[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

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darkcoug wrote:

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Ikariusrb wrote:

As far as desync goes, all ARPGs may do the prediction as you state, but for all it's other design flaws, Diablo 3 managed to resolve desync without any visible effects 99.999% of the time. Claiming working well in 99% of the cases means jack when there are 200 interactions/second. Generally playing solo, I cannot play for more than about 2 minutes without seeing BIG desync effects- such as firing at an enemy for several seconds before it turns out the enemy wasn't there at all. And that's playing solo. And it only gets worse playing with a party. And- my hat is off to anyone who actually plays a melee, because it's absolutely devastating for melee characters. I played several characters in Diablo 3, and I would once in a few days see serious spikes of rubber banding due to major server latency spikes, but normal day to day play never let us see a HINT of desync. A decade before, Diablo II did it as well. My friends who've played torchlight 2 report it suffers no such effects for online play. I don't know what you're doing differently, but your claim that this is darn near impossible to solve cannot be true- it has been visibly solved in other games which have been here before you.

I'm giving up on PoE unless you *really* fix desync. You claim you want a challenging game, and in higher level play, a single death will wipe out hours or even days of effort, yet desync singlehandedly ensures that you must play very low-risk and/or be substantially overgeared if you want to make levelling progress. Your skill as a player is < desync.


I hope you figure out what needs to be done to fix it, as otherwise I really like the game. With desync the way it is, the frustration factor outweighs the fun. I don't want to be angry when I die because the client lied to me.

One of the ways D3 handles desync is that if the enemies begin their swing with you in range, you will always get hit, even if you are well out of range by the time the swing ends. Now whether that tradeoff is better or worse than POE's sync flaws, I can't say. I do think one thing that also really helps D3 is that attacks (especially Melee) feel much more impactful. I do think getting rid of the melee accuracy stat really helps D3.

Agreed on the lack of accuracy being a good thing (as I've said in this thread before). Also, the D3 "hit even if not in range" thing never really bothered me. It's certainly preferable to desync.

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Ikariusrb wrote:

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Patsboem wrote:

As i understand what Chris/GGG said: most problems regarding to desync are related to there idea of hardcore, So in my opinion its not something that will be fixed. Maybe if they start to look at there attitude towards good game play and change what 'hardcore' should be..

I'd love some further illumination and/or confirmation of that. What exactly does that mean? I mean, *my* idea of hardcore is that you can actually, you know, survive based on your skills, not that you're at the mercy of random disagreements between your client and the server. What differing ideal of 'hardcore' would lead to a substantially different interpretation?

There are a lot of games where desync is not an issue while they have to deal with the same problems. This is what Chris wrote and why i dont believe they can ever solve this problem becouse he and GGG have a very strong opinion what 'hardcore' should be. As long as they think like this, we have to deal with crappy combat full of desync and without a smooth feel.

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Games using client action prediction like ours run into exactly the same sync issues that we do unless they cheat on certain aspects of the simulation. For example, it's common for Action RPGs to do some combination of the following:
Entities can hit each other from a long distance away
There's no chance to hit - all hits occur for sure
Various speed/collision concessions that make it easy to speedhack and/or walk through monsters with modified clients
Attack animations cannot be interrupted (i.e. what we treat as Stun).


Unfortunately, we don't want to do any of those things! They each individually ruin part of the hardcore experience: by allowing combat/movement cheats, preventing accuracy from existing as a mechanic, prevent stunlock, preventing people getting blocked in, etc.

Due to the fact that we want to have hardcore game mechanics (i.e. ones where position matters and it's difficult to cheat in PvP), the only option for us has been to put a lot of work into improving our combat simulation and resync code.

Any info about how will GGG deal with real money sellers?
They ruined so many games that it's not funny. Yet, there's almost no discussion on that subject...

Thumbs up for The Development Manifesto :)

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The physical-elemental disparity will be addressed. There will probably be an on-critical effect introduced for physical damage (which may be as simple as a guaranteed stun, but the options are still being considered).

Since there is a keystone that prevents stuns (for pvp) I would like to tell you my idea about this matter.
In my opinion it would be good for melee attacks with different weapons to have different effects (like different magic elements have different effects).
For example:
Melee attacks made with sharp weapons(axes,swords and so on) could have a chance on critical to cause bleeding damage over time to foes. Keystones that increase bleeding chance could be called for example "Master of Anatomy". There may be necessary to limit the times this effect stacks.
Melee attacks made with blunt weapons (clubs,hammers) could have a chance on critical to cause rupture debuffs which could amplify melee damage done on the foe by a % for a while. Key stones increasing this percentage could reduce attack speed. I.e. the bigger the blow the slower the attack.
Hope you liked my idea!

nice read!

a nice insight to how it works and what problems you face. if only other company's did this they might not have had so many haters *cough* you know who i am talking about *cough*

anyway! im glad you guys are working on it! this is the reasons i support this game!

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Nerdkiller wrote:

Link the sockets of 1 handed weapons together. Then add serious survivability support gems and ability gems. Invincibility for a short duration with a cooldown? Short term major hp buffs? Usable only in 1hd weapons?

Maybe add puncture to physical damage? IMO, physical damage is fine but thats just my opinion.

there already is an Invincibility skill. don't remember the name as i don't like it... but the last bandit camp, that guy uses it.

I agree that there are too many white drops too see anything but on the other hand I am really enjoying the multiple loot.
The only real problem is when you are in combat and loot covers the remaining monsters... Then it can get quite dangerous.

