Doug From Valve Response To "StutterBug" At Steam Forums

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Liftow

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For those of you who have the problem, and may not have been checking these forums - Doug V(?) was responding to peoples complaints in a sticky started by a Valve employee. It got quite heated with Doug closing the thread with a pretty arrogant post.

Doug From Valve said:
"We did not see this problem during testing.

There are currently less than 200 open tickets in our support incident database for the audio stuttering problem, this doesn't mean there aren't more people having the problem, but that's the number who have taken the time to report it (if you haven't reported it, please do so). You don't hear form the hundreds of thousands of people out there who aren't having any problems running the game.

If you read back through the forum... People are fixing the problems without a patch. If this was a huge bug in the code it wouldn't be fixable without a code change. Most of the fixes in fact have involved hardware configuration changes (i.e. disabling one of the two soundcards installed) and / or driver updates.

Here's the deal. We know that people are having a problems with audio stuttering, we know the clock is ticking, and we *are* looking at a number of different possible solutions.

I will post periodic updates to this thread but I'm going to close it as it is becoming less helpful to people looking for solutions to their problems. The Valve-bashing forums are under the General Discussion topics.
Click to expand...

If you are experiencing the stutterbug to any degree, please write a support ticket at Valve

http://steampowered.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/steampowered.cfg/php/enduser/entry.php

in order to let them know that there is more than 200 people with this annoying problem.
 
I'd rather side with Valve. You all are making a huge deal about the stutter bug, which mainly affects after loading and otherwise doesn't really mess things up too much except give you a few seconds of lag before some sound effects. It's not as bad as you all make it out to be and you really need to try configuring your computer better before you make such a huge deal of it.
 
Audiophile said:
I'd rather side with Valve. You all are making a huge deal about the stutter bug, which mainly affects after loading and otherwise doesn't really mess things up too much except give you a few seconds of lag before some sound effects. It's not as bad as you all make it out to be and you really need to try configuring your computer better before you make such a huge deal of it.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I dont think so. I'm running fairly high end system, with nothing but problems

P43.0
Asus P4P800-VM (BIOS up to date)
Radeon 9600
1g DDR Crucial
Raptor 40g Main
WD 40g Secondary
SBLive 24bit.

I've updated all drivers, just did a clean install of Windows, and Steam HL2 and have the problems still. The only remedy was to get rid of the Cats that I had and install the recent Omega drivers, but that doesn't completly alleviate the problem. No matter what configuration I set it to, it still is present to some degree. In this thread they initially indicated that they know it is a problem on their side, and that it is their top priority. Nevertheless, this thread isn't meant to start a flame war its' information for people having the problem. If you dont have the problem, don't join the thread.
 
How in the world was that an arrogant comment?

Also personally I would call the stutter bug a very minor problem that has been blown out of porportion. I mean come on, if it was a bug that caused you to crash to the desktop then I would make a big deal about it, but guess what? It is just a little minor stuttering that happens after load times and saving. Big woopdie doo.
 
I dont think that post is arrogant.
 
I guess the guys at [H]ardOCP don't know what they're doing, eh Doug?

Gotta love an e-mail FAQ "solution"!

Take Care.
 
Liftow said:
If you dont have the problem, don't join the thread.
Click to expand...
I have it.

I just live with it and move on. Some people do have unexplainable problems with high-end systems, like you, and their annoyance is justified, but the majority are people who are too stupid to bother installing latest drivers or are trying to run HL2 on maximum settings with a computer that isn't capable of handling it, and then cry "omfg hl2 us0x ima go paly halo2".

I also do not think that Doug's post is arrogant.
 
Hysterical. Well that's one way to "fix" the problem. Just tell people it's solved. Genius.
Yeah, 200. It's a real and accurate number that...:rolleyes:
It's their #1 priority too. Even though they don't know how bad it is or apparently what it is they're working on a fix (as of four weeks ago) for "200" people well enough for it to be #1 priority.
*Exposed - Yet More Shocking Valve Contradictions! Later today on SUFNEWS*

Just makes you think about that "bug club" mentioned in the gamespot article. How many times did this happen to testers?
Waive the issue and as far as you're concerned it goes away. Great idea Valve!

Take Care.
 
