A plea for change (revisit)

[J11]

HI Riley and team,

A few months ago I posted a thread about some issues I had along with quite a lot of other older players. subsequently most of us have stopped playing because of these issues.

It was closed because ‘the thread is old’. Obviously that is not a reasonable way to handle big sets of problems. My question is now posed back to the community and yourselves…

How many of these gamebreaking issues are actually solved now? Is it worth me logging back in regularly (especially now that I have more time).

quoted thread is below.

Thanks,

Hi @Riley_D @Robert @Mathieu_D @kyle_l @Jake_E,

I am writing this on behalf of some people in the end game community who are simply exhausted from the bugs and problems that have been in the game from day 1 here so please read carefully.

Over the last 2 years we have really enjoyed playing OrbusVR but right now there are still too many basic bugs that put us off and kill off our enjoyment in the game.

The top problems include (and definitely not limited to):

• Random desyncs (game breaking)
• Random crashes in the middle of boss fights (game breaking)
• Weapons just stop working mid combat causing wipes or loss in damage. (game breaking)
• Lack of true progressive PvE content other than raids and dungeons (right now it just feels like a dungeon runner).
• Disappearing health bars
• Spells persistently staying in game
• Spell initialization causing lag
• Losing frame rates after a few fights.
• Pally aggro issues (nearly unusable class at high level end game) (game breaking).
• Stuck combat bugs (game breaking)
• Bad exp from mob grinding (forced to do quests and missions for leveling up).
• Bad and unorganized loot from grinding (no clear loot progression until end game).
• No engaging solo/small group content outside of dungeons
• No clear reason to explore / be immersed in the OrbusVR world

Because of all these game breaking problems, there is a high possibility that those here who have signed their name against this are going to jump to whatever the next Alpha VRMMO in a playable state is released. Some people that have signed have already made plans to jump or have actively stopped playing VRMMOs all together.

Obviously we don’t want to do that but all of these problems combined results in a seemingly unpolished game and fragmented experience. Given that it kills off any fun it looks likely that this is logically what will happen.

We believe there needs to be changes and focus on these problems.

Signed (some of) your end game community:

Rickness_Voidwalker, J11, Arthanos, Landru, Justin, Bral, Cam, Archive, Human, Kizzlet0n, Infraggable_Krunk, DocAibolit, SweatyPancakes, Chezil, Rockabella, sean_d, Denmo, Fort_M, Burnator, Alu, Axile_Salamandra, AcaviGER, Vasilia_F, Sift, ChaseChair

To keep this thread constructive, If you would like to sign this too for your own reasons, Please reply below with what the biggest problem is for you that has/will put you off playing so that the biggest problems are clear.

[Cam]

Add removing skill curves from classes to normalize everyone for the sake of “balance” (mage). I’d still be here every day if diminishing returns weren’t artificially holding me back and ruining the only viable level 30 talent, because it seems no practical considerations went into how to implement that “nerf”. I haven’t logged in since the day that was updated.

[Game_Master]

Hi, first off welcome back - while we never responded to the original post, as it escalated pretty fast from the original post, we did read the entire thing including everyone’s additions to it. While we try to address everyone’s concerns equally, it’s not always realistic, and we totally understand some can feel unheard. (There are of course, universal concerns like stability which I’ll touch on below.)

Since that post, we have been working hard to improve Orbus, keeping the community’s feedback in mind, and we’d like to share some details where we’re at now and what we’ve been working on in our dozen updates since then, along with discussing some ideas on our vision of the future.

In terms of game-breaking bugs like desync or stability, spells persisting, etc. these are something we’ve been and will continue to be actively working on. A while ago in Patch 10.997, we implemented the in-game bug report system, not only to make it easier for players to report their issues but also for us to collect logs and other information more rapidly and in better numbers.

This has been really successful, and since then we’ve managed to fix a few desync causes and are investigating others as well as crash causes. We’ve also fixed issues with persistent spells, and some voice-chat errors (though we know there’s more to fix). We’re on a similar path with stuck combat and did put out a fix recently but reverted it temporarily due to other complications. A lot of these issues unfortunately do not have a singular cause, so require a lot of development time to hunt down.

In terms of game design and future of the game, we’re listening to the community and keeping their ideas and suggestions in mind for upcoming content. We’ve received a lot of feedback on the lack of solo or non-endgame group content, and we’ve taken that to heart and are on the same page here.
Seasonal Festivals, Tinkering, Housing, quests, and the G.R.I.N.D.I.N.G. device (for leveling outside of missions) are all content with a non endgame dungeon grind focus that we’ve added, and we’ll have more solo content or smaller group activities to announce in the future.

We’ve also been trying introduce new types of drops in the overworld or dungeons that are more in the middle tier of rarity, so players have something to chase or trade that isn’t either extremely plentiful or extremely rare. That’s something we’re paying attention to in future content as well.

We want to incentivize exploration and reasons to venture into the world more in the future content - we know that’s something players have been looking for and we’re heading in that direction. I don’t have details to share yet, but we’re keeping this in mind as we go forward.

While this post doesn’t address all the points you had listed, or list all of the fixes or quality-of-life improvements we’ve made to the game (and there are many others we plan to tackle), we just wanted to reply and say we have read the feedback and incorporated it into our plans both short term and long term.

Thanks!

PS: I did want to mention that we also added a whole weapon position customization option a couple patches ago since I know that was something that you personally and others had requested since you were having issues with the Valve Index - we wanted to make it a solid feature and do it right (plus let every platform use it), so it took some time to implement but I think everyone has been happy with it.

[Vasilia_F]

i still crash a lot in orbusvr in bad time crash tanking bosses in doungons i have use websocket and proxyed both still orbusvr crash for me

[Ewok]

The bug reporter has helped the desync issues and is really appreciated but has the idea of a crash reporter been considered or even be in development?

I feel like this is the number 1 issue for the game currently. I personally crash each time I play and know others crash often too. We had a shard dungeon failed due to multiple people crashing somewhat recently. I had been sending in countless crash logs recently but have lost motivation to even send them in at this point as I would rather just play the game then take 5 mins each crash to grab the reports and a little brief synopsis of what happened before the crash

[J11]

Is it possible to override the default exception handler to try catch any exceptions and automatically send to the server?

I guess something like this would do the job
https://answers.unity.com/questions/232589/is-there-a-way-to-catch-global-application-expceti.html

[Game_Master]

I am not personally one of the technical guys so I can’t really comment on this issue, but will pass the comments along. What I can say is that we will be continuing hunting for crashes in the coming weeks, and have a lead on some already so it is definitely something we’re working on.