448 réponses à ce sujet

[Thandal N'Lyman]

I didn't say I thought it was "fair", and I explictly said that (in a perfect world) they shouldn't  "have to" do things that way.  I simply don't think that BioWare is going to continue to devote internal resources to addressing the remaining hiccoughs in DA:O.  At least, not beyond hosting the community fixes and pointers to them.

We'll see.  And if they do, then that's a positive indicator of the institutional committment to "getting it right in the end." 

But given how long ago many of these problems were identified, how well-documented the fixes for them are, and how relatively simple some solutions that have not yet been implemented appear to be, I'm not expecting any "official" patches beyond ones that fix the remaining "can't play the game or DLC at all" issues.

Not the best result, perhaps, but a realistic one. 

Modifié par Thandal NLyman, 26 mai 2011 - 04:05 .

[Rob Bartel]

Wil SilverHeart wrote...

Hi T.N. I read and understand what you are saying and I some-what agree, however what about the new fans that are buying for the first time? Do you think it is fair that they spend this money for a product that in essance is supposed to be playable when you install it.

Correct, and that is what we are currently focusing on - ensuring that the game and DLC are playable once installed. Yes, there are other issues and we've logged them for future reference. Right now, however, these DLC authentication issues are the mountain we need to climb.

Thanks,
Rob

[Thandal N'Lyman]

Exactly!  (Thanks, Rob.)

I responded to:

Rob Bartel wrote...

... By far, the most common and critical issues being reported centered around DLC authentication. As part of our investigations into those issues we also identified a critical CD-Key issue with the EADM version of the Ultimate Edition. So, at this time, we're focusing our key patch 1.05 efforts on addressing those critical concerns...

With:

Thandal NLyman wrote...

This sums up the situation nicely.  The 1.04 patch was the last one to address game-play/plot issues, and the 1.05 patch is an(other) attempt to address the installation/authorization ones. 

Those  make the game unplayable for the customer, while the others are only annoying...
players can address the remaining internal glitches in their games on their own.  (Not saying they should have to, you understand, simply that they can.) 

And since that's the case, it's hard for me to see how BioWare can justify devoting resources to the effort for very much longer...

[Funkjoker]

So I did write the list for nothing? I do know that dlc have some greater priority for you, but especially the tech problems are a concern for us end users which can't be solved by us or the toolset, e.g. the crashes and the "loading times getting gradually slower" bug. And for gameplay, there are the important flag/import issues.

I'm a little bit concerned here, because in the last three posts there is no mention of any bug fix apart from some DLCissues whatsoever.

Thandal NLyman wrote...

I didn't say I thought it was "fair", and I explictly said that (in a perfect world) they shouldn't  "have
to" do things that way.  I simply don't think that BioWare is going to
continue to devote internal resources to addressing the remaining
hiccoughs in DA:O.  At least, not beyond hosting the community fixes and
pointers to them.

We'll see.  And if they do, then that's a
positive indicator of the institutional committment to "getting it right
in the end." 

But given how long ago many of these problems
were identified, how well-documented the fixes for them are, and how
relatively simple some solutions that have not yet been
implemented appear to be, I'm not expecting any "official"
patches beyond ones that fix the remaining "can't play the game or
DLC at all" issues.

Not the best result, perhaps, but a realistic one.  ../../../images/forum/emoticons/pouty.png

That may be the case justified for you, but if you compare this to CDProject or Blizzard, there are worlds between them and BioWare. And I doubt that EA has some monetary problems. I do know that not every bug can be fixed, but the list on page 3 is rather long, isn't it?

Modifié par Jean-Funk Van Damme, 26 mai 2011 - 07:23 .

[Thandal N'Lyman]

Jean-Funk Van Damme wrote...
... I do know that not every bug can be fixed, but the list on page 3 is rather long, isn't it?

Right, it is a long list.  I'm just pointing out that I have no reason to believe the 1.05 patch will address any (much less "most") of them.  The little we know tells us that the focus of the patch is on the problems people have getting the game to recognize what's installed and play at all

I further point out that the fixes for (almost) all the remaining issues have been created by the community.

And lastly, (and perhaps sadly) that I expect that's where things will remain.

[Animositisomina]

Rob Bartel wrote...

Those of you affected by DLC authentication issues are encouraged to join the beta group so we can confirm that the patch works as intended and gets you up and running as soon as possible.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your patience,
Rob

Beta group? What beta group?

