Multiplayer Experience - 28th June 2011 Patch

[Rylan]

I picked up this game on it's release day but, to this date, have yet to complete a multiplayer game with my friends.

Yesterday's patch was released on one of our scheduled days and whilst this was not billed as a multiplayer patch there were certain elements which suggested that, after a long time away, we should give the game another chance.

This is our experience from start to finish.


Five players attempted to join the game.
One of the players found that the new patch had made the game unplayable for him in Direct X 10 modes. The game crashed continuously until he reverted to DX9.
After all 5 players were connected two of the players could not see each other although I, as the game host, could.
Another player could not select a Civilization because the drop down menu kept reverting to Random Selection. We elected to play regardless.
The loading process took approximately 2 minutes but only three of us made it into the game. Two other players saw a picture of the American flag, two pyramids and a message stating "BONUS LABEL".
The three of us that made it into the game could select our units but they did not move once a target hex was selected.
After 60 seconds of waiting all of us went back to a loading bar.
During the loading process another player crashed to desktop.
The game eventually loaded again and 3 of us were able to select units and move them. The other two players were told the game was full and could not reconnect.
We then faced another loading bar which lasted for approximately 2 minutes. When that finished two of us were in a lobby together, the other three had either crashed out or were stuck in a hung application.


Let me assure those of you reading this that this is not a one off situation, it has been happening with every game we have attempted to play since we all bought this game.

Nor is it the fault of the computers or connections involved. Of those five players three of us hold rather high level IT positions and are long time gamers. We spend money and, more importantly, time ensuring that our computers are set up right and we also make sure that the two non-technical people are looked after. We do not have issues in any other games.

Yesterday's patch, if anything, made things worse and I want Firaxis and 2K Games to understand what you've done. After reading this I want you to consider why you got into making games in the first place, what your intentions were, what you hoped to achieve, aspire to, what you dreamt.

Then I want you to understand that 100% of the gamers I know believe that you have sold out those dreams and aspirations, took our money and failed to provide anything of any merit to us at all. Truly, you should be ashamed. In the 12 years since our little group began to form we have never come across an experience as poor as this and I use the word 'never' sincerely.

Congratulations guys. You made the worst game we have ever had the misfortune to buy. We have been fair and patient. We have given you chance, after chance, after chance and you still continue to fail.

[RafaDiablo]

sorry for your bad experience man!Alredy tried the new hotseat mode?

[Bloody Rose]

Let me assure those of you reading this that this is not a one off situation, it has been happening with every game we have attempted to play since we all bought this game.
That's typical. I pre-ordered the game and have been trying to play MP ever since the release. Nothing's changed.

[wyldmn]

My friends and have been playing MP games since October (usually 6-8 hours at a time). The first questions I would ask, what are the specs of the host computer? Should be the most powerful PC.
1. We usually use my Athlon II 640 3GHZ with 4 GB of RAM as the host, Windows 7. So we always use a quad core and 4 GB of RAM as a minimum.
2. Is anyone using a wireless connection, the times we tried we had all kinds of connection problems.
3. What are the Internet connection speeds, the worst one in our group is 3mps, usually we only use 8-12mps.
4. What do the PCs have running in the background, such as iTunes, windows updates, Adobe crap and so on.
You may have different experiences.

[Olek]

My friends and have been playing MP games since October (usually 6-8 hours at a time). The first questions I would ask, what are the specs of the host computer? Should be the most powerful PC.
1. We usually use my Athlon II 640 3GHZ with 4 GB of RAM as the host, Windows 7. So we always use a quad core and 4 GB of RAM as a minimum.
2. Is anyone using a wireless connection, the times we tried we had all kinds of connection problems.
3. What are the Internet connection speeds, the worst one in our group is 3mps, usually we only use 8-12mps.
4. What do the PCs have running in the background, such as iTunes, windows updates, Adobe crap and so on.
You may have different experiences.

Two of the guys are techies and all long time gamers, if every other game they play works, why would your sugestions make any difference.
I understand that your trying to help the guy out, but really, as long as the specs of the host computer meets the minimum required, then there should be no problems, nothing in the system requirements suggests any need for a high end system for hosting a multiplayer game nor does it mention needing a high internet speed.

[Andross]

I have also encountered these problems in multiplayer, from my experience anything above 3 people was completely unplayable, and so little has been done to multiplayer since release it's pretty depressing.

