An Honest Opinion. Issues/gripes I Have Noticed.

[Ryle [N7R]]

I speak for no-one but myself, however I am including feedback I have gathered from others over the last few months being back. Believe it or not, not all is negative or anything like that, but I have been meaning to make this topic for some time.

As a gamer for the last 15 years, I have played many many games. Some were short lived, some I played for over 8 years. MMOs in general have always flourished best when a good community feedback system is in place that the development staff acknowledges and works towards satisfying. So here is the (humble?) opinion of an experienced MMO gamer in regards to this stage of the Emulator project.

First off I would like to say that for the most part, I think development and just getting base systems into play has been fantastic. The game is playable, engaging, and in many ways we really can re-create our experiences from our live memories as nostalgia. All the props in the world to the Devs for getting us this far. However with all good things, there is always that honest feedback, and I am of the opinion that even somewhat negative feedback can be encouraging and constructive.

Id like to start with player skill bugs. Over the last few months I have noticed a lot of gripe and issue with player skills not being in, being broken, or otherwise not functioning as they "should(tm)." I have seen a lot of things go unchecked/fixed for months and I feel that before anything moves forward the things that are grossly broken should be the top priority for development. IE: Jenquai skills like Cloak bugs (both the combat one and the group stealth one), the afterburn skill already in use bug, the combat trance failure to apply coming out of warp, compulsory contemplation, general bugs we all know about and see on a daily basis. I know there are dozens more that are out there, but for sake of brevity I will just post those few that came to me off the top of my head.

Another major issue would be the CTD/Blackhole issue thats been rampant for quite some time. At risk of assuming or whatnot, but if its this widespread across multiple operating systems and configurations, I have to gather that there is something wrong server side. Handoffs, hangups, locations failing to update, skills not shutting off, whatever it is, its a major detractor. Especially when you crash out of game and cant get back in (sometimes restarting the computer works, some times it doesnt, sometimes it takes a full reinstall of the game for some people, sometimes its just as easy as control alt delete and ending the client.exe task). Id hope that some serious time would be given to tracking down the causes of this issue and at least trying to find a solution that would repair it for the majority of us that suffer from it.

Another often voiced concern I see with people are broken equipment buffs. You know them, critical targeting, HDC, and the like that for whatever reason dont seem to work at all. Some work a little bit, some work even a little too good (see navigation), but a good deal of them do not work at all. Maybe its time to take a serious look at the broken buffs in the database one by one and sort out the issues.

A big one recently (indeed in the last week or so) have been the drama/anger over timed static spawns. When you have 1 rare item that drops off of 1 mob in 1 place, and its on a timer, people tend to figure out when to log in a toon they have camped there, shoot it, and take up the 1 rare drop, thus denying others the chance of even coming across it one time. Weve seen this with the Warder, Sagat, now the MPP, and numerous other unique drops over the years. Granted its been a relatively new gripe out there, but a lot of people are very dissatisfied with how MPP/AV was deployed. I have personally spent 2 weeks @ 2-4 hours a day hunting for this spawn and never found it, I know many others have as well, when we have had reports and now posts that "someone" found it and has successfully camped it from the rest of us for the last 2 weeks straight. This should be a red flag. If anything it should be the kinda critter that can spawn anywhere, anytime, and never the same place twice. Spirit of actual exploration maybe? I dunno.

Raids. Ok this one is a mixed bag. Raids are too easy, raid loot is too prevalent in the system (everyone has everything 5 times over, yadda), while at the same time 1/2 of the original raids from live arent even in yet (Vrix/DT being the main ones). Its the typical "ho hum another cube of the leech no one wants, space it, someone might come and pick it up someday" combined with the imbalance of activated (FB/Oni/AV) vs Timed (Troller/GoBB/Warder/RD Base) vs. Static (Mordana). I feel all raids should be 1-2 groups, activated, and not on timers. Ive seen a lot of this sentiment, so I hope its at least considered.

