I got some thoughts I've had, and on what i have read lately.
First, the assassin class. I like the idea. However, I have to say that there already is a kind of assassin class. It's called rifleman... Problem is it doesn't work like an assassin should, and for an assassin it lacks in a few things, like the ability to assassinate at melee range (that would be a fencer?). My thought on an assassin class would be better placed as being a spy class. That would probably be a better way of setting it up. The reality of spying is, it's really kinda boring, and not very dangerous till you are discovered. In RL most spys were arrested and traded for other spys. Spying is intelligence gathering, but it does have it's moments with sabotage. Perhaps the spy class could have the ability to use BH terminals, but not take missions off of them. They would probably have to get their missions off of Imp or Reb mission terminals. Perhaps they could have a skill that grants them entry into any building, private or not. Maybe they could have a skill that they could use to "declare as rebel or imperial" kinda like a reverse TEF. Maybe they could access the information on guild terminals to get rosters and professional information, (would be helpful to the spy, {and the guild leaders} if the guild terminals kept track of who in the guild has what skills at what level). Maybe they could have a skill that told them what kind of gear a person they examine is using (plainly visible gear) and get detailed info on that gear. There are many possiblities,and the assassin type of character would be much more possible if characters had more skill points.
I've been wondering why furniture doesn't really act like furniture. I know that you can sit on couches, chairs and beds, but that is about it. Why can't we lie down on the bed? Can't there be an option on the radial menu? Why can't a table act like a table? Why can't we just set stuff on the table instead of going through all this shoving around of our stuff so that it hovers in the air over the table so that it LOOKs like it is sitting on the table. For that matter, why can't a chest, armoir, tool chest, cabinet, bookshelf etc... hold stuff, like a container? I have three armoirs in my house. Sitting inside the model of the armoirs I have a backpack, in the backpack I have my stuff... like my coat and hat closet, my weapons locker, and my clothing. To ask even further about the storage capacity of the houses. Why can a medium house only hold about 200-250 things (I'm not sure which total it is). In RL I look around my house and I can count several thousands of individual items, from probably 600 or more books, 3 computers, no less than 50 vhs movies, 2 beds, 1 sofa, 1 table, 6 bookshelves.... you get the idea. Why must a house have such a low number of items. If it's so that players won't have a lot of stuff, that won't work, they will simply have more houses or find other ways to keep a ton of stuff. Why not have items in the house not count to the storage total if they are in a container?
As for the Yuuzhan Vong, I would strongly suggest agains't it. Partly because it isn't canon, and partly because the story is silly. Like most of the post RotJ stories, everything is rediculously over powered, simply so that there is a real challenge to a jedi. I've heard from real, true die hard SW fans, who have more than read the books but been playing the RPGs and everything and are cynical enough to see through rediculum (I know not a word in the dictionary, but that is how words get started) to realize wither something is dumb or not, (example: midiclorians? Get real. George added that in cause some idiot critic just couldn't accept the force for what it was {life energy [news flash here,jedi philosophy= buddist philiosophy]}and demanded a scientific answer.) To get back to the point, there is enough going on in this huge galaxy to worry about with out having to worry about another galaxy coming along and killing us all. Suggestion here is, just give it time. Maybe in 5 or 10 years, if the game is still going strong and the storyline has since moved past the GCW and into the New Republic, they could be pulled in to stir things up again.
I noticed that someone was asking for some type of faction perk that rebels could buy to use against AT-STs, where the player could call in a request for boming run from a squadron or single starfighter, or maybe call out some troops to assist. Well there are, and they are way hella expensive, and have heavy requirements. The first one is the ability to check out hirelings (STs for imps, Reb solders for rebs, Compforce and SpecOps soldiers) and Bombardment (a one-time special device that summons a flying craft to do a planetary bombardment on enemies at the location where the device is used). However, I think the bombardment perk will become obsolete when the space expansion comes out.
I had some questions about vehicles, (which will also tie into some furnitures.) Will there be a patch or a release of vehicles that can have passengers? I'm not a programmer so I don't know what kind of difficulties there would be to institute a system that had passenger slots in a vehicle. It would seem natural for the owner of the vehicle to be the driver, but anyone else could simply mount the vehicle and would be placed in the first available passenger slot (first person to mount the vehicle {that isn't the owner of the vehicle} would be mounted into passenger slot 1. The second person into passenger slot 2... ect. {assuming that the vehicle can have more than one passenger} until all the slots were full or the vehicle is in motion) The same idea could be applied to sofas, couches and other seats that have room for more than one person. Additionally, will players be able to buy mass transports such as Corvettes, or freighters? What about Cap ships. How will those be doled out? Will people be able to just buy them and fly them or will they have to get one through faction perks? If an imp player was able to buy, say a star destroyer, would they be the only one needed to fly it, or would they have to buy a crew with faction too? Or could they get their friends together and have them man battle stations, would they be able to carry star fighters and stuff? for Star Destroyers that would make sense since imperial starfighters aren't equipped with hyperdrives, thus must rely on the SDs to move them about the galaxy. In some way that could open up a whole can of new professions (Captiol ship gunner, captiol ship mechanic, cap ship captain, etc.) and even those might lead into an idea previously placed emphasizing ultra-elite professions.
