Release 16 Instructions

• Elven Warrior Armor: This armor was previously just a clothing item. Now it has stats (equivalent to Augmented Plate).

Woot.

 

I completely understand your frustration and I am very sorry you found the request to read the instructions and known issues offensive. We in no way meant this to be an accusation nor an excuse for our slippage, nor did we ever directly accuse you the players of anything. It was simply a request to read the documents provided. We continue to get a large number of support requests that could have been solved by the person simply reading the FAQ, known issues, or instructions. This was taking time away from development from a very small team building a very large project.

I do understand how it can be quite frustrating to feel ignored when you are reporting issues. Please trust us that we do read every single bug posted and if we can verify them we do enter them in. Where we have failed is to let you know that we are logging all of this. So going forward I have asked my team to post a simple statement to each bug they look at. In some cases it might just say "bug entered" because we are having to go through thousands of these.

Please understand though that we have to prioritize every single bug against all the new content we have to create. I do this prioritization on a daily basis and it deals with thousands of data points. That means many of the issues you guys report will go unresolved for months but please trust that I am doing my best to balance them against everything else.

Going forward I have asked some of our community leaders to provide me with prioritized lists of top 10 issues from each release so we can better prioritize. You can see the results of that in this very release including: combat speed fix, pledge reward deletion, double death penalty, etc.

 

my freeshard folded. left me nowhere to complain....gr.... this is a lotta misguided anger really i'll amend the post. my apologies.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/f...rting-forum-should-be-organized-better.23052/

it still makes me giggle the abbreviation...

the majority of my frustrations stem from improper implementation of the forum. and if the known bugs actually listed all the known bugs (which no one would read anyway because of the length. how ARE you gonna win, anyway?) i thought that maybe you wouldnt have any ? taking up your time

but now i dont know anymore. i'm going to bed.

 

Ooh, enemies will open doors now? I wonder if spiders and crocodiles will open doors, or if it's limited to more intelligent baddies that have hands with opposing thumbs.
It would be cool if some undead resurrected more like zombies - not smart enough to wield weapons or open doors, can barely walk but too dumb to die, and really really won't stop chasing you!
Can't wait to test this stuff out! Thanks for the excellent update!

 

If they refuse to stay dead, does this mean we can't loot them unless we're mages?

 

Interior Object Culling:

If i pass a building with windows on the basement will they all look empty?
I rather load longer a scene like a town then having to walk through a town that feels liveless from the outside.
I rather upgrade my computer then this idea.
I for example loved the idea of my tavern house with lots of windows so players could see players activity from outside, and my decoration.

Not all of us have a problem with loading times. Some of us rather wait but get more atmosphere.

Only reading it makes me want to force player who complain about loading time to read the book "Momo".



I rather go into a good restaurant and wait for a nice meal then rush a cheeseburger.


Gesendet von iPhone mit Tapatalk

 

I definitely agree that empty houses is a step backwards, but adding the system to help performance may be a step forward in the long run, with a little work. Example: The system might be a good step toward possibly only rendering 'line of sight' items.

 

Yeah, I agree about the Interior Object Culling. If I look in a window from outside and see nothing, that will kinda suck.

 

Ditto... maybe the interior object culling could be an optional video selection?

 

From the Published_Player_Instructions we have this quote: "Other scenes are specific only to your Avatar and members of your party. You can identify these scenes because a popup that reads “Solo/Party Only” will appear when you hover your mouse over the entrance door or teleporter. These are called Adventure Scenes. Examples are the Kingsport Sewers and the Ravensmoor Dungeon at the south end of the Vale. Most adventure scenes are accessed from inside other scenes rather than directly from the overworld." But in Darkstarr's post here, the one we just read this is said:
"7 New Adventure Scenes: The Perennial Coast and Grunvald regions are filled with places to adventure and gather resources. New scenes include:

• East Perennial Trail
• Southern Grunvald Barrens
• Northern Grunvald Barrens
• Savrenoc Timberland
• Deep Savrenoc Timberland
• Savrenoc Stronghold
• Necropolis Entrance

