Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: Some say its not a bug.. who do you think is right?
Typical wild CL10 - Around 900-1100 HAM, no resists or one or two very low ones (10-15%), one single special of low-moderate capability (stun, blind etc), rarely ranged attack.
Your example kaadu - 7x effective HAM (including resists), don't know on specials but would assume they have at least one as good as the wild above, similar damage output.
Not trying to say anything bad about you at all, but I think anyone being honest with themselves would agree that something that is 7x as effective as a wild pet in its primary role (tanking) and at least as effective in its secondary role (dealing damage) is not working as intended. I have no idea how the devs are going to fix existing pets, but unless they do their entire combat revamp is going to be utterly pointless. It is obvious to me that whatever CL calculation they are using is fundamentally broken (and probably still based on damage dealing, not tanking). What is both incredible and no shock at all (at the same time) is that their internal QA process didn't show that such creatures were possible in the base mathematics of the clone system, which to me underlines the continued ineptitude of the internal testers. It also indicates that the programmers continue to either be completely out of sync with the realities of the game (that tanking is far far more important than damage) or that they are aware of this and just don't have the ability to make a CL formula that reflects the true value of a pet.
Im a nonCH, nonBE that just got a lvl 8 kusak with 7k He, 5k Ac and 3.8k Mi with stunning strike for 40k..and eventhough it does just 50-70 damage, I was shocked to see a creature of this ham size to be made available to me..dont get me wrong i love it..but it is wrong. If they keep allowing BE's to make creatures this large..the amount of CH's will drop and people like me will have no use for them except to train the creature making CH's now C Trainers.
But since BE's are geneticalIyengineering creatures, Ithink BE's should be able to make creatures better then what the wild creature is for that level but not amazingly better. Maybethey cankinda steal from the slicer...have BE's improve up to 40% of the wild version. So since my 3200k ham cowardlygot turned into a 900 ham minor sludge..a BE could engineer a minor sludgeto be up to 1260, or the damage could be improved while the ham stays at 900. Solike slicers slicing weapons for either speed or damage, the BE could improve either HAM or damage, and then either armor or special attack. That way BE creatures would havegood value but still wouldn't infringe on CH's ability..and they could still have value to a ch..since they can make better animals.
Also, 2 things id like them to do with BE..1st is to allow a BE to control any one of theyre creations even if they aren't a ch, and 2nd... a BE should be able to 'repair' a pets max vitality (one they created) back to 100.
"i feel it's a bug, and i won't sell my customers anything that is in the sights for a fix."
First, as to the subject of the thread, they will eventually remove the ability of Bio Engineers to make these pets. Which is a shame considering how long the profession was nerfed. Try making $1M credits in a month as a BE prior to the patch. Now, you can make it in a week if not a day.
Second, here's my theory as to why they will not "nerf" pre-existing BE pets.
Creatures in this game are a class of object. For a given class (let's say a Graul for arguments sake), all Grauls in the galaxy, and in all galaxies for that matter, are identical. They all have the samearmor, resists, attacks, speed, etc. They arenot a player crafted item and they are not permanently stored anywhere in a database. For the developers to do a balance pass on creatures, all they have to do is update N records in the Galaxies databse where N = the number of unique creature types. For Pikets, they'd modify males, females, plainswalkers and the fierce protectors, for example. So, were talking about a thousand records (?) or so. If it's an object oriented design where the base class (piket) has certain stats that are modified by subclasses (male, female, etc.), it would even be fewer records.
