“we are being targeted by a DDOS, but working on fixing it asap. Im sorry somebody is ruining your and my day. Rest assured we are doing our best to mitigate the situation though.”

DDOS attacks on online games is a somewhat rare occurrence, and hopefully it stays that way. It’s no secret that a major weak spot in any online games armor is the ability to mitigate huge amounts of traffic in a short time. Really any online game launch in the past decade has shown this to be true. Lets hope this was a one time thing and not a new trend in jerk trolling.

The guys pulled an all-nighter last night getting this update from Test to Live. This is the biggest update we’ve done since Launch, and we couldn’t be more excited to have you in it.

There is a list of patch notes large enough to, if printed, decimate a small forest. But the main focus for this update is performance.

We focused our efforts on the machines that more than 80% of our player base had, which is quad-core or above, AMD and Intel, 4G or more RAM, Windows 64-bit, AMD and nVidia GPUs.

We focused almost entirely on CPU optimizations, because it’s a great deal easier to lower GPU settings when you want higher FPS.

We also focused on optimizations that would yield maximum benefit in worst cases, such as 100+ man skirmishes. We had many 250+ man battles on Test where players were adamant that there were no performance issues!

Since getting OMFG1 to PTS we have gathered data from some MASSIVE fights and found that those around 100-man battles gained well over 30% frame rate over Live. Less than 2% had their frame rate go down from Live to Test, and a majority of THOSE were due to people actually raising their graphics settings on Test!

We also took our time with this update. We focused on the reports that players were giving us every day, and worked feverishly to get as many of those issues taken care of as possible. Crashes are down, hitches are down, loading times are down, player experience is up!
Now, I want to make sure I mention that even though OMFG Phase 1 is out, we are NOT done polishing up the game. As we continue to gather data from Live, we will be moving some people back onto gameplay fixes and tuning, while others will remain on performance as long as a majority of players still need it.

Over the next few weeks, we will likely release a hotfix build or two. We will also be giving you more information about our long-term plans and where our efforts will be focused going forwards.

OMFG2 will come to Test soon, so stay tuned for announcements on that front as well!

Lastly, thank you to the tens of thousands who jumped onto the Public Test Server to help us make this. The help is appreciated.

Ryan “codeForge” Elam
Technical Director, Planetside 2

The decision comes amid changes to the Chrome and Firefox core design and do away with plugin support. The good news for players for the classic game is the changeover will be very minor and barely noticed.

Bandwidth be damned, when it comes to free DLC you’d better believe 15 year olds across the land will be sharing their numerous deaths to “hackers” on twitch.tv in a major way.