Development Cycle Archive

Ok now i understand that grouping is perfered in this game but i still belive that players who choose to solo shoulden't be left completly in the dark

First off, i am not able to play this game for a long length of time, sometimes only for 30 mins or so, then i have to log off.

Why not make the path to jedi, nothing to do with grinding professions? Why not make it all quests? Depending on when u start the quest, how far your character is along, then give the quests accordinly. Just make is so as your character grows, the quests get harder. EX) You have been giving a quest to kill an npc to loot and item to give to a npc. If your on your own, u can kill the npc on your own, however if you are grouped, some of his friends might help him out. Different quests, some taking a long time (like eq) and some taking 30 mins to figure out. As you do more quests make them cost more, as in, further places to travel, and more dangerous locations.

This way, anyone can do it, but a grinder will do it a LOT quicker. Still tho, a person who dosen't play as much wil realsize he is STILL making progress......hmmmm just and idea, sorry if its been mentioned.

Odiss

Ok Thunderheart, you asked for it...

...here is my two cents as a member of the Beta community and as an avid Force Seeker since day one of releaase.

First and foremost: OBTAINING YOUR FORCE SENSITIVE SLOT

This should, by all means, not downplay the countless hours we have spent grinding out Holocron professions...(rant mode on) I, and many others like me, have spent months grinding professions with fingers crossed upon mastery to find the mysterious silent profession. Upon completion of a mastery we all get more and more frustrated on not obtaining the elusive FS slot; so, with this in mind, PLEASE DO NOT REWARD OUR EFFORTS WITH SOME CHEESY BADGE, OR STATUE!!!! You will immediately loose my subscription and, i feel, many others. The reward MUST be an exponentially greater step towards the opening of the FS slot. In other words, if I am on my silent profession and i have ground out 10 others since, SOE should reward our efforts with an in-game hint to what the silent profession is or with an item that will narrow it down to at least a certain skillset (artisan proffession, ranged combat, meelee, etc). With that said (rant mode off), how should a non grinder obtain this FS slot? Well, the easiest way to implement this, as well as the most fair for the grinders, is to implement a system much like the factional one in place now. In other words, generate a Jedi faction system where the player must seek out a Force Sensitive NPC that is NOT a static spawn and cannot be camped by many. Once this NPC is located the NPC should direc the player to complete a series of quests that would include profession specific missions. Not sure how SOE will implement this with the existing mission system and technology but something along the lines of: If you are an artisan you will be instructed to find a rare mineral and then use it to craft a schematic given to you by an NPC. Something of this nature may require you to master an artisan prrofession if say you are a Droid engineer and the required skill to craft the item is within the Architect profession at the master level. In the case of a fighter, of course, the target would be to explore a cave of sorts and to eliminate a "distruption against the force" or something of that nature. Entertainers could be called upon to use their talents to perform at a secret Jedi gathering and perhaps to keep an NPC entertained while some mystical Jedi thing happens in the background. Healers could be called upon to seek and treat a Jedi that has been wounded in the field or to resurrect a downed NPC.

All of the above are story-line driven suggestions that could perhaps be implemented in the original code with relative ease (i think). The idea behind this method is to make it HARD to find the starter NPC and to make it very hard to complete a subset of missions that will continue to get progressively hard and will require the mastery of various professions in order to flow with the Holocron path. In other words, this method should not be EASY but should not be a master professions till you get lucky thing either. (oh crap rant mode on again) I have to admit that when the holocron path was announced I was, at first, elated; but soon after turned off by the game. I love this game and this community so much that after a few weeks of "i'm not playing anymore I will cancel my account" thoughts; I began to miss the game and went back to the grind. I do feel, however, that the Holocron has ruined the game for many as it has made it into a second job rather than a fun game to play. In saying this, i have to admit that the premise behind this idea was good and the desire noble, but it went to hell in a handbasket fast. I am, however, enjoying making Gungan Head statues and speeders and will pobably hold on to my artisan professions as they can generate a fair amount of dough. (ok turn the damn rant mode off again).

Second: WHAT HAPPENS TO JEDI AFTER YOU UNLOCK?

