1911 replies to this topic

[Bazooka B]

It's coming? This is directly related to the large blurb I wrote on missed deadlines. After UI 2, project management has (wisely) chosen to take a very piecemeal approach to this feature. This way we won't end up blocking the entire production pipeline for several months. The feature might take longer as a whole to complete, but at least there will be a steady trickle of new features while we work on it. UI 2 set up a good chunk of flexibility and framework, since CW is an extremely UI heavy feature. Achievements brought in a lot of currently unexposed title support for faction ranking, and rewards. We rewrote a lot of our backend mechlab/inventory purchase logic for UI 2 as well, not only to allow rewards but also to make conquest benefits easier to implement. The 12-hour downtime brought a significant data migration, one of the largest I've ever seen, to allow robust support for player created factions and association among other things.

Thank you for your insight (on all of this) but what I and many others would like to know why CW is in design phase when it was supposed to be released 90 days after launch. Had it previously been worked on and scrapped, has it never reached your desk, what is the real story? I am asking you because I feel like I can trust your answer.

Edited by Bazooka B, 11 April 2014 - 11:12 PM.

[Karl Berg]

Kaptain, on 11 April 2014 - 10:39 AM, said:

Thank you for taking the time to converse with us! As someone who has been playing MWO since closed beta I have always wondered why MWO is "haunted" by "ghosts in the machine." That is, bugs that are at some point fixed only to reappear again. Things like: LRMs only targeting center torso, Corruption in Frozen City Textures, Shooting around Terrain causes weapons to hit invisible wall, AMS continues to shoot after mech dies, blown off arms get stuck in the air, hud corruption, memory leaks and so on.

With that said I am confused by your answer so I wanted to ask some direct questions
-Is auto generated code overwriting manual edits responsible for "ghosts in the machine" ?
-If auto generated code overwriting manual edits is responsible for "ghosts in the machine" wouldn't one expect more ghosts as the UI team and Gameplay team adopt auto generated code?
-Is there a system in place to prevent auto generated code from causing ghost to reappear?
-If auto code is not the culprit, can you shed some light on what causes "ghosts in the machine" ?

Nope. If a programmer hand-edits an auto generated file, the second they hit build those changes are gone. So the programmer is not able to even compile, never mind test or release, hand edits of autogen code to production.

As to what you're referring to as "ghosts in the machine"; In software development, recurring problems like this are referred to as software regressions. It's a fundamental problem, and there are a multitude of ways for situations like this to occur. So much so that there is considerable academic research into the topic. It's a bit heavy to get into on a forum, but I can certainly link you to some further reading:

http://en.wikipedia....ression_testing

[Laconicus]

Karl Berg........Respect. To have someone who communicates is all I have ever wanted. Many people just got angry because there was no information flow; so many people made their own news or just had rage posts.
Many of us just love the universe so you inherited many people who came in like fanatics and that is a double edged sword, as you already know by now.
I loved the honesty of your post too and only hope you keep it up, as the community needs someone to act as that honest and open source. People don’t mind failures, oops moments and the like as long as people are honest and communicate but at the same time give us a vision of what may be as the dreaming is half the fun.

[Karl Berg]

Bazooka B, on 11 April 2014 - 11:09 PM, said:

Thank you for your insight (on all of this) but what I and many others would like to know why CW is in design phase when it was supposed to be released 90 days after launch. Had it previously been worked on and scrapped, has it never reached your desk, what is the real story? I am asking you because I feel like I can trust your answer.

CW has unfortunately been subject to every scheduling failure that I listed in that post. Plus, due to being a UI heavy feature, had the bad luck to be impacted by every scheduling failure of UI 2 as well. I have had reasonably detailed documents from design, laying out the whole feature, on my desk for many months now. Portions of that document are already released to production, or on the verge of being released. All together, it's a very large amount of work, and so you're definitely going to see us continue to break it up into lots of smaller individually releasable chunks to make it easier to manage. Be assured that we know we've been dragging implementation of this feature on for far too long. We want to get it in your hands as soon as we possibly can.

Paul's recent command chair post alludes to changes that had to be made to some of the final components of CW due to recent situational changes. I think when he is able to post the revised design, it will be very obvious what those changes were, and why they had to be made.

[Karl Berg]

Ax2Grind, on 11 April 2014 - 01:25 PM, said:

Beyond the appreciation I also have a question for you. Can you tell us any more info about the investigations and possible fixes to Hit Registration, especially SRMs? I'd love to hear your perspective on this.

There will be a command chair post on exactly this topic, most likely some time tomorrow.

[Chronojam]

Karl Berg, on 11 April 2014 - 05:34 PM, said:

[The most real-deal post in a while.]

And finally, many thanks for taking the time to write everything up. That took a significant amount of time on your part, which certainly shows you care about the future of this game enough to invest that time.

