Filed under: Bugs

It's an awkward time for Champions Online. After the last State of the Game post by Chronomancer, things were looking up. The latest patch was slated to fix Lemuria (colloquially known as Lagmuria, due to the extreme system hiccups), add more power to various power frameworks, nemesis changes, the addition of team looting, and changes to the crafting system. Furthermore, the same State of the Game post announced that Champions would be getting its first expansion -- Vibora Bay.

However, with the deployment of the "kitchen sink" patch, most gamers have experienced more lag in all zones, some characters are locked in Lemuria, unable to log in, and there are issues with the crafting systems. If all of that wasn't bad enough, Cryptic Daeke has confirmed that Vibora Bay will be a "paid expansion" which will add more content for levels 37 to 40 -- a move which has sent many members of the community into what can only be described as "a frothing rage."

EVE Online's latest expansion, Dominion, brought sweeping changes to how alliances claim and hold space, and more recently revamped capital ship warfare. However, there has been a downside of late in terms of server stability and lag. Twitter is pretty much aflame with players lamenting the server issues, not to mention the forums, and it's something CCP Games needs to address right away.

To that end, CCP is looking to the playerbase for help with "Mass Testing" on Wednesday, to determine the source of lag in large fleet battles. The devs will be looking into the problems widely reported with medium and large scale fleet combat and will need at least 50 pilots, though if 200 or more showed up this would be even better, says CCP Tanis. Players interested in helping out should hop on the Singularity test server on Wednesday, January 27, at 17:00 UTC. Mass Testing participants should join the "MassTesting" channel in-game on the test server as well. All EVE pilots who want to get involved should see CCP Navigator's announcement for more info about tomorrow's fleet combat tests and the discussion in a related forum thread.

There are always people willing to defend a game, no matter what its flaws. You could have a game where the fundamental means of communication was broken for two months straight, and it would still have fans piping up and explaining why that isn't such a big deal. But with one high-profile game (Star Trek Online) finishing its beta, and several others slated to finish or start theirs, one of the classic defenses for a game's problems is losing much of its strengths: "well, it's still in beta."

Some of you may well recall our recent feature on betas, in which several developers alternately lamented and stated that the "open beta" is now essentially nothing more than a preview. Bio Break expounds on this point, noting that more often than not the defense of "it's just a beta" would only be valid if there was some large launch-day patch on deck to fix everything. Those patches, it's worth noting, occupy the same space as unicorns and fairies.

Broken parts of a game in open beta, more often than not, now mean that there will be something broken in the game at launch. That doesn't mean that the developers aren't working on fixing things, but it does mean that defending the beta as sacrosanct is lacking validity.

A few Aion players on the Azphel server got a bit of a shock yesterday when a bug in the system presented them with more than 30 trillion Kinah as a reward. With that much extra cash floating around, the economy predictably went...well, completely insane.

The Auction Hall looked like opening day at the NYSE, and even fairly common items were selling for outrageous amounts of Kinah. The news spread outside of game very quickly, sending the Aion team into overdrive as they tried to figure out what had happened. (Since this isn't the first time something like this has happened to an NCsoft game, we imagine there was a game plan in place.)

The Azphel servers were taken down for "emergency maintenance" shortly afterward, and news of a rollback came down very early this morning, surprising absolutely nobody. As of now, the Aion team is planning to roll the servers back to 6:00 AM CST Monday morning, but they're not quite out of the woods yet. They have since found "a few additional bugs that are having a direct impact on the stability of the Azphel economy", and promise more information soon.

"OMG lag!" "Ugh, I got dc'ed." "Hey, why didn't I get the hat?"

If you were logged into Guild Wars for more than five minutes on Friday, you most likely either saw people saying one (or all three) of those things, or said them yourself. As the Wintersday finale approached and district numbers soared in Lion's Arch and Kamadan, lag -- a typical festival issue -- became the most used word in the game, with Error 007 messages popping up all over the place.

Most players are used to that around festival times and understand that the server load in some areas is much higher than usual. However, another little glitch showed up Friday that players weren't quite so forgiving of: a huge number of players weren't getting their Wintersday hats, and Guild Wars players do not love it when they don't get their hats.