Another possible solution would be to:

- deactivate pure white drops, binding to a certain key; or
- make white drops transparent, binding to a certain key.

During combat you could make sure you only see the very valuable stuff. After combat, you could return to the view where you see everything.
People who care only about items could still choose to use the "show all items" view all the time.

One more thing I wanted to address:
Auras are OP. Kind of every single char needs as many auras as they can get, which is kind of against the principle of an aura (it was always a benefit shared between party members, not only the player who turns it on). I know that aura benefits are still shared, but sometimes you play alone etc, so you know what I mean.
A possible change would be to make auras use more mana. I am not a fan of the 40% rule at all; I prefer absolute amounts required, which should be scaled adequately. This way players who stack a lot of mana would be more rewarded for it and could still use every single aura (diversity remains but at a higher price).
Right now people use tricks (like bloodmagic) to use 5++ auras, although they have a poor mana pool. That's kind of against game logic.
To address melee: Yeah it's way to dangerous. If you got decent gear, you will still lose way too much health if you are shot by random archers. You die in ~ 4 seconds. I mean this is kinda too fast...I love the game being challenging as it is, but you should not die to every stupid mob so fast. Some defense improvements are required here, maybe at the cost of damage. I guess it requires careful balencing to keep the game difficulty challenging though.
For instance I love endurance charges, you could buff things like that to make melee more resistant. However you should restrict the charges to melee dmg received, so that ranged classes cannot profit from it. Also I don't know if passives are the right aspect to change; maybe melee skills gems are better to be overworked.
Finally, the passive tree has to be overworked a little in my opinion. As is, there are certain passives which are said to be OP - like inner force - but it's only on the upper part of the tree. To make it more symmetric, another node should be on the lower part, so archers or duelists don't have to go up there. It doesn't make much sense that this spec is on the witch part of the tree only.

In regards to loot allocation an alternative that would be of use to people who have high latency connections and also graphics latency (I play on wireless with a laptop), would be to have a selection for loot to be permanently allocated to a player until either they disconnect from the game or leave the current area. I have found after the last increase to loot timers that due to my graphics lag some items are still not obtainable or that the server has already given the item to another player even though I have clicked the item 5-10 times. I can see locking an item to a player until they leave the area to be a bit on the high side but in no ninja groups this could prove to increase the enjoyment factor for some players knowing that people cannot chest/corpse ninja items halfway across the map. A second alternative to this is a 1-2 min timer as not to make the game come to a halt due to say three people waiting for someone to leave the area. Another option is to allow for names to be displayed again to make people more aware of what drops are for them, I'm not entirely sure what the reasoning behind removing names from drops was. A third alternative is also to rework the design of your entire loot system to allocate loot to each individual players and keep everything separate much like Diablo 3's system, This would most likely over complicate things as a lot of people would want the item tension and others wouldn't meaning the server would be using two systems depending on a parties selected option, I can see the a drawback from this being increased server processes now having to allocate multiple full drops. A way this can be offset is to only allocate certain drops to individuals (currency, rare's and uniques) meaning that everyone has all the same whites, or to make the system drop exactly the same loot to everyone obviously the problem with this is that a huge influx of higher end items/currency could become available. I don't know if any of these avenues would be viable but I felt like throwing my 2 cents into this topic.

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gonzaw wrote:

Can someone explain to me why if you put some of the calculations on the client then it'll 100% allow people to cheat?

Like...is it impossible to prevent people from "cheating" even if the client does some of the stuff?
Like...the client application should have some security as well, so wouldn't just enhanced security solve that problem?

There is ways to make it so we can do this and that hacking is unviable. It is a lot of work but this is what GGG should do to truly define ARPG's, for how they should feel.

Reading the manifesto has really put a downer on playing PoE knowing that the desynch thing will never be fixed. It is even more worrying that rubber banding was stated as if it was good/okay.

Those that say that it is impossible to have a working game client side due to hackers have taken the defeatist attitude. They will paint you a picture of 1000's of automated hackers looting non-stop - but the fact is, it never has to be this way with proper implementation.

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Siasus wrote:

A third alternative is also to rework the design of your entire loot system to allocate loot to each individual players and keep everything separate much like Diablo 3's system, [... speculation about how difficult this is to implement removed...]

This would make the most sense. It's industry standard now and games with this system use the fact to bash PoE for it's FFA system (Marvel Heroes, any one?).

For people who don't want Free-For-all mechanics just take away all the grief by giving people their own loot that other people don't even see.

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iMbaQ wrote:

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gonzaw wrote:

Can someone explain to me why if you put some of the calculations on the client then it'll 100% allow people to cheat?

Like...is it impossible to prevent people from "cheating" even if the client does some of the stuff?
Like...the client application should have some security as well, so wouldn't just enhanced security solve that problem?

There is ways to make it so we can do this and that hacking is unviable. It is a lot of work but this is what GGG should do to truly define ARPG's, for how they should feel.

Reading the manifesto has really put a downer on playing PoE knowing that the desynch thing will never be fixed. It is even more worrying that rubber banding was stated as if it was good/okay.

Those that say that it is impossible to have a working game client side due to hackers have taken the defeatist attitude. They will paint you a picture of 1000's of automated hackers looting non-stop - but the fact is, it never has to be this way with proper implementation.

I'm with you on this iMbaQ. GGG's stance seems to be "we can't do it all on the client so we're going to do it all on the server". I suspect there is a compromise in the middle somewhere that permits even a little more trust in the client, perhaps backed up with a cheat detection system that will block an account if there are too many instances of calculations too far removed from what the server thinks should be going on.