Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Rountdable Discussion (Week Ending 1-25-04)
hasibert wrote:
I unterstand it like this:
level 10 combat droids and all other kinds of droids (crafting stations, surgical, storage, ....) for ALL characters
heavy combat droids for the droid handler profession
I understand why they're not adding certifications to let's say crafting professions. As a crafter, you craft and you're not a fighter. If you gain a certification for a strong droid, you get something what a ch (or dh) has,
you should not be able to fight strong creatures as a crafter, unless you take some combat skills. To add heavy combat droid certifications to crafters would be the same as to give them weapon skills. And because of that, this will never happen.
So you DE's can make non-combat droidsand combat droids with level 10 or less for everyone and heavy combat droids for the droid handlers, that's way better than what you have now!
Again, it's not a matter of trying to turn a select few into uber combat characters. Is it really so bad for a crafter to have a CL15 combat droid if a that same CH you mention also can have a CL 15 combat droid. The general ideas for certs is that everyone who is either a master of a starting profession or a novice or higher of an elite profession can have combat droids at above CL10. Don't think that it's an attempt to give one group an unfair advantage, it isn't. A crafter with a combat droid should be able to go to his harvesters safely, but die if he attempts to take on something serious.
Have a look in the DE forums
just to make sure.. We DON'T wand Droid handlers!! what we(at least I and some other DE's) DO want:
1. Functional droids which are USEFULL( Resource finder droids?[expensive!!days to find]battle droids? entertainer droids? Droids that delete harvesters when the resource run out? Delivery droids (for sales/bazaar) I can think of countless FUN droids.. for everyone!! (andperhaps also some for certainprofessions)
2. Battle droids at least better then now, at least with different weapon systems and with HAM better then 2 chuba's. I'm not sure we need ULTRA battle droids.. we just want Battle droids that are FUN and make the game more star warsy. Battle droids who come near the strength of pets.. Medium battle droids should be used by DE's and High powered battle droids perhaps for some exlusive elite professions like BH.
3. Fixes!! (that includes useless droids like the Loader.... and useless 6 lvl items (3 different lvls is more then enough anyway)
Check Drashk posts.. it contains a LOT of things that NEED to be done to make SWG star warsy... Star wars are vehicles, droids, spacecraft.. never forget that (I'm not saying brawlers and CH's, entertainers have no place... not at all.. but don't forget where this universe started...)
Not the most pressing issue, but one I'm curious about (and my kids keep asking). When will we be able to train other creatures as mounts? I'm thinking about that bantha on my datapad that my son won't let me set free...
Thanks for a great game. I never tire of it. 
There should be droids that enhance certain skills and actions such as slicing, crafting, and ITEM REPAIR.
I liked the DH idea for about 10 seconds before I actually thought about it. I came to this conclusion: IF I am a VERY wealthy and well known crafter, people might want to take me out or kidnap me for ransom. I should be able to BUY a big bad combat droid bodyguard to protect me from such things. These things should be extremely expensive but worth it. Why would I have to be a DH to have a droid? Anyone with cash should be able to have one. A creature handler is different. This requires a rapport with the crtter. A knowledge of critters. Droids are programmed by others to follow your commands.
If you do end up with a DH profession, have their main distinction be the amount of droids they can command. Not the level of droid. Maybe they have combat training commanding multiple droids. The level of droid should not be restricted though because of the idea of a droid. It s a helper programmed by another person to follow your commands.
A couple of side notes:
To the guy that lost 5 harvesters because he kept getting killed....this game is about interdependancies. HIRE a combat guy to take a harvester run with you.
The other thing...........I WANT A MINING PROFESSION and a MANUFACTURING PROFESSION. These were promised LONG ago and were scrapped. I want them.
#1 Cant call my bike anymore, radial menu wont stop radiating.
#2 i cant stay connected to the server at randon times, chat just stops working. i can move around if i wasnt sitting down when this happens. cant perform any actions, nothing is useable in my inventory, i DONT get "Connection to SWG Lost" messages, i cant be killed, can go anywhere un-opposed..... frankly this happens atleast 12 times a day (4 hours of play time roughly) and im getting sick of no one knowing why or what to do to fix it. ful scans dont do any good. its not my PC or connection as both are running flawlessly..... guess its the SWG Boogyman....
