Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Publish 7 Feedback: Droid & Droid Engineer Enhancements
Sad to say, but I expected this, and its why I dropped MDE about a month ago. I knew there was no way SOE was gonna do DE right anytime until AFTER the Space Expansion. DOnt get me wrong, I like the droid stims and more reasonable battery consumption. But thats all. I wont even bother getting any "combat" droids. I made myself a suite of droids that will serve me till June or July when DE is closer to getting fixed. They all have storage modules, medical modules, and a variety of crafting modules. I even have a couple crates of batteries left over, which indicates how oftenI actually use them.
There will be no more credits going to any DE from me for a few months, silly "combat" abilities or not. But it doesn't matter. So few of us actually watch and respond to these boards that they really dont have to listen to us. THey know the 80% or so who play the game blindly (..ooooh, I think there is a new patch today! I wonder whats in it?....) wont bother them. THose 80% will be excited by what they see or not, will keep paying or not, and SOE wont hear a peep from them either way.
But just to be helpful, here is my suggestion: F-O-R-G-E-T C-O-M-B-A-T
Forget combat when you think about droids. GIVE US UTILITY. Enough of this game is focused on Combat and PvP. Forget Combat! Leave it alone. Fix the BROKEN and/or USELESSprofessions.
Squad Leaders, Rangers, Politicians, DE.
You ought to devote a whole patch to nothing else. Get everyone in the game playing a useful and working profession and THEN start to add stuff for them to do.
I've never replied like this before, but what the hey, lets give it a try :-)
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Now, as always, we cannot vent at TH. He's just the messenger. Getting that out of the way, TH, you do a fantastic job. I wouldn't want it, but you do a good job.
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I dont blame TH either, I blame Sony's Execs
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-"Droid Invasion" should be renamed "The Adventures of Sideshow Bob." Why? Because that's a more fitting title for one.
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Hilarious
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-Make this game work. This is STAR WARS, not some crappy fantasy title that's like every other fantasy title out there (And yes, this was a jab at EQ.) For a massively successful phenomenon such as STAR WARS, the Development Team is not living up to our expectations. We, as paying customers, deserve to have a better game than this.
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True
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-This new Publish blows ass. Instead of adding one new dungeon per publish, how about half a dozen? Instead of fixing a half dozen things, how about fixing everything. If you want this game to be successful, I suggest you start churning out the fixes and the content. You can deny all you want, but everyone knows that you're losing customers and you're not receiving new ones to replace those leaving.
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Im almost done with this game myself
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It seems to me that you people are just trying to keep this puppy afloat for as long as possible, in order to bring in the cash. Then, you'll let it go, just like Ultima Online. And yes, we all know Raph Koster's history.
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I highly agree with this. Sony will just write this off as a Loss on there taxes to give the Execs more pocket change for Booze and Trix. Maybe we should call the Feds as we seem to have another Enron case here. LOL, but true.
Tarne_Monter wrote:
On the non-complaining side of things.
When a droid with combat modules is finished being crafted all you get is the HAM and Combat Module Rating in the examine window, and in the final crafing window. It would be nice to be able to see the damage range, to-hit, and attack speed so that customers know what they're buying before they buy it and put it in their data pad, and so DE's can label the droid deeds so people know what they are.
Pondering with no hope and no toiletWell, my day started off just peachy. I came home from a long hard day at work and logged on to SWG to relax.
It didn't happen.
Five minutes after I logged on, the tells began. "That advanced Probot you sold me that was advertised with the Medium Armor and 40% resists, doesn't have it anymore as of today. Either replace it with what you told me was on it, or refund my money. And I am going to tell everyone that you are a scammer.". I had about ten of those tells in the first hour from people that had bought droids from me from as far back as the game launch. Then the game mails started rolling in, telling me about the same thing as the /tells.
Finally I had to log out to get away from all of the pissed off and angry customers. My customers, and many of them were my friends until SOE pulled this crap. They are not just my customers SOE, but they are yours as well. And they are mad as hell. I logged out to get away from the angry people, and I dont know if I have the energy or willpower to come back. Thank you very much SOE.
You said it was a 'Droid Invasion', but I think that was a misnomer. It was a 'DE Invasion', and the least you could have done was lubed us up and kissedus first.
Neehivi wrote:
Smurfwalker wrote:
Whilst I'm not weighing into the actual argument over what are good/bad changes (I don't have an opinion yet), these changes have been on the test center for quite some time, and it would not have taken a whole lot to read the release notes or hop onto the test center to discover these things for yourself while there was still time to be involved in the development process.
Complaining about things that have been known for some time (ie. no droidekas etc.) is counter-productive, and contributes to a whole lot of emotional wind that the developers have to sort through to actually find any bugs.
If the changes affect you so much, you should have read the notes and checked out the test center, and the test center forums before it went live.
