Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: The Bio-engineering Trade Act of December 29th, 2003 (a suggestion)
Tal-N,
So what do CH's tell return customers asking for armored rock beetles at CL13? Were they supposed to have some kind of trade act where they would only trade say Cu Pa's?
How do weaponsmithes deal with returning customers asking about FWG5's. Should they have anticipated nerf and refused to sell any just to avoid future customer expectations?
This is just a game which rules are defined by malleable code, which is poorly documented. Play the game as it is. It is just a game, with no issues of conscience etc. Someone wants an uber pet, and you want to do it for the price they offer, do it, and don't look back. Make the best you can and dont worry about it. It will be nerfed in time if it is imbalancing.
How are you sure 6k HAM cl10 durnis are not the design? Did some dev actually respond to you?
It seems a bit twisted to me if you feel guilty about not nerfing yourself ahead of schedule for something that may or may not be nerfed. This is a complete non issue. You know any exploit gets nerfed on the hotfix schedule. Wait a week or 2 and it will go away if it matters, but don't get in any moral dilemna over it.
Let your hair down. Walk on the wild side and be a bad boy and make a 6K durni for a game. I am pretty sure you wont go to the land of sulfur and fire for doing it. Its not a matter of conscience, it is a matter of coping with a buggy product you pay $15/month for. If it really bugs you, head to a confessional and say 'Forgive me father for I have sinned, I made a 6k durni for a non creature handler'. We are all passing through this life once, and a little fun in a game is no harm. A little Guiness wouldnt hurt either.
Tal-Nwrote:
There is only one group of people who have the authority to say what is fair, it's the developers. They make the game, they have the design briefs for what should and shouldn't be possible. Who designed the mobs in the game? the devs. So what should we use as a baseline for what is fair? The mobs obviously.
It's simple logic and personally I sit on the side of the devs with this one along with people like Sumo and Arthur. Disagree with us and you disagree with the developers as well. Who makes the changes to the game though in the end?
Sorry, new to BE and I'm just starting todigest all of the content here. Not trying to be rude or call you on the carpet, but it would help me if you couldplease provide a link to a definitive answer from a Developer or THin regards to your claims above? Unfortunately, from my past experiences (Master Pistoleer, Master Creature Handler) these are few and far between. If it is in fact true, I'll be offering a similar pledge tomy customers as I did to my customers when I was a Master CH:
When the patch comes down and my creatures no longer perform as advertised, please come back to me and I will, to the best of my ability, replace it with the best replacement I can. Considering the extended beta of this game and the continuous nerfage and patching that goes on, it is hard to say what the future ever looks like in SWG. The Devs have gotten better (/tiphat to TH) but the process is still mercurial at best.
LokSG wrote:
This is just a game which rules are defined by malleable code, which is poorly documented. Play the game as it is. It is just a game, with no issues of conscience etc. Someone wants an uber pet, and you want to do it for the price they offer, do it, and don't look back. Make the best you can and dont worry about it. It will be nerfed in time if it is imbalancing.
Hmm.. it's just a game.. so we should take advantage of every exploit we can find? Dupe credits? Steal from other players (they aren't real, after all!)? How far should we go with this "it's just a game" mentality?
I'm an honest decent person in real life, and when I play online games I act in an honest and decent manner. I will use money cheats all day long in single player games (although it does tend to take the fun out of it), but I won't cheat in an online game. I also run my SWG business in a fair and honest way. When we were unsure about the total bonus allowed by BE clothing, I told *every* customer who asked that the rumor was that it was +25. I didn't try to sell them items totalling +150 just to pad my own pocket.
What I find really interesting about this whole issue is the lengths to which people will go to justify their actions. It's mind boggling, really. If you just care about padding your bank account no matter what, then at leastbe honest about it. This whole "oh but the devs haven't TOLD us we aren't supposed to make 10K ham non-CH pets" argument is just so ridiculous.You are just choosing to ignore the whole reasonbehind the changes to the CH tree and non-CH pets just because it's convenient.
