Development Cycle Archive

A few weeks ago I posted stating that we were working on improving the community relations aspect of SWG, and also working on several other fronts to try to make the game better in general. I thought you might appreciate some info on where we are.

Game info

SWG continues to grow (though of course the rate of growth has slowed from the early days). Most players have still not reached advanced professions. The economy's rate of growth has been cooling a bit, and we're starting to see cyclical economic developments occuring on a weekly cycle. The vast majority of money is still earned via missions, but loot as a percentage of earnings has been rising slowly.

The biggest expenditure is on structure maintenance, followed by travel, skill training, tip surcharges, and cloning.

Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler


2. Pistoleer


3. Bounty Hunter


4. Rifleman


5. Merchant

Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler


2. Architect


3. Doctor


4. Dancer


5. Weaponsmith

CS

We've been meeting every day to get the top CS issues that cause people to make CS calls, so that we can fix them. This on the grounds that these are among the most important bugs to tackle: both because they irritate players enough to get them to call us, and also because they clog up the CS lines, thus making CS slower for everyone.

I'm happy to report that our response time on CS tickets has fallen by a factor of twenty from a month ago (and so has the number of open tickets at a time and the number of tickets created). You should be seeing much faster and more responsive CS as a result. Before skeptics start screaming, I'll point out that we can see very specific declines in calls occurring when we fix certain bugs and issues. Overall, we hope to continue making significant progress on this front. A big thank you goes out to the hardworking CS staff who have exhibited a lot of grace under enormous pressure--they want your experience to be as good as possible, and they are not the bad guys.

The top issues that tend to get reported these days, and which are therefore our top priorities for fixes include missing items (mostly seem to be related to crossing server boundaries); ghosted items on vendors and the bazaar; skills going missing (still no luck on this one!); people getting stuck in certain places; things warping to 0 0 0; and mission NPCs not spawning at waypoints.

One to call out is houses vanishing--every case we have investigated closely has turned out to be a legitimate deletion. So we're planning on providing CS with a way to get the houses back, and we're looking to change how house deletion from unpaid maintenance works so that we don't have this problem coming up as much.

Community stuff

We've got an events manager now, you've met him (hi, Pex!). The events guys are busily working to ramp things up on that front.

The assistant community manager hunt is about to end, we think. This person will be in charge of communication with the correspondents, and will be on the boards pretty much all the time.

We've got a correspondent forum now so that the devs can discuss things with the correspondents directly without fear that chance remarks will be taken as promises. We realize that many of you want this forum to be public, but we're concerned about letting our devs off the ranch that way. ALL the designers are not only able to, but are required to post to this forum, so we're seeing a lot of communication open up and some very good discussions.

We're enacting policy on how the stuff from that board gets passed out to you guys, so expect this channel of info to open up a bit more soon. Please don't browbeat your correspondents too badly in the interim--they very much want to share everything with you, and we've asked them not to, so their staying relatively quiet is our fault, not theirs.

We also have this forum, which we hope will avoid the noise of the SWG Discussion forum, and provide a more focused area for discussion with the devs. This is intended to be a place where we can float things with zero commitment, so if you see something here, please do not take it a a promise that it will be implemented. It's a place to conceptualize and discuss.

We're also working on improving the patch notes process. The assistant community manager will have this as a primary duty. We expect to float things here, and then as they actually get implemented, we'll post them on In Development. Once they make it to Test Center, they will go on In Testing. Once they are released to you, they'll go in the Update History.

Lastly, there's the polls. We intend to start using this tool a lot more. You should definitely check them out if you haven't already, as we intend to be asking fairly important questions there. We don't intend to become totally poll-driven, but we do want to gather data on where we shoud be spending our efforts. Expect some poll questions to be fairly targeted and specific.

We've got a long list of other community things that we want to do, but we're planning on first getting this stuff working smoothly before rolling out additional things. Hopefully, you are already feeling the effects of more attention being paid to this area.

