Concerning Battle Servers.

[Swift]

An important announcement to inform all players that the open beta is underway, bringing with it battle servers. they work by slowing the game down when someone lags then speeding it up for the person who did lag so they can cath up. There are no pauses at all. Sounds good so far...

However, after testing a hectic 3v3 we found there were innumerable instances of units failing to respond to commands because they had to catch up from the lag. this meant my army in particular from about ten minutes in did not respond at all because lag prevented it from happening, meaning I could use no abilities, purchase no units, move no units and not use any globals until the computer had attempted to catch up, which in a large fight never happened, an example being my Chaos Lord took four minutes to respawn after clicking respawn.

Unless you have a very powerful computer or don't mind watching your units rather than playing them, please do not download the open beta until things are fixed.

Another problem are the army levels resetting (they come back on the older patch which can be reinstalled), not ever gaining army level experience, no ping counter in game and lag induced sync errors, though some of these may be down to faults in the beta and not the servers.

[Adeptus Noobus]

Do you know wether the Elite Mod will be affected by the new Server system? (as in: still being able to log into a game when playing Elite)

If your hectic testing was already while playing the Elite Mod, please disregard my question.

[Nuclear Arbitor]

huh... i would have thought it would be a smooth transition given that they got it to work with coh2.

[Caeltos]

It's probably not an exact identical copy-paste. But I think it'll ultimately boil down to the persons individual PC capabilities and performance to make sure there are no errors. It's been 3 years since the game was released, and I think it's about time people have sufficient rigs to run the game to begin with.

Since Battle Servers are also server-based, there might be some conflicting issues with having people being abit all over the place. Not sure exactly on the functionality on how it all works actually. It's very fuzzy, but largely it should be an improvement.

Despite that, it's an open-beta stage, but most importantly it's vital to relay feedback/information about the state of the Battle Server testing so they can make propert adjustments. The more elaborate you are about when sync-errors, and misc. stuff that occurs that are interrupting the performance, the more likely they are to identify the issue at hand.

[crazyman64335]

so are we playing on these new servers or not? because it does affect the "version" of the game, (deleting replays, resetting army levels etc)

[Swift]

They still need further testing, the game we played was not representative of any real game that would be played, though it was as large as the game could get, meaning now I have seen the maximum and minimum of it (having played a high resources 3v3 and a regular 1v1). The 3v3 was to test the limits of the servers, which proved they end up breaking the game in really large fights by having unresponsive units as they take time to respond in "real-time" as opposed to when one clicks them, however this was present in 1v1 too, when my opponent reported their units "lagged" during response.

It needs a bit more delving into, but so far it is only mean't for those who would never lag anyway, ones with a more powerful computer that is fine with dealing with lag.

[Nuclear Arbitor]

it will be a patch so yes, it will probably break replays. army levels should be fine though; i suspect the reason they were affected is because you were using a beta.

[Swift]

Apart from the obvious faults with army levels and other displays, the multiplayer is really enjoyable if you can handle it, because there is no lag which is great and I could appreciate in the early game more, so it isn't a bad thing these battle servers, it is just they are something you must be aware of, as even people with decently powerful PCs said they were experiencing lag with ordering their own units.

[PhatE]

My Warboss has never looked uglier than he did after 1 game