58 replies to this topic

[QuantumButler]

ElCadaver, on 27 November 2012 - 09:11 PM, said:

@OP

Whingers of the world unite.

I hope no one at PGI reads these posts

Can you imagine how demotivational and oppressive the environment would be if they all did.

That could account for the differences in what the whingers want addressed and what PGI is addressing. The are just ignoring all the rude abusive people. I don't blame them. No Company WANTS customers like that.

If you want a better game, change your tone and make constructive and polite suggestions

If you just want to drag the developers down, act like a whinely little girl, or better yet, ****** off somewhere else.

Getting sick of all the bad manners people.

We're not the customers PGI needs, we're the customers PGi deserves.

I used to make constructive, polite suggestions, they got ignored, so why bother? Might as well get some enjoyment as I let PGI know exactly what I think.

Edited by QuantumButler, 27 November 2012 - 09:16 PM.

[Roland]

Jun Watarase, on 27 November 2012 - 06:18 PM, said:

Oh boy another "learn2play" troll post. As expected from someone who names himself after a canon character. *reaches for the ignore button*

Well if you would just learn2play, folks wouldn't have to keep telling you to.

Also, uh, you named yourself after an anime character. Derp.

[Fate 6]

Vlad Ward, on 27 November 2012 - 06:23 PM, said:

Press it if you want. Or you can read the mountain of info out there on c-bill optimization.

But probably not. It's easier to just ignore information that contradicts whatever point you're trying to make.

Sorry, but I'm not playing the game to optimize cbills, and I shouldn't have to play around the monetary system in order to earn points effectively. Sure, I should have higher repair costs in a bigger mech (although they are a bit too high), but I should have much more potential to earn cbills as well. I haven't gotten more than 150k (without premium/founders) in a game, and I would expect the same is true of most people. After repairs it's closer to 100k. A loss would put me at about 120k-80k=40k earned. That's pretty poor earnings. If this game is optimized around playing with premades it isn't going to succeed.

[Jadel Blade]

ElCadaver, on 27 November 2012 - 09:11 PM, said:

@OP

Whingers of the world unite.

I hope no one at PGI reads these posts

Can you imagine how demotivational and oppressive the environment would be if they all did.

That could account for the differences in what the whingers want addressed and what PGI is addressing. The are just ignoring all the rude abusive people. I don't blame them. No Company WANTS customers like that.

If you want a better game, change your tone and make constructive and polite suggestions

If you just want to drag the developers down, act like a whinely little girl, or better yet, ****** off somewhere else.

Getting sick of all the bad manners people.

Or they could read it , bring it up in one of their meetings and suggest a priority shift.

Now I have argued FOR adding content because the severity and number of bugs isnt too high, but I based that on the fact they would actually start fixing those bugs at some point.

[Bagheera]

Hyperbole aside, most of your points are quite valid.

Jun Watarase, on 27 November 2012 - 05:30 PM, said:

-Weapon balance is still non-existent, only way to suceed is to boat lasers, streaks or gauss, unless you are using quad AC5s in a CTF-4X

Except that. Weapon balance has its issues, but is no where near as bad as it is made out to be on the forums. Frankly, I think everyone should just shut it about weapon balance for a solid month so we can concentrate on every other - arguably much more important - problem on your list.

Starting with netcode, bugs, and dx11.

ElCadaver, on 27 November 2012 - 09:11 PM, said:

That could account for the differences in what the whingers want addressed and what PGI is addressing. The are just ignoring all the rude abusive people. I don't blame them. No Company WANTS customers like that.

I appreciate the spirit of your sentiment, but ignoring client crashes, netcode that would be taxed to keep up with modems from the late 80s, and engine/coding problems like the HUD changes in the 11/20 patch* that made the game nearly unplayable for a significant portion of the playerbase because some people on the forums can't use their words like adults is highly unlikely to succeed on any level.



* - you can look that up in the merged performance feedback thread from the patch in question. Dev post states flat out that changes to HUD code ruined the game for lower end spec machines, especially dual core machines.

