Lockstep networking: the game should pause server-side if latency above # seconds is detected

Disclaimer, I'm playing over Ethernet and a FTTH connection that saw about a minute of downtime over the entirety of 2021. My normal latency to the Amsterdam game servers is 10-11ms. I'm using Lockstep networking and I don't know what this kind of situation feels like in predictive mode instead.

However, often times while mapping I still experience a rubber-banding phenomenon where the server seems to pause for a while, only for the game to fast-forward. Predictably, this happens during combat and causes the sort of issues that 50% of your "Contact Support" blurb at the top is about: "items may be lost or characters may die due to reasons outside of your control," sucks to be you lol.


(pictured: the game suddenly recovering from a 31-second connectivity problem (as helpfully shown by ShareX in the bottom-right corner) and desperately fast forwarding to the time of my death as a single pea-shooter mob kills my defenseless character and undoes several minutes' worth of progress. Bug report reference number: 1,359,148,591.)

Put simply, this shouldn't happen beyond a certain threshold (say, 5 seconds).

When the client detects a latency of above 5 seconds, consider dimming the screen and show some sort of "Connecting..." spinner, with a button that says "Log Out" that acts similarly to a logout macro

When the server detects... whatever it is that the server notices when the client detects a latency above 5 seconds (I don't know what the root cause is, but this is a scenario that the PoE netcode clearly handles!), consider pausing the game altogether until the client sends whatever signals it does when these latency issues are resolved.

For bonus points, you could add a short grace period after the situation recovers so that players are not caught flat-footed when the action suddenly resumes.

in difference to shitty games, poe is designed in a way so players from all over the world can play together on the server the map owner logged in to.

imagine with all the latency of indivdual players changing, the game would halt for all other players if a single player has a shitty connection.

maybe you mistook poe for a single player game, happens to the best of us ;)

If you are in an area with multiple people, you can just give the one affected person the Grace Period buff, much to the same effect.

As a reminder, 5 light seconds are about 1,000,000 miles. You wouldn't experience 5 seconds latency in regular play even if you were playing from the moon. 🙄 The in-game latency charts (sometimes) tops out at about 4 seconds and starts drawing latency as a dashed line after that, since 4 seconds is already an absurd amount of latency.

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bp_ wrote:

If you are in an area with multiple people, you can just give the one affected person the Grace Period buff, much to the same effect.

that's what reddit would call a "qol feature".

it's a 20 min task to create a app that dropsany data the client is sending to the server and bind that feature to a key.

dependent on the timeout you would set for the invulnerability timer on the server, you could get a "damage immunity" from 3 to 6 seconds in dangerous situations without losing a portal.

neat.

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bp_ wrote:

As a reminder, 5 light seconds are about 1,000,000 miles. You wouldn't experience 5 seconds latency in regular play even if you were playing from the moon. 🙄 The in-game latency charts (sometimes) tops out at about 4 seconds and starts drawing latency as a dashed line after that, since 4 seconds is already an absurd amount of latency.

data on the internet doesnt travel with the speed of light, there are routing protocols in place that make your data take diversions of hundreds of miles, there are overloaded routers which don't process your data in time ... the internet is a bloody battlefield (of secret services and companies) too.

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vio wrote:

it's a 20 min task to create a app that dropsany data the client is sending to the server and bind that feature to a key.

dependent on the timeout you would set for the invulnerability timer on the server, you could get a "damage immunity" from 3 to 6 seconds in dangerous situations without losing a portal.

You have just described a logout macro with extra steps, except it takes 5 seconds without any user input before it actually does anything. If your character can tank 5 seconds of whatever is going on without user input, I don't see how it would then die to whatever comes next. Maybe you're thinking aurabots or summoners; that can likely be addressed, too.

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vio wrote:

data on the internet doesnt travel with the speed of light, there are routing protocols in place that make your data take diversions of hundreds of miles, there are overloaded routers which don't process your data in time ... the internet is a bloody battlefield (of secret services and companies) too.

Data on the internet travels at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Say data travels over copper at .66c; data would need to travel the circumference of the earth 24 entire times before you can get a 5 second lag this way. Latency spikes of 5+ seconds are caused by other factors; if I had to guess, that would be server load, server memory swapping, noisy neighbors... these issues affect everyone in the area equally, and pausing an instance would probably help alleviate those issues and reduce latency for every player.

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bp_ wrote:

You have just described a logout macro with extra steps, except it takes 5 seconds without any user input before it actually does anything. If your character can tank 5 seconds of whatever is going on without user input, I don't see how it would then die to whatever comes next.

it would be more convenient for logout macro users if their character got invulnerable before the server eventually disconnects them after 6 seconds of no packets received.