Folks,
I'll be expanding this as the weekend goes by but here's where we stand right now in terms of some of the issues that have been discussed, tossed around, thrown like a spear at our heads since the Preview Weekend started:
1) We peaked last night at around 30K concurrent players across our servers, that is obviously a great number. During that time the servers performed extremely well in terms of CPU usage and we never once came close to max usage so we know that we will meet our server cap populations for launch.
2) Regarding overall server stability we've pretty much exceeded our expectations. We've only had two full server crashes across all servers since we began. Neither crash was due to player load, CPU overload, code going brain dead,etc. but due to a minor issue on our part. The same is true for region crashes of which we only had two. Unfortunately, we had more scenarios crash (20) than we like but the number is still quite low considering we've been running 15 servers for more than a day.
Client crashes (crashes to desktop) are down from the last stage of closed beta and thanks to all the people playing, we've already fixed two issues that have caused some of the CTDs. We're not there yet but we are in better shape than we were last month and we will be even better at launch. Even now the CTDs are lower than some games were at release but having said that, it's not good enough for us and CTDs are issue #1A for us right now.
4) Pet AI and pathing is severely broken. The Preview Weekend patch (3.
unfortunately borked the system. This is issue #1B for us. Even though this is a beta and new bugs/issues are to be expected, we messed up on this issue. We expect a quick turnaround on this next week. So please accept my apologies for this one, it should not have happened.
5) On the subject of graphical quality, SLI, etc., the problems that some players have reported are being focused on as well. From what we've been able to gather so far (other than on SLI which is a known issue), there is something weird happening with a small percentage of graphic cards as well as a possible issue which crept into this patch. We'll know more about it this week.
6) On some targeting issues, we're looking into that as well.
7) Regarding the GCD, we are not going to remove the GCD but we are continuing to look into some of the issues that have been reported with its use. As our closed beta testers have reported, our Combat Responsiveness Code made a huge difference to the game's feel and we're going to continue to look at the GCD and see if it needs tweaking along with any bug fixes that need to be done. I'll be posting more about this as well in the coming days/weeks. While the bugs with the GCD isn't our #1 priority, making combat feel even more responsive and fun is a major issue so it will continue to get looked at and tweaked over this last month and beyond.
So, that's it for now, more to come as the PW progresses as things arise. Overall we are thrilled with the response to the game on the Web, to our in-game surveys and from our feedback/bug tools. I'm glad we still have almost a month before launch but I am also quite happy where we are other than the problem with pathing/AI for which again I offer my apologies.
Mark
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