I'm hating the game right now

"You got to dig it to dig it, you dig?"
Thelonious Monk

Triumph: White Succubus: 50 Ill/Emp/PF Snow Globe: 50 Ice/FF/Ice Strobe: 50 PB Shi Otomi: 50 Ninja/Ninjistu/GW Stalker My other characters

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

No, you don't know that. Several people having old/incompatible drivers might all crash. That's still you. And them. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but lots of people having the problem doesn't automatically make it "not you".

Welcome to my world.

I've been saying ever since issue 18 that this game is getting steadily worse netgraph results with each patch, even to the point of lag(always means high ping to me) when things should be running perfectly.

The common denominator?
City of Heroes' messy shoddy code(mostly due to Cryptic's original coding and it not all being replaced with a coherent whole new engine)

It's as if CoH destroys its own network communication by trying to reconcile the disorderly network traffic when absolutely anythign doesn't go perfectly with the ping.


Does nobody else remember the constant crashes on BAFs when they first came out?

That same crash, when the power trays empty, team window goes screwy, your screen may spin and you sometimes see your character moved from the BAF to the park area of Imperial City(it's that huge a map sadly, which makes it very inefficient) and then you crash shortly after that, is still happening to this day, though more rare due to being triggered by packet loss(hello CoH's self-destructing network communication) and lag rather than happening with absolutely perfect ping like originally.





I know we should count ourselves lucky that CoH doesn't get into the "infinite rubber-banding loops" that Champions Online has commonly(which require forcing the game to close if they don't crash it themselves), but what we have is still not good at all.
It makes sense, though, that these 2 games would have such poor network communication evident since they were made by the same shoddy company with the goal of "pushing a game out as fast as possible".

For a game that was made during the days of dial-up being common, and intended to run on such a low-bandwidth connection, this game has the worst amount of network issues obviously due to trying to push too much information through the internet and servers on top of bad network code.
This game should run much much better, especially since practically all of us have much more bandwidth and reliability than dial-up.

Not to mention, our computers can easily handle CoH.




By the way, I'm actually not experiencing the issue much, but I team very little these days, partly due to all the incarnates with level shifts and the fact that still causes a crash if they're leading the team(at least).

1) When CoH starts behaving oddly for someone suddenly with a patch then it is the game code that is the problem, especially when there were no documented changes to the way the game runs at the core.
(Really, they need to include notifications of even attempts at improving performance/stability, or just modifications that are not meant to directly alter performance, in the game code so that we can know what is likely causing our issues with a patch. "
Stealth changes" are never good. FYI, the competitor labeled "WoW" actually shows such information and runs better than this game ever ran or could ever run the way it is. It works.)

2) When CoH starts behaving oddly for someone suddenly without a patch, and nothing on the person's computer has changed otherwise, then it is likely it is the game code that is the problem yet again.
Games don't stay in perfect working order at all times even if their code is perfect. A game that has shoddy code will certainly suddenly have severe problems with even a slight performance difference, especially with hardware shared by multiple instances of the game code(the servers).
The servers are running old bad code. They're bound to not run it well these days, and the game code makes any little hiccup a lot worse because it doesn't run that well anymore even on perfect hardware.

3) I would bet money that Techbot Alpha is quite a ways away from "computer illiterate". I bet he/she knows exactly what is going on with his/her computer, so that it likely is the game that is at fault.
I know I exhaust all possible solutions to a problem on my end before complaining.
The problem is, the game has some really impossible to solve problems that are not on my end these days, such as where the game crashes for absolutely no reason out of the blue(summoning a leprechaun pet immediately on entering an AE mission seems to do this).

4) You just told him/her "don't blame the game because it is you that is at fault".
Wrong. Obviously, he showed that other games work fine, but City of Heroes has the issue.
What is the "lowest common denominator"? City of Heroes
Thus, City of Heroes is the liekly source of the problem, not the hardware and software of the computer that City of Heroes is on, least of all when that setup has not changed since long before a problem suddenly appeared for no inexplicable reason.




Seriously, an older game should be performing much better on newer systems, or not performing at all. If it works at all then newer more efficient hardware and software(such that we should have now and arguably do have) will run the game better than ever.

City of Heroes runs worse than ever. (Anybody think that is untrue?)



