Development Cycle Archive
Thread: In-Concept Open Discussion (Week Ending 5-3-04)
Instead of doing a dungeon publish one month can the devs dedicate time to fixing the loot tables for the entire game?At this point I thinkhaving the loot as a whole fixed is better than another dungeon imho. I'm talking about things like mobsdropping things of an appropriate value for their difficulty.
For instance, my bro and I hunted Mokk onDantooine at their stronghold and in two hours found absolutely nothing of value on them or in the piles in their huts. No SEAs, Barely any creds, stone knives with horrible stats, and wooden staffs with poor stats and poor bleeds are all we found. Another example is the piles found in mid-level locations like the kliknik POI temple on Yavin. The piles only had a pair of slippers and a hat in them. This just isn't good for the game.
/cheers
For the in-game calculator idea!!!
and
The badge ideas besides the generic list we have now... and of course another vote for some kind of faction rank showing.
My recomendation, therefor is the following:
1. Take away the cantina's and the mission terminals from the outposts on the "adventure" planets such as Lok and Dantooine.
This will force a need for Combat players to find a PLAYER city for (ENTERTAINER)healing and to recieve their missions. This will Boost the ecomomy and cause there to be an actual purpose for player cities and player CANTINAS.
2. Have ENTERTAINER mission terminals and/or QUESTS direct the musician or dancer to a PLAYER CANTINA.
I understand this will require a NPC at the cantina, but what would it hurt to have a NPC patrion come with every PLAYER CANTINA when it is built. This would also add to the mission becouse there would be a chance to have a real live audiance in addition to the NPC being performed for as part of the mission.
I think these two ideas, in combination would make the entertainer missions, quests, and profession as a whole a lot more enjoyable and rewarding. I also believe it would help ad to the interdependent nature for which the game was disighned.
Greetings,
I dont know if this has been brought up already, but may I suggest/re-suggest that player vendors warn you of items left inthem when selecting 'Remove'. Harvesters now have a simular feature but vendors do not. A couple times now I have accedently distroyed valuable items thatwere left in thestockroom that I had forgotting about untill it was to late. Thanks for your consideration.
- make doc buffs about as effective as current entertainer buffs
- reduce the strength of chef buffs at least by 50% or more
this serves the following purposes:
- to wear armor has got disadvantages again, not everyone and his dog will walk around in full composite
- more important: players wont be as much overpowered in comparison to mobs as they currently are! Anyone with a master elite combat title can kill an ancient krayt on his own (with the possible exception of squad leader), that is simply not right. Weakening the players powers in this way will furthermore encourage more group play and add further strategical thoughts to combat.
StarchMonkey wrote:
I am a badge lover.
I think we should have a badge display revamp. Specifically I would like to see graphical badges. The game Jumpgate had a very good graphical badge system. I don't know if that game is even still running or not, but they even had a website you could go to and view peoples badges. I think this would be much better than the "...has seen blah blah blah" on our screens now. Basically just a little picture icon to represent the badge instead of the text. Also maybe we could add faction rank as a badge?
The second part I think should be a separate badge window when you examine someone. They could be organized into categories and all that kind of thing. Give badges, bio, and anything else their own page in the examine window.
Also for the non-badge lovers, an option to not display them would be in order I think also.
I like this idea as well. I played jumpgate myself and really liked the badge system in that game.
I have a few suggestions to add as well.
1) A bonus to smugglers when playing the gambling games in the hotels. Maybe something like a Luck skill mod for smugglers.
