Multiplayer zone swapping

When playing in online solo, going into a new zone takes maybe 1-2 seconds before the load screen appears. But when playing with someone else this time sometime goes up to 20+ seconds. Idk if this is somehow intentional or something else but it makes playing in multiplayer really annoying when you have to wait nearly a minute for the zone to “load” + actual loading screen. Just standing around doing absolutely nothing. If this has been posted already and this is a dupe i apologize i did not manage to find it in search.

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In any case any problems should be posted more. It’s never bad or worthless.
Any zone transfer(Questing,Monoliths,Dungeons) while playing with friends causes excessive amounts of wait time.

What people that love this game in these forums miss a lot is, reporting more problems, instead of praising the developers a lot. Because the cons are more than the pros at this time.

Thats quite an odd thing to say. Its always good to report both positive and negative issues with a beta game to help improve it but you seem to hint that this doesnt happen here. It does - sometimes in very long and heated discussions.

There are lots of reports in the Bug Section of the forum about specific repeatable problems & bugs that affect the game. There are lots of discussions & additional feedback notes posted in the official discord server too. There are plenty of reports in the normal parts of the forums of things that can generally be improved - in the opinion of those that “love this game” - these include everything from conceptual game design considerations to very specific changes & feature requests.

Those of us that have been here the longest and arguably like the game more than most are usually the ones that post the most criticism about the game and its usually done in a constructive manner which may seem like its more positive than negative at first glance.

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Positive things most of the time aren’t worth reporting. Since they are overpraised globally.
If you count the legion of problems this game has and not addressed/dragged + the amounts added after each patch you would quickly realize, the devs are either content with the current state of the game after 5 years in early access which is extremely ignorant. Or unable to fix/comprehend most of them.
This game’s lifespan due to all these and the lack of other crucial rpg aspects is so short you can’t even imagine. This is just one of many wrenches thrown in the gears.
And to be fair at this point there are so many creating an actual list would be rather hilarious.
From basic itemization, to crafting. From progression/questing to endgame or rather lack of endgame. From broken mechanics to the extreme of not being able to understand how certain things are still in the game.Lets not talk about the recent events of multiplayer and monetization through donation on an product thats barebones which can be compared only to a glorified Kickstarter 2.0 edition.
You guys want to be fair, well this should have been said with much more details rather early.
And no nobody would read this including the developers so we are just talking here for the sake of our own discussion.

PS. It’s even more hilarious this thing has a discord where things are being constantly reported. That speaks volumes.

I honestly could go on for a while with things that need fixing but the network thing with zone swapping in multiplayer has been bothering me a lot as it pretty much ruins the experience for me and my s.o. due to the constant waiting every time. We enjoy the game but basically forced to play solo even though there’s a multiplayer option. I’ve had the game for about 2 years now and there’s a lot i like about it but the updates have been feeling more and more like adding stuff without fixing long standing issues and i just play less and less. Which sucks as the game is very fun overall

It’s because a new server has to be spun up when there is more than 1 player. When you are playing solo online, the server you are already on can just unload the old zone and load a new one. When you are in multiplayer online, the first person can’t unload the exiting zone because the other people are still in it. So a new server has to be spun up to send that first player to. This is what causes that delay.

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Mike, this “problem” seems to be unique to Last Epoch. Is this a solution the team came on its own? Do you know how other APRGs handle zone transitions and avoid delays like that?

For example POE transitions are almost instantaneous and they keep the previous instance alive for a little bit.

Not sure why problem is in quotes, it’s definitely a problem. It’s also not unique to LE at all, there are just better solutions available in other situations because of related factors. The other option we had available was to put a zone transition party popup window, similar to what you see in D3 when entering a boss room. This would let everyone transition at the same time and it would allow for additive loading. It is also what happens in the monolith already. This is acceptable because everyone is in the rest zone so we can kinda put everyone in a bottle and change the echo that is loaded on the same server. We have looked at some other solutions that have been implemented in other games. Well, as much as we can given limited access availability. I am very aware of POE’s transitions.

People are working on this problem.

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Its nice to know this is something being worked on in the back-end and acknowledged as a problem by the team. I do hope an alternative can be found to the current way of zone-transitioning to make multiplayer lobbies more enjoyable

I put problem in quotes, because I was not sure if it was recognized as a problem and wanted not to be offensive. I know the team worked long hours to get multiplayer working. Glad this still issue is still getting attention.

On a side note - do you have any plan cooking to help corruption progression when playing as a group? At the very least make every player eligible for boss rewards also get a Gaze? This has been the biggest turn off for my group to play MP together. The random rewards aren’t half as bad, but personal progress getting stuck is not cool.

The changes made to how you reduce your corruption were required to be implemented and tested before we could really look at corruption sharing as even a possibility as previously it could get a whole timeline into a completely unplayable state if you farmed corruption while getting carried. This is still an issue but it is fixable by the player with the new zone type.

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I disagree with you but I respect your right to have an opinion.

I have been around playing LE since Aug 2020 (about a month or so before you joined this forum) and even though I have spent over 2k+ hours playing the game since then, I do not share your vitriolic views at all.

I am not discounting the fact that the game is in beta and by definition has a huge list of issues & backlog of content and functionality. I believe that I am simply more realistic as to the demands of software development and its difficulties and perhaps more importantly, I do not feel that the game nor its developers owe me anything and my attitudes to issues, bugs, delays are moderated by this simple fact: I am not owed anything at all and I have no skin in the game to make demands or get angry when things are not done or problems happen.