I don't think you can give the default "answer to everything" of "what did you do? you screwed something up didn't you?" to knowledgeable people with a proven record of their system working fine for a long time, despite known issues even.

We all know that the first answer from tech support about a problem is "play the game in safe mode and make sure that all your hardware and software is in proper working order", so we make sure of that before ever contacting them(the knowledgeable ones among us anyway).

We've "been around the block a few times".
Maybe you should listen to us when we say "exhausted all solutions, the problem is not on my end"(or at least, not the source of the problem) instead of "dismissing it out of hand" as "user error", especially when that user doesn't change anything without knowing exactly what it will do because they know to avoid causing problems.




TL, DR:
Don't say "don't blame the game" and then turn around and "blame the user" when you don't know the level of competency of the user, especially when said "game" should be playable by laymen(people who just want the game to run and don't care to go through troubleshooting even if they could understand it) as it is intended because laymen have money to spend as well.
If they want people to stop complaining about problems then they need to make the game "fool proof" so that it runs well even for those who don't know how to solve their own problems, let alone the fact that it doesn't even run well for "advanced users".

A) Every reward eventually reaches a point of "I don't need anymore". That's justa fact, but "when" it reaches that point varies.

B) Those aren't the only drop with that issue.
Well, there are other things with most of that issue though not entirely useless.

3 examples:

1) Alignment Merits
I can't buy anything worthwhile with these, if I can buy anything at all, due to no invention license as a Premium Tier 6, and refuse to pay a subscription let alone a "sneaky subscription". I'll deal with what I have available permanently for a one time payment, but it is stupid that I can get these drops and can't use them.

2) Reward Merits
I can only buy the lowliest offerings with these because of "no inventions" again.

3) AE Tickets
No invention access to spend these on as well.


I was actually hoping Hamidon Origin/Synthetic Hamidon Origin enhancements would have been put on the alignment merit vendors and reward merit vendors, but that never happened.

I don't think it will change either.
I have almost no reason to run TFs/SFs, other than the ones granting special rewards I can actually use such as HOs, and I just let the "rewards"(which don't fit the definition of that word anymore, honestly, due to being useless) pile up. I have no incentive to do content anymore, elt alone content that is still poorly designed.

It's funny. They work so hard to get people to run all the content, not just the "most rewarding", and then they found a way to make the incentives they had mostly useless for many(maybe most) people so that they no longer have a reason to run that content.
Good way to shoot your own foot, Devs. Now the game is even more boring all too often with more people unwilling to run the "less rewarding" content.

An entire team might still be "drivers" and stuff and a really bad confluence.

When an entire 16-24 man league *crashes*, it strains credulity that it could "just" be 16-24 people, all with a bad driver/system confluence that just HAPPENED to all conk simultaneously.

Blowing up EVERYONE in Talos Island when summoning Adamastor.

Yeahno.

The game has been extra-special flaky since i22 with a couple things creeping in even after that last big patch.

HOPEFULLY the next patch or two will stabilize some of this bad behavior.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

That was my thought. It's hard to believe this is "user error" unless "user error" means "playing the game as intended"(arguably could be in error ).


I've seen worse behavior than ever before with this game since issue 17, and especially issue 19, but, yes, it has been really odd since issue 22.
I find it hard to believe that a patch will solve the issues that this game has, especially without causing more, but it should "reduce the worst errors" to less often and/or less severe, though I bet they will still be present.

Not necessarily.

You have your operating system, drivers, the game, etc, etc.
Millions of lines of code.
All of it written at various points in time to conform to system specs that quite possibly no longer exist (if they ever existed for more than a few months at all).
Plus patches upon patches upon patches for all of the above.
Never mind the 32-to-64-bit transition. Some people will tell you something like that is trivial. Sure. NOW.
Not to mention that while basic x86 emulation still exists, that processors and GPUs are a whole 'nother animal than they were back in 2004.

The fact that it works as well as it does says surprisingly good things for an 8 year old game made for a deprecated OS.

And on a strict performance angle.
Please don't try and pretend you were running at 1920x1080 in Ultra Mode at 30-60 FPS back in 2004. Or even 1600x900.

Drop to 1024x768 and toss your quality slider back to Recommended, and check your framerates. Then tell me how "bad" this "old" game performs.

