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How many of you have experienced the wrath of WAR’s patch 1.2.1? Say it with me now, come on, all together, H..E..L..L..! While I greatly appreciate Mythic’s hard work and devotion to giving us new content, this still goes back to what I’ve felt for a while now, fix the existing game. I really couldn’t have cared less about Beyond the Sands right now. It sounds neat and I’m sure I’ll have a lot of fun with it, but I won’t experience any of it for quite a while.
With 1.2.1 came a whole slew of new bugs. Anyone out there tried to play a Choppa since? I tried to play mine for about a whole ten minutes. Everything from the artwork to my abilities were broken. The fun of the Choppa is to see them wave their arms wildly and slash everyone within arm’s reach and then some, so forgive me if I don’t have a blast when my Choppa stands with hands at his side with no ability or damage animations and appears to be half naked as his armor artwork is invisible. Also, the changes with Lotsa Choppin’, you know the one, now making this ability damage players within a specific cone in front of you rather than the full 360 degree AoE it was pre-1.2.1. I won’t get started on that though, that’s a whole other bone I’ve got to pick with Mythic and if you want to hear more, just tune in to this week’s Stonetroll Certified WAR podcast.
BUT, now is the perfect time to level your Choppa if you can tolerate broken animations and artwork. Why? Because Lotsa Choppin’ is dishing out WAY more damage than it should. Well, it’s not really doing more damage per hit, it’s that if you spam the ability as fast as you can, it’s somehow not held back by a cooldown and even though it may not look like your character is hitting anyone, the enemy is taking damage for near every time you hit that Lotsa Choppin’ ability button. At least this is what’s happening for me anyway. Try it out for yourself and see if you can find a groove, get it to work, and snag some massive experience points. I’ve read reports from other players stating the same so I’m guessing it’s not an isolated incident.
The new UI features that were added were welcome by me for the most part. It’s always great to add more functionality to the UI and Mythic continues to build on this. I really like the new guild search and the User Settings panel in general seems to be a little more robust. The bugs are the killer though. There is of course the dreaded chat bug which is pretty annoying as half of my chat messages never actually make it. It can be frustrating when you’re in the middle of a City siege and you just type out a paragraph into guild chat, you press enter and it didn’t make it. So, time to type it again and hope it goes through this time. I’m also currently unable to change my chat text colors, which is a little aggravating because I have a certain color system I like to use, so now when someone types in guild I’m automatically thinking it’s party chat because of the color scheme. I can live with these, and I’m sure Mythic will get these resolved in the next couple of days.
While I have not messed with the tokens just yet, I did snag some last night during a City siege. I logged on just in time for Order to move into the Inevitable City. They seemed to drop often enough, and from what I’ve seen and heard the amount it takes to trade for armor is about right. I don’t want the armor to be handed to you for free, but at the same time you should have a chance at actually getting something at some point, versus the old system. All in all, the tokens are for the better I suppose.
After logging on my Shaman, I go to mount up but the animation and artwork for that was broken as well. My character would just appear to run very fast lol. Once I reached the Inevitable City and began pushing back attackers, I quickly noticed that on top of my chat not working or responding properly, my abilities also were broken. Now, I’m not sure if this is all careers across the board or if it was career specific but it seemed like my abilities would not “queue” properly. You know, where one ability is in progress and you go ahead and click on the next ability and it will automatically move into the next one you had clicked? Did that even make sense? This made it fairly difficult to fulfill my role as a healer as some abilities would take upwards of ten seconds to complete that would normally take two.
I’m not real sure what other issues are out there, but I’m sure there are plenty. From what I can tell there are probably tons and tons of artwork bugs, broken abilities to the point that the career is unplayable, and plenty of minor bugs that I’m hoping Mythic is hard at work over the weekend attempting to resolve. Can I get a witness? I mean a hotfix?
What issue or bug has deemed your character unplayable until the next fix? Leave a comment in the thread below!
