The friction happens because there is three camps, really two. But there’s three:
Those who play PC on Private Servers.
Those who play PC on Official Servers.
Those who don’t play on PC.
Technically you could say there are those who play on consoles on private… but there’s like maybe 12 of them total on 30 servers. Yeah the math is crazy. I’m being sarcastic… just a bit. You get the idea, there’s not many of them.
Those who play on PC on private servers don’t see many issues. We’re called a vocal minority, but in reality, there’s a ton of us. I know, I’ve got about 20 or so players on a server I currently help with, and a clan of 6 who don’t have issues. Well… they do, but usuaully caused by a mod… so those don’t count, since I have to fix those, not Funcom.
Those who play on officials. Yeah they see some login issues. Gportal is not good. I’ve had about a 50/50 run with them. 50% they were fine. When I first used them about 2 years ago. Might have been Early Access. I dunno, but they were fine then. New server… they were fine. Until they weren’t. Back in January we launched a server and it ran fine. About 22 mods or so. Did alright. And then sometime in April I think, maybe March. It went to hell.
Couldn’t get the server to show up on browser, when you direct connected it ran badly. I thought we were going to have to wipe. This looked like a heavily corrupted database by the symptoms. But I did my diligence and tested it in SP. The Database was fine in SP. No issues. So I loaded it on multiplayer locally and again no issues. We had a ticket in for Gportal but a week nearly went by and no response.
So we pulled the trigger on Serverblend with the same database, same mods, same ini file. Game ran fine. Has been since. Our datebase is currently over 200 days old (1/4 of that of an official). Since then we’ve added mods, dropped some, and still have no issues. Server pops up on browser. And just as long as you’re on a SSD, you load in quick. Hey… when you’ve got 5GB of mods, it takes a minute to load the game on a HDD.
This can apply to those who run into bad luck playing private, and on Gportal when it gets squirrely.
And then you’ve got the console players. They get all the BS of the officials, and the shenanigans that comes with playing on a controller. Not to mention they have to play the game on medium settings making it look like Turok or Goldeneye from the N64. And then when Microsoft Live or Playstation Network burps, they well you get the idea.
So there is three vastly different experiences. And that causes alot of frustration between us. Funcom screwed up in two major ways.
First one was keeping parity between PC and Console. That should never have happened. Consoles don’t have the hardware of PCs. What runs well on Testlive will not run well on Console. That’s just basic physics there.
Second one is putting us in one forum. Console should have their own forum. I mean we cannot play together. We don’t even play the game in the same way. Case in point, how many console archers can keep three or more targets crippled? How many can animation cancel in a combo? (that one some of you might be able to do, assuming you can remap controls to specific hotbar slots). To put it shortly, we’re playing two different games here. Even if all bugs were fixed and the game ran smoothly, we’d still have friction because of this.
First one is out. I doubt that’s going to happen this far in. But the second one is as simple as adding new general sections for each platform. Really this should be done. We’re not playing the same game as each other. Even when I use a controller, its a vastly different experience.