Development Cycle Archive

Well, I started my "grind" last night from FS to Initate expecting the worst (from what I read on the boards), but ready to meet the challenge.

First thing I discovered I had no free trees...fair 'enuf, I had'nt holo-ground. I set off to talk to the Captain for the combat unlocks....

"Patrol the area"...pretty neat I thought until I actually did it, consisting of driving in ever expanding circles, and perhaps killing a goon or three every circuit. I could'nt wait until my set of 10 was over. I finally got my 10th run in and went back to the Captain....

WTH! 10 more?

You gotta be kidding me...I unlocked ranged accuracy, I'm a Teras Kasi fighter!

And folks, thats where it ends.


Im pretty dissapointed with the total lack of any form of imagination I've seen so far. A MMORPG that you dont "need" to play with other people...love those "solo groups" etc. etc.

I'm not complaining of the long hard road to Jedi-hood, I was willing to give it my best. It may have taken me ages, but someday I'd be there. But if I can't hold an interest in a "game" that's supposed to be "fun".. hell with it.

I'll probably carry on with my humble little vendor and chat with my friends, and decorate my new (Large!!!) house for eternity.

Devv, Scylla

Hi Thunderheart,

how about a tuesday-thing or better a statement HERE
on the FS skills ?????????

Not about how you get them ... but how they (are supposed to)
WORK. My impression from the board feedback is, that most of
the skills are not fully understood by the community. Maybe some
are broken at the moment, but i could live with this, if there
is a dev statement how they will work in the future. Spending
FS Boxes on things, nobody knows, how they work is quite ....
rediculous

to me "crafting technique" "experimentation" and "luck" are the
most mysterious ...

maybe i overlooked something all ready posted elsewhere. in
this case, anybody feel free to post links below my thread or PM me.

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Moepple wrote:

Hi,

yesterday I got visited by sith, but the disc I looted didnt work......I made a ticket then. Today I was visited by a second group of sith, this time everything was fine. I went to the WP and pooof..... there it goes.

Ok, tried 4-5 times, shuttled, relogged, whatever I could find what worked for others... nothing. The Waypoint is right next to a player-factory and always vanishes as soon as the camp wants to spawn.

I updated the ticket and today I got the response that they cant do nothing to help me, I shall file a /bug report.

Well, there I am. The CSR did not even read the ticket completely, cause I updated it every time and have some other issues. I am told they cant help me, but a bugreport will not help me too within the next few days, so I am stucked?

I am quite pissed by customer support these days, cause every ticket I made is closed, sometimes even when they ask me something and I have to reply, its closed..... And this time its not even read completely.

Any suggestions what to do now? I heard others have those Problems too, and CSRs move the WP then, but why the hell is the Customer Support on Gorath that crappy?

I would be happy if somebody with a red name could post something here what to do when encountering such problems, and it would be great if CSR would now what to do too.

Read ya.

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Well, the ticket is closed now, without any help given. The most interesting thing is, that my last add to the ticket is deleted. What is going wrong here, that tickets are closed and truncated?

Is the Support outsorced and do they get $$$$ per closed ticket, it looks like..... There is no way to get any response about customer satisfaction or to escalate a ticket if you think the CSR is a nerd :-)

Read ya.

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Clorets wrote:

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TMageDrewston wrote:

Although Palpatine called for the extermination of the Jedi and any Force-sensitives who could conceivably challenge him, he did keep a few loyal agents who were trained in the Force. Darth Vader was chief among them, as his primary lieutenant and Sith apprentice. Palpatine also had a string of loyal, deadly agents referred to as his "Hands." Mara Jade was foremost among these dedicated enforcers.

The above is an exerpt from the Starwars official website, can someone please tell my why this hasn't been implimented in the game it's self?

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thats what the bounty hunters are for

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I'm sorry the what? Bounty Hunters? No not bounty hunters. The Emperor's Hands. You know the group that Mara Jade leads.

So the question would be... how is doing a grind that is almost twice as long as the old system any healthier for the game than the old holo grind? I hated the holo grind as much as the next person, believe me, but now we just have a mass of people using a very small selection of profession templates that maximizes their ability to grind out the xp needed for their FS skills. Again- how is this a healthy change for the game?