And before anyone says "then they should buy new machines," I'll pre-emptively repeat myself. Min spec should be able to pull a solid 30fps on lowest graphic settings at lowest resolution. During closed beta I had gotten the game to a steady 40fps average after a great deal of work and research on the forums.

It is incredibly frustrating that since that peak, game performance for me has gone steadily downhill with every patch, and as of 11/20 performance on my system is worse than it ever was. Frozen City in particular became utterly unplayable (~8fps, echoing and cracking sound, etc) with that patch. Interestingly there were art changes to that map on 11/20 that were not in the patch notes until 11/27. But I digress.

At this point, I cannot replicate the performance I had in closed beta. For me it is a question of priorities. I love this game, but right now it is broken at its core. That has to be fixed. As far as I am concerned not a single thing matters in any patch until netcode is repaired and they either optimize the engine to run on their own published minimum spec (this machine is faster than minimum, but the same generation) or change the published minimum spec to something they can actually support.

Edited by Bagheera, 27 November 2012 - 09:48 PM.

[Roland]

I love the comment:
"Weapons balance is non-existent. The only way to win is to use <lists every weapon type in game>"

[Comguard]

OP is right. Checked the game for a couple of matches after this patch.

Start of game - already the first disconnect on the enemy team. Was it a farmer? Who knows. Is there any support for such issues? No. We still can't report such stuff in-game, shouldn't that be a basic feature?

Then another disconnect in my team - one of the hidden ones where the player is not listed as disconnected.

One player has the yellow-screen bug. In total 4 players missing just because of disconnects.

Then several players still had problems with the hud and minimap. I didn't have these problems with this patch although I know them from last week, but obviously it didn't get fixed.

I myself died in one game because I was clipped in a rock in an out of bounds area. Winner in this match was the team with less disconnects.

Add to this then hit-detection which is still awfull. When I was observing other players, it was crazy where they had to shoot to hit something. I guess it must be worst for those with low ping?

All in all, zero progress. And I still wonder why there is zero customer support for a multiplayer only game. Come on, when do the farmers get banned? What did we give you the founders money for?

[xxx WreckinBallRaj xxx]

Roland, on 27 November 2012 - 09:38 PM, said:

I love the comment:
"Weapons balance is non-existent. The only way to win is to use <lists every weapon type in game>"

The second part of that is biased but the first part is very true. We have weapons that are utterly useless while others are obviously overpowered. They did give ACs some attention but 9/10 players will still take a Gauss Rifle due to the lack of heat and effective damage it has at long range. When you make a comparison, such as PPC vs Gauss Rifle, and NO ONE will ever take the PPCs; it's very obvious they aren't equally balanced. Count the number Gaussapults you see and compare it with the number of PPCpults. Pretty much everyone strips off the PPCs for 2 Gauss the minute they buy the Mech and never look back. This is not good.

[Jadel Blade]

Bagheera, on 27 November 2012 - 09:33 PM, said:

Hyperbole aside, most of your points are quite valid.

Starting with netcode, bugs, and dx11.


I appreciate the spirit of your sentiment, but ignoring client crashes, netcode that would be taxed to keep up with modems from the late 80s, and engine/coding problems like the HUD changes in the 11/20 patch that made the game nearly unplayable for at least 35% of the playerbase because some people on the forums can't use their words like adults is highly unlikely to succeed on any level.

dx11 isnt close to the top of the important list imo.

at least 35% of the playerbase ? ...cough, hyperbole aside...

[SgtMaster]

I' m not saying the paint addition is not a nice one...

but,

i did not buy a founders pack because the game lacked 3rd view... so until i had a beta key, i did not know i would adapt to cockpit view...

it has been 3 patches in a row now, FPS drops, from 30 to 13 now... so game is now unplayable.
i have a slightly above minimum requirements/ not recommended requirements...

