Posted 23 December 2012 - 11:46 AM

Well it's been quite the year and it's hard to believe that just over a year ago there wasn't a line of code or single process in place for MechWarrior Online. We've come a long way but as we've also stated we know we still have a lot further to go.So let me take a moment to address some of the most commonly noted technical issues.Well not exactly 4 fps obviously but this has become the common term for the issue where the games frame-rate suddenly plummets to single digit performance. So what is going on with this issue? Well as is generally the case with a bug that doesn't get resolved quickly this issue has proved hard for us to reproduce consistently.So as we regularly do for a bug like this we take a longer term approach and raise the quality of our overall tools for tracking and reproducing these types of issues. In the New Year we have additional telemetry coming online for tracking fps issues and also server side fps issues.This data helps us to isolate and fix not just a single issue but gives us better insight and therefore hopefully faster resolution for any future 'mystery' performance issues that occur. We also have greatly improved profiling tools internally which as you saw with the Dec 18th patch really help us to isolate issues and improve performance. This will only continue in the New Year and our internal tools continue to improve as much each patch as the external game does.Some users have noted that performance can degrade during evening play, as just mentioned we have increased our ability to monitor server side performance and our tools to replicate performance issues and we'll be tackling server side performance in the new year now client performance is coming under control (after the 4fps bug is resolved).This can definitely be annoying and we appreciate the frustration when these issues slip through our processes and out onto production. As has also been stated we continue to improve the processes we use to deliver reliable patches. As you can see with the Dec 18th patch this was our largest patch yet which fixed a lot of issues and added a lot of content without major disruption.We know were not perfect yet though and issues like this one have crept out, we continue to scale up the number of platforms we test on and we're bringing online automated testing tools online to catch more and more issues before they can ever reach production. The yellow screen bug was being worked on into the break and we hope to have it fixed quickly in the New Year.We acknowledge the game currently leaks resources, another thread we've been pushing on recently and will continue to push on is we've been cleaning up the game logs and the code-base and taking more time to ensure that features once completed are really carefully reviewed for design flaws, memory issues etc. before they can start making their way to production.The goal is to resolve this issue in January and as mentioned we're improving our automated testing tools to catch memory/performance issues regularly and early for future builds.Please reference my prior command chair post on this issue that can be found hereWell hopefully this helps to shed some light on some of the recent technical issues. As you can gather there's a lot of work behind the scenes that goes into tools etc. that don't instantly improve the game but have an impact over the long run.We hope you’re able to enjoy MechWarrior Online in its current state over the holidays. It's been a great year and a real pleasure to be part of bringing back MechWarrior for the fans that have been waiting so long for it to return (myself included).We can't wait to deliver even more in the new year, happy hunting over the holidays.