Jan 30, 2012

Posted by in Yellow Posts | 5 Comments

Yellow Posts: More FPS Tips (Soon), PvP Flags, And Bug Fixes

Yesterday, I wrote about some suggestions from the Red Rancor guys on how to improve your FPS in TOR. Well, in addition to those suggestions, BioWare is going to post some official tips on how to improve your FPS in the near future. From Joveth Gonzalez, Associate Online Community Manager, we have this post:

Hi folks, I apologize for the delay in updates on this issue, but as I mentioned before, we needed time to gather data and put all of our information together in one digestible format. 

We just finished editing a document that we hope to be able to publish as a forum post here in the CS forums as early as tomorrow. [Ed. Note: This release estimate was revised to today, Monday, Jan. 3o]

I can tell you that it’s going to be a guide on optimization performance (which includes FPS) for your PCs. 

Thank you all for sharing your experiences here and for your patience as we work to continually improve your gaming experience.

Be sure to keep your eyes peeled on the Dev Tracker for when this post comes.

Forum poster _Darkstar, created a post called “Why oh why can I hurt other players if I am not PvP flagged?”. In it, he notes that he rolled on a PvE server to avoid PvP but some other players on his server have been playing an old MMO trick on him. An enemy player will PvP flag himself, run up to Darkstar and wait for him to use an AOE ability which then causes Darkstar to become PvP flagged and subsequently caught unaware and killed. The thread has grown to 94 pages of posts.

Even though this PvP flagging has been how MMOs have worked for as long as I can remember, BioWare doesn’t want to rest on its laurels. They want to come up with a fix so that this problem will only be a temporary nuisance. Joveth Gonzalez again:

Hi everyone, 

I wanted to let you all know that the development team is aware of this issue and is currently investigating different solutions for it. Your feedback is important and we want everyone to be able to have an enjoyable experience. We’ll definitely keep you posted with the latest information on this. 

Thank you

Aside from moonlighting as the long-lost fifth Baldwin brother, James Baldwin is a Network Engineer at BioWare and he wants to help you if you are experiencing connection problems or lag if they are result of network latency. He is going to need some technical data from your computer to help, so be prepared to open up the feared command prompt and type in a few commands. If you believe that you are having lag or latency issues caused by server network issues, check out this thread and post in it ASAP!

My name is James Baldwin, and I am a network engineer here at BioWare. We are continuing to look into reports regarding ongoing latency and lag issues within the game. While not all in-game lag issues are caused by network latency, we have experienced several network events in the past weeks which have negatively impacted play experience for some. We are continuing to work with our vendors to investigate ongoing issues as well as identifying end user ISPs who may be experiencing high latency or packet loss.

To help us more quickly identify these issues I am beginning this thread to better organize our network latency investigation.

After the most recent patch, some players starting experiencing system lock ups at certain points while playing the game. For me, it happens about every other time I change planets and have anti-aliasing on, but for others it is happening quite frequently. BioWare is aware of the issue and spent a few days gathering data about the issue from players. Once they received enough data they unstickied the thread and people freaked out since it appeared to disappear from the forums. It isn’t gone, BioWare has just gathered enough data to troubleshoot the issue. Per Joveth Gonzalez:

Hi folks, please see my reply for the other thread that we unstickied. 
Bottom line: There is no conspiracy. We simply received enough data for an analysis. We are definitely aware of these issues and please continue to submit your data in this thread. We’ll keep everyone updated as soon as we have more information. 
Thank you for your help!

 


  1. great catch I look forward to hearing more about what I can do to increase performance … well at least in game.

  2. Argh! Regarding the PvP thing, that is not how it works in WoW except early on perhaps and when there’s a bug. Nor in Rift. I haven’t come into close enough contact with “enemy” players in other games in a while to know how they work. AoE attacks that are not targeting a flagged player do not flag the attacker. It amazes me that people think they do. Go try it out.

    • It doesn’t work how they describe it. What would happen in RIFT is that a player from the opposing faction would flag for pvp. They would then look for unflagged players engaging in RIFT raids or killing large groups of mobs. The flagged player would then run into the mobs and would hope to get tab targetted. This would start a chain reaction, once the new player was engaged in pvp the healers would heal him, thus putting them into pvp. It was a trick used to flag players. Most players didn’t know how to turn it off in preferences to avoid such a trick.

      Short version…it wasn’t AoE abilities, it was mistargetting.

  3. The method described does work for triggering a pvp flag in SWOTR, I was especially annoyed by it one evening as a jedi knight used it on my bounty hunter. I was less annoyed by it after I killed him, then killed him again, and once more a little while later when advised he was still trying to use this tactic. My experience is that the best tactic to use on this exploit until it is fixed is chat. If some one is trying this call out for some help and teach them a lesson hey won’t soon forget. 10 on 1 might give someone using the exploit and I suspect they will not get much help from their allies either.

  4. PvP flagging happened all the time on my WoW Server, PvE Draenor EU.

    Usually when there was new content, Cata/Firelands etc, the clever 12 year old Horde BE would flag himself and stand on the NPC so that if you made the mistake of clicking him instead you’d auto attack and flag yourself only to be pounced on by his other 12 year old friends who all found it amusing.

    Top-Tip thrash them and Corpse Camp them for an hour or so. They tend not to do it again.

    Mildly annoying but all part of MMO’s tbh.

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