[General] Communication via IRC?

[LootFragg]

Hello world,

this is my first post, merely a result from me being overwhelmed by the mass of forum posts here and the general lack of any "direct communication" with people who know their way around the game, meaning not necessarily developers or affiliates of Tripwire Interactive, but simply players who have played the game, read the forums and are willing to communicate with people and answer questions.
I've been, even though not here, a forum user for quite a time now and while thread structures are great for short term archiving purposes, they are very indirect and often insufficient as a means of information for people who have questions.

This is the second paragraph that ends in "questions", so you might guess that I have some questions.

Some sites have an IRC channel where people can easily join and just ask questions into the audience which will or won't be answered eventually by one of the lurking people, a very crowd friendly open space concept.

Question 1:
• Is there an IRC channel related to the development of Red Orchestra 2?

I figure this would absolutely facilitate any communication on that matter. I have noticed how buggy the game still is and since I have bought the Digital Deluxe Edition, I'm willing to participate in beta testing but that means I need to be introduced to several topics and I need to be informed about the current frequently reported bugs in order not to repeat what has been said or even already fixed.

I have not yet played the beta, only the latest public version which seems to have been updated to the latest beta fixes. The new maps and features are all there, so I wonder:

Question 2:
• What are the differences between the closed beta and the latest public release as of May 28th, 2012?

There are various aspects of either UI or gameplay that render the game hard to play regardless of how much fun it is at the moment. I would like these to be fixed as soon as possible and while I can understand that a major release like Red Orchestra 2 must have thousands of players contributing by posting feature requests, I certainly hope the developers address the obvious bugs with high priority before adding new features or content.

As an example, there is a nasty UI bug that closes all overlays each time something gets updated, maybe kills or... I don't know what exactly. Every few milliseconds. This applies to the scoreboard display as well as the spawn menu and it makes spawning on a squad leader an incredibly hard task after having chosen a class.

Furthermore, the chat feature is bugged in that the chat line doesn't always display next to the player prefix but right on it.
Chat inputs aren't separated from the game either. If I press Shift ("Sprint") while writing, the game won't let me walk slowly after sending the message until I hit Shift again.
And there are easy to implement features such as aborting the text message by pressing Escape that are pretty much standard since Counterstrike 1.6 and have no reason not to be in the game.

Question 3:
• To all veteran users: How quickly do you think bugs get addressed and removed?

I've heard there have been lots of changes since the first release of RO2, so the GOTY edition is basically almost bug-free when compared to the first releases. But considering it is still very bugged and I can't find much information about further progress and plans, at which rate do you think do bugs get removed on average?

Anyway, this has been a long post and I just needed to get things off my chest. I'm seriously hoping there is a sort of IRC so I don't need to spam the forums for every minor flaw or question there might be.

Sincerely,
the Loot.

[Cwivey]

I can't really answer question 1, simply because I don't know. But your best bet is to look in the News Section as change-logs are usually posted there.

Question 2: At the moment, the only differences between the two is that the Beta does not include the Single Player and has zero people playing it. It's purely there for the testing of content (Maps etc) and game-play changes. As non are currently under-way or in a state to be tested yet, it has not been altered.

Question 3: That's a tricky question, some bugs are right bastards to remove whereas others are fairly simple. In general, bugs are sorted out from a few hours (As seen with the post-update Server Browser crashing issue) to a few weeks. The reason bug fixes were held off so long on the main game was because of the large content release and the old method steam used to update files. The old method meant that a simple change to a line of code would lead to many megabytes being downloaded (Fault of UE3 really).


Hope this helped.

[Zetsumei]

#redorchestra @ irc.gamesurge.net

but for reporting bugs use the appropriate forum section, you can use the search to find issues.