Protecting your "PRECIOUS" economy ain't working so give up and fix desync instead

Desync won't be fixed. How hard is it to understand ? It would require a huge rebuild of network code model and another year or two of testing. For a game that has been released, that is utterly unheard of. Its cheaper and more profitable for GGG to make a new game without predictive model than it is to completely recode of the most challenging aspects of existing, revenue-producing game for free.

Reading hookeysconfession is just mind blowing but onto the issue of desync and the belief it will be never fixed. I'm no programmer BUT surely there's a way to determine a desync death and a legit/stupid move by the player death and not give us the exp penalty as a result.

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grepman wrote:

Desync won't be fixed. How hard is it to understand ? It would require a huge rebuild of network code model and another year or two of testing. For a game that has been released, that is utterly unheard of. Its cheaper and more profitable for GGG to make a new game without predictive model than it is to completely recode of the most challenging aspects of existing, revenue-producing game for free.

While it will never be eliminated completely, there is an extremely lengthy list of things that GGG could do without touching their network code that would improve desync by a little bit each.

Such suggestions include but are not limited to:

1) improve monster pathing so they aren't so prone to getting aggro'd around corners but getting stuck halfway, stopping monster desync around doorways and tight terrain.
2) reduce the damage on all leapslam and charge abilities so these don't auto-stun you if they connect, stopping desync from did it hit or not.
3) design better setpieces so doorways can't be blocked by a single mob standing 2 pixels to the left so you can't squeeze by like you could on your computer because it was standing 2 pixels to the right, reducing player desync around doorways and tunnels.
4) reduce monster speed stacking so we don't have rare leapers with quick, allies move and attack faster and cutthroat warping around the place faster than a friggen spark projectile.
5) remove obnoxious ground clutter that isn't visible above mobpacks so people dont get hung up on terrain while opening strongboxes
5a) also, while not desync, preload the damn exile and their textures upon rolling the 'contains rogue exile' stronbox so you don't have 2 second frame freezes while the game has to render all of the random microtransactions you slap on everyone.

those are just the ones *I* could come up with right now, but I've heard at least 3 more elsewhere. There's more to mitigating desync than "Welp, gotta recode the game, GG"

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

The tradeoffs GGG chose for their netcode were not optimal. The harm caused by desync is greater than many of the gained benefits.

However, I am skeptical that weakening anti-cheat would be the most expeditious solution to reducing desync. My expectation is that the high move speed of both players and mobs contributes more to desync than anything else, except perhaps collision of players among each other.

 So with the latest passive tree having wonderful increased speed nodes such as Quickstep and Celerity (great for my evasion ranger) + speed boots (Normic's Storm) + chest (Queen of the Forest) since my evasion is over 6400 I get +64% increased move speed which is super great but that is f'n bad in the form more and increased desync. There is no way the server and its "action prediction" can ever know where and how far I'm moving with this much added speed so it's a giant pisser for GGG to give us the speed passives and then because they know that action prediction doesn't work for fast exiles does not have any f'n way to fix or is not planning to change the server/client way PoE calculates exile position and movement and keep both simulations in sync. This is an old and forever problem and yet GGG refuses to do anything about it. It isn't working and never has so GGG needs to change it.

 If GGG actually used the over 75% of my cpu's power that is sitting idle while playing PoE with some kind of client side checksum algorithm to constantly make sure that none of the super critical client side code is being altered/hacked and terminate if there is a mismatch (it has detected a change) and then pass that info to GGG so if it happens too many times they can warn the offender and if it continues then ban that could be a way to allow the client to be the authority for position and movement calculations. GGG has added something to the client to detect maphack use (or they just BSing trying to scare us off) so other client code checks are doable to minimize (I'm leery of saying prevent) client hacking.

 I stand behind my previous statement that each and every desync death feels like a hard slap in the face and ruins any desire to attempt to play a hardcore league unless I want to go super slow and take forever. Speed = increased playing enjoyment so the more speed the better but then desync all too often smacks me down hard. GGG must address this issue after Act 4 in a serious way or else more thousands of players will come in for the new content and then leave in a few months. That's no way for GGG to retain players (shooting themselves in both feet on designing PoE to have multi-year playing longevity and then desync many out).

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Arrowneous wrote:

 If GGG actually used the over 75% of my cpu's power that is sitting idle while playing PoE

What about people who are using older computers and have less than 3% idle while playing PoE?

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almostdead wrote:

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Arrowneous wrote:

 If GGG actually used the over 75% of my cpu's power that is sitting idle while playing PoE

What about people who are using older computers and have less than 3% idle while playing PoE?

 This is 2015 and more and more AAA titles are upping the minimum hardware requirements so GGG should not be expected to make PoE work on old computers with insufficient cpu/gpu power. Modern cpus and gpus are getting faster and cheaper so the trade off of a higher minimum computer hardware requirement in exchange for reduced desync is a no-brainer. We all want desync to go away (or at least be as low as D3:RoS).

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 This is 2015 and more and more AAA titles are upping the minimum hardware requirements so GGG should not be expected to make PoE work on old computers with insufficient cpu/gpu power. Modern cpus and gpus are getting faster and cheaper so the trade off of a higher minimum computer hardware requirement in exchange for reduced desync is a no-brainer. We all want desync to go away (or at least be as low as D3:RoS).

