Issues as a new player

New or old character doesn’t really matter.

If you are in scenes with lots of avatars and you are playing far from the server & host this NPC hitching is a semi regular occurrence.

It got better with the fix but it didn’t go away.

Why the devs and most US players don’t see it is because they don’t have the distance/ping back from the server.

Since it was so common back in the day it is simply a Pavlovian reflex on my part to exit to single player finish my npc business then exit back to multiplayer. So it wouldn’t even cross my mind to report.

My old suggestion from the Attenwood days would be to VPN in using two PCs one through Asia as first-in-scene the second through Europe and then call a party with rewards and have the the bug hunters all interact with NPCs. Alas, no time and no glory.

So if you have never had issues with looting bodies with double click this won’t be an issue for you. Us over on the other side of the pond use the E-key for good reason.

Hehe. No thank you.

We need the venting and the ranting and the complacency.
I’ve reported hundreds and hundreds of bugs. But if I couldn’t have some venting, ranting and complacency between that then I would have been long gone.

It is not that we couldn’t nor that we might not do it in the future but it isn’t really healthy to bother every time for every thing.

So I wouldn’t demand that anyone else should put up or shut up. It just isn’t a healthy approach for having fun.

 

that is no longer possible in the outskirts. they're forced multi. the new players that most need that workaround to get started in the game can't do it, because apparently they all have to suffer together.

 

Agreed.

 

If you are literally watching a major bug happen that the devs thought they had fixed just last month, and choose to not point them to the source, but instead complain about it to other players... well then it's on you.

 

Nah, again that is not healthy in the long run.

Now if the success rate of such reports would be high then yes I’d agree more with you. However over the years the success rate has decreased and decreased.
As such it has become a game of diminishing returns.

So each time one sees something one has to make a risk calculation of how much time it would take vs the likelihood of success and how much it bothers you.
Otherwise you’d spend all game time reporting stuff and none actually playing and enjoying yourself.
Where intermittent stuff with high repro time or investigation is less likely to reach the threshold vs stuff one can take a print screen and report right away.

You can easily see this behavior in the bug sector where worldbuilding stuff is much more popular to report because the effort is lower and the success rate is very much higher.

So if the choice is between ‘must report’ attitude between players and faster burnout of players leaving forum and game vs let people rant and complain but keep the player in forum and game. Then I’d take the latter any day.
We are here for entertainment anyway, any bug reports and fixes is cream on top of the cake.

So Jaesuns approach if using ‘please’ and asking for links etc encouraging a report or data to report is a much healthier one then the put up or shut up black&white fallacy.

Now me personally, since I’m a besserwisser I do enjoy to just do a big dive and meta analysis every now and then and repro and investigate to actually give great bug reports, and I know you do to but for different reasons. However most people are not wired like that. So just because we are then one shouldn’t judge others based on that.
This since the vast majority don’t even visit the forums to rant about it. So those who at least do that should be encouraged not discouraged. Because after enough rants some do report stuff, or it gets picked up by someone else, or sometimes even seen by the devs and looked into.

Hopefully this is a marathon and not a sprint. So you gotta keep energy for the distance.

 

THREE of us saying "Hey please report that, that's a big one that's being watched!"

"Meh, I don't see the point anymore."

Fine. I don't see the point in responding either then.

 

Well if the devs would test their fixes or play through their own game rather then relying on players, especially new players then we would have less issues. He only saw the issue from a stream yet you are calling him out for not reporting an issue. He was only sharing his observation and wasn’t the one who had the issue. So his bug report wouldn’t been much help. Now he could just email or PM a dev and say hey check out this stream that shows a bunch of bugs.

 

Share with the devs. They were having an incredibly hard time isolating that issue and couldn't reproduce it themselves.

It takes two seconds to post the URL and a timestamp in the CRITICAL section of the bug forums.

 

Ah, but then, I WASN'T complaining about the bug. I was complaining about the attitude of "I don't experience this, so it doesn't exist" and the insistence that the quest system works just fine and the only problem is user stupidity.

Also, I never mentioned the quest turn-in problem. I wasn't talking about that one. As I said, she "couldn't do any of the Soltown quests because ALL of the NPCs were doing the quit-conversation-too-soon thing." I never mentioned quest turn-in. She couldn't even start the quests because the NPCs were exiting from the conversation before giving her time to get the quest in the first place.

And if that bug was ever fixed, I missed it, because as far as I know, the devs were still saying they couldn't reproduce it. There was one thread several weeks ago where one of them (was it WizardSmoke? I forget) thought he'd found the trail, but I don't remember seeing anything come through patch notes. By all means, if THAT problem was actually fixed and has re-occurred, tell me and I'll be happy to report it. But no, I'm not going to keep wasting my energy or nagging the devs by reporting things that have already been reported. Especially when I can't give them anything detailed because I'm not the one experiencing it. Especially when it's happening at 2:30 AM. No one here is paying me that much.

@Sulaene Moon -- Just for the record, I am most thoroughly not a "he".

 

JIRA 64975

 

Some of us reported that we suspected the two issues were related. The devs didn't respond to that.

