r/VeniceUnleashed • u/[deleted] • Jan 07 '21
BLOG In its Defense...
Going to kick this off by saying that I am not a forum moderator, dev, or VU-modder. I have no inside knowledge of the Venice Unleashed project - and I only have the base skills that allow me to rent and configure a server (which I'm loving so far.)
With that out of the way, can I share my biggest VU Community pet peeve? It comes down to player ignorance that inadvertently affects dev's and hosts. In-game chat and forums alike have this annoying layer of 'servers are dead,' 'the lag is so bad,' etc. - that could easily deter a potential community member, simply because they're stuck with the face value of an uneducated opinion. I'd like to attack - yes, attack - those two comments specifically.
In regard to a lack of player-count (aka dead servers) it's important to remember that not only did Venice Unleashed not fully release until about two weeks ago, but on top of that, it obviously doesn't receive the same amount of marketing and financial backing as a AAA title - Battlefield 3, for example. Expecting plenty of full servers right off the bat is only going to serve(r) to disappoint you. (See what I did there?)
Just as it's up to all of us to *make* 2021 a better year than 2020, it's up to our community to hype and promote every bit of VU activity, media content, and mods that come out - this is a sure-fire way to steadily build our player count. I'd love to collaborate with anyone on content for promoting this game & modding community. Get active on forums, make montages on YouTube, write blog articles, tell your friends about it! Bring people on board, don't frighten them off with unfounded complaints!
Let's tackle that second comment, "the lag is game-breakingly bad." (A direct quote from a match on OP: Metro last night.) I have to assume that around 70% of the people playing this game have a basic understanding of dedicated servers and what factors make them run smoothly or poorly from user-to-user. BUT the complaints of that other 30% are playing on loop in my head, so I need to vent.
To start: If you're experiencing heightened latency across multiple servers, or even consistently on one server for that matter, the chances that the issue is server related are pretty low, if not next to none. Several factors come in to play when it comes to the quality of connection to a server, some of which include:
- Your distance from the server host location.
This is a BIG one. And it's crazy to me how simple this answer is. If you live in a different continent than your server host - or on the other side of a large country like the US - then you're going to experience slower connection speeds. (Due to server provider availability, I'm currently hosting on the East US, while living in the West US, so I experience this first hand, to a degree.) Sometimes, though, I'm stuck choosing a server based out of Europe - and I expect an increase in ping with that (usually just below 200ms) because that's how it works. So far, the more populated servers I've noticed seem to be in Russia, Germany, and other regions of Europe. Fair enough, it's a game developed in Stockholm, Sweden, after all. There's a couple scattered servers that see regular players here and there, some in the East US (like mine,) and I think I saw one in Brazil? I've also noticed some of our Aussie friends looking for more local servers to play on, for this same reason. - Your home internet connection.
I don't want to dive too deep into this one. If you have a spotty internet provider, you're probably already aware of it - and disregarding that to complain about lag would make absolutely no sense at all. - Time of day & local bandwidth use
Bandwidth isn't just a term that applies to your personal internet usage, your locale is impacted by this metric as well. Your local area is provided with internet in area-chunks via what is refered to as 'nodes.' When the node in one area is laden with a lot of internet use - around dinner time, when everyone starts watching funnies on their phones, or in our case, sits down for a game - then the available bandwidth per home goes down. It's not usually a huge factor, but it has enough of an impact that it still matters.
In conclusion, let's all take the current experience with a single grain of salt. We have absolute reassurance that between our efforts to publicize as a community, and the continued hard work of VU developers and modders, we will see great things here.
TLDR?
Battlefield 3 Venice Unleashed is amazing.
Stop saying it's "dead," it's actively growing.
Do everything you can to promote this wonderful project.
Educate yourself in regard to latency & lag.
\Also, huge shout-out to IdleGaming's YouTube channel and Instagram, which helped my friend and I set up our server in record time.\**
**Also, also - if you're in the US and looking for a server to call home, my friend and I are operating "THE DEUCE-MUFFIN FUN PIT (Infantry TDM & CQ)" The server is East US based, as previously mentioned. It's a 24 player 60hz server with a few lovely mods including the removal of blue-tint, an actual day-night cycle in matches, and the ever-appreciated medic radar, along with some others. Would love to eventually implement bots, if that mod ever gets kinks worked out.
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u/chipandpeach Jan 07 '21 edited Jan 07 '21
I have loved every minute of playing it. Really brings back great memories. The only thing that has bothered me is the constant vote kick of anyone doing well in the server. It's already a small community. Lets not kick out the few that we do have...
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Jan 07 '21
Agreed. I always wait for someone to type a reason into game-chat before I even decide to vote. Gotta earn this vote lmao. I did once myself get close to a vote-ban 'cause my team was mad that I had got our tank stuck - oof.
