performance-issues
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Wizardry Online compensates players for performance issues
For those put out by Wizardry Online's performance issues as of late, SOE has posted assurance that the worst is behind everyone: "Our engineers have been working tirelessly to address the issues and we're confident that you will have a better experience now." The studio is offering compensation for the inconvenience starting with a 300 Station Cash credit to players who logged into Wizardry Online before today. SOE is also handing out free seven-day Dimento Medals in the game. Finally, players who subscribed before March will see a seven-day membership credit added to their accounts.
Performance tweaks coming to Fallen Earth
We announced just last week that popular post-apocalyptic sandbox title Fallen Earth had been released on Steam. Well, opening that can of worms seems to have taken its toll on many of the game's more populated areas, causing performance issues and crashes for some players. Needless to say, GamersFirst is not about to let that fly. In fact, GamersFirst's Napalm stopped by the game's official forums earlier today in order to notify players of some small tweaks that are being made to the game in order to solve these performance issues. For starters, Embry Crossroads and all starter towns are being moved onto "much, much beefier hardware," which "will have an immediate impact, and should decrease the amount of lag that players are seeing in those areas." Improvements are also being made to server memory management, and the studio is even upgrading to a "more capable branch of the xScape engine" that should hopefully allow the game to handle a higher number of players in any given area. For the full details on the improvements, just click on over to the official announcement below.
BioWare responds to The Old Republic performance issues
Many Star Wars: The Old Republic players have raised complaints on the official forums about the game's technical performance. A disconcertingly large number of users report poor framerates despite lowering the game's graphic settings or running the game on a high-end PC. BioWare, however, is not convinced that there's anything wrong with the game, and instead the company asserts that users' lame rigs must be to blame. OK, not really. But game director James Ohlen told Eurogamer that "most players aren't really having performance concerns" and chalks the reported performance issues up to low-end hardware. He goes on to add that "[the team] knows that it's important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for [the team is] to grow [its] service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines." In light of this, the studio has a team of developers who are devoted to fixing performance-inhibiting bugs, so if all goes well, we poor low-end-rig-users will be able to play the game comfortably soon enough.
Black Prophecy community letter addresses known issues, item shop, and the future
Hold up just a minute there, space cowboy. Gamigo's Patrick Streppel has released a new community letter, which addresses a few questions and grievances that have been raised by Black Prophecy players. The letter first takes time to address some known issues with the game. Foremost of said issues is the acknowledgement that with the game's first major content update, many users began to experience large performance issues. Streppel states that fixing these issues is numero uno on the team's priority list but that it "cannot promise immediate improvement" due to the fact that the source of the issue is "spread across several internal game systems." Next up is the touchy subject of the item shop. Players have long decried the game's cash shop for being too expensive while simultaneously failing to give players an adequate description of what exactly they're spending their money on. In response, the team has lowered item prices and will proceed to alter item descriptions "in order to give [players] a clearer picture of what [they] are actually buying." The letter then gives players a brief glimpse into the game's future. The next episode of the game features warzones, which are "a brand new PvP experience" allowing players to duke it out with the opposing faction for control of key territories. Conquering these warzones will grant players XP, rewards in the form of exclusive upgrade blueprints, and "greater individual and group powers" for the victorious faction. For the full letter, which includes further details about the warzone system and more detailed discussions of the game's known issues, click on through the link below to the official forums.
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.
27-inch iMacs having performance issues?
It's not at all clear what the root cause of the problem is, but we've noticed a big uptick in people complaining about performance issues on new 27-inch iMacs on Apple's support boards. The most common symptom seems to be incredibly slow Flash video playback, but people are also claiming that there's a bug forcing the hard drive to spin down, that there's a corrupted Snow Leopard build preinstalled, and even that the problem is bad permissions, which is basically how an OS X user gives up trying to figure things out. Apple hasn't said anything yet, but neither of the 27-inchers we have here are having problems, so we're keeping our fingers crossed while we wait for an official resolution. Video of the issue after the break. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in] Read - First Apple Discussions thread Read - Second Apple Discussions thread
Select realms to undergo maintenance (updated!)
Drysc reports that a number of realms are under investigation for performance issues and will be undergoing a scheduled maintenance at 5:00 AM PDT on Wednesday, March 12 with a foreseeable downtime of 1 hour (update: Zorayn notes that downtime will be extended to 2 hours as opposed to one). As Drysc edits the thread, realms are added (or removed) regularly. From a quick perusal of the realms, it seems as though it is the Nightfall Battlegroup that is affected. Blizzard currently lists the affected realms as follows:Aerie PeakAltar of StormsAlterac MountainsAnvilmarArygosBlackwing LairDeathwingDemon SoulDoomhammerGnomereganIcecrownJaedenarKel'ThuzadLethonOnyxiaSentinelsTanarisThe Venture CoUldamanUndermineDrysc further notes that other Battlegroups are under close observation and will be taken down for maintenance should any issues arise that might require it.
