Development Cycle Archive

"Prettiest shim on Bria!" - Sev
Certified "cool" by the Darth Vader of Bria
Blue glowie.

TH,

Remember the other time this happened? When the first Commando feedback was given, Commandos were given a "Working As Intended" bill. Q-3PO immediately realized something was wrong and the next day work began on revamping the Commando profession.

You might want to make something happen and quickly.

Okay, this thread is so huge that I seriously doubt that this post gets read, but it's important to me, so here goes:

TH,

In your first post you say the following:

"To become a Jedi, there needs to be a known path with mysterious quests, new NPC’s, new NPC behaviors, new places and all the little things that will make The Jedi Trials a publish to be excited about." [emphasis mine]

Then, a few posts later, you say the following:

"Publish 10 will be the Jedi Trials. This will be the new gateway to the Jedi profession that will by a mysterious path to unlocking Force sensitivity." [emphasis mine]

I hate to nitpick about things, but this is a major difference when you get down to the meaning of the words. In fact, I believe the current forum poll asks us to choose between the path being mysterious and known. Are either of these two statements declarations about what the path will be (and if so, which is accurate?), or was this just a wording error?

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Jor'ran Kale - Jedi
Mar'shall Vaughn - Spy

Chuck Norris and Mr. T walked into a bar. The bar was instantly destroyed, as that level of awesome cannot be contained in one building.

and if my post wasnt clear enough and cause im still annoyed as sin

Always......ALWAYS fix CORE NORMAL systems FIRST before you fix extraneous and extra systems....... like fix Combat that afefcts everyone and the HUGE GCW before fixing somehting that should be "extra" and nowhere near being a "core" system.....like Jedi

Really I just want this one simple question answered...

WHY....really why...was the GCW and the Comat revamp which affects practically anyone who plays this game......postponed so that Jedi, which by comparison affects a small % of the community, could be fixed over TWO publishes first? YOu could have had 3 possibly 4 patches between May and the release of JTL to fix combat and the GCW, you could have doen a greta job. SO why was Jedi such a priority?

can i get an honest response from the producers and the team???????? I thinkw e would all liek an explanation.

"Honor is a virtue of the truly strong"

~~BLACKHART: FURY GM / Elite and kicka$$ Privateer Pilot. Master Shipwright.~~
******Mos Furiosis, tatooine. -323 3779*******
~~Check out Aly's Loot vendor behind my shop!~~

I'm in the "no jedi" camp myself and it has been frustrating to see two publishes go to setting up a feature that shouldn't have been in the game in the first place. Like everyone else the combat balance was an important near future item that would make the game worthwhile again. The game is more broken now than its ever been and the idea that no work will go into fixing it is atonishing.

The Jedi have ground the GCW to a halt worse than the item decay did last winter. I'm a smuggler that sells fp and have gone completely broke since pub. 9 because no one is buying anymore. No one wants to set up a bugged base when they know that it will take one Jedi to wipe out any defence they can make. I was doing money missions on dantooine yesterday and its ridiculus that my barely competent pistoleer/smuggler character can solo high end missions with some armor and buffs. There is nothing to be afraid of in the game anymore. Death isn't a penalty. There is no sense of accomplishment in killing mobs that can't harm you and no interest in trying to fight a war with no chance of winning and no opportunity to gain anything. Every profession has some broken aspects, many of which could seemingly be fixed by small well though out changes. The player cities are empty except for Theed and Coronet. Neither can be visited by anyone without a power rig thanks to the game stopping lag. When you run into another player in the field they are more likely to warn you off less you take some of their xp or loot than to welcome you into a group and request aide in accomplishing something.

The holo-grinding system totally ruined the game. That is not an opinion, it is an accepted fact. The thing that the dev team didn't seem to realize is that a lot of people weren't grinding because the deparately wanted a Jedi character, they were doing it because the game was/is totally lacking in other content or goals. Back at launch there were people doing anything they could to unlock a slot, but the majority of those I would talk to would say something like, "Would be cool to bea Jedi, but I don't expect to ever unlock a slot... I love being a <insert profession> though so who cares?". The people that ground through their 4 talking holos became frustrated and obsessed with the idea of unlocking... like an addict that didn't want to get started in the first place they were unable to stop. As a result the economy went all screwy and thanks to crafting holo-grinders zillions of items that no one wanted were made which I can't imagine had a postive effect on server performance. So it had to stop, we all understand that. A publish changing the nature of the slot unlock was needed desperately. A publish fixing the Jedi profession was a bizarre waste of resources when I'm sure Jedi can't be more than 1% of player characters and more importantly wasn't an option for the other players. If you fix ID then atleast other players can take advantage of the new game mechanics even though its a nearly vacant profession, its a choice any player has to enjoy. Fixing Jedi benefitted no one. Even the jedi are totally frustrated by the way it turned out.

