2) Gunshots to the head: as many of you have discovered, Rogue Spear does not validate headshots correctly (it does validate all other body parts correctly, however). This leads to problems hitting enemies when only the head is visible, especially terrorists in a cooperative game. This bug has been fixed for the mission pack.

3) Warping: there are some reports of minor warping, leading to players that appear to jitter back-and-forth a small amount, or warp backwards after they stop. We've found a couple of places where a character's location and speed were not always being updated immediately, and have fixed these cases for the mission pack. As testing reveals more cases, we will fix them. We'll never get rid of internet lag, but we are doing our best to ensure that we aren't making it worse.

4) Double kills: the code that was added to address gunshot validation in multiplayer that allows for simultaneous kills allows for clients who are really poorly lagged to get kills several seconds after everyone else sees them get killed. When someone is lagging this bad, however, game quality in general will suffer, so there is some debate as to whether or not this is worth fixing. We are evaluating putting a time limit on these kills.

5) Damage cheating: there have been reports that clients can change how much damage they do. We are still evaluating whether this is a valid report, or if clients are just fooling themselves into thinking they are changing their damage. I welcome any additional information on this cheat.

6) The Mod System: as the mod makers have discovered, many data files are not handled correctly by the mod system. This is being fixed for the mission pack. It is our belief that mod makers will be quite happy with the mission pack mod system.

7) Side-step accuracy: there is a rather lengthy debate on whether or not side-step accuracy is too accurate or is just fine. We will be evaluating it to see if it fits our gameplay requirements and making adjustments for the mission pack as needed.

8) Reticule displacement, aka "The Host Disadvantage", aka "The Devil Incarnate", aka "The Great Equalizer" depending on your point of view: in a multiplayer game, only the server's reticule is displaced when that player is shot. This has been fixed for this mission pack to the intended functionality of having EVERYONE's reticule displace when shot.

9) Gunshot sounds: there is a bug where players in observer mode will always use their secondary armament sounds for any gunshots fired by the player they are observing. Since secondary armament is single-shot, the player will hear the sound of their pistol if the observed player is in single-shot mode, or no sound if they are firing full-auto or 3-round burst. This has been fixed for the mission pack.

That is the complete list as I am aware of it. At this time, the plan is to address these issues for the mission pack only. At this time we are not planning on patching these fixes into Rogue Spear itself. Since these items only affect multiplayer, and we expect that most of our multiplayer users will be purchasing and playing the mission pack for its other multiplayer features such as the new weapons and the plethora of new maps, such a patch would not benefit most of our users. A patch is not a simple undertaking; it involves engineering time to extract the fixes from the mission pack code base and merge them back into the original code base, creating patches for all supported languages, and testing against all possible installations. We feel that our resources are better spent making the mission pack as good as it can possibly be.

-- Greg Stelmack, Software Engineer, Red Storm Entertainment, Inc. -- Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, Eagle Watch, Rogue Spear -- Current Project is still a big secret ;-)

"Greg Stelmack - 09:25am Sep 9, 1999 EST (3.)
R6 Core Engineer
Okay, here's how I feel summed up (much of this has been scattered elsewhere, but I'll put it here in one place):

1) Many people LIKE what we've done. I've seen a very vocal minority (2 or 3 people posting CONSTANTLY, and a handful of others chiming in) complaining about the new weapons and the speed of the game, but many many other individuals have said both publically and privately that they like it. You can't please everyone.

2) Modem users: there seem to be two complaints here. One is that lag is worse, making it impossible to play in larger games. We will be looking into this. A second is that lag has always been a problem, but they could overcome it by exploiting the 3-round burst bug in R6 and using "prefire" (firing where the guy will be) to have a better chance. They can no longer do this because we fixed the 3-round burst bug, and thanks to the new weapon attributes their favorite weapons expand when fired on full auto. In other words, they used the very unrealistic tactics we wanted to (and did) eliminate to work around the (very real) lag issue, and now they can't. It sounds like I hit my mark with the weapon balance as it is having precisely the effect I wanted, but that has hurt modem players by taking away an equalizer. We'll have to see if there is something else we can do to help equalize the modem players.

3) 3-round burst timing: many are complaining that the time between shots on single-shot and 3-round burst settings is too slow. To counter this, some (notably Pheonix) have posted the results of experiments that showed you could empty a clip in just under 3 seconds on full auto, 4 seconds on 3-round burst, and 6 seconds on single shot. I have observed similar results during our testing here. So I'm not sure if there really is a problem, but I will go back and double-check the code. One possibility here is that people are not paying attention to their specialty and are taking someone not very skilled with the weapon they are using (i.e. playing a sniper but taking an SMG, or playin an assaulter but then zooming with an assault rifle) which can increase the delay.

4) Reticule behaviors: people are complaining that the weapons are too inaccurate on full auto. This I definitely do not agree with. As I mentioned in my recent Designer Log, during testing here we had people taking a wide variety of weapons. Each weapon has an advantage and a disadvantge; if you take an assault rifle, you gain accuracy but lose reticule speed and have a higher burst size. People need to find weapons that match their skill, plus learn some fire control. I understand modem players complaining that they need accurate bursts to overcome lag; I'm not going to change global weapon behaviors for that small minority of players, so we need to see if there is a multiplayer-specific way of helping out modem players. See also the discussion of skill above; skill has a much greater impact on reticule size in Rogue Spear than it did in R6. 5) Movement speed: people think you move too slow when running. There have been a couple of changes here that people need to be aware of. First, you cannot run while zoomed. This is both realistic and an oft-requested change from our players. We are evaluating relaxing this restriction for low zoom values (i.e. SMGs), since you aren't truly zoomed but rather focusing on the target area, but I'm not sure yet if we're willing to change it. Second, we have slowed down the run by aroudn 10% for a variety of reasons. That should not be that noticable. Third, encumberance is now take into account, so if you are heavily loaded, you will move slower.