[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

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JohnChance wrote:

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Undon3 wrote:

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sai25 wrote:

The situation of medium/high maps its quite annoying.

I read some ideas and i just see 3 "fair" solutions to help the players keep doing maps.

I think you're starting from the wrong premises here...

Why would GGG want you to keep doing maps? Especially high-level maps?

I think it should be obvious by now that the map limitations are here not as an unpredicted flaw, but by design.

What will you do when you reach 100 in a month of constant high-level mapping? Leave the game? Bad for GGG.

The problem here is the way players are trying to play. Why would you be at 100 in a month? There are alts to make, there are races to participate in, and there are random maps to explore. For that matter why would you be at 60+ within three months of open beta? LOL

We have to remember more acts are going to come out eventually, the maps are just a stop gap place holders, they aren't "end game" they are "you are too far too quick, here do this till we are ready for you!".

Nope, I don't think so. If the maps are "stop gap" and "placeholders", why would GGG present them as endgame? Because they do so. Because it doesn't matter what you or I think (and I actually partially agree with you...), it matters what GGG thinks.
If GGG thinks you should not be 60 (aww, common, I was 60 in a few days...), then they should make that the max level. And slow down the levelling as necessary.
So no, maps are the official endgame for now, good or bad, this is what we have.

Also:
- alts are a question of taste. I never liked them, and probably never will. The only case I can understand alts are for Bioware's games, where there's such a huge, intricate story to explore, and you need more chars to do it. In PoE? Not worth it. We already run 3 times through the same damn content. I gotta be insane (IMO) to run again, and again, for nothing new.
- races? No reason to participate for me. I don't even like the concept. I might participate if there would have been serious rewards that I needed. But guess what? There aren't... surprise, surprise :)
- there's basically no reason for exploration in PoE. No random bosses, chests are non-rewarding, rares are non-rewarding... why would you explore?!? It's no coincidence so many people don't kill any mob on the map but run through many of them...
- randomisation of the maps does not change them in a significant way. It's the same old, same old, just mingled and contorted so you find your way harder. Great :\

Some comments and feedback.

Desync:

1. Please fix the difference between client and server calculations, for example attacking monsters that are charging (client attacks if your close enough to attempt a melee, but the server chases it until it stops and then attacks, you will always desync yourself if you attempt to melee a charging monster without holding shift, and if you hold shift you wont resync yourself by moving to where you are on the server). Also if they are calculating the same then you shouldn't be finding very many rubber bands/desyncs because you was surrounded on the server but not on your client. It feels like there's a lot of differences that leads to some pretty large desyncs, sometimes at random times.

2. Please auto do a /oos if we take damage, and there is nothing on our client that connected with us. If the client gets a message from the server that your stunned or taking damage (you can clearly see it when its happening that your losing life, stunned, w/e, then why on earth is the client not trying to fix it, it bloody knows where it thinks things are, and its obviously not the same as the server when its a distance away or just nothing hit you on your screen. Dodge a arrow and still get stunned, that's a clue something isn't right.

3. "Action prediction is mandatory for this type of game but results in you being slightly out-of-sync almost all of the time. This is generally no problem," OK.... I have to disagree that it is mandatory for one, I've never had so many problems big or small in other modern online games as this one, expect maybe trying to play css not knowing how to fix the settings and on slow connection, like 56k. Before I digress however, it actually is a problem, I've had my single mana flask drained trying to attack monsters with ground slam numerous times in races because of this constant out of sync (it can be hard to tell if your just missing as the miss rate is often much lower then listed, although that could be partly due to the sync issues), doing that just once can cause you to lose the race. I also think it contributes to getting stunned by arrows you dodged, getting temp chains cursed from those cold waves that you dodge in anger, and so on so forth, one stun or debuff can lead to taking far more damage then you should have, including more stuns, followed by more... until you die.

4. I know the manifesto says you guys are working on better code to rubber band more. I'd just like to say that's over due.

5. While on desync, is there any statement that GGG can make regarding how some players can stream game play with few sync issues, if any and insane race rng (at least compared to what I've had, I've never seen anyone else kill merv with a white Lv1 weapon, for example). I have literally gotten sick going to twitch watching some vids of a certain player *cougharion* in a race.

I'm also curious about things like when will there be, if ever a quest progression race, my class rankings, my ladder rankings, or white item only races. Why melee can miss, and then even with RT cant crit and rely on weapon upgrades to increase damage, while spells always hit, can crit, and just level up mostly to increase damage. What kind of data has been fathered from char deaths, how far out of sync on average players are when they die, and if some are more then others, or if such data has been collected at all. Why are players spamming the same stuff over and over not auto muted. Why players are freely allowed to scam others or make pub bandit groups to pk new hc players, but not allowed to post complaints, name them, or organize to hunt pkers to pk them, or make bar lists to attempt to prevent known scamers from continuing to do so. Is act 3 still on schedule to finish this summer sometime? Perhaps most importantly, since the network has made the game unplayable in many respects, is there any plans of implementing a lan or offline play mode in the future? But, that's all a bit off topic I suppose.

