Discussion: Issue 21: Convergence - November 10, 2011 [Live]

Hello Vinceq1980 and welcome to the City of Heroes official forums! I'd like to take some time to hopefully put your mind at east regarding an apparent misunderstanding you have of how Paragon Studios does business.

The person responsible for putting together the items in the Paragon Market is not in the same group of people whose responsibility it is to fix bugs. That is to say, adding new (and perhaps "trivial") content to the market does not in any way diminish the effort to produce, test, and publish new content. (As in, actual content.)

There's therefore no reason to be upset that some other things within the game continue to go as scheduled while bugs show up in the game. For example, there's no use in yelling at your mailman if your power goes out - the mail service can keep functioning in your neighborhood even if your lights don't work.

I hope this helps, thanks!

This is all conjecture.

...No it isn't, it's a fact. Artists, modellers and animators have sod all to with actual programmers beyond them producing assets for the programmers to bring to life.

This may help: There's a command called /wdwsave which will save your current UI settings to a default file. You can then use /wdwload to recall those settings. I've used this several times when zoning causes my windows to reset.

I assure you, it's not. I'm not going to go digging through the archives to find all the posts where Backalley Brawler had to insist he couldn't animate away powers bugs, but the work at Paragon Studios is certainly compartmentalized, as it is in most major companies. It just doesn't make sense to have your developers work on non-development items, any more than it makes sense for non-developers to work on development items. I realize you may not believe me unless a redname comes and confirms, but I am 100% confident that the person responsible for updating the market is not responsible for fixing bugs, or anything related.

While the first part is true, I'm not so sure about the second. No matter who makes the content, it still need to go through QA, and I doubt each group has their own QA department.

The current bottleneck does seem to be in testing, so that's what is being skimped on to the detriment of the game. That doesn't mean that they can pull people off of doing new costume pieces and let them code fixes as they wouldn't have the correct skills, but it does mean that the more trivial stuff with strong deadlines that is put out (that also needs to be tested), the less time is available to test things like bug fixes and patches.

A command which no longer has a legitimate function, and was mainly being used to get around how the game was set up (the 30 second log-off) got removed... Not a surprise, really.
Read the dev digests for this not really secret command (the way you get it enabled told you what it was/how it worked). It has to do with how the mission and base servers deal with the auction house data.

And this is old news (unless they someone goofed up how the restriction went in, but I seem to recall trying in a base and being denied
Like your above issue, not part of this update. And what can we say, the mail server doesn't discriminate.


1 - Your definition of showstopper must be really low. While I haven't been hit by it yet, I'll agree the UI issue counts as a show stopper. But it's not an "almost always" issue.

2 - Congrats for getting around the word filter... my little brother is more mature than that. And he's not even in middle school.
I agree, think keyes was adjusted to far down, but then, I kept seeing people who would sit by terminals spamming the power cells and then complain when they don't work and they died to the bots they didn't want to fight.

The new abilities are not worthless. The destiny might be a bit situational, but all the rest are good, especially the new alphas (Better than nerve for my controller earth/FF), and the new judgements look to be fun.

Already stated my position on the UI issue.

People abusing rewards getting the rewards nerfed, big surprise. Hmm, change seems bad for you - maybe MMOs are not for you?

The iTrial rewards should be changed to the new setup fairly soon. I admit I'm not going to try too hard for an Underground until then.

As for the iTrial (not plural, the Mother trial was never going live with i21.5 anyway) not being release, that's because they are trying to tune the better. DIYD^2
While it should of been in the live notes, not surprised if they thought it an exploit. If they wanted us to avoid the 30 second cooldown for logoff, they wouldn't make us suffer it when doing "Menu->Quit->To Character Select"

So the person updating the Paragon Store interface is different from the person that updates the UI interface?

Ok. Sure. Sounds believable.

I will grant that I have no idea how much QA testing has to go into new items released to the store, but in my estimation, bundling already-existing items into a new pack and putting them to market wouldn't take much of QA's time. I could be totally wrong, but if updating the market took as much QA testing as, say, creating the new power set that they want to put on the market, that seems a huge investment of time for very little return. After all, I'm sure they sold very few undead survival kits, especially compared to Street Justice.

If you're referring to bugs within the interface, no I do think that would be the same group of people, or at least, a related group of people. But bundling items and putting them on the market, yes I do think that is handled by a totally different person (or group of people) than the people who take care of actually creating the content, testing it, and fixing bugs. And testing is done by both developers and also the actual QA team, neither of which has anything to do with getting things into the market. That wouldn't make sense. It's like having the guys who stocks groceries on the shelves in the store be part of the same group that grows, picks, packs, and ships the food. It's just not the same guy.

Ummm... I dunno what to say to this. Are you implying that the people who design the interface are the same ones that add products (which are already created) to the database? Or are you, perhaps, implying that adding items to the market somehow requires a change to the market's UI?

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

Yes, it is a different person entirely.

Yet it still needed to be tested. Even in the case of the survival pack, they changed an in-game power to allow charges to stack between purchased and earned versions. That needed to be tested. That information needs to be stored on the character, and who knows how many different places in the DB it is stored and what restrictions have been placed on it.