As to snide kinds of comments about the developers not even reading these posts - I dont think I even need to defend that rubbish.

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Why does corruption have to be tied in to gameplay elements?

Corruption as a mechanic is a difficulty & rewards adjustment, but progressing linearly through it only makes sense for the first character on an account. Once a second character is started the player has advanced knowledge of the game plus stashed gear. Non-empowered monoliths are already very similar - they exist to fill the level & gearing gap between fresh characters and empowered monoliths, but once you have to level an alt with stashed gear they are just tedious.

If you think about it corruption is not different from difficulty in the arena. Memory keys already exist. I believe you can solve a bunch of problems by just turning it into a slider and completely decouple it from the shades and just track it account wide.

Whenever a character completes echoes on the maximum corruption possible for his account he earns corruption points and slowly increases the upper limit of the slider, but whenever he resets an echo he can always control the slider to go down or up (to the limit unlocked) as much as he wants.

This (or anything along this idea) will fix a myriad of issues of syncing between MP characters at different stage of progress, leveling alternative characters and not being rewarded playing echoes in other people’s webs.

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Fair enough, reality for one may not be the same for others.I can give you a number of early access/beta/kickstarter projects that started something great, got backed, and struggling after that even when they got a financial back that many others can also get. Anyway, I dont believe its about money, but about delivering on your word.

Quoting one of the latest developer streams. This is what we will get in 1.0.
Masteries, Item Factions, Performance improvements.
1.0 clip

Its hard to not notice the lack of mention to all the crucial “Bugfixes” since this game exists basically. Maybe my decision to watch this person a few times has been a mistake since he plays and sees the problems but blatantly ignores them or plays around them, not mentioning them. Intentionally most of the time its solo also, because naturally the single player part has less problems. By less I mean, the regular auditory will notice them less. Good advertising and all, but no. It has to stop for the game to have a realistic following, apart from the small amount of people here.

PS. Trust me Ill be the first person to say, “Hey they did this right, Grim Dawn now has rival. Diablo/PoE players can now come and have fun here.” Sadly as of now, that wont happen. Its just an interest itch. Not for myself, since I still play this. But for most people that tried it.

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Bugs will always exist as long as content keeps getting added. The only way to have a game with no bugs for its life is if the game is unchanging. Even then, there is the potential problems that can happen due to equipment maintenance. If you want no bugs, go play some old console games that aren’t online.

A weird answer since old console games have tons of them. And people love a lot of them cause they are non-intrusive (for the most part). The Nintendo era 70-90s is infamous about those. Its about to eliminate the things that make the gameplay experience unpleasant.

But Ill take it, and add “go play old console games” to my solution list

Think this is as far as I go, because its obvious the message isn’t going across. Seems that people love to ignore those. But before I leave any meaningful feedback and leave (start playing more rarely) even here are a few things that need extreme attention.

Multiplayer.

  • Abysmal loading rates
  • Unable to play any summoning build cause the lag and problems (yes one of the friends played a druid and that was causing massive issues). My guess is the game can’t just handle many objects on the screen and breaks or lags just has general problems.
  • Constant movement skills rubber-banding (not network related).
  • The chance if the game wants to lock some of your skills (you are pressing a button but nothing is cast). This happens when you load the zone, so you are unable to use some of your skills until you transition to a new zone again. So you basically watch and/or return to town?! This happened a ton to everyone I played with.
  • In general very laggy experience (Not network or System spec related, the game just craps itself)

Dungeon bugs: Some can be produced in MP and SP.

  • Temporal Sanctum you can still skip the walls with certain movement skills due to bugs with rubber banding or longevity of play (This works on both SP and MP). The performance of the game degrades over time and you will see many weird things in general.
    (Why this is important, well I don’t need to switch time, meaning I can just rush to the exit)

  • Lightless Arbor - getting engaged while transitioning still happens when you are not playing Offline. That results in your hero dying. And yes that results in 1 lost key (which is not a problem but it is in the end).I guess hardcore enjoyers will appreciate this one.

  • A lot of the campaign bosses are untouched since release (that means a lot of them either act weird, funky hitboxes, and incorrect telegraphs). As you can suspect in multiplayer this feels even worse due to the added problems above.

  • Certain quests in Multiplayer (optional quests) cannot be completed and lock out. Cannot say why but if you log in alone you can complete it and then you can make a full party again and continue.

If this is not enough there is much more. But those are the major problems at the moment.
And no if you didn’t know I’m not picky, just want it to be working as intended (unless that was what is intended)

Good luck with supporting the game. But unless this is fixed the multiplayer will be basically what you see at the steam charts. Truth is its extremely unpleasant to play Multiplayer, and trust me I love my friends company, cracking jokes all the time is the only thing that kept me playing. Otherwise online is just a complete mess.

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“Bugfixes” are a given. Just like the News at Ten doesn’t start off with, “I know you’re supprised guys, but the sun rose this morning and the universe didn’t implode…”.

As you can see from the patch notes over the last few years, bug fixes have always made it into each and every patch, even the big content patches.

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I started playing LE today with 2 other friends and I had this unfortunate surprise with this delay problem between zones. I really hope they can resolve this, we bought the game just to play together and this is really a problem.

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