Release 31 has made the game unplayable...

After updating and trying the changes of release 31 I am extremely disappointed. I'm to the point that I can't even play the game any longer. I was with a full group of high level, extremely experienced players, and we weren't even able to enjoy the game. After 2 hours of testing and play, everyone agreed that they couldn't continue on. Until this release is fixed, I can't even consider logging in to the game to experience the frustration that it has become.

1. Crashing so often is ridiculous, and having to remove my cape is NOT a legitimate fix. (Somewhat fixed)
2. In your attempt to buff earth, water, and death you have now somehow broken them. They are all weaker and not effective against enemies any longer. My earthquake is doing less damage, as is my searing ray, and death magic is completely useless as a heal now (and is doing less damage).
3. Whatever change you made to melee, requiring me to hit "T" with each new enemy makes the game experience much worse.
4. Focus drains entirely too fast now.
5. Removing the ability to walk with the mouse has also taken away from a positive game experience. (Fixed.)
6. At level 91, with as high as my skills are, I am "missing" enemies way too often with my melee strike.
7. Don't even get me started on the Player vs Player experience. For reasons unknown, I am barely doing any damage now with both melee and magic.

I could continue on, but those are the major issues. Until they are addressed I can't even continue playing. The game has lost all of its fun factor for me. Please fix what has been done...

Edit...

8. When trying to rotate the camera in combat and it shoots up to a view of the sky is extremely annoying.
9. Lowering the stun time of air spells but increasing the chance of them stunning essentially buffed the tree, instead of nurfing it. Magic is completely unbalanced and melee doesn't compete against other ranged skills in PvP.

Edit...

10. Weapon durability is going down way too fast and armor way too slow. Balance!!!

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11. Unable to add people to my friends list or guild. Typing in name and hitting enter no longer works? (Fixed, had to use "/allowzone" command to get them working)

Edit...

I found out that the devs did put in a temp fix to the crashes. Go to the bottom of the game menu and check "disable cloth". Since I've done this I haven't crashed once. Good job devs! This gives me some hope back.

Edit...

On a positive note. Great job on the permission changes. This was done very nicely.

 

D I T T O

 

I have not even been around for a while (due to outside influences) and I pop in today - and all the negativity from everywhere (and I mean everywhere), all I see is that there is something significantly wrong here. I now way should there be so much back sliding. I have yet so see anything positive from this release - graphics, system, AI, . . . . .

Something in the development process is broken if at the last publish before the final wipe there is so much negativity from every side - PvP, PvE, and even those that play alone and just want to craft.

????

Port?

 

5 at least I hear was an error that will be fixed with a patch. Small condolence I know..

I guess we can't expect every release to be improvements all around. Not that I have anything bad to say about R31 but I haven't had a lot of time in-game yet.

 

Yes game is very unplayable. Crashes are 10x more frequent, monsters don't even fight unless you are standing on top of them. What irritates me is Portalarium was aware of these problems in the prerelease of R31 and they decided to rush it out anyhow. Another typical thing I can't stand to see designers do just because final wipe is coming up soon. My suggest for Portalarium is delay final wipe and rollback to R30 when it was less buggy until you can get these problems corrected.

Secret to keeping your gamers happy is don't rush the product.

 

They didn't "just rush it out anyhow".. it was going to get released on the last Thursday of the month just like every other release before it has been the last Thursday of every month. If they need to delay launch I'm sure they'll delay launch but they're not going to postpone a regular release that's still in pre-alpha. It's our job as backers to play-TEST.. that means every now and then we'll get a release that isn't as polished as we'd like it to be. That includes final wipe.

 

I take the cloak off, I haven't had any crash since then. The issue has to do with Unity engine renderer for that nifty clothes movement (AKA "clothes sim"), which will throw memory access violation (due to Unity using 32-bit stuff when they're supposed to use 64-bit) if you wear stuff like cloaks, long dress, etc.

 

I am going to say R31 was already pretested and reports of crashes were much higher in the R31 test then in the previous release. If this is the case, why did it get released? It is hardly worth testing and working out the bugs if a person can't stay in game longer then 30 seconds to do so.

 

I have had several guildies test this theory and it does not hold true. Cloak or no cloak, crashes are still frequent. I will say however, the crashes seemed more frequent when larger groups were formed and fighting began. When I was in town and doing my own thing the first hour of playing I did not crash one single time.

 

I'm having a really good time playing the game. Of course, I'm not level 90 whatever and I don't have any expectations of power from before. But from my point of view (very low level) it's fun and the changes are fine.

There's a lot of combat, crafting, and economic balance needed still. But I'll say it again, in a DPS centric game, if you increase the power of one thing, you're decreasing the power of everything else. By design, any balancing that we do will be like this, forever.

 

Because the game isn't in a post-launch state and development continues?

 

You fail to see the point. Portalarium knew releasing R31 was going to lead to non stop crashing. Why not fix the crashing problem first so players can actually test the new content and report the other bugs they run into.

 

Lucky! I crashed at least five times without having gotten a cloak as a starting character this release.

 

I'm very curious, and with all do respect, what exactly are you doing at "a low level" that is fun for a sustainable amount of time? And you don't find the changes to combat and movement at all unpleasant?

 

It has been reported elsewhere that the CTD issues relate to the recent updates to the Unity engine that the Unity engineers (not Portalarium only) need to fix. Alas, it sounds like that is taking more time than hoped.

 

This is my experience with a low level character as well.

I don't find it unpleasant at all. The target reticle experience improved with game play for me. It can be a little wonky at times, but hopefully that improves. I usually do not use the mouse for movement, so am not affected by that (its a known bug).

 

I really don't know how long the crashing has been an issue. I have really only been around since January. Has this been an ongoing issue since day one? IF so, I would think in the years it's taken to progress this far, the crashing fix would be number one priority. Not only is it a blocker for testing the game, but it also a royal headache and many people will just log out for a night and try again the next day. Worst then that is the solution is probably a 0 instead of a 1 in some bit of code somewhere. Ahhh, if it were only that simple lol. I suppose none of this is very productive towards solving the problem but if they can tell me what I can do to help figure out this crash bug I will happily do everything I can to MAKE my game crash just to figure it out.

 

And here I was thinking that was just me - something whacky with my mouse setup or OS X. It's high annoying, particularly if you are in the middle of melee.

 

The last few releases have been reasonably stable as far as crashes / hangs go. This release is a major step backwards in stability. Given the amount of mention made of mods to Unity, my suspicions rest there. We'll see what the devs say.

 

Who is missing whose point may be a subject of some debate here. IF the game was in a post-launch state you'd have a point. As it is.. every time someone crashes that's more information they can use to track down the problems and we all knew this was going to still be an issue from the get go as they've been telling us they're still issues they're tracking down in Unity. Which incidentally is mainly on Unity's end.. not SotAs.. so what value would it be to hold off the release while waiting for Unity to fix things on their end?