MBJ's Preview Weekend Update

[Slaight]

"Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. http://media.ign.com/boardfaces/1.gif
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. You wanted SNL references, you got SNL references, lots and lots. http://media.ign.com/boardfaces/1.gif Hopefully, I get lots of bonus points..."

[Radaghast]

Glad to see they acknowledge the terrible pet and mob pathing.

If they fix the things they have listed before release, they will be dancing.

For those of you the do not get the "more cowbell" reference.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhSkRHXTKlw

[ScarDar]

The real band played one time at a KC Chiefs half time show on Thankgiving, and I yelled at the top of my lungs "More Cow Bell", it was awesome.

[Radaghast]

Here is another post from Mark Jacobs (http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/108321422/p1/?21)


Folks,

I'll be expanding this as the weekend goes by but here's where we stand right now in terms of some of the issues that have been discussed, tossed around, thrown like a spear at our heads since the Preview Weekend started:

1) We peaked last night at around 30K concurrent players across our servers, that is obviously a great number. During that time the servers performed extremely well in terms of CPU usage and we never once came close to max usage so we know that we will meet our server cap populations for launch.

2) Regarding overall server stability we've pretty much exceeded our expectations. We've only had two full server crashes across all servers since we began. Neither crash was due to player load, CPU overload, code going brain dead,etc. but due to a minor issue on our part. The same is true for region crashes of which we only had two. Unfortunately, we had more scenarios crash (20) than we like but the number is still quite low considering we've been running 15 servers for more than a day.

3) Client crashes (crashes to desktop) are down from the last stage of closed beta and thanks to all the people playing, we've already fixed two issues that have caused some of the CTDs. We're not there yet but we are in better shape than we were last month and we will be even better at launch. Even now the CTDs are lower than some games were at release but having said that, it's not good enough for us and CTDs are issue #1A for us right now.

4) Pet AI and pathing is severely broken. The Preview Weekend patch (3.3) unfortunately borked the system. This is issue #1B for us. Even though this is a beta and new bugs/issues are to be expected, we messed up on this issue. We expect a quick turnaround on this next week. So please accept my apologies for this one, it should not have happened.

5) On the subject of graphical quality, SLI, etc., the problems that some players have reported are being focused on as well. From what we've been able to gather so far (other than on SLI which is a known issue), there is something weird happening with a small percentage of graphic cards as well as a possible issue which crept into this patch. We'll know more about it this week.

6) On some targeting issues, we're looking into that as well.

7) Regarding the GCD, we are not going to remove the GCD but we are continuing to look into some of the issues that have been reported with its use. As our closed beta testers have reported, our Combat Responsiveness Code made a huge difference to the game's feel and we're going to continue to look at the GCD and see if it needs tweaking along with any bug fixes that need to be done. I'll be posting more about this as well in the coming days/weeks. While the bugs with the GCD isn't our #1 priority, making combat feel even more responsive and fun is a major issue so it will continue to get looked at and tweaked over this last month and beyond.

So, that's it for now, more to come as the PW progresses as things arise. Overall we are thrilled with the response to the game on the Web, to our in-game surveys and from our feedback/bug tools. I'm glad we still have almost a month before launch but I am also quite happy where we are other than the problem with pathing/AI for which again I offer my apologies.

Mark

[Gisli]

If I had to pick one particular thing that was most wrong with DAOC, that would be the ability to cast too fast. So I hope they don't end up going too far with changes to GCD! Yes, I want responsiveness. And I *definitely* want to know truthfully when I can or cannot fire an ability. But I never want to see abilities firing less than a second apart! 1.5 seconds is plenty fast enough.

[Remick]

Well I guess I am alone in my issues since before preview weekend in regards to the interface being buggy.

Buttons did nothing, Keybindings for my group (the default 1-4) would randomly stop working etc.:(

[Gisli]

Depending on what you mean by "buttons did nothing", that might be what he is getting at regarding GCD and responsiveness. And the keybinding thing is a known bug, you can reasonably hope that will be fixed by launch.

[Elola]

Example of buttons that did nothing and irritate me a lot, as a healer it is very annoying for group members' health bars to fade. Attempts at rectifying it using the UI Customisation prove fruitless.

