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Xsyon release moved to March 15th
Building sandboxes is hard. So hard, in fact, that not many of them get built. Those that do eventually see the light of day, like the upcoming Xyson from Jordi Grau-Davis' Notorious Games, often go through laborious birthing pains, buggy betas, and delayed releases. In a post on the official Xsyon boards, the game devs have announced the decision to postpone the official release by two weeks (the new date is March 15th) due to "problems with our servers and bandwidth" brought to light by the recent headstart launch and the sudden influx of warm bodies. The post details the forthcoming fix for the recent lag issues (a new download server) and also puts a positive face on things by bringing up the fact that the lag has caused a few hidden problems to surface. The Xsyon client and installer have also been updated, and pre-order players will have two weeks of free game time comped to their accounts.
PSA: Breach patched for lag on XBLA, trial time extended
Following in the footsteps of its PC counterpart, the XBLA version of Breach is now patched. The update fixes "all known crashes," addresses lag issues and squashes a number of bugs, according to developer Atomic Games. Check out the full list of fixes after the break. Additionally, the time limit for online play in the free trial version of the game has been extended to one hour. As an added bonus, those who've already exhausted their free trials will receive the new, full hour. The full title update is available now and will be automatically applied upon starting Breach.
Massively's EVE Online Incursion video devblog roundup
Having progressed from being a small independent studio in Iceland to a successful multinational industry leader, EVE Online's developer CCP Games has always had a reputation for being very close to the game's playerbase. Back in July, this view was soured when information from devblogs and the June CSM summit seemed to suggest that EVE would receive no bug-fixes or iterations on old gameplay features for at least 18 months. Players were in an uproar, and a growing perception began to spread that CCP was selling current EVE players short in order to focus on Incarna. In the past six months, things at CCP have take a complete 180-degree turn. Planetary Interaction has received the iteration players were promised, with gameplay tweaks and user interface fixes being deployed at a rapid pace. CCP also instituted team GridLock, whose purpose was to wage an all-out war on lag and fleet issues. In a refreshing and extremely welcome turn of affairs, CCP has been making a gargantuan effort lately to communicate with the players about upcoming changes and collect feedback. Though regular technical devblogs and pre-released test-server patches, players have been kept more informed than ever about what's going on behind the scenes at CCP HQ. Most recently, a series of 18 developer videos was released leading up to the Incursion expansion's final release today. Topics covered include battle reports from the ongoing war on lag, information on server optimisations that have been made recently, updates to planetary interaction, and other interesting topics. Skip past the cut for a detailed roundup of all 18 videos, all hosted on CCP's official YouTube page.
An inside look at EVE Online's CSM: From June to December
Keith Neilson is a Massively guest-writer who's here to recount his experiences at the recent Council of Stellar Management summit in Reykjavik. He writes regularly about EVE Online and has been playing the game since early 2004. Tweet It is undeniable that EVE Online is unique among MMORPGs in many ways. One of these is its Council of Stellar Management, an elected committee of nine players who play an active role in the development of the game, bringing player concerns and proposals for the future direction of the game directly to CCP at biannual summits in Iceland. Until this year, the perception of the CSM among players was that the Council is a marketing tool that does not fulfill its stated role of representing the playerbase. But in June, all of that changed. This term of the CSM brought in some major changes to the way the Council is organised, specifically with the removal of term limits (previously delegates could only serve two terms on the CSM) and the extension of terms from six months to a year. In addition to this, the CSM has been given "stakeholder" status within CCP. This means that the Council members have an equal say in the planning of future development along with the internal teams at CCP. This has allowed the fifth CSM to have a significant influence on the future development of EVE.
