OpticNerve wrote on Oct 19, 2021, 15:20:
Amazon Game Studios needs to give some sort of incentive for players to join a "losing" faction. Right now there is absolutely no reason to stick with a faction that is losing all of the wars and to not just jump ship to the winning side with your freebie Faction Change.

Perhaps make it so that players who want to join a faction with the least amount of areas controlled can change without the 120 day waiting period. Perhaps make it so that the losing faction has some sort of minor "underdogs" buff. There's a lot that AGS can do to incentivize players to try and self-balance the factions but they just need to provide the proper "carrot" in order for players to do so.

I agree, but I will also say that on a moderately-populated server (Neno Kuni) that isn't overrun with specific streamer communities, I've found the factions fairly well-balanced in terms of strength making it not such a big deal, it's mostly down to faction infighting and, in a couple cases, troll companies causing a lot of the problems.

I am a bit worried if they start throwing too many incentives to the underdogs that makes it better for a faction to consistently be the underdog. At least they added an incentive faction-wide to hold a city that isn't just control over the buildings in the supply carts and transfer between faction controlled city storages...albeit that's the least amount that could be done. Perhaps they could do something for factions that don't hold the city so it doesn't seem as much as a penalty (see: Azoth travel costs, fast travel to staging area, etc) and tie it to standing, at least making sure that an underdog faction can still stay competitive.

I really don't know what would truly work mechanically for an Underdog, and what would be considered an underdog. I mean, territory count isn't really all that, it's the 'quality' of the territory that matters...higher level areas like Mourningdale are going to be somewhat more attractive to PVP-centric players, but I think Everfall/Windsward are the better overall territories due to the population counts that'll more than likely always be in them.

Steele Johnson wrote on Oct 19, 2021, 12:16:
With no surprised, many players are quitting the game around upper 20s to mid 30s levels because they're seeing how messed up the faction war design is. Basically, a faction can take over the whole map (using the exploits in this article), then players from other factions just quit and go to another server lol

Players figure it's not worth the grind to endgame with territory battles so flawed (even without this exploit). This could take them a long time to fix, as it's the type of design where you might have to go back to the drawing board. I remember this happening with Planetside and Planetside II. Even after years of tweaking, they finally got it somewhat playable, but it still had many flaws and they lost a huge chunk of the player base

I'm pretty surprised to find out that many players are quitting the game en masse...I mean, the servers are still showing almost 450k people online, with many sitting at cap or very near it...

As for the faction system, people who joined the game not knowing about it probably weren't going to stick around in the first place simply because they didn't see anything but "brand new shiny MMO" on the tin when they purchased it.

There are issues to deal with when it comes to faction balancing, but the overall design is pretty simple and pretty effective in what it does.

Dumbledore wrote on Oct 17, 2021, 07:50:

DarkCntry wrote on Oct 16, 2021, 15:29:
Bet you're just absolutely fun at parties.

Here's a protip, let people enjoy what they enjoy.

here's a protip. people are allowed to have different opinions than you and they're allowed to express those opinions. if you can't tolerate that, you shouldn't be interacting with people.

hope this helps.

You're right about opinions...however...

even free it's still a garbage series that is only popular because it was the 1st semi playable fps on dumb-downed consoles. as a pc shooter it's mediocre at best.

You tried to make your opinion objective rather than subjective because you tried to qualify your statements on why the game is popular while simultaneously implying the 'dumbed-down' part of players....so yea, perhaps you should understand that opinions like yours aren't really needed.

Dumbledore wrote on Oct 16, 2021, 08:57:
even free it's still a garbage series that is only popular because it was the 1st semi playable fps on dumb-downed consoles. as a pc shooter it's mediocre at best.

solid music though.

Bet you're just absolutely fun at parties.

Here's a protip, let people enjoy what they enjoy.

RogueSix wrote on Oct 4, 2021, 19:03:
Current benchmarks are showing that many games are running slower on Windows 11 while only a few games run faster (usually within margin of error like 1 -2fps). I have also seen some worrying benchmarks with regard to percentile fps. Framerates momentarily drop by up to 60% in some scenarios vs. Windows 10 in games. No game supports DirectStorage yet and it remains to be seen whether the benefits will be tangible at all.

As a gamer, I see absolutely no reason to upgrade at this point. The free upgrade period for Windows 10 users will only start next year anyway. I hope that MS will address the performance issues until then and do a major cleanup under the hood. "Built for gaming" is definitely a bold lie from all the testing and reviews that I have seen so far.

Anecdotally I can state that I've not seen a performance change one way or another on my many months of Insider test driving. I may have hit a few dips here and there, but like you said, margin of error and what-not.

