Your community desperately needs to know a date for the next update. It seems like changes this big will force us to wipe (I run one of the biggest CE servers and I am certain that my concerns reflect those of the entire community).
Also, server numbers are down to less than half of what they were from live launch, and your active player base is decreasing as well. This is in large part to players going inactive because they don’t know if their builds will have to wipe the very next day.
I’m assuming you want to have a nice, big game with a big, active community.
So how about you tell us a hard date for the update so people now how to plan, and we know how to manage our servers?
I’m sure when they can provide a hard date, they will, as they have stated a good dozen times now. The last thing they should do is provide a date only to have to miss it due to a bug or something. This place will riot if they miss the date by a single day, so it’s more then wise to wait until the are certain.
As for your wipe concerns, they won’t be wiping the official servers so why do you feel you will need to?
Absolutely this. On my server I’ve seen our player levels drop to less than a quarter of what they were only a month ago, just waiting for this god damned patch. It’s almost like these people live in la la land with the pixies and fairies, and don’t notice that people aren’t playing their game.
Exactly. In general, the servers and the population are dying. I love having a top five server, but I hate that you only need an average of 23 players an hour to be firmly in the top 5. It used to be you had to have 30-40. There’s an overall decline in players, and Funcom’s refusal to announce a hard date on this update is a huge contributor.
They gave you a time frame of 4-6 weeks, we are going on week 5 since test live got it’s first patch with the pets in it, what difference does a rough estimate versus an exact date going to do? No, Funcom is absolutely going about this the right way, players are already on their backs enough as it is. They would lose far more people if they missed their given date of release, then they would by not caving to your demands. The vast majority of people who decide to quit the game because they can’t wait a couple more weeks are going to quit anyways, or would come back once the patch launches or shortly there after. There is a reason that a large portion of games that release major patches see immediate number spikes in player usage.
He said why, players left the game because in all unofficial servers this kind of big patch will force a wipe. And for people who run servers it seems important to know.
To Multigun, History proven Funcom action are not necessarily the right actions. so saying Funcom dont wipe so you dont need to wipe is silly.
why unofficial servers like to wipe often? because its like Seasons, it adds more freshness to the game, and once a clan dominate a server for a while they pretty much “won” the season and server can be wipe to give players a zero ground to try dominate this season.
And your strong lining on the claim:
So lets take no responsibility to the community who pay us. what i understand from this is:
*no date - because they are not professionals enough to release content with no bugs nor breaking other things.
*no date - because they dont have enough employees (in the code dep at least), so everything really slow.
both reasons are unacceptable in my book, they show amateur way of work.
in the end of the day you have people who run server that say their servers are dieing because people are leaving, you can keep looking for excuses to take off the responsibility for that from Funcom, but it doesn’t change the reality and the facts.
Okay, well I fail to see why it’s important to know exactly when the next wipe will be if you’re “wiping often” anyway? So important that you need to leave the game over it, that is. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be “nice” to know, but…
Officials aren’t wiping, so there’s no technical reason why this patch should require a wipe on unofficials. If you want to do it anyway, that’s of course fine but that’s something you as a server owner decided to do - it’s not on Funcom.
And I don’t know your server or the people playing on it, but people blame “the game dying” on whatever pet peeve they have ALL THE TIME, so forgive me but it’s a little difficult to take seriously.
Why do I care? Because this kind of alarmist and IMO exaggerated demand takes focus away from real issues.
My server community was worried and yes I have had folks take breaks…but surprisingly for two weeks population went down…but I told everyone I only wipe when it’s a gameplay major change…and surprise my population rebounded and we are sitting at 35 + a day now. I think folks just need to chill.
I’ve run 2 Conan servers since day 1 of EA. I’ve seen more people leave because of broken patches then with delays. I want them to get it right the first time certainly don’t want another MOAP scenario.
Exactly. While I can’t rule out that some people might pack up and leave because they don’t have an exact date for the patch (seems odd, but ok) I am 100% sure it’ll be much much worse if the patch is (too) broken when it does land. Especially since it messes with some pretty core features like thralls.
My pet peeves are the need for an AI Overhaul for NPC's, Building optimization, exploits, and too many servers. All but the last are being addressed (according to PR).
I think that last one should be looked at, since there are so many low to no pop servers. I would gladly start over (again) to find a server with actual people to play with rather than horde all of my supplies and work in ‘hopes’ that people will come play with me. I can understand that 'hope’ful frame of mind, but I doubt it’ll be common with the overwhelming amount of servers we have.
As to the topic: I agree with @Multigun, in that it’s better to have a vague timeline and to stray over that boundary rather than release something incomplete or buggy. Just imagine the MOAP coming out every month because people need their fix now. That would strangle off the population even faster, lol.
Wasn’t the MOAP such a disaster in the first place because people were making such a stink about not getting their patch fast enough that Funcom rushed it out before it was ready?
You’d think people would have learned their lesson from that.
I think a lot of people would be very happy with small, more frequent patches that are both bug free, and fast. For big content updates, longer waits are understandable. But surely the devs can figure out how to deliver both small, frequent patches, and big content updates… Or can’t they?
I’m pretty sure, the devs work with some kind of subversion and branches (GIT/SVN). But! It’s not in their decission to use a Hotfix-Branch and a Feature-Branch, where they simply can deploy a hotfix. So, don’t blame the developers
For the PC, this may be possible. However, you actually cause a time sink to occur. Some tests and actions (such as compiling) would have to be performed on the small patches regardless if they fixed one bug or 100. For example, testing to see if the patch installs properly has to be done per patch. On the other hand, you would see more frequent patches.
As for Xbox and ps4… These get tougher. Each patch must be certified, which is a vetting process to ensure we don’t see another Hot Coffee mod slip in. The Hot coffee mod was a patch for one of the Gran theft auto games that enabled a risque mini-game on the xbox platform. Long story short… Parents got mad, Microsoft apologized and blamed the developer but also put more effort into vetting patches. So… Where we stand today is that any console patch must be vetted which isn’t free. So dping multiple small patches would still need to be vetted amd would cost Funcom more money.
@Critter667 makes a very valid argument for why frequent small updates probably aren’t feasible for consoles.
As for PC, it can be hard to release a small fix when they are right in the middle of testing a big update. Currently they are testing, reviewing and polishing the Pet Patch that’s upcoming, but there is a more urgent fix that came to light after this testing began. It would be difficult to pull all of the new content they’d been polishing for the last month and revert back to Live with the small patch to test that fix. So this urgent fix is incorporated into the large update.
I would love to see a lot of small frequent bug fix patches as well, but if they are working on major projects that change core systems (possibly siege mechanics, purges, building optimization and AI all at once) then the small, minor fixes have to take a back seat or be incorporated into the big one.
@LessliRose it`s one thing to dispute what someone is saying in their post. But calling someone a fanboy is another thing as it seems more like you are attacking Multigun on their opinion rather than debating about both of your views in a respectful way.
