Pantheon: No, it’s not just you

By Frogboy on May 20, 2009 11:04:04 PM from

One of the most infuriating things about the Demigod pantheon is that it assumes players will be able to connect. The problem is, you get one person who can’t connect and bad things happen:

Now, in theory, with the proxy code (that’s staged but still being tested – there are a lot of fail scenarios to be gone through) the two players who couldn’t connect would get routed through the proxy. Will it work for sure? There’s no way to know until it’s out there and we see.

Look closely at the screenshot. Those people were able to connect to other people fine. But not to each other. Why? Some router thing? Some bug? Something else? I don’t know but like you, we are aware of it and it drives us nuts too.

Now ideally, what the system should do is pick one of those guys and eject them and find someone else. But that’s a level of sophistication that isn’t in there yet because, again, the system was designed on the assumption that we’d find a way to get everyone to connect (seems quaintly naive in hindsight).

But the overall experience is maddening and frustrating beyond belief. The proxy servers better fix this though, I fear, that the other issue (a person having more than 1 IP address) could be the cause as well (a person with multiple network cards / wireless cards that are connected to the Internet – that’s coming up next).

+897 Karma | 45 Replies

You poor guys.

I actually ran into those quirks with oddball connection fails in a server-client game, Warlords Battlecry. There was this one guy that just flat couldn't connect to some people, not knowing how to set up your system is a sad thing.

At least custom games are now largely bullet proof from what I'm seeing and chatting with other people (except, obviously for people who can't connect to anyone).

I get people stuck attempting to connect to me like that all the time when I join someone else's custom game, even though I connect to them just fine. This almost never happens if I am hosting my own custom game though. I don't think it has anything to do with multiple IP addresses, as I only have 1 assigned to the workstation I play Demigod from.

No amount of port forwarding, AV software killing, firewall disabling or even DMZing seems to resolve the issue.

-dolynick

I got online for the first time tonight (first time I tried) and got into 2 custom games with no issues at all. Even played with CariElf! Haven't tried Pantheon yet. Maybe this weekend.

Quoting dolynick,

reply 3

Pretty much teh same for me. I can connect to three peopel but not one person. Naked internet and all

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 2

At least custom games are now largely bullet proof from what I'm seeing and chatting with other people (except, obviously for people who can't connect to anyone).

This type of situation shown in the screenshot also occurs during custom games as well, on a fairly regular basis.

On top of that, Pantheon is doing some wierd things.

Example:

Talk about an easy win?

This was the first game I got into after about an hour and 20 tries at least as well.

-dolynick

Quoting Raspyn,

reply 6

Quoting Frogboy, reply 2At least custom games are now largely bullet proof from what I'm seeing and chatting with other people (except, obviously for people who can't connect to anyone).

This type of situation shown in the screenshot also occurs during custom games as well, on a fairly regular basis.

I saw this on Skirmish games a couple times as well. Each time there seemed to be two people that couldn't connect to each other but everyone else was connected to each other including the two. I didn't have any issues with custom games but it was probably the luck of the draw.

as mentioned already. this happens in custom games as well. usually the person who can't connect gets ejected. they might reconnect and work the 2nd time. or usually get replace by another random person in custom games.

Because of ppl getting stuck in the screenshot shown, I've stopped playing skirmish/pantheon.

It seems like this has changed over time, too -- I used to be able to get into Pantheon without much trouble, but since the patches last weekend it seemed like there have been a lot more people I couldn't connect to or that couldn't connect to me. I've heard the same thing anecdotally on the forums and on IRC, and I noticed this morning that the graphs from the last Pantheon show something similar.

http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/tournaments/10/graphs/

(select "Overall" and you'll get # of games played -- it goes way up last Wednesday and way down on Friday)

I don't know how reliable these are, but they seem to support my general feeling that Pantheon has gotten flakier over time. Probably I should go make some more logs to submit to Frogboy&Co...

The same thing happens to me. At times i can go into a 3v3 no probs at all. Other times i get stuck with a player!! It seems to be the same players over and over again,in custom games as well. Frustrating is the word for it.

custom games are far from bulletproof. we have a group of 4 friends who try to play regularly, it's a crapshoot whether we can connect to each other or not though. sometimes we connect right away with no problems and other times we can't all play together because it suddenly won't let us connect even though we just finished a game together. we all have forwarded ports and such and we can't figure out what causes it, especially since it's seemingly random.

that being said things have gotten much better. we can connect and play together more often than a few weeks after launch, but still not with an acceptable success rate. hopefully the proxy update will help with that.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 2

At least custom games are now largely bullet proof from what I'm seeing and chatting with other people (except, obviously for people who can't connect to anyone).

Hell no they aren't. Here is a list of things I have noticed that still break custom games:

1. 5v5 - For some reason, it seems to work fine up to 4v4, but as soon as you try to add those 2 more players, all kinds of wierd things start happening.

2. If players quickly join and then leave again, or join and then leave before they are finished connecting to everyone. This can result in them getting stuck in the "connecting" list even if they aren't in the game any more.

3. Seems like people aren't always updating their lists of players to connect to. Sometimes a player will leave the game (as in scenario #2) and ALMOST everyone will disconnect from them, but one person will be stuck in "Waiting to connect to <leaver>" state, and they never get the memo that that person is no longer in the game. Even worse is when they are stuck in the "Attempting to connect to <leaver>" state because then they never try to connect to anyone else, and I have to kick them.