Tried the following:
(1) Checked health bars do not fade
(2) Changing health bars to On, Off, Hurt does not seem to make any difference

[Gisli]

Health bars are supposed to fade when people are at full health. And yes, you are supposed to be able to keep that from happening if you want.

[Drakhon]

Tried the following:
(1) Checked health bars do not fade
(2) Changing health bars to On, Off, Hurt does not seem to make any difference

Those options refer to the floating health bars over people's heads, not the group/warband UI windows.

[Wolvan]

If I remember correctly there is another option way at the bottom of the list of options you gotta check/uncheck. Erdan showed me but I can't remember what the specific one is.

[Gwiragan]

The real band played one time at a KC Chiefs half time show on Thankgiving, and I yelled at the top of my lungs "More Cow Bell", it was awesome.

And, boy, that's about the only reason to be at a Chiefs game! :bag:

[Dall dies to much]

the funny thing about the 1.5 sec GCD is..

melee was hard capped at 1.5 secs in daoc... so some of this is interface issues

casting speed (for damage spells) was soft capped around 1.1 -1.3. sub-second cast speeds (on the damage spells) were only doable post ToA till they nerfed the bonuses 4 months later.

even then, with ping/server side lag, getting that kinda speed was a crap shoot.

I am really wondering if weapon speed is doing a damn thing in this game right now

[Gisli]

I am really wondering if weapon speed is doing a damn thing in this game right now

I think that weapon speed will only affect your autoattack damage. Which is pretty invisible to you unless you look at the combat logs.

[Drakhon]

I think that weapon speed will only affect your autoattack damage. Which is pretty invisible to you unless you look at the combat logs.

This is the case, though only damage per hit, not damage per second.

[Slaight]

Folks,

Well, things have been, as usual, busy here at Mythic so I have lots of news to share. So, without further ado and no SNL references, here's the update on my update:

1) Significantly improved NPC pathing - Okay, in all fairness it wouldn't have taken much to improve on what we showed you folks during the PW. However, the NPC pathing is back to where it needs to be and while it still isn't perfect, well, it's a heck of a lot closer than it was just a short time ago. We identified a whole lot of bugs and squashed them.

2) Improved pet commands and responsivness - Well, pretty much same as above. Pets will no longer act as if obeying an order from you was the last thing in this world that they wanted to do.

3) Fixed an issue with textures blurring - Nothing like looking at textures through a blurred lens to make things look really sharp eh? Major improvements in and more OTW.

4) Enhanced Global Cooldown Mechanic - Well, for one the GCD actually shows the correct cooldown time and not the rounded up cooldown time (Hey, what a great idea, let's make it seem slower than it is. WOOT!). The slop timer is working fine right now and we'll continue to look at making the GCD and combat in general more responsive.

5) Continuing to improve Client Stability - As always, lots of fixes going in here. The client is supposed to be more stable (and looks like it so far) but until we get the masses back in...

6) Added new Graphics Settings and seeking more feedback from testers to guide future improvements. You asked for it, you got it. Well, in all fairness we were going to put these in anyway but it never hurts to nudge us a bit at times.

7) Target Nearest Target improved - Yeah! One of my pet peeves addressed.

8) Renown Gear changes and Potency of Potions increased. Tweaking, adding, subtracting, in other words (don't say "nerf", we're still in beta!) balancing.

9) Increased bonus for medal winners in PQs. PQs are supposed to be fun, joyous and not grindy. We'll continue tweaking and changing them wherever we need to do that to make it so #1. (okay, a ST reference)

10) Added more loot bags in Tier 1 PQs - Boy, it's going to be rather crowded when we launch so we just upped the loot for the Tier 1 PQs. We'll do the same to T2 as needed. And when the rush is over, we'll tweak downwards.

So, in terms of some other good stuff, lots and lots and lots of bugs fixed and lots of new stuff added to the ToK. But wait, there's more and we'll address some of it next week as well as more coming info in the next update.

Oh, and there's still no such thing as a miracle patch so don't expect one here. Just a ton of fixes, additions and adjustments. We have another major patch coming as well before launch. We don't believe in miracle patches (miracle whip is a whole other subject) here at Mythic but simply hard work and a talented team.

Much respect to my team that is really doing one heck of a job getting things ready for launch.

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