[wyldmn]

Two of the guys are techies and all long time gamers, if every other game they play works, why would your sugestions make any difference.
I understand that your trying to help the guy out, but really, as long as the specs of the host computer meets the minimum required, then there should be no problems, nothing in the system requirements suggests any need for a high end system for hosting a multiplayer game nor does it mention needing a high internet speed.

Guess what I am also a long time techie too. Minimum specs are for SP, you may have to up your rig for other types of play. So many different PC setups and as for not mentioning internet speed, sometimes common sense is needed.

[Olek]

Guess what I am also a long time techie too. Minimum specs are for SP, you may have to up your rig for other types of play. So many different PC setups and as for not mentioning internet speed, sometimes common sense is needed.

Below is what you will read on the box when a customer decides to purchase this product, you show me were it states that the requirments are for Single player only, you show me were it states having high speed broadband is required for multiplayer to work.
And while your at it. explain why the same problems are happening on 10/100/1000 LAN.



Minimum System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows XP SP3
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHZ or AMD Athlon X2 64 2.0 GHZ
Memory: 2 GB of RAM
Hard Disk Space: 8 GB Free
DVD-ROM Required for disc-based installation
Video: 256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or
Core i3 or better integrated graphics
Sound: DirectX® 9.0c-compatible sound card
DirectX® DirectX® version 9.0c
Internet Connection: Required for initial game validation and multiplayer games

Recommended System Requirements:
Operating System: Windows Vista SP2 / Windows 7
Processor: 2.4 GHz Quad Core CPU
Memory: 4 GB of RAM
Graphics: 512 MB ATI 4800 or better, 512 MB nVidia 9800 or better
Internet Connection: Broadband Internet connection recommended

[wyldmn]

Below is what you will read on the box when a customer decides to purchase this product, you show me were it states that the requirments are for Single player only, you show me were it states having high speed broadband is required for multiplayer to work.
And while your at it. explain why the same problems are happening on 10/100/1000 LAN.

Common sense, these are minimum requirements to run the game and in the 20 plus years I have been playing computer games, games run on minimum can have problems, SP, MP or however you want to play it.

I have 2 PCs in my house 1 is my wife's PC and the other is mine. Civ5 runs on both PCs. I would never try to use her PC to play Multiplayer, because it is a minimum to play the game. The minimum computer that my friends and I use is a P8400CPU Laptop with 4GB of RAM and Windows 7.

Also it states broadband (very broad name and usage), which means highspeed internet. I would be leery of using 1.5mbs DSL (maybe even 3mps DSL, which my friend upgraded to cable, because his online experience in several other games was bad) to play anything online, but that is advertised as broadband. Also did you know that 1.5 DSL is probably only 256kbps upload speed. My cable internet 10mps is 1mps upload speed. Upload speed could be a big factor.

Like I said before your mileage may vary from my 5 friends and my experiences.

[Lathieza]

Seems to me you can easily test above when you select the smallest map. Just for testing purpose.

Anyway... i also think they delivered a piece of crap game and allthough it seems to improve with patches they are a very long way from home.
Especially because of the lack of communication and the speed the patches comes out

[Bloody Rose]

wyldmn, I did not start this thread but I will respond to your messages. My specs are Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 2.4 (sometimes overclocked at 3.0), Nvidia 8800 GT 1 GB and 2 GB RAM. The connection speed is 20mb/s. As I've already said a number of times, I still think the game is unplayable, even if I host. Now, I'm getting a PC with the following specs in a couple of days: Intel i5 2500K 3.3, Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 and 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM. Will you stop posting on these forums and trying to blame it on our computers instead of the game itself after I have tried playing on the new PC and reported that it's all the same?

[CanuckSoldier]

Yes the games MP code is still crap. And min and recommended specs are really for Single player only. And even then the min specs mean that you are due for long inbetween turn waits. Civ5 is a demanding game even though it is a TBS game. Just read this article from popular computer site AnandTech http://www.civplayers.com/index.php?section=smf&topic=9586.0

So for better or worse you are not going to play MP, which is crappy, on a min spec computer, because while your computer is taking 1-2 mins to process the turn the faster computers are done in 20-30 sec and they are collectively deciding you have lagged out because your system is not responding in time.

