Problems with the League Function

interesting that you chose not to reference the first point which of course is the one I was refering to and would support my statement, nicely done spin dr.

The first point was just making general observations. It wasn't making specific statements about bugs so it wasn't really relevant to the comparison.

Again, if you can't see that difference, there's a problem.

that certainly serves your twisting logic, how do you bend truth that way

FACT; i have run multiple attempts at each of the trials; baf, kir lamda

FACT on those runs that were over over 19 members or completely filled to capacity I have been dropped

FACT on those attempts that have been below the proposed threshold of 19 or less than capacity I have not been dropped

FACT on the attempts where I have not been dropped I have been able to successfully navigate with no rubber banding slideshow or other drop in performance

FACT on those attempts that I have been dropped from I have been unable to rejoin no matter the locked or unlocked status of the league

FACT I have received supporting posts within this post, and seen and read other posts indicating the same behavior with in other posts

FACT I am listing these in this manner to be sure there is no supposition of hyperbole or exaggeration by anyone reading this post

FACT I have followed the suggested actions of my peers, and those required of me by development team and /bug whenever this occurs

FACT this is not a rant but a suggested listing of the facts involved in order to provide clarity for those that may have been confused or felt the issue somewhat muddied by frustration.

FACT I will no longer respond to posts from individuals trolling my posts to foment hostility or provoke aggression.

Tito,

I'd have to agree with the others that your posts are largely generallities and you need to give more specific details about the problems you are having. It is clear you are experiencing severe difficulties but you are not providing sufficient information to allow anyone to identify what the actual problem is.

Personally I haven't seen anything like the problems you are encountering nor do I know anyone that has, however that does not mean I don't believe that some people do - presumably including yourself.

There are some known problems which may be impacting your system such as the memory leak in the launcher which appears to cause mapservers - ensure the launcher is set to close upon launching the game rather than continuing to run in the background.

What server is this on?

Do you still get the same problems if you reduce your game settings?

Before enterring were the teams locked?

How many others on the same run had the same problems?

Was everyone in the same zone before starting?

How much memory have you got installed? - 512Mb is going to cause problems zoning on a heavily populated server as you will hit timeouts.

(The following was originally posted by me on 7/11 in the Known Bugs thread in this same forum.)


Not sure if it helps, but I've been on enough runs now where I've been able to watch the players come in and get kicked out on large leagues that the pattern has become fairly obvious.

There seems to be 2 alternative events: either team 1 and team 2 start by filling relatively normally, or team 2 and team 3 do, with team 1 having a single member. A few individuals also spread out singly to teams 4, 5, 6 (and 3 in the former event). Once either team 2, or in the second case, team 3, gets to 7 members, you can watch as the remaining members pop into spot 8 momentarily, then get dropped. (Note the "19" total slots at this point, 8+7+1+1+1+1). The messages that display (almost simultaneously) if you happen to be on that team are:

--Player-- has joined the team.
--Player-- has left the team.

On the player's side if being dumped at trial start in this manner, you see the typical loading sequence, then (usually) a very brief mapserver notice at the very end of that sequence, and you get dumped back to wherever you were prior to starting the trial. Additionally, you are unable to rejoin the trial, as if you never joined to begin with... this is unlike when DCing during the trial.

I have had some small success in preventing league members from getting kicked in this way by moving the people from teams 4-6 into a lower team slot before reaching the problematic total. Of course, that's only possible when I successfully retain league leadership through the loading process, which seems to be a 50/50 proposition at best. Particularly in the BAF trial, where a single league member moving in too soon can kick off the cutscene preventing such action, this is not a very viable workaround, but it can work if you're on the ball. (Yes, the Keyes is the same way, but it's not so well known on my server that people generally charge ahead on their own... plus the first target group is already visible.)

Neither locking the teams nor the trial seems to have much impact on this sequence of events.

Presumably whatever algorithm is used to re-populate the league after initiating the trial zone and moving people to it is what needs tweaking here. It's worth noting that I have never seen it do any of this when _leaving_ a trial, only upon entering. Not sure if that's a function of the more piecemeal exiting that usually takes place, or what.

Hopefully such observations are of use. Good luck...

-=-

Subsequent observation and testing on my part over the last week has changed little in terms of my analysis.

