How about a little balance? Multiplayer is still borked.

Huzurdaddi · November 30, 2002, 01:52

How about a little balance on this message board?

I took a look at the message board, and it seemed from the posts that Civ3 PTW was now working.

So I downloaded the patch and gave it a whirl. 1st thing I noticed was that only 2 games were being hosted.

"Strange" I thought to myself. You would think that quite a few games would be hosted. Mulitplayer Civ should draw quite a few gamers.

I attempted to join a game. I was able to join. A few people made comments like "boy I hope this works" and "have not gotten a game to work" and "has it worked for you?"

Not auspicious signs.

We attempted to launch. And only a couple of us made it into the game. Actually only 3 out of 8. We then tried to remake. Again, only a small percentage of the people made it into the game.

We tried direct IP, but it was very difficult to get people to join direct IP. It did not help that we only had 5 lines of text to tell people what's up.

We tried a couple of more times to join up with public games, again with little to no succes.

I know that hordes of fanboys will now descend saying what great games they have had.

Until the matchmaking works as well as warcraft3's match making, or AoM's match making, it's broken.

And currently Civ3 is no where close to that standard. I talked (or attempted to, remember only 5 lines) to a number of people on line, and they all said to a man that the game still does not work.

I hope that this message stays on these forums. Some people (myself included) use forums to make decisions on whether to buy games or not. And it is hard to make an informed decision when one of the two sides is censored.

Swissy · November 30, 2002, 03:15

MP works, but unless you have some sort of broadband connection, cable or DSL, your going to have problems. Your best bet is to look in the MP forum and contact players who have similar playing availablity and broadband connections and set-up a game beforehand. Just trying to make a games on the fly is just inviting problems; players with slow connections, players with warez PTW, players not having current patch.

The system is better than it was out of the box, but still needs more tweaking to get more players up and playing.

Jaflin · November 30, 2002, 03:45

I too would like to keep this post alive. I have a cable connection and I am having the very same problems as Huz.

The availability of "games on the fly" are an indication of a game's sucess, and evidence that many people are experiencing a minimum of problems with those games. That availability is absent with PTW online, because PTW MultiPlayer is indeed.... still borked.

My most hopeful of wishes to the waiting,
Jaflin

Crousto · November 30, 2002, 05:30

I got PtW yesterday at 13:00. I immediately installed, patched to 1.14, and tried to join a game. No problem to get to the staging room, but everytime the hosts proceeded to the setup screen, I was dropped with a 'check your firewall config' message or something. So I look at the readme and this forum, configure my firewall (the WinXP one), and try again : not better. I completely disable the firewall

and try again : still no luck. I check the readme.txt again, it says something about old routers protocols causing problems if you're not the first to join a game : looks like it's my problem, because next time I tried, I get to the setup screen, and I was the first to join the game. But all the other players were dropped, so the host didn't launch the game. Now, I decide to try to host. 4 people join the staging room, all 1.14f and green pings. I proceed to the setup screen : only one guy left

We decide to go ahead anyway. And from there, it was great. 2humans + 2AI, small map, simultaneous turns. Only a bit of lag. We played for 2 hours and we'll try to continue from the save tonight.
So my first day experience with PtW is :
matchmaking process (Gamespy?)

game itself

notyoueither · November 30, 2002, 05:35

Well, if you don't want to hear from the people for whom it works...

Keep flailing around in the dark playing unknown people who may or may not be using cracked alpha (that will crash you 100% guaranteed, btw).

In the mean time, I will continue playing the game.

See ya.

aebrahim · November 30, 2002, 06:31

He does have a point. PTW's matchmaking system doesn't even come close to Blizzard's Battle.net system that's used for all their games.

The Warcraft III matchmaking system is absolutely amazing. Too bad Firaxis' matchmaking system seems like a quick hack attempt at making a semi intuitivate interface.

Having said this, I have gotten games to work, and have had some good games.

But just because I've been able to play MP doesn't mean that the system is good. In fact, it's pretty lousy.

I don't mean to flame here. I'm just stating my opinion. The game is good, I've had good MP games, but lets face it, the matchmaking system sucks horribly.

Sandy · November 30, 2002, 08:34

50% of games i join i play. I consider this acceptable taking into account a lot of newbie types who dont have patch/leave at first opportunity etc.

Kaewan · November 30, 2002, 09:55

There is absolutely no reason why PTW should not check versions when joining a game. I want to keep unpatched players out of my games!

Kaewan

WarpStorm · November 30, 2002, 11:22

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi
1st thing I noticed was that only 2 games were being hosted.

No, hosted games disappear once they start. These were 2 people trying to get games going.

I guess I'm one of those lucky people who has players I can play with and good luck at actually getting games to work, so you probably don't want to here my words, so that this thread remains 'balanced'.

CrONoS · November 30, 2002, 13:35

The first thing we need is the ability to kick people from the game, and from the first screen when you wait for people...
I dont know why,we dont have the ability to kick people!!

Have a nice day

Anyone serious wanted to play a game of Civ3PTW, contact me at:dominic_doucet@hotmail.com

Huzurdaddi · November 30, 2002, 20:11

Update: Today I tried the game for quite a few hours.

The good: You can if you really pick the people you play with get a game going.

The bad: It is amazingly laggy. It takes between 2 and 5 seconds to complete any order. And this is with people with under 150 ping. I would hate to see how people with dial-up access play this game.

I mean, really, what is it doing during this time? Is it sending to each player, in sequence, a multi part message about the move that just took place? Let's see if the math works out

6 player, so 5 other than myself. Send a message to each and wait for reply, that 150 milliseconds * 5. That's only 750 milliseconds, so that can't account for it.