Game economy/lack thereof. Quite frankly the credit is wholly worthless. As long as you have enough to buy components from a vendor youre pretty much golden. Like the raid issue, theres simply too much accumulated stuff out there that people just give it all away for lack of anything else to do with it. Its gotten to the point where everyone has 2-8 or even more toons with full capped raid + uber best PM stuff gear with still more sitting in vaults for the next wave of alts. No one pays creds for anything, its a barter system "Black Caster for aa" or something similar.

Im sure there are many other issues people may have, but those are the big ones I have seen or personally feel are most relevant at this time. Again, I say that all in all the EMU is a great game and usually quite a bit of fun, I mean why else would we keep coming back. I am by no means being ungrateful or intending insult, more I am hoping to see things get even better and thing these are some of the first places to look.

I hope the rest of the community joins me in putting out there how they feel, and I thank you for reading this essay. =D

[Rossdie [BT]]

I agree with a few of your points, Ryle. I would definately like to see the skills and all the device buffs working properly. I too, think this should be a priority, also getting group bonuses, group faction and other group effects working as they should.

The crash issue I do not believe will ever go away, I remember live was pretty much the same way, i.e gating crashes, lag and the likes. The ones that are unusual are ctd's just flying around the same sector, terminal crashes and such.

As for Raids and campers, I do not think making all raids activated will solve the problem of too much loot, in fact it would get worse in my opinion, because there is more FB stuff floating around then anything else. Plus, you have to realize this is a much smaller community than it was when live, so the DEV's are trying to find a balance on how hard to make the raids, can't make them too hard, but yes they are pretty easy right now. I know Kenu is working on alot of this so give him time. The campers issue will never go away so forget about trying to stop that, thats a problem in every MMO set-up like this one is.

Right now, I just want to see the game working properly, especially when more content comes. I would like to see the current faction that in game actually on our faction list and in working order as they did in live, i.e Mordana, Glenn commission, net-7, freespacers, etc.etc

[efialtis]

Getting the game to such a playable state like it is today is like a miracle in my book. Companies with vastly superior resources and still their MMOs go under from bugs and lack of content. I truly believe the Devs are making a fantastic job considering this is a spare time occupation, derive no income from it and hardly ever they get to enjoy it like we do.

Ofcourse there are issues but i see progress been made with every patch. The TS skills are now working in conjunction with each other, i only recently noticed it on my TS that i can finally use HP while NF and AB are active, and never saw a notice for the fix in the patch notes.

As for game economy and the influx of end content gear we must keep in mind this is a very small community at best, you can only do so much to balance the economy. After a while even the best of planning takes a backseat to player creativity for overcoming obstacles or the greater amount of time people devote to achieve their goals within the game.

As for raids and camping there is currently no solution. Even making all raids activated camping will occur for the items required as we have already seen in the past. Its up to the community to try its best and to the devs to figure out new ways within the confines of their coding.

I feel that, at least for the present, effort must be directed towards making things like skills and buffs work like they are supposed to before going forward with more content.

[Reon]

that is pretty much a compilation of what I have noticed...prolly the only other thing I could mention would be the inclusion of more missions and content, but lets look at the list of what it is...

I don't think Ryle meant this list as a Wall of Whine, I think it was meant to express the things the community has mentioned the most. I am sure many have seen me talking in the chat channels, and even with as vocal as I am, I rarely talk unless I am bored running jobs,ect. Most of the time I sit back and read chat. Ryle is not the one saying all of these things, he is typing a list of what seems to be the biggest discussions found in all of the chat channels.

The way the original post is worded, I doubt this is a crack of the whip or merely a list of gripes, but a compiled list of the things needing to be fixed soon before this game can make it to a Live version.


So, with that in mind, thank you dev's for the hard work, and keep it up the good show!

[Zackman [LDEV]]

Heya Ryle, heya fellow players !

KYP is in vacation currently so allow me to "pre"-answer, for the sake of a reply avoiding you thinking no one cares.


There is a [b]TON[/b] broken/not working yet - and there is a [b]TON [/b]working. Good thing is, left side is shrinking(bugs), right is growing(fully operational) - you should be worried if it was the other way around...

