Patch Notes Update Update 1.07 Incoming - 11am GMT
- Thread starter Michael Brookes
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Never give up on ticketing. How are they going to fix it otherwise?...
I've got 7 tickets at the moment, and FD definitely has priorities. When I placed a ticket regarding connectivity they replied the same day. I haven't heard a peep on any of the others.
Don't give up. There's still an awesome game hidden under all those bugs.
Holding my breath on all the multiplayer content that should've been present at release. Here's hoping.
I do understand that, despite my cynicism, but feedback is a two-way street. Frontier need to get bug reports, and in volume, so they can target their resources in the areas causing the most people the most problems. I get that. But I also need feedback to know that my bug report has been received/looked at/discarded as duplicate or whatever. If someone IS looking at every ticket, then it would take all of a millisecond to hit a checkbox that marks the ticket as a duplicate issue, but the payoff for me as a user is actually quite significant. It tells me that another human has seen my issue and considered it, even if only for a moment. That is as much a positive effect as a complete lack of response is negative. Without it I just feel like I'm shouting into a black hole.
Let me put it another way: How often would you keep doing something if you were getting nothing to tell you whether your actions were having any kind of positive effect or not?
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Only 1 month? Amateur
Only 1 month? Amateur
Well, I only want a refund for money the game stole from me due to a bug. I guess I don't matter.
OK before the 1.07 patch everything was working perfectly, after the patch the wanted bug is back from the beta days.
Went to resource extraction site scan ship with warrant scanner indicates ship is wanter, open fire on wanted ship suddenly I'm wanted? Getting attached from Security Ships boost out of resource site SC back to the station land very quickly before being scanned contact pilots federation to clear my record but it's empty no criminal record is showing even though my status still indicates I'm wanted in this faction. If I leave the station I will be shot to death & the only way to clear my record is to quit the game to the menu & reload again. And I'm not the only one my fellow commanders are experiencing the same bug.
I guess no combat till this is fixed so back to trading only.....
Went to resource extraction site scan ship with warrant scanner indicates ship is wanter, open fire on wanted ship suddenly I'm wanted? Getting attached from Security Ships boost out of resource site SC back to the station land very quickly before being scanned contact pilots federation to clear my record but it's empty no criminal record is showing even though my status still indicates I'm wanted in this faction. If I leave the station I will be shot to death & the only way to clear my record is to quit the game to the menu & reload again. And I'm not the only one my fellow commanders are experiencing the same bug.
I guess no combat till this is fixed so back to trading only.....
If you needed to use a KWS to find they are wanted, then that means the target is not wanted in this jurisdiction. If it were, you would not need a KWS, a basic targeting scan would say "WANTED". Therefore you're a criminal for attacking. Unless you're in an anarchy.
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I hear you. Just trying to stay positive. I still think this game has truly awesome potential.
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Nope normal scan indicated Wanted then I ran the KWS for additional bounties, then the wanted ship actually started shooting at me first but as soon as I fired back I'm suddenly WANTED.... like W the F ?
Deleted. Wrong response.
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Have you ever worked in the maintenance of a software? In the support? I have.
You may of course be right and everyone in the support is an unmotivated incompetent idiot who want's nothing more than to destroy your experience with the game.
However.
Grouping and filtering tickets by topic and known/unknown issues alone, not to mention responding to tickets - without even doing a single analysis on the issue - can take up to several support workers per day, depending on the number of tickets. Depending on how professional FD approach the support, they ought to have two or three levels of support, with the last being the devs themselves. In such a system it may take some time before a ticket event arrives at the devs, who may simultanuously have their time taken up by other duties, e.g. developing features/addons or working on general maintenance. It could only get worse if tickets arrived unfiltered at the dev's side. Then there is prioritizing of tickets and the difficulty of the tickets themselvers. Sure, some tickets may be answered promptly because they are known, easy to analyze and possibly fix. Analysis of more complicated issues alone however may take up to several person days, as may implementing a fix. When the information is insufficient to know what causes an issue - which is often the case - the devs have to be able to reproduce the issue. Take hundreds of different hardware combinations, different OS versions, unknown programs with unknown side effects running on the affected system, "production" server logging, which is often sparse to avoid killing the server with IO, mostly no direct access to any logs of the game client... Even if they find and fix an issue, how do they know it's fixed? Testing! You can almost never assume that a fix - especially an non-trivial one - doesn't result in an unwanted side effect, which the dev might not have foreseen. Testing takes then more time. if such a side effect is discovered, the fixing of the fix begins and everything has to be tested again. If there are more issues than devs to work on them? Priorities will be set and those issues that affect the fewest customers while also being the hardest to analyze may be the last ones that will be fixed, if that ever happens.
