Originally Posted by T_Immortalus
1) Nothing destroys fun more than a poor performing, especially if not working at all, game.
When something destroys fun then we don't pay, so you may want to look into making this game the best running game out there before many of us find a better one.
2) I don't know how you're going to get new free or old premium members to pay any money for this game with crashes and bugs much too often(twice is one time too many let alone more) while giving them no customer support.
Find a way to give them support or you'll lose money with Freedom and probably kill the game as even subscribers have worse performance due to increased load.
Why not try the LOTRO method of at least offering support until 30 days from the use of store points? it gives them support while encouraging monthly purchases. That should be the minimum offered.
3) Why not at least allow us to play the game offline when we pay the box price? You get money and we get to game even when the server is down while costing you no server resources thus saving you money. It would also be much more reliable to have most of the game's processing take place on our computers rather than overloading and burning out the servers unnecessarily.
Give this some thought as the "non-mmo" market is at least 100 times larger than the MMO one, and offline RPGs, of the scope that CoH could be such as Oblivion, are definitely popular.
(Edit: Having the client be more responsible would also mean less support request since support wouldn't be able to do anything and the servers would not be responsible most of the time for errors, bugs and lost items. That saves time and money. I don't care if it is "not how things are" or "a lot of work" because it could be how things should be and would be worth the effort if it results in a better performing game for us all.)
On to the issue....
First, my game has been running perfectly, if at lower graphics than it is capable of due to system issues that have been solved, for a long time, besides the usual lag and occasional server "lost connection to mapserver" mass issues for people all at the same time.
Last night I changed things to get better performance and got better performance than I dreamed. I had professional help from a fellow player who only had me do the safe things that work perfectly. I tested it extensively last night, including on incarnate trials and in Praetoria.
My computer works perfectly and runs CoH better than ever with less lag and never a graphical stutter, now.
I have never been happier with the game than since the changes I made.
But today, I was running a BAF trial on the same character that had tested extensively the night before. I had been, and always do, monitoring my netgraph and fps statistics. I have my maxfps set at 30 for perfectly smooth constant frame rate everywhere except the most demanding areas.
The trial was running about 200 ping, as usual for any place in the game, and a constant 24-30 fps, perfectly smooth and uniform and wonderful looking graphics.
We had a really long BAF run because the league was weak, and when Nightstar and Siege were down to 5% health each, I saw the Windows 7 "working" mouse symbol. "NOOOOOOOO", I screamed. It was a bad time, and the game, which was still sitting their frozen while Windows brought up the error box, showed still perfect fps and netgraph.
I had no warning.
Still, I chocked it up to crap luck with a server hiccup and decided to get back and maybe they would still be up or I would still get the empyrean merit I was after. I started the game back up, which had crashed full out. I logged back in to the character list. I logged my same toon in, but it stopped at less than 10% of the load bar to Pocket D.
I tried again, same result.
I tried a female toon in the Shadow Shard, Firebase Zulu, instead, and I got in without any hiccup or issue.
I relogged to my toon that crashed, but met the same result as before.
I checked for updates, set the launcher to check and repair the game, and booted the game up again. I met with the same result.
I rebooted my entire PC this time just to make sure, and repaired the game again.
I still could not log that character in.
I decided to try other characters. First,
I logged the female toon in the Shadow Shard again without any issues. I then went to try another character to see if I could enter Pocket D and see if it was a zone issue, a character I don't play much. That character couldn't get past loading in at the same point as the one that originally crashed despite being in the Rikti Warzone and not Pocket D.
I decided to try yet another toon who I knew to be in a low load area, the no powers room in Founder Falls AE, but even he could not load in.
Every time I brought the game up after every crash it always still said I was still logged in.
I ended up going back to the female toon in the Shadow Shard to login and see if she still worked, and she was still getting in just fine with no issues.
I'm afraid to make the toon leave the Shadow Shard. I can't tell if the issue is just random characters or male toons only or every zone but the shadow Shard.
The repair tool ran and no errors were brought to my attention, graphics load is fine and the netgraph could not be smoother. Th rest of my PC runs fine.
I'm even posting this while still logged in on that toon that works. My system can handle much more than Firefox and the game at the same time.
I know this isn't my computer, as I can login one toon without a single issue and it has performed better than expected for a very long time as well as absolutely beautifully the past 24 hours.
This is a server issue, perhaps where those characters are stored or those zones they were in are stored. They are all zones that have had changes more recently than the Shadow Shard has.
I don't know what is causing it. I can just say I'm very dissatisfied with the service, the completely impossible to prevent issues and the fact that I just can't play how and when I want even if I have to do so offline(if only I could).
I just want to play this great game without the bugs and crappy code that kills it. It would be light years closer to perfect if only it were more reliable and relied on the clients more rather than having so much on the server and expecting perfect internet connections from clients.
Please please, I'm begging, fix this, greatly improve performance and reliability before Freedom, and allow the free, and us premium vets and new purchasers, to get support when things like this happen so that we have reason to spend money on this game, rather than reason to not spend because of issues going without assistance in solving them.
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