Patch Notes for March 5th, 2024

[The Curator]

Head on over to the Patch Notes page to read the full notes.

 

 

[Random Robot]

Dark Mastery->Murky Cloud: No Fade or Pulse is still fading/pulsing

[Shin Magmus]

"Guys, we want you to farm Giant Monsters and engage with a new system."

 

Okay.  Shin respecs his Ill/Traps into being a GM Hunter and begins joining the playerbase farming all the GMs.

 

"What the fuck are you doing?  Stop farming GMs!" Devs immediately nerf Adamastor twice, Deathsurge, and I'm sure more to come.

 

...What do you actually want from us?  Every nerf to how people can get Monstrous Aether is just an indirect buff to AE Farming by direct comparison; back to the grind okay?  Here I go.

[Bionic_Flea]

Can we call this the Number Six patch? 

 

Issue 27, page 7, patch Number Six.

[lemming]

2 hours ago, ShinMagmus said:

"Guys, we want you to farm Giant Monsters and engage with a new system."

 

Okay.  Shin respecs his Ill/Traps into being a GM Hunter and begins joining the playerbase farming all the GMs.

 

"What the fuck are you doing?  Stop farming GMs!" Devs immediately nerf Adamastor twice, Deathsurge, and I'm sure more to come.

 

...What do you actually want from us?  Every nerf to how people can get Monstrous Aether is just an indirect buff to AE Farming by direct comparison; back to the grind okay?  Here I go.

You can hunt all the various GMs, just not stand in one area and continue collecting the same reward.

 

 Devs are always going to be doing wack-a-mole with player behaviours that they feel harm the rest of the player base, no matter which game.

[StarkWhite]

Yeah, there's a fairly visible line between "we want more people to engage with Giant Monsters" and "we want people to mindlessly farm the lowest-effort Giant Monsters."

[Sovera]

Yeah, sneering at the devs for fixing it when we had people posting how multiple leagues worth of players were farming Adamastors so fast it had become APS (Adamastors Per Second) is funny.

[c4_maniac]

Not sure if related but had two map serve disconnects today.

[eqspeef]

Do we really have people running 32 bit clients?  What do those numbers look like?

 

I know it's a 20 year old game, but 20 years ago is about the same time home PCs started going 64-bit, and I have a hard time imagining someone playing COH on a P4 with a CRT monitor when they could get a vastly more capable 10 year old PC for $25 on Ebay.

[Captain Fabulous]

59 minutes ago, eqspeef said:

Do we really have people running 32 bit clients?  What do those numbers look like?

 

I know it's a 20 year old game, but 20 years ago is about the same time home PCs started going 64-bit, and I have a hard time imagining someone playing COH on a P4 with a CRT monitor when they could get a vastly more capable 10 year old PC for $25 on Ebay.

It's more likely they're running a 32-bit OS like Windows 7.

[macskull]

2 hours ago, eqspeef said:

Do we really have people running 32 bit clients?  What do those numbers look like?

 

I know it's a 20 year old game, but 20 years ago is about the same time home PCs started going 64-bit, and I have a hard time imagining someone playing COH on a P4 with a CRT monitor when they could get a vastly more capable 10 year old PC for $25 on Ebay.

Some people still use things like HeroStats, which doesn't work correctly with the 64-bit version of the game client.

[GM Crumpet]

2 hours ago, eqspeef said:

Do we really have people running 32 bit clients?  What do those numbers look like?

 

I know it's a 20 year old game, but 20 years ago is about the same time home PCs started going 64-bit, and I have a hard time imagining someone playing COH on a P4 with a CRT monitor when they could get a vastly more capable 10 year old PC for $25 on Ebay.

Cipher did a look-see a while ago and there are actually people playing this on Windows 95 🙂 

[GM Crumpet]

9 hours ago, ShinMagmus said:

"Guys, we want you to farm Giant Monsters and engage with a new system."

 

Okay.  Shin respecs his Ill/Traps into being a GM Hunter and begins joining the playerbase farming all the GMs.

 

"What the fuck are you doing?  Stop farming GMs!" Devs immediately nerf Adamastor twice, Deathsurge, and I'm sure more to come.

 

...What do you actually want from us?  Every nerf to how people can get Monstrous Aether is just an indirect buff to AE Farming by direct comparison; back to the grind okay?  Here I go.