Quad Core, if i just needed to add ram, that's one thing, but if i need a new vid card, that requires its own power supply, i am screwed, if i need new vid cards with SLI, i need new mother board and all... still screwed.

All my others games run fine

so either i buy a new pc all together to be able to play this game, leaving me without funds to invest in the game,
and maybe have to re-buy again after a few more patches, or i am forced to stop playing.

Maybe that is why i am limited to playing with 4 friends, so i cannot discuss this topic on a wider scale.
Then again, most stopped playing because we couldn't play together.

Funny how they still send me an email for every patch insisting i spend money on new game items..
No Candy for me, no Money for you...

If i was the only one having issues, i would just leave, but more and more people seem to be having the same problems...

Edited by SgtMaster, 27 November 2012 - 10:22 PM.

[Bagheera]

Jadel Blade, on 27 November 2012 - 09:44 PM, said:

dx11 isnt close to the top of the important list imo.

at least 35% of the playerbase ? ...cough, hyperbole aside...

Yeah, I edited that down after the fact. Hard to use a number when I have none. I generally know better than to do that, but I've had the shittiest of days and this forum doesn't help my mood sometimes. Had to go correct myself.

Suffice to say though that the number of people reporting issues with that patch was enough to be representative of a fairly widespread problem. The fact that a developer posted in the performance feedback thread to explain that they had discovered an issue which affected a wide range of system specs, but hit low end users the hardest is even more evidence that the 11/20 patch did horrible things to a lot of players:

Matthew Craig, on 22 November 2012 - 09:17 AM, said:

I just wanted to post an update for the community so far our investigation has shown that it seems the performance issues for this patch are most noticeable to users who had borderline frame rates already i.e. min spec users.

Currently it appears to be a combination of more expensive in game HUD operations the HUD uses ActionScript which appears to be causing some hot spots that are more noticeable on weaker cpus, we're working to isolate and optimize these areas and potentially also in game streaming.

The in game streaming again appears to be hurting lower end machines much more than higher end machines, we're still investigating but I wanted to post an update on what we've found so far.

My understanding from Dev communications during closed beta was that a large portion of their optimization work was tied to dx11 as well as to Cry3.4. Perhaps it was more the latter than the former, but I only listed dx11 because of my memory of those comments.

Matthew Craig, on 22 November 2012 - 11:13 AM, said:

It's not intentional to be CPU bound, though it is easily overlooked these days that powerful GPUs need powerful CPUs to keep them constantly fed. Drawcalls are not cheap on CPU time and GPUs have gotten much further ahead than CPUs in the work they can process.

As I've mentioned in other threads DX11 may help and is currently back in testing. The cpu cost of the UI is not optimal so is not an indication of where final performance will be. To further clarify on this it's not that the whole UI is written in such a way it will remain slow, profiling so far shows there are just a few hotspots in ActionScript that we need to isolate and probably convert to native code (c++) to make them run faster.

I think dual core cpus will ultimately be able to run the game reasonably, but it's worth pointing out that CryEngine is heavily threaded at any given time there are decent amounts of load on main thread, render thread, physics, animation worker threads, streaming threads, network thread etc.

The fewer cores the more contention I do think that quad core is a better place to be for those that have that option. Again we're committed to running well on dual cores but the nature of modern engines is more and more threading.

With regards to pushing the GPU one of the great things about the CPU being the bottleneck is you can throw more work at the GPU until it balances out. Down the road you can bet once the CPU side is under control we'll be looking for more things to throw at the GPU on higher end cards.

I may have also been thinking of the above when bringing up dx11.

However, my point about my own personal experience stands. It's hard for me to see the point of new content if the playability of the game continues to go downhill with each patch at the most fundamental levels of performance. Skim through the thread where I pulled those; you will find plenty of players with a wide range of system specs reporting the same problem that I am describing. Do I know a hard percentage? Of course not, hence my editing, but it's plain and clear that there was a problem and that a significant number of people experienced it.


The bottom line for me is this:

If they cannot optimize to their own minimum spec, change the spec and republish it with a big fat apology saying that the new minimum is the best they can do.

