Yellow Posts: Instancing, Resolve, And Beta Testing Weekends

Launch Day. Can you feel it? It’s coming (and Soon™). With it comes all of the memories, expectations, and nightmares of launch days past. We’ve all been there on launch days where there are tons of problems. Long queues, overcrowding, server outages, and lag are all issues that we have dealt with on launch day of other games. The devs have said over and over that one of their primary goals with beta testing is to make launch day as smooth as it possibly can be. One of the things that the devs are thinking about doing to improve launch day is implement phasing or instancing of the starting areas.

Instancing technology creates multiple copies of a zone so that it doesn’t get overcrowded. The benefits are that overcrowding is reduced, queues are almost eliminated, and server stability is improved. The downside, as forum poster Divineye points out in his thread “Why U phasin Bioware?”, is that you could be standing in the exact same spot as your friend and not be able to see or interact with him. Georg Zoeller, Principal Lead Combat Designer, posts several responses (starting with this one) to this thread and its replies, but the first one sums up BioWare’s stance on instancing technology and why they feel it is the best option for them:

Launch is a pretty unique situation in many regards. It creates loads on part of the game (the Origin Worlds) that are never seen again after that point. 

There are several ways to handle this:

A) Phase (or instance) these areas to handle the temporarily highly inflated load. 

B) Design the areas as if they were always under full load. That would lead to large, empty areas after the initial rush in which the normal player population gets lost. You create a large desert – fine if the planet is called Tatooine, but generally large areas with duplicated content suck in MMOs.

C) Put out tons of additional servers for a few days to handle the temporarily inflated load, then consolidate them later. Players generally don’t like that, as it destroys communities.

D) Put up long, multi-hour queues. Players hate that and you really don’t want to be exposed to:

‘My lord, permission to land on Korriban has been denied. They say the planet is full and that the Sith Environmental Protection Council has decided to protect the native population of K’lor’ slugs from being overharvested by denying entry to new visitors.’

E) Don’t do anything, after all it’s temporary and tell players to ‘deal with it’. This leads to people ‘waiting for respawns’.

We opted to go with (A) since it’s a native, well tested feature of our game engine (we work in different phases/instances on our development servers), it can be activated on the fly and deactivated as population levels normalize and since it has the least impact on players. 

We definitely plan to minimize the use of this mechanic, but as with our decision to limit the launch supply of the game to a manageable number of players, we are making these choices in order to guarantee satisfaction for the paying customers that will flood our service at launch day.

BioWare understands that this is not the perfect situation, but it is a temporary fix to a temporary problem. Instancing is the best way to minimize impact on the player population as well as make the game experience the best that it can be for launch. While it may be annoying for a little while to deal with different instances of the game, it won’t be as annoying as not being able to play the game at all.

In the thread titled “CC immunity = bad game design?” forum poster Aaoogaa says that BioWare’s implementation of a resolve bar (a PvP-only resource; when it’s full you are immune crowd control abilities for a short time) is bad game design. He argues that cooldowns on the CC abilities should be used to regulate the use of crowd control, not resolve.

Trouble is, cooldowns do not protect against multiple players “stun locking” your character for an extended period of time, the resolve bar does. As Georg Zoeller, once again, explains:

Yes, the answer is exactly what many people in this thread have alluded to.

Resolve (AKA ‘stamina’) exists to throttle chain control on a player from one-on-many situations, because not being able to do anything for an extended period of time is just not fun.

We are calibrating the system in a way that avoids it kicking in when two players are just going head to head, assuming they are focusing on getting the fight done.

In newer builds resolve in the game actually trickles away over time, so it doesn’t carry over from fight to fight.

Currently, we do not feature diminishing returns but rather a binary system of ‘immune’ or ‘not immune’, which makes it easier for players to gauge the state of combat for tactical choices.

Personally, I like this system. I’m not the worlds best PvPer (not even close) so if anyone has any thoughts about the resolve system, I would love to hear them below, but I do know that when I am stunned, feared, immobilized, stunned again, and then killed without even being able to defend myself, that isn’t fun. It’s frustrating and annoying. This system should serve to help with that problem and make PvP more enjoyable for everyone.

As I’m sure all of you are painfully aware, there was no SW:TOR beta testing this weekend. However, Stephen Reid, Senior Online Community Manager, did post a sort of “lessons learned” update about what the devs got out of the first beta testing weekend. It’s a really interesting recap post and I would encourage all of you to check it out. So how did the first beta testing weekend go, Mr. Reid?

On balance, extremely well. Every goal we had was met or exceeded, and we had no major downtime. This is good news for us, as now we can move forward in future Testing Weekends and increase the overall number of invites.

One more step towards release! Holiday 2011 can’t get here soon enough.