Laurreth
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Posts posted by Laurreth
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So will the forums be down too?
That's one thing that really annoys me, they kill the entire infrastructure during most maintenance. Could at least show a Twitter feed with relevant messages on the notification page.
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I guess everyone saw that coming. Having no normal maintenance this week was a dead giveaway.
On a side note, and not to complain, but has the length of the downtime(s) for any of these patches been explained?They always take 6 hours (except the recent downtime for the server consolidation, which came in at around 12 hours (edit, and hopefully before too many people complain) there have also been shorter ones, but 6 hours is really the standard timeframe for routine maintenance). IIRC it was explained once on some Q&A or blog entry, with some hints to the time it takes to have a controlled shutdown, routine DB-, hard- and software maintenance (backups?), patch installation, quick QA run, etc. There's probably quite a bit of slack in there to account for some less-expected surprise features too.
All in all, I prefer a well-planned and issue free 6-hour downtime to a slapdash 3-hour job, and so far that seems to be working well
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Apart from relogging (which you probably tried, right?) and having the patcher repair your installation, there's little I can think of.
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You know, after playing GW2 ("that game") for a week I have to say, SWOR ("this game") isn't that bad. It's maybe even better, but like so often, "better" doesn't necessarily mean "good".
Why am I writing this here? Maybe because I want this game to stay alive and grow beyond what it is now, because it really still has the potential, especially with a good number of sucke^Wsubscribers providing a steady source of designer food. This is not intended as a source for a flamewar, but knowing the territory, asbestos underwear may be advisable. I'm also trying to step around the major bugs that GW2 is encountering at the moment, focusing of the basic design deficiencies.
Anyway, back on topic. Really.
Alright, you chase green markers, then talk to or kill someone or something (sometimes both). You actually do that in both games. The big plus this game has is that it's actually telling a compelling story, something that at least the story nerds among us can enjoy; there's at least the semblance of something bigger than the character going on and involving the player character, and when you finish a planet (by wiping a few farmsteads clean of invaders, let's suspend that disbelief for a second), you are told that you're the hero and how everyone is looking up to you now. It's the good old "you (along with everyone else) are the hero" meme, but at least it's orchestrated in a good way.
GW2 doesn't offer that degree of immersion. Right off the bat, you get involved in some abstract struggle against something esoteric, and all you know is that there's stuff that wants to kill you. Spoiler: right up to the point when you realise that OMG it's a dragon and your storyline merges with that of everyone else, that doesn't change. Heck, even after that point, why would it bother me? A huge dragon raising the undead is apparently the only source of entertainment the world of Tyria has to offer, apart from the usual lust for mutual genocide everyone in there appears to harbour. The "open world PvE" offers superficially fun events, but those repeat quickly, and offer less distraction than one would think at first. Apart from that, you do menial kill/gather tasks for nondescript NPCs in a world that may be a tad more "interesting" and gritty than the very Clone-Wars-clean SWOR world.
"But," I thought, "the small-scale PvP in SWOR sucks noodle!"
Maybe, but apparently that wasn't rock bottom. Compared to what GW2 has in stock there, let me tell you, the rotation of a measly 4 small warzones we are dealing with is a miracle of fun and glittering unicorns. We get largely uncluttered maps, by now a pretty good balance through mirroring, three distinct gameplay mechanics, and every map having its winning condition wrapped in a story goal (except for Huttball, oh how much I hate that).
Contrast that to GW2, where you have small-scale PvP organised through a lobby reminding very much of every FPS game ever, with a bunch of cluttered maps that have only a fraction of the visual appeal of the open world, and which all come with the same tired "capture three points" mechanic without any variation. Oh, and at the time of writing, it's nigh impossible to play with (as opposed to against) your friends, unless you join a tournament; you join a server, you get randomly assigned to a team, and can't even tell which one at first. Oh yeah, every match is commented by something resembling the obnoxious Huttball commenter, just with less enthusiasm and vocal talent in an endless loop.
So we're down to the much-touted "open" PvP, pitching three game worlds (read: servers) against each other, but I can't say much about that, since the queues are longer than the server queues SWOR had right at launch, and getting into a match, or heavens forbid, getting more than one person of a group in there, takes the better part of an evening, so that's a tale for another post.
