By Jim Rossignol on November 4th, 2011 at 10:04 am.
The Battlefield blog has some details on what DICE have fixed or are planning to fix. The quick match thing will be improved (ie made any use at all), squad functionality is to be addressed, and apparently the worst of the lag issues has already been issued a fix: “Some users are experiencing lag and rubber banding, mostly tied to Conquest mode on Tehran Highway and Caspian Border. This was due to a bug in the network code that has been identified and eliminated in today’s console server patch, resulting in a big improvement in these cases. For PC, this issue was improved in an earlier server patch.” I was still rubber-banding on Caspian Border at 10pm last night, so I am still a bit sceptical as to whether this has definitely been “fixed”.
04/11/2011 at 10:11 James Allen says:
It always crashes during loading when I connect to the first server, but it’s fine after that.
04/11/2011 at 10:34 Meusli says:
I have the same issue also. Most times it just requires closing it down and restarting it, then the worst time is when I have to validate my install as it can not sync to the cloud. This happens at least once a day which is annoying when you have a party set up and you can not join with the other people.
04/11/2011 at 11:25 Shortwave says:
This happens to a pal of mine.
04/11/2011 at 13:20 Smashbox says:
Me too – the game was reliable for a few days last week, but got very crashy over the weekend.
04/11/2011 at 10:19 Baka says:
Any info on the upcoming balancing tweaks? I heard rumors that they’ll buff Jets and nerf Stingers amongst other things. I’m doubtful this would be necessary.
04/11/2011 at 11:07 Elltot says:
I don’t think they should nerf stingers / islas. If you’re good enough in a jet you can avoid em.
Jets need a buff though. The cannons are extremely weak against any ground targets and the heat seekers are pretty poor for air ones.
04/11/2011 at 11:16 ShineDog says:
Kind of but I don’t know what changes I would make. Once you unlock rocket pods you can really savage tanks, but AGMs are pretty terrible unless someone has SOFLAM. 2 passes to disable and then they pop smoke. RAGE.
04/11/2011 at 11:21 Mechanicus_ says:
I’m not sure if the jets need re-balancing, their later weapons seem quite potent but the problem right now is hardly anyone has those unlocked (I just unlocked rocket pods, but have yet to try them).
Does anyone else get the effect in jets (and to a lesser extent choppers) where they suffer from a constant, repeated buffeting effect (as if you have hit the ground) even while flying nice and level? It seems worst on the large conquest maps with many players (so probably a symptom of lag).
It’s also annoying that in some maps the stall ceiling for jets is set extremely low – on that canal based map in particular the ceiling is so low you can accidentally hit it just pulling up a little to avoid ground fire, and hitting it makes you instantly freeze in position in mid air; ignominious death follows shortly.
04/11/2011 at 11:34 ShineDog says:
The buffeting is what happens to the jet camera when the player encounteres rubberbanding. The new server patch has improved this enormously.
Rockets can be pretty damn effective, but you are an enormous sitting duck using them and you’ll probably only get disables out of it for the most part. The real problem for jets though is the stationary and mobile AA cannons, missiles can be dodged even without flares, but those things will slaughter you.
04/11/2011 at 11:34 Solly says:
Perhaps the conquest jets could do with a SLIGHT buff on attacking ground targets, but that’s it, as the rush ones feel nearly invulnerable and are extremely dangerous to tanks. The heatseekers themselves feel fine also, you just need to get very very close before you shoot, so you don’t give the other pilot enough time to drop flares.
04/11/2011 at 12:32 Spork says:
I don’t think stingers etc need a nerf now that most pilots have countermeasures, it’s not easy getting a hit unless you coordinate launches. Jet heat-seekers seem a bit short range to me, so I mostly use cannon.
I like that AA cannon are effective; many pilots fly right over them.
04/11/2011 at 14:17 Mechanicus_ says:
Missiles do seem alright, but gun based AA is the killer. On many maps an AA vehicle sitting at the flag closest to its own base can handily cover all the other flags in the map with little risk of ground attack; or worse there’s that map where the invulnerable AA gun on the carrier, presumably meant to stop aircraft spawn killing, can also cover 2-3 of the capture points.
I would like to see the speed of the AA gun projectiles reduced and/or given a more pronounced ballistic trajectory – just enough to make them harder to use at long range.