What is the most important bug, what is minor prio? You cant answer that correct because everyone has diff. weight on things.
A builder will cry when failing a rare item for the 6th time, a combatant will cry getting incapped again cuz heals didnt fire.

So all the devs can do is to work all bugs from list from top to bottom. Of course "mob isnt spawning" is more important than "Paul Sanders pants are not blue like they were in live".

But TBH Ryle, dont you think that you left out (partially) the fact this EnB Emu is not a prof. game studio with 30 mil. $$ to get a game going in shortest time with 28 Developers?
Dont forget, most coders here are such good coders that they make a living with their skills - so they DO code already 10-12 hours each day, come home...and code AGAIN 4-5 hours on this free volounteer project...so they have "pointers, arrays and alien rays" for 16-18 hours/day in their head.

Sometimes they get involved in projects at work and simply [b]CANT [/b]spend the time here we all want.

So the most important thing is: [b]PATIENCE[/b]!

Of course i know, we all have patience - since this EMU is going on long enough already...and still will. See what has been achived (sp?) already, what we can do!
I think thats amazing!

Dont forget, we are "whining" on a very high level! Ago 2 years no1 ever would have said "hey, my nullfactor field is broken" - we were uber happy already that we could warp

What i want to say is, i dont think it's about [b]WHAT [/b]is broken, the bottom line i read from your posting is more of a conceirn [b]IF [/b]things get fixed.
[b]I can assure you, yes - things get fixed, every day, every night a bit more.[/b]

See what we had with the last patches. So many bugs were fixed that were broken for a [b]LONG [/b]time. We got a new raid, new content, new sectors, new skills, new mechanism, new items, new new new new....i was pretty baffled to say at least.

I know that "someone" spent like day and night before the Beta-patch to get all going, coding with a bottle under the desk and a pizza-feeding-machine to get it all done right in time - "In time" to make us player happy!


[b]Skills:[/b]
Constantly worked on, Consider that there is a lot of work "under the hood" you dont "feel" when published - but its the start for building things easier and faster based on this.

[b]Factions:[/b]
I know for sure that (was a topic here) factions are currently worked on - and all "sideffects" coming with them


But its also very important that we post the bugs at the right place. I see so many "spreaded" bugreports. In forums, diff. topics:
Always make sure you post in the bug tracker and dont open a new report for an already reported issue (gets overssen then).

And before you say "I always do" - i KNOW that and its great. But i see also replies here from people not reporting them - so all i can ask for is: Do so please! Every single ticket helps:)


But bottom line is, and it shouldt be stressed out:
The work here is constantly going on and everything gets addressed. Some bugs not today, not tomorrow, also not not next week : But there is a day for EVERY bug, where it gets fixed - no doubt!

The message is:
[b]Dont worry, the EMu gets done! EMU will work with all bugs eleminated - but it takes time.[/b]

[i] [/i][size=3][i]Hey...you know i know you from Galaxies....and you know how bug ridden THAT game was...after 5 years and MILLION of dollars thrown into it.... [/i][/size]

[Ryle [N7R]]

Yeah Reon got what I was saying. Im not trying to come off as ungrateful or impatient, I am just pointing out what I, and some others ive discussed it with, have seen as some of the "big" problems moving forward.

As much as I would love to see fantastic new content, id love moreso for whats listed in addition to whatever anyone else can post up I may have forgotten, as being far more important to the game right now.

I know its a volunteer project and has no actual budget, i just wanted to highlight some of these outstanding ones I hope no ones overlooked or forgotten about. Some are pretty game breaking for a lot of classes and so on.

And yeah Zack, Galaxies was a bloody mess, even with a huge budget they never sorted it out, and it was 8 years not 5 lololol, so even worse!

The problem with SWG was that the devs woudnt do what you just did, acknowledge there are problems at all. I dont expect, nor does anyone i know, some overnight crunch fix, but at least some addressing each push gets us closer to polish.

