Development Cycle Archive

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Shug_Ninx wrote:

"Haden, I'm confused. You said you had nine programmers in your origional post but now you say fifteen. Did I misread something?"

We have 9 *designers* on Live, and 15 people capable of "coding" for us, which in this case includes the 9 designers.

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H B hasn't logged in since this post with this account. There's gotta be a lurking H B somewhere out there or George put him on as Chef at the ranch for a bit of soul searching...

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Shug_Ninx wrote:

Hey everyone -

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah regarding blah blah combat revamp blah blah interviews. I was blah blah for Blah Blah Con blah, then plowing blah your blah blah since blah I blah blah. I blah mean blah for blah blah the blah blah interviews blah to stir blah blah upset blah, and blah blah active blah forums blah blah.

First off, blah blah tell you blah blah upset blah blah timing blah Combat Blah, Galactic Blah Blah reblah, I blah your pain. I've been blah blah on Star Blah Blahblahblah (in blah blah blah) for over blah blah (blah blah blah!). During that blah I blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah love blah blah, not blah blah developer blah, but blah blah player blah. As a blah, I've been blah about all the blah blah the game, concerned blah blah changes, and blah blah blah update. Like blah blah blah, I don't blah blah wait for the Combat Blah blah. I wish blah blah blah tomorrow. As a blah, I'm blah blah that blah blah blah.

Second, I want to apologize for any consternation, frustration, or anger that my interviews might have caused. (Been waiting two paragraphs for that.. too bad the apology is ONLY limited to the interviews. You folks have so much more to apologize for. -Vyko) Normally, we do blah blah interviews blah blah BLAH&BLAHs, but blah blah blah via blah, moments before I had to rush out to blah blah and then Blah Blahiego. They were blah blah blah-to-blah. I'm sure I could have blah blah more carefully, but the key points to take away should blah:

We're always upset about any changes to our schedule, and we recognize that you're upset too. (Getting warmer. -Vyko) With that said, the (formerly known as) "combat balance" and Galactic Civil War revamp are going to come after Jump to Lightspeed (which launches in October). (Right now would be a GREAT time to address any of the seriously broken professions wondering why we need an addon instead of a repaired/completed base game. An addon to a broken game will just be.. well, a broken addon, really. -Vyko)

We want to transform the combat balance into a more sweeping Combat Revamp, and we want to take the time to do it right. (Wasn't this said almost verbatim by TH months ago? -Vyko)

Combat Balance is the top priority behind JTL, followed by the Galactic Civil War revamp. (Untrue. Patching JTL after it comes out will be your priority. -Vyko) We know that these are both very important to the community. We also recognize the need to address Smugglers and Squad Leaders. (Again, we've heard that for a year now, Hayden. Guess what? Smugglers haven't seen ANYTHING but the fabled "nerf-bat" swung directly at their gonads. Quit it already and put up or shut it. At this point in the game, empty promises make you look foolish. -Vyko)

We have been and continue to work on the Combat Revamp. Work on the Combat Revamp will not stop due to JTL. We will get it out as soon as possible after JTL. (If that's the case, wouldn't common sense at least suggest that maybe some hotfixes for professions/content/bugs would be a good thing? How long will the powered-up slices, for example, be readily available? How about broken spawns now? Or.. hmm, yeah, not enough room for all that. You see my point. -Vyko)

There might also be some stuff that wasn't clear at the time of the interviews (or wasn't clear from the interviews) that I think it's important you know (if you don't already):

We are committed to receiving feedback from and engaging the community. To that end, we'll be holding a correspondent summit at the end of August. (*BZZZZZT!!!!* WRONG ANSWER, THANK YOU FOR PLAYING, PLEASE TRY AGAIN LATER. If engaging the community means NOT stepping foot into any forum that MAY include a) Honest criticisms and requests to work on same, or b) Really irritated customers that don't like to be strung along, then by all means, you're doing a DANDY JOB. -Vyko)

