A Warning to the BF:1942 Community

[Whiskey Tango Foxtrot]

Inconsistant Online Performance even on the official EA Servers?

I have seen this before.

If you guys follow Teamplay First Person Shooters you may have heard of Global Operations released by Barking Dog/Electronic Arts about 6 months ago. What occured in the Global Operations community made me lose a lot of respect for EA and I truly hope their sense of commitment to their own Products and its' community is greatly improved for BF:1942. If you have not heard of Global Operations, I'm not too surprised.

Global Operations (GO) had a rocky start, they released a Laggy, Bug-Filled Demo (Unlike the Beautiful BF:1942 Demo) and subsequently released a Laggy, Bug-Filled Game. GO was EA's most recent entry into the Teamplay First Person Shooter at the time and it was developed by many former members of the CS Team (Before Beta 5.1 I believe). It contained many well executed Team Orientated Aspects and would have provided much depth to Teamplay and Clan Matches.

This was recognized by ENDLESS THREADS that basically stated that this game had tremendous potential if only the lag was reduced. It was the same thing over and over, "Great game, good teamplay but the lag kills it. I'll buy it when they fix the lag." After an initial patch and a second patch release seperated by months, the issues were still not resolved. Old problems were replaced by new problems but in the eyes of the community it didn't matter, they were minor compared to the still unresolved Lag Issues that was slowly stifling the Fanbase . Petitions were mounted, letters were sent to the upper management of EA and Barking, a final push was made to inspire them to fix what could be a very successful and popular game. The only obstacle was that people refused to buy and play an online game that has Lag Problems.

It was established early on that the GOs' Netcode was inadaquete because even on the EA Official Servers, for the length of time they existed, could not even handle half the player max without serious Lag Issues. We aren't talking about Minor Lag when you are facing a specific "busy" direction. We are talking about Warping, Bullets that didn't hit there target, and vitual slideshow in serious firefights. The Issues were as close to being "show stoppers" as they could come without actually being one.

For six months players tolerated a nearly unplayable Netcode, after endless, unreplied pleas from the community and clan leaders (Like COFR) to Electronic Arts and Barking Dog, their response was to drop Patch Support for Global Operations. The much needed patches to resolve MAJOR LAG ISSUES are no longer being officially (if at all) worked on.

My warning is simple. I like what I see of BF:1942. PLEASE, for the sake of the success of this game we must be Honest with ourselves and the Developers, if there is a Lag Issue we must identify it for what it is. Currently the running discussion is that the Lag Issues are connected to Inadaquete Server Specifications. A few people have observed that this may be the case 50% of the time but why would they be having the same problem on the Official EA Servers. The game is so new there could possibly be Configuration Details to be ironed out for computers of varying specifications so there is an unexplored possibility. If you discover Configurations that improve your gameplay please post them along with the specs of your computer. A guide should and probably will eventually be put together. When it is established that it is an issue that we, as a community, cannot resolve, then we got to get on the developers case about it.

My warning, in summary, is to be aware of the problems and make it known to the community and the developer otherwise it will not be resolved. If you are not experiencing the same problem don't Fanboy Flame them, help them solve it. Don't allow the developers to become complacent and don't let the Fanboys create the image that all is good when it is not.

Battlefield: 1942 is not just good enough, a game this cool cannot be left to slip through the cracks. It would be a great loss to the Teamplay First Person Shooter Community.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

PS: Hopefully my warning proves to be unnecessary.

[swad]

That, my friend, is a very good post. I knew nothing of Global Operations, but I've heard so much how EA releases... maybe patch it once, then move on. Let's hope between EA and Dice that someone keeps this one alive.

[richcz3]

A long read but a very good read.

I think BF1942 has a real groundswell moving along with it. It brings together a variety of action gameplay and sucsesfuly/effectively integrates them well together. It looks to be a contender for a variety of GOTY awards from various publications.

So with that, I would like to believe that its release here in September will grow to a feaver pitch as the holidays approach. EA/Dice could have a huge hit on their hands. EA's attention to detail will be under the microscope in a big way. I don't think they want to screw the pooch on this one.
It's for those reasons I believe BF1942 will not end up and also ran.

richcz3

[Karsten]

OK... I acctually purchase GO and played for a while. Great concept, good looks... SUCKY NETCODE! And yes, that is why I stoped playing.

However I do not see, nor have I seen this in my limited game playing with 1942. GO was consistenly bad. Never made much of a difference, as soon as you where with a lot of people online it started to get worse and worse... most anoying was the bullet vanishing!
No such behavior with BF. It works fine on a good server, a fat pipe and peopel with decent connection. I really don't think we have to fear the GO bug.

[Docastillo]

I trust DICE, and know for sure they will make sure we, as BF1942 fans, will get everything we need, want and ever hoped for.

[swad]

I truly do hope we can trust Dice. From all I've heard, doesn't sound safe to put our trust in EA, though.

[Red MEat]

I do not believe it is the netcode so much as the servers that EA may be running or their network connection. Global Operation and BF are made by two different companies and EA is little more then a publisher. EA has been having quite a bit of financial problems this has resulted in layoffs, closing of offices and Dev groups. I doubt they will buy the best in regards to server hardware and that is from I have learned so far nor will they maintain a full T1 or T3 line just for their game servers. They used to co-lo their servers but some of the places they had servers have gone belly up and prices for rack space at the others have gone through the roof compared to two years ago. Like most companies the extravagance of having the latest servers and fastest connections is not paramount, the bottom line is. Since this is not like WWII Blitzkrieg where you pay them to access the game EA doesn’t really have to provide the gaming community any servers and thou most like do so for the initial testing of the MP code and will keep these up for a while. So you should never truly rely on EA servers as a prime example of how good the game runs in MP… that is until they publish the servers spec’s so comparisons can be made, also we don’t know what other software is being run on their servers whether they have auditing software tacking its performance or what.