[Kyp [LDEV]]

[quote name='Ryle' timestamp='1344595758' post='61555']
Id like to start with player skill bugs. Over the last few months I have noticed a lot of gripe and issue with player skills not being in, being broken, or otherwise not functioning as they "should™." I have seen a lot of things go unchecked/fixed for months and I feel that before anything moves forward the things that are grossly broken should be the top priority for development. IE: Jenquai skills like Cloak bugs (both the combat one and the group stealth one), the afterburn skill already in use bug, the combat trance failure to apply coming out of warp, compulsory contemplation, general bugs we all know about and see on a daily basis. I know there are dozens more that are out there, but for sake of brevity I will just post those few that came to me off the top of my head.

Another major issue would be the CTD/Blackhole issue thats been rampant for quite some time. At risk of assuming or whatnot, but if its this widespread across multiple operating systems and configurations, I have to gather that there is something wrong server side. Handoffs, hangups, locations failing to update, skills not shutting off, whatever it is, its a major detractor. Especially when you crash out of game and cant get back in (sometimes restarting the computer works, some times it doesnt, sometimes it takes a full reinstall of the game for some people, sometimes its just as easy as control alt delete and ending the client.exe task). Id hope that some serious time would be given to tracking down the causes of this issue and at least trying to find a solution that would repair it for the majority of us that suffer from it.

Another often voiced concern I see with people are broken equipment buffs. You know them, critical targeting, HDC, and the like that for whatever reason dont seem to work at all. Some work a little bit, some work even a little too good (see navigation), but a good deal of them do not work at all. Maybe its time to take a serious look at the broken buffs in the database one by one and sort out the issues.

A big one recently (indeed in the last week or so) have been the drama/anger over timed static spawns. When you have 1 rare item that drops off of 1 mob in 1 place, and its on a timer, people tend to figure out when to log in a toon they have camped there, shoot it, and take up the 1 rare drop, thus denying others the chance of even coming across it one time. Weve seen this with the Warder, Sagat, now the MPP, and numerous other unique drops over the years. Granted its been a relatively new gripe out there, but a lot of people are very dissatisfied with how MPP/AV was deployed. I have personally spent 2 weeks @ 2-4 hours a day hunting for this spawn and never found it, I know many others have as well, when we have had reports and now posts that "someone" found it and has successfully camped it from the rest of us for the last 2 weeks straight. This should be a red flag. If anything it should be the kinda critter that can spawn anywhere, anytime, and never the same place twice. Spirit of actual exploration maybe? I dunno.

Raids. Ok this one is a mixed bag. Raids are too easy, raid loot is too prevalent in the system (everyone has everything 5 times over, yadda), while at the same time 1/2 of the original raids from live arent even in yet (Vrix/DT being the main ones). Its the typical "ho hum another cube of the leech no one wants, space it, someone might come and pick it up someday" combined with the imbalance of activated (FB/Oni/AV) vs Timed (Troller/GoBB/Warder/RD Base) vs. Static (Mordana). I feel all raids should be 1-2 groups, activated, and not on timers. Ive seen a lot of this sentiment, so I hope its at least considered.

Game economy/lack thereof. Quite frankly the credit is wholly worthless. As long as you have enough to buy components from a vendor youre pretty much golden. Like the raid issue, theres simply too much accumulated stuff out there that people just give it all away for lack of anything else to do with it. Its gotten to the point where everyone has 2-8 or even more toons with full capped raid + uber best PM stuff gear with still more sitting in vaults for the next wave of alts. No one pays creds for anything, its a barter system "Black Caster for aa" or something similar.

Im sure there are many other issues people may have, but those are the big ones I have seen or personally feel are most relevant at this time. Again, I say that all in all the EMU is a great game and usually quite a bit of fun, I mean why else would we keep coming back. I am by no means being ungrateful or intending insult, more I am hoping to see things get even better and thing these are some of the first places to look.

I hope the rest of the community joins me in putting out there how they feel, and I thank you for reading this essay. =D
[/quote]

Thanks for the pre-answer, Zack. I'm back now.

