so the beta is over, and they got to fix the servers somehow so it can handle insane numbers of players at once. the overpopulation of people trying to player search and start matches at the sametime broke the matchmaking. only those that got matches are those that raced to get matchmaking started right after maintainence, before the overpopulation hit the breaking point again.
but the open world hub and the training mode always works fine and solid 60 fps. so at least that as well as the equip/customization stuff is functioning fine.
they fixed the log in issue on the 2nd day, went from 20% chance logging in, to 99% chance logging in on first attempt, so they are making progress.
its less than 24 hours since open beta. so they can announce if they play a new beta test or already found the solution so the matchmaking problem doesnt happen at launch, and if it does, they have effective solutions in place to fix things asap.
what irks me is that later they set a cap on amount of visible players, it went from being able to see 25+ players to only 5 players (not counting yourself). the full version better have at least two dozen players at a time, because Xenoverse has a lot more visible players in view, and Shinobi Striker can support at least populations in the 20s to 30s before the framerate starts dropping, so the full version definitely should not be capped at only 5 visible players at a time, that results in too much extra players disappearing and reappearing. plus the hub looks more lively and awesome with more visible players at once.
that is the one thing that baffles me about the later phase of the open beta test. why did Namco reduce the amount of visible players so much? in the first half of the open beta, performance and framerate was fine, and it only lagged when it spiked to about 30+ players. they shouldn't have reduced the visible players cap to only 6 players (counting oneself). amount of visible players in the lobby/ world hub has nothing to do with the matchmaking having problems, that's an internal server problem due to the overload of players creating/joining quickmatch "rooms" which automatically searches for players to add to the group.
so they should restore the visible players cap back up to where it was.
Shinobi Striker can lag if the amount of visible players goes up above 30 or so. but I seen it run fine and maintain pretty solid framerate and performance, even with 25 players in view.
Reducing the visible players cap was the biggest step backwards the open beta made, considering that would have been completely AND easily avoidable if they had the good judgement to just slightly tweak the visible player count (not less than 20, no more than 30), INSTEAD OF dumping the cap ALL the way down to 6......
Shinobi Striker visible players count went from this
to this
(and no, the amount of players logging in and present in the lobbies did not decrease, there's more players than what is displayed, due to the reduced visible players cap they set.)
Xenoverse displays more than triple than what Shinobi Striker displays in the current updated version, so Shinobi Striker fans that agree this matters, and they should raise the visible players cap to like 20 visible players or more (preferably 25 to 30 visible players), you can share your requests at Namco's twitter accounts, and can include #shinobistrikerBETA in message so they have a better chance of reading your twitter message to them.
it really does matter. that gorgeous world hub is big enough, and the platforms this game is made for, can easily handle quadruple the amount of visible players the game was reduced to (only 5? 6 if we count ourself? c'mon. this is PS4/Xbox One generation hardware, the full version should display a lot more at once than that.)
and again, more visible players is a good thing because also it reduces the amount of disappearing that goes on when it tries to load a 7th player ninja in view, in order to do that, it has to cause one of the 5 other players to be invisible. that's unprofessional keeping the visible players cap that low. PS4 and Xbox One hardware is capable of handling much more than that. a balanced amount would be at least 30 visible players at a time, but even 20 visible players is more acceptable than just 6!!!! it really makes the world feel more alive and populated, plus makes the platform not feel like PS3 hardware struggling to display more than 6 players at once.
