Is PoE suffering from poor game design choices?
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Not saying game is for you (judging from your response it probably isn't), more saying I completely agree about the boring aspect (though I still enjoy watching high level dota tournaments because I have been so in depth with the mechanics I understand the subtle tiny shifts of balance between the teams), and that the game map dominion is an interesting change that (sadly) Riot (makers of LoL) compeltely ignored and mothballed and fucked over in a million ways, when it could have bee a much better game.
Essentially the game is so easy to follow you don't need to be able to understand the games mechanics to see whats happening. You can see red team is winning, they have 3 points. You can see in a fight that blue team managed to only just survive, you can see that red team is about to jump onto one member of blue team and completely destroy them. Mostly just bitter, game mode has so much potential as has similar complex decisions regarding map awareness, map positioning, and teamwork/team decisions but its very much by the wayside and the gamemode is ignored |
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You're really pushing it by talking about it so much. Just drop it, I for one loathe ARTS games after having played them for so long. They are stagnant and rife with issues. The problem with DOTA and LOL is that it's snowball hell. Look at LoL statistics, if you're up 100 gold in the first 10 minutes, your team has a 80% some chance of losing. It's not about tactics or positioning, it's just about farming and turtling and baiting. It's a fun time waster, but there's no grand strategy; especially for LoL. You can be as skilled as you want, but it comes down to what hero is OP at the moment, who can out-bait who, and whether you're willing to fight for forty minutes or not in an up-hill battle because somebody made a half second mistake in the first five minutes. My Keystone Ideas: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/744282 Dernière édition par anubite#0701, le 6 janv. 2014 à 22:20:02
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" The fact that you are talking about lag in LoL proves you have no idea what you are talking about, because the effect of lag with 9 other players in same place in LoL is nothing compared to regular desynch you get in PoE playing on your own. Also I have less than 50ms in PoE yet get desynch with almost every Whirling Blades, while in LoL 50ms means absolutely perfect game with no problem at all regardless of what skill I or others use. PoE is definitely doing something wrong. |
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" The claim could certainly be made as to such. IGN: SplitEpimorphism
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" You didn't read anything that I wrote. LoL vs PoE is a major design decision. LoL says, "lol we will have 10 clients in a game and maybe three or six dozen minion units fighting on a tiny map at any one time" - they also don't care if you're playing with 200+ ms to the server -- the game is coded so that you CANNOT make ANY ACTION until the server says you can. Your action is sent to the server, the server verifies you can make that action, and then you do it. That's why you can feel half a second delay in your actions. PoE says, "lol we will have up to twelve clients in a game (technically speaking, you could have two player parties in cutthroat trying to kill each other) and maybe several hundred enemies in a map at once, nevermind projectile entieis, aura entities, et cetera" - PoE was designed from a garage in NZ, where server access was minimal, they had to design the game at 200 ping themselves, so they needed a system that was still fluid and responsive at high ping. They also played D2 and said to themselves, "Man, it sure is frustrating to die and be like, "But the server gave me a second to half second delay! Without that shit, I would have lived!" So, they designed a system that would let users move instantly or make actions whenever they wanted to. The cost is of course, desync. The cost for LoL is lag. You don't (usually, though sometimes with some skills it happens) feel lag in PoE. I would say neither approach is right or wrong - because if PoE were built like LoL, we'd have similar issues, just with lag except desync. People would say, "GGG fix ur netcoad i dun like 0.5 sec lag when i cast fireball at 0.1 sec intervals". The issue is, first of all, you're using Desyncing Blades. There are several skills that have sync issues in PoE, but if you don't use them, you will have a much better user experience. I can't help but fault GGG for not having fixed or axed these skills, like Desyncing Blades or Shield Charge or Flicker Strike, because they've had ample time to try and rectify them. The problem is, symban, GGG chose a different approach to client syncing. Maybe you can enjoy LoL with 0.5 sec delay between your actions (I can't), but you'd still be having issues if things were different. There's really no point bringing up LoL or Source or Dota in any of this; because GGG can't change their base networking code at the tip of their hat. You