Dark Age of Camelot keeps its eyes firmly fixed on RvR for 2011
"Realm vs. Realm combat is what keeps you here year after year," Stuart Zissu concludes in the Dark Age of Camelot's January newsletter. Because of this fact, Zissu reassures players that Mythic is firmly committed to strengthening and focusing on DAoC's RvR in 2011. Zissu first addresses a number of important issues that the team is tackling, such as lag ghosting. Realm abilities are also being adjusted to include several additional levels. While these new levels won't add to the overall strength of the abilities, they do allow players to fine-tune just how much (or little) of these abilities they want to have. A few of the realm abilities will be improved on a case-by-case basis, however. He also highlights the next upcoming live event, which will revolve around the return of demonic invasions. Those wacky demons -- like frat boys out of control, they are! You can read the full newsletter over on the Camelot Herald.
The Lawbringer: Lagpocalypse 2010-2011
Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Running parallel to the games we love and enjoy is a world full of rules, regulations, pitfalls and traps. How about you hang out with us as we discuss some of the more esoteric aspects of the games we love to play? The Lawbringer is taking a little detour today to discuss one of the more esoteric issues (like I try to do here) that many players are facing today dealing with World of Warcraft. It is interesting that one of the biggest hurdles to playing an MMO is present outside the game rather than within. Today, I want to talk about Time Warner/Brighthouse and the intense lag of 2010 and 2011. In fact, we'll visit the past and see how these companies interacted with Blizzard, and then take a stroll into the present and try to understand what's going on right now. Confused? You might be, especially if you aren't a Time Warner or Brighthouse customer. There are some other ISPs affected by all this mess, but for now, I'm sticking to the most complained-about. Here's a quick little rundown of what's been happening over the last few weeks (and for some people, months) due to issues with Time Warner and Brighthouse internet service.
Breakfast Topic: It was lag, I swear!
This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider's pages. Lag is probably the single most common excuse for mistakes in all internet gaming. From the beginning of the big craze of first person shooters to now, mistakes are chalked up to lag. The expressions change from: "Oh sorry, you didn't get a heal? I lagged real bad!" to "Oh, I had a huge lag spike!" -- even expletive-laced shouts at the lag itself, as if you could personify bad latency. This happens in PUGs, guild runs, and even just friend and family groups. The question is how often are people actually lagging versus how often is it merely an excuse, because no one else can prove you did not lag. The truth is, it is not always lag -- but sometimes it is. I have went on expletive-laced tirades when I disconnect during a boss fight or see that horrible thing when my entire action bar is lit up with queued spells but I am not moving. However, if you actually make a mistake that is your fault, I am a big proponent of taking credit for and owning it. If you blame lag or someone else every time you make an actual mistake instead of taking ownership of your shortcomings, you never learn from them. Admitting you used an ill-timed spell, moved into the fire, or just got caught up in your rotation and had a lapse of attention allows you to learn and grow from your mistakes (and hopefully never make them again). Do you ever use lag as an excuse when it was a personal mistake? Is it a common go-to excuse you use often? Or do you believe in admitting your mistakes and trying to get better from them?
The Perfect Ten: Most controversial MMO stories of 2010
Well, this is it, folks. The end of the year. A time of reflection, of massive weight gain and of lists. Man, we like our lists, do we not? Fortunately, at Perfect Ten Industries, we've been excelling in lists for months now. Frankly, we're just getting warmed up! While 2010 may not have been much to write home about in terms of newly launched MMOs, there was more than enough controversy to keep the discussion brewing for months. MMOs are big business, and when every move you make is closely scrutinized by millions of gamers, there's no room to slip up unless you like forum hyenas pouncing all over you, snapping and snarling at your faulty flesh. So let's take a jaunt down our top 10 list of the most controversial stories of 2010 on Massively, keeping in mind that it was devilishly hard just to keep this list to 10 at all. What's a week without being riled up about pixels and polygons, after all?