In contrast, player crafted pets are player crafted items. Assuming there are 300,000 subscribers and each has only 1 character (a very conservative assumption) and further assuming that each player has exactly 20 player crafted items in their posession, there are 6 million player crafted items in existence. This figure is to illustrate a point -- the number in reality is much higher. The level of effort required to sort through all of the crafted items, identify which items are actually BE pets and not CDEF pistolsand then further identify and set aside the records that correspond to pets matching a profile (is a CL11 pet with 8k HAM ok? CL12? and so on) would be difficult (assumes elegant, well designed database) to impossible(assumes spagetti database)depending on the database schema. Not only that,but assuming some brilliant programmer at SOE wrote the SQL script that would do all that work, the actual execution of the script would have to occur on a production database while it was live, unless SOE wants to piss off the entire user community by taking down the database (and galaxies) for an extended period. And, just for kicks, let's contemplate the potential damage that script could do if the brilliant programmer overlooked a minor detail. Would you cancel your account if you logged on and your pets were nerfed and your FWG5 pistols were now Wooden Staves? SOE is just not equipped from a customer service perspective to handle that if it went badly. One of the things they care most about is your money and I'll wager they won't take the financial risk .
By comparison, nerfing the ability of a BE to make CL10 Kaadus with 10k HAM by changing the game mechanics is both easy and low risk. And that's what you'll see.
Moral of the story is: If you don't want to create powerful CL10BE pets because you think they unbalance the game, don't make them. But, if you aren't making them because you are afraid you'll be selling an item that will blow up later, rethink things. After the run that the BE's have had on this server since the beginning, I for one would like to see them continue to be able to make game-influencing, high-dollar items. It's about time you guys got the love. If it were me, I'd make as many of these as I could, sell enough of them so I could afford what I wanted in the game, and stash twice that number away for the future.
Cheers-
Addressing the why the won't nerf existing ones:
Old baby-DNA pets that have persisted in people's datapads started returning "Invalid Stats" when trying to be summoned after this last publish. It would probably be incredibly easy for them to apply the same filters to a CL. One stat out of whack with the CL = "Invalid". What those parameters would be I don't know. With the baby-DNA creatuers it was the 3k damage (Trivially high for a baby-DNA clone) on my gurreck that makes it "Invalid" despite having an Attack of around 13.5
If they want to purge the system of the mistakes that is just one apparently easy means they have of doing it.
Sumorex,
I've read many of your posts and highlly respect your opinion.
You raise an interesting point - perhaps we will see a brute force tactic applied to the playerCallPet() method like
if CL <= 10 AND (petHeath > 2000 OR petAction > 2000 OR petMind >2000)
call petCLImbalance()
elseif CL <= 11 AND (petHealth > 2500 OR...
We shall see. They haven't gone back and nerfed player crafted items in the past (T21s, Pistols, etc.) in favor of letting them decay and fade out of existence, and I think that will hold true here.
Cheers-
And, besides, Talthazar confirmed with the devs that it is a known bug that they are working on. Look for all of these creatures to be reduced to normal stats, just like they did when we used to get massive dna from sampling our own clones at launch.
In the meantime the people using the bug are putting the BEs that play by the rules out of business.
Nemthang,
First LOL thats greek to me.... been soooooo long since i done that stuff.
But they have altered a good bit of stuff in the past. BabyDNA pets, Medium Armor pets, Probots. You're right though they didn't alter FWG5's (etc) but those have an incredibly high decay rate compared to pets. I've yet to have a single pet permanently lose stats from decay, though I don't PvP much so I don't get griefed with repeated incaps.
I think its important to remember these are apparently two very different types of items. Datapad entries lose their serial numbers don't they? I can't recall seeing a serial number on a pet once it leaves deed form. FWG5's retain their serial number. Kinda like there are Datapad Items and there are Inventory Items. I'll have to check when I log on tonight to see if I can find a serial number to anything in my datapad... I could very well be wrong 
just going off memory, which we all know is quite falliable.
Scorus,
The point you miss is that when they nerfed the creaturesbefore (not pets, but creatures were nerfed - the pets just happened to be creatures that were pets), they were nerfing a class of objects in the game, not individually evaluating and modifiying millions of items.
And Sumo, visible serial number or not, they are all a unique item. Otherwise, how would the game know that your kaadu has 8832 health and mine only has 8816?