Let me share with you from the view of someone who is an actual developer when it comes to games and has had training for such. We have 3 classifications for bugs, an "A" bug (aka, showstopper) things that fall into this category are crashes and things that break the server outright. These get the most immediate attention in all things. Then we have a "B" bug which is not necessarily going to bring the game to a grinding halt, but is annoying enough that it shouldn't be there in a production environment. A classic example of this might be the skills not working as intended. Finally, we have a "C" bug, these are the things we want to fix but don't necessarily have the resources and things that might wait into a Production environment. (Blue Pants example from Zack's post).

Things go unfixed for such amounts of time because we don't always have necessary steps to reproduce the bug, this is [b][u][i]absolutely essential[/i][/u][/b] for a fix to something that involves program code. If we can't duplicate it, we can't see why its breaking. That said, you endeavor to provide this to us, I can schedule it to be fixed faster.

Something I would like to point out is this, in addition to what Zack said about us doing this in our spare time, most of the developers here are (contrary to popular belief) not programmers. The entire programming team includes Tienbau, David, Rolo, Redoc, and Myself mainly (Zack helps too as his web duties allow). Out of these people not everyone understands the necessary programming language for a particular fix, or the section of code where it is. Different people specialize in different sections.

That said, if I had a small army of trustworthy of C++ programmers as a professional studio does, I could make things happen much faster, but since I do not, we are caught.

Now, specifically referencing what you've said, many of these things have had fixes applied, but these fixes (due to incomplete data being received in bug reports) haven't necessarily solved 100% of the cases where something happens.

The CTD/Gate Timeout thing has fixes applied server side, along with tracking now trying to determine all the causes for it, but usually its a communication issue where its not receiving a timely response from the game client on the other end. The problem with this is we can't crack open the game client's code to determine anything and must essentially guess at the fix and try.

Broken equipment buffs, while important, are an example of a class B bug. We want to fix them but need to fix showstoppers like the CTD bugs where we can first. Unfortunately, since I have limited amounts of programming staff to throw at these problems the changes are delayed.

As for timed spawns, something I would have you note is that [u]all spawns in the game[/u] (with the exception of combat job spawns) are subject to a specific timer set by the developer +/- 50% of that timer already. There's not a whole lot we can do to make it more random than that. The fact that someone is still capable of camping it speaks to them being on obsessively . The only other thing we can do is triggered spawn, which is something we've considered, but we'd have to make the loot more rare in those cases so that the 'ubers' didn't become too common.

Raids: We know these aren't hard, Tienbau has been slaving away at a lot of code for new AI, once he's finalized it we're going to do a LOT to make these impossible for anything short of at least 1 full group and probably more.

Economy: Well.. we've done a few things to fix that, but unfortunately the only way to truly test this would be a targeted wipe of recipes, credits and building resources so that we could determine whether or not it still sucks. The reason for this is because most of the currently 'broken' economy is a side effect of the 'hulkfest' from a year ago or so. I'll have you know that many of the developers called for a wipe when we went to beta. We opted not to do anything more than targeted focus testing as needed for things, and you may begin to see these things soon.

That all said, if you know people who can program in C++ and/or C# and aren't just full of shite, send them my way, and I'll give them more work than a rational person needs.

[Klyde]

Personally, I think the economy is just about right currently. I have started new chars and not given them handouts, and they seem to get just enuf credits for the next level gear as their skills progress.

One of the things concerning raids that I notice: It's darn hard to find that fragile balance between too easy and too hard. The server for whatever reason struggles with anything more than 2 full groups in close proximity to each other. Guns blazing, skills used, mob movement, etc. lags things to the point of CTD's enmasse. While we all have fond memories of how they worked in live, needing multiple groups and such, the server just can't handle it, or the network is choking, dunno which. So raids need to be kept in the 2 group or less area for now, imho.

I don't seem to have many problems with CTD's at session changes so I can't comment on that.

All in all, this game has progressed by leap and bounds from when I first started, so kudos on that and keep on truckin.