No problem. We are hoping that the ambiguous "quality of life" fixes they state in the blog pertain to what we rant about since we believe they would not outright say they were wrong and let us know clipping animations is the next step.

 

We don't mean to bash BioWare when saying that but it is hard not to when even their statement regarding matters, this one especially, seems purposely ambiguous as they will never completely blame themselves. This is a discouraging trait we wish BioWare would inherit from Blizzard (admitting they made a mistake and give us details as to what they are doing).

I agree, I would like to see the nitty gritty details be a little more forthcoming out of Bioware. The only reason I can see for them to withhold stuff would have to be because they haven't figured it all out yet, and they don't want to provide the user base with ammo against them (sort of what seemed to happen with the hi-res textures thread/issue). However, their silence is equally damaging, probably more, so they might as well just appease those who want it and provide a clear cut idea of what they are doing on a regular basis. They might take some flak for saying they have not figured it all out yet, but we would respect them for it a lot more in the long run.

I for one am kind of insulted at the way they break down what they are doing.

 

It seems they use terms to explain the fixes they are rolling out so we can understand it better, meanwhile the terms they are using were created by them. Therefore they can mean anything. Like, what exactly is "Quality of Life"?

 

We are not idiots. Tell us wth is going on.

lol... are you schizophrenic!? You're having a convo with yourself, man!

It's not about how good or bad WoW as a game is. It's about how the game plays. Yes, it's the most fluid game I've ever played. I'm still leveling so the ability delay stuff isn't hitting me too bad. I haven't PVP'd though and I won't until the delay is fixed. Now if only I could time my jumps to get to that datacron...

I feel like I have to trick the game into thinking I actually jumped when I jumped. Lost count of how many times I've pressed forward+space bar only to just face-plant. So you have to hit them almost together (I'm talking about tight precise jumps from very high up mind you). It's counter intuitive to hit jump before moving forward, in a game. That was just me ranting and has nothing to do with the delay on abilities.

One note about LotRO that I think people have suggested eroneously, their combat is smooth. It has a completely DIFFERENT feel than other MMOs, but different doesn't need to be bad.

 

In fact the original LotRO combat system was the best MMO experience I've had with regard to combat. Ever. CLEAR AND FAR AND AWAY the best.

 

It's gotten sloppy in later versions as they've tweaked this and that due to math issues that arose when they increased the level cap, but that's not interface that's just balance issues.

I was a founding member of LOTRO and in the beta, offered the lifetime sub and turned it down. My experience with their combat and general feel of connection with the character was completely different on release from what you described. It always felt sloppy (admittedly I did not care for their ability queue system even at first - got a little better when they allowed you to display what was in the queue in later versions). Also, their was something about how your character always felt like he was moving through thick milk... the animations were very poor, and slow. Even running felt like you were not quite touching the ground. The best way I can describe it is sort of like playing Fallout 3 or Oblivion in 3rd person view. Your character sort of hovers above the ground just a tad. Not the same, but similar in feeling.

That didn't stop me from enjoying it for a few months on release, and coming back last year for a 6 month jaunt as well. LOTRO is a good game, but it never really felt smooth to me.

lol... are you schizophrenic!? You're having a convo with yourself, man!

Ahahahah I knew someone was going to get me on that.

Touche!

Ahahahah I knew someone was going to get me on that.

 

Touche!

That actually confused me a lot at first, but it all makes so much more sense now

Has anyone seen a quote from BioWare related to ability responsiveness that actually references "cinematic combat" and the apparent animations-over-actions paradigm?

its so nice knowing forums is full of educated professionals with impressive past workplace resume judging how a probably one of the 4 biggest gaming industry company should address their bugs.

Has anyone seen a quote from BioWare related to ability responsiveness that actually references "cinematic combat" and the apparent animations-over-actions paradigm?

Nope .... Scroll up on my rendition of their update and the "Quality of Life" statements.

Like many others have stated, I'm just a newb player. I don't understand the ins and outs of how things work or why. I just know that when I hit a button, something is supposed to happen.

I fell in love with this game from the moment I logged into the beta over Thanksgiving weekend and went so far as to preorder the day before early access in the hopes that I'd get even one hour's worth of early play. I cancelled my WOW scrip because like so many others, for me that game has run its course. But I love the fact that I can pay as little as $15 a month for something that is consistently enjoyable just about any time I feel the itch to log in and play.

I accept the fact that, even though my computer is a fairly good system that is less than a year old, I need to upgrade my graphics card and more than likely power supply in order to get more than 15-20 fps. I accept the fact that I have to turn all my graphics down to their lowest setting and switch shadows completely off so that I'm not playing through a slide show. I cannot afford to buy a monster system in order to have more fps than my visual cortex can noticeably process. I accept all these things because for me, this game is fun. I'm having fun playing again. After a couple years of going through the motions in an online environment, I'm once again immersed into a story that I'm interested in the outcome of.

