What is Desync? (A thorough explanation)

Desync in this game is tremendously horrible! I have never in my life played a game with suck desync issues such as this, good game, horrible connection!

I am still relatively new to the game, though I have put a good amount of time into it for a newbie. How ANYONE plays hardcore on this game is beyond me. I encounter these desync issues very often and it got to the point today that I was so frustrated by it that I closed the game.

The OP talks about how all these other games have desyncs as well, and while that may be the case, I have NEVER gotten as frustrated at THOSE games as I have with this one. I agree with others on this thread that asked "if desyncs happen and are inevitable, then why did GGG CHOOSE to design the game this way?" And no, it isn't for "tactics."

I sunk a LOT of time into D3 and can honestly say that I never even knew what a "desync" was (in terms of being impacted by one in a game) until I started PoE.

So, GGG, what is your PLAN of action?

As much as I enjoy the game, I've had multiple deaths in Nemesis purely because of desync.

7 or so now. One death was legitimately stupid by me, which was Corrupted Blood.

The fact that I am constantly losing currency, time spent, and a bunch of other things invested in the game because of an inherent flaw in the game design, is really turning me off.

I want to play the game more. I really do. But I'm tired of losing all my progress because of GGG's terrible design decisions, or general cheapness. Whichever excuse you want to use.

I'm partially insulted that I donated my money to see a game, a year after my donation, have the SAME FUCKING ISSUES with promises that they are 'working on it' to basically state 'It's impossible to entirely fix.'

Games released in the year 2000 had less desync issues. I had less issues playing Diablo 2 on a dial up connection to battle.net.

It's an absolute fucking shame that the scariest thing to encounter in this game is it's own servers. It's not the Nemesis mods. It's not Merciless Dominus. It's not whatever ridiculous level 99 map may ever come. It's the fucking servers.

/endrant.

If only there was a game that combined D3's excellent combat with PoE's amazing depth... oh well :(

"

ruskyandrei wrote:

If only there was a game that combined D3's excellent combat with PoE's amazing depth... oh well :(

The solution would be breaking all information down and decide individually how they are threaded. D3 actually had a lot more Desync in the first two weeks, they changed a lot in this time, but not sure what fixed the problem.

Also there is a misleading statement in the OP.

"

If GGG tried to synchronize the client and server even just once every second across all the clients currently playing it would overwhelm their available bandwidth by orders of magnitude.

Desyncs and every thing that is linked to it is caused by a simple problem. Wrong Player position. If the player is at the wrong position monster will be at the wrong position too. The simplest solution and something that should never trouble the bandwith of any reasonable server is check the position of the player. Simply synchronizing the players position regularly will automatically move the mobs to the right spot. There is no reason to synchronize the whole game-state. But as soon as every person runs an /oos macro exactly that will happen.

The game consists of many unimportant stuff that does not need to be synchronized as often as more important data like the player-position. Basically one wrong information, the player position, causes all over wrong informations. Fixing just that wrong information will automatically make the other informations more precise. And not sure how large positional information can be (maps in PoE aren't that large, so it depends on precision). but it should be possible to synchronize that regularly.

Another possibility is simplifying player-movement. When a player stands surrounded by enemies and moves away his move-command is sent to the server. When the server gets the command a bit later a monster might already be blocking the players path, even when the player might already be past the group. The game will notice the desync when he is far enough away and ports him back into the group. Something as simple as making the player smaller than every monster would propably help, since it reduces the amount of such edge-cases (in the most simplified case the player will be a point which can always slip passed monsters). And of course the faster something moves the more likely it is that after the command arrives the server it is invalidated by new facts.

However I'm pretty sure that GGG is not confident with the current state. The problem however is that they might need to sacrifice something.

Most developers would stop claiming a problem is impossible to solve once their competitors have built working solutions. There are plenty of examples of secure realtime multiplayer games on the market that have no "desync" issues. And many of these games have been around for years, long before POE released. The desync story out of GGG is garbage. I shudder to think the engineers at GGG really believe it. Testing aside, I wonder if anyone at GGG even plays what they release to the public anymore.

Please:

1) GGG and apologizers, stop implying desync is caused by network latency/lag. In most games network latency causes input delay that is easily dealt with and does not destroy playability. POE desync is not input delay.

2) GGG and apologizers, stop implying desync is caused by network connection issues, dropped packets, disconnections. Desync in POE is obviously an artifact of the game design, a software defect that manifests in even the best network conditions.

3) GGG, stop claiming that your game is somehow "special" and so desync is unavoidable. All realtime multiplayer games have to deal with network latency, and most do so quite well without sacrificing security or playability.

4) GGG, stop deluding the community and yourselves that your clever coding eliminates input delay related to network latency. Input delay is not the end of the world, and being able to see what is actually happening on the server is far more important than instant input response. Your current desync situation is pretty damning to the idea that you can hide input delay. The only way you are going to get rid of input delay (without some far worse side effect like desync) is if you build what is essentially a single player game, and none of us want that.

5) GGG, stop patching your current broken design and put together a real solution. If your engineers can't figure it out, get some help.

MajorAggro actually summarized it to the point(s).

I simply cannot fathom how this game can sport a hardcore mode with this kind of issue. I've been playing for only a few days, in normal difficulty i can shrug off deaths by desync. But why even bother with any other difficulty if i get punished for random desyncing?

Minutes ago, i had insane trouble with brutus (oddly enough, the first time on normal it was fine). There's no "tons of mobs", no "many players" in that case, it's just me, brutus and a flat, constant 50 ms ping in that chart at the top.
Yet, every time i ducked behind a wall and casted a taunt totem, i was producing a desync. Observe brutus go around one way and then go the other? Find myself butchered 3 seconds later because he actually didn't go that way. Ring-around-the-Rosie is the deadliest game you can play in PoE.

Again, this is the first and only game that i observe to have these kinds of issues. Maybe if you want to sport "narrow passages", "enemy/player collision" and "importance of positioning" (i really laughed when i first read that this game thinks it has especially important positioning. How smug...) then you should not choose a network solution that has extreme issues with all three of those. Seriously.

Have you actually tried keeping at least the player position synced?
That's 2 floats, don't tell me your bandwith doesn't allow that. This entire issue would not be such a hot topic if we wouldn't TP back in time/place (or somewhere completely else) multiple seconds.
Oh, would that mean the client actually notices that he is desynced and could force a resync? Well, you can't allow that, the client must stay desynced for multiple seconds so you don't get into bandwith troubles. Right?

id like to play multistrike leapslam faster attacks + + + aoe clearage but the game wont let me.

OP your argument is invalid. Those "desync explanations" dont solve ingame situation at all!


Why the hell client is sending position data to server and then server synchronizes it with client again? Where is the logic? Isnt this a double traffic waste?

People keep dying in stupid situations and I didnt played for a while because of this.