supernickx
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Posts posted by supernickx
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You have a valid general point, but my years of IT work allow me to comment with some awareness even if I don't know the details of their infrastructure. Having both programmed web applications and managed hundreds of servers, I know some of what is possible. I do take your point about how the ability to effectively troubleshoot can factor into design.
I just can't believe that there isn't a better way to distribute players among servers without causing most of them to wait in queues for extended periods.
This isn't a question of technical expertise on their part.. Or technology available. I'm sure they have both in spades.
It's as the lead guy said: part science and part art. They have the science down, it's the art that is the struggle.
If you just all of the sudden released all caps on servers you would quickly see servers like mine (Legions of Lettow) race to their hard capacity very fast. This is bad news because it means server performance will suffer.
It also means people will dodge other servers to go to the busier ones too leaving some servers completely abandoned.. So the people on full servers are now struggling with server performance and the people on abandoned servers are either quitting the game because there's no one to play with or they're now too moving to full servers, thus perpetuating the issue. People inevitably will choose the fuller server given the option; that's just people on the whole.
It's a social issue we're experiencing here - Bioware are trying to think of the long-term and not the short-term, of which they know the customer loss won't be great in the short term. Even if they bleed 100k customers from this (a lot of which would come back later anyway imo) that is still a very generous number from myself and not a great deal to Bioware.
However if they bleed 30k a month for the next year on servers that are dead or busting at the seams - well, that's significantly more damage control...
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Does anyone else find the idea of threatening to cancel their sub a bit ludicrous? It also serves to accomplish nothing imo.
So you have to put up with queues for a few weeks. How does cancelling your sub and not playing SWTOR anymore really make you any better off?
I hate queues just the same but stopping the game because of them means I don't get to play anymore at all.
It's like getting in a queue to see a movie and your solution to that queue is not going to see the movie. Makes no sense at all.
Granted yes, if things are still this bad come Feb when you actually start paying for the game, by all means take a month or two off to let it cool down but the threats of "I AM QUITTING FOREVER" are bizarre.
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Seems their solution to the problem is to massively bump the server limits periodically; while it's great that i'm online due to it, that doesn't seem like a feasible long-term solution as it will create performance issues eventually.
Depends on their capacity. Right now the servers seem capped at a lowly 2000 or so player limit when the clusters are definitely capable of handling much, much more.
This is in their effort to effectively herd players onto servers to ensure 30 servers don't have 4000 while 70 have the hard cap of 10,000.
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I find it curious that almost all the EU servers are now listed as Full, Very heavy or heavy.
Surely 12:30PM GMT on a weekday they can't be THAT full.
When will this digital herding end?
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They've said at a later date they will add Level 50 only Warzones.
Lump it for now unfortunately. View PvP as it is meant right now: a bit of fun on the side of your main quest.
Later you can get to the competitive level 50 vs level 50 PvP action - for now I don't see why it matters that much at all.
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It's a bit of a void thread to be honest.
Their official stance is as above poster has in his sig:
Q: Addons?
RV: We're working on that now, post launch feature, but it will at some point come.
Don't think they will be considering the emotional gripes as a reason not to do it.
Addons are a great thing for MMO companies because it allows for good things to be added to your game without you actually doing it. In some cases if an addon is REALLY good or well liked then the game's developers actually put it in the core code.
To not have them is just shooting yourself in the foot really as Turbine learned with LOTRO. By not doing it the community misses out on all the great things the devs wish they could do. By adding them thec ommunity does the features for you free of charge. Win win if you ask me.
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We need a mix of both lock all full server up the pop caps so they aren't full anymore (but keep them locked) add in friend invites to servers (so your friends can join you on a locked server) and have free server transfers for anyone that wants them (to non locked servers or ones you have invites to).
I think everyone will be happy with this i cant see any reason why you wouldn't be. I get that its not the easiest thing to implement but I'm sure that it could be done pretty quickly if they wanted to.
Would love to see all that happen - think it would be the best outcome for all right now.
Hey ho though: the problem with big companies like EA and Bioware is they think they know best. They won't take tried-and-tested methods from other games. I'm not suggesting this will kill SWTOR (naive to think that) but the damage control must be horrible. Can only imagine what customer services are going through right now.
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SWTOR opened since 13th Dec....
1 week....
Men.....how can it be SO HARD for people to create a new char in a different server...
1 week dammit!! There's a life out here!
Which is great if you have no guild yeah.
We have 60 people in our guild who got allocated to one of the worst servers for queues. (Legions of Lettow EU)
To somehow just say "hey guys all 60 of us will be moving to a new server now, that time you booked off from work and invested 50-60 hours was for nothing" is ridiculous.
Not only would we bleed members, irritate the hell out of those who invested a lot of time; it's also a complete nightmare trying to basically just start everything all over again because of something that is 100% not our fault.
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Let me get this straight Stephen.
- Bioware expected queues.
- You knew queues were coming too.
- Bioware system allocated far too many people to some servers thus giving a huge population surge on some servers.