23 Replies
Yeah, I do agree that the current game needs to be combed over for problems before moving too deep into the LotD. But, Mythic did acknowledge that many bugs showed up once 1.2.1 was released that didnt show up on test. Lets hope there’s ALOT of fixes this week.
As for the Choppa; I agree to a point that removing the 360 degree of attack was a nerf, but I think its just a matter of rethinking your playstyle. I think it will make the class take more skill to play overall instead of “spam these two buttons until targets until something dies”. Was the buff to Lotsa’ Choppin’s damage due to the removal of the 360 attack? I guess its an arguement of if the 360 attack was the point of the class or just massive AoE damage (even if its in a cone).
The only thing that keeps bugging me is that they say they are making performance and stability fixes all the time, yet I havent seen a true boost in my games performance or a reduction in lag since like….December? I’d like to see someone state what specs on a PC will run this game optimally. Is there anyone out there running the game at like 60 fps + with little to no slowdown except for in seiges?
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
The only thing that keeps bugging me is that they say they are making performance and stability fixes all the time, yet I havent seen a true boost in my games performance or a reduction in lag since like….December? I’d like to see someone state what specs on a PC will run this game optimally. Is there anyone out there running the game at like 60 fps + with little to no slowdown except for in seiges? — Slurm
Ya… I’ve actually noticed in *increase* in the amount of lag spikes I’ve had lately. As for my Black Guard, everything seems fine for the moment (artwork breaks little less than it used to, abilities still work, etc etc). My only beef being that Black Guards didn’t actually get anything! -_- Other classes had fixes/changes/nerfs etc and then there’s the Black Guard who remains the stagnant little child in the corner of the dark closet. >.<p
Other than that, I’d like to say that though 1.2.1 did bring some serious issues to light, (Ninjaing Keeps Anyone?) I still find it to be an improvement overall. Hopefully they will continue to hotfix over the next few days.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Hmm, not so sure I agree that the changes to Lotsa Choppin’ is as simple as rethinking your style of play. When tactics are based around the original 360 AoE abiltiy, this new cone dmg really gimps tactics like Extra Choppin. Tactics that you spend a valuable Mastery Point and take up a valuable tactic slot for.
Changing to a cone target area is fine, but they should’ve seen it wasn’t as simple as that and adjusted some of the other skills that were built around the 360 aoe to match the new cone area of effect.
As far as performance goes, Im able to run the game at 60+ fps, I set the main video setting to Fastest Framerate, then enable Grass and specular lighting, with abilities to show set to Party. This is if I’m not in a siege, during sieges it slows down tremendously.
I’m not so sure we will see hardware optimized enough to run Keep and City sieges at 60+ seconds in WAR’s lifetime, especially above the minimum graphic settings. That’s a lot of raw CPU processing power to display those sieges, and even if a few of the elite can afford some insane CPU that can handle that if it even comes out in WAR’s life span, the vast majority of players will still be stuck in slow-mo : P But as for normal game play outside of sieges my performance has really began to rock in the last few months.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
Oops, and don’t forget, along with the solid performance I’ve been experiencing…I still have plenty of game/driver crashes. I even have a paper on my desk that I keep track of how many crashes I’ve had each week. I had a total of 7 last week. But when it actually works, it works great!
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
“I’m not so sure we will see hardware optimized enough to run Keep and City sieges at 60+ seconds in WAR’s lifetime, especially above the minimum graphic settings.”
Then Mythic built the game wrong. They should have never went with such demanding FX if they were telling us that we would be experiencing huge scale fortress battles. You cant experience it properly in a slideshow, thats just crap.
Do you really think the performance issues are based mostly on the player’s side though?
“this new cone dmg really gimps tactics like Extra Choppin. Tactics that you spend a valuable Mastery Point and take up a valuable tactic slot for.
Changing to a cone target area is fine, but they should’ve seen it wasn’t as simple as that and adjusted some of the other skills that were built around the 360 aoe to match the new cone area of effect.”
