Enough is Enough! How much $ have you dumped into this "F2P" game that isn't playable?

Optimizations are needed, there's no arguing that and it's something the team is well aware of and continually working on. Although I have to say given the machine specs you listed, I'm trying to understand how you lag, glitch, or have graphical problems. We test constantly with a significant number of hardware configurations and some very clearly show areas that need improvement, others do not. A moderately current system (I play on a Core i7 3.06ghz, with a NVidia GTX 480 daily from home), I don't lag, or glitch, or crash. I've had 2 total crashes since beta on this machine, both of which were my fault not the games fault.

In the office I have 3 machines I play and test on, and the only one that really struggles performance wise is a Core 2 Duo. Neither of my Core i7s (First gen, and Sandy Bridge) with GTX 480/580s ever have problems with the game either. Don't get me wrong, I'm not running 100fps or anything like that, but the game plays smooth and is enjoyable across the board (for me personally).

The only time I'll ever get a slight hesitation in the client is if 3-4-5 things explode right next to me and tons of particles are in the air (like if 2 rockets and a bunch of tracer fire all hit at the same time, while a mine or C4 or something is blowing up) .. then I'll get a minor hesitation but that's to be expected when that many particle effects all go off within 1-2 seconds in a small space.

So I have to ask, with 16gb of RAM, a 2GB Video card, and an i7, what else are you running on the machine and in the background while PS2 is going? Do you have any anti-virus/system protection apps? Are you running Windows 7? I'd like to know more about your system and how it's configured. (More for personal interest of wanting to know why it performs poorly for you, when it most definitely shouldn't with those specs).

What kind of FPS do you achieve in non-populated areas, and then in populated areas?

Glad to hear. Did you enjoy your total of 2 hours of gameplay? My game crashes daily. And no, it's not my fault.

My game flickers daily, no it's not my fault.

I meet hackers daily, no it's not my fault.

Denying problems that you have in your game is the wrong route to take.

I never denied anything, re-read my post. I clearly stated, given the machine specs he listed, he shouldn't be having the problems which appear to be severe, and affecting his game play. In my very first sentence, the first words were "Optimizations are needed, there's no arguing that" .. don't know how much more I can address that we know there are issues.

In fact, if you follow any of my posts, you'll see I'm usually the first person to acknowledge an issue, and work towards resolution. But thank you for taking my post out of context, and narrowing in on one piece.

Regardless, I still want to understand the OPs setup/configuration.

Come on man! Threads about the game crashing are dime a dozen, even if that was true you shouldn't ask us, who sometimes experience a crash every ten minutes, to believe it. I don't agree with the OP, he clearly does not understand how to manage money, but you responding that you had two crashes and the game was innocent both times is just adding insult to injury.

One thing that people never list in their specs is their ping (maybe because Sony conveniently forgot to include a ping indicator ) and a lot of the game's problems manifest themselves with high-latency. I bet you your ping to the server is less than 50ms and never goes above that. See my thread The Game Should NOT Crash Every Time my Ping Spikes about that.

I understand your frustration, and I'm not trying to add insult to injury. I know there are many crash oriented problems, I review the crash data, I see them, and I also see the variance in the type of crash and source of crash. In many cases it's an obvious issue, if 10,000+ people crash to X,Y,Z scenario, it paints a pretty easy picture to solve.

If 100 people crash to X,Y,Z scenario, and we duplicate their machine specs in our test lab and replay their scenario again and again and again and we can't get it to crash that's a little harder to nail down. That's when other factors come into play. Anti-virus, firewalls, routers (believe it or not, we've got a list of known routers that cause issues, and work arounds or fixes for those, some require firmware updates).

What I'm saying is, there are thousands upon thousands of possible configurations and every one is different. The machine I play on that I used as an example in this post, has Windows 7 fresh install, the latest updates, an NVidia driver that's about a year old, and nothing else on it. Literally, PS2 is the only thing installed on it outside of what's installed with a fresh Windows 7 install. I recognize this isn't a normal or expected setup, and that most people have 15 things running in the background, between mouse adjustment applications, chat software like Ventrilo or Teamspeak, anti-virus, a web browser, and numerous other items. When you put all of that together, that creates a unique scenario sometimes. But my statements were not false or inaccurate, and I've had 5 hour playing sessions without a crash.

My ping averages around 80-120ms as I tend to bounce between East Coast and European servers frequently. (I'm not discrediting there could be a high ping related problem, I'm just sharing my particular "at home" experience.) Comparing a work experience wouldn't be fair, as at work I use a different client than you use geared towards diagnosing problems.

