Thursday Nov 12 - Total Disaster

[StuartR]

New client update. Visible changes include a number of new options are now the default in network route including: Prefer Warm Connection, Prefer Session Creator Server, Auto-migrate Session To Closest Server, Prefer Sticky Session Path.

Regular weekly 6-player session. It took us one solid hour before we could all join the same session and hear each other (reasonably) well. During that hour we created and abandoned a number of sessions, players had difficulty joining sessions, players went silent and had to drop out and restart JK client. A lot of intermittent crackling the entire time. One player had cracking consistently.

Observations/ Experience:

- players had difficulty joining sessions. Came in as 'gray ghosts' and audio we never established.

- when leaving a session to try rejoining, I again saw 'artifacts of sessions past' - I saw players purportedly in the session I just left that I know were not really there. I saw my players in 'other sessions' with other players which I knew was also not the case. Hitting 'Refresh' on the session list sometimes worked and erased those false sessions but sometimes that action just hung up the JK client.

- we all heard intermittent clicking during the session. One player head it 100% of the time. He started his own session and said it was fine but as soon as we joined the clicking returned. He muted us one by one to see if the issue could be attributed to specific players but it could not.

- a couple of times, if one player 'Resync'-ed then the volume level for one or more other players would rise or drop in the ears of some session members.

- inconsistent volume. Sometimes a player would get suddenly loud. Sometimes a player would get suddenly soft and turning up the input level and personal mix level still did not result in a satisfactory volume.

Overall an utter disaster. Those 'arrtifact sessions' might be related to the 'Prefer Sticky Session' feature or is just a cache inconsistently on JK - I don't know - but clearly an error. No explanation for the clicking - nobody mucked with their audio interfaces since earlier successful sessions.

My advice to users: If you experience any/all of these issues maybe have all session members uncheck all those Network Route options except 'Peer-to-peer'. Then, possibly, you'd be back to the setup you had before this update (JK was still not great before the update but it was better than post-update).

My advice to JK: If you're going to use your live user base as testers, assign new features at the session level and do some A/B implementation - activate new features in some sessions and not in others and MONITOR HOW THE SESSIONS ARE PERFORMING. This might help you understand when and how issues are introduced.

From my experience testing some of the new, yet unsupported features in JK, it's best for now to leave all these Network/Route settings set to their defaults. If in doubt use the Reset to Defaults option in that window.