I recently jumped to Perimeter and was forced to watch the warp tunnel animation and blank interface for several minutes, while the game conveniently displayed incoming damage and capsule ejection. Never did the overview load or the rest of the UI. I simply cut straight to floating corpse.
The GM said he is not allowed to reimburse the loss as it was “not the result of a server-side error or a verified bug”. I can’t fault the GMs, but this is a preposterous excuse, in their words it is due to “disconnections/rubberbanding” in my system or between systems. I included my screenshot showing that the game clearly put me straight into a pirate camp without letting me know. If the software can’t load a new system, your ship shouldn’t appear there to everyone else but the stuck client.
This sounds like you had a desync, which is potentially related to the internet somewhere between you & CCP, and likely nothing to do with the CCP server.
Sure, nothing to do with the server. The problem is this game is designed to screw the victim whenever that happens. If you’ve ever undocked in a busy system and stared at a black monitor for minutes, you know what I mean. Typically the other players see you instantly, so you are blind and naked for that entire period.
It’s understandable that disconnection shouldn’t make you “safe”, because we don’t want exploits. But when you are undocking or jumping the server should wait for some indication from the client that it’s not stuck doing nothing. Even if it took a whole tick to make this check, nobody these days runs 500+ latency anyway, and a single second between grids means nothing. It could even check for timers so people didn’t just use it to escape pursuit… or heck, let the GMs use their common sense when you can clearly see it’s an unfair situation.
It does, it disconnects you with a socket error if it doesn’t hear back. Which then prompts a warp off & vanish.
P.S. People absolutely do run with 500+ latencies, not everyone lives in a major city.
I’m not being insensitive, but in general… when I lived in Asia and had to connect from the exact opposite side of the planet, it was still in the 2-300s.
My point is a call/response check like that would take 100 ms for most clients, so the most it would delay you in your game would ever be a single tick.
Anyway, desyncs are very hard to manage. As they mean only part of the data gets through. Who’s to say which part. Adding a check could easily allow for exploits.
Going to second Nevyn here. Dealing with this sort of network issue in the way you want would be extremely difficult, because there are so many things that can go wrong.
Also keep in mind that even doing what you want, delaying the drop out of warp or undocking or whatever wouldn’t prevent a bad situation from occuring. Say you’re in a fleet and you desync or start dropping packets during warp. The game delays load, but now your fleet is down you and everyone else who had the issue, and even if you would have died otherwise having more targets on grid might have allowed your fleet to win the engagement, and either way you’re going to drop into gods know what when the thing resolves itself.
Plus ultimately the game needs to actually confirm that you’re undocking to load the stuff outside the station (or whatever loading event is happening here) and then the part after you’ve confirmed your undock is where you’re hanging up. Waiting for your client to load and render everything the server just told you about.
Finally it’s my guess that having everything load “speculatively” (this is basically what you’re asking for, in computer terms) would be a significant performance hit as well as take a lot of time and energy from other features for CCP to implement.
Not to mention that it would require some kind of time-out, which could mean that some people wouldn’t even be able to undock in Jita, they’d just keep timing out.
Overall I sympathize, but I don’t think there’s much CCP, or any other online game company, can really do here.
