I give up. I'm out

But are people really “hopping on the bandwagon” though?

As you could see in the thread history i posted, i started posting feedback on bugs back in 2018, some of which were desyncs, disconnects and crashes which still happen today. I am by no means any “pillar of the community”, but i have followed the development of the game since i got it. And sadly i personally feel it is still far from being an enjoyable experience. Not because of the game itself, but because of the many issues.

Meeeshka on the other hand is, or was since he has thrown in the towel, one of the old pillars. And when people with this kind of dedication give up, i think that is a very large and blinking warning sign.

Then there are all the other people posting. Some are more vocal than others, some more regular than others. Many players never post at all. Regardless who they are (yourself included), they are all experiencing bugs that reduce the enjoyment of the game. I’ll wager most experience bugs every time they play. I have never heard of/seen a post by a player saying they are not having issues with bugs. Think about it. That is a pretty scary prospect for a game both players and developers want to love.

As players we can only attempt to help so much, as with describing the issues as good as we can, providing visual “evidence”, reproduction steps if possible etc. If that doesn’t help, the only thing we can do is either wait and hope it gets better, take to the forum or simply abandon the game.

The “length” of patience is different for each individual. How “long” is yours?

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They shouldn’t be focusing on new content if the game is broken.

And personally I would have been cool with paid for content if it would’ve helped fund a bigger development team, but there free updates and there causing more bugs. I think the devs are wonderful.

That being said I shouldn’t have to relog 5 times in less than a half hour to make sure I can play semi properly.

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I have made both a commitment and investment into this community. Just as I am not perfect, I do not expect any person or technology to be perfect.

I look at the efforts of the devs, the commitment they make and the members I am friendly with which makes it easy to maintain a positive perspective as to what Orbusvr offers and what is being delivered.

Do glitches and bugs get frustrating…yep…but I am here for much more that a a gaming experience

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I thought you were a developer from previous posts?

Think about the complexity difference between desyncs happening mid/beginning of a dungeon (it’s instanced, party chat is always on, it pulls you from anywhere in the game world, etc.)

VS. highsteppe update and graphics updates? The latter may be mostly 3D modeling with some code written about it. I think this update might have been time consuming but not necessarily complex.

Not my product, could be wrong, but hard to imagine otherwise re: complexity.

If I was scoring the desync thing might be a series of high point stories or timeboxed research and fix (you get X hours to work on thing this week, after that communicate results and move on).

Yes, i used to be a developer before i burned out in my mid thirties. It is a rough business.

This isn’t any different from a multitude of other multiplayer genres though, where people will expect such issues not to be present 3 years down the line. It may sound harsh, but if Orbus wasn’t a VR mmorpg and the only one of its kind on top, it would have had no playerbase anymore. Which brings us back to the question: Why are these issues still present when they are not VR specific?

Don’t get me wrong. I want Orbus to succeed. It is pretty apparent Meeeshka wants Orbus to succeed with all the work he has put into making video content both for the community as well as bug reports for the developers. I have no doubt that pretty much everyone else here also want Orbus to succeed as well. But good intentions doesn’t fix the issues. Only the developers can do that. All we can do is tell the developers how we feel about them still being there.

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There is a solution to all of this. Start paying a subscription. The team is small and under funded. We are expecting the dev’s to pull a rabbit out of a hat with no support. If you want perfection then open your wallet and contribute.

Once you have a stake in the game past $14.00 plus $10.00 if you sprang for the DLC you can expect more. As it is, this is an awsome game and for $24.00 a player I think they are doing great.

Stop letting your egos get in the way of reason or start paying for perfection.

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My thoughts earlier, so we agree on the following for sure (first comment on the post):

I think they’ve been doing fine up until now (as far as positive reviews go) due to the lack of competition, but I do worry for the community if another VRMMO comes out that’s more polished. I’d hate to leave, but if the gameplay is better I might switch

IMO, I think it’s too much to assume that because something isn’t related to the 3D/tracking/etc associated with VR, that the problem should be easier to solve. You burnt out in your 30s–not sure if you were a game dev, but either way it’s a tough job. I get burnout every few months or after a stretch of 40+ hours a week.

For all we know, as an example of how we could be wrong, it could be the opposite: the VR stuff could be easier than the game logic itself (inventory, classes, instances, etc.). If they didn’t want to rebuild the wheel, some portions of the VR-specific code could be open source or forked from open source. But all the MMO specific things they may have had to build themselves, (especially if they stopped using unity? Not sure how much they helped with that portion out of the box). this is a guess based on the abundance of free hand-tracking and other VR specific code snippets available–many from oculus itself to encourage 3rd party devs, like Orbus.

(for non-devs: a fork is when you make your own version of existing code because you need extra/different functionality, or if it’s bugged and the original coders won’t fix it, etc.)

Also, there are a ton of Android specific issues that have to be dealt with. The platform evolves and changes in fairly big ways on a regular basis for no apparent reason causing sometimes massive editing or rewriting of thousands of lines of code just to comply with the update.

Well, I bought the game when it was $40, so, by your logic, I, along with many, many other players should expect more.

How far do you think your $40.00 should go? It’s a one time charge. Do you think it lasts forever? You are right. You personally should get $16.00 more service. At development cost that is maybe 10 more minutes of bug fixes? You have been taken my friend. You should get a refund for sure. The game should be perfect for that sacrifice.

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Do you think it lasts forever?

