Hi Guys. My story, DMT asked me to write it up and post it here. First of all, after the first three games i would have really liked my money back as it was so buggy in multiplayer, then i found out it was impossible, then i persisted in playing and found out it is an awesome game when it works, a game exactly to my taste.



What happens: I think i have played 50 multiplayer games by now, of which I only finished 1 without desync. It often occurst first at turn 30~50. Then I leave, often have to shut off the game (previously i had to shut down steam), then i rejoin and it works for anywhere between 1~30 turns. Sometimes, the desync happens unnoticed for a few turns. This means that in some cases, i own 3 systems, then, when i get back, SOMEONE ELSE HAS THEM FOR 5 ROUNDS ALREADY? And this kind of matches a bit with what is said here previously:

"As background information, another user has stated elsewhere that two invasions cannot finish on the same turn."

Although I am sure this is not the case, since i have had desyncs at full peace with all systems divided.



With a desync in this case; no-one in game gets any message. The turn will NOT go, noone can see my talk in-game, nor can I see them. It seems to me as if no-one is doing anything, and to them it seems as if i have not ended my turn yet. The turn-timer apparently does not care, as the game hangs in purgatory like that untill i leave, after which the round ends. After that i can enter again after which this story repeats itself after 1~30 turns.



All in all, i would really like to play this game, but in multiplayer it just plays as a alpha version, not even beta. Also, when i press shift-tab to acces steam in-game, the L_SHIFT keeps hanging (in the bottom center of the screen i can see it flickering but actually i am not pressing it at all, so the L_SHIFT button hangs! This is ultra annoying as you cannot execute any more actions while pressing shift (although i am not!). Solution: press L_SHIFT again.



If you do not fix this multiplayer issue, it would only be fair of you to reimburse my game. In my opinion, you have released a game that was not finished. Hence, I will buy it again if you ever fix the issues. I mean, one game is usually an investment of up to and more than 3 hours. If you are 2 hours into the game and it ends, nothing is more frustrating. Hire some devs.

8 player game just now... total desync at turn 40..... what a waste of time.... This is getting infuriating and ridiculous.



When I made this OP THREE months ago, fixing desync issues was already WAY overdue. This is now embarrassing.

DMT wrote:
8 player game just now... total desync at turn 40..... what a waste of time.... This is getting infuriating and ridiculous.



When I made this OP THREE months ago, fixing desync issues was already WAY overdue. This is now embarrassing.

Yah I agree with DMT - this is not currenly playable with all the sync errors - AMP you have some work to do with MP. I was in his game btw and we had to have several people rejoin the game before it finally died an ugly death at turn 40

it breaks my heart to see that this is still an issue.

Knakworst wrote:
With a desync in this case; no-one in game gets any message. The turn will NOT go, noone can see my talk in-game, nor can I see them. It seems to me as if no-one is doing anything, and to them it seems as if i have not ended my turn yet.

Nice description of the desync-situation. Me and my friends are very familiar with that error and we are hoping for it to be fixed since the release...

Interestingly, it is always the same player who keeps winding up in the situation described by you.

So we first thought it might have something to do with his PC/Connection/Software/Router... but no other game is a problem for him, not even on steam!



Basically nothing has changed in this matter since the release... really a pity.

Another turn out of sync. This time, last turn, just on science victory. Along with some reloads during the game. Lucky we even got that far. So utterly frustrating these sync issues

Sigh, naother game just now, desync.............

Noticed something serious today... During the first war with me a player had lower tech, lower overall everything. I had the correct defenses flak vs his missile. Then his 9k fleets were killing my 18k fleets. He had no flak. The game then went out of sync. We reloaded then MAGIC my exact same fleets eat through his fleets.



This was not before his initial attack took out my entire defense which it should not have been able to do. I believe the desync caused this prior to reload because I was able to push back after being eaten with the exact same fleets vs the exact same fleets. Then went on to win the match. if we didn't get forced to reload and everyone rejoined, I may very well have lost and that I believe is down to that particular desync. Quite scarey that such a serious error seems to exist in this game.

Instead of starting "Free Steam Weekends" (which i am sure actually scares away half of the potential buyers because of the inability to actually finish a game without reloading), maybe focus on the MP issues. All kinds of features were implemented on the previous patch (which are generally all turned off in all MP games anyway), try to focus on the desync issues.

