished it, it was with some pretty clever "cloudy" server code, placing single threads on multiple cores. The 1000 player FPS was done on a quad core server.
Is GW2 using same technology? it might be possible but remember once you make a claim like this, it sticks for ever and todays MMO gamers have this habit of rubbing it in and not let it go.
So IMO Anet should just not say things which they might regret later because i am really looking forward to GW2 release.
I doubt they're using the same technology, but NCSoft has had some pretty solid net and server code over time. L2 had some pretty huge keep seiges, although they were accompanied by lag (I didn't experience these, but a good friend speaks rather fondly of them). I'm just saying that it's possible that ANet actually has programmers that are clever enough to facilitate 500 person battles within the current level of technology. Only time will tell if that is actually the case or not, but I'm not writing it off as impossible.
However, GW2 does give me the "too good to be true" feeling, so I will contain my hype until I get to actually experience what ANet has built.
We have zero idea if the "caps" are soft caps or hard caps, or how a hard cap would be handled. All MMOs have a soft cap before performance issues become serious and server stability becomes an issue. Arenanet have been upfront about capacity expectations. I think the numbers they are throwing around are high enough to make it unlikely that the caps will be reached very often, if at all.
I think a lot of it depends on what the over all server population caps are intended to be as well. If it's the typical 3k to 5k range, it's hard to imagine WvW capacity being reached often, if at all. As much as many of us are salivating over WvW, there are still likely to be a lot more people who rarely enter WvW than people who frequently enter WvW. If there are hard caps and those caps are reached, those that are decicated WvW players may stick around in a queue, but those who are more casual about it are likely to just go do something else until the capacity issues resolve themselves.
With way point travel and the extensive system of portals, it's not like you'll waste twenty minutes getting to Lion's Arch, only to find entry to The Mists barred and yourself facing another 20 minute voyage to get back to your PvE content.
Another missing piece of the puzzle is exactly how one enters The Mists and where they arrive. We know there is a portal in Lion's Arch, but does it transport you to a single, safe hub from which you can make use of waypoints to travel to friendly destinations? Can you directly chose a particular waypoint whenyou first enter the portal?
If waypoints are available in The Mists, it may be possible to bypass areas that have reached the population cap, rather than being bottle necked by an invasion to your server's borderlands.
There are too many questions at this point before the potential concern the OP raised becomes an actual concern.
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
u will never see 500 players next to u in the map. first the map are extremely Big,
there is event everywhere down to 1 player to 100 all sprend out over the map, while u battle 20 player on a event , there is probably 100 other player attacking the keep with siege weapon and while other player are doing smaller event somewhere else.
its wont be a showdown in the middles or else u will just lose,
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~
It's likely that Arenanet are using something similar. If Arenanet has managed to bring the server technology for GW1, which allowed for no downtime for maintenance and hot patching, into GW2 with it's persistant world shards, then that would signal a very robust and adaptable server infrastructure. (The fact that WvW transitions at the end of each two week period do not appear to take place during a scheduled maintenance window, but rather occur in a matter of minutes, lead me to believe that they have indeed ported over and improved on the GW1 server technology and that this will be a game with out regularly scheduled maintenance windows. This is only possible if game servers can be efficiently moved around between physical servers).
I guess it then comes down to how fine an area can be broken off and moved around in such a way. Is it a region? A zone? Or is each zone broken into smaller pieces that can be load balanced individually?
Want to know more about GW2 and why there is so much buzz? Start here: Guild Wars 2 Mass Info for the Uninitiated
I don't think it would be wise to plan for situation A hoping that situation B never happens. If it can go wrong, it will go wrong.
Anyways, unless ANet is completely retarded they'll have a solution for this.
A lot of people who are interested in GW2 are going to be playing for the pve and e-sport pvp, to think you are going to get 500 per 4 zones in the WvWvW, I think would be more on the rare side to never. This is not going to be DAOC where the "end game" was the frontier pvp, GW2 will have pve and e-sport pvp in addition. Plus they stated this is ball park figure and has not been optimized yet they may be able to get more.
