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i wrote this right after the obiwan beta went live. it doesnt include NGE things yet. only that the devs are able to host 2 different comabt system at the same time

*attention long mail - get some popcorn and a drink - i hope you enjoy the read and agree in some points with me*
but first off, iam a 18 year old german player, so please excuse my bad english in some cases since english isnt my
mother language.

dear developers of swg,
iam writing this letter to you in a kinda neutral point of view.
the reason why i only mail / pm you this message is simple, i want to avoid the general spam on the boards.
with this mail i will try to tell you the current situation on live servers out of the point of view from a pve and pvp player.
i started playing swg in november 2003 at the early start of europe-farstar (mid november i think). i was playing the
pre publish 15 combat system quite i long time as you see. and iam playing the post publish 15 combat system since it
went live aswell. and i enjoy both in some way.

The pre publish 15 situation and why the combat rebalance was needed

with the old combat system and balancing we had some major problems in pve and pvp.

one of them was the armor. the crafting cap for armor was setted to 80% and the slicing cap was at 90%. this
caps were too high for the system since you had almost 95% damage reduction with the melee toughness and synthsteak.
the other problem with armor was that it was possible to get full protection with only 4 pieces, helmet ,chest plate , boots
and gloves. the encumbrence with only this 4 parts was so low that players had no mind drain without taking drinks and foods.
this made it possible to stack all kind of defense buffs and be the perfect soloist in all styles.

another problem were the buffs. in the early publishes buffs had a random chance of strenght / effectivness, just like heals.
so you never had 6 buffs at same strenghts. with one of the publishes you changed it and gave it a static multiplier. so
everyone was getting 2200 strenght buffs / 2500 with food and 2700 with food and medical city bonus, i dont want to mention
the janta enhanced buffs. this way player had absolutly no health and action cost while doing special attacks, that made it kinda
easy to solo creature because we only had to heal the damage taken and not the damage we gained from doing specials.

another major problem were the DoTs from weapons and combat medics. the weapon dots from exceptional and legendary
weapons been so insane that some of those could kill players in only 2 ticks. that made it impossible for a fair pvp fight.
many mass pvp battles has been won by only 1 player... the one with the highest dot and an area attack to apply it to everyone
nearby. the combat medics DoTs itselfs arent that much of a problem, doctors and jedi where able to heal them while fighting
or just over heal them with stim packs / force heals. the real problem been the enhancers introduce with the geonosian cave.
those has been drop from 90 (base) upto 500-600 (legendary / exceptional), crafted this ones were ticking for 1000+ and it
was possible to stack the DoTs - a single a + b + c poison + area b + c. in the end you had a tick for over 3000.

one of the bigger problems been the so called "stackers". melee profession were able to wear a 4 piece set of armor with 90%
damage reduction and still gain the full profession toughness (unarmed / one-handed / two-haned and polearm). together with
a personal shield generator they were already immortal, for pve and pvp. but the fact that it was possible to gain a complete state
immunity by picking up a known stacker templete with a powerfull fencer weapon as damage dealer those stacker were unbeatable,
even the jedi chancellor / overlords werent able to take them out with a perfect saber.

the biggest problem in my eyes been the weapons. we already had many many weapons. but only a few weapons were really usefull.
to name some :
T21 Rifle
Jawa Ion Rifle
Stun Baton
Power Hammer
Looted Long Vibro Axes
Geonosion Sonic Blaster
as you see not really much to choose of if you want to compete with other players. the main reason why this weapons were the only
usefull weapons was the armor piercing of medium / heavy of the T21 , Power Hammer and Long Vibro Axe and the Stun damage
type of the Jawa Ion Rifle, Stun Baton and Geonosian Sonic Blaster. we were in the need of gettign a weapon revamp to be honest.

