What is Desync? (A thorough explanation)

When getting stuck on terrain can be replicated with 90% certainty with mobility skills
when whole build viability revolves around desync
when people have quit hardcore because a literal 100% of their deaths was lost to an unavoidable battle with desync, not the game
when boss fights like vaal pyramid fight are balanced around the whole notion of decync to kill you, and otherwise would be a complete joke
When a game has instant-kill mechanics and is touting itself as hardcore but you can never tell if what is going on your screen is real and your life hangs by the notion of hope that what you see is real

you just have to ask yourself, what sort of calculations have been worth adding to make this a core "feature" of PoE?

Although we may never get the answer, we can at least pray. Please GGG, shield us from desync. Let our adventures be lag-free. I have sacrificed many a thousand fusings for RNJesus, but my prayers have not been heard. Truely we are sinful beings, but do we not deserve a Christmas miracle? Please, if there is any hope left, any compassion to shed a light through this dark and acursed tunnel of misery, give us a sign!

"

MauranKilom wrote:

So you are trying to justify desyncs with packet drops?

Seeing I said: "The "why the fuck am i teleporting" should eventually be fixed.".....

hello. i used to play poe till 1 months ago. But i still read the forum time to time, hoping for a reason to bring me back.

i have read the first post till the end (but not the 29 pages of replies).

Thanks you author, for exoplaining in such a clear way what a Desyinc is. I read with interest.

"

GGG wanted to make a much more tactical game where the environment could be used to your advantage. A game where funneling enemies through doorways was a viable tactic and where getting surrounded and trapped in a corner become a scary proposition. Where tactical positioning was just as important as the gear on your character. To accomplish this, GGG can't rely on many of the things that I just pointed out that D3 relies to hide desync. As an unfortunate result, PoE is more susceptible to desync and when it does happen it has more significant impact on the player's gameplay.

I disagree with your opinion quoted above tho. Looks like you want to justify the fact that PoE has issue with desyinc with the fact that GGG wanted to make a more tactical game.
The impact the CCC choices made on the game highly influence the gameplay in a way that i have played diablo3 for more months that i have done with PoE.

And beware, that i consider PoE a much more original and creative game, and i would have loved to play it even longer, if it wasn't for these game play issue.

One of the main game play issue is of course the desyinc rate. But not just it. I find the camera is too close, so that the scenario you can see is too limited. Also the graphic is not the best, and so the animation.

Definitivly i'dd like to see a new poe with better Syncronitation, better camera and graphic. About syncronitation, i'dd definitivly prefer more syncronitation to the state ot nowdays, in which we have to pay for a little more realism, the very expensive cost of desync.

I also beg GGG to go in this direction, so me and my wife would come back to play. Adding new features is mandatory and you'r doing it great every week, but making the game more playable... is a matter of "play or not play"

thanks for reading.

This may be against company policy or something, i don't know. But if desync occurs in all online games, why not just let us play offline? Or hell, i will BUY Path of Exile, for 50 dollars, as everything stands right now, if i can play it offline with no lag. All i do is solo anyway.

I think thousands of players would do this, and keep both their offline and online accounts active! I would be able to port characters to and from the accounts, and could play Hardcore locally without having to hit /oos contactantly! I could actually play the game instead of play around the game!

I would pay money for this. Has GGG addressed WHY its online only? Are they afraid of hacks/cheats and stuff?

Read about half this thread.

Solo, offline play. Sounds like it fixes all the issues.

GGG, when can we get that? I will pay monies for it. Happily.

"

tpapp157 wrote:

When you move, the monster pathing on your client updates immediately for them to continue chasing you in the new direction. Since the server calculates the new monster pathing separately for it's own simulation of the game state and since your character is in a slightly different spot on the server, the monster pathing on the server is now slightly different.

I'd be particularly interested in learning why multiple clients see the same mob desync at once. I've played with other people (in the hedgemaze *shudder*) and more than once, we all attacked the same desynced mob for multiple seconds until the server synced the mob back somewhere else. We confirmed over VoIP that the mob was desynced for all of us.
So apparently all clients had the same simulation going on (with the same results), but the server was out of sync.

At this point i can't help but draw the conclusion that the server code is simply faulty. Why can all clients (which all receive input in vastly different order) get to the same conclusion, whereas the server disagrees? Multiple times? The problem is clearly on GGG's side, since all clients were apparently (to the applicable extent) synced.

"

Kechop wrote:

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

Same deal with fast movement-based cyclone builds, on top of which multistrike adds loss of character control. It's hilarious to play for 5 minutes, followed by ragequit-grade frustration. The problem is not taking hits since that's what you do is melee anyway, the problem is the loss of life hit/leech regen. The Blood Rage mechanism is even based on the incentive to play very aggressively, too bad the game breaks down when you actually try to do so.

It's amazing how bad the gaming user experience has become because of the forced online part, and that's what passes for "game of the year." 10 years ago reviewers would pretty much have said: "send us the game again when it's actually finished and debugged, and we'll review it again because it looks very promising. Right now it's just broken."

Desync is the biggest problem for me in PoE (beside the Tradesystem, the 15 years old Everquest has a better tradesystem).
When i Cycone, my character starts moving, but not direct to the possition in clicked?
No, i goes up and down and left and right... no wey to stop this... and all with ONE click...
I will wait some weeks and if this dont get better (or they changes the machanic of cyclone), i will quite like all my friends allready have because of desync... they are to frustrated dieing and loosing exp because of desync, so they quit.
But i LOVE PoE, but with that desync, i dont know how long i will stay

I am also a Cyclone build and I've gotten an ear and eye full of this "desync" crap, why is it that I can play a whole host of other online games similar to this one and never get the same magnitude of desync as I do in POE?

Furthermore if it is known and as reported as much as it is in this game that certain skills fall prey to desync problems, why not take them out until you guys can fix the issue? Sucks theory-crafting / making a build only to try it out, have it be awesome when it works 20% of the time, and completely suck the other 80% of the time due to shitty servers or coding deficiencies.

It's particularly frustrating when you are tearing up a map with 1 bubble to go to level and then you stop doing damage and fly all over the screen only to catch up and be dead and now 3 bubbles from level.... VERY ANNOYING!

It's also worth noting that D3 uses another cheeky trick that PoE doesn't use - in D3, all attacks have a 100% hit chance. This means that once you tell the server you're beginning an attack your client doesn't have to wait for any indication back from the server about what is going to happen, allowing more seamless looking simulation. You can see this by trying to avoid a monster that has begun an attack animation against you - the attack will land even if you are relatively far away.

In PoE you have effects like %chance to pierce, which need information from the server (because if your client just made it up it would look absurd when it was retconned by the server), which has the upside of letting you run away from monster attacks more easily but has the downside of making impacts much more delayed seeming.