Client-server Action Synchronisation

The only real solution GGG is to allow the client to make some calculations that will help to prevent or cut down on desyncing.

This will allow cheaters to manipulate those calculations, but if you can manage to only do this in PVE only areas (PVP all server-side) and only in standard leagues (not hardcore) then I don't think anyone would really care if people where cheating.

All the cheaters would be doing is preventing their deaths and who cares if they don’t die in Standard leagues. They aren't getting much of an advantage and that advantage does not really affect the non-cheater's experiences.

You can always implement cheat protection afterwards but since many won't really care if people where cheating in standard leagues it wouldn't even have to be strict or complex cheat protection. If all goes well with the cheat protection though you could maybe even then try it in hardcore leagues and PVP.

I like this game a lot and I am semi-regularly playing it since the Closed Beta and I must say that the clunkiness of the desynch is probably what puts me most "out" of the game while playing. I learnt to do guess-work when playing which has already changed the way I play this game as compared to other ARPGs. I have to do this just to accomodate the constant desynchs I get. Also my ping seems to vary a lot (from 50-300ms) which seems to depend on the instance I am in. My internet connection can't be blamed in those cases - i switched back and forth between instances to check. In the cases of 300ms pings the game is simply not fun to play and even at the lowest pings I do get a lot of desynchs to an extent it is less fun to play the game.

Bottom-line: The game would "feel" a lot better to play if the reactions and displayed game objects and events were corresponding with the state on the serer. Right now this is far from being the case. It becomes very apparent over time and through interaction that the character is evidently not where he/she is displayed to be at and does not hit what he/she is supposedly hitring on the screen with different kinds of AoE. The kind of AoE that either hits all or nothing. This is just breaking all immersion for me.

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When the semantic is that you're ordering a unit around, this lag is understandable, but if you *are* the unit, then it feels really terrible.

But you *are* the unit in MOBAs too, and it doesn't feel terrible. There is just as high of a precise control requirement with MOBAs as there are in ARPGs. You have to be able to make split second decisions, and in a lock-step setup you at least guarantee that your commands go through where and when you intended.

With desync, you are never 100% certain that your character is where it looks like it is, and your commands could be off by a large margin if your character is desynced.

Lockstep cannot work for PoE, but not for the reason Chris mentioned. The actual problem is RNG / Loot. In MOBAs, you have completely deterministic gameplay. There may be some pseudo-randomness involved if there are things like damage ranges or hit/miss chance, but those can easily be resolved by synchronizing the RNG seed between the at the beginning of each session.

The problem with that is that this way, each client would know in advance what items will drop in this session. You could build a tool that tells you whether a Kaom's will drop in an area the moment you enter it. You would just keep entering areas until you know you will get the items you want. This would not work with parties because you obviously cannot predict the other player's input, but if you are the only player in your instance, Lockstep is basically just local singleplayer.

This might be fixed by introducing a kind of server-side client, which will be act as an additional "player" in the lockstep setup and be the only one that is allowed to spawn items. But then we are basically back to an authoritative server again.

The proper way, IMHO, is to give the clients some trust in advance and then check their logs afterwards. That should give you the best of both worlds - the performance of singleplayer and cheat-security of an auth server.

"[I]n order to keep hardcore game mechanics like body-blocking, stunning and missing while also preventing players from manipulating combat results, small amounts of desync will occur naturally. There is no way around this, due to the speed of light. An ideal solution from Grinding Gear Games would be to very rapidly detect and correct those sync problems, putting things back where they should be."

As others have said many, many times and in many, many threads in these forums, players avoid the 'hardcore game mechanics' because these mechanics irretrievably break down play due to the very nature of the medium combined with the mechanics themselves. That is to say, players avoid the 'hardcore game mechanics' because they are forced to play against them rather then with them and this due to (1) the nature of the internet and (2) the way PoE is designed under the hood. This is likely the single biggest reason people are turned off from PoE, a critical error in game design relative to the medium the game is being played on, and GGG seems to have doubled-down and excused this genuinely obvious set of issues instead of proceeding with epistemic humility, instead of saying 'shit, I think we really botched something here. How can we change the mechanics while retaining the soul of this kickass game?'

Since trusting the client is, understandably, off the table the ideal solution is to change some of PoE's game mechanics and that's all there is to it. There is no way to retain some (all?) of the 'hardcore game mechanics' and not unduly streamline the way players interact with and play the game. There is no reason to believe GGG wants to unduly streamline the way players play the game and, to be fair, there is no way that GGG can avoid admitting that the current situation results in unduly limiting how players play the game from character builds to play tactics to enemy offence and defence relative to the real prevalence of desync. Players simply cannot take advantage of the many options PoE offers for play and this because of the way the game mechanics, including what goes on under the hood, interact with the medium the game is played on. GGG knows that the situation is as bad as players make it out to be, that it's not hyperbole, even though they've remained silent on just how impactful desync is to playability.

There is no other way to look at this than as a critical failure and something needlessly holding back a game that is undeniably kickass in so many other areas. The time for being defensive is over for GGG and the time for being polite is over for the playerbase. All of us, the developers and the players, know that PoE's potential is being restrained by the mechanics and it seems clear that the only way to resolve these issues are to trust the client (which should not happen for a game like this on the internet) or to change some of the mechanics in order to free the game's potential.

