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Post by SirPartyMan on Jan 4, 2006 9:45:14 GMT -5
Please feel free to site your own experiences, successes, and failures. This information will be passed along to Firaxis/Take Two developers.
Be as specific as you can if you are having problems.
Thanks, SPM
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Post by Avogadro on Jan 4, 2006 10:19:24 GMT -5
Before patch I was doing OK. The odd time I would "loop" but this was usually because someone was blocking me with a firewall. Now I haven't played in 3-4 weeks. I tried to host (which I would usually do alot) and in 4 hours could get no more then 4 players to connect at the time so sad to say My civ4 game and Frieds strat guide are sitting in a box beside my comp stand. The point is: I cannot be more specific then this. Most players on ladder cannot be more specific then this. We are normal people trying to play a game. We know nothing of erasing game logs, rearranging inf. files etc etc. That stuff was hard enough to do as a beta tester when we had Canuck and Nolan over our shoulder helping us for instalation of every patch. Not one dam patch worked properly during the whole beta testing sessions. We, betas, lost 100's upon 100's of hours trying to make each patch workable instead of having the developers make self-extracting/self-fixing patches...we had to delete files, rename files, yim Canuck, hunt for drivers etc etc. They better wake up over at firaxis because this game is not that good. The programming is bad. I recently bought 2-3 more games and can tell you they run a hell of alot better. How many millions will they make on this game and they got what? 1-2 part-timers left working on the project? Jesse get the message to your boys, they released this game months early now they need to spend some bucks and hire 3-4 peeps to fix this thing. Hell we got people not even working for the company making better patches then what is officially being released. Hire them. The Civ community should not need to be getting a higher education in informations systems in order to run a game. IMy wife spent 60US dollars for game and 12 dollars more for the guide. This represents 90 dollars Canadian. Enough to run 2 games which work well.
Sounds like I'm bitching? She worked 14 hours at minimum wage to buy this for me before x-mas. Why? Because I love civ and she loves me.
Hell I won the last CCC and I still have a sour taste in my mouth. Can firaxis not imagine the response of the average consumer who is not a 100% civilizations addict? If I am getting pissed imagine how many are simply walking away from it.... I'll be back to play when the right patches come out in the mean time I have but 3 hours of "fun" a day accorded to me. I need to work and raise a family so I will spend those 3 hours in c3c while the one's making the bucks fix their problems.
::::stomps away grumbling and wishing there was something to kick::::
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Post by yyrkroon on Jan 4, 2006 12:45:08 GMT -5
In many instances I will attempt to join a game and will loop on "contacting peer" for one of the peers.
This does seem to be more frequent since the patch - I have spent a couple hours trying to get into a suitable game without success on more than one occasion.
I have also tried using DirectIP games to get around this, and have had contacting peer problems with that method as well.
I will also note that I have experienced far fewer conx problems with ladder games than with non ladder games. I suspect this is because many ladder players have tinkered with their router settings.
In short I think the gamespy-voodoo-magic-no-router-config-needed sucks.
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Post by Magzi on Jan 4, 2006 13:02:35 GMT -5
I too have many problems connecting now and can't connect at all from my laptop, which is a mystery to me why not. As a result have managed one game in a week and a half. What was even more annoying is that a player dropped and couldn't get back in and the AI that took over killed me ;D Yes Avo I agree it is a little disheartening, especially after having bought the game I then had to spend on computers too!
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Post by Lestat on Jan 4, 2006 13:18:21 GMT -5
As I said before lobby chat in stagging room overload some players and result is hard connect to game.
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Post by Tony on Jan 4, 2006 14:07:08 GMT -5
OMG, how can connection issues be a result of being able to chat in the lobby from staging room. Anyway back on topic...worst worst and worst, after the xmas rush things have got a little better, i connect about 30% of the time but still not good. In fact its such a big problem, alot of games in the lobby have "good peers only" in its name, these people think the connection issues are due to imcompatability. Dont know if its GS, or patch or game coding or what but the "connecting to peer" problem is not nice
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Post by Sidhe on Jan 4, 2006 14:13:05 GMT -5
Then re-educate them Tony.
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Post by NicodaMax on Jan 4, 2006 15:31:07 GMT -5
Now this was a hard question! 'bout the same I guess... There are connectivity issues and stability issues. I had my run in with the lag problem but I think it was external factors (neither game nor my pc). It's harder for me to connect to games in lobby now, but I saw an improvement in direct IP games. Go figure
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Post by Tony on Jan 4, 2006 18:16:15 GMT -5
Then re-educate them Tony. I dont know whats causing the connecting to peer stuff myself Educate me
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Post by umbra on Jan 4, 2006 18:30:52 GMT -5
Well i think its just pepole on old pc, and bad Connections,
get atlest 1mb line.
and you will do fine, and the grapich in the game is kinda big,
so you should have atlest 1gbite ram
after the patch every thing seems fine to me
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Post by Avogadro on Jan 4, 2006 18:39:26 GMT -5
1024 kb or RAM here 256 MB video card with shading capacity AMD 3400 chip set
nothing wrong with my specs. Game released too soon in my opinion.