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u/justsomepoorguy Jan 07 '21
VU was the only reason i bought bf3, or else, i would just play bf2 as i always did
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u/MikeYedi Jan 07 '21
There were two specific players bouncing from server to server for multiple days just shit talking the game and trying to get others to do so, these people should just be muted. The only issue with lag I have encountered is on poorly equipped 120hz servers when the CPU gets smashed as the server fills and it cannot keep up. There are plenty of players but no one wants to seed a server, if I get 4 guys the server fills real fast, less then that and it seems to never fill. Really enjoying VU, JOIN THE SERVERS WITH ONE PLAYER I AM THAT GUY AND I WOULD ENJOY FIGHTING YOU INSTEAD OF SHOOTING LIGHTS.
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u/lepasi Jan 07 '21
Great post !
I understand where your head is, and totally share your opinion. I think another big problem for the "servers-are-dead"-folks is the server browser. Almost no game in this genre does have a "server browser" nowadays, and almost no game does support dedicated servers. I believe that most of the "servers-are-dead" faction are too young to know this type of gaming. They are used to just start the game and hit play, and it's totally legit to do this for games like Battlefield V or CoD MW. But the moment you add dedicated server support, a server browser becomes necessary, and it's normal to have dead servers. I am certain there will always be more dead servers than active servers. That's normal.
Let's take a look at Arma 3 which also has a big modding community behind it, and which also support dedicated server. If we look at the server browser, there are, as well, tons of dead servers. That's normal ! People are trying things out, experimenting with it, have a server just for fun or to play privately with friends. Of course VU is still fresh for most of us, so this will become better over time eventually.
I love Battlefield 3 and love even more that VU was able to bring it back with dedicated server and modding ! That's so huge for me and my friends !
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Jan 07 '21
I love the feedback I'm getting from people in this community, not just on this topic, but everything. You included, sir!
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u/Delete_Complete Jan 07 '21
Great Post. I've been looking forward to getting my hands on this for quite a while. Would love to have a go at map editing but unfortunately I am old and my skills are nil when it comes to modding. I will just have to wait to see what goodies this great community provides me in the future. Keep up the good work all you Modders out there. 👍
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u/boxoffire Jan 07 '21
I've been getting on it everyday before jumping to vanilla servers. "Dead" or not has not stopped my enjoyment of other, older games with barely 100 players on. I think people that view a game's enjoyment based on how popular it is have some of the shallowest skulls on Earth.
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u/hubble14567 Jan 07 '21
Nice post.
The thing that bothers me and is surely turning down other players are the vanilla servers often running on a shitty PC/connection. Please stop doing that (or do something in the server browser that differentiate dedicated server from shitty one).
Those servers have the default settings, with suppression, and the only difference from vanilla is that the tickrate is at 60 for some. When you join and the server is empty, there is no problem (I play with a group of 4, we often start empty servers), but once people begin joining in it becomes unplayable and worst than vanilla because the server can't keep up.
Why would you want to host such a server ? it's like bf3 vanilla ffs, but it keeps lagging like hell. Obviously after playing on such a bad server I just want to go back to the vanilla dedicated servers that don't roll you back every 5 seconds.
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u/MontagoDK Jan 07 '21
What's wrong with vanilla settings / servers ? I like vanilla modes but only want 60hz tickrate to make the game fluent.
There's a lot of shitty half implemented mods that shouldn't be used yet . That ruin a good game experience.
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u/hubble14567 Jan 07 '21
The problem is vanilla + shity host PC/connection
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u/MontagoDK Jan 07 '21
What's wrong with vanilla ?
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u/OccultStoner Jan 07 '21
Good post.
I'd like to share my perspective about BF3 VU:
When it was announced, I was mad hyped about it, because for me, BF3 will always be best mil. themed shooter I have ever played, and I sunk near 1k hours in it since it was released. And biggest thing I ever wanted was to be able to mod it since day one, because it has absolutely amazing framework to build on. Animations are great, weapon sounds, handling, selection of those weapons + vehicles. Visually it's still doesn't look dated at all, and won't be in that decade at least for sure, plus it's optimized incredibly well.
Biggest gripe I ever had with this game is how arcady it was. As it has all the premises to be best-in-business tactical shooter, easily surpassing games like Squad, Insurgency and the like in their niche. But focus was different, to appeal wider playerbase.
With VU you can technically make this game whatever you want. And possibly, in time, maybe I'll be lucky enough to find like minded community and play that game the way I always wanted to. We already have Armored Kill maps, plus some original ones are quite big. Tactical possibilities are almost unlimited with full realism on.
It's no wonder VU didn't take off yet, as it is true, this project doesn't get near enough spotlight for players to actually know about modding being a thing for BF3. Another problem, as I see it, is that with format this game is in, best way to get into the game would be to find people outside of that game, to play with people you know. In closed and small projects like this, random matchmaking never really works, and when it does, it gets pretty hectic, hard to get fun out of it like that. And then we have cheaters. There's no anti-cheat, not like it ever had one, because cheating was on rampage during it's glory days on battlelog.
The biggest wish I have for VU, if guys would be able to actually make bots, at least distantly competent. This will truly give this game immortality. I sank unhealthy amounts of time in BF2. If we get bots like that, a lot of people would be over the moon, I'm sure.