Yes MP should work better, far better. But that is just not reality, so don't expect that just because you can chug along in SP that you will be able to play MP. You will need a group of people with much better than average computers and internet speeds to play MP. AT CivPlayers we keep our games generally to 4 players because we just don't know the computer specs of the random people in the lobby that we meet. If you know your fellow players well and know what kinda of computers they have then you might be able to go upto 6 players in a game.

But rmember that there are many things that lag the game worse in MP too. Any AI, either AI civs or CS's will cause the game to lag more at the end of each turn. So it is much better to play against humans than play coop against the AI for now. If your computer doesn't have a high end graphics card don't play with DX10/11 play with DX9 it does make a significant difference for not much lowering of eye candy. Don't play on a map larger than needed, all those tiles and cities you have on too large a map need to be rendered by the game each turn, so playing on the smallest map reasonable for your players will help alot starting in the mid game when the entire map is visable.

And for reference I play on a ASUS RoG G51 laptop, Quad Core i7 @ 1.6GHz, 6 gigs ram and a nVidia 360M GPU and have no problem playing MP with 4-6 random players from NA or Europe.

CS

[wyldmn]

wyldmn, I did not start this thread but I will respond to your messages. My specs are Intel Core 2 Duo E4600 2.4 (sometimes overclocked at 3.0), Nvidia 8800 GT 1 GB and 2 GB RAM. The connection speed is 20mb/s. As I've already said a number of times, I still think the game is unplayable, even if I host. Now, I'm getting a PC with the following specs in a couple of days: Intel i5 2500K 3.3, Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 and 4 GB DDR3 SDRAM. Will you stop posting on these forums and trying to blame it on our computers instead of the game itself after I have tried playing on the new PC and reported that it's all the same?

I was just trying to help and have not blamed anyone and as Canuck Soldier has said he can play within reason also. If you would have read my post, you would have noticed that I say I only play with the same group and I know all of their specs and also setup their PCs/Laptops. I will be playing MP for 6-8 hours tonight, like we always do.

So now I am not allowed to post on these forums , are you a Moderator, I don't see it after your name?

[Nefliqus]

I picked up this game on it's release day but, to this date, have yet to complete a multiplayer game with my friends.

Yesterday's patch was released on one of our scheduled days and whilst this was not billed as a multiplayer patch there were certain elements which suggested that, after a long time away, we should give the game another chance.

This is our experience from start to finish.


Five players attempted to join the game.
One of the players found that the new patch had made the game unplayable for him in Direct X 10 modes. The game crashed continuously until he reverted to DX9.
After all 5 players were connected two of the players could not see each other although I, as the game host, could.
Another player could not select a Civilization because the drop down menu kept reverting to Random Selection. We elected to play regardless.
The loading process took approximately 2 minutes but only three of us made it into the game. Two other players saw a picture of the American flag, two pyramids and a message stating "BONUS LABEL".
The three of us that made it into the game could select our units but they did not move once a target hex was selected.
After 60 seconds of waiting all of us went back to a loading bar.
During the loading process another player crashed to desktop.
The game eventually loaded again and 3 of us were able to select units and move them. The other two players were told the game was full and could not reconnect.
We then faced another loading bar which lasted for approximately 2 minutes. When that finished two of us were in a lobby together, the other three had either crashed out or were stuck in a hung application.


Let me assure those of you reading this that this is not a one off situation, it has been happening with every game we have attempted to play since we all bought this game.

Nor is it the fault of the computers or connections involved. Of those five players three of us hold rather high level IT positions and are long time gamers. We spend money and, more importantly, time ensuring that our computers are set up right and we also make sure that the two non-technical people are looked after. We do not have issues in any other games.

Yesterday's patch, if anything, made things worse and I want Firaxis and 2K Games to understand what you've done. After reading this I want you to consider why you got into making games in the first place, what your intentions were, what you hoped to achieve, aspire to, what you dreamt.

Then I want you to understand that 100% of the gamers I know believe that you have sold out those dreams and aspirations, took our money and failed to provide anything of any merit to us at all. Truly, you should be ashamed. In the 12 years since our little group began to form we have never come across an experience as poor as this and I use the word 'never' sincerely.

Congratulations guys. You made the worst game we have ever had the misfortune to buy. We have been fair and patient. We have given you chance, after chance, after chance and you still continue to fail.

I have very similar experience and I agree with your opinion about civ5 and dev team. This game is good only for very young singleplayers. Civ5 was made to achieve their psychological needs, it is very similar to Teletubbies‏ concept.