Hmmm, here I think i will leave it up to the community of Jedi out there to answer this. I wish i could tell you more but from what I have heard and read on the forums something needs to be done for the profession. I've read that it is nothing more than another grind fest right now...boh? Who knows, I just wish I could be one! Now, for missions and Jedi titles...well the ideas here are limitless. Why not give jedi some missions (kind of like the mission terminals). I see no harm in that and only good things coming from it . This could be implemented using the above method of creating a non-static NPC spawn that is hard to find and impossible to locate by non-Jedi players (thinking of the Bounty hunter camping the static NPC). Jedis of the forums UNITE!!! Come here and give your ideas!!! I think the devs would greatly appreciate the imput.

Ok folks, THE GRIND calls... I must master Droid Engineer so it's back to crafting advanced droid frames for me. May the force be with you all! And, hey...give the devs a break, I'm sure this is a HUGE issue on their plate and I know that the pressure is on for them!

I like what lupomaster had to say, and I marked his post a 5/5 to show my support. Here is what I have to say as long as someone is listening:

Unlocking the FS/ Jedi 'Slot'/skill tree:

I think the current system of holocrons is a good system of separating the wheat from the chaff, ie, I believe that someone who truly wants to be a Jedi should also be willing to make some serious time for the game, after all, we can't have 50% (or even 10% truly!) of the server running around as Jedis now can we? But I think that there should be more to 'completing' a holocron than simply mastering a profession.

Suggestion: To cut down on the sheer 'grinding' needed to unlock the FS, eliminate the 'silent' holocron or whatever that makes people blindly master professions until they get lucky and open the Jedi tree. Instead make each holocron a little tougher to complete by not only requiring mastery of a profession, but also require them to complete a 'quest' /mision/ themepark while they maintain mastery of that profession. Obviously the quests will match the profession. When all the requirements have been met, have a mysterious voice say to them something like they are now ready to continue in their search of the force or whatever, meaning that they can then use another holocron. Also on that note it should be made that if you usea holocron, you cannot accidentally use (waste!) another one (learned the hard way myself) until you have completed the one you have 'used'.

Ok now onto the second part about gaining xp once you actually become a Jedi/Sith:

It seems to me there should be a happy medium of ways to gain xp, from general combat to skill specific quests. You should be able to gain 'Jedi' xp anytime you use an ability that requires the force, ie. using a lightsaber or other force moves (choke/forked lighting/ healing abilitiesetc) in combat, or otherwise. Once you have the xp to be trained in a new skill (box) then you must seek out a 'Jedi trainer' who only you can see, and which the force will lead you to. He will then tell you that you need to complete a mission or quest before he can train you in the next skill. You go do the quest, come back and he either tells you to do another quest or pronounces you ready, and trains you. Then its off to the races again!

Thats a broad outline of the current issues being addressed here. Hope it sounds as good to y'all as it does to me.

I know I am probably in the minority, but I believe a large part of the current jedi setup is fine in terms of advancing up the skill trees from initiate. I do, however, think that boxes such as Padawan, Apprentice, Knight, Guardian and Master should all be quest based instead of xp based.

When a person creates a force sensitive character, he/she should have to level his/her skills just like every other jedi has had to do. However, once they are at 4/4/4/4 initiate, they go to their trainer and receive a semi-difficult and time consuming quest to obtain the level of padawan learner (Hint: quest should take more than 8 hours to complete). The quest will be randomly selected by the trainer from a large pool of possible missions. Once the quest is completed, the initiate returns to his/her beginning trainer and is given the title of padawan.

With the padawan level completed, the player then has to find a new trainer using something like the, /findjeditrainer or /finddarkjeditrainer command. This will take them to a randomly selected NPC that will cycle through a different, more challenging pool of quests. Of course the quests will be unique for the kind of trainer: light jedi trainers should not give out massive kill and destroy missions while dark trainers should. The padawan will then have to complete a certain number of these quests before the trainer accepts him/her as an apprentice. Once accepted as an apprentice, you would once again go out and kill, kill, kill to level through the skill trees of the Knight. Once you reach 4-4-4-4 at the Knight level, your trainer gives you yet another series of even more dangerous and challenging quests, again all randomly selected from a large pool. Once completed, your trainer can grant you the title of Knight.

