SirCypherSir

Wouldn't server performance testing still require more than the 1-5 ppl that habit PTS normally? How about an organized playtest? Or are these fixes too small to warrant such?

More players do offer a more practical test yes, and we will take all we can get. What we usually get from larger groups is a larger range of behaviors to find any strange edge cases. And we are confident the changes we made will improve performance as these are based upon profiling we do on live servers when the population is at maximum for a continent. Its more of making sure those changes didn't break anything or cause a crash of some sort. Hope that all makes sense.

KoolbIade

How exactly are we supposed to test any of this? Can't really deduce server performance with low populations, alerts rarely trigger on PTS and we can't cause "maintenance," etc. Is there a playtest coming sometime?

We will be manually triggering and ending alerts. But just having some random behavior tested out on PTS would be good to catch any potential server or client crashes. So far, I have not seen any crashes. We will of course review the /bug's but that doesn't guarantee they get fixed with the next hotfix depending on the severity of the bug.

3punkt1415

why not ask 100 people two days before to meet up on testserver, give out a 500 certs token, you will have plenty of people helping, and not run every second patch in an issue like this. Less stress for you and for us.

This idea is worth a try at least. I'll see if I can make it happen for the next major patch.

Great shot kid! That was one in a million!

The crash was being caused by how the DoT's stacking for the Thumper incendiary rounds. Confirmed this is fixed now.

TheSquirrelDaddy

My question / concern about Sanctuaries (and Oshur): Can DBG afford the additional infrastructure needed to run these zones? Currently, the continent zones all exist in dedicated VMs for each zone. These are up and running even when the zone is locked (you can remain on a locked continent indefinitely). This represents an ongoing cost - each VM has a a rental fee (even the home office VMs would have a licensing fee based on allocated cores). As a general rule of thumb, it's not good to pay for assets that spend a large amount of time idling.I worry about PS2 taking on additional operating expense without also creating renewable revenue to offset those expenses. I understand that the Orbital Stations could, in theory, be piggy-backed onto Koltyr zone(s) or replace Koltyr entirely - but that solution would come with it's own issues.

Put frankly: How can the Planetside team justify these added expenses? After the initial bump in traffic / revenue, the levels will return to their current rate and additional ongoing expenses will be incurred.

Would it not be a more solid investment to develop map-cycling technology for the zone servers so that a limited number of servers could serve an unlimited amount of content? Namely by gracefully kicking players off the zone after a lock, unloading the locked continent, and then cycling to a new continent to be queued for the next unlock. Such a system would allow the current infrastructure to serve an unlimited number of continents in rotation.

/u/ps_nicto /u/Wrel

I know you guys can't comment on this, but I think this is one of the biggest issues facing Planetside and I hope that it would seriously considered.

For the servers that host zones it is mostly how many players are connected to those zones, how concentrated those characters are within those zones, and what types of interactions are happening between characters. We have a number of dynamic zones spinning up and down all the time with the current tutorials, and koltyr is a dynamic zone as well actually. Of course we will pay attention to the performance of the servers due to the addition of Sanctuary.

We are in the final stages of prepping a release candidate but it is not yet submitted to Sony. I'm hoping to have an ETA to announce Soon™

BruceLeory

Not giving us 4xp for July 4th is worse than the ETA on the big update. Theres just no excuse. I dont know the ins and outs of what goes on to make things happen, but wouldnt it be the same as giving 2xp? The equivalent to flipping a switch?

I put some good money into this game to be completely forgotten about like that. Sad.

That one is completely on me. I apologize personally as it was obvious it should have been turned on for PS4 as well. The rest of the team doesn't deserve any heat for that one.

HotzenpIoz

My brain just combined back to the future with the surfer title reward, and the memory of ever spanable hoverpikes from PSA (so the tech must be there).

May I present: The new and improved directive 4 summer fun reward, the hover board!

It should buffer some fall damage and neglect all of it on slopes. I'd give it 2-2.5 times the normal running speed (whatever that is) with the intention to be able to trespass terrain more quickly and get to places you normaly wouldn't so easy (maybe at all, with enough inertia).

OFC it should always be spawnable.

I'd either replace it with the ability or utility slot, but abilities and weapons should be disabled while riding it. Granates not, because fun. I'd really like to see a squad of hoverboard heavies with AV granates tryharding tanks.

There also should be a 1-2 sec "cooldown" before you can shoot any weapon and there's ofc no slayride potential.

TLDR: A fun gimmick, not meta reward.

What's your opinion?

Edit: u/ps_nicto could/should it be done?

Could it be done; sure.

Should it be done; probably not as it would require a significant amount of animation work. Would be a ton of fun though.

Personally, I'd rather get the NS Segway in the game if we wanted to add some new fun vehicle ;)

Our next major PS4 patch should address many of the stability issues currently plaguing the platform. We are about to go into submission with Sony soon and should have a release date to announce soon.

Also in this patch are optimizations that boost framerate performance by quite a bit. More than 30% in most cases. I know PS4 has not been getting enough love and that should be remedied with this patch.

Hurridium-PS2

Are both the event and the update going to be released at the same time?

Yes. So it will be a bit of a shotgun blast of content for PS4.

flamousz

Also it would be lovely if you could look into server performance again, cause hitreg goes out of the window on occasion and people start warping when the pop starts exceeding ~400 people per server.

Which server are you playing on?

We have a tool that tracks all of the various client and server crashes. If you are having the same crash over and over we will be able to see it in the tool and deploy a fix with our next update.

Lazerlazarus

Crys on ps4... we havent had an update in months

This is true, but the biggest PS4 update since the release of the game is in the works right now. Huge performance boosts and loading time improvements as well as a ton of content. We will most likely extend the summer event for PS4 due to that getting a late start in July.

PS2Orange

There was a small 50mb patch about 30 mins ago, was that the client only patch fix? If so it didn't seem to fix anything.

That was a speculative fix for the loadout freeze and invisible vehicle issues. We were going to formally announce it in a little bit.

Thank you for letting us know about this. We are looking into why this fix didn't make it into the patch as expected. The hope to get a client only patch out with the fix ASAP.

Halfromthe80s

Re: Ticket #722600

I received a basic cookie-cutter reply to my ticket, with all the usual "repair/reinstall/delete files" stuff.

This has persisted between different installations of Planetside 2 on different hard drives (my old one was a standard disc drive, and my current HD is an SSD), so I know for a fact that I don't have corrupted files.

The ticket response basically said I should create an issue on the bug tracker, which I did, but beyond that there was no additional help offered to help troubleshoot the issue directly.

My bug tracker - https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/PS-4058

Here are others that were in the system before mine:

• https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/PSA-1740

• https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/PSA-723

• https://dgcissuetracker.com/browse/PS-4049

Thank you for the information. Already starting to see some better repro steps that we should try right away.

Noname_FTW

/u/ps_nicto

Thumbs up. We should do another round of loading screens soon.