Revisiting the Fighting game debate Wifi vs Ethernet following the 2nd Japanese Figthing Game Publisher Roundtable
- Thread starter Kalentan
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That about sums it up. Harada is spraying pure PR bullshit and people are buying it. Infuriating.
Traditionally, neither has PC, which is why it's surprising to me.
or something
Like, people think this shit is cute but I'm done with anything that doesn't have rollback. I didn't touch samsho, gran blue, dbz, or the new tekken shit. It's at the point where I'm like FUCK these motherfuckers for doing their fanbases so dirty. "oooh, but see, the Japanese culture is hard to change" man, fuck that... you are selling a product, if it's so hard to make the product that people want, then just stop fucking trying.
just a few years ago playing fighting games online was a nogo with a lot of those that are now pushing for rollback netcode. There is simply a problem from developer side when you miss the moment where fighting online became accepted as the norm instead of a "causal" option. Totally on them, im not defending. I just can see why they are deflecting, they missed the point to keep up, and now have to catch up, but still have to keep face.
Going by how long development takes, how you often start planning in a different market then when the game releases at the end, im not suprised that those things happen.
And especially covid now has made this way more pressing then anybody expected. Prior you could go to friends (or in japan in arcades) and play with others. tournaments where not played online but in person, so pro players trained offline with likeminded. Those things changed drastically in the last year.
Well, western devs made the switch real fast, and Kayane asked Harada about rollback in a 2011 interview. The problem lies in the stubborn mindset of some of those devs.
While covid has exarcebated the issue, the thing is the concept of rollback netcode for fighting games is so old and has been proven for so long (Again, Namco themselves released a game with GGPO *10* years ago), there's no excuse. You could argue that maybe they're just behind the curve 7-8 years ago, but as of the past 3-4 years, if you're releasing a new game without properly implemented rollback netcode you're simply not prioritizing the right things to earn my money.
A: "Firefighters are good at putting out fire."
B: "Oh yeah? What about that one firefighter is over there just watering the grass?!"
A: "...Well okay that guy sucks but in GENERAL firefighters are good at putting out fire."
We don't talk about the one guy who sucks at his job.
SOMEHOW...this is the truth.
I'm really interesting to see how the switch version of EX Layer does since that also has rollback and 95% of people playing on the switch will be on-wifi.
But yeah, with this beta, and the future release, it's sealed. Don't buy fighters that don't have rollback netcode. There's no excuse anymore, it MUST be done.
Rollback and Crossplay are 100% necessary in every fighter (and I'd say every game but that's a bigger conversation), period. No excuses.
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Just a few years ago?
Killer Instinct came out in 2013 and is still one of the gold standard and the rollback it used is even older.
Rollback has always been demanded, it's just only now dev's (specifically Japanese) are listening and even then most seem to want to just ignore it.
Which is... A-OK and the right way.
I would prefere it people would say more often" thats the minimum and you dont deserve my money". Thats the only way that they would learn fast.
In reality people still buy it, and lessen the inscentive to invest in improvements like that...
not just fighting games, games in general. With fighting games i only can asume that the comunity has the biggest bargaining power, since with other genres, the "causals" can push the sales high enough that the enthusiasts are that, enthusiasts but not the main target. With fighting games, where tournaments and all are that relevant, i could see "not buying" actually working. (except smash, that has to much hype/cazsal factor to fail, even if they ignore the enthusiasts)
See my response above
yeah, i wont say anything against that. i was (and am) a causal, i just started to hear a bigger outcry in the last view years. it was something in the back, but the outcry was just smaller i asume. Probably the boom in tournaments, E-sports and all pushed, what core knew for long in a more prominent spotlight in the last view years?
While I'm sure people have been asking for good online for a long time, I feel like it really started to blow up after Sajam said this:
I wouldn't say this is true. GG Strive netcode isn't flawless or anything, I had slowdown and frameskipping like I've seen in other rollback games during the beta. Since the beta includes your connection speed in ms on the top of the screen, I've noticed that the majority of the times I experienced this was in sub-100ms matches that should be perfectly playable. I've had these weird slowdowns in 60ms matches as well so I'm assuming the culprit was they were on WiFi and there was some sizeable packet loss. Either that or there's something wrong with the netcode or the latency indicator.
More or less, I think Strive has very good rollback netcode but I believe the design of the game hides it's lag better than, say, +R. Strive is a much slower game with chunkier combos so it's probably less noticeable.
It's a little of both.
Reworking a game's netcode after it's already been released is a big job. Netherrealm was able to do it, but they also confirmed that it was far from easy. A game has to plan to have rollback netcode in the early stages in order for it to really be feasible.
And for a long while JPN devs refused to use GGPO in their games despite it being easy to obtain, easy to read thanks to a revised translation, and dirt-cheap to license (before it became free altogether).
Yep, the speed of the game is a factor. That's why I found it hilarious when I feel such delay in a game as slow as Tekken with 10 frames start up jabs.
Only true words. The time between matches is hilarious. but i generally find that japanese developers strugle more with online functionality?
I think a big deal is that the big Japanese companies seem to just rework the netcode that worked before like that's in their development pipeline and are really abrasive against shaking up that pipeline.
The Street Fighter V netcode fiasco made me realise that fuck me it sounds like there's only one or two people at capcom who really understood the netcode and once they were done with shipping the game they told them to fuck off to other projects and basically placed all budget on skimpy clothes and trailers and nothing on a non-existent netcode team.
The Street Fighter V netcode fiasco made me realise that fuck me it sounds like there's only one or two people at capcom who really understood the netcode and once they were done with shipping the game they told them to fuck off to other projects and basically placed all budget on skimpy clothes and trailers and nothing on a non-existent netcode team.