04/11/2011 at 10:19 JiminyJickers says:
Does BF3 allow for offline bot matches? I enjoyed the earlier ones and the Star Wars versions for that.
Would play it multi too but not a massive fan of multiplayer so if it does do bot matches, then will definitely be picking this up.
04/11/2011 at 10:23 The JG Man says:
Unfortunately not.
04/11/2011 at 10:26 JiminyJickers says:
Thats a shame. Oh well, plenty of other games coming out to keep me occupied, thanks for confirming.
04/11/2011 at 10:22 Akaichi says:
Would be nice if they would do something about the stuttering issue. Plenty of people seem to have that one.
04/11/2011 at 11:02 Electricleash says:
The stuttering seems to be related to graphics drivers. Ive been trawling the various forums trying to remedy the situation.
On Nvidia it’s the 285.62 that are causing problems, for me and my GFX260M anyway.
I rolled back to 280.26 and the stuttering is gone… but the regular freeze-crashes are still there, so you win some you loses some.
Not sure about ATI drivers.
04/11/2011 at 10:23 The JG Man says:
Hell, I’d like being able to stay in a game for longer than a round before being disconnected for some reason or other.
04/11/2011 at 10:46 Ilinx says:
Ugh, I can totally empathise. I actually made it through one level change without crashing last night. It was incredible. Of course, then I got dropped from the server for some random timeout issue and went right back into the level change crash cycle.
04/11/2011 at 11:27 Shortwave says:
Got to love it when it crashes and you are doing amazing and got a ton of unlocks then BAM, gone.
Now instead you get a quit punishment point.. Haha.. : /
04/11/2011 at 11:40 The JG Man says:
I love the fact that Battlelog has me down as having ‘Quit’ 44% of the 48 games I’ve played. I think I’ve maybe quit 3 or 4 once I discovered they had lag. The rest are all disconnects.
04/11/2011 at 20:20 Shortwave says:
Yea’ I didn’t even think about how many times I quit because of yee’ ol’ rubber banding.
04/11/2011 at 10:37 mongpong says:
Any news on getting that chat box reduced in size?…and moved.
04/11/2011 at 10:42 akumen says:
Game is running at 7fps for me this morning. Can’t tell if my GPU is kaput or a result of them patches.
04/11/2011 at 11:27 Shortwave says:
Try another game?
04/11/2011 at 12:58 akumen says:
Yep … looks like my 480 is kaput even Heroes VI crashed it.
04/11/2011 at 20:24 Shortwave says:
That’s good news!
SAPPHIRE 6790 1GB GDDR5 – $139.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102931
Free 2-day shipping even. : P
Very good upgrade and deal if you ask me.
Unless you decide to go big..
04/11/2011 at 10:46 Pheeze says:
I really hope they fix the audio cutting out bug. It’s pretty game-breaking and is really disappointing for me, since I loved BF:BC2 solely for the amazing audio experience!
04/11/2011 at 11:14 ShineDog says:
There is a fix for this, involves tinkering with a config setting.
You’ll need something that hexedits, notepad++ is free and does the job.
quoting.
Sound problems. Sound was going in and out, disappearing gunshots, etc. Solved by going to documents ->Battlefield 3 -> Settings -> Open PROF_SAVE_profile in hex editor(NOTEPAD) and change value to 4 in “GstAudio.AudioQuality 4″”
04/11/2011 at 11:19 Pheeze says:
I trawled the internet for a fix, but I didn’t see this one before. I’ll give this a try later on, thank you!
04/11/2011 at 11:05 TheFlyingWooly says:
I tried 64 player for the first time since the release last night and it was nice and smooth. Been on about 4 or 5 servers and played Caspian and Tehran no bother.
Still getting some crashes and now the audio seems to go a wee bit funny when lots of stuff is exploding at once, can fix it buy changing the audio settings to something else then back to war tapes though.
One last note, the IRNV scope is awesome, makes me feel like Predator.
04/11/2011 at 11:31 Shortwave says:
The only thing I can ask for right now…
PLEASE FIX THE SQUAD SYSTEM.
When I sit down to game with a buddy I don’t wanna’ spend the first ten+ minutes trying to get on each others team.. Usually we have to wait till’ the end of the round (Which could be how long..) just to get it.. Or we finally do, then the game boots him back to the other team, gotta’ love that. For competitive people that’s really a game breaker.
