We talk with Mike Ferguson and Habib Loew about the new WvW Progression and removal of Culling.

So now on to culling...

Habib: Oh culling... Yay!

Would you like to give a brief overview of culling and what you're changing?

Habib: Sure. When we talk about culling in the context of WvW, what we are really talking about is a process by which the server decides to not tell every client about every other character in an effort to limit bandwidth utilization and, sort of as a side-effect, prevent the overloading of clients with having to render too many characters and that kind of thing. It was a solution that we shipped with and, you know, it did the job. We didn't have excessive network congestion and we didn't have overwhelmed clients, but it was at the cost of you would run into a big battle and you couldn't see most of it some of the time.

So we've been working hard for a number of months on removing culling entirely and having an alternate solution to deal with performance issues, because we just felt it was necessary for players to see everybody they are fighting at all times. So under the new system culling is just completely gone from WvW and we've highly optimized our network stream to take advantage of the bandwidth that we have without going over and we've also thrown a little extra money at our bandwidth coming out of our data centers. And then with the optimizations we are being careful not to overwhelm the min-spec connections of anybody who has got a client connected to the game so they are able to receive that traffic just fine.

Additionally we have given clients two new graphical options for controlling how characters are rendered on their clients so that if you are playing on a lower spec machine it doesn't just catch on fire when we start reporting all of these players to you. The way that works is we'll report all of the players that are within range and we will draw up to 300 of them with models on the screen. After 300 we force them to draw nameplates only. Then the options that we give you are WvW Character Limit and WvW Character Quality.

The way that works is you can adjust the WvW [character] limit and if you set it to its highest settings then you'll get 300 characters with models. As you adjust that you are changing the number of characters who get models versus the number of characters who only get nameplates. Then with WvW Character Quality you are taking the number of characters who have been given models and are deciding of them how many you want to have low quality models and how many you want to have the high quality models that everyone is used to. So with those controls we feel there is a lot of potential to find a performance setting that works for you and we fully expect that people are going to have to play with those a little bit to find out what is exactly right for their system.

All right, wow. You mentioned that one of the options is to show only nameplates. Then one of the new things you are giving out with the new progression system is special nameplates. Was there any correlation to those design decisions or did that just happen by accident?

Habib: I think that it's a happy accident. We understand that it is important to players that they can show other players their achievements and their accomplishments. And certainly, as someone who is running around in WvW, if I see a Gold Legend running in my direction I'm going to have a somewhat different emotional response than if I see an Anvil Rock Invader, right? It's just a different thing to know that this guy has been around for a few thousand hours and has been putting the hurt on people; that I'm probably going to lose that fight if I'm honest to myself.

Do you think it is spooky at all if you have only nameplates showing and just have a bunch of nameplates attacking you?

Habib: So I think... Here is how I'm going to say this. If the question is would I rather fight players with models or players with nameplates, I'd obviously rather fight players with models. But that is not really the situation that we are addressing there. I would absolutely rather see players with nameplates only than not see them at all, and that is the sort of situation that we are coming from. For low-spec machines unfortunately, there is just a point at which you run out of options for what you can do in terms of rendering optimization. So nameplates are a thing.

We certainly talked about some other options. Maybe we want to use an icon instead of nameplates or something like that, and we'll continue to look at whether or not nameplates are doing exactly what we need them to do. But we feel like the most important thing is that you will always be aware that another player is there. The nameplate only option is not intended to or expected to be as fantastic as having a high-res model doing all of its full animations or even a low-res model doing limited animations, but it is an option to let you know that people are there and run away from them or attack them if need be.

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