The outcry hit the forums pretty quickly, and community manager Regina Buenaobra logged an extra long workday communicating with the community and the ArenaNet team, trying to fix the bug. Eventually the bug was fixed, with a very welcome announcement from Regina: they will be re-running Wintersday. Dates are still to be announced, but it's welcome news for all players.

Good luck on round two, and thanks to ArenaNet!

You know the one. It's a tiny bug, a problem that only comes up once in a blue moon -- if it's even a problem and not just a slight problem like a model clipping issue. You really shouldn't care one way or the other, it's so irrelevant... but you care. You can't help but care. The very thought of it bothers you. And even though it's something so obscure that you're not sure if anyone has even bothered reporting it other than you, or so rare or so unnecessary, you still get angry when all sorts of other minor bugs get fixed and this one persists.

We're not talking about bugs that people can legitimately point to as impacting quality of play today, like the infamous Vanish bug in World of Warcraft. We're talking about those minor issues that you can't let go of, sometimes even long after you've stopped playing the game. What small and ultimately irrelevant bug just can't help but get your goat every time it comes up? How do you try to work around it? Have you reported it once, multiple times, or not at all with the expectation that the developers must know about it already?

Champions Online has a brand new dev blog out from lead GM Noel Holmes: "I wanted to take some time to let the community know what we were up to, and what's been keeping us busy for the last few weeks."

The Champions Online dev team has found plenty to keep themselves busy lately, working out the bugs and updates that are part of rolling out a new game. Things like restoring deleted characters and rolling characters back are no longer just wishful thinking.

Of course, dealing with the problem of an unresponsive Nemesis was a big issue on the table. Fixing the issue obviously isn't just a matter of a few keystrokes in such an involved scenario, and Holmes takes some time to explain how they went about taking care of this.

It's not all bug fixes and putting out fires, though. The dev team has been paying close attention to player feedback in these first few months, using it as a guide to future improvements.

The full entry can be read here.

Peter Stindberg of Babel Translations has put together an exhaustive accounting of how Second Life inventory items can be transferred between users and what the nominal success-rates of those transfers actually are. Some kinds of transfers will always succeed (except in unusual circumstances – which admittedly do happen). Others will always fail. Some ride the grey zone in-between.

If scripted or non-scripted inventory transfers matter to you (and if you're a content-creator, a scripter or distributor, they probably do), it's definitely worth your time to check out Stindberg's very cogent analysis, which includes tips on how to mitigate non-delivery issues.

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	Are you a part of the most widely-known collaborative virtual environment or keeping a close eye on it? Massively's Second Life coverage keeps you in the loop.

Within the last 24 hours, we've been getting widespread reports of Second Life instant-messages suddenly being delivered weeks after they were originally sent. Initially it seemed to be a single burst of such messages that were unclogged from some creaking subsystem and delivered in a bunch, but it seems not to be the case.

We've experienced this ourselves over the last day now, with messages suddenly popping out of the Second Life grid, as if they were fresh and new. Initially it seemed that it was messages that had gone undelivered in the last five weeks, but we've just seen two that were originally sent, and apparently remained undelivered for over six months.

The latest EverQuest II producer's letter has shed some light on what the next game update, Will of a Tyrant, is likely to contain when it is released on the 9th of December. Senior producer Alan Crosby freely admitted that the patch will not bring as much new content as players might be used to getting; instead, the focus for this round of updating has been to fix lots of little bugs, some of which have been mildly irritating folks since EverQuest II's launch. Crosby said that this approach was chosen to give the game a nice clean slate for the coming expansion, Sentinel's Fate.

The letter goes on to discuss a couple of features (that may or may not have once been considered a part of the Will of a Tyrant update) that have been scrapped altogether. The Item Ratings system was abandoned, at least partially due to feedback from the player base, and the Fighter revamp that was in the works has been considerably scaled back. Both of these negatives do have a silver lining though -- the developers are looking at alternative ways to enhance gear, and Fighters will still see some tweaks, albeit "small changes, rather than sweeping revamps". Crusaders will be among the first Fighter classes to be looked at -- see the full letter for some early details.

While the producer's letter makes Will of a Tyrant sound overwhelmingly lacklustre, keep in mind that it doesn't go into some previously announced events that should give players something new to do for at least a little while. Hopefully the decision to squash all those bugs pays off with a smooth launch for Sentinel's Fate in February.

