Dear diary, it's the fourth day, it's been amazing but why do we still have lag?

[Oveur]

I’ve asked myself this question 3,289 times today. Don’t get me wrong. Most territories and platforms are mostly doing great by now. I know very well some of you still have outstanding issues, bugs or customer support tickets waiting. I didn’t say everything was perfect. Then we’d be playing all day ourselves.

But little time for that. There are problems to be solved, this is what we signed up for, gaming is what we love doing and we’re incredibly sorry that you have to go through these issues now with us. That’s why we don’t have problems sitting here now on a Friday night hammering through this still. We want to live up to your expectations and in some cases, we obviously aren’t. And I’m sorry for that.

But the world is conquered by eating an elephant in small bites accompanied by martinis. And here are todays bites, some of which are stuck in our throat:

• US XBOX – Our battle with this server cluster continues. I’d put swearwords here but I think you can hear me in your head right now. You will have noticed some great server moments in the last 24 hours, some not so great. We continue to re-configure, deploy fixes, roll some back, try something different, measure, analyze. There’s just so many of you shooting so much. If you could just be nice and all get along. Hellbugs have feelings too you know. This is by far our top issue. We’ve thrown a ton of more hardware at it (we had reinforcements ready), changed client-server protocol to remove load balancing setups to have less moving parts and a host server code changes.
  
  
• Game Server Crashes – These are the service not available and service timeouts you see. Today’s server code update alone had 9 different game server crash fixes. Some happened rarely, others were quite frequent. It all adds up. You should see less of service not available and the timeouts now although just tonight we’ve spotted a few other ones.
  
  
• Connectivity and patching – This one is still on the list. There are so many new players joining us and we even have a few of you which are still patching. We’ve deployed patches, reconfigured contend distribution networks and continue to do so based your reports of where you are in the world having problems.
  
  
• Chat & VOIP – Back on the list again, we have some fixes for this, both that we can do server side but also client side. Unfortunately client patches of this nature can’t be deployed till the 15th as mentioned yesterday.

I’m not listing here individual gameplay items, such as general balance, mission changes, enabling or disabling missions or side-missions (such as due to exploits). That doesn’t mean they aren’t important, it’s because this is always important and constantly going on with a dedicated team. I did list Arkfalls, simply because that affected so many of us. Now to the happy part. We all enjoy happy endings. Like in the Fifth Element. Always makes me cry.

• What’s our DLC plan? – I’ve seen a lot of you mention this and this is material for an entire blog post because there is so much I want to talk about. However, let’s be short. There are at least 5 DLCs this year. They all have a free and paid component. We do not want to segregate our playerbase so we always want everybody be able to participate and play with friends. The free part is features and content, the paid part is essentially, say, access to a new playable species with a bundle of stuff with it. The upcoming TV tie-ins aren’t DLCs that cost either. It’s all yours.
  
  
• More updates enroute – Today fixes some disappearing item cases, more Arkfall loot love, mission and side-mission updates in addition to all the optimizations and bugfixes we deployed to improve the server crashes. Our patch around the 15th is in testing and on its way into certification. We anticipate to update our servers with code updates daily. XBOX of course more frequently till we fix it. Which we will.
  
  
• Another big patch? - It’s Friday night and it's tricky to rock a rhyme that's right on time. We have a patch around the 15th but we’ve already started work on the massive patch that’s coming roughly 2 weeks later. There are so many things we can’t fix, add or improve right away and have to be part of a larger client patch. That’s why we have two planned. After that you should see a nice shiny DLC.

The summary is, we have the cavalry out, we’re not giving up till we make this an awesome experience for you and as I mentioned yesterday, figuring out a way to make it up to you. When I find a way to make it all work, I’ll let you know here first. Promise. Besides of course just fixing the damn thing.

I hope I’m not still in your head swearing. That wouldn’t be very nice of me. Especially on a Friday. If it was Thursday, it would probably be fine.

Again, our apologies. After 5 years of creating this, it saddens us and frustrates us that you aren’t getting the great experience we strived to create. The upside is that it makes us quite determined to get you there.

A A,

Oveur

[Feyniphia]

Don't worry Oveur, You'll get this stuff worked out very fast. Got faith in you! Can't wait to see the DLC and the patch soon!

[Shane5484]

I dont understand how any trion staff can be working on dlc's that are coming out in six months or a year when, with the game in its current state you will have no player base in a month.

[Bluegobln]

Some of us are getting the best MMO experience we've had in years. That's saying something.

