Ladder
The ladder will be available to all cycle characters. There are plans to eventually add many types of ladders to the various endgame activities available, though it’s unknown when this will occur.
May 19, 2023
Mike: I think there’s opportunities for good ways to do that. I’ve talked about this before how I would implement it, if it was just like carte blanche go ahead Mike do what you want. I’d personally like to, if we were going to do this, I think it would look a lot more like – almost like a…back when I used to play WoW you would get tokens for your tier sets. I’d really like to see something similar to that happen for ladder rewards so there isn’t this issue of missing out on it and then it like going away forever type thing.
Also, having some sort of like, I don’t know, point system where you can pick one of some option, like if you get enough points or something, I don’t know. I think there’s lots of ways to do it where it’s really fun. It acts as a nice reward for achieving something because having those like, ‘Hey look what I did, here’s this cool thing I got for being awesome.’ I think those are really great, and I think there’s a lot of pitfalls in adding those and presenting them nicely. I think there’s opportunities for something to be there. We don’t have anything specific planned.
Source: YouTube Link
May 19, 2023
Mike: Not initially. Yeah, I think there’s – yeah, you’ve hit the nail on the head on one of the reasons why it’s good to have and I think it’s going to be one of those things that we’re going to need to be careful about how we implement it, to have it be something that people are excited about and not have it be concerning. Maybe like, I don’t know, some sort of minimum achievement that’s not relative to other players for a specific bonus, I don’t know. I don’t know if this is the right way to do it or not. I guess this is a suggestion, and please give us feedback on what you want to see.
Source: YouTube Link
May 19, 2023
Mike: We’re not starting a new cycle with the initial ladder launch [patch 0.9.1], we’re just adding it to the game. However, when 1.0 drops there’ll be a ladder reset and only new characters created after 1.0 will be eligible for the ladder, it’s a very standard ladder system. The characters eligible for ladders will need to be new characters as you go in.
Veterans will still have an advantage though because of the experience that they have, like as a player, which I think makes sense. That’s not something we’d want to take away, I don’t think either. I think that’s a positive thing. If you can learn and increase your skill level as a player and do better because you’ve increased your skill level as a player, I think that’s positive feedback.
I don’t know, I could be wrong about these things. I know I’ve found myself questioning a lot of the things I’ve assumed about – like that I’ve taken my personal feelings for it and pushed that towards an assumption that other people feel the same way for a lot of these things. Quite a few times it’s been very wrong. I play games differently than a lot of people, is something I’ve learned. I don’t know maybe I’m just getting old.
Source: YouTube Link
May 19, 2023
Mike: Sorry, so we’re talking post launch ladders. When a news cycle starts and you’d like to participate in a new ladder you have to create a new character with a new stash and nothing from the previous one on that new ladder. So you’ll be starting from the exact same equal playing field of everyone else. There is literally zero mechanical in-game functional advantage to being an extremely experienced enfranchised player.
The only advantage that an experienced enfranchised player will have is the personal experience that they have, the personal knowledge and information and personal experience, I don’t know how else to say this, that they as a player have. So you could put a day one player on a five year old account and a player who’s played for five years on a brand new account and they would have functionally identical experiences, though the advanced player may have MTX that makes you look different, but the enfranchised experienced player would probably do better because of their personal skill. The only thing you can bring with you to a new cycle ladder is your skill and cosmetics.
Source: YouTube Link
May 19, 2023
Mike: Maybe, maybe. That’s a tough one to do. There’s some tricky stuff there. We don’t have plans for that initially, but maybe.
Source: YouTube Link
June 23, 2023
Mike: Honestly, I have not looked at the overall balance of the ladder recently. I know that it’s going to be way off. I am not surprised that the ladder is in absolute shambles right now, as far as balance of something like that goes…at all. That is not surprising. I know we very intentionally did not make some – there were some nerfs for some builds that we very intentionally held off on doing until the next ladder cycle. We’re still trying to really dial in what strategy we’re going to be using for mid-cycle balances and I expect we’ll probably be airing on the side of caution for making changes. So we’ll probably be hesitant to make large nerfs mid-cycle, especially for high powered builds that are achieving top ranks on the ladders.
