Beta 1Z next week…

Denryu

Join Date 07/2006

+93

Quoting Myles,

reply 73

Thanks for chiming in Frogboy. Some people seemed to be reading way too much into this.

That would be me. I am way to literal minded and the most recent comment by Frogboy helps me see the big picture and where our input comes in.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

Yeah, thanks for the info Brad. Looks good now.

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Elemental has never been stable enough for me to do any serious testing. Only with the latest version have I been able to play more than a few minutes before CTDs, and then couldn't reload. Reloading still doesn't work. I'm wondering how many others have the same 'luck'. (rhetorical question -- there is a limited number of testers -- how many enjoy sufficient stability to effectively test?)

Beyond basic stability I am unable to comment on readiness to progress to beta 2.X.

@RavenX -- the first year or so of UO was truly a great time. The game was very 'rough' (exploits, asocial behaviors, bugs, patch problems -- don't play on patch fridays until the patch was reverted and fixed! -- etc.) but it was a 'magical' time. I remember when GMs were acutally helpful (the 'I can't help thee with that' change was truly a sad day). Raph et al did a good job. UO showed that the ability for some to be jerks enabled many to be 'good' guys -- without the ability to do 'bad' there is little ability to do 'good'.

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Quoting Nick-Danger,

reply 78

@RavenX -- the first year or so of UO was truly a great time. The game was very 'rough' (exploits, asocial behaviors, bugs, patch problems -- don't play on patch fridays until the patch was reverted and fixed! -- etc.) but it was a 'magical' time. I remember when GMs were actually helpful (the 'I can't help thee with that' change was truly a sad day). Raph et al did a good job. UO showed that the ability for some to be jerks enabled many to be 'good' guys -- without the ability to do 'bad' there is little ability to do 'good'.

Indeed it was, my friend. I was on the Great Lakes shard at that point both as player and staff. I was there for the "helpful" GM days too. When we had to go to using pre-scripted replies that was a direct result of the law suite filed by the guys wife who got stalked. I can't remember what the "Official" excuse was for that though that we told the player base. It made the news in England when it happened but I don't know if it was widely known about here in US.

It's also not-so-widely known that Origin temporarily hired some "Sociology" Experts and professors to "observe" how players interacted with one another and their findings helped us come to the conclusions of how some of the later PvP mechanics worked, for instance the whole "Tag" system of having players be able to chose to be labeled as PvP. I'm not a shrink though so don't ask me to explain the logic behind all that...lol.

@Frogboy: Thank you for the reply, Brad. That does clear some things up for some people I'm sure. A question if I may. Is there any word on the changes to how capturing resources will work? I.E. Being able to grab a resource that's close to a city but not adjacent. Scott mentioned it a little while ago in one of his posts. Will that be in beta 1z?

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[quote who="=Outlaw=" reply="55" id="2575314"]After 'Z' its 'GT'. Everyone knows that[/quote]

Heh...and I was gonna say that I was pretty sure Kawasaki made a 1Z back in the 80s...

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2422

Elemental has never been stable enough for me to do any serious testing. Only with the latest version have I been able to play more than a few minutes before CTDs, and then couldn't reload. Reloading still doesn't work. I'm wondering how many others have the same 'luck'. (rhetorical question -- there is a limited number of testers -- how many enjoy sufficient stability to effectively test?)

Precisely. And this is specifically why we have the vote.

Right now, relatively few people are providing data or crash info (some people are but we have a hard time determining overall ecosystem stability).

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

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I tend to report a crash everytime I think it has a different specific cause rather than every time it happens. The crashes in 1G don't seem triggered by events. So for 1G I don't think I reported more than one crash.

Of course I've reported lots of crash bugs over the various beta series so anything caused by hardware has a good chance of being resolved by now.

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Quoting Raven X,

reply 79

@Frogboy: Thank you for the reply, Brad. That does clear some things up for some people I'm sure. A question if I may. Is there any word on the changes to how capturing resources will work? I.E. Being able to grab a resource that's close to a city but not adjacent. Scott mentioned it a little while ago in one of his posts. Will that be in beta 1z?

Isn't already working like that ? I can tap resources that are in the city zone of influence (and it provided some problems, with the fact that those tiles under the influence couldn't be built from another town which also had a zone of influence over it)

And I must say that the game start to look more polished than before : I tapped a resource 2 or 3 tiles away, and when I built some thing to link the city to it, the walls were naturally drawn around the city.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 81

Precisely. And this is specifically why we have the vote.