The community is going to be fully-integrated into the design and implementation of the Combat Balance and GCW. We'll be pumping out design docs as they are ready (the HAM revamp is already on the forums). We'll be starting feedback threads for the designs, and eventually the Combat Balance will have its own "sandbox" for testing. As the correspondents and others play through all the changes, we'll be doing lots of focus threads to get feedback on the actual implementation. (Is "sandbox" a code-word at SOE for "hey guys, let's go to Jack in the "Sand" Box while they post hundreds of threads filled with hope. tee hee. -Vyko)

JTL is a high priority for us not only because it's something we believe that players really want (based on focus testing, press reviews and previews, forum posts, in-game feedback, PMs we receive, feedback from events such as Fan Fest Comic Con, surveys, etc.) but also because it is setting a tone for quality going forward. (Perhaps I'm dense, but wouldn't you want to make the core game the quality part, so it's easy to tack on quality parts? Just... I dunno, a thought. -Vyko) We also feel that we need to have JTL out there before we tackle the full-blown Galactic Civil War revamp because a large portion of the content is faction-based. (Does this sentence make sense to anyone else? No? Didn't really think so. "We want to add the JTL expansion to the broken GCW because a large portion of the JTL content is faction-based...," and.. what!?!? I'm lost. -Vyko)

We will continue doing frequent publishes that contain interim combat fixes and some small (but cool) tweaks and additions between now and JTL.

We are NOT shifting a huge number of people over to working on JTL. JTL's progress is such that we will probably only need to pull 1-2 designers (out of 9) from Live. The one area where JTL will impact us is in testing - most of our Testers will likely be working on JTL in the weeks prior to its launch. (Good to know. Could you please let ThunderHeart and GreenMarine come out and play, then? -Vyko)

Finally, regarding specific answers to the interviews themselves... I've reread the interviews numerous times and I can understand how some responses could have been misconstrued or taken out of context. I'm not going to go through every answer, but if you have specific questions/responses you want me to address, feel free to post them on this thread. (...where obviously they'll be utterly ignored, or at least be given the appearance of being ignored. I'm still waiting to see the SOE Special Ops guys knock on my door. "Mr... ah.. Vyko? Yes, we're from the SOE Forum ah.. Detatchment. Please come with us. -*wink* Vyko)

*** This section skipped as it seemed genuine, and I won't mock Mr. Blackman for apologizing for a gaff. We all make them, and points to you Hayden for being man enough to admit it. Even my cynicism only goes so far. -Vyko***

I'd also point out that we also try to get feedback from "non-forum posters", including players who never hit the forums, fans of the films who are intrigued by Star Wars Galaxies but aren't playing it yet, and even people who have left the community. At the end of the day, we want to know what current players like and dislike about the game so we can build on our strengths and correct our weaknesses. The forums are often the best place for the latter (but that's certainly NOT all they are used for), but when we want to know what people like about the game, we often have to solicit that information and look beyond the forums. (Wow, that must be a lot of work. There's LOTS of people on the forums. Listen to us a little, BECAUSE WE'RE STILL PAYING YOU MONEY. -Vyko)

Thanks for taking the time to read this. I'll try to be active on this thread throughout the day, so feel free to shoot me any additional questions.

Haden Blackman

LucasArts Producer

P.S. Please remember that it is NOT Thunderheart's (or anyone else's) job to respond to my communications. (Amen there, H-man. He doesn't even respond to his own half the time. -Vyko) I am again sorry that it has taken me so long to get back to the community, but please don't take it out on Kurt.

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Shug_Ninx wrote:

At the end of the day, we want to know what current players like and dislike about the game so we can build on our strengths and correct our weaknesses. The forums are often the best place for the latter

Haden Blackman

LucasArts Producer

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• character customization : physical customization and Image designer feature is way cool


• housing : it's really funny toown a house and furnish it


• vehicules + mounts : boths are great


• professions : lots of different professions, combat, crafter, entertainers...


