Development Cycle Archive

Due to the difficulty of starting a new thread in these forums this is as good as any to start

tuesday march 16, 2004 1am pst

before the crafting 'nerf' goes through and the 'unnerf' goes through on wednesday i would like to point out that for one line experimentation items (including weapons)the 'nerf' is actually not a nerf and the 'unnerf' is a nerf i posted heavily against the proposed changes not because the concept was a bad one but because the implimentation was poor and i expect to see and produce several 'perfect' schets in the 24hr window mostly loot schets but never the less the BEST weapons and single line equiptment OF THE GAME will happen after the patch goes through later today the hard caps should have stayed the same just more bang for your buck so to speak about the experimentation points so that the top end damage didnt just get a major boost which the patch will do (to bad it was so heavily imbeded in the patch)

Im glad you are so concerned about the economy it is important to everyone playing the game and needs balanced but you just swung it in the wrong direction inadvertantly a more consistent supply of good-great resources with hardcaps removed would lower priceson crafted items (the hi BER harvesters backfiredyou get more resources for less money now then ever before but the resale value is 100+ times the cost of extraction)

one thing that might help is a playground for the 'rich and famous'an incredibly hard dungeon with a timelimit (similar to the corvette) and an access feehi enough to drain bank accounts rapidly offset by good enhancements/tapes

REMOVE ALL RANDOM ENHANCEMENTS from the game along with the weapons and equiptment made from them then reintroduce them after they properly tweaked to do what you intended from the begining (the geonosian cubes are working as intended and shouldnt be revamped)

the economy is important and a suit of armour and a selection of weapons should not cost more then a guildhall(and presumeably a stardestroyer when the space expansion hits) i can understand being 'FIRST' has its price but the market soon stabalizes ata lower rate (for themost part top end weapons and armour will always be more then the sum of their parts) the reason is that it is to easy to make money and you have to work to spend it there are not enough 'money sinks' for the miner or the combat templates i would like to see miners (people with 8-10 harvesters on one resource type) pay a mining tax on their income from sales and bulk sales OR make them buy a mineral contract at the planets capitol for placing more then 4 large harvs on a particular resource (calculate extraction rate at 13 BER for 7 days and charge2 cru for the 5th harv4 cru for the 6th etc etc) this wont stop people from using multiple accounts to harvest but add a MINER profession to the game and as they progress up to master the mineral contract is reduced by half (now if the miner could get more lots in the process +10 or even +20at master that would encourage single account miners) {i have been approached many times by 'miners' offering resources at 10cru while the resource is still live and listen to them brag that by the end of spawn they will have in excess of 10million of the resource if they sale all of that BEFORE it gets expensive that is 100million credits 99million in profit AT LEAST}

it has been said that crafters have all the money actually its the mining companies crafters have to charge the rates for equiptment because the cost of materials in bulk is prohibitive you almost need a miner, a crafter, and a combat template just to keep your head above water if you want to do any kind of PvP the insurance for PvP was a good money sink and you have limited it to all but declared faction PvP and reduced the cost of the insurance to boot doing this made it easier and cheaper to PvP yes but it removed a major money sink (and possibly the only money sink other then buffs and equiptment that effect these players that can afford 3-4 suits of top quality armour and a range of top quality weapons) and the PvP weapons and armour manufactures make the BEST equiptment else it wouldnt be used for PvP these manufactures are along the lines of Stratavarius crossed with Honda The best product money can buy MASS-PRODUCED just to keep the vendors stocked (removing the decay of faction PvP will lower demand for this equiptment it lasts longer but not until it is for ALL PvP)

resource rarity is a good way to distinguish the masters from the 'grandmasters' but the law of supply and demand comes in to effect if there is a HI demand for a peice of equiptment that requires a resource thatonly spawns once every 6 months the price is set by those that have it and if a second spawn is worse then the first the price jumps yet again because you know its going to be another 6 months till you see it UNTIL the ECONOMY is balanced it would be a GOOD idea to let spawns of extremely rare and rare resources spawn more frequently BUT let every one know that this will be happening it will relieve hoarding of resources and as more then just a few LONG time master compete on an even level the market will stabalize and it NEEDS to be stable BEFORE the space expansion hits or it will never stabalize

(1) Make critters harder, the way most used to be. I know you just went through the "creature balance" to make some mobs easier in anticipation of making crafted items less effective, but this needs to be undone.

