expletive deleted superfail expletive deleted

[Margalis]

From that huge interview I got one clear message: the game is only half done and we have lots of awesome plans for what to do with the other half!!

[Moaner]

Well I don't want to post spoilers but my engineer is level 12 and stuck on a story mission at the moment.  I spent over an hour on it before getting pissed and exiting out.  This was in Embankment redoubt or something.

I'm putting it away for a couple days. 

[schild]

Embankment Redoubt? The RTS minigame? Easy peasy. Just run at least one of your guys to the exit. If you want, hit up teamspeak and i'll help you out.

[Moaner]

Yea it's that RTS minigame.  In the past I just ran through it but the portal seems to be missing.  I'm guessing it's under a piece of terrain or something.  They also made that demon so damn mean it's hard to even look around, let alone actually kill him.

I'll try again this weekend.  I may actually just start a new character, I'm not very pleased with my engineer.

[lesion]

The big nasty demon spawns the portal when he dies, or at least he did for me.

I find the best method of killing him is to keep your squad far enough so that you can pick off the 5 or so minions he spawns, then drop the ignite bombs on him so he slowly burns to death while you mow down adds.

[Chorulle]

It took the lives of many disposable templars before I pretty much came to the same approach.  Just keep your guys hunkered down spraying everything that moves while you carpet bomb the guy to death.

As for engineers, I never really was comfortable with them in beta, but I really wanted to be.  The problem from my limited experience is you wind up being a halfass marksman with a little hovering trashcan as an assistant (which spends most of it's time charging into rooms and getting killed).  I never stuck with an engineer high enough to see if you could develop the drone into something useful (maybe after you can stick a gun on it the damn thing would stop charging around so much).

It would be nice if the drone actually looked different as you gained levels (sort of like in AO where higher level engineer pets looked more badass as you went along).

[MrHat]

Morf's build for the engineer is the right way to go atm.  Basically a haste bot.

[Morfiend]

I play an engineer as my main. I dont use the Drone cause the thing is just dumb as dirt, but I love the Bots. Droneless Engineers can be very mean AE machines once they get up a bit in level.

[Phred]

No seriously, what the fuck is this bush league horseshit? I've never seen a game that works and yet get so willfully fucked up by people NOT CODING THE GAME. Can anyone else point me to an instance of that? I'm in awe. Not that they're reading this but wholesale firings of their PR and Marketing departments is in order. Why didn't anyone say, "You know, guys, the patch hasn't gone in in the twenty four or so hours we've been up... I think we can wait until prime time is done."

Ping0, the guys and gals that fuck things up, seem to be a separate operating unit of Flagship.  Best name for a customer service/relations group ever.

Don't forget the beancounters. It probably costs a lot more to have it done in off hours.

[Soln]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


So, got into multiplayer, made it to level 8.  Solo'd to "Speak the Truth".  Needed to step through portal to speak to Sage.  Died with 2 emperors, rezzed, finished them, died, rezzed back, portal disappears.  There are a few other variations on this on the official boards, but quest is a-borked-O for a few folks.  Thing is, how do you proceed without this quest?  Kind of, game over, no?   

[EvilJohn]

Accompany someone else going through the same quest (parts) and use the portal when it appears would likely work. Otherwise, yeah, that is the main story thread and if it is completely borked you won't be able to advance to the later stations.

That's decently early in the game (about 2-3 hours worth of effort), so mebbe you can sweet talk someone here in rolling a character up or asking in the stations.

[Arrrgh]

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh


So, got into multiplayer, made it to level 8.  Solo'd to "Speak the Truth".  Needed to step through portal to speak to Sage.  Died with 2 emperors, rezzed, finished them, died, rezzed back, portal disappears.  There are a few other variations on this on the official boards, but quest is a-borked-O for a few folks.  Thing is, how do you proceed without this quest?  Kind of, game over, no?   

I haven't ran into any level restrictions on grouping. Any high level character would mow down the emperors and people seem pretty willing to answer help requests in chat.  Everyone gets their own separate loot pile so no need to worry about ninjas.

[MrHat]

Yup, and the party portals make travelling to help out a trivial matter.

[Signe]

All my old test characters are still on the test server.   

[Signe]

I don't think these people ever played their own game BECAUSE IF THEY DID:

They wouldn't have forgot to make it possible to split stacks, or sort your stuff... I NEED to sort my stuff!  They would have given us some more hot bars.  Made the UI customisable, especially the chat window.  It doesn't even fade anymore.  ON or oFF.  That's it.  Well, no brainer choice... the way it is now... OFF.  They wouldn't have made it impossible for melee characters to run and swing.  Because of that, I'm really trying to figure out if there's a reason AT ALL to play a melee character.  Maybe for people who are a bit lazy and find it easier not to bother to aim or something.  I don't know.  God, this game needs so much work!