Ahhhh i gotcha.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 7:55 pm
“Do you really think the performance issues are based mostly on the player’s side though?”
From an outsider looking in, I’m gonna say that WAR’s graphics are “too good” to expect to have a large scale PvP battle at 60fps with any detail on even a higher end gaming machine, with the hardware that’s currently on the market anyway. It’s different than something like COD4 or BF2 where you are basically fighting inside a module with a pre-determined set number of players. In WAR you aren’t really fighting inside of a module, the zones are very large and you can’t know how many people are going to be in that particular zone or what they will be doing. Even if they had optimized the engine to run smooth with 100 players on the screen, you can’t be sure that 200 won’t be there. Add in X number of player’s ability animations, flashy spell animations, aoe dmg/healing animations and graphics hitting X # of players and it’s just a nightmare. It has the potential to require an insane amount of processing power. Which is why it’s much easier to optimize performance in scenarios or battlegrounds as you can say, here’s the maximum number of players that will be here in this smaller zone built specifically for this fight with no outside interference or unexpected graphics to render.
Again, this is me totally guessing since I have no real knowledge of how they built the engine and what it’s limitations are. Just using some standard PC hardware logic. Maybe I’m way off and they’ll have it working within a year, but I would think in order to do that they’d either have to put caps on battles like they have with fortresses or they would do like AoC and force low res displays of certain things to speed up the processing.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 8:36 pm
Remember how I said 1.2.1 perhaps wasn’t that bad? Anyone participating in a city siege/just playing the game says otherwise. (They got Rollbacked :O)
http://forums.warhammeronline.com/warhammer/board/message?board.id=bug_1-2-1&thread.id=1040&view=by_date_ascending&page=1
And if you think this one is bad, you should patrol the rest of the forums.
Evidently, people are PISSED OFF.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
Under Bug Reports: Patch 1.2.1 Bugs
Title: You have no Right
(Note that the thread has been closed by a moderator **gee I wonder why**, so that may be why it isn’t working.)
The general agreement was that players are pissed off that they are getting constantly DCed, stuck, or even worse… rollbacked. Players have lost medallions, tons of RR, etc etc due to rollbacks recently. In a nutshell players are demanded fixes, stating they are quitting, requesting compensation for rollbacks, etc etc. Normally I would brush this off as the simple QQers or ragequitters, but it they make really valid points. =\ Scary stuff.
Posted on April 19th, 2009 at 9:01 pm
[...] finally, over at Lagwar, there’s more misery at 1.2.1, listing bugs and problems that this patch has introduced to the game. I get the feeling I’d [...]
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 4:56 am
thanks for the comments Rer, and that forum link, we got to save it before the closed it so will def be discussing on the podcast tonite. LOL sending from my phone so hopefully im not sending duplicates
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
I sometimes wonder if the game is performing so badly because of server issues rather than client issues. My PC can handle any game I throw at it with amazing FPS. Even WAR runs at ~80FPS if I’m just running around in PvE. The problems start creeping up when I get in large group situations (10-20 people on my screen at once).
I can render dozens upon dozens of PQ mobs without a hiccup but throw players into the mix and things get hairy. There are Line of Sight checks going on all over the place in group fights, as well as damage checks, security checks, Tome of Knowledge checks, user interface updates, etc. Those server checks aren’t just happening for me… they’re happening for every single person in the vicinity.
I wonder if the servers simply can’t handle everything being passed back and forth…
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
“Mythic did acknowledge that many bugs showed up once 1.2.1 was released that didnt show up on test”.
Okay either their testing is not working OR when they are fixing things they are not rolling out the fixes correctly.
So fix 1 works on program A, fix 2 works on program A. They both work, brilliant, unfortunately fix 1 wasn’t applied to a version of program A which contained fix 1. When you are changing the same program time and time again, you have to be so bloody careful you are working on versions of the program which contain previous fixes OR when you fix a problem you mark all the lines you are changing, so they can properly be applied once progam A becomes available to be changed.
