Are we(zons) better off w/o Torches ?

[aishilee]

Hmm. my zon and many others in game uses hellfire torches. Hmm the stats skill and resist boost is a definately a great help.. but with the insane ias our zons have while striking and shooting projectiles.. our chances to cast that beautiful hellfire is very high. which will most of the time crashes the whole game if more den ?3? were casted at the same time.. this disallow us from spamming LF in very quick succession.

so .. are zons better off without torches ?

[crawlingdeadman]

i've decided for my own benefit that yes, we are. the last 3 zons i've made have not included the stats from the torch so that i can take it off at will.

[Virility]

?more than 3 what? More than 3 successive proc's of the torch? I recall last season sitting back and consistently watching a Javazon consistently crashing full games with no help from the group, but without torch proc's. This season I can proc the torch successively easily 3 times without problems crashing the game(3 player) my torch firing successively. Bow/strafe skill used.

[CursedYew]

Buy a better comp if you lag I don't have any problem with hellfire at all.

[AnimeCraze]

Buy a better comp if you lag I don't have any problem with hellfire at all.Nothing to do with our comp. Tell that to blizzard. They need to buy better servers.

[chien]

Haha, true. Nothing to do for the computer. Come on, this game is old :) For me, I will use it for private game, but I will take it out for pub games to be safe.

Chien

[Virility]

I could almost agree with you AnimeCraze, but frankly I am greatful to play this game online, with the only entrance fee being purchase of the game. To have someone even update and periodically patch, and some what police the hack programs, is amazing to me after such long time. I guess its because the Diablo Battle chest is still selling very well.

Regardless I think the Hellfire Torch is one very cool toy. From collecting the organs to the end battle, it is good gaming fun.

[DaveTheGreat]

I just use it in private games, then take it off in public ones :wink3:. Best way to go about it IMO

[GlobZ]

Wow, there's so many baal runs I mean when the game crashes, you can join another 1 right away. (it rarely or never happens to me btw) so yeah I rather keep the extra stats lol.

[synx]

I don't know where this talk of torches crashing the game comes from.


I really think it is your old pcs, as 8 player games with several people proccing torches doesn't even cause a hiccup for me. Hell, this game didn't lag me out 6 years ago on my old pc with 128 megs of ram, and a geforce 2mx.

My rig:
Asus M2N-E SLI
AMD X2 6000+
8800 GTS 512
2gigs Corsair XMS2
Vista Home Premium 32

[AnimeCraze]

Again. Please refrain from saying things you do not know about.

Torch crashing games comes from the server. We see no lag on our end, and game crashed suddenly. I am sure a dual core laptop is more than enough to handle the game in DirectDraw mode.

[Armor_Biff]

I don't know where this talk of torches crashing the game comes from.


I really think it is your old pcs, as 8 player games with several people proccing torches doesn't even cause a hiccup for me. Hell, this game didn't lag me out 6 years ago on my old pc with 128 megs of ram, and a geforce 2mx.

There really is a problem with this, I just posted a new thread about it and then saw this thread right after. Its no bull**** and comp specs has nothing to do with it.

[synx]

Again. Please refrain from saying things you do not know about.

Torch crashing games comes from the server. We see no lag on our end, and game crashed suddenly. I am sure a dual core laptop is more than enough to handle the game in DirectDraw mode.

Sorry, but I have yet to experience these mystical crashes you're talking about, and am simply relaying what I've seen.


Again. Please refrain from being a dick, just because you're crashing with torches, and I don't.

Thanks.

*edit*

It may be worth noting that I'm running the game under glide, which totally kills the performance of directdraw/direct3d.

[Gorgrims]

The crashing of a game makes everybody crash. Which mean's if you arent crashing due to spell procs, nobody is. It doesn't matter which PC I use, with enough effects, the game crashes.


You also assumed peoples computer's were ****e, and since in your opinion, yours wasnt, it must have been your superior computer who kept you away from crashes, while everybody around you with a crappy one did. sigh. nobody's better here....