If there's one thing that MMO gamers all agree on, it's the short list of things we almost universally hate: cheaters, gold (or equivalent currency) farmers searching for your credit card, and bugs. Oh, the dreaded bugs. They do so much damage to your gameplay experience, why doesn't the company just fix them? The inimitable Scott Jennings tackles this question in his latest column on game design, explaining that the main reason bugs don't get fixed faster is because doing so is much harder than it seems.

As he points out, the architecture of an MMO is a tricky thing at the best of times, frequently only held together with the coded equivalent of a wing and a prayer. Some bugs are so massively detrimental to the game that they get to jump to the head of the class, but others are annoying and bad but not at the highest priority. Or -- as sometimes happens despite everyone's best efforts -- fixing the bug would require doing so much damage to the rest of the game that it's better to work around it. If you're wondering why your favorite company hasn't fixed a much-hated bug, this article should prove an interesting read.

Champions Online has another round of bug fixes ready to go out, and will be asking their players to put them through their paces on the public test server for a few hours today and tomorrow. If you haven't participated in a public playtest before and are interested, it's pretty simple. Just log into the Champions Online site, get a public test copy of your character and head over to the public test server to see how the patch holds up. The patch notes are here, and CO will want your feedback in the public test server forum once you're finished.

While it's always fun to be in the know a little ahead of time, Cryptic is throwing in a few extra goodies to thank you for your time. All participants will receive a (very apt) crash test dummy head costume piece. Even better, Foxbat is going to be there for a costume contest. He'll be jumping instances to judge the costumes, and the winner in each instance gets a Retro Destroyer action figure.

All the information, including specific times, can be found on the Champions Online site.

Hackers, as everyone knows, were scheduled to be the mirror class to Choppas... wait, no, that's not right. We're not talking about one of the classes of Warhammer Online, we're talking about that scourge of the paying and fair-playing populace of every MMO. The most recent developer diary on the game's official site is with John Cox, development manager, discussing some of the ways and means that allows Mythic to fight against the scourge of hacking and try and keep the game on the level.

Cox discusses a number of techniques, starting with the most obvious: that several people working on fighting the hacks are part of hacking communities, observing silently and sometimes even testing them internally to develop a response. He also discusses why some of the progress on fighting illegal behavior is a bit slower than the community would like, and why it's not always as possible to shut things down straightaway on the server end. With a discussion of some of the holes in detection, which includes an explanation of why the game briefly had Vista users almost universally flagged as hackers, it's an interesting look behind the scenes at Warhammer Online's efforts to fight the good fight. (That is, the one not involving Order versus Destruction.)

There are elements of games that are turn-offs for all of us. Some of us love PvP, for example, and a world with virtually none of it isn't very appealing. But sometimes we don't event start playing the game before our feelings about it go straight into the dumpster. It's hard to argue that Tabula Rasa's frequent shifts during development inspired players to expect any longevity out of it, and whether or not it's the case Warhammer Online's frequent server merges and population shuffling have given the impression of a game that's struggling a bit.

Sometimes you hear of a developer or project head assigned that makes you cringe, sometimes it's a choice of IP or business models, or sometimes it's just the number of issues you have patching the game to try out the free client. We ask you, readers, what makes you start losing faith before you've even loaded up a game for the first time? It might not be a dealbreaker, and you might even look back at it and laugh, but there are certain things that make you more nervous about committing to a game. What does it for you?

Remember Kevin Alderman (known in Second Life as Stroker Serpentine), CEO of Eros LLC who is one of the plaintiffs who have filed a lawsuit against Linden Lab for negligence with respect to security and failing to act in accordance with their obligations under the DMCA? Well, it can't be a good week for either him or for the Lab.

During Linden Lab's Burning Life event in Second Life this year (a sort of living pop-art showcase and party that draws many spectators) persons only presently known to the server logs left a cache of copied content, including at least one of Alderman's latest products, and a whole swag of other content belonging to other designers – free for the taking.

It isn't really Burning Life's fault, but if you had to place the stuff somewhere where many people would take it, none-the-wiser that it was unlawful content, that would be the best place at this time of the year.