Ryyst's Blog #6 - Six Point Oh

[RR] Ryyst

Howien said:

I can imagine you had your hands full when we betatestet for droid logistic wize. But thats where the "leaders" come in. Let some guys have the logistic problems, with having some people under them. Then the "leaders" report back to you. There is a difference in sorting out reports from many 1000 players and then only 10-20 guys. All im saying if you keep doing things the way you allways had, you will have this problem in 7.0 as well. Unless your lost to much revenue untill that time:(

And you saying each update aint the same? Its excaxtly the same. You got many of the same problems EVERY time you make a new update. The bottle neck on your servers are still there, have you rentet another srrver in those 2-3 weeks to take of some pressure? Naaaaa you didnt... Do you have the same problems you describe, making the game run on many 1000 different devices? YES sir you do. But as allways you try to push the problem to somewhere else. Now its the players hardware. Imo i think its time to man up and say YEAH guys we made yet another not so brilliant update, we are sorry but its OUR fault, that we aint learning from our history. Its truely annoying that you try to run away from your responsibility.

About reporting, it aint about reporting, its about your product is defective, and i refuse to pay for something that aint working the way its suppose to

Once again. At no time have we said its your devices fault.

Its not your devices fault

Its not your devices fault

It's not your devices fault.

Our game runs on many devices. The graphic settings that are optimal per device is different. That's pretty typical for video games released on multiple platforms and hardware. Higher end devices will be able to take full advantage of the new graphics capabilities, while older and less powerful devices will roughly stay the same. Just like a $10,000 PC rig will be able to play a graphics resource hungry game better than one you picked up at best buy for a deal. Both can play the game.

The issues we are having are....

1. Paint, wheels, wraps - Some are off. Right now we're in the process of fixing a bunch of wheels and paints and wraps.
2. Latency due to sever stress- As with most updates, there is a period where the servers are stressed because everyone is updating and downloading assets. As more people DL the game and DL the assess, the bandwith will go back to normal. "Renting" servers is not feasible.
3. Latency due to graphic settings - This has been the one I've been talking about. Each device has different capabilities. That is a fact, not an opinion. A Samsung S6 is more powerful than an iPhone 4. The Samsung S6 is able to handle more powerful graphics.than devices older than it. That is also a fact. So those devices should be set to a higher graphic setting than the others. We are in the process of tweaking that. So yes, it is about reporting. We don't know what you are experiencing on your device. We can't see what you see. Are your graphics blocky? Are they cartoony? When are you experiencing lag?

We need to make sure your device is first set properly. That is, we need to know that the graphics setting we've assigned to that specific device is in fact optimal. Once that has been established (by seeing how a number of similar device users are fairing) then we can start trouble shooting outlier scenarios where players with that device still experience issues.

As for outside testing. Again. Adding 100 or even 1000 players to the mix won't account for the 10000s of scenarios. Plus then we have to address security matters. We have to set up "public servers" It would almost be like running a second game. Again, it may "seem" easy enough, but it really isn't. As much as people may think being a game tester is glamorous, it really isn't. Assigning "leaders" for groups is also not feasible. We would have to go through a process of choosing, and then assigning out "subordinates" and as much as you would think a lot of people would be responsible, just judging by the forums, power tends to corrupt. Then we would have to have people watch over said leaders. Again, its like running a whole separate game. Like I said, we've done player testing, the returns were not that helpful. That sort of testing becomes a job. Once people find that out, they stop participating. Plus then we'd have to deal with the legality of it all. Contrary to belief, we aren't that big a studio.

And no, each update is totally different. Different things are updated. Different features are added. Sure the simple "process" is similar, but that is where the similarities end. Doing a graphics overhaul is way different than adding Tournaments, which is way different from adding Turf War which is way different than adding Android.

I used to work for a very big game developer with hundreds of testers, and they even had the ability and bandwith to actually do player beta testing. Each update? There were issues. Each update there were decrees that this was the worst update ever. Each update had similar responses. Several days of damage control and fixing issues, but after a little time, everything was back to normal. Did we learn something from each update. of course we did. But just like any game, each update was different.. .only similar in that.. .it was an update. Adding new features, adding new characters, adding new quest design, changing this ,changing that. Each update is like releasing a whole new game. That doesn't mean that each update would be smooth and problem free. Again, with their resources, surely they could have found every single thing wrong, right? Clearly if they played the game, this issue should have been found! Afterall it's huge!

