Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: TH This is just a slap in the face
There is no assumption. The patch notes were WELL DOCUMENTED in that they stated that they reduced the power of nonCH pets to CL10 becasue wild CL15 pets were too powerfull for nonCH characters plus they reduced the power of pets made available to the CH dabblers. No one in their right mind really believed that they would leave such an obvious hole inthe systemto allow BE's the abiity make make CL10 pets not only as powerfull as the wild CL15 pets were before but even three times more powerfull.
The word exploit gets misused a lot. Just creating one of these creatures using bugged DNA was not an exploit. It was discovery of a bug, Making 5 or 6 or 10 of them to test how the system works was good investigation of the bug. I made quite a few copies myself and had trusted associates put them in theri datapad so that I would be able to test the effectiveness of the nerf I knew was incoming.Tal-N was industrious enough in his expermentation to track it down to the DNA of ANY creature that had all of its resists in effectiveness with no special protections. That being said, those BEs who read this in the forum or discovered it for themselves and proceeded to go into mass production of these creatures were the ones that decided to exploit the bug knowing full well something about these pets was not right. It was the rampant spread of these exploited pets that led to the nerf. It HAD to be nerfed when you had people blatantly auctioning these things off for 500k or more in the forums.
DataOutlaw wrote:There is no assumption. The patch notes were WELL DOCUMENTED in that they stated that they reduced the power of nonCH pets to CL10 becasue wild CL15 pets were too powerfull for nonCH characters plus they reduced the power of pets made available to the CH dabblers. No one in their right mind really believed that they would leave such an obvious hole inthe system to allow BE's the abiity make make CL10 pets not only as powerfull as the wild CL15 pets were before but even three times more powerfull.
They left it thru QA. They left it thru the TC. Don't be blaming the BE for the DEV short sightedness. Seems the coders dont even read their own patch notes. Why would we be expected to?
-Indene-
"Don't be blaming the BE for the DEV short sightedness"
I am not blaming the BE exploiters for the devs short sightedness at all. I completely agree that the patch was rushed, it was not complete, and did not receive sufficient QA. It certianly was not documented properly. But that is par for the course and, by now, should be expected.
However, every man must be responsible for his own actions. One can not use the shortfalls of another to excuse his own actions. BE's who started cranking out these bugged pets were exploiting the system. Whether they considered it a bug or not they knew the end result was not the intention of the system and was, in fact, so far out of wack that it could not be the intended use of the system. It is these BE's who I hold responsible for forcing the devs to come down with yesterdays hotfix that has left crafting any pet under CL30 a big mystery until they have a chance to fix it correctly in the next publish. If the entire BE community ackowledged this was a bug and avoided using DNA with effectiveness resists until it was fixed there would never have been any need for a hotfix.
But then again, I think they should not have put in a flat limitation on things, they should have made it based on the Levels of the Bio-Engineer's Engineering skill.
So that a Master might just be able to make these super power low level creatures.
But then again this would have been caught and noticed if say a Box was placed on the Crafting pad when the template is being constructed that tells the approximate or average level of the creature that will be built.
And if it had been there as people put the DNA in to tell them what they where getting then I suspect this issue would have never been an issue in the first place.
As the problem would have been caught right off the bat.
By the way....Cloning Vats and a Level Display...Thats all thats needed, and I know the problems would disapear faster.
Just as Cloning VATs would make the entire DNA holding of ten-trillion DNA items another NON-Issue, as a Failed creature or any creature could be enhanced or changed if people wanted to take the time to do so.
Plageron wrote:
Actually I feel bad for the development team.
But then again, I think they should not have put in a flat limitation on things, they should have made it based on the Levels of the Bio-Engineer's Engineering skill.
So that a Master might just be able to make these super power low level creatures.
But then again this would have been caught and noticed if say a Box was placed on the Crafting pad when the template is being constructed that tells the approximate or average level of the creature that will be built.
And if it had been there as people put the DNA in to tell them what they where getting then I suspect this issue would have never been an issue in the first place.
As the problem would have been caught right off the bat.
By the way....Cloning Vats and a Level Display...Thats all thats needed, and I know the problems would disapear faster.