Your efforts in getting us the response are incredibly welcome. A few eyebrow-raisers in there, particularly about the teamplay aspects being potentially bound by certain agreements, but I hope that all works out.

About ghost heat, balance, SRM/LRMs, etc: One of the issues with ghost heat is that it helped discourage build diversity and felt more like a temporary punishment than a real fix. Ideally, you'd want all equipment to feel viable, without fear that a long range mech will always core you before your own weapons ever become effective. Some tweaks to mech health might have even helped figure that balance out, but it didn't seem to really ever be on the table. On that note, test events that help discover the impact of hypothetical new balance changes would be really cool, the test server seems a little underutilized beyond stress/sanity checks. And maybe help avoid "Wait, why did they do that?" reactions come patch-day.

Anyhow, thanks again for all the info you've brought forward in this thread.

(The apology for missed deadlines and such was really cool, too)

Edited by Chronojam, 12 April 2014 - 12:48 AM.

[NaZotH]

This is the best thread ever.

[Rasc4l]

Karl Berg, on 11 April 2014 - 11:49 PM, said:

There will be a command chair post on exactly this topic, most likely some time tomorrow.

Mr. Berg, your answers in this thread are valued greatly.

Game balance seems to be something that is difficult to achieve so that both noobs and highskill players are all happy. For example, LRMs are still pretty useless in 12-men drops and PPC+(U)AC5 pinpoint meta dominates.

Have you at PGI thought at all about adding a "hard-core" mode or setting similar to the one Battlefield series. In BF, hardcore mode would give you only 50% health i.e. made the weapons actually work i.e. was the only mode I played. I would definitely welcome the option, for example in launch module private matches to have the ON/OFF button for ghost heat. Whatever ghost heat claimed to fix, it was never a problem at competitive level (6xPPC stalkers and other joke builds). What would really be great if private matches would really allow editing the actual numbers i.e. adding 30 m/s flightspeed to LRMs etc. This way, competitive leagues could have their own gameplay rules and the whole competitive scene would remain unaffected by the latest n00b-QQ in the forums, which resulted in the latest nerf of weapon group x.

[Modo44]

LRMs are tuned in strangely extreme ways. The again lowered speed makes them relatively easy to dodge, but the lack of random spread makes the smaller launchers way more effective (most hits on most mechs go directly to the CT). Fast LRMs were at least a worry. OTOH, easily coring LRMs make many missile setups a waste. 2xLRM20 tends to be way less effective than 6xLRM5, which seems just weird given the weight and size difference -- the technically support/backup weapon system (LRM5/10) is better both as that, and as a main weapon system.

[Mycrus]

repete, on 11 April 2014 - 10:37 PM, said:

Actually, speaking from experience, and based on others, he's just as likely to block you. I still have ZERO idea why Russ or Bryan blocked me.

i don't have twitter but i would probably block you too ;p

[StandingCow]

Holy crap, this is going to be my first positive post here in a long time... but this Karl guy ain't too bad!

Karl for president of PGI! If communication were like this from the beginning I think we would have a lot less pissed off people.

[B0oN]

Thanks for all the info and insight behind the curtains of the ongoing war-show that is called MW:O, Mr. Berg.

This thread needs to be janked out of Offtopic and get a golden stickie right on the frontpage plus a throne in GeneralDiscussion if one were to ask me.

On an off-topic related note :
To all the people suffering from motion-sickness : Please go and have your eyes checked by an optometrist !
PLEASE !!!
Why?
If your eyes are of different visual performance(one eye sees sharper/less sharp then the other, or has any anomality to it) it WILL cause your head to be strained massively, causing : headaches from mild to brutal, nausea, disorientation, motion-sickness and can even lead to more permanent damages to your ocular musculature due to permanent over-burdening !

Don´t believe what the grammarnazi says ?
Search around, you might find TB´s (TotalBiscuit) problem with FOV and motionsickness was inuced by one of his eyes having vastly differing visual peformance (about 4 dioptres) which caused most of his hassle .
Furthermore: am wearing classes for 27 years now, nohing worse than when these glasses are not fitting my bettering/deteriorating eyesight anymore, resulting in : ... right! All the pleasant things I stated above .

So, please guys, get those eyes checked, you can´t replace them !

Sorry on that lenghty offtopic, back on track .

Another massive thanks to Karl Berg for his insights, greatly appreciated !

[mansquid]

Fantastic Karl, wish this had come sooner. Pray tell, is Clan Warfare going to come in portions? I'm imagining this like the Warframe community warfare events, wherein they released conclave (controlled dueling space), Clan houses (private dueling space you could build/research in), and now finally contested dueling space (Solar Rails) wherein Clans have established player control over an arena. I don't expect MWO to release exactly like that, but it seems like a good way to test individual functions while building overall player to player interactivity features? You're the dev.

