[BUG] GSF is Broken

[Gavin_Kelvar]

I couldn't help but notice that there was no mention of GSF in your "Bugs to be fixed next week" post. We need information on when it WILL be fixed. Let me try to impress upon you what is at stake:

 

GSF has a relatively small community that is made up of a core group of users and then, to a lesser extent, folks looking for conquest points. Once even a small number of core users get fed up and leave (and there is a lot of that talk going around) they are extremely hard to replace. At that point, the other core users have fewer interesting matches and in turn THEY lose interest. It is a downward spiral that could be very real and happen very quickly.

 

Your game is already competing for attention with games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and the new WoW expansion, removing a central reason that many of us play gives us time to dabble into other games. That time spent dabbling quickly leads to decreased usership for SWTOR.

 

Let me be clear: we demand information. If this is a fix that is coming in three weeks, tell us. Because I can guarantee you that two weeks of silence will permanently decrease usership. We understand that GSF is the red-headed step-child of GSF and is probably unlikely to see developer attention in the near future, but that doesn't mean that we don't expect blatant bugs to be fixed in a timely manner.

 

I wholeheartedly agree. GSF was what brought me back to TOR and renew my sub. But over the last few months the lack of bug fixes for things flagged months ago coupled with this really left me feeling that once my sub is up at the end of the month I'll just cancel and not consider resubbing until we've had bug fixes at the very least. No point paying money for something that's steadily having bugs introduced that, if left unfixed, will eventually render it unplayable.

[Donlan_Yllvei]

Tait, it's great to hear that the community team is aware of the issues, but being aware of the issue and actually doing something about it are two completely different things. Please let the Devs know that this is an urgent matter (at least to me, I don't want to assume and put words in anyone else's mouth) and that it would be greatly appreciated if they could give some attention to resolving these. It is very frustrating that these bugs were added on top of pre-existing bugs in the GSF game play.

 

(My apologies to anyone if I was rude or offensive, that was not my intent with this post, I simply wanted to call further attention to the prevailing issues. Please note that I am not trying to speak for anyone, these words are my own and should not be taken as speaking for any group of people or persons. Thank you.)

 

 

nah, not rude. This issue needs to be repaired. A lot of ppl sub just for GSF, myself included. I love it. This really needs to be fixed - not just looked at. If the GSF platform isnt going to be actively supported anymore, I will most likely cancel my sub and find another fighter sim to put my money into.

[Verain]

I don't like to turn threads into "fix this or im takin muh ball an goin' home", but that attitude is sorta prevalent. Right now this is mostly being viewed as "they obviously didn't test us" and many of the regulars are unwilling to play, and are rightfully cross.

 

But if this becomes like, for instance, the "totally gonna work it off" bug about sound not working in Windows XP, or becomes something that sounds like it's a long term project that "would be nice", then I'll be clear: I'll never buy or play another EA product, period.

 

Possibly meaningless, I'm just one guy, but before this patch I was able to pick up games nightly with an assortment of cool people, and now I can't. Again, bugs happen, fixes happen- my statement only applies if this is left fallow like the XML display bug, or like the sab probe bug- months without any dev response or code fix.

 

 

I don't say this out of malice or anything- I know you guys have a lot on your plates and stuff. But a break of this magnitude, if allowed to coast for weeks or months, is a solid statement of future intent corporation wide.

[GrimAce]

I'm not usually one to complain - SWTOR is a big game, and what issues I've had have been pretty small or trivial, so I'vep osted bug reports when I can and moved on, happy to enjoy the game.

 

But when an entire subgame is broken, then, yeah, I'll voice my concerns too - especially with what appears to be no plan to fix it in the next patch. Sure, new content obviously takes precedence with the expansion coming out of early access, and I understand that. But GSF is entirely broken. That should be a major priority too, and the lack of communication or transparency on the matter is really frustrating - okay, we got a 'we're looking into it', but nothing else. No transparency. No discussion of any potential leads on what may have broken during the patch.

 

We need to know you're working on fixing this.