Not trying to be a "dev apologist" here. But claims about how such and such SHOULD perform, because it's an "old" product on "new" hardware is ignoring (or ignorant of) the fact that code only plays "nice" with other code because someone puts an absolute ASSLOAD of work into it. That sorta thing irritates the crap outta me, so I'm sorry if you're the one getting the ****kicker to the nethers here, but YOU put the nethers there to be ****kicked.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

What REALLY needs to happen is at least a temporary suspension (or at least a marked slowdown) of new development while the game code gets a good "thrice-over" and has someone thoroughly fuzz the results.

That isn't going to happen though. It can't. Paragon's built their workflow pipeline for ship-and-patch. And it's going to keep going that way until the game crashes down around their ears.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

/SIGNED

But yes, never going to happen, despite the fact that the game could run better if they tried to make it so.

I understand that newer hardware and software can cause conflicts as well, but it just boggles my mind that things have to work so drastically different and break when all they're doing is the same things they have always done: making ones and zeroes in a certain order and showing pixels on a screen.
I guess I'm just saying that the heart of every computer is the exact same things. There has to be a better more universal way of programming for that. It could be that the operating system, which once facilitated programs, is now hindering programs.
I don't know though.


FYI, my monitor's native resolution is 1920x1080, so I'm not changing that. I also get 60 FPS in most settings in the game(barring teaming, high populated areas and skyscraper areas that have a lot of things to render and just areas with a lot of small objects, which all stutter my graphics at least a little bit) with the settings I have it set to.

My point was about the background performance, the bugs, which my graphics has nothing to do with, even though that could use a lot of work to be more efficient so we could have even more awesome visuals with less powerful hardware.




Edit:
Hopefully, they are working on a worthy successor to what made CoH great. Whether it is a superhero game or not, I just want lots of customization, cool effects and to feel super.

Edit 2:
I also meant it performs much worse than even games of the same age as it, both how they did perform and how they now do. Arguably, City of Heroes isn't more graphically taxing than Wow. The similarity in amount of polygons and textures is hidden by the graphical style difference(and WoW doesn't make a lot of use of reflections honestly but they have even better shadows), and that game has always performed better than CoH by far

The worst thing, though, is that even with my crappy internet, which used to be worse because I had a worse router and the service was new(antenna wireless link), WoW has always ran smooth as butter, without any rubber-banding aside form really bad bugs with the code. Their character tracking is that efficient and coded well.


That's one thing I wish this game would have done: look through the character tracking code to optimize it and make it so that rubber-banding rarely, if ever, happens, and powers go off more reliably with less lag and, if there is lag, go off at precisely 1000ms(arbitrarily selected lag of 1 second, 1000 ping) from activation if you have 1000ms ping.
(Yes, WoW does this, so I was able to compensate for the lag I did have to make my character's performance look and behave as if I wasn't lagging at all. Now that is very nice!)

You'll presumably be able to use them on the next round of ATOs, whenever they may be released. *shrug*

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

I'm not holding my breath for that.

It took me all of two days to buy all the ATO's I'd ever use off the market and less than one day across the two characters to earn all 6 cats.

I just wish we could do something more useful with them for the time being instead of having like... 400 or so by the time the next six ATO's are available.

If this makes any sense, I hate watching something PURPLE flash on my earned blingy thing just to see that it's something pointless.

You're playing the game for free. Of course you're going to have limitations. Paragon needs money to pay the programmers to fix the bugs and run the servers.

It probably would. But management usually doesn't like redesigns, because it often takes a lot of manpower and doesn't add revenue. Making something that people will go and buy in the Paragon Market will keep the servers running and the salaries paid for another month.
Usually a redesign happens with a new version of the game.

My guess is that if we would still be using Pentium 4s with a GeForce 2 on Windows XP and DirectX 6 at 1024x768, that the game would work very nicely now.
I make software for a living. It can become very complex very quickly, especially when performance is an issue and previous programmers have used all kinds of obscure tricks and shortcuts.