In order to advance to the guardian level, you have to perform a series of quests from a special, non-static Master (enter the blue/red glowie). Your Knight trainer will give you a set of coordinates (randomly selected out of maybe 200 or 300 possibilities to prevent BH camping) to find your Jedi or Dark Jedi Master Blue/Red Glowie. The Jedi or Dark Jedi Master Glowie will only spawn two or three times per week at different hours of the day. For example, it may spawn on Monday at noon, Wednesday at 6 PM and Saturday at 3 AM (having it spawn several times a week and at different times of the day each time will appease everyone from your average 40 hour a week working player to your out of school for Summer Break player). You should only be allowed to speak to the Master that your Knight trainer assigns you to. The Master should remain static for at least one hour each time he/she spawns and should be able to give quests out to more than one PC at a time (e.g. two knights happen to be assigned the same Master spawn, the Master should give randomly selected quests to both). In any event, once the player completes that quest, he/she must again wait for the Master to spawn to obtain a second quest. After the third quest, the Master should agree to accept the Knight for further training in the ways of the Force.

The new Guardian then goes out and levels the Master Level trees. Unfortunately, at this level he/she cannot go get training from a static NPC. He/She has to wait for his/her Master to spawn again. Finally, once the Guardian has reached 4-4-4-4, he/she must return to his/her specific master and begin the final jedi trials. The trials should include everything from killing multiple NPC Jedi/Dark Jedi to killing specially spawned Krayt Dragons. At the same time the Master Trials should include some sort of crafting quest that requires you to obtain a schematic for an ultimate form of lightsaber with AP3 capabilities. Once those trials are completed, your Master will finally grant you the title of Jedi/Dark Jedi Master.

Keep in mind that this type of system will take quite a bit of time to just reach the Knight Level, even for the best power gamer. It will also keep everyone interested as they will know that at certain levels you finally get to do quests and take a small break from grinding. Oh, and with the randomly spawning NPC at the Master Level combined with losing a number of jedi to BH's and other players along the way up the trees, it will only further limit/hinder the ability of someone to ever Master Jedi.

Ok, that's my input for better or worse. I look forward to seeing what you all finally come up with for the final jedi concept.

Well but crafting force crystals or foraging them isn't very StarWars-like, is it? Plus it would be kind of too easy that way.
In addition, crystals would in that case still be for rich people only. Because if they were craftable or foragable, people finding them would still sell them - and I guess they wouldn't sell them that cheap.

Maybe the crystals (not talking of Pearls here) should be a reward within the quest to unlock the FSCS. Not tradeable of course. The way to get the Crystal could still be hard but it could be done without luck and without fear of AFKLooters. Of course the normal crystals would stay in the game but the player playing the quests to unlock his slot would not be able to use those. He has to use the crystal that is given to him by HIS QuestNPC and none else.

Alright. I'd like to contribute my ideas of how to unlock the FSCS aswell. I guess this way would be more or less easy to implement (which should in my opinion always be considered aswell).

Here we go:
My ideas involve - of course - mastering different professions. But as I totally dislike the Hologrinding and especially the frustrating run up and down all types of professions once a holocron was silent, I thought of ways to prevent this. Here is what I came up with:
The Force Sensitive Character Slot is unlocked after mastering four Elite Professions. This sounds not much - but let me explain.

Profession One:
The first elite profession is free of choice. The player (if new to the game, I will cover "old" characters later) starts the game with a certain profession and I self-set goal, lets make it Smuggler here. So he starts playing and eventually he will become a Master Smuggler. This will trigger the path to the FSCS (as the player has mastered an elite profession). The player will receive a mail with a waypoint attached where some stranger wants to meet with him. Needless to say that this NPC would spawn at random locations to prevent camping and griefing.
Once the player has reached the NPC, he will receive some missions to do from him. How many depends on how hard/easy it is supposed to be to unlock the FSCS. The missions the player receives are generated for the profession he mastered especially. So they take advantage of all the things a master smuggler can do.

