Bio Engineer Archive

From this point on, every time I post a BE topic in the correspondant forum I will crosspost it here (unless its about private stuff I cant repost). In the event of getting some dev response I will update it with the response.
I will keep this stickied so everything is easy to find.

Do NOT reply to this thread

If you have something to say, please start a new thread. I read every message on this forum, theres no need to spoil these threads just because you want to get my attention.

NancyJ Wrote:

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Just a quick question regarding CL 10 pets, bugs and exploits.
Here are a couple of screenshots of some non-CH pets that a lot of BE's are making right now, whether or not they are considered to be 'exploits' is a hot topic right now.

High HAM, High Kinetic
High HAM, High Damage

Theres a lot of mixed signals going around and not a lot of solid information. Some people are being told by CSR's that these pets are exploits, the makers of them are cheating and that anyone found making them or using them will be punished - others are being told the complete opposite, that the pet validity checks are working and that if the pet passed them it was fine.

Just a yes or no to whether these are considered exploits would be great

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Thunderheart Wrote:

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Keldarin's answer was:
These pets are more powerful than level 10 cloned pets are intended to be. I would not go so far as saying that players who made these "cheated" however. It is known that there are still ways to create these overpowered pets and they will be tuned down. When that happens they will be considered invalid and will have their stats/level adjusted automatically.

I'd be very interested in knowing how the "High HAM, High Kinetic" pet was made. That one has stats that are even out of the range that I was aware could be made. The other one is pretty standard for the broken pets however.

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NancyJ Wrote (6/30/2004)

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I know most people are gonna ignore this cos you're sick of hearing about the invalid pets issue but I'm gonna harp on about it some more anyway

*/beg*

PLEASE remove the validity checks.

Pretty please with sugar on top?

They dont work, they only catch sub par, crap stats pets, they let through the 'uber-pets' - all they do is piss off BE's and their customers.

AFAIK they were put it to aid the transition from the old pets to pets made under the new system since it shouldnt theoretically be possible to craft pets that are declared invalid.

These checks have been in for months now - there are very few old pets that havent been adjusted yet so please can we have the checks taken out now so we can get on with our job?

We have heard from fanfest reports that the pet validity issue wont be addressed until after JTL - which is AGES away.

We've lived with this issue long enough (way longer than BH have had broken jedi missions btw we just dont whinge as loud)

The issue has been around for over 6 months and it is game breaking for a pet crafter and is putting a lot of players off the profession and the game.

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Message Edited by NancyJ on 08-15-2004 09:20 AM

NancyJ Wrote: (5/25/2004)

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Merchant Changes:

With the upcoming changes to merhcant vendors (specifically having to retain the skills)

1. Will BE's be given any concessions (similar to CM's being given terrain negotiation without taking scout)

OR

2. Will merchants be able to hire out vendors? (through in-game mechanics)

OR

Both?

Whilst we see that this is a good change for merchants, it is a problem for Bioengineers, who already are required to have 2 novice professions, neither of which are artisan.

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Message Edited by NancyJ on 08-15-2004 09:20 AM

NancyJ Wrote6/3/2004)

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I have to say I'd never noticed this before but it was mentioned on the forums and I went to check it out.

Currently the mods on pyollian cake should last for 1 assembly roll. Therefore the mod should disappear after creating the item.
However this is not working for DNA template combines, but it does for the final creature combine.

So, is the mod affecting both the DNA template and the final creature combine, -OR- only affecting the creature combine and NOT the DNA template -OR- something else entirely?
If so is this intended or a bug?

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GreenMarine Wrote:

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Here's a guess without looking at the code: Bio engineer crafting is really complex and uses some nonstandard functions. The cake effect only applies to the traditional crafting assembly library function. If the bio engineer stuff is
not making a call to that function, the cake buff won't apply. That's my suspicion without looking at the code. If you want a definite answer, I can look it up later.

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NancyJ Wrote: (6/17/2004)

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Before you start thinking this is going to be another BE fix our bugged pets whinge - its not.
I am expressing my concerns about the plan to leave fixing these pets until after JTL.

A recent IGN article said that at the fan fest players were told that bugged CL10 pets would not be address until some time after JTLS and that no definate timescale had been planned.

Currently the favorite flavour for nonCH pets have approx these stats:

10k Health
6k Action
4k Mind
60% Kinetic Resist
vuln to all else (except sometimes blast)
and anything from 100-400 damage

These are becoming more and more common and are not difficult to make. They are not one off combinations of bugged DNA - there are loads of different recipes floating around and even a pretty reliable system for selecting a multitude of different combinations that will work.

Now we know that you dont see this as a priority right now but if these remain after the combat balance I am concerned that the game will almost be back in the state it was at release - when equipment was weak, buffs equally weak or unheard of and CH dabblers were king - except these pets require no skill points to handle.

Honest BE's will be put out of business if they refuse to make these combinations because there will always be someone else willing to make a fast buck.

