Development Cycle Archive

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Jedi; you want respect, but you haven't done a thing to earn it.

I think you should cut down points you get in the ranking system if you as a jedi are grouped. I fear that each fraction will group with all council members online and then go out search for the others fractions jedi, thereby the fraction that has the largest group that day will gain the most ranking points. The ranking points you get from killing non jedi should be (as i think it already is) very low or none. Jedi fights for ranking should be 1 on 1, 2 on 2, or 3 on 3 at the most. So give out only about 1/10 of the jedi ranking points when you are grouped (i know the the group share the frp now depending on how much dmg you do, but i think the points you get in a group should be very low). No more then 6 jedi should never be involved in a fight against eachother. To be able to have it this way, the different jedi skills should be more balanced so not all will have master def/LS heal 4.0.0.4. Make it someway so the most benificial way of gaining rank in the council is by, singlehanded, killing jedi of the opposite fraction. Also try to make it so the jedi wont camp eachothers council spots, we need to go search for eachother, or stumble on eachother why out doing something else.

Gruber' Littletank
Jedi knight
Holy war.

The enclaves: The jedi enclaves are out in the middle of no-where, a safe haven for jedi knights to go and relax (sort of). They are very well designed and look great. But they have a few issues/bugs.

There is an issue currently where the doors that you should be able to either lock, and dont open (fixed by a relog), or sometimes even worse, the game forgets you can enter there, and it counts as if you cant. E.g. Im a rank 4 sentinal, so i should be able to enter the sentinal area of the enclaves, but i still get bounced out as if i dont have the required rank to enter.

Logging out from one fo the lower balconies (ie council lvl) will result of you spwning on the higher balcony when u log back in. This will cause you to be stuck in that area, as you not recognised as being aloud to enter there.

The sentinal guardian NPCs out the front of the enclaves are a problem too. They are almost non agressive and a BH or another oposite faction jedi could just sit down next to them. Another problem if there was a fight at the door of the enclaves the sentinels can be attacked by its own jedi, and even turn and attack them. They need to be made non attackable by their own faction (ie like can be done with reb/imp NPCs).

Dark jedi terminal freezes yavin for at least 20-30 seconds whenever someone tries to access it, light one does not seem to cause this problem.

For those that have not fully tested and looked at the system, the terminals and their use will probably be very confusing. They need to add documentation either via in game mail (when u first complete ur trials), or somewhere on the site that explains the use of the terminal properly.

Force ranking system: Currently the ranking system is near impossible to hold a rank in the system, some of us have PvPed for 4-5 hrs for the last 2 days, and end up leaving with less xp than what we had when we entered. This is either to the high amount of xp lost for a death, or because we loose rank x 100 xp per 2 hours. As a rank 4 sentinal i loose 400 xp per 2 hours, and over the last 2DAYS i have made a total of 150xp. This is partly to my template (master healer/master enhancer 4004 saber), as im spending more time healing myself to stay alive, than attacking other players. Also we do not earn any xp if we dont attack (so a healer will never get force ranking xp).

The xp earned is shaired between the group, so group "gankings" wont result in large amounts of xp (which is good), so 1 v 1's allow for the highest amounts of xp. The xp earned is also the PvPrating of the player u killed, so if u target an oponant and type /showpvp, and it says he is 1000, then he is worth 1000xp between the group that killed him. It seems to be shared based on the armount of damage you do to that player also, similar to the wayan NPC/mob is calculated.

It's my personal opinion that what both of these posts have in common is the fault in the system. Buffs. The numbers are targeted at unbuffed players...not buffed players. As you can probably tell from my previous posts, I'm not a fan of everyone requiring Doc buffs in order to be able to fight. Buffs are what has made it possible for people not to care about the encumberance of their armor. Buffs have made people not want to group and it is the buffs that are making this situation more difficult to balance.

...I am soooo going to get flamed for saying that

hehe one flame for you!!!

no actually i think you are tottally right.. for me (master swordsman) is just stupid being able to kill 6 rancors in less than a minute with a hammer and they barely hurt me (it took Luke much more than that and he only killed 1 rancor and he didnt killed it by himself he kiled it with a door lol.. so actually it suggests that i can own 6 Luke in less than a minute and all of them hitting me at the same timerofl) and all of this just because of the buffs i wish buffs were out of the game..

I'm gonna try to explain the FRS/PvP systems as best as I understand it and what I have experienced today.

My Background: Last night (Saturday)I finished the Knight trials (15)and joined the FRS. I didn't do any PvP until this afternoon.