Much like DirectX, I don't expect to see any tangible effects whatsoever when it comes to DirectStorage until adoption rates stabilize for the PC market...again, anecdotally, the way a few games I've played on the Series X perform does show a lot of promise for it though.

I'm cautiously optimistic about Windows 11, much as I was with 10 and it didn't do anything disappointing to me...so we'll see after everything gets the real-world roll out.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 22:28:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 16:26:
Again, all of that was software created solely to pinpoint a physical defect in the hardware...

Outside of Stuxnet, no it wasn't.

You're blatantly wrong here and continually insisting you're correct doesn't change the fact that you're wrong.

Unless you have some extraordinarily complex mental gymnastics that "proves", for example, that BASIC, a programming language, was solely and specifically designed to not actually run programs but to destroy hardware. Or that PLCs, which are used in literally millions of devices, sole existence is to destroy hardware instead of, you know, actually controlling it to perform specified tasks. Or that a serial bus, a simple means of communication inherent in anything with a bus, was solely created and solely exists to destroy hardware instead of communicating with that hardware on a simple and basic level.

I can destroy fully functioning, thoroughly tested CPUs simply by changing a register value. I know, I used to do it as part of gate threshold testing on B0 step CPUs when I worked at Intel. Does that mean register values are only in existence to destroy CPUs in your world?

The real fact of the matter is that common, everyday software can destroy hardware in an inordinate amount of ways when the right confluence of events occur without any faulty hardware in play. It's not a myth, it's not a legend. It's a simple fact of architecture engineering that is not just possible, but probable.

What we're actually talking about here is you repeating a long debunked myth.

No, the myth was that software can never harm hardware...the semantic argument here is that software can damage hardware, but by exploiting vulnerabilities in said hardware. That's the whole point, software needs a vector to exploit in which to successfully damage the hardware, without it the worst thing that can be done is to exploit the software handling of the hardware (buffer overflows or driver 'mucking', for example, bypassing physical 'countermeasures' that manufacturers should be putting in place).

I'm not arguing that software is incapable of damaging hardware, I'm arguing against the insinuation that without the hardware defect that New World is the root cause of the destruction. If this were the case, then we'd see a far wider spread of the issue along the lines of a greater stretch of hardware.

This comment was edited on Oct 1, 2021, 14:53.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 15:47:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 13:50:
...software alone doesn't kill hardware...

Stuxnet disagrees with you. So does PLC software that can literally be used to pop capacitors, destroy motors, destroy robotic arms, etc. You can use the serial bus to corrupt firmware and brick whole machines.

Hell, back in ye olden days, you could use BASIC's POKE command to destroy entire systems simply by poking the wrong register at the wrong time.

Software alone can, and does, kill hardware through no actual fault of the hardware itself.

So we can put that decades old myth to bed right here and now.

Again, all of that was software created solely to pinpoint a physical defect in the hardware, so semantics are at play here. Of course, targeted software can cause exploitable hardware to fault, but that is not what we're talking about here, nor what Tom was implying.

Tom wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 14:44:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 13:50:

Tom wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 13:46:
Well well. Guess they didn't fix this POS after all.

For the folks who believe there's no bad software, only bad hardware... wake up. They can BOTH be bad.

Or maybe you want to claim that all the folks in that thread were running New World as the very first game on their new GPUs and any other game would've killed em too?

Again, software alone doesn't kill hardware. It takes a defect in the hardware for it to fail...why is this so difficult to understand? Flaws in software are supposed to be counteracted by hardware protections. I mean, running Notepad on some Gigabyte PSUs can result in the PSU exploding, does that mean Notepad is to blame?

What part of "they can BOTH be bad" did you not follow?

But here's the thing, bad software is just, well, bad...it doesn't do anything other than being bad. Your implications that the game is the cause of the problems falls back to my example that Notepad must be capable of blowing up PSUs because it happened to Gigabyte...

Tom wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 13:46:
Well well. Guess they didn't fix this POS after all.

For the folks who believe there's no bad software, only bad hardware... wake up. They can BOTH be bad.

Or maybe you want to claim that all the folks in that thread were running New World as the very first game on their new GPUs and any other game would've killed em too?

Again, software alone doesn't kill hardware. It takes a defect in the hardware for it to fail...why is this so difficult to understand? Flaws in software are supposed to be counteracted by hardware protections. I mean, running Notepad on some Gigabyte PSUs can result in the PSU exploding, does that mean Notepad is to blame?

Quinn wrote on Sep 30, 2021, 13:36:
Besos: Take the blame for this amount of money. We will have it fixed before release.

EVGA: OK.

EVGA: Yeah we found this fault within our GPU that only occurs during New World, but it's our fault. The fault is in our card. We fixed it.

Conspiracy jokes aside... I always thought it dubious at best that this fault only occured in New World but was somehow a problem on the GPU's side. This is exactly why I haven't bought New World yet.

