Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Weekly Roundtable Discussion (Week Ending 4-19-04)
Thunderheart wrote:
10110110 wrote:
ON ARMOR
Hello.
Is the team going to do anything about the fact that everycharacter (including Jedi) wears composite? What's the use of having all these neat types of armor whenonly onekind is used byan entire population (excluding Wooks)?
Each armor type should have strengths/weaknesses against the spectrum of damages inflicted in SWG. Current composite resistance capabilitiesare far superior to any other type of armor made. Is this how you want it?
Also, do you plan to make your upcoming death watch armor a big waste of time like RIS? Broken, shifting stats and loot camp madness?
Basically what I am asking is are you ever going to make armors like Padded, Mabari, RIS, Death Watch (Mandalorian?), Bone, and Ubese worth wearing or are you going to let the composite craze run its current course? Its kind of sad when everyone standing next tomy toonis wearing the same stuff, only in different colors.
No, its not how the devs want it. The rub is that with the crafting experimentation bug, everything is uber. To change that, it needs the crafting experimentation change integrated, but its been pre-empted due to popular demand. We're hoping to equalize that with the combat balance.
And for those of you who are following the Combat balance news story, we had a strategy meeeting yesterday and myself and a couple of others investigated what could be done to get the combat balance back in the mix. The programming team is putting together a plan that may get the "development sandbox" that JustG mentioned in his letter to accelerate this.
Thunderheart,
I believe that you are mis-interpreting the question here, and I don't belive it is fair that you are trying to push the blame back on the community.
Hispoint, I believe, is not that composite armor has reached 80% effectiveness, but rather has to do with vulnerabilities with particular armors.
Composite is only vulnerable to stun. RIS armor, which by all accounts is expected and announced to be armor of the highest order, is vulnerable to both stun and acid. How can an armor be expected to be better when it has more vulnerabilites. All other armors are not only lower in base resistance, but have more vulnerabilites than composite, but still always include that stun vulnerability.
A viable solution to some of these issues would be to make different armors have 'different' vulnerabilites. For instance make RIS only vulnerable to acid (but not stun). Therefore a person could choose to make RIS armor or use acid layers to make it better or at least different from composite.
Make ubese only vulnerable to heat/blast or something like that, so that stun/acid become part of the base resists or special protection. This way people have to conciously choose their armor for their situation, and so to would attackers when choosing their pvp weapon, just like you do when fighting creatures.
I can understand your point on experimentation if perhaps RIS was indeed supposed to be the only armor able to reach the current out of balance levels that composite has, but even so, with its additional vulnerability, a 50% composite > 80% RIS against an acid rifle (of which you guys so graciously added to the game).
With the current state of armorsmith it is not viable to craft armor for others until master anyway, so instead of making armor scale up in base %, instead make most armors have the same potential, but give them each unique special protections and vulnerabilites. Also perhaps give all regular armor 2 vulnerabilies (even composite) and have only rare quest armor such as RIS or mandalorian have single vulnerabilites.
Atteke wrote:
Thunderheart could you guys put the combat balance on Test Centre in it's current condition like you did with the new HAM system in January? just so we can take a look at it.
-Thanks
Rookgraawl wrote:
TH:
Could you PLEASE make a statement to the community regarding the Jedi revamp?
Countless community members, including Arjun (the Jedi Correspondant), have been pleading for a little bit of information about what will be happening to the profession. PLEASE make a statement about the revamp, and what we can expect.
No one wants any spoilers or secerts here. We just want to know what we can expect, so that we can determine whether or not our efforts are in vain.
Giving this statement now will make your job easier! The rumors and concernes in the community will calm if you give us just a bit of info, and will leave you with less to sort through. Please, please address this.
kimsdragon wrote:
1. What does ! and ? mean over a creature's head?
Thunderheart wrote:
Atteke wrote:
Thunderheart could you guys put the combat balance on Test Centre in it's current condition like you did with the new HAM system in January? just so we can take a look at it.
-Thanks
Not really. Not for now anyway. You see, if we put it on Test Center, we'd have to push it out in Publish 9 with the the way the process works. Once a clump of code is integrated, "its in there". Thats where the sanbox that we've been talking about comes into play. This sandbox would be like a second Test Center, but configured in a way where it would be insulated from the live code and we would be able to push different versions out much easier without interfering with current process.
So in English "No" 
p.s This "sandbox" is it real or some kind of metaphor. 
Thunderheart wrote:
No, its not how the devs want it. The rub is that with the crafting experimentation bug, everything is uber. To change that, it needs the crafting experimentation change integrated, but its been pre-empted due to popular demand. We're hoping to equalize that with the combat balance.
I think i read somewhere our Bounty Hunter terminals are now broke on Test Centre.
MasterNitro wrote:
Did the dev will do something for BH ?
Preface: Since the idiot software that the dev team uses puts in HTML code that cannot be copied directly onto Lithium, I'm not going to cite TH's post where he responds to armor imbalance questions by blaming those terrible players for thwarting the will of the devs, and then in passing mentions the much ballyhooed and scapegoated (by TH himself) combat rebalance that might get a look see after it was used as the catch all explanation for every question asked about a combat profession for the past four months.
This is just beyond ridiculousness, TH. It's those terrible crafters, especially the masters, who want to not change the expermentation system so that master crafters can put out the same overpowered stuff and the crafters grinding their way up have no economic status in the game. Becasue the devs frankly don't play the game, and are managing all of this from spreadsheets and have no real experience with crafting in game. This is utter nonsense, and the devs should know it if they don't.
As for the combat balance, you guys have already blown it. You nerfed the poodoo out of CH to start with it, and now you're debating how to get it back in the mix? Cripes. For MONTHS you addressed every question about combat profession issues with "will be addressed by the combat balance" and now you put it off indefintely? I guess you guys need more time to fly your Y wings around in the SE, huh?
Thunderheart wrote:
No, its not how the devs want it. The rub is that with the crafting experimentation bug, everything is uber. To change that, it needs the crafting experimentation change integrated, but its been pre-empted due to popular demand. We're hoping to equalize that with the combat balance.
Thunderheart wrote:
No, its not how the devs want it. The rub is that with the crafting experimentation bug, everything is uber. To change that, it needs the crafting experimentation change integrated, but its been pre-empted due to popular demand. We're hoping to equalize that with the combat balance.
hasibert wrote:
Thunderheart wrote:This was a big request pre-launch too. Its always a big player interest, but the answer is that with the family rating, the lack of children has to do with keeping vulgar and/or upsetting images out of the game.
are you serious? The world is crazy!
I don't think it's the children themselves that would be upsetting, it's what some immature players might choose to do to them, or perhaps a situation where a child NPC gets randomly spawned into some situation no child should be in....