 

Where is the link to this video? Windows suddenly closing would be a new issue. I've not seen this happen? I certainly would like to see it happening if you would only provide a link to the video.

Is the "Windows Suddenly Closing" completely repeatable? Or Random, or?

 

Your pain with the questing system is felt by us all. Its pitiful. Ive been playing since 2013 and have zero inclination to complete the Truth, Love, or Courage quests, or any other quests for that matter. The quests are so broken at their worst, and "beta" / "rough draft" at their best, that they stand a fair chance at stopping new players from seeing the beauty of every other aspect of this game.

Please stick around, everything else about Novia is pretty cool. Quests do give good exp and items, if you can tolerate them (I cant!).

 

Oh, for heaven's sake. It is NOT a new issue. Once again, you've decided that since you don't experience it, neither does anybody else -- even though it was mentioned in the exact same thread you linked above.

No, I am not going to go hunt up a link. I already gave you all the information necessary to find the link yourself if you actually thought it was worth the effort to report it. You obviously don't -- neither do I.

 

.


That sounds like a challenge...

Muhahahahaha, challenge accepted
*runs for the wild nether regions of twitchdom*
clickety
night before friday...hmm..
clickety
...hmmm...
click click click
skip skip skip

Aha!

Spoiler: twitch link - don't click unless you want to listen to cussin and bad jokes and twitchdom

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/477489461?t=00h33m36s

*waits for the thunderous aplause*
*waits*
*waits*
*waits*
*stomps foot*
*waits*
*waits*
*waits*
*watches tumbleweed pass by*
*waits*
*waits*
*waits*
Oh bother.
*kicks a stone and walks away*

 

@Bedawyn

I was just skipping to find the exact npc moment but as I was skipping I thought it was nice how you and others was trying to help her out getting over the first stumbling blocks of stuff etc and showing her around, especially liked that you showed her the Desolis/Epitaph scene since it is one of my favorites.
Didn't watch the whole things though, was just skipping for npc action.

But anyway, nicely done and keep up the good work!

 

Agreed that it is not a new issue.
The closing window thingie I get maybe once a month. But don't recognize it in Soltown, there it is more totally unresponsive NPCs. However the closing one I'd get a lot over in Ardoris about a year ago when I was doing a lot of deco over there. The window closing thingie is usually if you are loading a scene just at the point of a schedule change, and you are far from the Host of the scene ie you are not first-in-instance. Also most likely some folks was spamming the training dummies as well so one would have checks for combat etc.

Like you recommended I usually just restart the client which resolves it.

 

@Spoon, well, I'd give you the thunderous applause. And I can't take credit for Desolis, that was Hemswal and Alphaine (haven't even been there myself yet). But I do like watching the newb streams, and since I've taken a nauseating amount of characters through them in the past 6 months and play comprehensively, trying to not skip anything, the NUE is the one area of the game I feel I know enough about to help others, so I do try.

And yes, Meti's stream is rather full of cussing and bad jokes and raunchy talk until a few of her viewers have logged off for the night. Normally, that would turn me off a stream, but Meti manages to be fun despite it.

???? Could you elaborate on how this might affect the conversation windows? Not disagreeing, just don't understand the relevance. I can sort of see a connection, if we're right about it being a network issue, but only barely, shapes seen through a fog.

 

Sure, I will edit this post with details later on, just browsing with my phone right now so writing long posts is a ***..

EDIT
@Bedawyn

I took this text mostly from an old post of mine and rewrote parts of it:

So why would this affect NPC dialog?

In the generic scenario this is since the dialog result is coming from the server, but the movements of the npc is executed locally on your client with frequent movement sync requests to the host client.
So if the npc is supposed to be walking around but is interrupted in walking around by a player, then the sync queues trigger.


So in the specific case of the closing window then it is my theory that latency plays a big part in a three stepper (don't know exactly how the code works, just observing the behavior) so my guesstimate would be
1.
You load a scene, you get data from both server side and client host side (or you are in the same scene but which for some reason experience a latency spike, for instance lots of area-effects spells)
2.
there is a schedule change, all NPCs get their behavior updated and want to do something else, this means data push from server to all existing host clients plus other clients
3.
you interact with the npc - your dialog goes server side to Austin, but the movements of the pc are executed locally and synced with the host client
4.
while you talk to the npc there is a mismatch between your client<>server latency vs your client <> host latency
5.
the npc on the host thinks that it can move away and sends new coordinates, those coordinates are synced with the server and sent to your client
6.
The dialog response comes from server, but, the NPC coordinates doesn't match
dialog closes (or in other cases times out, or in other cases is unresponsive etc etc)


So why exiting the scene and loading it again seems to work
- magic, it could simply be a spike/timing issue so that it simply required you to wait - which the reload provides as a side effect
- when you load the scene again the npc definitions are once again synced from server and host client, thus resolving lockups
- when you close the scene your queues are emptied and start over
- you might have triggered a new instance and thus received a new host client
- the mmo gods of yorn looked down and took mercy in your plight



One thing to note was that the streamer actually restarted her computer which would also reset her isp connection, which could trigger new paths from her machine to both server and host client as well.