But maybe there's nothing there and I'm just being paranoid.

It was a problem for a card that had already known problems...take a gander at the history of EVGA's 3090 FTW line and you'll see that New World was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

New World, the new Crysis for benchmarking GPUs...

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 29, 2021, 08:43:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 29, 2021, 01:32:

Tom wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 23:54:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 14:42:
Even at a billion FPS in the menu, it didn't cook GPUs, faulty production of the GPU cooked the GPUs. I mean, if you want to go against what EVGA even said themselves, feel free.

Faulty game + faulty GPU = dead GPU. Those GPUs were running other games fine and made it through plenty of tests and benchmarks until they came across this game. I don't know how that's going against what EVGA said. It's the truth.

Here's the thing, it was literally only those GPUs that died, a specific model number from a specific batch...EVGA issued RMAs and AGS applied a patch. Software, without malicious help, will not damage hardware because hardware is supposed to have encoded safe guards to keep things like that from happening. In the 3090 case, manufacturing defects that overloaded the capacitors of the card because it didn't know how to throttle itself.

So, once again, if it were faulty game being the culprit here, we'd have seen other GPUs, and definitely more of the same 3090 series, going tits up.

It had nothing to do with capacitors. It was faulty solder connections.
I posted links where EVGA explained it.

Weren't the solder connections through the capacitors though? I could've sworn I saw the GN remarks talking about it...either way though, it was still shoddy manufacturing of a card that people had already complained of issues with.

Tom wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 23:54:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 14:42:
Even at a billion FPS in the menu, it didn't cook GPUs, faulty production of the GPU cooked the GPUs. I mean, if you want to go against what EVGA even said themselves, feel free.

Faulty game + faulty GPU = dead GPU. Those GPUs were running other games fine and made it through plenty of tests and benchmarks until they came across this game. I don't know how that's going against what EVGA said. It's the truth.

Here's the thing, it was literally only those GPUs that died, a specific model number from a specific batch...EVGA issued RMAs and AGS applied a patch. Software, without malicious help, will not damage hardware because hardware is supposed to have encoded safe guards to keep things like that from happening. In the 3090 case, manufacturing defects that overloaded the capacitors of the card because it didn't know how to throttle itself.

So, once again, if it were faulty game being the culprit here, we'd have seen other GPUs, and definitely more of the same 3090 series, going tits up.

saluk wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 19:03:
Solution: allow players to play their character on whatever server is open. Use instancing for places where real estate is important. Let players switch their instance as needed. Design your game to work - and be fun - with these limitations.

What research did they do that let them think 2000 player max per server was a good idea.

The 2k cap is supposedly temporary, and a way to not overwhelm the community system they have in-game. The game has a heavy influence on capturing territories and upgrading towns, which requires a healthy amount of people, but they also need to keep a balance between who joins what faction so they don't heavily skew one particular one.

Now, the biggest issue is that the faction system doesn't take in full account of streamers with massive communities. It's why people are seeing servers with 20k+ people in queue when there are dozens of others servers with either less than a minute or no queue whatsoever.

Tom wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 14:40:
Come on guys. This is the same game that ran at a million FPS in the menu and cooked GPUs. And the devs were like "we did nothing wrong! (but we'll fix it right away...)"

Not to mention Amazon's gaming track record in general. Expectations at zero.

Even at a billion FPS in the menu, it didn't cook GPUs, faulty production of the GPU cooked the GPUs. I mean, if you want to go against what EVGA even said themselves, feel free.

Dev wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 13:17:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 13:11:
You're conflating access to AWS with AWS availability.

AWS is a great service, and it has almost limitless scalability, but that doesn't make it biblically omnipresent.

The funny thing is that you seem to be misinformed about the server situation with New World, as you seem to think that they have a limited amount of servers when reality doesn't support that...

https://newworldstatus.com/

The problem with their servers is that they artificially capped all of them at 2000 people.

I'm completely uninformed about their particular setup there. Interesting, appreciate the link. So sounds like they do have unlimited ability to get servers going.

However, that gives them EVEN LESS EXCUSE. Because if that's the case, now all those issues are poor design decisions and implementations that don't lend well to scaling properly to avoid these negative experiences. Instead of the common "whoops we didn't expect all the load and are having issues getting new servers going" reasons that most new MMORPGs have. Even more evidence they haven't studied existing successful MMORPG designs and didn't properly test and stress their own designs. So it's gone now even more towards incompetence.

It's not incompetence, it's artificially attempting to control a population.

The game is heavily dependant on server population health, and having literally every one and their brother on a single small set of servers is not good for the overall health of the game. What is problematic here is that the artificial limits are not properly acknowledging large-scale streamers...which is why you can see on there that some servers have over 21k people in queue.

