1941

Between this, Bioshock Infinite and (if I think it wise to start it now) Tomb Raider, I’m basically not leaving the house for the 4 day weekend, I can tell…

1942

The current state of the game is weird, at the moment. One-shot-kill shotguns makes infantry harsh. Lots of new antivehicle weapons (that all need nerf) and new bonus to destroy vehicles make driving vehicles harsh. The same anti-vehicles stuff make air harsh, double harsh if you play NC, since the opposition is faster (mosquito) or more agile (scyte). The “Quickaction” button has ben redone to use a single location, and that reduce freedoom.

Its like sometimes the only option is to die in not honorable ways and get farmed, and I don’t like that.

1943

Whaaat? SOE used to have a messaging program for Everquest (EQIM) and it was actually really nice for checking to see if your friends were on etc. But they’ve been saying for years that they aren’t going to bring it back. Now they’re putting one in for PS2? wtf

1944

Thanks for sharing this. I grabbed the last card at Walmart on the way home tonight!

1945

Cool, you’re welcome!

The SOE Station Cash cards are notoriously hard to find at Wal-Mart. I bought two the other day in preparation for the 2X weekend (one for my account, one for my son’s), and I swear I spent 20 minutes in the store looking for them. I eventually had to leaf through every single little display holder for dozens of crappy internet-based game cards before I found a small stash of 8 or so hidden behind a thick stack of some fashion-model-dress-up internet game cards. Dunno if some enterprising individual was hiding them there for later purchase or what, but I left the remaining ones right up front for any fellow Planetside players to find.

When I asked the guy at the electronics desk about them (prior to finding the hidden stash) he said they can’t look them up in the computer because they have no value until activated, thus they don’t show up in inventory. How the hell do they know when they are out then? Most likely they don’t even care, as I suspect Wal-Mart makes next to nothing on the sales.

1946

I went to two different stores and it seems Walmart has pulled their $15 1500 plus 500 free cards and replaced them with $10 1000 Free Realms/ SOE Station Cash ones that have 200 extra. Which is not quite as sexy. I spoke with an employee as I know there were stacks of the $15 cards at one of the stores just recently and he confirmed that they had removed a bunch of cash cards for several games within the last day or so. Awesome timing on the sale if this is true.

1947

has anyone else had the game get progressively LESS stable since beta? For the past couple of weeks I haven’t been able to play without the game either doing some sort of weird visual glitch that absolutely ruins my ability to see anything in the game, or just start to stutter and then crash. I never had this problem in the beta. I know this game is heavily dependent on processor, more so than GPU, but I have an i5 3570k, so I"m left to wonder how Sony is screwing this up.

1948

Have you tried doing a full reinstall at any point? It’s possible something got damaged or didn’t patch quite right between beta and now and that’s been causing issues. I’ve always gotten that… “flicker” glitch where most of the graphics keep flickering in and out, but that was happening since day 1 and has mostly gotten better for me as time has gone on.

1949

I’ve seen the flicker glitch off and on since release day. Some patches it seems to go away, then a few weeks later I’ll get it twice in one night. I suspect they’ve never really fixed it, that it’s something very small in the coding somewhere that when you hit just the right transition grahics-wise it hits.

The game HAS been buggier lately though. New bugs I’ve seen a lot of recently have been the freeze at loading sceen (when switching continents or recalling to warpgate) and the weird undead deployment screen where you accept a revive from someone but instead of switching back to game view you are stuck looking a deployment screen on which you can click nothing and cannot escape out of, meanwhile if you hit fire or jump you can hear your character performing those actions, so the revive apparently goes through but you are still stuck at a non-functional deployment screen. I’ve also spawned a couple of times and had the game fail to draw in parts of the facility floor where I spawn, causing me to fall through the floor and be unable to jump back up and out. I’ve even seen other people get stuck down there with me, so I suspect that one is a server side bug with spawn tubes.