[Bloody Rose]

I will be playing MP for 6-8 hours tonight, like we always do.
Make a long video and show us that it's possible. Perhaps that will change the peoples' mind. Note that you can't call it playing when it gets stuck all the time, you have to constantly reload the game, a player drops and such. That'd be sadomasochism.


So now I am not allowed to post on these forums , are you a Moderator, I don't see it after your name?
Of course you can post, but misleading people is a terrible idea. They might buy a new PC because of you and then face exactly the same problems.

[Xill]

Last time we tried to launch a game with a good amount of players (5) it crashed 3 of them while loading and the 2 remaining (me and another) could not click next turn. We gave up after a few tries with similar results; one player rejoined after the opening crash, only to have the wrong civilization assigned to him and crashing another guy when forcing the game reload. Another got hung on an infinite loading screen. We haven't played since.
There is reasons to be angry, this is totally pathetic. It's beyond bad. It's broken. It's a display of utter incompetence.

Personally I would be ashamed of having a company that release buggy stuff like this. It's totally unprofessional. Better a bad game that works than a good game that doesn't.

That said it does work if your just 2, most of the times. 3 players, sometimes. 4 almost never.

[Olek]

Not only that, but telling customers that Broadband is recommended for multiplayer is misleading, if your going to tell me that I need a 20m connection to play it without issue, then you could probably wipeout the entire Australian population from playing multiplayer, not to mention the fact that over here we have to pay double for the game.

Our guild members play Civ 4 multiplayer, we never have a problem, no matter how many players, graphics aside, which does not get transfered anyway, I don't see Civ 5 being anymore complex than Civ 4 under the bonnet, it does not even need to calculate stacks anymore, nor random events, the number of units and cities in game being far less than a Civ 4 match.

[civdiss]

Not only that, but telling customers that Broadband is recommended for multiplayer is misleading, if your going to tell me that I need a 20m connection to play it without issue, then you could probably wipeout the entire Australian population from playing multiplayer, not to mention the fact that over here we have to pay double for the game.

Our guild members play Civ 4 multiplayer, we never have a problem, no matter how many players, graphics aside, which does not get transfered anyway, I don't see Civ 5 being anymore complex than Civ 4 under the bonnet, it does not even need to calculate stacks anymore, nor random events, the number of units and cities in game being far less than a Civ 4 match.

Look from any angle you look at this you'll end up with the same result. Civ V MP is a colossal failure, it is the first time in the history of gaming/software engineering that a newer version of a software is much worse than the previous one both in terms of functionality and features offered to the end user. Main reason for this is gross incompetence, poor judgement, miscalculation, mismanagement, idiocy you name it. Now the question is what are we going to do for them to realise that MP is a big deal? and even if they release 1 million SP patches and a trillion DLCs we won't go away..as we paid $50 for a game with an amazing MP experience and we got...

[Kanjutsu]

I've been wondering.

I keep seeing peoples speaking of Computer Specs, Internet Speed ect, ect..

But there is one thing I cannot understand with Civilization V problems.

The Multiplayers.

My story is a simple one. Me, my brother, we always play together.

Single players I have yet to experience a single crash, except maybe with DX11 but even so it may have happened once or twice.

Multiplayer?

Out of nearly 10+ games me and my brother could NEVER finish a single game. It's always the same story after each patch.

The game reach about 200+ turns and boom the game crashes. Reload play a few turn the game crash again, rinse and repeat until bore to death.

What's funny is we play in LAN. (or is it truly LAN, I'm guessing with Steam it's via internet anyway)

Internet Speed?

According to speedtest.net I get the following result:

DOWN: 61.14 Mb/s
UP: 0.99 Mb/s

Seeing I never had any problem with others Multiplayer game I think my internet is not the issues here.

As for my rig I crush Civilization recommended settings by miles. Same for my brother.

If you want info on my rig I'm running a Mach V on Win7 Ultimate 64 bits with a Rampage III Extreme motherboard a Core i7 960 3.20Ghz with 12GB 1600Mhz DDR3 with 2x Quadro FX 2000 1GB video card.

Also, I cannot understand how the game take more then 3-5 minutes to play turns past around 300+ turns when playing in Multiplayers.

In singleplayer it never take more than about 10 sec or so between turn and that even on a Huge map with 22 Civ (which is max this game allow so far).

