[Videos] Billy Buskell denying issues about off-host headshots

If only the off host headshots were the only problem with this game ... there are many more. The way Billy handled the manifest bloat (People wanted new content. We gave them tons of new content, now what? Still unhappy? Why? It's for you, not microtransactions! You're all conspiracy nuts!) was also borderline dismissive.

Not good. Not good at all. Out of touch with their own game, out of touch with their playerbase.

Nobody denied that the "new" content can make you stronger. It's the way they implemented it (30+ cards for all non common weapons, rendering the first ten ranks redundant) that sucks. On top of that now only a few low ranking boosters will drop in the expensive packs, with the occasional UR booster.

Not to mention how new players are now screwed.

Guys, there's a bigger picture here. This "vacation" that most of the studio is on is actually most likely a several-week period for everyone to interview to find another job. Billy probably has either seen the writing on the wall or has been outright asked to move on, hence his emotional state, outbursts, and ragequitting Reddit.

Responding with logic and evidence isn't going to work, the same way it won't work on a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. It's probably best to just ignore him. He never really was responsible for those details anyway.

For those holding out hope that these issues will be fixed, bad news: the game is probably close to its final state. They're likely going to roll out the datamined content, take another pass or two at rebalancing, then pack it up. They're not going to address what's most likely a symptom of fundamental/structural problems.

What if we were happy with the balance on gold before the patch came in?

As far as the rest goes?  Meh.  I don't mind that they added 30 variant cards of each gun.  It gives people something to open.  They should NEVER pop instead of a regular not maxed out weapon though.  Ever.  Also, the skins are ugly and it would be great if we could opt to get the perk without the shiny purple/red/yellow overlay.

The headshot thing is being blown out of proportion, I think.  He was speaking casually, acknowledged that work is going into fixing it but they're having issues replicating the issue.  He mused that it might be a really bad connection for the players.  It's a stream.  He's supposed to talk, and thinking out loud is probably part of that.  I don't REALLY believe that they automatically dismiss anyone who uses the term "netcode". 

We shouldn't be getting so worked up about this.

Weapon mods, mostly uncommon, will be a big problem. The pool of uncommon stuff is huge now. I wouldn't like to start over from scratch. If a new player want to take the bad way with only 100k packs it will take forever to max out uncommon stuff. If he takes the advanced pack route it will also take a long way to max uncommons and will significantly slow down the rare/UR progression.

I still hope BW will create seperate packs exclusivly for the "new" stuff. This would solve the problem immediately, and it shouldn't be to much of a hassle for them.

Just play the game...


Like really, these are the same people who said they could not reproduce the vanguard glitch 5 years ago... the game CAME OUT LIKE THIS where 1/6 classes were completely unplayable...



Enjoy what you got, and take the hit.. and learn from your mistakes, this makes the 2nd game for me from bioware, there will be no 3rd.

Lol not that hard.

No no, a bundle of 1000ft that I cut and make my own cables. The house is pretty much a Batcave-esque lair of computers and other devices that I prefer to wire in. It's so much easier and cheaper to cut my own cable than to constantly be buying a 6 ft, a 10 ft, a 20 ft, etc.





Yeah I found it funny that the Frosty Editor devs are worried that people might do something with their tool that people can already easily do with CE.

The point might have been that they have not coded any abstractions for dealing with network traffic ordering problems.

If you look at the ports you need to have open on your firewall, you'll see a mix of tcp and udp ports. Let's imagine that the tcp ports are used for mission setup and that the udp ports are used for mission progress (that's the best case scenario). UDP has two problems: 

(1) Not all packets that are sent arrive, and
(2) Not all packets that arrive arrive in the same order that they were sent in

TCP hides these issues by slowing things down and resending stuff so that (for a single connection) either everything arrives in order or the connection closes. UDP is faster but requires code to deal with the problems TCP deals with.

So, personally, when I see the word "netcode" I presume that that would be a reference to the code that tracks what has arrived, puts counters on it so that the receiver can tell when something got skipped or arrives later than something else, has timers for noticing when stuff is not arriving, and has some sort of check for if the information was corrupted. (That whole "something got skipped" thing is sort of subtle to deal with in games where it matters, though, so let's just ignore it for now. But arrives late and/or out of order are both things the game needs to be designed for...)

So, anyways, if there is no netcode, that would explain some of the problems we see.

Like, for example, teleporting - one game sends a stream of updates, that include things like where the fiend is and who it is attacking and stuff. Now imagine that some of those get lost and some of them arrive late, but others after the late ones were sent arrive on time, then the late ones arrive, then you get another small delay. Now all of a sudden you have a situation where the fiend would teleport backwards and appear to be somewhere where it's not, and then when later on, packets start arriving again, all of a sudden it teleports forwards to where it really was.

All because there was no netcode. Well, that and having a messy internet connection between computers for that mission - this would not be just a constant 300 ms ping issue, this is where things get worse than that. (Which brings up the other issue of the game needing to deal with delays - if the game is not telling the player when things are messed up, how will the player even know to mention that in a problem report? Far too many games seem to be coded to only report ping when packets arrive and not mention the ping problem when nothing is arriving. But, here, I do not even know how to get the game to show me anything about ping... So, sure, i can easily believe that there's "no netcode".)

I gave up on actually maxing even by nefarious means. I got the three or four weapons I actually use to Siphon X, that's good enough. It is so fucking tedious having to open 20, 40, 60 mil worth of packs at a time and not be maxed. I think I've done about 150 mil since 1.09 dropped and still have about half of the UR variants at rank 5 or below.

Already do, lol. Still find it tedious as shit.

i.imgur.com/TXg2bUW.png

lmao Siphon increases a whopping .75% from I to X, AND IT DIDN'T EVEN FUCKING INCREASE ON RELEASE

Bulwark? A pathetic 50 DR if all three allies are humping each other?  Please.

Concussive increases 87.5% from I to X. Still pathetic damage versus the huge health pool on Platinum. What's 1500 damage in a babydick radius (which doesn't increase) compared to 50000 HP?  And of course, it's reliant on headshots, which, you know, lol WHICH WORK PERFECTLY FINE, CITIZENS

www.welovetheiraqiinformationminister.com/images/07-minister.jpg

...term adapted by game developers at Blizzard, for instance.


schedule.gdconf.com/session/overwatch-gameplay-architecture-and-netcode