The problem you have, is if you change no longer works on the newer version of progam A. You end up having to change and test twice.
The problem I have with Mythic, is there development is sloppy and indicates poor version/development control. They just make to many mistakes.
For what I imagined to be a modular system, they seem to have different version of code for each character, which would imply why some characters work and some don’t.
Anyway, what would I know
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
“I can render dozens upon dozens of PQ mobs without a hiccup but throw players into the mix and things get hairy. There are Line of Sight checks going on all over the place in group fights, as well as damage checks, security checks, Tome of Knowledge checks, user interface updates, etc. Those server checks aren’t just happening for me… they’re happening for every single person in the vicinity.”
Don’t forget the collision system. But this is the point i was trying to make. Theres just soo much data being thrown around. I just don’t think the game was built within reason of people experiencing the game the way it was meant to be. It’s kindof like Crysis, but the problem is the network/servers rather than the graphics.
“Okay either their testing is not working OR when they are fixing things they are not rolling out the fixes correctly.”
I think alot of it is Mythic’s testing process, and this is where alot of angst is being built up in the community. Mythic is using its paying player base as testers. Wether it be voluntarily on the test server, or through trial and error patching, they are making us pay to test stuff out. How many people really play on the test server at any given time (not counting the week before the Choppa and Slayer release)? When a patch goes on, some people will go check how it might affect their toon, but they aren’t going to participate on large scale battles or even a quarter of the regular content to see what bugs may be there (if im incorrect about this let me know). Without a dedicated test team, I’m not sure if we’ll ever see a “smooth” patch, especially not when Mythic likes to roll out monsterous patches rather than small ones which would be easier to fix. Its easy to put out the flame on a match, not so easy to put out a roaring house fire.
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
“I sometimes wonder if the game is performing so badly because of server issues rather than client issues.”
That may play somewhat of a part, more so in city sieges than anything, but as far as keep sieges and general open rvr it’s not really the servers at fault, at least for the frame rate drops I’m experiencing. Server lag “feels” different than a frame rate bog down. It’s a very similar situation to the frame rate slow downs folks used to have in Ironforge in WoW. There’s quite a big difference between rendering NPC’s and other players. There’s a crap load more processing involved. Therefore PQ’s are going to be much smoother as there is not as much processing load on the CPU required. The more players you have on your screen the more your CPU will have to work rather than a PQ where your GPU gets to handle the majority of the task. That’s the beauty of MMO’s, or the evil rather, these games rely on the CPU just about as much and probably more in certain situations than the GPU. Where most current FPS games rely largely on the GPU.
I’ve not really had any issues with server lag/issues except during City and Fortress sieges. But that’s not to say you and others aren’t experiencing it. But the “feel” of server lag and just flat out frame rate bog downs are pretty distinct so you should be able to tell which one you’re having. Or maybe you’re experiencing both : P
My money is on the CPU bottlenecks with the amount of data needing to be processed. I would just about bet that if you were playing on some insane 4.6GHz i7 CPU and the proper hardware to back it up, our frame rates would not drop anywhere near what they currently do in Keep sieges and other BFO’s.
“My PC can handle any game I throw at it with amazing FPS. Even WAR runs at ~80FPS if I’m just running around in PvE. The problems start creeping up when I get in large group situations (10-20 people on my screen at once).”
A lot of us are running machines that are considered top notch among PC gaming machines, and we can play just about any game out there at max settings as smooth as butter, but I can’t think of another game that I play anyway that is designed the same as WAR, so it’s hard to compare them. Just because I can run Crysis on Very High at 60fps doesn’t mean I’m able to run WAR during open rvr the same. It’s not really a fair comparison. Not that you used Crysis as an example, just don’t really think there’s another game out there you can compare it to fairly anyway : P
Thanks for the comments and sorry about the freakin novel!
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 10:25 pm
By the way, did you experience the big City siege crashes and queue flub-ups from 1.2.1 Snafzg? The City crashed on the last one I did and could never get back in LOL.