These would have been acceptable around the 2000~2004 early MP age, these are utterly unacceptable for any game YTD 2012.



edit: When rearranging the MP games by "TURN" it actually sorts it alphabetically, i.e.: [14, 130, 1300, 2, 22, 241, 3, 32, etc). That's the touch of the rookie dev.

Knakworst wrote:
Instead of starting "Free Steam Weekends" (which i am sure actually scares away half of the potential buyers because of the inability to actually finish a game without reloading)

My thoughts exactly, I was quite happy at first to join this free weekend because right after ES release I heard about some quite terrible issues, so I kept away from the game for the time being. Then again I'm a MOO lover and generally enjoy 4X as long as it's against humans. Giving a free-weekend is pretty much saying here's our game, it's fixed, come and see it. People like me come here, waste several hours on desync or disconnects, quit in frustration never to return to ES again.



Why would you do this, Amplitude?

Throughout most of the free weekend I played the game entirely in single-player. Worked wonderfully there, but when it got to multi-player the game fell apart. I'm glad I was able to find this thread before I purchased the game. It is quite disappointing to have such a huge flaw for a game that is rather expensive for an indie title. I believe this would make the game unfit for purchase.

The lack of any direct response to these mp issues for how long its been out, along with the the continuing addition of new content, good or bad, says to me that it will never be fixed. Perhaps the are incapable of correcting it, so they chose to ignore it and hope we forget about it. If mp dies completely then they don't need to bother fixing it, right? I think that's the plan here. I used to be an advocate for this game, I'm certainly the opposite now.

Kyu wrote:
The lack of any direct response to these mp issues for how long its been out, along with the the continuing addition of new content, good or bad, says to me that it will never be fixed. Perhaps the are incapable of correcting it, so they chose to ignore it and hope we forget about it. If mp dies completely then they don't need to bother fixing it, right? I think that's the plan here. I used to be an advocate for this game, I'm certainly the opposite now.

I'm not going to say that I no longer advocate the game. With all the potential the game has I'm still in favor of them continuing to update it and make it amazing, and I'd be more than happy to see it succeed. However, I will say that, unless they fix the Multiplayer Desyncing issues, the game likely isn't worth the current price, even at 50% off. There are many games out there that are the same price, or cheaper, that don't have multiplayer issues as bad as this game does. So, I'll only likely get the game once it is around 75% off, to justify the price for just a single-player experience.

If you never want to play multiplayer, its a great game. If you want to play multiplayer, I can tell you that since it was available as a playable alpha version on steam, I have near +0% more confidence in the stability of multiplayer since then, something like 6 months? So yea, not a mp advocate anymore.

I really cannot relate to what I read in this thread; the first thing I did after installing it (the day before yesterday, around 23:00) was to play about 100 turns in a game with four human players and two AI. No problem whatsoever. Adding to this, the entire day yesterday was spent in a single game with my friend (seriously, it must have lasted over 10 hours (admittedly, it could have been ended a long time prior to that; I was still learning the game)). There was one problem: my fleet was attacked by pirates without me getting an alert. Reload, and it worked fine.



Maybe I've been extremely lucky, but I really don't see how I could have been consistently lucky for 15 hours straight while you people speak unplayability after forty turns.

I rather think it's about turns and events than "hours spent". Not sure if you care much about statistics, but DMT here (topicstarter) is someone who plays this game every night, and preferably, One game per night, a good game that lasts long. You did *not* hear us say that EVERY game goes bad, but yes, 90% does. And you are only playing with 4 people (also, are you sure noone left), the average serious game i would say has at least 5 players (look in the lobby). The people posting here have got together hundreds of games played - keep that in mind. And these are the serious games with, i would say, the best returning players ; i.e. the core gamers; i.e. the advocates.

The reason why we are so frustrated/disappointed is not necessarily because this game is too expensive (as in my opinion it is still in alpha and should be free) but because of the massive potential this game has that is being spoiled by sloppy MP.

I rather think it's about turns and events than "hours spent". Not sure if you care much about statistics, but DMT here (topicstarter) is someone who plays this game every night, and preferably, One game per night, a good game that lasts long. You did *not* hear us say that EVERY game goes bad, but yes, 90% does. And you are only playing with 4 people (also, are you sure noone left), the average serious game i would say has at least 5 players (look in the lobby). The people posting here have got together hundreds of games played - keep that in mind. And these are the serious games with, i would say, the best returning players ; i.e. the core gamers; i.e. the advocates.

The reason why we are so frustrated/disappointed is not necessarily because this game is too expensive (as in my opinion it is still in alpha and should be free) but because of the massive potential this game has that is being spoiled by sloppy MP.

