Don't think this is due to Maximum Pressure specifically, but more in line with the 0:00:00 bug players will get. When the event doesn't properly clear on the UI when it ends, it'll get into a frozen state that mimics past alerts regardless of which one is currently playing.
We haven't been able to repro this, but we've been putting out speculative fixes every now and again. We're currently working on another one for the August update.
The actual questions is: Will people risk their lives for a transit or will they just stay safely with their dominating air zerg next to the enemy Buoys for easy kill farming?
Your faction technically just needs one more Tempest than the others to win the alert. So, no need for transits anymore after having enough Tempest. From then on, the other two factions won’t even get close to their turn-in Buoy, if the dominating air zerg ball is around it („critical mass of units in the same area“ / Why „hunt down“ them, if they have to come to you?). This way the current problem just shifts from the Aerial Anomaly to the centralized Buoys. Sounds very „one-sided“ to me again…
If the Tempest within the Buoy would decay, that would be another story: It would force at least some of your factions air to transit again. Other ideas would be that there are several Buoys at different locations, or that your turn-in location would be your actual Warpgate.
Definitely the right question to ask, and the truth is that we'll have to see how it unfolds. If one faction is truly camping the buoys without any recourse, that means that you're giving the other faction time to gather forces uncontested in the anomaly, which would ultimately mean another big clash in the middle.
At any rate, the changes are certainly going to be better than it is on Live currently, if for no other reason than the center of the map being much more accessible than the far reaches, for all factions at all times.
Any ideas for addressing snowballing too with the new system? It looks like it would still be an issue. 1 platoon joins in from the start, is uncontested for 5 minutes, and they've already gotten too many points for the other factions to catch up - so they don't bother.
A few factors contribute to snowballing.
The first is population and a willingness to participate. - Fun events that don't feel one-sided get more participation.
The second is the placement of the anomalies themselves. - Defending inside your territory is easier than having to extend outward.
The third is a critical mass of units in the same area. - The more consolidated a force is, the more difficult it is to kill targets within it.
New anomalies addresses the latter two directly. By centralizing the turn-in location, even when you have an anomaly the spawns deeper into your allied territory, you'll still need to come to a location more easily reachable by all factions in order to earn any points at all. This opens up strategies to defend turn-in locations, hunt down aircraft in transit, and it makes killing enemies actually mean something, since the damage isn't done until a vehicle turns in its re...
Read moreTempest capacity for Galaxy is going to be severely reduced in the next update, and deposit rates will be slowed as well, so you have a better chance to kill targets before they drop all their resources off. Those changes should drop Galaxy's value during the alert.
This might be due to some of the NPC changes we made to fix performance. Thanks for the report, we'll give it a look.
We know why this is happening and there is an animator working on the fix right now. Hopefully you will see a client update in the coming week with a fix for this.
For awareness, we believe the NPC fix we mention in the patch notes is the main reason why servers are garbage right now. We want you all to have a good weekend, so it was important that this fix went out before hand.
Servers are up now though (a little over an hour of downtime start to finish,) so feel free to jump in.
No need for apologies man. I wish I had been a little wiser in my teenage years and pursued a career in the tech industry (because I find that stuff pretty interesting these days), but my no means am I unhappy with where I'm at.
I'm also really glad to hear that you guys get a little bit of pull in the industry. I think that often people have a pessimistic view that game companies are being 100% dictated by the business suits who have never touched a console or gaming PC. From what I've seen from SOE/Daybreak through the years, it genuinely sounds like a pretty fun team to work with.
Dev teams tend to have pretty good clout and control over a lot of the facets of their game, but the higher-ups are the ones who make the big decisions about what games get made and with how many resources and with what kind of timeline. Good decisions happen when the Deciders council the Devs to make sure the opinions and market knowledge they're basing their decisions make sense.
Players must deliver Tempest from Anomalies to the nearby Data Buoys in order to score points.
Wouldn't server performance testing still require more than the 1-5 ppl that habit PTS normally? How about an organized playtest? Or are these fixes too small to warrant such?
More players do offer a more practical test yes, and we will take all we can get. What we usually get from larger groups is a larger range of behaviors to find any strange edge cases. And we are confident the changes we made will improve performance as these are based upon profiling we do on live servers when the population is at maximum for a continent. Its more of making sure those changes didn't break anything or cause a crash of some sort. Hope that all makes sense.
How exactly are we supposed to test any of this? Can't really deduce server performance with low populations, alerts rarely trigger on PTS and we can't cause "maintenance," etc. Is there a playtest coming sometime?
We will be manually triggering and ending alerts. But just having some random behavior tested out on PTS would be good to catch any potential server or client crashes. So far, I have not seen any crashes. We will of course review the /bug's but that doesn't guarantee they get fixed with the next hotfix depending on the severity of the bug.
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