Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Test Center Update Notes Mar 5, 2004
As a Chef, some thoughts on the Bags on Vendors change.
ACK!!
I have a Tailor friend who delivers 200 crates of Trim weekly and offers it to my vendor. Anyone care to extrapolate the number of mouse clicks it would take for him to offer them all to my vendor individually, for me to buy them all individually, etc? That's not even taking into account the 'Sales Limit' either.
Hitchico wrote:
Is it true that on the test centre counter attack, dodge and block are capped at 125? This worries me as I am a Master Swordsman, Master Carbineer so now one line of one of my chosen proffessions is rendered virtually useless? I can understand capping it due to the dabblers with approx 200 dodge (+whatever dodge tapes they may happen to have) and insanely high melee and range defence by picking and choosing defence lines of various proffs. But i have no other proffessions and as a Master of 2 proffesions why should i be penalised due to the fact their defences overlap? If the developers never wanted this to be the case then why have similiar defensive attributes if they didnt want them to stack. I could understand capping the dabblers but if you are a master of 2 proffessions then surely you should benefit from all your defences.
Maybe I should stop being different and playing the classes that i enjoy and go for the flavour of the month tka rifleman :/
So now I should be learning Pistoleer or Rifleman right? So that I can cash in on the dodge/block skill bonus?
I mean hell... Swords and Carbines are like bread and butter for so many people. What about all those Fencer/Pistoleers?
They fit together even better! I mean at least if I choose Rifleman and Swords I can match up the Mind abilities, but what about the Fencers? If Pistol doesn't match, nothing does. Oh look, theres another rise in the amount of Pistol/TKA (smugglers) fighting over Locked Containers at the Starport, and believe me, that first slicing xp is hard to come by, without every Fencer in the galaxies looking for new Active Defense bonuses.You know what bothers me...
When I first open my store I wanted to have a promotional give away for the first week or so. Buy this product you get one free or you get this with it. How would I have done this? Put them into the bag. But now I can't do this.
Nor can I sell a complete outfit. Nor can I sell an entire room for a discounted price (couch 500, chair 200, table 300 etc etc... Together in a set - which comes in a baggie - 500 off purchase).
Could we possibly roll this bit back to the way it is on Live now, and perhaps work toward allowing people to see the contents of bags on vendors?
But in RL, you would be hurting something fierce.
aibo220 wrote:
The biggest problem isn't just the backpack mess, but also the vendor limit, experimentation changes and that i've heard that TH said resources with decent stats should be loot.
Plain and simple... Combat has never been SWG's strong point. AI in this game is so retarded you can't even laugh at it. I have a harvestor and their are huurtons all around it. Am I scared? No. I just go up to from the opposite side and the Huurton just tries to attack me from the other side of the harvestor. Why doesn't go around? I even drove over to it so it will chase me! I wanted some action dang it!
And pvp is a joke no questions asked. Skill has nothing to with it. It's just the one or two professians that out perform all the others. And then its the equipment. And then its just spaming one move. A joke!
The only thing this game has going for it is the crafting. First my problem was the item limit on homes. 150? I have 10 lots... I need to place harvestors, place factories and THEN a store front. Oh wait... What about storage? Funny you should ask... With the 150 limit on my house I could either store not even half of my stuff in there and have some ugly plain looking store, or I could decorate my store. And even if I decorate it, the limit confines me to only the front room. How fun is it to run a store/business like this? It isn't.
But... I have accepted that this is just the way it is. The item caps are so unresonable in this game when it comes to homes its unbearable. Especially since there is no reason for it.
Now though.... Now the developers want to make things more difficult. The bag thing, the experimentation thing, the vendor limit... What gives?
Let me make this as clear as I can for you:
CRAFTING IS THE ONLY ASPECT OF SWG THAT WORKS... COMBAT IS A JOKE... CRAFTING COULD BE IMPROVED UPON BUT NOT IN THE ACTIONS YOU ARE TAKING... EITHER WAY, CONCENTRATE ON WHAT NEEDS THE ATTENTION MORE... EXPLOITS, BUGS, COMBAT!
You want to fix crafting? Give us more items: furniture, clothes..... Let us change the color! There is absolutely no customization when it comes to homes on this game. Changing your vehicle and droids color is stupid. Especially droid. You need a DE to do it for you and then it smears off after not even a day. The vehicle doesn't last any longer so its a waste of time. Let us change the color on our furniture! Goodness, its not that much I'm asking for. Let us change the colors of our clothes. It'll make it easier on tailors to not have to stock their vendor full trying to get the same shirt on there in a few different colors.
Give us more room in our homes so we could actually place a large home and get some use out of it for those 6 freaking lots and be able to decorate it from top to bottom and not just the hall way!
Or just leave crafting and merchant as is and come back when you got the slightest idea as to what we want and focus on combat, the bugs and them exploits that are ruining the game almost as much as you are.
I have harvestors, and let me tell you... I have 4 on a 30% Alum right now. Why? I hate surveying. It's something like: survey, get on bike, drive 120m to the highest point, get off bike, walk 100m back to my bike uphill without any scout, 5 minutes later, survey again... REPEAT! REPEAT REPEAT!!!!!!!!! I can not stand it! That flying off the bike is so irratating its driving me up a freaking wall.