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NancyJ Wrote: (6/25/2004)

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Ok this is the situation as best I can determine from the reports I've had.

Covert factioned BE samples a creature at a lair. Overt of opposing faction shoots creature from lair, all creatures aggro Overt, poor covert BE gets teffed and usually killed by the Overt.

Can I get a quoteable comment on this or do I have to wait for our next 19 answers?

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TH Wrote:

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No, I'll check.

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NancyJ Wrote: (7/11/2004)

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Being the geeky number crunchers that we are, the BE community has stumbled upon a little problem with our additive schematics.

The experimental percentages are listed as 33 OQ, 33 PE, 33 FL, however through extensive testing we believe this to be incorrect and that the weighting is actually 50% OQ, 30% PE and 20% FL.

Would it be possible to have this checked and if we're right either the weighting corrected to 33/33/33 or the schematics altered to display the correct weightings?

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NancyJ Wrote (8/13/2004)

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At fan fest apparently it was asked if we could get the CL on the template during experimentation and the answer was basically no.
But could we possibly get it on the final combine after experimentation? It would really help.

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NancyJ Wrote:

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So I got kitted up via the frog and managed to do some DNA sampling on TC2, its still only a small sample of data but it took 3 hours and I had to go sign on

I know you're all busy with other things but I figured I'd do this while I had the chance, I'll leave the figures uploaded on my server so you can look at them whenever you feel like it, but I hope it can be of some use.

I'm 100% dedicated to getting this fixed, and unemployed so I have all the time in the world to do as much testing and data collecting as you need me to.

So this is the first set of data I've collected using Rock Beetle and Jundland Eopie DNA

I heop its clear what it all means, I'm not the best at tabualting data, besically there are 2 colums of numbers, one for the experimentation showing where I put my experiment points and the other for the DNA template.

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Keldarin Wrote:

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Thanks a ton for this info NancyJ!! It really does help.

For this particular set of data I think I've actually narrowed down what's going on. It all comes back to those darn armor calculations that made the whole system so hard to implement in the first place and has been the cause of nearly every problem thus far.

The solution isn't trivial though so I'm going to have to think a little bit about how to fix this one. Actually there is a trivial solution, but it's too costly so I have to figure out the hard solution that doesn't make the crafting calculations slower than they already are.

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NancyJ Wrote:

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Just thought I'd mention that the results I posted earlier were the DNA templates after experimentation, not before, dont know if that helps or not.

This second set uses Gubber in Physique, Prowess, Mental, Psychological and Correllian Butterfly Defender in aggression.

In all cases I did no experimentation at all. The light red are invalid combinations and the light green were valid.

I hope this information is helpful and if you need any more or if theres anything else I can do to help just ask.

I realise the numbers are still very low but this is for 2 reasons really, firstly I'm not a CH on live so I can only tame under CL 10s and secondly I got flamed on the BE forums for suggesting we take a proactive approach to our problems so I've had to do all the testing alone and the formulas I have that are known to cause validity are all fairly low level.

Anyway, heres the data.

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NancyJ Wrote: (7/29/2004)

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Just wanted to ask if I could have a 'red name' give me a quotable comment on why bioengineers are excluded from the crafting quests.

Right now the feeling amongsts BE's is that we are very much a forgotten profession and are never considered in the same way as artisan crafters. We have no skill tapes, no looted schematics, no crafters apron and a basic vendor costs 15 more skill points for us than an artisan crafter.

We have very high skill point requirements for very little reward and no post master content.

So pretty please with sugar on top can you give me something to tell my forum?

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NancyJ wrote:

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I was going through the post archives and I found this from Talthazar from back in November

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Oh, btw, you said you'd fix the bugs with critical fails not destroying dna samples. It used to be a crit fail would simply leave the samples in the crafting tool. Now what happens with a crit fail is that the samples drop to the end of the list of items in your pack and in the order they appear in the tool. I was able to confirm this while filling a large number of orders this weekend. While I'm pretty sure no one minds this I'm fairly certain this was not what you intended.

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Now it seems to me that this suggests BE's didnt used to lose DNA samples on a crit fail.

I was wondering if I could get a quoteable comment on why this was put back in? Losing unique DNA samples and templates is something that BE's are very unhappy about.

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Thunderheart Wrote:

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Sorry NJ, but not right now, though you should put it on your list of BE issues. We can revisit the issue, but for all intents and purposes, crafting failures are meant to be in the game. They are a very small number (5% or less at the master level). I've done just about all I can do on this issue.

I understand its painful though.

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OK, paraphrased, I asked about the FS skills and if they will apply to BE as I had been told they would, since our crafting system is separate from everyone elses *see pyollian cake bug*

The answer from Kel was that I was right, they didnt work for BE, but he's put that right and fixed the food for us too

/rejoice

Followup: Confirmed on TC

Message Edited by NancyJ on 08-22-2004 12:37 AM