Bio Engineer Archive

The problem with that, NancyJ, is that "addressed" means anything from "we're working on a hotfix that will be out in 2 or 3 months" to "the pet checks are working as intended" - we don't have a clue, and little reason for confidence given the historical evidence to take that as much hope that this will be resolved.

I feel like more hope lies with the community's efforts to better understand the system as it exists than to holdexpectations that it will be effectively resolved in the very near future by development efforts diverted from the much vaunted new Jedi system to address this issue.

In answer to the original poster - the pet check is supposed to catch those creatures that exceed some criterion for acceptable levels of stats and abilities in relation to their defined CL. It seems to hit hardest on the low level pets, because they have the tightest restrictions, but it is either exceptionally inconsistant or dramaticly misunderstood. The pet check is supposed to be, as it is currently implemented, executed when the player attempts to call the pet from the datapad, or at taming. The pets stats are checked against some unrevealed criterion, and the pet is either acceptable, or the player is offered the choice of altering the stats to fit the level, or the level to fit the stats. In the case of the Non-CH pet, this is not a simple lowering to a maximum acceptable level, but a drop to a pet quite incapable of providing anything more than entertainment in return for a mind-bar. As the non-creature handler is limited to two stored, one active at a time for pets, it in most cases means the end of the pet, as the "slot" is worth more to a pet-using player than the creature now residing in their datapad.

The issue most BE's seem to have with the pet check is not that we do not recognize or accept that there should be a reasonable limit to the pets a non-CH can control. The pet check seems to nerf many, indeed most, of the pets we would expect to be reasonable, and allows some real "monsters" to continue to be usable. This has forced many of the BEs into a painful choice - make pets we do not think are reasonable, because they are the only thing that consistantly works, or stop making pets for the non-CH user completely, as our efforts at anything else are so often wasted.

The issue of leaving a pet in the datapad until full grown has been investigated, as has leaving a "nerfed" or "adjusted" pet in the datapad. The end result is, once "modified" by the pet check, the pet never regains its original stats or utility. Some pets that have had their levels raised make reasonable CH pets, but the majority are not, and the player and the BE that created the pet are both left holding a now-empty bag.

It's probably the single most difficult issue to abide in the profession at present, though there are other things in need of tuning as well, and it has probably resulted in more damage to the profession and the player base than anything else which affects BE crafting, in terms of its effect on the expectations of the player as pet customer, and the BE's mounting frustration with the issue driving some to forsake the profession entirely, and casting a malaise at best over the most resilient of us.

LLan