I would love to know Chris, Damien and other GGG members what do your work hours look like and how much sleep are you actually getting during this stressful beta time. I'm running a small landscape contracting company pulling 70 hours a week between work and paperwork and I cannot even fathom what you guys are doing.
I haven't slept since Thursday night (it's Saturday morning now) and Mike on the support crew was with me all of last night having had only two hours sleep which is pretty indicative of our hours of late.
I know Chris pulled a 30 hour shift or two recently and support staff has been extremely stretched with non-support staff and siblings even being pulled in to help during the 9pm to 12am shift. I've done a few all nighters and ended up in hospital for high blood pressure and overexhaustion haha - I went straight in the next day because I really wanted to get the skill fx microtransaction vids out the door and hey, I love my job!
But yes, we're stretched in some senses but also enjoying what we're doing and really loving the opportunity of having the game out in the wild for people to play.
@F2Pelerin2010 - I am - for some reason they wouldn't cast me as the witch! ; )
Haha, that's awesome - you did a great job :D I lol'd when I
Spoiler
let out the Vaal Shadow "I will have to answer to the Ancestors for this, they will not be pleased"
The game being hard and unforgiving as it is, desync adds this tiny pebble that makes it all plumet downhill into 'I don't wanna play this game' for me.
I'll just do something else until GGG find time and energy to fix it, then come back to the game. Maybe the predictions will come true and some items and support gems I really need for my builds will cost a bit less when I come back.
Anyways: please do keep desync high on your priority list.
I am sorry if this post is a little aggressive in tone. As Damien mentioned, I'll be posting very detailed specifics about exactly how this all works and how we plan to fix it soon! This has gone up a lot in the priority list now that the servers are behaving better.
THATS aggressive? Wow, clearly you missed jay Wilson's gaff a bit back. The bar has been lowered: you could post "quit whinin'" and you'd still be shining. That was a short and simple explanation, not aggression. :)
the team are well aware of the desync issue and have paths to pursue to deal with it. However, as many of you are aware, we are still a small indie team and we've just hit a major milestone in our development - Open Beta - which brings with it a myriad of new and greater issues and learnings that take a lot more time and resource.
Our priority must be the stability of the servers that serve the game to you. Our top guys are focused on this for the time being - which means that for the most part the only topics they can dive into on the forum are either those that they can drop into with a single comment or, if they're typing a larger spiel, those that are to do with the issue they are currently dealing with. That means that Chris and Jonathan, who are probably the best guys to talk about this issue, are busy. And desync requires more than a passing comment.
Chris has a lot to say on desync but he's going to need time - first to coordinate the approach we're going to take and secondly to write up the explanation that some people require to understand the issue better. For now, thanks to the many issues we are now dealing with day-to-day, we need Chris to be focused on the bigger picture - ensuring there's a game running 24/7.
So that leaves us lesser mortals to discuss desync for now!
For those who don't know me, I'm a mere nut on a cog in the great machine that is Grinding Gear Games - my area is the video (trailers, microtransactions) and voice acting - and my knowledge of PoE desync comes from a recent conversation with Chris. As I've stated, he'll have a deeper, better explanation of what's going on sometime in the near future. For now, here's what I've gleaned from talking to Chris.
One of the first things people should understand about desync is that it is NOT a bug - it's a term for the completely natural phenomenon of the client (your game on your PC) getting out of sync with the server. This means ALL online games have to deal with the issue in one of the various ways they may choose to do so. Many of those upset about the desync issue point out that they play other online games that don't behave in the same way. Please note, these games DO have to deal with desync as well, but some of them a) have a gameplay model that mitigates the desync issue or b) have efficiencies of code that we will also be working on as soon as we can focus our primary resource on it.
We've opted for one approach to maintaining sync for what we believe are good reasons given our gameplay model and specific requirements (we want you to miss sometimes...) There are other options open to us but there are many considerations to weigh up. Without going into the detail (because I'll leave it to Chris and also because I just don't know it!) one of the various options open to us will result in more rubberbanding, quicker, and could very likely lead to an increase in complaints even though the game is technically 'more in sync'.
One of the better known ARPGs out there deals with desync in a way that we believe contributes to the lack of challenge in the game (you pretty much ALWAYS hit). We want to deal with desync in a way that does not compromise our dedication to making Path of Exile a challenging game for gamers and this is not as easy as it may seem.
I'm sorry that some of you are so upset by the desync problem that you don't want to play anymore. For those with the patience to hold out for a little longer - we'll be dealing with it as soon as we can! But please don't think we're sitting around doing nothing or ignoring your complaints. Desync is certainly one of the bigger issues on our plate and will be dealt with in the fullness of time.
We also have plans to bring behind the scenes content to you soon so you can see what we're dealing with and so we can talk directly to the big issues on camera. It is my aim with the behind-the-scenes content to prove the "indie" in our name and to let you see more of how we work in the effort to defuse some of the anger out there from people who think we're intentionally ignoring them or intending to 'hurt' their gameplay experience - the truth is quite different guys!
Thank you for your understanding and patience!
I've never seen anyone type so much but say so little. You should be a politician.
I'm here a bit more than half of year. Can't say that desyncs got much worse, but they obviously never got better. I'd have been playing Torchlight 2, but TL2 is very bug-heavy game too...
I was having a ton of problems with desync after returning home. They weren't a huge problem in Closed Beta while I was in North Dakota, and they never said they fixed anything in that time, so I got to wondering if desync might be influenced by some external factor.
Well, I went ahead and changed my default DNS server, and while desync still happens, it no longer happens every time I enter a doorway, so if you have giant desync problems, you might want to check if there are things on your end that might help lessen the problems it causes while they fix it.
I understand that there will be slight desynch and that you guys are working on the issue and that is appreciated. I think what most people are complaining about is the same thing I had happen to me yesterday. Standing in an empty room taking damage from an unknown source wondering what is going on only to realize you are taking melee damage from mobs three rooms away. This is NOT slight desynch. This is MAJOR desynch. I think this is what most of the players are annoyed with, at least the players that have actually played games other then WoW and Diablo. Frankly major desynch needs to be addressed asap or you will see less people playing and , more importantly, less microtransactions. Even though this is beta, a lot of gamers. right or wrong, see open beta as a release more or less.
I said earlier in this thread that I was going to shelve my marauder. That turned out to be hard to do since I love playing this game so much. So today I go to try to grind out some levels. I was getting constant, massive desyncs. I played long enough to get around 35% of a level (I'm at level 69), but ended up dying twice due to desyncs where I was getting hit by things not on my screen. It made me so angry I couldn't see straight. For my own well being (and my mouse's) I'm just going to uninstall this game until the desyncs are fixed.
It makes me really sad too, because I otherwise would love this game. Around a week ago I was ready to dump another $20-$30 into this game, but I held off due to the desync issue.
Hopefully GGG makes a very noticeable announcement when they do fix it, so I'll know to come back. I'm definitely not done playing this game; I'm just putting it on hold for a while.