[Furtled]

Rob Bartel wrote...
Our primary goal with Patch 1.05 is to address the various DLC authentication issues that people are experiencing. We also have a CD-Key hotfix in beta testing to correct a Windows Registry issue in the EADM install of Ultimate Edition.

*Throughly selfish/cheeky question* Would you be able to confirm if the patch has anything for the CTD issues please?

Modifié par Furtled, 26 mai 2011 - 10:55 .

[RaenImrahl]

For those interested in being part of the test beta group, send a PM to Luke Barrett.

[Kastagir]

Animositisomina wrote...

Rob Bartel wrote...

Those of you affected by DLC authentication issues are encouraged to join the beta group so we can confirm that the patch works as intended and gets you up and running as soon as possible.

Once again, thanks to all of you for your patience,
Rob

Beta group? What beta group?

This is in reference to the two fixes currently in beta:  the CDKey fix and the DLC Authorization fix.  These issues have priority and are getting worked on first. 

From what information we have been given, no content fixes will be included in the 1.05 patch.  It remains unclear whether any content fixes will be delivered in a future update from Bioware.

[Animositisomina]

Kastagir wrote...

It remains unclear whether any content fixes will be delivered in a future update from Bioware.

My guess is that once BioWare saw all the community-made fixes, they decided to not bother with any official fixes of their own. I doubt we'll see any of that stuff fixed now in a true sense. I also have a feeling that this means I will never be able to get my characters to upload to this website or view anything other than my achievements, which I can view in-game anyhow. But I'm a pessimist.

[CesUtd]

Thandal NLyman wrote...

Jean-Funk Van Damme wrote...
... I do know that not every bug can be fixed, but the list on page 3 is rather long, isn't it?

Right, it is a long list.  I'm just pointing out that I have no reason to believe the 1.05 patch will address any (much less "most") of them.  The little we know tells us that the focus of the patch is on the problems people have getting the game to recognize what's installed and play at all

I further point out that the fixes for (almost) all the remaining issues have been created by the community.

And lastly, (and perhaps sadly) that I expect that's where things will remain.

I hope this is not the case. I will not use community patches for the game. I did this for an EA game before and it messed it up. I prefer an official patch. I rather have a login problem than have a game that is unstable or incorrectly takes events into account like the Conner and Isolde problem. I want to play as a mage but playing as a mage results in crashes for me.

[Funkjoker]

We are using patches 1.03 and 1.04 now for almost one year, yet still there are great issues with CTD, important flag/import issues, memory handling etc and as such those patches are more or less inacceptable.

I pointed this out in my first post. I'd be very disappointed if at least ^ don't get fixed.

CesUtd wrote...

I hope this is not the case. I will not
use community patches for the game. I did this for an EA game before and
it messed it up. I prefer an official patch. I rather have a login
problem than have a game that is unstable or incorrectly takes events
into account like the Conner and Isolde problem. I want to play as a
mage but playing as a mage results in crashes for me.

That is correct.

"Our DAO PC Plans, Moving Forward" turns out to be a greater letdown than I expected it to be.

Modifié par Jean-Funk Van Damme, 27 mai 2011 - 11:50 .

[Thandal N'Lyman]

As far as I can tell, there are only two types of bugs in DA:O that are still getting "official" attention:

1) Player is unable to launch the game or legitimate DLC due to "authorization" errors,
and;
2) Player's game freezes/crashes during play.

Those are serious problems that only the devs can fix. To it's credit, BioWare is continuing to try. Anything else...not so much. The remaining issues (the overwhelmoing majority of the things on that long list) just don't break the game. Real Life doesn't work 100% "as expected" 100% of the time, and neither does DA:O.

Could those things be fixed? Obviously they could. And the Community has done so for most of them. But those things don't prevent players from having romanced the LI of their choice (or not), defeating the AD (by any one of several means), and putting their choice of candidate on the throne. All the while having freed a statue (or not), paying their respects to a dead King's body (or not) and discovering the truth of about the exile of the Grey Wardens from Ferelden.

Finally gives an "Item Set" Bonus? Pffffft.

Triggers a kiss from my LI Assassin when saying "Farewell" at the City Gates? meh...

Doesn't crash when battling Sloth in the Fade? Priceless!