I think that WoW has made some very good design decisions that cryptic didn't. Next to that WoW had a lot more money to redesign things over the years. But just your example: I think that by only allowing a few speeds made the code in WoW a lot simpler than in City of Heroes, where your speed can scale with level and enhancements. Blizzard made a lot of choices like that to keep the core engine simple and efficient when doing the initial design of the game. Would you be happy if all travel powers just were 50 mph and unenhanceable, if that would make the rubber banding less? It's things like that where Blizzard has really shown in each of their games that they're really good at designing these things. The core of WoW is actually a lot simpler than CoH. There is a lot less variation and customization. I think Cryptic designed the game to be cool, but didn't think enough about efficiency, and those decisions still plague Paragon Studios now.
The lag tracking in WoW was only a fairly recent addition during Wrath of the Lich King. It is a very nice feature though.

I was just pointing out that practically everything is limited in some manner, either sooner or later.
Also, it would have made more sense to allow invention access earlier in the paragon reward tiers than the merits/tickets used to purchase specific ones. This would turn it into a "quality of life" reward where suddenly you find IOs easier to get with each new form of currency you unlock.

Alignment Merits also need something worthwhile to give people reason to stay full hero or villain, as intended, even if they do not have IO access, simply because IO access is completely separate. Right now, there is NOTHING that alignment merits can buy for anybody without an invention license. Maybe inspirations or SOs, but wasting 2 days of work on that is a joke.

How much money did they really have? How much money could Cryptic have made if they made the game just a little better so that it could have kept more people from the start and during its lifetime?
WoW was Blizzard's first MMO. Where does CoH rank for Cryptic and NCSoft? Just partnering with NCSoft improved Cryptic's chances compared to Blizzard.

I don't think it was a question of money. I think it was a question of intent, and the original management at Cryptic just wanted to cheaply push out a money-maker, not a long term reliable product.

I'm not even talking about travel powers, at least nothing more than sprint.
The game just completely LOSES movement commands. You can be standing in one spot for a long time and then decide to move and if you have any network lag then you're going to see your character move and then the delayed "sorry, you were actually back there" server confirmation will throw you back.

Essentially, they made this game so sensitive to lag that any lag is more obvious than anything in any other game(well, except for other Cryptic games and equally shoddy messes).




You should try Champions Online on a connection that is certainly fast enough to run smoothly(a low end speed though like 256k, 4x dial-up) but occasionally drops packets(to be expected with any network as none of them are perfect) and see what I call "infinite rubber-banding".

"Infinite Rubber-banding":

1) An error such as packet loss, or simply a terrain glitch, causes the server to "think" your character is in one position while your game client places the character in another position.

2) The game client re-sends the packet, but, before it is sent, the server has sent the confirmation "you are not there, you are her" to which the game client has to obey and forces you to where the server says.

3) The server then receives the lost packet that had your new position. It sends the command to move to that new position.

4) In the meantime, your character has moved and now sends a new position to the server for confirmation through the tracking system.

5) Your client receives the confirmation of the original lost packet position now. You are "rubber-banded" for the second time, to the position you originally intended now.

6) Your client receives the confirmation from #4 and now rubber-bands you again, sending a new position tot he server after.

7) The server checks the new position and finds it is different than the one it expected, throwing you around again.

8) This goes round and round because the client and server are slightly out of sync due to lag, bouncing you faster and faster as the lag decreases even(commands go faster but are still out of order).


So, one little lost packet, or just disagreement between the server and the client about character position, and a little network lag causes an infinite loop of rubber-banding your character back and forth between 2 points.

This either causes the client to disconnect form the server, crash or you have to forcibly kill the program to fix it(which you will just get stuck in again if you reload the game too quickly).



Yes, I experienced this a few times in Champions Online, along with the usual amount of normal rubber-banding such a flawed system produces.


Rubber-banding should never ever happen to yourself on your client computer. Sure, you may see others bounce once due to missing their movement commands, but it will be a lot smoother than if each client is forced to bounce again and re-update the position.


Essentially, the fact that rubber-banding exists causes exponentially more lag and rubber-banding.
There obviously is a solution as World of Warcraft uses, and I have witnessed it due to finding myself in a part of the world with no NPCs present until the server caught up with me. In fact, it was not unlike our bug here where we are out of sync so the zone areas away from where we entered are empty and we are unable to enter the mission door or other zone doors.

Sure, that could seemingly allow players to move past NPCs and other "active objects" without having to deal with them, arguably cheating, but that would require a lot of wizardry to do that and still be able to play while also meaning they don't get rewards for the bypassed objectives/enemies and may not be able to advance/complete the content they are doing.
Honestly, it's a non-issue.

