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Posts
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That is strange actually, as I have played that in the past, and felt combat was *faster* there than here.... of course, the "missions" are different, and less prone to have 20mobs per group...
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Pfft, the more the merrier i say. Only used the term "unofficial" because its happening before the player meet, and so is more of an ice breaker event...
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Just as a small update...
Kall and I should be in Birmingham from *around* 2/3pm... that gives us enough time to wander around and double check stuff.
Which leaves the early evening free for "unofficial stuff" to happen.
If you are getting there friday afternoon/evening time and fancy meeting up at all, drop me a PM with a contact number (that you will have access to on friday), and something will be arranged as a meet up.
If no-one replies, i shall just be located in a random pub drowning my sorrows.... -
Personally, a reaction time of *around* 1 second is what i think is suitable for "MMO" game play, at the high end, with more leeway in the early stage of a game
That takes into consideration the typical lag of around 250ms, occasional "hunt and peck" with fingers or mouse for abilities (if reactionary), and the occasional time it takes for powers to activate.
Past the one second delay though (ie 2 to 3 seconds) it then starts to feel more turn based to me, and the fun starts to go away.
Now, saying that, I have been involved (in another MMO) in fights that had 1500 people involved. Depending on how much notice we (and the developers had), it has been "smooth as butter play", which really made it dynamic, and also 60 second lag times, where you had to plan way in advance what you were going to do. Both versions were fun for me (and i wasn't on the winning side in all cases)... but when you can spend 10+ seconds before you do anything (ie large ship combat) I dont find that enjoyable, the smaller ship classes (ie the around 1 second reaction time) i have a lot more fun -
What resolution and Settings have you got enabled?
Ambient Occlusion and Depth of Field start to kill framerate... as well as high AA settings. -
Quote:Ah yes, but the way in which the OP put it across though was that (well at least in my eyes) they took unpaid time off.I've taken time off work for recreation before. That's why they give me "vacation" days.
Then again, when i was working, i was well known for being able to go 11 months without using up any holiday up, so ended up taking the *entire* last month off due to the "use it or lose it" part of our contract....
And during those 11 months, i was still able to take long weekends off to go to the occasional player meet, visit family for new year/christmas, have friends visiting me, play expansions on day of release etc etc.
Depending on your job, it is actually quite amazing what you can end up getting away with... especially if you were like me and willing to work 14 straight days covering other peoples holidays. -
The current updater only needs to patch what actually needs replacing, and so that is 4GB of files.
If they kept "older" patches, then you would generally find that you could have 30-50 different patches before you can play.
One mmo that i can think of, actually *does* do the "different patch" per version route... so it could take the best part of a complete day (if not longer) to actually get up to date, as there was no method of it being able to patch from any old client up to date.
*edit*: To clarify, it would take the version number that you were on, and then supply each and *every* single patch from that point on. Installing additional expansions would help *ease* the amount you had to download, but it still took a while to get fully up to date
Personally, I prefer the "City of" method, instead of the "gorilla" method... (and when the 800lb Gorilla only had a burning expansion, patching up from "basic" to that involved a *lot* of patches, and it only got worse the longer it went on.... -
Quote:I dont know why you mentioned price though. The pure fact of you being a customer gives you the right to complain.It doesn't matter what I paid, the fact is I paid. Let me put it another way. Let's say you go to an upscale restaurant and you get the priciest thing on the menu and someone at another table gets an item much more affordable, that person would still have as much right to voice their concerns over their dish if they felt something were wrong. That's just how business is conducted.
What it doesn't give you the right to though... is to complain about something that was totally out of their hands.
