Bio Engineer Archive
Thread: The new phonebooks are here! The new phonebooks are here! (Cloning)
When did we know that cloning was broke? Middle of beta. How long has it been for them to fix it? About 8 months. Keldarin gets no love from me for taking that long. He was obviously working on something else instead of my profession.
After re-reading the Nov. 7 message, I see no assurance that BE's will be able to make better pets than a CH will be able to tame. WIth the possible exception of the decreasing of the levels. Unless BE's make better pets, there's no reason for a CH to pay for one when he can get it for free in the wild.
What I'm looking for is, "BE's will be able to make pets with higher HAM, customized appearance, and customized attacks that will not be available in the wild." What I'm seeing is "Wild and cloned creatures of a similar level will have comparable stats."
Tal-N wrote:
Good job Keldarin? I think thats much more than he deserves after what we've been through these past 6 months. I'd say good job Tal, about **edit** time Keldarin. Given his track record I'm half expecting this systme to be riddled with bugs even though it's been in development for 3 months by the time it goes live, what with the complete lack of bio-engineers on the TC it's not as if there's going to be a very thorough road test here.
Come on Tal-N, lets be a little fairer about this. Do you think Keldarin sets his own priorities? If his bosses tell him to work on players cities, mounts or whatever instead of BE, is it his fault? Is it his fault that Farmer got changed to BE at the last minute? Is it his fault that the game went live in June before it was fully tested? Is it his fault that there aren't many BEs on TC?
Has he introduced bugs in the publishes? Yes and he's fixed most if not all of them. Has he been less than forthcoming in his communications with us? Yes, butdirect dev communication in the forums is regulated by Q and the others.
All I'm saying is that yes, we have been shafted but I don't consider Keldarin the lead shafter.
Benechi
Do you think Keldarin sets his own priorities?
A programmer actually has a certain amount of leeway in what they can focus in, they can if they want opt for overtime if they are determined to get something done plus they wouldn't be a designer if they didn't have some control over what gets serious attention and what doesn't. But in any case you set a very good point, Keldarin is just doing his job. Why should we thank him for that when he's already paid? If you want to take it a little further you can thank his boss who told him to now pay the BEs some attention, after all he's just a poodle who jumps through hoops for them according to your reasoning.
Tal-N,
Please don't put words in my mouth. I never called Keldarin "a poodle who jumps through hoops for them". He's a programmerwho is working on the projects that are assigned to him. I don't see anything particularly wrong or evil with this.
I guess to get across my POV, I'll use an analogy. Let's say that there's been a huge pothole in the street at the end of your driveway for six months. When the guy finally fills it you can deal with him in several ways...
You can say: About (censored) time, you incompetent (censored).
You can say: Gee thanks man, that hole was a big pain in my butt.
You can say: I was thinking you'd never show up. Your bosses are sure idiots.
You can say nothing. etc...
I guess it all depends on your personal philosophy on treating people. I, for one, don't think that I'd ever give someone a hard time for "refusing to work overtime" on my behalf. I guess we must agree to disagree.
Anyways, I'll quit while I'm behind. Defending Keldarin on the forums here is a bad idea. Besides, I'm a coder myself. So I'm probably biased.
Benechi
It's more than just a case of him taking a long time to deal with this situation, it's also the fact we've recieved numerous nerfs and half-fixes which were decided by him plus his communication with the community and the correspondants has been abysmal. If he'd taken a long time but had been very open about his progress and kept us up to date then this animocity wouldn't exist (at least for me that is) however he has consistantly shunned the community who have been very patient. For him to suddenly show up, hand us this system which we have had very little feedback to go on and then vanish again without a peep is very annoying.
If things work flawlessly with this system then I'll think more of him since maybe he's someone who works better without communication and it turns out that he had been listening to our feedback but not responding. If however it's got some very basic issues and problems then I'll stand by my estimation that he's a very poor designer.
So on the one hand I'll not thank him for how long this took, but if it turns out to be a really good system with no major flaws then I'll congratulate him. However on the other hand I'm also going to make sure I voice my opinion if the system turns out to be hopeless and point out that he should have kept an open channel of communication so that problems could have been avoided in the development process.
Oh, and a MCH friend of mine got a minor disease off of something or other and noticed it ramped up in damage as it was on longer (so it wasn't being healed per se that was making it worse, it was progressive damage over time). 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 sort of thing, per pulse.
If all disease works like that, letting one of the mean diseases (like, Endor or so types) progress could make healing other than disease cure a really bad idea. And a really nice thing to add to pets.
For my part, I want to see some fairly comprehensive CL lists on how things are changing with the creatures, and if the things we normally deal with (or make) are going to have any utility at all. The vague description of the 'new' graul mauler sounds frighteningly like pets aren't going to be real useful at all... which MIGHT mean critters in the wild below CL 60 might not be as dangerous (?) as they were. Odd possibility that I discount immediately, since they were concerned things were too easy already it would make no sense to turn 'midlevel' CL35-50 content into walkovers.
My god guys, have any of you been on test? I didn't count em but we can make some 60-70 creatures now, only need to bother with one template, its awsome. Most all of the old ones are in there, and they put in things like grauls and even woolymanders. God I would so love to toss my master on test, but I guess the devs have a problem thinking ahead and letting us do character transfers *shrugs*. It is supposed to be a TEST server isn't it? They could at least quadruple the exp output or something, man, would make things so much easier.
Anyway, I was on there drooling over the vehicles, then realized they changed BE and sat there drooling over the clone line, hehe. If I can get help I am gonna at least get up to novice BE to test this stuff out a little, its gonna rock, I can't wait till it goes live. I am counting the days man.
Atyyy: Master BE/Crappy CH/Novice Swordsman on Starsider
I need meat!! 
Actually, even though I disagree with Bigjeff5 on a thread elsewhere, Im dying to know how the system works too
Tons of creature shells, customization on top of that, and thats only in appearances? But theres more, whe can alter the pets characteristics, attacks, resistances too?
This is like a dream come true after the months of waiting with growing dispair playing this class 