Development Cycle Archive

Thanks for all the information.

I guess my biggest beef is the lack of communication. Which it looks you guys are trying to work on. The Correspondent idea is a great one! However I'm sick of hearing from the Correspondent "I don't know, I posted it on the forum and havent heard any thing back." Same line for weeks, and weeks.

I know PlayerCities is a huge request, but personally I'd rather have working professions. Why not take the manpower focused on new features, and put them on fixing existing professions. Then when they are fixed to a semblence of normalcy and most people are happy. (You will never make every one happy.) then go back to the new features with even more devs available then before.

I'm mainly talking out of my butt here, and I wouldn't presume to tell any one how to run their company or staff. Every one's company is different and goals/bosses expect widely different things. Just providing input after years and years of software/developer management.

But why add a spoiler to a new car, when the engine doesn't run?

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Holocron wrote:

Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
2. Pistoleer
3. Bounty Hunter
4. Rifleman
5. Merchant

Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
2. Architect
3. Doctor
4. Dancer
5. Weaponsmith

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What about the Least Popular Advanced Profs and Least Commonly Mastered?

Thanks,
PWT

But are all the developers having fun? That's the important thing, right? I'd feel bad if we were and they weren't. Stressing out about little teeny bugs while we're fighting Dark Jedi. I mean whos problems can really compare to someone that has to fight a Dark Jedi?

Holo: I realize there won't be any detailed answers on the topic, but I have a question about unlocking FS slot, and I don't really expect a detailed answer, just a simple yes or no.

I play a Creature Handler, this class as you listed yourself has become VERY popular. Now does playing a POPULAR class have any influence on lucking the FS Slot?

More simple: Will people who play popular classes have harder time unlocking their FS character slot?

Thanks in advance.

This is exactly the sort of post you need to make on a regular basis, Holo, maybe every two weeks and certainly at least every month.

Thanks again, Holo,and please make a habit of this.

I think this is a great step forward. As for substance perhaps tackle 1 of the tougher issues that spring up on the boards i.e. the post that are more about perception than actual game mechanics.(I know everyone has theiropinons but your's are valued by many).

On another front I have no problem with complete honesty about variousissues. I don't know what the SOE policy is, butsometimes ananswer as blunt as 'This is never going to happen so stop asking' is alright with me.

Keep up the good work, you guys should be very proud of this sand box you created for all of us to play in.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm glad this is going to be (I'm hoping) a frequently updated type thread from you. Before going any further, you're doing a kick *&$ job with the overwhelming pressure turned on. All of the devs are (Except Quid..traitorous lit'l...... j/k )

Any ways, to answer your questions I would personally like to see detailed updates. Not just, "we're working on it, and we've implemented x number of hotfixes" etc...

I would prefer to see something like:

"we'vefinished the artwork and models for the starships a week ago. They've been tested and are still having some bugs such as wookies comming out on the other planets as rodians, butthe devs areworking on that specific issue as I type. Our goal is to have the starships ready for implementation by the next publish which is September 27th at 4AM PST. We may or may not have this finished by then due to some other bugs we've rescently noticed causing PCs with darth vader's head and Leia's metal bikini body (Although some of you wouldn't mind). Please remember these are goals, not promises so if you don't expect it to be done and it is well enjoy the suprise, and if it's not you won't be let down. In other aspects, we've started working on fixing the ...."

Well you get the picture I think

Also, general areas of interest I'm sure all the players would like to hear about would be

• actual dates for the storyline arc quests (Scheduled start dates, deadlines, etc...),


• broken quests that have been fixed,


• new content that has been added after Thorough testing,


• GCW updates,


• new badge quests,


• Theme park exspansions (After they're working as intended)


• And anything regarding the "In Development" area of the site.


• New professions, skills, etc

Also, one small request if it's not too much to ask. Could we please have a forum area for new content ideas that comes from players? I offered some suggestions for the story arc in SWG discussions and was basically told to post it somewhere else because it wasn't related to "In development issues"

Thanks again for your time, and I appreciate the responses you give to the community.

main reason why majority of the money is from missions, are because npc missions are rarely worth the trouble opposed to terminal missions.... (ie, for killing a guy i got 30 cr and a gorg casserole!)