Yeah, but like us, when you go from a small group of players to a vastly larger group of players, crap happens and small variables can affect huge things in ways we could not have foreseen.

So while in a utopia, anytime a software company releases something new, there would be no bugs. Everything should run smoothly. Unfortunately, we don't live in one, and so while we may learn that,the process of overhauling graphics.should be different, our next update will have something entirely different which when released to the public at large, a small thing that we overlooked can cause ripples. Doesn't mean we didn't learn from mistakes, means we are human, and there simply is no way to tell the future. All we can do is prepare as much as we can, which we always do, realizing that there is always the possibility of somethings going wrong. But as we always have, we will work our butts off to fix them as best and as quickly as we can.

dwdtuning

@[rr] ryyst lobby rotation? Wtf big cheif. It's we can now talk to the whole world but still stuck racing same ol people..

DownShift

Mr Alvin72 said:

I've been running a top 25 team for awhile now. My concerns are the small fonts, lag during a race and the awful blue background. This game has a feel of a war simulation game like Mobile Strike . I think if you have a better contrast of the background color instead of being all blue this update wouldn't be bad. I'm running Galaxy note 7 and the graphics is nowhere near CSR2. I truly hope you listen to all the customers who are complaining. I don't want to see Racing rivals disappear . I'm just a dedicated turfer that's it.



Mr Alvin72

You bring up valid point here about the UI, I'll add that to the list of things to look at once we get past the initial lag/matte/general paint issues.

DownShift

SWEETRIDE95 said:

Very frustrating. I really hope you get things ironed out and the game is great again. It sucks on my Note 4 Galaxy. Laggy, glitchy, inconsistent lights, ect. I turned off the special effects options and nothing really changed. All I wanted was the lag & tie glitch fixed and a test track. Now I am considering other things to do with my spare time. Very sad.....

We pushed some device changes a bit ago, Note 4's were part of that. Reload the game and let me know if its running any better for you.

DownShift

C y r u s said:

Why is the font so small? Everything is hard to see and very hard to read. Why make the tach smaller? What was the point in that? Now when you launch you hear a pop sound that sounds a lot like your hitting the wall in first gear. If the car has a fast 1st gear you won't see the needle because you roll off the line and there's a flare on the ground that runs right behind the tach and drowns out the needle and dots. Who thought of this?



Several updates now and one simple thing that has been echoed a thousand times is "why do I have to load someone's garage to chat with them?" Update 3, 4, 5 and 6 still no change.



Next time you have a player council maybe you should actually listen to what they are telling you. These are some of the things that people have been asking for and yet nothing changes.



This post isn't all negative though. With 6.0 I can now tune multiple cars at the same time with little to no lag at all. Kudos on fixing that aspect of the game. That was a big one that needed serious work for those who race turf and need to tune cars. Great job there. Please please increase the font and remove the flare at the beginning of a race as well as the pop sound. Or atleast make the tach bigger.

Thank you for your feedback, these are all valid points. We're going to look into the font/UI issues, the flare, etc.

Kalaborator

I truely appreciate the feedback from this new admin. Seems like he is truely taking into account the issues we have. Sadly, your help may have come a little too late for many. I wish the best for you and hope that many of the problems can be fixed.

adam75beast

How about letting us message friends even when they are offline

xXxBONDOxXx

[RR] Ryyst said:

Well, here we are with another update, and here I am again addressing all the insults, the hate, and complaints that come with every single update we’ve done. So let me go ahead and address some things.

“Everything sucks!”

Look. It’s never our intention to “ruin the game” at honestly, we still believe we haven’t. There are issues. There are always issues. I’ve said time and time again, there are 1000s of different devices in 1000s of different circumstances that no company, no matter how big they are, can successfully test. All we can do is try our best with what we have. It’s the same song and dance we go through every update. Every update is the “worst update ever”. Why? Because once you go from a handful of test devices, testing all they can for months, then the game goes to 100,000s of players in all those circumstances, that’s when things happen.

So lets look at some things…

1. Lag. Always happens when we update. Why? Because everyone is downloading the game and in the beginning, everyone has to also download assets. It causes a lot of stress on the servers, and also uses resources on your device.

Outside of the normal “New Update” latency we’re still assessing the performance of all the different devices out there. As time goes on and we gather more data on the various devices players use, we will be able to determine just what each device is capable of and

2. Issues – We’ve always addressed the major issues. Not always the day of launch. In fact rarely is it day of launch. We spend the first few days gathering info about what’s happening. Then we get to work. After a while things normalize and everything is honky dory.. .every single time. That isn’t about to change.

