Patch notes for 1.0.2c

[Muezick]

darth barrus did this =O dam sith =O makeing up buggs so we cant play for a few hours =O

He's a schemer. you know how THOSE kinds of people are.

[Vutar]

Just the clarify the top 2 are pretty much gamebreaking they have ruined the economies of pretty much ALL Servers - some players now have millions and millions of credits over multiple characters and accounts (this is full guilds abusing also) Why this bug appeared after a patch is the most worrying of all.

It is a big deal no doubt. However the plan should be in place before they take the servers down. Everything tested and ready to go. The implementation should not take this long. This is EQ1 style of patching...

[Deleted]

It is a big deal no doubt. However the plan should be in place before they take the servers down. Everything tested and ready to go. The implementation should not take this long. This is EQ1 style of patching...

I agree the patching is a bit ridiculous in timescale, but I'd rather this over completly corrupt and destroyed economies. However it does feel a little archaic in their setup :X

[Aquineas]

Just the clarify the top 2 are pretty much gamebreaking they have ruined the economies of pretty much ALL Servers - some players now have millions and millions of credits over multiple characters and accounts (this is full guilds abusing also) Why this bug appeared after a patch is the most worrying of all.

I'm not at all suggesting the patch is unnecessary or even insignificant; it definitely is. I was more referring to the number of changes. I had seen some unreliable chatter suggesting that a major client patch was coming to add some "legacy" features. Considering what is being fixed by the patch, I'm actually less irritated than if it had been some major release. A major release is a situation in which they could have consolidated things; emergencies less so.

[Deleted]

I'm not at all suggesting the patch is unnecessary or even insignificant; it definitely is. I was more referring to the number of changes. I had seen some unreliable chatter suggesting that a major client patch was coming to add some "legacy" features. Considering what is being fixed by the patch, I'm actually less irritated than if it had been some major release. A major release is a situation in which they could have consolidated things; emergencies less so.

Sorry I missread as minor ;p probably from reading in various places this patch is insignificant.

[Rayaleith]

Just the clarify the top 2 are pretty much gamebreaking they have ruined the economies of pretty much ALL Servers - some players now have millions and millions of credits over multiple characters and accounts (this is full guilds abusing also) Why this bug appeared after a patch is the most worrying of all.

This is not game breaking in my opinion since there is not economy yet. And there won't be an economy till they fix the AH functionality to decent levels. Now people with crafting skills get very little from what they could just because of the awful AH interface.

Now I would be glad to wait for them to fix the action delay or the very bad UI, although these are things one MMO should not launch without. At least I want to hear them giving a free day for the inconvenience. Since the "sorry for the inconvenience was invented, companies have no sense of responsibility.

[Chrysia]

This is not game breaking in my opinion since there is not economy yet. And there won't be an economy till they fix the AH functionality to decent levels. Now people with crafting skills get very little from what they could just because of the awful AH interface.

Now I would be glad to wait for them to fix the action delay or the very bad UI, although these are things one MMO should not launch without. At least I want to hear them giving a free day for the inconvenience. Since the "sorry for the inconvenience was invented, companies have no sense of responsibility.

There never WILL be a game economy if they allow players to gain this kind of edge this early. As it stands, those that abused the bug to get infinite commendations have millions of credits, while most others have a couple hundred thousand.

[Deleted]

This is not game breaking in my opinion since there is not economy yet. And there won't be an economy till they fix the AH functionality to decent levels. Now people with crafting skills get very little from what they could just because of the awful AH interface.

Now I would be glad to wait for them to fix the action delay or the very bad UI, although these are things one MMO should not launch without. At least I want to hear them giving a free day for the inconvenience. Since the "sorry for the inconvenience was invented, companies have no sense of responsibility.

Urgh I know of people who have 50million credits + I have 200k they can simply inflate any price they wishes or remove any competition from the GTN - he can also deck out his char with max level items of anything.. If thats not gamebreaking then I wonder what you'd consider to be?

[Xorious]

This is not game breaking in my opinion since there is not economy yet. And there won't be an economy till they fix the AH functionality to decent levels. Now people with crafting skills get very little from what they could just because of the awful AH interface.

Now I would be glad to wait for them to fix the action delay or the very bad UI, although these are things one MMO should not launch without. At least I want to hear them giving a free day for the inconvenience. Since the "sorry for the inconvenience was invented, companies have no sense of responsibility.

*facepalm*

How is people having insane amounts of money (Think in numbers where they can buy everything in the whole freaking GTN, multiple times, and that is just ONE person) not gamebreaking? This will make the economy unable to ever exist because these people will make insane prices because they know other people have such amounts of credits too. Never will be an economy that way no matter what they do with the GTN.

Once they allow addons etc you can fix ur UI, if not, too bad, there's people that do like it.
Have you tried putting the action-delay thing to 0.0 instead of 0.5? I first thought that the combat wasn't fluent either, when I did that it became very fluent.

Also, thinking u get a free day for this... hahahaahahahahah

[Aquineas]

There never WILL be a game economy if they allow players to gain this kind of edge this early. As it stands, those that abused the bug to get infinite commendations have millions of credits, while most others have a couple hundred thousand.

