I've carefully read your non-rant and spot on problem spotting and solution seeking thread and I have to say that I feel it's all in vain. In a normal world, not governed by greed, where we're "all kids just wating to play, and laugh and have fun and make friends with everyone", any development company would LOVE hearing criticism, on-point identified problems, possible solutions or brainstormed ideas on those problems and suge a huge involvement from the playerbase.
Now I'm not throwing mud at EA or Respawn by any means but their (in)actions speak for themselves. They don't act on a lot, and if they do, they don't relay and feedback on it. At least tell you to shut it cause you have no clue what you're talking about. Or any example with any user that ever posted a single word on the forum.
I don't wanna suggest revolution, but just like I've always thought with pre-ordering games... why not just... step away for a week or two, to see what not having a playerbase is. Then, they will seek ways of gaining back our trust. Instead of pushing crappy patches, greedy transactions, "awesome chaos event" disguised under doubling of all event-related prices in all types of currency.
It's not their fault for asking, it's (y)ours for keeping on giving money and time to them.
Valorant tried this, while attempting to fix their latency issues, and you basically ended up with all the people on your datacenter range. For example, I'm from Romania, moved to Greece. Now my matchmaking consists of 93% Turks. I have nothing against them, but gameplay-wise, they're the furthest I've met from having teamwork ideals. Not to mention being extra loud and obnoxious.
I don't have enough experience to have an educated opinion on this. I come from the age of dial-up, where 1 phone call would end your Counter-Strike killstreak.
PUBG tried this when launching PUBG Lite, which was the same game, but left behind a couple of updates (like 4000 of them). Basically, you had a partially polished, greatly optimized for slower PCs, mini-PUBG. In time, the main and the mini-game became 2 different games, with all the patches rolled in on the main one. Eventually, people continued complaining about both, accounts were hacked on the mini-game (mine too, lol) and it ended up being left for dead. Literally. The dev team sent an in-game letter saying they're abandoning it. The servers are still up, you can still play, but no updates since april 2020 (if I remember right).
I may not be right, but aren't there too many SFX and VFX in game, to which they keep adding? Those things drain a lot of resources, connection and otherwise: Packet loss, latency, and so on. The slower your cpu/gpu and the more "chinese fireworks" (both audio and visually) you encounter, the faster it melts and you end up teleporting across the map (i was actually trying to shoot such an unfortunate player, in game, poor dude).
@grimuletz That boots part was in response to user troubleshooting we're asked to do by CMs when highlighting game issues. It's a bit of running joke now.
I fully agree with this ''It's not their fault for asking, it's (y)ours for keeping on giving money and time to them.'' and i also agree it's very likely in vain but i'll still try as i think many would like to see these improvements. When they said we have a 10 year roadmap then reduced player count or lack of revenue for a period of time would force them to take some action to sort some things out. I doubt they'll stop supporting Apex at the first hurdle and they did a few rounds of improvements with Anthem for example before cutting the string.
Adding unnecessary visual and audio clutter has also been a complaint for awhile. Simple things like my health bar flashing instead of my screen when i charge an evo or the kill leader blinding me amongst many others. It's just not needed.
@OldTreeCreeper So they're just holding onto what they have.. I'll have a look and think on those numbers and come back as i want to check some bits from the updates and those times. I didn't even think to look at AHQ activity.
@DoYaSeeMe They're old but still relevant and the Kovaak article just explained a bit more how high ping effects your matches. Clientside tickrate was 60hz for the first video and likely went to 20 in the second if he alt tabbed out to check and Apex was running in the background. Either way, even if they did increase it since, the server side is still 20 with a huge network delay and a simulation that still favours people with ridiculously high ping leading to many being shot behind cover ect. The time that passes when you're meant to be safe has increased significantly since then as we're well beyond milliseconds and that's without mentioning actions not even happening.
The problems we have now are much much worse than they were when Battle(non)sense's made those reviews and likely hasn't done more as there's nothing more to update us on. I haven't seen any announcement to make any of us think otherwise. In fact the only thing i heard about server side was the partial downtime maintenance and that wasn't even on the servers the matches are played on.
Graphical optimisations won't be much improvement if the main problem is on the network or server side. I'm not saying there won't possibly be minor improvements but my PC can already run Apex well above 144fps most of the time so reducing GPU load for extra frames won't really solve the major issues although i would welcome those changes as long as they don't effect the quality of the experience like the silent nerf to Caustic and Bangalore past update.
In reply to what you said a few post ago as i just needed to double check before posting, battlefield had more players in match (64) destructible environment (we don't have here) and bullet physics simulation on a fully server side hit registration to mitigate how far behind cover you get hit and this is all running on 64tick servers over 5 years ago so yes, i believe they can do it.
The developers just need to feel like the changes are necessary and the e sport market is just one incentive for them to do it that will lead to improvements for everyone else.
@Midnight9746 The days of providing a quality experience are overshadowed by profit.
I don't know how the contracts/agreements work with server providers. I know when it's community rented you used to be able to do it on a monthly basis but this was years ago for the users. What arrangement Respawn have with Multiplay and if they're locked into a contract is still to be confirmed as it's just hearsay atm. Hopefully something can be changed or improved upon.
Thanks for the input. Appreciate it.
@apostolateofDOOM apex tracker says 12,102,689 Tracked Players.
@apostolateofDOOM one image that belongs to your original posting is this one:
@apostolateofDOOMI think you got a few things wrong.
Matchmaking happens on dedicated lobby servers, which are in control of Respawn. Groups of matched players are then forwarded to Multiplay's hybrid cloud solution, where they get a game server assigned. Now, Respawn doesn't have control over this server, they only provide some parameters, like minimum requirements, region, etc.. To get an idea of how spread Multiplay is, they are integrated with the 3 biggest public clouds (Google, Microsoft Azure and AWS) and over 190 data centers, a lot more than any game studio could afford. In simple terms, it's like picking the right server from a list of 1000 instead of 50, so I don't really get how this is the worse solution.
The ping you see on the performance display, in the top right corner of your in-game HUD, is to the match server, not the lobby one. That's why you see a different, usually higher average value than the one you get when you select the data center to connect to.
I've revisited some of Battle(non)sense's videos recently and learned some new things regarding data transfer. Packet sizes have limitations, which is why large updates must be split into more packets and sent in quick succession. Servers do actually send packets at a high rate, so the tick rate may be a variable one, going from 10-20Hz at the beginning, when there are 60 players on the map, up to 30-60hz (not sure if all lowest end devices can support 60hz).
@DoYaSeeMe I was under the impression the performance display was to the lobby server and why there was a discrepancy between what was displayed and what we were dealing with. If that's not correct then i'll change it but that's all the more reason something needs to be improved upon when people have a really good connection being displayed but performance is really bad.
This isn't necessarily about being the worse solution for the masses but it's not the best one for those that play competitively or a wish to do so where performance is clearly lacking as most, if not all in comp scene or aspiring to be in, are running hardware that can take advantage of 60hz+ and the majority of regulars are also experiencing these problems frequently. I don't understand why lower end hardware couldn't take advantage of higher tick rates when Valorant is really low on resource req for PC but older machines can run on those high tick servers just fine. Excluding Switch and in the future mobile.. Also having a vast pool of servers doesn't do justice to those that wish to participate in e sports or want a consistent experience which we don't have at all currently.
Do you have a source for the servers running at a higher rate?
I knew the matchmaking and actual match servers were separate which I've edited slightly but will do some more on OP this evening and come back to reply to more of the posts.