Quote:And you can't quantify the investment in this game on dollars and cents alone. This game is also a time investment. I'm trying to change the alignment of a character from villain to hero for a friend who's on vacation which we all know takes roughly 40 hrs assuming I were to get tips on a regular basis. I took off work today to spend time doing just that and find out I can't log in. There on the forums I saw the five hour shutdown window. I'm inconvenienced but it's not a big deal. I can still plan around it. I log back in later on for about 30 minutes and out of nowhere I see the red text stating I had 5 minutes left to play. All day I check intermittently with little to no information from Freitag. When my friend gets back from vacation, his toon probably won't be ready to play with the rest of us who play heroes for another day or so. While I do acknowledge the apology, how's that going to help me keep a promise I made to my friend? It isn't. I'm probably going to give him a purple recipe to make up for it. I know he won't be up in arms demanding any reparation but it's the gesture that counts. Now while I think awarding everyone purple recipes is a tad excessive perhaps some extra offline XP and perhaps reset everyone's fame timers.
Ok, so you couldnt keep your promise to your friend... but to be honest, there was *nothing* that you could do about it. Would you be the same if there was a major powercut in your area and you were unable to play the game?
What is possible though is that we might get a few free days of gametime added to our account (everyone can at least use that). -
Quote:Having actually seen that, its quite interesting.
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Personally i blame the Australian
What?
its an *Australian* Nemesis plot, having this downtime during our play hours.... -
Quote:But once again, how appropriate would that infrastructure and setup be towards running an MMO?Then irritate yourself. Travel industry reservations systems have NO scheduled down time. They are up 24/7, barring crashes. We even loaded new software with the system up. Granted, we did it for the airline I worked for during the lowest user load times, but the system did not go down.
Also, whilst you are loading up the software, did it have any side effect to the running of the system, or was it effectively transparent so that there was *no* delay on the tasks being ran.
Because, at least from the *customer* point of view, when some servers get under heavy load everything takes longer to complete. Buying/Booking a holiday... those extra 15-30 seconds isnt going to make a blind bit of difference (typically)... if it went up to 5 minutes, then yes... a problem has arisen.
But playing an MMO where you had 15 second lag? Who in their right mind would play a game like that? -
Quote:Obviously you missed the dev blog over on their website talking about their artistic influences on their game.I assumed that was a new game since that's the first thing I see every time I go to the PlayNC site to manage my account these days. It looks interesting, especially the bunny girl, but... Hideously small ankles with ultra-thin high heels? Really? Come on!
Also surprised that you didnt pick up on the fact that the hands are also not in proportion to the rest of their bodies....
*edit* To avoid double posting.
The Mechwarrior reboot has had its own issues due to a Cease and Desist order from Harmony Gold USA that was issued in 2009 (soon after the announcement actually), claiming that some of the mech designs were stolen from Robotech. Harmony Gold USA own the rights to Robotech.
Not to mention as well that in 1996, FASA themselves had issues with a similar thing concerning Macross... it is actually even messier now as Harmony USA have their *own* issues over who owns the original rights.
So when will it all be sorted? Who knows, but there has been a tweet from the President of Piranha Games that more information will be coming forward soon™ (i added the tm part)
Hell, right now, so many companies own different parts of FASA ip, it actually getting very very messy, and if/when anything does get resolved, it would be for the better. -
Quote:I believe that they announced *this* one because it was outside of their normal scheduled routine...Call me crazy, but I don't usually go into downtime announcements expecting to find patch notes in them. This is the first time I've ever seen a downtime announcement explain what the downtime is for in my seven years here, at least that I can remember. Usually, they just list the times when the servers will be down, which I typically don't care about since I'm at work at those times anyway.
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Quote:That would be as good as "not having downtime"... it is such a small percentage, you could get away with that as a selling point (0.14% downtime). 2 hours a week downtime is only 1.11% downtime... which although good, is actually better than other MMO's i can name (800lb gorilla had between 4 and 6 hour weekly downtimes when i was playing it).That said, we're not talking about five nines uptime here. Even reducing CoH downtime to an hour a month would be a huge improvement for those affected by the choice of maintenance window over the 2 to 6 hours a week we see now.
About the *only* MMO that i can think of that has downtime on that level (correct me if i am wrong) is Guild Wars.
What is it that Guild Wars (an NCsoft title remember) does differently to other MMOs that enables it to get away with extremely limited downtimes?
And is it actually feasible to implement the *same* idea's and concepts behind it towards other MMO's or is it something that just so happens to work for it alone?
I cannot answer this one, i do not know the answer to it.