“Anyway, what would I know” (ThatsSkarWithAK)
That’s my thought : P What do I know anyway? The only ones who really know what’s going on is those people in Fairfax. Or at least I’m praying they know!
Posted on April 20th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
I haven’t played much after 1.2.1 due to obvious reasons, but before 1.2.1 I could run around on fastest frame rate without any noticeable lag (haven’t written down the fps so can’t say exact numbers there). Of course the normal choke points when 50-100 people ran up the stairs to kill the lord it got a bit cranky. I wished they expanded the inner keeps, I find it odd that the the keeps/forts are so big, yet the lord room which should be the pride of the castle is as small as a washing closet.
I run windows mode 1680×1050, have dual core 3.33ghz, Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 512MB GDDR5, 4gbs ram. I bought this computer before x-mas and it cost me about 1400$ in norway and things are much more expensive in norway. The biggest problem I have is latency lag, but I think this is due to the fact that I play from norway on us server.
note: I and a friend bought the SAME computer except he bought the radeon graphic card with more ram, but the game is noticeably better on my computer, the only reason I can see for this is that he uses vista and I XP.
Posted on April 24th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Hi Elling, I’d say you probably do have some latency issues going on playing on US servers from Norway. Hope you pick the game back up : )
You sorta stated though exactly what I’ve been trying to say that the frame rate drops at the choke points in keeps and such. That’s exactly what I experience, but that has not one thing to do with servers. At the choke point everyone is now being displayed on your screen versus another time where it’s just maybe half of the warband or even less.
I’m working on an article to better explain what I’m trying to say lol, and I do understand that City sieges have some serious server problems. But for the general game (keep sieges, tier 1-3) WAR has had some of the best server stability of any MMO I have ever played. Just my personal exp with it.
Something I’d recommend is to try a CPU monitor while you’re right in the middle of some keep siege when your performance goes to crap with a few hundred people on your screen, look at your CPU and how much load is on it, also look at your RAM load. And no you can’t just window out and do a ctrl + alt + del : ) I’ll have this up in the next week or so, should be fairly interesting. And here’s my current specs, although various diff builds will be used in the article. Q9550 Core 2 Quad 3.4GHz, 3GB DDR 2 PC8500 1066MHz, eVGA GTX 285 1GB , Ultra 800w PSU.
Thanks everyone for the comments, and if you find a fix let us know : ) Now if only Mythic would come out and address this. Which will prob never happen.
Posted on April 24th, 2009 at 10:48 am
I’d like to see someone with an I7 system and dual gpu’s run this and see if they still have the same issues.
Posted on April 24th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
I had one incident last week when I was running after a sorc and on my screen I was right behind him and I said to my BW friend, “I got him I got him, his right in front of me” and the responded “wtf are you talking about? the sorc is 50 feet east” this was in chaos waste around prime time and the servers seemed to be under a lot of strain. this is probably why my martys blessing don’t always heal people who seems to be standing right next to me.
Gamespot had a performance test on warhammer when the game launched : http://www.gamespot.com/features/6197926/index.html , would be interesting to see if this still applied to the game or if there has been some changes to this.
Posted on April 24th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Hey again folks.
Elling, we also posted open rvr benchmarks a couple months after the games release. Will post the link later as Im typing on my phone lol, but you can go back through our archives and find it under Articles and Guides then Warhammer Online. Tyvm for the comments.
Slurm, in my article the high end machine we will be testing has the core i7 3.2GHz extreme CPU, EVGA x58 Cladsified mobo, and two GTX 295 vid cards. So we will def cover the high end as well as mid grade hardware. Will post as soon as can.
Thank yas!
Posted on April 24th, 2009 at 7:04 pm
Sometimes when i listen to your podcast (which i love and catch every one) I wonder if we are playing the same game.
If i get one crash to desktop a month i would be suprised and I am currently leveling a choppa to 40 and have not experienced any of the bugs you mentioned aside from the occasional mount bug which doesnt seem to be class specific “hey lookee that squig hearder is moving fast on his feet”
.