Right now, relatively few people are providing data or crash info (some people are but we have a hard time determining overall ecosystem stability).

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

Would it be possible to have an automatic crash reporter like some other games have? I know when WoW crashes (which is infrequent these days) a popup appears where I can type in what I was doing, and it just mails off their crash data files without having to do anything else.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 81

Elemental has never been stable enough for me to do any serious testing. Only with the latest version have I been able to play more than a few minutes before CTDs, and then couldn't reload. Reloading still doesn't work. I'm wondering how many others have the same 'luck'. (rhetorical question -- there is a limited number of testers -- how many enjoy sufficient stability to effectively test?)
Precisely. And this is specifically why we have the vote.

Right now, relatively few people are providing data or crash info (some people are but we have a hard time determining overall ecosystem stability).

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

Perhaps we should submit our machine specs along with a list of other software titles that we regularly play without crashing.

You should also have a questionaire to determine the skills and abilities of the people doing the beta testing.

This is common in beta tests I think. You could also add all of this into impulse.

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That is not that common at all, actually. Also the game is still very very bad for me atm, the reason I am not reporting any more crashes is that it crashes all the time and I get tired of firing up elemental only to see it crash. There should however be a crash report or two around so I feel like I did my thing. we will see IZ appearing and then have a peak at the stability.

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I'm looking forward to this game a lot, and don't mind testing relatively buggy and plain games, but at the current state this game provides so little enjoyment and is so difficult to play without a proper manual that I shy away. I'll rather opt to just sit in the sidelines and wait for the game to be more stable. Feels like too much work to test the game at its current state.

My two cents honestly is that this not quite ready for multplayer testing yet. I might have a different view on how far the game should be to be suitable for multiplayer, but then again my opinion is the only one I can give.

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Quoting Shurdus,

reply 86

Also the game is still very very bad for me atm, the reason I am not reporting any more crashes is that it crashes all the time and I get tired of firing up elemental only to see it crash.

I reported a couple of crash related issues, but yeah.....I feel just like you. I am having random crashes all the time + save/load isn't working properly. Once the next beta [1Z] is out, I will begin playtesting it again, and I will report everything what I can find. We must move to Beta 2 afterall, and if the game is not stable...that is not possible.

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 81

Right now, relatively few people are providing data or crash info (some people are but we have a hard time determining overall ecosystem stability).

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

*coughs politely*

The point being, of course, that the more people actually posting those debug.errs and dxdiags, the more we can actually help Stardock move to Beta 2. If you get CTD, for goodness sake, post it.

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Quoting Winnihym,

reply 89

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

*coughs politely*

The point being, of course, that the more people actually posting those debug.errs and dxdiags, the more we can actually help Stardock move to Beta 2. If you get CTD, for goodness sake, post it.

And as others have noted. When the CTD is caused by the same thing, "Out of Memory" everytime, on the same hardware, that is relentlessly kept updated, it becomes moot to send them all in over and over.

Beta 1Z will, if nothing else, provide a easily seen correction to the current status. It won't CTD after 165 Turns, unless your trapped on the map and can't interact with the other entities at all. LOL

Brad quoted it above. It will be easy to know after 25-30 games played under 1Z if it goes to Beta 2.

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eta till we get 1Z?

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Quoting KillzEmAllGod,

reply 91

eta till we get 1Z?

I suppose it will be april 1.[thursday]?

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Quoting Frogboy,

reply 81

In reply to: "Elemental has never been stable enough for me to do any serious testing. Only with the latest version have I been able to play more than a few minutes before CTDs, and then couldn't reload. Reloading still doesn't work. I'm wondering how many others have the same 'luck'. (rhetorical question -- there is a limited number of testers -- how many enjoy sufficient stability to effectively test?)"

Precisely. And this is specifically why we have the vote.

Right now, relatively few people are providing data or crash info (some people are but we have a hard time determining overall ecosystem stability).

IF you cannot play through a game without crashing then it is NOT ready for beta 2.

I've only been sending in 1 report from an 'issue' (such as 'immediate CTD when reloading save') from one game, when it seems it's a general issue applicable in all game attempts and not specific to that one game attempt. Would you like more examples (ie -- report the same'general' issue from more game attempts)? If more, what would a good number of examples be?

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Beta 1Z next week&hellip;

Beta 1Z next week…