#3 Bazaar / Vendors .... how many times are you going to claim this is fixed before you actually do fix it? (on a side note: after you actually DO fix this problem, how about tieing the Players Vendors into the Bazaar so we can buy something were searching for from a central location and only have to go venturing out into the wild to retrive it? treking 10km out to a vendor you dont know is stocked or not kinda stinks)
#4 back to my bike issues.... thought you had fixed it so vehicals stopped storeing themselves? well again you failed miserably. (yes im upset. any other company that had issues with performance that took move then 7 months to fix would find themselves retooling thier staff)
#5 while were chatting about whats taking so long.... when are you going to get around to fixing the Sit .... Warp problems? it has been what? a year now?
im sure this post will be ignored right along with all the rest of them. but rest assured. i'll remain vigilant or posting aswell as making sure not a single person i know buys this game.
Good Day
Thunderheart wrote:
Could you drop a hint when we will see the post about the DROID INVASION, please?Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two seperate professions.
Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different playstyles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.
So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.
Oh my god. I swear, Thunderheart, you must have *NEVER* actually read the Droid Engineer forum. If you had you would have found that this is the COMPLETE OPPOSITE of what the vast majority of Droid Engineers want! If there is ONE issue that most Droid Engineers are united on is that we *DO NOT* want to see a Droid Handler class!
-norax
Thunderheart wrote:
Could you drop a hint when we will see the post about the DROID INVASION, please?
Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two separate professions.
Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different play styles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.
So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.
How can one person get it so wrong? The DE community has voiced time and time again that this is the absolute one thing we do NOT want.
We have massive threads, we have huge in game cross server meetings, we are on to our second hard working Corespondentand yet the message never seems to get to the Devs.
Every time anything get's floated our way we see the words "internal discussions." Their internal because what we want never actually get's discussed, our voices are not heard, our desires are never considered. It's the Devs that want this DH bull, not the players.
Please TH, listen to us for once, we might not all agree on one path to follow but there are two things most of us will quite vocallyagree to. One, we don't want a Droid Handler profession. Two, most of us agree some form of certification is the only viable and fair solution.
We've cobbled together dozens of certification system variants over the months, read them. Droids are not animals, they are both very intelligent and very dumb, itmight take a rocket scientist to build one, but it doesn't need a rocket scientist to use one. You want to make it fair and equitable then tie them into the professions across the board instead of limiting them to the combat profession. A great many will say break it into the set levels of all professions, Novice Novice, Master Novice, Novice Elite, Master Elite. You get your limitations and you get a fair system.
The onlyfear I've heard from the Devs in allowing higher combat droids is that player might use them to grind through combat faster, a cert system takes care of that with ease. At this time using a droid togrind that is actually slower than using an animal because we can't heal droids.
After reading every post on this thread, 4 pages at this time,one poster doesn't care either way and onlyone poster is in full support of this nonsense and he's admitted that he's not aware of our issues. I stopped counting those against at 20+.
TH, you have our Corespondent telling you what we want. Hell, you were actually in attendance of the big cross server DE meeting last night. This proposed DH junk is not what we want.
TH,
One east request, please give us a /IGNORE SHOUT command. I am not sure but this might also improve performance at the user lvl with less then 1gig ram. If nothing else it will declutter my screen.
Request
/IGNORE SHOUT
Thunderheart wrote:
Could you drop a hint when we will see the post about the DROID INVASION, please?
Ill be doing it this week. I had to push it off until some of internal discussions were finished. The timetable was changed because the Droid Engineers were very clear in telling me they wanted Droid Engineering and Droid Handling as two seperate professions.