I'm glad you think PoE is a AAA game, however it doesn't have anywhere near the technical staff that most AAA titles do. Comparing desync in PoE vs ROS isn't a fair comparison as D3 ur attacks always hit AND it trust the client for things like ATTACKS and POSITIONING vs in PoE where it trust the client for nothing, which does PREVENT some forms of cheating. In D3 the only online aspect that is calculated is LOOT, not attacks, misses, positioning, ect. Are you suggesting PoE go to this method instead of the current situation?

Also IDK how so many people have performance issues, I play a variation of rainbownuke on some modest hardware with a somewhat decent connection.

The economy on the other hand is fine, not sure what your complaining about. Do you even PoE?

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goetzjam wrote:

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 This is 2015 and more and more AAA titles are upping the minimum hardware requirements so GGG should not be expected to make PoE work on old computers with insufficient cpu/gpu power. Modern cpus and gpus are getting faster and cheaper so the trade off of a higher minimum computer hardware requirement in exchange for reduced desync is a no-brainer. We all want desync to go away (or at least be as low as D3:RoS).

I'm glad you think PoE is a AAA game, however it doesn't have anywhere near the technical staff that most AAA titles do. Comparing desync in PoE vs ROS isn't a fair comparison as D3 ur attacks always hit AND it trust the client for things like ATTACKS and POSITIONING vs in PoE where it trust the client for nothing, which does PREVENT some forms of cheating. In D3 the only online aspect that is calculated is LOOT, not attacks, misses, positioning, ect. Are you suggesting PoE go to this method instead of the current situation?

Also IDK how so many people have performance issues, I play a variation of rainbownuke on some modest hardware with a somewhat decent connection.

The economy on the other hand is fine, not sure what your complaining about. Do you even PoE?

 If you are knowing that D3:RoS can calculate all positions and movements server side and then relay that to the client and still be low desync then GGG is really behind the 8-ball of modern on-line game programming curve and is hurting us all (yes, I do understand that this is highly technical complicated programming but others have managed to do it so why hasn't GGG figured something out by now?).

 I'm referring to the PoE economy as a reference point. GGG has stated that it has all calculations done on the server and then it updates the client with that info every few seconds. GGG also states that they chose this to prevent client side cheats/hacks from damaging/destroying the PoE economy. I used the recent /hideout exploit flaw as an example of how other bugs can wreck the PoE economy worse than fixing desync by allowing the client to be the authority on exile/monster position and movement. If GGG can't figure a way to protect the PoE client code (I suggested a real time checksum thread of some kind running in parallel with the client game code as a self-monitor for hacks, maybe some form of encryption/decryption is needed) from hackers and thus we are doomed forever and will never get to a lower desync game state in the future then that is very sad indeed.

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davidnn5 wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

I mean, what you're talking about isn't only giving up on the economy, it's all competitive things in the game.

Races, ladders, challenge completion, pvp, and the economy that runs through all of those would all have to be discarded by GGG.

Gee, wouldn't that be horrible ;)

Tell you what breaks my immersion 10000000x more than removing some particles? The game itself, in its current state. Races, ladders, challenges and pvp... Who cares? None of those are really relevant to PvE, just player feelings.

GGG cares about those things, and a non-negligible chunk of the playerbase cares about those things. Just because you do not doesn't mean they're free to gut.

Unstated is the fact that once you remove those things, playing with other people becomes extremely optional. They might just as well release the game in a single-player binary that is both client and server.

Ultimately, that's what a large majority of people want. They want to play an offline single player ARPG, maybe with a few friends.

I'm sure GGG would love to target that market if it costed them nothing, but they cannot release the server binaries until online is "dead" for fear of reverse engineering. They rely on player interaction and online play to keep the game monetarily alive due to their f2p non-p2w microtransactions.

They want to support a community of online players that enjoy the game (competitive PvE trappings and all), and that's their choice to make. This is GGG's proposition to the user: "Enjoy our creation as we've made it with all the tradeoffs we've chosen, or go play something else."

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I agree with the subtopic that there are yet more things GGG can do to reduce desync without moving to a "trusted client" world.

The sum total of those things still will not remove desync completely, because the server will always know the outcome to a random coinflip one network-hop before the client does and before the user can react to it. The only real, permanent solution is to move the server onto the client.

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almostdead wrote:

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Arrowneous wrote:

 If GGG actually used the over 75% of my cpu's power that is sitting idle while playing PoE

What about people who are using older computers and have less than 3% idle while playing PoE?

Dude, if you have a computer who's CPU is running 97% on PoE, then shell out the 30 bucks for an I5 chip. Or hell, by that point, 5 bucks for an I3. Is there even an I1 still in production?

Long story short: No modern chipset running on drivers that were updated this century have any excuse to be running at any more than 75% usage - and that's on the spuddiest of potatoes.



IN ADDITION


Who the bollocks has CPU problems, but a GPU powerful enough to handle the graphical jizz, weather and particle effects that this game just loves to vomit on you. Even Witcher 2 runs better on my computer, and that game at least LOOKS good enough to tank me that hard. PoE, sadly, does not even come close.