can't rewrite that kind of code from scratch. It's not feasible at this stage. It'd be like rewriting the graphics engine, or something. GGG's system almost works perfectly. All they need to do is fix how the game detects sync issues and sync you quicker -- and fix problematic skills like Desyncing Blades. There's no reason to abandon all the work they've done in this area, software development is about iteration and investment. Let me put it in really simple words since I guess nothing I ever say about this issue seems to connect with people: LoL/DOTA/SOURCE/TF2/CS/Most Games: Client is playing catch-up to server PoE: Server is playing catch-up to client My Keystone Ideas: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/744282 Dernière édition par anubite#0701, le 6 janv. 2014 à 22:34:31
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" This is something I can't forget, and while I will not be a dick about it...(again) IMMEDIATELY after I read the patch notes when they nerfed all life builds in the game because a fraction of a percent of players were building around Kaoms, I just...stopped taking GGG balance seriously. Like, HOW do you make that work ? LOGICALLY ? Hey, one item is throwing life builds out of balance, lets adjust life numbers around it. Makes me shudder to wonder at what they this is an 'acceptable' margin of tolerance for sync code. Look at the recent added elemental support buffs. 100% because yeah, it was sinfully low before. Mathematically worth the socket or mana multiplier ? no. My logic is that there is a weird phenomenon when people make the transition from player to developer, that they suddenly feel that to make a 'difficult' game or one that is 'challenging', they need to somehow get in the players way of playing. Like what just seems straight up stupid in an obvious way to us, through some weird distorted developers' need to be complicated goggles, becomes a mechanic that challenges and doesn't take it easy on the player through their eyes. not sure if I've used enough words to describe what I mean, but it's late here.... |
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" You really don't understand do you? Valve utilizes the same method that GGG uses for their hit detection in Source games. Also, no matter what you will have input delay. Your client will always have delay no matter what. Period. It doesn't matter how good your connection is, there will always be input delay. Just because you moved on the client doesn't mean you actually moved.
Spoiler
Client and server hitboxes don't exactly match because of small precision errors in time measurement. Even a small difference of a few milliseconds can cause an error of several inches for fast-moving objects. Multiplayer hit detection is not pixel perfect and has known precision limitations based on the tickrate and the speed of moving objects.
The question arises, why is hit detection so complicated on the server? Doing the back tracking of player positions and dealing with precision errors while hit detection could be done client-side way easier and with pixel precision. The client would just tell the server with a "hit" message what player has been hit and where. We can't allow that simply because a game server can't trust the clients on such important decisions. Even if the client is "clean" and protected by Valve Anti-Cheat, the packets could be still modified on a 3rd machine while routed to the game server. These "cheat proxies" could inject "hit" messages into the network packet without being detected by VAC (a "man-in-the-middle" attack). Network latencies and lag compensation can create paradoxes that seem illogical compared to the real world. For example, you can be hit by an attacker you can't even see anymore because you already took cover. What happened is that the server moved your player hitboxes back in time, where you were still exposed to your attacker. This inconsistency problem can't be solved in general because of the relatively slow packet speeds. In the real world, you don't notice this problem because light (the packets) travels so fast and you and everybody around you sees the same world as it is right now Right there Valve describes desync as you experience it in Path of Exile. And yet you hardly ever have desync issues in CS:GO/CS:Source/etc. because of some of the systems Valve has in place. Mainly, their prediction models and lag compensation doesn't suck like GGG's does. And yes, Valve even does the same thing with movement, particularly if you are running cl_predict 1
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Lets assume a player has a network latency of 150 milliseconds and starts to move forward. The information that the +FORWARD key is pressed is stored in a user command and send to the server. There the user command is processed by the movement code and the player's character is moved forward in the game world. This world state change is transmitted to all clients with the next snapshot update. So the player would see his own change of movement with a 150 milliseconds delay after he started walking. This delay applies to all players actions like movement, shooting weapons, etc. and becomes worse with higher latencies.
