[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

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xpose wrote:

strong elitist attitude. Having loot options has nothing to do with any part of your rambling elitist post. Please provide a example where joining a party with loot allocation would somehow dumb down the fact you have to think, react and make meaningful lasting decisions.

Elitist elitist elitist. And?
Reaction to picking up items? Rings any bell? It's supposed to be a competition, you compete against other exiles for the loot that is given. What about the people who want to play as a role of a thief? GGG has said that they don't like meta-options and this is just a beginning of a slippery slope that they unfortunately decided to walk. Whiners are never happy and satisfied, and now that they got this through, they will start the whine about other stuff, and it goes on and on and on and on... And before long, all those who don't want the game to go towards casual are gone, and then there's left only the whiners who will quit soon as well because everything that they whined about was implemented thus killing the game when trying to "appeal to all" (which is impossible).

The ranged versus melee disparity
When it comes to late game, all you really care about is
1. The time it takes for you to kill enemies (TTK) and
2. The level of relative safety in which you can do it.

Now if you compare the skill gems (support and active) available to melee versus the those available to ranged, you'll quickly realise that the ranged active + support-gem combinations are so amazingly far removed from the ones available to melee that the #1 (time to kill or TTK) is not even a contest.

The intent of multi-strike and melee splash is obviously a poor attempt at replicating the incredibly powerful chain / GMP gems, but it falls drastically short. Not only does it exacerbate the issue with physical vs. elemental damage, it barely closes any kind of significant gap between the TTK for a ranged versus a melee - maybe I'm being overly negative here, but I sincerely challenge you to show me a build where these gems are used in such a way that it comes even *remotely* close to the kind of TTK you can expect from the typical freeze-pulse, EK or lightning-arrow type builds out there.

Ignoring the massive discrepancy between TTK for ranged v. melee, there is then the huge problem with survivability with melee. Monsters hurt. A lot. Regardless of whether you're ranged or melee! Ergo, it's a no-brainer to make melee characters more tanky; maybe this'll provide some kind of incentive to make up for the crappy TTK while you try to balance those half-assed melee gems you just introduced.

What I would change if I had a magic wand

+There is no reason why melee skill gems (I'm talking *true melee*, where you have to close enough to lick the sweat off the monster you're killing, not lightning strike etc.) shouldn't be significantly more powerful than ranged skill gems (increase effective damage on these skills by a large margin) - you want to be ranged and suffer no fear of death via kiting etc, fine - but your damage will not measure up to melee.
Even if ranged have significantly lower damage than melee, their TTK will remain largely the same due to their vastly more competent ability to AOE crowds of monsters; this does mean their single-target will suffer in comparison, but honestly who cares, the benefit of not having to stand next to brutus to wail on him vastly outweighs the fact it takes you an extra 15 secs to kill him than it does for a melee; just chuck down another taunt-totem.

+There needs to be a flat defensive buff to characters that are in melee range, using melee skills; how exactly, is up to you, but melee's never going to be desirable over ranged unless this happens.

+Multi-strike: remove 40% less melee damage, and remove increased melee physical damage, leave the rest the same. (even then it's still not even close to how good chain is)

I really don't understand the lack of action on the matter of lag/desync. Yeap, we all read the good words and the deep explanations why it happens, but what it all comes to.... other games have done it and it is working. Yeah, you can hate D3, but I have never had connection issues due to slow sync between server and client. Do not know how they achieved it and not sure if I would like to find out what corners they have cut, but it is done. Not all of us what to be tanks. There is no build diversity at all on the end-game.

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bootdisk wrote:

There is no build diversity at all on the end-game.

Build diversity is in there. To understand true meaning of no build diversity -> play D3. :-)

Melee vs. Ranged

My two highest level characters are a witch firestorm/summoner and a duelist. The witch, of course, has the easier time, especially with maps. The duelist was dual wielding, and I was having a very difficult time keeping him alive in latter act3/merciless or in maps. That has recently changed. The new melee support gems? No. It was to switch him away from being dual wielding to using a buckler and a single sword. It doesn't matter that I have less block now than I did with the dual wield, the difference in evasion alone is a tremendous help. I also have a marauder that has a 2handed axe vs. mace and tower shield as alternates. His survivability while wielding the two hander is substantially lower than when using the shield. Shields provide bonuses that weapons do not, bonuses that really make a difference in the survivability of the character.

I would really like to see dual wield/2hander builds be more viable. I know people who do just fine with them, so I know there are viable builds out there, but they are much harder to accomplish that a sword and board fighter, and far harder than a ranged character.

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Filousov wrote:

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bootdisk wrote:

There is no build diversity at all on the end-game.

Build diversity is in there. To understand true meaning of no build diversity -> play D3. :-)

Wrong. The desync kills the leveling, so the only way to progress is being a tank.
D3 have a lot of game design issues, but in technical aspect.... damn, it is working.

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bootdisk wrote:

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Filousov wrote:

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bootdisk wrote:

There is no build diversity at all on the end-game.

Build diversity is in there. To understand true meaning of no build diversity -> play D3. :-)

Wrong. The desync kills the leveling, so the only way to progress is being a tank.
D3 have a lot of game design issues, but in technical aspect.... damn, it is working.

this isn't entirely correct. You don't need to be a "tank", however you do need to balance out your defense / effective life and damage.