The problem here is that even created by MBE superpets would undermine the entire justification for the December creature nerf.
CHs were told in August that eventually armor on everything below CL 30 (and that was revised upward to CL 40) was not keeping with the combat concept.
If a BE can put light armor on aCL 35 critter, this contradicts the stated purpose of the nerf...phase 1 of a 4 phase revamping of the entire combat system.
From my perspective, the devs are in a panic now.
The BE dev is working cross purposes with the combat devs. This much is clear, and they've got to backtrack, fast. No one is coordinating the development team, best I can tell.
The fact that they threw the new BE system into the players' laps without any idea of what its limitations were indicates to me that even they have no idea what this was supposed to do.
Now they're faced with this very serious, game breaking contradiction. Non-CH uberpets that are superior to pre-nerf CL 30 critters. Directly undermining the entire stated purpose of reducing the call level of non-CHs from 15 to 10.
They panic, toss in a hot fix, and discover that it was overly broad and broke far more than they intended it to.
Again.
There cannot be happy people in Austin right now. Not at SWG central at least.
They KNOW they have screwed the kusak on this, and TH's desperate attempt to shift blame away from those responsible is corporate PR flackdom in the classic sense.
DataOutlaw wrote:
they knew the end result was not the intention of the system and was, in fact, so far out of wack that it could not be the intended use of the system.
The pets were not that out of whack. If you were allowed to wear armor that gave you 60% resist to kinetic, but forced you to only use cdef weapons and never use a special, that would be the equivilent of these pets. There was no indication by our player rep or the development teamthat we should stop making them. There was no warning that half my pets would become uncallable - not just the level ten pets, but many in their teens and twenties also.
When they decided to do such a horrible patch, why didn't they take the extra effort needed to keep this from turning into a catastrophe. There are numerous ways they could have done it. They could have simply offered NPCs who would adjust a player's bugged pet to acceptable levels. But what they did shortsighted and a horrible approach to a problem they created.
I don't know who makes the decisions for this game's development, but in my line of work, he would already have put us out of business. Go troll elsewhere DataOutlaw. Us Bio Engineers are not going to accept responsibility for the manufafturer's screw up!
But you know, somethings are simply to intelligent for some people to figure out.
DataOutlaw wrote:
However, every man must be responsible for his own actions.
Very well put. I use a similar quote with my kids all the time. I do not defend the people who purposely cranked out the uber non-CH pets.
However, you must admit that on the CH pets (Say, CL 25+) , we still have nodocumentation where the line is. We're supposed to be able to make pets better than wild ones. But, how good is too good? We have no idea how HAM, resists, attack speed, damage, specials, armor etc are all weighted to equal a value or a valid CL range on the finished clones.
Benechi
Plageron wrote:
Well all i can say is a Level Box and Cloning Vat would have made it possible for them to fix these issues and caught them alot faster.
But you know, somethings are simply to intelligent for some people to figure out.
Plageron,
You may be right. But then again, such a system would probably let BEs know too much about their own profession. I get the distinct impression that the BE dev isn't quite sure what the changes really mean.
That's why there's a panic on. This change was introduced without thorough testing, and now BEs and their customers are paying the price forthe lack of vision by the developers.
You meant the November patch notes that had this to say about it?:
"Non-creature handlers cannot call pets of a higher level than 10, down from 15."
You call that "well documented"??! I'd call it "mentioned in passing"....
DataOutlaw wrote:
There is no assumption. The patch notes were WELL DOCUMENTED in that they stated that they reduced the power of nonCH pets to CL10 becasue wild CL15 pets were too powerfull for
*snip*
meroc wrote:You meant the November patch notes that had this to say about it?:
"Non-creature handlers cannot call pets of a higher level than 10, down from 15."
You call that "well documented"??! I'd call it "mentioned in passing"....
DataOutlaw wrote:There is no assumption. The patch notes were WELL DOCUMENTED in that they stated that they reduced the power of nonCH pets to CL10 becasue wild CL15 pets were too powerfull for
*snip*
I also notice that there is no comment about any relation between ham, resists, CL.
That statement as stated does not tell me that I should expect a CL10 pet with xk ham to be invalid.
-Indene-