Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Age of Conan - A little peeved

So, of interest is an issue that really should not exist. But does, and still does after today's patch.
Introduced in patch 1.04, it seemed but a minor quibble at the time.

Every time a player logs in and has left Tortage, they log in to Midnight.

It seems the time scheduling of where the player character is at on the clock is always midnight on first log. This means that time is done client side and not server side.
So, lets say you login, and of course it starts at Midnight (dark in the Hyborian world), then a friend logs in say...2-3 hours later, Guess what..?

You will be at 5-6 am or later, and they will be at...you guessed it...Midnight.

Now, maybe this is not an issue to some, but with my limited play schedule, I can play for 1-2 hours and I am always playing in the dark. Dark looks cool and all that, but not all the time. No sunlight, no cool shadows on the ground...

I do not know about you, but for me, that is just depressing.

Thoroughly disappointed that this bug stayed in from last patch. Not winning anyone over with these types of problems.

Which brings me to the infamous "Thread Deletions" on the main AoC forums. It seems in the last patch for the Testlive server, they decided to "stealthily" remove DX10. No warning.
This started some speculation, and I decided to post asking why it was removed. This took maybe 2-3 hours before it was deleted.

Felt almost conspiratorial.

Luckily it was added back in, and a Dev finally stepped in to explain the issue, but only after he saw that this was being discussed on other forums due to the fact that in the last financial report DX10 was missing from the future updates list.

This all comes back to the "Midnight" bug I originally discussed in this post. I did the same thing and asked why this was not on the known issues list, and that thread was closed.

So, how does one look at a company when you enjoy their game, but the overall feeling is careless development and hard stern rules of discussion of issues. It is almost like a Nazi regime.

I don't know about you, but I get to feeling uncomfortable hanging with Hitler all the time...

2 comments:

Talyn said...

I hereby dub 1.04 the Vanguard patch! My friends and I used to make bets prior to logging into Vanguard that it would be nighttime. And another bet that it would be raining. I swear it seems Telon has 30 minutes of daylight and 9 hours of night. And it sure does rain a lot, especially for so few clouds in the sky... /grumble

Sounds like that should be a fairly simple hotfix for Funcom though. I'm guessing there are already fifteen bazillion forum threads about it?

Yasmina said...

Hmm, that does stink! Part of why we play Conan is 'cause of its good looks -- let's just admit it. So we should be able to enjoy it with all the different times of day in-game.

And sheesh, I thought the whole point of New Director Craig was to have regular and solid communication from the developers. You know they've been cranking hard on DX10 'cause people still hit them with "it was on the box" and 'cause so much work has been put into it now. But this is the hard time, eh, when limited resources mean tough choices. I don't have a compatible card or OS for it, though I'd love to see it with my next machine, so I don't worry about it too much.

I bet they wanted folks to concentrate on testing the current stuff, or they did a big integration from their DX10 branch and it wasn't working very well, so they just said, ugh, disable it for this PTR patch and we'll get it back up when we are focusing on it.

All they need is to tell us what's up. Unless it's a mysterious business decision, and the developers are being asked to keep their mouths shut. Ugh!