f13.net

WAR hasn't been a disaster at launch like AoC, but it certainly seems like a number of basic things were missed or forgotten about. Things like the chat system, gold spam measures, RvR balance mechanics, window dragging exploits and so on - there are quite a few glaring holes that it seems WAR should have patched over, but didn't in time for launch.

For anyone in the beta, why is that? Did these issues not come up? Was the beta community completely different to the live community?

I don't recall anyone mentioning window dragging during beta (any phase). In fact, until I read about it here, I didn't even know it existed. My guess is that there were simply not enough people involved in mass pvp for it to make a difference.

Population balance was always a very "hot topic" (and tbh it doesn't have a simple solution, so I don't fault Mythic for not having "fixed" it), but AFAIR most everyone was content with the chat system (it has gone through a few revisions, but that's also to be expected -- placeholderish UI elements are ok until the last phases of testing).

Edit: As it was pointed out in another thread, most test phases were tier-focused and involved everyone starting at level X, so the "full" leveling experience wasn't really tested until open beta, at least that's how I see it.


-- Z.

"Thou shalt launch in September" -- EA Executive :awesome_for_real:

this exactly. I wasn't involved in a long beta either. It was just 1 week. It wasn't enough to judge the pvp content from the random T1 scenario pops. I was just more interested in checking every zone for interesting classes and how each played. By the time I waas about to leave T1, the beta was already over.

I expect the /ignore thing was just insufficiently tested because there's just not that many people worth ignoring in beta.

Not many companies have been able to effectively hold off gold sellers.  I don't really see much they could have done without actually fucking with the normal players chat abilities.

It's not so much "hold off" gold sellers than it is to make dealing with them painless - click and report, or something else simple. The most recent patch included a new spam reporting mechanism, but it is still "type the correct name into a box".

I mention gold selling as well since MJ blogged how important it was to stop it and the WAR site also has that stupid "gold farmers banned" box. It obviously wasn't important enough to stop to actually put time into developing systems against it (especially given how the /ignore command functions).

From what I've heard WAR had a good beta; I'm just interested to know how a number of basic things got missed. Apparently it was the lack of a longer-term open beta.

As for realm imbalance: there appeared to be nothing available at launch to redress the issue. Nothing at all. So while Mythic might not have been able to fix it, they don't even appear to have taken steps to address such a 'hot topic' at launch.

Well, I don't know... around the 3rd or so patch for LotRO (when gold sellers were becoming a problem), Turbine lay some serious smackdown and the spammers practically vanished overnight. Neither of my level 50 characters has had a single spam since then. It was pretty awesome, actually. Clearly it IS possible to do some sweeping fixes to alleviate the problem considerably. It's as if they installed ye olde mail spam filter.

Well obviously Turbine doesn't have the ability to shut out gold sellers on all their games, because in DDO I get shitloads of plat spam tells.  Once again.. I said not many games, let alone one that just launched. 

...ways to get to 40 if there aren't adequate people available to kill in Tier 4.

I've never understood why they can't simply detect spammers and auto-ban them.  These people are doing something very out of the ordinary, and I don't see how a normal paying subscriber could ever get banned because it's likely they aren't going to send a tell to the whole population of the server in 5 minutes.  Why does it even require a petition at all?  Or do I misunderstand something vital here?

They shouldnt have missed:  One side starting closer than the other in any scenario, and keeps failing to load at all for individuals, allowing them to walk through everything like a ghost (this is really fucked up)

Spammenot works very well and I haven't seen anything get through it nor have I seen anything in the log that wasn't a gold spam. It autoreports as well.

As to the rest  :nda:

I'd guarantee the gold sellers had access to at least the last few weeks of beta.  The apps they're running were likely developed a fairly decent time before the game launched. 

Why would anyone want to buy gold anyway?  That's the part I don't get. 

Again, one of my largest beta complaints:

When they started wipes/premade characters every month or so, NOBODY LEVELED.

This push will be about T3 content! *everyone makes a preset level 30 character, pvps with it*

This push is about T4 content! *everyone makes a preset level 40 character, pvps with it*

Followed by altering the low end xp curve a week before launch and not completely grasping what that does to the curve.

AoC was a huge success at launch, the problems started when people started getting to the higher levels and running out of content.  Sound familiar?

