Is PoE suffering from poor game design choices?

I always shit my pants laughing when people say "league of legends does not have reactive combat"

like wtf. Lol and Dota have some of the highest mechanical skillcaps in all games. This wouldnt happen if it wasnt an extremely fast paced game that requires ridiculous amounts of reaction time and hand eye coordination

Dota/lol take far more skill than PoE's braindead spam 1 skill snoozefest. Yet they still have better working netcode

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symban a écrit :

None whatsoever, unless your connections sucks already. 50ms is more than enough to have completely smooth gameplay in LoL.

As someone who lives in New Zealand let me say that creating netcode on the assumption of 50ms is a FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA!

99% of games I play are 200ms+, and it has nothing to do with 'crappy internet' either. It's just the simple fact that 99% of games don't have a New Zealand or Australian server, so I have to deal with connecting to a server on the other side of the planet. The fastest internet in the world can't bypass basic physics such as the speed of light.

Granted, GGG DO have an Australian server, but that only happened half way through Open Beta, so naturally the game had to be coded for a high ping tolerance. Which by the way is something that games with server response netcode like LoL, very much DO NOT HAVE...


If you seriously think fifty fucking milliseconds is the norm for most people, you have no idea what you are talking about.

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Dizrupt a écrit :

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symban a écrit :

None whatsoever, unless your connections sucks already. 50ms is more than enough to have completely smooth gameplay in LoL.

As someone who lives in New Zealand let me say that creating netcode on the assumption of 50ms is a FUCKING TERRIBLE IDEA!

99% of games I play are 200ms+, and it has nothing to do with 'crappy internet' either. It's just the simple fact that 99% of games don't have a New Zealand or Australian server, so I have to deal with connecting to a server on the other side of the planet. The fastest internet in the world can't bypass basic physics such as the speed of light.

Granted, GGG DO have an Australian server, but that only happened half way through Open Beta, so naturally the game had to be coded for a high ping tolerance. Which by the way is something that games with server response netcode like LoL, very much DO NOT HAVE...


If you seriously think fifty fucking milliseconds is the norm for most people, you have no idea what you are talking about.

What? League of Legends and DotA 2 both have lag compensation built in. It's not perfect, but that's simply due to a logistics issue more than anything. And by logistics, its usually because you live too far away from the server. Sure, ideally we would have netcode so that everyone can enjoy the game, but GGG has shown that improperly done netcode to compensate for high ping environments just hurts everyone.

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Fruz a écrit :

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symban a écrit :

PS: dont give the excuse of PoE being from an indie company, because so is LoL. PoE sucks in desynch and command response not because lack of funds, but because of bad design decisions.

Not only, there are many many things that could be optimized.
There are obvious client side things that could be upgraded :

- check the range of the monsters/player from a totem/monster/player that provides him an aura, and if he's too far away = he desynced => resync.
- when a player/monster takes dmg from a source, check the source, the range, and if there is an impossible result = desynced => resync.

Those are just basic example, there are tons of check that could be done client side to optimize the whole thing.
I don't even know if they implemented something to resync only some given entities not to overload the flow/server, or if they use a perimeter or so, but seriously, if the player can see a desync through the client, that means that GGG could definitely implement client side methods to force resync at adequate times.

But since the whole game has memory leak and optimization issues, maybe they can't do it because it's already too resources consuming .... who knows.

This game is great, but let's be honest : optimization-wise it is HORRIBLE.

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.


If they had just done what most MMOs/MOBAs do, you could have denied literally every single piece of information to the client. This in turn would cause some delay to occur, but with a proper setup and decent internet connection, most people would experience very minimal delay (as in, hardly noticeable)

The funny thing is that PoE netcode allows active combat game-play, but also causes desync, which negates active combat game-play.

So its a circular self-negating loop of death. :P

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Moosifer a écrit :

Someone explained it earlier, it's two different systems. Would you rather engage in combat then desync or stand in place doing nothing? They are the same thing just you don't know desync is happening until you resync/die/notice nothing is happening. If you lag and have a long delay between commands it will be ever present and lead to the same or even more complaints, as people will always be able to see and feel it.

I've learned how to deal with desync. I know what to avoid and when to avoid it. Sometimes I'll play with 200 ping which means a constant delay that I can't do anything to fix, no adjusting, just dealing with it.

I much rather have desync.