Anything of the sort? A hint? A whisper on the wind?

[juju2112]

Hi Karl!

I have some questions from the perspective of a fellow programmer:

• Beyond just having QA test things, what strategies do you employ to minimize bugs?
  
• Do you have lots of good unit tests? Is your codebase modular enough for these to be useful?
  
• When a bug is fixed, is a unit test created to test for it in future builds?
  
• Are there integration tests?
  
• Do you have a Continuous Integration environment like Jenkins running?
  
• How frequently do you need to pull out memory analysis tools like Valgrind, Purify, or GDB?
  
• Do you have static analysis tools like SonarQube?

[ciller]

My biggest standing issue after reading everything is that even with perfect hit detection SRMs are not a good weapon. When considering the range limitation, the projectile speed, and the overall damage they do not compare favourably to other weapon systems.

Lets look at the issue more closely. Dropping in the random queue or 12-mans, the opponents bring a majority of high dmg alpha, pin point weapon load outs, often matched with jump jets. The most common example would be SHD/CTF/VTR/HGN with ppcs and ac5's. Facing mostly this type of loadout on the opposing team makes closing any ground with an SRM close range based mech to be very difficult and you will take quite a bit of damage trying to get from cover to firing range.

Once within range, the over all damage compared to the alpha builds is about equal except that you miss more with SRMs due to their flight travel time, and the damage is spread out more because the missiles have a natural spread pattern. What this means is that even once an SRM based mech has closed the gap, it has gained no real advantage. The pinpoint alpha shots will quickly core a mech out long before SRM's have chewed through any appreciable amount of armor.

SRMs need to be a stronger weapon to make up for these inherent shortcomings. Finding the balancing point between good and too strong is probably not easy but currently the balance is so far off it is laughable. A hit detection fix will do very little to fix this weapon, it needs a straight up buff like increased damage per missile or bringing back splash damage. Until then it is going to be a useless weapon that few people use and no one uses effectively.

Edited by ciller, 12 April 2014 - 06:44 AM.

[MisterPlanetarian]

Karl Berg, on 09 April 2014 - 10:36 PM, said:

Well, our online user count is highly lumpy, with seasonal, weekly, and daily lumps. We have two daily bumps corresponding to European evening and North American evening. Based on that alone, I would highly suspect that match quality varies depending on time of day. That's almost a necessarily true statement in fact. The magnitude by which it varies is a more interesting question. In theory, the first outcome you'd notice should be an increase in wait times, it takes a while for the skill loosening to meaningfully increase, as it currently follows a very non-linear curve. That increase in wait times should for the most part be compensating for the reduction in player count, and keep skill matching close. It was designed to do this after all. Our telemetry and data-mining bundles all that data together, across all time zones of course. We don't exclude any regions or time periods from our analytics.

I can absolutely attest to this. My worst matchmaking stories by far for me as a European can be traced to around lunchtime. I loose probably 8/10 games everytime I try to play solo at those hours. Everything from signifigant tonnage deficiencies to facing 4 man premades constantly really seem to peak at the odd hours.

Edited by MisterPlanetarian, 12 April 2014 - 06:43 AM.

[Modo44]

You are missing the point, ciller. Without good hit registration (good as in similar to other weapons), nobody knows how useful or terrible, exactly, SRMs are. The results are too random for a solid analysis.

[ciller]

Modo44, on 12 April 2014 - 06:47 AM, said:

You are missing the point, ciller. Without good hit registration (good as in similar to other weapons), nobody knows how useful or terrible, exactly, SRMs are. The results are too random for a solid analysis.

Respectfully, I can not agree with this. The damage can be tested in training grounds, and hit detection is relatively reliable against slower moving, large mechs in matches. The inherent problems with SRMs remain.

[Modo44]

Testing grounds does not tell you how effectively a weapon can be used/countered. Neither do matches, because you may be hitting or not regardless of your aim. The overall bad SRM hit detection is at the core of the balancing problem.

No, your personal experience is not a counter argument, for clear reasons: 1. Your local hit detection != everyone else's local hit detections. 2. Your skill with SRMs != everyone else's skill with SRMs. 3. Your perception does not constitute good statistical data. Humans are prone to autosuggestion.

Edited by Modo44, 12 April 2014 - 07:19 AM.

[Jason1138]

Russ got up on a stage and said CW would be here in 3 months when he knew for a fact they weren't even working on it yet

That tells you all you need to know about this company, or the likelihood of us ever seeing the features they've been promising all this time. they lie, intentionally, and constantly. its not an accident, its not a missed deadline, its fraud. Fraud committed for the purpose of getting people to put more money into the game, with Phoenix programs or Clan packs, or whatever

This game is nothing but a cash grab at this point, and some of the people associated with it literally belong in jail