Someone forgot to tell Marc Jacobs...

[trias_e]

...when to patch an MMORPG.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2048444

There's really only 1 rule (which you keep breaking for seemingly no reason):  You do it as far away from your primetime usage as possible.  That means you patch on Monday or Tuesday at 5 AM EST.  Always.  Not fucking friday morning when you get into work.  BAD.

Mythic, come on now.  Stop failing MMORPG 101 class.  You've got a good game on your hands.  You have a chance to acquire a few of those Blizzard moneyhats that you long for, (represented by your cranky asocial irrational customer base*) like the geeky high school student staring across the window desperately at his hot neighbor (whom already has a boyfriend).  You'd be able to impress her with your impressive guitar mastery*, you little Malmsteem you, but you keep forgetting to fucking bathe.

Anyways Mythic, you do very little to instill any confidence in the future because somehow you seem to have not learned some of the very basic lessons in this business, despite the fact that you've been doing it for quite a long time now.

I'm just glad this shit didn't happen on our server, although we did have all sorts of scenario difficulties last night.

*This, of course, doesn't reflect me
*it's easy to get good at guitar when you have no social life

[schild]

I'm not big on tin-foil hats but...

This update will address issues with performance of certain in-game social elements, such as /tell, /group and guild communication.

Bullshit. No one brings servers down for that. What a crock of ass.

Real reason plz. Maybe they're fixing the Marauder ability that's firing twice each time you press it once. Yea, I saw a marauder do about 172k damage in a scenario. Was pretty damn amazing.

[Arthur_Parker]

I thought the guild communication thing stopped people in guilds from flying anywhere, dunno that seems a bit serious, just reading that thread is all.

[Trippy]

Some programmers like working over the weekend

(It's quieter, less distractions...)

[amiable]

I'm not big on tin-foil hats but...

This update will address issues with performance of certain in-game social elements, such as /tell, /group and guild communication.

Bullshit. No one brings servers down for that. What a crock of ass.

Real reason plz. Maybe they're fixing the Marauder ability that's firing twice each time you press it once. Yea, I saw a marauder do about 172k damage in a scenario. Was pretty damn amazing.

That's nothing, I've seen screenshots showing Maruaders doing 420,000 damage per scenario.    That coupled with Chaotic Rift is GG.

Also population issues are rearing their ugly head on Volkmar, where Destruction is taking Altdorf because they can farm empty instances, there aren't enough Order players to enter them all.

[trias_e]

I thought the guild communication thing stopped people in guilds from flying anywhere, dunno that seems a bit serious, just reading that thread is all.

Yeah, although it's still pretty evasive to call that a guild communication bug.  It's more a bug that doesn't allow you to join scenarios, disables flying anywhere, makes your guild disappear, and disables your social window.   

[trias_e]

To be fair, the patch this morning is clearly an emergency fix patch, which you can't blame Mythic for.  However, you can certainly blame Mythic for pushing out a patch too early on Thursday morning when they strolled into work (which is exactly what they did).

Conversation was likely something like:
MBJ:  Did you guys finish the patch last night?
Lead Programmer:  Mostly, but
MBJ:  Put 'er up!
Lead Programmer:  Err....ok...

Ok ok, that's not fair.  It could have been the programmers saying everything was fine.  But you get the point.  Someone isn't being very smart here.

I could excuse a patch on thursday morning if it didn't fail horribly.  But when you do things like, say, forget to put a price on your new tradeskill item you're introducing, it's clear you rushed things, and a rushed patch on thursday is just  .  Learn to wait until monday next time if you would please.

[rattran]

Perhaps Mythic hired Gaute Godager 

[murdoc]

Last night was easily the worst I've ever seen scenarios. My PC runs this game pretty damn good and it was a slide show. I finally just gave up.

Didn't help that the new Order tactic in Mourkain Temple is to get the artifact then have their Rune Priests run up to the front and cast their Master Rune in front of everyone. 

[tazelbain]

Last night was a mess.  The real fault is not having the elder servers up so we could bang on the new patch for a day.

[Khaldun]

See, weirdly, the T3 scenarios fired for the first time EVER on my server last night, and of course, as we all suspected, there were a fucking shitload of players ranks 22-31 who had been trying for about a week to get in. Not only did they pop, they popped constantly, with about a minute of downtime between them. And the people playing T2, where nothing but nothing but Phoenix Gate had popped for two weeks straight, said that all three scenarios were popping, clearly with some randomization of the selection.

