i17 Still Beta Condition - Have We Been Shafted?

Having no problems here, and enjoying all the new features I am able to. Funny, I guess it's not 100% of the player-base.

Well ideally by releasing UM early, they will be able to get that stable across all platforms, fix or specifically define conflicts with other programs so when GR, the paid expansion, hits the shelves, it will mostly be content and not major subsystem overhauling so GR would be a relatively smooth rollout. Knock on wood.

Ok, basic functionality wise I AM able to play the game without crashing. The new Email functionality seems to work fine, most of the UM features at least work even if they absorb an inordinate amount of graphics horsepower for what you get.

The Auction House interface is a big step backwards in functionality even disregarding the bugs that got it taken offline. It worked, sort of, but it was much clunkier than the old one.

The new, "improved" enhancement screen however is utterly broken with it's illegible font size, an issue that's been reported time and time again in the closed beta and the open beta. Ok, so this doesn't make the game unplayable; it does make the enhancement screen unreadable however making respec's problematic.

Tonight I ran a bunch of regular missions with a couple of my regular buddies; we didn't encounter any crashes but there were many annoyances that had been reported in closed beta and made it to live unchanged. Tells were inconsistent and frequently reported the "offline or hidden" message despite the fact that we were all unhidden (verified and actually hid/unhid to make sure). There was a fair amount of rubber banding without any indication of trouble on the netgraph. Contact text was MUCH smaller font size than previously and difficult to read. We found several other annoyances like this ranging from minor to major.

All in all I had the impression that while the game ran it felt like early closed beta with the bugs we ran across. Unfortunately the Dev's had set themselves a hard date to release the issue causing it to go live in an unready state. I believe we had the longest closed beta of any issue this time; I did see several serious bugs addressed over that time. Unfortunately there were too many other bugs that never got addressed and not a few um, questionable design decisions.

I'm hoping for a major patch in the next few days to alleviate these problems but overall I have to agree that issue 17 needed a few more weeks in beta, it isn't ready for prime time yet.

I'm with you. Ever since i17 launched, I haven't been able to play the game because of severe lag. I hope this problem gets resolved soon. I don't like the idea of paying for two game accounts that I can't use.

I'm having no issues after I tweaked some UM settings that were making my computer attempt to barf.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Aah, the "worst release since X" thread... I was wondering how long it would be...

This is interesting, I'm finding that this issue as improved my performance. Which is very odd as I have old graphic cards that supposedly would not work with UM (7800gtx in SLI).

When I logged on last night I expected to see many of the problem mentioned above. However, what I found was:

Less lag then before the issue.
No snap-back, including when I zone (I use to always get at least one snap-back not long after zoning).
There was no delay in opening the auction UI (there use to be about a 30 second pause the first time I used the auction UI on each character).
I can turn on all of the new graphic options with no noticeable increase in lag (although a couple of them don't seem to do anything). I like the water reflection option the best.

I guess, I’ll just count myself lucky and hope no future changes causes any problems.

What it comes down to is this:

There is a nigh-infinate combination of video cards and system specs. There is no possible way they could have tested all of them. They tested what they could, then let us in to test what we could.

Those who didn't participate in the Open Beta, or who didn't give feedback about any problems with their systems will be the ones who have the most trouble now that the game is Live.

UM was a HUGE code update. There was no way it was going to go Live without various bugs/issues.

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Biggest Troll on the forums? I'll give you a hint:

The game definitely seems to be spewing far more stuff down the pipe than it used to. When I approach a busy WW's (Talos & Steel) or BM (Cap), for example, the netgraph ends up maxing out for several seconds as I freeze and rubberband towards the AH - and it's overloading my 5mbit connection since when that happens the 24kbit audio streams I normally listen to while playing cuts out for the duration (they were never affected by anything happening in-game pre-I17).

The CPU tends to get overloaded now as well when I zone. Loading screens tend to take a while, so I used to use that 30s or so to alt-tab over to my browser to do a quick mail check and suchlike. Now I can't - while loading, everything slows to a crawl and it can take 10+ seconds for that alt-tab to take effect, plus more time for any browser links (as an example) to register.

Leaving my graphics settings as they were pre-I17, I've lost around 5fps (which is considerable in some of the busier zones - used to average 15-18 or so in Atlas, Talos, Mercy, and Cap, but now it floats around 10-12) overall. Managed to gain most of it back by reducing terrain texture quality from my normal High to Medium and character quality from Very High to High, as well as turning the draw distances for both down to 80%.

Admittedly, my GeForce 7300LE's not the best card out there, but it rather sucks that I have to run a game released a full year before the card came out at those settings (as well as particle physics off [with count down to 10k], shaders, shadows, antialiasing/antioscopic filtering, depth of field, desaturation, and bloom off; was able to have shadows on low and depth & desat on pre-I17). :/ Several other people, including the leader of the SG & VG my characters belong to on Freedom, I've talked to in-game have had to reduce their graphics quality levels as well and still aren't running as smoothly as they did pre-I17.

And, of course, the enhancement screen illegibility sucks as well. Doesn't matter as much for respecs (at least if you weren't planning to reslot some enhancements purely because of their level) as it does for replacing existing ones. Bet there'll be many people who accidentally spend Inf, merits or tickets on recipes it turns out that they already had the same or a better level on (I know I can't remember the levels of everything I have, or the effect % of every type of effect at every level, so the tooltip's next to useless for that).

I seem to recall the I13 launch being really bad. Worse than this. I don't recall the specifics though.

Oh definitely, of launches on issues, this one is awesome and sedate.

If your computer is laggy, *turn down the settings*. If that doesn't help, *get new drivers*. If that doesn't help, *check your net speed*. If that hasn't done anything, *improve your ram/video card*...

