Stress test : Things to know

Mars505

Thought i do a list and maybe people can add to it.

Things to know about a stress test (for any game) :

 Be prepared for anything

1. Lag

   a. Choppy

    b. Rubber banding

    c. Latency lag

    d. Video

    e. Town Lag ( my new one , can't quiet place it , but it is a combo of population , video and sound)

              

2. Crashes may happen

         a. Hang up

         b. To desktop

               1. If to desktop make sure to look in your system information and see if an error report was made

                 if made , hi-light the error report and export it with : File<export  . Then got to the

                 LotRO website file a bug report and upload the file

         c. Video Lock up .

               1. Sound is playing but video is locked up.

3. Command /loc  will bring up your location inside the game  . If you see something odd or a bug use /loc  and write down the location or take a screenshot and submit it to the LotRO Website.

4. Have a pen and paper, never know when you need to write something down.

5. People can be rude, specially when your fighting for the same mob on a quest, prepare for kill stealing and an over all lack of respect in the first few levels . Try and form fellowships early as possible to make questing easier . If your doing a quest and see someone near the start spot, just send them an invite.  Don't be afraid to join a fellowship

6.The game is in beta , keep that in mind.

7. Play it like you would if you bought it, test it out throughly and post some objective views on the forums at LotRO .



Thats all the tips I can think of at this moment.

Markaj

Good points and reminder, thanks a lot

Keldien

"5. People can be rude, specially when your fighting for the same mob on a quest, prepare for kill stealing and an over all lack of respect in the first few levels . Try and form fellowships early as possible to make questing easier . If your doing a quest and see someone near the start spot, just send them an invite.  Don't be afraid to join a fellowship"



That is excellent advice.  As a few others posted on another thread, the respawn rate of newbie quest mobs (Wolves, Boars, Burrowers, etc) is dreadfully low in comparison to the amount of people they're bringing in.  Getting into a Fellowship to finish this will lower your gained exp by a little, yes, but you'll actually be able to get the quest done and get out of the area before most people - thereby giving you a significant head start on questing.



Another thing to mention is that you begin the game in an instanced area.  After completing it you enter another pseudo-instanced area that has all of the other newbies of your race.  In this area BE SURE to read the quests before you finish them - one will give you a warning in bold red letters that by accepting and finishing that quest, you will be leaving the area and be unable to finish the rest of the newbie area quests.  Finish up everything before accepting it.

Mars505

good add on

a_postos_3

Yeah well said. Thanks man!

Sevenwind

And don't be rude and stand on TOP of the quest NPC giver!!! Yeah you know who you are! haha

Molarean

The best advice is for closed beta testers to take the weekend off. 

thinkingbear

I am so ready for this.  I took tomorrow off work so I can log in at 9 AM Pacific Time

Mars505

Would like to also say, This is not the movie. This is based from the book lore, so keep an open mind to the quest dialog as well as taking the time to read through it, at least for the Prelude quests and chapters. ...

Jackdog

Anyone want to bet there will not be at least 5 threads over here tomorrow night bitching about server ques, lag, and crashes

virtuella

Originally posted by Jackdog

Anyone want to bet there will not be at least 5 threads over here tomorrow night bitching about server ques, lag, and crashes

Well that's their own fault then if they haven't read what the devs said.



The stress test this weekend will be interesting because for us the goal is to push the servers to the point where they explode and collect data on what finally caused them to kick the bucket. At the same time, due to the positive buzz post NDA lift we're going to have a number of people who are playing to try out the game not help us crush the servers. I know it isn't necessarily fun play while bringing a server to its knees, but that's what we really need to happen this weekend to help prepare for open beta and launch.



Hakai

The Lord of the Rings Online Team

Turbine, Inc

Jackdog

Originally posted by virtuella

Originally posted by Jackdog

Anyone want to bet there will not be at least 5 threads over here tomorrow night bitching about server ques, lag, and crashes

Well that's their own fault then if they haven't read what the devs said.



The stress test this weekend will be interesting because for us the goal is to push the servers to the point where they explode and collect data on what finally caused them to kick the bucket. At the same time, due to the positive buzz post NDA lift we're going to have a number of people who are playing to try out the game not help us crush the servers. I know it isn't necessarily fun play while bringing a server to its knees, but that's what we really need to happen this weekend to help prepare for open beta and launch.