My conclusion:

1) The code for scenario queueing had been bugged prior to Thursday.
2) Said bug is inconsistent across servers.
3) Said bug is probably the result of the complicated interaction of successive changes to the code for scenario queueing between late beta and now.
4) Whatever happened to said bug in the last patch fixed some servers and fucked others up gigantically.
5) Server queueing is tied to other subsystems in some complicated ways. For one, I think there's something truly weird about the location of the player at the time of joining the queues that has an effect on which scenarios you're placed into, and how the scenarios pop.
6) There were also bugs messing up performance in scenarios or whereever many players were gathered (I saw those too last night, but sporadically). These are probably independent.


Concern:

This reminds me a bit of how strange interactions between what should be separate subsystems really fucked SWG up royally for the first three months of live, at which point the devs introduced more things to fuck the game up.

[schild]

I can now only queue up for one scenario at a time.

That is... what the fuck. What. The. Fuck.

Scratch that, right when I logged in, I could queue up for anything. Now that I've been in a scenario, I can only queue up for THAT ONE.

WHich is, goddamnit, Serpent's Passage.

[schild]

Magically fixed itself, don't know how.

[Hayduke]

Last night on one of my servers I wasn't able to queue at all.  I'd press the button and there'd be no feedback whatsoever.  Switched servers and everything worked perfectly.

[slog]

I would like to thank you all for your continued Beta testing.  I consider am buying this product in the March-April timeframe and I'm hoping all your testing efforts make for a better product for me to enjoy.

[trias_e]

Well, the truth is, every patch seems to make things worse, so if you joined in April you likely would be alpha testing.

I kid.  Sort of.

[Draegan]

I had zero issues last night.

[murdoc]

I had zero issues last night.

So... you did other stuff than play WAR?

I'm also experiencing the AoC effect. Game ran smoothly with almost no hiccups at launch and each patch it has steadily been getting worse with last night being almost unplayable in scenarios due to the video lag. :(

[HaemishM]

I had no problems with scenarios last night. They seemed to run fine with decent enough framerate.

I did have the problem with guilds below level 17 getting fucked in the ass by removing their use of the guild tavern. Now THAT is some douchenozzle bullshit.

[Evildrider]

That was always there though, I remember even seeing that in the guild reward list.  They pretty much just fixed a bug.  It sucks, sure.

[Mrbloodworth]

Apparently, i'm no longer in a guild, but im the guild leader, and still paying taxes.   

[schild]

That's a pretty normal bug at this point. When a guild gains a level or things change while you're online, you won't be able to access the guild menu until you relaunch.

[trias_e]

While Mythic is having a tough time patching thus far, this bit of news is very encouraging.  They ARE listening, they REALLY are!

As part of our ongoing effort to tweak Warhammer Online based on player play patterns, we are making some adjustments to the rate and manner of experience gain in certain parts of the game. We continually analyze the data from our in-game metrics tool and as a result, we  have made some changes to WAR.  These changes will ensure that you will see a noticeable improvement to the rate at which you gain experience in tiers 3 and 4.

We are currently in the planning stages for our next phase of experience enhancements, so expect more on this subject soon. In the meantime, we know these adjustments will make for an enhanced game experience in the later tiers as well as providing additional incentive for people to engage in open RvR action.  Again, please keep in mind that these changes are only the first step and we have some additional changes/improvements to open RvR that we can talk about next week.

Quest Experience Rewards

    * We have revised the experience awarded for completing quests in chapters 10 through 22.

New Repeatable Quests

    * We have added new repeatable PvE quests to all tier 3 chapters (chapters 10 through 14).
    * The new quests offered in chapters 10 and 11 may be completed twice each.
    * The new quests offered in chapters 12 and 13 may be completed three times each.
    * The new quests offered in chapter 14 may be completed four times each.

Skirmish RvR Experience

    * The experience earned for killing an enemy player in an RvR lake will be increased by +50%.

I'd like to think this has to do with schild's bile-fueled rants vomited in mark jacobs direction.  Well done sir!

Or perhaps it was just their in-game metric tools as they claim (in-game metric tools=their experience with attempting leveling a character up in their own game and thinking, "shit, this is slow.")

Seriously though, good for mythic.  Their stubbornness has worried me, but this is a very good sign.  Hopefully these changes are significant and help to get people through the t3 grind.