There are two numbers that people seem to be confusing:

PVP Combat Rating - this was added with Publish 9 for every player including non-Jedi. It starts with a default value of 1200 and any player can view their own rating by typing /showpvprating or /showpvp. You can also view the rating of anyone else by targeting them and typing /showpvp. This number goes up anytime you help in killing an opponent (you don't even have to get the DB or even be grouped with the people who DB'd the opponent). This number goes down every time you are killed by another player. After the PvP I have done today, my combat rating is now 1331.

Force Rank Experience - this is the amount of xp you have as a Jedi Knight or higher in the Force Ranking System. I have been PvPing ina group in Theedfor aboutthree hours today and have only earned630 force rank xp. I have have helped to kill many Master BHs and Dark Jedi. I seem to be getting between 5 and 50 points of force rank xp per kill for both Jedi and non-Jedi, unlike one report that someone was getting over 1k xp for a single kill. I have mainly just been killing the players with my lightsaber only - I'm not sure if using force powers to kill would net more xp or not. I need 10k xp to qualify forRank 1:Sentinel. This seems like it would take a pretty long time to attainbyhow muchxp is grantedcurrently.

From what I have read on this post, I think that once you have attained a Rank higher than 0 you will lose 100 times your rank xpfor each cycle that you do not participate in by voting. So a Rank 1 Sentinel will lose 100 xp for not participating in the voting cycle, and a Rank 9 Council Member will lose 900 xp for not participating. The voting cycle on TC2 is accelerated to approximately 2 or 4 hours - I'm not sure. On live servers it will be one day.

[Edit]: I just logged in again after being disconnected suddenly when the server wentdown and before I had even loaded a Dark Jedi had killed me. This is my first death and I lost 249 points ofForce Rank xp, which I think is wayout of balance withthe xpyou getfor killing other players. I talked to the Dark Jedi who killed me and she received 199 points of Force Rank xp for killing me.

Being able to be attacked because you are overt before your game has completely loaded is definately a major problem. I think the best solution to this would be to not make overt status come up until you actually move or 30 seconds after the game has completely loaded.

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The feedback I need is how easy/difficult is it to gain FR experience.

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• Master Force Powers - This is what I consider the jedi version of "ranged" combat. The melee oriented LS tree combines with this to complete the jedi's potentialoffensive abilities. Mastering both offensive trees would be suicide, or course, since a player may only use one or the other at a given time, and any uniqueadvantage offered by mastery of these trees wouldn't be adequate to compensate for the disadvantage presented by a major loss of defensive abilities. Therefore, staying competitive in the FRS requires a choice of one or the other offensive profession, with only the possibility to dabble in the other. As it stands now, the LS tree is the overwhelmingly better choice. The fact that the sabers are player crafted, will naturally skew the statsabove and beyond that consideredduring development(as has been seen repeatedly in every crafted item in the game). In addition, they're upgradeable, which again tips the scales in their favor. As with all other weapons, players willhave a standardset of sabers (or crystals, i suppose in this case), to be used for generaladventuring / money-makingefforts, and another set with the absolute best stats they can possibly find to be used strictly in PvP. Since the Force Powers tree offers no similar advantages, sabers will be the natural weapon of choice for jedi in the FRS. Another problem arises with the fact that all force powers require force points, and the lightsaber auto-attack does not. So even when a master LS runs out of force points, he can still do plenty of damage. On the other hand, once the Force powers user is out of force point, he has no analogous ability, and will certainly die, unable to do further damage.

• Master Healing -Healing represents the other side of defense (recouperative, as opposed to slowing taken damage).Itis an important part of long term combat, but in PvP, damage is taken very quickly, even buffed. Since jedi healing is based on force points, eventually theability to heal will run out, and you'll die I see this as the biggest drawback to healing, since it is necessarily temporary, and even with 7200 force points, consistent healing will drain your force bar all too quickly. To counter this by slowing damage-taking, a jedi may take up the defense tree, but this will take out damage doing ability in some form. Taking half the defense tree allows mastery of either LS or Force powers (the two offensive trees), with no dabbling, which will always be underpowered with respect to a master LS with respect to ability to do damage quickly.

• Master Enhancement - This i see being the least mastered of all the trees. This is the perfect dabbling tree, offering state resists, speed enhancement, meditation, etc. There are many useful skills in this tree, but not enough, in my opinion,to sacrifice both offensive and defensive capabilities to warrent mastery of this skill tree. Another running skill and /avoidincapacitation (especially as opposed to /regainConsciousness in the defence tree) are just not enough incentive for the skillpoint cost, no matter what kind of force point and force regen bonuses the box comes with.