Quite true. The good news is, depending on how they store/archive character history, they can probably write some code to determine who abused it. As a developer, I'd have a lot of fun writing this if I worked for them. I'd have even more fun with evil remedies. I'd write in a level 50 elite assassin mob who would stalk the player and ask for a huge amount of money to stop hassling him/her.

[Eroginous]

Except every server is a duplicate of the next so all they need is one test server


which they conveniently have.

which they can also take down and put up as often as they want.

So they could "test" and "perfect" their bug fixes on the test server and then apply a 15 minute patch to live once it's settled.

For all the money the poured into this game you think they could've gotten some one hired by blizzard to see how they do it and do it right instead of completely screwing it up.

While every server is a duplicate in terms of software, they are not all the same in terms of hardware. Not to mention they don't use the same programming code throughout the entire system. One part of the game might use values and commands that other parts of the game don't use. Typically, that's where the bugs start, differences in code that cause unexpected anomalies.

So the coding team has to sort through the code, find a way to change it while maintaining the intended effects, while removing the unintended effects. There are multiple ways to code a function in a game, the key is to find ways to fix things that don't work in a way that won't break something else. Blizzard experiences this every time they release a patch for the exact same reason.

*facepalm*

How is people having insane amounts of money (Think in numbers where they can buy everything in the whole freaking GTN, multiple times, and that is just ONE person) not gamebreaking? This will make the economy unable to ever exist because these people will make insane prices because they know other people have such amounts of credits too. Never will be an economy that way no matter what they do with the GTN.

Even without an exploit, people make an insane amount of money just from doing war zones and quests. I'm level 12 and I have over 6k credits, just from doing quests. If I do WZs, I'll make anywhere from 700-1500 credits PER GAME. The Economy isn't fucked because of the exploit, it's fucked because the amount of money you get from the game (without exploits) is too high compared to anything you can buy.

There are no real gold sinks.

Once they allow addons etc you can fix ur UI, if not, too bad, there's people that do like it.
Have you tried putting the action-delay thing to 0.0 instead of 0.5? I first thought that the combat wasn't fluent either, when I did that it became very fluent.

Also, thinking u get a free day for this... hahahaahahahahah

The action delay thing isn't a setting in the UI, nor is it lag. The character animations delay the activation of abilities. In some cases this means that abilities are canceled completely when they should instead be going off. In other cases, this means that abilities don't go off when you queue them.

Example:

On my SI sorcress, I start by casting Lightning Strike (1.5sec activation). As soon as the bar reaches the end, I hit Force Lightning (3 second channel), casting a shock (instant) right after.

In all actuality, this should be an uninterrupted stream of damage. However, here's what happens (even with queue delay set to 0.0): I cast Lightning Strike, the ability goes off and does a one second animation. From the time the ability goes off, to the time that Force Lightning activates, is one second. Then the channel starts, and goes for it's duration. If I then cast shock right at the end of the channel, instead of the channel finishing up then the shock happening, it will cut off the channel too early, then the shock will fire as soon as the animation for for Force lightning ends (anywhere from a half second to a second and a half later).

This makes it especially hard to engage in fluid combat with enemies, especially in pvp. This is an issue that has been discussed extensively, and it really needs to be fixed.

[DrunkenBeard]

General

•Fixed an exploit that could allow players to receive more items than intended via in-game mail.
•Resolved an exploit when selling items.

The wording doesn't make any sens. You don't "fix an exploit", you fix a bug. An exploit is the method used to take advantage of a bug (be it a special manipulation, a piece of program or anything else). In computer security it is common knowledge that fixing a bug around a specific exploit is bad as there is no telling someone else would think of another exploit targeting the same bug. I hope it's not what's happening here and that it's just a slip.

[Mijolnyr]

As I am a developer for a company that has thousands of servers in production (big enough that we have multiple data centers), I do have a clue as to how long it takes. 2 hours isn't unreasonable. We can do a full push of an entire release of our entire suite of applications in under 8 hours, and again, it's a much larger code and server set than SWTOR. Most of that time isn't the push per-se, that will be done with scripts which will complete the time within an hour. The additional time is used for QA verification.

I do have an issue with your "billions of lines" and "huge chunks" references. You are probably making it out to be bigger than it is, and additionally, from seeing some of your other posts, you seem motivated to try the squelch the opinion of anyone who expresses the slightest displeasure with the patch. Their opinion is just as valid as yours, you know.

While you make some good points I highly doubt you have any sort of clue how much coding the employees of BW run through while patching. I understand you might be a dev and deal with more servers individually but very VERY few things rival the amount of coding an MMO especially one of this size has. Along with that unless you work with servers that support this much graphical acceleration and usage load which again would be extremely unlikely because again even the hardware that is required to maintain an MMO is specific, you couldn't compare you experience to what they have to do. Don't get me wrong I'm sure you have more understanding than the majority of the people out there, but don't try and act like the authority on the matter. I'm glad you pointed out that most of these fixes really don't require drastic changes in the code, but changing even a single character can have different results with different servers/hardware/systems, so even the slightest change requires a healthy amount of testing, even after its all be finalized on the servers themselves.