Edited December 8, 2014 by GrimAce

[Gerfaut]

Additional bug: Alacrity affects GSF tooltips (see this thread on the GSF forum for more information).

 

From the limited testing I did, this appears to be a display bug with no effect on gameplay: only the tooltips are affected, not the actual cooldowns while playing GSF. However, it creates confusion, as players with identical builds but different amounts of alacrity will have different cooldowns displayed for their ships' abilities.

Edited December 8, 2014 by Gerfaut

[Caernos]

Daily awareness bump, GSF is still broken.

[btbarrett]

Just checking in to let you know that everything is still broken.

[Verain]

Monday afternoon in Austin, someone should have gone through enough coffee to post confirmation, ETA, plan forward, etc.

 

I will say this: There are so many bugs that we are having a really hard time even gathering them in one place. It's essentially as if about 30% of the entire everything stopped working.

 

 

Please revert patch. Not a joke.

[StrixHiraeth]

Please revert patch. Not a joke.

 

Agreed.

 

So... aside from Tait saying someone would look into this, has GSF even been mentioned, like, at all?

 

If the bugs can't be fixed... tell us that. If you aren't conidering GSF a priority right now... tell us that. Silence tells us that GSF---and more importantly, its players---don't even matter enough to be recognized. Or, it tells us you are very overwhelmed...

 

Revert the patch.

[Verain]

I actually am not sure how well I'd respond to "you guys are just not a priority" either tbh. I will say that we need dev comms on this really fast.

 

I'm sure there's sound technical reasons, but as a player, it's just so absurd that GSF got absolutely destroyed by some ground game update. The servers went down, couldn't queue. They came up, everything was broken.

[Werehowie]

I'm *********** done. I have absolutely zero faith that this will ever be resolved. I'll pop in from time to time but this is *********** atrocious. Good time to pledge for Star Citizen gentlemen!

[DakhathKilrathi]

If this makes it a week without seeing a fix, I'll be dropping my subscription. Why should I pay to play a game that is broken?

 

I recommend that others in the community seriously consider doing the same.

[SalvorCaelum]

I'm thinking if the new points in disciplines didn't do anything, we'd get a better response.

 

Except, this is simply the GSF equivalent. "Awareness" of the issue might be ok if we weren't getting an achievement for completing a heroic. What you've got here is a subgame that is straight up broken. Looking for a bit more.

[Verain]

It's only the technical code side equivalent of a whole slew of nonfunctioning talents.

 

The talents in GSF are also the gear. Picture no gear worked above level 30. That's what this is.

[MiaowZedong]

I think it's a given that there will be a patch tomorrow. If that patch doesn't include anything for GSF, I'm pretty certain there will be subs lost. Edited December 8, 2014 by MiaowZedong

[DamascusAdontise]

I think it's a given that there will be a patch tomorrow. If that patch doesn't include anything for GSF, I'm pretty certain there will be subs lost.

 

agreed, no fixes, no word on fixes, no mention of fixes......... only a pat on the head and a "I hear ya buddy" subs up soon, looking like I have to put up or shut up and unsub =/

 

Allowing the expac to fully release like this is really embarrassing. Kinda jaded at this point, I reserve the right to be impressed with a quick fix but I doubt thats coming.

[Docmal]

I would like to add my voice to this. I am a pretty avid SWTOR player, and I do a lot of progression raiding but when I am not raiding in SWTOR I am doing GSF. Until 3.0...

 

I am glad I got my Space Ace title before 3.0 because I can't play it when it is so broken like this.

 

3.0 brought me back from the brink of quitting this game all together, but the disappointments just keep rolling in.

[GrimAce]

The problem with threatening to drop sub is that there's so few players who prioritize GSF that it's really not a huge deal - and let's face it, if I were a dev I wouldn't be all that interested in responding to some silly threat like that anyway.

 

I mean, if you do drop sub, that's your choice and by all means I understand and respect that, but using it as a bargaining chip is fairly inconsequential in the larger scheme of things tbh. Send in-game bug reports, keep bumping this thread, and just generally make a lot of noise. That's my advice.