and last but not least, the fightclubbing of force ranking xp. this allowed the light jedi to gain a invulneribility to ALL other players
except this stacker template i mentioned some lines above. the dark jedi werent that much of a problem since their force armor still
had a massive force drain and "only" protected them from 78% damage at overlord (light jedi had 78% at rank 9 if im right) but the
damage enhance at master Powers was very insane, but only a few people really played the powers template because it was too weak
unranked / low ranked vs the master Lightsabers with 450+ damage sabers.why was it to weak ? the damage was ok, but the delay
between every hit was 3 seconds, a master lightsaber hitted every second. so the lightsaber user had the higher DPS.

this been the negetave aspects of the pre publish 15 combat system and balancing. the posstive ones will follow abit later, now of to the
post publish 15 combat system and balancing.

with the above explained balancing everyone knew we were in need of a rebalance. this rebalance came form your site abit fast for some
players. we only had 1 month to test it on the test center, i can imagine how hard you worked this months to fix the major issues and i have
much respect for you that you managed to make it in the time you had /tip hat.

the early CU brought all of us a big suprise, you change the whole combat system, that made swg almost a new game. only the gfx was left
from preCU after using some respecs and getting used to the new system i have to say that its really awesome for the pve aspect of the game.
you managed to bring us a balance between all ranked profession and melee profession. the only thing we need are some new melee weapons
enhancer with similar stats to the power cells and reinforced casings (-SAC is most important). the first thing that i found out by playing the CU
was thefact that you added and focused on the combat levels. this makes the game my exciting and funny to play. the group play is improtant to
be able to success the dungeons now. with adding roots and snares you truly gave us chance to control our high level enemys. the removing of
armor piercing and balancing of the damage from master level weapons made all profession more valid. the hard caps for weapons in damage
and SAC also makes it posible to gain a good weapon for the players with not so much time. the work you did and still doing on the jedi profession
us actually a good thing, since jedi becomes more and more a normal class. the recent changes on squad leader makes the group pve even better.
now we just have to wait for the new ranger enhancements and we have an actual use of every combat profession for pve. oh and btw. the commando
specials you added dont work. when you are master commando and want to use adv. dead bang shot it only uses the simple attack, not the
improved / advanced but i think a fix is on the way. the last expansion rage of the wookies was a good addition to swg even when i didnt play on
the planet that much.and the new trials of obi wan are really really awesome, i really enjoyed the beta testing. you made a very good job in designing
the planet and the new quest. the rewards are aswell very cool and what i like most , you added many dungeons / instances with needs group play.

i have to say you guys and girls did a very great job in balancing the pve and giving us new quests and content.but one thing you left out, sadly.
the pvp in the current Combat rebalance is too slow and too fast in some cases. i will explain why :

the pvp everyone liked, everyone was used to and everyone loved was fast paced with a awesome combat queue and 3 hitable bars.

now we have only 1 hit bar (health) with 3000 base health as a human.
we dont hit every second anymore. fully speed buffed with doctor adrenalin buff and mushroom pie i hit every 2 second with the same attack
and every second when i use 2 attack to combine them i.E headit - leghit - head hit etc.
so fully buffed it gives us a bit feeling of pre publish 15 but the base hits we gain are so hight that we die in 3 hits, with the new squad leader
enhancment in 2 hits. we have no visible combat queue anymore, and only 1 attack is able to be in queue now.
we can see the possive buffs of our opponents whice is really bad for pvp. since you added snares and roots to the game the pvp became more
slow aswell and is dominated by "ganking" in most situation. the main thing we do now is pointing one target out, root it and go on it with 3-4 people
to get him down in 2 seconds because everyone of us hits for 500-1000dmg in pvp now this *4 on a 3000 health bar and you know how fast he dies.
by removing the posture change and dizzy + knockdown you also removed our ability to control a fight. the mind cost for heals and action cost for
specials slows the pvp down aswell.i remeber that one of you devs stated that the pvp will be fast, well you slowed down the combat speed and in order
to make it "fast" again you removed the pvp damage reduction to let us hit more harder, in my opinion.

so the question is how can we work on it. as you may have reconized the calls for "preCU" getting louder and louder, but sadly in not so fine way, flaming
to you guys in all aspects. but you have to understand this people in some way, many of them played this game for over 1 and a half year and then you bring
us a complete new combat system with major changes in all aspects.

