Development Cycle Archive
Thread: A sort of state of the game
How exactly does one get one-shotted for 1200-2000 by a CH? I've never seen my pets do anything more than base damage and usually significantly less. My highest damage pet, and the highest I've actually ever seen is a bio-engineered rancor with damage output of 600-610. Since we can only call one of these at a time, and I can only call a lvl 20 alongside him which doesn't put out the 600-1400 damage your numbers call for I have no idea what you're talking about.
Are you perhaps a rifleman who expects tohandle a high levelpet in a brawl while prone? If so, you need to remember that a sniper's strength is in stealth. If not, then you're outright lying.
Holocron wrote: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.
Perhaps it would behoove you to open up customer service during the hours that people actually play, and not only doing the hours that 94% of adult America is at work. This may provide a much more accurate picture of what issues are important enough to call about. It would also be helpful if the phone number were toll free so that those outside of the local calling area of that office were not penalized further for your service problems.
Holocron wrote: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.
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.
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.
The latter makes the former redundant and therefore unnecessary. Get rid of it immediately.
No customer is entitled to control another customer's service experience, and that's exactly what those kinds of processes do. No "player correspondent" is entitled to, and more importantly, qualified, to speak for another customer, and no customer is entitled to any avenue of communication that any other customer is not.
Holocron wrote:
One thing we have been discussing is simply making the houses inaccessible when maintenance expires, as a grace period.
Errm, Holo, you're contemplating creating an equally annoying Catch-22 situation here.
If you can't access the house, you can't pay the maintenance. The management terminal is inside the house.
You knew this, right?
Plus, we've got testimonials that PA Halls, and all their contents, have vanished, the problem has been identified, and the PA halls returned but the contents lost.
This is a serious issue. You cannot have people investing thousands of player hours into gathering resources and then have them disappear in a bug. It's what sparked the outrage in the original thread over on the main forum. Sure. They got their PA hall back. But the stuff they'd been collecting in anticipation of Player cities is gone.
You've managed to hack off some of your mostdedicatedplayers. The very players you are counting on (although you don't realize it) to create the content that will keep other players engaged.This is NOT good.
Do you guys do backups? Do you preserve game states for reference?
I will point out that the number of tickets would certainly be down since all tickets were wiped not too long ago.
Any chance you'll really stick your neck out and give us the list of advanced professions with the fewest players and the fewest masters?
You have recently commented that the devs are unhappy with the overall pet situation also, though I notice that no changes are coming in the next big patch. Does that mean that you aren't that unhappy with it, are making changes that aren't ready yet, or just don't know what to do about it? If balance is a high priority, that needs to be one of your top issues.
Of all the changes that are in the new, big patch (which I will hopefully be able to test soon, thanks Hurricane Isabel!), I think the one that will help most with player retention is the quest fixes. SO much of the content in this game is laying fallow because players despair of even trying quests after spending an hour or so just to find out it is bugged. Corellia has so few working quests it is ridiculous.
Yeah, BEs can now use factories. Now all you have to do is give us a way to get thousands of the same meat, hide, seafood, eggs and milk. Resource collection by hand is adequate for crafting by hand, but automated resource collection is necessary for automated crafting.
I'd like to weigh in further on the house poofing since the thread was locked in Discussion (don't really understand why).
Holo, is sufficient verbosity in the Player logs to manually calculate maintenance lifetime from player cash transfers into the PA? If you PA hall is bugged, the PA log is probably bugged to.
If you need a test subject, as stated in the locked tread my PA hall poofed. There are 6 people in my PA so that's a very small number of player logs to look though to find aggregate maintenance payments. It happened within the last week so you wouldn't have to go far back. I would love to help solve this problem. I cannot stress the severity of it enough.
Jacore
Holocron wrote:
is anyone looking at the Tailor/armorsmith bug? where schematics disapear from our tool when we get more than 256? And how about the necklaces that still don't show an icon in the creation, inventory or examine screens?
I don't know off the top of my head. I know that the correspondents are aware of the issue and are escalating it to us.
WOW!! An actual dev comment on this issue FINALLY!! Thank you so much Holo!
Now, can we please get some kind of status/further info on this? Please Please tell me that this issue is at a further stage of development/fix/awareness than 'the correspondents are raising it' !?!
Also i'd love to know if there is Any kind of movement at the station regarding the most insanely annoying 7-day relisting of vendor items? This has got to be one of the single most annoying unfun chores in this game
Thanks in advance.
YA id also like to now if playing 2 characters hurts or helps you open youre fss cause thats what im doing crafter and bounty hunter.
And if bounth hunter is the 3rd most popular profession and master least played dont that tell you something about the road to master like its to hard and not worth it plz fix inv xp and payout im going broke just doing missions.
Are the TEF issues a concern of yours? Do you plan to implement any changes?
Yes, a huge concern, but we don't yet have a solution.
Couldn't you just make someone on death temporarily unable to attack PCs or heal faction members for the same time period as a TEF?
Perhaps, you could allow them to end this state prematurely, if they go to a factional recruiter and declare overt status.
I guess that solution isn't super simple, but it wouldn't require any message passing or changes to the TEF system. And it would be way better than the current system, IMO.
PWT wrote:
What about the Least Popular Advanced Profs and Least Commonly Mastered?
Thanks,
PWT
Least Popular:
1. Image Designer
2. Bio Engineer
There, that's a good stab at it and probably not too far from the truth.
What you should really do is make this kind of information available from the SWG web site all the time. Think PlanetSide and DaoC here... online stats rock.
If you continue to write up these kind of posts instead, why don't you include the priority list for current bugs? We'd all like to know what you're working on, I'm sure... it would give some kind of light at the end of the tunnel.
You might think that everything is peachy... subscription counts are up andCS calls are down. That sounds good.. but the reality of it is different. Several of my friends have stopped playing andsome have publicly quit. My guild is getting smaller on a daily basis as well. I'm teetering on the edge myself... some detailed news on upcoming bug fixes and content.. including a DATE, would be very very calming.
PWT wrote:
What about the Least Popular Advanced Profs and Least Commonly Mastered?
Thanks,
PWT
Least Popular:
1. Image Designer
2. Bio Engineer
Least Commonly Mastered:
1. Jedi
2. Image Designer
3. Bio Engineer
There, that's a good stab at it and probably not too far from the truth.
Our first thought is to enhance droids so that it can at least become Droid Wars, which is Star Warsier. - Holo
For that alone I love you 