Long story short: Don't assume.
Devs are people, support workers are people, they all have a life and hopefully aren't forced to work 12 hour shifts. Also a company has a limited budget meaning they can't scale on human resources arbitrarily (knowledge transfer to new workers also takes time as well).
Those are probably the most effective things you can do, to get your issue fixed:
- Do as much pre-analysis as you can. Is your network card having hickups? Does your internet provider have connection issues? Does the issue only occur at full moon or when it rains? Try to make sure the issue is not created on your side. Yes, everybody assumes they're not an idiot, but it's easy enough to overlook seemingly idiotic things like an unplugged network cable. It's even easier to overlook non trivial things. If you learn something about the circumstances under which your issue appears, this will later be helpful when you create a ticket.
- Definitely not an unplugged network cable? Create a ticket!
- Describe your issue as briefly, yet as accurately as possible.
- Do you have logs, screenshots, system specification - really any kind of artifact - that might give a hint at what causes the issue? Include them!
- Be polite! You haven't bought a 100k € luxury car (which dreally doesn't excuse being impolite), but a 40-50€ mass market product. There are others with issues and calling the dev's mom names doesn't help fixing your issue in any way, nor does it make your issue more important than everybody else's.
- Possibly create a forum topic or search the forum for others with similar issues. Having a number of people with the same/highly similar issues gives the issue weight. More importantly, comparing the circumstances under which the issue occurs also helps the devs to analyze an issue.
- Be patient. No matter if your ticket will be fixed or not. Up to three month isn't much time for analysis and fixing of hard corner cases. Especially, if a system is growing and other more common issues have to be fixed all the time.
If glaring bugs continue to be unfixed and unacknowledged for extended periods of time, it's really ok to call a project out. Just do it in a civilized manner.
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Just a thought on the hyperspace stutter. I think it is purely client side and actually related to a CPU bottleneck where all the threads are waiting on one thing to complete. The reason I say this is that I run in borderless window mode with multiple monitors and it seems the whole system stutters during that jump stutter. I also guessing (and this is based on some dev comments made in alpha and beta) that the bottle neck is brief enough not to be picked up by things like task manager.
Just some thoughts (and sorry I can't post the references - they are somewhere in the forum though).......
Just some thoughts (and sorry I can't post the references - they are somewhere in the forum though).......
I agree with this, I've been trying to trace the issue myself and it does seem to be worse if I have other background CPU tasks (like say YouTube videos running too) although even just the simple act of typing while I make a Hyperspace jump freezes up the keyboard response (but it goes into the buffer because it all appears after the jump).
Weirdly enough it doesn't happen every time, but certainly most of the time.
I also run in borderless window mode
99 bugs in the queue,
99 bugs in the queue,
take one down, patch it up,
103 bugs in the queue...
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99 bugs in the queue,
take one down, patch it up,
103 bugs in the queue...
- - - - - Additional Content Posted / Auto Merge - - - - -
What sort of disk is Elite installed on? I was having hyperspace stutter, but I've swopped to a SSD this weekend and it's gone.
Has always been installed on an SSD. In fact all three of my machines have the stuff and they all run SSDs
Yea it's on my SSD drive - only game on there, Steam installs to my HDD
I have run in both modes extensively. Stutter appears independent of CPU from what I've seen so far, but I'm still investigating. The game is odd in the sense that the CPU never seems to spike--instead, it stays at a pretty constant 85% across all four cores on my rig. Will start running a system monitor on my second screen this weekend in borderless mode with logging enabled and see if I can't suss out the culprit.
Some fair and reasonable points. As it happens, I have worked on the support of a software product. Not a game, and nothing as big as this, but I understand the principles. And I'm a methodical and analytical type, so I appreciate the need for such things when submitting bug reports.
However, I'm not actually talking about the fixing of the bugs. I'm not even talking about the triaging of them, not really. I'm just talking about FD letting people know that that bug report they filed 3 months ago hasn't just been lost down the back of the sofa or has been eaten by the dog. You, like a few FD staff in here, tossed out the old "File a ticket!" line. Does no-one see the irony of that statement, when my whole problem is a lack of acknowledgement of tickets already submitted? Again, to be clear, I'm not talking about getting a reply with a fix or even a idea of when a fix might appear, I'm just talking about plain-and-simple "Ok, we got your ticket. We're currently running a queue of xx days at the moment, but as soon as someone can look into your issue, we'll update your status.". That's all!
