Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Roundtable Discussion (Week Ending 4-12-04)
AgreaAtodlie wrote:
....destroying game play for both bh and jedi...
Its funny you mention this, just out of curiosity I looked at eBay to see if anyone was selling jedi accounts. Since the last publish the number of jedi for sale went from 1-2 every other week to right now with over 20 jedis up for sale...this means one of two things, jedi sux, or after grinding that long to get them, they are completely bored with the game and are getting a refund of sorts.
After playing this game since August I have to say this. First I love the game, I'm not leaving. But I learned a valuable lesson. I will NEVER play a mmorpg sooner than 1 year after launch. I never want to play a game that is in beta again. This game will continue to be in beta until the servers are shut down for the last time. I suspect I'll be among the last players to logout, I just wish I had started playing next august so I can never think back and say "Remember when you used Bleeds and they helped?" or "Remember when pets stopped following every few hundred meters?" or "Remember when nobody wore composite armor?" or "Remeber when the cantina in Kor Vella was hopping and there were medics in almost every med center?" or "Remember when you got experience for items crafted in a factory?" or "Remember when the faction recruiters were naked?" or "Remember when you had to walk from Bestine to Jabba's palace?" or "Remember when the advanced planets were full of creatures?" or "Remember when insurance didn't do anything?" or "Remember when people would '/yell Holocron 3mil PST' and a huge crowd would form around them?" or "Remember when there were no player cities and it was fun to explore maps?"
Icould go on for hours remembering things I liked more about the game in september than I like now. I wish holocrons and player cities never happened...
erroroccured wrote:someone dial 911 i am having a heart attack. I received a response from the devs. Joking aside. I think the true problem TH is everyone is becoming severly dissapointed and bored with this game and with new MMORPG just around the corner. They hear of changes next publish then it gets pushed back and back and back and back. I think you can agree people have an expectation to have their professions fixed within over the year they have been playing the game.
People start to ponder if this game is going to make it and what can be done to save it. I hope you are succesful.
I had a bit of insomnia last night and this same thought kept running through my mind. There just is not anything fun to do in the game anymore (or maybe ever). There are no challenges. I've soloed the Geo Labs, including the Acklay. (Was fun once, maybe twice, but is now boring.) I've soloed The Warren. Doing so was a challange as a MCH/MP and aside from the ATST, was a joke as TKM. Soloed all the Nightsister POIs -- and reported multiple people exploiting along the way. Stood, fought and destroyed 15 (!!!) rancors. All this with average equipment and buffs and an average template (MSwd/TKM).
My jedi has kill thousands of pikets and huurtons. I crawl over Dathomir and Endor and Yavin 4 and Dantooine killing anything that crosses my path, wincing at the loss of each point of condition on my four pearl sabre. To what end? None. Another meaningless box with another meaningless skill. Ninety-percent kinetic makes most of the kewl powers a joke anyway. And even if I get the power, I'll be gang ganked if I show anyone but an ewok.
My Friends list is more a graveyard list of great friends made and lost than a tool to let me know who is online. SWG's tagline is becoming, "See You When Space Is Released." Even then, I doubt people will stay past the first month after the novelty wears off. Sad, really.
Now, a few members of my guild talked me into buying the pre-release version of an upcoming MMO (to bring this back to the original poster's qoute). The game, even in data, as far more content and has a far superior sense of place than Star Wars Galaxies has since launch. We all know this game was released much too early and we know the reasons. I have only begun to judge the game since the release of vehicles and player cities, but even in that short time not enough progress has been made.
I'm sorry, Devs and TH, but as innovative and powerful as the system is you have developed, the world of the game is so barren and empty of any real life I have little hope that it can be saved in the short-term. My only hope is that when Spaces released you bring enough people back so that the money stays lucrative enough that the world can be filled in with more than one dungeon a month.
If I have one piece of advice, I would suggest you destroy every mission terminal in the game. Get rid of them all. Have NPCs give out destroy missions and delivery missions, entertainer and artisan missions as well. Have Jabba and Valeria and Borvo or their subordinates give out bounty hunter missions. Darth Vader or the Emperor should give out Jedi missions. The scythe schematic mission is 1000 times more fun than grinding missions from the terminal, as are the pedantic and overly simplistic theme park missions. Make all missions like that, make them multiple stages, and given, received from, and rewarded by NPCs. In other words, give them life!
More than anything the terminals destroy any life in the game. They are impersonal and too often ludicrous and repetitive. Since when does a pre-technological society like the Dantari run spice, get involved with the Hutt, or any of the other insultingly mechanical titles/stories that are given to their missions on Dantooine. The only time I pay any attention to any of the stories given at the terminals, though I've read them over and over and over and over and over again, is when they are so stupid they stick out. And whether by intention or the simple fact that terminals are the only source of steady income, the terminals are the primary source of content in the game!
Well, back to that prerelease beta. I will be back next week for the Corvette and will likely pop in next month for whatever the new dungeon is. Otherwise, what other reason is there to play?
Ok Thunderheart i have a question for you...
I almost kill a rancor and we know when it is on low health it moves away from you, then since they pushed the new AI system live the rancor doesn't move away it warps 100m away from you most of the times even if it is not stuck behind anything.
