Avian Gamers Network

"Secret Team" - It's no secret that we're going to continually work on expansions, but we're not allowed to tell you right now what we're working on for our next expansion. It will be cool though, we can promise that!

We are on these and are certainly not happy about letting bugs into the game. We are working on the majority of these issues in the current publish.

Every publish has a two week testing cycle, 4-10 days of which is on the public TC, dependent on the element. We will not commit to a actual ship date until we know the publish no longer has a known show-stopping issue. Which is why you won't get actual publication notice most of the time until the day before it happens.

And if we end up with issues, which will happen due to the difference in player numbers and type of play that occurs on Test Centers, we will hotfix them as quickly as we can diagnose and fix them.

We care about quality a lot, since lack of quality detracts from our fun, accessible, Star Wars experience we are striving to deliver.

We have certainly not forgotten JTL, it is a huge part of the game! Publish 13.0 has some new missions for JTL for example. But JTL is pretty darned fun and Star War-sy already, and we have bigger/nearer targets in the coming several weeks so we won't be doing a lot in JTL other than needed improvements/fixes.

I can't stress enough that the development of SWG is a team effort. The things we are doing in the game bubble up from the team and player feedback. We have always heard the players, but we haven't always been able to move on that feedback for a variety of reasons. But now we are capable of doing so and will! And our team is putting in the extra effort to make SWG better as quickly as possible. Both the new people on the team and the ones that have been here from the very beginning want the same thing; make this gaming experience GREAT! Which of course means more fun, more accessible (easier to understand with depth) and most of all more Star Wars!

I think the "secret" team will have a public name soon enough. Patience!

We actually did upgrade some of the hardware when JTL shipped. There are several elements to this problem of hundreds of people in small areas. Server lag (too much to process), Client lag (both bandwidth and graphical rendering). We can and are working on the server lag issues all the time and the Infrastructure team owns most of this work. But when we upgrade combat we will help this also. Most server time is taken up doing line-of-sight, AI and combat. Optimizing these high-CPU elements is our challenge to lower server lag. Currently we don't block people from entering ground zones when the numbers go beyond what we handle well, so the player experience degrades as that number is exceeded. We are discussing how to address this in the least impactful to play/most immersive ways possible, because there will be a limit to how many people we can handle on any given server even with optimization.

On the client side, we are doing framerate improvements every single publish. Sometimes they aren't very much, but cummulatively we want to get at least 50% faster over the coming few publishes from where we were January 1st. As we improve the client performance, being in larger cities with lots of people should start getting to be a signficantly smoother experience.

On the bandwidth side, too high of bandwidth leads to disconnections of the players client (and higher bandwidth costs for us) so we are always looking to save bits coming down the wire. This is traded off against the fidelity of what you see (how often the other players and NPCs arounnd you are updated). Today we have pretty high fidelity in what we show you. If too many people show up and your internet connection gets saturated, you start to "lag" behind the incoming updates. If you lag too far behind the connection is actually terminated by the operating system, leading to a disconnection.

None of these are easy problems for any MMOG, but the high levels of customization and visual fidelity in SWG make them particularly difficult. But the good news is we are working on them and you should see continuous, incremental improvement on all aspects of this over the coming few months. And if we can find a way to make it better instantly you better bet we will put it in ASAP!

P.S. I didn't mean to skip over the new hardware question. When we launch expansions we typically add new and more modern hardware to our service allowing us to rebalance which servers do what area. We also do this rebalancing with our current setup when we see that it will improve the overall experience.

P.P.S. I also wanted to mention client crashes. We are deadly serious about client crashes. Please use the in-game reporting of these (send the reports when it comes up and asks you to send them if you should crash). We look at these daily and are working the highest frequency crashes hard. Today our crashes are at a very low level relative to the last few months, but we are not slowing this effort down. You can also go to the active bug thread in the In Live section of our forums to report crashes and dialog with our community and QA folks so we can get the info we need to reproduce and fix any and all client crashes. Most client crashes as of today are linked to driver incompatibilities and as we disocover these we add warnings that happen when you launch the game so you can be aware it is time to upgrade your graphics drivers.



Message Edited by SOETyrant on 02-04-2005 06:57 AM

Gordon Walton
Sony Online Entertainment

...Seriously though, this is currently a pretty small team, still learning our tools/processes, so they are in the "crawl" stage of crawl/walk/run in fluency. Every publish they will be putting in more directed, ever-more Star Wars content. We are simultaneously improving the tools to increase productivity and increase the range of story experiences we can provide.

Every chance we get, I will augment this team with more people as we believe directed Star Wars content is our biggest long-term challenge to making a world-class entertainment experience. We currently have two open positions we are hiring for this team to get Senior Content Designers (meaning they have built story based content for 3 published games).