BW has done pretty good about keeping maintenance times short and stuck to their projected times. Tonight seems different as in they are fixing some game breaking issues that are too tempting to leave in game for any amount of time. People have already been banned for exploiting these issues and I'm sure BW wants to protect their customers from the wrath of the banhammer by removing the temptation all together.

It is good though for people to voice their opinion on how mismanaged this maintenance time was with conflicting posts and short notice. I hope they don't make a habit of this, and I do appreciate people speaking up about it. Hopefully BW gets the idea and only does this when really needed.

[DrunkenBeard]

Along with that unless you work with servers that support this much graphical acceleration and usage load which again would be extremely unlikely because again even the hardware that is required to maintain an MMO is specific, you couldn't compare you experience to what they have to do.

Graphical acceleration is done on the client. The servers are only responsible for data persistence and business logic.

[shadowkras]

The wording doesn't make any sens. You don't "fix an exploit", you fix a bug. An exploit is the method used to take advantage of a bug (be it a special manipulation, a piece of program or anything else). In computer security it is common knowledge that fixing a bug around a specific exploit is bad as there is no telling someone else would think of another exploit targeting the same bug. I hope it's not what's happening here and that it's just a slip.

No, the wording is not incorrect, different programmers will call things differently depending on what kind of workspace they have or the online communities they visit. They are fixing the exploit as in the bug that was exploitable. Iv seen it being used way too many times in all my years of programmer.

[ZeroWashu]

This is why the downtime seems so ridiculous. They take servers down for hours...to fix a few things.

Because they fixed two bugs that were incredibly severe and abused by a large number of people. Essentially the vendor trick was a method to obtain nearly unlimited amounts of credits and there is another trick to do the same with badges (though I know of no one who has actually done the badge one - I do know the stacking bug).

As in, while people were cry babying pee pants over slicing others where churning hundreds of MILLIONS of credits through shell accounts and using them to buy mats and items since launch. It apparently took this long for Bioware to act because either they could not fix it until now or they had no means to track the behavior.

and yes, I do mean hundreds of millions of credits.


Exploit Early Exploit Often



MODS: Since this has been patched can we post how it was done, yeah some of us know the vendor bug as we reported it in my guild. (and I don't think a patch introduced it, its been around since before slicing nerfs from what I remember)

[davesurfer]

Even without an exploit, people make an insane amount of money just from doing war zones and quests. I'm level 12 and I have over 6k credits, just from doing quests. If I do WZs, I'll make anywhere from 700-1500 credits PER GAME. The Economy isn't fucked because of the exploit, it's fucked because the amount of money you get from the game (without exploits) is too high compared to anything you can buy.

There are no real gold sinks.

6K? lol. At higher levels each skill can cost up to 48K to learn. Speeder 2 (and the mount) is 235K, speeder 3 (and mount) is like 365K. There are numerous speeders that are 1.5MM credits. When I die now my repair bill is over 2K credits. My missions are costing me 2K per run and I can send 5 guys out at a time, so that is 10K per run. If I get an epic mission it is 3,500 per run

6K is nothing. If you are thinking in WoW gold, divide by like 1000, so your 6K is like 6 gold in WoW

[Aquineas]

While you make some good points I highly doubt you have any sort of clue how much coding the employees of BW run through while patching. I understand you might be a dev and deal with more servers individually but very VERY few things rival the amount of coding an MMO especially one of this size has.

Well first of all, you're right, I'm not in any way an authority of Bioware software. But certain things just make sense, and some things are logical and accepted practice. For instance, it's safe to assume:

1. They have scripts which roll changes out to the servers.
2. They have scripts which verify that each server is running the code it should be
3. They are running on one of four platforms, in decreasing order of likelihood: Linux, BSD, Windows, Solaris

Along with that unless you work with servers that support this much graphical acceleration and usage load which again would be extremely unlikely because again even the hardware that is required to maintain an MMO is specific, you couldn't compare you experience to what they have to do.

Most of what you describe with complexity is a client issue, not a server issue, nor is it a server load issue.

Don't get me wrong I'm sure you have more understanding than the majority of the people out there, but don't try and act like the authority on the matter.

I am not an authority, but as I said, some things are just common or accepted practice because the patterns are the most reasonable for a given problem set.

[Sarevokcz]

*facepalm*

How is people having insane amounts of money (Think in numbers where they can buy everything in the whole freaking GTN, multiple times, and that is just ONE person) not gamebreaking? This will make the economy unable to ever exist because these people will make insane prices because they know other people have such amounts of credits too. Never will be an economy that way no matter what they do with the GTN.

They can just, you know, TAKE that money away from them

[shadowkras]

6K is nothing. If you are thinking in WoW gold, divide by like 1000, so your 6K is like 6 gold in WoW

Considering the time it takes to make credits at low level (without using AH or professions), i would say its more like 10k = 1 gold.