(1a)To compensate and thus avoid undoing your CH balance, you could make creatures found in the wild have a higher challenge level. This would encourage interaction between the BE/CH community even more and it would definitely make sense from a suspended disbelief point of view. Critters genetically designed in the Star Wars universe would, as the clone troopers were, naturally be imprinted with the instict to obey their masters. That would definitely help explain (at least to me) why someone can control a Rancor with such precision without using the Force, as is supposed to be the case, and why the Witches of Dathomir were able to do so.

• Mission payouts need to get the nerf bat. With Vehicles in play, missions are being done at 5x the rate they used to be and this is causing entirely too much money to be dumped into the game world on a daily basis. This one would definitely not be popular, but it's all relevant. People need to adjust.

(continued) accidentally hit the post button and my edit isn't working.

• More money sinks need to be added to the game. Vehicle repairs should be fixed asap. duping vehicle health is a major thing that is allowing for a lot of money conservation and should not be allowed to continue.

• Any and all Jedi related items (when the Jedi Revamp takes place) need to be acquired via Jedi-only quests rather than loot drops. This will stop the 8 million credit sales of items that I hope were never intended for market.

• Please consider the idea of Armor Certifications. You have them for weapons, but it perplexes me as to how a Master of a combat profession gets the exact same benefit from armor that a novice dancer does.

• Please consider the idea of harvester certifications. I am curious how it is a Master Carbineer can operate such a complex piece of machinery without the proper training.

• Please stop cross-server swapping of lots. A guild of 20 people from Bria creatingcharacters on Naritus and placing 200 heavies in exchange for a guild of 20 people from Naritus creating characters on Bria and placing 200 heavies should be considered an exploit. Not only does it overinflate the economy and lag the database, it allows for enitrely more top notch items being created than was ever intended. Add to that the fact it penalizes anyone who doesn't do it in the worst of extremes.

• Please consider allowing factioned players to build faction perks. One of my biggest dreams in this game is an armorsmith, a weaponsmith, a droid engineer, and a master artisan working in tandem to build an ATST. Or a weaponsmith (turrets), an architect, and an armorsmith working in tandem to build faction bases. These schematics could still cost the same faction points, but it would be adding a step and encourage players to work together. Combatants would get the faction, delegate them to the crafters, who would then create the end product.

Those were the ones I wanted to post for input/feedback. I have a lot more but that's a bit to digest and pick apart. Thanks for reading and May the Force be With You!

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Tathir wrote:

• Please consider the idea of Armor Certifications. You have them for weapons, but it perplexes me as to how a Master of a combat profession gets the exact same benefit from armor that a novice dancer does.

• Please consider the idea of harvester certifications. I am curious how it is a Master Carbineer can operate such a complex piece of machinery without the proper training.

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I would like to see a tab for Ambient sounds. I enjoy turning down the music and listening to the crowds in cities and wildlife in forests but as soon as a speeder flies by or a blaster fires you almost need new speakers

kudos on light and up/down interior command, been waiting since the beginning for them, good job

now onto biz:

-go with a hybrid DE, dont do the droid commander

-up item cap limits on houses

-add more cool art/paintings, a museum on every planet or at least the big 3.

-drop interplanetary shuttle wait times at coronet, and/or all the spaceports

-raise the limit of lampposts in cities to a different pool of decorations, lamps max out a player cities decor count very quickly.

-add back armor to droids.

just my 2 creds

I have been reading a lot of great Ideas.