We get it, there are issues, and fixes/changes are coming (we've had 3 code pushes in the last 2 weeks alone) and many more are coming. There's a strong and solid pipeline of changes, and many of those details will be released tomorrow.

The point of my post is not to say we don't have issues, it's to say that given what he listed for specs he shouldn't be having the kinds of problems he's having and I'd like to learn more about his setup. My goal here is to help him, and others in the community, not defend or argue the current state of the game. We all know what that is without slinging mud. We want your play experience to be positive, and many of us go through great lengths to help and assist the best we can until the underlying issues can be resolved.

We'll get there.

My game doesn't crash daily.

It doesn't flicker daily.

I don't see hackers daily. (not sure how this could possibly be a different end-user's fault but okay clearly you feel you need to establish that it's not)

Assuming that the problems you experience are present for every single person who plays and are thus totally irrelevant to your or your setup is the wrong route to take.

We're playing the same game. The difference is the computer and the person using it. You have problems, I don't. The issue is somewhere directly related to your specific setup - otherwise I would experience it as well.

I know for a fact that a large outfit i play on experience these problems daily. I'm ofcourse just speaking for myself, and cant say that -everyone- is having this problems. I know however that a lot of people are.

I'm a customer and i'm entitled to complain if the product that I pay for isn't working properly.

What you're not entitled to do is demand an instant fix. If you can find me somewhere in the EULA which you agreed to that states that SOE will provide instant fixes delivered to your computer at the speed of light the moment an issue arises, okay. Until then take a moment to realize that things take time.

Really you can't blame a "F2P" game as not being free because your unable to play it do to hardware.

He is giving you his experence, while also saying they still have things to work on. I Play quite oftain and I don't get the same issues that you do. However one of the people in my outfit is a Software engineer with 5 systems. All but 1 can play PS2 fine while one crashes, though he can't figure out why since nothing seems to be a blatent cause.

As for the Ping spike thing, can you say its just because of Ping thats causing it, or is it due to lost or incorrect packets? I know I tried playing while uploading a video to youtube though my web browsers and I my outfit could see me warping around a bit so I would think I was lagging, yet I didn't crash.

Software is not an easy yes or no answer to a problem, sometimes a problem can have a cause thats is near impossible to find, and the same problem could be caused by a hundred diffrent variations making it hard to find as well.

Also you can't use Forum posts as a Poll, considering your not likly to find people posting "This game works Great" all the time.

Nice to see SOMEONE from SOE respond to THIS thread.

Those of us who have rendeing issues seem to be ignored. Thanks.

Don't worry, we're looking into the rendering issues too

This thread, with all of 2 pages? I don't think anyone has been ignoring those problems, I've seen developers post on graphic glitch and rendering problems all the time.

I have the same game experience as you Veratu.

I've never crashed even a single time where PS2 was to blame. I've had plenty of crashes, but it has been because of overclocking to the limit while comparing performance changes. I've never had the "triple-load screen" issues or anything remotely similar.

I get 30fps minimum, 40-50 average, 60-150 max.
My ping is around 80-150ms.

Currently I have a FX-8320 and a HD7950 on a gigabyte mb, I used to have a Phenom II X2 550 (unlocked 2 cores B50) and a HD4870 also on a gigabyte mb. The old setup was just as stable as my new one.

I'm not here to flame the OP or anything like that, but the fact is that most people have tonnes of *crap* on their PC running in the background. And it could also be a simple thing as a firewall issue, which is not something SOE can fix, but each and every one of us has to troubleshoot and fix our selves.

If you are crashing, then start monitoring your background processes. Try disabling the firewall in your windows/router. Make sure your antivirus isn't messing things up, like running scheduled scans in the background.

And on topic about the $$ spent:
I've spent exactly 0 dollars on PS2. On PS1 however I've had monthly subs on and off since 2003. Also I have to say that given the fact PS2 was released in November, which makes it quite "fresh", everyone should expect the game to have problems.

If you spent 1000 dollars on it already I think that is your own problem as you choose to spend money on it, the game is free to play. I've been here since beta and spent 0$ so far.

Going on about "lawsuit" after barely 2-3 months? Hah! I played AoC where they advertised for the Dx10 native feature when it was brand new, they removed that 1 month or so after release because of it crashing clients. It took idk 6 months to get it back? or was it a year?

I've actually had two crashes, but I've been playing since August. Since launch in Nov, I've played daily. The hacking/aimbotting is easily the most frustrating thing in the game, period.

I've been taking advantage of double and triple smedbux weekends for years just in case a game came along that needed them. And it did! Having spent every red cent of that here and having picked up Alpha Squad and a subscription, probably $200-250.