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a new PLAYABLE SPECIES! I mean, if they're doing that, then they're gonna make more species which will make the game more fun because you can vary even more!
If they had done something that's not a reskinned standard humanoid, maybe (think GW's Charr, which would have been a direction for the Cathar, but a nightmare with the armor system already being strained to the breaking point by pointy ears). The way it is, what was running around in the video looked disturbingly like it was taken from
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I would love if they expanded and open up the current planets more! I'm tired of playing in boxed-in selected regions with no day or night cycles. I feel like i'm on a movie set piece.
I second that.
Also, having "endgame-grade" content on every planet would liven up the world a lot. One easymode approach to that would surely be "hard mode" versions of instanced heroic quests, since there's some damn sweet content in there already, that, when blown up to a difficulty level compared to the Lost Island flashpoint and itemised accordingly, would make very viable entertainment.
Putting some new content into "smaller" worlds should also be feasible. I don't think worlds like Hoth or Corellia that already take an eternity to load could take much more greebles (the Blackhole was already put into a segregated expansion of the latter), but there'd be some room for expansion on the starter worlds, or even the capital worlds to put some cool endgame content in viewing range of new players.
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To be frank, the video doesn't strike me a all that hot for existing players. The space sequence looks like the same tired station assault/defence with More Floating Boxes™, the Cathar are just another 6' tall biped with a furry face that won't bring anything really new to the table (it'd take a new class to do that), and warzones stay "fresh" for around a week.
The operation… gotta see if I can be coaxed into grinding the gear required for that at some point.
Makeb may be interesting, IFF it's both big and diverse enough to offer more than a few days to go through.
I had hoped to hear about the big secret space project, or how the plans for bringing PvP to the game are developing, but for now I guess more of the same will have to do
To quote one of my guildmates about the little "speech" at Gamescom, "I've seen more emotional presentations on mechanical cleaning products!", and that video matches the enthusiasm.
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What time does the Community team usually start looking at the forums?
Pretty frequent polling suggests that "yellow posts" start showing up on the devtracker at around 15:00 CEST (13:00 UTC), mostly Tuesday to Friday (we all know how Mondays feel, and damn meetings), which would suggest that most, if not all, such posts are originating from the East Coast
I would suggest trying around 17:00–18:00 BST to give them a chance to grab coffe.Of course, that only catches the writing schedule.
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3. The generic form people get saying "Thanks for the bug report, but don't expect to hear back from us..." is frankly inappropriate customer support. In every software house I have worked over the years, cases are attached to bugs and once a bug is fixed the customers who logged the bug get notified (sometimes even automatically) that their bug is fixed in a given release.
While I agree somewhat, I'm not sure if it would be a big plus. The patchnotes appear to be fairly comprehensive, and with the amount of duplicates or vague reports that are probably floating around the system, giving feedback to reporters would likely end up being much more of a hit&miss than just pointing people at reading the notes.
Since this is as good a place as any to bring it up, I actually think that there's too much feedback on bug reports in some places. I'm fine with a response to the ticket, giving the premade "thank you, watch the patch notes" text. But often, I will get a live chat response to /bug submissions that essentially boil down to the same thing: just a "thank you", without actually asking for new information. To be honest, I find that communication rather awkward, since I'm not sure what to say other than "thanks for the response", smile politely, and hope the CSR closes the chat again. Fun enough, most of the time that happened when I was in warzones or flashpoints, making things even more inconvenient.
Now, again, I welcome communication from support, and I do really appreciate the manner in which it is handled for this game, but at the same time I think that live chat that does not solicit new information is a bit of a time-waster for both parties.
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It's a shame that the character race doesn't come with its own background story. From what the internet tells me, they should be at a rather "interesting" point in their people's history, just over 300 years after being nearly wiped out.
*hint hint*
No really, the stories are still the best part of the game, I'd happily pay money for more. -
4... This one is an usual suggestion, but bear with me. Hold your dev's accountable. If there is a BIG issue that's affecting a large number of players, figure out who's responsible and let us know that you know there's an issue and it's been brought up to the correct team, assigned to specific team member, who is currently working on a fix. Seriously, I'd adore that kind of post. because it illustrates to me a number of things... 1.. the post hasn't fallen on deaf ears... 2... it shows that you're doing your job by taking community concerns to the devs... 3... it informs US that the correct team is aware of the issue... and 4... it informs us that the issue is having a resolution worked on.