EVE devblogs discuss developments in the war on lag and RMT
With the Incursion expansion's second phase almost ready to deploy, it's been a busy few weeks for the developers at CCP Games. Work is well underway, but a few of the folks at CCP have taken time out of their busy schedules this week to explain some of the interesting developments that have recently gone on behind the scenes. GM Grimmi, well-known for his work battling EVE's RMT (Real Money Trading) problem, delivered an update on the problem and what CCP is doing to tackle it. Similarly, aptly named developer CCP Masterplan wrote two in-depth devblogs detailing the latest developments in the war on lag. Lag has always been an issue in EVE Online's territorial warfare, as each side in a fight will try to bring as many ships as possible to major battles. The point at which the EVE server lags and server nodes begin to drop has been increased over the years through hardware upgrades and software performance optimisations, allowing much larger fights than were previously possible. With the playerbase growing every year, however, the number of players who can potentially meet in one place for a major battle has similarly risen and the issue of lag has persisted. Skip past the cut for a roundup of three new devblogs detailing CCP's progress in the war on lag, recently deployed optimisations for fleet battles, and the progress made in the fight against RMT and botting.
EVE Online devblog discusses recent 3000-player battle and server stability
Recently, we reported on the largest battle ever held in EVE Online. Over 3200 pilots clashed in the lawless nullsec system LXQ2-T. What was meant to be a titanic battle between the Northern Coalition political conglomeration and its rival Russian power block from the drone regions was quickly overcome with lag. Although it's impressive that the server didn't crash, pilots reported delays of several minutes between issuing a command and the server's carrying it out. In a new devblog, CCP Veritas looks at exactly what went on behind the scenes at that colossal battle. While we play EVE Online in realtime, the server essentially queues up our commands and processes them in order. If the load becomes so high that more commands enter the queue every second than can be processed, our commands begin to be delayed and we experience that as lag. If you've ever been interested in what goes on under the hood of EVE's massively complex server, this devblog is definitely worth a read. If nothing else, it reinforces the fact that lag is a much more complex issue than we sometimes expect and progress in combating it involves painstaking work. In a future devblog, Veritas will present a historical look at the EVE server's performance and how it's been improved in the last few months as part of CCP's ongoing war on lag.
Killzone 3 has considerably less input lag than its predecessor
Digital Foundry has taken its mathematical approach to examining the deep inner workings of games to whole new heights with is recent lag analysis of the Killzone 3 multiplayer beta. Using a special controller (designed by modder extraordinaire Ben Heck), the DF team measured the exact amount of time that passed between pressing R1 and the in-game gun actually firing a bullet: 116ms. According to the blog, that's about 33ms shorter than the lag present in Killzone 2, which apparently makes a world of difference in twitchy shooters of this ilk. Check out a video of the group's study, as well as a few other odds and ends about the technical side of the beta, over on Eurogamer.
Age of Conan 2.0.7 coming today after extended downtime
If you had your heart set on a little Hyborian hooky this afternoon, go ahead and cancel that sick day and head on in to the office. Funcom is in the process of uploading Age of Conan version 2.0.7 to the live servers, and according to a post on the official boards by senior community manager Tarib, the downtime has been extended from six to a full eight hours (it began early this morning at 7:00 a.m. EDT). The good news is that the patch looks to improve performance in Khitai's Northern Grasslands zone (often called Northern Crashlands due to its low framerates and frequent lockups). While the jury is still out on the success of this aspect of the patch, it's gratifying to see Funcom taking action on the matter. 2.0.7 is also tweaking the ranger class (yes, again), in the seemingly neverending struggle to bring Hyboria's bow and crossbow crowd into line with the rest of the classes. This time it's not a nerf but rather a series of mini-buffs, including more damage for the deft stabs skill, a better snare effect on pin down, and more. You can view the patch notes from the Test Live server, but you'll need to sign in with a Test Live forum account.