Please try and see if you can make, or find for that matter. An amazon who's able to do Lightning furies at extreme rates, with enough effects you will drop from the game, atleast more often than not, and so will everybody else. If other people manage's to crash and you don't, ill believe you instead.

In singleplayer i've managed to LF pretty fast without anything crashing, so I definitely think it's a server-problem/ server-"reflex" that drop's people lagging too much.

[synx]

*shrug*

I have yet to crash from any spell effects, and I've been on many baal runs with LF zons, summon necros, and strafers/zealers firing off torches rapidly.

Hell, I've even been in games where they've attempted to desync it by spamming bonewalls, meteors, plague javs, and traps all over the ground. No crashes.


Until I get disconnected from spell effects, or see a fraps of someone getting disconnected from them.. I'll maintain the opinion that the problems are client-side.

[BlushNine]

Connection Interrupts are a network problem. Network problems depend on so many factors. Ask any person in the IT industry. Anything from your computer to the 20 or 30 routers between yours and the server, the server setup, the connection between other players and the server on your game, etc. Pointing a finger at any 1 technical cause, like someone's computer or the server is a shot in the dark at best.

My shot in the dark, probably has to do with the total sum of roundtrip delays between the hellfire caster to the server to the other players and the size of the packet window not being large enough to accommodate the number of events unacknowledged before either a predetermined tolerance for packet loss or buffer size.

Or it could just be a really old game.

I don't think its your personal computer. I have a pretty decent machine and my internet gets sick download speeds. I don't even run in D3D mode, just 2D mode and hellfire will cut my connection. But since it only happens in multiplayer, and only in very heavy games, I would conclude its network side issue. Never cuts out in solo. So if you never seen this happen, you could just be lucky that you sit very close to a major internet backbone or a short number of hops to the nearest Battle.net gateway. Who knows? I certainly don't.

The Connection Interupt might be a function call designed to trigger from the Diablo game at your machine or the server machine. What if both player and server machines are fine and its just the way they programmed the game to interface with the network protocol stack? It is pretty old you know. Unless you help build the program, we really don't know do we?

So basically all I'm saying is we're all a bunch of idiots taking wild guesses.

[mephiztophelez]

I don't know where this talk of torches crashing the game comes from.
it comes from the number of games that crash because of multiple torch procs going off.

it's not just peoples imagination, its a fact.

the "anti-dupe" fix implemented last ladder is why we get connection interrupted rather than just long lag spikes.

[NASE]

When do you play synx? If you play when nobody but the 8 of you in the game play on that server, you simply can't overload to server with to much effects not can you lag on the bottle neck before the server as just to little people are playing.

It hasn't happened with me aswell, though I play when servers are low on people - sunday mornings or somewhere in the afternoon. Perhaps this can explain why you aren't getting these problems.

[synx]

When do you play synx? If you play when nobody but the 8 of you in the game play on that server, you simply can't overload to server with to much effects not can you lag on the bottle neck before the server as just to little people are playing.

It hasn't happened with me aswell, though I play when servers are low on people - sunday mornings or somewhere in the afternoon. Perhaps this can explain why you aren't getting these problems.

I typically play during 'prime time' around 5 pm and 8pm. I've seen queues to join games, and massive constant lag spikes, but never C/I'd from stuff like that.

What C/Is me : Switching to CTA immediately after going through a waypoint, and dropping huge amounts of gold in town (your guess is as good as mine on this one).

This is just a shot in the dark, but whoever is getting C/I'd by spell effects should download the glide wrapper and run it in 3dfx mode, and report back here with the results.

Blush is probably right though, we've got no idea what the real cause is.

