Would love an explanation how why this makes sense

So I'm finishing a fight in AQ with an SP3. In mid animation got a phone call. Call ended and jumped back in and animation completed. I even got the victory screen. I hit continue, go back to the map, and my champ is at half health and the opponent is at full health. WTF?

Comments

TheParasite

The game communicates with the server after the victory animation to inform it that you have won the match giving all the status info to it. But you were in the mid of the phone call so that after the animation ends the game tries to connect to the server to update the status but it couldn’t do it because you might not have access to the internet to do it since you are in the mid call. So the game fails to communicate which leads to a loss and you will be ending up with 50% on competitive modes like AQ AW Incursions. If you were playing other modes there is a chance for you to redo the fight after reset happens.
So, from the next time, Please make sure to have your internet connectivity at the end of the victory animation to register your win. It is definitely not the fault of the game in the first place

DNA3000

The game client runs combat. But it is the game servers that keep track of everything. When you received the call, your phone switched from the game to the call. This caused the game to suspend in the background. It stops running, stops processing the game, and stops talking to the game servers. If this happens for too long, the servers "give up" on you, decide your game crashed, and conclude the fight was disconnected. It performs the disconnect process which is to reset the fight to the beginning and deduct half your health. That's what the servers decide has happened.

When you finish the call the phone switches back to the game client. The game client has no idea any of this happened. Remember: it was essentially asleep the whole time. It continues where it left off, which was to finish playing the SP3 animation. Then it tries to do the next thing, which is to tell the game servers that you killed the defender. However, it is too late. The game servers say "what defender?" because the servers no longer believe you're fighting that defender. The game client then decides something has gone wrong and does what the server tells it to do, which is to go back to the map and continue where you left off - which as far as the servers are concerned is you crashed out and should now be placed back at the start of that fight and at half your original health.

DNA3000

The correct thing to do in this situation is to say "hang on one sec please" and switch back to the game with the call in the background. Mobile phones cannot run the game in the background but they can run calls in the background. Let the animation play out and the victory screen appear, then switch back to the call. You can even continue to talk on the call while this happens, although if you don't have the game muted they'll hear the game in the background of the call.

TheParasite

This happens only when it’s on WiFI and not on data. Data uses the same channel source to connect to internet as well as the call. So it disconnects temporarily while call is active.
But when connected to WiFi, network disconnection doesn’t happen because there is no need for the interruption of network since they are from different sources entirely

TheParasite

I would agree the point that call can run on background when the game in on the front

DNA3000

It has been a while, but I believe this is a carrier and technology specific limitation. Old 3G phones could not send data and voice simultaneously. 4G/LTE and 5G can, although you may need to enable this on some phones. I've never had to manually enable VoLTE or Voice and Data 4G/5G, its just always been on by default on my iPhone. However, YMMV. During the transition to 4G/LTE, I know some carriers enabled this automatically and some did not. But I did not think this was still an issue on modern 4G/5G networks.

AverageDesi

Not really. You can use both mobile data and call at the same time. Although it differs due to certain conditions which I don't know the exact reasons for. But I'm sure VolTe fits there somewhere

AverageDesi

TheParasite

It is still an issue on many networks
Not every user has an iPhone or a VoLTE to communicate like we do.

TheParasite

VoLTE has a bus which sends parallel packets to/fro since it is already forced to use a single channel to communicate. So like our Electrical system Alternative Current (AC), it alters the focus of each packet sent and received. So every milliseconds it switches the usage between the multiple packets available at the time, but it can communicate with only one channel at a time. Since the focus switches between every packet in very short period of time (milli seconds) the connection doesn’t get broken to all. That is the reason we are able to browse and make call at the same time. But it purely depends on the Network Provider and the packet size

DNA3000

I am not a VoLTE implementation specialist, but this is not how I would describe VoLTE because it specifically invokes the notion of a channel which LTE very specifically breaks. To greatly oversimplify, older 2G and 3G cellular systems were circuit/channel based communications systems, very analogous to those old timey pictures of people sitting at switch boards and plugging cables into ports to complete calls. Data was superimposed on those data channels through encoding, very analogous to old timey modems sending digital data through telephone lines.