/agree
/agree
/agree
WE DID.
The responses in this thread are pretty much what we said when it was on TC - however, they want feedback based on it in live play, and they are getting it.
Don't presume that we didn't see this coming - we did; being uninformed and accusing others of being uninformed is just bad form.
Audio
AudioOrgana wrote:
Neehivi wrote:
Smurfwalker wrote:
Whilst I'm not weighing into the actual argument over what are good/bad changes (I don't have an opinion yet), these changes have been on the test center for quite some time, and it would not have taken a whole lot to read the release notes or hop onto the test center to discover these things for yourself while there was still time to be involved in the development process.
Complaining about things that have been known for some time (ie. no droidekas etc.) is counter-productive, and contributes to a whole lot of emotional wind that the developers have to sort through to actually find any bugs.
If the changes affect you so much, you should have read the notes and checked out the test center, and the test center forums before it went live.
/agree
/agree
/agree
WE DID.
The responses in this thread are pretty much what we said when it was on TC - however, they want feedback based on it in live play, and they are getting it.
Don't presume that we didn't see this coming - we did; being uninformed and accusing others of being uninformed is just bad form.
Audio
/agree
Nicely put Audio.
Oh man!
I'm a master DE and I just want one question answered:
WHY CANT I COLOR MY DROID CHASSIZ'S ANYMORE DURING CRAFTING!!!??
Are all furniture/decoration droids going to have to be the same color from here on out? You're going to kill creativity in droid shops if this was an intended change. I REALLY, REALLY hope it is just a bug that will be fixed very quickly. I was in the process of making a Droid Superstore with lots of variously shaded display models when this patch hit , andit has caused a MAJOR problem for me.
And since I'm on the subject, can we have some furniture versions of our other droids so we can display them too.
Please TH or some other dev respond to this. I really need to know if I have to trash my big plans. My heart will be broken if that is the case.
As for the other stuff, I havn't really tried it, but no matter how good it is, if I can never color display droids again, then I will have nothing but negative feelings for this publish.I hope that is not the case.
Animi wrote:
I'm not sure if that stuff works or not, but thanks for stealth-nerfing my prenerf probot.
Prior to the publish my probot was:
- 40% Resists to All
- Medium Armor
Now, my probot is:
- 12% Resists to All
- No Armor
I don't think it's right for you guys to retroactively nerf legacy items.
I agree with this statement. My probot was no fearsome warrior before the driod invasion, but he was a very good tanker, drawing baddies off me when I was inced. Now it's 40% resist and no armor, coupled with it's pathetic HAMs, andvirtually no damagesend one message to me.
Droids are for item storage, nothing more.
Ironic that the patch that was to fix droids wrecked mine.
I'm a fairly new droid engineer (don't ask me why), and this patch is the biggest sham I've seen yet in the game. There simply is no droid invasion. Between the artwork and that title, you've completely deceived the average player, and they're pissed off, as am I. I have always tried to think of the bigger picture and give you guys the benefit of the doubt with questionable stuff in the past, but I've pretty much lost all hope droids will ever be implemented properly, sensibly, or even implemented in a manner that remotely resembles Star Wars.
Combat droids are not helpful to non-combat and new characters. Why? They aren't powerful enough by a long shot. I keep hearing "But combat droids are illegal in the Star Wars universe." Are you going to tell me that grauls, rancors, kimos and a host of other creatures are legal? Sure they are. Besides, you've often stated that continuity will suffer for the sake of gameplay. It's easy to conclude that real droids, combat and otherwise, are more important to gameplay in the Star Wars universe than pets. Period. But they are not in this game. I understand you want to make droids as capable as a non-CH BE pet (and I don't think you've accomplished that even), but there are a lot of CH's out there, and therefore more powerful pets. Why do we not have droid equivalents??? This is Star Wars supposedly. They are also not helpful to new players because they are very complex and, therefore, expensive. I don't mind complexity, but no new player is going to be able to afford a droid, such as they are.
The new bug of not being able to customize the appearance of a droid chassis completely eliminates the only real use of droids in this game - furniture. Perhaps not only.. medical modules and portable crafting stations are useful. However,droids as decoration area big part of our market. This is now broken.
The removing of armor was a very flawed decision. This takes a marginally useful droid and makes it even worse. Nerfing this profession is not a good idea. It has suffered from lack of attention, design flaws, andpoor implementationlong enough. Anything you do to weaken droids further will only serve to eliminate droids from this game, and therefore make the game less Star Wars.
On the plus side, combat modules do seem to stack. Repair and wound kits seem to work from my experience, although that is limited.
There were some good things with publish 7, but droids aren't one of them. Yet, every average player is goingto think that's what this patch was all about.
My opinion on this, well TH you once again lied to the players, about the droids, no surprise there really.
I think who ever was in charge of this needs to be fired immediatly.