Hey everyone, in the most recent Q&A post Robert mentioned that the recent “lag” and desync issues unfortunately do not stem from one place or from server capacity - we’ve spent much of this year hunting down widespread problems and fixed many backend issues and errors, but many of these issues have remained, which means for the time being we have to change strategies to tackle the small desyncs and maybe from there find a clue if there’s any relation to each other.
Right know, I’m compiling a list of 100% reproducible desyncs that I can share with the team to work on, and I will likely need your help to narrow them down to the smallest number of steps.
If you have a desync you know about and are able to reliably get to happen every single time, let me know the steps and I will reproduce it and pass it on.
Just a quick note, I totally mis-stated the order of things for the multiclass bug…Click on the new weapon first, THEN the one you have equipped. That’s 100% my fault.
I’m sorry if this will come off as a rant (i guess it is) rather than contribution with reproducible desyncs or similiar, but…
My session today had:
1 blackscreen (forced quit game to solve)
3 disconnects (game closing to oculus home, not the login screen: 1 in overworld highsteppe, 1 during a dungeon, 1 in player house looking at auctions)
several examples of others disconnecting during a dungeon run
1 reward chest “arriving” late after a dungeon run
1 reward chest not arriving at all
1 observation of last stand event ending, but blue marker remaining (observable by others)
That’s honestly not… great… Not for the game, not for the players. What makes me sad is that these/similar issues happened in pre-reborn too. I do not remember when i first bought the game, but it was pretty long ago, counting in years, and still connection issues persist.
I love the game, but i can feel getting a little more annoyed and losing a little more urge to play with every occurence. If i could tell you what is wrong, i would. I bet all players would. But more than likely that will be the case for most, and at this point these issues really should have been tracked down and sorted.
As i said, sorry if this comes off as a rant and isn’t constructively helpful, but if this keeps on you will bleed playerbase for sure.
I’ve played a lot of games over the years, and all of them have bugs. You know what happens when you report them? The “tech support” copies/pastes responses, usually blaming you, your device, or your ISP.
What happens when you report a bug in Orbus? You get a personal email requesting more information, and they will ask more questions in order to find out exactly what happened. They are proactive in working on issues, and asking the community for input is an excellent idea. Nobody knows the game like a player does. Devs play, but this is their job. They’re not in game many hours a day like many of us are.
Additionally, a lot of gamers are also developers of one type or other, and are happy to help trying to track down gremlins. Debugging is not as simple as saying “this is wrong” and fixing it. In a game like this you’re dealing with an extremely complicated system where everything affects everything else. Changing one thing can have far-reaching consequences, so it’s not a matter of just changing stuff and hoping it works. We’re also dealing with fairly new technology, and all that comes with that.
As an ex-dev myself before i burned out (not in games but web front/backend), i know what you’re saying. All i am pointing out is that the first version was plagued with similar issues. They then rebuilt (reimagined?) the game as reborn. But those same issues - or symptoms rather, the causes themselves may be different - are still present.
Also, as an avid player of mmorpgs over the years (my first in a very long row of titles being everquest back in '99) i want orbus to succeed. Not only for the sake of orbus, but for the sake of vr in general. However, one thing that is a common denominator for all the more succesful ones over the past 2 decades is connection (and state) stability.
What i am hinting at is that, besides getting player input, maybe more drastic measures needs to be used. Things like client-to-server logging when the client requests state changes on something that is way off what the server state actually is along with conditions on the client experiencing the issue and historical event data seen from the clients side. To help track down the issue(s).
Sure, this might mean more bandwidth used both for clients and server, as well as lower the maximum server population cap. But if it would help track down issues with more haste and precision than player reports, will it be worth it? I would think so.
Now, i don’t claim to have any knowledge of how the game is set up in terms of the codebase. All i can see is that at its base it is a unity game (along with a number of plugins). But as a player it isn’t my job to know either. And while player reports are definetely good, nothing beats good old detailed debugging, following the chain of events closely as well as using the process of elimination and testing the validity of every step. Slowly but surely.
I hope i made it clear that my intent is not malicious, but rather… a warning bell ringing perhaps. I am guessing the devs aren’t made of money either so there is probably also a factor of time versus sales/popularity here to be argued.
Edit:
Also, just to show that in the past i have done all i could to provide information about issues i have experienced. Here is a post i made back in 2018:
Also, regarding Mishkas multiclass desync bug, it seems it can happen with other things than class changes as well.
Today, i had healing potions and the harvester equipped. I switched the harvester with the teleportation device. The paperdoll updated correctly as expected, however i still had the harvester equipped rather than the teleportation device, even though the harvester was in my bags.
