Development Cycle Archive

Additionally, plan on seeing Smuggler NPC’s that will take you from “anywhere to anywhere”.

this sound very cool to me. might be neat to include this sort of idea eventually into the skill trees for smugglar once the space expansion comes out and smugglars actually own their own ships. reduced travel time, no having to hop port to port, just a quick, direct root to your destination... for a price of course

This was a big request pre-launch too. Its always a big player interest, but the answer is that with the family rating, the lack of children has to do with keeping vulgar and/or upsetting images out of the game.

i don't really understand why seeing a few children NPCs running through bestine would hurt. especially if no other NPCs attack them, just so you keep that 'family rating.' but, ultimately, the level of mature content that enters the game is soley based upon what the consumer brings to the game. i know my guild is full of us silly perverts and corruptors of young minds kids do play this game of course (our youngest guild member is 12, but he is far more mature for his age than the other half of our guild) but this game is rated T for Teens, that means ages thirteen through nineteen, if you want to get really technical. anyone can legally see NC-17 movies and R-rated at the age of 17, no problem, an age about right in the middle of the teen age spectrum. i suppose it is silly for me to comment on this point seeing as corporations do have to watch their asses against lawsuits, etc, and i am sure it's been pointed out and discussed for many hours by game patrons, game patrons to developers, developers to developers, etc etc. but, when we all first saw anakin skywalker in episode one he was barely out of diappers-- if it appears in the movies, i don't see why it can't appear in the game. 'm sure no one is asking for content as the violation of small childan a-la michael jackson or stormtrooper brutality.

might be a neat idea to give image designers the ability to make player characters look younger with various skills (no younger than what is generally though to look like 15 just to keep it safe and clean) it's something to consider if there are a lot of requests for it. ultimately for something like this i would respect the decision of developers with regard to this topic.

It is a shame bikes are targetable when your flagged or dueling, I've seen time and time again people destroying other peoples bikes for malicious reasons. A suggestionplease remove them from being targetable objects. They are not pets so they donot pose a threat to people during PvP and therefore there should be no reason for players being able to destroy one and others vehicles.

As you all know certain people don't play nice this is oneproblem I would like to see removed from the game.

I've said this elsewhere but felt it needed to be somewhere more "visible":

Please, make the gambling games more interesting and graphical than the lame command-line/text-menu driven ones that are in hotels now. I mean really devs, this is Star Wars... pushing the envelope in gaming graphics and scope! How hard would it be to put an actual graphical interface in your sub-games? I've played lugjack and whatever that other roulette game is called for all of about 10 minutes. They seem weak even in comparison to old dos-based text games (is this Zork Casino?).

Bugs I've encountered lately:

--creatures warping into the air or a good distance away during DNA sampling or milking, new since the AI hotfix

--getting an "out of range" error when trying to store my bike too close to the entrance of a house

--factories stopping the production run on a schematic when there are still uses available, the correct resources, power and maintenance, and room in the output hopper. I have had this issue several times, but it seems to affect tailor component schematics and power-up schematics the most.

--unable to repair a vendor: status message says requires xx credits to repair, but adding maintenance does not repair the vendor. Vendor continues to operate normally regardless.

--can recieve multiple "critical fails" in a row. Backing out of the crafting window and restarting the tool breaks the cycle.

--characters that have left one city and moved to another still show up on the citizen list for the old city as well as on the new city unless they manually remove themselves on the old cities terminal

--major lag when on Dantooine. Things run just fine unless I go there.

Suggestions:

--item storage in proportion to lot usage

--allow maintenance to be removed from all things that require it. The code is in there for some structures (vendors, city hall, and such), it seems like it should be easy to apply it to all maintenance items.

--let mission terminals and trainers give a kick-back to player cities financially similar to the way shuttle tickets are taxed

--introduce some way of reliably "mapping" a city. It's frustrating to plan a city (using a personal mineral harvester to check what areas are "buildable") and find out that not all structures use the same criteria for placement. For example, a 5X5 area (or greater) that shows buildable to a personal mineral harvester may not be open to a building or a garden. Gardens, banks, and garages level themselves on the lowest area of ground, often giving them the appearance of being halfway or more underground in areas that are considered buildable.

