Nivash

@printedcrayon: Not like there's anything he can say to turn back the clock, so what's the point. From what rumors I've heard, he triggered the admin exodus by not being willing to take responsibility (and by insisting on some ridiculous love triangle bs) so it was never supposed to do more than cover his ass.

He's going to disappear into the night.

@zojirushi: It's off and on. Managed to get in a minute ago, but the entire site was purged. Nothing but the ui left. Accessed my profile and it was empty - no avatar, no messages, even the "number of the posts" square was broken.

@bossin: They’re calling it the Super New Awesome Gaming Forum. It’s improvised as hell because it got created right in the middle of furor yesterday and was barely even correctly indexed on Google a few hours ago, so it’s a bit hard to find. It lives over here: https://snagf.forumbee.com

I’m going to miss GAF. For all its faults, there were tons of good people on there and even the discussions on Off-Topic were actually good for the most parts. I get that people were turned off by the extremely narrow opinion corridor on politics and social justice at the end, but there still WAS room for discussion. GAF helped me evolve my own opinions on a lot of topics in a way I probably wouldn’t have at other places.

I got a front seat to the collapse in real time yesterday. I happened to read the thread where the final post of the accusations that ”went viral” was made and... wow. It basically metastasised. First threads got locked. A few people got banned. Then it snowballed. By the time the load got high enough that you could barely browse the site - I’d say 3-4 hours later - Off-Topic was filled with nothing but reposts of the accusations, threads with people expressing their anger and threads about how to jump ship. At that point the mods were all gone too.

It feels surreal that a forum as massive as NeoGAF could really just die like this. But without the core mod community, I’m not sure how it could be revived either. I try to keep up some small hope that EviLore will try to salvage what he can and sell it to a serious actor at a bargain price, and that they in turn can bring back the mods but yeah... feels like a longshot. And even if it happens, it won’t be the same.

Cow's eye in high-school. Didn't really got a lot out of it.

And yeah, I'm in medschool so I guess you know what that means. Let's just say that two straight weeks of dissecting the same "subject" in the middle of February in Sweden, when you don't ever see the sun if you spend the day in an autopsy room, gives you a whole new outlook on life.

I've been playing BF4 pretty regularly since launch and I thought I'd update some of you on what's been done on PC since then.

Played for a good 4 hours straight just now on 64 player conquest and had no freezes or crashes at all. Looks like DICE might have finally managed to patch the game to a fully playable state. DICE hasn't really been all that forthcoming on when or what they patched since they have been working fervently in the background with a lot of server-side patches, but I'm pretty sure they must have dropped a patch today since I had to update Battlelog and graphics were set to default high rather than custom once I launched.

So if you bought BF4 for PC and got turned off by the massive instability, chances are it might actually work now.

This is a very welcome change, just yesterday the game still crashed and freezed a few times. Even Shanghai appears to be stable now - no mass-drops from what I could see, including during the levolution event. It also felt like the netcode might have been tightened a fair bit - granted, I was playing on a 10 ms ping server but I noticed no jankiness at all. That's more subjective, of course.

On a side note, they appear to have done some balancing as well. Stealth jets are MUCH better now. They are crazy agile and can quite literally run circles around the attack jets. Well, the T-50 and J-20 at least. The F35 might still be a bit sluggish, didn't try it out. I'm also pretty sure they buffed the guns on them too - it's actually possible to take down an attack jet with one well aimed full burst from what I could tell.

The stability has been increasing incrementally with the server-side patches for some time now and with a bit of luck we might actually be back to BF3-level stability by now. Then again I might just have gotten lucky, so chime in if it hasn't been the same for you guys.

EDIT: OK, took a closer look at those jets - for some reason it's mainly the T-50 that's gotten crazy agile. The J-20 might have gotten a small agility buff. F35 still controls like a flying garbage truck. Not sure what's up with that. This is pretty much the way it has been for some time though.

Nothing to speak of in Gothenburg yet. Some rain, but that's hardly out of the ordinary. Last I heard the front got postponed from 1500 to 2000 local time. Guess we'll see in a few hours. From the sound of it the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute is still considering winds of 30-40 m/s a possibility but I seriously doubt that.

Oh, they also named it "Simone".

I heard it was going to be the worst since 1987. We've been getting some class 2 storm warnings in Gothenburg, Sweden when it hits us tomorrow as well, but nothing like what you guys are staring down. Guess you'll taking this one for the team, so thanks! :)

Stay safe you lot!

It was mentioned in another thread: this game is broken on some systems. Extremely low FPS is one part of it but some graphics options not turning on even when they are on are another part. Some people also get graphical glitches.

CA has promised to patch it over the coming weeks with the first patch hitting on Friday. Hopefully that will sort it out for most people. I'm running it on an i5 3570K with a 7950-Boost and still can't get even a stable 30 FPS on the very lowest settings with everything turned off.

I have more or less the exact same specs and the exact same issues: 15 FPS even at the lowest settings, glicthes galore like the army of the dead in the picture up there and god knows what else. I never bothered to find out. I'm not going to ruin my experience with the game by playing it like this, I'm waiting for the patch.

The issues appear to be extremely common so I have complete faith in CA fixing this soon. Hopefully as early as Friday when the first patch hits, or in a driver update.

As for those not having these problems: that's the thing. It's absurdly random. The game is outright broken on some machines and works fine on others with no relation to system specs. Count yourselves among the lucky ones and weep for the rest of us.

EDIT: Here's a few comparison pictures to what @buckybit posted:

Buckybit

Nivash

This is at 1080p, Extreme preset. It's taken from as close to the same angle as I could get.

See the difference? The lighting is all broken even from up here, as are some of the textures, like the house in the upper right.

This is what we get when we move up close:

Again, this is the Extreme preset. The textures are so low res that I think Rome I had more detail. And it's not just that: look at the legs of the guys, especially the leg of the guy to the right of the the guy in wolf mask. There's also something decidedly off with the the overall impression, things just don't seem to fit right for some reason. It's more in-your-face full screen.

Here's the same picture at 1080p, Low preset:

It's barely any worse! Sure the textures are even lower res, and the grass is gone, but the lighting is still equally broken. And hey, the leg-glitches are gone.

But more importantly, care to guess what FPS I get? In the low 40s.

I looked around a bit and found a place where my FPS actually dropped below 30:

Am I seriously supposed to believe that my i5 3570K, overclocked 7950-Boost with 3GB VRAM and 8 GB system ram is incapable of rendering this at anything lower than several hundred FPS!? It makes no sense.

It's just insanely broken right now. Friday can't come soon enough.