[Caernos]

I mean, if you do drop sub, that's your choice and by all means I understand and respect that, but using it as a bargaining chip is fairly inconsequential in the larger scheme of things tbh. Send in-game bug reports, keep bumping this thread, and just generally make a lot of noise. That's my advice.

 

That's kind of my approach to this, make as much noise as possible. To further make noise, I'm going to try and listen/watch the next live stream and ask for information then. Hopefully the community team will have a dev with them at the next live stream, but if not, they can keep passing the message on to the devs that GSF is broken. And of course, as I've said before, I plan to keep bumping this thread until we get a response on a fix.

[Verain]

The problem with threatening to drop sub is that there's so few players who prioritize GSF that it's really not a huge deal - and let's face it, if I were a dev I wouldn't be all that interested in responding to some silly threat like that anyway.

 

I don't really think it's a silly threat, but I agree there's no way for a dev to respond to it.

 

The thing is- people claim that they will quit for all sorts of reasons. Dumb reasons, mostly. Somehow every game is the worst at balance and everyone is quitting because of the balance, and yet very few actually seem to.

 

But a game being almost unplayable IS a reason to quit. And it isn't an idle threat, and many players haven't even logged in and aren't crying on the forums at all.

 

Anyway, whatever. Most of the malcontentedness is that the players really want a dev response . We've had bugs in a few components for seven months now, and no one has said anything to us about anything at all.

 

I'm sure there will be some comms soon on this bugset.

[Caernos]

Now that some necessary fixes have been implemented, here's hoping the Dev's turn to GSF now.

 

And not just the bugs they introduced in 3.0, please fix all of them Devs, including the ones that have been broken for months and that we've been asking and waiting for fixes on.

[Donlan_Yllvei]

new patch this morning didn't fix much. Nothing whatsoever about GSF.

Granted, they only a week to fix bugs after the 3.0 rollout, but honestly, that's why they shouldn't do it this way. one week of beta is ridiculously insufficient. I expect we'll now have several weeks now of bug fix patches. And i expect GSF is pretty far down the list of fish to fry.

[DamascusAdontise]

Okay BW, time to pull your head out of the fire and give us some information about GSF.

 

Since you have been looking at it for over a week I have the following questions:

 

1.) What went wrong

 

2.) How long will it take to fix (even ballpark works)

 

3.) Do you plan to address not only bugs from 3.0 but also all the broken stuff introduced into the game starting 7 months ago?

 

Now that you have fixed the major issues and release is upon us, I think we deserve some answers.... and fast.

[Verain]

Here, let me answer 1 for you. This is as good as an official answer:

 

"The ground game updates for 3.0 had unintended effects that did not show up in testing."

 

Why is that the answer? Because if it's the answer, then there it is. But if the actual answer is something more like "we seriously didn't even do anything in GSF besides force a game start and stop to be sure the server didn't crash", they won't tell us that. More importantly, if Bioware had some pretty glaring bugs that are technically interesting and we'll all have a good laugh about them, put them on the forums and you'll see them quoted and requoted like some admission of perpetual failure, bandied about by the Angry Monkey 2016-2020 AD squad.

 

The other two I really want to hear. We need an ETA on this, and we also need to find out what is going on with the fact that the tooltips have been vague hints since July.

 

 

My suspicion is that they have some internal order of bug solving, based on:

 

> How impactful the bug is to the players it impacts (with an exploit impacting ALL players)

> How many players the bug impacts.

> How hard it is to fix.

> When the next push is going to live AND which fixes can be done in that timeframe.

 

GSF is extraordinarily impactful and whatever 3.0 introduced shouldn't be TOO hard to fix, because they can just clone old code but only have it called by GSF if they can't figure it out otherwise, but the players impacted is likely a lot lower than much of the ground game stuff.

 

 

 

So when should they fix it? In my entirely and totally unbiased opinion,

 

 

 

Right the hell now.

[Lendul]

It's not like 3.0 was the beginning of things being broken in GSF. Sabotage probe being broke has been a known issue among the GSF community for months now.