Chef Archive

Over the last few days I have been mulling over the chef situation. I am not a master yet, I am not even that high level because I cannot afford the large amount of time it would take for me to craft/practice d-pyro's over and over and over and then run to my harvys for reactive gas and rice and then repeat the process again for the oh so lovely 105 xp per item. If I spent my time to craft in order to get master (which is my eventual goal) I would not be able to survive economically, the maintenance on my house and harvesters is too high to supplement to 1 to 2 items a day a sell at awful prices because all people want my stuff for is pet food (yes I do have Mix II) so I must keep my combatant skills and wait untill they fix my chosen profession.

1) Obviously we are not a large enough group to be considered a priority, Creature Handler will be nerfed for the second time and probably a third time before our profession is fixed. We simply seem to not matter.

2) Our poor Correspondent is not being listened to, the entire point of us having a correspondent is to give us a voice and when that voice is being ignored how are we supposed to be heard and how is our profession supposed to get fixed. And thank-you SirVimes for attempting to get them to listen.

So here it is fellow chefs what do you think we can do as a group in order to make them listen to us. Do we need to all join test center and become chefs? Do we need to stop producing food on all the servers and see if that gets their attention? I almost quit the profession last night after realizing that we are not included in the next patch, and there is no acknowledgment that the profession will be fixed soon. From what I have been reading its sounds like the frustration level of the chefs is reaching critical mass.

So here is my question: What do you as a Chef think we could do to get this fixed?

Mumu, Novice Chef, Tempest

Unforunately there appears to be NOTHING that we can do from inside the Game or Forums. Even with sympathizers that come from other professions and say they feel our pain, it is not enough.

No, to get a response we need outside influence that not only have a strong voice but have audiences of their own. This would be in the form of SirVimes doing an interview with on "HyperDrive Radio" the starwars station that so many people were listening to before the game released, and gettingreporters from Game Publications like IGN and Gamestop doing a report on how "The promised buffing profession is not the buffing profession.".

Doing something like this would be kin to a "Whistle Blower Report" on local news where the BetterBusinessBureau would step in because it makes their reputation bad to have bad businesses around and then the bad business would correct to save face. In this environment it would SOE as a whole look bad to advertisement partners, stockholders, and prospective clients. Then the urgency would go down the line probably from SOE CEO or President.

I HOPE that they do something and not let it get that bad.

I was going to write a long tirade, but figured nobody would read it. A summary:

1) People complain about game play issues first
2) There are MANY more people playing other professions that want their profession fixed first. The devs obvoiusly get more complaints and input about other professions, and will fix what gets complained the most about first.
3) Unless the average player starts to complain that there are no food buffs available, or that food buffs are not useful, there will be no incentive for the Devs to do anything about it. Do you think the average commando has a real problem with not being able to buff his strength up by 100 or 200 with no downer? He probably doesn't care.

Now, if you take out ALL the chefs - delete the profession entirely - what effect would that have? 1) Nobody could buy Tat Sunburn. Would the average player have any other complaint? What % of players actually use food? I'm guessing less than 10%.

My opinion - NOBODY CARES ABOUT CHEFS. Not the devs because we don't make up a large enough portion of the gaming community and not the players because honestly we don't do enough to be valuable.

What can we do? Nothing. If we went away, the devs would get less trouble tickets, and the gamers may notice no buffs are available, but since the buffs stink, there's nothing to complain about anyway.

There are many more issues with SWG that need to be fixed - like the lag that still exists, play balance in combat, having some kind of story and emersive feeling in the world, the missions, the themeparks and so on.

If you're really ticked off, create another character on another server and play some other class. Maybe if the entire community realises there are no food buffs anymore, they may complain. But then again... would they even notice?

try and arrange something like a 15-30 min boycott of the game. lol

they may notice if nobody was loged onto a server for a while. Actually they would just think it was s server problem and restart it

As a bio-eng I can say that I hope much needed changes come to your prof.

> Do we need to all join test center and become chefs?