And aim assist in SP unless you play on “hard” mode?
For starters hard mode is hardly hard more than it is illogical.. The game of waiting for AI to catch up or I’ll die if I advance, fun game. : P Anyways back to MP sorry.
04/11/2011 at 11:56 ShineDog says:
No aim assist in PC campaign on any difficulty, they’ve just copy pasted the description across all versions.
The campaign is really bad though, not worth bothering with. It’s literally a poor mans CoD.
(That is – It’s trying for CoDs constant thrill ride, but also trying to be more serious, but in the end the two goals sabotage each other. You dont get the tension of a good pseudorealism shooter, but it also consistently fails to provide big bombastic action. It’s a series of corridors, and while there are some real high points (paris! <3) it never really goes anywhere, and the late story is completely incoherent.)
04/11/2011 at 20:29 Shortwave says:
LOL, so there was none! WOW…
That is such a joke that they’d have that there…
Yea’ I got really annoyed with waiting for my team-mates mostly.
Won’t bother finishing it.
Also.. What’s with the freakin’ downgrade on building destruction? So depressing.
That was the most epic thing I ever seen in a video game in years… And they kill it? Ha..
Yea’ I seen building crumble in BF3.. It just, looks terrible to me! Silly.
04/11/2011 at 11:47 Knufinke says:
Has anyone played the coop yet?
04/11/2011 at 12:40 Salt says:
I played a few rounds of the helicopter based coop mission with a stranger. The game itself was pretty fun – one of us flew the ‘copter, the other controlled the gun as we protected a bunch of AI controlled friendlies from several thousand enemy troops in a quite large battle area.
They seem to have just forgotten to put in the multiplayer communication system though. Like multiplayer there’s no built-in voice chat, but here there’s also no text chat either. It was literally impossible to communicate. Thankfully they remembered to put in the spotting system from multiplayer, so we could at least silently point at the legions of advancing enemies.
I think it would be an entertaining diversion if you have a buddy to play with and some external voice comms.
04/11/2011 at 12:54 buzzmong says:
If it wasn’t for the fact there are some unlocks tied into the co-op, then I’d say don’t bother with it.
As far as I can tell, you need to play each mission 3 times (easy, normal, hard) in order to unlock everything for mulitplayer. You might just get away with playing them once on hard though.
If you don’t care about the unlocks, then personally I wouldn’t bother with the co-op missions as they’re not exciting and a bit glitchy.
04/11/2011 at 12:57 Knufinke says:
Thanks for the reply. Looks like a great way to train my helicopter skills. God, I really used to be a pro in BF1: Desert Combat. Now I’m just crashing into the nearest antenna I can find.
04/11/2011 at 14:06 Gesadt says:
apparently you can exploit perma-spawn in coop to collect all the points for unlocks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2KMXIXGjbM
04/11/2011 at 12:39 Shooop says:
This is DICE remember? Expect to see the game actually playable in about 2 months or so.
The fact that PC actually wasn’t the lead development platform probably has a lot to do with it: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/324517/battlefield-3-lead-platform-switched-to-consoles-mid-development/
04/11/2011 at 13:08 evilbobthebob says:
Current issue I have is random green flashing. Hasn’t been fixed with the latest graphics drivers, and is quite widespread. Also quite irritating…
04/11/2011 at 13:19 Gravy says:
++ FIX THE SQUADS!
How on earth do you go from the great squad based system we had before in bfbc2 to what we have now. If you’ve got 4 friends and you all want to get into the same squad surely it should be simple rather than waiting a map or more to get everyone together in the same squad without the server auto balancing.
Either that or you join and theres too few squads ie Bob and his mate Billy have a squad of 2 locked so no one can get in effectively screwing it up for everyone else. All they need to do is add more squads.
Its such a huge step backwards and i don’t understand why dice haven’t acted on this already and arn’t treating this as an issue because its HUGE.
04/11/2011 at 13:25 aircool says:
No colourblind fix? Bastards!!!