- There was no development done to allow character transfer despite you knew this was coming.
So to summarize:
We should lose all of our effort put into characters, completely upheave our guild from the server you put us to risk going on a server which may just go from light to full in the next week anyway? (As some have definitely done)
Your response yesterday seems to impose that servers which are near their hard population cap will basically have queues from here on in, with no ETA on a character transfer.
Maybe some more clarification on this if possible? Your post is unclear to me.
In the first paragraph you say there are a bunch of servers nearing the population cap, then you go on to say:
Many of you who are already playing on these servers are asking for solutions, and we understand your frustration. At this time we can only ask for your patience. Population caps are being gradually raised on these servers, but raising them too fast will create an influx of new players and perpetuate the problem.So what is it? You're reviewing the cap on servers other than the ones listed?
I also find it very curious that there can be a 900 queue on Legions of Lettow at 10AM in the morning on a work day. Surely there are no more than 2000 people online right now, which is no where near the cap of players online?
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Nope, no, nah and never. No addons
Just love the "Oh no, i need an addon to tell me wich build is the ultimate one. what should i do? Im lost! Oh god oh god..." Are people really lemmings these days? How about the old fashion way: Try and see what works best?
Only thing i could see would be a UI addon then, but then again that is something BW could implement into the game by themselfs, and i think they should. Lets demand that instead of bringing in addons!
Please explain to me how any of your reasons for being against add-ons somehow impairs your playing of the game?
99% of posts I read for people being against mods are completely biased emotional opinions.
The reasons I read that are for the idea of mods are very concrete because the ideas posed are capturing development items that should have but haven't been provided.
I honestly think people read the word "game mod" and start to flip out like it's some kind of arch evil. They have this illusion that in WoW there were mods to basically play the game for you - of which heroic cataclysm raids will definitely show you otherwise.
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Let me get this straight Stephen.
- Bioware expected queues.
- You knew queues were coming.
- Bioware system allocated far too many people to some servers thus giving a huge population surge on some servers.
- There was no development done to allow character transfer despite you knew this was coming.
So to summarize:
We should lose all of our effort put into characters, completely upheave our guild from the server you put us to risk going on a server which may just go from light to full in the next week anyway? (As some have definitely done)
Your response yesterday seems to impose that servers which are near their hard population cap will basically have queues from here on in, with no ETA on a character transfer.
Maybe some more clarification on this if possible?
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Sorry, don't agree.
Mouse-click based healing completely changes the dynamics of healing. It's such a tired old method of: click target, press key for heal, click another target, press key for heal. Mouse based healing should be a standard feature but as such it wasn't, and we will have to rely on a mod for it.
I also find the following style mods to highly increase my meta game as they are so rarely provided by the developers themselves:
- Bag organizers
- Gear checker with a link to say TORHEAD in game to save me alt tabbing
- Automatic gear swap to save me pressing every single icon
- Auction house mod to save me the hassle of what is always a cumbersome system in new MMOs
- UI mods to ensure I have things like more bars, different colours available and more information flowing (like hey an actual combat log?)
- Notes and waypoints mod for making marks on my map. If I find a rare mob, i'd like to be able to mark it and not have to alt tab and go hunting the internet
These are just some of the mods i'd like to see.
I could care less about things like threatmeters or damage meters, though I do like them because i'm that sort of geek where I find numbers and info to monitor fun.
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Levelling pure healer build. All points invested into heal tree. Level 35 now and finding it very easy. For big packs I have the luxury to heal myself and I can use Aric for lots of extra DPS.
Can take on elites easily.
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I won't presume to speak for everyone, but I can say that of my circle of friends and my wife, all of which I've gamed with for the last 12 years, I'm the last hanger on, waiting for a ray of light.
It's not too much of a leap to extrapolate that as 6 of my closest gaming friends are currently playing something else rather than deal with this others will likely be doing the same. That's 1(me) out of 7 total people that I know of that bought the game and haven't cancelled their sub and moved on (back to Rift).
Sure a few of those promise they'll keep an eye on it for the future (probably for my sake, i was really looking forward to this), and maybe one just didn't like the game that much, but if this is an indication of how playing a Bioware MMO is going to go (weak communication, lack of ability to provide the service being offered) then the future isn't looking too promising.
As I said: the people who quit indefinitely as a result of 2-4 weeks of queues in a game that will be lasting the next many years will be very few. Sorry to hear you're one of them. You have the next decade to play SWTOR if you want, I don't see what the huge impact is honestly.
Personally speaking abandoning the game indefinitely because you had to wait a few hours each playsession for a few weeks seems ludicrous but that's me I guess.
Threatening Bioware will get you nowhere and "making a stand" really just prevents you from playing a solid game in the end.
I'm not siding with Bioware - i think the way they're ensuring players filter onto new servers is very cut throat.
And lastly.. not every single server is full. It's not like 100% of the sub base is stuck in this situation; probably less than half that.
