I played some online yesterday in a party of 2, and it took us multiple minutes to figure out how Town Portal was “supposed to” work, because the experience of using it while online goes like this:
hit the Town Portal button
the portal appears
click on it
it disappears
guess it didn’t work. better hit the town portal button again
(repeat steps 1 through 5 until you realize you need to click on the portal and then wait 5 to 10 seconds for the load screen)
If there was some indicator that the portal had been activated instead of disappearing - maybe like the “Now Traveling To ” indicator that appears when you change zones - neither of us would have been confused.
All zone transitions online take a good 10 secs or so before you get a loading screen. It’s a bit more obvious with minions as they despawn immediately on clicking the transition (which also leaves a minion class defenceless while you wait).
Have you never played mp???
Though I’ve never had the specific issue described.
i typically see a few seconds. it’s not that it takes a few seconds that’s a problem, it’s that i can’t tell i’ve actually clicked on the portal, so i spend the next few seconds repeatedly clicking on the portal.
and i do that because, invariably, it never activates on the first try.
As you may have noticed different people are affected differently by neteork issues. My ping is always around 10-15 ms, I very rarely encounter rubber banding or lags (never when I play solo, sometimes when I play in a group). Yesterday after the latest patch was the first time group play was unplayable in a party of 4.
The zone transitioning issues you describe are gone for me since 0.9 went live. Have you never played the actual live version??
Yes, though since I live in the pariah state of the west coast of Europe, my internet packets are given a good hard internal cavity inspection by French boarder control before they’re allowed to enter the EU. I’m sure if I were a Citizen of that Glorious and not even slightly fractious country (or had an Irish passport) then I would also have such low pings.