Anyway, all in all this game is great singleplayer. but they should not have advertised it as being able to run multiplayer is all I believe.

My 2 cent. and yes Im angry that multiplayers keep crashing. But I enjoy singleplayer so yeah.

[wyldmn]

Make a long video and show us that it's possible. Perhaps that will change the peoples' mind. Note that you can't call it playing when it gets stuck all the time, you have to constantly reload the game, a player drops and such. That'd be sadomasochism.


Of course you can post, but misleading people is a terrible idea. They might buy a new PC because of you and then face exactly the same problems.

First I don't have to prove anything to you. If you would actually read instead of raging you might see several other people can play MP, beside my friends and me. Also, You may have lots a time to make a video I don't.

[QUOTE=Bloody Rose;1411536Will you stop posting on these forums and trying to blame it on our computers instead of the game itself after I have tried playing on the new PC and reported that it's all the same?[/QUOTE]

Read your response and tell me you did not tell me to quit posting. And Misleading? telling the truth is misleading, wow! I have a disclaimer stating your mileage may vary. Let me break that down for you. What my disclaimer says, may not be how it works for everyone due to all of the different computer setups. And yes I have done lots of software testing, in a work environment and found that the same brand and model PC with 1 program different can have an effect on another piece of software.

Also, our game Friday night started at 6 PM (actually loaded a game at 5:55, but put standard speed instead of quick and had to start again after 3 turns.) We finished at 12:30 AM (we were going to quit between 12:30-1 AM). Pangaea, 4 humans, 4 AI, 16 CS, prince level, standard map, quick speed. Had a resync at 10 PM and at 12:25 AM (same PC that we always have trouble with, the guy's wife's laptop, which she does lots of bad surfing). Decided to restart the last auto save twice and got a Direct X error twice on reload and we decided it was time to quit. Also the lag was worse later in the game than before the patch. Lastly, Alexander AI declared war early ( about turn 60) in the game, which was a change from the old AI, before the patch.

[wyldmn]

Not only that, but telling customers that Broadband is recommended for multiplayer is misleading, if your going to tell me that I need a 20m connection to play it without issue, then you could probably wipeout the entire Australian population from playing multiplayer, not to mention the fact that over here we have to pay double for the game.

Our guild members play Civ 4 multiplayer, we never have a problem, no matter how many players, graphics aside, which does not get transfered anyway, I don't see Civ 5 being anymore complex than Civ 4 under the bonnet, it does not even need to calculate stacks anymore, nor random events, the number of units and cities in game being far less than a Civ 4 match.

Wow, 1 person that says that they cannot play and has a 20mps connection, turns into the broadband standard. We play with 1 DSL 3mps and up to 5 others with 10mps. Broadband is a wide brush word and just because your ISP calls it broadband does not make it great.

Yes, Fireaxis does need to work on the code for MP, but unless you are a programmer and can see the source code that is just a guess at the differences in code.

[Rylan]

Wyldmn,

I'm happy that you personally are able to play this game multiplayer with your friends. However, I'm sure you'll understand that this is not much consolation to the many many players who are struggling. At the moment your posts are sounding very much like those of an apologist; you assume that because it works for you that we are at fault, that Firaxis and 2K have done a wonderful job with Civ V. This is not the case.

As I mentioned in my initial post three of our group are IT Professionals. Not 1st Line helpdesk or people who know a bit about Windows XP but skilled engineers carrying a myriad of Microsoft, Cisco and programming qualifications backed up by years of experience. I say this not to brag but to clearly set out the parameters of the discussion. The questions you are asking are similar to those which are relevant to games of a higher quality where a smaller section of the purchasers are struggling. They are also questions of more casual players with less technical ability. They aren't relevant to me or my gaming group but, since you've asked, I'll answer.

My PC is used for a gaming PC and Hyper-V testing lab and is specced accordingly. It's eye-wateringly better than both the minimum and recommended specs as listed on the box.

That aside, I just want to refute, with all vehemence, your attitude to minimum and recommended specifications. Whilst it's accepted that hosting multiplayer games comes with extra overhead, Civilization is a turn based game which should have very little in the way of overhead, both in terms of processing and memory but also in network utlilization. RTS games such as C&C, Total War and Starcraft 2 put much greater strain on a machine and yet all of those games will still run very happily on machines which were not considered state-of-the-art when purchased several years ago. When compared to the latest FPS games the resources which Civ V should require are negligible.