4. Many people connecting at once. This is a nightmare - everyone is simultaneously connected to some, waiting to connect to some, and attempting to connect to some. Sometimes this settles out; usually it results in one or two players being "stuck" in some way and unable to connect to each other. This usually results in one or two players leaving before they are finished connecting, and then the people that are actually IN the game experience #2 above.

The only reliable way to get a big game going is to keep slots closed and let players in 1 or 2 at a time; that way, if a player causes an issue, you can tell who it is and kick them before they screw everyone else's connection dialog up. However, this takes FOREVER and, given the A.D.D. attention spans of your average gamer, means that people in-game often get bored and go elsewhere before it fills up.

edit: Oh and there is a new kind of bug today. Happened to me AND another guy who was trying to host before me. Fatal error when trying to kick people from the lobby. No I don't have the log files. Sorry.

Quoting dolynick,

reply 7

On top of that, Pantheon is doing some wierd things.

Example:

Reduced 75%Original 800 x 369

Talk about an easy win?

This was the first game I got into after about an hour and 20 tries at least as well.

-dolynick

What's not an easy win is 2v0 on slaughter. You have no way to make money except mines and spawn, so you slowly farm until you get giants and take the cit. It was horrible.

There is stil some logic error in the network code. I find if Im in a custom game and several people come and go, the game becomes impossible to get everyone connected. People get stuck in the "waiting to connect" and not the "attempting to connect" as you described.

The only way is to quit and make a new lobby, and usually then everyone connects up fine first time.

As someone already pointed out, the lobby isnt cleaning things up right when players quit out.

But the overall experience is maddening and frustrating beyond belief. The proxy servers better fix this though, I fear, that the other issue (a person having more than 1 IP address) could be the cause as well (a person with multiple network cards / wireless cards that are connected to the Internet – that’s coming up next).

I wouldn't say bulletproof. There's still people who get in lobbies that for one reason or another can't connect to one person...which delays everything.

However, everything is better than it used to be.

How difficult would it be for upon connecting to the online portion the game doing a port check to see if the correct ports were open and if they weren't it would just grey out the host/join buttons until it was open. Most of the problems are from people who have it closed.

Played 3 pantheon games tonight. Out of three games 1 Prison was 3 vs 2(me on the 2 man team) second game was 3v1 on the brothers(me being by myself) and finally one on cataract where it was 3vs1(me again). Had some bad luck tonight, but I'm fed up with pantheon until the system gets fixed.

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 2

At least custom games are now largely bullet proof from what I'm seeing and chatting with other people (except, obviously for people who can't connect to anyone).

Custom games are connecting 100% and launching 100% fine for me. I've stopped playing Pantheon right now until this issue is addressed. All in all, I've been having a blast with custom games so, meh.

Custom games are most certainly not bullet proof. Who have you been listening to? I usually see one person per game who can't connect to someone. We just kick them out of the game and replace them. Custom games just let you kick and try with someone else or a new host until it works.

Well, I've already said this in another thread but my pantheon experience is hopeless.

Even if the connection screen (when you are waiting for people to connect) shows that everyone has connected to each other, the chances of everyone getting into the actual game has been zero.

Why not just make every pantheon game 1v1?

Yeah, that sucks beyond belief but at least it's:

1) Easier to connect

2) Ensures a fair game as long as you either get rid of all AIs. If you give each player an equal amount of AIs, all that will happen is a AI-farm-fest.

Even after reading all these journals, I'm stumped as to why this kind of thing doesn't work.

I used to play massive amounts of Age of Empires 2/3/Age of Mythology and I don't remember any of these problems and I'm pretty sure they're P2P. Maybe they weren't. Either way, it worked dandy.

This doesn't.

For the connection issues, I was having an issue connecting to a friend online and it was just a damn persistent connection issue. No matter how we did it- had me host, had him host, had someone else host and have everyone join one at a time and we joined first, etc... Nothing fixed the fact that we just could not connect to each other.

Next we tried GameRanger. When I went to connect to the room that he was in, a funny thing happened- GameRanged popped-up a notification that I am using some sort of narrow NAT cone router which generally makes connecting to others faster but that there are a small amount of very rare routers that absolutely hate my kind of router and will flat-out not connect to it no matter what (at least over GameRanger). After all we've gone through and yet still continually fail to connect, I'm kinda guessing that might be the issue... And hopefully proxy servers will solve it as we'll each be able to connect to the proxy server and that in turn will indirectly connect us to each other thereby keeping our routers' hate at bay.

Something to look into though if there is some kind of possible work-around for that. On my end, I am finding nothing, but that doesn't stop you guys from looking around.

(Btw, my router is the fairly common WRT54G Wired+Wireless from Linksys)

what about the lag spiking problem, frogboy?!

...and favor works again. You're the man... eh frog... frogboy.

What I get more recently... is "player has left the game", and then all players drop, and im ingame vs AIs. This used to be less in the first two weeks after release. I wonder why this is becoming more common.

Quoting TheBird,

reply 23

what about the lag spiking problem, frogboy?!

Seconded, any news on this?

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Pantheon: No, it’s not just you