What are the problems with MP that make civ players avoid it?

[zubrin]

Long time reader, I supposed this is my first post (I thought I had an account from years ago, but that might have been on Apolyton).

This forum is relatively dead for a MP forum. I have heard people state that MP is broken, has problems, or other things that make it unplayable. What precisely is broken about MP? Am I on the wrong forum site for MP? I have been playing with a group of friends and we have been trading victories pursuing different paths --nothing truly broken. Is there a mechanic that ruins the game? Or is there some bug that breaks MP and renders it unplayable.

I do understand that there is balancing issues with the civs, but the top half or so seem competitive enough with each other to continue to make the game playable.

Thanks for helping me clarify why MP seems to be inactive here.

 

[Kyp Durron]

Not sure about the forum here, we have a pretty good level of activity at www.civplayers.com however. And there's other groups around but none have all the MP styles in one place. So just come check out our steam chatroom.

Really the bugs aren't too bad, only a few games are unplayable. 1 out of 50 perhaps. Its just lag is a issue at times.

 

[zubrin]

A few of my games have been partial LAN/online. It appears that the lag is induced by the slowest computer on the network (the one still processing game moves), which has made it more palatable. I would be waiting at the end of the turn if not the beginning, the big difference is that I do not get the first mover advantage by having a faster computer, which seems fair.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Yes Civ is a peer to peer game, so you are right the slowest computer/network speed is the weakest link, and will lag the game for everyone. But generally speaking MP is very playable for 4-6 players. And we are talking from the stand point of random internet players getting together in our steam chat room for a game. So alot more random factors than playing LAN with your friends and their systems that you know a lot about.

So come check out our chat and bring your friends too, the links are all in my sig.

CS

 

[mak54291]

You need to pay to play at civ5. Was not the case with civ4. This must be the reason why not much players in civ5 mp.

There is not chat in civ5, this is bad.

And civ5 require a beast as a computer to play in my book, for some not so good graphics.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

You need to pay to play at civ5. Was not the case with civ4. This must be the reason why not much players in civ5 mp.

There is not chat in civ5, this is bad.

And civ5 require a beast as a computer to play in my book, for some not so good graphics.

There are lots of players in Civ5 MP, not like a RTS or MMO game, but come join CivPlayers or NQ steam chat and you will see there are plenty of players playing MP.

You don't have to pay to play MP either, other than the cost of buying the game in the first place. If you are talking about DLC, it doesn't work in MP anyway unless all players in a game have it, so DLC is really not a factor in MP.

Yes not having a global chat was a monumental mistake on 2K's part, but worse, the real problem is that the games list is regional. So new MP players click MP, go to the games list and think MP is dead because they see no games, when in fact there are lots of games, they just can't see them because there are none close to them. And of course with out universal chat there is no easy way to explain that to people.

The system requirements on new games are always a problem, but I really don't blame game companies, in this case I do blame the players. New Civ games come out once every 4-5 years, moore's law makes this a monumental shift in PC technology and games are just that much more advanced as well. But Civ players expect there 4 year old machine that plays Civ4 fine to play a game 4 years newer and more advanced. The same thing happened from Civ3 to Civ4, a big outcry because my old Civ3 machine can't play a game with a brand new engine....well people should realize that technology marches on and it is not out of line to expect to upgrade your computer every 4 years. IMHO

If you are interested in online MP check out the links in my sig and come to our steam chat.


CS

 

[mak54291]

There are lots of players in Civ5 MP, not like a RTS or MMO game, but come join CivPlayers or NQ steam chat and you will see there are plenty of players playing MP.

There is more games in civ4 than civ5, today !

You don't have to pay to play MP either, other than the cost of buying the game in the first place. If you are talking about DLC, it doesn't work in MP anyway unless all players in a game have it, so DLC is really not a factor in MP.

Civ4 do not require any cd-key, you can just copy it and donwload it with bittorrent.
Moderator Action: We do not condone piracy in any way. If you want to play a game, then buy it.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
Civ5 require you to buy it trought steam.

Yes not having a global chat was a monumental mistake on 2K's part, but worse, the real problem is that the games list is regional. So new MP players click MP, go to the games list and think MP is dead because they see no games, when in fact there are lots of games, they just can't see them because there are none close to them. And of course with out universal chat there is no easy way to explain that to people.

A mistake, I'm agree. Good info, didn't know that. This explain a lil bit more why only two games was show yesterday.

