Preview Weekend Update

[Mbj]

Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. 
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

( Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. The reason for all the Saturday Night Live references was that a poster or two dared me to work a certain phrase into the update. I kinda took that and ran with it.

[Soulafein]

woot!


thanks for issuing the pet pathing & AI Mark...Im sure many Squiggies and WL's are going to get happy soon.

ps:

what you do in life echoes in eternity

[oettinger]

ALL of the problems that I experienced in the PW have been adresses by this post... It shows that the developers are aware, and that it is not "working as intended"

Always refreshing when a person admits that they made a mistake, and intends to fix it...

Although, the RR gear from Tier2 being purchasable, and worn in Tier 1??? I did think this was "working as intended" I thought it was a chance to PWNFACE for 2 lvls just to teach the lowbies a lesson...

[Tee]

Mark, you've officially addressed all my concerns thus far, and I'm extremely looking forward to the future of WAR. Thanks for the update!

EDIT: My main concerns, by the way, were the animations and pet/ai/mob issues. I know the CTDs and the like would more than likely be cleared up, but these two especially worried me.

[PvPskills]

Zomg a Mythic employee mention WoW in their post Watch out for flames as the majority here has VERY low tolerance for that word, no matter the context.

[fatalitez]

PW was great, bugs are expected. Looking forward to more WAR ASAP

[Zerikin Loukbel]

Nice upate.

[Bacardi151]

Fantastic job all around Mark. Thanks much for all the hard work that you and the mythic team have put in.

[Aegorian]

great update. you pretty much touched on every issue i found with the game and cant wait to see the results of your work. Solid job so far!

[Headbanging247]

Very nice, good read! I'm very happy with the time that the developers have taken to respond and listen to people's threads.

Where I was impressed was where a WAR developer replied to my thread when I had troubles, which I have never seen first hand until now.

I'm looking forward to the game, the improvements, and everything that Mythic/EA has to offer for WAR.

Thanks again!

[etrusk]

Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this Dev post.

Now we can peacefully wait for OB, when the doom and gloom mongers will crawl back out of their holes.

[Jtmk]

You owned the few negative points in real reviews xD

[Zaagazug]

Thanks for the update - keep up the good work

[Katlan]

Nice to hear your opinion/comments on it, I was happy w/ PW and everything. thanks!

[Zlade]

Good to know. The pet's responsiveness and the GCD sometimes messing up were the worst parts of it imo.