[Khaldun]

As a skeptic, I'll give Mythic this: they are really, really trying to be responsive to the significant issues that players are having in a really timely way. In some ways, I'd rather these kind of quick responses that occasionally screw up or overlook something than stony silence or happy-happy fanboi bullshit for months on end. In a way, I'll also give Blizzard some credit: they have put the screws to Mythic with the (I think incredibly deliberate) timing of the WotLK release. Mythic must know they have a month, no more, to make the game so "sticky" in social and game-mechanical terms that most of their subscribers will stay subscribed even if they turn their attention back to WoW. Right now, it's not sticky--I was pretty close to unsubbing three nights ago--but good for Mythic that they know it, understand it, and they're working at it. It must be almost more frantic at their offices now than it was in the three or four weeks before launch.

[tazelbain]

Please post it.  In a spoiler if it is too big.

[schild]

While Mythic is having a tough time patching thus far, this bit of news is very encouraging.  They ARE listening, they REALLY are!

As part of our ongoing effort to tweak Warhammer Online based on player play patterns, we are making some adjustments to the rate and manner of experience gain in certain parts of the game. We continually analyze the data from our in-game metrics tool and as a result, we  have made some changes to WAR.  These changes will ensure that you will see a noticeable improvement to the rate at which you gain experience in tiers 3 and 4.

We are currently in the planning stages for our next phase of experience enhancements, so expect more on this subject soon. In the meantime, we know these adjustments will make for an enhanced game experience in the later tiers as well as providing additional incentive for people to engage in open RvR action.  Again, please keep in mind that these changes are only the first step and we have some additional changes/improvements to open RvR that we can talk about next week.

Quest Experience Rewards

    * We have revised the experience awarded for completing quests in chapters 10 through 22.

New Repeatable Quests

    * We have added new repeatable PvE quests to all tier 3 chapters (chapters 10 through 14).
    * The new quests offered in chapters 10 and 11 may be completed twice each.
    * The new quests offered in chapters 12 and 13 may be completed three times each.
    * The new quests offered in chapter 14 may be completed four times each.

Skirmish RvR Experience

    * The experience earned for killing an enemy player in an RvR lake will be increased by +50%.

I'd like to think this has to do with schild's bile-fueled rants vomited in mark jacobs direction.  Well done sir!

Or perhaps it was just their in-game metric tools as they claim (in-game metric tools=their experience with attempting leveling a character up in their own game and thinking, "shit, this is slow.")

Seriously though, good for mythic.  Their stubbornness has worried me, but this is a very good sign.  Hopefully these changes are significant and help to get people through the t3 grind.

Wrong ANSWER, Mythic.

1-22 is fucking fine.

23-40? Nightmare. NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHTMARE.

[schild]

wait

he says this helps with t3 and t4

but those chapters are oooooooooooooooooooooooooooh

i see

this doesn't help with t4 even a little tiny bit

ok

my keyboard is broken with stupid

also, bullshit solution, just cut exp in half plz

[pxib]

Every single patch has improved performance for me. I can turn the sound on now, framerate has improved, and I haven't had a screen freeze, graphic glitch, or crash to desktop in more than a week. So whatever is screwing up your game is making mine work.

Which is probably a bad sign.

[trias_e]

this doesn't help with t4 even a little tiny bit

Well it helps questing in t4!  But I suppose the idea is that by funneling people into t4 faster, the players will be able to create enough content for each other that people won't feel so much of a grind to 40.  You can take part in all of the fun end game open rvr stuff just by getting to t4 (right?), although you might be a little gimpy.  So no big deal.  Just getting more people into t4 seems to be the most important part.

[schild]

Quests in t4 give like 6k exp. There's no way to NOT feel the grind for the first few levels.

Also, the scenarios are 

[trias_e]

Perhaps they will give significantly more now.  We'll have to wait and see how big of a change this is.  Regardless, I'd like to see how the open RVR end game plays out when lots of people are involved.  That's the meat of this game IMO.  I'm happy with that coming faster, and also very interested in the changes coming to RvR in the next few weeks.

[Lakov_Sanite]

So wait, the big improvement is letting you do the same quest 3-4 times over before you have to move on?

[trias_e]

    * We have revised the experience awarded for completing quests in chapters 10 through 22.

This is the part I'm assuming will be a good sized quest XP buff.  I could be wrong.  That repeatable quest part is just...yeah, well, unless they give some decent rewards pretty meh.  The 50% buff to Open RvR kill experience should be decent as well.

[Nija]

50% in the RVR lakes is fucking huge.

Keep sieges here I come.

[tazelbain]

There has been one time that I have found a descent xp in RvR.  +50% would have made it good.  But mostly its empty or zerged.  +50% to nothing is not so helpful.