• 6 Improved Adventure Scenes: We circled back to new scenes we added in R15to make them more visually distinct from each other. The modified scenes include:
  • West Perennial Trail
  • South Celestial Wetlands
  • North Celestial Wetlands
  • South Brightbone Woods
  • North Brightbone Woods
  • West Veiled Swamp" On the one hand we hand we have it said that Adventure Scenes are Solo/Party only, on the other we have "7 New Adventure Scenes" and "6 Improved Adventure Scenes" I may be wrong, but I somehow didn't get the impression that they were focusing on making that much focus on Solo/Party only zones. Oh well, I'll chalk this one up to Chaos.

"This also means we removed the Lunar Rift from Owl’s Head." Sammegarian wonders, will this be reflected in a future entry in Lady FireLotus' "Through the Lunar Rift" journal series? (Obviously this is more a question for Lady FireLotus herself than for Lord Darkstarr)

"Soltown is now located closer to Solace Bridge and will be the location you go to directly after Solace Bridge" Important information for folks such as myself who have choose to visit the starting city (Formerly Braemar) to greet new players as they come in and provide them advice/guidance (And perhaps a suit of platemail, to protect them from the dangers that await them).

Darkstarr's post: "Repair Kits Scale: Repair kits now repair items in an amount related to the value of item. This means using them on high level items will now make an actual difference."

GingerLee's Post:
"Repair Kits Scale: Repair kits now repair items in an amount related to the value of item. This means using them on high level items will now make an actual difference.

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU......"

I wonder if GingerLee actually understands correctly what this means, in the Published_Player_Instructions it is more clear: "Repair kits repair less durability on more expensive items, due to the rare and exotic materials used in their construction." This means using repair kits are even less sensible, it is already common habit to replace gear rather than repair it, this just reinforces the validity of this practice.

• "Obsidian Golem: These creatures are personifications of the rare obsidian. As if the shardfalls were not dangerous enough already!" Now we get to take the fight to the ShardFalls, literally.

• "Undead Resurrection Behavior: Undead creatures will now appear to die, only to rise again (they are undead after all). For now they will do this at all times, but in further releases this behavior will be slightly randomized and will mostly only be triggered when Undead are killed by physical means (i.e. magic will usually destroy them the first time). We will also use this behavior as the basis for the Phoenix behavior (we hope to get the Phoenix in R17). This behavior we affectionately call the “I’m getting better!” behavior."
• Will we be able to continue to beat on them after they've fallen? From Buffy the Vampire Slayer :
  Xander: "So, we Bronzin' it tonight?"
  Willow: "Wednesdays, kinda beat."
  Xander: "Well, we could grind our enemies into talcum powder with a sledgehammer, but, gosh, we did that last night."

• "A.I. and Door Improvements: Enemies will now reliably open a door that you closed behind you. Yes, this means the various clever tactics used in Vertas Pass (AKA the “hind behind the door” maneuver) won’t work anymore."
• All I can say, this makes me happy.

• "Ambush Creature Nameplate Hidden: Nameplates for creatures waiting in ambush are hidden until they stand up." Also makes me happy, one of the first things I took note of when ambush was implemented was: Oh yeah look, a full lifebar, that one will be getting up to attack me.

• "Double Death Penalty Fix: If you died and then resurrected and then changed scenes, the game was inflicting the death debuff and durability penalties a second time. This issue is now fixed." Well done, I have been a victim of that myself.

"Animal Charm (now just for Animals): Players will no longer be affected by the Animal Charm spell (even though technically humans are just clever animals)" Does this mean that when taming is implemented, we won't be able to tame players?

"Player Books Delayed: Player books were another victim of Unity 5 transition. We plan to circle back to them in Release 18." I am probably the only player (that enjoys writing) that is happy about this. I have taken it upon myself to go through all the in game books, again and again, and make editing notes for every single one. Each and every book that gets added to the game would be one more to edit, with players able to add their own books to the game at will......I'd go insane.