--give some kind of on-going benefit to politicians trained in a skill. Once you've created your militia or placed that civic building, there is no benefit to keeping the skill.

--give mayors greater control over their city. A way to post and enforce laws and regulations and deal with unruly visitors and citizens.

--put a cap on how much maintenance can be paid into a structure or vendor to get rid of deadweight from players that have quit or left the game or otherwise abandon their structure. A month or two should be sufficient. But it would also be necessary to increase the reliability of the structure damaged e-mails. Not getting an e-mail untilsomething only has a few hours left before it poofs isn't helpful unless you are online at the time the mail comes in. Have it automatically send one when a structure reaches 0 maintenance, when it's at 75%, 50%, 25%, 10%, 5% and then confirming that the structure has been destroyed due to lack of maintenance would be extremely helpful. It would also help track the cases--and they are out there--where a structure "forgets" that maintenance was paid and goes from 100% with a week's worth of maintenance to gone in three days.

--allow vendors (tie it in to global advertizing) to be searchable from bazaar terminals. There are too many vendors out there that were only placed for xp or that sit empty while fully stocked vendors get overlooked by frustrated players who have given up after finding several empty-vendors.

--fix "illegal" vendors, i.e. vendors that still operate and exist even though the owner has dropped the skills necessary to have the vendor

--update and free-up names that belong to accounts or characters that have been deleted. A friend of mine created a character on one server, but then deleted it to play on another server. A few months later we started playing on the other server (that he had originally created a character on), but he was unable to use the name again even though the character was deleted. No one else took the name (typing it into a friend's list generates a "not a valid friend name"), but it's still tied up in the generation stage.

--bring back the "roleplayer" tag and allow for player customizable tags (be it through a PA or whatever)

--allow a character to changeor add a last name after character generation (maybe through an ID or a Politician). The only name tied into the character for identification purposes is the first name. If a female character gets married, she might just want to take her husbands last name...

--open up a "thug/mercenary" faction. There was originally a Hutt faction, and the new Corvette stories support it, and it would be nice for players to have an option besides Empire or Rebel since the neutrals have nothing going for them.

--take a good look at the current Overt/Covert/TEF rules. For people who like to role-play (after all, it is an RPG) it's difficult to justify the game-mechanics of the current system. I am not the only one who would like to play a faction, but don't want to go near PvP at all. As it stands now, Overt/Covert is simply a PvP switch On/Off. Maybe this is tied into the GCW revamp.

Comments:

It's great to see some of the correspondant and profession forum requests get addressed in the upcoming Publish 8 (interplanetary survey droids, remote harvester access through droids). There can never be too much communication, though, as many people here have expressed.

Give more power and information to the correspondants for each forum, or hire more people for your communication. Too often the correspondant is left in as much darkness as the rest of the community, giving the impression that no one is listening. I have seen many changes and potential changes come down the line that suggests that there is someone out there listening, but there really needs to be a greater presence of red names and responses on these forums. It's impossible for one person to keep up on everything that gets discussed throughout every forum here; it's hard enough for one person to keep up on 75% of things in one forum alone.

Post a weekly list of known bugs and what is being done with them; if more information is needed I know there are plenty of people who would put in a little extra effort to run tests if it meant getting them fixed. If there is a centralized place, it would help to cut down on the repeated posts in this discussion and others from week to week as well as the frustration of players who do the reposting. I think many people could accept a "This is a description of a known bug. We're too busy with other things to worry with it right now." It's certainly not ideal, but honesty an openness should help the morale of players.

There's no way to please everyone. There's always going to be people who think that because they don't get their way everything sucks. There's always going to be people who think that everything is wonderful despite whatever bugs may be out there. Responding to things like petitions and sit-ins and stuff like that only serves to frustrate other members of the community. Wookiees cried for armor, typed tons of petitions, and staged a sit-in one day on all the servers and the devs gave it to them fairly quickly after that. Great for them! But what about the players who patiently try to discover the cause of bugs or work hard to come up with Top 5 lists and give tons of words of constructive feedback only to get overlooked over and over again with no kind of recognition of their efforts?