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Chris wrote:

All online games have this situation. 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:
Wait until data arrives back from the server before doing anything. This is a very common strategy in RTS and MOBA games. If you click to move, the unit will only start moving once the server says so, which is 50-250ms later. If you are close to the server, you'll quickly get used to the lag and everything feels pretty good. If you're far away (New Zealand, for example), it feels like you're playing drunk. Every time you issue an order, nothing happens for quarter of a second. This does not work for Action RPGs.

How bad could it possibly be? If other real-time games, multiplayer PvP even, are capable of pulling this off, would it be so ruinous for Path of Exile? I'm inclined to trust Chris' judgement as a developer over mine as a clueless consumer, but I just can't imagine this system being worse than the prediction used presently. Even if input feels less smooth and there's slight constant delays across the board, it would be worth it a million times just to eliminate desync deaths. Instant input is worthless to me when any time it matters I could be pretend-playing on my client with no knowledge that the server disagrees with my actions. Is this server waiting system really beyond consideration even as a bridge solution?

No doubt first impressions of the game and low-intensity content would suffer with this method, but who cares? Shouldn't you be investing in longevity of the game by seeking to satisfy dedicated players? Probably not, if that were a good idea every other game developer would lead by example.

Wow, Capture the Flag pvp... now THAT would be so much fun.

Did anyone play NoXX CTF? That was a ton of fun and I imagine it would be similar to that.

Nice reading. I would like to make a possible recommendation you may have already considered to stem the "litter on the ground".

You could, in addition to your considerations, implement a customizable "loot settings" where the player only sees the text for what they want to see on the ground, i.e. "see all rares, see all uniques, see all 5S, see all 5L, see all 6S, etc.; however many settings that would be fit for players to customize what they want to see on the ground worth picking up.

Anyway, as stated, you may have already considered this, but I think it would be a grand idea, and could even be used in the interim as a short term solution in place of a longer term goal.

Thanks for your consideration!

V/R,

Spectre

In regards to desync:

Note: No attempt to analyze any data belong to GGG was made. I frankly don't care about whatever is in the payload of packets being sent between my machine in GGG's servers.

Being a network engineer by trade, I wanted to see just how much latency there was between me and the servers that I connect to. While I had a character running around in a map, I fire up Wireshark on the same machine for a minute. I then stopped the trace and took a look. Well, now I have some better understanding why there is desync in PoE and not in any other game I have played in the last decade.

Every packet in the communication was TCP. There was no UDP whatsoever. For those who are not into networking, TCP is a very reliable method to transfer data. Every packet that is sent from one machine is acknowledged to have been received from the other side. If a packet is lost, the sending machine can resend that data. The downside is the overhead (roughly 20% of the bandwidth used is not data itself) and it is slow. Slow because of all those acknowledgements and resending of packets if things get lost.

What 99.9% of the gaming/video streaming/videoconferencing industry uses for the data stream is UDP. UDP is send and forget. If it makes it to the destination, great. If it doesn't make it there, we aren't checking or resending, because what we are doing is time sensitive, so resending data won't accomplish anything - we can't go back and place put a frame of video that was missed 2 seconds ago, you are already watching the video beyond that point.

Why is GGG using TCP for data transport in an action RPG? It makes no sense whatsoever. You can set the push bit to get a little more priority in network transport (which GGG has done) but the client machine is not always setting that bit on the ACKs. All this is doing is slowing down the communication between client and server, which GGG has already stated is the reason for the desync in the first place.

Wait it really uses TCP? lol

I was always assuming it was UDP

I would like to ask something with regards to desync.

Does the likelihood of a player getting desynced increase the further away he is from the server? If so, could someone explain to me why I'm experiencing horrible desyncs even though I live in Singapore, which is the location of one of the game's 3 servers. Also, could I get some suggestions on how to tackle this problem?

My understanding of this topic is severely limited, so to the kind soul who would help me, please try to explain it to me in the simplest terms that you can.

It's not that simple. First, because latency isn't just a function of geographical distance. It SHOULD be lower for closer ranges but there might be other issues impacting it. You also have packet loss.

And second, because Desync isn't just simple lag and rubberbanding. It's heavily dependant on game environment and how you're playing.

The more complex pathfinding gets, the more likely you are to get desync'ed. High mob density, chokepoints, fast movement with large changes of intercept vectors are very likely to cause it.

For example, using Whirling Blades to go through a pack in a small room with a door is highly likely to desync, whatever your latency. Slowly kiting away in an open area has little chance to cause it. (and will probably have little consequence anyway)

In the first case, mobs have to recalculate paths around obstacles and each other to a target whose position changes drastically. And even a small latency will cause discrepancies between your client estimate and what the server calculates. In the second case, the calculations are rather simple, with some mobs probably off a bit, but no gamechanging errors.

As for TCP, it's baffling... But then, GGG seems to think other games' solutions, though a proved standard, are not "hardcore" enough or "cheating"... So it may be something similar. Maybe they wanted their mobs to have absolutely accurate info on where you are, never mind what it means for the player.

Can someone explain how UDP would be better in the context of an online video game? I would have thought that a "push and forget" protocol would be bad for desync. For example, the client would have to wait for server instructions that may have got lost on the way, and the server doesn't know to resend...