2) Archeaology Profession - I remeber awhile back someone made a suggestion to have an archeaology professions. Maybe have it so that players in this profession can search for artifacts in the various ruins located on the planets. They can have special artifact survey tools or have a skill that gives them the ability to search the area for artifacts. Going back to the game Jumpgate, they had space ruins in each starsystem that spawned, and with a special shipboard tools, the pilots could track down the space ruin and use the tools to extract artifacts from the ruins. Most of the time the artifacts where datadisks but sometimes you got special ship enhancements that could be used on the players ships. Maybe have a simliar system designed into SWG for an Archeaology profession so that players can search for randomly spawned archeaology sites on the planets for artifacts
-Battlefields: The problem with battlefields is that they are no different than PVP or simple PVE battles, and therefore not desireable at all. So I think that battlefields should take on a completely different play style. Like in the upcoming expansion where you control every shot, battlefields should be "twitch based", where skill is actually a factor. You could move up the imperial or rebel ranks depending on your performance in battle. When you step into a battlefield, it would be like stepping into an fps game. When you zoom into first person view, you will see your gun. Brawlers could have a style similar to Jedi Knight 2. This would improve the amount of immersion dramatically, and give plenty of incentive to go into battlefields.
-Break the silence: My very first thought when playing this game for the first time back in June, was "Is my sound working?". Almost a year later, it's no different. You get a few tracks from the prequels looped over and over and over, and then a handful of sounds and squacks. SWG needs much much more music namely from the later movies. Also, why not have the characters (NPC and human) say something? When I type "/wave" your character waves.. big deal. It would be a whole lot cooler to actually hear your character say "hi" or something.. anything. Everyone loves the Wookiee voice, but yet its barely in the game.
While Im at it, (this may cause latency problems, but..) why not allow Voice over IP in the game? Not like in Counter-Strike, but actually coming from your character as if it is actually talking. My friends and I use a ventrilo server for this purpose. This would create great role playing opportunities (you can finally show off your wookiee voice without getting weird looks), and save our fingers from typing. Beefing up the sound in SWG would be a huge improvement on immersion.
-Physics: As far as I'm concerned, aside from vehicles, there are none. I remember after buying the game, my friend and I wanted to jump off the waterfall in Theed. We ran at it, "jumped", and.. nothing. Gravity is one of the most important factors of any game fun-wise. I'm not asking for FarCry's physics, but a little gravity would be great, like when you get smacked by a Rancor, you actually fall back a little, or better yet, add "rag doll-physics". When a character gets knocked out, or you kill a creature, you see his lifeless body fall to the ground. Now THAT would be immersive. The game engine probably couldnt handle this, but it's something to think about.
-Droids: (Coming from a non-droid engineer) There are too few to choose from, and they are as dumb as a toaster. You added a few from the movies and thats great, but why not create brand new models? You could have a "design a droid" art contest in the forums, where the winning designs would be implimented into the game. Also, I think owners of droids should actually be able to control them remotely. ie you take the role of the droid, while "you" stand in a stationary position somewhere.
In the EU, droids are smart. I think theres a book specifically on a droids adventure.. dont know. What Im getting at is one of the new races shipping with the expansion should be DROID! Having droids as a playable race would be infinately cool. They would be advanced in combat, but lack in armor selection, and obviously would not be able to wear clothes. Instead, there could be special installations you could build or purchase to act as armor, etc. If droids were a playable race, suddenly, it would feel a whole lot like Star Wars. There would be droids everywhere, like in the movies.
Well that's all Ive got for now.. I'm sure I'll think of some more later on
.Buffs in their current state do not go very well for that group, making it unfriendly for casual gamers, as they go away when being offline.
I would like to see that being changed, them staying when being offline.
Buffs could act like similar to a TEF and not allow you into a non-static buildings, to prevent logging out fully buffed at a HQ for example, to prevent PvP issues.
Nuff said,
Cali
Sorry I really haven't read the thread. TIme has been short and all. But a thought came to me. I'm sure other have said it before. Here's my thought...lol
When Duel Wieldcomes to the game. I hope it's going to be a quest based skill gained. I would hate to see it just added to the master box. I would like to see players put some effort into getting it. Not just 4 gopher or stomp missions. Maybe some thing like the hermit quest...random POI.
Just a thought.
