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

I have been told that alt+tabbing makes it worse, which seems to fall in line with my experiences. I alt+tab quite a bit. Not sure if I set my second monitor back up and just clicked out of the window if I would get the same effect - that is, I don't know if it's the actual alt+tabbing or just temporarily changing which window you're focused on.

I generally don't get the flashing at all to begin with, but the FPS drop is there as soon as I log in. The flashing then builds up over time. I only got to be online for about an hour last night so I didn't have much of the flashing at all, but tonight (when I plan on being online for at least six hours) I know I will start to see it before the end of the night.

And I should clarify, I am assuming that the FPS drop/lag is related to the flashing/flickering graphics only because someone else was experiencing both and said they were related. I don't actually know that for sure, but I hope so!!

Well, I can tell you that running in Windowed mode and clicking on a different process seems to have the same effect. As for ALT-Tabbing, I found that in full screen ALT-Tabbing would sometimes cause the process to freeze entirely when I went back. WindowKey-Tabbing did NOT seem to cause the freezes, but did lead to the flashing. All of this is, of course, assuming it is the process switching which is causing it, which seems to fall in line with my experience as well.

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".

I too switched to windowed mode quite a while back, because in full-screen mode I would lock up the game about half the time I alt+tabbed. I switched to windowed thinking it was the alt+tabbing specifically, and thinking I could get around it by clicking on something in the task bar. I was happy to discover that alt+tabbing in windowed mode did not run the risk of locking up the game.

I only started experiencing this new flickering/lag bug recently.. others have mentioned "around the halloween patch" which sounds right.

Yup.. go read your EULA and let me know how that demand goes....

Oh and if you think they are delaying a fix to play a new game... well... just.. Wow.... might want to get a new sarcasm detector.

As Garielle mentioned farther up the thread, the Paragon Studios team really has their hands tied here. There's a huge population of people who are enraged at unscheduled downtime, so if they bring the servers down today, they're going to make people angry. If they wait until normally scheduled maintenance, they make other people angry.

I've personally had fantastic customer service so far. I had to file a support ticket because Street Justice was locked out for me last night, even though I had purchased it. I received a reply only an hour or two later that it was a known issue, and seemed to be resolved by logging out and back in. (Which worked for me.) I've filed bug reports and contacted customer service for another issue and each time have had quick, professional, and informative replies in generally short order, (above and beyond the automatic form letter reply). Having worked in customer service I have to say, hats off to the Paragon Studios / NC Soft customer support team. You guys are awesome.

n-th'd. Although, it does work on my Fire/Energy Dominator, but not my TA/Archery Defender. Could it have something to do with the fact I already have a weapon.

Nonsense. There's a difference between being a supporter and an apologist.

Leaving game-breaking bugs in is what is going to enrage people. People were angry at a 6-hour downtime that was announced barely ahead of time - and frankly, they were right to be at this point, because 90% of what this patch introduced was a bunch of bugs that RUINED the game for many of us. I was fine with that 6 hour downtime when it happened - I'm not anymore, since apparently it was a 6-hour "destroy the game" patch.

This needs to be hotfixed, NOW.

This sort of stuff might be acceptable from a beta, or a brand-new released game. From a 7 year old veteran MMO? No. not even a little.

Sappphire, I think thats why you may never see another maintenance/Publish combo again- the window of disaster recovery is too small. It was a nice idea to limit downtime but it just has too much potential to blow up.

I also have a sneaking suspicion that the decision to push this issue live was pushed past the devs by a higher up management. The Devs certainly knew of the bugged state, hell the changes to the Alpha and Interface that Hawk posted about aren't even in Beta yet! (And they are significant changes)

So I'm beginning to think that someone else (marketing maybe, who knows) determined that the patch had to go live NOW!!! Why? Not sure- maybe to keep up the stream of "new shineys"? Maybe to give the studio talking points for the summit? I doubt we'll know... but if I'm right, then this better be a lesson for Paragon- Deadlines are all fine and good and should be adhered to.. unless your developers present evidence that the intended product is indeed still not working.

I don't necessarily believe the mistake was in combining the maintenance and the patch, I think the mistake as doing it during the regular maintenance time (a Thursday), instead of the regular patching time (a Tuesday). If they had done both the Maintenance and the Patching on a Tuesday, the recovery time would be the same was the current practice of patching on Tuesdays.

NCSoft/Paragon has had things go wrong when patching on Thursdays in the past, and when I saw they were patching yesterday, I assumed, wrongly, that they were patching to address some problem that required immediate attention. Guess I was giving them too much credit in this case.

Still, I think the idea of combined patching and maintenance is a solid one for reducing downtime, it just shouldn't be done late in the week.