Well, we already have 3 Chef's that I know of on TestCenter not counting SirVimes. We've been able to test and report all the bugs that I've read in these forums, and honestly it appears that they're getting fixed on TestCenter. If you really want to check things out, feel free to create a character and come to my pub located on Corellia, New Hope [2819 -1834]. I'll provide you with food/drinks so you can test anything you want, just send me a /tell or email ingame.

In my opinion, the code on TC allows Chef's to function with their existing schematics. I make crates of Tatooine Sunburns and Chardes for several people. It seems as though crates work fine, and that using multiple charges of a food/drink works just fine. When are these changes posted to live? Good question, my guess is likely when mounts and cities gets pushed.

As for fixing the schematics and improving buff size/length, I happen to agree that needs to happen. Unfortunately that isn't fixing bugs, it's changing content. And as explained, that needs to go through design passes...starting with Thunderheart and SirVimes. I'll be standing in line with the rest of you guys in getting Chef brought up to the level I believe it should be. Cause right now, our entire profession isn't in demand...and it should be.

- Malikor [Dragon Pearl Enclave] : TestCenter

GalinHawk and FeeeeedMeeee when I saw that you had posted, I was hoping that you had something more constructive than "nothing can be done" and "nobody will notice". I know that not every Chef is a master of patience and faith but we should at LEAST be masters of brainstorming solutions. We've been broken in almost EVERY patch and "WE" found the temp fix, not a DEV and not a CSR rep. So don't give me this nohope talk. There is ALWAYS something you can do. Reference my reply about going outside the game.

Well thanks guys, that was actually a better response than i have seen before. I am glad that things are being tested on test center this makes me very happy, gives me a little bit of hope and I have been seriously considering joining in order to help the profession along, thanks for the offer.

As for the BE's and the DE's and the pikemen who acutally are less in numbers than us according to the official webpage (we are .30% and Pikemen are .25%) I do not mean to exclude you, it is very easy to become enraged on this issue. Honestlyimperal ghots you are right the way chef is set up right now no one would care if they deleted the profession except us chefs. And that is very sad. I have read their intentions to fix the DEs I just really want a timeline of when they are going to fix chefs and the changes they are proposing like the DEs. Also i think that yes serious issues need to be fixed first and I understand the need to push cities and such out but maybe instead of trying to say change CH they could spend their time making us lowly professions desirable and more powerful and therefore actually balance the game and attract people to our professions without pissing off all the CH'sI know a lot of them who are threating to quit.There approach seems askewed to me at the moment.

To me the fact that any of us are still BE's or pikemen or chefs says that we are a patient group and if they explained to us why its so hard after 4 months to fix even seemingly simple things like the buff stats maybe or BE's additives doing nothing, or droids eating battieries like antacids we would go "oh, ok we understand" and wait till they fixedit or even hotfixes like they having been doing with squad leaders would make me happy.

I think chef is unique in that i have seen a vast understanding and amount of suggestions on how to fix the profession and I have notseen a response. Come on thunderheart has responded to the CH thing how many times now? why are we considered so meaningless, it is very sad.

I think i shall join testcenter and see how that goes and i would like an explanation from the devs. If anyone has better suggestions i think its time to voice them, it would be nice if we could convince all the creature handlers to bow out for a 1/2 an hour I am sure that would get there attention.

Mu

I understand your ideas, but practically I don't think there is much hope. Not that I don't want it to be, but SWG outside of the "internal" community has a HORRIBLE reputation. Adding the chef problems would be "oh, one more problem for SWG, we'll add that at the bottom of the list". I think public action will just give SWG more of a bad name that it already has.

I think the biggest way to get attnetion would be a pull tactice (as I mentioned) - people other than Chefs need to DEMAND food & drink buffs to improve. Without that... read my above.

Oh I totally agree with you, what would be a way for other people to let soe know that they want better, food should we get them to post here, should we get them somehow to communicate in game, i think its a really interesting thought. I know some of us are in guilds and we could try to pull a few strings. How could we do that, i think that is actually do-able, or at least bumps us to the voice of squad leader, lol.