• "Performance: This represented the second largest amount of tech work in R16 and has resulted in a major increase in performance. In some cases we have increased frames per second by more than 50%. Also, performance is not as dependent upon shadow distances any longer, so these have been increased. Additionally load times should be generally better (and will be much better in R17)."
• For me, any FPS is fine, it's when FPS (Frames Per Second) becomes SPF (Seconds Per Frame) that I start to go crazy. (Yes, I have played games where this has been a legitimate issue)

• "Visual Quality: Efforts to improve visual quality are ongoing. We will continue to iterate on these until we have highly competitive visuals." One day people will look back at games like Skyrim and think: That game is really ugly.

• "Persistence: As part of development we will need to periodically wipe data including characters, property, etc. As we near official launch the frequency should decrease, but there will definitely be a wipe right before launch. So consider everything gained during early access temporary." I look forward to that final wipe. That said, I am not in a hurry for it to get here, do it right, besides, I have to come up with my character backstory and such, I need all the time I can get. Also: "So consider everything gained during early access temporary." Except the Grand Tour Hats, right?

The Hendoman said: ↑

my favorite part was where Dev's are basically giving us grief because we 'dont read the known issues' WHATEVER....


How many of the bugs *I* have reported that are ignored, and are NOT listed in the known bugs section? Every one. That's how many. So hey, before you start dressing down the players, please remember you set up a broken infrastructure from like 1991 and there is no reason to blame us for what you dropped the ball on.


i mean, REally. to say that WE are the reason the game wasnt ready on time is asinine. when you re-read that first section, you will see that they say they are far from release becasue players are wasting Dev time by making them chase down bugs and known issues. come on.

i am trying Sooooooo hard to remain positive and promote this thing. you guys are making it SOOOOO hard by saying you are wasting time tracking down known issues. Very few of these bugs are replied to. aren't there like 345 bugs and 6 have a reply from a dev?

The Hendoman​

Darkstarr:
"I completely understand your frustration and I am very sorry you found the request to read the instructions and known issues offensive. We in no way meant this to be an accusation nor an excuse for our slippage, nor did we ever directly accuse you the players of anything. It was simply a request to read the documents provided. We continue to get a large number of support requests that could have been solved by the person simply reading the FAQ, known issues, or instructions. This was taking time away from development from a very small team building a very large project.

I do understand how it can be quite frustrating to feel ignored when you are reporting issues. Please trust us that we do read every single bug posted and if we can verify them we do enter them in. Where we have failed is to let you know that we are logging all of this. So going forward I have asked my team to post a simple statement to each bug they look at. In some cases it might just say "bug entered" because we are having to go through thousands of these.

Please understand though that we have to prioritize every single bug against all the new content we have to create. I do this prioritization on a daily basis and it deals with thousands of data points. That means many of the issues you guys report will go unresolved for months but please trust that I am doing my best to balance them against everything else.

Going forward I have asked some of our community leaders to provide me with prioritized lists of top 10 issues from each release so we can better prioritize. You can see the results of that in this very release including: combat speed fix, pledge reward deletion, double death penalty, etc."

Well, a lot of time is used up by repeated reportings of the same bug, which is caused at least in part by people not reading the known issues segment. A lot of the time they spent on rereading reports of the same bugs they already knew about, it could have been used to, well, read reports of bugs they were not yet aware of at the time (Yes, perhaps even yours). But where was that time spent? Reading new reports of bugs they already knew about, reports about bugs that, had the player already read the Known Issues, that player would have known that the Devs were already well aware of that particular bug. Personally I read the Published_Known_Issues and Published_Player_Instructions each Release, not just the highlighted green sections denoting new changes, but the whole thing, refreshing anything I've forgotten. It has been a good thing, sometimes I will encounter a bug, but already know that Portalarium is fully aware of said bug, because it was listed in the Known_Issues, so I move on, rather than tax more of their time by duplicating reports they already have plenty of. That said, I can understand other people being less inclined to read the Published Known Issues and Published Player Instructions, not everyone has as much free time as I do, I currently am unemployed, and therefore have a bunch of free time, I can read all day, should I feel so inclined, at least until I rejoin the ranks of those with a job. (I've spent the past 8 hours reading this post/the known issues/instructions/other posts related to Release 16, obviously I have too much free time) That said, Hendoman, I can understand your concern, but give them a break, they are a skeleton crew trying to man a giant operation, and reading the KnownIssues/Instructions is really a good suggestion, if you can manage to find the time. Starr, and all of Portalarium, good job so far, you continue to impress.