As far as I'm aware it was only Adamastor, and that's been a problem for a while with the number of AFK players farming merits, and Ghost of Scrapyard as he can be summoned in a minute or two. There were 24 hour leagues on some shards getting 30 to 40 MA's and 200+ merits an hour. All the other GM's are either random timings, or summoned under specific circumstances that take work. I haven't seen Deathsurge leagues anywhere, but if players do start farming at the rate they were with GoS I'm sure that will be looked at.

[mechahamham]

4 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

Cipher did a look-see a while ago and there are actually people playing this on Windows 95 🙂 

 

How the heck does that even work?! I mean, I thought you had to have at least Win98 to install DirectX 7.

[GM Crumpet]

3 hours ago, mechahamham said:

 

How the heck does that even work?! I mean, I thought you had to have at least Win98 to install DirectX 7.

I may be confusing win 95 with win 98 🙂 I know it's an early Windows. It was a couple of years ago he mentioned it in conversation

Edited March 6 by GM Crumpet

[Number Six]

12 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

Cipher did a look-see a while ago and there are actually people playing this on Windows 95 🙂 

 

You're remembering wrong, the absolute minimum requirement for HC is Windows XP, Service Pack 2. It uses API calls that did not exist prior to that version.

 

The 64-bit build requires either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10/11. It might run on 64-bit Windows 7 -- I don't remember the exact details of which features were added when and which specific SDK version dropped support for 7. But the 32-bit client is explicitly built using a toolchain that supports those older versions for compatibility.

 

15 hours ago, eqspeef said:

I know it's a 20 year old game, but 20 years ago is about the same time home PCs started going 64-bit, and I have a hard time imagining someone playing COH on a P4 with a CRT monitor when they could get a vastly more capable 10 year old PC for $25 on Ebay.

 

Not saying it will be the case forever, but our general rule of thumb is to try to make it so that if they could run it at shutdown in 2012, they can come back in now on the same machine.

 

As for how many people are using it; we don't have exact numbers because we don't collect that kind of detailed information. The launcher does include OS version in the user agent string so we have a rough aggregate guess based on that. Over the past 30 days:

 

Windows 11 (64-bit)	30189
Windows 10 (64-bit)	36042
Windows 10 (32-bit)	194
Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	207
Windows 8.1 (32-bit)	6
Windows 8 RTM (64-bit)	8
Windows 7 (64-bit)	619
Windows 7 (32-bit)	58
Windows Vista (32-bit)	4
Windows XP (32-bit)	1
Windows Server 2012R2 (64-bit)	6
Windows Server 2016/2019/2022 (64-bit)	2
Windows Server vNext (64-bit) (lolwut)	1
Wine (Mac/Linux)	4843

 

Note that just tells us the OS, not if someone is running the 32-bit client on a 64-bit OS, which might be done for a variety of reasons including some older graphics drivers that don't play nice. Though at least in that case, if they're on a 64-bit OS, the 32-bit client can use up to 4GB of address space instead of 2GB, which is less problematic.

 

Also a glance through the support forums and discord to see a number of people reporting "Out of memory" errors when running the 32-bit client confirms that it's at least a decent number.

[mechahamham]

1 hour ago, Number Six said:

Wine (Mac/Linux)

4843

 

 

*GASP*

 

There are DOZENS of us!

 

I used Win7 for a LONG time, despite working my dayjob in Linux. I had few different pieces of hardware and software that just wouldn't let me ditch Microsoft. I did most of my Live-era CoH career on it.

 

My understanding is that CoH would play somewhat okay on Wine after about 2010 or so. I've never connected to HC's servers using anything but. Valve software has really done us a solid by pouring so much effort into the project over the last few years.

[Shin Magmus]

14 hours ago, GM Crumpet said:

Cipher did a look-see a while ago and there are actually people playing this on Windows 95 🙂 

FINALLY, The Glorious Windows 95 Resurrection!

[lemming]

2 hours ago, mechahamham said:

*GASP*

 

There are DOZENS of us!

 

I used Win7 for a LONG time, despite working my dayjob in Linux. I had few different pieces of hardware and software that just wouldn't let me ditch Microsoft. I did most of my Live-era CoH career on it.

 

My understanding is that CoH would play somewhat okay on Wine after about 2010 or so. I've never connected to HC's servers using anything but. Valve software has really done us a solid by pouring so much effort into the project over the last few years.

I've been a Linux user since the 90s, and Unix for a decade before.   I wound dual booting for CoH back in the day.   When HC launched I had a Windows 7 laptop that ran the 64 bit fine.   (The laptop sucked, but I didn't feel like fussing with wine right then)

 

Now I run purely Linux.