please keep reading

most of the people that "cry" for preCU server are pvpers. nearly all pvp player i know of wants it back aswell.
i may have a way to stop this, and make both sides happy. the pve and pvp people.

you could try to setup 2 or 3 complete new servers with a file backup of publish 14 and only do some minor fixes to it. i will go into this in a few seconds.
with setting up a complete new server everyone who wants to play on it would have to start at 0 without jedi, this servers would have no jedi for atleast 18 week.
you may think now "hey this guy thinks it so easy" well yes i think so but only because noone told me yet how complex swg is. i know that swg has to have a really
complex database whice might be the problem. but by setting up 2-3 server you might be able to use a old cleared database for the servers. for the client site there
should be no problem since we still ahve all files from publish 1 to 14 in our folders. untouched so the old system must be still on our HDDs.

*this should be solved now, it IS possible to set up new server with old system, why ? you devs were able to setup 4 server with a new system(NGE)
so dont tell us again its not possible*

setting up 2-3 server isnt all. if you decided to do so you should set them as pvp only servers with restriction. no expansion support (except jtl) and no new
development support. only csr support. aswell as a extra fee of 5 or 10 dollars a month to cover the extra cost for you. and make it that you have to enable
the pvp server on your account by ordering a "pvp" package ,could be added to the subscription as an extra option. so you pay the normal 13dollar a month
for the game + 5-10 dollar for the pvp server access.

well now to the settings of the server. it should have all patches upto version 0.119880.
the only way to be a non pvp target will be to be a neutral / civillian.
going rebel or imperial will set you directly at special force with no chance to go combatant or on leave.
factinal bases will be only placeable in player cities with a limit of 3 bases per city and 30 bases per planet.
when you got killed by an enemy of the opposite faction and clone you will be unattackable for enemys for 10 minuts (to avoid griefing)

now to the game fixes / enhancements

general combat and balance

-remove DoTs from all weapons (looted / crafted)
-remove the spider venom loot from the geonisian cave (fire spider)
-remove the 80%crafting for for armor
-remove the 90%slicing cap for armor
-add a 50% crafting cap to all armors
-add a 65% slicing cap to all armor (28% effect slice)
-add mind healing to stim packs
-make warcry break on damage taken
-raise the minimum damage of the laser carbine
-add heavy armor piercing the to elite carbine and raise the max damage a little bit
-raise the minimun damage of the laser rifle
-add medium armor piercing to the de-10 pistol
-add blaster fists to the game
-add light armor piercing to blaster fists
-set the blaster fists damage 60-170
-add medium armor piercing to the curved sword
-add heavy armor piercing the the vibro lance
-add light armor piercing to the fwg5 pistol
-set the state immunity to 125
-increase accuracy of all ranged profession
-add a hard cap for doctor buffs to 2500 for 3hours.

profession armorsmith

-tantel ,ubese and padded segments will now take 3 layers.

profession jedi

-decreased the lightsaber block of a master lightsaber to +25
-added +60 lightsaber block to the force ranking system, you gain abit block each rank.

Force ranking system

-added +60 lightsaber block to the ranks
-added a bonus to force regeneration to light jedi robes
-added a bonus to force power max to dark jedi robes
-Bounty hunter will only drop FRS xp with mission
-Padawan will no longer drop FRS xp

all other stuff should remain as it was with the old combat system.
if you decided to do this i would happiely sign up for a test period or maybe get up 30-60 choosen people to test it
15-30 imps - 15-30 rebs. i think it would take us 3-4 weeks to get this rolling when you have a server up and some devs to help
us fixing this, and after that testing period it can go live and we would only need csr support and the technicans who keep
the servers up.

i hope this text gets forwarded to the devs and might get more than a raising eyebrow. i have much respec for the work
you did on swg, but the pvp community is very big aswell and would like to get a cool holdable system.

thank you for reading
maker , german player since nov.03