Ways to improve guild wars interface, gameplay, and reduce laggs

#1
Guild halls basically take a server to make. When a player makes a guild hall he or she is taking up some of the memory inside the Arena net server and therefore is costing them a bit more money each time. A couple restrictions to make sure we drop a bit of this problem.
Rule number 1:
To buy a guild hall, a guild leader must have at least 4 people (including themselves) that will join the guild within 4 days of construction.
Rule number 2:
If for some reason a single person does not join the guild by that time, as long as the guild has had at least one person join, the time will be extended.
Rule number 3:
If by a month the guild has not met the minimum requirement of 4 members, the guild is deleted, all money spent on that guild (hall, cape, traders, etc.) is returned to the original person who bought that particular furnishing or trader.
Way this will help:
By setting a minimum amount of members and a time limit, this allows that people who have a busy schedule and might not be able to make it within four days will have an extended period to make it on. If they still want to set up the guild they get their gold back so they can just rearrange a more suitable date to create the guild. This will increase the memory the game has giving other players a slightly better interface and a bit less lagg.

#2
Servers in the game are shared in towns and outposts and the like. But some people will waste time just sitting around, or waiting for a pm. They don't belong on a guild wars server. By allowing people the option to enter a personal server in a town or outpost, it allows them to open up their own pc as a guild wars world (as in explorable areas). They can still recieve pms, talk on guild chat, and use party search, but it will also reduce the memory space taken.

#3
in aspenwood, jade quarry, and alliance battles, it will take a maximum of 20 minutes to get into a single fight. In the random, team, and zaishen challenge arenas, it takes a grand total of about 1 minute max. My idea is to siphon off just a few servers from these (just 1-3 apiece would suffice) and that would add, in total, about 3-9 additional fights in the alliance battles. So instead of only 4 fights being allowed at a time, their could be 5 or 7, drastically decreasing wait time and increasing participation (also a slight waiting period in random arenas but I after getting used to teh alliance battle wait, I can definately wait 30 seconds to get into a fight).

#4
Siphon off some of the chat moderator team to script up a seperate guild recruitment chat I have already stated the benefits to this in another post and it gained very wide approval inside the game (apparently this isn't a very popular site because the time it takes to load one page makes it completely worthless).

#5
Siphon off a few of the scriptors from eye of the north, and make them read our ideas. That way it may not improve gameplay or interface or improve laggs too much, but it will allow our ideas to get out.

Sadly for me and everyone who liked or hated this thread. There is only a 5% chance that the gw staff will be bothered to read this forum post. There is also only a 37% chance that with everyone in arenanet too busy spending our money to care about what we think to read any of the posts in this forum. I say this with the utmost regret but I feel we are all being left out of the game's preduction. The only real way to make this change is if everyone in this forum, and all other forums sent arenanet an e mail at roughly the same time (say the 26th of July), that would make a big enough ruckus that the likelihood of them paying closer attention would increase to 64%.

So you want to piss off a lot of people for a minor resource use reduction ?

Then there is the issue that your script for checking which halls to delete might take up more server CPU space than the

You mean like a guy in a 1 man guild going into his guild hall ?
Oh wait, you don't want 1 man guilds having halls.

We have been told by Gaile on multiple occasions that there is no server limitations on ABs. So I'll need you to show proof that there are 3 Luxon and 3 Kurzick teams waiting at AB's and all of them get simultaneously told to wait.

Unless you do this, a logical conclusion is that the wait times at AB's is due to a lack of people who are waiting to start a match.

Another chat channel = more server load = more lag. Though there won't be any noticeable lag, this goes directly against your title suggesting your ideas are there to reduce lag. Or is this a thread with multiple suggestions, in direct violation of this forums rules ?

We do have people like Gaile who are paid to watch the various fansite forums and bring any useful threads to the attention of the devs.
Please provide proof that you didn't just make these numbers up. Making up numbers makes you look like an idiot and actually damages your arguments.

/unsigned

I only really agree with this in your post, but not even, its more like

1. where did you get your information regarding the amount of server space a guild takes up..? plus, some people enjoy having their own 'guild of one' and that should not be a matter of judgement.

2. how do you know what everyone is doing? maybe they are talking to their guild on vent, watching the trade channel, or simply talking in alliance chat while they sell or reorganize their items... I dont know, i personally dont know what constitutes being worthy of sitting afk in a town

3. again, I dont see where youre getting your numbers..

4. P

5. They have people who read the forums... Gaile for example... Im sure any ideas worth it make it to their desk... pvp-edition for example.

