Thank you for all of your reports and feedback about the desync issues that have been hindering your ability to enjoy New World. With the Heart of Madness release, we have put in some major fixes to address desync issues that we’d like to take a moment to talk about.
Desyncing occurs when the data on the client doesn’t match the data on the server. It can cause problems such as animations playing incorrectly or stuttering, a character’s position being different from their actual location, or important effects (both visual and functional) not activating at the right times. As an example, the client may attempt to perform an animation, but the server may correct them if the server is playing a different one. In this case, the player would see the animation flicker or jump unnaturally to a new position. Due to the scale of New World, the frequency that we share this data between the client and the server is limited, which can cause cases where this data could be mismatched.
We are introducing optimizations in the Heart of Madness release that increase the frequency at which the server sends data to the client while also reducing the size of the data being sent. When taken together, these changes should help alleviate the issues mentioned earlier while also drastically reducing the likelihood of seeing other players freeze in high intensity combat situations (such as wars).
We expect this initial round of fixes will improve the overall gameplay experience, but we are not done! There are many contributing factors in regards to desyncs manifesting and these occurrences are fluid and can appear over the lifetime of the game. While you may experience similar feeling desync issues, the path to addressing these instances may vary on our end. There is not one big fix to resolve desync issues and they will remain a top priority. We are currently working on additional improvements and these fixes will be released in future updates as soon as they are properly tested.
Please continue to report any desync issues that you encounter with as much detail as possible and we will continue to work on fixes as quickly as we can.
Thank you again to all of the players who have submitted reports related to desyncs in the past months. Having these reports helps us more accurately determine the causes of desyncing and come up with appropriate solutions.