What happened to ATAG online action..?
 

Tried to join, says authentication error..?
Is server not set up for latest version..?


Mike

Steam shutdown all servers for some reason earlier, maybe you tried to join then. I've been on it pretty much all night but for a few minutes.;)

I just lost connection.

I was chasing a 109 on the deck and after I ran out of ammo, the spitfire that was with me started chewing him up. It was almost a done deal, when I saw both of them warp in the distance. I lost connection few seconds after. I think more than one server lost connection.

I think some German spy cut the line so that 109 can get away.:mrgreen:

Is it back up for you guys?

nope.

I think I'll go shoot some people in the head with the tank gun in red orchestra 2
:mrgreen:

so i finally downloaded this game after building my new rig...and the server goes down right when i try to play. RO2 sounds great right now..im working on the drum mag for ppsh, but 109 E-4 was calling my name!

There were 180 people online earlier today, so don't sweat it. Some kind of steam issue I'd wager.

What, 180 on ATAG? I could barely imagine the furballs with numbers like that, would be fantastic trying to protect a raid with huge numbers of escorts and attackers!!!

Craig

Unfortunately, there's nothing organized as a matter of combat flights on the ATAG server.

lmao

Is not exactly like that.
More like 130 BF-109 E4's +20 BF110's +5 Ju88s vulching the 20 allied pilots, that are brave enough to fly red and constantly complaining how uber the spitfire is..:rolleyes:

:lol:

Hmmm it used to be like that :-P... but I fly for whoever has the smaller team ;)

P.S. With the spit mk1a now working very very well I am expecting/hoping that the team problem will be sorted :D

Nah. It's not a plane issue. It's an attitude issue.

Same as Krupi, whoever has the smaller team.Personally I would rather fly LW, but the last few weeks on ATAG have been flying RAF.

Yep. Same here.

Normally teams are rather balanced in ATAG. But action is too often at low alt.

Yep
 

yep!!!

and yep!

In the last week I've noticed a lack of LW AI bombers. More allied bombing raids than LW? seems a bit odd.

I have to agree here. I've spent more time chasing altitude to attack a friendly formation of bombers than anything else.

'Blenheims heading for Calais'....'Wellingtons heading for.. wherever'.

For now, it seems to me to be more in keeping with the 'spirit of the game' to send more bombers to GB. With or without close escort.

Mind you, I do appreciate that it can't be easy for the mission designers.

Thanks for everything you blokes have done so far!:grin:

The last two nights i've not encountered a single LW bomber. Seems most of the time Dover and nearby airfields are constantly being buzzed by low flying LW fighters. During the real BOB, the ideal purpose of the Hurri was to take out bombers whilst the Spit kept the LW escorts occupied. Often however both Hurri's and Spits engaged the bombers.

I've yet to experience that kind of action online...what is needed is waves of LW bombers with LW escorts, at altitude. I can't think of one incident when allied airfields were being constantly buzzed by lone squadrons of LW fighters, except in Northern France of course.

That said, I love playing online and am having a ball....even if it's mostly a low altitude furball over dover.:rolleyes:

I fly mainly LW, either the E-1 or the 110 c7 against ground targets, from time to time I fly RAF and make up numbers but this is a mission based server so there is plenty going on even if the sides aren't even. Really I will fly for what ever side I am interested in at the time, and there is no reason that anyone shouldn't or be whined at because of their choice. The sides did seem pretty even if not red biased after the release of beta2.

Craig

Me too, but the English Channel is a bit big for that when we've got the Isles of Paleantology to fight for, yes?

That's because of the team stacking. The Germans don't have much to do, so they go where they can find some action....over the British airfields.

We picked a formation of Dorniers tonight going for Limpy. It was rather nice change.

Later tonight tho, it went back to 10 vs 4 kind of deal, where two 109's were circling above the field waiting for me to warm up the engine. :rolleyes:

Actually, there are a lot of games that have team balancing built into the game. In Il-2 it was a lot better. Most people liked a nice balanced game and everyone had fun.
I wish they gave the server the ability to choose how much imballance to allow.
Even if the server is mission oriented, and there are British bombers going over, a lot of blue players still choose to go cherry picking over the British arflields, when it's 4 to 1.

This is simply ignorance.

I love it when there are lots of LW pilots. As long as I have a wingman or two, there are plenty of allied airfields to take off from if Hawkinge is being shot up by Jerry. As long as the bomber flights are regular are varied there is always lots to do.