(for most of your questions I actually did my research. I got together around 7 seperate people in game while making this post and had them make different teams in alliance battle. After checking to make sure none of them were on the same set of 12 people I pmed all of them. A total of 4 were in a battle the other 3 were waiting. My primary conclusion was that around 4 battles can take place at a time atm in the regular alliance battles. I'm about to test my theory on aspenwood, the jade quarry isn't really worth the time because no one goes there)
Also on a seperate note, the server usage I checked was that in gw about 1 server should hold enough memory space for one battle. Which means a total of 4 servers are put into the regular alliance battles and possibly also true with aspenwood and quarry. I've been writing up html code for a while so I'm quite sure my figures on the server memory is accurate.
The percentages are based on a number of things. I have not seen a single idea taken from this forum for a total of 5 months. I rechecked the percentages and I believe you'll find these a bit more accurate.
Chance of them reading this current post: remains 5%
Chance of them reading any of our posts: around 20%
I noticed that when I e mailed them about a specific forum (guild-hall.net) one of the gameplay ideas went into the game: chance if we bug them about guildwarsguru.com 60% a good increase.
Lastly, if anyone is watching this at the moment or any of our threads at the moment. I want serious hard evidence. I do not mean to be rude bilateralrope but I refuse to take your word for it that some Gaile is actually reading any of this. You give me hard evidence that he's really watching and not just browsing through and then sleeping for the rest of the day then I'll factor that in my percentages.

1)
Does it really take that much space to hold information for a guild hall? I mean i can see our guild hall fit into a relatively small amount of space:
type=shingjea;
dyetrader=true;
merchant=true;
priest=true;
crafting=true;
rcrafting=true;
etc
our guild messages might take up more space...
2)
We all know the shifty types of people who would just love to mess with gw's insides. Many already mod the game, but it's harmless as the game is hosted on arenanet servers. If we had it hosted on our computers, nothing would stop me from giving myself 99999 health and increasing my damage to 99999.
4,5,6 I don't know how arenanet does their servers, but it seems to work.

Your ideas are just incorrect. They show that you don't know a lot about computer programing, but still feel like you need to make suggestions to improve it. It would require about 5-10 bytes of data to store a GH.

The moronic, supposed "limit" on ABs has been a rumor spread by many for years. Its just not true. Hit "b" and look at how many GvGs and Hero's Ascent battles are played on a busy Saturday night. Then tell me A.net can't run 3 games at a time for some technical reason (its obviously not true if there are like 15 games on obersver at any giving time). A GvG wouldn't consume that much more server space then a AB. They are probablly even run on the SAME servers. Severs are not limited to only run ABs, or only run GvGs. That's like saying there is one server in a.net's offices that runs the riverside province mission, one that runs the Elona reach mission, one that runs Venta Cemetary Mission. You get the idea... If that's how a.net's offices work, they would have over 3000 servers. It makes no sense and is a urban legend spread by impatient 10 year olds who want to be able to blame somebody for the long wait they have to have to enter a battle (because they are impatient and spoiled).

Research your own arguments, dont exaggerate so people may see what your trying to say.

So you are able to confirm that 3 of the 6 required teams were waiting for a battle. What about the other three teams ?
And what did you do to confirm that the 4 people in a battle were actually in separate battles ?
If there aren't enough people on both sides, then AB's can't happen. And you have yet to show a situation where there are enough people waiting.

I have this site who after interviewing ANET staff found out that the guild wars gameplay servers can handle 2500-3500 users per server. So where did you get your 1 server per AB figure from ?

Oh look, I just directly contradicted one of your assumptions with actual data.

Personally I'd be surprised if there is any html running on the GW servers. Generally if you want to show off your credentials, it helps to actually have relevant ones.

Can I have all your raw numbers, the calculations you used, and how you went about getting that data ?
True, I don't have any more than the posts Gaile has replied to. But you on the other hand have provided no evidence for any of your assumptions on either how the GW servers operate, or on exactly what Gaile does.

I'll assume that the he was a simply typo, considering that we all know that Gaile Gray is female. And ANET's Community Relations Manager.

The ideas presented here to reduce the game lag is ridiculous. There are other factors that are hundreds of orders more consequential than those presented by the OP.

First of all, I am sure that each guildwars instance of a guildhall is not persistent. That is, it only exist when a player instantiated it by joining it. So the vast majority of the GH at any given time is minimal. A guildhall would only take a couple of bytes at most to store in a database. Only active GH would reside in memory.

Second, the suggestion to create another instance for idle players is ridiculous when the premise of the suggestion was to reduce server strain. It is more straining on the server because there must be more security measures taken to insure that such an off-load to a client does not result in unwarranted data manipulation. Having a group of people in one area is perhaps more straining on the client having to render more particles, but its minimal addition for the load on a server.

Thirdly, additional channels does not reduce server lag, it might reduce the spam but not the lag. The chat is a stream of data, and each instance is earmarked with a tag that denotes the type (Trade, guild etc..) and a channel mask everything else but the selected tag. ALL the chat is still sent, but the CLIENT is masking, there is no lag reduction here.

html is nothing more than a formatting language comparable to css and latex. It does not involve databases, server side manipulations, data structures or any algorithms. To use html as a credential in this instance is laughable

#1,2,3,4,5 Please post references and raw data indicating the truth of these statements.

