Quote:
Originally Posted by shmaster
For those who already started, let us enjoy talking about Cygame's stupidity and bad business decisions.
|
Well, if I were to point out complaints it has to be the loading times. I get between 1-4ish seconds loading times, and the game still loads even after the loading sometimes (assets popin and such). 1s loading isn't something I'd normally complain about but this game annoyingly loads at every click. So what happens is I can play for 4h and practically speaking only maybe play for half that if not less, with the rest being loading times.
Spoiler for rant on granblue's netcode:
I assumed initially that the problem is distance, but while I'm sure that
doesn't help, that's not the culprit here. I know, because I was bothered enough about how poorly the game was running that I actually looked at the network traffic—hoping to fix it if it was an issue on my end. What I found was the following,
- the game loads from their servers everything; no surprise here, and not particularly wrong way to go about it, however...
- the game doesn't cache most of it's junk in any meaningful way:
- every sprite you see probably a fresh re-download; there is some caching and it's fairly fast when it hits however it's ID based so requires a request to be sent regardless of hit or miss, the request itself isnt slow but it blocks other requests by forcing them to wait for it to finish
- every font (forecefully) re-downloaded every time; that bgm sound you hear re-downloaded every screen. And I do mean forcefully.
- enemy sprites, npcs, ....absolutely no caching (not even the ID one that requires request to verify hit/miss) you re-download everything every time, every screen
- I won't go into how silly it's way of working with non-asset data is, it's practically embarrassing. The methodology might as well belong to 1995. The way things appear to work from looking at the network traffic this game would be "slow" even if it didn't have to go though the network.
All in all it's an unimaginably idiotic number of requests for things that are extremely simple. A lot of the non-cache-ID-hit ones going from anywhere between 400 to 800ms.
The saddest part of the whole thing is that they could literally
flip a switch (not even exaggerating!) and
make the game at least 3 times faster (chose the demo from their own service provider, so it's the actual difference you would see); in the case of their terrible practices even more so probably. However looking at how "performance ignorant" their way of doing things is I'd be surprised if it even occurs to them in the next 5 years.
Also, in case anyone thinks maybe what they do is for security, I won't go into technical details but no it's not for security. Their way is less secure then even the most basic strategies they could go for, they literally do
less then nothing at the benefit of nobody. If anything it's making it slow for everyone by hammering their servers harder costing them more money to maintain everything. Ironically the TSL (https) protocol is more or less equivalent to HTTP2 in some performance aspects, so it would actually make their entire game
faster if they actually encrypted their entire traffic. The reason being that the encryption costs is negligible on todays hardware and https actually knows how to do "more" with fewer connections so even with the cost of encryption you get magnitudes better performance compared to http1.
Oh well. Guess I'll just have to settle with the reality that whenever I play this game, I have to pay a toll of half the "time" I spend on the game going into the void.
-
Another minor complaint is how obtuse if not inaccessible it is to buy their premium currency at the moment (I believe its entirely possible though various 3rd parties but not interested in doing that). I wouldn't even care if not for this (from my understanding as a new player) one time offer for the first 7 days of getting any character in the game I want (if my understanding is right). Either way its only a minor annoyance, I can live with out it, and I'm understanding that this was a early released version of the english patch.
With regard to english translation quality, the only thing that bothers me is the use of "cut damage" and the way they use the word "hit", which I believe is a bit confusing with how it's wording, but otherwise everything else is more then acceptable as far as I'm concerned.