I run at 1600x1200 on my 6800ultra here, but with no FSAA or AA. I make sure the bios AGP Aperture is at 256meg (to match the card), and FastWrites are off, and vsync is on. I also set the audioquality slider to Medium (everything else on highest settings), all things which help the stuttering issue, which no longer occurs. In timedemo runs using the anand/hardocp demos, I get in the 65fps range with vsync on, and 72fps with it off.

rms
 
~Speed_Demon~ said:
Hysterical. Well that's one way to "fix" the problem. Just tell people it's solved. Genius.
Yeah, 200. It's a real and accurate number that...:rolleyes:
It's their #1 priority too. Even though they don't know how bad it is or apparently what it is they're working on a fix (as of four weeks ago) for "200" people well enough for it to be #1 priority.
*Exposed - Yet More Shocking Valve Contradictions! Later today on SUFNEWS*

Just makes you think about that "bug club" mentioned in the gamespot article. How many times did this happen to testers?
Waive the issue and as far as you're concerned it goes away. Great idea Valve!

Take Care.
Click to expand...
err what the hell are you talking about? They never said the problem was fixed, they said the are in the process of fixing it. :rolleyes:

Also why is 200 tickets so unlikely? I havn't sent one, I bet most people here havn't sent one. In fact I along with most people probably don't know and/or don't even bother to send one.

Get your head out of your ass, Valve isn't intentionally trying to piss you off.
 
Let's be honest with ourselves, m'kay?

There was never anything like the 6,000+ post, 500,000+ view topic complaining about ONE pervasive bug in the various Doom 3 forums. Not even on the Far Cry forums, and Far Cry was a much buggier game than Doom 3. There were various, largely unconnected individual gripes over the course of weeks and months. Not one eruption of screaming about one bug that afflicted great piles of people who bought the game.

But there was at the steampowered.com forums for HL2. That is a fact, not an opinion, and the difference in volume of owner complaints about one pervasive bug is a fact, not an opinion.

It is pretty dumb for somebody to look at that, compare it to what happened on other recent FPS releases, and then decide it is a good idea to make some patronizing post about how there have only been 200 tickets in the support system.

Really? Could it be because most support systems are manned by retards, or send out form letters?

Speaking of which, I just got sent a bunch of goddamn generic links in response to my request for support. Give me a friggin' break! They are literally the exact ones that I have already read, and were NOT RELEVANT! :rolling:

Take Care.
 
~Speed_Demon~ said:
Let's be honest with ourselves, m'kay?

There was never anything like the 6,000+ post, 500,000+ view topic complaining about ONE pervasive bug in the various Doom 3 forums. Not even on the Far Cry forums, and Far Cry was a much buggier game than Doom 3. There were various, largely unconnected individual gripes over the course of weeks and months. Not one eruption of screaming about one bug that afflicted great piles of people who bought the game.

But there was at the steampowered.com forums for HL2. That is a fact, not an opinion, and the difference in volume of owner complaints about one pervasive bug is a fact, not an opinion.

It is pretty dumb for somebody to look at that, compare it to what happened on other recent FPS releases, and then decide it is a good idea to make some patronizing post about how there have only been 200 tickets in the support system.

Really? Could it be because most support systems are manned by retards, or send out form letters?

Speaking of which, I just got sent a bunch of goddamn generic links in response to my request for support. Give me a friggin' break! They are literally the exact ones that I have already read, and were NOT RELEVANT! :rolling:

Take Care.
Click to expand...
Think about it for a second, we have one single very minor bug. Yes it is minor, if you don't think so then you have obviously never played all that many PC games. Yet somehow this little minor bug gets over 6000 posts, it also doesn't sound like it is easy to fix. I mean if it was then it would be fixed by now, and don't give me this crap that it is because Valve is incompetent. I don't see you programming this game engine from scratch, if it was easy to fix then it would be fixed by now, and it is obvious because what possible benefit could Valve get out of not releasing a fix for it?

Also he was talking about how if it was such a big problem for so many people then they would have had more than 200 tickets, a huge thread full of complaints doesn't mean that everyone in there feels the bug is a large enough problem that it deserves sending one of these "tickets".

People are whining over a problem that is really minor for the end user and then insults Valve when it isn't fixed when it is obviosly not easy for Valve to fix.
 
wtf... arrogent? Uhhh, I'd be pretty pissed too if there were a bunch of immature kids trolling my forum, bashing my team about the job they did, acting as though they werent working on a fix.
 
A lot of people have their settings too high for their CPU too. Guess what--sound takes CPU time. Easiest stuttering fix, turn everything way down and then increase until it comes back.
 
Which confirms my suspicions that the bug is related to an engine flaw and will not be easy to fix anytime soon.

That goes for the vampire game that is using SOURCE and has the same exact bug.