That was, until the release of patch 1.1. Until that time, I had no issues with delays of any kind. Granted, I haven't done tons of pvp and I don't do alot of raiding or endgame. 99% of my play is solo through storyline and planetary leveling. But from the moment this patch went live last week, this game has been virtually unplayable. I am dying to mobs that I normally wouldn't break a sweat to simply because none of the 3 or 4 interrupts I can cast (most of which are supposed to be instants) actually go off. My first month's scrip has already been charged to my cc. Therefore I'm not going to invoke my drama queen status for at least the next 30 days. I will wait and see if they fix this. But if they don't, I'll chalk up my $75 investment to a Christmas present that I was able to get a couple months of enjoyment out of and cut my losses. Like many of us in today's economy, I cannot afford to continue to sink any amount of money every month into a game that is for all intents and purposes unplayable while I wait around and see if they'll fix the issues that their rush to release new content has brought about.

Please focus all your efforts on fixing this issue instead of trying to develop anything new. Regardless of how many new flashpoints you put in or shiny new gear you bestow, if we cannot make it through existing content, why would we care about new?

its so nice knowing forums is full of educated professionals with impressive past workplace resume judging how a probably one of the 4 biggest gaming industry company should address their bugs.

Because the educated professionals are not the ones buying the game and playing it.

Would you release a candy bar that tasted amazing to the "professionals" over at Hersheys (an experienced candy company), but like garbage to the people who love candy bars and Hershey?

Maybe we should just like it because the "professionals" say so.

its so nice knowing forums is full of educated professionals with impressive past workplace resume judging how a probably one of the 4 biggest gaming industry company should address their bugs.

I dunno about programming and gaming professionals, but I'd sure like an English professor to take a look at your comment and translate it into something I could read and comprehend.

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

Well, I thought I'd chime in.

I've played most MMOs released since 2000. I'm a very competitive PvP player and I currently have Valor rank 60 on my Sorc in this game. I'm Madness spec and all of my spells are insta-cast except Force Lightning (an instant-channel spell). The 2 non-instant spells I use I wait until Wrath procs, which makes them insta-cast. So other than the global cool down (GCD), everything should fire when pressed. I routinely find that spells do not fire when pressed, especially Crushing Darkness benefiting from Wrath.

During PvP matches, I would say 25-50% of my Crushing Darkness spells benefiting from Wrath (which makes it instant-cast) do not fire. The button is not grayed out on GCD or out of range, and I just hit the target with Force Lightning, so why do I keep having to try to activate this spell multiple times? It is insanely frustrating.

I do run an overclocked dual-core CPU, which I now read is potentially an issue. That's nuts. It is also nuts that this happens mostly during PvP and not PvE. PvP is when you need this the most.

All I wonder is how in the world this got past developers during Beta. I think they were so concerned about PvE that PvP combat was a complete afterthought.

Nope .... Scroll up on my rendition of their update and the "Quality of Life" statements.

Yeah, I saw that...those are the nigh-canonical quotes on the issue...but they don't ever seem to draw a connection between their animation-over-action system leading to ability delay.

They give a lot of technical excuses relating to apparently client/server failures, engine failures, optimization for dual core machines (luckily no one has dual core machines! *eyeroll*), global cooldowns not becoming available correctly, etc....but I've never seen a comment that indicates the developers recognize that even if they fix all the optimization and engine issues the ability delay will still exist and still be unacceptable.

Which, I guess, brings us back to what you were saying earlier this page: we're not idiots, just tell us what's going on.

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

 

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

Why bring that up? Does that change anything in the slightest of how things are perceived now?

All I wonder is how in the world this got past developers during Beta. I think they were so concerned about PvE that PvP combat was a complete afterthought.

Well. It doesn't help that it's almost universally assumed the EA pushed the game out before the bugs and UI issues were fixed.

Of course, since people presumably brought this issue up in alpha there's probably a bit more to the issue than simply "this is broken, fix it". Developer obstinacy? A massive case of "gambler's fallacy" with regards to "well we made all these animations, we can't just make things happen instantly!"?

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

 

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

Actually, and I am not looking at WoW with rose tinted glasses because I would rather poke my eye with a sharp pointy stick than play it for one more minute, but combat has always been very smooth in WoW (smoother than TOR) when the servers were working... that is... lag aside.

Lag, as you mentioned, used to be terrible in WoW... I mean, the game was almost unplayable many times each night due to massive lag spikes that lasted for 10 minutes at a time. I recall even without a lag spike my latency being 10 thousand milliseconds sometimes and entire sides of Azeroth would feel it (usually Kaladim or the Eastern kingdoms would have the problem, but both were not affected at the same time)... do you know how much of a delay that is when you press a button and it happens 10 seconds later... it's nuts. I'm speaking more about Vanilla, things did get a lot better in BC lag wise. I'm not kidding when I say lag used to be bad... the running joke for the first year of the game was that the servers were held together by rubber bands and gerbils.