It will be interesting to see what unfolds in Austin.
Nemthang wrote:
Scorus,
The point you miss is that when they nerfed the creaturesbefore (not pets, but creatures were nerfed - the pets just happened to be creatures that were pets), they were nerfing a class of objects in the game, not individually evaluating and modifiying millions of items.
And Sumo, visible serial number or not, they are all a unique item. Otherwise, how would the game know that your kaadu has 8832 health and mine only has 8816?
It will be interesting to see what unfolds in Austin.
All pets need to be called. It wouldn't be that hard for them to tie the "pet adjustment" into the call command.
The servercould then check the creature's stats and abilities and map it back to a CL range. If the CL is too low, they'd probably just raise the CL. That'd be easier than adjusting the stats and abilities downward.
Benechi
I see several Bio Engineers saying to their customers not to worry about these pets. "The Dev's won't nerf exsisting pets".
Did you not notice what they did last patch? They changed all the pets, even tamed ones. Even the pets selling for millions of credits, like Webmasters. If they took away those Medium armored pets for balance, I'm sure they won't have a problem adjusting the level of these beastsfor balance.
Nemthang wrote:
Scorus,
The point you miss is that when they nerfed the creaturesbefore (not pets, but creatures were nerfed - the pets just happened to be creatures that were pets), they were nerfing a class of objects in the game, not individually evaluating and modifiying millions of items.
And Sumo, visible serial number or not, they are all a unique item. Otherwise, how would the game know that your kaadu has 8832 health and mine only has 8816?
It will be interesting to see what unfolds in Austin.
I am going to have to go with Sumo and Scorus on this one and think that the most likely re-course will be to affect all pets.Yes, they are 'unique' objects but that doesn't stop a very simple across the board check to either adjust stats (very unlikely) or re-evaluate CL based on a new formula. Weapons were not nerfed simply because of the rate at which they decay and exit the world naturally, it just hasn't been worth the programming time to eliminate broken ones. Pets however, lasta great deal longer, months at least unless the owner is completely frivolous with them and allowing them to continue will undermine all the balancing they are trying to do in the next few months.
They may not of course, which will not only make the next set of changes virtually impossible to fairly balance in any reasonable time, but also undermine the proposed re-vamp of DE droids which will be more tightly controlled and, therefore, almost certainly significantly weaker than current low level BE creations.
I think people should stop saying the words bug and exploit to describe this situation.I think there is a difference between a bug and just a system that isn't perfected.A bug is when something is glitchy,like when you can't log into the bazaar. I think the code is working properly as far as the computer is concerned. I mean,you put dna in and the program does what it's told.It does what it is programmed to,it doesn't know what players or the devs think is acceptable or unacceptable for HAM and resists and levels.
I am not saying the devs intended these cl2 10k ham pets, just that a bug would mean they knew about it and coded it so it wouldn't be so, and there is a glitch making them still come out this way. I think it is more something that they overlooked in programming,they overlooked a part of the new be system code that would let these pets be made.
So,if they change it, they will have to add or re-adjust the code,fixing what they overlooked.
So the question I feel should be more like "Do you think non-ch pets with these statsare fair and/or balanced?" or "Do you think these were intended?"
The idea of calling people who make or use these pets exploiters is absurd.The notion that there is some moral obligation to not make or use them is more absurd. I havn't made a cl pet with more than 4k to ham with crappy resists like 10%,I will never make a cl2 10k 45 resist pet, but I have no right to judge anyone who does,and really don't care how others play.
To the original question ,then ,I don't think it is a bug, but then it's true the devs wouldn't give players anything too good,so it is almost certainly not what they were expecting in the patch.But that's why I don't think it's a bug, becuase everything is working as they wrote it, maybe not what they "intended"
But come on people, every other profession got to ENJOY it's "bugs" before they were taken away!
We are like the guy who was whipping himself in the book,"the Scarlet Letter"