Sept 1st Update

how i wonder did they "fix" this known "bug" LOL. i really dont understand how they would of done it. further more random pvp does that include jq? cuz it was fun to take a full group of necro bombers into jq and just blow shiz up LOL.

A.Net, MK is laughing at you.

LOL it aint fixed u can still sync

TA is seeing more activity. Hopefully anet realizes that TA doesn't need to be deleted anymore now.

Actually, ANet argued for the LONGEST time that it's not a bug, that it was just part of the game.

I thought that was exactly what my post wanted to show.

It isn't a bug...it never was. In fact Anet in the past went to great lengths to explain that it was not a bug and it was a normal part of the game. The fact that they are saying it is a bug now that needed to be fixed is hilarious and goes directly against their previous stance.

So I don't laugh at people who say its not a bug...I laugh at people who listen to everything Anet says and completely forget the past.

Oh, haha my bad. I read AP's quote as 'it's a fixable issue' instead of 'it's part of the game, deal with it'.

TMK Anet never specifically stated it wasn't a bug. Anets stance on syncing was not that it wasn't a bug ( which would imply that it is an intended feature ) but that syncing didn't exist. What AP is saying in that quote if you brush up on English comprehension 101 has very little to do with declaring a bug and a lot to do with denying that it can be reliably repeated ( which we all know is false ).

The only change of mind Anet did was acknowledging that syncing exists. It is just another issue in the long line of issues where the community knows about something ages before Anet does.

Hmmmm.... if synching is still possible, then maybe it's time for a suggestion:

Implement like so:
1. Universal queue across all districts.
2. When players hit "start" they receive a random wait from 0-5sec.
3. At the end of the random wait, they are placed at the end of the queue.
4. After placing in the queue, the traditional team matching timer starts.
5. From the player end, they should just see the old 30sec timer replaced with a new random 30-35sec timer.

There. Problem solved.

False. Anet specifically stated it was not a bug...I could probably find it. They also said something along the lines of it being something that was simply in the game (unintended or not), and not really a big problem. I can't remember if they even stated it as an exploit or not.

But yes, they did deny it existed didn't they LoL. Thanks for reminding me that it is even more stupid than I realized.

probably along the lines of:

if(player1 AND player2 pressed join within <0.5secs of each other) {
place player2 in different game
}

or in other words, if two or more players pressed join within a certain time frame, the game will make sure they will never be placed within the same game. the easiest way to do so is artificially add a second or so to each successive player's join time so the old "sync" mechanic never kicks in, and cascade down for all players.

might not be the most elegant of solutions, but its the one that i would use.

Should have been fixed *eons* ago, before the time Anet took the stance that there wasnt even a problem, which itself was eons ago. Not to mention the reports that it still hasnt been fixed anyway. Well, its the thought that counts.

I have not played in some time for various reasons - but wow, the *finally* fixed this one.

Really, this pretty much killed a fairly casual form of PvP for how long?

I like a lot of the fixes I've reviewed since I went elsewhere for a bit, may try it again for a while.

I don't dislike this fix, but getting teamed up with people from american and european districts isnt fun.
I think we should just have all asian and international districts team up, and the euro/american districts.
So that you basically have a RA for the PvE crowd, and one for the PvP crowd.

Or, have 3 districts: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced. Maybe decided on the amount of gladpoints or balth faction you have?

Having to play with mending wammo's and ele's with bows will cause a lot of rage by the ID/KD crowd, which isnt fun for either you or the wammo.

Ra sync gone wooohoooooooo

Any deterministic mechanism (like you suggest) can be inducted from data. Players will (quickly) isolate the mechanism and determine the strategy that maximizes the likelihood of landing in the same group.

Any non-deterministic mechanism is going to require the server to do a lot of calculating every 30 seconds, which isn't a great idea. In principle, it would be easy to whip up some code that would randomize any given list of players. Only difference between this task and shuffling a deck of cards is that you tell the computer to read the size of the deck from the length of the list of players.

But doing so requires moving a lot of zeroes and ones around, so you'd either need longer match timers, more processing power on the server side, or both. Neither of which is appealing from the developer side; both cost money. (One labor, one hardware.) There is of course a third alternative, namely degrade server quality further, but let's not go there.

As with most business problems, this one boils down to money. A good solution to the problem is infeasible because it is costly. Bad solutions still cost money (labor) and are publicly embarassing when they fail. Best practice is to leave the problem alone unless you're willing to sustain the costs necessary to fix the problem for good, because money thrown at deterministic solutions is money wasted.

"Kun Shao has gone on vacation until the Xunlai Tournament House is able to distribute points for the month of May."

Why is everyone talking about this being "borked", or possibly hinting at permanent removal of XTH, or whatever other bullshit people are saying because of this? It says he is being removed UNTIL the May points are distributed. They just don't want this NPC lurking around with no use. It confuses people who are still trying to get their long lost points. They can reduce internet traffic by removing him because now it'll be one less NPC in a district, and people won't be talking to him daily to see if they got their points yet. Anet said nothing about permanently removing XTH, and if the person talking about "borking" Kun Shao could explain what the hell they're talking about, that'd be nice.

Eh I don't know if I want the sync gone for DA. It's fun to try and see how many times I don't die, versing [Ball] players and [NuDe]'s or [SuB]'s.. the latter being the hardest team I've ever faced. Because those 2 first guilds are humans still and make mistakes or get tired etc, but those SuB guys are like robots.

Anyways, I barely ever faced sync in RA. I also enjoy the extreme anger RA in AD gives me and would like that to stay.

Naahh. They can do it in a bit smarter way. For example we added some random number generation in our internal queueing strings. At same time we optimized some of the queries and there was no difference in performance for the outside world. If they just switched to non-deterministic mechanism then indeed players would notice a worse performance on the server side. I am not sure it is possible for GW but might be that some of the stuff can optimized so instead of releasing it as they find a way to do it they use it as a buffer for some other changes like RA.

Anyways great update Anet!