In Response to recent catastrophes
Well, I promised to remain upfront and honest about any problems we ran into, and boy did we hit some speedbumps.
I am struggling to think of how to open this, and I figure the best possible way is to rip off the Band-Aid. DPTST4 had a great launch, and we fumbled the ball in our day 1 fixes. When this post comes out, we will have flowed for about a solid week of pure persistence (If all goes according to plan). Unfortunately, we had for week 2 in order to reach that point. So why? Well much to the frustrations of our High Beat friends, our persistence engine is FAR from perfect. DSMC is a fantastic bit of code that allows us to do things like weather changes and restart protection. However, whenever we want or need to release a patch, DSMC can not maintain persistence. This means all of our bug fixes tank our progress. Hence Sochi and Beslan changing hands left and right.
Part of the reason it’s so frustrating right now is because before now, we’ve never had the numbers to move the needle with the speed that we have been. With our frankly unpredicted jump in player numbers, DPTST 4 is just overloaded in it’s ability to respond to player input. I can, and will, scale so that it doesn’t get too easy, but that takes patches. The bad news gets worse, as although we launched (relatively) bug free, so many have popped up, that it causes problems. Our decision to implement the C-130 as a supplement to CTLD has backfired. I didn’t know you guys were using the Herc’s load menu and script in that format. It wouldn’t be an issue, if we were using regular CTLD, but to resolve issues we saw during DPTST3, we switched to a MOOSE-centric CTLD which the Herc script appears totally incompatible with. It’s a nightmare. A similar issue is creeping up with Enigma’s scripts where, I’m not totally positive where the compatibility issues are. A-10As have an problem where they’re just picking up random NDB signals, because FC3 has awful radio controls.
Gameplay issues, are popping up too. The AI’s capture protocols were always designed to be supplemented by a human controller. We’ve also seen an expected requirement for a human blufor controller. Basically what I’m saying is I still don’t know half the things I need to fix, or how to fix them. This launch has been a mess, and I apologize for it. If I had a time machine I’d go back and do a month long open beta like we did with DPTST3. I ran on like an hour
And yet, you guys still like flying here. It honestly baffles me. I have never seen this level of positive reviews. I told Sarge, that it felt weird how I don’t have to shill the server anymore, people are just joining themselves. Shoutout to Triplication and the rest of High Beat, who have done better advertising in a week, then I could in a year. Longtime regulars like StarStranger, Fangirl, and Alien have been showing up day after day. Brosef, made his return to DPTST after finding that DPTST2 was unpolished and needed work (Which I agree with, it totally did), and boy have I never heard so many great ideas of where to go next.
All of this is to say that, I think we’re gonna be ok. I am reminded of David, who played during DPTST1’s buggy crash filled early days with 20gig mod packs that often didn’t work and saw potential. So the plan from here? This post may come out late, but I hope to release one more patch on Saturday with resolved Hercules behavior Enigma Recon functionality. From there, I want to go another 1 to 2 weeks without a patch so we can have another round of long term play. If that goes well, hopefully we can all just enjoy Knife Fight for a couple of weeks.
Yeah, we’re gonna be ok.
Shoutout to the AI A-4 who made a rocket run on a tank in the middle of the night. Ballsiest move I ever did see.
and also no blog post monday, but we’ll pick right up the week after with some good future DPTST talk
