Is PoE suffering from poor game design choices?

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RandallMourn a écrit :

The only design decision I truly have a problem with is the lack of a toggle to eliminate weather/particle effects. I find it analgous to walking into a sandwich shop and having the following conversation:

Me: Hey, let me get your signature sandwich but hold the special sauce please.

GGG Sandwich Maker: Sorry, but you have to have the special sauce to enjoy the full experience.

Me: But the sandwich is good enough without the special sauce. I don't need it.

GSM: Yes, you do.

Me: But I don't like the taste of the sauce. It actually detracts from the experience for me.

GSM: Um....

Me: On top of that, I'm allergic to it. It could lead to something detrimental.

GSM: Well, maybe you could pay a doctor to give you an allergy shot before you eat the special sauce.

Me: You realize that the money I give the doctor is less money I can spend on your sandwiches, right?

GSM: Yes, but the experience. You need the experience.


See what I'm getting at? I may not like desynch or other isuues. But they aren't game breaking (for me) and the company has what they believe are valid reasons behind these things. Fair enough. But having my FPS drop to 2 in a boss fight when a simple toggle eliminates it for what, in effect, appears nothing more than a vanity driven decision is misguided at best.

Please, GGG, please stop forcing your special sauce on me.

I AGREE !!!!!!!!!!!!!
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF HAVING THESES STUPID PARTICLES !!!!! I have said that on these forums hundred times !!!

I LIKE MY GAMES UGLY AND RUNNING FINE 8!!!!!!!!

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Qarl a écrit :

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ToxicRatt a écrit :

Bloody Brilliant. To bad no one from GGG will read it.

Yes, it does get read. People believing it doesn't get read could explain some of the tone.

Boo, there's a new sherif in town ! I like your game (besides the insane stupidity of maps and unique drops), mainly for the gameplay ! The freaking LMP makes me still playing !! BUT GOD DAMMINT, I AM SICK AND TIRED OF HUUUUGE LAG BECAUSE OF THOSE GREMLGRMELGMERLGMELGMERLGEDSJFDSKJF PARTICLES ! DAMNIT, I HATE dying on a boss or a pack of mob because OF A LAG

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DalaiLama a écrit :

What would you suggest for a chisel recipe instead? Or are you saying that there should not be a chisel recipe?

There already is one.

What I'd suggest is this;

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TheAnuhart a écrit :

Please, just make every map boss (even, say, lvl 72+ map bosses) drop a chisel an alc and a chaos.

Simple, people can farm the 72-74 bracket un-chiselled (not as faceroll as 66-68 or lunaris or act 1 normal). And acquire mats at a better rate to roll their 75-78s.

Reason to do map boss, easier rolled high tier maps helping to sustain themselves and mid-high maps which are helping to sustain themselves and high tier maps.

Not chaining 77/78s but not facerolling 66-68s.

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deteego a écrit :

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symban a écrit :

First of all 50ms is NOT 0.5 second. It is 0.05 second.

Yup, believe it or not, in the real world we have to deal with physics, and whether you are on fibre connection or copper connection, electrons/protons will travel at (almost) the speed of light.

So in other words, if you have landline connection (TODAY), that is ADSL2/Cable/Fiber/vDSL, in the same country that the server is on, you are going to have a ping of 5-70MS, which is 0.005s to 0.07s delay on inputs. Its only when you start going into 100MS (0.01 seconds) that you start noticing any sought of delay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DreDIhnK-co - one of the most intense q3/live matches ive ever seen. at the end you can see what kind of ping both players have. lag.. lag is not an issue for games 100times faster paced than poe

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Fruz a écrit :

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allbusiness a écrit :

They can't do that because they built their own grave by wanting a system that prevents cheating while also providing 'actiony' gameplay. The issue is that the system already allows maphacks to occur (just not perfect ones). This is mainly because the way the game architecture is setup. By virtue of the fact that the client runs some local side calculations, it has to have certain information about the gameworld in order for this to work out (otherwise the client would see nothing). So guess what? You can reverse engineer and get an easy maphack out of it. It's been done, and can easily be done still. Giving the client MORE information would only exacerbate the issue.

Well I assumed that location of monsters/players in the map is accessible from the client, as well as what affects them ( auras i.e. ), so it would just make informations already present in there more easily "exportable" with hacks, etc ... but I don't think that it would really need to add informations from the server.
I don't quite see how the whole client could work without coordinates.

Well in a system like DotA2, you can only receive co-ordinates that you can see, so you can never map hack. Wc3 had an issue where the client had information of the map for the system (actually in my younger ye olde days, I implemented an AH system for Wc3 under the pandamine alias which got implemented in DotA for some versions)

In any case, maphacking in DotA2 is impossible. You can graphically reveal the whole map, but you want see any units or spells. There are some cases where you can get a very slight advantage (like Pudge's hook), but its definitely very different compared to revealing the whole map, which in MOBA's is completely gamebreaking

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deteego a écrit :

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Fruz a écrit :

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allbusiness a écrit :

They can't do that because they built their own grave by wanting a system that prevents cheating while also providing 'actiony' gameplay. The issue is that the system already allows maphacks to occur (just not perfect ones). This is mainly because the way the game architecture is setup. By virtue of the fact that the client runs some local side calculations, it has to have certain information about the gameworld in order for this to work out (otherwise the client would see nothing). So guess what? You can reverse engineer and get an easy maphack out of it. It's been done, and can easily be done still. Giving the client MORE information would only exacerbate the issue.

Well I assumed that location of monsters/players in the map is accessible from the client, as well as what affects them ( auras i.e. ), so it would just make informations already present in there more easily "exportable" with hacks, etc ... but I don't think that it would really need to add informations from the server.
I don't quite see how the whole client could work without coordinates.