Of course, this game works for me and required zero of those dollars to be playable or fun. Most of it has been on vanity stuff. Camos, composite, helmets, plane stuff.

I think premise is flawed.

Performance as improved alot lately i'm consistanly getting 100-150fps whereas in dec i would struggle to see 50fps, only issues i have atm are random flickering CTD's and Render Distance issue's which can be a pain in the rear when you cannot see whose shooting at you at 100m.

I run this game on tweaked ini settings but with shadows completely off as they don't look nice at all.

[Rendering]
GraphicsQuality=4
TextureQuality=0
ShadowQuality=0
RenderDistance=999999.000000
Gamma=0.500000
VSync=0
OverallQuality=-1
LightingQuality=5
FogShadowsEnable=0
EffectsQuality=5
TerrainQuality=5
FloraQuality=0
ModelQuality=5
ParticleLOD=3
ParticleDistanceScale=0.650000
MotionBlur=0
AO=1
VerticalFOV=75
MaximumFPS=1000
GpuPhysics=0
UseLod0a=0

This is a working progress,stil searching for the sweet spot of visuals and a ballanced stable fps count.


My System

I7 3770k
32gb Memory
4GBGTX680

People have pointed out you can't really look at your gaming rig as "dumping money into the game" etc... let's not get hung up on these definitions however, something I'd like you all to keep in mind since there has been talk about EULAs:

EULAs that say something are one thing... for that to hold up in a court of law is something entirely different. Generally, by and large, they don't hold up.

Otherwise, if you really want to start any kind of litigation, I suggest you first think things through and not just talk from emotions, and I have an idea to share, there's a route you can take -- virtual goods and consumer protection laws which don't extend to cover them yet.

Stuff like:
- the right to a no questions asked refund upon returning the product undamaged, under certain conditions
- fit for purpose (patch nerfing something into the ground or making an item obsolete rings a bell?)
- as described (don't even get me started on this)
- deceptive advertising is punishable by law (like a bundle called "anti-air" with no stinger, but a G2G launcher instead, seriously...)
...loads of stuff down this alley really.

Buying a physical product (which has its own set of logistic, manufacturing costs, etc), one would enjoy these types of rights (depending on the country) yet, with a weapon unlock you enjoy which of these types of rights?

Food for thought, have fun with it

Honesty, you guys deserved to be robbed for spending this much cash on a free-to-play game. 1 thing is paying a membership to support the game you enjoy playing. Another is bursting out hundreds of dollars just so you can get ahead on a game that apparentely you're not really into. Is your need to be above others that big?

I has the ways to make the flicking happen.
1.Running to a battle
2.Start using other software or device to download, making some packet delay, some packet receive normal at least 10sec, you can see the people running repeat.
3.Stop download, the flicking happen.
Result
The screen flicking, and if you switch out, it has a big possible to freeze.
physX dll showing higher cpu usage.
http://puu.sh/1RybO

It should be like normal
http://puu.sh/1Smhv

I have been reading alot of forums about getting higher fps and a great looking game. I finally found some that work for me and it was mostly related to RenderQuality and Shadows. The lower your shadow setting the more fps I am getting. I run with 2 or 3 shadows and get around 50 fps in the warpgate with shadow=3 and about 60+ fps on shadow=2. The RenderQuality is on 1.41000 which is usually 1.00000 by default. If i change this to default I will get even more fps but the game will render less beautifully. I will post my specs below and the settings I use.

If you are having low fps try to adjust the shadows and you will see the difference. I am sure each system is different but these seem to impact the fps the most as well as RenderQuality. I could probably go to the default renderquality and run with higher shadows but they are not that important for me.

System:
Windows 7 64 bit
i7 3930k
16 gb Memory
Nvidia Gtx 670

RenderQuality=1.410000
FullscreenWidth=1920
FullscreenHeight=1080
WindowedWidth=1024
WindowedHeight=768
Mode=Fullscreen
FullscreenMode=Fullscreen

[Rendering]
GraphicsQuality=5
TextureQuality=0
ShadowQuality=2
RenderDistance=999999.000000
Gamma=0.000000
MaximumFPS=120
UseLod0a=0
OverallQuality=-1
LightingQuality=5
EffectsQuality=5
TerrainQuality=5
FloraQuality=5
ModelQuality=5
VerticalFOV=90
ParticleLOD=5
ParticleDistanceScale=0.650000
FogShadowsEnable=1
MotionBlur=0
VSync=0
AO=1
GpuPhysics=1