I would accept that, even if it meant my system was not entirely up to snuff. At least then it would feel honest.

Netcode is still #1, and playability is #2. If dx11 is part of the fix, wonderful, if not, also wonderful.

Just fix it already.

Edited by Bagheera, 27 November 2012 - 10:17 PM.

[Roland]

Bluten, on 27 November 2012 - 09:43 PM, said:

The second part of that is biased but the first part is very true. We have weapons that are utterly useless while others are obviously overpowered. They did give ACs some attention but 9/10 players will still take a Gauss Rifle due to the lack of heat and effective damage it has at long range. When you make a comparison, such as PPC vs Gauss Rifle, and NO ONE will ever take the PPCs; it's very obvious they aren't equally balanced. Count the number Gaussapults you see and compare it with the number of PPCpults. Pretty much everyone strips off the PPCs for 2 Gauss the minute they buy the Mech and never look back. This is not good.

Yes, the PPC is still fairly weak compared to other weapons, although at the same time I run an absolutely brutal beater mech that carries AC's and PPC's, and will kill a catapult before it can reload.

But the PPC is not the entirety of weapons.

Currently, you see a wide variety of weapons used. LRM's, SRM's, SSRM's, Lasers, AC's... Essentially every single weapon type in the game is used. Some are still somewhat weak, but the idea that it's all Gauss rifles is nonsensical... especially now.

And hell, in the original statment I quoted it showed this.. because they freaking listed basically every weapon type in the game as being "the weapons you need to use to win."

[yashmack]

comparing the PPC to a gauss isnt quite fair, theyre similar but the trade off for having no ammo is a little less damage
I loved my PPCs in my awesome, theyre fun to play
since my poor performance started after the last couple patches ive had to go back to lasers as I cant get a hit with a PPC when my computer is pretending im watching a slideshow instead of playing a game...

Edited by yashmack, 27 November 2012 - 10:08 PM.

[Vlad Ward]

Fate 6, on 27 November 2012 - 09:27 PM, said:

Sorry, but I'm not playing the game to optimize cbills, and I shouldn't have to play around the monetary system in order to earn points effectively. Sure, I should have higher repair costs in a bigger mech (although they are a bit too high), but I should have much more potential to earn cbills as well. I haven't gotten more than 150k (without premium/founders) in a game, and I would expect the same is true of most people. After repairs it's closer to 100k. A loss would put me at about 120k-80k=40k earned. That's pretty poor earnings. If this game is optimized around playing with premades it isn't going to succeed.

It's not about playing around with the monetary system or playing with premades. It's about aiming better.

Salvage Bonus = 2% of the total purchase value of all undamaged equipment on a destroyed enemy Mech.

You go figure out how you might be able to get more money out of that.

[JudgeDeathCZ]

Patch was OK for me however they should focus on major gamebreaking fixes like black/gold screen,No-HUD bug etc...than adding new stuff :s

[JokerVictor]

I've come to the conclusion that PGI are either mostly or entirely incompetent. That bargain bin pedigree of theirs is really starting to show. I joined the closed beta at the beginning of August, and all of the problems the game currently has were problems back then. Literally NOTHING major has been fixed. You can split hairs and say the game feels better all you want, but you're just blowing smoke up your own *** if you think that's true. Fact of the matter is, the game ran and played WAY better when it was running cryengine 3.0, and nothing they've done since the engine switch has gotten it even close to where it was.

Oh and, here's that sterling pedigree btw:

• Bass Pro Shops: The Strike (Xbox 360, Wii, Windows)
  
• Duke Nukem Forever (Windows, Xbox 360, PS3)
  
• MechWarrior Online (Windows)
  
• Die Hard: Nakatomi Plaza (Windows)
  
• EA Playground (Nintendo DS)
  
• Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 (PSP)
  
• Need For Speed: Undercover (PSP)
  
• Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (Windows, Xbox 360, PS3)
  
• "Bass Pro Shops: the hunt (Wii)

That inspires lots of confidence doesn't it? I'm sure impressed.