You ask what other services are running in the background and refer to it as 'crap'. I do have things running in the background on my machine but I wouldn't call that crap; they are simply applications typical of most PCs these days. However, if the 3464k used by Itunes Helper and the 5220k used by LogMeIn are a problem for Civ V I'll again state that that's Civ V's issue since other games which should require much more in the way of resources run fine without them.

The reason why Civ V requires more resources is nothing to do with evolution of gaming, or more complicated processes...it's a result of bad coding. There is no fault tolerance built into the multiplayer. The slightest elevation in latency is enough to crash the game for everyone where, in a better designed game, that would simply result in a little lag for that individual. Whilst I do agree that people who are serious about gaming should avoid Wi-Fi where possible, even the slowest connection speed will be sufficient to ensure the outbound connection is the bottleneck and not the connection between PC and router.

You and I can argue specifications for as many threads or posts as you'd like but I'm going to ask you a very simple hypothetical question;

Let us imagine for a few moments that you are right, that all of the errors listed are down to the setup of each individual gamer. If those same gamers, with the same issues, manage to play all other games without those issues affecting their gameplay do you not accept that Civ V, at the very least, completely intolerant of those errors?

Does that still not lead us to the same conclusion.....Civ V is incredibly badly coded?

I'll let you mull on that one.

[wyldmn]

Rylan,

I can sure you, I am not a level 1 tech and have been working on PCs since my dad bought an Apple 2+, when they first came out. Also I do have MS certs.

I apologize for no one, never have never will!

I was giving you another perspective, that you obviously do not want to even listen to. Canuck Soldier has posted that you can make it work, but don't try to run large games.

The website for MP is: http://www.civplayers.com/

iTunes IMHO is crap and I do not allow it on my PC. Also the 1 PC that we always have disconnects from has iTunes on it. As for Logmein, why do you have it running in the background, should just be on when you are logging into a remote server/PC. I gave you specs, because they work for us, I also stated that your mileage could vary, which means, what works for me may not work for you. So cut out the raging and get some perspective, that it can be done, but for some reason, your setup does not work. Maybe you and your friends aren't as good with PCs as you/they think.

[deejaycee]

Kanjutsu, you NEED to overclock that CPU. It's begging for it. I thought the only reason people bought i7's was to overclock as they clock so damn amazingly!!!

my i7 920 sits at 4.2GHz easily and have had it at 4.5GHz stable too (though temps were cooking the air in my case a bit!)

[deejaycee]

Wyldmn, I think you missed the point completely mate, with all due respect of course :)

I concur that Civ5 is appaulingly coded and it's is very clear the MP isn't finished.

Yes, it can be made to work if you limit the game to tiny map, no barbs, no city states, only 1v1 etc etc blah blah blah blah blah. but thats NOT the point.

Come on 2k, get your head out yer arse and start to mobolise the customer satisfaction team.

1. COMMUNICATE!
2. Admit that there is a problem
3. Explain wy this has occured, we all suspect it's because you fired your MP team and rushed the game out and are now concentrating on DLC to drive revenue. Correct us if we are wrong!
4. Give us YOUR understanding on the technicalities of why MP doesn't work
5. Don't worry about admitting to us that you don't have the answers yet or that you have made some incompetent decisions, we don't care. We just want to see some actoin from you.
6. Action! stand by what you say you will do. keep us updated all the way along. Work with 2K Greg, give him the answers for us. He is ready and willing and is the key to good customer relations
7. Deliver us from [MP] evil and you will have a happy customer base and an epic game that will drive revenue for many years to come

[deejaycee]

On reflection, firing your senior management team would probably be a good start....

[BigDaddymcfatsacks]

MP Sucked, MP still sucks, MP is gonna suck in the future.

What else is there really to say...

[wyldmn]

Wyldmn, I think you missed the point completely mate, with all due respect of course :)

I concur that Civ5 is appaulingly coded and it's is very clear the MP isn't finished.

Yes, it can be made to work if you limit the game to tiny map, no barbs, no city states, only 1v1 etc etc blah blah blah blah blah. but thats NOT the point.

Come on 2k, get your head out yer arse and start to mobolise the customer satisfaction team.