04/11/2011 at 13:44 Yargh says:
2 thinks that may help with some of the complaints:
1. If you leave your squad and click on another a (quite small) join button usually appears lower down. Why they made it so small is a mystery (it is also a little bugged and doesn’t always show up for some reason)
2. ASUS nvidia card owners should uninstall the useless ASUS GamerOSD utility. It caused my game to crash every time it tried to load from in-game, campaign and MP, with an error on atkdx11disp.dll.
04/11/2011 at 14:02 mondomau says:
Played my first few games last night: can’t comment on balance and advanced gameplay mechanics (except the flashlight, that was a real humdinger of a design choice, DICE) as I am fantastically bad at online man-shooting, but I can comment on the horrific GUI design and options layout:
- Squad management is nob; the ‘join’ button is effectively hidden from view by cack-handed colour layout and everything about the process is counter-intuitive
– Why the fuck do I have to be in an actual battle before I reconfigure my keybindings / graphics options? Come to that, why can I not rebind the reload/spot keys? Ooo, Ooo, and why is the spot key now also an emote function?
– Why do I have to create and maintain a separate friends system in origin AND the BF3 client?
– What the hell is up with the BF 3 client anyway? It is appallingly badly laid out – everything is crammed into the top and bottom bars that are constantly flashing at you with pointless notifications about battle reports etc.
- Finally, someone tell me (with a straight face) how this is genuinely better than the BC2 server setup? It was bad, but it was better than this shit.
Should point out I loved the game once I was in, I just get annoyed because this shit was utterly avoidable.
04/11/2011 at 15:59 Rahabib says:
is there a demo out? I can’t trust devs and would want to try it before I buy the game. The beta melted my computer (admittedly at min specs) to the point it was unplayable.
04/11/2011 at 16:12 Shooop says:
Right now only for single-player. *Nudge, wink*
04/11/2011 at 20:30 Shortwave says:
YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL BUDDY.
05/11/2011 at 02:51 Shooop says:
@Shortwave
You mean to tell me trying to play that game doesn’t count as punishment enough?
“Move to set piece A, now QTE, now to set piece B, etc…” Why is there no option to make the movie play itself without me needing to push any buttons?
The only part of it anyone could actually charge money for would be multiplayer, and that in typical DICE fashion is unplayable until the patches arrive at least 2 months later. And by then Serious Sam 3 is out and FPSs are about shooting things again.
04/11/2011 at 19:17 Sorbicol says:
I’d much rather they fixed things more fundamental like not being able to connect to servers at all – “You have been disconnected from the login Server” – than lag and rubber banding.
that and the keybinding too – we don’t all use WSAD to move around, and hardcoding the Q key to spot / commsrose is the single most irritating problem I had. Other than not being able to join a server……..
04/11/2011 at 19:20 Battlehenkie says:
It’s a fantastic game, but it still feels awkwardly like I’m paying to do a final stage of beta testing. There are so very many different crashes/freezes, not to mention bugs, and a buddy of mine can’t even touch his MP as he’ll crash every 5-10 minutes while SP/Co-op are fine. Pretty much renders his copy useless atm, seeing as the campaign is absolutely abominable and we’ve already finished co-op missions.
04/11/2011 at 20:34 Unambiguous Morphology says:
DICE needs to fix the control options. I prefer a controller for an FPS, and the controls for that are just plain awful. No sensitivity options or calibration, and the worst offender is for some reason inverting look for helicopters and jets doesn’t translate to the controller being inverted in heli’s and jets. I can’t fly!
04/11/2011 at 21:48 Balaks says:
I had the problem that some of you seem to be having in that I would automatically be booted from the MP game between 1 min – 10 mins into the game, almost every time. Ive now fixed it though – basically you need to update punkbuster (the one in your battlefield 3 folder) and it works just fine for me now, have played for several hours MP without any issues.
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06/11/2011 at 06:56 Bweahns says:
I still get FPS drops to zero frequently even on low settings with my crossfired 5850′s. I have the latest drivers and crossfire profiles. Also get crashes fairly regularly.
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06/11/2011 at 23:12 Brittfire says:
Rubber Banding. you may want to look at people who DONT update PunkBuster as an issue with older version spams the server with requests. laggyness ensues. We kick anyone that does this (after we tell them to update) and our server runs lag free!
07/11/2011 at 06:25 DarkByke says:
There’s lag because people think they can play this game with their shitty 1MB/s connections.