Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Roundtable Discussion (Week Ending 6-21-04)
This is an open letter to the SWG devs and community.
I have been playing since September and have been a holo slave since December. The boredom is so bad with holo grinding that I read the forms for quite some time last night while I macro spammed lairs to master commando (2020 as of last night). One positive thing about the SOE forums is that the quality of posting has gone way up. It looks like most of the little 16 year old whiners have gone away and most of the posters are very smart and experienced gamers. There are hundreds of posts with legitimate complaints and some great and creative possible solutions. But even more disturbing is when posters cite past dev behavior and promises and show us a negative pattern from the SWG team.
First the positive-SWG currently has the best graphics an MMO has to offer. Even now, I am still impressed by the scenery every time I log. The crafting system I think is currently second to none. These two things were done right and are enjoyable.
I have always given the devs the benefit of the doubt that they were forced to push SWG out when it wasn't ready because of money. I can live with that. What I am having problems with is the total lack of mid-level content to explore. To me, the purpose of paying a monthly fee to play an MMO is to constantly have new things to explore and do in a persistent world with persistent friends (guildmates). Instead we are paying for the devs to put near 100% of their resources into the DEVELOPMENT OF THE CORE SYSTEM. We are paying the salaries of programmers who spend all of their time squashing bugs and re-vamping professions instead of giving current players something to do. Granted they have given us the DWB, the Corvette, and the Geo Cave. However these are all very high level dungeons meant for uber templates and/or large and well organized groups. What SWG is totally lacking is something for more casual mid-level players. I cannot remember the last time me and and my RL wife, who also plays, were able to go explore something new in the game on our own without worrying about being totally wiped out in seconds.
Old and extremely annoying bugs are still there such as rubber banding during a vehicle dismount. It was said in a past patch that this problem was fixed. Within 15 minutes of logging after this patch I rubber banded. Are these bug fixes even tested before acknowledging they are fixed? Another bug that was a result of a band-aid fix of getting Krayt dragons stuck on harvesters is the bad creature warping problem when they run away. These high profile bugs should be squashed immediately without delay. Yet weeks and months go by with no fix in sight.
And re-vamps? To call the current Jedi phase a re-vamp is a total joke. To re-vamp something it had to have an initial stage of constructive development and implementation. The current system had no thought or development. It was a band-aid for something that was supposed to be in the game, had to be in the game, and wasn't at the time of publish. I can’t believe that they thought people would figure out on their own that they would have master professions and drop them to unlock. Some of the unlocking theories I saw in the forums were brilliant (hermit) and would have been awesome had some of them been the case in-game, but as it turns out there was nothing mysterious or intriguing about the unlocking system-a set number of seemingly random professions to master. But even the current Jedi system I can blow off because maybe the devs had problems out of their control (bean-counters).
What I can't forgive was their biggest mistake to date-the great Holocron giveaway of Christmas. This was where SWG started to really nose-dive on us. Getting Holocrons should have been part of the holy grail that was Jedi. I don’t care if the artisans were complaining about not being combat and therefore not being able to loot them. Any artisan that has any ambition to be good at what they do could easily have saved the credits to buy holocrons from the combat players. Before the giveaway maybe 1 in 10-20 people were actively trying to go for Jedi. I for one was trying to become a master Pikeman so I could kill the high-level mobs to get Holocrons, then do whatever it took. After Christmas ANYONE with even the smallest desire and 0 commitment was able to start down the path and they started to drop professions they were good at and take up new ones that they knew nor cared nothing about. This DESTROYED guilds. The guilds no longer had any sense of themselves because the player base had no sense of itself. Want something sliced? Too bad your guild smugglers dropped the prof to holo grind. Want to do a high level cave? Too bad since all your uber combat guys are holo grinding. I don't know how a supposedly educated developer was unable to see this coming. I saw it coming and I am not a professional MMO developer.
Another mistake that I cannot forgive is dedicating too many of their limited resources to the "re-construction" of SWG. The monthly story arcs should have NEVER stopped. We have had 3 arcs since initial release 12 months ago. I have nothing against the uber high level content they have given us, but where is the other Mid-level content? I for one enjoy the sense of discovery. Just once I would have liked to have discovered something in SWG that I didn't know about. One time an NPC told me about a mysterious earthquake on Yavin IV and gave me a WP. Not looking at the WP on the big map I dutifully took my speeder out and drove for 15 minutes to realize it was the Geo cave.
The content that is there, namely the existing quests that have been there since release, is largely meaningless. All of the NPC quests I have ever taken have never had any story with substance. The 3 arcs that were released are largely generic and meaningless stories. Here is a possible solution so this is not an all rant post-The SWG team needs to add a good writer to the group. Give us a mission where we care about the story. Or if you don’t want to pay a writer, use and implement existing expanded universe stories and content.
Another decision that I am having a very hard time with is shoving it to the smugglers and squad leaders by re-vamping ID. ID!? Where in the heck did that come from? How many ID's did you know? ID for the most part was fine except for some minor annoyances while smuggler and SL sit there broke. Instead, the devs decided to dedicate the art people and coders to making holo-emotes. They say that smuggling will be too hard to implement on the ground. But after all the months of promises they couldn't even give the smugglers a bone by giving them spice experimentation.