I especially love the large bomber formations the ATAG lads have been experimenting with - nice work Bliss and Spin and co. Frequency of bomber flights is I understand still being tweaked as there are (or were) some quite long periods of no ai activity (at least there were last week - havent played much since the patch went global - no doubt the lads have redesigned the mission 4 or 5 times since then! :-) )


The key thing I'd love to see is a formation of 5 or 6 human 110's escorted by 5 or 6 109s coming over to raid the allied airfields. The only thing i think is missing is getting groups of humans to fly together with strategy across multiple aircraft variants. No doubt at all though that this will come in time as we all get used to things - Spin and I flew in a 3 blenheim formation to raid german fields a week or so ago with three hurri escorts - was tons of fun!

So bring it on Jerry! Get your squads together and show us how it's done! Our spits and Hurries are warmed up and waiting! :cool:

I am itching for the same thing mate, we have just about had it happen on a few occasions that I have been involved in, a bunch of 110's with a couple of 109's as tip cover, invariably it seems that we are just about at the targeted field or mission objective when steam crashes or some other PITA error occurs. It's not for lack of trying a lot of the time mate, I promise we will pay you a vist soon ;)

Craig

Yep, because a lot of us simply cant stand the ugly British crates.
Even if I make no contact at all I still enjoy cruising with my wingman on a free hunt over the English coast.
All your going to do by making people fly somewhere they don't want to is is kill the servers popularity.
I know there are some that are happy to fly whatever they are given. However there are MANY, myself included, who have one aircraft, and fly it to the exclusion of near everything else.
Don't worry, wait till we have IL-2 Sturmovik: Defense of the Reich. All the rustang fanbois will swamp the servers and we valiant few Blue flyers will still be in our beloved 109's.

The war is over for 70 years, remember? ;)

We've been playing some sort of Il-2 version for ten years now!!! Don't you get tired of doing the same thing for ten years?

It's actually this kind of attitude that kills the popularity. Think about the people in the other team. How do the feel when they get bounced over and over at the end of the runway and know there are 5 109's circling above for every Spit or Hurricane.
It gets boring quick.

+1 to that bud, love shooting runstangs full of holes! Balancing servers is a sure fire way to turn people off.

Craig

Same issue for me, yesterday 0800pm GMT, i could join all the other servers on the list, but when i try to join ATAG i got a authentication error message. It felt a bit wierd, cause i was on ATAG just an hour earlier with no problem.

same here...but then I tried few times again and was able to connect..

You usually get "authentication error" message, if you were playing on server and got a timeout. You can't connect, because server still thinks you are connected.

that was my assumption...

-had same error msg and suddenly everything ok.. a steam-thing:-/ didnt do nothing myself.
Btw, ATAG`s my server and red`s my side. Lots of targets when on red side..lol Great fun and great server! Hard on my fps when between flak on red side, but allright on blue side..
Some red flak-guns draggin`it down mayB??
~S~ :)

ATAG is a great server, but it recently suffered of lag. I tend to exclude the server's fault as they've got a multi-gazillionTerabit/s connection, so it could be some new dedicated server software bug.
Two days ago I've tried to fly alongside a squad mate, resulting in light but visible sliding back and forth of each other. And now, when engaging enemies and the action heats up, it's common to have lag or freezes.

Cheers!

what should 'force' the players to climb to higher alts?
even more when lower flying planes are difficult to spot.
The same height experience i already had in IL2 dogfightservers. I flew most times COOP based online wars in my 10 years of IL2. And there, high alt combats happend often, sure depending on the mission - mostly when the task was "escort/intercept" bombers.

Altitude means victory (if one can spot other planes from 5-10 miles, as it happened in RL with good visbility).

not without a reason i said 'players' - we have a simple "refly" button in game.

as i tried to say, its about missiondesign mainly IMO. And i guess the missionbuilder are still in the learning phase with this software.
And if we will see again formations of bombers (most time AI, and i mean more than 6 in one formation) at higher alts online(24/7 servers), protected and intercepted by high flying fighters - time will tell.

organized events, where all players are playing as a team, thats another story.

About COOP online wars, i think, we dont have to talk anymore with CoD, their times are over i belive. It was a nice time in IL2 :)

:(
Considering just how popular the online wars were, especially with the Russian community, I am genuinely shocked that the developers of CoD did not make an effort to include this style of play. I personally spent hundreds of hours flying in the various online wars over the years, and DF servers will get old very quickly.
A huge, inexplicable oversight.

Well, after now about 2 month of testing on a dedicated server with concepts, missions and players I can tell you that the problems are not the missions. The missions are available, also the servers providing such missions. For example our server has missions with up to 24 bombers stacked in a box and 16 escort fighters clashing into 18 RAF interceptors. The problem is the software and the human-factor.