Well in a system like DotA2, you can only receive co-ordinates that you can see, so you can never map hack. Wc3 had an issue where the client had information of the map for the system (actually in my younger ye olde days, I implemented an AH system for Wc3 under the pandamine alias which got implemented in DotA for some versions)

In any case, maphacking in DotA2 is impossible. You can graphically reveal the whole map, but you want see any units or spells. There are some cases where you can get a very slight advantage (like Pudge's hook), but its definitely very different compared to revealing the whole map, which in MOBA's is completely gamebreaking

I agree with what allbusiness wrote. They literally dug their own grave by compromising gameplay (in a hard core game none the less) in favor of making the game hack proof.

When there are so many other ways to go about doing it, that work, that don't compromise the game.

I almost feel this is a fake excuse in that sense, and that there is another reason for the desync...

Anyway, the big problem isn't the desync, people are willing to "ride it out". The problem is when the developers, chris specifically, shrugging the issue off as a non issue. I think he said in that athene interview that they looked at some cases of proclaimed desync and it turned out to not be desync...then what the heck is it? Why does it happen in this game and no other game? This isn't a small issue that you see a concerned post about every other week. its an every day issue for most people I would argue. Some more tolerant to it than others.

To me, something seems VERY fishy with the developers reaction to this issue, their explanation of the issue, and their explanation as to why they decided to go this route with the game design. The explanation of why kinda makes sense...except...I don't buy the "manually dodge melee which is better but causes desync and d3 doesn't have it" when you can clearly dodge a lot of melee skills in that game (not auto attack tho) and who the heck manually dodges auto attacks? It makese sense for fights like Kole...which..ironically...are notorious for desyncing to the point that people ignore him. Cool feature rendered useless by the feature itself? And its not unique to POE that you can dodge a boss melee hit...

Im not sure if its arrogance brewing...or that they are not being honest about whats really going on. My fear is that its really just a cost cutting feature, or that the issue is so deep within the code they just are not going to deal with it ever...

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CapitalPunishment a écrit :

Cool feature rendered useless by the feature itself?

Yup, the feature is self-defeating. You could run around / past mobs, manually avoiding them, using environment as cover... but all this will make you desync more. The best option is still to stand in place and soak up damage.

Also about weather effects, I would like to reiterate a poster above: I like my game ugly and running smooth. I already have everything set on low (playing solo, it still FPS lags in some occasions), I wont miss the rain and a few leafs swirling around. -_-

The funniest part is that the excuse makes 0 sense. If the client has to run some local calculations, it is literally impossible to deny the client information. If the client has to run any calculations at all regarding movement (which it likely does considering you can still move around despite being desynced), this means that the client must have certain information regarding objects in the game world such as barrels, chests, doorways, monsters, etc.

In turn, this means that anyone with some programming experience can make a maphack. Very easily. It's not even that hard. There's been a maphack for PoE literally since CB. Their choice to do it 'this way' and make it 'hack proof' is a load of bullshit. The safest way is to do it like Deetgo and I have suggested, which would be to run the client as an interface and deny all information.

Except they likely can't... have you ever noticed that just before a race at the time everyone is making their characters for the race the server has a sudden spike of desync, lag, disconnects and rollbacks? Stuff that starts to clear up when the race has actually started and clears up when its over.



To move everything server side like that would require processing power (real time updates faster them the current rate) and bandwidth that would cost a massive amount of money and in a game that isn't turn based likely would be far more then pretty much any non blizzard sized company can afford.



If they want to host their own servers and not use something like amazon cloud then they need to make compromises that they seem unwilling to make. It seems like they are getting the worst of both design methods (server side and client side) and not many of the benefits of either.

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Jiero a écrit :

Except they likely can't... have you ever noticed that just before a race at the time everyone is making their characters for the race the server has a sudden spike of desync, lag, disconnects and rollbacks? Stuff that starts to clear up when the race has actually started and clears up when its over.



To move everything server side like that would require processing power (real time updates faster them the current rate) and bandwidth that would cost a massive amount of money and in a game that isn't turn based likely would be far more then pretty much any non blizzard sized company can afford.



If they want to host their own servers and not use something like amazon cloud then they need to make compromises that they seem unwilling to make. It seems like they are getting the worst of both design methods (server side and client side) and not many of the benefits of either.

Actually you are wrong here

The server is already processing this information, it just gives the client extra information so the client has an ability to process it in parallel. The server still needs to do the calculations you are speaking off, after all, the server is always the "authority" when it comes to game logic.

Server bandwidth could be a different story. Emphasis on the could. It really depends how PoE is engineered, and I can't actually qualify this statement. PoE's current system sends less bandwidth to the client when running normally, but everytime a desync happens, it sends a massive spike of data to the client (this is why the command is limited, it also puts a lot of stress on the severs system). Using a system like DotA2's, you have no desync at all. Network bandwidth using DotA2's system is also a lot more stable, which makes it much easier to scale

Furthermore, what Chris said in the Athena interview didn't make complete sense. When he mentioned people working on prototypes to fix the sync issue, and then he said there are current problems with the prototype (i.e. it causes cheating), I just basically face palmed with the "no shit sherlock" attitude. I said this before and I will say it again, I don't see how its physically possible for GGG to fix these desync issues without changing their engine, or making the skills (and other parts of the game) more mechanically shallower.

What exactly are the GGG engineers doing, of course they could fix desync the way that Chris was describing, but just as has been stating, it would allow cheating. Why are they wasting time doing this when they know its a dead end?