At the same time, like if you’re not going to nerf those things mid-cycle you’re kind of left in sort of a weird situation where if you buff other things to keep up with them… Sorry, let’s start right off the top. If you nerf those things – let’s say every build in the game can do 100 waves, I know that’s not true, and one build can do 500 waves. Oh my god! There’s people at the top of the ladder with 500 waves and you’re like that’s clearly the massive outlier. The obvious solution is to nerf that one build so that it’s not crazy more powerful than everything else, right. Easy…so nerf it. Great, now nothing can ever take the top spot on the ladder. Well that sucks. [Mike laughs] Suddenly the ladder is just dead for the rest of the entire cycle. What do you do?
The other option, and I know that these are very simplistic answers here – another simplistic answer is just buff a few other things so that they’re competitive now. Okay, so now you’ve made the new expected point on the ladder 500 waves instead of 100 waves. Is that something you want? Is that good for the game? Does that have any knock-on effects? Well yeah, there’s a knock-on effect in the sense that now you’re expecting to sit around playing for 500 waves instead of 100 waves to compete. Is that fair? Is that healthy for people? Maybe not. What do you do? Who knows.
Then after the end of the cycle, if you’ve done that and things were competitive for the cycle, and then the next cycle you’re like, ‘Okay let’s bring things back to 100 waves’ so you’re just going to go nerf like crazy. So the start of every cycle, and let’s say you fall into that pattern, at the start of every cycle you have huge nerfs and halfway through the cycle you have big buffs, and that does not feel good. What ends up happening is you’re like, ‘Okay huge nerfs at the start of the cycle’ and everyone gets really upset about it, and then you start to buff things mid-cycle because one thing stood out and you didn’t nerf it. That’s something to avoid for sure.
We’re still working on how best to fit all of that in and it’s going to come down to a case by case basis. It’s not going to be a one rule fits all situation. But yeah, I hope that gives a little insight into that topic a bit.
Source: Forum Link
Matchmaking
Matchmaking does sound like something they eventually want to see added to the game. What that looks like or how it’ll work is still very likely in early discussions/development.
February 4, 2023
Judd: We’ll be looking at additional ways to find people to group with in game soon but we will have “public” towns functioning for 0.9 where you’ll see other random players and we’ll likely add a separate LFG channel in the meantime. There’s also a LFG channel in the Discord server.
Q: On my part I feel like in 2023 players shouldn’t have to rely on Discord or spamming chat to find someone. Adding a public game list that can have personalized names would go a long way in terms of reaching random players. Not everyone wants play with dedicated group all the time. The game is awesome but I just feel the social part could be improved!
Judd: Agree entirely. We’ll make it happen.
Source: Reddit Link
March 7, 2023
Mike: We have plans for an automated matchmaking system. No details available yet.
Source: Discord Link
June 23, 2023
Mike: Um, I’d really love to get something like this in. It’s something we talked about doing for a while. It’s really surprisingly tough to make work well. Not impossible.
Source: Forum Link
July 10, 2023
Mike: Some sort of automated or directed matchmaking is generally on our radar but we don’t have a specific timeline on when.
Source: Discord Link
August 30, 2023
Kain: We do not currently have any way to automatically sort you into groups with other players as a kind of “drop in” style of forming parties. We are looking at additional options for finding parties, though not being implemented for 0.9.2.
Currently you need to seek out other players to play with. Alongside outside approaches, With towns you can also encounter players in town, and link up with them using the dedicated Town chat channels.
Source: Reddit Link
Improvements to server performance and stability are a huge focus for the team. They’re currently working on multiple solutions to improve their back-end infrastructure and reduce instances of network inefficiency. Expect to see several improvements leading up to launch and over the course of the games lifespan.
February 4, 2023
Judd: There are definite wins we can make for load times before even getting into micro-optimizations. We’ve implemented some nice tech so that end game monolith zones load very quickly but we need to focus on campaign zone transitions next. It will improve between 0.9 and 1.0!