It all comes back to communication. An ounce of feedback from the devs and moderators can cure a pound of complaining and whining and crying. Don't let a few people, no matter good they are at working others into a frenzy, shape the changes and updates to the game at the expense of everyone else. I understand that something of the magnitute of SWG is not an easy thing to balance and keep people happy. It would just be nice to have some kind of tangible evidence that there is a priority list for changes and fixes on the devs table that can address minor concerns along with the major ones and that it doesn't get shuffled around at a whim.

Thunderheart,

You need to get started on the 10 questions form each profession, you can't start something without finishing it.

I'm disapointed at the way SOE handle this.

Do not start somehting you can not finish!

TH,

NO MORE NEW CONTENT, just fix the game.

I am not asking for anything new, i just want things to work, i don't want my pet to autostore, I don't want my mount to stand there looking stupid, I don't want to die every 15 minutes because this game has so many bugs.

Don't talk about anything. Just FIX the bloody game. Fix the bugs. If you can't do that get a new job.

Thunderheart, about the Corellian Corvette!

First thing, it's should be called the Lok/Dathomir/Dantooine Corvette since you spend most of your time puttering around these planets looking for stuff before you can even get to the ship.

So I'm sitting in my workshop on Corellia trying to decide whether towaste more storagearea with my new DNA or risk making an invalid pet, when I had this amazing idea. Since SWG is supposed to be geared for all types of players I should be able to have some fun with the new corellian Corvette dungeon. So I gather a group of my crafting buddies, I think the most advanced combat profession we have is novicepistoleer, and we decide to hit the corvette. So after running around the galaxy getting the right information for some dude we finally get the tickets we need.

Finally we are on our way to the corvette. We're all thinking how cool this is going to be, puzzles gahlore to solve, and maybe even some loot. Wow, crafters seeing loot without having to spend 4 million on it. So we're all looking out the window and we see the docking bay. Our ship docts to the corvette with a thud. The captain asks all of us, "You're sure you want to do this?" And we respond, "Of course we want to do this, SOEgeared the game to appeaseall player types, not just combat acheivers." Well, as soon as our first 5 guys step off the transport ship I see blood spash across my other buddy's face. I turn to see an evil grin on the captains face take shape, then a diabolical laugh, "Move on my pretties, like sheep to the slaughter! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!" The next thing I know I am waking up in a cloning center.

Very impressive SOE, finally a quest for players who HATE playing combat professions. (Some of us really do enjoy playing games like Sim City instead of Unreal Tournament) *sadly shakes his head*

/sarcasm off

Hey Thunderheart, how about a quest where people who have combat skills are not allowed in. Something like Myst where everything is crafting based? We'd like some adventure too without having to worry about 100k HAM mobs slicing our heads off.

---

SpaceCrazy wrote:
Is there ANYTHING to kill that gives positive Naboo Faction?

---

---

Albion_DeCrappa wrote:

Hey Thunderheart, how about a quest where people who have combat skills are not allowed in. Something like Myst where everything is crafting based? We'd like some adventure too without having to worry about 100k HAM mobs slicing our heads off.

---

---

wickedHangover wrote:

---

Albion_DeCrappa wrote:

Hey Thunderheart, how about a quest where people who have combat skills are not allowed in. Something like Myst where everything is crafting based? We'd like some adventure too without having to worry about 100k HAM mobs slicing our heads off.

---

You mean the quest in Theed where you answer the trivia questions was not enough? I think there's one in Bestine too when you finally complete that quest.

That seems a little odd, I thought 5 trivia questions would be enough for the entire crafting community to enjoy formonths on end.

But I do agree, more content would be nice in the game in the form of anything that does not involve killing things and that also involves some of the empty NPC cities, or I should say any city other than Theed, Bestineand Coronet...

---

there there are us that are middle of the road.....i am a crafter and i enjoy violence!!!!!!

but since the game is entirely skill based i dont have enough combat "skills" to really do anything (God i hope the SE is twitch so i can actually have some fun and use my REAL skills as opposed to some spreadsheets)

so if youdont want to group or are not high level combat person about 90% of the game is just cut off to you....