I'm fairly sure that they're being held accountable internally, and if it's "only" by means of a nice ol' wall of shame. Holding them accountable externally (not that you're proposing that explicitly) doesn't serve a specific purpose, except having the developers and designers live in fear of being exposed to a raging mob. Fear and panic never helped development along in a healthy environment
I also don't doubt that they're fairly diligently trying to get things fixed as fast as possible. It may be bad when an operation breaks, but such things happen, and a one- or two-day turnaround is not a bad time for a project that size. Your personal pet bugs may have been around forever (some of mine sure are), but looking at patches like 1.3 or even some intermediate versions shows that even the smaller things do indeed get looked at, so I don't see an overwhelming need to put more pressure on.
However, a small attribution to someone who actually fixed something really big or nasty could be a nice incentive. "[so and so] managed to squash a bug so tooltips can now be generated from live data instead of being entered manually from a huge spreadsheet" would make that team or person rather highly regarded
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Generally, I'm slightly optimistic about the general intention of the whole thing. The game needs to compete with Guildwars 2, and remain a financially non-ruinous proposition for people who want to play both, like me. So, yay! However, I see some points that would really make the game not fun to play once I decided to let my account lapse.
Let's go over the restrictions first, since it sounds like you don't actually want people to give you their money:
Story Content: Players can play their full class stories from levels 1 to 50.
Character Creation Choices: Some character creation options, such as species, are limited to subscribers.
Sounds alright. I hope that people get the option to buy species and other creation options.
Warzones: Free players are limited in terms of how many Warzones they can play per week.
Flashpoints: Free players are limited in terms of how many Flashpoints they can play per week.
Space Missions: Free players are limited in terms of how many Space Missions they can play per week.
Operations: Only Subscribers may complete Operations.
Why do you sound so much like you don't want money? It's depressing! Let people buy admission for a fair price. 10-pack of warzone matches, with ranked warzones being more expensive, same for flashpoints, and most of all for ops! Selling tickets is really the oldest trick in the book.
Capitalism HO!
And why the limit on space missions? Does that mean we'll see multiplayer space combat, or do you just want to keep people from playing Rebel Assault?
Travel Features: Subscribers have access to all travel functionality, making getting around the world easier.
That one really, really, REALLY needs further explanation. Does that mean fee2pay players don't get to use taxis (on routes that have an alternative footpath)? Or does it just restrict use of the quicktravel options? Again, admission (or rather fare) is the magic word.
Game Login: Subscribers will always be in login queues ahead of free players.
Risking to sound (even more) cynical, I'm alright with that, not having seen a server queue in about half a year.
Galactic Trade Network: Subscribers can post up to 50 auctions for sale.
Meh, but needs watching.
Then let's go over the absolute kicker (from the FAQ):
[When you decide to let your subscription lapse, y]our account will automatically be downgraded and it will operate under the Free player restrictions. You will need to choose what items to keep with you within the restriction levels of the free access. Furthermore, you will be able to see, but not use, your excess credits, inventory slots, bank tabs, and extra characters.
No, no no NO! That does not fly. Let people buy that stuff to keep! Why do you want to make your players, your customers angry when they switch to an alternative business model? Sure, you lose some kind of safety net, but if you really need to extort people into subscribing like that, it just means that the alternative model is deeply flawed. It means that free players are really just being subsidised by the subscribers, instead of being another viable source of revenue.
I'm not sure about other people, but for me that'd mean that I'd stop playing the game. It's been really tedious to get the character set up, and losing that is a setback no matter how you look at it.
Switching models should not incur such drastic penalties. It should mean selectively paying for what you want to play, not suddenly having your game experience and characters neutered, robbed, and kicked in the face.
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The bottom line here is simply this.. Bioware should NEVER under any circumstance take a name or free a name for use by someone else..
Again, I'm most definitely NOT talking about blindly "taking away" something. That is also not what I am proposing. The idea is to avoid swamping the namespace on the destination servers in a rather polite way that puts the comfort of existing and new players over those who are inactive. Think of it as a "need vs. greed" approach; if you actively transfer now, or log in after the merge just once, you win the roll.