Dev wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 12:56:

DarkCntry wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 12:48:
As for anyone on the fence about the game, understand that it's an action RPG MMO. Launch weeks are going to suck. There are some serious issues with how AGS is handling populations, naming, and server coverage, but I doubt that'll last too long without change.

Previous big launches I've excused that... because physical servers, not having next door AWS access to freely increase and scale worldwide, etc. This time, nope, no excuse. This doesn't just reflect badly on the studio it reflects badly on AWS as a whole. This could have been a big bragging thing "Use AWS for game launch weeks, see how great we are and how smooth it will go because of that!" great PR thing. Could have allowed them to spin off a specialty scalable service for game launches especially MMORPGs, make a pile more money.

You're conflating access to AWS with AWS availability.

AWS is a great service, and it has almost limitless scalability, but that doesn't make it biblically omnipresent.

The funny thing is that you seem to be misinformed about the server situation with New World, as you seem to think that they have a limited amount of servers when reality doesn't support that...

https://newworldstatus.com/

The problem with their servers is that they artificially capped all of them at 2000 people.

Cutter wrote on Sep 28, 2021, 12:35:
Shitty game anyway. You're not missing anything. Honestly, it's like whoever made this has never even seen another MMO much less played one. Really just an awful game.

Another in a long line of "Hot Takes from Cutter".

As for anyone on the fence about the game, understand that it's an action RPG MMO. Launch weeks are going to suck. There are some serious issues with how AGS is handling populations, naming, and server coverage, but I doubt that'll last too long without change.

The game, itself, isn't bad for those that are more into community-driven aspects and less standard MMO-faire. I generally enjoy crafting/gathering more than raiding/dungeoning, so the game greatly appeals to me in that aspect.

Kxmode wrote on Sep 23, 2021, 13:34:

Beamer wrote on Sep 23, 2021, 07:52:

Kxmode wrote on Sep 23, 2021, 03:24:

Slick wrote on Sep 23, 2021, 00:35:

MondoCalrissian wrote on Sep 22, 2021, 23:52:
Epic built their empire by stealing game ideas from smaller studios and locking games to their platform. There are no heroes here.

And Epic is far from the first platform to play the exclusive game, in fact, they're pretty late to the party.

Would you mind providing one example in all of PC gaming history where there was such a thing as third-party exclusives? And for the love of goodness, please don't point to games on Origin, UPlay, or Battle.net.

Much of what is on Steam is only on Steam?
Oh! You think being there because it's big and successful and the developer chose to be there to make more money is different than exclusives on Epic, which are only there because Epic is big and successful and devs choose to be there to make more money.

And maybe you forget back when some entire games, and lots of features of games, were 3dfx exclusive. But you think that's different, because it used tech, and somehow it's better to require a user buy a different $300 card than to just download a different storefront.

And we had a handful of Intel exclusive games, such as POD.

And, well, what if we go back further, to when games were DOS exclusive or OS/2 exclusive. But that's fine to you, because somehow having to change operating systems is better than having to use a second store.

Even further back, man, lots of exclusives to Amiga.

I've never in my life met someone as brand loyal as you.

I'm not referring to exclusive games that came bundled with hardware. I meant platforms that exclusively sell video games, so I apologize for not specifically making that clear. By extension, I am also not referring to legacy operating systems since none before Windows 2000 had platforms that sold video games. In the future, I will try to be more specific.

That means you're goalpost moving then, as your original request was to find in all of PC gaming history, but when that it was shown to exist you further 'clarified' the request to fit a very specific niche...

The point is that we've had exclusives from day 1 of video gaming, day 1 of PC gaming, day 1 of board gaming...it's a matter of perspective. What Epic is doing isn't locking down games to only their store, it's, at worst, stupid timing inconvenience. I remember having specific-hardware limited software back in the early days, from Apple II-era to IBM-compatible-era that would only work on specific models, which is far worse than whatever is happening today. I mean, 12 months is annoying as hell to wait, but almost EVERYONE that posts on Blues is literally going "well I'll wait until the game is complete/bug patches are done, see you in a year" so it really doesn't matter anyways...look at it as pre-purchasing early access.

Cutter wrote on Sep 22, 2021, 20:12:

Pallais wrote on Sep 22, 2021, 20:07:
Tim is discovering that there are consequences to his actions. Filing an appeal is most definitely not agreeing "to play by the same rules as everyone else".

This whole thing just feels like Epic is trying to wing everything instead of sitting down and making a coldly calculated campaign. Their court stuff would have been a lot better if they had...

Indeed. With the money they have why aren't they allowing a professional PR firm deal with this? He comes off as a petulant child.

Probably because at the same time people would decry anything like what you suggest as "corporate PR speak"...so yea, damned if he does, damned if he doesn't.