Profession Two:
Once the player has completed all the "profession one" missions for the NPC, this NPC will tell him that he needs a certain item/something done, but he has to go undercover because some old "friends" are after him.
So the player receives a new mission - which will be of a kind that he has to master a different profession in order to succeed in that mission. This could for example be a request for a type of armor only an Armorsmith can craft - or a type of weapon - a dance - a special item to be looted.
After giving this mission the NPC will disappear for 30 days (at least - as not all players are powergamers that can do the professions that fast) to prevent the powergamer to grind up e.g. armorsmith, craft the armor and head back to the NPC to continue. After 30 days, the player receives another email with a new waypoint where his NPC spawns again.
The player hands the armor over to the NPC and by doing that he triggers a certain amount of Armorsmith missions that he has to complete.

Profession three/four:
Works exactly as prof. two. After doing all the missions the NPC gives for profession two, he will once again give a mission that can only be done by a certain master of a profession. He again disappears for 30 or more days and leaves the player alone. After that time he spawns once more and the fun begins again for profession number four. With profession four, the player again has to do some missions for that type of profession.

After the fourth profession:
Once the player has mastered all four professions and done all the missions for the NPC, the NPC will reveal to him, that he (i.e. the player) has successfully passed all the test and he has proven worthy. The NPC will then give the player one more mission - the final test.

The final test:
The final test should be something very Jedi-like. For example something where the player has to decide (and only decide to make it possible no matter what the fourth profession was. You can't send a Master Dancer out to kill a krayt neither can you send a Master BountyHunter to heal somebody up) something. This could also involve light/dark side affection.
After passing the test (could involve some sort of trivia game as well), the player finally gets the message, that his force sensitive slot as been unlocked.

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General settings for this idea:
The biggest problem right now in the jedi system is - as far as I am concerned - the "silent" profession or better the hologrinding in general. People get their first holo, grind the profession, learn the master and drop it instantly to get to the next profession.
So in about 2 Months a powergamer can at least come to his silent holo and start grinding all the professions left. Either he is lucky and his slot is unlocked after the first profession - or he is not and has to do 24 professions.
Though I understand that it has to be hard to become a jedi I think this system is way too frustrating because you never know, how long the grinding will go on and as soon as you come to a profession that totally doesn't interest you, you might more likely become frustrated rather than really trying that profession.
I think the jedi should be an achievable goal in a way. It is now, but it is very, very random. So I thought up the way described above in detail (well more or less in detail ).
However there have to be certain rules to prevent us all from eventually unlocking the FSCS (which would happen if you just took the suggestions I made above).

Rules for unlocking the FSCS:

1) The items the QuestNPC requests have to be made by the player that has received that mission. For crafted item this is quite easy to do, as they have a serial number and tell who has crafted them.
For fighting mission involving mobs you could prevent the player from buying the item in a way that he might well get help with this, but maybe he should have to loot an item only he can loot. So the NPC/game would know that the player who received the mission actually really was involved in getting that item. I guess there is no way to prevent the player from getting help in fighting missions as this would basically mean to redo a lot of the game from scratch - which it of course totally impossible. But if there is a way, then of course it would be good to make even the fighting missions possible only for the player who received that mission and for no one else.
For other sorts of missions e.g. dancers, medics, etc. I must honestly say I haven't figured out a way to make those missions hard enough to make them worth being in this quest for the FSCS. Maybe in that case simply a larger amount of missions to do would do the trick. I don't know.

2) The time between the NPC spawns is another important factor - as this basically determines how long it actually takes the player to unlock his slot. After the NPC has given the mission which requires the player to master a new profession it should surely not spawn early then 30 days from that day - to prevent powergamers from becoming jedi in a few weeks. On the other hand, we have to think of the casual gamer again. For a real casual gamer it might be hard to become a master in an elite profession within 30 days but still he should receive the chance to unlock his slot. So we have two different groups of people. The powergamer and the casual gamer. And they both want the FSCS.
This is why I suggest that the NPC is allowed to spawn after 30 days. If there is a powergamer who has already reached master level he knows that he has to wait exactly 30 days to go on. Until then he has to keep the master of course - as he knows that he will have to do more missions that require his master skills once the NPC spawns again.
Well and the casual gamer doesn't have to fear he can't make it in 30 days and would see himself forced to powergame as from day 30 on, the game would check every day, if the player has reached master level. As soon as he has *poof* there comes the NPC. So the casual gamer would have as much time as he wants while the power gamer can move through this faster - but not too fast.