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As frustrated as I am with the queues and seemingly lack of any real explanation - I do have to wonder why people keep playing "fix the queues today or you will be losing hundreds of thousands of subscribers" - despite popular belief, the people who actually quit the game indefinitely and don't play SWTOR will be very, very small. And they know it too.
Here's to hoping their digital herding policy ends soon as it is obvious they are deliberately capping servers to far less than their capacity. (To ensure everyone spreads across all servers they've paid for)
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People really have no idea what a bad release is.
They pop into a brand new MMO expecting the caliber of an MMO that's been out for 7 years.
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Good job. You can watch our videos and see our boss kills as we go along here:
Just got the Alderaan one down last night - going for the Taris one soon. (Level 38)
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1) Dungeon finder.
Finding a group and getting them all to the flashpoint takes too long, it's not fun so hardly anyone is playing flashpoints.
Excuse me but this is one of the MOSt important reasons wow died. Srsly think about what you are saying because it would turn this game into the same easy mode fkfest wow has become.
I fail to see how teleporting back to the fleet station with a scroll and running up a lift to my instance is somehow a challenge. Strange view to be against it really, this in no way makes the game any harder. I'd rather just queue from in the world instead of spending 10 minutes of my life warping back somewhere and running around a friendly environment.
Also, wow died?
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A lot of this will come in time. Nice post though.
I do think they left some rather simple things out though like:
- a /random system for rolling while master looting (to avoid any errors made)
- a moveable UI, extra bars at the bottom etc
- a summon ability for your team mates
- a more realistic search system on the auction
- Seeing how much things sell for before going to vendor/auction
- hotkey for target's target (much easier for healing)
- functional raid frames in PvP (always seems to bug)
Probably some other stuff.. Most of what you detailed are more major projects that we'll prob see rolled out but the above seems like very easily achievable things that weren't added for some unknown reason.
RE: The dungeon finder. This mentality that it causes people to act like jerks is comical. It doesn't exist. People who are jerks are gonna act like jerks regardless - a dungeon finder or cross-server dungeon finder isn't going to stop that. The days of having 500 people on a server where everyone knew each other are over so people do not take this into account when acting like a horse's butt.
I think the levels dev put it best: they want to encourage people to explore the world and get out there right now. When they feel the exploring has been done and people just want to pop in for a quick 5 minute queue and 30 minute dungeon; they will be able to as they add the functionality eventually.
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There is no need for server transfers. There are plenty of low pop servers. The players are just refusing to roll there out of stubbornness.
So I guess 60 other people in my guild should all reroll?
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Guys, there are plenty servers with endough room, stop QQing and choose different server!
So I guess me and my 59 guild mates should throw away our thousands of hours (combined) and just start again because Bioware have taken the strict player cap stance on servers? Not to mention how unreasonable it is to expect 59 people to just up and move.
That solution reminds me of the tech support company who told the customer to restart his PC to fix a crack in his monitor.
I'm not on the "FIX IT OR ELSE!!" or "IM PAYING FOR THIS!!" band wagon but if it's still like this in a month.. yeah, we got problems.
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What about 'they will raise the pop. cap' don't you understand?
Depends how much it is raised by and what their capabilities are.
If queues are 1800 in peak time, the bear minimum they need to raise our server cap by is 1800.
If they raise it by 500.. well, that really doesn't help anything.
If they raise it by 3000 come Friday (once they're happy they have herded everyone into the servers and got all servers to a decent playerbase level) i'll be happy and queues should disappear.
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This is apparently in game.. It does work sometimes. I have had to alt+F4 and also been disconnected once or twice and come straight back in. Other times though I come right back on and get put in a queue... so it's very hit and miss right now. I think it needs the time improving beyond the 2 minutes it seems to be and it also needs to be more forgiving. My client crashed in an instance (seemed to be a Talos V bug as two of us got it) and came right back to a queue.
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Sorry but I don't see how a few servers that have queues is a "launch" failure. Epic bugs, hardware failure, game breaking issues and server crashes all combined is arguably what you might call a failure.
So no, I don't think a handful of servers experiecing queues is going to destroy the game somehow. It might cost them a few thousand subs, but hey ho it beats losing a few hundred thousand because of rampant lag and server crashes I guess in their eyes. Also most who are so dismayed to not buy the game as a result will inevitably buy it in a month anyway when queues are gone.
I'm on Legions of Lettow EU and we have some of the worst queues - it's just one of those things you put up with for now. Still like it end of Jan? Yeah, they're gonna take more of a hit.
Warning on high population servers
in General Discussion
Posted
So you have to put up with queues for a few weeks. How does cancelling your sub and not playing SWTOR anymore really make you any better off?
I hate queues just the same but stopping the game because of them means I don't get to play anymore at all.
It's like getting in a queue to see a movie and your solution to that queue is not going to see the movie. Makes no sense at all.
Granted yes, if things are still this bad come Feb when you actually start paying for the game, by all means take a month or two off to let it cool down but the threats of "I AM QUITTING FOREVER" are bizarre.
Sorry but this crutch of thinking idle threats and ultimatums will get you what you want only serves to make BW employees less inclined to reply.