I just hope people selling these pets will refund their customer's money when the fix goes in. It's the fair and honest thing to do.. even if this is only just a game.
Ri'a
gen_x_jedi wrote:
When the patch comes down and my creatures no longer perform as advertised, please come back to me and I will, to the best of my ability, replace it with the best replacement I can.
So, let'ssayyou sell a CL 10 critter with 10K ham, 50% resists, high damage, etc. for 500,000 credits (I've seen them sell for millions, but we'll use this number). Then, the fix goes in, and the pet can no longer be called.
At the same time, cloning is fixed. The best pet you can provide the customer with is say.. 3-4K ham, damage similar to wild CL 10 critters, andminimal resists. You'll just hand your customer that pet, and say "sorry, this is the best I can do"?
Or would you refund the money, or at least the difference? That seems like the more fair thing to do, because a post fix CL10 pet will not come any where near the ones being produced today.
Ri'a
Tal-N wrote:
Yeah, now here's what I mean. Take a look at the damage there. 70-75. That is fairly typical for a CL8 critter isn't it and that is where we're starting to see the problems. Resistances are being totally ignored, we know that for a fact. If you took rancor dna and did enough inbreeding you'd find the resistances being exactly the same. So thats a sizable chunk of what makes the pet 'tough' being ignored. Secondly you have the HAM, clearly playing some of the role because it's reduced a bit with each generation. However your seeing stats which are exagerated because of experimentation. Indeed when you look at the action and mind pools for that clone they're what you'd expect really, if you didn't experiment on that clone you'd end up with typical results.
This just goes to show that it's not simply inbreeding causing this, it's a flaw with the calculations. If they prevent us from sampling our clones we'll still be able to get stuff like this.
But ultimately we come down to the same basic point. Is this fair? Is this balanced? That is such an abstract topic that your going to have some people saying yes. Some saying no. Some saying a bit. Some saying they dunno. But who is the authority on what is fair for the game? Me? You? Your pet cat? There is only one group of people who have the authority to say what is fair, it's the developers. They make the game, they have the design briefs for what should nad shouldn't be possible. Who designed the mobs in the game? the devs. So what should we use as a baseline for what is fair? The mobs obviously.
It's simple logic and personally I sit on the side of the devs with this one along with people like Sumo and Arthur. Disagree with us and you disagree with the developers as well. Who makes the changes to the game though in the end?
While you do make some compelling points, Tal, I gotta say that you have reached new heights of arrogence claiming that to disagree with your point of view is to disagree with the devs. Frankly, unless you have some secret link to the devs that we don't know about, you do not in fact know the devs' opinions on any matter. To claim that you do makes you look like a pompous so-and-so.
I can understand why you would want to avoid creating pets that may get nerfed in the end, but I think that it is intellectually irresponsible to not push the envelope and see how far we can take creature clones at all levels. Like it or not, *we* are the testers for this system. We all knew that we would be. It would have been much better if we had been able to find out about this on TC, but that was not possible, so we deal with the issues as they arrise.
I don't know if it is just my own personal mind-set, but I find it more irresponsible to make a crappy pet than a good one. I always try to do the best I can. I have not personally sold any pets yet because I have not yet made one that is "good enough" to sell, but I saw a kimogila (minimum cl 40, right?) at the coronet starport last night that was 6.5k average HAM, and crappy resists. It belonged to a 12 year old kid (not speculation... I get tells from this kid all the time, and I only put up with it because of his age).
Some less than scrupulous BE took advantage of a kid that wanted a kimogila, and sold him crap. Personally, I think think this sort of thing is going to be more damaging to the profession in the end than selling pets that may (no, probably *will*) be nerffed at some undetermined point down the road.