All for the sake of preventing cheating and ensuring propriety of code that is already protected by copyright, they have crippled this game.
those were not worth crippling the game when there are other solutions.




Edit:
Rubber-banding and "infinite rubber-banding" are not a symptom of "too much speed" either. They are a symptom of a flawed real-time tracking system that is then exacerbated(made a lot worse) by the speed at which we can move.
So speed is a problem, but not the cause.

Essentially, the game is tracking our position even when we don't move. When we start to move at a really fast speed then the game is tracking both position periodically(like every whatever interval the client checks this) and the movement commands issued by yourself. when those commands and the position interfere, rather than working together, then we get the problems with speed.


The only problem we should ever have with movement speed is increased graphical load due to rendering more of the environment at a faster pace, not network lag.

Maybe you don't believe me. Maybe it's hard to understand. I just honestly think I know a way to greatly minimize network lag issues and almost eliminate rubber-banding and other positioning errors. I have given this a LOT of thought occasionally over the past few years and I'm pretty good at logical deductions and problem solving.



Edit 2:
WoW has several movement speeds actually.

First, the running speed of your character is based on level.
Second, consider their "mounts" like our "movement powers". They also have 3-dimensional flight.
They have different "mounts" with different speeds at intervals 60% boost, 100%, 150% flying, 280% and 310% boost in speed.
They also have other separate powers which don't work with mounts but work in their combat ready phase with lesser speeds.

It's not an issue of speed or variations of speeds or even a difference between 2D tracking and 3D.

They simply know how to code to make tracking issues almost nonexistent.

What I'm talking about isn't a redesign.
It's basically code-level bughunting and code cleanup.

Fuzzing is essentially running the code and inputting random or deliberately wrong responses to see how the game acts, and to find places that it blows up the game so they can put controls on those inputs.

What I don't want to see is a "painted into a corner" variant of what happened to M2. Where they get to the point where further development merely breaks the game, with no possibility of a roll-back, because they're not properly maintaining the code.



It's even MORE fun when they don't document any of it. Or do it half-***.

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

In my case, I haven't noticed any change. It consistently runs fine and has for years. I can dual box. I can do iTrials and mothership raids. And my internet sucks like a tornado. My connection is slow, unreliable and lightning in the area knocks it out completely.

Definitely a "YMMV" thing; personally while I've encountered a few bugs over the years things in general have been remarkably stable. It's been a few months since the last crash to desktop and I haven't encountered any real problems.

Now gameplay wise I've a few nitpicks <cough> pet AI <cough> but as far as starting, logging in and running missions, iTrials, raids and whatnot it's fine so far... <looking around for some wood to knock on>

Games should improve as they age, barring hardware and software incompatibilities.
This one started out from a position that it is more likely to just get worse, which it arguably did get worse.


Edit:
Yes, it is stable enough, for enough people, but how long will that last?
How long will it last when their standard operating procedure is apparently something akin to "make something and leave it alone unless it has a serious issue"?

I doubt it. As much as I like the Devs and appreciate all they do and how hard they work, they seem to be on a mandate to worry only about putting out new content.

when one keeps putting out new content on top of new content, without fixing issues, what happens is it becomes more difficult to find where the root cause of problems are. Right now, I've noticed performance problems since I21.5. and while I expect some issues since I have an older machine that still runs very well, the issues are beyond what I would consider acceptable. at I21 I had no problem running the game at a very high graphics level with no problems. Now I've dropped almost all of ultra mode and down below what I used to use on normal mode just to try and mitigate rubberbanding and freezing. Has it worked? Not really.

Why, do you all ask, don't I post my DX Diag, Hijack this etc, in a post here? Because, I am a network engineer and consultant for a living. I have a bunch of software on my machine that I use for work, and that has been there for years which will I will be told by the gurus in this community to remove from my machine, and I know this because I did post that stuff a number of years ago.

Truth be told we need at least 1 issues that is nothing but bug fixes. I've been asking for this for a long time, and it should be done 1 at least year at minimum. Will it, no because that doesn't bring in numbers. But it would keep people around longer and make the game more enjoyable.

This is why I keep advocating improvements to how the most basic important systems work in this game, such as character tracking.

This game is just "an implosion waiting to happen".