3) Failure. Of course it is possible to fail certain tasks. Those should also involve some sort of maximum time allowed per mission. Again, this is a problem for the casual gamer so I'd say the maximum time should be at about 20-30 days. After all the player, no matter if casual or power, is at master level when he receives missions. So even if a casualgamer has to craft for example some type of armor 30 days should be more then enough to complete that task.
What happens in case of failure? Well, this is something I am very strict on. If a player fails one task it is no problem. He can simply run back to the NPC and regrab the mission without any delay. So the player would be allowed to fail once for each stage (i.e. profession). If a player fails a second task on the same stage, nearly everything is lost. He has to start over.
No matter at which stage he is, the master profession he currently has will be seen as if it was his first. So of course he can still talk to the NPC and will receive missions for his current profession. But that profession for example was his fourth one, it is now his first and he has to do three more new ones. Becoming a jedi shouldn't be that much a piece of cake.
For the worst case scenario: You fail so often that you end up with having reached master level in all available professions over time. In that case, the NPC profession quests fall silent and you are directly send to the final test. As that player would surely have worked hard enough to become a jedi. Of course this only works if you fail Quest missions. It would be impossible to simply not go the the NPC after mastering the very first profession and then run to him once you mastered all professions (which would be stupid anyway, as you'd have a chance to unlock the slot much faster if you talk to the NPC directly).

4) What is with those that already have mastered several professions? Well some of those players really like the professions they have. So it would be kind of tough to have them wipe their professions totally. And after all - they have already reached at least one elite profession. But of course it would be far to easy to simply send all those players the Quest-activation mail. So we have to split these players in two groups: Those who have already mastered an elite profession and those who are on the way to their first elite master.
Those who are on the way to their first master are covered by the system I already described. So they require no special stuff.
Those who have already earned an elite master title would be required only to reach a master in one of the six starting professions. This would of course mean that maybe those players have to surrender one of their elite professions but they wouldn't have to start all over again. So the damage for those is minimized and of course they can simply decide not to try to go for jedi and simply keep going the way they were.
For the case that a player (who was grinding holos) has already mastered all the starting professions. Those players should receive the mail instantly, as they have worked up their way to jedi already in a way. However, to make this fair, if they would get for example Master Creature Handler as a goal from the FSCS NPC, they would have to do that again. No matter if they already have the badge or not.
I know that this is something not every player would like, but this would have to happen to keep the game fair and the chances of unlocking the FSCS even.

5) How long should it take to unlock the slot. Well given a total of 4 professions, with 3 of them being timed for at least 30 days, we would have something around 100-110 days for a power gamer to unlock the slot - if he doesn't fail twice in one professions missions that is. For the casual gamer the time would be from 100 days - more or less endless.
But as I mentioned before the time it at least takes can be raised by adding more missions to the different stages or raising the difficulty level of those missions. That would involve a higher chance of failing and thus a longer time. But still every player would know that eventually he has a chance to become a jedi.

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Conclusion: I had the general idea about this just today and most of the ideas came to my mind while writing this text. So it might be a little bit hard to read from time to time maybe but I guess in general, the ideas I have become clear and are a quite fair and even way to unlocking the FSCS. I hope that my ideas in some way contribute to the final way it is done.
Generally all I can say is: No matter how the unlocking will be done: Make it hard, but not too hard. The player should be able to do it solo (after all jedi is a lonely road these days). And please make it FUN. Grinding professions endlessly isn't fun. It really isn't.

Last but not least I'd like to apologize for all grammatical errors in this text. English is not my first language and though I speak it fluently, my written english tends to be a bit strange from time to time, but I guess the main ideas become clear in this text.
And one last thing to you dear reader: Thanks for reading it all! (No not you! You cheated. You just started reading the text below mine and only read the last few lines! ).