1. COMMUNICATE!
2. Admit that there is a problem
3. Explain wy this has occured, we all suspect it's because you fired your MP team and rushed the game out and are now concentrating on DLC to drive revenue. Correct us if we are wrong!
4. Give us YOUR understanding on the technicalities of why MP doesn't work
5. Don't worry about admitting to us that you don't have the answers yet or that you have made some incompetent decisions, we don't care. We just want to see some actoin from you.
6. Action! stand by what you say you will do. keep us updated all the way along. Work with 2K Greg, give him the answers for us. He is ready and willing and is the key to good customer relations
7. Deliver us from [MP] evil and you will have a happy customer base and an epic game that will drive revenue for many years to come

I already new the coding wasn't great mate, maybe you could show me where I ever disagreed with the coding. Saying it works doesn't make it so everything works great. You did totally missed my point, that the OP stated that he can't even start a game. I stated yes you can and this is the way you can. He and others, then attacked me for contradicting his broad statement. Yes there are limitations at this time, but broad statements are not good either.

Some of the raging at 2K for this problem will not solve the problem either. Somewhere they have stated that the next patch will work on MP, how well is yet to be seen. If you don't remember Civ4 had MP problems with the vanilla version and BTS fixed everything except the random events bug, with patches. I can speculate that when the new engine came out it broke some of the sub routines that worked in Civ4 MP.

[Bloody Rose]

Some of the raging at 2K for this problem will not solve the problem either. Somewhere they have stated that the next patch will work on MP, how well is yet to be seen.
The "raging" is 100% reasonable here. Even if the devs release a patch that fixes everything, everyone will know how much time it's taken for it to happen and hopefully remember that.

[Rylan]

Sorry, could you point out where I "attacked" you? If you're referring to the "apologist" comment then I think you're being oversensitive.

You and I clearly have differing opinions of the word "working". I state it doesn't work correctly and you defend it by implying it works providing you use it within certain guidelines. However, those guidelines are so restrictive that you almost make my case for me.

Again, I'll answer your question, although you haven't given me the courtesy of answering mine;

I was referring to the LogMeIn server which runs on my PC so that i can turn it on and control it remotely. Clearly, firing up the client would be ridiculous. Why would you even think that?

To suggest iTunes is responsible for causing Civilisation to crash is ludicrous ( you and i both know it ) but again, let me ask you - since iTunes doesn't make any of my other games crash, or those of my friends, isn't it more likely Civilisation is the issue? Surely, as competent tech support, you'd be trying to identify common factors?

[Bloody Rose]

I just want to report, as promised, that after getting the new PC with the specs described above nothing's changed.
4 player games without city states or AI are still possible to finish (though they lag a lot near the end) and I've completed two of those while none of the games with more players have ever been finished, all due to crashes and freezes.

[Olek]

Some of the raging at 2K for this problem will not solve the problem either. Somewhere they have stated that the next patch will work on MP, how well is yet to be seen. If you don't remember Civ4 had MP problems with the vanilla version and BTS fixed everything except the random events bug, with patches. I can speculate that when the new engine came out it broke some of the sub routines that worked in Civ4 MP.

What do you expect people to do? if people feel they have been ripped off then why not come here and vent, they have every right to, it doesn't matter if it makes any difference, but if I was selling a product and many people complained about it, I would take note.


Yes they have said that the next patch will address multiplayer, they also said multiplayer was awesome, even without the desyncs, the multiplayer game is bland, the lack of animations and sounds that should accompany those animations, warfare is like a silent movie or a game of chess, compared to singleplayer it is crap.
Maybe you can get it to work, good for you, but when people can play a dozen other games with no problems, your only painting yourself as a target trying to tell them that they or their system are at fault.

[dormantreign]

I got my buddy to buy the game for his B-Day the other day, i gave him money towards it too :P. Anywho we experienced a few drop in connections, but always managed to pick it back up. Also, alt-tabing out of the game is disastrous, we figured out it was causing alot of issues. My biggest issue with the game is no animations during multiplayer.

[Xill]

I got my buddy to buy the game for his B-Day the other day, i gave him money towards it too :P. Anywho we experienced a few drop in connections, but always managed to pick it back up. Also, alt-tabing out of the game is disastrous, we figured out it was causing alot of issues. My biggest issue with the game is no animations during multiplayer.

On Mac you can Alt-Tab fine without crashing. But the connection bugs, savegames going to wrong folders, loading games errors, between-turns useless cpu processing, etc, that we have are the same as on PC, which means the core of the multiplayer coding is corrupted.