Online mode is no longer functional for everybody. :: Islands of Insight General Discussions

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Rushin

Aug 22 @ 11:34am

Online mode is no longer functional for everybody.

Before August there used to be more available servers and they used to be restarted (automatically?) from time to time. As of about 1-2 weeks ago, the servers are no longer being restarted. The 3 4 game servers currently left alive have degraded down to the point where trying to connect to them will likely crash your client.

Even if you do load in - which tends to take 5 to 10 minutes sometimes now - the servers are in a very bad state. You lag and get teleported around. Puzzles only partially exist and take 2-10 more minutes to load in upon visiting a new area. All other players are forever frozen in place. Somehow, miraculously, solving puzzles still seems to "count" fine but the overall experience is still really bad. Forget playing with friends, or with anybody really.

Problem is, I have a feeling that the developers aren't even aware of the issues - let alone willing to fix them. There has never been any line of communication so for all I know it's basically abandonware now. I'll be happy to be proven otherwise and edit the post though. You can complain to their zendesk support but as you expect they'll just tell you to check your firewall/antivirus/drivers and other things unrelated to their servers being horrible.

Please note that ironically Offline mode is also not recommended to play - it will likely wipe out your entire progress at random and degrade your SSD life expectancy. See here for a workaround that lets you play.

P.S. try not to alt-tab or focus out of the game while connecting in online mode, this helps crash less often.

Last edited by Rushin; Aug 25 @ 11:13pm

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Showing 1-15 of 25 comments

Whatever

Aug 22 @ 1:19pm

Knowing it's BHVR, we should expect the game to be shut down altogether within a few months, or at least to be turned into a pure single player game with no official support. They are probably working on it as we speak. Don't bother contacting the devs about the servers, they know about the issue very well, there is just no point keeping the servers for a game with such a low player count.

Rushin

Aug 25 @ 11:13pm

People are creating more and more threads about this so I figured I'd bump the one that offers some explanations and tips for crashing less often.

ColdTooth

Aug 29 @ 12:45pm

Well that sucks.

Hopefully they just fix the singleplayer experience altogether. Really enjoyed the puzzles in this game :/

suni

Aug 31 @ 12:29pm

I've experienced the same recently. I got this game a while ago when it was free on Steam, and have liked it a lot, playing in the online mode. I've been wondering about what is the best path forward, concerned of losing my progress. I've considered moving to offline mode (I understood that the progress from online should transfer "one-time" to offline), but now I see mentions that the offline mode might also have (different?) problems.

For now this has reduced it to the state where I most days try a couple of times to see if this day I would manage to login AND the puzzles would actually load. Most days they don't, either resulting in a client crash or resulting in eventual login but with puzzles not loading. Shame, since I really like the game when it runs.

Flint

Aug 31 @ 1:41pm

Suni, play offline. I'm 170 hours in, no stutters yet. Stutters are encountered by people with huge save files that played for a very long time. I recommend using the bat file too, it makes backups of your saves, so it's safe even if you crash (I personally never crashed, but there were cases on forum). https://steamcommunity.com/app/2071500/discussions/0/4406292251588739442/

Bunny

Sep 3 @ 8:00pm

Can't load in at all in online mode. Getting the Unreal Engine Crash Window during the Join Server loading screen.

Last edited by Bunny; Sep 4 @ 2:46pm

Rushin

Sep 4 @ 12:25pm

UPD: as of today, something has changed. Servers now crash every 2-15 minutes. They often crash faster than you can load into the game at all so most of your "gameplay" is now watching the loading screens. You can play normally sometimes for short periods of time (no lag, puzzles load fully, other players move around etc).

One can only hope they are silently working on something server-side. Or it could just be power outages or something else unrelated to the game itself. Who knows, the devs have zero communication anyway.

Last edited by Rushin; Sep 4 @ 12:27pm

Nihixul

Sep 4 @ 12:52pm

Originally posted by Rushin:
UPD: as of today, something has changed. Servers now crash every 2-15 minutes. They often crash faster than you can load into the game at all so most of your "gameplay" is now watching the loading screens. You can play normally sometimes for short periods of time (no lag, puzzles load fully, other players move around etc).

One can only hope they are silently working on something server-side. Or it could just be power outages or something else unrelated to the game itself. Who knows, the devs have zero communication anyway.

Yikes. I wish someone on the dev/publisher/ANYTHING side would say *something*. It is borderline fraudulent to continue selling this game... and I say this as someone with over 300 hours in-game and who wants to continue playing it.

Calico

Sep 4 @ 9:31pm

I managed to log in online fine earlier today, but the whole game crashed after about 10 minutes. Also, it seemed empty. I agree that we need more communication. It definitely seems like the game has been left to rot at this point.

Alan 'Bumbaclart' Patridge [h] has Islands of Insight

Sep 5 @ 1:48am

I have just got to Serene Deluge and I just want to finish the game. :(
I find it so strange there's no communication from the developers.
No discord or anything?

#10

Rushin

Sep 5 @ 1:53am

Originally posted by Summer Martin h:
No discord or anything?

Unofficial fan discord[discord.gg] only. No developers in there.

#11

Nihixul

Sep 5 @ 6:12am

I was able to get into a server and play for a few hours last night, with only the initial issues: puzzles take a few minutes to completely load, a bit of rubberbanding in movement. Not saying that is an acceptable state of things, but thankfully still playable for now.

#12

Rushin

Sep 5 @ 6:29am

Originally posted by Nihixul:
I was able to get into a server and play for a few hours last night, with only the initial issues: puzzles take a few minutes to completely load, a bit of rubberbanding in movement. Not saying that is an acceptable state of things, but thankfully still playable for now.

That was the .171 server.

It takes me 3-5 client crashes before I manage to join it. Other players don't move so forget coop experience of any kind, puzzles take 2-10 minutes to load in each new area you visit, and you get thrown around up to halfway across entire zones at random times. All while the other servers now tend to crash within minutes of being restarted so often you won't even load in before losing the connection to it (or you load in but get booted out anyway and whatever you solved didn't actually register).

But sure, I guess you could chalk that up as "technically playable" :/

#13

Rushin

Sep 7 @ 7:05am

UPD: the servers have somewhat stabilized a bit. There's currently 1 server in a horrible state (see above post) and 2 servers in a good, stable state. Which one you get is practically random.

We'll see it goes.

EDIT: not even ten minutes after posting this several servers have started crashing again lmao

Last edited by Rushin; Sep 7 @ 7:17am

#14

Alan 'Bumbaclart' Patridge [h] has Islands of Insight

Sep 7 @ 6:37pm

Originally posted by Rushin:
UPD: the servers have somewhat stabilized a bit. There's currently 1 server in a horrible state (see above post) and 2 servers in a good, stable state. Which one you get is practically random.

We'll see it goes.

EDIT: not even ten minutes after posting this several servers have started crashing again lmao

I got to play for an hour or two last night before things went to ♥♥♥♥