Creature Handler Archive

Thread: I think this could be interpreted as the official reason TH never posts here....

Hasara
Wed Apr 07, 2004 10:31 am
#14

This doesn't just apply to TH, it's how SOE customer service as a whole operates.
DaBudo2
Wed Apr 07, 2004 11:28 am
#15

I decided to check his posts for the last month (since Mar 1)just to see what forums he posted in. By far, the vast majority of his posts are in non-profession forums such as Concepts, Game Guides, In Live, etc. He has posted on 13 profession boards but that still leaves a lot that he hasn't posted on. So, it's not just CH. I think it's like was said, he just can't be every where at once. We need to give the guy a little slack here.



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Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read. G. Marx

Pickaroon - MCH, Master Pistoleer, Elder Geek
BOTHEN! WOOHOO!
fantoq
Wed Apr 07, 2004 11:32 am
#16

Barb,


Not it at all. TH's job is community relations. Therefore, he needs to relate to/with the community. (ie, public relations) If you hire a PR firm that doesn't communicate, you'd fire them in a minute. It's also their job to take the good with the bad.


I've been on forums where devs and even PMs routinely respond. Are there flames? Sure, a few. But in reality, with good communication the number of flames drops significantly. And you rarely see the devs goaded into a flame thread, they simply ignore them.


Do I want an "I win" button. Not at all. It's a game, I play it to have fun. I usually sit laughing when I get incapped. On the other hand, when issues exist for months that aren't even acknowledged, I'm ticked off. A "Hey, we know it exists but it is a bear to nail down and we'll continue to work on it" goes a long way as opposed to dead silence. It took over a month to get a simpleexplanation of the call timer, it should have been addressed within a day or two. And when the answer after that time makes no sense, it's an insult to the customer base. There are many good threads here that don't contain a flame until they linger without an official comment for days.


How about the as yet unresponded to lists of fixes/ideas/etc?? Don't they deserve an answer?


It's simple, if you don't like the heat, don't become a chef. I get 'flames' from customers from time to time. Know what, I respond to the factual part of them best as I can. If there is no factual part, I just tag it 'idiot' and move on. The ones that hurt more are the ones pointing out things that are really broken, and feeling the pain of that user. I don't think TH or SOE feel the pain of their users at all, or simply don't care.





fantoq
MCH
former Medic
App. Carbineer
Society of Interplanetary Mercenaries[SIM]/ stargate/ naboo
Pluto9Moon
Wed Apr 07, 2004 11:49 am
#17

Personally, I feel the only thing TH should EVER, EVER, EVER post here is "I am sorry for my uber-poke comments". The rest should come down the pipe through Vert. It's the way it is supposed to work. It doesn't.


Xray. Will he get flamed by an "**edit** **edit**"? Maybe. Will he be asked why he disregards us with his own flaming comments? Definitely. All I can say is read your history. TH has done his share of inflammatory comments.





Sign for Hutt Faction here: Hutt Faction

Not against broad changes, just profession specific ones (read as CH) that go against what we've been told in the past.
(I hired Trayson as a ghost writer for a good tagline)
SioBabble
Wed Apr 07, 2004 12:05 pm
#18

Unfortunately for TH, he's been caught passing on developer lies about 50 times too often.


He has no credibility, and the developers have no credibility. They have broadcast their incompetence too many times.




Tazz vonMannstein Baron-Administrator of Corellia, master navigator of Corellia, captain of the Gregarious Gurreck

Sio Babble MBH/MCH/Cabana Boy; master of Tyson, the GNORT OF DEATH

Jeffn Akbar Nerfed from here to Lok MD/MCM

Zanti Agaesia Bothan MBE, 12 point Master Chef, Havoc Squadron Ace pilot


Nicosar
Wed Apr 07, 2004 2:53 pm
#19







Hail,


I didnt rtead this entire thread sorry. But I definitely wanted to add:


I am not one of the TH haters, by any means, but things like this really bother me. Yes, there are correspondents, and if thats why he doesnt participate then he needs to say that.But for a dev to come out and say "I wont post on forums bc the flamers might come after me" is nonsense.


I realize the devs are being pulled in 89 different directions and I try to empathize. However, it is a pretty piss poor business decision to refuse to engage your PAYING CUSTOMERS in dialogue because you might get flamed. That is sad. Makes me wonder why I am giving them my money if they wont even respond to our concerns -- what business does this? "I am not going to answer the phone because you might be upset with the product we sold you." Amazing.


TH needs to understand there are the immature flamers out there and there are the concerned members of the community who care about the future of their prof. To say you wont come participate on the forums because the former might do what they do best only punishes the latter -- and that is a mistake and you will inevitably lose both as customers.

Pluto9Moon
Wed Apr 07, 2004 3:56 pm
#20

Barb, You, the other dissidents and I have went back and forth on this. I believe some of us really do not want an I win button. We do however want back in the game. We were too powerful, in the very very beginning. Rancors being controlled by newbs is bad. Even before the December patch we were balanced. Maybe the creatures were too high. I tend to disagree. My CL 23/23/24 trio was consistently beaten by TK's, Commandos, and BH's.


The remarks just prior to the nerf were coming from Novice-pick a professions. "You wait until the nerf". I did not realize just then how bad we were being nerfed. Admittedly I participated in the GCW a few more times with Wild Pets. That did not work. Even now BE pets are still just a distraction. I win vs some sort of balance is the goal for many of us. I do not want July pets again. I am not even certain I want Wild Pets better than BE anymore. But I would like a role. If the role is to be one of support. We must have a better way of supporting that plain ol' /guard. Seems a little too much nerfing in many aspects. The delayed (read as not going to happen) combat rebalance has more than crippled us for 4 months and it more and more looks like we will not have anything until next year.


