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).

+912 Karma | 45 Replies

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).

Yeah, not exactly "bullet-proof" just in custom game you're able to manually kick those non-connecters. 100% of the games I've been playing for the last few weeks have been custom game and it's has definitely been the best option and is more or less pain free at the moment.

Quoting Zoobi07,

reply 18

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.

The same thing happened to me last night. 2 games out of 3 had inbalance team when playing patheon. Although I wasn't the one alone, it's not fun for either side to play 3 vs 1. I was chatting with the people in game and they all played other games the same night with the same issues.

Did the AI decided to take a night off?

Thanks for addressing this!

Another thing that might help, I see a lot of games where one person IS connected to another person who is still attempting to connect to the former. Err... that was confusing, so it's like this.

Sythion is connected to Frogboy

Frogboy is attempting to connect to Sythion

I'm just wondering if this could be simply an issue with missing information. Maybe Frogboy is connected to me, but needs to refresh information to know that. Or maybe I'm not connected to Frogboy and I need to refresh my information to try again.

I always can only connect to one person - I have no hard/no software firewalls and pretty often no one can connect to me/us.

My friends have them switched off also for testing, they can also can only connect to one person and no one can connect to them.

I hope you are working towards fixing the bug(s) and not assuming its players router problems for those who can not play multiplayer.

We have not played multiplayer since May14th and are still waiting for the connection problem to be fixed.

Thank you

Quoting MadcapET,

reply 2

Quoting Zoobi07, reply 18Played 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.
The same thing happened to me last night. 2 games out of 3 had inbalance team when playing patheon. Although I wasn't the one alone, it's not fun for either side to play 3 vs 1. I was chatting with the people in game and they all played other games the same night with the same issues.

Did the AI decided to take a night off?

I'd rather play without the AI than with the AI.

So should I decide to get the game now or wait till some of these connecting bugs are fixed?

Quoting Blitz64,

reply 9

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

The worst bit about this is that when you do leave and try to get another Pantheon game, the same people pop up in the list again. I have literally had the same person show up in 10 successive tries to get a Pantheon game where everyone connects. I went and played a custom game just to get off this guy's cycle.

thing is , this also occurs in custom games too!

Also there is that glitch where you can play as a light character like sedna on the forces of darks team. And vice versa.

I recently installed Call of duty world at war and since then i have had some problems. I tried joining pantheon 8 times last night and everytime i would connect to everyone, start the loading screen, and then it would say a player is dropped.. and i see 0 ping to everyone so it was me that was dropped.

Before installing the game i could connect to pantheon just fine. I tried /msconfig and disabling the punkbustera,b but it still happens, is there anythingn else to try?

Yeah some sort of system that ejects people if they can't connect after X amount of time seems like it would help. The situation you outline above has happened to me multiple times and then it usually ends with the search stopping and me getting an error message.

If I've pushed the button to play Pantheon, that's what it should do. It should not stop until I get into a game successfully or the search takes too long (n time) at which point it should come back with a prompt, "Having trouble finding a game, would you like to continue searching?".

I can stress enough how bad it is to the end user to have it stop searching and just present an error message -- this should never happen.

(Error messages posted to log files fine, a window that continually notifies the current status saying things like, "Found X number of other players but could not connect to all players, attempting to find more players" would be ideal).

-Jara

PS: I suspect this will be needed in addition to the proxy server stuff you are working on. No case can be 100% successful and the code needs to be ready to handle that so that one bad apple does not shut down everyone elses play experiance.

PPS: I'd also go so far to suggest that once someone hits the search button, controls should be removed from the player to prevent impatient players from pulling out before giving the search long enough time. Granted this only works if you have a fail safe that after N amount of time of searching it comes back and ask the player, "Would you like to keep searching?" at which point that is when the user can choose to exit the search or continue.

I feel like the proxy servers should work. But I'm thinking of a different solution as well.

In a previous post a sort of connectivity was described where, if two players in a game cannot connect to each other, they would just send their messages to a player who they can connect to, and this player would forward the messages to the person they can't connect to. I feel like that sort of solution would also fix this problem. Is that still in the works?

Huh... I can't connect do Pantheon at all. Instead, after waiting a couple of minutes, it bombs me straight back to the desktop.

Custom games work fine though.

Quoting Exterm123,

reply 6

So should I decide to get the game now or wait till some of these connecting bugs are fixed?

Magic ball says....wait and see

I'm one of the people that can connect to most but not to a few. Maybe it would be an idea to survey those with this connection issue and try and isolate a factor that could be the cause? You probably already thought of that though! My ISP Be/O2, I'm on ADSL2+ and my modem/router is a Bebox / Thompson Speedtouch 585. No firewalls except the windows firewall. Windows XP.

I really hope these proxies will fix it, as it is a pain at the moment to get a game going by avoiding other players with this connection issue. Any ETA on that next patch with the proxies?

This (the problem Frogboy describes) is my only major connection problem, and has been for some time. For the last week at least, i've been able to connect to the host 9 times out of ten, if not more, but of those lobbies, unless it's a 2v2, 4/5 times I'll be able to connect to all but one other player. Sometimes another player can't connect to another player, but it's very common for it to be me and another player. I've got a static IP, so I too doubt it's related to the multiple IP problem. And yes, this happens in custom games as much as anywhere else

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

So that how forces of light win their games....

Quoting Cowbuttzex,

reply 17

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

So that how forces of light win their games....

Well if it makes you feel better I also have a loss on my record for a game that matchmaking tried to set up but that I never actually got into. I suppose that balances out things somewhat.

-dolynick

The proxy system will certainly help Pantheon a load.

Just had a very frustrating half an hour where we had players that either just wouldn't connect to one person or to everyone. What then happens is they eject and the game then starts and you end up with a 2v1 scenario - it should never allow this. If a player ejects either it takes you back to player selection or even better pull in another person from the queue.

Unfortunately those same people causing the issue continue to try and so effectively killing any games when they are trying

Also got hit by a lag spike, literally a split second stutter and I ended up on my backside - was a shame as the game was going great. I still completed it with the AI - which again probably shouldn't happen.

So big thumbs up to get proxy into Pantheon asap - but also build in code to handle someone leaving before connectivity is completed.

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).

Nope not bullet proof still had plenty of trouble this morning connecting to people. Scenarios just like the above.

I have all the correct port forwarding done. And it still occurs.

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Pantheon: No, it’s not just you