But in all seriousness, this is a legitmate problem here. With fewer players on any particular server, the less enjoyable it becomes. Furthermore, to add insult to injury many people on the server are AFK in the cantinas collecting XP for playing music and what not. I think it would be extremely beneficial to maybe merge some of the servers, resulting in a population upswing and thereby providing a better cross section of the SWG community. Feel free to comment on this.I think the most important thing DEVS should look at is the combat balance, bring it in sooner........ PVP sucks so much at the moment.
Whats the point in paying 10k per buff when it comes down 2 who has the most MIND. 5 sec and ur dead.......
PVP is dying because of this mind damage.....
now pvp is littered with Combat medics and Riflemen.. this needs to be SORTED. and the no decay with PVP sucks as well. If u have fire and/or poison and disease stacked on u when u die u get decay.
I think the combat balence shud be before the jedi revamp.Bring out mind healing stims or something. you brought out a poison and disease resistance food, it SUCKS the most i have seen is 38%. Bring in a 30sec timer like KD so that if ur poisoned or diesased it cant be applyed for another 30sec and/or it can only take away a max of 70% of ur base mind. If u have had a cure from a doc u are imune frm the effects for 30 secs.
Yea this may be a nerf call, but this mind damage needs to be looked at ASAP its killing PVP. I been a CM so i know its kinda fun to poison.
1 on 1 u may beat a CM dependent on ur race and over factors. like food mind buffs but again i stress to TH get ur team to look at some combat fixes pretty quick.
What an articulate and accurate post. New stuff like AV-21s, candles and droid modules are cool but I wouldn't say the game is really hurting for them...it really seems that the new dungeons like the Geo cave and Corvette are catering to powergrindersbecause the mobs are considerably harder than those in other caves. Nothing wrong with hard NPCs, but it seems that the devs' main answer to player complaints about the game being too easy (or players killing too many of one type of NPC) is to A) make areas with ridiculously high-HAM mobs and B) amp the HAM of the existing ones.
Aproblem with A) is that casual gamers get rather excluded since not everyone can afford to take expensive 80+% composite suits to a place like the Corvette where it will get severely beat up in battle alone PLUS get decayed, nor are many casual gamers strong enough to take on content of that HAM-and-damage-dealing-level. Q-3PO said that the devs want to cater more to casual gamers than powergrinders...
A problem with B) is that it effectively sends the message to players, "if you use your minds and discover good strategy to defeat high-level NPCs, you will be penalized by having to fight stronger versions of those NPCs". Besides, is there really anything so bad about players killing those NPCs? If that's their way of having fun in the game, and it doesn't involve camping, kill-stealing,griefingor cheating, why make it harder for them to have their fun?
OHMSS225 wrote:
TH,
Can we get a response as to what the devs consider "high end content."
I have played through the corvette many times, and I personally do not consider this "high end content" at all. On a scale. Of 1-10, I'd say the corvette is not even a 4 on content. The only thing I can find that was "high end," was the difficulty level of the mobs. Difficult mobs do not equal content. The only reason for difficult mobs in any MMO,and this has been confirmed by the devs on many occassions.is to keep players from breezing through the content too fast. There's nothing wrong with that, but the devs cannot add increasingly difficult mobs to cover up a blatant lack of content and storyline.
With the mobs as difficult as they are, the devs are purely catering to the power gamers with elite profession templates. This is something the devs swore to never do. They are cutting out the casual gamer. I welcome to be proven wrong on this point by seeing some metrics, but I think that they would confirm that only a very small population is being allowed into the new areas of the game... the power gamers. With a dungeon like the vette, which has many different versions, there could have easily been a stealth version involving less combat and more puzzle solving skills while leaving another harder version for the power gamers. Also, with the vette being instanced, it could have easily been scaled to fit the skill level of the players inside.
At the next meeting the devs have, please remind them all that difficult mobs and loot are not adequate. We need storylines! Not loot.
I hope that you will deeply consider all of this when discussing the upcoming death watch. Sure, the new jet pack is cool, but without some decent level puzzle solving and storylines, the new dungeon will be pure crap. After all, this is a role playing game, not a first person shooter.