Source: Reddit Link
April 27, 2023
Judd: We’re certainly aware of instances where people are experiencing “lag” which is manifested from a number of different things. Sometimes it’s a skill being used, sometimes it’s a certain function being called that is less performant than it should be, etc. A number of fixes we’ve been putting out are to rectify certain cases of these but we have plenty more in the works. We’re aiming to eliminate all of these causes by 1.0 and ship them as we make the fixes.
Apologies for when you do experience these in the mean time!
Source: Reddit Link
May 19, 2023
Mike: Yes, that’s something we look at all the time. The most knowledgeable and awesomeness developers we have are constantly working to improve our online play experience, who are able to to make improvements and advancements there. We’re rebuilding one of the systems we use from scratch to improve that experience right now. There’s so many little projects that I’m just like if I say this no one…there’s going to be like four people that are like, ‘oh I know what that is’ and one of them is going to be the person that’s doing it. But yeah, we’re working hard on it – it’s a very, very important thing.
Source: YouTube Link
May 27, 2023
Judd: Yea they are a bit longer right now, apologies. We are working to reduce them with both small and large efforts. Later this year we expect them to be significantly reduced and in the short term we can shave a bit of time off them.
Source: Reddit Link
June 2, 2023
Mike: The long loading times is especially bad in multiplayer. That one, that one’s got some problems. We’re still working on that. That one needs some fundamental architectural updates, and some of our back-end has been in the process of a major update for quite a while now. None of it’s been deployed yet but we’re working on it. I know it doesn’t necessarily seem like it but the network infrastructure and performance for multiplayer is a huge priority for us and it is something that we’re working very hard on. It’s just a really huge task and other things get completed at the same time in the meantime, so those things get released. We’re not holding up production on other tasks while we’re working on it. So it doesn’t always appear like it’s a top priority item but it is.
Basically in multiplayer what happens right now is when there – basically each scene is a server, so each zone is its own server, and when you’re on your own playing solo and you do a scene transition the server that you’re on can just close the last scene and open the new one and it’s totally fine and you just keep going. When you’re in multiplayer and you have two people and one person goes into that new scene the person that’s left back has to stay in that server. So the person that’s advancing the new scene has to spin up a new server and that spinning up a new server time is what’s taking so long and what’s causing that huge delay in multiplayer scene transitions. Because once that person’s in the second person coming with them happens really quickly, but frequently that transition happens at the same time so both people go together and both people experience that really long load time. That’s if you want to know why it’s happening. It’s not as terrible in Monolith because we do some funky stuff to have multiple things loaded at once, but it’s still there.
We are exploring multiple avenues to make improvements there. It’s not just like, ‘oh we’ve got an idea let’s try this one idea’ – it’s like, ‘okay we’ve got six ideas, let’s put different people on different ideas and let’s get them all going.’ It is a very high priority thing for us.
Source: YouTube Link
June 14, 2023Hackaloken: One initiative that isn’t visible in the patch notes is that we have an internal team dedicated to improving performance, particularly on the server side. There are significant technical changes underway that will have a big impact, but we’re still in early stages. We’re also working on reducing zone transition times.
Source: Forum Link
June 28, 2023Mike: 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.
Source: Forum Link
June 28, 2023Mike: 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 kind of 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.
Source: Forum Link
June 30, 2023Aaron: I feel more than anything else it’s just the server side stuff, that’s just my personal opinion. Like being able to play with a group of four Necro’s and I go left, you go right, you go Center, you go backwards, and it functions perfectly – I feel like that’s my current greatest want.
Mike: Yeah, there’s definitely a need there and there’s a lot of time and effort being spent on improving that. Like that’s what I’m talking about when I say polish. Getting the servers – it’s less about the actual server boxes themselves. We don’t have hardware problems so much as we have software problems. [Mike laughs]
Aaron: And you’re alluding that it’s not, you know, it’s not like oh there’s 40,000 players on at a time, we can’t handle it. It has nothing to do with the volume of players, correct?
