What is Desync? (A thorough explanation)

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Jim_Fear wrote:

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Mysterial wrote:

However, in fairness to them, re-architecting poor networking decisions after the fact is generally really hard. Networking isn't something that you can just "bolt-on" to an existing game and it magically works; a fair amount of game logic has to be based around the networking scheme. Doesn't excuse the amount of time I hear this issue has been around, though.

This part interests me. So, when building the game, why would GGG (or any company for that matter) make poor decisions in the networking department when their entire game rests on that very foundation?

I can't imagine they did it on purpose knowing something like this is hard to fix later on. In your opinion, what would be the reasons for doing this?

If I had to speculate, I'd say it was small scale testing that failed to warn them that larger scale use of the product would result in too much load for their hardware. IE - it worked fine with a small base so they went with that method, and now they're trying to tune up after the fact with an ever increasing player base continually adding more load to the servers.

Here is where I have a problem with some of this speculation regarding Desync and GGG lack of fail-safes for it.

PoE is a pretty solid game, and it's still in beta. They hit a lot of points that gamers are looking for in a game. At least those who enjoy ARPG-type games. In fact, they did such a good job I can't resolve how this same team would then turn around and build such a game on a poorly configured foundation. That doesn't make sense.

Developers, or my experience with them anyway, are so freaking nit picky it makes me daydream of a land where these freaks of nature are tortured day and night. Ok, i'm being sarcastic, but I've never been so frustrated in my career as when I'm working with developers.

This attention to detail shows in the game play and (now it's my turn to speculate), I would be surprised to find out that same effort wasn't put into making the schema of hardware/data streaming. It's easy enough to speculate, but I'm of the mindset that it should correlate with what we know. And, to me, I know they made a strong, well-thought game.

That's not a bash against some of the posts here, debating how/why it's happening in PoE; it's just my opinion why I think GGG put more effort into the foundation than I think they're being given credit.

Good post, thanks for the info

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Jim_Fear wrote:

This part interests me. So, when building the game, why would GGG (or any company for that matter) make poor decisions in the networking department when their entire game rests on that very foundation?

I can't imagine they did it on purpose knowing something like this is hard to fix later on. In your opinion, what would be the reasons for doing this?

Well obviously I doubt any poor decisions they made were known to be poor decisions at the time ;)

My guess is that they were optimizing bandwidth to an extreme level. In my experience, CPU costs much more than bandwidth, but costs may be different for them, or the game instances may use sufficiently low CPU that bandwidth is their limiting factor.

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tpapp157 wrote:

Let me begin by saying that absolutely every game that is played online has to deal with desync.

You and Chris need to give this up.

PoE is the only game that has crazy ass desync like this. Other games may have to deal with desync but they obviously had enough common sense to get it fixed before releasing their game upon the masses.

Desync has been around for about 2 years now, it should have been much higher on their priority list than it is. The desync issues GGG has should have never seen Open Beta. There's no wall of text you can write me that will change my mind.

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darkjoy wrote:

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tpapp157 wrote:

Let me begin by saying that absolutely every game that is played online has to deal with desync.

You and Chris need to give this up.

PoE is the only game that has crazy ass desync like this. Other games may have to deal with desync but they obviously had enough common sense to get it fixed before releasing their game upon the masses.

Desync has been around for about 2 years now, it should have been much higher on their priority list than it is. The desync issues GGG has should have never seen Open Beta. There's no wall of text you can write me that will change my mind.

So... What I got from this. Was yet another reason not to group with summoners :)

I still believe the call is wrong taking into account how prominent local servers are now adays.

I would have preferred the server contain the master state of the game, and the client just relay that information (and confirm it). This method works fine if you have <50ms ping, which is going to be the case if you have servers set up in most continents. Like I said in the other thread, this is not the 1990's where having 200 ping is normal. Having 200 ping is actually abnormal unless you are playing on a server in another continent

You see, the issue with the current desync model is its pretty much unplayable anyways. On one hand, you are screwing people that have high pings (state is always on the server), on the other hand, you will randomly screw people over due to desyncs (what happens currently) regardless of their ping, and this is outside both of the players and GGG's control

The issue is, the latter is out of control (we can't control when desyncs happen), ping is in our control and/or GGG's control (they can set up servers to help reduce ping). The current model they are using is always going to cause massive issues

If you make a fairly sane assumption that most people will have around 50ms ping, than the model where the client has to confirm with the server (when using a sane protocol like UDP instead of TCP) is going to be far better for everyone. For the people with 200+ ping, its pretty much bad luck, although such people are probably already aware of this situation (and they would get screwed with the current version anyways)

So its either this, you screw almost everyone over with the current desync problems, or you only screw people that happen to have high pings and/or are on wireless. I know which I would go for, because if the netcode architecture remains the way it is for the game, I am simply going to stop playing it. I am already not doing HC due to desyncs, but this is pretty much confirmation that the game will always be this way

At the end of the day, this problem is massive, and even if there are technological reasons why this is so, GGG made that those decisions, so its their responsibility and their fault the game is like this.

I play realtime games that have complete server side state (dota2), which requires as much tactics and positioning (in fact far more) than PoE. There aren't any issues with delay at all in that game if I play on australian servers

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darkjoy wrote:

There's no wall of text you can write me that will change my mind.

Then it wasn't written for you and you had no reason to reply.

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deteego wrote:

Having 200 ping is actually abnormal unless you are playing on a server in another continent

Oh, like, say, Australia and Oceania?