This is why i see Master LS, Master Defence being the only possible template that can survive in the FRS as it is now.

Just a little vignette out of the theoretical for my personal experience, to backup my claims. WhenI made my character, I knew that LS / Defence was already FOTM, so I wanted to do something different. I chose a Master healer, Master Force powers, and took the speed and meditation lines out of Enhancement. Until the advent of the knight trials and the FRS, I absolutely LOVED my template I intentionally created my jedi to be a support character, and it was wonderful for exactly that, support. I would go out with hunting parties, keep them healed up, and keep the enemies loaded with state effects, then doing damage as possible in the interim. The problem with this template, is that I get absolutely slaughtered in 1-on-1 combat. I tried a little bit of PvP, which always got me killed, as well as a ton of PvE, and the only reason that ever went well, was because MOBs are stupid and required a lot of /forceRun2 and kiting until a KD stuck. Even then, if the creature ever got into melee range, or if it had a ranged attack...forget it, I was dead. And I was ok with that, because my jedi was meant to be a support character, and that's what he was good at.

But now? Now I have come to the realization that my particular build (to which i was becoming increasingly attached ) will have no place in the ranks of the jedi knights. As it stands now, when the conversion to live occurs, I'll have to decide whether I want to try out this build again, and whether it's worth sacrificing any chance of ever participating in the FRS.

I don't know if there's any chance of stopping the runaway train at this point, but I felt this was something that needed to be addressed at least. This type of singular end-game (heavy combat) will only lead to cookiee-cutter jedi, as everyone strives to be the very best. Perhaps with some heavy balancing (starting with giving force powers a huge upgrade so as to be a viable offensive strategy) could salvage the wonderful diversity allowed by this system, but I somehow fear that such a thing will never happen.

/shrug

I've said my peace....go about your business

Ackeeba Owadu
Master Weaponsmith - Intrepid
Ackeeba's Weapons Emporium - The Promenade
Tatooine (2599, -4428) outside Mos Eisley

"In the modern lexicon, to sully a reputation would be "to talk smack about."
- Niix Starkyller

Weaponsmizzle..../wearTshirtWithPride

FRS xp is WAY too hard to get. I killed 7 bounty hunters and only got 26 FRS xp out of all those guys... Then when I died I was in the whole by about 100. Its hard to tell because it tells you you're at something like 1102, but when you look at the skill tree it says you have 0. Then after I helped kill an enemy jedi, I still wasn't into positive FRS xp. If FRS xp decays weekly, there'll be no way for anyone to get even close to the 10k they need for even rank 1. Recommend increasing the FRS xp reward for killing non-jedi enemies to at least 100 or more, thats still 100 non jedi for rank 1, its insane! And increase FRS reward exponentially for beating a jedi. Just beating a bounty hunter (who has almost no defense mods) is hard enough, solo it takes about 3 minutes if he's kiting youbut not really running away very well. So damage needs to be increased for the FRS to work too.

I don't know about the FRS because I am a Padawan on TC2, but can't xp loss be capped at 0? I don't know about anybody else, but to have to gain back hundreds of thousands of negative Jedi XP doesn't seem fair. Why can't loss be capped? And if it has to go below 0, why not have it capped at -10k like faction points are capped at -5k? Let me present an argument. If I go through the quest on live and become force sensitive but I choose only to retain those FS skills to enhance my artisan and TK abilities, don't I lose Jedi XP every time I die? That makes it extremely difficult and mind-numbing to gain back enough xp to progress forward in Jedi should I ever choose to. I am not arguing against Jedi XP loss. I am all for the loss of points in order to limit Jedi on the servers. I am all for keeping the jedi population limited, but an unlimited loss of xp is unfair and should be capped.

Djules Wyndu and Magae Switch
(aka Weato Neato the Beta Hutt)
DUO Motors will return...with Ships!

JustG:

Is there anythingin placethat will prevent 2large guilds (a group of players working together) from monopolizing and controlling the FRS system outcomes?

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Star Wars vs. Star Wars Galaxies
(Revised 07.07.05)
( Maybe one day these ideas will be considered or implemented. Bump it, please? )

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Star Wars vs. Star Wars Galaxies
(Revised 07.07.05)
( Maybe one day these ideas will be considered or implemented. Bump it, please? )

The sad part is when some bitter rifleman chases you around and is able to spam sniper shot before you DB the person you killed. I can see this becoming a problem.

I'M NEW!