Mike: Correct. Yeah, it’s not been a volume problem.
Aaron: Okay, that’s good because the volume is going to triple soon.
Mike: I hope so. Yeah, we’ve provisioned huge server banks and to try to alleviate problems we’re like alright, let’s buy more servers and it doesn’t help, you know. We’ve tried a lot of things to do that and a lot of the main focus right from the start of the problems we’ve had to now – our main focus and the biggest wins have all come from software improvements and we’re going to keep doing that.
Source: YouTube Link
July 10, 2023
While my internet isn’t great, I don’t experience this in other games. Do you guys have the same experience? Is there anything I can do to minimize the issue?
Judd: We have a large networking update that has been in progress for a few months now that we’re confident will address a lot of this. In short, in many instances that happen frequently we are transmitting more data than is necessary and is causing things to flow less quickly than it should. We have two engineers fully dedicated to the effort with the support of others. Over the next couple patches you should see this happen less and less.
Source: Reddit Link
July 14, 2023
Mike: I can’t really go into details on it but it’s completely behind the scenes. If everything goes right with it to you’ll never be able to tell anything changed other than stuff is faster and better. But it has massive implications for us. We’ve been testing it internally to very good results. But it still has a ways to go.
Source: Discord Link
July 14, 2023
Mike: Wow, I cannot explain this, and this is not from a ‘I’m not allowed to explain it’, I actually can’t explain it because I don’t know. [Mike laughs] Well, okay so I do know some stuff. There’s a few, especially networks with server spin up times – there’s a few tasks that currently run in series, so like one after another, that we can a little bit unreliably start in parallel that’s not very expensive if one of them fails, but it’s rare that one does.
So we can have things that would normally wait – so one thing would start and it would wait for it to finish and then when it finishes it would tell the next thing, ‘Hey I’m done. You can start doing your thing now.’ That second thing doesn’t necessarily need to wait for the first thing to finish and it can just go ahead without it. So we’ve started doing, and hopefully this should be obvious that we do this in many cases already, but there was one key place recently that we’ve expanded to work in parallel instead of in series so that it will speed up load times, especially for entering new scenes in multiplayer. It’s not quite the full speed up we want yet but there’s a significant speed up there. The scale of the changes that are happening with our network infrastructure are enormously colossal. Even that undersells it a bit.
I think this comes on the tales of us mentioning that we’re making some back-end changes with things and, as far as players are concerned, nothing should appear different apart from it just being faster.
Source: YouTube Link
July 21, 2023
Judd: Glad you’re enjoying it! Yes we believe we’ll have much of the rubber banding addressed by then. We are using a network library that is sending a bit of unnecessary data back and forth quickly for some actions that happen very frequently and have been working towards removing that library all together for a lower level networking solution where it’s used. Funny enough we got our first internal playtest session in with the new solution yesterday and it seems to have gone very well. This should make a big impact there and we’ll continue to push for better and better client and server performance.
Source: Reddit Link
July 21, 2023
Judd: Loading times and smoothness of online play is the actual top of our priority list to continue to improve. I have a lot of high caliber engineers working on this and we have clear paths defined to improve them! We agree that a 10 second loading time, for example, is unacceptable.
Source: Reddit Link
July 21, 2023Mike: We’ve been testing a new networking library that one of our team members has been developing from scratch for Last Epoch. I don’t know if I can actually tell the difference but I feel like I can. You shouldn’t be able to see much difference in actual live performance of the game other than like reduction in – when things are going well it shouldn’t appear that anything’s different, is what I’m trying to say. There should be more times that things go well.
Source: YouTube Link
July 31, 2023
Judd: Very valid question and observation. The short answer is that we’re working/iterating on it and they’ll be improving before 1.0. But, who likes short answers…
When it comes to the social features being a bit slower to update it is because we’re currently using a system that is not completely ideal where we’re polling for changes to many social interactions/statuses and we’re being a bit conservative with the poll rate as we evaluate the impacts on cost this has to us. We’re essentially querying a database for updates and upon those queries were fetching other associated data from multiple sources. We have identified things that we’ll be doing for social features that will make this feel much less sluggish but in the future we’re very interested in a slightly larger system rework that can make these updates happen near instantaneously. We want to make sure by 1.0 these updates are at least drastically improved.