Exactly. It’s not like it is easy–nor is it free to develop. The worst part of bug fixes is that usually you give an estimate for how long it will take, but with bugs there’s no guarantee at all that it only takes the estimated amount of time. It takes as long as it takes to reproduce the bug and make fixes.

Imagine if their devs get paid as well as I do–that’s thousands of dollars a month. So to pay one fulltime mid level dev, that’s an example of how much money they need.

And you’re absolutely right about Android switching things up as it suits them as new devices come out. I was a victim of that a long time ago during one of the few android projects I’ve worked on–literally this: oh wow my code worked yesterday before I stopped working, got an update, now it’s broken.

While we’re not wrong to be upset as a community, we should also have a bit of empathy for those struggling so we can have a good time. If you weren’t generally liking the game, you probably wouldn’t be here on the forums @Yeetlord. Not throwing shade or anything.

I think that this is why FF14 went on a subscription.

I think some of you guys are missing the point I and others are trying to make:

  • What is the base “building block” of an online multiplayer game? (doesn’t even have to be “massive”)

I’ll tell you what it is:
State propagation and replication through client-server communication. In its most basic form, if you can not properly handle this, your game has no proper merit. And that is basically what all the fuss is about, since Orbus has lots of content. But the most fundamental part of the whole is not working properly.

And in my opinion, 3 years of development should not pass without the root causes being identified and dealt with.

Let me put this another way: If Orbus did NOT have such issues, i and many would probably be fine paying a subscription.

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Ok. Lets say that the root cause of all of these communication issues has been identified and takes the entire game back to square one in order to fix it. Would you pay a subscription to have it fixed? That’s the real question. I would. This is an amazing game.

Another solution would be to add more things to buy for real money in the store. My guess is going subscription is the only way to get the manpower to tackle the bugs. Then after there is no action, can we complain.

No. Like i said, i would probably pay a subscription when it is fixed, since (like all mmorpgs) that is the most important cog in the clock. Without it, you do not have a properly functioning multiplayer game.

Is it an amazing game? Sure. When it works as it should.

Lots of mmorpgs has emerged and failed for way less than this in the past, so i think the developers should feel very fortunate that a large part of the playerbase are as loyal as they are. But the clock is ticking.

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So what you are saying is the investment has to be made and all bugs fixed before you would pay to save a game you enjoy playing and have invested years worth of time playing? Very short sighted.

I look forward to the game that comes out on Oculus that has no bugs or issues.

I play alot of different games on the headset and have not found one that is perfect. Not one. These are games with only one objective, Golf, first person shooter, gambling… all of them have ridiculous bugs. Most are communication issues. The scale of Orbus is league’s beyond any of them and it still works equally as well.

The next MMO on headset will be no better. It will have the same issues only worse as the graphics will be pushing the headset to extremes.

No again. My first mmorpg was EverQuest back in 1999, and i have played a plethora of mmorpgs since. But i also play other genres (and i am not talking VR only here), and i often play and support early access games.

However, if i had to toss extra money (that i do not have mind you) after each game i have invested lots of time in for them to fix fundamental problems that should have been the main focal point from the start… Well… I am sure you can see where i am going with this.

Personally my main problem with Orbus is that desync and disconnection issues should have been sorted or very minor from the start. And a year down the line these issues should be close to non existant.

And that, i think, is a developer problem, not a playerbase problem of extra funding. That is how the game industry works: You don’t get paid extra up front for something you might fix that should already be functional. But you might get paid extra if you have a good project and people want more.

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The issue may not be in development. I am not going to go into different platforms. We are talking vr here.

The biggest issue I’ve seen over the platform has been communication issues. Sound going out, players disappearing, desync, unexpected logout. These happen in every game on the platform. It is most noticeable when playing multiplayer but it happens even in single player mode.

My point is this may not be a developer issue. It may be a platform issue. It may be throwing money at the problem will not fix the problem and is why i will bet the next greatest MMO will have exactly the same issues.

I am not saying you are right, nor am i saying you are wrong as far as lag/connection issues go.

But desync (aka state conflicts), that is entirely a developer issue.

I don’t think so. I have played mini golf and had the same issues. Sound goes out, player disappears. A game that has just one objective. No massive projectiles to keep tabs on. No drops to make sure get put in your bag. Just did the ball go into the little hole.

I logged into Pokerstars vr the first time and opened in the middle of someone’s game. I had no idea I shoild have opened into the lobby. I was new to the game.

I’ve been in an airplane race and lost because of dsync.

It is all over the platform. You are speaking as if you are a developer on this platform and I am saying the platform is most likely the issue as the same problems pop up in every game.

Those are also developer issues.

Take a very well known example from a multitude of games:

  • you as a player are moving from A to B to interact with C. But when you get to B you can not interact with C, because although the client tells you you are at B, the server thinks you are still at somewhere between A and B. That is desync.

  • In games where this is handled properly, you will - if there are connection issues between the client and server - instead be bumped back every so often to where the server thinks you are. In other words, you will only get to B when botht the client and the server agrees that is where you are. And then you will be able to interact with C (+/- lag issues). This is popularly called “rubberbanding”. However, in this case, there is a clear enforcement from server to client of state.

  • Now take Meeeshkas many reports of class desync and think about it a little. Then think a bit on the issues of shaman orbs, ranger arrows, scoundrel cards, bard notes etcetera.

In other words, desync and lag are very different. Lag can be quite out of the hands of the developer. But desync should never be.

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