My own personal standpoint is this: I will make the best pet I can at any level. I will be proud of the hard work that I have put into making them, knowing that I am giving my customers the best I possibly can. I will be very clear with my customers, making sure that they realize that nothing in this game is set in stone, and like anything else, their pets may be nerffed further down the road. If they still want to buy, I will charge a fair price for the time that I invested making their pet.
And no, I will not encumber my make believe playtime with real world morality. I have a little bit too much seperation between reality and fantasy for that.
AnitaSWG, the most I have sold any pet for is 40k. If I actually make 500k off apet I'll reconsider, but I think the players whose BE pet gets nerfed will have someone more deserving of their scorn than me:
Half-a$$ed developers who allow this stuff to get to live in the first place.**edit** straight if I pulled this kind of crap at my job I'd be out the door in seconds. Why shouldn't I hold developers to a similar standard? Oops, I'm sorry Mr. Investor, the gains I made on that investment were made using an exploit of the trading system used on the NYSE... hmmmm... seems the SEC kind of frowns on that sort of thing... so I'm going to take your money back and set things to how they should have been. NOT! The many investment firms that have been hit recently with SEC findings*eat* the fines, not pass them on to the investors. I say that if you bought a 500k pet off me and Sony nerfed it, *they* should refund you the **edit** money for supplying a substandard product, not me, the investor. (Sorry for the above reference being a little archane, used one from my own industry...)
Shame on them, not me for working within a system they provided with nearly ZERO documentation.
Being a fair person I would of course refund a portion of the purchase price for any pet that got nerfed. I'll have to ponder what the exact methodology will be. Prolly a pro-rated portion based on a 6-month lifespan of the pet.
OK. I surfed a whole lot more than I should have here at work and found the link to the CL5 Gurrcat that Tal-N made. Dear god... now I understand. My little FrankenDurni is nothing compared to that beast.
/sign
I'll try to work within the limits of the system to create pets that are reasonable monstrosities, not insane ones like that Gurrcat. I think if I stick to mainly first generational DNA I'll be fine, which is why my CL8 durni looks reasonable.
In any case, anyone intelligent would agree there are some things that are broken and need fixed. I do like the new system, its very fun. I like that we can mix and match things to make unique creatures. I don't like how much power we can condense into lower CL creatures however.
Anyways irregardless of any arguments or views we have here, in the end changes will come and it will be the developers that do it. I am 100% for game balance and being fair to the game. The new system is nice, but it does need some fixes and tweaking for sure.
What more useless. Having a pet or not having a pet?
As long as the clones have a decent benefit over the wild ones were in bussiness. Even if we end up with CL10 pets that have 10% resistance to a handful of damage types at the most it's far better than the wild ones. The people who don't think so are simply expecting too much so they won't bother. They'll quickly change their mind when their friend who does have a pet starts kicking ass easier than they do.
Haven't been working much on multi-generational DNA sampling, so I really can't say how much that affects things, but I think this is from 2/5 Sharnaff DNA (Physique and Prowess)and 3/5 Gurrcat DNAthat was all first generation and was created with 7 experimentation points maxing out Physique at 41%, I think:
Durni CL8
HAM: 5093/2437/2904
Armor: None
Resists: 10% across the boards except vul to Stun
Speed/Hit/Damage: 1.99 / 0.24 / 70-75 (DPS: 8.7)
Special Attacks: Null and Stunning Strike
Ranged: No
Since this creature was created to be a CL10 tank, its HAM total is 10,434 for an average of 3,478. According to the above calculations, this is supposed to be approximately a CL14 (interpolating a bit). I think the calculation of CL for these purposesmust take into account average resists, DPS and special attacks as well. I created a CL10 Angler and a CL10 Swirl Prong that have 8k health as well(I don't have the stats with me at work), butthey do minimal damage, have minimal resists and usually only have zero or 1 special attack that is not powerful (Dizzy, stun, crippling, etc).
Being new to the BE field (since the patch), I can't really argue either way, but I find the above creatures to be reasonable within the CL system. They are built for a single purpose and if used for that purpose function well, but if you use them in another way they are crap.