3. Moving Forward – We’ll always move forward. We’ll always try to improve the game. That’s what we’ve done since day one. Turf Wars, Racer Showdowns, Tournaments, Mystery Crates, WWE integration, BMW events, Halloween events, April Fool’s Cars, better single payer experiences, partnerships and now graphic and tonal improvements. Some are hit, some are miss. Some things we keep tweaking, and through it all, we’ve made the changes we’ve needed to, we’ve fixed what needed fixing and we’ve removed things that weren’t working. We’ve also added improvements to fight against cheaters and exploiters. All for little or no fanfare, even after being bashed verbally for months. It’s fine, we understand, and yet ,we keep doing what we do.

4. Cars look worse - On our newer devices, they don’t. We achieved what we wanted. That being said, we’ve also scaled things. That means we’ve tried to optimize the game for most devices. In some cases, we’ve had to “turn down” the graphics some users on older devices, and devices that don’t support our newer graphic programs. Each Android device is NOT the same. Capabilities vary from device type to device type and there are 1000s of them. We’ve looked at the most popular devices and automatically set your graphic settings accordingly. However, we’re not perfect and we don’t have profiles for all the devices out there. So maybe your device IS capable of handling the newer graphics and special effects but we’ve set your device to a lower setting. We can see about helping. You just need to let us know via a ticket in game so we can see what device you are using and assess it’s capabilities.

For those on older devices, unfortunately, to play the game, you may experience less than optimized looking graphics. That’s the nature of technology and video games. At some point, the games advance as tech allows and older machines get left in the dust, with Racing Rivals, we’ve tried our best to still give players on such devices, the game play they know, while sacrificing graphics.
We’ve added Graphics options. You want to improve performance? You can turn off the shaders and special effects. (Those on iPhone 6s and up, that option isn’t there, but will be added shortly)

We’re still sorting through all the devices we don’t have info on. In the future, we’ll also allow you to scale the graphics on your own. Kinda like with PC games, it usually picks the best settings for your hardware, but you can manually override that and choose higher graphics setting or lower graphic settings.

5. Some paint and wheels and (whatever else) look weird - We’re working on that. We’re looking into the fleck and matte paints, we’re looking at metallic cars, we’re looking into wheels, we’re looking into car wraps. We’ll get that sorted out. We always do. No need to think we won’t now.

6. Chat - Like I’ve said. It’s easy to test global chat between a handful of people, it’s quite different when 100,000s of players join in. We’re already working on optimizing it. We’ve seen the feedback. You guys would like the opportunity to ignore it or turn it off. We’ll look into that for the future
.
7. Other Issues - Other things may pop up, especially between players that are on two different versions of the game. As they are reported, we’ll look into them.

8. Light Laggers - We’ve done what we can. At this point, it’s not really affecting races. You can still effectively race. You can still get the same low RTs. Its been done. I’ve seen it done, I’ve done it myself.

As long as YOU are paying attention, the game gives you ample warning when a race is about to begin, and you have enough time to prepare for it.

Doesn’t mean we quit trying to find ways to alleviate the issue. Problem is, there are too many false positives. Punishing every instance will bring us back to the days where players brought out the pitchforks because of these false positives.

9. Ghost Shifting - We don’t have an official stance yet, but we are looking into the whole issue.
So yeah, I get it. Things have changed. The update didn’t go as smoothly as it could have, but this one was harder to do. Updating the graphics of a game is easy… ish. Updating the graphics of a mobile game to take advantage of newer modern devices while trying to cater to older devices and make that all work on 1000s of different kinds of devices, a bit more difficult.

At the end of the day, the core game is still there. We’ll work through the major issues and everything will be okay again, we just need to get through these hurdles. We’ve been there before. This is our 6th update, we hope to have many more. In the meantime, report your issues, be polite, we’re all human beings, there is no point to being insulting or being just plain mean. We are people just like you, there is no need to forget that. We’ll work with you guys to fix things, Maybe it won’t be instantaneous, but after 6 updates now, we’ve always pulled through, we will again.

Looks like csr but worse! I hate csr,The cars the whole thing looks really fake now.....I'm thinking I wasted a lot of money on this game now with this new update.....thumbs down......"shakes head in disappointment "

DdgDktaRlz

Let's give them some time to fix stuff.

