SOCOM: Confrontation Catch-All [1.50 = Finally OUT!]

Well SOCOM team has been working on the problem and just announced (2318 PT) that the servers are back up. I'm going in to see.

NOTE: 2250...they are up and running 'fine'.

Donan wrote:

Was this in a ranked event with no respawns? That could make a big(!) difference too. If you are playing a server with infinite respawns, this isn't really SOCOM, just folks loosening up or just playing an 'arcade' style. Ranked event's have to be tactical, team orientated play or you just don't win. If someone is doing as you describe in a ranked server, the folks on their team will give them an earful or kick him...period!

It was in a ranked, no respawn game and it happened round after round. I was definitely not the only one complaining, but the guy played the same way every single round. In one round two guys on our team that were clearly friends decided to wait back on the side that guy kept taking and ambush him.

Sure enough, he ran out, they fired, saw blood, and he killed them both, full auto, without ever slowing down. He did it again to me maybe 10 seconds later, as I had gone to the right and turned around to wait when I saw the two ambushers die. Not sure on the distance and I don't know the names of the maps so it's hard for me to say exactly where it was, but I can try. We were the military dudes, not the mercs, and we started off in some rocky canyon type area with a sort of dilapidated bunch of buildings around after going uphill a little. The one guy kept rushing around on our left, so the two guys waited, more or less in our spawn, for him to run around the rocks on that left side, if that helps you figure out how far away he was doing it.

Well I bought it, I look forward to playing with you guys

Thin_J wrote:
Donan wrote:

Was this in a ranked event with no respawns? That could make a big(!) difference too. If you are playing a server with infinite respawns, this isn't really SOCOM, just folks loosening up or just playing an 'arcade' style. Ranked event's have to be tactical, team orientated play or you just don't win. If someone is doing as you describe in a ranked server, the folks on their team will give them an earful or kick him...period!

It was in a ranked, no respawn game and it happened round after round. I was definitely not the only one complaining, but the guy played the same way every single round. In one round two guys on our team that were clearly friends decided to wait back on the side that guy kept taking and ambush him.

Sure enough, he ran out, they fired, saw blood, and he killed them both, full auto, without ever slowing down. He did it again to me maybe 10 seconds later, as I had gone to the right and turned around to wait when I saw the two ambushers die. Not sure on the distance and I don't know the names of the maps so it's hard for me to say exactly where it was, but I can try. We were the military dudes, not the mercs, and we started off in some rocky canyon type area with a sort of dilapidated bunch of buildings around after going uphill a little. The one guy kept rushing around on our left, so the two guys waited, more or less in our spawn, for him to run around the rocks on that left side, if that helps you figure out how far away he was doing it.

This really does sound like a one-off occurance and there are two explanations. The first is that prior to one of the recent patches, some people were invincible due to a random glitch. The other is that some players are on able to log on with extremely sub-par connections so it's possible that his lag was enough where you're bullets weren't registered.

Hang in there with the game. Socom is notorious for rough launches but it'll be well worth the patience and persistence once things are ironed out a bit.

With LittleBigPlanet, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Resistance 2 and more over the next few weeks I'm probably going to hold off on SOCOM until things settle down a bit and they get the game a bit more stable and feature complete. I'm still very much interested in giving it a go but now just doesn't seem like the time.

Dreaded Gazebo wrote:

With LittleBigPlanet, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Resistance 2 and more over the next few weeks I'm probably going to hold off on SOCOM until things settle down a bit and they get the game a bit more stable and feature complete. I'm still very much interested in giving it a go but now just doesn't seem like the time.

I would highly suggest this for anyone considering picking it up. Seriously on a console this kind of buggy mess should never, EVER, happen. It makes me so angry. It's pathetic. And I thought the latest Alone in the Dark game was bug ridden. Socom beats it hands down, and that is not a good thing.

I'm really surprised to see that they don't have any matchmaking. The experience of getting into a game is pretty rough and full of seemingly meaningless choices. I need to play more before I could comment on the gameplay.

Double post.

93_confirmed wrote:

This really does sound like a one-off occurance and there are two explanations. The first is that prior to one of the recent patches, some people were invincible due to a random glitch. The other is that some players are on able to log on with extremely sub-par connections so it's possible that his lag was enough where you're bullets weren't registered.

If this is true, and it does make perfect sense based on what we saw, that is some pretty awful netcode.

Having actually played a bit, I gotta say that the gameplay itself is actually pretty good, in spite of all the rough patches with the user experience and UI. I seems like it could really use a bit more work in making it noob friendly, though. For $20 less then a full featured SP/MP game, I'd expect it to give me a little bit more: not a full SP campaign, but maybe some sort of vs. mode with bots for practice, or tutorial, or something. I needed to dig through menus the first time I played just to see what button did what.