TH needs to:


1) apologize


2) discuss the timers without talking about some hypothetical exploit


3) in detail (with the understanding things change) tell us how the CH's will be reworked to make us stronger until the rebalance


Anything shy of that is meaningless mouth service.





Sign for Hutt Faction here: Hutt Faction

Not against broad changes, just profession specific ones (read as CH) that go against what we've been told in the past.
(I hired Trayson as a ghost writer for a good tagline)
meroc
Thu Apr 08, 2004 6:23 am
#21

Actually Pluto, I think he needs to play a CH for a few weeks. If he ever has, it must have been a long time back or he wouldn't have even made those comments about CH timer `sploits...


And Barb, most of the people that want an "I win" button have already left for other classes, those that remain do so because they like the feel/flavour of the class. If CH isn't viable in the GCW then I'm pretty well out of it, unless the Dev's work out some novel way I can stick a needle in a players butt and have them drop, cause BE is my only other full profession...


Sure, I could drop CH and take a "real" class, but thenthat only makes a joke ofclass diversity when everyone ends up playingeither aTKA or a Rifleman...



Meroc

Taipan's Pet's and Bio Tissues, Anchorhead, Tatooine 430 -5000, Ahazi
Master Bio Engineer, Master Creature Handler, Part time Pistoleer.
BECalc 2.0, the Clone and Tissue Pricing tool for Bio Engineers
Version 1.x mirrored on SWG Warcry
KzinKiller
Thu Apr 08, 2004 10:41 am
#22

Well, in the past TH felt free to make authoritative comments about game systems he had no experience with (Player Cities) and got burned pretty badly for it ... he's demonstrated pretty clearly that he has little or no experience with CH issues and frankly, saying nothing is better than saying something clearly wrong, so he seems to be learning from experience and playing it safe.


I no longer see thisas a CH issue ... SOE is just clearly very understaffed in development resources. When a profession gets major code revisions because of dev attention, they won't see any more attention for months as the same limited staff moves on to the next slot in the Big Wheel of Professions ... so if the changes you got while you briefly had developer attention were in fact ill-considered and just plain BROKE your profession .... too bad, so sad, you won't be getting more attention for months, so just suck it up and deal with it.


At least, that's the message from California & Texas ...


So I don't take it personally as a CH ... or Pistoleer ... or Droid Engineer ... or any of the other professions I've played or wish I could play if they were even close to functional. It's nothing personal about your profession or mine ... it's simply mismanagement and poor allocation of insufficient resources to do the task.




*
The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them
Albert Einstein

CU-1 ... CU-2 ... CUL8R
Templar1865
Thu Apr 08, 2004 11:51 am
#23

You speak truth, Kzin. I'm struggling my way up the CH tree (still don't understand why I get a lot of XP using an "uber" pistol but very little when using an "uber" pet) after mastering BE. I was a BE before they got worked on, and it was really, really, bad. I held onto a belief that it would be cool once the devs fixed it, and some of it is. After the cloning tree redesign (which got released with major problems because it wasn't tested properly, properly meaning by enough people over enough time in a real-ish setting), which happened last fall, we haven't seen a single piece of added content or improvement. I would expect that the professions are on something of a rotation, and CH (as well as BE) had its turn and now it's waiting in line. The line also is much longer because of the Space Expansion. That's a money-making venture, fixing what people are already paying for is loss prevention (with amuch lower priority for SOE, apparently).


We're seeing majority rule here. If you add a new uber pistol or phat lewt drop, most of the gamers get their little dose of bread and circuses and are pacified. When problems are relegated to only one profession (a shrinking one, now), the priorities go way down. TH should have the world's toughest job. He should dive into flame threads head first if they have even a nugget of useful insight.


From a business standpoint, this isn't going to happen. If you study psychology long enough, you learn that a subject will stick with a behavior if they think there's even a longshot chance of getting a reinforcement/reward. CHs saw what awesome fun and power the class could have, and so we stick with it in the hope that we might get even a fraction of that back. Sony knows this so they're really not worried about making us a priority. They know that most people switch professions instead of leaving the game. They know that there isn't another strong competing product on the market right now.


So don't expect a lot of customer relations excellence from SOE, regardless of what whipping boy is in the position.


Also, who wants to place money that SOE will release Space within two weeks of Blizzard launching Worlds of Warcraft? "No, no, don't leave now! Look at all this new content we made for you! SOE loves you. See?"
SkyPreacher1
Thu Apr 08, 2004 3:09 pm
#24

If they release Space Expansion after WoW the one good thing will be this, I won't have to worry about someone trying to take down my Krayt dragon, cause baby, I will be the only one at the Krayt graveyard.


Oh and when you are flying over Tatooine, look down and you will prolly see a wookie striding along pet in tow, killing squills. IF they release SE as borked as this game is now, most of you will be crashing and burning any way.



....and then no matter how hard we get nerfed, we still keep CH because we are still some of the coolest characters on the game.

BOYCOTTING JUMP TO LIGHTSPEED UNTIL COMBAT BALANCE AND GCW REVAMP!
SWG: Quote: Grand moff Tarkin: The Jedi are extinct, their fire has gone out of the universe. you my friend are all thats left of their religon. Except for the other 5000 over there...
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