LSOD in falz of TTF too?

[Malkavian]

Yesterday playing Towards the Future I got the typical falz bug of challenge mode. Endless Loading SOD. I was going at full power... charge laser, charge vulcan, baranz launcher that has charge special and srank zalure shot. So I lost 3 of those weapons. And got the exp resetted to when I reached Ruins after Vol Opt fight. Kinda painful.

I haven't heard of more people experiencing this. But it seems logic since ttf falz is in a quest too like challenge maybe it can happen too. Or maybe is just very rare to happen.

Anyways since that happened to me I'll take measures.

1. After killing Vol Opt equip the most valuable weapon. Because that is the one it will be saved if LSOD joining Falz happen.

2. Or better before falz go to the bank and save all the weapons except one.

3. Unconfirmed but it is said that joining the last in falz warp may help.

Tell if you know more people that got this type of LSOD in TTF too.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Malkavian on 2003-10-16 07:05 ]</font>

[VulpesMundi]

Unfortunately, LSoD can happen at any Falz battle. My first experience with LSoD was actually playing offline single-player with my HUmar. I had run him all the way through Normal mode, went to fight Falz, and got the infinite portal. That wasted about two hours of my time, but at least it was Normal and I hadn't found anything important - and being offline I didn't lose anything I had already owned.

While playing online, I usually only use two weapons at a time. One valuable weapon I keep equipped whenever the game is going to auto-save, and one expendable weapon that is easily replaced. Also, I never carry extra MAGs to feed while online. If I'm going to feed one I'll have it equipped. I'm quite wary of FSoDs, as well, as I've actually FSoD in teams while in the middle of battle. All this is especially true when I fight Falz. After getting that LSoD the first time and losing a couple hours of my time, I have been quite careful with my items and my time. It's a hard lesson learned, sometimes.

Sonic Team never ceases to amaze me on how many bugs they can miss. There's so many bugs in E1&2 that never existed back on the Dreamcast. Such incompetance. -.-

Again, my condolences to your losses. *Sigh.*

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: VulpesMundi on 2003-10-16 12:13 ]</font>

[Jazhara]

On 2003-10-16 12:07, VulpesMundi wrote:
Sonic Team never ceases to amaze me on how many bugs they can miss. There's so many bugs in E1&2 that never existed back on the Dreamcast. Such incompetance. -.-
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: VulpesMundi on 2003-10-16 12:13 ]</font>


Any game you play for thousands of hours will show you lots and lots of bugs.

ALL video game software is bugged - games do not ever go through a submission 100% clean. PSO is especially likely to have this happen due to its online nature. Don't kid yourself that another favoured game of yours is bug free - it's not. The bugs are just listed as <4% (approx) repeatability and hence happen so rarely they are not cause for concern. As Yuji Naka has said many a time, nobody at ST expected people to play PSO for anything like as long as they have (I remember an early interview with him where he said he expected v1 to be played for 30-40 hours per person, fairly normal for an RPG. Not like the 1000+ hours ppl racked up at all http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_lol.gif).

The level of bugs in PSO is not really indicative of incompetence - more of the scale of what ST tried to do with the PSO product.

What IS sad about the GC version is the seeming unability to patch problems, which was always going to be an inherent risk in doing a game such as this on console with client-side saving. Commendable, but ultimately flawed.

The overall level of bugs in PSO is actually quite good at its root - what is poor is the inability to correct the serious problems that do exist. I could accept "hardware limitation" for the GC, but HacXbox players should be patchable.

I know how people feel when they complain about the bugs in PSO, they annoy the hell out of me on a daily basis. But take it from me, if the game had come from a different developer / publisher combo it could have been a helluva lot worse - and then some.

Bitching at ST is easy, particularly in a forum they don't post to defend themselves in, but it is a little naive to do so.

The root of PSO's problems lie in a long-taken design decisions to have online and offline play with the same save file on a machine with a 56k modem. Brave, commendable, and I'm still glad they did. Many people would have never played PSO without the offline mode to get into first.

The dissapointing thing is this could have been addressed for GC. The LSOD issue is in the end just packet loss, if ST had made v3 Broadband only and rewritten the network code to suit this, the problems would happen far less often if at all. Seperating online and offline characters such that they can never interact, with server-side online saving, would have cured a lot of cheating.

If you understand this and play anyway, that's your choice. Nothing is perfect. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_wink.gif



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Jazhara on 2003-10-17 02:57 ]</font>

[neko-chan]

On 2003-10-17 02:53, Jazhara wrote:
Any game you play for thousands of hours will show you lots and lots of bugs.
While this statement may be true (but can't be prooved, unless you can show us detailed reports about game debugging and statistics), you should also note that not many console games have the chance of going under long beta test sessions, such as PSO.

PSO beta tests were not limited to a bunch of players (Super Mario games, for example, are tested by the folks at Super Mario Fan Club in Japan), but many thousands of people had the chance (by paying >_>;;;) to evaluate the product and report bugs and issues.

Not to mention, this one is the third version of, basically, the same game. And the first version was released almost three years ago. Three years are a lot of time if you have the skills and will to get rid of the junkie code.

PSO DC v1 -> Network Trial in late 2000
PSO DC v2 -> I don't recall a large network beta testing but it may be possible, anyone can cofirm?
GCN -> Network Trial Edition last year

Not to mention all the feedback ST had the chance to gather during these three years. What bothers, IMO, is the fact that we are encountering the same old bugs existed in the previous versions.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: neko-chan on 2003-10-17 03:42 ]</font>

[rena-ko]

any game that is ported over and was originally written to fit at another machine shows bugs with time that the creaters would have never tought of...

then again, they drove a trial to prevent things like that...

(sometimes i really wonder... what was the trial used for anyway... instabile routines causing fsod... lobby update issues (no song change etc), malfunctioning download feature... )

last time ST impressed me was when they put the autumn trees online (who where there before, just not visible).

...

[Jazhara]

On 2003-10-17 03:41, neko-chan wrote:
Not to mention all the feedback ST had the chance to gather during these three years. What bothers, IMO, is the fact that we are encountering the same old bugs existed in the previous versions.


Completely agree, that is pretty inexcusable. Bugs from DC should have been fixed.

However, the original complaint bemoaned bugs new to Ep I & II, hence my reply. Converting a game to different hardware is not simply copy --> paste, the bugs caused by a port can often be the hardest to find and fix.


EDIT - Unfortunately I can't post console hardware QA reports here, they're confidential. Take it from me just about 99% of games are bugged in some way, but in most cases they are rightly waived - if you can't make it happen on a dev kit, it's quite possible you can't fix it either. Hence the harder it is to recreate, the more likely it needs to be recreated in a debugging environment to find the cause. Bugs that happen 'once only' in a 20-man test team happen more often when played by 200,000 people.

That's not to excuse serious errors in PSO at all, as you rightly say that's what a Beta's for! http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_smile.gif

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Jazhara on 2003-10-17 05:59 ]</font>

[VulpesMundi]

It should also be pointed out that Sega claims that they cannot replicate the problem of character corruptions from the double-save, so ST does nothing about it. They obviously know that duping hasn't been stopped and that, from all the complaints, the double-save is causing more harm than good, but they won't remove it. I repeat: they are incompetant. There's no excuse for any of the existing problems, especially the ones that they created themselves. http://www.pso-world.com/psoworld/images/phpbb/icons/smiles/icon_razz.gif

Edit: the DC ver.2 beta test was held either in late April or early May of 2001. If I recall correctly, the Japanese version was released in June.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: VulpesMundi on 2003-10-17 10:29 ]</font>