For everyone else that isn't, I know you guys are working hard to get them on the same level as us. They have a lot of awesome to look forward to and you can be proud of that no matter how frustrating the struggle.

For anyone having trouble getting to playing the game, or server issues, or whatever is wrong - don't worry, when you finally get through this stuff it IS SO WORTH IT. I hope you keep that in mind even though you may lose patience (nobody is possessed with infinite patience). It will still be here, and so will we!

[Honved]

I dont understand how any trion staff can be working on dlc's that are coming out in six months or a year when, with the game in its current state you will have no player base in a month.

Sadly I agree, I'm not even angry, more disheartened. After building this game up for months I feel like I flat out lied to people, I still enjoy the game although much of the core content needs work. I'll be playing for another month or two to see if progress is made. I do get the sense trion is trying to see with what they can and cannot get away with. =/ I was apart of the warhammer online release and that went smoother. =/

[Mog]

I dont understand how any trion staff can be working on dlc's that are coming out in six months or a year when, with the game in its current state you will have no player base in a month.

Ya know game development is usually structured into numerous teams that all work on different things. The entire team does not just work on troubleshooting issues. Different people on the team have different skills and not everybody has the skill set to troubleshoot server code or bug issues etc. I am sure they have all the people who can work on troubleshooting doing just that. Many of the Devs specialize in specific areas of development so they would working on those areas. It would not make sense to take a guy who does design and put him on debugging server code.

[Raehvyn]

Sadly I agree, I'm not even angry, more disheartened. After building this game up for months I feel like I flat out lied to people, I still enjoy the game although much of the core content needs work. I'll be playing for another month or two to see if progress is made. I do get the sense trion is trying to see with what they can and cannot get away with. =/ I was apart of the warhammer online release and that went smoother. =/

It is very unlikely the team is moronic enough to think that DLC is more important. You might think they're trying to find a way to see what they can get away with but that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. They want more people around for the DLC, right?

Chances are there are teams. One working on the DLC, one working on fixing all of these problems. I say that not because of experience but because this has been explained before to us on other MMOs. Mass Effect mentioned that when a game goes to get certified it takes time. So during that time they go and create DLC, so chances are the DLC has been in creation before hand.

You're playing an online game. There is no way to fully test something like this without it going live, is the general consensus. Anyone who bought the game or preordered it and planned to play within the first week or two should have had a good idea as to what to expect. I don't remember Warhammer's launch but I do remember them breaking everything any time they tried to fix anything. I remember a game unable to support the size of the battles it had, absolutely broken classes, and glitches all over the place. Keep taking might as well have been called bug wrestling.

See? Every game has issues. They said they are looking into compensating us, so let us be happy we've communication with them at all and that we know they're not sitting around derping all over.

[Mutated Spleen]

I dont understand how any trion staff can be working on dlc's that are coming out in six months or a year when, with the game in its current state you will have no player base in a month.

Well that's because you don't understand how game development works (and I realize that probably came off offensively - I promise I did not intend it as such). It's not one dude working in his basement to bring us this game. It's a large, cohesive team, where different departments have different tasks. Having 493 people work on fixing Problem A when it's a job for 3 people is a waste of resources, and ineffectual at the least. I guarantee you there is a team working on fixing the issues, and a separate team working on the DLC, and probably about 13-28 other teams working on other things.

Anyway, even if the game stayed exactly the same, I, personally, would be playing it for at least another month, probably more. I still have to finish the majority of the main campaign, I have played 0 PVP, I have done none of the instances, etc. There is a ton of content for me to finish, and a couple silly glitches aren't going to stop me from that.

EDIT: Damn you whiskey! I didn't read the post immediately above this which says, more or less, the same thing, albeit a bit nicer <_<

[Shane5484]

The only conclusion I can come up with is that Trion was forced to release game early by syfy. I say this becouse this game is not even close to being public.

[Merrin Nightbringer]

F*&^ the haters. Not trying to sound like some kind of Trion fanboy, but let's be real: we've all seen launches go much, much, worse and not get NEARLY the level of support and dedication we're seeing from Trion.

As for the DLC, this kind of stuff has been in the works since before launch, probably while the game was in beta. Anyone who knows a little bit about how most game developers work these days realizes that they have dedicated teams to specific tasks or portions of the game. Is it likely that they peeled some staff OFF DLC production to work on this? You bet- Trion did it before with Rift.

Can't wait to see this game/show hybrid really take off. My prediction: hundreds, perhaps thousands, saying "well, I thought it was gonna be lame at first, but now it's totally f(*&^ng awesome."

Thanks again to the Trion staff for their continued dedication to their playerbase.