Either fix what needs to be fixed or just do nothing. I rather you do nothing then do something and ruin this game further.
Devs, I hope you can take some consideration into the words of the people posting on this thread.
(I made this big so it might better be noticed 
)
It seems that every patch there are a slew of great and exciting enhancements to the game. To that end, I think the developers are doing a great job.
The problem comes to bear when so many changes are introduced that have a grossly negative impact on the player community. Now I realize that many changes are put in due to current bugs, and many others are put in for "balance" issues. But I just want to ask that you reconsider certain changes when there is such a strong level of feedback from the players.
Let's take a look at the bag issue on vendors and trades. We can no longer offer items on vendors that are in a bag? Well, I have seen no reason listed as to why this is being implemented. But I can guess at a few possible reasons.... could be that players are being "ripped off". Could be that you are trying to fix the database issues. Could be that you don't want players to be able to use vendors as a storage facility anymore.
But whatever the reason.... I only ask that you reconsider this change, and instead try to come at it from a different angle.
If players are being ripped off:
Work on making a way for us to see what is inside backpacks on vendors.
If you are having database issues:
There are countless ways to handle an overloaded database. Limiting the size of the database will never "cure" the problem, because it's only just going to keep growing as more new players come on board. Please consider that this change is a bandaid. It will not get RID of the problem. You may see some temporary increase in database performance, but in the long run this will not solve the issue. Now I've no idea what sort of database you are running. But I do know that there are plenty of ways of enhancing a database, rather than limiting it, in order to make it perform better. It could be as easy as dividing it further, and spreading the database over more servers. Heck, you could even sort inventories based on player's first name... and have one server for each letter of the alphabet, with one master server setup just to control traffic flow and tell the game which database to look to whenever a certain player asks for an item.
My point here is simply that rather than add a change that essentially feels like a "nerf" to the player community, you could instead look into actually handling this problem by fixing it terminatedly.
If you don't want players to use vendors as a storage facility:
Then give us more storage space. Give us a structure called a "Warehouse" that takes 1 lot and holds 150 or 200 items. There are many things that you can do to help fix this. Of course, it still comes back to the size of the database, but there are ways to fix that as well (see above).
Why should you consider these words?
Because we make this game. We, the players and the devs and everyone involved with it, MAKE THIS GAME. We are a group of people with a common goal... to have a fun and enjoyable play environment where we can explore the Star Wars universe.
With changes like this one, among many many many others that I have seen, I fear that you are going to continue to see your numbers fall by way of the boards. I have talked to quite a few people who agree with me that they have noticed a significant drop in the amount of people playing this game. I know that my friends list, which contains close to 80 people, is down to about 4 or 5 regular people. Four or five out of EIGHTY. I remember when I used to log in and I would literally have to scroll back just to see who all was online. Now I log in, and I'm lucky if I find anyone to even talk to.
What happened to them all? They left.
Sure, some people left for RL reasons that had nothing to do with changes to the game. And sure, some people were never really long-timers from the very get go. But still... there have been a LOT of people who were serious SWG fans who wanted nothing more than to play this game. Yet they have left for other games, with complaints of too many detrimental changes.
I'll tell you... nobody likes to be given something and then have it taken away. Yes, I know there are bugs. I know there are exploits. These things need to be fixed. But too often there are things that truly are NOT bugs or exploits, but they get removed anyway.
There are 33 professions in this game. Every single one of them has problems. I know you are aware of this. But it doesn't seem to me, from a player's point of view, that these problems are really being taken into consideration. Often I read that "that change is coming, but it won't be quick because it takes a lot of work." Well of COURSE it takes a lot of work. Hey, it also takes us a lot of work to master an elite profession! But we don't complain, or say it can't be done. We just do it, because we want to.
I would really love it if you announced the next publish and called it something like, "Publish 8: The Ultimate Bug Fix". And in that Publish, I wouldn't want to see ONE SINGLE "new feature" added to a very broken interface. Rather, I would want to see three pages of "bug fixes". Not "Fixes"... BUG fixes. There's a difference. The vendor bag issue is not a "bug fix". It's a "fix". In other words... it's a nerf (from our point of view).
I hope you listen well to the words of so many players, as we truly are who make up this game. This game is not made by the developers. If it was, then it would be a movie and not an MMORPG.
it reminds me of collision.....
there was a time when you could not walk thru tables and sofas and crafting stations and crates....
but someone got locked in a house because another player blocked the door with a crate or something....
instead off just fixing that problem.....they remjoved collision all together....now eventually they just addeda /exit command or something but to this day we still walk thru everthing in our homes...
that sound to me more like they where solving some other programming/database issue than really worried about one or 2 players being held hostage.
in eclipse most of the player has composite suit with 80 kinetic resist and 62-65 base unsliced
almost everybody buffed and wear eff sliced armor 80 kinetic approx 80-90 base
and devs give us very nice armor thanx
equalityin the game perfect ...
. JUST A SAD AND PATHETIC ATTEMPT.