Look at something like the doggie coming soon. Someone needs to be in the game walking that dog over every type of terrain in the game trying to get him to fall through holes, looking for anything that might clip the wrong way and cause a server meltdown.

It's amazing the amount of testing that needs to occur on even the most minor of things. The severity of the bug often has little to do with the importance of the feature. The problem is they don't appear to be doing that needed testing on any of it - small or large.

I agree that there are things within the game that seem trivial but require a not-trivial amount of work; I only meant to imply that the amount of testing that goes into something like the Undead Survival Pack is probably not anywhere near the amount of testing that goes into new actual content (like a story arc or power set). It wouldn't make sense for such a low-ticket item to consume a high-ticket resource. On the other hand, I don't think it's lack of testing that lets bugs get into the game, as there are plenty of examples of bugs being revealed while on test, by players, and still making it to live. Discovering bugs leads to figuring out why they're happening, which leads to figuring out how to make them not happen anymore. Those last two steps are handled by a different department than the first. So I still don't think the Undead Survival Pack interfered with the sudden appearance of other bugs. (I'm not an expert though, obviously, who knows. Maybe the undead pack CAUSED all the bugs...)

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=277957

Flipping. Tuesday.

Enjoy a bug-filled weekend folks. Think I'll be using my time for more enjoyable ventures, like studying for Calculus.

Edit: Also confirmed here: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...98#post3984098

Yeah, I won't be playing this weekend. This is complete rubbish.

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

To expand on what Raj said:

The "secret-ish" /ah command is a veteran reward, which I believe was available on test to people who didn't qualify for it yet (tho I may be wrong, it's been a while since I was on test, and I *do* qualify for it). The problem with using /ah is that it requires downloading the entire auction house database to the instanced map you're in. So every time someone accessed the AH from a base or mission map, the entire AH database was downloaded to that map. Which is why, when this went live, there were enormous and terrible server lag issues. (We can argue about the programming decision here to require a total download of the database to the map, but it's moot. That's how it works and it's not going to change.) So they've restricted it to outside zones only, most of which already have the AH database loaded.

On the other hand, you can still use /vault while inside a base or mish, which makes it easy to make room for additional drops if you accidentally find yourself suddenly full on salvage. You just then have to remember to open the AH as soon as you exit the mission and clear your inventory.

I totally agree with you about the 15 second timer on self gleemails. I realize this is probably a tech/coding issue, but it's pretty annoying. I feel like I spend way too much time doing "maintenance" on my toons, shuffling inventory around to my crafter, etc. I'd love to see an "enhancement tray" type tech in gleemail, where I can just drag and drop my 20 items and then switch toons. In fact, I would (personally) be okay with a drop in the gleemail item limit to 10 items if we could just drag and drop.. having to switch toons twice as often would still take less time than waiting 15 seconds between each item!

(I should clarify that I'm happy for the gleemail function at all though.. a cumbersome system is better than none at all. And waiting "until they could do it right" would mean we still would have no way to transfer items across servers, except for the risky "list it on the market and switch quick" tactic.)

Did this make it to live? Don't see anything about it in the live patch notes, but crossing my fingers.

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

Actually, it was mentioned in one of the base threads for open beta.

I believe Hero bases are affected.
At least, from what I've heard (I don't have defensive items in any of my own bases).

I DO LIKE this idea for future development

There has been a longstanding request by players to have a room type where defensive items will work against players.
On the other hand, players also want defensive items to "operate" (effects) but to be purely decorative (not affect players).

The idea of having a room type that toggles on the AFFECT would satisfy both camps, so those who just want the EFFECT would also get their candy.

As it currently stands, though, the bug is not ideal. I do not want to see the beautiful bases that folks have created using defensive items as decor sacrificed for it.

.

Don�t say things. What you are stands over you the while, and thunders so that I cannot hear what you say to the contrary. - R.W. Emerson

As of last night, no the flickering graphics/flashing and lag/FPS drop bug fix had not made it to the live server, which makes me a sad raptor. I am really looking forward to this fix. I count myself fortunate that I have thus far had remarkable patience with the bug.. I get so little time to play that I dare not sacrifice any of it for anything short of "literally unplayable" (like during the Chaos Event of 2009). 2-5 seconds of <1FPS with occasional 10-second bursts, with 10 seconds to 2 minutes of normal gameplay is ... well.. just barely bearable.

Gahhh... I saw the build was the same, so was really hoping. I can play for a while, but after a couple of hours, the flickering/flashing begins and gets worse and worse until eventually I can't see anything at all without a reboot, which is not always feasible.

Originally Posted by Frosty_Femme I said "ur" which is not a word. It's a sound dumb people make when you ask them to spell out "you are".

Villain bases are affected as well. Upon walking into my base last night, every item that could be destroyed in a raid conned hostile to me: teleporters, teleport beacons, mediports, certain control and energy items, etc. I then added some defensive items because I knew about the bug, and they were also hostile as expected.

And yes, I'd also like a "Danger Room" feature to be added to bases at some point.