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Post by Tony on Jan 4, 2006 18:45:58 GMT -5
Nothing wrong with my comp spec either, the comp is less then 3 months old.
And a 3 meg connection, which is not behind any sort of firewall or router.
It connects to every other game just fine, never have i had a a problem.
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Post by Avogadro on Jan 4, 2006 19:25:56 GMT -5
Only point I'm trying to make is the game was released and now they must turn to mp communities to get info on how to fix it and what the issues are. Had they tested longer say...3 months then they would have had a better game straight out fo the box. This is not an attack on Fried or any of the programmers. I am merely trying to slam the multinational companies that run the show and decide to release games ahead of schedule to make more bucks in their quarterly assessments. This game runs well on SP for me but the whole point of the marketing was "build from the MP up". Ask any beta who was not a techie and they will tell you...this game was hard to test, hard to patch, hard to report on etc etc. It should and could have been much more user friendly but it was rushed pure and simple.
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Midgard
Worker
Captain of LoD
Posts: 103
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Post by Midgard on Jan 4, 2006 19:35:30 GMT -5
Does anyone notice there is only 1 vote for big improvments and i am going to go on a limb and say that vote came from SPM.
I will have to agree with Avo, the game has gotten worse since the 1.52 patch, Lobby stability is wonderful now tho, do not change that, but I havent been able to connect to a single game since the new patch, and I previously loved CIv4 greatly, and now I can barely stand it.
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reptile
Worker
in desperate need of a new avatar
Posts: 106
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Post by reptile on Jan 4, 2006 19:36:42 GMT -5
Hmm, related to the vote: i didnt have problems before and I dont have them now, but since others seem to have more problems it´s getting more difficult for me, too.
I tried an hour to get a game today. Once we got to the 1st turn and the host dropped. Mostly the games didnt get started because there were too few players. Then I hosted one game by myself by IP. First, I had to ask someone to leave because he was the only one in the game and obviously blocked other players. So the bad-peer-problem really exists. Literally the second I could make him leave another player joined. And then so on and on until we were 6. The game was running without any problem until the end. When we were 6 I asked the "bad peer" to join up, i wanted to try if it works this way, but he didnt enter. I dont know though if it wasnt possible for him or if he didnt try at all. The question then is: what makes you a bad peer? Even IP-ing doesn´t solve it.
Edit: No, that one vote was not coming from SPM, I bet it was umbra. Just look at the myleague ladder main page and you can realize SPM´s objectivity.
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Post by markweston on Jan 4, 2006 22:04:21 GMT -5
My experience has been a massive increase in failures to get into games (stuck on "contacting peer..." etc), and also an increase in the number of games that freeze or go OOS directly after launch. I remember the night I first installed 1.52 being particularly bad. Impossible to tell from my anecdotal experiences whether this is a patch problem or GS server load problem, but the timing seemed very precisely coincidental to me.
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Post by friedrichpsitalon on Jan 4, 2006 22:08:53 GMT -5
Actually, the positive vote wasn't SPM. (Nor was it me.)
Unfortunately, no amount of testing can anticipate the issues MP will bring to the table. There are literally thousands of people playing MP around the clock; even 100 testers would never reproduce the amount of gameplay that a consumer base would represent.
It's easy to say "well, surely they could have caught more" but you say that not knowing what already WAS caught. A live player base is always going to be more effective in catching bugs than any quality control staff - that's the simple and factual nature of gaming.
Does it excuse the current situation? Absolutely not. Nor does Firaxis expect it to. Does that fact perhaps deserve understanding? Possibly - that's for you to decide. Does it deserve your patience? Consider the "wonderful and golden" final C3C and how many patches it went through... and make sure you count C3's patches, and PTW's patches, because don't kid yourself about C3C's balance and playability - all the C3 patches and PTW patches led to what we have there now. Heck, the final version of PTW before Conquests had a completely unbalanced civilization for ladder MP and a 100% repeatable, certain OOS bug involving 5-6 units and two full eras of the game!
I'd say CIV is actually doing pretty well for its lifespan, if you compare it properly.
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Post by WarningU2 on Jan 4, 2006 22:25:24 GMT -5
It is the same for me connection wise as before the patch. I will say the lobby has vastly improved but I wish there was a way of filtering the games.
