Development Cycle Archive

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Adrionys wrote:

Thunderheart, please tell us that you care more about actual bugs, that have gone untouched since launch, than answering pathetically stupid questions as this!

How many posts do you see virtually begging for answers that NEED to be and SHOULD be answered???

Let me ask you a straightforward question, TH, and do me the justice of giving all of us an honest answer...

If you were to go out and by software, get it installed on your computer, play around with it, begin finding countless bugs, send the software company writtens warnings that they have known issues, be completely ignored by the company, go to download the constant updates which add "flashy" new features (that are also laden with problems), find the company's feeble attempt at a feedback forum and see all pertinent questions ignored...would you tell your friends that they should pick up said software? If you were having to pay for it, monthly, would you continue to pay?

As I said, please be honest.

Yes, TH, I am being VERY critical and I know full well that it's against your rules. Well, guess what. You're (SOE) breaking some very major rules of good business. It's time for a change, TH. You are the players' mediator. With all of the new games being released, you're going to begin seeing more and more accounts cancelled, as you are already, unless YOU do something about it, personally, Kurt. This falls upon your hands and no one elses, at this point. So, unless SOE originally intended for this to be a very temporary game (maybe until EverCrack2?), I suggest you start listening to us paying customers and actually doing something to appease the one's who really pay your bills.

Yes, this is a repost, from last week's "discussion", as you have decided to ignore the major concerns of most of the hardcore players. So, what will it be - will you continue to ignore our concerns or are you going to address them, TH?

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I guess Thunderheart is too busy to actually address everyone's concerns, this week.

I hope he never has to deal with this kind of CRAP from a software company.

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Cafa wrote:

Filing a CSR ticket has pretty much proved worthless in my last 5 issues. They have not come, or responded four days later that they "will" investigate a problem, of course, the problem happened four days ago and all evidence of it was erased by the problem makers.'

SOE treats their customers' concerns with the same consideration as your basic domesticated animal on the way to the slaughterhouse.

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Yeah, some CSRs are about as useful as JPGs are to a blind person...but I've had a couple of good experiences.

I couldn't agree with you more about how SOE treats us. Kinda makes you wonder how they stay in business.

I learned this last night the hard way:

1. if you shuttletef'd when you load you don't get the 60s grace period and can get load killed (I have also heard this is the case when in a guild war).

2. If you let yourself lay there dead for a few minutes after a pvp death (in my case hoping to show people that I was load killed), when you finally clone you will get decay. I think this is because there is a timer on your corpse so that after a certain amount of time you can't be revived, and once that time is up the game loses the concept that it was a pvp death.

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wickedHangover wrote:
(a pile of good stuff)

As a Master Doctor/Master Fencer with my primary avatar I find this all to be true, but I would like to point out one, I think very important, point.

HAM on a target is a poor way to measure difficulty.

The canonical example is the Corvette which, for at least some of the missions, can be completed without destroying the vast majority of the targets therein, because the AI is weak. Worse, the humanoid mobs seem to employ the same lame behaviors that make them pathetic in planet-bound PvE. You don't need to kill them at all, for the most part.

Your own example also belies this statement: If I sit there and hit F9 for an hour I can kill it. So if the target is instead twice the HAM, isin't it now just twice that length of time? It is just a DPS vs. target HAM game. A stronger creature is just more of the same.

After listening to the original whining and pissing from those who went off to the Corvette and got their butts handed to them, I expected the place to be full of sudden-death. Needless to say I was disappointed. The same kludges that work in groundside PvE work on the Corvette.

I would suggest that the -largest- thing lacking from all forms of PvE is VARIETY. Every creature reacts the same way to having it's lair attacked. Every lair pops the same number of creatures (except for an extremely rare megaspawn) in the same order, with the same number of spawns. The POIs always have the same density of creatures. Random spawns are no more and no less dense than they were yesterday, even if you wiped them all out. In fact this regularity makes it possible to AFK macro combat grinding of Skaaks or Meatlumps. Duh.

Beyond combat being entirely broken, beyond GCW brokenness, base brokenness and TEF brokenness, is that the environment of NPCs and creatures needs not just variety of creature strengths but variety in their behaviors. The -challenge- is not just that they're strong, but that they're -unpredictable-.

--doogie

I'm posting this here because Pex closed the COA threads in the events forum.

Despite my doubts about how COA was run, its now over, and the Rebs won. Congrats to them. They now have permanent access to Dead Eye.