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Holocron wrote:

The biggest expenditure is on structure maintenance, followed by travel, skill training, tip surcharges, and cloning.

Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
2. Pistoleer
3. Bounty Hunter
4. Rifleman
5. Merchant

Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler
2. Architect
3. Doctor
4. Dancer
5. Weaponsmith

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A few brief points. First, if we get to see a ranking, can we at least see some percentages?

Second, absolutely *no* surprise here about CH. I hold the unpopular opinion that attack pets should be removed from the game entirely and focus on the "supposed" stars of the game: the player. Half my guild is practically going CH, it's just that good. Limit faction pets to battlefields.

Third, take notice that the most popular elite classes are not being mastered (except for CH, which is the uber class anyway). Pistoleer has crap specials (am one, probably going to drop it and stick with marksman since those skills actually work). BH is insanely powerful, but that power comes without mastery, so why bother (eye shot anyone?)? Rifleman suffers similarly to pistoleer, broken specials. I've heard merchant is a really bad profession, but don't know specifics.

"Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler"

Did you forsee this being the most popular advanced profession?

Are there more of them than you thought there would be?

Why do you think it is the most popular?

"Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler"

Why do you think this profession, out of all the advancedprofessions, is the one with the most masters? Sheer numbers, or something else?

All that information was great! I wouldn't mind seeing some PvP information as well myself everyone once in awhile, but maybe that belongs in another post. Just a quick who has the upper hand and who has more soldiers kind of thing.

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Holocron wrote:

A few weeks ago I posted stating that we were working on improving the community relations aspect of SWG, and also working on several other fronts to try to make the game better in general. I thought you might appreciate some info on where we are.

Game info

SWG continues to grow (though of course the rate of growth has slowed from the early days). Most players have still not reached advanced professions. The economy's rate of growth has been cooling a bit, and we're starting to see cyclical economic developments occuring on a weekly cycle. The vast majority of money is still earned via missions, but loot as a percentage of earnings has been rising slowly.

Please keep in mind that your economic indicators are based on (as of yet) unbalanced and, in some cases, outright broken professions. I would hesitate to rely on these numbers as being indicative of how the economy will play out in the longer-term till those situations are better resolved (but I'm sure you knew that...).

The biggest expenditure is on structure maintenance, followed by travel, skill training, tip surcharges, and cloning.

Most popular advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler


2. Pistoleer


3. Bounty Hunter


4. Rifleman


5. Merchant

Most commonly mastered advanced professions:

1. Creature Handler


2. Architect


3. Doctor


4. Dancer


5. Weaponsmith

Does it in any way concern you that CHs are such a dominating profession selection for players? I would have thought that players would have tried to move to other, more 'Star Warsy' professions and playstyles.

If it is a concern, canyou let us know what the Dev Teams' collective take is on the fact that so many view the current incarnation of SWG as 'Pet Wars'?

CS

We've been meeting every day to get the top CS issues that cause people to make CS calls, so that we can fix them. This on the grounds that these are among the most important bugs to tackle: both because they irritate players enough to get them to call us, and also because they clog up the CS lines, thus making CS slower for everyone.

I'm happy to report that our response time on CS tickets has fallen by a factor of twenty from a month ago (and so has the number of open tickets at a time and the number of tickets created). You should be seeing much faster and more responsive CS as a result. Before skeptics start screaming, I'll point out that we can see very specific declines in calls occurring when we fix certain bugs and issues. Overall, we hope to continue making significant progress on this front. A big thank you goes out to the hardworking CS staff who have exhibited a lot of grace under enormous pressure--they want your experience to be as good as possible, and they are not the bad guys.

One word: Boourns. ....'nuff said.

The top issues that tend to get reported these days, and which are therefore our top priorities for fixes include missing items (mostly seem to be related to crossing server boundaries); ghosted items on vendors and the bazaar; skills going missing (still no luck on this one!); people getting stuck in certain places; things warping to 0 0 0; and mission NPCs not spawning at waypoints.

One to call out is houses vanishing--every case we have investigated closely has turned out to be a legitimate deletion. So we're planning on providing CS with a way to get the houses back, and we're looking to change how house deletion from unpaid maintenance works so that we don't have this problem coming up as much.