The system requirements on new games are always a problem, but I really don't blame game companies, in this case I do blame the players. New Civ games come out once every 4-5 years, moore's law makes this a monumental shift in PC technology and games are just that much more advanced as well. But Civ players expect there 4 year old machine that plays Civ4 fine to play a game 4 years newer and more advanced. The same thing happened from Civ3 to Civ4, a big outcry because my old Civ3 machine can't play a game with a brand new engine....well people should realize that technology marches on and it is not out of line to expect to upgrade your computer every 4 years. IMHO

My cpu is not the best but I have a dual core and I paid 400$ for my video card last year. The game lag. I guess I have 25 fps or something when there is a lot of map reveal.

If you are interested in online MP check out the links in my sig and come to our steam chat.

I'll try that.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

I would caution you that discussing pirating games is against the ToS for CFC, and you likely are going to be warned by the mods here, and rightfully so.

And you won't get much sympathy from me that Steam actually forces people to pay for a game, how do you expect game developers to fund the next game if they don't get the revenue from this game that they deserve? Pirating Civ4 was just as much against the law as pirating Civ5 is, just because the copy protection on Civ4 was not as secure as Steam is on Civ5, makes you no less a criminal for pirating it.

CS

 

[CanuckSoldier]

And if your saying there are more games in Civ4 than Civ5, I suspect your statistics are flawed, as I explained, Steam uses a regional games list, Gamespy for Civ4 uses a global games list, so of course you are going to see more games listed for Civ4 than in your area for Civ5.

This is why we use Steam chat rooms to hook up with other international players to play games.

CS

 

[IonTichy]

As for myself, I play lots of MP with my friends (where I can be sure that no one drops suddenly or destroys the ongoing game in another way).
It is a lot of fun until you have to fight PvP.
The biggest issue for me is simultaneous turns which creates a mess during confrontations. We tend to get around this with a gentleman's agreement which consists of taking turns in unit movement. This makes the confrontations take more time, but at least it's guaranteeing some fairness during combat.

There is really a need to implement such a system in the game!
Of course, if there is already something like this included, please correct me....

 

[KM]

..If u like a game. Buy it!. Use demo versions, and sometimes steam has 3 days free trial etc to try the game out. But then if you still want to play you have to buy it and that is a good thing. I mean seriously. If you look at the hours you play civilization. The cost per hour played will be ridiculously low.

Anyway. I think the biggest mistake they made in civ MP is what canuck pointed out. THey should have been looking at some other popular MP games like SC. You need a lobby where you can see all games or be able to see all servers and how many agmes there are on each server asnd switch between them from within the game. You need a built in laddersystem and you do need a chat. You need statistics and all the lull lulll that makes people adddicted to MP. That is see your profiles statistics and ranks increase, number off kills, won games and all other things possible to think off.

 

[mak54291]

Anyway. I think the biggest mistake they made in civ MP is what canuck pointed out. THey should have been looking at some other popular MP games like SC. You need a lobby where you can see all games or be able to see all servers and how many agmes there are on each server asnd switch between them from within the game. You need a built in laddersystem and you do need a chat. You need statistics and all the lull lulll that makes people adddicted to MP. That is see your profiles statistics and ranks increase, number off kills, won games and all other things possible to think off.

Looking at the size of civfanatic, I can't believe they did not make such a system.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

Looking at the size of civfanatic, I can't believe they did not make such a system.

Yes but 90% of posts in CFC are about SP stuff by SP players. Firaxis has still not put MP on a equal footing as SP, or even close. That is why we have these problems with MP, it gets left to the last minutes of the development cycle and then requires patches afterward.

Civ could really use a dedicated server instead of a peer to peer system, but neither Firaxis or 2K have any history or experience with dedicated game servers, and are not keen to start it seems.

In game rankings would be nice, but if CivRev is any idea of how they would want to do this, I'd rather not have a dumb easily abused and meaningless system like that. We at Civplayers offer a human moderated and very accurate ranking system and dispute system. Unless 2K is willing to do what we do, and provide a 100% solution, I'd rather not have them just provide a 50% solution.

But they certainly could provide a universal lobby, but the reason they did not was because they don't want to moderate it, and the Civ4 unmoderated lobby was spam central, and rather than fix the moderation problem their "solution" was to just not have a chat lobby :-/ Which has really hurt the MP community.

But I agree, players want statistics and to be rated etc, but for now if you want that, look at the links in my sig and come join the league.

