1.4.2 Patch Notes 10/16/2012

[rross]

1.4.2 Patch Notes

10/16/2012Classes and Combat

• Bounty Hunter
  
  
  • Mercenary
    
    
    • Sweeping Blasters now correctly causes the player to face the ability's target.
  
  Smuggler
  
  
  • Gunslinger
    
    
    • Sweeping Gunfire now correctly causes the player to face the ability's target.

Companion Characters

• General
  
  
  • Some companion abilities now show more descriptive failure error messages.
    
    Flashpoints and Operations
    
    
    • General
      
      
      • The UI for lockout tabs (for groups and lockout timers) now displays correctly.
      
      Operations
      
      
      • Explosive Conflict
        
        
        • Some terrain has been adjusted to prevent players from skipping some encounters in this Operation.
        • The Defected Imperial Commander no longer occasionally becomes untargetable.
    
    Items
    
    
    • Consumables that have an activation time are no longer consumed on a subsequent activation even when that activation is canceled.
    
    Missions and NPCs
    
    
    • Class Missions
      
      
      • Sith Warrior
        
        
        • General Faraire: This mission no longer fails to update upon entering its phase.
          
          • Trooper
            
            
            • The Ambush: Corrected an issue that could prevent players from completing this mission.
        
        PvP
        
        
        • Warzones
          
          
          • Implemented changes to correct issues that prevented Warzones from backfilling when a pre-made group member let the Warzone invitation time out.
        
        UI
        
        
        • General
          
          
          • The map and other UI elements no longer occasionally flicker on machines with SLi or Crossfire setups.
          
          Maps
          
          
          • SLi performance is no longer degraded when opening the Galaxy Map.
          • GTN kiosks now on player ships are now properly represented on the map.
        
        Miscellaneous Bug Fixes
        
        
        • Players who log out on another player's ship without ever having boarded their own are now correctly evicted to the docking bay.
        • Vehicles can once again be used in the Black Sun, Old Galactic Market, The Works, and the Jedi Temple districts on Coruscant.
        • Resolved an issue that caused the game client to sometimes treat mouse clicks outside of the window as valid clicks when using virtual on-screen keyboards.
        • Performance is no longer degraded in the Walker interior on Ord Mantell when moving the camera around the character.
        • Certain visual effects no longer disappear as they pass over particular types of geometry.
        • Some misplaced art assets, seams or holes in the terrain, and locations where players could become stuck have been corrected.

[SoulBender]

Thanks for posting that. I wonder what piece of that caused the problems today.

Being a software guy, I completely understand when things go tits up. Hopefully they continue to learn from these patches and continue to refine the system.

[rross]

No problem.

Everything became clear to me when I found out that instead of developing their own game engine, they decided to purchase a third-party engine. You never know exactly what's connected to what.

In all honestly, you'd think that the QA department would find a lot of these errors before deployment. I understand that it's impossible to test everything, but you'd think they'd at least test the current top raid tier or two, some PVP, and the basic economy functions (crafting and GTN) yet those things always seem to be what always brakes with a new patch. If those were working smoothly, 75% of the player base would probably be content.

[SoulBender]

Yeah, the 3rd party engine was an obvious issue.

[Jetsu]

In all honestly, you'd think that the QA department would find a lot of these errors before deployment. I understand that it's impossible to test everything, but you'd think they'd at least test the current top raid tier or two, some PVP, and the basic economy functions (crafting and GTN) yet those things always seem to be what always brakes with a new patch. If those were working smoothly, 75% of the player base would probably be content.

It depends on what's causing them. If it's something that was deployed to production that shouldn't have been (or missed and should have been) than it could be working perfectly fine on the PTR and their internal test server but still not work at all once it's live.

The GTN search issue, for example, almost had to be a query (hopefully maintained as a stored procedure) issue on their database. The server they were testing on could have been working perfectly if it was released properly (or not if that is the case) there, and the client build would have been fine. Then the production servers didn't perfectly match the test servers and it causes everything to go bad.

[Lucious]

Hey, Jetsu...I am not entirely sure they have the same setup for servers on the Test as they do for the Live game. I recall them mentioning they made equipment expansions on the Live servers to handle the higher volume. That would make the process of implementing seemingly stable beta tested content from what, is most likely, the old server setup with less processing power and equipment on the new expanded, more complex, Live systems. If so, it can cause a host of problems that wouldn't be caught until the (m)asses started screaming.

[SoulBender]

All good points both of ya.

We have VMs for test and physical boxes for prod. That gets us every once in a while.

I doubt they are using stored procedures. Just a gut feeling.

[clamus68]

The one thing you can't really test properly is the load that the live servers have on them. But as always, the fact that people are discussing IT related issues on a fan site as opposed to gameplay is kinda sad. Customers shouldn't have to worry about such things. I worked on the hardware side for a few years and I know stuff breaks all the time, but it gets old. As much as I don't care for GW2, one thing I can say is that its much more stable. I haven't run into any gamebreaking bugs. That is kinda refreshing, just wish the game was as good as SWTOR. SWTOR for all its faults is heading in a great direction. Love the content, love the populations of the server I'm on, can always get a wz or an fp.