I just wanted to share my thoughts on the patch as I had a ton of people in my chat today really unhappy with the patch, myself included, and people wanted me to try talking to the devs since I’m currently the largest and most regular streamer for the game on Twitch.
My concerns are that the latency restrictions seem to cause much more problems than they solve. I still had the slight rollback or latency issues today where someone might suffer a lethal blow and it will briefly register and play the death sound but then a rollback occurs and they’re just barely alive still, but now I can’t group with some of the players I’ve met and friends I’ve made in the weeks since launch, queues are way longer, and the quality of the matches we get into are much lower as well and don’t provide a quality and competitive environment like it did pre-patch. I’m not sure if the latency limit ultimately really solves anything because I’d still see people micro-teleporting around. I’m thinking maybe they meet the latency requirement but have a bad wifi connection or something else causing jitter and packet loss. I don’t know what kind of metrics are available to the system, but perhaps the limit could be expanded to maybe 200 or even more if players have reliable connections and 0% packet loss?
The fact that we could play the game in nearly any region as well as cross-platform made the game feel so open and inviting. Myself as well as a few others are competitive players that came over from Battlerite, a game with a unique feel and great potential but dwindled due to mismanagement and poor dev support. It also had very old fashioned netcode in the sense that everything was simply purely server authoritative without any form of latency compensation, rollback, etc so the game was only really competitive at 50ms and below, and even then if the other team happened to live near the server and had sub 10ms latency, you’d be able to tell their shots would just land more.
So here we are with launch day Bleeding Edge, it’s not 100% perfect, but it’s so fun and fresh and doesn’t feel like anything else on the market. Suddenly we can all group up from East Asia to EU and have surprisingly competitive matches with the only issue being the occasional visual jitter if a player were to rapidly spam left-right over and over (still happens in solo matchmaking post patch anyway btw). The community is small for this game right now but it feels close knit and we can pretty much group up with whoever, wherever. Not every match is perfect but we’ve been able to pretty consistently get games against other solid teams when we queue at the same time. We’ve been discussing potential teams with various players and strategies and looking forward to both ranked play and custom lobbies. I was actually getting everyone hyped up about me hosting a tournament once we have lobbies. All of that was essentially shattered today, groups were split up, queues were high and regulars and newcomers alike were expressing concern with 8 minute and longer queues at regular hours. It was a lot of doom and gloom and that’s basically why I’m here.
I hope I’m not coming off as pretentious not trying to flex the "i'M a StRrEaMeR" thing, again, people asked me to reach out in hopes that perhaps I can get something done. I have so much passion and hopes for this game and want it to succeed. If I had admin over this project, I’d personally rollback the patch, but bare minimum let people still group and play in the majority region as well as possibly expand the latency limit, especially if players have a stable connection.
Cheers, Tyr808