[Soln]

Accompany someone else going through the same quest (parts) and use the portal when it appears would likely work. Otherwise, yeah, that is the main story thread and if it is completely borked you won't be able to advance to the later stations.

That's decently early in the game (about 2-3 hours worth of effort), so mebbe you can sweet talk someone here in rolling a character up or asking in the stations.

Ok thx.

Just one thing. 

How do I group?  Christ, how do I unhide the chat box?  Where is the chat box/log/spam window?   

[Rendakor]

To unhide the chatbox, click the triangle near your health bar.

[Ixxit]

You can also hit the '~' key to activate/deactivate the chat window.

[Morfiend]

Accompany someone else going through the same quest (parts) and use the portal when it appears would likely work. Otherwise, yeah, that is the main story thread and if it is completely borked you won't be able to advance to the later stations.

That's decently early in the game (about 2-3 hours worth of effort), so mebbe you can sweet talk someone here in rolling a character up or asking in the stations.

Ok thx.

Just one thing. 

How do I group?  Christ, how do I unhide the chat box?  Where is the chat box/log/spam window?   

Press ~ you cant miss the chatbox. It takes up like 1/4th of your screen, even on a widescreen. If you want to do this, I will be doing it on my Evoker tonight. You can get me on any of my 3 characters in game, Morvant, Morv or Morfiend.

[rattran]

I find evoker or marksman much easier to play than melee. Point and click rather than run, spin, button mash, move a few step, chase down etc.


Much more relaxing to just shoot them up. That said, I'm still enjoying the Cuisinart/blademaster.
 I do wish they'd fix the memory leaks. Kinds ridiculous to fill 4gig of memory and all swap in ~90 mins

[Miasma]

I can't believe these idiots still don't have the account subscription stuff up.  What a disgrace.  And they are obviously very lax when it comes to bugs so for them not to have it running must mean that something huge is going wrong, like billing the wrong credit cards and such.

[Oban]

Odd that they would screw up such a major item... revenue is good, mmkay.

[schild]

I can't believe these idiots still don't have the account subscription stuff up.  What a disgrace.  And they are obviously very lax when it comes to bugs so for them not to have it running must mean that something huge is going wrong, like billing the wrong credit cards and such.

This is actually a problem with the billing company they hired. I talked to another company that hired the same folks FSS did and they're having absolute nightmares as well.

After getting the story from a third party, I'm about 99% sure Flagship has nothing to do with these issues, particularly since they're billing structure is so straightforward.

[Signe]

State of the Game

It’s been less than a week since we’ve opened the Hellgate, and we’re ecstatic at how many people have already joined us online. Overall, the game is running really well. Our game servers are incredibly stable and the community has been great about working with us to identify and resolve issue through the forums. We’ve been working through some issues as every new online game does, and as is befitting the season, we’ve our share of both tricks and treats.

Hellgate: London was scheduled to ship to stores by October 30th so it could be available for sale on the 31st. The excitement of retailers having the game on hand won out over our carefully crafted plans and we started seeing anxious gamers wanting to get online a day earlier than expected. Although we had to scramble, we also didn’t want to disappoint our first players, so we opened the servers early.

 After the game had been running for a while, we found that we were having issues with out subscription transactions not being correctly processed. While this wasn’t an issue of incorrect charges being applied or insecure data issues, we needed to suspend subscriptions while we worked with our payment processing partners to address the problems. We’re working on this through the weekend and will take as long as required to iron out the last issues. We will update everyone as soon as we have more concrete information.

 Turning of the ability to subscribe meant that we had some cool All Hallows’ Eve content that a lot of people weren’t going to be able to see. So, we decided to “turn on” the goodies for everyone who was playing. Unfortunately, this meant we would need to shut down the game servers in order to issue a new patch. Although we announced the down-time on our forums and within the game, not everyone got the message, so some people were surprised when they couldn’t get online for a few hours.

This, in turn, led everyone that was playing to rush to the Hellgate: London forums, which promptly overloaded both our forum and website servers. The treat was that we really saw that there are a LOT of passionate people playing the game. The trick was that the rush to our sites caused our little corner of the Internet to shut down.

It’s not that we don’t already have a good amount, but we immediately put out the order for more web servers. We’ve also implemented a website overflow plan in case we get that many people flooding onto the boards in such a short amount of time again. Live and learn!

We brought the servers and our sites back online a few hours later, patched everyone with all of the special themed content, and we’ve been up and running ever since. Some of our Beta testers have progressed through the end of the storyline and are continuing on in Nightmare difficulty. We can’t wait to see them tackle Elite Mode.

All in all, we’re pleased that the game itself is running so well. We’re also as frustrated as you are about these initial bumps in the road. Trust us – we’re here working on them all day, every day.