This also seems to happen with full health rancors, they walk and suddently they warp 100m away.
So can we have some Neutral missions where you work for the law instead of against it?
Ta
TH, when are we going to get the results of Act III which supposedly ended on 4/4/2004?
This is certainly true, that professional management and marketing strategies will return less revenues than if SOE chose to address this game from the players' standpoint.
People don't come here to play a good game. They come here to immerse themselves in the Star Wars Universe. If that is not provided at least adequately, no amount of genius marketing strategy is going to save the day.
That immersion is what would MAKE this a good game. This particular product is different in that respect. The base potential customers are those who have lived their lives watching and reading the saga, and they have those expectations. Meeting those expectations may not be the easiest thing in the industry, but it certainly would restore the faith that us veterans had back in beta, with a seriously overworked, dedicated, and creative development team.
I find a major problem with this issue is that the development team appears to be out of touch, starting with Haden, who is the expert on continuity. Many of us are confused on continuity issues, as applied to the game. There are way too may to even begin to list. But that continuity is a MAJOR issue, when applied to the customer base spoken of above. To those of us that live the Star Wars Saga, and looked forward to this product, continuity is 1st and foremost in our minds, the true Nerds we are.
Secondly is the playability. As a SW Nerd, the vast majority of those wishing to play this game, and immerse themselves in the Star Wars Universe, are trying everything in our power to apply content to the product. We try and fail, for the most part.
Most importantly concerning this issue is the fact that, no matter how you look at it, potential customers want to IDENTIFY themselves with their unique characters. Joe SWFollower has always wanted to play as Han Solo, for example. Well, this may sound a little lame on Joe's part, but this is what being a nerd is all about! He arrives in the game, and finds himself very disappointed in the Smuggler implementation. Because there is no true Smuggler content. This applies to all professions, but let's concentrate on Smuggler as a specific example.
Smuggler has NO content. At least, not the content that potential players are expecting. They make the connection between the Smuggler profession, and Han Solo, or Talon Karrde. The failure here is that this professional content doesn't exist. A Smuggler never really Smuggles....yet.
Watch the movie, basically, that's what a being a Smuggler is supposed to look like 
Addressing this issue, the broad perspective of the players is that CONTENT resides within the PROFESSIONS. I am playing the game as a Smuggler, I expect the gameplay to approach that which I see in the movies, and read in the books.
To that end, the Bounty Hunter, then, is the ONLY profession in the game with any content. Bounty Hunters actually hunt bounties. This is what they do, this is their purpose, and tying the purpose of a profession to a unique missions system, and balance between player interactions, is what should be the single biggest change that would turn around sales.
Apply the concepts of Bounty Hunter in this product, to all professions across the board, so that each profession, regardless of what a player chooses, will be an immersive and FUN thing to do! This is the natural progression from the base game concept to the next level of finishing the product. And this is the primary content. It's nice to go to the Geono Caves, but I'm STILL not a Smuggler!
Conclusion: Continuity, and professional content. These two issues, if corrected, would prove to be the one true method of drawing hundreds of thousands of customers to this product. THIS is what we seek.
I believe that disappearing items need to be addressed. This week, my server experienced a "loading" status during the middle of the day and when it got fixed, a lot of items had disappeared from my house and bank; most of them returned the next day but two of them have not and CS simply closed my ticket without a reply. (I do plan to resubmit my ticket until I get a decent response.)
I understand that the Holocron says if there is insufficient room in the container the items disappeared from when the items try to become available, they will be lost.However, I do not feel this is a satisfactory solution to a known server problem. Explaining what will happen to the items is not sufficient if what actually happens is that the items vanish and there is no compensation for them. I admit that bugs are random and may be difficult to fix, butpeople shouldn't be losing potentially rare items due to circumstances that are not only completely beyond their control but also part of Sony's responsibility.
I would suggest that in cases like this, inventories be temporarily allowed to accomodate more than their capacity to make room for the missing items and the missing items alone, then the player be sent a system mail saying that his/her inventory is filled beyond capacity and s/he has a certain number of days (say, seven) to remove excess items before some will be deleted (preferably the ones at risk would be the missing items that returned, I suppose, that way at least the player will have some idea of what could be lost). This may seem exploitable, but it isn't because the bug causing disappearing items is very random and doesn't happen all that often.
This may not seem like such a problem because not too many people complain about it and the few that do are silenced (a friend of mine lost far more valuable items than I did, and his tickets kept getting deleted for a month before he finally got a response, and he got no compensation whatsoever). This game has a lot of people, but individual problems should be looked into even if the majority of players do not experience them for some of those problems, like this one, can have severe consequences. I can afford to part with the items I lost, but some players cannot and if their stuff vanishes for reasons beyond their control, I dare say that more should be done about it than deleting or closing their CS tickets with no help.
TH. Please confirm or deny that grinding profs to unlock your FSCS will stop after the jedi quest system starts.
I'll ask here as well as on Orkut. I want to know if my last 5 months of grinding and that subscription money was a waste of my time. The "you will be rewarded by your place in the quest timeline" just doesnt cut it for me.
Yes or No?