@Laveno: Just because a large number of people have MP issues doesn't mean that you have to get errors, too.

So it works for some people, fine. But it also doesn't work for a lot of people... We know that, Amplitude knows that... and now we're all waiting for something to happen.



Knakworst says it.

Laveno wrote:
I really cannot relate to what I read in this thread; the first thing I did after installing it (the day before yesterday, around 23:00) was to play about 100 turns in a game with four human players and two AI. No problem whatsoever. Adding to this, the entire day yesterday was spent in a single game with my friend (seriously, it must have lasted over 10 hours (admittedly, it could have been ended a long time prior to that; I was still learning the game)). There was one problem: my fleet was attacked by pirates without me getting an alert. Reload, and it worked fine.



Maybe I've been extremely lucky, but I really don't see how I could have been consistently lucky for 15 hours straight while you people speak unplayability after forty turns.

I just had a 5 hour sync free game. I get about 3/5 games sync maybe 4/5.... I also play public and yes it does seem to occur more often with certain players in the game. Some people cannot get even one game without desync.



It at least partially due to regions and individual circumstances. Though these people do not have issues with any other game....

Based on the responses, I think my post came of as a little more hostile than I intended; I apologise for that. As this was the first thread I looked in, my view on this issue is (mainly was) likely extremely one-sided.



As this was my first thread, the de-sync issue was likely brought out of proportion in my mind (I was probably relating to Shogun 2 Total War, the multiplayer campaign of which is completely and utterly broken; I've had no successful co-op campaign at all). I read it as pretty much 99.999...% (which is equal to 100%, by the way) of games going de-sync, which contrasts greatly to 300+ turns of completely de-sync free games.

I rather think it's about turns and events than "hours spent". Not sure if you care much about statistics, but DMT here (topicstarter) is someone who plays this game every night, and preferably, One game per night, a good game that lasts long. You did *not* hear us say that EVERY game goes bad, but yes, 90% does.

While true, de-sync is caused by events being calculated differently by the computers and not strictly time, hours was one of few metrics I had available (and I figured that increased time means increased probability of a higher turn count). I have hence-forth used the metric of turns, which, while not perfect, is better. Happy?

And you are only playing with 4 people (also, are you sure noone left), the average serious game i would say has at least 5 players (look in the lobby). The people posting here have got together hundreds of games played - keep that in mind. And these are the serious games with, i would say, the best returning players ; i.e. the core gamers; i.e. the advocates.

I have a hard time seeing why there would be a relevant difference between four and five players. Suppose there is, why not just play in matches of four, at least until Amplitude fixes the issue? Nevertheless, it is true that we were playing under relatively "clinical" circumstances; almost no one left (there was one occasion where a computer was apparently running on battery, but there were no issues after that) and all of the players were relatively close (~30 kilometres distance at most, although three players were in the same house).



Your last point is the majority of the reason for my original post; suppose my surprise when, after I had experienced no problems whatsoever, I signed in to the forums and the first thread I see is a thread entirely devoted to the subject of de-sync, and a fairly large thread at that.

The reason why we are so frustrated/disappointed is not necessarily because this game is too expensive (as in my opinion it is still in alpha and should be free) but because of the massive potential this game has that is being spoiled by sloppy MP.

While I've said nothing about expense, I have to agree that in many ways the game feels in Alpha-stages (or rather in a weird mix-up between Alpha and Beta, since the game is playable, but content is added, which is usually done in the Alpha stage). The way I see it is quite similar to the situation with Minecraft; we get to play the game while it is still in (late) development, the developers get money without "actually" having "finished" a game, and we still get the "full" product once it's released. Admittedly, this is not how it has been phrased, so that could be a improved. Other than that, I kind of like it as a business model, as it gets the players some say in the development, and makes it easier for the developers to enter the market. They can also afford a longer development cycle, which makes for a better game.



As I stated, I have had problems with de-syncs in other games (Shogun 2) where it has pretty much ruined all my interest in the game (it took them three years to fix the majority of that problem, and then there are still a whole sleugh of bugs left). On that level, I can really sympathise with you guys, my post was more rooted in the surprise of seeing the problem here, too. I guess it was a pretty clumsy way of entering the conversation to add some data and insights from the other end of the spectrum, possibly helping to solve the problem (if Amplitude actually reads this thread, that is).



I hope we understand each other better after this (and I hope my internet returns so I can actually post this). Happy gaming!