crashes posts

The Daily Grind: Do you bother playing an MMO on patch day?

by Brooke Pilley Apr 27th 2009 at 8:00AM

Filed under: MMO industry, Opinion, The Daily Grind

Most MMOs have hundreds if not thousands of quests, textures, user-interface elements, statistics, NPCs, zones, instances, skills, and animations. On top of that they try to provide an environment where thousands of players can interact with each other without causing noticeable client or server performance issues. Obviously, there are many complex pieces to an MMO and messing up something small can have huge unforeseen consequences.

Ironically, patches are intended to fix game issues but for some reason they often break something else in the process. No developer is immune to this phenomenon. We here at Massively play a wide array of different MMOs and we can all share tales of patches gone horribly wrong. We also know that even though most patches are player-tested before going live, it makes little difference.

So, do you play on patch day, even with the knowledge that you're likely to encounter issues like bugs, crashes, exploits, and possible rollbacks? It's a bit of a paradox really. If people avoided playing on patch day, it would simply delay the inevitable problems from turning up. Patch day would become patch week, month, or year. Patch days need mass amounts of players to uncover the issues. Unfortunately, it can be an extremely frustrating experience if the player doesn't have the tolerance for it.

Tags: bugs, crashes, patch, patches, rollbacks

AoC beta: a tale of two clients

by Samuel Axon May 3rd 2008 at 8:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Age of Conan, Bugs, Events, real-world, Forums, Launches, New titles, News items

Frustrated with the Age of Conan open beta's serious performance problems? Worried that the game won't be ready for retail in just a couple of weeks? Don't worry too much; not it is all as it seems. Word on the virtual street is that the open beta client is an old build with issues long since resolved in the closed beta version.

When the IGN beta event finally began on Thursday, thousands of excited gamers ended up more frustrated than entertained. The experience has been marred by low framerates, stuttering, and frequent hard crashes. Admittedly, it's a beta; some of that is to be expected. But it's bad, and since the game's retail release is less than three weeks away, there's an air of concern that Age of Conan will hit retail in an unplayable state. The reality is more complex than that.

Tags: age-of-conan, aoc, beta, bildo, bloggers, bugs, client, closed-beta, crashes, forums, framerate, funcom, ign, ign-beta-event, keen, open-beta, performance, stuttering

New TR patch shoved out the door

by Chris Chester Feb 26th 2008 at 9:05AM

Filed under: Sci-fi, Bugs, Game mechanics, Patches, Tabula Rasa

Well, that was quick. I'm not too sure why I'm surprised, but players woke up this morning to find that Tabula Rasa's patch 1.5 had snuck out the door last night, and is patiently waiting on player desktops. Players didn't quite have a full week to fully digest the patch notes after they showed up on the public test server before they're going live, which is either helpful or incredibly reckless depending on how much stock you put into the QA process. In this case we're going to go with "reckless" because early reports (confirmed after we ourselves downloaded the patch) show a strange bug where the game resets your resolution every time you load up the game, causing crashes for some (this blogger included).

As to the content of the patch itself, we've already talked about some of the neat things that players will find within. One of the changes we didn't get around to talking about are the changes to the Spy class. They've reworked the way Traitor works in PvP to make it more like a traditional Mind Control, in addition to throwing in a new melee attack for Spies that is similar to other players' melee attacks, and takes into account bonuses to damage and knockdown given by putting pumps into hand-to-hand. (Spies are one of only two melee classes in the game, so this new attack is distinguished from their normal blade attacks.) Oddly enough though, Spies do not get a respec.

Full patch notes available after the jump.

Tags: breaking, crashes, destination-games, h2h, melee, patch-1.5, QA, spies, tabula-rasa, tr