I have payed valve $300 and everyone else payed their fair share, we deserve a functioning product or at least post something about it directly, not play these hide and go seek games.

Something along the lines of "Yes, it's a bug, and may take sometime to fix, in the meantime please continue to submit bug reports."

Take Care.
 
This is why the "Valve-ite" (wait for that one to be censored) responses of `would you rather they got on and fix it or be posting here every...` are tiresome. For one thing, they don't seem to be getting on and fixing it. They seem to be waiting and suggesting things *we* came up with in the first place. So why don't they have time to drop in and notice a few thousand posts about some `little` problem and tell people what's going on..?

Take Care.
 
~Speed_Demon~ said:
Which confirms my suspicions that the bug is related to an engine flaw and will not be easy to fix anytime soon.

That goes for the vampire game that is using SOURCE and has the same exact bug.

I have payed valve $300 and everyone else payed their fair share, we deserve a functioning product or at least post something about ti directly, not play these hide and go seek games.

Take Care.
Click to expand...
So your saying that this minor stutter bug means that the product isn't "functioning"? Lol, give me a break, read some of the things in this article:http://www.lupinegames.com/articles/10gamerknow.html and go play some more PC games to find out that most games have problems of this sort (most have more problems than this) and the developers will rarely tell anyone whether they are fixing it or not. Heck for most games patches aren't even released until a few months after the game.

~Speed_Demon~ said:
This is why the "Valve-ite" (wait for that one to be censored) responses of `would you rather they got on and fix it or be posting here every...` are tiresome. For one thing, they don't seem to be getting on and fixing it. They seem to be waiting and suggesting things *we* came up with in the first place. So why don't they have time to drop in and notice a few thousand posts about some `little` problem and tell people what's going on..?

Take Care.
Click to expand...
heh, last I checked Valve and the various companies they have licsenced the engine too are the ONLY people who have access to the Source code, incase you didn't realize that means that they are the ONLY people who really know how to fix this problem, also considering Valve actually designed and built the engine I wouldn't come to the conclusion that they don't know what they are doing. Also I don't understand why you have any reason to think that they aren't fixing it? Maybe they aren't putting all of there resources into fixing it but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it. Not many developers tell the customers exactly what they are doing and what they are fixing. If you do think that is how it works then you are living in a fantasy world.
 
It appears that the majority of people who have come here with legitamite gripes about the game (mostly the stuttering), are fairly intelligent. Many understand software, the development process, bugs and the like. We all have bugs in our code folks - thats a simple fact of the matter. We all try to test it (well at least good devs do) but invariably there is going to be something that slipped through the cracks.

So, fine, I realize Valve is just like the rest of us developers. Some of us have to live with TPS reports and the like, but hey - it's OK. Lumberg is a pain in the arse, but we can live with him.

Anyway, I digress. From everything we have seen with this bug, how it's not tied to some particular hardware configuration, some sort of commonality like a sound driver, BIOS setting, video driver whatever - something is a amiss when we are told that it wasn't seen during testing. How can this be? They tested the game on one and only one configuration? Maybe they didn't see it during testing because it was run on exactly identical machines all with the same ghost images. If so, then what?

And if not, why wasn't the game play tested on peoples personal machines in the company at least? They were afraid of it being leaked? Anything can be leaked.

I would bet if this game was played on at least 100 differently configured machine - that the bug would show itself on at least one machine. I know other people with this game, and they have the stuttering as well. Coincidence? Well, I would have to say no based on all my math and stastical analysis I had to do in school.

So what are we to believe? That's the real question. The fan-boys can go ballistic all they want, I really don't care. They have basically become a minor buzzing in my ear that I would experience after a loud RUSH concert.

Take Care.
 
So it all comes down to whether I believe the people who have the Source code and who actually developed the game or the people who don't have any of the Source code and don't have any idea what Valve could be doing?

In that case I think I will take the people who have the Source code and developed the game. It just seems like the most logical thing to do considering eventually the bug will be eliminated and this whole argument won't even mean anything anymore.

Also if it didn't show up with Valve then it must have not shown up with Troika either since like you said it "has the exact same bug". Troika has all the Source code, they even told us that they optimized parts of it for some of the lighting Vampire would need. So that means that if they could fix it then they would have already, but they didn't. Why? Maybe it didn't show up with them? I don't know, and I doubt you know either.
 
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter said:
12/14/04 09:23:32 PM GMT
Valve's DougV has posted a final update in the "Stuttering problems in HL2 update" thread and then locked it. I take issue with several of the points made in this post and it is clear that this issue is being continually mishandled. Take the following snippet for example:

We did not see this problem during testing.