I'm not defending WoW, but WoW's only real ability delay was lag. No lag meant smooth combat (although no lag was rare in Vanilla).

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

 

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

I don't even agree with you on your assertion that WoW played that much worse in the first 3 years than it does now. About the only meaningful change they made was the addition of an ability queue, in responses to high-end raiders utilizing Quartz + Stopcasting because of slight client/server latency.

But I would still take Vanilla WoW's responsiveness played on a terribly ****** computer with 500ms of lag over SWTOR's responsiveness.

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

 

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

The problem with that argument is that if you do compare more recently launched games: Aion, Rift, Warhammer, they do not have responsiveness problems. MMO's have moved on since WoW's launch, but its a serious problem that TOR still feels like its from WoW's era and not from the list of modern MMO's.

People love viewing WoW through rose-tinted glasses. They forget just how poorly that game played for the first 3 years compared to how it plays now. The lag and 'ability delay' in that game were horrible at first. Contrary to popular belief, you did NOT have the responsiveness you have today.

 

I'm not defending the current issue in TOR. Rather, just trying to debunk the myth that WoW's responsiveness has been smooth since it's launch.

This is false and I hope does not confuse those not up to speed... I don't have the energy to go into great lengths and detail to explain this to you. The statement that WoW at any point in time was not responsive in combat is simply wrong and claiming anything like this is a blatant lie.

inb4 getting stuck looting...

Well, I thought I'd chime in.

 

I've played most MMOs released since 2000. I'm a very competitive PvP player and I currently have Valor rank 60 on my Sorc in this game. I'm Madness spec and all of my spells are insta-cast except Force Lightning (an instant-channel spell). The 2 non-instant spells I use I wait until Wrath procs, which makes them insta-cast. So other than the global cool down (GCD), everything should fire when pressed. I routinely find that spells do not fire when pressed, especially Crushing Darkness benefiting from Wrath.

 

During PvP matches, I would say 25-50% of my Crushing Darkness spells benefiting from Wrath (which makes it instant-cast) do not fire. The button is not grayed out on GCD or out of range, and I just hit the target with Force Lightning, so why do I keep having to try to activate this spell multiple times? It is insanely frustrating.

 

I do run an overclocked dual-core CPU, which I now read is potentially an issue. That's nuts. It is also nuts that this happens mostly during PvP and not PvE. PvP is when you need this the most.

 

All I wonder is how in the world this got past developers during Beta. I think they were so concerned about PvE that PvP combat was a complete afterthought.

It is equally persistant in PVE, trust me. I feel it when raiding in EV. But I even felt it on my level 18 BH. Let me explan:

I was at 20% HP after popping a med pack. I always send my companion out on crew skills while I am leveling, especially with a Merc BH since they are so solo friendly. I was fighting an elite after taking down two weak mobs that spawned after the cut scene with him. So you can understand he hits hard. He is about 15% HP when I pop shield. Now the entire time I absorbing damage I was going to rocket blast then finish with Death From Above. That should kill him. Well, after dealing with slight unresponsive abilities, I started pounding my rocket blast. Once, twice, three times, four times... dead. The shield actually died before any of my abilities can go off and I died with a mob at 15%.

This is false and I hope does not confuse those not up to speed... I don't have the energy to go into great lengths and detail to explain this to you. The statement that WoW at any point in time was not responsive in combat is simply wrong and claiming anything like this is a blatant lie.

 

inb4 getting stuck looting...

/agree.

Also, lol, stuck looting was epic sometimes. You could slide across the whole zone with your character in a crouched position, but that meant you never did get the loot. Sometimes I just gave up on trying to loot certain corpses because it just would not work. This problem persisted for a crazy long time too.

I should note I don't think stuck looting bug was related to any kind of delay or even lag because you could still engage in combat or whatever fine when it was happening, as could others around you. It was just a really annoying/funny bug.

/agree.

 

Also, lol, stuck looting was epic sometimes. You could slide across the whole zone with your character in a crouched position, but that meant you never did get the loot. Sometimes I just gave up on trying to loot certain corpses because it just would not work. This problem persisted for a crazy long time too.

 

I should note I don't think stuck looting bug was related to any kind of delay or even lag because you could still engage in combat or whatever fine when it was happening, as could others around you. It was just a really annoying/funny bug.

Server-client communication bugs relating to looting and latency issues related to insufficient server hardware are quite a bit different from ability responsiveness issues due to poor engine performance coupled to the fundamentally awful decision to give precedence to animations over actions.