Development Cycle Archive

Vendors are going poof again, lost 300+ items two days back and still no CSR response, and sadly, I know what the response will be:

1. You must have deleted thems, we wont help you
-or-
2. Prove that you had the items. Screenshots or any other valid proof will not be accepted as proof.
-or-
3. No response at all (most likely)

Droids.

Most of the community doesn't know yet, but the "Droid Invasion" publish is not bringing any significant new combat droids. In fact, they are weaker than before with the (retroative) removal of the Medium Armor despite the bump in HAM. The wallpaper (and Blair's annoucement) is quite misleading for the general population.

What's the plan for DE? For being the 'focus' of the publish, we've had remarkably little information, feedback and results.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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LeBob wrote:

TH

are you guys making any progress on the 'NPC stuck in wall' bug?

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With each publish, we're making strides with this. There is some more progress made with this publish. AI code is very tricky though.

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is it possible to enable CSRs to do this?
can some of the more bugged spawns be moved 100m or so temporarily?

and actually now that I think about it... your original answer is not that great either since (I think)...

AI code does not influence where a MOB spawns.... am I wrong?

to be clear: there does not seem to be a problem of the MOBs sticking themselves but rather the spawn mechanics of the game engine spawn (verb) them into the collidable environment

thanks very much

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Keltorr wrote:

[edited for length]

Also, is the house placement bug going to be addressed? I'm talking about the one that can be exploited to allow solid walls of houses. If the bug has already been fixed, then the existing walls of houses need to be broken up, or else the message is sent to players that it is ok to cheat. [edited for length]

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actually it does not form a 'solid wall' per se... since if the fidget with the plane where the houses meet you can actually go through at that point to the other side

although, I do agree that it is an exploit since it appears to the uninformed to be a 'solid wall', and in fact I think it's a ban-able exploit (or at least vacation)

one of the devs posted a while back a response to this bug...

I think they said "any action taken to use the game mechanics in a way not intended by the developers is an exploit" which is up to interpretation to the reader

I don't think it will be fixed any time soon... I'm sure it would be very easy for them to increase the footprint of those houses by just one unit, however they have not, and probably will not for a long time

Thank you for wasting a year of my subscription promising to fix Smugglers over and over and nothing ever comes of it. If it's a SE fix, that's stupid to have even put it in the original game...waste of my time and patience. No word, no attention except to nerf our only combat to a point of uselessness even to get away which is what it's meant for I'm assuming.

I just want TH or someone to say "You'll be there in Publish 8." or "...9." or even "...SE." so I know to swap professions now and quit wasting my time. It wouldn't hurt to formally apologize to lying to our profession openly at least 3 times, cause right now, I'm angry, frustrated, and fed up with TH and the Devs. As far as I'm concerned they're all lying cows and I don't trust them any farther than I can throw 'em.

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DVader539 wrote:

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LLJK_Griz wrote:

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Thunderheart wrote:

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DVader539 wrote:

Here's a real, real, real simple fix for you.

Spraystick is supposed to be Acid damage
Tusken Rifle is supposed to be Kinetic damage
T21 is supposed to be Blast damage

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The correspondents and I have looked at this many times. Sorry, but its not an easy change. Damage types have a relationship to damage and by changing the damage type, it also changes the damage modifiers (numbers) and throws them out of whack. This is something Im checking to see if we can address in the weapon balance part of the larger combat balance, but I don't know what the answer might be. And in any event, concentrating on these minor things before the weapon balance isn't productive. We'll want to look at things when the combat balance is on TC.

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If that is true, then why did the Tusken start off as kinetic and then mysteriously change to another useless energy rifle around publish 4? Why has it taken this many months of weaponsmith and rifleman correspondents complaining before we got ANY response on this?

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First off, thank you TH for a response to this issue. Before you read anything else in my response, please understand I am directing no anger at you, since I know you are only fielding the question, and are not responsible for the error nor ignoring the error.

With that said, LLJK_Griz makes a very valid point. If it's not an easy change, then how did the Tusken Rifle change it's damage type? If it was unintentional, then I'd like to meet the unlucky guy who by-mistake did the complex job of reprogramming it. If it was intentional, then I'd like to meet the doofus who went to all that complex work to screw up a weapon. Or is this a case of "if you had a dozen programmers sitting at a dozen terminals typing randomly, in twelve days they would reprogram a complex variable of this game"? of course that last one was a joke. I hope...

Finally, what bass-ackwards logic made the Dev team make a weapon's stats not variable-entry based? That being, a weapon's code is a string of numbers, each number representing a stat. Like 1=energy damage, 2=heat damage, 3=kinetic damage, etc. Then a seperate function takes certain numbers during a fight and puts them through an equation set to figure out damage and such. If the Dev team made it any more complex than that, then please hire my service of logical thinking. I'll sell you my services at a good price since I'd enjoy making this game better. (p.s. I'm serious.)