Modifié par Thandal NLyman, 27 mai 2011 - 02:53 .

[StoneTheCrow]

This reliance on the community to fix things by itself bothers me. There is no toolset for Dragon Age 2, so who will fix the minor but inevitable bugs there, once the game at large is "playable"?

Yes, I enjoy my games polished as they can be. As a customer, I have no choice but to compare Bioware to other developers out there. Blizzard releases compatibility, bug fix and content patches for Diablo 2 ten years after that game's release.

I sincerely hope that patch 1.05 will not be the last, and you consider a patch 1.06 to fix some of the other bugs which have been reported in this topic. There are still a lot for which no user created fix exists.

Modifié par StoneTheCrow, 27 mai 2011 - 04:37 .

[Glog78]

Should i at this point mention what a other company did after beeing aware that DRM (in case it wasn't drm it was the copy protection) causes troubles? Sorry i will get back playing when some change in mind is done. It just makes no sense to let customers suffer for pirates (which never will suffer , cause there is always a way around).
So in my eyes just remove this crappy drm stuff and instead use the time to fix ingame issues like memory crashes and storry related bugs.

[Thandal N'Lyman]

@Glog78;  This really isn't the right thread for "Down with DRM" discussions, but what's your particular issue?  If it's the need to find and insert the disc, then your CD-Key will allow you to download and activate the EADM version and you won't need the physical one ever again!

[Glog78]

Thandal NLyman wrote...

@Glog78;  This really isn't the right thread for "Down with DRM" discussions, but what's your particular issue?  If it's the need to find and insert the disc, then your CD-Key will allow you to download and activate the EADM version and you won't need the physical one ever again!

Ok to make long stories short, last time when the server where down and you didn't did a backup of the files needed you couldn't play your savegames with dlc's. I was one of the customer who right at this period bought the ultimate edition and invested hours cause a bought game wasn't able to activate.

Second many of the issues with activated and deactivated dlc's comes from a DRM system where you are forced to connect to a server to activate. Reminds me that still daupdate service isn't automatically started on a windows 7 64 Bit. This is all connected to the DRM System.

So if you wan't drop like 1/3 of the problems you just remove that all and leave only the additional (not forced) feature to upload some data to the server to share with some friends. That way you can optionaly use the "Share Data" Server but won't have anymore troubles to reinstall / reactivate / Download the Game or DLC's.

This sounds like a customer friendly solution. Btw. i know customers who prefer to play not legal copies of the game , even they bought the game cause it's much less trouble to set up.


Edited:
Btw the time they invest to get this system running, could be better invested to fix bugs in the game itself.

Modifié par Glog78, 27 mai 2011 - 06:57 .

[SLAYEROO]

What about those memory leaks dear Bioware? I keep crashing every 1 hour of gameplay and sometimes have to go and replay 20 and 30 mins of the game.....

[RaenImrahl]

Glog78 wrote...

Ok to make long stories short, last time when the server where down and you didn't did a backup of the files needed you couldn't play your savegames with dlc's. I was one of the customer who right at this period bought the ultimate edition and invested hours cause a bought game wasn't able to activate.

Second many of the issues with activated and deactivated dlc's comes from a DRM system where you are forced to connect to a server to activate. Reminds me that still daupdate service isn't automatically started on a windows 7 64 Bit. This is all connected to the DRM System.

Patch 1.05 is suppose to address this, if I read Rob's most recent message aright.  The patch should make the DLC authorization work like is was *suppose* to work... meaning it only needs to be authorized online *once*. 

Beyond that, no, this isn't the place to discuss DRM for DAO.

[Rob Bartel]

As RaenImrahl points out, the system is not functioning as intended. Some of these DLC authentication issues run deep and were leading to some nasty memory overruns and file corruption issues. The server outage really highlighted some of that unintended behavior. We don't have all of the details yet and are continuing to test but we believe that some of these other programming-related issues that people have been reported are actually stemming from this symptomatic file corruption.

Needless to say, we aren't happy with the authentication system on DAO and chose to rewrite the bulk of it for DA2, despite the project's aggressive timeline. You'll note that when the servers went out, DA2 authentication was largely unaffected - it was relying on the same servers but failed far more gracefully thanks to that rewrite (we did lose some of our access to DA2 crash reports during that period but that thankfully didn't impact our users directly). While we unfortunately can't just port the DA2 code back into DAO, we are applying some of what we learned from DA2 to make this fix.