Yeah, this video made a splash. This started a discussion which made Max do a video on it and that made it "FGC mainstream". Rollbackia was born
The FGC keeps asking for the wrong things.
Build in frame data, cross play and rollback netcode are the three most important things we need as well as a proper tutorial how their game mechanics work.
Yeah man, it may not make a difference but at least we can say we tried.
I think people have finally lost all patience with them and in the future they'll either adapt or lose sales
And they know it
The problem with rollback in netcode in Tekken is not the attacks but the movement. Pretty much every movement in Tekken can be canceled into a another movement or attack at any frame. The most infamous example of this is Bryan's taunt jet upper, a move that requires a series of three different frame perfect inputs.
This is true. I remember one of the KI guys recommended that a fighting game to ideally work with rollback shouldn't have moves with startup faster than 5f and movement options like dashes or air dashes shouldn't instantly move the fighter, there should be a few frames before they accelerate. This makes it less jarring if a correction has to happen because you're less likely to notice it.
Guilty Gear Accent Core R+ is no different in that regard though.
What's misleading? He always said the game have rollback when people saying it doesn't at all, or is he supposed to say "oh our game DOESNT have rollback" so he won't be misleading by then? Weird logic.
And they know that it needs improvement, thats the whole deal of season 4 netcode update,why bother doing if it was perfect? Cause it wasn't and they knew it wasn't ideal and admitted as such.
That guy is still firefighter, even if he suck.
A bad Videogame doesn't magically stop being a videogame if it sucks.
A bad rollback is still rollback and don't become something else if it sucks.
As simple as that.
This is fantastic news. Any way to filter them out or just play through it and then blacklist?
Adam Heart explained in interview that I linked that rollback netcode relies on delaying the game for a few frames, once the you go beyond the threshold of how many frames the game can process it have to force more delay to allow the game to have more processing time. Tekken isn't the only game that does that, KI does that as well. Why? to eliminate the teleporting that accrue when the game rolls back extremely late. Code Mystics, the people responsible for updating the netcode for the recent SNK fighting game rereleases, also explained that point.
This one is easy- people came back to check out the new update which in turn increases the pool of players to matchmake with. Over time those people left and now the pool is small enough for these connection problems to return.
Classic symptoms of DELAY BASED netcode.
You can understand why we don't bring up the exceptions?
We don't bring up the firefighter that is watering the grass when talking about how firefighters are important to putting out fires.
Then why does Tekken online plays nothing like any other rollback game in the market?
And that's the reason why people are asking for ways to identify if people are playing on wifi, a good netcode won't fix a bad connection.
I liked the part where they called out fake ethernet players
Still had a few matches with wi-fi jitter that had a bunch of teleporting
I've played rollback in melee/slippi where 4 players are inputting at 500+ apm simultaneously and im beginning to think any type of game can work.
Still had a few matches with wi-fi jitter that had a bunch of teleporting
I've played rollback in melee/slippi where 4 players are inputting at 500+ apm simultaneously and im beginning to think any type of game can work.
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They are very different. For example the basic back dash. In Strive you push back, back and your character does a back dash animation that at no point can be changed. In Tekken you push back, back and at any frame during the movement you can cancel it in one of three different movements and then any of those three movements can be cancelled into one of four movements and so on.
It wasn't as clear cut as that.
Sonicfox said he was using it to test the waters with WiFi, just to see what happened.
He had 300ms on ping measurement and 5 or more frames of rollback.
The matches were still good because of the netcode but there were a few rollbacks in the matches and when they happened they were more severe.
To be clear, its way better than playing vs wifi in any other game's netcode; but not as rock solid as ethernet can be.
And to that, why would you risk playing other players with WiFi and get a rollback at a bad time and lose a match, when you can just avoid them, play only wired players and have a flawless experience.
Wifi players, keep playing whoever wants to play you. Rollback will help you immensely.
If given the option, I will use a wifi filter.
Also, I would be way more open to playing wifi players on rollback nc if I could see their ping before the match, and the network indicator had a flag for connection stability.
Too much variance within the last few minutes, red flag.
When comes to Namco's deflection, I'm kinda tired of Harada's word salads at this point.
Either get with the program, or I'm not buying your next fighting game.
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Nah, in Accent Core R+, there are as much possibilities with the air jumps, dash cancelling, dash brakes etcetera. Not to mention some other VERY high apm games like Melee like mentioned above or Brawlhalla.
I don't buy this excuse more than the others.
Doesn't matter, there would still be start-up frames right? Rollback can occur during those initial couple frames of start-up and it wouldn't look any different to the naked eye.
I'm sad that GBVS decision to not include rollback absolutely killed that game along with the pandemic. Which is a shame because it's legit good fighting game
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GBVS was kind of in a sucky position. Since it was basically the game that was too far along by the time Strive decided to do Rollback. (Unless I'm not remembering correctly, didn't Strive get announced with rollback prior to Granblue releasing or was it after?)
should have been their top priority to retrofit it, don't know if they've changed their minds since then
When Strive comes out, whatever little players they have left will be gone, and there's still 2 DLCs left to announce
Strive was announced after GBVS was released, and during that time they still weren't going to include rollback.
In some ways, Arc fucked over their partners lol.
EDIT:
I've checked, Strive was announced in Aug 2019 at EVO. So you were correct, it was announced just before GBVS was launched in Feb 2020.
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Ah. For some reason I assumed Strive was announced quite a bit ago.
Though 2020 might be messing with my sense of time.
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DBFZ did, but I don't think GBVS sold that well at all. It didn't bomb but it still kind of a tiny splash in the waters.
Edit: As of November of last year, GBVS has only sold about 450k copies. That isn't great.
