Input Buffering Patch 1.3.4

General Discussion General Discussion
31

Transcript from AGS dev meeting:

dev1: Players hate the skills queue over to the next weapon. We can easily reverse this part of the queue system by removing that part of the code.

manager: Now, hold on. We can’t just undo that part of the code base. I was team lead during the time that feature was being coded. It will make me look bad !

dev1: Ok … so what should we do?

manager: Spend precious time and resources to “fix” it per weapon, that way it would look like last week with me as lead was still productive.

… 1 week of coding

dev1: We only had time to fix input buffering of FS, IG and VG this patch

manager: That’s alright. Just release patch notes and say all weapons are fixed. Players probably won’t notice and I can get my promotion sooner and I can nope out of this project

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32

And now we are here, with input buffering still broken on VG Fire ice also LOL how does the conversation continue on from here?

33

Before this patch was so much worse. At least they are working on it instead of waiting a whole month.

34

But it was all fine before Feb patch also… See the trend here?

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A Trend of working on things to make it better so you can weapon swap instead of being stuck in a constant “sorry guys I couldn’t swap my weapon” problem. Much better then Feb patch… I played a lot more today because it’s improved so much.

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36

@Zelme The same thing weapon swap issue again in the vod linked below - I swap weapons and press riposte which actually lights up! Then my weapon decides to swap back and cast sacred ground on random target all on its own? I am so used to using the ‘swap active weapons keybind’. My muscle memory tells me to spam this key until weapons have swapped, especially during CC so the action happens as soon as I’m out of stun etc which worked fine before, the problem is the game now thinks or queues multiple weapon swaps which ignore me pressing my skill on the swap. Seems if I want to use this key I have to be extremely careful and press it like a sloth. Sucks if you have high APM.

Twitch war VOD 00h16m40s Timestamp of issue

37

I really wish they will just revert the weapon swap queue patch back. For me, it was a lot better than this one.

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38

It’s actually way worse after the patch for me. I ended up just getting off last night and haven’t played since because I was so irritated by it

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39

The idea of the queue is good, but the implementation is not.
Buggy, but also requires some extra “intelligence” put there by the developers so that it ends up actually doing what the players wants to do, not what the player tells it to do.

For example, for the case mentioned above, if I press the weapon swap bind multiple times within a fraction of a second with no other action in between, my intention is not that the character switches weapon multiple times. The intention is that it switches weapong once, and to be sure of that, we mash the switch weapon button multiple times to provide redundancy in case the first time it wasn’t detected or something.

Same if I press Void Blade twice in quick succession: I am not wanting to activate and immediately deactivate the blade and put it on cooldown. I am just wanting to activate it ONCE, and I am mashing the button to make sure it happens.

The reason we mash the button is because of what a video posted above shows: the player is mashing Q to get the Orb of Protection casted, but it doesn’t work. They press it like 5 or 6 times and nothing happens, until it’s too late.

So what we have now is a system that shouldn’t trust the user input, and a user that doesn’t trust the input system, because the system behaves arbitrarily either ultraresponsive, or non-responsive at all. So the user doesn’t know whether they need to spam the keypresses, or not, to make them work.

I don’t think the solution is to go back to pre-February state. We need to have a decent input system that is not based on spamming keys until they decide to work.
But, dear god, it needs to be consistent and work every time.
They need to fix the bugs and keep the queuing system.

1 Like
40

Actually ground targeted spells like ice storm are an exception to the double tap and cast rule test it yourself, same with most bow skills, the way the bow functions normally prevents the cast.

41

For me and many others it’s 100% worse than pre Feb patch

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42

I actually never had any problems regarding input prior to feb patch. Skills fire off perfectly fine. I’m not sure if players notice they are ccd or inbetween an action when they are expecting their button presses to work but I have a pretty good hunch it’s either cc or inbetween another action.

Anyone that’s played mmos knows button mashing comes with the territory, it’s just how it is. This game just happens to have staggers and cc and the light and heavy attacks which are the reason why your button presses won’t do anything till you done being staggered ccd or finish your light/heavy animation

3 Likes
43

After reading this and other threads we might need an optional buffering in settings so players can decide if they want this or not at all. It seems that some players actually like mashing. If that is the playstyle you like then the input queue might not work as intended for your playstyle. Maybe it also needs a pass on different weapons as well to see if those weapons/skills are queueing up differently as seen in some of these videos on this thread. Having an option to turn Input buffer off or queue up multiple buttons for combos might be a solution we need.

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What they did with this patch was to push the game harder toward the server side being authoritative. It causes issues when player actions happen between server update cycles. It is most often seen now with the charge ability. You start the charge after a server time point and it is completed before the next server time point. The server sees the client in a different location and reverts it to the previous time point because it never recognized the action took place.

2 Likes
45

good one. now they need urgently handle it.

46

im less concerned about how hard they worked on something than I am on the results of that work.

When what they make as a fix is actually worse than the thing it was fixing, then I dont care at all about how much work went into that nonfix.

in the case of weapon switch bugs:

Before: You occasionally could have a time when the wrong skills were showing on your hotbar, related to the weapon in your hand. If you just swapped weapon by hitting a single key, it fixed the issue.

Now: You blow cooldowns for no reason on a weapon you dont even have equipped yet. only the visual aspect of the bug is any better, and everything else related to combat and movement and using skills is broken, janky, delayed and oh yeah you just cant block half the time for reasons. Also, nothing you do fixes it.

I’d rather hit weapon swap one more time and occasionally have the wrong icons showing, than being totally unable to do pvp without huge issues and in some cases entirely broken weapons.

I’m sure a survey of the players would find this to be the prevailing opinion.

The way the results of their changes FEEL in the game is the most important thing here. I dont care how many lines of code were written or who’s in charge or whatever.

I DO care that they may have been unable to discern this difference and reach this opinion themselves in regards to this patch. They either could not tell the difference, or they could and didnt care and pushed it out anyway, or they didn’t test any of this at all.

None of those 3 options is OK. All of them are glaring indications of incompetence when it comes to developing a game.

If incompetence isn’t the reason, then I’d have to assume this patch was the result of malice.
I’m not left with a lot of options otherwise.

3 Likes
47

It’s not about button smashing.

See this clip:

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48

Im nt happy, the new input buffering is just as bad. I end on the wrong weapon all the time, my weapon swap back in its own for some reason.

And god try using entomb while someone is hitting you, they either constantly cancel your ability cast or you cancel it yourself prematurely.

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Thats because you couldn’t swap weapons at all if something was queued before it. You also couldn’t swap if you were being hit. You also couldn’t swap sometimes if the swap had not happened yet, you expected it to swap and started doing actions again.

1 Like
50

They won’t need to work on it if they just reverted it to February’s code and took it back to the lab for fine-tuning. In Feb people were frustrated because they couldn’t swap weapons, but they had been dealing with it since launch so they had time to get used to it. Now they have to learn a new workaround for this new queuing bug and still stay competitive. Casting spells you didn’t meant to (or stuttering while running and trying to cast) is far worse than just not being able to swap.

1 Like