• skills points : neat way to create a character the way we enjoy it


• travel : shuttle travel is great, gives a SW feeling


• NPC cities : they look good


• crafting : we can harvest, make our schematics and tag our products


• bazaar + vendors : great way to buy / sell and nice to own a merchant


• pets : funny to have display pets


• droids : cool to have utility droids


• civil war : nice we can choose when we want to PvP with overt system


• chat : great chat system easy to manage lots of nice emotes too


• email : very good way to keep in touch with friends


• maps : waypoints is a great feature to meet with friends and register interesting spots


• death : cloning is a funny feature


• harvesting : cool to survey, kill and harvest


• players cities : great to gather with friends and build a city.

• character customization : hats, belts and bandolieers don't fit most of the players


• housing : item limit per house (instead of per player), no feature to move a full house, no way to personalise interior walls and floors and create our own archtitecture, non usable corridors at the entrance of some houses, bad desing of most of the houses (do you really think someone would live in such poorly designed floor plans...), no player garage to store our vehicules


• vehicules : decays too fast, need a /pull_and_mount and a/mount_my_mount feature turns WAY too slow, need to change the double click on own mount to /mount (not interested in examining my mount 10 times a day...)


• professions : should need only 50% xp to requalify for boxes we already got and surrended 9sorry but grinding isn't funny)


• travel : shuttles are so small they looks like toys, very annoying to have to run to get a ticket at each starport (where's the fun ?)


• NPC cities : where are the kids, sorry we all are cloned...


• crafting : limiting resources to 100k stock piles is *self-edit* and yes we do need warehouses, create some "mining" skill to combine resources, bring back item naming colorization!


• bazaar + vendors : include players owned vendors to be listed on the bazaar (as soon as someone visited a player vendor he should be able to list it items on any bazaar interface provided the merchant is able to publish his vendor on the planetary map) Let players make vendors in private buldings. Let master merchants rent vendors to others players and let them manage the vendors.


• droids :gives usreal combat / assassin droids (small droid commander profession?), create a autoharvest function on harvesting module droids


• civil war : please remove TEF. Give factional armor schematics to factional armorers. Reduce factional stuff cost.


• chat : we need an /anon feature and we need to have it by default when we log if we want to be anonymous.


• emails : give us folders to manage our emails


• maps : change the /waypoint xxx yyy to /waypoint xxx yyy "My waypoint name", let us create folders in our datapad


• death : item decay please remove it from all insured items it ALWAYS *self-edit* me when I loose 1% on insured items, bring back corpse run, that was funny!


• harvesting : autoemail notification for switching resources or harvesters being offline or decaying


• players cities : give a tool to desing and place houses for mayors, most cities looks awfull, give us a way to level the ground to make neat cites and for god's love please gives us players roads and walls (medieval towns looks more advanced than Star Wars one's!!!)


• armors :make all armors usefull and reduce armor decay (one armor per DWB raid.... no comment)


• combat special moves : improve ALL basic moves effects as we goes throught master a combat profession, it is very sad as master only 2 or maybe 3 moves are still usefull. Change ham cost so special moves kills mobs faster than they kills us.


• balance combat so we don't do like 10 damages on high end mobs (after resits) when they do up to 4 k to us.


• buff time : it can take an hour to find a buffer and get a whole group buffed and thenget killed in 5 min : create a droid buffer wich can store doctors buffs usable by any novice medic. The doc would craft his buffs as usually and store them on droid modules mades by DE. Players could buy thoses modules and drop them in droids. Do the same for entertainers buffs. Thoses buffs should be a bit lower than master applied buffs. (10% ?) Let us keep out buffs whe we log out


• food : empty stomach when we die / shuttle


• improveloot so apart grinding there is some FUN killing mobs


• decay : give us a money sink repair 100% feature so we could keep our beloved armor, weapon... stuff all players life long and make real itmes stories. This would be done by a Master crafted tool so the creds would still go to the crafters. The price would be over 100% item cost, 100% cost would go to the crafter and the over 100% woud go to the galaxy void as money sink


• latests dungeons : top end harcore gamers only. Casual gamers cannot enjoy the DWB and the Geo Lab. Let casual gamers enjoy the whole game.


• items storage : create an special all items storage bag wich can hold as many itmes as a player can own for a day or two per month: 750 (houses storage) + 50 inventory = 800 so we could easily move our stuff from place to place

Ty for reading