Consider:
- The original support ticket system got abandoned by FD without any notification.
- Nothing sent to existing open tickets to say they'd been closed, much less migrated to the new system.
- Nothing was announced anywhere that I could see.
- Even the line on the old support page of "If you wish to open a new ticket, please visit support.elitedangerous.com." is given zero prominence to let you know that the system you're in is actually no longer actively maintained.
I can give you a very specific example of why the current behaviour is problematic: For the past few point releases, I've seen in the release notes the issue about adding telemetry to try and track down a problem with resource loading. Now, for all I know, that could be what's causing the issue I see with stuttering hyperspace. Perhaps the freeze (easily up to 10 seconds in some cases) is being caused by just such a resource loading problem.
As it is, with FD's refusal to even acknowledge tickets, I have no idea whether this additional telemetry is evidence of my issue being actively investigated, and I should just shut up and sit tight, or whether it's a completely unrelated issue and I should keep raising tickets, as we're so often urged to do.
What do to? I like to think I'm a logical person who takes a reasoned approach to things, but in the absence of any feedback, I have no way to know if I should modify my approach or in what way. Like I say, screaming into a black hole.
Do you see the problem now?
Yes, because that's exactly what I implied. Right?
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@maddog_uk_69
Some great points. (Also respect for the lack of CAPS LOCK and !!!! - very rare these days)
Some great points. (Also respect for the lack of CAPS LOCK and !!!! - very rare these days)
Michael Brookes
Game Director
Some fair and reasonable points. As it happens, I have worked on the support of a software product. Not a game, and nothing as big as this, but I understand the principles. And I'm a methodical and analytical type, so I appreciate the need for such things when submitting bug reports.
However, I'm not actually talking about the fixing of the bugs. I'm not even talking about the triaging of them, not really. I'm just talking about FD letting people know that that bug report they filed 3 months ago hasn't just been lost down the back of the sofa or has been eaten by the dog. You, like a few FD staff in here, tossed out the old "File a ticket!" line. Does no-one see the irony of that statement, when my whole problem is a lack of acknowledgement of tickets already submitted? Again, to be clear, I'm not talking about getting a reply with a fix or even a idea of when a fix might appear, I'm just talking about plain-and-simple "Ok, we got your ticket. We're currently running a queue of xx days at the moment, but as soon as someone can look into your issue, we'll update your status.". That's all!
Consider:
Were we supposed to just work it out for ourselves? Should anyone really be surprised that people are annoyed?
- The original support ticket system got abandoned by FD without any notification.
- Nothing sent to existing open tickets to say they'd been closed, much less migrated to the new system.
- Nothing was announced anywhere that I could see.
- Even the line on the old support page of "If you wish to open a new ticket, please visit support.elitedangerous.com." is given zero prominence to let you know that the system you're in is actually no longer actively maintained.
I can give you a very specific example of why the current behaviour is problematic: For the past few point releases, I've seen in the release notes the issue about adding telemetry to try and track down a problem with resource loading. Now, for all I know, that could be what's causing the issue I see with stuttering hyperspace. Perhaps the freeze (easily up to 10 seconds in some cases) is being caused by just such a resource loading problem.
As it is, with FD's refusal to even acknowledge tickets, I have no idea whether this additional telemetry is evidence of my issue being actively investigated, and I should just shut up and sit tight, or whether it's a completely unrelated issue and I should keep raising tickets, as we're so often urged to do.
What do to? I like to think I'm a logical person who takes a reasoned approach to things, but in the absence of any feedback, I have no way to know if I should modify my approach or in what way. Like I say, screaming into a black hole.
Do you see the problem now?
Yes, because that's exactly what I implied. Right?
We are aware that our support response hasn't been what it should be and this is no fault of the team working hard through the tickets. We're hiring more people and improving our response process to improve the system which will take time. We are on it though!
Michael
It would be a design mistake to do any kind of IO (disk, network, ...) or lengthy processing on the main thread if they want to archive stable framerates. However, signs suggest that at least disk access is done on the main thread, which could explain some of the stutter people are seeing. It can't just be the planet procedural generation causing it, as I see it inside stations and elsewhere out of sight from any planetary object. GTX 970 with i7 and 10GB of ram, so not the hardware really.
I am only seeing stutter when the hyperspace jump starts. And it affects the whole system, not just the Elite process(es).
I've had a search through the forums for the posts I recall reading but have been unable to find them. I'm sure someone will recall them though
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