I admit I find it surprising that you have never once encountered this issue, Gaia. I have never once in the past week encountered a BAF or Keyes trial which attempted to start with more than 19 members that did not get "auto-trimmed" to _exactly_ 19 in the 23 such trials I've run and logged in the week since 7/11, absent interaction on the league leader's part to move players as they entered the trial in order to prevent such drops. (Note that since Lambdas cannot have more 16 members, this problem will not be encountered during that trial.)

Players are sufficiently aware of the issue on my server (Champion) that they will request a cap of 19 players in such leagues.

16 of the above 23 were locked trials. 7 of those also had locked all teams at the team level, as had 2 of the 7 open trials.

In the 14 of the 23 cases where there was no attempt to move players as they zoned in, players were consistently dropped by the system on entry once the magic "19" (8+7+1+1+1+1) was reached. In the 9 cases where players were moved prior to hitting 19, we were able to achieve league counts of 21-24, depending upon the timing of the interaction and the number of players entering the trial.

-=-

My own testing with different hardware configurations has, to date, shown no correlation on this specific problem between hardware specs and drop-at-trial-initiation. I have 3 different boxes capable of running CoH sitting side-by-side, ranging from 6 years old with onboard gfx to 1 year old with quadcore CPU and dual GeForce cards.

Connection speed appears to be a factor based on my experience thus far (logically, since if my analysis is correct, it's basically a race to be one of the first 19), but not hardware specs per se. The oldest box DCs at least once per trial (memory leak issue)... but has no more problem at start of trial making the "19" cut than the relatively new, beefy box on the same connection. If I am streaming music/internet radio on box 2 simultaneously, however, I can fail to make the cut (on my preferred "power-gaming" box, to boot).

thank you for your responses

I play on a low population server, liberty

I am running a p4 3Gb with 1Gb of ram
I run an ATI radeon x1050 vid card and an SBlive! 24 bit sound card

the launcher settings are as indicated in your post, Gaia

these occurrences have occurred at all game settings supported by my system (not ultra)

I have experienced these occurrences on both locked and unlocked teams

in all but one instance all tm's were in the same zone

as many as 6 and as few as just myself have experienced this at a given instance


I would agree that this method of team filling is occurring, Magenta, since I have seen it occur even at initial joining of the league where as many as 7 teams have been created before the Star started to condense back down.

I actually had this happen when I was talking to a GM about another problem. He said that they were aware of it but keep on reporting the bug anyway.

Your observations are very helpful in this Magenta. With this being recent it may be a lot of why I haven't seen it - I've only done a couple of BAFs in the past week and as you say Lambdas can't be large enough for it to be an issue.
Hopefully we can build on those and better identify the specific conditions causing it.

If moving people between teams prevents them being dropped then there is presumably something about the team makeup causing it.

Some thing I can think of to try
Different team sizes (I presume this has been looked at but just to ensure its there)
3*8, 2*8+smaller teams, 24*1! (I'm not altogether sure I'd want to do it if that was the only option though), All teams smaller than 8, All teams larger than 1.
No mixed faction teams
All mixed faction teams
All teams formed - then join league
All invited to league - then to team
Single faction league (Oh I really hope not!)
Any idea as to the AFK status of players prior to entering? (could be related to the kick anyone not clicking enter in time change).

I would presume the unable to rejoin is a consequence of being kicked before entering as that would mean they were never on the trial in the first place although I'd have thought locking the teams should avoid that.

@Gaia: I haven't tried different team counts or compositions in any meaningful (ie logged for analysis) way yet. I'll have to try that over the next week... assuming I can talk people into it, heh.

As for AFK, as I was recording I would always log the reported number of people in the trial queue, and try to guess the level of acceptance (usually fairly obvious, but I know of a couple out of my sample set where I had to guess whether the last person had actually hit the green button or not.)

@RebelScum:

bump

To put it another way Tito, you aren't likely to get an official response from anyone directly involved in developing the game on this board. Please note the board's description at the top.

"Discuss gameplay / technical issues or bugs here! This is NOT a forum where official technical/QA support is available. For technical assistance email support@coh.com."

still curious of any of the individuals that had been doing testing beside myself had anymore feedback

my playing time has been limited due to job constraints and so I was hoping someone might have mined some pertinent data

thanks

I have only gotten to make a couple of runs at a trial in the last several days. still expereincing the same issues at the same team sizes, lock vs unlock hasnt seemed to matter under 19 or max capacity
lock vs unlock on team nearing capacity or over 19 the problem seemed to occur about 2 to one over 3 runs total that I have tried since I was taking any accurate notes. one out of three unlocked.