I was hoping to have the initial DAO beta patch out to the beta group in time for this weekend but we're still finding some lingering corruption issues that we want to make sure we understand and correct before handing it over to you. Rest assured that we're continuing to make progress behind the scenes and I look forward to getting these fixes out to everyone as soon as they're ready.

Hold steady,
Rob

Modifié par Rob Bartel, 27 mai 2011 - 11:26 .

[RaenImrahl]

Good to hear. BTW, I think there's always been a lot of confusion as to how the DLC authorization is suppose to work... for a long time I, like many others, operated under the assumption that we had to be online to play with DLC. A few of the long-time veterans of this forum, such as Kloreep, set me straight.

It's also interesting to hear that the DLC troubles may affect some other aspects of performance. If that indeed proves to be the case, then patch 1.05 may help some overall stability issues as well-- what many (sometimes incorrectly, but understandably) term as a "memory leak". I suspect 1.05 may not be a magic bullet for such ills, but it may serve as a very good tonic.

I should also add that in my own experience, I've not had a single issue with authorizations with DA2.  Any move towards optimizing DAO in a similar way, even just nudging the code in that direction, should make for some happy campers.

Best,

RI

Modifié par RaenImrahl, 28 mai 2011 - 05:13 .

[Thandal N'Lyman]

Yup! Great news about tracking down some of those nasty CtD problems. (Strange that at least some were DRM-related.)

But it's also more confirmation of what I said before:

Thandal NLyman wrote...

As far as I can tell, there are only two types of bugs in DA:O that are still getting "official" attention:

1) Player is unable to launch the game or legitimate DLC due to "authorization" errors,

and;

2) Player's game freezes/crashes during play.

Modifié par Thandal NLyman, 28 mai 2011 - 06:28 .

[Wil SilverHeart]

Hey All,

I would just like to ask, Where does .NetFrameWork factor in to all this? When I look in Add/Remove Progs. I see MS 1.1, MS 2.0 SP2, MS 3.0 SP 2, MS 3.5 SP1, MS 4 Client Profile, And MS 4 Extended. On my XP Home O.S. all done via Auto Updates.

Another thing I noticed yesterday after I done my weekly scans, I have an app called Ad-Aware ( Lavasoft ) and at times when it updates it will automatically put itself back in auto boot ( Ihate this so shut it off, via admin services ) This is normal but what I found interesting is that for what-ever reson it was turning my internet connection/network connection on and off, I could view this behavior via the connection icon in my task bar. This was creating real havoc. I shut Ad-Aware off in services and voila!!! issue solved.

Point of this.... To everyone make sure you are all up to date with Operating system, Sound Card, and Video Card. And deffinitely make sure you have nothing running in the back ground that may cause issues.

I like my OS stream-lined and when I'm booted up I have only 22 services running and I use my computer like normal. So as everyone can fathom there are services running on your rig that probably don't even have to be. if this intrestes anyone there is a Great resource about services at, " BlackViper " .com

Cheers! W.S.

Modifié par Wil SilverHeart, 28 mai 2011 - 04:17 .

[fkirenicus]

While I support BioWare's decision to first and foremost focus on DRM/DLC issues not working as intended, I for one can wait several months for a new patch if it means gameplay issues are addressed as well.

Though I find Origins mostly OK now, the missing elven boots in the Lothering Chantry should be fixed. It would also be cool if more recipes could be found in random loot (guess that's just a .2DA update, or what?).

In Awakening on the other hand, there are quite a few issues I would love to see corrected - the random encounters being one. After 3 playthroughs and at least a thousand area transitions, I still haven't been able to find the Dumat's Claw (?).
The silverite mine bug also should be fixed.
Finally, even though I have a brand new and quite powerful computer, there's an extreme lag when entering the shore area where the salvaged goods from the shipwreck is. 

[Kastagir]

I purchased the Awakening expansion over a year ago and I still haven't been able to play through it for reasons related to the game-breaking bugs introduced in the expansion or the 1.03 patch it requires.  These bugs have remained unaddressed and it still remains unclear whether this effort being headed by Rob Bartel will make any attempt to fix either the regressions introduced in 1.03 (and not fixed in 1.04) or the gameplay/quest bugs present in the Awakening expansion.