The holo giveaway and ID revamp were dev decisions that could not have been motivated by money counters. They represent the poor management and poor thought processes of those in charge of SWG. I don't think it is too much to ask to have something new to explore once a month, no matter how small. I do not feel that I am getting my $180 per year ($260 for both of us). I think it is wrong that our money is going towards paying for something that should have been covered by the initial game purchase....namely INITIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE SYSTEM.
SWG hasn't been fun for me since my holo grind began in December. But I was always going for Jedi and sucked it up. But then when I read the forums I realize there is no content to look forward to once this incredibly difficult goal is achieved, however I keep moving along and am working on my 18th profession.
The devs need to push it up. If things don't start looking up after publish 10 I will be leaving. $280 can easily buy other games through the year to keep me happy and less frustrated. WoW and EQII is on the horizon. I have been to the EQ website and the trailer looks absolutely amazing. The EQII install is going to be 10gig because of all the voiceovers. They recently started adding a 3-part story driven adventure to beta with IN GAME MOVIES!
It will deeply sadden me if I have to leave. I was born in 1976 and grew up a Stars Wars geek for the last 27 years. I have waited my whole life for this game. After release I thought I would have a good outlet by being able to live a small part of my life in the Star Wars universe. But so far my SWG experience is largely unfulfilling.
Even though it seems like it I really don’t intent to flame the devs with this post. I realize they work very hard to give us a quality product. It is just that I am loosing faith due to some of the decisions that have been made. This is how I feel and wanted to put this out to the SWG community. Thanks for reading.
Cymek
Raging Hologrinder
Intrepid
AgreaAtodlie wrote:
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They have so much on their plate...we honestly should be giving them praise for getting what they have done out on time or reasonably close to on time...That isALOT of designing, programming, and developing...we act like spoiled brats (yes i am very much guilty of this too)...we say "more more more more", and if we don't like it....we say "this is such a let down BLAH BLAH BLAH"...
This is the part where we all say thank you to the SWG team...they need some lovin' too...over 32 professions, thousands of quests, multiple worlds, servers, get it? that is a lot of work...so from me Thank you for working your proverbial butts off to keep us the paying customer from being bored.
TH
this issue has been brought up many times but I feel it needs to be addressed again.
Storage space.
Yes each player gets a Bank to deposit 100 items
Yes you can buy a house or houses to store 150 items each.
However for crafters this is not enough. Not given that each house takes up 2 lots.
I am just a Doctor crafter, my needs are small compared to a Armorsmith or Archetect, but I am quickly running out of space.
My lots are in 2 houses (cause 1 can't hold all my resources and factory crates) (4 lots)
2 factories (used more for storage space than actualy factory runs) (6 lots)
1 Merchant tent (again used for storage as well) (7 lots)
This leaves me with 3 lots for harvestors. Given the spawn rate for somr rare elements (dolovite iron, Class 4 LPF, High quality supplies) this is not enough.
There are many solutions to the crafters problem:
1. Create a crafting house, Has 1 type of Crafting station built into it, higher maintenance fees and more storage space (200-300 items) Master artisan, or Novice level skills branching from the Artisan profession are required to place this, so only crafters can use it.
- Food/Med crafting house - requires Master DOC, CM, BE,Novice Chef, Merchant to place
- Weapon/armor/general crafting house- requires Master Artisan, novice armorsmith,weaponsmith, merchant to place
- Clothing - requires novice taylor, Merchant
- Structure crafting- requires Novice Arechetect, merchatn
Novice Merchant gets the ablilty to place all crafting houses or move it to master merchant as a bonus to them.
2. Increase the stack size- again this would only be beneficial to crafters, something as simple as increaseing the stack size to 250K or 500K would give us a lot more room and not be beneficial to anyone but crafters again. Also increase the Stacks in factory crates to 100 for every type of crate this too would be of great help. This should not take more than 1 hour worth of codeing for the devs.
3. Increase the storage capacity of the houses.
I think the best quick fix is #2 and #1 done down the road.
Storage space is an issue for every crafting profession.
Can we please have an answer to this issue?
CommBubba wrote:
Here is one suggestion to the massive jedi problem. Why not give jedis perma death? Being a jedi would come with huge advantages and a huge disadvatage. OOPS there goes all your force crystals and 10 million credits...
they had that system but it was more trouble than it was good. Your best bet would be to go through the jedi forums for posts from the december, january and february time period you'll learn a lot about how jedi has progressed into a playable profession.
wickedHangover wrote:
I think every creature in this game, including Krayt dragons, should have a cave of some sorts. I'm sure they can copy and paste the pygmy torton cave like another 50 times and change each instance to have it represent more creatures. I love caves, but there's only like what 20 in the whole game?
It would just be cool to wander through the hills and run into a cave filled with dalyrakes or one filled with spiders, there are some things that I wouldn't expect in a cave like war grondas or things like that, but a razor cat cave would be really cool a giant cave of mountain worrts would be cool. I could go on and on, it just makes no sense that each planet has like 2 caves and on corellia the 2 caves are not even creatures, its those half NPC half creepy fuzzy creature things...
This may be difficult to do, but what about random generated caves? Caves are cool, but you mention'd walking through the woods and come across a cave, well it if twas random that'd give more reason to wander around aimlessly in the game and see some of the scenery.. just a thought.