Single Player Patch

We’ve made the general fixes, improvements and changes found in Patch 0 available to our stand alone players. The option to patch your single player version of Hellgate: London is available from the launcher when you first start up the game.

Founder’s Offer Extended

We’ve received a flood of messages from people that have pre-ordered asking that we extend the time for our Founder’s offer. We understand your concern, and want to assure you that our delay in accepting subscriptions will not adversely affect your chance to take advantage of this offer. We’ll release specific details in the next few days, but we’ll extend the timeline of the offer and make sure that we take care of everyone that wants to be a Founder.

 New Special Event

We’re putting the final touches on what is making it into our next patch, and details will be coming VERY soon. One hint – there’s going to be fire. LOTS of fire…

 See you online!

--Bill Roper

Posted by: admin on Sat, 11/03/2007 - 23:19 Talk About This Story!
Filed under: Bill roper, letter

[Ixxit]

Billing is back up, and of course,  it didn't work (said it couldn't process my perfectly good Mastercard).  According to the official forum others are having the same problem too.  One guy said his card got rejected, yet he got charged anyway.  Will have to check to see if this happend to me too.  I tried a few times myself, so it would be lovely if I get charged multiple times.

These guys are amateurs.  Wheeeee another mmog debacle.  Who would have thunkit.

[schild]

Flagship isn't handling any of the billing at all. They hired a horrible company. We can blame FSS for a lot, but this company is a bunch of devious scumbags.

[Tebonas]

I really loved my Engineer. But then the game crashed and now he is gone. Can't even make another character with the same name. Fucking Alpha piece of crap!

[schild]

What? Huh? The characters are serverside. Unless you were playing single player. In which case "lol."

[Tebonas]

Yes I was. I don't give that much a crap about online play anymore. Maybe after all the stupid people got killed off.

The offline player segment that doesn't exist anymore? Thats me.

[Trippy]

Flagship isn't handling any of the billing at all. They hired a horrible company. We can blame FSS for a lot, but this company is a bunch of devious scumbags.

Flagship hired that company. It is Flagship's fault the billing is so fucked up.

[schild]

Flagship isn't handling any of the billing at all. They hired a horrible company. We can blame FSS for a lot, but this company is a bunch of devious scumbags.

Flagship hired that company. It is Flagship's fault the billing is so fucked up.

From members of another company, I have first hand knowledge with more than unsavory business tactics to get gaming companies to sign. It's disgusting and neither company is happy, nor should they be. This is another situation where, due to what I've managed to find out, I'm simply stating the reality of the situation. It's simply not my business to make the entire situation public, though I probably should.

[Trippy]

Doesn't matter. You said you talked to another company that has had similar problems with this billing company. That means that either:

1. Flagship did their due diligence before signing on to use their services and knew that they were fuckups and decided to use them anyways

2. Flagship didn't do due diligence and were caught off guard

Either case it's Flagship's fault their customers are suffering.

[eldaec]

On the subject of general HGL bitching:

Someone needs to take another pass on the sound effects and particle effects. They all suck, and even for a MMOG, seem EQ era. The standard rifle effect espeicially.

Looking around the forums, it seems that Flagship can't even press DVDs properly, I've seen a tonne of messages from people (myself included) who can't read the movieshigh000 or movieslow000 files. Now sure, I can take the disk back when I get around to it, but this is a fucking MMOG, any other MMOG would just let me download missing files since you have the infrastructure sitting right there.

Both the tutorial and manual are even more crap than usual. There are still UI icons and indicators where I have no idea wtf they mean.

The game so very tiresome as a single player game, but doesn't seem to have any tools to help groups form. Usuable chat interface and a lfg tool would be a start.



We've been here many many times before, but do these people even play other games?

[schild]

The game so very tiresome as a single player game, but doesn't seem to have any tools to help groups form. Usuable chat interface and a lfg tool would be a start.

Not sure why you'd be looking for a group in a single player game. But pressing "P" toggles your LFG thing as far as I know. Also, having used the chat interface for the first time tonight, it's just fine. It's not as much a clusterfuck as the SWG one. And since I'm only using guild chat it's even easier.

We've been here many many times before, but do these people even play other games?

Pfffft. I'll take randomly generated levels, a proper hardcore/harder difficulty, a story arc that ENDS, and so much loot that half of it is missing from the strat guide over uhhhh uberguilds, raids, 60 levels of meh, and a chat interface. Also, you know what you can do in Hellgate? DODGE FUCKING PROJECTILES. YEA, THAT'S RIGHT. I CAN FUCKING MOVE TO THE SIDE. IT'S A FUCKING REVOLUTION IN MMORPG GAMING. And no one mention AC2 or NeoCron. They're dogshit and always have been. And did more wrong than the SWG NGE.

[Trippy]

How about AC1? Can we mention that?