Hubris isn't helpful, being defensive isn't helpful and it's clear that the community being polite and insightful at various stretches hasn't been helpful. Path of Exile suffers from critical, long-standing development issues and they need to be addressed. It's genuinely past the point where anyone can say 'they're an Indie developer', 'this is their first game', 'give them time to test out some patches' or anything else that gives an excuse to this situation. We're past the point where we can say that 'Path of Exile is a great game but...' and solidly at the point where we can say that the game is a very unfortunate failure, that the developers have opted for good enough development with excuses instead of accepting the fact that some of their initial concepts were not suited for an online-only game and, therefore, need to be changed for the game to actually work much less succeed.

This game has so much potential and it's clear that GGG has so much talent, that Path of Exile is close to being one of the greatest games many of us have ever played. The problem is that the issues are obvious and nothing meaningful is happening because, for reasons we can only take to be fear or arrogance at this point, GGG refuses to face and address the reality of meaningful conceptual changes to 'the hardcore mechanics'.


Addendum

If PoE was a single-player or LAN-focused game, having trusted clients would be par for the course and we wouldn't be having this conversation. Since we all must play on GGG servers it stands to reason that the clients should not be trusted in order to not break a strongly economy-driven game. There's really no denying this and, all things considered, is grudgingly acceptable if and only if the game wasn't so frustrating to play due to desync. It is true that RNG/crafting is a legitimate issue but it is second to desync/playability despite being intimately connected to it. This is because a game that plays poorly is too frustrating to want to deal with RNG issues, while a game that plays well is only frustrated but not broke by RNG issus.

With this said, if PoE was a single-player or LAN-focused game there would be no need to really discuss desync or grumble about it.

Many fancy words for loads of crap, you wrote down assumptions and opinions as facts:

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This is likely the single biggest reason people are turned off from PoE

Yes, likely but just a guess really. I don't avoid any mechanics myself. Do you have the stats?

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Since trusting the client is, understandably, off the table the ideal solution is to change some of PoE's game mechanics and that's all there is to it

People have been suggestion to have a hibernate solution, GGG did not respond to that. Is it already off the table?
Is the ideal solution really to change mechanics? I disagree

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There is no way to retain some (all?) of the 'hardcore game mechanics' and not unduly streamline the way players interact with and play the game. There is no reason to believe GGG wants to unduly streamline the way players play the game and, to be fair, there is no way that GGG can avoid admitting that the current situation results in unduly limiting how players play the game from character builds to play tactics to enemy offence and defence relative to the real prevalence of desync. Players simply cannot take advantage of the many options PoE offers for play and this because of the way the game mechanics, including what goes on under the hood, interact with the medium the game is played on. GGG knows that the situation is as bad as players make it out to be, that it's not hyperbole, even though they've remained silent on just how impactful desync is to playability

Disagree with everything, please speak for yourself.

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There is no other way to look at this than as a critical failure

What? for you maybe, I'm looking at it in another way already..

I wont even bother responding to the rest of the rubbish. You better start writing a novel or something, in a book you can make up your own fantasy world and make your own facts.

I guess the elephant in the room is...

Why not just do it like D3?

It seems there is an effort to justify desync (which means the rubberbanding, telekilling, and all the unfair deaths and general unsmoothness it causes).

ANY justification is invalid. It's a problem, period. No excuse. "Hardcore mechanics" is nothing if this is what it creates.

Your "hardcore mechanics" doesn't mean a thing when it automatically creates this sort of problem. The cons simply far outweight the pros.

TLDR: No justification for desync, and GGG should abandon their flawed "hardcore mechanics philosophy" which causes this specific problem.


It's really a simple matter, pick a system for smoothness: D3 or the current PoE? It's D3.
What should they do? Make it smooth like D3.

PROBLEM SOLVED EVERYBODY HAPPY /thread

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074 wrote:

It seems there is an effort to justify desync (which means the rubberbanding, telekilling, and all the unfair deaths and general unsmoothness it causes).

ANY justification is invalid. It's a problem, period. No excuse. "Hardcore mechanics" is nothing if this is what it creates.

Your "hardcore mechanics" doesn't mean a thing when it automatically creates this sort of problem. The cons simply far outweight the pros.

TLDR: No justification for desync, and GGG should abandon their flawed "hardcore mechanics philosophy" which causes this specific problem.


It's really a simple matter, pick a system for smoothness: D3 or the current PoE? It's D3.
What should they do? Make it smooth like D3.

PROBLEM SOLVED EVERYBODY HAPPY /thread

"preventing accuracy from existing as a mechanic, prevent stunlock, preventing people getting blocked in, etc." Next time read the OP before posting, I'm happy with PoE's system if the alternative is to simplify everything ala diablo 3-style

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Reductant wrote:

"preventing accuracy from existing as a mechanic, prevent stunlock, preventing people getting blocked in, etc." Next time read the OP before posting, I'm happy with PoE's system if the alternative is to simplify everything ala diablo 3-style

Which is meaningless when you have telekilling and random rubberbanding into unexpected places, hitting mobs close to you is in fact doing nothing because the client doesnt know the mob is out of range, running away from mobs thinking you are safe but is in face DEAD because you don't know you are locked in, and a whole lot of other weird stuff.

The "too much work" and "you-ARE-the-character hardcore mechanics" sounds a whole lot like excuses rather than justifications. It is not justifiable when "you-are-the-character" means "you-are-rubberbanding-all-the-time".