Having played both PoE and DotA2 for thousands of hours, this statement is complete and utter bullshit. DotA2 has to deal with the exact same things as PoE (complicated pathing/collision, determinism being different due to RNG, i.e. evading hits versus not evading hits causing you to die/live etc etc)

There is no way, in utter hell, that you can say, after playing both games, that you would rather have networking system that PoE uses. After the thousands of games that I have played of DotA2, there was never a situation where my client "stood still" due to the way the game was engineered. The worst that happened was disconnects on server shutting down, which is a totally seperate issue. The only time I got delay was when someone was hogging all the bandwidth downloading, and PoE was just as bad in this regard

Also, a 50ms delay is almost completely unnoticeable to the human eye in regards to reaction, there are plenty of tests that show this, its outside reaction time. The amount of split second decision that you make in DotA2 is the exact same as in PoE. If you don't cast a shield in time due to an instance cast spell (and there are plenty), you die.

As for the people complaining about having 200ms ping in NZ, this kind of an argument is a furphy

1. GGG has opened a Server in sydney australia. there is a direct pipe from NZ to australia across the atlantic, you will have 50-70ms ping, which is definitely more than adequate
2. Setting up servers in countries is much much much much much easier, and cheaper than what it was 10, or even 5 years ago. You only need to cover a few areas to hit a massive demographic, that is east/west america, east/west europe, singapore and sydney.

Making 100% of people having to put up with terrible shit netcode is much worse than the alternative, which is having 95% of people being able to play absolutely fine while the rest of the 5% may have to deal with their own crappy internet (and those 5% can easily make up for it, by getting better internet, or if they take it seriously enough, moving)

Also, your comment about having to deal with desync is a joke, I posted this in the other thread, but basically desync has morphed the game in such a way that the strongest builds are the most boring ones, i.e. builds that are designed to be played in autopilot mode which a braindead monkey could imitiate

I have said this before and I have said it again, there are plenty of games which have the same fundamental problems that PoE have, that have much better online playing experince. Chris comparing PoE to a now 12 year old game (D2) and claiming why PoE crappy implementation is for some reason "forgivable" is downright disingenuous at best, and deceiving at worst. GGG's network engineers did a terrible choice in making the netcode for the game, and thats what it is. Trying to make excuses just looks pathetic, especially when there are real world examples that simply "work"

In the real world, you don't deal with excuses, you deal with results

PS: I was in the original alpha/beta tester for LoL, and actually spoke with their network engineer who was called Igor. LoL was created as an indie game just the exact same way PoE was, it was in development for years by a very small team of people, their engine was created from scratch etc etc. The difference? Igor, was a very smart guy, and made the right decisions in regards to netcode (smart use of TCP/UDP). Even though playing on 200ms was annoying on american servers, it was possible to adapt and play. When LoL was available in Australia, zero problems in regards to netocde. Same deal with DotA2 (which has much more complex mechanics akin to PoE)

Stop whiteknighting PoE in this regard, they made a dumb decision, they have to deal with it.

Also for those wondering, DotA2 and LoL are completely secure, there aren't any hacks for either of those online games, not even map hacks (which PoE has)

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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.

The design choices are something I like to complain about sometimes but they're not really a big issue.

For me, the big issue is the huge amount of grinding it takes to progress in the upper levels. I am referring to items and experience points, both.

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What? League of Legends and DotA 2 both have lag compensation built in. It's not perfect, but that's simply due to a logistics issue more than anything.

Please try playing either game with 200-250 ms ping, I don't believe you can say this with a straight face - these games, when played seriously anyway, are almost unplayable after you hit that mark. I don't actually believe you've ever done this.

Even on high speed internet connections in the US (a , the average ping for those users is probably 100 ms~ because the servers for the US are located in Texas for PoE.

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LoL has very smooth and reactive combat even with playing with an ADCs like Lucian or Vayne who can have 2,5 attack per sec, you can micromanage you mobility skills and keep fighting while 9 other players are doing the same. And there WONT BE ANY LAG or DESYNCH. None whatsoever, unless your connections sucks already. 50ms is more than enough to have completely smooth gameplay in LoL.

Symban, if you needed 50 ms to play PoE flawlessly (there is even around 0.25-0.5~ s input lag at 50 ms in LoL [this is what 50 ms fucking means], if you don't feel it you need to get your eyes checked) it would probably be unplayable for 80% of consumers and still ocassionally frustrating for the other 20%. 200 ms is a respectable connection in a lot of countries where servers are not diversified; 200 ms is hardly a 'crappy' connection (though it's not stellar). I hope you aren't in the business of designing games with this philosophy; you'll have a product fail harder than PoE at networking.

Anyway, I better STFU about all this stuff. Nobody is communicating at this point. I'm too frustrated to make any further discussion -- and I'd rather not be put on probation. Good day.

This game had so much potential too. It's a such a shame to see it crash and burn. Hopefully they'll learn from their mistakes.

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anubite a écrit :

...(there is even around 0.25-0.5~ s input lag at 50 ms in LoL [this is what 50 ms fucking means]...

1 second = 1000 milliseconds