Hakai

The Lord of the Rings Online Team

Turbine, Inc

still it wil happen, you and I both know it.

virtuella

yup yup but now we can point them towards this post and tell them not to try and freeload into a stresstestbeta and play for fun.

keltic1701

Originally posted by Mars505


Thought i do a list and maybe people can add to it.

Things to know about a stress test (for any game) :

 Be prepared for anything

1. Lag

   a. Choppy

    b. Rubber banding

    c. Latency lag

    d. Video

    e. Town Lag ( my new one , can't quiet place it , but it is a combo of population , video and sound)

               

I thought I was the only one who experienced severe lag while in a town. I believed that addional RAM would solve this problem or at least lessen it. I was going to upgrade from 512M to 2 Gig in the next few weeks. Would this ease the lag I get when in a town?

 

Live long and prosper

Hobl

yeah lag in town is caused by the loading of the mass amount of the models.

Mars505

I have 1 gig , and gets pretty bad on high settings.  think with final optimization on textures and a few tweaks they will get it.

greasy85

I'm currently a beta tester for the game myself and they have an ingame bug submission command and its /bug and just fill it out and you done.

greasy85

Originally posted by keltic1701

Originally posted by Mars505


Thought i do a list and maybe people can add to it.

Things to know about a stress test (for any game) :

 Be prepared for anything

1. Lag

   a. Choppy

    b. Rubber banding

    c. Latency lag

    d. Video

    e. Town Lag ( my new one , can't quiet place it , but it is a combo of population , video and sound)

               

I thought I was the only one who experienced severe lag while in a town. I believed that addional RAM would solve this problem or at least lessen it. I was going to upgrade from 512M to 2 Gig in the next few weeks. Would this ease the lag I get when in a town?

 

Live long and prosper

no because that would be server side lag not you it would be because of the amount of people on at the same time hints the name stress test.

skilcline

Great list!

Hopefully not too many people will be basing their views of this excellent game, on a stress test, which IMHO, is called that because it is frustrating to the player, but ultimately is essential to the developers!

bdschilz

honestly LOTRO  just earned my respect with bring the servers to there knees... great job

Womba

Also, thing that helped me and many others is to do something with .ini if your not afraid with some tweaking. Dont worry, nothing too big like messing with vanguard

 

Under "My Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online" open "UserPreferences.ini" and change:

AllowFakeFullScreen=True

to

AllowFakeFullScreen=False

 

What this does is this: (by gm in betaforums)

"It turns the screen from a window (with all the windows overheads) without a border or controls, into a full screen application without many of the windows overheads."

After changing that i managed to get 50fps in Bree last night compared to 15-30 i was getting before.

Mars505

Originally posted by greasy85

I'm currently a beta tester for the game myself and they have an ingame bug submission command and its /bug and just fill it out and you done.

Excellent one !

Jackdog

I was impressed, played on Meldenor from 9 till now and it never crashed once. Newbie areas near Archet ( post burn) and Coombe were packed to teh gills. I did turn down my draw a distance a bit simply because of the number of new PC's in town areas caused me a bit of chop. They have sure came a long way since the first couple of tests. I made a new character just for the test last night and I ended up playing as normal.

Kudo's Turbine for a non stressful ( for the player) stress test.

Mars505

I actually was preparing for the test lol , I was getting all my drivers tweaked out and found this neat little overclocker for nvidia, and I can say on Melandor I was able to play Ultra High with x2 antialaising out in the lone lands . I went to the 3 rd server and made an elf and it was packed their as well , it did get choppy so I had to lower it down to high graphics lol . The instances where 0 lag and running 60 frames + on the 3rd servers dwarf elf  noobie area, I was freaking out cause I have never had an mmo play like that , ever. 

thinkingbear

Originally posted by Jackdog
Kudo's Turbine for a non stressful ( for the player) stress test.

Yes, I was very impressed.  In almost 24 hours of gaming over the past 2.5 days I lost connection to the server just once, and in joining a server I had to wait in a queue only once for all of 15 seconds at that.  I also really enjoyed the Tolkien trivia contests last night and thought for the most part the people I ran into were mature and well behaved with very few asshats.  I don't know if game would seem so cool to a non-Tolkien fan, but I am a long time LotR fan and the theme definitely has me hooked.