So here we all are shouting in the wilderness hoping that the devteam would find us and solve our problems. I accept that they probably read all the forums, but reading and understanding are so far apart. The devs seem to manage to fix quite a few things but don't think through the implications. The Chef revamp is an example. The chefs have made a fortune selling brandy but as a result the smuggler spice line became worthless. The Jedi got a major revamp and it killed the GCW/PVP. ID's got some new powers and since there were so few most players have given up on doing stat migrations entirely. The Imperial Crackdown should have been named "Rebel Faction Farm" because all it did was inconvience some people and set up Mos Espa and other places as permanent stormtrooper spawns that the Rebels could farm FP from at will. (Atleast they could back when people actually tried to fight the war.) I don't have any details of the new Jedi path andI already know it will mean less people in non-combat professions resulting in inflation of combat equipment pricing. Should make the game a lot more fun. Woohoo.

I am an engineer and I understand how hard a large scale project can be to plan and execute. The problem that SWG has is so painfully obviously a resource issue. Other people in this thread have said it, this game makes an untold fortune for SOE and Lucasarts, so lack of money isn't the problem. Its lack of spending the money. If you continuelly miss dates and disappoint your paying customers then its time to add more staff. A viable company cannot spend the majority of its time apologizing to its customers. SOE needs to look over their planning documents and not ask, "how much of a delay will the player base accept?" but, "what do we need to do or spend to make the promises to our customers?" Without us there is no game. Why isn't that clear enough? If we aren't happy then we won't get friends to join. I have friends that are hug star wars fans that I would be embarrased to explain the current state of the game to. Who is that helping?

I've been playing since last June and this marks the third time I have stared at a Dev post and considered cancelling my account. The first was the commando nerf in decemeber. The second was the when it came to light that the smuggler revamp was pushed back after JTL. This thread is the third. I'm on vacation tomorrow through Tuesday, I wonder if I'll be clicking on enter game or delete account come Wednesday night...

Antonius Ordnung
Master Smuggler, Master Commando (Thanks NGE!)
Resident of Shadow Impire, Lowca
Colonel, Imperial Supply Office / Master Pilot, Corsec
Captain of the YT-1300 "Overdue Revamp"

I wish I would have counted all of the posts of people leaving the game now. I am pretty sure it would be a large number.

And I don't blame any of them one bit. I also wish I could go back and count all the times this community has been mislead by the game devolpers and community leaders. I refuse to blame any one single person. I place the blame on all of the designers, devolpers and people in positions of authority that make these insane decisions.

I have been playing since public release and I have, for the most part, bent like a reed in the wind for all the let downs this game has given me. CSR's do not help paying customers with problems. Devolpers and Community Relation personell have out right mislead and broken promisses more times than I care to count.

I read one user say, Why put in space when the first stage of the game is still broken? Man he hit it right on the head.

I love starwars I saw the 1st movie when I was 9 years old and I have been in love with it ever since then. When I came to this game it was my first MMORPH gaming experience. I so want to trust and believe what you are saying ThunderHeart. Unfortunatly you and all of the members of the devolpement team have been less than honest with us, your paying customers.

I know this decision has been made regardless of what the paying customers wanted. I bet my Jedi Toon that if you had put up a Poll in the main page about this, to either postpone combat reballance to put all energy into JTLS, I wager that you would have gotten 93% against and 3% for it. (gotta assume the other 4% would have voted for new wookie armor or something like that)

I am a systems technician, and we are pushing oput a brand new novell network (bye bye NT4 legacy crap) and a new product to replace an old AS/400 system. We started to fall behind and we had made a promise to our busniess team that it would be done. So guess what we did? We hired contractors to help us out. Yea it was not cost effective, but we did what we promised.

Ok lastly ThunderHeart, I will put it plainly.

If you do not have enough staff to do what you and all of the dev team promised the public, HIRE MORE DEVOLPERS.

In the end, you must do what you think is right... of course.

What EXACTLY is this?

PAR

Retired MBH
Master Armorsmith / Master Doctor
Hockey Player / Mountain Biker / Software Engineer
Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

TH- I know this is disapointing news for you and ton's of players and definatly see the need for the time and to have time for small fixes now but it seems to me that this would be a perfect time now that time is set aside for just "stuff" to add things to help player events, roleplaying and pay attention to the non-combatant professions that really need your love. Any plans to do this or is the extra time just time set aside to continue to focus on combatants?

Cheers,

famousFATWOOKIE
Master musician, Master entertainer of Mos Oasis
-I support ATK people and playstyles.
Find FFWB Here!A SWG History

As I read the official Dev proclamationa scene from the movie Training Day comes to mind...

EVER HAD YER

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"What happened to you man, you used to be beautiful."
-Ordell Robbie ~Jackie Brown~

SOE's catering to the carebear players has done more damage to this game than Jedi and CMs ever could.