And is the Guild Wars methodology behind it actually scalable enough to get away with it being put into a larger (more persistant) world and still do the same job.
I guess that the answer will be seen when Guild Wars 2 comes out, and if that has downtimes or not on a similar scale to Guild Wars, or if it goes the way of more persistant MMO's and actually does downtimes the "standard"[1] way
[1] Standard being a regularly scheduled downtime.
Question: When your server (that you have coded for) has a downtime, how long is it for? -
Quote:The whole network-service side i felt was not appropriate, because you didnt actually specify what it covered. Infact, i feel that your experience itself is not *directly* applicable to the game server industryIn your haste, I think you missed the bit about network-service software, too.
Quote:I'm not talking about bugs that become apparent, and need to be addressed post haste — that's why there is also unscheduled downtime, annoying as it is. The question is: what is going on such that every week, the whole thing needs to be effectively turned off and on again?
Databases can and are backed up live. (I know my bank, for example, doesn't have weekly scheduled downtime. Does yours?)
You missed out the part where i said that my banks website *does* have weekly downtimes (typically early hours sunday morning but that is neither here nor there, it is at a time where there are fewest people using the service)
*EDIT IN* Side note: if you have to drop the database connection to a player for any reason, then more often than not its bad for their experience as they get forcibly disconnected from the server in that situation. Unless of course you allow the client to be "trusted" above the server in those situations (Rule for MMO's... never trust the client for stuff, its open to providing false information with bots/injection et al).
Also from talking to one of my contacts in the industry, there are also some maintenance tools that need to be ran as well, and if the server is constantly working, then it just prolongs the agony, and can also make the server unstable whilst it is *active*. Of course, as time progresses, and server OS/maintenance tools improve, eventually the need for downtimes reduces.
Quote:Well, yes, that's correct. Your post really did not explain much at all that needed explaining, and was patronizing to boot.
It comes down to an economic decision: doing it 'right' obviously requires more manpower and possibly hardware than doing it the way they are now. They believe, and quite possibly correctly, that the lost revenue from those who give up playing from a disadvantaged timezone is more than offset by the savings they gain from just kicking the servers every week instead.
Of course, if money is no object, then in the computing world pretty much anything is possible (within the existing technological boundries), but as you yourself admitted as well, they have probably taken the *best* option for themselves, which makes the whole argument moot. -
Quote:I am inclined to troll this one, but I will be honest in that i personally think that if your "years of experience" writing for one style of coding (long uptime scientific computing) is woefully inadequate to writing server code that does what CoX servers do.Pray, do explain.
Please use small words, as my years of experience writing long-uptime scientific-computing and network-service software have possibly left me ill-prepared for a sophisticated argument.
How many transactions does your database make? How many users are logged into it at any one point in time? How often are there software upgrades to the base program?
The MMO evolves, it is a constantly changing codebase, and as such, it has its own problems that arises... sometimes those problems dont take long, othertimes they dont arise for several months.
The database side... yes you can leave it alone... but eventually you will *need* to reoptimise it in one form or another (typically with minimal downtime, and depending on the size of the database this can be anything from a few seconds, to 40minutes and longer).
One MMO that i play, its database is 1.7Tb in size.... and they have spent 7 years on working towards getting their daily downtime to 30 minutes or so, but they *still* need the daily downtime to perfom a non incremental backup of the database and clear out the trash.
CoX might only make a *full* backup once a week, but it does incremental backups on a regular basis.
((backing up from incremental is handy for sudden problem crashes, but you still need the full backup to speed it up if the error was actually present for a long period of time and it only appeared after a prolong amount of time)).
Of course, you with your "long uptime" experience would have known all this and it wouldnt have needed explaining in the 1st place. -
Quote:Ok, I am sorry about you being offended, i wasnt intendinging it to come across that way. I was just telling you what i have been told from other Australians in other MMO's and how they cope with DT in their "peak time".Sigh no one is suggesting moving the entire shedule foward a couple of hours but staggering so you only get inconvenienced occassionally.