Seriously people - the few have issues, and even out of those, "unplayable" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm getting 6 to 15 FPS typically, and that's playable. I know some folks start to pitch a hissy fit when their rate goes under 50. If you need more performance, you MUST start to sacrifice the graphics and other stuff - do so.

Other bugs, well, they're working on the main one, which doesn't affect a LOT of people, myself included, most folks didn't even KNOW there was a problem. They're more concerned with WW being down, than any disaster that might have awaited them there.

So... No. We're not shafted. This is a very smooth issue release. I've seen PLENTY of them. Seriously.

I sympathize with those players having problems with I17 release. I recall having problems a couple times with way earlier issues on my old computer. Even after getting my new computer, I noticed that it ran better with the Beta version of Ultra Mode than it did with the Live version that was running before I17.

I was in Beta testing with my computer to work on Ultra Mode settings, trying different things and I can tell you one major bug that got squashed was turning on the shadows. The first time my computer was set to Ultra Mode, my FPS bottomed out to about 1 FPS. I had to reboot the computer to start it up again and so long as I left shadows alone, I could run Ultra Mode just fine.

I am amazed at how smooth this release has been for me. I had an issue with my GPU crashing a couple times a day while playing, but a driver update seems to have fixed that.

For some, this is "the worst release ever", and for them, it may be, but for others, it is a wonderful experience. I wish the ones with problems good luck and be patient. A solution will arise, just look at different options.

One final note, I highly recommend upgrading your GPU/computer when you can, it will be worth it. I went from 5 year old Pentium single core with GeForce FX 5500 GPU to a i7 with a Radeon HD 5770. I can run at max Ultra Mode (without Ambient Occlusion) and FSAA X8 and still get 60 FPS.

1) Maybe it was mentiond already but i didnt read the whole thread.

LGSF cant be completed atm by a normal team.

The green mitos have been uber buffed/ or broke


2) is it suckky at the moment to not be able to use WW/BM yes my trays are full already.


3) i prefer the old WW interface anyways

4) I cant read the numbers enhs anymore in my build screen


So to the op "shafted" maybe/maybe not but some things are very suckky atm

Able to play fine, but my gfx went from a 1st gen Xbox 360 game to a 1st gen Playstation 2 game (maybe 1, they're really crappy) because of the intel gpu issues.

Worst issue release ever.

Have had no issues at all. No noticeable lag. Have not encountered any bugs yet.

I was getting at least one graphics driver crash every day. Since the patch I have had none, and I have been running with UM turned up to max on a card which probably doesn't support it.

A near-perfect rollout as far as I'm concerned. YMMV.

(Compared to I4/5/6, this has been a perfect roll out.)

WTF??? In the time I have been playing COH, I have never seen so many small minded, entitlement freaks come out of the cracks to complain(yet once again)about how terrible this game is and how awful the devs are for bringing out one of the most exciting issues yet on COH. I was not able to get on the first two days of I17 due to a glitch, but the tech support was on it right away and was very helpful, even if we figured it out before they were able to. You know......there are choices for everyone. Maybe COH isn't the right choice for some.

Do you really have so little life left that this is all you can do is tear people down that manage to bring so much to a game for so little?

If you hate COH that much........it's a very simple choice........leave. No one wants to hear all this crap. There are going to be glitches in any new release.....deal.

And btw......GREAT JOB DEVS, GREAT JOB. Keep up the great work.

It's got to be difficult to code a game ... at all, really - so much going on at once ... but to code a game so that it supports multiple levels of graphics quality. There have been other games that do not even try to support older computer configurations - if you want to play, you have to upgrade... I completely understand the frustration of not being able to log in, or of problems that occur that make actual game-play nigh impossible, but as people in this thread have noted: it's not affecting 100% of all subscriber computers, some people are able to play on their machines with no problems at all ... and, it's not the OMG ABSOLUTE WORST ISSUE ROLL OUT EVER! I've been playing since 2006, between CoV release and I7, and I've seen this cry every single issue.

It's not. And people need be patient for the unexpected bugs that have cropped up or reappeared (I seem to remember that the bug of getting stuck in the crystal was fixed on Test at one point, so this seems to have been re-introduced somewhere along the way) - there is no way that a limited beta test (even open beta - some people cannot and others do not wish to participate in testing, so the numbers really are limited compared to the actual player base) can bring out all bug possibilities.

Instead of coming to the forums and wailing about how you're getting shafted, do everything you can to help get the problems fixed. Report all the bugs using /bug in game. If the bug is that you can't get in game, contact support. Realize that the first level tech support you are going to get is not going to give you a good answer - and may not even give you an answer that seems to have anything to do with what you contacted them about. If they say "do a and then b" ... even if you know everything there is to know about computers and KNOW for a fact that doing a and then b will have no affect on your problem, just do a and then b so you can report back: Did that and still have the problem. Do what they suggest as many times as it takes to either fix your problem or get your support call escalated. Then do whatever that level of support asks of you. And be polite. Tech support specialists are not robots, they are humans. They have bad days and can make mistakes but they are generally trying to get your problem fixed (that's not saying nobody can get a bad tech - it happens).

And if, in the meantime, your game is not playable, find something else to do. In the northern hemisphere where I am, it's spring. The weather is getting warmer. Go outside and let the sun on your skin make you some vitamin D - let the light help you get a better serotonin level in your brain (and a better frame of mind) ... If the game is the only thing that keeps you connected to the outside world, it may be time to get some other connections. Don't let technical problems rule your emotions - it's really not healthy... Breathe.

Storm

I love threads like this, the apologists come out of the woodwork as fast as the whiners do!

Anyhow, other then the font's being WAY TOO small on the enhancement screens and the market being down at the time of this post this roll out has been perfect for me, mind you, I don't use ultra mode at all cause I want the game to look the same across my three computers so....