EA used to be run by gamers but over the past 4-5 years it has slowly been taken over by MBA’s… Sales and Marketing types, and yes I have little respect for these types because they do more harm then good when they run the whole company. Westwood Studios is a good example of Sales and Marketing staying in their area and allowing the Dev and Designers to do their jobs and only poking their pinheads out to sell and promote the game.

Just my 2 cents.. since its taking forever to compile my code


-Red MEat-

[Docastillo]

EA pulled off some nice tricks...

I mean, their press events were okay, a few EA guys mailed us from time to time to post some news and they visited our homeland, www.cebf.ws quite often.

But I still don't really like EA. They are way to commercially orientated. Not that they can change that, they wouldn't last another month, but I still think commerce is slowly ruining the game market.

DICE on the other hand, made me and lost of other fans hella happy with Codename Eagle, the basis of BF1942, and it's sequel beats all other games when it comes to the true thing games should have; cool gameplay.

Rexxie has been to DICE, as one of the few he was invited to watch BF1942 in earlier stages. That was only the beginning of the BF1942 hype, our forums had only 40 members or summin', and he (and the others) clearly described the feeling they got there. DICE loves games.

They love BF, and that's what you need to make a good game.
And I would never believe they'd let BF flop, just because of a problem they don't feel like fixing. They will do everything they can to make BF last.

I should have bought DICE shares, damnit.

[swad]

Doc: that is comforting to hear that at least we should have the developer breathing life into this game no matter the turns it may take. But seriously, EA are pocket lining developers anymore.... money mongers or what have you. You can't count on a publisher like them anymore. It's the developers who keep the ball rolling.

[Docastillo]

True, but publishers often get rights when they come to a publish agreement.

I think EA has much power over BF. I even believe it was them who decided when the demo's were going to be released.
At this moment, I don't even think DICE can release an official patch without EA's approval.

[Red MEat]

DICE is a huge company and they have some really brilliant people working for them, sadly they are in Sweden. But they have opened an office Canada and with all the work they are doing for Microsoft on both X-Box and PC titles there are rumors of them having a development office in the US. As long as they stay a development house they should continue to “Wow!” us with games. Too bad MS didn’t publish this game, at least they have the deep pockets to maintain a much larger server farm, but then again it would be on the Zone but hell most people would probably pay to play on the Zone if they knew they could play without so much Lag.

-Red MEat-

[GonePostal]

Good point. I have encoutered certain netcode related problems with the last demo before the release, haven't been able to test the newest patch though. And yes, I have encountered the fanboys that insist if the don't have the problem, there is no problem, just my problem.

[Docastillo]

I think it's allright the way it is.

I hope DICE earns millions, and I also hope they will never lose their love for games. When developers starts looking for profit rather then gameplay, games get screwed.

like MOH:AA.

[Bolt]

What you on about? The netcode in BF is the best ive ever seen from a multigamer. I mean, im in europe and im pinging 130 on american servers at best, stable as a rock...

The problem is more a memory leak of some kind, has nothing to do with the netcode.

[swad]

HECK NO to microsoft publishing this. If that would have happened, it would have gone to X-Box never to see the light of day of a PC

*mumbles semething about a halo and walks off*

[Docastillo]

HALO will come out on PC swad

[swad]

Yeah, and Duke Nukem Forever isn't vaporware

[Red MEat]

Sometime the netcode is at fault, load balancing the connections and so on. But nothing is perfect and it takes time to find, repro and then track down the real problem in the code and come up with a fix. Other times you can have having the code running in debug mode and it runs flawlessly but when run in release mode the problem occurs. When that happens it is next to impossible to track down the problem if you can’t hook into the debugger. Other times it could be a certain race condition or a cascading effect that is causing the problem.

Not everyone is seeing the same problems and as others have seen some severs are so laggy they are unplayable others have little or no lag. It could be the physical system whether it’s the server or the user’s computer or the network connection (server or the users) even the netcode or it could be a combination of all. You can only do so much real world testing, and if DICE was ordered to get the game released by a certain date they may have allowed problems to be closed and then be taken care of via a patch. They might also be waiting to do a full post mortem so that people can decompress and review the code with clearer heads.

Having designed and developed software and hardware products you get to the point that 98% is good enough because if you continue to “muck’ about in the code and being stressed out over release dates you will just cause more problems in the end. While releasing the product then addressing any problems via a patch is the best way to solve any remaining issues. No one is perfect you can only set the bar as high as everyone in your Dev team can reach if it is set to high then not only will the Dev team fail but the product will also be an utter failure. So far I don’t think the game is a failure it just needs some in game tweaking and netcode tweaking but it’s far from a disaster…. Because that title still is held by WWII Blitzkrieg where they ran out of money and they had to release it too gain some back to keep making patches.

-Red MEat-

[Red MEat]

Swad

Actually DICE is making the X-Box and PC version of Midtown Madness 3 and the PC version will be released about 6 months after the X-Box version. MS has to have titles for its X-Box too keep up with Sony and Nintendo but I know from friends that work in MGS they are ramping up all their PC and X-Box titles both in house development and external such as DICE.

Age of Mythology, Fighter Sim 3 and the next Mechwarrior titles are all due out before the end of the year. And while at E3 this year the amount of PC and X-Box titles blew me a away. I have toured MS MGS offices and was impressed… though I would never work for them I like my companies small and more personal.

Pssst… “<whisper: I got to play the PC version of Halo… just for a few minutes… it’s coming>

-Red MEat-

[Weyland]

"Digital Illusions CE .. sadly .. in Sweden"? Now your kidding us... there's absolutely nothing sad about that! ;p

/Weyland - Sweden