WAR NDA officially lifted. Post pics and info!

[Calac Oakshield]

Playing on Blood Keep currently level 10 Zealot

[Saban]

Are you now?

Servers where down when i checked <.<

[Drtyrm]

Player collision was as much fun as I thought it would be. I played zealot a bit over the weekend and I'd run from guys in the scenarios and use teammates as moving picks to pull them off me and give my hots/shields time to heal me up. All while mashing that insta-cast direct heal. Man, I might end up being a healer again.

[Zarcath]

Originally Posted by Drtyrm

Player collision was as much fun as I thought it would be. I played zealot a bit over the weekend and I'd run from guys in the scenarios and use teammates as moving picks to pull them off me and give my hots/shields time to heal me up. All while mashing that insta-cast direct heal. Man, I might end up being a healer again.

I've had good and bad collision moments.

It sucks getting blocked by your own team at the start of scenarios when you're all making a mad dash. I've yet to see a "wall" of tanks block a path to protect squishies behind them (maybe only possible in keep sieges). All of the scenarios I played were open fields though, and with the prevalence of bunny hopping, doesn't seem like you can force anyone to stop via collision.

But there were times where I got behind an enemy and starfed back and forth as they attempted to flee, all the while saying "Where you going buddy? where you going". There were also times in the Gate T1 scenario where we cornered enemies from escaping and beat the shit out off.

[Ninajrr]

It sucks getting blocked by your own team at the start of scenarios when you're all making a mad dash.

I was under the impression that collision only existed between enemies, not allies...?

[gremlinz273]

Originally Posted by Ninajrr

I was under the impression that collision only existed between enemies, not allies...?

Your impression is wrong. Although, honestly I think that would be the better way to handle it. Minor pet peeve is the guys that charge out ahead of everyone at the start of a scenario, then stop right at the tunnel to adjust some inventory or action bar forcing everyone to dance around them. It does limit the number of melees that can be beating on you at any time. Overall, though, collision is a huge plus.

[Ninajrr]

Aw, oh well. The least they could do is make ally collision only active when in combat

[Senen]

Ya I'm not a big fan of the collision between allies more times then not I get hung up on one of my own guys while trying to manuever for a better position. The funny thing is one night during testing they had some how bugged the collisions to where everyone was getting hung up pretty bad something about square corners instead of round being added to the char collision boxes. Anyways Spyke the main guy that runs some of the events said the collision is there for one reason. To keep 10 Brightwizards from all stacking up on the same square and forcing them to spread out. I guess its there way of controlling the frontline of combat. I hate it though I'd much rather have collision between myself and the Nme so tanks could form lines to block etc and be more strategic in movement.

[Mist]

I thought I'd hate the collision but it's implemented very well, all things considered. Rarely have rubberbanding issues. In fact, I noticed that player location lag in general was almost non-existent, which was shocking considering how laggy abilities feel.

[Mogley]

New Mark Jacobs post on the VNBoards.

Originally Posted by Mark Jacobs

Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth. happy
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4. We need to improve on anything that makes the UI feel more sluggish than it is.
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

P.S. You wanted SNL references, you got SNL references, lots and lots. happy See if you can spot them all. Hopefully, I get lots of bonus points...

[Zarcath]

It might have been interesting if you could on a group or area level, create/join formations. Some sort of ground template that appears, and if you stand within it you get some sort of defense bonus or create solid collision.

So say 1 tank is up front and he's creating an opportunity for a line defense. If other melee/tanks stand in that line, they create a block of collision (instead of a bunch of individual collisions, where it might be possible for people to slip through).

[Tallyn]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

It might have been interesting if you could on a group or area level, create/join formations. Some sort of ground template that appears, and if you stand within it you get some sort of defense bonus or create solid collision.

So say 1 tank is up front and he's creating an opportunity for a line defense. If other melee/tanks stand in that line, they create a block of collision (instead of a bunch of individual collisions, where it might be possible for people to slip through).

This would be seriously cool. Am I delusional for remembering that they were hoping to implement this at one point?

[Daezuel]

That post covers most of my concerns about the current game however there is no mention of the severe animation bugs. (getting stuck in an animation...happened a TON to everyone I played with so it's not a user issue imo)

I can't tell you how many times I cast my channeled damage spell and watched the animation of the spell continue on to the point it was cast across the entire zone, heck a few times I even had 3 beams stuck on the environment. Was funny watching my Ironbreaker friend get knocked down by Trolls then get stuck in the face down position until he moved, only to go back to that animation when he stopped.

As much as I wish the game was out right now so I could start leveling for real for once, I really think they should have left open beta running to sort out these errors before live.

[Morsakin]

Nice post, Mog. It's good to see they're openly admitting to the downsides of the game and that they're working on fixing them; it's a nice change of pace from it either being not mentioned and totally beat around the bush or made to seem less impacting than it actually is.

[Cinge]

Originally Posted by Zarcath

It might have been interesting if you could on a group or area level, create/join formations. Some sort of ground template that appears, and if you stand within it you get some sort of defense bonus or create solid collision.

So say 1 tank is up front and he's creating an opportunity for a line defense. If other melee/tanks stand in that line, they create a block of collision (instead of a bunch of individual collisions, where it might be possible for people to slip through).

Proper use of Hold the Line and guard, with player collisions can be a awesome sight. Hold the line gives everyone behind the tank something like 45% disrupt rate increase, and dodge/parry increase, along with guard and you could have your tanks lead the way, keep position so the casters are behind them and melee dps around the tanks.

Also good to see they acknowledge all the problem. I have faith in the pathing, as it was fine in regular and CE beta, but broke for the weekend.

CTDs I think I got 3, and 1 other c++ runtime error crash over the course of the weekend. Other then that nada.


Subject of GCD and animation, i still don't understand why they make their UI show 2s, it cannot be that hard to make it show the actual 1.5s. I think this along with their code is what's making it feel so odd at times.

Targeting seems fine, with just the odd "face your defensive target" at random, like 1 out of 200 cast. Has to be a option to turn off that auto reset behind you camera though. It gets annoying, and I'd rather be able to leave the camera behind me looking back, while i run forward, and execute moves via hot keys/mouse and target people. Maybe its some kind of anti kite camera or something.

Emotes are just polish, while fun, are some make or break thing for me. There are alot of emotes though that just give the shrug animation when you do them. Maybe thats what they are talking about and filling in the rest.

The pvp gear thing is odd. If you make it so you have the lvl 10 RR gear, you cannot do t1 or scenarios, whats to stop the guy with the lvl 21 gear doing t2, and onward. I had no problem with the guy with rank 10 gear, hell he cant do it endless as he's getting exp so he is going to level out of it. When you hit 10 you can do the same thing for the 2 levels . If you put that level 10 into t2, now hes fighting people with lvl 14 and lvl 21 gear and alot more abilities, and hell even a extra tactic slot at 20.