The new "Normal" - Multiattacks, Combat unpredictable

[Narcil]

nope it's every1, on all adventures. supposedly will be fixed after tomorrow's maint.

[Sharpielein]

You're about 1 month late with your complaint:
http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/t...-unpredictable

[Fexno]

Threads merged: "Ghost generals and repeated general attacking"

[Xibor]

That is so strange - the wife and I have only seen a very minor subset of these issues:
-The general does vanish sometimes, but always ends up where he should be going in approx the right time frame.
-I do get 'general is attacking' up to 3 times, but it seems to me the overall timing for the battle seems correct (estimated, not tightly timed).
-I've never lost any troops (except for expected battle losses) or had them shift around
-The wife and I have seen slightly more odd behaviour when we are on the same map sharing an adventure, but I took that as being at the same IP and confusing the server somewhat. Sometimes her system plays the sounds of my attack before I show my general as even being there yet for example.

Since it's somewhat intermittent I wonder if there are external factors we are not aware of - issues with the specific ISP you are using, whether or not you are on a public or private network, some server hops are pretty direct (you only go through a few of them) but some bounce 1/2 way around the world and through many different systems and each one could be 'doing something'. I am very far from a communications expert, but I have had to deal with some of the issues.

It is true what Narcil said - what you are seeing is local and up to your Flash player, what is really happening is only in the game server and if a packet gets lost in transmission (not at all uncommon) you may not get the information from the server that makes what you see 'line up', or if it thinks there's a packet error it might send the same packet again. Much of this could be explained simply by flaky internet off-and-on issues that don't consistantly repeat.

Now troops reallocating themselves back to different or previous configurations - THAT's different, that's a bug, and that's a serious problem. So far I've been spared the pain but maybe I've just been lucky.

Hopefully this new release (whenever it comes) will improve things.

[Sharpielein]

It is true what Narcil said - what you are seeing is local and up to your Flash player, what is really happening is only in the game server and if a packet gets lost in transmission (not at all uncommon) you may not get the information from the server that makes what you see 'line up', or if it thinks there's a packet error it might send the same packet again. Much of this could be explained simply by flaky internet off-and-on issues that don't consistantly repeat.

Now troops reallocating themselves back to different or previous configurations - THAT's different, that's a bug, and that's a serious problem. So far I've been spared the pain but maybe I've just been lucky.

Hopefully this new release (whenever it comes) will improve things.

Well, I personally know that back in the old times, games like Diablo2 (15 years old) had serious issues with the phenomenon called "rubberbanding", i.e. desync between server and client side status. It was an issue in times where latencies were often 4-5 digit and the Internet as a whole was rather unstable. Modern games (pretty much anything released less than 5 years ago) can't blame the general unstable Internet in that fashion and additionally to an improved Internet, serious web developers know how to prevent such issues.

Yes, I have lost troops to these issues on more than one occasion and it's probably cost me over 100k coins in lost cannoneers, elites and crossbowmen but that's not my gripe.
We shouldn't be forced to consider something "normal" that has not been a problem at all for the first 2 years the game was released and something that is so far out of whack that it's downright unacceptible for an online game.
Why display animations at all if they're wrong and unreliable and misleading anyways?

[Xibor]

Modern games (pretty much anything released less than 5 years ago) can't blame the general unstable Internet in that fashion and additionally to an improved Internet, serious web developers know how to prevent such issues.

I was in no way saying that it's desireable or even 'normal', and I wasn't globally blaming "the net" for everything as some kind of excuse - I was only pointing out some of the chaos and complexity of modern computing and the number of variables that can be involved.

I also have noticed that these occurances seem to have just started with PvP so clearly there is a connection, it's only my experience in debugging to try not to have tunnel vision and consider every possibility.

Hopefully fixes are coming soon and the issues (at least this issue) can be closed.