Why I've given up hope of this game becoming great (but not quite on GGG)

I guess part of my acceptance is because I played online rpg's pre 2000. Back in those days the internet (dial up) could easily crap out on either client side or the server side making you die and lose all of your equipment + hours of experience. Not to mention server crashes paired with rollbacks etc. Me and my friends would always joke and say our chars had a "seizure" or maybe that the gods smote us down or something. Compared to those days, things like this are tame and personally I have never played a game that didn't have some sort of problem like this (although some nowadays are nearly perfect in that regard).

Reminds me of why I usually jog to round up monsters on my favourite char, instead of using whirling blades. Whirling blades is like a gamble: if it works you have an excellent tool in your hand, for all kinds of purposes. If it doesn't and you desync, all kinds of things can happen too, bad only bad ones.

I can only imagine how awesome it would be for this skill to be so reliable that I could use it automatically.

DOS is great.

(Also, great post Scrotie.)

I have to agree with Scrotie. The combat is the most clunky of all ARPGs I've played. At least if you're a melee char who has to aim. Ranged chars with great AoE are much less affected, maybe that is why several people say "I see no problem".
Desync really breaks the game for quite a few playstyles and limits diversity tremendously. It's a pity, because the rest of this game is very very good.

In my experience, desync only gets bad when I try to do something remotely strategic. Something as simple as just trying to pick enemies off through a doorway leaves the game completely dumbfounded. Or if you chain whirling blade out of an enclosed area. Anything like this will have you resyncing many screens back, or even appearing inside rooms you never told your character to be in.

The game heavily disincentives any thoughtful gameplay. The best strategy for a smooth predictable experience is to run into rooms, stand in the very middle and just spam. It's part of the reason heavily defensive builds are sooo much better than heavily offensive builds. You need an extra 50% effective health buffer to account for those times when the game has no fucking clue whats going on and no amount of skillful gameplay can save you.

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CliveHowlitzer написал:

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SL4Y3R написал:

Not to completely side track your post, but how divinity? I've been tempted to buy, but haven't played turn based since the FF series. The battle system does intrigue me, I've watched videos, but otherwise I haven't heard much else.

It is pretty damn awesome, I recommend it if you have any love for the cRPG genre and especially a satisfying tactical turn based combat system.

Is it as good as Aarklash Legacy? I loved that one, would love to play DOS if it's as good.

In terms of aRPG, I've been into Transistor and Incredible Adventures of Hellsing 1-2. They are so awesome, downside is I cant come back to PoE for a real while after seeing smooth gameplay in aRPGs.

@topic: I think it is very important for game devs to consider the consequences of new elements in terms of their effects to core elements. IWD2 failed to do that with its scaling difficulty as the system they created was conflicting with how AC system was supposed to work, ending up with a game where tanking utility could not be fulfilled by chars that were meant to be tanks, but instead had to be done by air elemental druid-monks / Deepgnome illusionists with tons of mirror images.

I feel PoE has similar issues in terms of how the game supposed to play vs technical issues and other elements conflicting with that.

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Treffnix написал:

The combat is the most clunky of all ARPGs I've played. At least if you're a melee char who has to aim. Ranged chars with great AoE are much less affected, maybe that is why several people say "I see no problem".

If your char has to click on mobs then you are fucked sooner or later. The amount of monster desync when a group is rushing you (preferably though narrow passages) is hilarious. One click on a desynced mob and you are possibly dead, if you are not tanky enough.

In the last month I've been mostly levelling a Marauder (dual strike, multistrike, splash) in Std. When combating bigger packs, the gameplay is so clunky that's hysterically funny. Half of the mobs you click on are desynced, resulting in you hitting air, even though there seem to be mobs where you swing. Anything faster than a zombie will cause desync, because the AI sucks.

The only way to survive this kind of combat (and level to 90+) is to be as tanky as possible. Huge amount of leech and spamming pots in advance is mandatory. Ofc not to forget the most useful skill - /oos macro - and lougout support gem :/

This is a very good analysis.

I think that PoE can be seen as a great experiment. Making a free game, with so much action and deep thoerycrafting/mechanics, is not a trivial task for a small company.

There are a lot of things that have gone wrong, there have been bad design choice, but nevertheless PoE is still here and still has many players.

To make errors is a direct consequence of doing things. I faithfully hope that next GGG game will be even better than PoE, because developers are more skilled.

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In my experience, desync only gets bad when I try to do something remotely strategic.

I would replace the word strategic with tactic. This is the most disturbing conseqence of desync.

BTW, there is a thing that has not been mentioned by OP: trade.
Like Magic the Gathering, PoE endgame is built around trade. I do not understand why absolutely zero improvements have been done for the trade system. GGG should had been stacking improvements/fix for the trade system to ensure a more dynamic economy. (It is like you want to build a Mind over Matter character and you don't stack mana).

The desync in many of my experiences is the client side gameplay vs server side prediction. Many times I have procced a mob to run to me, I'll hit and the mob doesn't take any damage, then the mob will disappear and rubberband a few screens back and act like nothing has happened - I have to proc it again. And vice versa, taking damage from 'invisible' enemies client side, but surrounded by mobs server side. Maybe increase the frequency of synchronizations? But doing this will sure kill bandwidth! Which is an issue for alot of players here in Oz and Nz, bloody traffic caps.

Great post man, I agree on most things.
I've played this game on and off for about a year, but I quit exactly because of those reasons.
It's a shame, I love a lot of things about PoE, but the gameplay experience is too clunky.

I have a good pc, perfect fiber connection and everything well-tweaked, but mobs keep desyncing anyway. To be honest most of my deaths were my own mistakes or just getting bored and basically suiciding. But that's not the point, the mob desyncing just makes for a terribly annoying gameplay that drives you crazy. And I did die to it once.
Precinct boss warping like crazy and hitting me off-screen. It's something that should happen when you're lagging with a horrible connection, not with rock solid 30ms ping.
Well of course you could argue about what risks you are going to take, but come on... where do you draw the line? Can't just avoid every situation that's even slightly dangerous, just because the mobs might desync.

Another thing is partying. Always loved public groups in PoE, fun social experience compared to solo.
But the low FPS just kills it. But that's not all.
The party size of 6 seems to be an arbitrary number to me, just because of the number of classes in the game - well not anymore since the Scion. But I think it should be smaller, like 4 or 5.
You can't see anything in party play. Gosh, people have been BEGGING for a way to somehow balance out visual effects with characters/environment etc. Because right now the combat effects just overpower everything, it's insane. People have been asking for this since the beginning, and still nothing. Sad.

Also all this talk about desync vs. security... Well, I don't wanna go into this topic but there are hacks available for this game, so who knows maybe we would've been better off without desync and with actual player retention.

I'm sure many would agree that the complexity of systems in this game rocks. Planning a build and theorycrafting is awesome. But when you actually get to play, the clunkiness and those technical issues just ruin it really badly.
It's a shame. Sad to see PoE go down the drain like this. I'm done for now, but it'll be interesting to follow and see what happens.
I'm not sure if the devs do not understand the priorities of these things - just how CRUCIAL it is to have a smooth gameplay experience - or they just don't have the means to fix these issues. But in any case, based on the current trajectory, this won't end well.

PS: Just about to start the new Divinity RPG. :P It seems to have received excellent ratings so far, my expectations are very high. Hope I won't be disappointed.
Anybody played the original Divine Divinity game, way back? I did. It was great.