I general multiplayer games are incredibly hostile towards new players, so I'm surprised to see a marquee title like Socom do absolutely nothing to ease in new users, particularly since they potentially might have lots of new people to the franchise, as it's on a new platform. I'd imagine that if I weren't already a hardcore shooter player, I'd have traded this back in almost instantly.

Yellow5 wrote:

I general multiplayer games are incredibly hostile towards new players, so I'm surprised to see a marquee title like Socom do absolutely nothing to ease in new users, particularly since they potentially might have lots of new people to the franchise, as it's on a new platform. I'd imagine that if I weren't already a hardcore shooter player, I'd have traded this back in almost instantly.

I completely agree that Socom should have both bots and a tutorial mode/training map for people to get acclimated with the gameplay. There's nothing worse than having new people fumble around in objective-based games. Call of Duty 4 combated this problem by only making those more tactical modes available after players had completed a number of games.

I think there are a few reason for this. For one, Socom gets very little marketing/media exposure due to Sony essentially focusing funding and resources on other next-gen titles like LBP, Resistance 2, and Killzone 2. My opinion is that they view Socom has only a last-gen blockbuster and they have this incorrect notion that only the Socom fanboys would pick up Confrontation. In additon to that, Slant Six is also relatively naive in their understanding of the Socom francise and it seems as though they also assumed that Socom:Confrontation players would only be people who played the previous titles.

Yellow5 wrote:

I'm really surprised to see that they don't have any matchmaking. The experience of getting into a game is pretty rough and full of seemingly meaningless choices. I need to play more before I could comment on the gameplay.

Matchmaking/party system is coming. It's one of those features that has been demonstrated to the press but was cut to get the game out by Oct 14th. Same with the clan functionality. It's all coming, hopefully soon.

Gaald wrote:

I would highly suggest this for anyone considering picking it up. Seriously on a console this kind of buggy mess should never, EVER, happen. It makes me so angry. It's pathetic. And I thought the latest Alone in the Dark game was bug ridden. Socom beats it hands down, and that is not a good thing.

I'm guessing you didn't play some of the other big PS3 online titles when they launched.

SOCOM is actually well ahead of where Call of Duty 4 was when it launched on the PS3. You can actually get into a game of SOCOM. COD4 and Rainbow Six Vegas were just broken. Of course, most people played these on the 360 so they didn't notice.

Those games were patched up fairly well after launch.

Make no mistake, SOCOM's release state here is inexcusable. But on this platform, it's far from unique.

NEWS FLASH: Invite working for custom created games. I was invited by someone while looking to join a room. Blue box came up telling me about invited and to go to messages to accept. I asked the fellow and he said pretty straightforward. While in the scoreboard from a session, click for friends list, then when it comes up select friend and invite. I wasn't able to verify the stipes because I had to bail after a session. But it happen to me and worked! So perhaps someone can create a game when some of us are on and give it a whirl.

So you got the invite in-game and were able to accept without having to leave the game and check the messages section?

93_confirmed wrote:

So you got the invite in-game and were able to accept without having to leave the game and check the messages section?

I was in a channel getting trying to get into a ranked room when the request came. It tells you of the request and where to go to accept it (Messages). ( mispoke above about being in a 'scoreboard' section of a game. I recalled wrong on that upon further reflection).

Also I noticed for the first time 2 Clan only channels. I didn't go in to see if it was all Clan related (probably not), but it had more room to join then other Channels.

[quote=Donan]

93_confirmed wrote:

So you got the invite in-game and were able to accept without having to leave the game and check the messages section?

I was in a channel getting trying to get into a ranked room when the request came. It tells you of the request and where to go to accept it (Messages). ( mispoke above about being in a 'scoreboard' section of a game. I recalled wrong on that upon further reflection).[quote]

See, that's my beef. You have to leave your game to check Socom messages. They should have had an access feature from the in-game menu to check that but I guess they left it out ot avoid people using it to cheat in ranked rooms.

EDIT: I'm in US EAST 8 - 16v16 Ranked Medley is anyone wants to join up.

I love proximity chat. I'm running next to a guy whose wife is tearing him a new @sshole about being lazy, not looking for a job, and playing Socom all day. He's literally getting Female Doggoed out all round and is still racking up kills. Less learned - use the mute button.

EDIT: I'm trying to be really patient with this game but the random mid-game freezes are killing me. I've had to hard reboot my PS3 four times in the last hour. It's weird because the game is running pretty smooth and it'll just freeze randomly with no warning. *sigh*

93_confirmed wrote:

I love proximity chat. I'm running next to a guy whose wife is tearing him a new @sshole about being lazy, not looking for a job, and playing Socom all day. He's literally getting Female Doggoed out all round and is still racking up kills. Less learned - use the mute button.