In summary

I don't want to make any promises--this post is a bit of an experiment. But a "State of the Game" letter periodically is one of the things that we have on our list as something that we feel would be valuable to improve the tone of the boards. Many pointed out in the discussions on community that we needed to make more substantive posts, not just more posts. So this is something in that direction. As it is a bit of an experiment, I'd love to hear what sorts of things you feel would be substantial info for a letter like this.

May the Force be with you!

Message Edited by Holocron on 09-25-2003 11:58 AM

Have you decided to go ahead with the combat changes? Are you going to reduce rifle speed without a damage increase?

Holo, most players have not reached an Advanced profession because when they start up the path, they quickly find out how broken it is, and end up switching to another.

Then they find out THAT one's broken too.

Then they just go into some kind of ranged combat class, or CH.

Where are Player City's?

Thanks for the post. I'd love to see someone take some of the most frequently postedrants from the other forums and answer them in terms of upcomming developmental changes.

For example:

You mentioned NPC's failing to spawn at mission WPs. What is being done about this?

Are the TEF issues a concern of yours? Do you plan to implement any changes?

Maybe this is'nt the place to do so, but I think that a weekly or monthly post answering directly the top 5 posted problems would do wonders for morale. Even if the answer is "we have no idea and are not planning on changing anything atm."

Thanks,

Rai Cella

This is a worthwhile post. I'm glad to see the devs taking control of the game. It gets a bit tiresome reading all the speculation by different players on these boards. I'd like to see the devs give us players more posts like this, telling us what they intend to do in the future. This way people know what's going on and don't have to debate various topics that aren't in consideration anyway.

First of all, thanks for doing this. It may not be as detailed information as people want, but it's a ray of light in an area that's previously been completely dark.

That said, I have to ask, is anyone looking at the Tailor/armorsmith bug? where schematics disapear from our tool when we get more than 256? And how about the necklaces that still don't show an icon in the creation, inventory or examine screens?

Other than those 2 items, I see alot of fixes in the next publish that have been a long time coming... looking forward to seeing them come to the live servers.

Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
   
2. Pistoleer
   
3. Bounty Hunter
   
4. Rifleman
   
5. Merchant

Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
   
2. Architect
   
3. Doctor
   
4. Dancer
   
5. Weaponsmith

1.) Duh But I wont beat a dead horse.

/nod agree with Odano on this one Holo.

Also if I may (and I'm not a chef), the food stack issue should be amoung your top issues to resolve. Many of your chefs, are suffering dramatic loss of buisness over this, and us combatants that are used to stuffing ourselves () are getting frustrated with this drop in your house Bandaid, not fix.

Just thought I would mention the need to resolve this one.

Regards, Vail

Before you spend additional time implementing the Development Forum, it is essential that you finish the job of identifying Correspondents for every class.

There are still classes without a correspondent. I cannot understand how there can be an update on the state of this system when the fundamental issue of representation has not been addressed. Don't put the cart before the horse.

Eureka

Is there any way you could tell us the least popular professions? Just for the sake of curoiusty?

Holo,

Thanks again. Posts like this I think really help.

My only comment on this is towards the polls (thanks again for weightin in on the vanishing houses). I'm glad that you'll use them more. It's 2 way communication.

For my part I'll try to put a couple suggestions up, but it is my hope that you will make details polls when they come to what should we be working on. If they're too generic it sets up for failure as people's interpretations of a statement will wildly vary.

But once the correspondent forum is back up...if a list of 20-30 top 'specific' issues across classes became the poll for people to vote on....that's very valuable information when you compare to to profession densities. A lot of peple are willing to look big and not just vote partisan. Detailed polls like that will help curb the partisan 'let's scream louder than eveyrone else' fest.

Jacore

LOL CS Tickets aren't being posted anymore because people know they won't get answered inside two weeks and even if they do its some kind of automated form letter.

*chuckle*