Long term it may be rare to get 500 per zone for the WvWvW but short term people tend to ride the bandwagon of testing a games various features. Any and all problems should be considered now rather than the first month the game launches.
Also, their is no infomation as to how the battle is decided by the end of that week. Due to that you may march your army to take that one area but still lose because taking it is worthless compared to doing other things. Since it is a week long contest, so you may win that one battle but lose the war when the other 2 server decide to only focus on killing your server. A week long 24/7 battle means that controling areas will vary depending on how many people are on at a specific time.
They made every single dynamic event grief proof by painstakingly testing every aspect many times. I'm 100% sure they spotted that glaringly obvious potential flaw in WvW.
No one said WvW would be fair. That's the whole point of open world pvp. If you want a fair fight, enter competitive pvp.
Yet BG warzones and war front do not hold anything up to DAOC/ DF or shadowbane style pvp. People want more then just the 10 minutes rush. They want the planning, the hard work, the stradegy, the politics, the crafting logistics arm, the community ect. ect.. When you have all that your 10 minute battles are something a whole lot more then a team death match.
I would assume the sides are capped so you can't steamroll simply because your server has more people (this would also encourage people to not stack up on one "uber pvp" server) So that means roughly up to 166 people of your "team" in each zone.
Also siege weapons. In the WvWvW their are suppose to be long range siege weapons. They are like the ones in 5v5 only with a much larger range. The 5v5 trebuchet I have seen were 1-2 shotting people for 9k damage or so. The WvWvW siege weapons should be able to take out any large clusters of people.
This is not battlegrounds. You will face unfair odds in the wvw. That is why there are 3 sides, if one side gets too big the other 2 clash against them. This is not competetive pvp, this is world pvp. unfair odds and playing them to your advantage is part of the game.
They will likely cap each faction, but if you are only bringing 50 to the battleground and the other server brings there 166 you better seek some allies.
You really haven't been reading properly.
On Reddit AMA they have said AT LEAST 500 people for EACH SIDE.
Where the hell did you get idea of 500 pop cap in zone?
Seriously, man, if you can actually get 400 people into the zone at the same time of day for two weeks, then your side deserves to win xD
Its 500 people in each map.
My understanding of how WvWvW works in Guild Wars 2 is that its an OBJECTIVE war game
Meaning, if you can get 500 players of one server into the middle zone, others can split up and destroy your undefended border zones. So lets say you happen to get 400 and leave 50 to defend and 50 in other areas, all they really needed to do is get 100 to destroy your keep, and another 100 to take over all supplies. And thats with the other 2 factions only at 100 players each. So even if you hold Middle, you will have no supplies to upgrade your keeps, nor enough to defend the other areas.
And thats saying that in that 2 weeks time, the two other servers won't rally enough players to destroy your zerg, and hold all other objectives and wins the war. Which demoralized your 500 troops that you have spend weeks gathering.
This is assuming 500 players per zone.
And Besides, even if you are able to win for the first 2 weeks, the rating system they have, will match you with other Servers that was able to rally 500+ players as well, so your strategy will probably only work on the first few matches. And you will have to keep that strategy going, because its only gonna get harder and harder to control all those 500 players weeks after week fighting against other similar minded guild masters in their own servers.
But i really want to see how their engine will handle all the players and destructable worlds. If the lag is playable, then it will be a wonderful addition to the MMO market.
Life is a Maze, so make sure you bring your GPS incase you get lost in it.
This is pretty much what WvW will look like. i know this is just outside the Divinity"s Reach and not the Mist but iam jus saying that you probably never gonna see 500 player in 1 spot but all scatter everywhere .
This pic was Linked Feb 17 by the Dev .its showing where people are in the beta,
~The only opinion that matters is your own.Everything else is just advice,~