[BlushNine]

I could believe that a side effect of the dupe fix shortens the tolerance for lag and thus causes C/I, this is very plausible. Dupe Lags are far worse as I recall them, than the lag spikes we encounter with torches in conjunction with the fact that on occassion I've experienced lag spikes far worse than torches and not getting kicked off. Maybe not "lag" per se, but rather the number of packets being sent for the activation of torches might be as high as when packets are being sent for duping. "Lag" is such a general term for unresponsiveness, it's often not caused by excessive traffic but rather a failure to receive acknowledgement or ack-ack/nack packets back.

This would coincide with your dont-take-my-gold-im-ubering-and-think-ill-die. It's been explained to me that when you use a waypoint, the game sends a packet to the server for a save state similar to when you are exiting the game, and gold is tracked very inefficiently in the game when on the ground (probably the programmers thought who the hell would put piles of gold lying around), several dupe methods and hacks were used previously that relied on gold piles for some reason.

[AnimeCraze]

Blush is probably right though, we've got no idea what the real cause is.Actually, we do. If everyone in the same game gets disconnected, then chances are it must be at the source (or at least some common junction). Just think of the probabilities of 8 independent unlucky events happening at the same time, unlikely, isn't it. Glide wrapper has nothing to do with it as I run DirectDraw. Another thing is, poison creeper disconnects, everytime, even when most of the mats are not anywhere on my screen, so that's not a graphics problem. My guess it's probably the dupe fix as well, as I never had it before then. Also, if it is any real lag, then you must see effects on the screen, as the game tries to recover as much as possible. A sudden and adrupt disconnect cannot be due to lag itself.

Anyways, the best way to test this is to have someone sits in town for a Baal game, while some strafers strafe like mad in Throne. If the player in town gets dropped as well, then it is Blizz's fault.

[thefranklin]

Synx:

Join a full baal game with your zon that can make cows. Put on torch, make cow game, herd the biggest pack you have ever seen and start throwing lf's. Game crashed.

[aishilee]

hmm. yea. my laptop is ****ty.. running on 512ram and some pretty weak grahpic card.. but i can guarantee the multiple hellfire and all the fanciful spells like LF and CE will crash the game if casted simulatenously... not the computer.. it wont lag or hang. it juz crashes that very game. you cant find and join back the game even it was up like for <5mins.

so. i think we are better off with torches in private games den in 8player games. in 8 player games, most probably a few more players would have torches on themselves..we juz have to not shoot/throw too many bow/jav.. and give each other charc a chance.

[Summerfun]

I has nothing to do with hardware

My new comp is a quad core with 8gb ddr3 ram, and i still get CI

[lukefojut]

Right, back to the topic (I think CI has been discussed sufficiently!) I think Amazons can survive far better than other classes can without a Torch, as they seem to be far less skill dependant.

The key to building a decent Amazon has always seemed to me to be a healthy balance between stat placement (sorry, this should read dumping all my points into Dex for my Bowazons) and reasonable gear. I honestly can't think of an Ama I've built who actually needed a Torch particularly.

I'd rather leave the torch off and save annoying people in public games - life is too short. That said, the stat and res boosts are useful, but an Anni can make up for some of the loss.

[Alc]

Anyways, the best way to test this is to have someone sits in town for a Baal game, while some strafers strafe like mad in Throne. If the player in town gets dropped as well, then it is Blizz's fault.Not that it needs confirming (it's pretty clear from my own experience that certain spells/attacks, especially firestorm, cause CI), but I've crashed while in town in baalrun games at least a couple of times (joining late and needing to shop). If you're trying to tell me that's a client-side issue then I'd have to question your logic. I also had uber trist games crash on me semi-regularly, until I stopped using the pala torch. Circumstantial evidence? Certainly. It's compelling enough for me, though.

Apologies for more CI discussion, lukefojut, I felt it was relevant.

[erzk]

Are you guys saying that torches doesn't crash games playing on bnet? I even crashed private games with my bowa using torch, on bnet, procing firestorms.

[Dirkw]

I rarely see spell effects cause game crashes to be honest.

That said, I don't like the effect of the firestorm on physical characters anyway. Especially because it isn't really functional either.