I personally love the chages they made because previously I had to be close to a target to hit it with the “lots a choppin skill name that evades me at the moment”. Now i just point in that target’s general direction and let fly my wrath. Before the patch I would sometimes see my character not moving if i spammed the attack too much but since then i’ve learned to let him finish doing his damage before telling him to hit again.
One time I had a chat with a CSR about a few art and guild bugs (being guild leader and unable to rank, change titles or get into the guild vault randomly was annoying) He sugested I delete the game then the folder its in and reinstall. It was a pain but i’ve experienced fewer issues. The reason he gave was that sometimes patches or even the old beta files I had would affect the game. I rememberd that in AoC and in starwars galaxies it was common practice to reload the game after a few major patches to improve stability and reduce bugs.
About typing paragraphs in region chat that dissapear, you might create a separate chat channel that displays all types of player bugs and check it when stuff like that happens. My main chat channel has those bug messages turned off but when it happens to me i look at the “bug channel” and it says my paragraph was too long. So i have to learn to limit my shakespearean pontifications.
always a great show, i listen at work and it makes me want to be online playing.
Might give it a try.
Posted on April 26th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
“If i get one crash to desktop a month i would be suprised and I am currently leveling a choppa to 40 and have not experienced any of the bugs you mentioned aside from the occasional mount bug which doesnt seem to be class specific “hey lookee that squig hearder is moving fast on his feet”
.”
that’s PC gaming at it’s best. everyone experiences different bugs and probs. so while some have little to no issues, another may be frustrated to the point of quitting from all of the problems. That’s what separates the PC from a console. We have the freedom to change hardware/software in and out as we choose to fit our needs/budget, but the trade off is we have to be ready for any and all bugs that come along with it. The issues I have are in no way isolated though as the forums and herald fix notes are filled with them, and with as bad as i may let on like I’ve have it, my experience isnt near as bad as others lol. but the reason why I mention every teeny tiny problem that I experience is because someone listening probably had it happen to them as well, so it lets them know they’re not alone. oh yeah, and what fun would it be to listen to a podcast that’s all daisies, sunshine, and Mythic patoot kissing haha! j/k but we do try to cover both sides, i think we do well at criticizing where its due as well as praising (which i think we do a lot of)
btw, the text disappearing was a part of the server issue during the city siege i was in. and shortly after the city server crashed >.< So that’s why what I was typing was not making it there, because the server was overloaded and eventually crashed.
thanks for listening, and thanks much for the feedback!! and are you not experiencing the choppa bugs? mine still is jacked up. lotsa choppin’ does not flow, every other time you use it the animations do not work still. try using a diff ability continuously 5 times in a row to where you get a flow down, then try doin that with lotsa choppin’, mine does not work. tons of people are having that same prob. plus my characters waist is invisible, you can literally see through the middle of his body like he’s cut in half and his torso is floating above his legs lol. dont mind that, but the lotsa choppin break really sucks, hope they fix it tuesday.
Posted on April 26th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
i am to the point I’m debating canceling my subscription until Mythic fixes their crap. i have just had it. you can’t play your choppa or any other class for that matter that has a spammable ability that works only off the global cool down, but hey, dye is working properly again! mythic’s priorities are absolutely backwards. 1.2.1 shoulda been pulled immediately after its launch, but someone in the PR department prob said that it would be a career killer so they let it ride and the media played it out like WAR got all these new features, but the players are screaming that they can’t play due to pathetic bugs like the one i mentioned above.
i absolutely love WAR, I want to play it I really do, but I can’t play a game when the simplest of things like you’re abilities don’t even work. I guess I’m supposed to just go to a capital city and just work on my armor’s color scheme? LOL.
sorry for the rant, just reaaallly frustrated atm. will be yet another weekend w/o WAR. going on 2 weeks now not having played.
Posted on May 2nd, 2009 at 2:17 am
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