I can't be the only one that can't stand how much the jetpack glitches for light infantry and it dosen't work anymore unless you logout. And sometimes the jump pads that go from the bottom of bio labs to top of bio labs dont work. Dosen't matter what you do it dosen't jump ( I don't mean the floating upwards pads but the jump pads ). Then theres the Sunderer bug that kills people after its deployed because the deployment pylons make the sunderer bounce back and forth for no apparent reason. The jetpack bug has been in the game since the start and still no fix. Any word from them? Do they even know? Sigh....
Trust me. Your not the only one. It is really dumb. Planetside 2..."Definitely not still in Beta.(sarcasm)"
Hopefully in January once they get back from there Winter break that they took after releasing the game.. Infantry rendering problems, jetpacks, c4 bugs, no horns that you pay for, bases down to just spawn camps verses actual fighting, problems with the map disappearing and showing the skymap.. The list could go on an on. I just love the none 1.0 release of the game .exe
Well we told them not to release the game so fast, they didn't listen.....And now with 3-4-5-10-20 times more people in the servers just the lag is killing the game.
If you've done any serious programming, you know that the hardest part about fixing bugs is figuring out what's causing them in the first place. It's stupidly easy to say, "The jetpacks break sometimes. Fix it." It's significantly more difficult to answer the question, "Why do the jetpacks break sometimes," or "In which situations do the jetpacks break?"
It takes time, sure. That's what beta was for. But they kicked the damn thing out the door before they'd figured out half the problems.
Im a professional software developer, so I know a little about what goes into tracking down these bugs. While for many bugs ("Omg, optimize the game plox!" "Why is recoil inconsistent?!") there are broad, and complicated issues that take a lot of investigation, the light assault jetpack bug is relatively straightforward. I don't have unrealistic expectations of their programmers, but I'm also not an SOE appologist. This bug has been known for a while, and is well documented. It is pretty simple to reproduce. Getting killed as a class other than Light Assault has a fairly high chance of breaking LA jetpacks when you switch back. Switching back and forth and charging into battle to die should reproduce the problem in under five minutes. Once Jetpacks are broken: -Press and hold spacebar as light assault. Look at server logs (or add temporary debugging/logging) to see whether the server is receiving a 'Jump' command, or a 'Jetpack' command. If the server is only receiving a 'Jump' command, then you've established that the client is the problem (its not sending the right message to the server). Boom. We've divided the search in half already. -Now, Get yourself a debugging version of the game client (I'm sure their QA department already has those available). Add debugging to check if the spacebar key is ever going down the "do_jetpack" code path. If it isn't, you know that its an issue that the ability is getting unbound from the spacebar key. If it is, then you know there is a problem in the jetpack execution. -Add some code to log the amount of fuel you currently have. Its possible everything is working, but the client loses track of your jetpack fuel and permanently thinks you have 0 (or more likely, -1). You can eliminate (or confirm) bugs in the jetpack fuel logic pretty quick this way too. The fact is, that while the issue may very well be complicated, there are a finite number of points of failure. It is simply a matter of testing each one and determing "It WAS working at this point, but by the time it got to this point, it was NOT working anymore." Divide and conquer is a pretty standard bug hunting technique, and to be honest I'm sure SOE has developers that are a lot more talented than I am. This issue basically ruins the gaming experience for probably 20% of the players, so it SHOULD be made a priority. I'm willing to be patient, but I also expect them to address the issue, rather than backburner it for 3 more months.
