Development Cycle Archive

These changes are akin to giving Creature handlers Krayt dragons, and bounty hunters rocket 'escape' packs.

Hi I haven't said much lately, but just have a question for u all to ponder:

How do you know it will or will not work if it has not yet been tested extensively live?

It is not publishing tomorrow, so lets give it some cool discussion and hope.

-- Janson

Although I'm not sure, I belive that originally a Force Sensative character could be played just like any other character.

They could choose to become a Jedi, or choose any of the professions avialable to anyone else.

This would give them something else to do, and they could live "normal" lives with no one the wiser, unless they let others know, or they used their powers or their lightsaber.

I believe I recall reading that this was changed because the developers didn't want players using their FS slot as a mule for their main characters.

However, this did not prevent them from using their main characters as mules for their Jedi.

Also, I think they didn't want Jedis getting any more of an advantage from having additional weapon skills.

Yet Lukeshot a pistol more than he weilded a lightsaber.

Lower level Force Sensitives would not be as vulnerable as they are now because they could defend themselves by other means.

And since they can eventually become much stronger than the other players anyway, having the additional advantage of using non-Jedi specific weapons would not make them all that much stronger. They would be on more equal footing with other players when they used other weapons, yet they would still be able to use their force powers as well.

I believe that current Force Sensitives would not be so frustrated if there were other things they could do besides grind out Jedi XP.

There could be a Force Sensitive who lives modestly as a tailor, or even, as someone wished to be on the old Dev board, a Dark Jedi Bounty Hunter.

And just wondering, the answer to why not is because there is NO 'major quest' that I can not go to Theed or Coronet and round up a squad of people to run with me through in no time at all.

ALL quests are abusable, and I guarantee that this team of developers does not have what it takes to create a system that will not be broken and abused within two weeks of it going live.

As has been said before, holo-grinding sucks yes, but it is the only way that can not be abused and broken.

(And no I do not consider afk zombies as abusing, they will do that long after holo-grinding is gone just to jump stats and because they can).

Hey All

First of all, this is a cool idea making the jedi thing quest orientated, i mean, its not like the jedi in the movies go around finding holocrons to tell them what they have to do to become jedi, Thats why they have masters who are actually jedi and not some monkeys voice recording trapped in a cube telling them what to do to become a jedi. =)

Bu this also raises the question. What kind of compensation are we talking about for those who have been doing holocrons. Its alright if you have mastered them and for those of you out there whose holocron fell silent, you above all must be thanking the SWG God for this new change. But what if you are half way through or have just started a new Holocron mastery? Do you lose all the work you have done or is there a skill point system based on what you have done?..well thats a stupid question cause we all know their will be compensation, but does it work for all aspects of the holocron mastery from 0xp in the base skillsto the COPIOUS amounts of xp needed for that mastery as well as apprenticship points spent.
It just seems a little to much of a drastic change to shot change all the people who have worked hard at their holocrons to accomodate the new quest based jedi'ness... Now dont get me wrong, i think this system is great and everything and will make the game more interesting, but i think the Dev's need to be mpore specific in what changes there will be e.g compensation points for holo's and how they will work, will holo's still be used, what kind of quests will their be, will they all be on the usual force sensitive planets or all of them.

Secondly. The jedi thing seems to be the in thing, many people want to be jedi yes, which kinda defeats the point of Jedi in my humble opinion. Jedi are meant to be few and far inbetween. it is cool to give everyone a chance at it, but surely this quest thing will make it easier, pluse the Dev's face the task of dealing with respawing the big Bads that are associated with the quests, if indeed their are any.

Thirdly. Dev's are doing an awesome job, keep it up, and although you try and keep us up to date on latest upgrades and publishings, this is rather a vague one, but other than that, you guys are doing an awesome job dealing with the bugs as well as players on the game. This is way better than any other MMORPG i have played on. Nice work.

Regards

Nightstar.

All I think they should do is remove the silent holocron let it say what you have to do.

That would get rid of the trouble of grinding 13+ profesions untill you unlock the slot.

**edit** sorry for spam :/

Meant will the changements be for publish 6 or 7? considering its not live on TC atm

Haven't really followed this thread much, because I've been avidly paying attention to the Chef threads concerning our revamp, but it has been in the back of my head, so I thought I'd throw in a few comments of how I think Jedi should be handled:

1. There are a certain set of criteria, established at character creation, that are required to open a Jedi slot, as is in place now. (Whatever those criteria may be.)

2. Once the criteria are reached, the player gets a message that they feel a strange urging to travel to a distant planet. Awaypoint is placed in their datapad for a corner of one of the adventure world.

3. The character arrives at the locationand has to go through a dungeon of some sort. This dungeon should have extremely high powered aggro creatures, droids, or NPCs in it -- BUT there should be some way that an intelligent character can somehow "neutralize" all of the NPCs, either by ingratiating himself to them, shorting out a transformer, etc.

4. The character arrives at the depths of the dungeon and, to access the final room, must solve some sort of puzzle. This could tie into the Librarian that's being added to the Theed Palace (i.e. Star Wars trivia), or some sort of logic or math puzzle, or a riddle, whatever.

5. If the character fails, they cannot get in the room. The creatures they neutralized turn on them and they either have to fight their way out, or they die. The WP is deleted from their datapad and, if they do return, the dungeon terminals or whatever don't respond to them. A month later, they will get another message with an urging, either to the same place or another one to repeat this process, or one similar to it. (Having several variants of this would be a good idea, although no matter what you do all the variants will appear on the internet at some point or another.)

6. If the character succeeds on getting in the last room, they gain access to either some sort of stationary Jedi Holocron (with an ancient Jedi Master's persona contained within, as presented by the canon), or a secluded Jedi Master. (I personally think the Holocron is a better idea, but that's mainly because I like the idea of the animation involved.) Perhaps Imperial characters would be sent to a Sithguide and Rebel characters to a Jedi guide, while Neutrals who unlock the slot would be sent to arandom one of the two, or to some kind of alien Force Adept which is aligned with neither side.

7. Theguide then sends the character on a series of elaborate, cross-galaxy missions. Even the missions that are combat-related aren't simplistic. Each mission requires paying close attention to the teachings of the guide. Perhaps you arrive to find two groups fighting and have to figure out which side to help. Each mission should have several sub-missions to complete the task given by the guide. It should be possible to make the wrong move and to fail the mission. If you fail any of these missions, your access to the guide is sealed off -- for a month, at which point the waypoint comes back to your datapad.

8. Assuming that you are eventually successful in these missions, you open your Jedi slot.

9. Once you access the Jedi slot, the bulk of your Jedi Experience should come from quests... a lot of quests. Lightsaber experience would, of course, still come from combat, but Jedi experience would be hard-earned through quest-based gains. Again, these quests should require some level of dedication to your ideals. A light-side Jedi would not have a quest where they had to kill a Townsperson, for example.

Just a few ideas about my ideal vision of how something like this could function. I really enjoyed the Act III missions and the Nym Quest, because there was a genuine chance of having major difficulty with it -- because both required paying attention to details and figuring out the right answers to questions. I think this would restrict Jedi slots to those who will handle them in the way I think they're meant to be handled.