[Jun Watarase]

QuantumButler, on 27 November 2012 - 08:33 PM, said:

Admittedly the paint stuff should have been in on day one of Open Beta, but turning the time of day slider to "night" and removing the ugly fog filters on a single map does not count as "new content". [something you can do in about 2 mins btw, not 2 months].

The paintjobs don't do enought to freshen the game up, and none of the substantial bugs or performance issues have been fixed, the only thing on the horizon that could really make the game fresh is 8 v 8 group drops.

The reason why PGI is adding new map variations so slowly is very simple.

Think about it this way...it takes very little time to translate something like a manga volume. Random people on the net can do a chapter in a week or two....and that's not even working on it full time. So how is it that manga volume releases are spaced out at a rate of one every few months, when professionals are working on it full time?

The reason is simple...they can translate it a lot faster, they just choose not to. By spacing out releases, they get you to come into the bookstore on more occasions to buy other stuff. Also it means they can take more time to get other titles licensed rather than blowing through a series in 3 months and then being left with nothing to work on.

What PGI is doing is spacing out map releases and minor content to make it feel like they are adding a lot more stuff to the game over a longer period. If they added a ton of new map variations within a week, next month, people would be asking for more and saying "hey, they added 12 maps last week, why cant we get more by now?". And its a lot easier to feed the players a bit of content over a long period than a lot of content over the same period.

ElCadaver, on 27 November 2012 - 09:11 PM, said:

@OP

Whingers of the world unite.

I hope no one at PGI reads these posts

Can you imagine how demotivational and oppressive the environment would be if they all did.

That could account for the differences in what the whingers want addressed and what PGI is addressing. The are just ignoring all the rude abusive people. I don't blame them. No Company WANTS customers like that.

If you want a better game, change your tone and make constructive and polite suggestions

If you just want to drag the developers down, act like a whinely little girl, or better yet, ****** off somewhere else.

Getting sick of all the bad manners people.

Edited by Jun Watarase, 27 November 2012 - 11:03 PM.

[Jun Watarase]

Also i would like to point everyone to this post : http://mwomercs.com/...ost__p__1500585

So 6 months of closed beta, and not once did any of the devs realise that screen shake/smoke was screwed up, despite hundreds of posts telling them about it, and despite playing the game over several months. And that's not counting all the time we have in open beta so far.

One match, that's all it would have taken...one match of testing where someone said "okay, let's chainfire streaks/ACs at someone and see what happens". Or getting shot at by a streakcat.

This is further proof that the devs do not listen to what we tell them, nor do they test it adequately (or play the game and take note of obvious things like this).

Edited by Jun Watarase, 27 November 2012 - 11:01 PM.

[Taizan]

Skyfaller, on 27 November 2012 - 06:56 PM, said:

I'll say it again: Color blind HUD color support has been asked for ..forever... and not been done. Yet there was time to add camo and color schemes... what does that tell you about their priorities?

Color blind HUD support as a priority

So first of all, there are very very few games that cater to this condition and even fewer that got it down right.
WoW being one of the more successful MMOs out there has introduced a decent color blind mode in September 2011, about 7 years after its release. Unfortunately most games do not take this condition into consideration at all.

I'd be surprised to see color blind mode introduced when there are more pressing matters at hand. Just imagine the outcry if they'd present color blind mode instead of 8-man matchmaking or CW!


Camo & Color schemes

Maybe we have different opinions but to me this was one of the best things they have done. Finally offering more mechanics & incentives to spend MCs on. Not just hangar slots and hero mech. Finally giong the right step for an F2P game. Having a robust and working RMC economy is of very, very high priority for any F2P game.

Also the issues like netcode and technical issues. are still being worked on, its not something you can just turn on or off, its highly complicated and needs a substantial amount of emulating and testing.

Edited by Taizan, 27 November 2012 - 11:17 PM.