Hello, Tonight we ran our very first session within Roll20. We had been previously running our campaign via Photoshop and Discord Screen Sharing. One of our players recommended this as a way for us to have a more immersive time until we can finally get back to playing in person. My Co-GM and I actually spent many hours learning the program, creating assets and making our maps, interactive puzzles, and helping our players set up and learn how to use the software. He ended up purchasing a plus subscription to get us access to the dynamic lighting.. and we had considered Pro for the API access in the future if we enjoyed playing this way. Yesterday and today I spent an extensive amount of time testing everything to ensure everyone would have a mildly seamless experience. I work in technology, and my Co-GM actually prepared ourselves for glitches and issues.. The beginning of the night started innocent enough, but as the players loaded into the dungeon that we had spent so many hours creating, only 2 of the 6 of them were able to see the assets other than the walls. We spent a good 45 minutes having them try different web browsers, clear cache, run incognito mode, disable ad blockers, etc. Nothing was working. It didn't take long for the Co-GM to also start glitching out, unable to see much of anything or interact. After a short meltdown, we ended up having to divert all players to me, and pull my player window into screen sharing on discord. Of course, this meant that combat and puzzles themselves would become a lot more clunky to interact with. A while after doing this, we were able to start getting players that were slowly able to start seeing thing normally, but not without more glitches. One player can see the entire map even with explorable darkness enabled if he only zooms all the way out on the page.. which has ruined immersion for him, he is also unable to drag his character as his screen drags in a random direction when he tries to pick up his character token. One player was lagging so terribly (on 300mb internet with no issues on any other app) that we ended up having to go back to the stream through discord again and have the GMs move. At one point I had to reload a couple times to gain access to tokens again.. among many other random issues with players being able to see or interact with content and dynamic lighting just completely breaking for nearly everyone at a rate that we had to reset it every couple minutes. My question is.. is Roll20 typically this bad? I imagine that there's a large uptick of people playing due to covid, but then have those issues persisted since people started quarantining in March and Roll20 hasn't done anything to resolve.. or is this simply just big server outages that are happening tonight. If this is a normal thing.. I think we may have to go back to Discord/photoshop. This has literally been the most miserable experience.. and honestly the worst session I've had in the years I've been roleplaying. Normal: Thanks for listening to my rant.
