I forgot Monthar, sorry. We talked about all of those possibilities. Changing the code to a timer is scary, I think. The theory of the decision, I think, is that the folks who flipped the port are most likely to be on at roughly the same time of day but they may not be on 3 hours later. I know if I play at 8p regularly and you moved the battle to 11p and I had to work the next day, I'd be a little pissy. Especially at work the next day. It's true, though, that if I can make it Saturday night, I might not be able to make it Sunday night or whatever. The best answer, of course, is that we don't have the servers down when a battle's supposed to happen. In a perfect world...

Qitro, some folks found the game unplayable w/o those drivers and can play very happily now. If you're having problems, give 'em a shot. If not, don't stress on 'em. I'm not sure what all NVIDIA changed in the driver but apparently the changes can have unintended effects on older cards. That would probaby be one reason NVIDIA hasn't released them yet - they're still testing them. If you try 'em and you don't like 'em, rollback.

Arm, I do believe the ability to have characters of varying nations on Testbed is intended.

Keline, I'm not sure. I'll see what I can find out.

Closed this thread cuz there's a new thread now.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you elaborate?

If you have a code base that's been through three previous versions, and you've been building the same game for the last ten years, then yes, I would expect you to have a largely flawless launch. On the negative side, you have now restricted yourself to paying the same game from the same companies. When you branch out and try to do something new, you enter an entirely new problem set that doesn't have the same solutions and doesn't hold up to the same stresses. WoW didn't have a particularly smooth launch. Do you now think that Blizzard is a talentless group of yahoos who don't know how to build a game?

You guys are yelling as if that will a) motivate us to move faster or b) shake us out of some complaceny. I can assure you that we are moving as fast as is prudent (we don't want to introduce more problems than we solve, and that requires thorough testing), and that we're not complacent. Far from it. Nothing is as painful as someone who wants to play, but can't because of a bug. For many of you, the game is going to get a lot better on Tuesday. For those of you who may still have problems after the patch, we'll continue working on your issues.

Oh, last thing. If you crash, and Windows asks to send a problem report in, please do! We get all of those problem reports, and they're hugely useful in fixing CTD. I'm not sure why more companies don't sign up for the program.

I don't think we were that bad! :-) But thanks!

Gads! Can you please ask him to make sure he's filed a support ticket, and also to post information about it (hopefully including the support ticket number) in the forums? i'd like to make sure we're on his problem.

Not intentionally, but that may be what happens. Consider that we've fixed a lot of problems in the code in the first patch on Tuesday, and some of these manifest themselves differently for different configurations. Our challenge is to figure out what's going on with the person's computer. Once we know what the issue is, typically we can quickly solve it. Where it takes a long time is when we can't repro the issue in house.

Three things:

1) I'm not sure where we disappeared to, but that's not our intent. I, magically, have once again contracted all sorts of stomach problems, and to make matters worse, I'm at a trade show (DICE) and I fly back to Seattle tomorrow for all of two hours to sit in an airport, and then fly to Australia for 16 hours. So I've been off the forums for a day or two, but it's certainly not intended to be long term behavior.

2) Rolliard, the only real change we made between the end of beta and the launch was to change the UDP ports. You mentioned you had a firewall that you had opened, which one are you using, and what version is it?

3) There is a patch coming out on Tuesday. Take a spin with it and let us know if you're still having the problem after that. If you want to take a preview, the version up on testbed is running right now. Also, I noticed you had an 8800 GT, there are new drivers from Nvidia that we've posted, you'll want to snag them as well.

This problem should have been fixed already. I'm looking into why the mission is still this way.