Guild Wars 2 AMAA (Arenanet on reddit) Oct.17

link: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/11mz4k/i_am_a_programmer_for_guild_wars_2_amaa/
taken from here: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/game/gw2/Oct-17-reddit-AMA-bulletin-points-on-gameplay

quote about invincible players at wvw

So again they tell the same stuff, but no ETA whatsoever, seems like they have no fucking clue how to fix shit and want to keep players playing while they in hope of a fix doing so.

You're always so negative about the game... :/ Do you actually like it at all?

If he expresses his negativity he must be passionate about it and like it, that's how I see it

Hey, somebody has to be "that guy that is so used to playing an already-old MMO where everything works nice and smooth" complaining about every little thing. If it wouldn't be him, it'd be someone else no worries. I don't think it affects us so much as we're not getting killed by invisible zergs very often nowadays since we're well used with "aoe the road" as opposed to "aoe the baddies on the road". Trouble seems to be that they can't focus all their resources on troubleshooting because they also need to play catch-up on missing features they want to implement. It has been only 2 months though and if you look back a lot of things were bugged or not working at all and fixed in this timespan.

Now from the other side of the fence: truth is they are taking a bit too long to come up with any sort of fix for the invisibility thing and there are plenty of suggestions for temporary solutions like reporting location to show nameplate only etc. When for some reason you do get full numbers shown on your screen anyway fps goes down the hill while GPU sits idle (had 100-ish drawn in a battle couple days ago somehow). Also a number of events and skill challenges still tend to bug out, personal story still gets stuck for some people every now and then, there are still bots (though less than a week ago as far as i can see). Oh and yeah, there's no UI to help organize a large group in WvW.

Still, invisibility and fps aside, the rest of the problems are 1st world inconveniences that are more likely to not even affect you. Dam nitpickers..*looks for a cool clam to throw at them*

Between the invisibility issue and pandas the number active has taken a big hit, ive always felt that this will always be a second game that will stay on the hard drive for years, the comfortable old shoe that you never throw away but go back to from to time for varying lengths of time.

The invis enemies in wvw is gamebreaking in my opinion i would prefer to have shitty vector graphics with players i can see than this. Its kinda sad that the problem seems to be resolved by players not playing than any sort of dev proactivity.

Im with melody i cannot beleive that at no time in the development process they never had more that 50 people on the screen at any one time... especialy on a game that sells itself on mass PvP ...... the Very thing that being a boon is all about and the one thing that we all crave.

Despite this i like the game still and have been holding back on Spvp for a reason.... something to do when i have an assortmrent of alts. Despite its faults i have never liked alting as much as i do in this game. plus the server we are on has a real chance to form a good community, between the RPers and the willingness of the guilds to work together in WvW then pikey square has a great future given time.

He has a point though, I can't really enjoy WvW because I can't see anyone I'm fighting, after the initial "oh my god this is so fun" period, WvW just became boring because you ended up spamming the same skills because hey, what else can you do when you can't see who you're up against. After that the only PvP I did was in the puzzle with Furie and Gekido.

I wouldn't be too worried about people gone to play pandas or <insert other mmo here>. They tend to complete the pve content way before the next patch arrives and there's not much else to do there...personally I wouldn't see myself doing battleground-style stuff and "world pvp" in any other game that's out there now, knowing that there's GW2 s/t PVP and WvW available..for free.
They probably did have more than 50 people on screen in the development process but they didn't have a wide variety of machines (both low and high end) to test on so the problem that led to the introduction of culling was probably not discovered then. It's also very likely that they didn't have the other hundreds of players elsewhere in the maps using up server resources/bandwidth as well. Culling was introduced at some point in the betas because they discovered it was unplayable on lower-end systems and even on some high-end systems that the game was not optimized for at all, it's really a poor workaround and a very shabby temporary solution slapped on there but if they didn't put it in they'd probably have more people complaining about having no fps and the game being unplayable on their requirement-meeting system than they have now complaining about invisibility.
I'm not blaming them for not discovering the fps issue in the first place, but if they initially assumed that this system would solve a problem without creating a whole new one instead that's just faulty judgement. However it doesn't really matter now, surely they had their reasons to rush release despite having several unaddressed big points from beta, game's just 2 months old, they obviously care a lot about their game and are putting the work into fixing all areas of it so it'll get there eventually. The fact that it's so easy to get back into after a break will make it that much easier for people to come back once the thing that bugged them the most gets fixed.

here is something in development that will “greatly increase” number of concurrent players in WvW. (!!!)

Hmm im not sure about this, personally i also find the maps too small, stuff like being able to treb bay from garrison etc is a problem also it makes it hard for small groups to be effective its too easy for the main zerg to keep flipping supply camps back. maybe if they added 3 more maps between the boarderlands where small groups could take and hold objectives that feed some sort of resource into the map BL & EB

In my opinion the wvw is the best siege system in any game so far (exept for the culling) the maps are greatly designed for big and small sieges ... Siege equipment is great and in balance...the diffrent type of objectives are cool and even the bonussus like the quaggons and stuff are awesome for small party's to help the greater good and help enough to give a smaller zerg the edge to beat a bigger one .... This is still all macro management ... And the classes support the oppurtunity's for micro management so well that i think there is an infinte amount of strategies to explore to bad i havent found any guilds using micro management at all so far.... All vids online = "now bomb bomb bomb" maybe time for boons to take the initiative and share with our allies for more succes

Just my 2 cents

Sure but trebbing from fort to fort shouldnt be