Who's opinion is that statement?

Technically, if you say something both foolish and flamebait enough to provoke people who actually know Anet and GWG admin to either have to clean up your post or just give you a talking to there would be an increase of % that you will get noticed, though by doing so you nullify your credibility and therefore make the whole point of the post moot.

Currently the data you have suggested is EXTREMELY limited both in the depth of description and how much controlled scenarios you actually ran. Your credentials have no weight to them seeing either they have no measurement; "writing html code for a while" could mean a few hours or 10 years. Also, as your claims have already been disprove and that lowers it even more.

I doubt the one opinion you actually did have, yet stated as fact will be considered to be put into action by administration, Anet or GWG.


Also, "Laggs" and "Lagg" are not words.

Assuming some sanity on the part of Anet's coders, a guild hall would only actually exist on a server if someone is in it - having a guild hall at most uses a little database space otherwise.

A logged on player has to be somewhere, and given that they can be in their own instance merely by walking out of town (and that instance will use more server capacity due to all the mobs and stuff in it) a guild hall instance isn't some massive resource hog.

A single guild wars server can host a number of areas at a given time. In fact, each server is memory limited, not CPU limited, and that memory limitation is highly dependant on the number of players - not areas. (See: http://www.monashreport.com/2007/06/...of-guild-wars/ ).

This would break rule one of Guild War's security model - giving a player intelligent assets.

As far as Jade Quarry, etc, the number of instances are limited by the number of full teams attempting to enter those areas, not servers or anything else. Seriously, Guild Wars is designed for the dynamic creation and destruction of instances, PvP or otherwise.

I lol'ed. Sorry.

really?... Hmm, And you always seemed to get flamed on the nwn forums too for being a scripting n00b. IMHO, Darkhell153=Scriptkiddy

I don't disagree with your test data, but the conclusions you draw from it are based on suspect assumptions. Instances being limited by the number of teams wishing to enter is a lot more plausible (and coincides with ANet's statements better) than there being a fixed number of instances for each PvP type, and your data fits with either model.

Inhouse developed, wholly owned game servers and rented web servers are apples and oranges. I doubt the server costs can be directly compared.

I have no reason to believe ANet have lied about either of those things. Just because ANet don't implement every ridiculous suggestion or respond in person to every thread don't mean they don't read forums, and I have seen ideas from forums implemented.

And what figures would you of actually tested ?

The number of people waiting for an AB ?
Nope, you didn't even have enough people involved to be able to confirm this server rumor even if they all failed to get into an AB. But some of the teams did get in, and you didn't even bother to repeat the test until. So since we don't see any evidence of this server limitation anywhere else, I fail to see how its a logical conclusion especially when we have been given a credible alternative.

The percentage figures of how often ANET reads a post ?
No raw data provided, nor do you say how you collected this raw data. So no useful data here

AB's per server ?
Nope, no evidence of how you came up with this.

Cost of a server ?
You fail to take ANET's income into account. Then again, we weren't talking about it until you brought it up.

And you evidence that ANET is lying is what exactly ?
Oh and I'm not really surprised that when you face data that contradicts you, you accuse it of lying because otherwise you might have to face the fact that you are wrong here.

On the other hand, you haven't provided any data.

You haven't shown how your experience is any use in running an online server for a game.

As for how much servers cost to run, why is that relevant ?
Exaggerations are a bad thing here when what we are actually asking you for is precise accurate data. Also 1/4 million might be an acceptable expense for ANET, as a while back I saw them saying they had sold over 3 million copies of guild wars over the past 2 years. So at 1/4 million per year for 2 years, we are still talking about than 50 cents per copy sold.

Seconded.
Didn't your math teacher tell you to show your calculations?

I want to know your numbers down to the last hundred-thousandth, and I want them verified by ANet's head technician, before you bash ANet's servers.
It's called managing hundreds of thousands - to millions of people.

I couldn't provide you numbers myself, because admittedly I'm not the most computer savvy.

But please, post the official server information that ANet so liberally has given you.

Otherwise, don't make faulty suggestions provided with made up figures...it's how catastrophes like Enron happen.

#2... how about instead letting us play completely offline if we want to, with the condition that nothing we do offline can be put onto the official servers? would certainly cut bandwidth usage if some of the population isn't connected at all (after a 1 time download of server emulation software of course) I mean... this isn't a monthly fee mmo, so it would make sense.... kinda like how you could play diablo2 off of battle.net....

Calling people "moronic jerks" doesn't help your arguement. Ad Hominan (mispelled) attacks are not a way to win people over.

I'm reporting this thread to be closed.

I concur. This thread is just a mess of yelling. There really isn't any way any of us could know the technology that ANet is using; let's not make assumptions.

Regarding whether ANet actually reads threads in the Sardelac: they do, even if they don't actually post in these forums often. I know this because Gaile reports inappropriate behavior on these forums too.

Anyway, this thread is closed.