The comment about using the downtime to spend time with families is just plain insulting. If we were that sort of loser who did nothing but play 24/7 we wouldn't be worried about losing the couple of hours in the evening we do set aside for it.
And make up your mind. First you say moving it would greatly inconvience you then you straight away say its a good thing for us to have as we can use it to get a life. So why not have that usefull break yourself then? If its such a good thing that is.
For *ME* personally i am not bothered about Downtime, i have never been bothered about when downtimes happen, they are annoying to me when they happen (especially late at night for me)
But, you are then applying MY opinion across a whole section of the playerbase.
Sidenote:
You know why running a downtime when a load of people are on the server is a bad thing. When it starts back up it gets hammered.
Hard
Which is something that you DO NOT want to do.
Quote:Originally Posted by HalfflatI note it is very convenient for those who are barely or sporadically affected by these downtimes to assert that their timing is for the best.
The fact that they have to have a regular weekly maintenance downtime at all is an indication of their failure to make a stable system. Updates, emergency bug fixes and spontaneous hardware existence failures are, of course, another matter.
I believe she posted earlier on in this thread as well... but didnt complain about the downtime, she just accepts it. Its something that she has had to do for a few years, in that the downtime will affect her at somepoint during the day (unless it is between 6 and 8am GMT which are her normal sleeping horus)
The system can be stable, but scheduled maintenance is there to generally also run some server specific tasks, stuff that actually allows the server to be, you know, more stable during the week. Every single server, at some point or another requires a downtime. Database servers (depending on the database) requires sessions to be cleaned up and optimised (look at the market soon after a maintenance down time and then compare it a few days later at the same time... its a world of difference)
If there was a *natural* point in time when all of the game servers had no one logged in, then chances are the developers would try their hardest to arrange the server maintenance for that period of time. There isnt, so they try to inconvenience the *lowest* population level.
My bank generally runs maintenance every saturday night/sunday morning for a few hours every single week. This is to run "scheduled" tasks that can only be ran with with a very limited number of people online....
And how do you know that the server guys are not applying OS specific server patches during the downtime? You do not know, because it isnt a patch related to the game, and so it isnt necessarily linked in game patches.
Quote:If they regularly screw-over a particular segment of players, then they are ultimately going to lose a proportion of them. But more than a purely capitalist calculus, it is also intrinsically unfair. It is, in effect, NCSoft saying: we'll take your money, sure, but don't expect the same quality of service.
Sometimes being fair requires more effort. It is sad that NCSoft feel no compunction about taking the easy, unfair route.
Eventually, with a rolling set of downtimes, you will end up inconveniencing the developers as well. Maybe this becomes the time where *scheduled* downtimes dont have a developer entering the building for several hours (if it was held late enough US time zone wise) but then it would mean potentially longer than average downtimes (look at unscheduled downtimes outside of office hours as an example). -
Quote:Honestly, how much are you willing to bet on that one. Moving downtime *forward* just a couple of hours will actually inconvenience the EU playerbase quite badly, in this case spiting many for the sake of a few.A larger amount of people getting a shutdown every one to two months is not going to upset anyone. Whereas putting them all in one timezone does. Surely it is better for a company to upset none of their customers if possible?
I have nothing against Australians and New Zealanders, i actually know a few and i find them to be loads of fun to be around. And generally speaking, those Oceanic players actually found the "downtime" a good time to, you know, spend time with the wife/gf/get something to eat*... it was far easier for them to do this as it was "set in stone" as to when the downtime was... and so could more easily schedule around it.
Of course, I am sure that you would still be willing to have the downtime scheduled for when the Americans are asleep and the developers have finished their work day, but still have to stay in the office (on patch day) just to please the few players who said "but you promised us that you wouldnt bring the servers down in OUR peak time this month"
But the downtime has *always* been scheduled at a time where "player concurrency" is always at its lowest, and also at a time where the developers are at hand (at least for CoX... other MMO's may differ) just in case anything happens... especially for patch days.
*actually they did complain when the downtime went on for far far longer than expected, but then again, everyone else also complained about it as well.