 

Glad to see the clarification that it was XP, not 95, though marginally better...   I remember in 2000 when McAfee didn't test their release against '98 because NT was close enough, and then crashed every single 98 system on bootup when that was released.  Memory protection sucked.

[GM Crumpet]

5 hours ago, Number Six said:

 

You're remembering wrong, the absolute minimum requirement for HC is Windows XP, Service Pack 2. It uses API calls that did not exist prior to that version.

 

The 64-bit build requires either Windows 8.1 or Windows 10/11. It might run on 64-bit Windows 7 -- I don't remember the exact details of which features were added when and which specific SDK version dropped support for 7. But the 32-bit client is explicitly built using a toolchain that supports those older versions for compatibility.

 

 

Not saying it will be the case forever, but our general rule of thumb is to try to make it so that if they could run it at shutdown in 2012, they can come back in now on the same machine.

 

As for how many people are using it; we don't have exact numbers because we don't collect that kind of detailed information. The launcher does include OS version in the user agent string so we have a rough aggregate guess based on that. Over the past 30 days:

 

Windows 11 (64-bit)	30189
Windows 10 (64-bit)	36042
Windows 10 (32-bit)	194
Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	207
Windows 8.1 (32-bit)	6
Windows 8 RTM (64-bit)	8
Windows 7 (64-bit)	619
Windows 7 (32-bit)	58
Windows Vista (32-bit)	4
Windows XP (32-bit)	1
Windows Server 2012R2 (64-bit)	6
Windows Server 2016/2019/2022 (64-bit)	2
Windows Server vNext (64-bit) (lolwut)	1
Wine (Mac/Linux)	4843

 

Note that just tells us the OS, not if someone is running the 32-bit client on a 64-bit OS, which might be done for a variety of reasons including some older graphics drivers that don't play nice. Though at least in that case, if they're on a 64-bit OS, the 32-bit client can use up to 4GB of address space instead of 2GB, which is less problematic.

 

Also a glance through the support forums and discord to see a number of people reporting "Out of memory" errors when running the 32-bit client confirms that it's at least a decent number.

that told me. I said it was an old memory from a long time ago. I got it wrong 😛 

[eqspeef]

8 hours ago, Number Six said:

Over the past 30 days:

 

Windows 11 (64-bit)	30189
Windows 10 (64-bit)	36042
Windows 10 (32-bit)	194
Windows 8.1 (64-bit)	207
Windows 8.1 (32-bit)	6
Windows 8 RTM (64-bit)	8
Windows 7 (64-bit)	619
Windows 7 (32-bit)	58
Windows Vista (32-bit)	4
Windows XP (32-bit)	1
Windows Server 2012R2 (64-bit)	6
Windows Server 2016/2019/2022 (64-bit)	2
Windows Server vNext (64-bit) (lolwut)	1
Wine (Mac/Linux)	4843

 

It's mind blowing to see Vista and Win 8/8.1 still running.  (How is Vista beating XP?)   I'm not amazed that win7 still has some die-hard users, though.

 

I also want to meet the Win95 guy and see his computer.  😆

[Number Six]

11 minutes ago, eqspeef said:

I'm not amazed that win7 still has some die-hard users, though.

 

If anything I'm more surprised at how low the win7 numbers are. I thought there were more die-hards.

 

Although, there may be a significant overlap between win7 die-hards and players who will cling to Tequila until the day the manifests stop being updated, so they wouldn't show up in these stats. Still about 5,000 uniques in that same time period hitting the old manifest urls.

[Denariusjay]

OMGGGGG THEY FIXED THE NO FADE FOR STEALTH, I can finally see my Ars/Ars dom in all her glory  ty ty

WE don't deserve this devs 

[nightchrome]

It's good that the power info for Liquid Nitrogen was fixed, but is anything being considered for fixing the power itself?

As it stands, Liquid Nitrogen is completely useless in endgame and star content, because the damage only happens if the enemy falls down,

and no enemies that matter are ever gonna fall down in endgame/star content. Which means the only thing LN is doing is slow.

At this point, if you focus on endgame content, it's irrelevant and skip-worthy.

Whether the damage amount is reasonable or not is certainly another discussion, but the fact that it just doesn't occur at all past a certain point surely has to be something worth considering.

[Techwright]

I'm intrigued by the Windows 8 RTM and Windows Server vNext in @Number Six's chart.  I've never seen either.