I'll agree that atm a player needs more life/ES than he/she should. But imo it has to do with mob damage (being too high near end-game). Lower the overall damage, just a bit, and we won't see any more "path of life nodes" threads. This is just an opinon.

ty

Re: proposed scheme to run exact same simulation on both client and server to solve desync issues once and for all for non-cheating solo players:

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bartekltg wrote:

Trust & Control. Server receive my mouse/keyboard click (with game time stamps) and _recreate_ events.

Some comments:
Evasion, damage, chance to hit etc. client/server should computed from deterministic pseudo-random sequence(the same on the server and the client). But client can't known "drop". Cheating client can look at sequence and decided whether or not kill monster or _open chest_ now or shot in the air and get better item. Loot should by drawn by server and send when needed.

In single player it work. No desync, very limited possibility of cheating (I can imagine client with pick order of attack and maximize damage, but... come on!:))

Yes, the game could drop placeholder items until the server fills them in - beautiful. They could even morph from placeholder to the real item graphically as eye-candy.

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bartekltg wrote:

Bigger problem is in multiplayer. Whatever we do, my teammates will by delayed (hmm, retarded?) on my client. But not on the server! Dsync exist, but what can happen? Monster kill me, while on server someone kills monster. Then I shouldn't die until server tell me so.

Monster could shot at two different target on the server and one of the clients. Once again server send me "what really happened" and my client correct it.
Monsters can also have inertia in targeting. They decide 100-200ms earlier, who want to hit, this information will be sent to clients. They revive it 100ms before (great, client known who to hit)- 200 after (it is still earlier) monster hit. Time between animation start and hit also is helping us.

I like the "monster inertia" idea for multiplayer. People can't react instantaneously, why should mobs? This would be unnecessary in single player mode though.

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artemis42 wrote:

@BrentFasilo, the reason they don't do what you suggest is because it would make it possible for nefarious players to reverse-engineer the client and create much more powerful and untraceable bots. The game's innards need to be kept as secret as possible (ie. on the server). Surely you must realize the devs would have thought of something like this before?

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bartekltg wrote:

I'm not sure. Now whole mechanic exist inside the client, it is little secret. GGG said the client _predict_ monsters movement, not wait until server sent trajectory.
The server only send us random stuff like damage and chance to hit. But you can't make superfast or invincible bot. Possibilities of cheating are very limited and you will not write better bot for grinding.

Sigh, yes, the second level of cheating. Reverse engineer the client, then run multiple scenarios before choosing which click stream to generate. I really hate people sometimes. One thought for this is that you could *choose* to run the game in this solo-with-no-desync mode. All of your drops are tagged non-tradeable (account bound?) Fine for regular players, and useless for farmers.

I'd also like to reiterate my suggestion for separate threads per manifesto post. For me, the signal to noise ratio in this combined thread is 4 to 1, and I'm sure that is also true of the many people who only care about one of the four topics as well. It would keep the discussion more focused.

Regarding desync:

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Chris wrote:

The server has to dictate whether things happen or not, but there's a 50-250ms delay before data gets to the server and back. There are three ways that games can solve this:

• Trust the client. This means people can cheat, but the results are instant. We will not do this.

I understand that this also means that people could cheat, and the results of said cheating would be instant. However, in many game situations, couldn't we still allow the client to do this?

In reality, allowing the client to perform calculations isn't necessarily trusting it, it's just allowing it. For example, let's say you've captured a prisoner (in a post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested world, perhaps), he's all handcuffed and shackled, and he's starting to get a real foul odor to him, so you want him to bathe. You would basically have three options:

• Complete the task for him. You don't remove the handcuffs or shackles, you manually remove his clothes and sponge him or something. This probably wouldn't get you killed, but it would be very awkward and time-consuming, and you probably wouldn't do that effective of a job.
• Trust him completely. This, of course, is insanely stupid.
• Take him to a pond, remove his handcuffs, and keep a pair of armed guards on him. This is what sane people would do.

The thing is, right now PoE never takes the handcuffs off. I understand this is safest, but frankly there's too many prisoners in need of a bath, and it's simply inefficient.

I think that, for solo play situations, the game should allow the client to perform operations... but not trust it. The game would still send data to the server on a regular basis, which the server would then perform a quality-control analysis on, thus continually monitoring for cheats and hacks. Right now, the system prevents cheating; this new system would not prevent it, but instead enforce anti-cheat policies, much in the same manner an armed guard would.

For other situations -- such as PvP or party vs monster -- all clients should rely on the server for calculations. I understand desync is probably even more of an issue with groups than it is with solo, but in those cases the players are competing against one another (either directly or for loot drops), so you wouldn't just have cheaters, you'd have victims. That adds a whole new level of entanglement that we rightly shouldn't allow.

Well its nice that the devs wrote something about the thing that will kill the game slowly, de-sync.
We all know the feeling from FPS Games, a little lag, a ping spike and you explode in a bomb of frustration, but overall the game experience is satisfying.

In PoE its the complete opposite if you do not desyncing all the time you are kinda suprised that you can survive in 66 maps as a level80 char without 99% lifenodes, but seconds later you are dead again.

Im still playing it from time to time because the item-hunt addiction is still there, but most of the time i simply dont care about that game anymore.

Leveling? - impossible
Getting instakilled by creeps -15 level to you? - normality
Dying because of my own "bad" connection? NOT ONCE

No matter how you turn it around the sync solution of PoE is plain bad and will kill it in the longrun.