Hyperspace Beacon: Testing the SWTOR waters
If you didn't know already, just over a week ago three writers from Massively, including me, traveled to Seattle, Washington for PAX Prime. During that time, besides catching the flu, we were able to catch a glimpse of some of the games that have yet to be released. We were able to play games like TERA, The Force Unleashed II, Guild Wars 2, RIFT, End of Nations, and many, many others. Some were pretty good; others, not-so-much -- but most seemed very polished and perfect for presentation. Of course, you all know I was there to see Star Wars: The Old Republic. I caught a lot of it. There were six of the eight classes available for demo at the gorgeous LucasArts booth. (BioWare did have a booth there, too, but the team was displaying some small game it was trying to get off the ground called Dragon Age 2.) Visitors had a chance to try out the smuggler, trooper, agent, bounty hunter, and both Sith classes. Because of the enormous lines that constantly encircled the booth, I was only able to play three of the classes: smuggler, trooper, and Sith inquisitor. For this edition of the Hyperspace Beacon, I will give you my impressions of the gameplay for those classes. However, I want to take a slightly different look at them. At E3, Massively's editor Seraphina Brennan was able to give her impressions of the smuggler class -- she covered the mechanics and so on. Although I will touch on the combat mechanics, I have decided to focus on some of the features BioWare is famous for: cinematics, character development, and overall storytelling. Follow after the break, and I will give you an honest breakdown of how SWTOR measures up to its predecessors.
TERA's Patrick Wyatt talks lag, security, and an M-rating
TERA is shaping up to be a huge hit with international audiences, and nowhere is this more evident than in En Masse Entertainment's willingness to reach out to fan communities outside the U.S. The latest example comes courtesy of TERAHispano, as they recently sat down with En Masse COO Patrick Wyatt for a round of questions regarding everything from microtransactions, to account security, to lag. Wyatt has lots to say in the lengthy interview, and among the more interesting nuggets is the fact that En Masse expects TERA to ship with an M-rating. He also touches on performance issues, pointing to the Focus Group Tests as evidence that lag won't be an issue for the game's action combat system. "When we built the first Western servers for TERA, we selected a QA datacenter just a few miles from our offices in Seattle, which meant that European players who joined our Focus Group Tests were playing on servers over 5000 miles away. Based on the forum posts, polls, and informal surveys from those events, we didn't see lag problems," Wyatt says. Finally, he reiterates that TERA will not be a microtransaction-based title, and also discusses GameGuard and alternatives to the intrusive anti-cheat software.
Darkfall EU server latency issues to be corrected
Denizens of Darkfall's European shard have been subjected to a rough ride of late, and not just from the title's relentless PvP action. Due to a Storage Area Network hardware failure at Aventurine's third-party hosting center, players have seen high amounts of latency over the last week. The bad news is that Aventurine doesn't have a specific timetable for correcting the problem. The good news is that the company is currently working on it, as well as prepping for future hardware upgrades. "Performance is an extremely serious issue with us and we're constantly working on improvements. Apart from dealing with this specific issue, we are currently working on major performance upgrades for both servers to be added during the upcoming expansion," says Darkfall's Tasos Flambouras on the game's official forums.
EVE Evolved: The war on lag
It seems as though everywhere I go to read about EVE Online, someone is complaining about lag. Throughout the game's seven-year history, developers and server engineers have waged a constant battle against the lag monster. Frequent upgrades and code overhauls have ensured that the capacity of each server cluster increased at pace with the growing subscriber numbers. When the Dominion expansion came, something in it caused lag to get a lot worse. The issue has yet to be corrected and has even spurred some players to put media pressure on CCP to correct the issue. Until recently, the developers at CCP had been very quiet on the topic of lag and their efforts to combat it. Aside from the occasional fleet-fight mass testing event on the test server and the news that there was actually an entire team dedicated to lag, players were left largely in the dark as to what was being done to address the issue. In the absence of strong evidence to the contrary, many players began to assert that EVE's developers weren't working on lag at all. Earlier this week, we posted that CCP was planning a series of devblogs on lag to showcase the progress it's made. In a surprisingly rapid turn-around, four devblogs on lag and another on CCP's core technology groups have already been posted. They cover such topics as server scalability, the results of recent mass testing events, and CCP's new "thin client" testing tool. In this week's EVE Evolved, I introduce each of CCP's four recent devblogs on lag with a quick summary.