Community stuff

We've got an events manager now, you've met him (hi, Pex!). The events guys are busily working to ramp things up on that front.

The assistant community manager hunt is about to end, we think. This person will be in charge of communication with the correspondents, and will be on the boards pretty much all the time.




Maybe you guys should make sure that he/she has the best possible crafted flame-retardent suit.

We've got a correspondent forum now so that the devs can discuss things with the correspondents directly without fear that chance remarks will be taken as promises. We realize that many of you want this forum to be public, but we're concerned about letting our devs off the ranch that way. ALL the designers are not only able to, but are required to post to this forum, so we're seeing a lot of communication open up and some very good discussions.




This, to me, was good news (with a caveat). I'm concerned about how often you will allow our correspondents to give out "news". Having the development/change discussions behind closed doors is all well and good....and understandable. However, I caution you to not keep themfrom releasing news in a timely manner. If the correspondents are not able to give their respective communities feedback, we'll all be right back in the same boat we were before. Just make sure that you are able to let them release something on a weekly basis, perhaps. Do not keep them silent for too long or they will be seen as ineffectual (along with the Correspondent forum in general). Make sure that they are allowed to talk about something official and 'on deck'. This will, I'm very sure, keep the noise level down on each respective profession board.

We're enacting policy on how the stuff from that board gets passed out to you guys, so expect this channel of info to open up a bit more soon. Please don't browbeat your correspondents too badly in the interim--they very much want to share everything with you, and we've asked them not to, so their staying relatively quiet is our fault, not theirs.




In that regard, I'd encourage you to allow the Correspondents to 'poll' the profession about issues that have been cleared on the private forum. This will be a good way to allow players to discuss while not releasing anything official. ....just a thought.

We also have this forum, which we hope will avoid the noise of the SWG Discussion forum, and provide a more focused area for discussion with the devs. This is intended to be a place where we can float things with zero commitment, so if you see something here, please do not take it a a promise that it will be implemented. It's a place to conceptualize and discuss.

This forum is one of the better decisions you all have made, so far, with regard to keeping the board noise to a lower level. It harkens back to the "Focus Threads" we had in Beta that were so very helpful, informative and productive.

I'd like to put forth that we start discussing Droid Engineers in greater depth on this forum soon.

We're also working on improving the patch notes process. The assistant community manager will have this as a primary duty. We expect to float things here, and then as they actually get implemented, we'll post them on In Development. Once they make it to Test Center, they will go on In Testing. Once they are released to you, they'll go in the Update History.

Lastly, there's the polls. We intend to start using this tool a lot more. You should definitely check them out if you haven't already, as we intend to be asking fairly important questions there. We don't intend to become totally poll-driven, but we do want to gather data on where we shoud be spending our efforts. Expect some poll questions to be fairly targeted and specific.

Suggestion: Allow profession correspondents to build/post polls to their respective forums.

...'nuff said.

We've got a long list of other community things that we want to do, but we're planning on first getting this stuff working smoothly before rolling out additional things. Hopefully, you are already feeling the effects of more attention being paid to this area.




Absolutely. Better (and more substantive) communication has always been my single largest concern regarding the state of the game. Bugs, imbalance, issues, etc., I can handle those. It's in everyone's best interest for real, productive two-way communication to occur.

In summary

I don't want to make any promises--this post is a bit of an experiment. But a "State of the Game" letter periodically is one of the things that we have on our list as something that we feel would be valuable to improve the tone of the boards. Many pointed out in the discussions on community that we needed to make more substantive posts, not just more posts. So this is something in that direction. As it is a bit of an experiment, I'd love to hear what sorts of things you feel would be substantial info for a letter like this.




Suggestion: Depending on how often a Dev plans on posting the official "State of SWG" post, I would recommend that it be in reply (at least in part) to the latest poll results.

May the Force be with you!

Message Edited by TheRealTK421 on 09-25-2003 12:54 PM

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/bow

Respectfully,

Would you guys be willing to share the proffession percentages for all proffesions, not just the rank of the top 5?

People are already willing to play the best, would it make sences to make the classes no one plays more fun unill you get a shift in the player base. This avoids the concept of a "nerf" because you effect very little of the current player base.