aye, there will probably be some bad things about WAR after release so its pretty much a waiting game right now.

Originally posted by Mark Jacobs

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. ?
- “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.

( 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. The reason for all the Saturday Night Live references was that a poster or two dared me to work a certain phrase into the update. I kinda took that and ran with it.

From: www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php

Seriously, can we say night and day on Developers communicating with players?

Mythic is telling us where they are screwing up.

Funcom is hyping stuff that not in the game.

From: www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php

Seriously, can we say night and day on Developers communicating with players?

Mythic is telling us where they are screwing up.

Funcom is hyping stuff that not in the game.

It is pathetic that Funcom has not directly came out and apologized to players for some of the major disasters in the game.  They only talk and address things they think they have a handle on (like new content).   The disaster they call PvP/sieging/gems is simply ignored.

Lit

Originally posted by Gweyr

Originally posted by Mark Jacobs

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. ?
- “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.

( 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. The reason for all the Saturday Night Live references was that a poster or two dared me to work a certain phrase into the update. I kinda took that and ran with it.

 

From: www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php

Seriously, can we say night and day on Developers communicating with players?

Mythic is telling us where they are screwing up.

Funcom is hyping stuff that not in the game.

Exactly, like apples and oranges they are so different, Mythic is quite refreshing after the debacle that was, and is, AoC.

Originally posted by Litigator_AB

 

 

It is pathetic that Funcom has not directly came out and apologized to players for some of the major disasters in the game.  They only talk and address things they think they have a handle on (like new content).   The disaster they call PvP/sieging/gems is simply ignored.

Lit

The sad truth is Funcom is a lot like SOE. They will never own up to the fact they have screwed up. The only bad thing is Funcom doesn't have the financial resources to ignore a lot of crap like SOE does; funcom is at least moving in the right direction with their new "report a mod" tool because they realized their mods were doing a horrible job at moderating (not all....but the loudest Mods were screwing it up for everyone).

Well just wait and see what happens I suppose.

I'm showing no love for Funcom right now.  They have owned 3 gems so far and each gem was ruined at their prime.  Years later 2 of those gems shine, but now it is too late. 

Bnadwagon MMO gamers like myself don't like to enter deserted newbie zones, or play through a game where everyone around me knows what to do exactly while I explore and figure things out. 

Funcom is a business.  No business should make the same major mistake 3 times.  Not even 2.  Each  major MMO they launched has been a flop, then revived years later.  That is not how business works.  you make a mistake once, you listen to yoru customers and you never make that mistake again.

Funcom needs to go bankrupt or get bought out by Sony or NC Soft or someone with a little bit or responsibility to their customer base and some organization.  they had their chancees.  They need to go.

Enigma i have a question for you since you mentioned that you are a AO vet. How was Funcom with that game? I mean i've only seen what they do in short term. Anything they did/didnt do with AO, i think can be expected for AoC also. Did they add content regularly? Did they listened to community? etc. I want to choose a game and say "thats it, this is my game for the next 4-5 years, i'll be the vet." It's getting harder and harder to jump from game to game. damn i m getting old.

Originally posted by Falfeir

Enigma i have a question for you since you mentioned that you are a AO vet. How was Funcom with that game? I mean i've only seen what they do in short term. Anything they did/didnt do with AO, i think can be expected for AoC also. Did they add content regularly? Did they listened to community? etc. I want to choose a game and say "thats it, this is my game for the next 4-5 years, i'll be the vet." It's getting harder and harder to jump from game to game. damn i m getting old.

AO improved significantly after it got anew dirrector and Gaute moved to other projects (AOC). Still, they had some issues thatwere never resolved. ARK was a great customer relations buffer and they did a great job of handling issues. 

Problem is that AO released at the times when there was little solid competition, so the game could afford a year or two to get better and gain back the customers, and even then it never really recovered from the hideous launch customer number wise.

AOC won't have that luxury, because the market is more saturated and by the time they fix it in a year or two, there will be other, new games, and while some people might come back to take a peak, majority of people won't.

Originally posted by Cursedsei

Originally posted by Major69er1

aye but in reality AOC was much more fun the first 20 lvls then Warhammer

 

thats cause more than half of their development time went into it :P

Thats why its fully voiced, and all that jazz

True enough... and in most cases, a new MMO (or any RPG/Adventure type game really) usually start off slow and very "basic", and then become more involved and more exciting over time... as both the character and the game itself progress and develop.

AoC seems to have it the other way around. The first 20 levels are great... then it all falls apart.

Originally posted by Malickiebloo

I'm sure they're worried , They were obviously worried to begin with .Why else would they have released when they did? It' dosen't take a developer to realize they weren't ready for primetime.There would be no reason to release in that state unless you wanted a head start on the competition.

There are a couple things I hope comes from this . Number one being people get a decent game to play. You can always spot a great artist with passion by the level of polish in their work..  All accounts plus past experience(DAOC) says Mythic are great artists with a passion for what they do , Passion leads to polish. Just as a great musician or painter struggles with any inconsistency in their work in order to better themselves. Mythic has shown such determination many times over.So I have faith Mythic can deliver that game.

Second I hope to see funcom learn from this and better themselves. They have a decent vision IMO AO shows this , AOC shows this, I'd go as far to say The Secret world does as well . They just don't seem to have the passion needed to become great at what they do. This is a sign they lack the confidence needed or the ability to judge their own work as anything but great.Both lead to failure , If you don't step back evaluate your work and learn from your mistakes you will never improve, ever that's the bottom line.

 

I think the saying,

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

fits well in that context :)

As I've noted before... It's not like FC were complete newbies coming into this. They've had the experience of developing and launching AO - and all the problems they had there.

What's really funny is, I have a book called "Developing Online Games" from New Riders (I'm fascinated with game design and development :-p)...

They have a post-mortem in there about AO - written by none other than Gaute Godager himself - complete with the mistakes they made, etc. 

Here are some highlights as what he notes as mistakes for Anarchy Online. See if any sound familiar... (anyone who wants to flame me or call me a liar... This is directly out of the book I have sitting in front of me at this moment. So stifle it.)

---------

- "Not Enough Testing in Realistic Environments"

- "Too Many Features/Not Enough  Focus"

- "Inadequate Customer Service"

- "Underestimating the Power of Pre-Launch Promises"

- "Totally Wrong System Requirements on The Box"

- "Overestimating the Community's Ability to Forgive and Forget"

And then here's something he goes on to say of Communicating About Changes:

"I think this really took us by surprise - not so much that the communication with the player is important, but to the degree it matters."

...

"The rule here is that the bigger the change, the more detailed the information. People want predictability!"

(I can give them a pass for underestimating the importance of communicating with your players the first time around... but not the 2nd)

 --------

So... what do y'all think... Did FC apply anything they learned from AO's development/launch to AoC?

For myself, I think the answer is pretty self-evident :)

I really had high hopes for AoC but it was only a huge disappointment in the end.

Was in WAR Guild Beta and I really like what I saw - being an old DAoC player I felt at home immediately.

WAAAAGH!