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".

VERY true Garielle- I realized that after I posted and read a similar comment in another thread- a Tuesday combo downtime would be a good solution (hell.. it's what I do when I need to do a software push at work.)

I'm trying to be neither an apologist nor a supporter, I'm just stating what I know, what I see, and how I feel. As angry as the bugs are making you, I can point to someone who is just as mad at every unscheduled maintenance and hot fix. The things that make one person angry are not going to be the same thing that make another person angry, and the things that one person is okay with, another person might not be okay with.

I don't consider any of the bugs "game breaking show stoppers". The UI reset can be fixed in a fraction of a second with /wdwload. I have been playing through the flickering graphics/FPS drop bug for a while, as annoying as it is, and that's not even fixed in this patch. I will grit my teeth through this bug tonight, and next week, and as long as I have to in my very limited game time until they fix it. I haven't been able to modify the costume on my Arch/Traps for weeks (or months?), but I can still play her. I am very sorry that the state of the game is so frustrating as to make playing undesirable for a number of people, but that doesn't mean it's literally unplayable. I can take a fraps video and prove how playable the game currently is. Frustrating? Yes. Unplayable? Not by my definition.

And trying to hold a 7-year MMO to a higher standard to a new game isn't quite fair. While we've had longer to work out some of the kinks in this game, we also have orders of magnitude more content, which is more stuff that can randomly break in creative ways. A hot fix now has the opportunity to break the game even further, making it truly unplayable. Having fixes queued for the Tuesday patch lets them poke at these fixes internally a little bit first, to (hopefully) ensure that they fix what they're supposed to, and don't break anything else.

I realize I am not likely to calm your fury about this, I'm just trying to give perspective on how I see things.

Very true, I've seen a lot of decisions come down that the people who have to implement said decision disagree with .. but that's corporate life. If you don't like what your boss tells you to do, you can quit and start your own company. (Assuming you're not in a union I guess.. We don't have many unions here in FL and I've never been in one so I don't really know how that works.) I mean, you can say "I disagree with this decision" all you want, but the boss gets what the boss wants, that's why he (/she)'s the boss.

On the other hand, this might not have been pushed down from upon high, I have no idea. I do know that it doesn't really matter what happens, there will be angry mobs ready to torch down Paragon Studios regardless. Someone once said that if they gave us each a pony and a thousand dollars, there would be angry mobs upset that the ponies don't fly and puke rainbows. Others would be angry that the money came in $100 bills instead of $20s. It's just not possible to please everybody.

I always had the impression that the delay and the one-item-per-email limit were deliberate design decisions, meant to hamper RMTers. But yeah it's irritating, especially when trying to do something like mail 50 Candy Canes to an alt. One at a time, 15 seconds apart.

If we are going to continue getting more choices for Incarnate powers (adding to the existing ones, not openning up the currently locked slots), then we Really need a way to breakdown the powers we've crafted. They cost us enough time/energy/inf/etc as it is and even with a related cost to break it down back into say components (not previous versions of the power), then that makes it this much a more enjoyable experience. Sure some will say that we can always Test/Beta this stuff, but considering tools like the TransferTool aren't accessible it makes that essentially useless.

Oh yes, and I agree with that purpose. It would just be nice if it didn't apply to one's self.

Well said!

Well, there's several new games out, so it looks like a good weekend to put CoH on the shelf until they can get this mess patched..

thank you. i appreciate this as it is somewhat of a workaround to the bug. still would have been nice if this was posted yesterday when the bug was causing much frustration to the players. would have shown the devs standing firm in fixing the many issues promptly. now however even one day late it further solidifies how broken the chain of communication is for paragon studios.

for shame.

One problem with this - Zwil was asking for confirmation of unfixed bugs reported in beta because he was not aware of them. Several of the biggest bugs were NOT on the known bugs list (although they may have been added since it originally came out). So, your righteous devs vs evil, suit wearing marketing types theory seems to be a bit of a fantasy.

There are certainly failings in either how information on bugs in transmitted within the company and/or how they are handled, but it is not limited to some faceless overlords. There are some pretty bad failings on the part of the nice, friendly gamer devs as well.

Yes! The e-mail spam time limit filter should not apply to e-mailing to yourself, which is likely 99% of the general use of the e-mail system.

It it such a pain to e-mail 'sets' of IOs around, that...it's almost not worth doing unless it something 'really rare'.

similarly, the option to hit the spam button on emails from yourself should not be available, or should be greyed out. I've not done it myself, but with the default email window setting, the claim items button sit very close to the spam button. 1 miss click could... well I dread to think. Has anybody actually classified their own emails as spam?