However perhaps if it were "are you ready for a message? ack. Ok here is the message. ack." and it were done in sequence then may. That would work out to 1500 milliseconds. Maybe if anyone in the chain loses a packet (assuming it is UDP) then it restarts the whole sequence, then MAYBE that can explain the horrible lag. Maybe.

But man, I mean really, that would be a very stupid way to do the protocol.

aebrahim · November 30, 2002, 20:26

Quote:

Originally posted by cronos_qc
The first thing we need is the ability to kick people from the game, and from the first screen when you wait for people...
I dont know why,we dont have the ability to kick people!!

Have a nice day

Anyone serious wanted to play a game of Civ3PTW, contact me at:dominic_doucet@hotmail.com

Yeah I wanted to do this, and I was totally baffled as to how they overlooked putting this feature in. There's really no excuse for it not to be there.

WarpStorm · November 30, 2002, 21:09

Quote:

Originally posted by Huzurdaddi
I mean, really, what is it doing during this time? Is it sending to each player, in sequence, a multi part message about the move that just took place? Let's see if the math works out

6 player, so 5 other than myself. Send a message to each and wait for reply, that 150 milliseconds * 5. That's only 750 milliseconds, so that can't account for it.

750 milliseconds is about 3/4 of a second for every action. This doesn't take into account packet losses and retries. Assume a small amount of that and you are up to a second lag for every action in the game.

Huzurdaddi · November 30, 2002, 21:55

Quote:

750 milliseconds is about 3/4 of a second for every action.

Yes, I know that. However, it does not add up to 2 or more second per action.

But your comment got me thinking. MAYBE the protocol is token-ring like. So one one client can talk at a time. And if it does take in the neighborhood of 750 ms per action that MIGHT explain it.

Also maybe they have some "intelligent" code for figuring out where the token is, like asking evey client if they have it.

You know that could easily explain why it's so crummy.

It would also explain why on lan it's not too bad. On lan you are talking about 10 ms or less per round trip. So on lan it may take something like 200 ms which is perfectly acceptable (well a LITTLE laggy, but not bad).

It's probably not right. But it is AN explanation. Although if it is true it does indicate a little lack of clue on the aprt of some developers over at fraxis.

Ozborn · December 1, 2002, 11:47

Civ3 mutliplayer is still broken in the sense that the game finding and setup is horrible and lag is still a problem. Having said that though, the 1.14 patch is a significant improvement from the complete non-functionality of the original game's multiplayer. I have actually played 3 games, 2 to completetion (short elimination style games) so that is better than nothing. Still they need to make an interface like AoE2 or Warcraft3, there shouldnt' be so much lag.

WarpStorm · December 1, 2002, 14:56

Of course AOE2 and Warcraft3 had a few tries to get it right, not to mention publishers who don't jack them around.

Acemo · December 1, 2002, 21:18

My biggest problem with MP so far has been finding good players, players that will finish games and not just drop out when they get a little behind.
Granted, the game still needs work, but it is certainly playable and a whole lot of fun, at least when I can find dependable players.

Alexander's Horse · December 1, 2002, 21:38

Quote:

Originally posted by Acemo
My biggest problem with MP so far has been finding good players, players that will finish games and not just drop out when they get a little behind.

That pretty much the problem with all mp games

One reason many of us wanted direct ip is you avoid these matchmaking lounges which are usually full of losers and unreliable players. Its the same with Civ 2 - the gamezone room is a circus.

yxhuvud · December 1, 2002, 23:15

Someone should tell them to go and look at the network code in freeciv. Now there's a civgame that is lagfree, and without any of those awful out of sync crashes. I really can't see how the amount of information that has to be relayed would differ much between that and civ3...

Coracle · December 2, 2002, 00:17

I know what the review said on Gamespy.com about MP:

Quote:

It doesn't work.

Well, that's not entirely fair. It does work, but only after a patch. And it doesn't work well. For an expansion focusing on multiplayer as the key addition, that's a big no-no. The whole of the multiplayer experience is an exercise in frustration as the game will crash and it may do so in a severe fashion. Woe unto those who enjoy the benefits of "Alt-Tabbing" out of the game, as this not only caused my game to crash, but my system to restart as well.

So MP stinks. End of story.

Psycho Billy · December 2, 2002, 01:14

Quote:

Originally posted by Coracle
I know what the review said on Gamespy.com about MP:
So MP stinks. End of story.

So whatever happened to:

Quote:

Originally posted by Coracle
The computer gaming "reviews" have been revealed to be a farce. Back in December before even the first patch they gave a messy beta game glowing reviews. So I'd never waste my time with reviews again as they are written by Industry shills.

Are computer gaming "reviews" now legit? Should we trust reviewers now?

Oerdin · December 2, 2002, 01:35

I guess Coracle only likes reviews that agree with him. That said I have heard an over welling amount of negatives about MP. Even after the lastest patch.

What's the point in buying an MP game when the MP is buggy and the interface is poorly designed? I have to say that Warcraft 3 has a great MP and even CTP2 (which is two years old) has a great, fully functioning, MP. I just can't excuse Firaxis shipping a product like this for the second time in a row.

Cyclotron · December 2, 2002, 02:16

That... is the funniest thing I've seen all day. Go hypocracy!

WarpStorm · December 2, 2002, 05:54

Quote:

Originally posted by yxhuvud
Someone should tell them to go and look at the network code in freeciv.

Of course, then they'd be subject to GPL and have to give out the source code to the entire project. I'm sure that the corporate bean counters at Infogrames'd have something to say against that.