A delay between player input and corresponding visual feedback creates a strange, unnatural feeling and makes it hard to move or aim precisely. Client-side input prediction (cl_predict 1) is a way to remove this delay and let the player's actions feel more instant. Instead of waiting for the server to update your own position, the local client just predicts the results of its own user commands. Therefore, the client runs exactly the same code and rules the server will use to process the user commands. After the prediction is finished, the local player will move instantly to the new location while the server still sees him at the old place. After 150 milliseconds, the client will receive the server snapshot that contains the changes based on the user command he predicted earlier. Then the client compares the server position with his predicted position. If they are different, a prediction error has occurred. This indicates that the client didn't have the correct information about other entities and the environment when it processed the user command. Then the client has to correct its own position, since the server has final authority over client-side prediction. If cl_showerror 1 is turned on, clients can see when prediction errors happen. Prediction error correction can be quite noticeable and may cause the client's view to jump erratically. By gradually correcting this error over a short amount of time (cl_smoothtime), errors can be smoothly corrected. Prediction error smoothing can be turned off with cl_smooth 0. Predicting an object's behavior only works if the clients knows the same rules and state of the object as the server. That's usually not the case since the server knows more internal information about objects than the clients do. Clients see only a small part of the world and just get enough information to render objects. Therefore, prediction works only for your own player, and the weapons controlled by you. Proper prediction of other players or interactive objects is not possible on the client at this point. The server/client structure that GGG uses is similar to what most FPS/Action multiplayer games use. It is to minimize delay as much as possible in order to create the most seamless experience possible. The real issue is that GGG somewhere along the lines really fucked up on either the prediction or how the client and server are suppose to interact when an error occurs (basically resyncing/compensation). If they stuck to a basic client as an interface and server does all the calculations, you'd have delay, but it certainly wouldn't really be that bad at all (various 'action' MMOs use the same server/client structure and yet work out perfectly fine). It would have been much easier to code for, and you'd still have the same cheat protection that GGG wants. However, they went the much harder path, thus resulting in massive desyncs and people bitching constantly about it. If you had a delay model, people would complain, but it wouldn't be nearly as bad as they are much more used to playing under a delay model than they are under a 'oh shit you're not suppose to be there, let me teleport you back 400 feet' model. And really, here's the real kicker. By utilizing this same method that most FPS games use, GGG kicked themselves in the nuts because it opens the doors for maphacks/botting/etc. When you use a prediction based model like GGG does, you MUST give the client some information otherwise it would be impossible to run such a client/server model. If you ran it similar to how LoL, DotA 2, etc. are structured, maphacking would basically be impossible under normal conditions. Dernière édition par allbusiness#6050, le 6 janv. 2014 à 22:52:33
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" LoL/DOTA/SOURCE/TF2/CS/Most Games: Client is playing catch-up to server PoE: Server is playing catch-up to client This is the fundamental difference between Source and PoE. Maybe it's oversimplified, but it basically makes any of your comparisons pointless. Valve and PoE can't be using the same optimizations, not if they are this fundamentally different. The server never "knows" stuff about the client until the client's already done it, for PoE; for Valve games, the server KNOWS what the client did because it authorized it. The difference between playing Tf2 and PoE is night and day. If I lag in TF2, my game grinds to a bloody halt. Baseballs stand in the air and my minigun spins even if I'm not holding M2. In POE, if the game is lagging, I won't even know it until I'm rubber banding half-way across the map. Ideally, I won't even notice that there was resyncing. My Keystone Ideas: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/744282 Dernière édition par anubite#0701, le 6 janv. 2014 à 22:39:27
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" I marked the important part. A good idea doesn't guarantee a good execution. The idea of craft items as currency is great because that's a common thing playerbases do in other ARPs. But the gamedesign part totally ruined the idea. For example the Skilltree uses a skeleton and licks clusters all over the place but the clusters itself are barely linked. It would be far better if the tree wold look more like a spiderweb meaning there should been cluster/cluster connections and less stat notes. The Materiasystem as skillsystem would be a good idea but it was huge flaws. Materia wasn't tied to colors, it affected stats. In terms of ARPG it might have been a good idea to adapt a gem system like in D2. For example Heavy Strike in a Weapon working differently in than in a shield/helmet. Color could have been used as compability test to award boni or add mali, such as socketing a blue gem in a green/red socket would have the opposite effect of quality. The biggest issue is gem leveling itself imo. Instead being tied to the character level you must level the gems and that form of Asia Grinding is a deadly sin. Several gems are only available in A3x. Some gems only in merciless