Here is my concern about future story arcs, if they occur: lets suppose the next Story Arc has a prize similar to Dead Eye that can be made permanent by winning the final Arc. Seeing as how the Rebs won all three stages of the current arc, I think it is reasonable to assume that they will win all three stages of the next arc. So, they get that permanent advantage too. Follow that up with another story arc, followed by another Rebel victory, and they have three advantages the Imps don't.

At what point do the Rebs have so many advantages that it is no longer possible to effectively play the Imps in the GCW?

I strongly encourage the Devs to make the final prize something different than a schematic that gives one side an advantage in combat. I imagine the Rebs would have been pleased if they could have reported to the Rebel Coordinator during the Epilogue to COA and received something like a Rebel Victory Banner, or other unique item, that doesn't have the potential to imbalance the GCW. In fact, I imagine many of them, and all those that don't actively pursue combat, would have preferred something like that.

TH,

There appears to be a very serious issue of CSRs victimizing legitimate weaponsmiths as of late, confiscating their stocks and taking away their accounts. As a weaponsmith I am very concerned that a CSR might decide to arbitrarily take my account from me without cause. I have never used any exploits in the creation of my weapons, but that does not appear to be stopping the CSR in this instance. This concern stems from the following thread:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=weaponsmith&message.id=44616

In this case a WS was nearly shut down because of an exploit he could not have possibly performed and that was never proven to be performed on his weapons. First off, the weapons as have been shown on the thread can be made legitimately usingloot drops that have occured in the game and the best possible materials. Second, the person could not have performed the exploit because he is not of the right profession. How is it weare held responsible for the actions of others? As a WS, I have no idea what a smuggler can and can not do in game and no recourse to deal with an exploiter myself (hence the dire need for player created missions to track who did an exploit and when it occured).

I ask that in the future honest businessmen not be harassed by the CSRs andany CSR responsible for harassingsomeone for something they can't possibly do be censured.

Any chance that the drop rate on the AV-21 Speeder power supply could be increased? I don't have 8 million credits to buy one

Perhaps artisans could craft it without the power supply part, but the vehicle would be as slow as a Land speeder or something.

It's just frustrating having the schematic and not being able to do anything with it.

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DoogieHozer wrote:

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wickedHangover wrote:
(a pile of good stuff)

--many very good points--

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I guess my problem is looking for content that falls in the above 56k ham to the 300k ham range. I am not saying there is none, I am just saying it is too rare.

As for what my (many player's) ideal situation would be is a battle between either single random spawns, or random mobs is a 10 minute battle that I may or may not win. Not the current system where if I hit it long enough without getting bored I will eventually kill it. I know this has a lot to do with the missing force powers, but the logic applies to creatures who didn't have those anyway.

If you work out the math, our HAM bar size is the problem. If our health, Action and Mind bars were seperated from the secondaries in a pool of points that would allow us to have 10k ham, but keeping the same secondary numbers, then we would have more realistic battles between players and higher level mobs. Even PvP would improve since right now its basically a contest to see who hits first, because most anyone can take another player out in one shot.

So say I migrate my stats to this:
9500 - max 12,000+- doc buffed
450 - max 2950+- doc buffed
350 - max 2850+- doc buffed
9300 - max 11,800+- doc buffed
400 - max 2900 +- doc buffed
450 - max 2950 +- doc buffed
7300
400
350

or something like that, what happens is that now we are on a more level playing field with high level creatures and the next step is to increase the amount of 50k to 200k ham stuff is out there. This is not a nerf to creatures and PvE, its a balance that will work its way even into PvP and would probably be the simplest solution to any combat rebalance problem that exists.

It would take nothing for the dev's to try it and if it does not work, oh well, it was worth a shot. I work with a lot of numbers at work and the numbers in this game add up very nicely fort he most part, but our ham bar numbers and buff numbers are real odd.

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CivilizedAphid wrote:

I'm apoplectic about fellow players who seem to dismiss nonanimating working harvesters as a nonissue. Another worthy gripe that goes utterly ignored is the fact that the battle command window's and datapad's dimensions and location do not save between sessions. I imagine the only reason the latter concern hasn't already been addressed is that it hadn't ever before appeared in a thread of this kind. Scandalous! Get with it, everyone!

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I remember when the harvestor animations worked, I think it was before aleraan act 2 came out, not sure...as for the datapad, how come every time i open it up after a shuttle trip it displays the help information and my waypoints are all gone? forget the dimensions, I have to keep flipping the tabs around to get my info back.

And as for the Macro screen, why are my macros not in alphabetical order? They rearrange themselves into any order they want as often as they like.