I played AoC for less than a day played, and have played WAR for over 3 and will be playing for a while longer.  Same goes for all of my friends who got both games. 

AoC was a trainwreck as early as level 25 IMO  (which in WAR terms would be about level 14)...while WAR is still playable but flawed through T3.

That said, it's looking like WAR might end up like AoC...just perhaps delaying the suck a bit more.

The problem with AoC was the lack of content. The problem with WAR is the lack of people/realm balance.

No, it doesn't sound familiar. The scenarios are there. The PQs are there. The open RvR and keeps are there. It's not the content that's missing. It's the people.

Though, arguably, the people are [the] content.

Theres no arguably about it, without people the content is worthless.

I never saw it happen, and I wasn't in DAoC long enough to experience it there either, so I wasn't looking for it. I did some rudimentary tests for obvious exploits that I knew from other MMOs and didn't find anything. The game looked both stable enough and fun enough that I didn't ruin the experience by burning through all the content tests. As a result of my unwillingness to spoil my later fun, I was not a particularly useful beta tester. However, there were presumably DAoC veterans who were familiar with window dragging who either failed to check or who did so and kept quiet so that they could exploit it later. They are the worst sort of beta testers. How about getting rid of the whole beta testing concept for your next game Mythic? Hire some (more) dedicated test staff instead.

Your post is flawed in the assumption that a beta test is for that sort of testing. Mostly, keep doing beta, just get better testers also.

The key for War is going to be whether or not Mythic can patch and balance quickly. So far, based on last weeks patch, I'm not real optimistic. But the way they managed DAOC isn't going to cut it in the modern market.

Given the amount of resources Mythic spent on patching DAOC for the window exploit, you would think they would have spent 5 or 10 minutes reviewing their "OMFG LETS NOT FUCK THIS UP AGAIN" DAOC lessons learned database and done some internal testing.

Looks like this didn't happen.

I understand that most people use beta testing as a vehicle for promotion and to draw in some of the hardcore gamers in big guilds to draw in their members at retail. However, they also use it to canvas audience reactions, particularly to content they are developing. The problem is that the audience reaction to game-breaking exploits tends to be 'awesome, I'll just keep quiet about this and use it later' among many of the sort of people who play betas heavily. The audience reaction to such exploits being in the live game tends to be 'what the fuck were you testing exactly'. So in fact the 'beta test' starts to work against you post launch if you didn't actually have staff or other interested parties really testing things.

So I think that the idea of 'beta testing' as it is perceived now is now mostly harmful. You are better off getting real testers and finding faults and inviting 'evangelists' to play the game early separate from that.

How bloody hard is it to mess up an /ignore function, which supposedly they fixed with the patch?  It would require some really sloppy or incompetant programming.

As it is, it should be simple to write a spambot finder which flags people for review, if not automatically booting them.

Are spammers finding some sort of way of putting special characters into their names that just aren't displaying in chat?  Otherwise, yes, it is odd that this function is not working.

Chat box really needs right click context menus for character names. 

No it simply took login off and on for ignore to stop working.  It was just a really simple bug.

I can get around most of that crap as long as it is fixed fairly soon, but there are two big things that constantly bother me. First is population balance, which we where told by MJ something along the lines of "Dont worry about it, I am pretty sure things will work themselves out".  The second being the fucking pathing is still wonky. Its not as bad as it was by any means, but for some reason Empire Ch. 12 was just horrible for pathing. Evading PQ bosses, and mobs running from hundreds of feet away to agro you for no reason.

Also, PLEASE TAKE AWAY THE WARNING SAYING ULTHUAN US A OVERPOPULATED SERVER, WE NEVER GET PAST MED ON ORDER.

Id also like to add, that there are many MANY things that are not replicated across clients. I play with others on a LAN a good amount, and i have been very surprised how many things in this game, are NOT synced up between clients. Things such as sounds, Pets, spell affects, emotes.

Case in point, the "Rocks" affect they "fixed" a little bit ago (from a root spell, there is ice, rock and some other that use a tinted version of the same mesh attached at the players origin point). While it is completely true that the rock effect clears now for the person affected, on others clients, this is not the case. The viewer, or affected, doesn't see the graphic anymore, but everyone else does. This is only one example.

