Thursday, August 27, 2009

Some 1.5 issues addressed

Abigale has posted a response on the socom.com message boards to some of the issues that have come out of patch 1.5. Read it here:

Hi, All-

As I mentioned earlier, I have been passing on your feedback about Patch 1.5. This evening I was able to get some responses to some of your questions and concerns. So I wanted to pass the these reponses along to you.

Quick Match Issues
We have discovered that users who join a Ranked 8 v 8 Small quick match game are sometimes being matched into an unranked game instead. When this happens, M203s and RPGs will be available in the game and the ranking will not update as it is a unranked game even though the user selected the ranked 8v8 quick match game. We are working on a server side update to this issue and hope to have it deployed later this week or early next.

Confrontation Rating
We are looking into the Confrontation rating issue, where the rating increases or decreases by an abnormally large amount. So far, this is still in the discovery stage and we will provide more information on our progress as it is available.

Team Select Issue
For the SOCOM Confrontation 1.50 update, we did change the team select logic so that late joiners should no longer be able to switch teams. This is an intentional change in order to balance out the teams as in previous SOCOM games. However, as many users noted there are a couple of issues with this change where users can bypass this restriction by bringing up their friends list and closing it. Also, late joiners are unable to change teams even when returning to the game lobby after the match has ended. Both of these issues will be fixed in the next SOCOM Confrontation update.

Voice Chat Quality
Some users have noted that the quality of the voice chat has deteriorated and that the voice chat is significantly louder in the SOCOM Confrontation 1.50 update. We are looking into both issues. Part of this is a side effect of the bandwidth optimization made for the 1.50 update as the voice chat was using a very large amount of bandwidth which was causing latency (lag) issues for some users. We will try to improve this but we may not be able to restore the voice chat back to the same fidelity as before the 1.50 update as it would again cause latency (lag) issues for some users. We feel that the improved on-line performance is worth sacrificing a little bit of the quality of the voice chat.

Tie Breaker Logic
One item which was left off of the SOCOM Confrontation 1.50 build notes was the change to the tie breaker logic. We did intentionally change this logic to make the tie breaker decided by number of kills per team rather than objectives completed for the game type. This change was made based on community feedback in order to prevent the exploits which were happening such as players suiciding our voting out their own teammates. We understand that this is a controversial change for some but we feel that the change is the right one to make especially as the clan ladders and tournaments start to heat up. It should be noted that this only applies in the situation where there is a tie and so completing objectives is still a requirement to win some of the game modes.

Not being able to switch sides in the lobby after the game is of most annoyance to me. It's kind of hard to fathom how that was overlooked before the patch went into the approval process. Taking a look at how long it took for this patch to hit, I can only wonder how long its going to take for the next one, that fixes this issues, to arrive.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

1.5 Patch is out. No this is not a joke.

Yes, it's FINALLY here. I've been playing for the past hour and so far I can tell you that there is a huge difference. I'm finding myself having a lot more fun than I used to. The menus run smoother, the game runs smoother, the weapon selection menu is redesigned and doesn't force you to stop moving, you can join games from the clan list (and presumably the friend's list as well), the briefing rooms are set in some kind of order rather than being randomly listed, I can go on and on, and I've barely scratched the surface.

For a proper list of the fixes and changes, look here.

This might single-handedly bring me back into playing SOCOM on a regular basis.

Come back later for more impressions, and possibly a short podcast from me and [possibly] Hellman.

Monday, August 17, 2009

SOCOM Confrontation makes Greatest Hits


Starting today you can pick up SOCOM Confrontation (stand-alone) for $29.99.