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After discussing this with my fellow Riflepeople, the idea of the T21 being blast damage is debatable. But a very good point was made.

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T21 ws only blast for a few days and IMHO it should stay energy cause a blast rifle would be overpowered for the stuff that is sposed to be what commandos are made for taking out.

However the fact that within a week the T21 was changed from Energy to Blast and back to Energy does show just how full of [balogna] old TH is with his responces to us idiots that play this game

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Hey TH, I've got a question for you. With the upcoming combat balance, we've been toldthat armor is going to get balanced. Is there any possiblity that this armor rebalance will hark back to the ideas of theolden days, when armor was supposed to have serious enough tradeoffs that it was not going to always be beneficial? Right now, especially in PvP, if you don't have armor you will never be as powerful as those that do. It's just not fun to see so many people running around in their suit of composite, constantly buffed to high heaven, knowing that you have no chance of ever taking on because you don't want to wear armor. Maybe specialize armor so that it only really defends against one or two damage types, then have it be vulnerable to one or two to make it a strategic decision. Just an idea.

Thanks,

Jackmon T'oth

I am concerned that the crafting patch may be pushed live tomorrow as it is, then later removed. This is going to lead to tons and tons and tons of schematics of stuff that cannot be reproduced by new crafters. We've had small instances of this in the past with T21s and FWG5s, but tomorrow there will be 20 or more items that are better than ever before and better than they will be for the foreseeable future. Its going to completely invalidate and make un-fun the crafting game for new players who will not have a chance to compete with these items even after collecting resources for months and honing their character and equipment to the pinnacle of perfection. Please, abort this before it is allowed to ruin the game.

I wrote this in another thread, but I thought I'd put this in here too:
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One facet that all of the past weeks' discussion was getting away from is that the only goods being bought on the servers are master produced goods. It seems to me that upon entering a crafting class there should be a few components that a master and a lucky novice produce at the SAME level.

If a master had an advantage at producing say "butter knives" it certainly wouldn't come in the ability of said knife to spread butter. Assuming heavily decorated knives cut the same as a well-crafted plain-looking knife so, arguably master knives would be produced quicker, and his quality would be more consistent (the in-game result would be less critical failures to produce the same high-level knife over and over). There's always the apprentice with real talent that could, by chance, produce the most heavenly of knives on his first try because he's got the gift. So, what am I babbling about?

Why not give a novice a chance at producing a very high quality good, perhaps as good as a "since-beta" master? Make critical failures MUCH MUCH MUCH more common as a newbie, but a person with time and resources should be able to roll the dice over and over again until they get a schematic that competes with a master schematic. In this new system I'm suggesting, most noob crafters do not have the piles of good resources laid up to out-sell the master crafters. Certainly there is a problem with crafters that can dabble and make their own goods, but I think we achieve one of the original goals of making master crafters more consistent through the reduction of critical failures.

This opens certain markets to low-level crafters with the creation of niche markets for the guy who has a stock-piled a couple hundred K of something and got lucky with a schematic one night. To prevent dabbler-abuse you could tie the number of items in a schematic to crafter level so that Master Crafters still create the products in bulk. Regardless of number of schematics produced, all of them are going to require resources that are finite. Hence, Joe-bob's butter knife of spreading is going to be around for a while and then no more will be made unless Joe-bob spends a large amount of time "rolling the dice" to get another amazing success. If a novice schematic could only produce 100 or 10 of these uber knives all of sudden the value to the crafter increases a lot, and therefore the price now competes with the master crafter's.

To tie this to the butter knife, you may have seen the multitude of late night info-mercials for Wonder-uber-super knives. Is the market already flooded with wonderful 200$ kitchen knives that will last until your grandkids need to give them away? Yes. Are their fewer and fewer ads from small start-ups selling knives that may, for a time, work as well as a 200$ knife? No. The path to selling a knife in a buyers' market is in specialization in the vertical market of people who need one knife to do it all and don't care if it's name brand or has matching steak knives. (of course throwing in 6 junk steak knives will sway some buyers) They guy hawking it on late night television is the newbie crafter, the company with 200$ knives in 5 different chains of kitchen stores is the Master Crafter. The customer shopping at the kitchen store is a Master Chef shopping at well-stocked vendor, while the customer purchasing from the infomercial is the one buying from the noob spamming the starport who carries much of his stock in his backpack. Allowing for a _chance_ (5%? 1%?) new crafters will craft the few things they can craft at the same level as a master, with decreased crit fails and increased schematic numbers the bonuses for the master, increases cash flow to new crafters while still providing incentive to climb the tree.