Still, even with all that bugginess I have played over 100 hours and had a great time doing so. While annoying, the occasional relog isn’t a terrible price to pay. So far I’ve yet to run into anything that caused a problem that couldn’t be fixed by relogging.

1950

Yeah, the game is buggy at times (all the stuff Slainte notes, plus the occasional loss of firing and reload animations, etc.) but still fun. Though yesterday there was this guy exploiting to sit under a Sundie (as in, under the ground and invincible) killing everyone who spawned there. Even admitted in chat he was cheating because “I’ve been banned for no reason before so I decided to cheat.” I just spawned elsewhere, but still. And if chat is any guide (ha!) there are still a fair number of hacks going on, but really most of the time I don’t notice much out of the ordinary.

I got some double cash to snag a Phoenix and Striker (don’t like the Lancer really) and the NS-11C, which I love. I still can’t seem to do much with aircraft, though. I simply cannot fly the damned things, at least the light fighters, with the mouse. To add insult to injury I have to choose between the inverted controls (necessary for me to have even the vaguest chance at flying adequately) or the non-inverted (necessary to use the Phoenix at all, for me) when on NC. Anyone use a real joystick with this game? Does it help?

1951

I actually didn’t get to play a ton this weekend, but since my last post I did deactivate the PhysX and things ran a lot better. No more crashes or anything. But it makes me wonder what I have to do to get the game to run smoothly with PhysX enabled, considering that I have a GTX680. Oh well. I’ll have to play a little more to be sure that the PhysX was the root of my problems, but I’m pretty sure it was.

1952

Interesting; I’ll give it a shot.

1953

I think I have a 560TI and the game runs relatively smooth with physX enabled. ( 40+ FPS, 60 FPS far from huge battles ) The game is mostly CPU capped, and the PhysX seems a GPU based effect. It may need CPU if don’t have hardware support, or driver support (have you guys installed the PhysX driver component for your card?). Basically, PhysX uses almost nothing of a resource (GPU) that is not the one limiting your FPS. Also, I doubt is a effect that need much memory at all. But if your videocard is already almost over of ram, maybe even a tiny bit more can cause a crash. I don’t have quality on high on all settings for that. I remember having to lower the settings, after a update, having the settings higher than high with ini editing. The game crashing can be a indication of the memory capacity of the videocard ending (and why theres no a safeguard for that? I don’t know).

TL:DR version:

PEBKAC

1954

Thanks for the response. My game actually ran fine, until it didn’t, with PhysX enabled and all the visual settings cranked to max. But PhysX didn’t really add anything for me, so turning it off so the game runs without crashing is a small sacrifice.

1955

Yeah, I can’t tell the difference between PhysX on or off, on my 670. Stability is better with it off though, no doubt about it. So, off it goes. The game is always CPU bound anyhow, at least with me (i5 3570k).

1956

The new alert system its very gamey, but works. It add a objective, in a game that is normally a sandbox. And if you follow that objective the game could be more fun. Too bad is very dificult to have any type of metagame when maybe a faction is less populated than others. But it sorta works!, for the most part. And is fun!. I think this game is growing to become a great game.

1957

I’m confused by the people not being able to tell a difference with Physx on. Explosions in particular are night and day, especially when a tank round passes by and there is debris raining down everywhere.

I’m on Waterson Vanu btw if anyone wants to group up sometime.

1958

Yea I agree Harkonis, I find the differences to be quite large.

1959

I guess I don’t pay much attention to the effects and all; PhysX really wasn’t doing much for me. I’ll toggle it on and off again and see if performance changes, or if I notice anything, but it wasn’t a key part of the game for sure.

1960

Oh I can tell the difference between the two, but the rest of the game looks fine to me. Basically when I said “PhysX didn’t really add anything for me” I meant in terms of level of enjoyment. It looks cool and everything, but its hardly crucial to how much fun I have in a firefight.