Bioware have generated enough publicity around the transfers, and are now running a weekend for former players to check out the new stuff For Free*. At some point, it should be rather safe to assume that someone isn't coming back, and while we might not be talking about a Million people, it's still safe to assume that it's a large number of players and characters.
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I am not sure I understand your idea.. Move all affected characters to cold storage?? What is an affected player?? Are you talking about the people that refused to transfer on their own?? Or just characters that were left on the old start servers??
Affected players would be accounts that did not participate in the transfers, so everyone hit by a forced transfer. At this point, we're probably talking about the characters from what, a Million accounts, sitting around on servers that will be retired. A good part of those characters will never be played again, so what would be the point of keeping them colliding with things that are yet to come?
I am not talking about immediately taking names from active players (nor inactive players really), but about making names from inactive accounts and of unplayed characters available. As long as nobody created a new character with your name, you could log in and never know that anything happened; all you'd need to do to keep your names is logging in once after the merge.
Effectively, it means that a character would only be transferred to a destination server once it's actively played again. That process could be totally transparent to the player, but it would keep the dead wood off the active servers, while rewarding people who pick up the game (again).
The only difference to a "dumb" merge would be that there's no level 5 character that hasn't been played since early February, from some long-dead server, blocking a name.
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I see a problem in automated merges if they're done naively by just shoving over all characters from the origin servers. It will lead to a lot of "lost" names from millions of characters that, frankly, nobody will ever play again. We're talking about a lot of "proper names", without the accents and other ways attempting to express the original intention. While I appreciate that it will frustrate some players if they return, I think that active and new players should be first in line for hassle-free names that can be typed without resorting to input method editors.
IMO, it would be better for the players, if more complex to operate, to move all affected characters to "cold storage", and require players to transfer when reactivating them. Alternatively, all affected characters could have their names freed up, so that active players get dibs at them unless they're reactivated.
As a small perk, reactivated characters could get a vanity title ("Hanns Olo, Cryosleeper"?)
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Why not just come out and announce server mergers and sever closures a server is not going to be kept open if it only have 10 active subscriptions no matter how much they want to stay put.
Server merges would be extremely damaging, since they would shove tons of characters to the destination servers, blocking names and taking up live storage. It makes a lot more sense to keep characters on the origin servers or in limbo once those close down, and require players to transfer them, incurring potential name changes when that happens.
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Extra Credits have an interesting piece on power creep, explaining how it happens, why it's bad, and how to counter it.
While I think that SWOR is on a decent track at the moment, the situation may well pick up steam with the upcoming level cap increase, and probably new armor sets and other goodies. There is already an, IMO, huge problem with players being separated unnecessarily by even narrow level gaps (ever tried finding a group to do Esseles in story mode without someone being massively overpowered and making everyone else not getting any advancement from it?), and upping the caps will be damaging in that regard at the high end, where advancing is much more time-consuming. In the end, the power spread will widen drastically, making it even less possible to do content together.
I'm already seeing serious issues in PvE content, with some flashpoints definitely being too easy at some point (amazingly, Directive 7 is one of them, even on hard, it's barely challenging apart from some trash encounters that can tax the healer a little). Of course, there could be a 3rd difficulty at some point, but would that be conducive to continued fun? Or would it just serve to widen the divide described above?
Conceptually, Guild Wars 2 has a good down-leveling system that may not keep low-level content fresh forever, but enables higher-level players to be useful (and mortal!) companions in such places, enabling them to offer help in positive ways, i.e., without destroying any experience gain in the area or making the entire situation ridiculous by one-hitting anything between narrative scenes.
Where do you see places where power creep is already rearing its head? How would you counter it, and kill it while it's still in its infancy? What other systems would you like to see to enable people to play together in fun and "productive" ways?
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Hey Erin. While your talking to Matt about the CTRL+F thing, throw on the list CTRL+A (I'm not sure if it was mentioned or not...too lazy and tired to look it up, truth be told).......With my Jedi, I have that bound so it casts my freeze target ability, but at the same time, it turns on and off Ambient Sound. Thank's, and Keep up the great work!
Don't the 1.3 patchnotes say that Ctrl+A and Ctrl+M were entirely removed from the game anyway? Not that I ever even heard an effect of Ctrl+A.
