Hello, Pilots!
We are aware that some of you are experiencing server's issues and lags and this post will explain what our plans are and why, hopefully you’ll get some answers.
First of all, we are very thankful for all the positive reviews and the growing community.
What an exciting time for us! (also very stressful)
Let’s start with the servers (lags).
At the moment we only have 2 regions, Europe and North America, servers are respectively in the north of France and in Canada, you can choose which servers you want to play on from the Settings menu.
And so, all the players in Asia, Oceania, Center and South America, not forgetting Russia, have a high ping, we are aware of that and it is very frustrating.
We are very sorry about that, adding servers is something we want to do and are working on, but not to forget that servers are a non-negligible cost so we have to choose carefully.
Also, adding servers will split the queues : yes it will reduce your ping, but if you find no-one to play against, that’s also a problem.
Today we plan to add 2 server regions (one server for each), one in Asia (not precisely defined where) and one in Brazil. From all the feedback we’ve got, this should fix the majority of player lag.
If after the update you are still having lag, please make sure to reach out, either on Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Twitch, or through the Steam community. We spend a lot of time reading all of your concerns, feedback and questions.
Today, if you are in Europe, your ping should be less than 100, same as if you are in the USA/Canada.
From what we have seen, most of you play with a 20-30ms ping or less and servers rarely get overloaded, so if there is high ping, it’s more an issue about internet speed, wifi, or others settings, but we are very concerned by it and will gladly help you finding a way to improve it.
A bit of informations about the “rollback netcode”
A lot of players are asking us to implement the “rollback netcode” and we understand why.
It seems important to us to give a bit of explanation about what it is and how this will change in terms of feeling and gameplay, but also to explain how we plan to solve this.
During the early-access we have tried to implement prediction/reconciliation.
It is not “rollback” but it takes some principles from it.
It was working and good for beginners, but the feeling was not great for competition.
Rollback can give some weird feeling for your opponent in a high ping situation, and what happens today from players complaining about lag (for the vast majority), is that they do have a high ping.
So except if we decided to use a P2P solution (without an authoritative server), there is no counter to high ping.
Here is a complete article explaining what Rollback is and how it impact the gameplay, I can’t explain better than this (or then read some PHd about P2P games and rollback, but this is not the point here): https://gamerant.com/rollback-netcode-explained/
As competitive players, we know how frustrating the lag is and how unacceptable it is to lose a match because of lag.
So here is our plan.
- First, bringing new servers that will reduce the lag, from 200 or 400 you should go under 100 which is more acceptable.
- Then, we will re-implement the prediction/reconciliation algorithms we’ve made during early-access, and it will be activable as an option in the settings, this will reduce your lag input but could cause some weird feeling, so as an option, you’ll be free to activate it.
- Third, add an extra option to “blend” the lag and prediction, which could contribute to reducing the lag feeling and the gap between reality. We want to try this but are unsure of the result.
- And last, we are going to improve the general netcode in the server, moving to a new stack, that should make the game faster and improve for everyone, including players who have no lags today.
We do not want to implement a full rollback for many reasons.
The first one is the cost of development, we can’t assume it today and it you’ll be a lie to say “let’s go”, while we have some affordable solution that does work.
Also, full rollback with high ping (keeping an authoritative server) would make unfair matches for matches with high and low ping, and it would be even more frustrating for everyone (seeing the shot teleporting, or the ship teleporting, also it is a cheat exploit used in some games).
The best we can do today is adding servers.
As the community keeps growing and supporting the game, we might in the future have the budget to plan on a P2P with an authoritative server (checking and validating what’s happening), that will be safe and fast.
But for now, it is not possible.
Giving you more inputs here, the more you play Exoblast and the more you will be able to predict what is happening in the fight, and the more you will be able to compete even with high ping.
Unlike other games, Exoblast is completely playable with a good anticipation and skill, but this requires some training, as an example, some dev members and community players are playing from the EU on NA servers (with a ping from 100 to 200) and still able to win a lot of games.
We know how different it is from fighting games, but Exoblast does not have that many frames to read and only 3 inputs to play.
Just give us some time to update the game and improve all of that.
With your feedback and our hard work we can find the solution 🙏.
As a small indie team, we are doing our best efforts to bring new servers and a netcode update in the next patch, with a new balance and some new features we are excited about.
While waiting this new update, if you want to experiment the game without lags (and by that I mean if you are far from the servers we plan to add), our advice is to play using the “Local Mode” (which is Offline) and there you can set up the AIs you want, the side you want, etc…
It’s not the perfect solution you want “now”, but you can train and learn all the ships, and trust us, if you beat the AI level 8 you will be rocking the ranked mode once servers will be close enough for you to play 🤠
Enough talking, back to work.
Thank for your time and understanding 🙏