Miracle Dragon : "Ooh, enemies will open doors now? I wonder if spiders and crocodiles will open doors, or if it's limited to more intelligent baddies that have hands with opposing thumbs.
It would be cool if some undead resurrected more like zombies - not smart enough to wield weapons or open doors, can barely walk but too dumb to die, and really really won't stop chasing you!
Can't wait to test this stuff out! Thanks for the excellent update!" It would be amusing if anything and everything could open doors, I had in fact wondered this myself. On the other hand, if only intelligent baddies could open doors, you might get used to only humanoids opening doors, then one day you are running from a dragon, you get through a door, close the door........Boom, dragon opens the door, Surprise!

4everlost : "If they refuse to stay dead, does this mean we can't loot them unless we're mages?" Oh, that seems like a good question, I'd like to know that too.

Myrcello : "Interior Object Culling:

If i pass a building with windows on the basement will they all look empty?
I rather load longer a scene like a town then having to walk through a town that feels liveless from the outside.
I rather upgrade my computer then this idea.
I for example loved the idea of my tavern house with lots of windows so players could see players activity from outside, and my decoration.

Not all of us have a problem with loading times. Some of us rather wait but get more atmosphere.

Only reading it makes me want to force player who complain about loading time to read the book "Momo".
(I left out Myrcello's video, my post is already over-doing it.)
"I rather go into a good restaurant and wait for a nice meal then rush a cheeseburger."

This concerns me aswell, I like seeing the little details, being able to sneak a peek is nice. Also, will this be everything on the Lot, or *just* inside the house/building? Scenario: One person stand just inside a lot, another just outside the lot. "This is an amazing garden." says person A, just inside the confines of the lot. "What garden?" asks person B, standing just outside the confines of the lot, not five feet away.

Musaab Osman : "Yeah, I agree about the Interior Object Culling. If I look in a window from outside and see nothing, that will kinda suck."
I agree.

Sara Dreygon : "Ditto... maybe the interior object culling could be an optional video selection?" I second this motion.

Now, I really need to stop, my post is becoming dangerously close to being as long as Darkstarr's original post itself. I am sorry, I am so, so sorry.

 

I want to see in window objects too, but as @Miracle Dragon said it may be for future line of sight adjustments. I don't need my computer to draw all the things in your house I can't see right now.

 

I have a question about dungeons. Will we ever see a dungeon where we see others in it outside our groups for Episode 1...something like the dungeons in UO? Or will they always be solo or group only dungeons?

 

There will be some open dungeons at some point where you can see multiple parties

 

Thanks!

 

I understand all the concerns about interior culling but there really is no other way to get performance acceptable on bigger cities like Ardoris. And remember Player Owned Metropolis is BIGGER than Ardoris!

With that said we are going to attempt to provide and option to turn this off (it will default to on) in a patch tomorrow. Also in further releases we will tweak it so it won't affect things on balconies, roofs, porches, etc.

 

Fixed in the player instructions now. Good catch

 

They eventually die and can be looted, just not upon the first death

 

interior culling i not a big issue imho, as long as ecxterior items stay visible at long distance (so long as you load them by visiting the lot first) it is great. I can see BTB arena from my ranged arena on The Brave Coast and love it! It would be nice if these performance options stayed options.

 

exterior items in the yard are not affected but for now items on balconies, porches and roofs are (will get fixed in R17)

 

I noticed in the QA test items on the personal dock leading to a houseboat in Ardoris would appear as I got close to a lot, then dissapear as I got farther away from the lot. (a matter of 10 meters or so). Didn't get a chance to test various graphics settings to see if that changed the proximity..