EDIT:
If i remember correctly, when CoX was released EU side, a lot of players complaining about the downtime being in their "peak time".... during the daytime hours... (and not in the evening). This was the ideal time to go and eat/drink/do some shopping.
Guess you cannot please everyone all of the time -
You also have to remember that since the launch of Going Rogue we have had 4 booster packs released, 1 of which *didnt* sell all that well (The party pack).
The Origins, Animals and Steampunk pack also had a *lower* cost than the normal Super Booster pack.
The case of "Going Rogue" being a flash in the pan... actually considering that the expansion cost £27 ish at launch, it is *not* suprising that there was an increase in earnings for that quarter... people bought the expansion on top of their normal subscription fee.
The thing that *isnt* revealed, and it is the essential one, is the number of subscribers of City of Heroes. We can make estimates, and guesses... but as long as we are basing it off "Total Earning" we are going to be off the mark by some degree...
Booster sales, discounts on subscription fees (for 3,6 and 12 month purchases), not to mention as well character renames, server transfers, extra character slots, respec tokens.... they all add up and make the total number harder to estimate accurately.
I would be more inclined to say that the total number of subscribers has stayed the same from pre "Going Rogue" to post "Going Rogue". Is it a cry of "DOOOOOM"?
In my opinion it isnt.
Just yet.
But without an increase in players coming into the game, then just natural erosion of the player base, will eventually cause the game to close down.
Back on topic:
I have played other MMO's and they range from "daily" downtime, to weekly downtime.
The case of a "rolling" downtime (ie it moves forward an hour after each *scheduled downtime*), will quite rapidly place it at *bad* times for developers.
So if you want to avoid that scenario, you then have to cut out the downtimes which are not convenient for the developers.
Which unfortunately, for *ease* of the developers/server maintenance cross over, typically ends up being in Australian prime time.
This seems to be the case if the game has maintenance between 11am UTC to 4pm UTC (Typically between 7pm and Midnight Australian time, if not 2-3 hours later)... strangely enough though, those are within the *easiest* timezones for the Developers to make it...
((Note: The 800lb Gorilla with its Downtimes once a week at 3am in the morning... more often than not had problems bringing its servers back up (at least EU side) and more often than not, one server was down for at least 3-4 hours longer than the rest. Which one would it be? Who knew... but it still happened))
So to me, an Australian complaining about their play time being screwed up by server maintenance (in particular scheduled ones) is nothing new. It happens a lot, unless there is a *dedicated* server hosted locally... and even then, i can guess that its downtime would normally be more scheduled to match the rest of the servers... especially come "expansion" or "content patch" days..... -
I also have the mousemat, but i never bought the Gamestop version of the game either. Infact i had to go digital download as i had an EU account. The box version would have been useless for me.
I currently have the US version of Stateman that was given away with the US collectors of City of Villains as well as the EU version (US version has no cape).
But i never bought the US version of the game.
But if you imported the US collectors version, then yes, you have them available.
I was more referring to "general release". There will always be a person or 2 who go the extra mile to get what they wanted (for the version that they have).
I know EU people with EU accounts who have the *boxed* US version of Going Rogue, even though it was never released in the EU. All the general EU population had was digital download.
The fact of the matter is that it *wasn't* generally available to the EU population
Slighty back onto topic:
Glad to see the Logitech G13 get a mention, as i have one, and i have to admit i do like using it for CoX... at last i can easily get my keybinds layed out on the keyboard *as i like it* -
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So for character name of "Master Shen Shao Shi", that can be changed to Shen Shao Shifu in pinyin (please please please correct me if i am wrong on this one though)
*edit* Looking up on Wikipedia Shifu is pinyin for "master" anyway *arrgh!* -
Quote:Funniest thing was that as soon as you made *this* thread, it would have shown up as the most recent EU thread.... but then posting on the player meet thread, made that one instead show up on the main forum as the most recent thread....It was a miniscule threadjack to stop this disappearing from notice...
And at least I was polite about it
One thing that i have noticed though is that cross-posting (which you have done) is generally frowned upon amongst the community..... -
Yep, looks better now... suprised that you had to threadjack an unrelated forum thread though as well.....