the class rewards repeat themselves at some point. So if you want to change a build you must buy a gem or start from nothing. Especially the 3 Grindgems are something that shouldn't exist at all. Instead of having common drops like gold--->Shards and Orbs, Orbs are quiet rare. Compared other games it takes far more time to craft a magic item and even far more time to craft a rare item. The issue is that big that PoE doesn't have got a risk reward and several HP Defense changes on higher difficulties make it better to farm low difficulties for currency. The gamedesign chose the ASIAGRINDER as option. A really short lived genre. Players who read about PoE think crafting will be great but will leave once they find out it's a trade simulator and crafting is nothing but frustration because you have only some currency items and most crafts are failures. That one part I would heavily change in a user code league. Common currency many itemmods. High Range mods in the same class such as 1-400ed instead of 150-200 since there also should be rarer currency and the goal of players should be to craft+find the perfect item not to trade or RMT the perfect item. Quarl should realize by now that this is a disaster if you read the last Diamond Newsletter you see that Diamondsupporters all design items like 40-100% Quartuple Res 100-200 life high defense/damage. Sure from my point of view I would allow such items and add a drawback. PnP RPGs did it in a clever way. For example BG2 had an easter egg armor+weapons if you gave golden, silver and bronze pants to a smith he forged The Big Metal unit which was the strongest Armor of the entire game and id added fast attacking crossbow items with infinite ammo. But it had a big Drawback. By the time you received the big Metalunit it turned you into an IronGolem and ironically in a part of the game where you have to go through small doors. The result was that you had to remove the armor after combat to pass through a door. I would add such drawbacks to such items too such as 200% increased character size, Armor can only be removed in town, -100% Running Speed. Such a thing would make an edge case out of a powerful armor again. It would be excellent in a map like dried lake but it would be horrible in a map like crypt. Same way with weapons: You want a weapon with 1500 damage? Sure thing I will add a reflect mod, so you will be forced to attack slowly. This is a common design concept of PnP RPGs with fixed drops GGG devs seem to be unfamiliar with. Even the normal games had such a concept there were items you could obtain quiet easily such as the Berserker Sword or Backbiter. Pretty powerful weapons in early game but they were cursed. Backbiter damaged yourself and the Berserkersword put you into Berserkerrage, which meant that you totally lost control of the character and the berserker was immune to all spells and attacked everything, so in early game it was quiet likely that the berserker sword killed the entire party if it had been used on the main character or resulted in a game over. This concept went to the extreme in modder communities, such as Weidu engine ones or other ones such as rosenranken. You could obtain powerful cursed items without much effort but the curses were incredebly nasty such as a low chance petrifying the entire party(Game over unless you protected yourself from petrifying effects), imprisonement on the user(Game over if the main character wasn't immune to the imprionement school of spells or used the berserker sword9 On the other side there were really powerful items only obtainable through nasty fights. For example in the Solaufeinmod the strongest Katana could be obtained qiuet early but the fight could be abused by taking the stairs to reduce the spellspools of the mages, remove invisibilty effects of the thief etc. But even if you fought the fight wasn't that hard because the spell casters used many area spells which also hurt the allies. The Solaufeinmod added a highly abused class combination for the main character(a human kensai mage) hunting for katanas. most of the time you met him directly after leaving the building. And he used an even more powerful katana with high regeneration, acid reflection and he used scrolls and spells to minimize all the damage done to him. Similar way if you choose obtained Solaufeins Moonblade(Solaufeinmod), you had to fight the eclipseparty, which was incredibly difficult in their first version(the later versions added weaknesses on purpose such as failing savethrows against emotion or ignoring invisible characters. The YT videos using I found either all use the LUA Consule or modded items granting stats which are like immunity. Even if you know the weaknesses 1-2 characters usually die during the fight since the AI has a target preference. In PoE this would mean you can find powerful uniques with heavy drawbacks or you tie uniques to a special fight for example fighting Vaal normal with level 15, he receives a Turbo Boost and the patterns are different. But I don't see any change in future because to me it seems GGG defines MMO= >10 players in 1 instance. ARPG <10 players in 1 instance. Especially the changes on OB made PoE look like an Asiagrinder. Even the GGG definition of hardcore is questionable. I consider a hardcore game as hard not as time consuming. It's not like that GGG doesn't read your post. It's more like the feedback will be ignored unless it has sizes "loot allocation" |
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" QFT Gamespot simply looks at games being hyped, jumps on the bandwagon and vomits out reviews that rehash what the gamer community thinks. PoE is good... but nowhere near as good as what the community thinks it is. A lot of it is hype. Hype from gamers getting wet 'n exited from the mere thought of indie devs overthrowing an industry juggernaut at its own game. Too bad reality=/= hype ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ
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