EDIT: I'm trying to be really patient with this game but the random mid-game freezes are killing me. I've had to hard reboot my PS3 four times in the last hour. It's weird because the game is running pretty smooth and it'll just freeze randomly with no warning. *sigh*

My wife and I cracked up at the proximity story

I've not had any freezes since last night. Then, I not only had freezes, but when I quit a game, the console would reboot on it's own (this happen with not only SOCOM, but 'Life'. It's happened before with socom, beside the freezing and cold boots). But again, since late last night, everything has been pretty smoothe for me(except a few times I get the box with the warning about clan, stats etc. may not be tallied due to server problems).

Thanks for the info and explanations, guys!!

I'm not getting any freezes. My biggest problem has been the match disconnections after I ready up.

Apparently, the freezes are happening most in 16v16 and seem to occur the most when people are talking while running or talking right when the round begins and ends. What's strange is that everyone freezes and gets booted so there's something wacky going on with the netcode.

It would make sense that I haven't been getting freezes then. I mainly stick to 4v4s, I find that the smaller maps and quicker rounds are just more fun for me. I think it's a gears transition thing.

Ya so far I have played around 4 hrs and it is pretty fun if not a bit janky. This will tide me over for a week or so until Fallout hits but once Gears and Left4Dead launch I can't see me playing this too much. For the next little while though I wouldn't mind organizing some Goodjer nights on the weekends. Let me know if we can get some concrete times in.

I have part of my thesis due this week, but I hope to get some time in. Whats the best way to learn the game - justget in and get whacked around?

SpyNavy wrote:

I have part of my thesis due this week, but I hope to get some time in. Whats the best way to learn the game - justget in and get whacked around?

Seems like that's the only way if you don't have any friends online to help you figure things out.

I'm hearing a good bit of praise for the FAMAS. Maybe we should give the Frenchies a shot, 93?

I've been using the M4 over the IW.

SpyNavy wrote:

I have part of my thesis due this week, but I hope to get some time in. Whats the best way to learn the game - justget in and get whacked around?

This is a lot like Gears of War online in the fact that all the hardcore players are playing ranked matches. I have never played a SOCOM game in my life so just like when Gears started I have been jumping into unranked matches just to get the hang of it. And so far so good. Last night I was in the top 3 all night. One other thing I find funny and this is usually the case with console shooters is every game type turns into straight deathmatch. I got yelled at last night for continually planting the bomb and winning for our side.....apparently the rounds end too quickly when I do that. Haha. Anyway it's been lots of fun so far we should try and set something up for Saturday night around 7 or 8.

SOCOM.com update:

As I'm sure many of you are aware, the launch has not gone without its share of problems. Unfortunately, the server environment is not holding up during peak loads. We've made many changes and improvements to the server to improve the issues (the first few days were really rocky) but we are still seeing server issues when we get up to around 25,000 simultaneous players during peak hours. Our primary focus at this time is to resolve these server issues. We have all available resources looking into the issues and we are trying to resolve them as quickly as possible. It is not as easy as adding more servers, we have to identify and fix the bottlenecks in the system which are preventing the servers from scaling properly. The servers should continue to get progressively better as we roll out server side updates.

As a reminder, our scheduled daily server maintenance is between 5am and 8am PDT (8am to 11am EDT). We bring the servers down during this time to roll out updates. The servers will usually only be down for about 20-30 minutes but some updates may take longer.

In parallel to the server updates, we are also working on a new client patch which resolves some client side stability issues. These issues include getting booted to the XMB, large number of players getting disconnected from a specific game and other issues. We've been working on and testing this since the game launched and we should have a final version ready for release in the next week or so. It is hard to provide an exact date or timeframe as we need to make sure the patch is thoroughly tested and does not introduce any new issues.

We are also working on a patch to enable trophies and address various user feedback but this will be after the stability patch. Our top priority is getting both the servers and client as stable as possible before making any changes which could possibly cause other issues. Please continue to provide feedback in the SOCOM: Confrontation PlayStation.com forum. We do read it and use the feedback to make further changes and tweaks in future updates.

So, stability patch soon, and hopefully the community features not far behind.

*Legion* wrote:

I'm hearing a good bit of praise for the FAMAS. Maybe we should give the Frenchies a shot, 93?

I've been using the M4 over the IW.

Yeah, I gave up on the IW and use the M4 90% of the time. How about you disband the clan until the community features are up and in the meantime we can each create clans just to test out the different Special Forces weapons. Or we could just go French now and call it a day.