As many others have stated, a healthy change for the game would have been to make the path to Jedi completely quest based, as it seems we had been promised. Instead the grind was almost doubled and thesmall amount of content added to the game is just mere window dressing to make the grind look enticing at first glance. I've been holding on desperately for new content. I wasn't so much eager to obtain my Jedi as I was looking forward to new, involving, well developed content for the game which would make me feel like I was really playing in the Star Wars universe. It seemed to me that's what we were promised in this update. That promise was not fulfilled. I log on now with nothing to do, and nothing to be hopeful for in the future. It pains me to say because I'm a die hard Star Wars fan, and think this game has vast amounts of potential, but I'm going to have to let my account expire. I simply cannot justify spending $15 a month on a game that offers me nothing but excessively repetitive and boring tasks.

BTW- I don't have a website or any place to post my spreadsheet, but if you'd like me to email you a copy, or if anyone would like to put it up on a page so that people could link to it, send me an email to [email protected]

Message Edited by Aasimar on 09-10-2004 06:44 PM

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Aasimar wrote:

Aranell, I really appreciate your post. I'm a numbers person, so breaking out the math really helped illustrate the full extent of how horrible this new grind is.

Actually, this inspired me to do a little math of my own. I was curious to compare the old holo grind to the new FS xp grind to see who had it worse. As different xp types are valued differently I couldn't just add up all the xp earned for each prof, but had to convert each xp type into its equivalent FS xp with the conversion ratios. I created a spreadsheet (yes I have way too much time on my hands) where I added up the xp required of each of the 32 standard profs, broke it down by type of xp as defined by the FS conversions, and got totals for each type. I then applied the ratios as found on the forums to come up with a total of how much FS xp someone who worked through all 32 professions would have earned.

Here is the final result: The total amount of FS xp you have to have to master six full FS skill branches is 7,350,000 plus anywhere from 100k to 200k more for unlocking 2 to 4 Novice skill boxes (this is all assuming no freebies). The total amount of FS xp you would earn by converting all the xp you would spend to master all 32 professions is: 4,478,863.

Therefore, if you're starting from scratch on the FS quests, you will be grinding through MORE XP to earn your FS skills than it would take to master every single profession. This also means that the old grind where you may have had to master all 32 was faster than this new path. Put another way, the amount of FS xp you would earn from xp spent mastering all 32 profs would only grant you approximately 60% of the FS xp you need to unlock your Jedi in the new system.

The old grind sucked but at least you got to do different types of activities as you progressed down different professions as you worked towards your goal. Now, if you're going to grind, you do the same thing (namely, killing rancors) over and over and over and over.

In THs post on the Reckoning of Effort, he states:

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The old path to Jedi was a very long and arduous journey which involved becoming master in numerous predetermined professions that were specific to each player.

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and...

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it put people on a path of playing through professions as quickly as possible in order to unlock their Force sensitive slot. This was not healthy for the game, thus our desire to revamp this system.

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So the question would be... how is doing a grind that is almost twice as long as the old system any healthier for the game than the old holo grind? I hated the holo grind as much as the next person, believe me, but now we just have a mass of people using a very small selection of profession templates that maximizes their ability to grind out the xp needed for their FS skills. Again- how is this a healthy change for the game?

As many others have stated, a healthy change for the game would have been to make the path to Jedi completely quest based, as it seems we had been promised. Instead the grind was almost doubled and the small amount of content added to the game is just mere window dressing to make the grind look enticing at first glance. I've been holding on desperately for new content. I wasn't so much eager to obtain my Jedi as I was looking forward to new, involving, well developed content for the game which would make me feel like I was really playing in the Star Wars universe. It seemed to me that's what we were promised in this update. That promise was not fulfilled. I log on now with nothing to do, and nothing to be hopeful for in the future. It pains me to say because I'm a die hard Star Wars fan, and think this game has vast amounts of potential, but I'm going to have to let my account expire. I simply cannot justify spending $15 a month on a game that offers me nothing but excessively repetitive and boring tasks.

BTW- I don't have a website or any place to post my spreadsheet, but if you'd like me to email you a copy, or if anyone would like to put it up on a page so that people could link to it, send me an email to [email protected]

Message Edited by Aasimar on 09-10-2004 06:44 PM

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By "healthy for the game" in TH's original post, you should read "healthy for SOE's bank balance" and then you'll see why they didn't like hologrinding and decided made the Jedi grind so much longer.