"Ahmadinejad tells you, 'You buy gold, 1 for $5.  Also powerleveling 1-40 for $777.  www.helpmebuynukes.com'" (x20)

"Ahmadinejad is online" -> in ignorelist

"/ignore Ahmadinejad" -> "You have removed Ahmadinejad from your ignorelist"

"/ignore Ahmadinejad" -> "You are now ignoring Ahmadinejad"

"Ahmadinejad tells you, 'You buy gold, 1 for $5.  Also powerleveling 1-40 for $777.  www.helpmebuynukes.com'" (x20)

Total.  Fucking.  Clownshoes.

On the contrary, I feel like *from the technical side* this is way worse than the AoC launch. The content is there and will be for the foreseeable future. Quests all work, no obviously broken abilities. But the fucking client and the servers... it's awful. It's godfuckingawful stop it sort of awful. It's been years since I've played a big publisher, AA title of any genre which has been this unstable. Years.

Really? I've had some graphical stuttering (this shit is annoying) and lag, but nothing debilitating. I've yet to crash a single time in release.

I've crashed plenty of times.  Alt tabbing is still not an option.  It takes my computer at least 2-3 minutes to become useable again after logging off.  AoC had no problems at release, it was a very smooth launch, they simply had no endgame and not enough content to even make it there.

Huh?  I had tons more crashes in AoC than I have had with WAR.

I get at least one CTD every 2 hours or so. Sucked when you had to go back into the queue. Game ran very smooth for me up until the 1.01 patch, now my FPS is BRUTAL. Tried deleting the cache folder and that didn't seem to help.

Database Fail.  Very reminiscent of SWG launch clownshoes. 

Things have gotten better for me since the patch/ram upgrade, but I still get CTD's now and again. I've had it poop twice coming out of a scenario, a couple times while just running around and once during a scenario. I also get weird hitches where all the textures go 8-bit color funky and then come back to normal. And I'm pretty sure there's a nasty memory leak as WAR was hogging 900+ megs of memory after a crash. I'm living with it but it is rather frustrating. On a positive note, I found I can pretty much run all the settings on high, albeit with a rather low res (I don't care about this as anything in high res and I can't read the chat box).

DaoC had some pretty terrible memory leaks, WAR is following in step it appears.

I wonder if /vidreset really ever did anything.

AFAIK it did nothing.

Don't discount the placebo effect!

AoC had a number of bugs and missing content that people had bought the game specifically to play.

Ultimately WAR has a lot of PvE content and PvP content of varying quality (maps where one side is advantaged = poor quality). Perhaps it even has TOO MUCH content, which spreads players out too thinly. PQs are a great idea, but appear to be generally impossible in anything but peak periods unless you happen to stumble over the one per tier that has become popular.

Realm imbalance is the big question mark for me that makes me wonder about WAR's design. DAOC indicated that realm imbalance could be a real problem, so perhaps Mythic thought having only 2 sides would mean this wouldn't be an issue. The whole attitude that launch would somehow sort out realm balance, or that beta players are a different breed of player who prefer the dark side but other types of players would love to be the good guys, just smacks of naievity. That there wasn't even a mechanism at launch to try to encourage realm balance - buffs to the disadvantaged side, or xp bonuses or something - makes me wonder exactly how much Mythic learned from DAOC.

No item linking at launch in such a gear centric game as this one is inexcusable, period.

Exactly the same thing here. It was perfect before the patch, now is terrible on my machine, which I built specifically to play this game at the highest settings while watching ultra high def TV on two monitors (no joke).

It may have fixed it for some, it broke it for me.

Wasn't it a leftover command from the first client?

7,680 × 4,320 pixels. I'm impressed. You're seriously ahead on the tech curve.

Yup, happened to me too. Reported gold spammer (a tedious process compared to WOW's right click on name>select report spam) + added to ignore list.

3 hours later the bugger is still spamming me through the ignore, even when I tried remove and re-add him to ignore. Lets see if the same account will spam me later.

Whatever WoW did to slow down spammers seemed to work pretty well.  Yes it is easy to report them, but I just don't get spammed now.  I might get a tell once a month now.  They still sit and spam in general /say around the banks, but I can live with that.  Plus, as said, it is very easy to report them.

I know there are work-arounds, but surely censoring the names of any gold spam sites is a easy way forward. It forces the gold spammer to spend time modifying their message instead of just rolling up a new character every other day.