Here comes a big incoherent feedback and experience rant for you guys and girls at Fatshark because FOR ME this is the worst part of Darktide currently, and is making the game nearly unplayable in higher difficulties. While there are some posts in recent weeks More and more of these are going to occur as newer players begin transitioning into higher difficulties.
Game stability for me right now is borderline acceptable as my game will crash due to game issues (most likely server issues not client related) around once every 5 hours, Other more frequent crashes I have are mainly related to instability in my overclocks as I’m always playing around with my system as a hobby.
Server performance seems to be degrading as time goes on, I’m not sure if its because I notice it more through time played or if it really is degrading.
I don’t know if its specific to Asia Pacific southeast-2 Amazon servers but there’s a tonne of stuttering and server dysfunction going on to the point and without exaggeration Its a fight against server performance EVERY ROUND… My latency to the AWS game servers is 54ms.
I don’t remember these issues during beta period or early in release, maybe they were always there and I only noticed when I began playing damnation difficulty, Earlier on the game was surprisingly responsive and felt good apart from the odd round where it felt like you were running in mud eg- felt like the server was pulling you or holding you back somehow, maybe it had a higher tick rate or tighter network prediction and you guys lowered it to save bandwidth or loosen up how movement felt? or simply get rid of that mud wallowing feeling? who knows?
Another issue is how smooth the game feels when the servers struggle, I can have 70+fps when the screen is filled with enemies and psyker sparkles (like enemies running through walls and in the air) yet the game feels like its playing at 20fps or lower, it becomes like a slideshow… Why is FPS “feeling” tied to server performance? (amd software reports my average fps in darktide is 91 and 95th percentile frame times are 12ms)
enemy spawning behavior: please for the love of god fix this, I occasionally see enemies spawning in and out of existence meters away, sometimes in front and most annoyingly behind or inside your character model, eg- you’ve just cleared a corner up against a wall with no way for an enemy to drop in on you, you turn around to face forwards then take a hit from behind (with no warning sound btw) because an enemy or two magically spawn in or run in through the wall from outside the map.
One of the worst maps for this is the hourglass one in reverse, you can be fighting a horde alone then all of a sudden shield Ogryn, crushers and ragers can spawn 1-5m away away and start swinging, or hounds spawning directly in front of you only to leap less than a second later with no audio cue whatsoever.
There’s also the extreme frustration of input roll backs, the server seems so overloaded that packets are being dropped or simply being ignored for the sake of its own self preservation.
That’s not the worst of the buggy servers either, while more rare, Stacked hits or stacked damage occurs. Single hits from a poxwalker or gunner can take all your stamina, break your shield and ALL your health, insta downing you in what appeared to be ONE HIT whilst you were blocking or clearly dodged… This seems to only occur while the server is melting down and all those other issues are occurring.
All this is confirmed to be happening by others I play with at the same time and I’m 100% certain my connection is excellent as I’ll go through that before I jump online and Whine about it, I am wired to my router which has the correct ports open and I also have QoS setting which prioritize game data on my PC over every device connected in my home.
Either the server software needs some serious work or the server hardware and bandwidth requires upgrading to a more expensive AWS plan which can handle the load this game seems to have.
On that subject I notice I’m connected to 6 or so servers related to darktide while playing (maybe 3 or 4 and connections are up and download separate), 3 or 4 of them have a latency of 260ms so I assume its backend stuff like master server and stats located either in europe or usa, then two servers at 55 ping which are the AWS (amazon) servers, there’s a server or connection with 10 ping which may be my ISP (I haven’t checked the IP yet), SO, why so many connections for one game? surely we only need the game and the login account? Which one has final authority? I really hope its not one of the servers with 250+ latency because the game certainly feels like that at times almost as if the game instance tries its best to sync all 3 datasets up lol…
Not gonna lie and I never thought I’d feel this way but I prefer the P2P networking in Vermintide 2. It could have been modified to a token ring sort of scenario where all users held a version of the token so that once one disconnected everyone remained, a star ring of sorts.