For the software: The software renders coops to rediculous small raids, due to that...

1.50% of players receive a CTD the moment larger amounts of AIs spawn,
2.the connecting time to the mission increases to inifinity if you also add ground objects, or even buildingsto the AI planes in the mission (one of the both is ok, but both ground objects and AI - is a desaster)
3. the more AI you have, the more network-lag you have, thus providing the players with stationary planes, which suddenly warp to their real position, because their position doesn´t get refreshed in time (in the old 1946 the number of AI were restricted by the players system, here it is a general game/network problem)
4. warping AI as soon as the damage modell is working (f.e. everything runs smooth until the first hurricane starts hitting one bomber -> slide show and warping)
5. breaking RAF Radio due to too many planes in the air, and therefore breaking the custom menu in my opinion the heart of all-what-is-possible-with-CoD

For the human factor:
Most players hate to read. They just have 1h spare time and want to have action as fast as possible and will not bother reading any briefing. Therefore you have to provide them something to shoot at, where ever their random moods just gets them to. This makes it impossible to provide objective base missions with larger numbers of AI involved, you simply can´t have the AI targets everywhere. Or you simply ignore this demand and focus on one aspect area, one objective, one flight, but then you have to ignore the demand of the casual player for entertainment and stick with the few players, who have time to read a briefing and have the discipline to stick to their task.
Furthermore, and I guess this also can be adressed to you, the most players do not understand the new possiblities the software has. There is simply no need for the 1946 coops-system anymore. You just can enter a server at anytime, choose an available flight, may it be the as a flight leader of an AI flight, which is in idle mode on the ground or already engaged in fighting with enemy in the air. Or you can choos to create your own flight and start in a hanger. Then you can wait for either start a mission on your own or team up and then start a mission in which you can choose to play on the intercepting side or on the escorting/bombing side and the team, which meets its objective will receive points, adding to a final victory condition and so on... this is all possible and feasable. And all the testing of the last months, was for me to gather experience in the game behavior, scripting, software limitations, to be finally able to provide some kind of "coop" war some day, but one as mix between the ADW and VOW. A server 24/7 available, where you don´t have to wait 1hour to get up an OPFOR Team just to get a Loading-Mission-Screen 2minutes after take off, but you can join and fly a mission on a randomly evolving map, with AI and with historically accurate missions. We can get behind the software limitations some day (hopefully), but we will never get past the player limitations.

But anyhow, most player don´t even know what is possible, that there is a briefing available and an objective to meet and everthing is new to many, so noone can blame anyone.

I posted on the ATAG forum regards the increased size of the AI Bomber formations. My system performed accepably well previous to this latest patch but now, with formations of 30+ AI and other players defending/attacking, ATAG has become virually unplayable.

Even over Hawking at 13K and Flak suddenly appearing, If I engage a single fighter that happens to be at a similar altitude I get lag, low fps, stutters with the end result of complete loss of visual which is critical to the outcome.

Its a shame because the whole experience of MP on ATAG has taken a nosedive. Most of my sorties are to intercept/defend AI formations -my system cannot deal with the low level furballs even if I wanted to - not that I want to anyway. I see combat in a X - Y axis and at 1500ft the Y axis has effectivley been cut in half!

Yes, the AI related issues have gotten worse with the official patch in my opinion too and you/we shouldn´t blame the ATAG Team or the mission builders. Almost everthing is possible with the scripting options, but the game simply doesn´t allow to use it yet...

I haven't blemed them Snafu, they and all the server hosts are doing a fantastic job. I asked if some (not all) of the AI formations could be dropped to their previous size (15 to 20) so that those of with lower spec systems could at least see wether recent performance issues are a result of this official upgrade or the increased AI formation numbers.

Previousley, with the last Beta and moderate formations, my system performed reasonably well.

Nope! I can count on one hand the number of hours I have in types other than the 109.
Perfection never gets old!

By your logic ATAG should be a ghost town already, yet its not.
Here is what will happen if you try to balance things:
Welcome to ATAG redo-server! How can I help you?
Yes id like to fly a 109 please
Oh I'm sorry, but we have already met the max number of 109's,
What?
Yes were sorry but you'll have to take an English crate.
No, I don't have to. Goodbye.

That's quite a depressing read SNAFU :( I do hope this get's addressed sooner rather than later. Multiplayer is where the real potential of COD lies, as we learnt with IL2 so i'm optimistic.:rolleyes:

OK for the first part, understood. As far as online wars, there are still many SEOWs all around, with 60-70 pilots each time + other online wars, based on Bellum for instance. I still enjoy them with 6S, my squad.

Cheers,
6S.Insuber