As far as “lag” in terms of network lag, there are some areas where the networking library we are completely replacing is sending too much data back and forth - much more than necessary and we’ve been working for the last 8 months on removing the remaining areas where this library is holding us back and making some interactions feel sluggish. That’s at least the main part that I believe is being felt on live while there is more that is being done on a per individual instance of problematic areas to improve that. The good news is that we are looking to replace this problematic library with our new lower level, much more optimized, solution possibly even before 0.9.2. We are merging it into our main development branch for wider internal team testing this week.
For zone transitions there are additional optimizations we’re making for matchmaking to those servers that will help, especially while in parties where the transition time is currently the worst. You can actually see how much faster zone transitioning is in the offline client which is external proof that it’s a server matchmaking slow down. There is actually a much larger project underway to improve this, but to the end user it will just result in you noticing that speeding up.
I suppose the biggest thing to say here is that we are well aware of and actively working to improve those things and you’re not alone in seeing those as areas that need improvement. The exciting thing is that we’re far in the process of making those improvements.
Thanks for your enthusiasm for the game - we’re hard at work!
Source: Reddit Link
August 11, 2023
Mike: So it’s a lot of things. It’s load times, it’s having your friends list update quickly, and like things like that. It seems silly but like, you know, just really reliable multiplayer services are the key stuff we’re working on.
Source: YouTube Link
August 11, 2023Mike: We already send way too much network traffic, we don’t need to have more. [Mike laughs] Talking about the things we’re trying to fix right now, that’s one of the things we’re trying to fix…is reducing network traffic.
Source: YouTube Link
August 26, 2023
Mike: Yes, the recent server downtime was in preparation of server improvements.
Source: Discord Link
September 6, 2023Terek: So with 1.0 getting closer than ever, is there going to be any improvements to multiplayer?
Judd: Yes! [laughs] Yes, absolutely. So this is actually the number one priority within the studio – is to make sure that all of our multiplayer features and all the server performance is improved. This is something that the playerbase will be seeing throughout the next many patches. Patch 0.9.2 comes with a lot of improvements. We have a lot of stuff slated for 1.0 but things like reducing the time between loading scenes and making it so that when you have four Necromancers in endgame with a hundred skeletons a piece isn’t making servers light on fire. Doing things like the social features, making sure that those update more quickly when you’re interacting with those. Those are all things that we absolutely know need to be improved and are actively working on.
Source: YouTube Link
Character Creation Options
An option to create online Solo Character Found characters is planned to be added sometime in the future.
September 6, 2023McFluffin: We used to have a lot of community events earlier in the development process which was kind of the way we made our own sort of seasons while we were waiting for the development of the game. VisionGL was running tournaments and there was lot of cool stuff that we were able to do. Unfortunately some of that stuff hasn’t been able to be done lately with some of the changes, especially to multiplayer. Do you all have any plans to address that and bring that stuff back so the community can start to do some cool things again?
Judd: We do. I think Mike actually has a good answer for this one.
Mike: Yes, we are definitely looking to bring that type of interaction back with our community because this was something that I really enjoyed watching myself. Watching those races it was just a ton of fun to see and the restrictions that were put on those characters and how people adapted to those situations to make cool new builds and things. So those were events that we really enjoyed watching ourselves.
With the changes that were required to come with our initial version for account found instead of character found solo versions, we are going to be adding back in “Solo Character Found” options to multiplayer. So this will re-enable the ability for people to have completely fresh starts where there’s no interaction from previous characters, not just your own things you’ve found.
Source: YouTube Link
Character Limit
The current online character limit is 20 but that limit is expected to increase by launch. What the new character limit will be is unknown at this time.
September 8, 2023
Mike: Yeah, I’ve gotten approval for this but it just didn’t make it in pre-patch so it should hopefully be 1.0, assuming nothing goes wrong.
Source: YouTube Link
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