LTE networks are packet based networks, rather like, say, ethernet. As a result, all data going into and out of LTE phones is essentially just data packets. Phone calls, internet browsing, all of it just converts to packets and sent to and from the phone similar to how all data from your PC gets packetized and sent to your ISP. VoLTE uses a specific standard (IMS) to embed voice calls in that LTE data stream. While you could argue that every stream is a "channel" that the phone must "focus" on, we don't normally describe packet based networking in that way (at least outside of OSI slide shows).

The reason why this requires both phone support and network support is I believe less about the VoLTE call itself, and more the standards governing call handoff between the LTE network and non-LTE networks, like the POTS environment or older cellular networks. We could have just done this all with VoiP gateways back in the day, but there was no way the big telcos were going to deploy an open standard gateway mesh within their networks. Thus: VoLTE.

TheParasite

I explained it simpler and you explained the same thing on TL;DR

LTE is a packet switching system which can run multiple things at the same time and Older type is channel based which run one at a time as you said analogous to be even simpler in explanation

TheParasite

MCOC still supports IOS 12 if I am not wrong, they just recently removed the access to IOS11, so even devices like iPhone 5s still support IOS12 which doesn’t have a concept of LTE. So many factors to be considered to conclude things

DNA3000

To be frank, the moment you said "VoLTE has a bus" you left the realm of oversimplifying and entered the realm of just being wrong. The only people who would understand what that means would also know that's architecturally incorrect.

TheParasite

Do you mean to say VoLTE and Internet can communicate at same time over a single line of communication

TheParasite

It supports both at similar time not the same time

DNA3000

I mean to say that "at the same time over a single line of communication" is word salad.

Can I talk on the phone and play an internet game at the same time? Yes, in the colloquial sense of those words. Can I talk on the phone with VoLTE and stream a Youtube video at the same time? Yes, in the colloquial sense of those words. Yes, technically speaking only one packet can be sent at a time (assuming a single radio transceiver), but that's a distinction without a difference.

LTE, being a packet based protocol (not a packet switching protocol which is a different thing) supports multiple data streams simultaneously. The definition of "supports simultaneously" in the context of packet based network stacks is allowing multiple queues of data to be serviced by the communications scheduler. It does not mean "send multiple packets simultaneously" because that falls under the category of "too obvious to state" for packet based networks.

Ordinarily, I'm fine with oversimplifications if they aren't overtly wrong or at least self-aware of the corners they cut. When they are wrong, I often try to correct them. But I always give people an out. I don't say "that's just wrong." I simply state "I would say instead that." However, if someone decides they are going to push the issue, then they have to demonstrate they have the requisite expertise to do so. If they don't, I don't feel obligated to give them a free pass.

More to the point, I hate it when people assert oversimplifications that misrepresent the situation. Saying that LTE can't really send more than one thing at a time implies something that is not true: that it takes special circumstances or abilities to support multiple data streams at the same time. That's false. LTE, like any packet based network, can support multiple data streams simultaneously without problems. Phones or carriers that cannot support VoLTE and internet simultaneously aren't limited by LTE, they are limited by their own implementation of VoLTE (or lack thereof).

In fact, phones that do not support VoLTE can still support phone calls and internet simultaneously. They simply have to use a VoiP client like Skype, and then they can talk on the phone all they want while still playing internet games, browsing, or streaming media. Simultaneously.

Again, I'm not saying a single radio can send two packets simultaneously. But that's not what's meant when someone says LTE can support multiple data streams simultaneously. You'd be laughed out of any conversation involving these networks if you attempted to deploy that particular nit pick.

TheParasite

You don’t need to read the documentation about it and write an essay regarding it when you understand the word difference between similar and same means on that sentence.

Everything what you explained lead back to the same reply I did already in layman’s understandable format.

No two communication can happen on the same time but can happen similar time because the system communicates using multiple packets where the focus is switched between them so fast and tries to complete it parallel

DanielRand

I appreciate all the overly technical explanations but the bottom line is the sp3 finished before time in the fight ran out. In my mind that should not equal a loss.

TheParasite

Your game screen has to be active (not as background process) after the victory animation for the game to communicate your status info or else it fails to communicate to the server and register things. That is base line mate.