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Looks like JD is posting in Thunder’s absence (nasty cold going around Vancouver).

Hello from Relic,

Our new community manager (Thunder) is out sick today, but we want to keep everyone posted and up to date on our progress, so I’m posting another update regarding the Soulstorm patch. Please help spread it around to any and all of our communities if you can help.

We continue to run into complicated snags with every turn of this patch; at this point, I do not expect us to release a patch this week. We have confirmed our fixes on almost all of the issues that we included in the pre-release notes, and I’ very happy for that. The people we assembled together have done a great job of working through systems and data that some were looking at for the first time, and I have personally been involved with this for over a month. Unfortunately, we are having a hard time figuring out how to get around all sorts of new issues related to our digital distribution partners. We absolutely want everyone who bought Soulstorm, whether it was in-store or online, to be able to keep playing and enjoy the patch, but the myriad of different security implementations have led to a surprising number of problems.

Thanks again - we’re working hard - I appreciate your patience.

Jonathan Dowdeswell

Thanks for Adonis for the heads up.

Thunder, Relic’s community manager, posted this blurb over on the forums :

Update: The Soulstorm patch has been undergoing testing on all language versions and digitally distributed versions of the game. We are now up to release candidate 3 for the patch. Bugs were found during testing that needed to be fixed and the patch is being rebuilt into the new release candidate. The latest bugs were generally isolated to the installation for the patch, which is the part of the patching process that has undergone the most change as we support the digitally distributed versions of the game.
What does this all mean? Not too much, I’m just trying to keep you all updated as to what’s going on. Our goal is still to ship the patch this week and we’re working on it.

For those unfamiliar with the patching cycle, once all the fixes are in the patch it’s sent off to QA. These guys then test the patch looking for bugs - did any of the changes break the game, does it install properly, and so forth. Since DoW’s first release this has become more complicated, because DoW is now also being digitally distributed via services like Steam or Direct2Drive, and that requires additional patch builds. In this case QA found a few bugs, and these bugs are now being fixed.

Hopefully this won’t delay the patch much, as Thunder pointed out they’re still aiming for a release this week.

On a personal note I’d like to thank Thunder for the update. These short blurbs letting people know what’s going on is exactly what we’ve been waiting for all this time. Thanks, and please keep it up!

You can discuss the patch in this thread.

Relic’s let everyone know that they (THQ) are planning to release the Soulstorm patch next week, Release notes this week.

On behalf of Relic, I want to extend our apologies to the Dawn of War: Soulstorm community for the first patch to the game being delayed for several months. During the creation of the patch a number of technical issues turned up related to the various digitally distributed versions of the game. We had not anticipated these issues, and are new in dealing with digital distribution, so solving these problems took much longer than we would have liked. In addition, we became aware of a number of new bugs as we worked on developing the patch that made it clear that more than a hotfix for a few key issues was necessary. We then made the decision to further delay the patch to address them. None of this was clearly communicated to the fans of the game. We will attempt to better communicate such delays and decisions in the future.


Right now we expect the patch to be released next week. I will be posting the full Soulstorm patch notes this week.

Thanks to Thunder for the heads up.

Edit: PATCH NOTES RELEASED - omg, lots of fixes!

Relic would like your help with something.

We have been conducting an open test of some upcoming patch content with our online community. The balance playtest introduces players to bug fixes, new maps, and balance work for a future patch. The feedback and support that we’ve been getting from Company of Heroes fans has been incredibly helpful during this process. First and foremost we must thank all of you who have been participating.

Currently we are planning to make at least two more updates to the balance playtest before we lock down the change list to create the final patch. These updates will include more balance changes and the addition of some new maps.

Our latest version of the balance playtest has a number of changes to our network code. We’d appreciate getting logs from players so that we can analyze them, especially if you’re experiencing lag while playing the game. You can find the log that we need in your "My Documents\My Games\Company of Heroes" folder, and it’s called warnings.log. Ideally we’d like players to:

1) Start the game
2) Join one game
3) Play one game
4) Quit to desktop
5) Send in the log to webmaster@relic.com along with a brief description of the symptoms. IE: I played a 3v3 and 20 minutes in it began to lag.

Following those steps will help yield the best information for us to track down any bugs. Once again, thank you to all the members of our online community who have been participating in our balance playtest.

Thanks to Thunder (Relic's new CM!) for the heads up.

Going on a bit of a “rant” here, I promise, it’ll be short. Little bit of a public shaming for THQ’s support organization who from what I can see are trying to do the best they can with not enough resources.

THQ Support is known to send people to the Relicnews.com forums to get support for Relic’s games. We’re a privately run forums staffed by volunteers. Perfectly reasonable for THQ support to spot a new problem on a community forum, identify a fix from it and document it in their database. But to send people to our forums to ask for help? That tells me that either THQ needs more support staffers, or they’re lazy.

Support for games often requires patches. The game companies provide them. Often games, like Relic games, require you to download patches as you log in. That means they’re already hosted on the publisher’s servers.

Now when it comes to patches, sometimes fans mirror patches as well, and post them publically. Sometimes even posting them in fan run support forums. Moe had his server also resolve to dowpatch.com and had the DoW Patches listed.

So what does THQ Support do? In a public support article, they use the list of DoW patch downloads from Moe’s server. Lazy THQ, Lazy. In all honesty I expect that someone there thought DoWpatch.com was a THQ hosted URL. Still doesn’t excuse it though. The bad part is, that Moe’s server’s been down for the last couple of weeks, so guess what, no one using that article has been able to download patches!

Edit: Just noticed this. I was wondering why people would MSN me asking about that error. THQ Support needs to add this info to the article so people can fix that themselves if the forums go down.

Update: Added “- Sometimes” to the Article title. I’ve been taken to task for suggesting the THQ support team is lazy for sending people to our forums for support as it is not THQ’s Support’s policy to send users to our forums for official support. As a support person, I know how hard it is to keep up when your corporation has you doing to much with too little resources (time and staff). I don’t know what the internal situation is at THQ’s various support organizations, so anything you read above is speculation on my part based on the few issues that have come to light on the Relic forums.