Upcoming EVE devblog series to show CCP's lag-busting efforts
With EVE Online's single-shard universe, the server hardware and game code have to be continually updated to cope with the game's constantly expanding playerbase. Each time the server is upgraded, node stability and lag in large fleet battles improves significantly. Unfortunately, this trend of periodic improvements took something of a wrong turn when the Dominion expansion came along. Before Dominion, fleet battles took place with over a thousand ships on each side and no crippling lag or node deaths in sight. Since the expansion's release, however, fleets of only a few hundred have regularly experienced unplayable conditions. Frustrated by CCP's lack of visible progress in tackling lag, members of the EVE community have been making their outrage known. A recent appeal to the gaming media by a few players resulted in the issue getting very high exposure, which could be bad for CCP's public image. CCP issued a response explaining that lag is a high priority, and that there is even an entire development team dedicated to tackling it. Earlier this week, CCP Zulu expanded on CCP's lag-busting efforts in the first of a new EVE devblog series dedicated entirely to lag.
One Shots: Boing!
When it comes to springing up in the air in an MMO, you might immediately think of the super jump travel power in City of Heroes, or perhaps some other superhero game with a similar mechanic. You most likely wouldn't ever think about Dungeons and Dragons Online, but according to today's screenshot from Varun, you can actually bounce yourself up into the air there too! As proof, we have today's weird screenshot taken recently from the game, which he sent in along with this note: "I just read your Suspension (of disbelief) bridge post and wanted to share a similar screenshot from Dungeons and Dragons Online. I am not exactly sure what causes this, but I think if the net lags a bit and you keep on pressing the jump button, 2-3 seconds later you sort of get a super jump!" Have you captured a screenshot of a strange moment from your favorite MMO? If so, why not share it with us? We'd love to see it! Just email it in to us here at oneshots@massively.com along with your name, the name of the game, and a description of what we're seeing in the post. We'll post it out here and give you the credit for sending it in. %Gallery-85937%
Tsunoda downplays lack of rumble in Kinect
Echoing statements made by Sony's Phil Harrison a few months before the introduction of the Dual Shock 3 (specifically, that rumble was a "last-generation feature"), Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda suggested that the lack of rumble from the Kinect camera wasn't a big deal, by suggesting that rumble isn't a big deal, in an interview with Edge. "The overwhelming thing we've discovered is that rumble is such a rudimentary form of haptic feedback," he said. "It's not like a little rumble in your palm is your whole way of interacting with the world – it's not like, oh, I stubbed my toe and I get a little rumble in my palm." The audiovisual presentation of Kinect games, he said, does more to immerse people than rumble, as evidenced by the instinctive reactions he observed from players. "In many of the games we have, people will crash a vehicle and they'll go totally like this [mimes dodging out of the way]! And even people playing games with a controller, there's always people doing this [mimes driving motion]." Tsunoda went on to sort of address the nagging question of lag. "The way we measure 'lag' is by putting people in front of the experience and measuring their thoughts. Either it feels good or it feels sloppy. It's not how many milliseconds, it's: 'Does it feel good? Does it react fast? Does it feel as if you're in control?'" So what is important isn't the amount of lag, but the perception of lag.
Help EVE's developers get to the bottom of fleet lag this Saturday
The down side to EVE Online's truly massive single-server design that puts all players in the same universe is that lag has been a constant problem since the game's launch. For the most part, the game runs smoothly and lag doesn't affect the day-to-day lives of players. It's when too many players congregate in one place that the server node they're on begins to grind to a halt. Circumstances can rapidly go from bad to worse, with server nodes collapsing under the strain and database failures occurring. It's been noticed by players that lag in fleet battles has gotten considerably worse since the Dominion expansion came out. To get to the bottom of the issue, CCP Tanis has been scheduling regular test-server events in an effort to replicate the conditions experienced on the main EVE server. By logging a fleet battle in action, CCP hope to find ways to resolve fleet lag and prevent further lag-causing defects from reaching the main server unnoticed. On Saturday 29th May between 20:00 and 21:00 EVE time, CCP will be running an important hour-long testing session. They're asking players to turn up and help out, as they need at least 300 pilots to begin testing and ideally would want over 500. For information on what the testing consists of and how to access the EVE test-server, visit the official mass testing sticky thread on the EVE forums.