CS

 

[mak54291]

Yes but 90% of posts in CFC are about SP stuff by SP players. Firaxis has still not put MP on a equal footing as SP, or even close. That is why we have these problems with MP, it gets left to the last minutes of the development cycle and then requires patches afterward.

Even the 10% beat the ut population.

Anyway I am not agree with you. So I keep saying what I said: "Looking at the size of civfanatic, I can't believe they did not make such a system."

Civ could really use a dedicated server instead of a peer to peer system, but neither Firaxis or 2K have any history or experience with dedicated game servers, and are not keen to start it seems.

p2p work well. They did a good choice to make a p2p system. They had an history with p2p? I doubt it is the reason. The reason is, they did not spend time in something not really needed in the situation.

In game rankings would be nice, but if CivRev is any idea of how they would want to do this, I'd rather not have a dumb easily abused and meaningless system like that. We at Civplayers offer a human moderated and very accurate ranking system and dispute system. Unless 2K is willing to do what we do, and provide a 100% solution, I'd rather not have them just provide a 50% solution.

Like if they can't ban the cheaters like valve did.

But they certainly could provide a universal lobby, but the reason they did not was because they don't want to moderate it, and the Civ4 unmoderated lobby was spam central, and rather than fix the moderation problem their "solution" was to just not have a chat lobby :-/ Which has really hurt the MP community.

I don't think it is the reason, it's not that bad in the lobby. Some kids did some bs but really not that bad. Like if they can't find mature volunteer around anyway; it would even not cost anything to moderate it.

 

[CanuckSoldier]

You obviously were not in the Civ4: BTS lobby when spammers like Vent, were spewing racial and religious crap pretty much 24/7. It did not make the MP lobby look like a welcoming place. So I am very much sure that is the reason we do not have a chat lobby in Civ5. And I doubt very much that 2K Legal is going to agree to let volunteer moderators take care of a lobby, they just don't want to take the legal risk of doing that.

And as far as p2p systems go, they are find for small games with small number of players. But when you start wanting more than 6 players it becomes a problem and requires that you have a very good data management system in place. As in p2p each additional player doubles the data being transmitted each turn. So a 8 player game has 4 times the data being sent as a 6 player game has. At server system doesn't have this problem as the server is the hub, and adding a player only adds that players data.

And yes they *could* do lots of things with a ranking system, but in my experience I would not expect very much from a company that has no history of running leagues. 2K did not even chose to use VAC for Civ5 to prevent online modified files......

CS

 

[mak54291]

You obviously were not in the Civ4: BTS lobby when spammers like Vent, were spewing racial and religious crap pretty much 24/7. It did not make the MP lobby look like a welcoming place. So I am very much sure that is the reason we do not have a chat lobby in Civ5. And I doubt very much that 2K Legal is going to agree to let volunteer moderators take care of a lobby, they just don't want to take the legal risk of doing that.

CS

By the size of civfanatic, they could pay one then.

The real reason? In my book, it must be something like the expansion of mac no right mouse click or it was a phase to be console ready.

 

[mak54291]

And as far as p2p systems go, they are find for small games with small number of players. But when you start wanting more than 6 players it becomes a problem and requires that you have a very good data management system in place. As in p2p each additional player doubles the data being transmitted each turn. So a 8 player game has 4 times the data being sent as a 6 player game has. At server system doesn't have this problem as the server is the hub, and adding a player only adds that players data.

Yes I forgot to say: for small games. I am not sure about this. I mean the connection are so fast these day, I have like 150kb\sec of upload and I think the normality is around 70.

And yes they *could* do lots of things with a ranking system, but in my experience I would not expect very much from a company that has no history of running leagues. 2K did not even chose to use VAC for Civ5 to prevent online modified files......

It is sad because I am a css player and VAC work well.

 

[tommynt]

After the game develpoed into "playable" (but far from perfect), I think main reason why people dont stick to mp is that they dont want "loose".

While people win like 95% of sp games they ll usually loose 75% of mp games (when talking about a "average" 4 player game where only 1 can win).

Going back from 95% to 25% win and even worse in start is probably not good for most egos.
Also when reading the typical mp requests like "ANIMATIONS" it looks like a lot dont want learn the game and develop their gameplay but rather play mp like sp what dont work

 

[classical_hero]

One reason no PITBOSS.

 

[Naizarak]

it's broken from a technical standpoint. games freeze way too often and don't even start with more than 6 people. i haven't finished a single full MP game lol