I have trouble believing this considering that the stuttering problem was evident on Gary McTaggart's own computer, a Valve engineer on the Source engine. The following is a snippet from my IM conversations with him after he put in the first fix that corrects the stuttering but created the slowdown problem:

[09:02 PM] GaryMcT: I didn't realize how bad it was until I now see it fixed. :)

I am a professional software engineer, and have cut Valve a lot of slack for this problem as I know the complexities of software development quite well. However, I am beginning to lose interest in completing Half-Life 2 primarily because of Valve's poor community management as of late.
Click to expand...

SOURCES: http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter
http://www.valvesoftware.com/people.php
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/#PatchAnalysis

I'll just sit tight and wait some more, I'm very patient, I have waited 4 weeks to play HAlf-Life 2 and DM is tiding me over till then.

Thank you.

Take Care.
 
~Speed_Demon~ said:
SOURCES: http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter
http://www.valvesoftware.com/people.php
http://www.blep.net/hl2stutter/#PatchAnalysis

I'll just sit tight and wait some more, I'm very patient, I have waited 4 weeks to play HAlf-Life 2 and DM is tiding me over till then.

Thank you.

Take Care.
Click to expand...
Alright I guess you can sit there not playing Half-Life 2 due to a minor bug little stutter problem.

www.bleb.net seems to be nothing but a blank page so I am a little curious about why this guy has dedicated so much time on such a little problem.

Also that IM conversation doesn't really mean anything, whether it happened or not is unknown. The way Gary says what he does makes it seem like he really didn't notice it before.

Also when I re-read what Doug said I get the feeling he may mean they didn't notice the "severe" stuttering that some people have been recieving, I.E. where people will have the computer freeze and have terrible stuttering for up to a minute every 10 minutes. That is a problem that I know exists but definately not on every computer. My computer lags yes, but it was definately not that bad, in fact until I came on here and read about it I had assumed it was just because my computer wasn't able to completely handle Half-Life 2 at the maximum details setting.

If that is the level of stuttering that Doug was talking about then I can easily see why it never showed up during testing.
 
If you look at the e3 vidoes it also has the Stutter bug, so how can he say it's isolated incidents?
 
Don't worry guys, I'm sure Valve will fix the stuttering problem within the next half year or so, remember, they're working HARD on it. :|
 
Dr.breen said:
If you look at the e3 vidoes it also has the Stutter bug, so how can he say it's isolated incidents?
Click to expand...
What? Which one? I never saw the stuttering bug at all in any of the E3 videos.
 
The Mullinator said:
So your saying that this minor stutter bug means that the product isn't "functioning"? Lol, give me a break, read some of the things in this article:http://www.lupinegames.com/articles/10gamerknow.html and go play some more PC games to find out that most games have problems of this sort (most have more problems than this) and the developers will rarely tell anyone whether they are fixing it or not. Heck for most games patches aren't even released until a few months after the game.


heh, last I checked Valve and the various companies they have licsenced the engine too are the ONLY people who have access to the Source code, incase you didn't realize that means that they are the ONLY people who really know how to fix this problem, also considering Valve actually designed and built the engine I wouldn't come to the conclusion that they don't know what they are doing. Also I don't understand why you have any reason to think that they aren't fixing it? Maybe they aren't putting all of there resources into fixing it but that doesn't mean they aren't doing it. Not many developers tell the customers exactly what they are doing and what they are fixing. If you do think that is how it works then you are living in a fantasy world.
Click to expand...

Ok twat, that's about the 3rd time in this thread alone you've said this bug is minor. You've said our systems must suck. Yet you turn around and say to go play other games because they have worse bugs. Well douche bag, I don't have any problems with other games because I do run a clean system. This is the ONLY game I have issues with. This is NOT A MINOR ISSUE. It is beyond annoying and more to unplayable. Get your head out of Valve's ass for a while and breath some air.

If you don't have the problem, or your problem is only minor, so be it. Keep it to your frigging self. This thread isn't for you. It's for people who have this issue that is beyond a minor annoyance. Don't tell me I have no right to want this fixed. Now, if you'll excuse me I'll go back to riding your mother. It'll keep me occupied till they get this game fixed. ..|..
 
Meh, tired of seeing these threads, do what Doug told you to do and report it to them in the proper way, crying about it isn't gonna help.

Chances are its user error, trying to run HL2 with all settings on max at some ungodly resolution with other apps running in the background on ancient PC's and wondering why its ****ed.

*closed* btw.
 
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