1. I think the weekly pass for starships is a fantastic suggestion. I am a Master Artisan and I own my own extractors. I find myself spending 50k a week on tickets planet hopping. In addition to the Pass, Iwould like to see shuttle times reduced. At the Theed Starport, I can use my tickets ALL the time, not just when a transport is there. I hate the waiting. I get 4 hours in the afternoon to play, and I spend a good bit of that time waiting.

2. Love it or Hate it, the crafters have the money and will continue to have the money. It is the nature of a free enterprise system. Since I own all of my assets, I can spend 60k to run my harvesters and factories, and sell the items at 380k credits. And buy the way, I am selling the products at about 2.1 credits per unit resource. Price gouging can backfire. I sell my stuff inexpensive, and I have a ton of business. Making 100k a day is the norm for me.

3. Give me a starship. I am tired of hanging out in starports. I want my own starship. One thing, when you do, up the skill points so that a person can work on the starships and not have to loose the skills he/she has. I like the idea of being able to gain skill points with time on the server.

4. Since when did Jedi wear armor? I have never seen a movie, book, cartoon, or action figure that had a jedi in armor. Get rid of it.

I love this game and I think it is worth the money I have paid. Keep up the good work, but lets see some starships.

Jerry Garcia

I've been watching the ongoing battle between the dev team and the player base over the recent experimentation changes which are going live now and back offline tomorrow... It seems that the only common point of both sides is that we need more variety when it comes to equipment even though the proposed system fails abysmally to accomplish that.

I was thinking about the december changes to BE crafting and it looks like that would be a decent solution for the variety problem, at least when it comes to weapons, armour and medical gear.

Instead of a closed item list with fixed value frames and all that, make it so the final appearance is just a skin, make it so they each take several sub components and add the variety there. For example, a pistol with a cold damagetype component and a quickfire part would make a fast firing cold based gun, regardless of it's skin... it could be FWG, scatter, whatever.

Now, put there the resource importance but not as a blatant nerf but rathermaking each component dependant on a given attribute pair. The cold damagetype component from the above examplewould have to be made from highly cold resistant minerals, with low impact on speed, ham costs, etc (but experimentable nonetheless), a lower HAM cost component would need toughness or mass or whatever.That way weapon or armour variety is guaranteed, as each crafter and user will prefer a given aspect of the item over the rest. Some people might want heat damage, others energy, some fast firing guns, other slow but bigger punch, or lower special HAM costs... since each aspect can be maximized from it's components over the rest, there's more variety. Even if most people will favor higher damage/speed, there is a lot of room for variety with damagetypes and ham costs, or range, or.... etc. Same with armour, adding more layers than just specific resists with encumbrance effects and being able to combine what resists you'd want in a given piece, or stims, making them have more charges, or heal a given pool more than the other, just to cite a few examples.

Now would come the certification problem. Instead of the current cert system (which is quite dumb, frankly) add something similar to the challenge level one we have in CHs. As a character grows their skill handling pistols, they'd have access to more powerful ones based on the item's damage over time and ham costs, range, etc. Certain rare damagetypes can increase the level-meter more than others, if need be, to take into account PvE. In this scenario, a master pistoleer can wield more "overall" powerful weapons than a novice, or just marksman.

Crafter classes would get access to more varied components for their items as they raise in skill, as well as item "skins".

Have you considered having non-static NPC's? It would be interesting to have actual people playing important NPC's to give some fun non-static missions.

How about adding reinforced fiber panels to some of the quest pack schematics? That way wookies would have a chance at using some of these without giving up using a pack at all.

So I'm standing here in Endor waiting 9 minutes for a shuttle and I am reminded that Q3PO told me this is where I form hunting parties and how these waits are good for me and I should like them.

Wrong!

Solution: Continue the wait as need on Main planets and moons and create a no wait option on secondary planets. This way you aren't on Endor all alone waiting for the invisible hunting party you are supposed to be gathering who doesn't exist.

Of course the problem is there are only 2 things not able to be soloed in this game and THAT is debatable.