I play little except on the weekend, and after several attempts last week that aborted I only ended up playing one game.
I find it's not just the peer circle jerk - its actually getting started after the launch is my problem now. The timer just sits at 1:07. Alt-N will show 0 ping to players and you are foobared. You need to restart at least once to launch successfully (advance the timer). Never had this during the beta ... in fact the beta was flawless for me.
I think it is to do with people coming in during the staging and leaving. I think ghosts are left which screw up the launch.
I've had more luck hosting games myself then joining.
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Post by Avogadro on Jan 4, 2006 22:30:47 GMT -5
But why does... let's say The settlers "Heritage of the kings" work for me straight from the box? or Clan Wars?
Why does the interface for MP work there and not here? I am not a techinical guy. (Hell I'm lucky if I can zip up an attachement) Therefore I like things to run right and proper. If I charge a patient 60$ for medication then give him a half dose...I can expect ramifications. These big companies banking on a series' popularity is not cool.
Once Again I restate that this is not directed personally to Fried or any particular programmer at Firaxis. I have had the occasion to talk to many amongst them. They are all nice, hard working, honest gentlemen. But there are issues here that I personally beleive may have been resolved had the testing been: 1-A bit longer and 2-A bit more user friendly. Hell how many veteran ladder players signed up for testing and quit cause they couldnt get the dam patches and techinical issues worked out? I would spend 3 days getting a version to run properly and boom before I get one game of beta in...a new version appears...then another and another. Civ lost many many testers this way and at the very least the dowload packages could and should have been either self-extractive or a second version should have been zipped which stood alone. Meaning make a patch fix the game itself or Make a second package available for download which would have complete updated game version. Instead we got small files with like 17 instructions to follow for each patch etc etc. Hell even the Firaxis servers where so slow we had to get civilization fan sites to lend us mirrors to make patches available for download to tester at a decent kb/sec rate. That's the stuff I'm taking about. A company has millions in assets and injects very little of it into a quality product. It is not the programmers fault. Those poor schmos were working 100 hour weeks trying to fix it all. Soren and Dan worked like mad-men trying ot make dead lines. Maybe if Firaxis and take2games had hired 20 instead of 4.....
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Post by strictlyrockers on Jan 5, 2006 0:13:10 GMT -5
But why does... let's say The settlers "Heritage of the kings" work for me straight from the box? or Clan Wars? Why does the interface for MP work there and not here? I am not a techinical guy. (Hell I'm lucky if I can zip up an attachement) Therefore I like things to run right and proper. If I charge a patient 60$ for medication then give him a half dose...I can expect ramifications. These big companies banking on a series' popularity is not cool. Once Again I restate that this is not directed personally to Fried or any particular programmer at Firaxis. I have had the occasion to talk to many amongst them. They are all nice, hard working, honest gentlemen. But there are issues here that I personally beleive may have been resolved had the testing been: 1-A bit longer and 2-A bit more user friendly. Hell how many veteran ladder players signed up for testing and quit cause they couldnt get the dam patches and techinical issues worked out? I would spend 3 days getting a version to run properly and boom before I get one game of beta in...a new version appears...then another and another. Civ lost many many testers this way and at the very least the dowload packages could and should have been either self-extractive or a second version should have been zipped which stood alone. Meaning make a patch fix the game itself or Make a second package available for download which would have complete updated game version.Instead we got small files with like 17 instructions to follow for each patch etc etc. Hell even the Firaxis servers where so slow we had to get civilization fan sites to lend us mirrors to make patches available for download to tester at a decent kb/sec rate. That's the stuff I'm taking about. A company has millions in assets and injects very little of it into a quality product. It is not the programmers fault. Those poor schmos were working 100 hour weeks trying to fix it all. Soren and Dan worked like mad-men trying ot make dead lines. Maybe if Firaxis and take2games had hired 20 instead of 4..... This is all really well stated Avo. I don't think I could have said it better myself. If CIV had gotten the kind of investment in development that I think it deserves, it would have been tested longer and had more kinks worked out. I don't think it would have been made much better "game-wise" but it would have been smoother running out of the gate. It is still a great game, and there are a lot of players out there (like me)who are aware of how new Civ games tend to be a bit buggy in MP when they are released. So they shy away for a whle intending to buy the new game and get into when things have been smoothed out a bit. The patches will fix things. C3c is a gem IMHO. CIV just needs to be shined up a bit. It will become a gem, too. In the meantime, I honestly don't want to mess up my c3c skills with CIV. The mouse controls are opposite, and I have really been enjoying the tough ladder future games lately. I'll probably have to take another break from civving now anyway. By the time I get back things may have been ironed out to the point where I am ready to make the switch. I don't plan to go back to c3c once I do.
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