you cant sell a game that doesnt work

[Mark]

You literally cannot play multiplayer. I have never gotten through a game. There is NO multiplayer on this game because it doesn't work. Period. End of Story.



Lost costumer from take command days. I understand you're a small company but it just doesn't work and I cannot recommend it to any of my friends because we cannot play against each other.

Moderator - EDITED TITLE AFTER FORUM COMPLAINT

[Los]

You realize that people are playing large multiplayer battles constantly? Try a cursory search on You tube..or Witness: http://kriegsspiel.forumotion.net/f32-scourge-of-war

Now, how about you pull your finger out and post exactly what your problem is (nicely) and maybe someone will help you.

Los

[Mark]

Um I play ks and we haven't gotten through a single battle without a crash or clitch. Where are these so called large scale games? When the game first came out excitedly i tried to play tons of multiplayer with all the people who bought the game in that first wave. The vanilla game couldn't get through multiplayer games. Most of the guys I played with initially are like freest concept but no stability. And it's the same a year later.


Just saying not many people buy a game for its single player (to wit, I've never played). Multiplayer doesn't support multicores so you have to over clock. It glitches throughout, especially with commanders and their movements. The lag is incredible even running top end machines with good connections. Random errors lose people for such things as using a courier, ordering a brigade formation, pulling up the minimap.

Games that should take an hour have to be restarted again and again and again and again

[CaptainAndrew]

I play with the ks group and with Mitra too from time to time and I can attest to OP's statement. For some reason the rate of failure is much higher than the rate of success when it comes to MP.

It doesn't really matter if it's a mod or the vanilla game or if it's one group of players or another, it's still more likely than not that a battle would not successfully go from start to finish on the first try with lag that doesn't gradually become far too bad to play with.

It certainly doesn't help that there is no proper way to save a battle that wasn't a debug option with very limited features. At the very least, this debug option should be expanded upon so it saves more information of the battle so that troops would retain orders given before the restart and routed and surrendered units would stay that way.

[mitra76]

Andrew did we play the same matches? Honestly I remember very few failures not linked external factors (my PC blue screens, people using mods different from the what activated from the other players, people with bad connections, people who don't know how open own proper router firewall, people using WI-FI connections, etc..). I cannot speak for the KS mod but I don't think the things are different, only with mods people have to make more attention to activate things correctly and in the correct orders, is a matter of good practice and experience; in GB was not different. And matches with SOW usually have more players and last longer than the normal TW multi matches which desync frequently anyway.

Last week we played two times with 9 players both battles and with 35000 and 46000 men in the field, without evident lag and with 3 new players without previous experience.

[CaptainAndrew]

Even playing with you we are usually not able to play from the first try and must either restart from the beginning in case it lags or save and restart if it freezes in the middle. In many cases, after saving and restarting, the game will run smoother for some reason. Did the players do something that made it lag less or did something change by itself?

Opening ports can be difficult for some setups and seems to be dependent on luck sometimes. There are people that can connect to a host and then there are some that can't connect even though their firewall should be open and they have been able to connect to other hosts.

It, honestly, doesn't even matter if it's mostly the players fault for causing the issues because it still means that the game is hard to play without interruptions or gradually increasing lag.

MP is very dependent on the player to not make a mistake by turning on a newer version of the Grog's toolbar or not having the game in the same language as everybody else. Everything has to be perfect for many hours due to the usual length of the battles but that is very hard to achieve. Many people live together with someone which means that there might be someone else using the internet and potentially causing lag. It's easy to blame the player but the it's quite hard to be the player for whom everything is set up perfectly.

I guess this probably cannot be remedied by the developer without significantly changing how the game works which I think nobody would want. The problem is that only real way to deal with this is to restart the game. If it is restarted near the start then it's ok but, if it needs to be restarted later on, the game might need to be saved. Saving, like I said in my previous post, has not been implemented fully and so it's not a good option.

[voltigeur]

Multiplayer doesn't support multicores so you have to over clock.

So let me understand this. You are

A. Not playing the vanilla game but a mod which I understand changes the game parameters extensively
B. Over clocking.

Do you not think that adding in these factors may cause some instability issues?

The lag is incredible even running top end machines with good connections.

Good connections to where? Your datagrams will travel over a variety of different providers links to arrive at their destination and the contention on those links will all vary.

Have you run traceroutes from each client machine to the host machine to arrive at the conclusion the players all have good connections?

If there is little or no packet loss and reasonable ping times on each hop on each player's individual link then you could only then conclude there were good connections for that particular game instance.

[con20or]

Moving this to tech help forum.

Mark/ CaptainAndrew - if you would like to post more info on the crashes you are getting we can take a look. Please copy and paste your sowwl.log files as well so we can see what error you are getting. We can help with any problems as long as they are not mod related as it is up to the player to make sure they have matching/up-to-date mods installed.

[CaptainAndrew]

Thank you for the offer to help but as I tried to explain earlier - in most cases it's not the game's fault for causing crashes.

I would've definitely liked if more of the problems were due to the game because then there would be a chance they are dealt with permanently. It's far worse when the cause is something no one can ever fix for good. That's why it's so imporant to have a good saving feature

[NY Cavalry]

You will have to excuse Mark. It appears he was in the heat of battle at the critical point and lost connection for whatever reason. He will be back as he plays both Waterloo and Gettysburg and is really a good guy to have around. Just keep his troop limits under 2500 men.

From my limited experience playing Waterloo MP is that MP is much improved. Runs quicker and is more stable than Gettysburg.

A rising issue here is with MP support in general. In times past, Norbsoft has been very supportive of MP even putting up with unjust flack at times. In general, and at all times MP players have always appreciated the efforts.

I will now ask two requests:

1. That, as in times past, that a representative from Norbsoft come and talk with us. SOW Gettysburg for all the trouble getting it to what it is today is a great MP experience. From TC2 (no MP) to SOW Gettysburg is really worthy of praise and gratitude on our part.

2. Windows 8 and now Windows 10 is going to kill MP. These two operating systems are very unstable in MP. I cannot speak in absolute terms with Waterloo, but from what I have heard, yes there is a problem.
Windows 7 is a solid operating system that certain players have gone back to in order to play SOW. In this respect the future looks bleak. This largely means that we will not be seeing any new players to MP because they will always be dropping getting discouraged and giving up MP.