Their argument makes a lot of sense too. A good balance is akin to Bio-Engineers and Creature Handlers; BE's make em and CH's use them. Its really two different playstyles. One is crafting and one is combat/exploration. Adding a class of combat droids to the game has to be similar. Combat droids themselves have to stay level 10 or under for the general population otherwise everyone would rush out and get the better pets. That leaves a wide range of powerful combat droids that needs to be in the game, but to get those droids, players have to spend the time and energy to earn them.
So what we'll have is a Droid Engineer profession and a Droid Handling profession. All players will have access to combat droids up to level 10 and DH's will get a wide range of heavy combat droids to handle.
This... is the most outrageous thing I've heard from Thunderheart to date. The significant majority of the DE community does not want this... has never wanted it... and continues to vocally argue against this stop-gap band-aid fix.
It's also beenmade painfully obvious countless timesthat the DE community does not want and has never wanted DE's to become a robotic version of CH... if this is what you thought was our "very clear" request for a DE / DH plan, then you are terribly mistaken.
It's January 19th, and why are the DE's and the rest of the community just learning about this plan now? I've personallyheldpre-development discussions about the combat aspects for our current chassis with the hopes that we could get some voice about those issues before development was set in granite.We never had a Developer come into the DE forums asking for input on this Droid Handler idea... if you did, you'd find the vast majority of us against it.
The Droid Handleridea has been such a dead and forgottenissue for so long that nobody in their right mind woulddream to think that the DE community wanted this as their solution.Now, are we faced with this message from Thunderheart that makes it sound like the DH idea is in full developmental swing.... or set in granite. Without any previous interactive feedback from the DE community!!!
This is outrageous! Where is this nonsense going to end? Are you going to carry the BE/CH system exactly as is over to DE/DH? Are we going to have DH's running over to Lok approaching Droidekas saying: "Good... er... boy?" and taming them like wild creatures??!
This plan concieved in OUR names for OUR community must stop! It's a ridiculous, easy, band-aid fix to a problem that can be solved by listening to our community and fielding the many, many alternatives we've already pitched upon SOE's deaf ears.
Developers! Come to the DE forums and see for yourself!
hasibert wrote:
I have not absolutely no base, I follow the discussion everywhere and read all dev posts, but you're right, I didn't read through the DE discussions
Then **edit**.
jk
As demonstrated in his post today, TH doesn't havea clue about the DE class or crafting professions for that matter.
It would be interesting what your correspondent has to say to this!
Drashk was/is for the cert system.
I think you can compare droids with creatures, droids should be that what creatures are at the moment, this is Star Wars, not Pet Wars, so I think it's a very good idea to have a droid handler profession
Droids are NOT just combat. They're EVERYTHING. Anyone should be able to use them. They should all have different purposes.
I have a question for you, where do you want to put the certifications? In which trees? In which professions?
There are a few methods. At lvl 4/master you get a certification OR the better system which I like is each droid has a certificate that requires certain skill points. These skill points are distributed among ALL skills/professions. Maybe specific professions would have droids that are specific to them, and they'd get the cert for them at a point in their level, but generally it would be a point system.
I think what's quite clear here is that there needs to be a thread in the In Development or In Concept forum that asks for CUSTOMER feedback on this DE/DH idea ...
THUNDERHEART -- listen up, you want us to use this new forum structure as designed? Well we can't open new threads on this topic, but it's obviously one of crucial importance to your customers, so get with the program. Open an In Development thread asking for customer input on the concept of DE/DH and what we'd like to see as a way of preventing powerful droids from unbalancing combat.
Give your forums at least a chance of working the way you supposedly want them to work. This is not a LIVE issue, but people are discussing it here because you've given us nowhere else to discuss it.
Thunderheart, Have you ever REALLY read the de boards, cause you are totally clueless to what had been asked for.
Thanks yet again for absolutely nothing
Ackis wrote:
Droids are NOT just combat. They're EVERYTHING. Anyone should be able to use them. They should all have different purposes.
/agree
but that is no reason against a DH profession, heavy combat droids for the DH's, all other droids (low-level combat and others) for everone (or with a cert-system)
You are all saying you don't want a DH profession, but no one can say how a DH's profession would hurt the DE's. You get more than you have now, so it's better than what you have now, isn't it?