Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Rountdable Discussion (Week Ending 1-25-04)
Monthigos wrote:
Making a Droid Handler profession IMO opinion is a smart idea. Why? Because not having one makes droid Engineer the uber class. This is the reason why the transfer command was moved to Master Creature Handler. With the transfer command creature handlers are not only the most powerful PvE class in the game but also they could sell their creatures as well, making them fairly economically.
If you give the droid engineers uber tanks, damage dealers and a crafting professions, why would anyone not pick it up? You people seem to forget that you are in fact a crafting class, not a combat class. Can't you be content with making boatloads of money off of Droid Handlers instead of taking the whole cake? If you folks get your way, EVERYONE will be a Droid Engineer.
That's not the freaking reason why people are up in arms.
TH is saying that the DE community CLEARLY told him they wanted a DH profession.
This thread http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=52116makes TH a liar, a bad politician, bad (you choose), whatever.
Thunderheart:
Vehicles have to autostore. Without vehicles autostoring, the game environment gets horribly polluted with vehicles. If you were involved in the vehicle tests on TC, youwould have seenwhat happens. In an hour hundreds of vehicles accumulated around starports, cantinas and other places where players gather. The downside is any place there is a high player traffic, a crazy amount of vehicles gathered and then your frame rate chugs because there are so many vehicles on the screen.
Please don't play dumb, TH. If you are really playing the game as you say you are you should pretty darn exactly know which auto-store bug players experience. It's just plain annoying when you survey a lot and your vehicle poofes under your arse the moment you dismount in the middle of nowhere. It's also annoying that vehicles almost always auto-store when you enter a building and do some shopping inside (vehicle will sometimes have auto-stored even after just 1-2 minutes).
Itotally agree that there should be an auto-store but please set it on a reasonable timer and get rid of the dismount poofage. Make them auto-store when a player has not used the vehicle for 15 minutes and when a player travels via shuttle/spaceport. That should do it.
*Extra Idea*
One of the major complaints about contributing to the feel of the game is the lack of music/repetative music. I have a solution to this.
An in-game MP3 player with all of the SW music. (Give it out with the space expansion, otherwise it could take forever and a day I think to download all the songs over patch). First of all, this would not take a miracle to program, in fact it would be incredibly simple. So players can just hit "random" "all" if they want to let the music do what ever it feels like, or play what they feel like playing when they feel like hearing it. And you could give it a large number of instances such as
Situation: Battle
Play track: 05 Duel of the Fates
Situation: Enter City (Tatooine)
Play track: 01 Cantina music thingy.
Et cetera. Let the players customize the music to their liking 
Just an idea, give it some thought.
Thunderheart wrote:
Lag is lag. Sorry about that but when then servers are full, there will always be a drag no matter how much we tweak it though the programming team is always working on ways to improve that.
I really wish this didn't get the SOE olé.
There is lag... and then there is LAG. Playing eclipse on Lok or Dantooine is impossible. This is not a software issue so do not blame the coders. We know the database cannot handle the number of people you let on the servers. Reducing newbie melons didn't make the database any stronger. The problem is the servers controlling Lok and Dantooine are weaker than the ones on starting planets. That's just a guess but it would seem to make sense. You guys expected the starting worlds to be busy and would need the most support. But as the game ages we are expanding into the buildable worlds Lok and Dantooine, and they are as busy as the 5 starting worlds. They cannot handle it. It has taken me 20 minutes to buy 2 crates of muon on a busy vendor on Dantooine. After I finally managed to purchase them, they poofed from the vendor because the lag was so bad.
This lag is the same lag that makes the duping of credits possible.
This is not an inconvenience. It is a game breaker.
Monthigos wrote:
Making a Droid Handler profession IMO opinion is a smart idea. Why? Because not having one makes droid Engineer the uber class. This is the reason why the transfer command was moved to Master Creature Handler. With the transfer command creature handlers are not only the most powerful PvE class in the game but also they could sell their creatures as well, making them fairly economically.
If you give the droid engineers uber tanks, damage dealers and a crafting professions, why would anyone not pick it up? You people seem to forget that you are in fact a crafting class, not a combat class. Can't you be content with making boatloads of money off of Droid Handlers instead of taking the whole cake? If you folks get your way, EVERYONE will be a Droid Engineer.
First off, that's not why people are upset. They're upset because TH is putting words in the DEs mouth. Saying that the DEs have made it "very clear" that they want a DH profession is about as ridiculous as Koster saying that current Jedi are "very happy" with the Jedi system. It's simply not true, and has absolutely no factual basis.
Second, DEs don't want to be the only profession to use droids, they want everyone to be able to use one. A certification system is most definitely needed, but not one that is only for DEs, and definitely not an entire new profession. The new DE correspondent has laid out a very nice multiple profession cert system that the majority of DEs and players alike seem to be in favor of.
Dash_Rendar1943 wrote:
So still no word about the Imperial Officer Hat working?
I believe that will be coming in 1 or 2 patches with the Clothing Handler profession.
V1G0 wrote:
Dash_Rendar1943 wrote:
So still no word about the Imperial Officer Hat working?
I believe that will be coming in 1 or 2 patches with the Clothing Handler profession.
TH -- I understand the considerate amount of works you guys have, but I was wonderin... Will there be any in game music added for example when im in town like a longer mp3 instead of just the sun rise and night time themes, also wonder more battle theme songs and would be nice to have some music while just exploring through ... I really do think this will beef up the starwarsy ness if more music was added
Could you drop a hint when we will see the post about the DROID INVASION, please?
Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two seperate professions.
Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different playstyles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.
So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.
TH, take one look at the DE board. There is already a massive post saying that 99% of DE do NOT want a seperate class. Open book test my friend.
Makkari wrote:
Jai-Qon wrote:
Ummm... Like nice to meet you... Who are you? What do you do at SOE? What function do you play in the making of SWG? Why are you asking questions that if you looked a bit in the easily defined sticky threads in almost every profession you could answer them all yourself?
Uhm... personally, I thought his sig answered a lot of those questions:
Runesabre
Lead Designer
Star Wars Galaxies
I agree with you Makkari, I was asking rhetorical questions on most of it. Lead Designer is great... The gist of my post was if he is Lead Designer, why isn't he utilizing his assets that are already in place, namely TH.
I was just having a bad day I spose... Could be the fact that I chose to be a Squad Leader... stupid broken profession.... blah... we are useless... blah... why did I do this?.... what a waste of my time... Oh, wait... My internal monologue is broken... *slaps forhead* 
Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two seperate professions.
Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different playstyles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.
So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.
I spent alot of time getting Master Droid Engineer, so are you guys going to let us have another character on the server? I already paid for THREE accounts (including my wife's). I can't believe what I'm reading. This almost makes me sick to think about a "droid handler". And when is SWG going to actaully be starwars related? Everything I've seen in this game so far has had nothing to do with starwars story line (well maybe the rancor). But this is getting completely outta hand. I don't even remember any character in starwars being labeled as a "Droid Handler" fankly it sounds kinda gay. Now if you want to call it "Droid Controller" and let me be able to control a army of Droidekka's then I'll listen, but until that happens forget it.