Architect Archive

I am very glad that we have Zarcath to be our correspondent to the developers. I have read all of Zarcath's posts and I find them to be detailed and well thought out. But I personally think that a weekly list of suggestions is too frequent. I am a software developer and ifmy customers were to hand me 5 new requests a week I think I would cry or quickly go insane. There is no way the developers in my company could keep up with that kind of demand. And I don't believe the developers at SOE could either. I also don't believe they intend to. Not that they intend to ingnore us but rather to take some of the best ideas.The problem with this is that we need some feed back to tell us which ideas are going to be worked on.

We weekly come up with 5 ideas that we think SOE could do to improve the game. But after several months of submiitting ideas and not seeing those ideas go into development people are going to start to get frustrated. I am not saying that SOE is ignoring us. I just believe there is no way to keep up with those kind of requests. So what I propose is that we take the weekly correspondence to bi-weekly correspondence. I think that if we keep handing in suggestions weekly we are going to start nit picking at the game because we are going to run out of things to suggest. We will eventually end up with things like. "We would like to see the ability to have door bells added to houses so we know when people are at the door". This is silly and doesn't really do anything to improve game play. Something like thiswould happen because the developers can not keep up with the amount of suggestions to the game. What I forsee is that in a month or two the developers might be just getting to what we first prosed in the first week. This will lead to frustration with the people on this board.

I would also like to see some more feedback from the developers. I think it is great to have Zarcath as our voice here. But the voice is useless without ears to hear it. And we will not know that we are being heard unlessa Dev posts back to this board with comments on our ideas. Something telling us what comments are good ideas and what comments are bad ideas. For example. I do not forsee the game designers implementing furniture on balconies. Why you ask? Ever notice that sometimes when you first walk into your house your furniture has not been loaded into the gameyet. Ibelieve this is because of bandwidth and frame rate issues. Thereis no need to load the furniture unless you have to see it because the game has to send you a description of the furniture(what is it, where isit at, what are its attributes, canI pickit up, can I walk though it... and so on). So this would be the scenario iffurniture was on balconies. You would walk intoa playercity, and you would have to wait severalseconds for youcomputer to downloadall the extra information aboutthe furniture, thus affecting bandwidth.Plus while you may not be able to see all of the furniture the game still has to compute whatit needs to draw and what it doesn't need todraw. This takes away from processing power.Say we submit this on friday. But Tuesday or Wednesday of next week we have a Dev respond to oursubmission and tell us whatis possible and what is not. That way every week we don't keep talking about furniture on balconies if it is not going to happen.

The point to all this is that we need to havesome feedback to let us know what ideas to stick with and which ones to drop.And weneed to submit out ideas less often sowe get more quality ideas to submit rather than havingto startto come up with little nit picky things. I knowthis post is all over the place but I hope it makes a little sense.

What really needs to happen is to have the bugs fixed before we add other fun things that don't work.

You can add land speeders till you are 100 but if I can't make the parts to build it, it isn't an enhancement.

Factory Crates... Fix unloading them, make input hoppers use them. Make factories faster than you are.

Schematics.... Fix all the default schematics so we can actually make everything we should. Harvesting Mechanism for example.

Administration/Transfer.... Fix administration of house/factorys and add ability to transfer lots like you can structures ie /transferlot playername

Critical Failures... Nothing wrong here, build new tools people. When I hit a bad string I destroy them all and don't have any failures for a very long time. Always build a new tool for a final assembly and have not failed since starting this proceedure.

Vendors... Fix vendors so all people can remove their items andSo it warns you if you want to take it down with unclaimed items, Fix it so if you remove an item from your own vendor and cross a server boundary you don't lose it until the next reboot.

That's my Architect bug rant!!!

Kailus - Bloodfin

You have made somevalid points, Baldrin.

I believe that Zarcath was asked or directed by the devs to submit 5 top issues weekly. Whether these are used primarily as a 'laundry list' for future development or not, I think Zarcath is only doing what was asked of him.

I have great trepidation and do not really expect to see many of our issues addressed for months. I would rather hope, that our bugs are being addressed first rather than adding more candy to our bag of tricks. If SOE holds true to form, they will indeed address the bugs before we even smell added schematics, etc.

What has me perplexed however, is that no dev has responded to the first two submitted reports, while many other professions have had at least some comments from a dev. As I stated previously in another post, we are not even on their 'radar' to look at as a profession yet for 'fixes'.

Zarcath remarked in another recent post, that he expected to have some news for us from a dev. I'm still waiting on that, but not holding my breathe.

pmub

I am starting up my Architect tree and came to the board to get some pointers. So I will answer for your Correspondent. Indeed SOE requested we send them the top five EACH week.