Fastest Growing MMO Launch In History?Follow

Its nice when they admit it.

We had the same trouble with Virgin last year when they downrated WoW traffic as "peer-to-peer" and traffic managed it into 1000ms unplayability at peak times. It took a lot of pressure before they relented.

And there was never any outright admission or apology.

Turns out it might not be the ISP after all.

I'm ready to Force Choke someone if I don't figure out what's causing it soon. To complicate things, I noticed today that refreshing my browser window (F5) would clear a lagspike.

Like, I don't even know what's going on anymore. I hate it when something's not working and I can't fix it myself. Means you have to get others to do it and that sh*t always ends in tears.

Time to find the network admin and ask him about ports and stuff, just so I can tell the ISP that I've tried all that when they suggest it. I just don't think it's anything on our end since other games play just fine over the net. It smells like a bad hub somewhere on the line, but I have no idea.

UGH!

They need to invent some smarter internet one of these days.

There was another rapidly patched bug last night.

You know they said they fixed the bug with commendations in the post going into inventory instead of currency?

Well they did but instead they didn't disappear from the mail. This made it possible to take the same commendation multiple times. I have to wonder how many people did that all evening and ended up with massive injections of cash into the economy from vendored lockboxes.

As a software developer I am both impressed and worried by the speed at which they are patching. The failure of a transaction such as removing a currency from the mail feels more like a design flaw than a glitch. The fact that a fix can go so wrong also indicates shortcuts in testing. It wasn't a big bug but the fix may have made a large hole in the integrity of the economy.

And the 9000 errors continued to disconnect us while playing. This may not be their fault and I do suspect our ISP. However disconnects do happen and recovery could be better. We were in the middle of an instanced heroic and on reconnection we were each dropped back into the instance. It was my instance so I was fine but my son got dropped into the middle of his very own fresh instance full of mobs and was promptly killed.

I know that WoW used to have these problems and they overcame them but the trouble is that SW:TOR is not going to be judged by how WoW was at launch but by the difference in what people have come to expect and what they are experiencing in the game.

And this is not totally unfair. A new game has to come into the market to beat the existing king-o-the-heap not to beat it as it was 7 years ago. They have learned many lessons and do many things better than WoW.

I think they need to stabilise quickly. Some of these annoyances could easily be left to fully tested content patches rather than hotfixed on the fly which is leading to more problems.

I don't think you understood me, or perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

I agree that the instability issues are an unknown for a game suddenly coming under major stress loading. I also blame my ISP or some other external agent for the disconnects. The fact that it happens to two computer side-by-side pretty much ensures it is not at their end.

Although server pops don't seem to be as high as they were they are going to have to grow into it and there will be teething problems. I accept that and I'm not criticising them for it.

What I was saying was not an unreasonable expectation is that they would have looked at how other games coped with disconnects - because they will happen - and come up with their own coping strategies.

At launch WoW didn't handle them too well. It was still a massive improvement on EQ's handling at the time. WoW improved and although it did have a patch of dumping you in different instances it mostly recovered and I've suffered from a bad connection enough times to know that it is pretty good now.

I'm talking about maintaining group, displaying the player as disconnected, preserving the instance ID etc. These are things that I would expect a new game to have taken on board at launch. Possibly they should have given them even more thought because there was bound to be some level of teething problem.

I ran a ping on www.swtor.com and www.google.com while playing, and I had a torrent running in the background as well (to see if it, as rumored, would prevent EC 9000), and I noticed that whenever I get a lagspike (timeout), my torrent would lose connection as well, but in ~30,000 pings (packets sent), I only lost one (1) packet to their site and none to Google.

I get the feeling that something is randomly dropping p2p connection and that the SWTOR connection runs via this.

Still don't have a clue what I'm going to say to the network admin once I find him, though. It's obviously not the firewall or I wouldn't be able to play at all. I'm guessing it's something with the ports, but Bioware wants me to open 20,000 ports to play. Good luck convincing a network admin that he needs to open a 20,000-port hole in the network.

Edit: Wish they'd just used the same damn ports as WoW or Rift or Warhammer Online. Between these four games, I'm probably looking at opening ALL the ports in the router.

Edited, Jan 6th 2012 5:55pm by Mazra