Sure it sucks right now but they are saying that it will be fixed.

Takes time to make a change. Give them time

thelord17

I've encountered a problem not so much gameplay related but more so the fact that after playing no more then 20 minutes after 6.0 released my phone gets so hot that it turns off. This only happens when playing racing rivals as I've attempted to do the same thing with other apps and found that the only way I could was with every app other then rr open. And this is with all the new shaders and graphics turned off. Is this new update so graphically intensive that it uses more then a gigabyte of ram to process properly? If that's the case shouldn't the minimum amount of ram required to properly play have been made public knowledge before hand? Also I've been playing on a droid mini which was manufactured in April of this year btw

DownShift

thelord17 said:

I've encountered a problem not so much gameplay related but more so the fact that after playing no more then 20 minutes after 6.0 released my phone gets so hot that it turns off. This only happens when playing racing rivals as I've attempted to do the same thing with other apps and found that the only way I could was with every app other then rr open. And this is with all the new shaders and graphics turned off. Is this new update so graphically intensive that it uses more then a gigabyte of ram to process properly? If that's the case shouldn't the minimum amount of ram required to properly play have been made public knowledge before hand? Also I've been playing on a droid mini which was manufactured in April of this year btw

Do you know the model number of the droid you're using? As an example, most Motorola device model numbers will look something like this: Motorila Xt1030

thelord17

My phone tells me the model number is "DROID MINI"

moparman406

Any news on a fix for this update? Will we be able to have a working game before turf and why all my tournament tokens gone today?

Roush Sport

moparman406 said:

Any news on a fix for this update? Will we be able to have a working game before turf and why all my tournament tokens gone today?

Just noticed - all of my tournament tokens are gone as well. I was hoping they'd come out with a way to just cash them in for half value or something, versus having to race. I had over 200 entries for the first tier tournament- cashing them in for half the entry fee (250 a pop) would have been nice.

dwdtuning

Why won't anyone answer on lobby rotation. This is a major issues. I need more victims. How am I supposed to prosper with my free enterprise if we race the same hand full of people for life of the ign?. Guess I'll just make another ign for a fresh server. This will be like ign #20,532. Is it really that hard to turn off servers restrictions.

moparman406

So few hrs tell turf and no new info on issues being resolved

streetxxracer22

exactly, the whole layout is just ugly

moparman406

Yeah no shit my game has had no change all week besides tournament tokens being taken away. But somehow were supposed to try and turf should just let everyone claim t100 or postpone all together

C y r u s

Is there a point to making everything in the game smaller? The lights, the tach, the lettering, the cars during race etc... why would you make the lights and tach smaller? What's the reasoning behind this?

C y r u s

I have a very hard time believing your a gamer like us Ryyst cause there is now way you played this version vs the other and said "ya that's cool.. let's do that!"

MK_JEDI

Can even turf without having to restart app every minute
http://i.imgur.com/0aZDdrs.jpg

52midnight

Ryyst, I understand the mentality to makes better. As humans we always look forward to progress but this update set the game back not forward. The game impressed me when I doorstep started playing it until now. My cars were gorgeous,they looked realistic it was impressive. Now the cars look really bad. Cartoonish like the old racing games. Pls. Fix this so that we can once again admire the game while we are playing. I have all the faith that you guys will come thru better than ever.

moparman406

Turf keeps crashing my game getting error unable to download game must restart

Mr Alvin72

Thanks for ruining turf. Everyone is struggling. Why aren't others forced to update? This will definitely be a last turf for alot of users. This game isn't enjoyable anymore. If you guys do plan to stick with it new people will just download play for a little and quit. You guys even test out the game play?

Mr Alvin72

What happened to team points board? Team rank is missing. I know half my team is quitting after turf.

C y r u s

I'm done after turf as well Alvin. Possibly before if I can't launch a car or see the tach when I do

Mr Alvin72

It's bad

C y r u s

It's a dumpster fire and they don't realize just how bad they made it. They took well enough and destroyed it in the name of "progress" it's not progress when my ps1 racing games look exactly like this one

Mr Alvin72

I can't race.. The game play is gone. It's a struggle to race missing launch. Stupid whoosh sounds on launch.

Lunayee

Someone has to say it:You just lost a bunch of players. I've seen a lot of people just selling all their cars and just leaving for good. Usually they come back,not this time.