Now what I'd pay for is a "toggle voice" shortcut that also disables ducking, since the announcer in Huttball is a darn annoying *wad (the starred out thing would have been the front of a mosquito, but let's just say "idiot").
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The transfers made a huge improvement, and especially 1.3 is really a very solid patch that delivers many small things that have been troublesome, but there's still my one major grief with the game: simply put, there still is no PvP. This is supposed to be an MMO, and the setting lends itself to epic battles like few else, so having to put up with four tiny small-scale sandbox battles really doesn't cut it, and got old around April (if you dragged out leveling for a while).
PvE is suffering from a similar problem. Look at the hilarious zerg encounters offered, e.g., by DAoC's ToA. Compared to that, even the operations or world bosses in SWOR are tiny appetisers. Don't get me wrong, PvE content is fun and well-written most of the time, but there's nothing that rouses a lot of people to work towards a common goal.
Then there's still crafting that feels hollow and, quite frankly, a bit like pimping your companions. Send five people to go get stuff, send someone to go make stuff, RE stuff, curse, repeat.
I cannot help but be sad about the group finder. While the idea is sound, there is a problem within the server that I am on. You see everyone transfered out with the free server thing and now there is is no one on TerroBlood, the acution house is empty.I can't quite tell if you're being serious.
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Ctrl+something shortcuts get massively easier to use by swapping the Ctrl and CAPS keys. (Some games get this wrong by having broken input handling, but luckily SWOR gets it right.)
Make character perks global!!!
They're called character perks, and IMO, most aren't even that expensive, all things considered. Making them global would devalue them immensely, since a single L50 char casually running dailies and a few flashpoints for a week or two could easily unlock all of them.
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I remember reading about plans to make the servers that are now origin of free transfers unavailable for the creation of new characters. Now, I don't know if that's in place already, but I got along pretty far in the creation process on one of the ghost town servers, so I assume it's not.
Wouldn't it make sense to make those servers entirely invisible on the server list now, both in-game and on the website, at least for players who don't have characters on them? IMAO, that would improve the "new player experience" quite a bit for pretty obvious reasons
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The weekend will also provide more data for us.
Let's hope it shows that the only remaining German PvP server works out
I haven't really monitored it, but I guess the situation is similar for French and English (Euro) PvP servers.
Anyway, nice plus in population, even though we have that whole football dilemma drawing people out of the game at the moment.
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It's in 1.3 on PTS now, but the AA options in there don't seem to do much. There's some improvement, but IMO even at the high setting, it still looks way worse than even 2× AA forced in CCC (there are lots and lots of shimmering edges and heavy moirée on high-frequency scenery like stairs), and setting AA to high blacks out video sequences.
My issue with forcing it through the driver was mainly that it'd lead to random massive slowdowns mentioned above. I didn't have crashes, but of course having to kill the client isn't smooth operation either.
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Many, if not most people have already rerolled on other servers that are more populated so that they can play the game with others instead of waiting for hours to do a warzone or flashpoint. They did this in the hopes that they would be able to bring their main characters along later on and be able to keep their higher legacy, plus add their new character on their new server to that legacy.
Sometimes, hope can be crushed.
It's also been common practice in several games to handle player funneling that way, so it was to be expected since at least March when people really started getting vocal about ghost servers.
But look at it that way: You don't lose anything compared to now. The communities on the servers you are playing on now will still be there. So the expected case is that you have two servers with viable populations to play on. Look at it another way: what if you had 8 characters on each of two servers, and one was being funneled to the other, would you be here complaining that you don't get 16 character slots? If you created characters with the same name on both, would you be complaining that you need to rename them?
Yes, this is a desperate measure. But it's a needed measure which will strengthen the game again. Play the game, or if it depresses you too much or makes you rally angry, don't.
I would suggest trying around 17:00–18:00 BST to give them a chance to grab coffe.
Scheduled Maintenance for Game Update 1.4: September 26th, 2012
in General Discussion
Posted
(That was a reply, so I'm explicitly not accusing you of qq'ing)
With the operation, they are hopefully putting many major assets (graphics, audio, scripts) required for the WZ and an FP (did I miss an announcement?) with a similar theme in place. They do need some food to keep the 6-week schedule, and having a complete operation as a base should speed up development of those