Development Cycle Archive

"One thing we have been discussing is simply making the houses inaccessible when maintenance expires, as a grace period."

If that happens how are we to reach the maintenance terminal to add more maintenance to the house?

I think he means that instead of disappearing, and taking everything with it, the house becomes inaccessible for a certain time, during which you can get a CSR to help you with the situation. They fix it, you get back into your house, pay maintainance.

Otherwise, it's just....gone.

Have you decided to go ahead with the combat changes? Are you going to reduce rifle speed without a damage increase?
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Seriously, if your going to post things like that, refering to other posts, make sure you READ THE POST YOU ARE REFERING TO next time. it specificly said that making caps different for each weapon type it would allowe them to increase the damage on the slower weapons without them being too powerfull

State of the game is all well and good, how about a state of the GCW? I'd like to see Imperial and Rebel demographics so we can either address or lay to rest the concerns of Imperial players feeling outnumbered, is it just the lack of them going overt or is it a genuine imbalance of numbers?

How about Bio-Engineer's,

Heck how out our Dev? Is he even alive? He seems harder to find then Force Slots.

To feel what its like to be a BE i would read this well written post from a Master BE.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=534383

Holo, a lot of this is very useful information, and much appreciated.

I do have one significant problem with what you've said and maybe one minor quibble. The quibble is that there's still a slight drift to corporate speak here and there. Not too badly, but I think there's still a distance to travel to plain speaking communication between players and developers where you don't feel obligated to put a happy p.r. face on that communication. We're here, we're subscribed, you've seen to that with the forums of the closing. You don't need to sell us anything anymore except the willingness to continue subscribing. To do that, I think you just need to give us confidence about where the game is going, since we've already endured where it has been.

The significant problem is that I still see to some extent the overreliance on metrics for making evaluative statements that I've criticized before. Credit supply is not a negligible issue but to be honest, saying whether credits are coming from missions or loot says nothing at all about the state of the economy. It neither tells us about the existing money supply (which is the real issue when we're talking just quantitatively about the economy) nor about the important *qualitative* issues in the economy. One of those that I was just talking about in SWG Discussion is the number of player shops where the vendors are no longer stocked. You might think that's a good thing for the database, but if the trend continues, it's going to make things difficult for players when it involves goods that they need resupplied like weapons and armor.

There are many other issues of that kind that your entire assessment of the "state of the game" basically doesn't touch on. The numbers are interesting, they're important, they tell you some things worth telling, but I'm still concerned now, as I have been for a while, that the devs' collective grasp on how the game *feels* to the people playing it is weak. It's hard to get a systematic feel for that--it feels differently to different kinds of players, and differently on different servers--but it should be part of what you know and have to say about the "State of the Game". A "State of the Union" address that only read out census figures would be a poor speech even in terms of being political propaganda, let alone reassuring American citizens about the future. Same thing here: you need to talk to us not just about metrics, but about how it feels down there in the servers, day in and day out, about the kinds of qualititative experiences that people are having in the game. A lot of that, good AND bad, is not in your metrics and never will be.

In a galaxy where Creature handlers are supposed to be rare, it's the most mastered and the most dabbled profession. How wonderful

Holo I'd like to see some numbers on CHs, how many are there, how many masters? Or just what percentage of the population is a CH. What percentage of the population owns a CL 15 or higher pet?

Oh and you know you could post on the lounge occasionally! We don't bite!

OK Holocron............... lets get real................ the reasons the number of CS has drastically declined is not because of "excellence in customer service" it still sucks......................... the reasons are

1.) People do not bother to waste their time because they know that:

a. can expect that customer service will not answer their reply

b. if the ticket is answered it will usually be with a cut and pasted canned reply

2.) We have been limited to only 1 open CS ticket at a time ............. duh............... I would imagine the numbers would be reduced if you implemented such a policy.

So please do not confuse the drop in numbers to an improvement in customer service............... its an artificial reduction. Customer service is still an issue with this game.

I believe a format such as this will prove highly valuable, especially for players like myself who browse the boards periodically to see what issues are being worked out, thoughdon't post much themselves. 3-5 broad topics with a few sentences (or paragraph) for each subpoint of a topic gives me a good sense of where development is headed.

Any thoughts on character race percentages?

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Holocron wrote:

One thing we have been discussing is simply making the houses inaccessible when maintenance expires, as a grace period.

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Interesting... seems to me as if taking that step would in and of itself give you tons of info on the problem... if people start complaining that they can't get in their house, then maint. fees are getting eaten up too quick; but if people still complain about vanishing houses, well, then at least the problem is now distinct from maintenance fees...

Omfg great Holo.

I'm slowly believing more that the big issues of this game are going to be fixed pretty soon and wont take a gazillion months..... yay. Doing a great job on trying to communicate more.