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Closed Some skills heavily rely on latency
Bug type: Skill
Brief bug summary: Some skills are VERY reliable on latency (ping to the game servers).
More details:
The following skills play horribly when playing under high pings -
Dawn Warrior's "Equinox Cycle" (4th job skill). The skill changes between Sun and Moon modes and allowing players to get higher damage when used to combo properly. However, every attack changes your current active mode buff and that waits for the server's buff update. If there's some lag ongoing, the skill can cause attacks to delay for more than one second.
Blaze Wizard's "Orbital Flame" (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th job skills; main attacking skill). The skill shoots a flame from the character. The time it takes to the flame to shoot out of the character is your ping to the server. For me, as I live in Israel, this takes nearly a whole second in the American servers, or just a bit less than 0.2 seconds in the European server. The delay issue makes it very hard to control the skill. And due to the high latency, Blaze Wizard's max hits-per-minute output is limited to about 25% of what the Korean players are able to achieve under the same conditions (latency excluded).
Those skills were designed with the Korean version of the game in mind, where it's region-locked to Korea and everyone gets very low latency (mostly less than 15ms) to the game server so it never got noticed by the developers.
Steps to reproduce:
1. Play from a personal computer, outside of the Nexon offices. Preferably outside of the USA.
2.1 Play Blaze Wizard, shoot an Orbital Flame.
2.2 Play Dawn Warrior, get it to 4th job and use Equinox Cycle.
Character name: Irrelevant.
Character level: Irrelevant.
Character job: Blaze Wizard, Dawn Warrior.
World name: Irrelevant.
Date and time of the incident: Since the Cygnus revamp update, up to today.
Comments
Ping is a very difficult issue, since it's based on your physical location, the physical location of the server, our (society's) technological level, and even something as silly as the speed of light versus the speed of computers. While certain game updates can improve on latency, ping can only really be solved by being closer to the server or making all classes functionally similar. The former option isn't feasible, and the second option isn't desirable.
If you want to suggest changes to improve latency, you may, but this isn't something that can be "fixed" in the same way Root Abyss boxes DCing players or a missing tooltip on Metro hair can.
People like @Peep keep suggesting unblocking tunneling services to improve latency. Nexon has never responded, one way or another.
Are you making up things? Just setup Orbital Flame to shoot at the client side and make Equinox Cycle change the buff on the client side before the serve relays it.
Don't use Overwatch to compare the two. Overwatch is an FPS game with engine prediction of the players' coordination. MapleStory is 2D and doesn't need anything to be ping friendly. Also, I know what ping is and I do networking and system administration for years.
This very same issue with flash jumping/teleporting multiple times being stopped due to high ping was fixed (was very noticeable with Angelic Buster, Xenon, the explorer thieves or every class with double flash jumps), so I can't see why they can't apply a similar fix to those skills.
Do you think anyone from Australia would bother with a class like Wild Hunter in GMS if it was ping reliant? Yeah, me neither.
And yes, if it functions incorrectly under certain circumstances that cannot be avoided whatsoever, it's a bug. If I get 25% of my potential DPM with Blaze Wizard due to having extra ping, it's a bug. It doesn't happen with the top-DPMing classes but only with 2 buggy classes.
The phantom teleport can also be pretty annoying when the servers are under heavy stress.
Client-side skills also run the risk of wz editing. That's why most things in the game are server-sided now.
If you get 25% of your potential DPM with Blaze Wizard due to having extra ping, it's because you have extra ping. Still not a bug.
A bug is an incorrectly functioning game mechanic, ping is just latency. Since you did system administration for years you should know this: if one of your systems malfunctions and crashes when inputting a particular command, that's a bug. If one of your systems takes 2 seconds longer to load data in one location than at another, that's latency. They're two very different things.
I'm not saying you can't lowering latency shouldn't be a goal, I'm saying having a high ping or being ping-dependent isn't a bug. Some classes benefit from lower ping, but that's just the way they're designed.
Then have a check to validate it on the server-side, bingo.
I don't care about my latency, this game is designed horribly and redesigning the way some things work is the way to go.
You can't just say "some classes benefit from lower ping" because that's just denying the issue. This is GMS - Global MapleStory. Why do American players have an edge over me when playing Blaze Wizard just because of their geographical location? Because of bad development and bad game design, of course.
If that's not a bug report, then I don't know what to do with this complaint and I don't know how to make Nexon react.
Do you feel like actually saying anything useful instead of trying to invalidate my post? Justifying bad design won't get this game anywhere.
One of two things should happen. The skills should be updated to accommodate for this seemingly unavoidable problem OR the game itself has to be operating smoothly with consistency.
Oh don't worry. As an American player, I can assure you we get ping lags all the time as well. We're all both equally screwed by unresponsive dev team.
This thread is over a year old. Do not necro threads.