Talking about transports, I'm reminded to suggest this. Why not increase the size of the starports? At least in some of the larger cities. I've seen many people complain about the wait time on transports. I'm going to put the mass transport system into perspective for everyone right now. Shuttleports are bus stops. Starports are International Airports. Now this is why I suggest larger starports and maybe even more landing spots for shuttles. Most airports have multiple gates, so that roughly ever 2 to 5 min an airplane can take off or be boarding, or what ever. It would seem to me that a starport should also have multiple landing pads for transports. Every 2-5 minutes a new corellian transport (the large transport ship is of corellian design) should be landing, taking off what ever. when a person buys a ticket, they then should have to go turn it in to the droid that is taking tickets for their destination. To be more clear I'll make the example I have in my head.
A person goes into the starport concourse in Coronet, and buys a ticket to go to Theed, Naboo. Then they look up at the reader boards over head (the green ones that currently are just ignored as hazy detail work {which is important to help add realism}) and find out when the next transport to Theed will be available and at what landing pad. They see "Theed - Landing Port 4 - ETA 5 minutes 36 seconds". They now know that the have to be at landing port 4 in just over 5 minutes to make the next flight. If they miss it, then they can just look up and wait for the next flight.
In this way the worlds and starports will seem more busy, simply because there are more ships comeing and going.
As for shuttleports, they could work the same way but on a planetary scale.
And talking about scale. I would like to suggest that the worlds, cities, buildings, ships.... all be re-scaled to be more realistic. I understand that when a player loads into a planet, it loads the entire planet, but since it doesn't load all of the details until the player is practically on top of them, the planets could cover a larger area. I took a look at a map (a real one) and measured out 15km by 15km, and that's not alot of space. As I recall the city of Seattle would fill up most of that. So why not increase the planet ground coverage to 30km by 30km, or larger... That would give plenty of space to make the cities larger and more in depth, there could be real zoning for NPC cities. IMHO Coronet (being the hub of the galaxy) should probably cover a 1-2 km radius. That would give plently of space to have 2 or three med centers, cantinas etc. Honestly, I would imagine that with a city as important as Coronet anything that anyone could ever want or need should be able to be found in Coronet. There could be a huge region of the city that is literally slums. Very few CorSec police roaming about, a bunch of random hoodlums, or maybe even gangs, IN SIDE the city walls. There could be a huge marketing district where you might find some really posh cantinas, or high class restraunts, clothing shops, etc. The apartment idea could really be expanded that way. To build on that even more, the shops and cantinas could be "purchased" and ran by players. Or, to make life easier and smoother for the starting players. If there were shops that were NPC ran, players could apply for a job at say an NPC restraunt, and they would get paid to make food to order, by the NPC. All the supplies would be there and available for them to cook with. They would simply have to go through and find the right ingredients, craft the food or drink and give it to the NPC. When the player is done they choose the "quit" option in the conversation with the NPC, and get paid for all their work. Like wise, the NPC could sell the items that the player had just made for them. It could help ease the buying and selling a goods if they were all seperated by vendor. I know that if I was walking around town I would be more likely to access a vendor if I knew right off what it sold, so thus if I wanted to buy some food, I would be more likely to buy some if I looked up and saw a banner or sign that said, "Jalob's Cafe" or "Corellia Grocier". There are alot of ideas going here. What the NPCs should be for in SWG is to facilitate transactions between players.
But what about player cities, if all that were possible then why would anyone go to a player city? Many reasons if some of my ideas were to be implemented. Part of why player cities always seem so barren is because, first, there are no NPCs. Second, most of the things about a player city is meant to have people coming in for missions then going out for a long time doing those missions. To get people to go to player cities requires them to have things that NPC cities don't have, or maybe no other city on the planet (or in the galaxy) has. I would start by suggesting that there be more that just 5 levels to player cities. I thought about it for a long time and I felt that 9 would probably be perfect.There could only be 1 or 2 of them on any one planet and they would likely require a steady citizenship of 200 players. Second, make player cities cover more ground space. Now, I had thoughts about what it could be about a city that would draw people to them, and had several ideas. One, allow the largest player cities to have starports (maybe only one or two landing pads at the most). Two, there is already city specialization, so I suggest taking that to the next step. Instead of just giving some special bonus to particluar groups of people who practice their craft with in the city, have buildings that reflect the type of city it is. For example, if the city is a research city, then allow the city to place a Technical collage within the city limits. The technical collage would come stock with all the artisan and elite versions of trainers. It would also have all of the elite, or advanced crafting stations and they would all be for public use. It would come with special schematics that the crafters can use while using the crafting stations there, AND it would have a special bazaar terminal that a person could use to buy resources from off world and retrieve them with out having to travel.
What about a city that specializes in medical stuff? Well they would have a similar collage (I would call it a University of Medicine, Liberal and Contemporary Arts). There you would find the medic and entertainer trainers and trainers for all of the corresponding elite/hybrid professions. Necessary advanced crafting stations. The ability for dancers and musicians to create their own flourishes. (I haven't figured out what kind of cool things doctors could do there since, experimental medicine doesn't exist in SWG like it does in RL) ID's could create new tatoo styles or hair styles. Not just have new ones that were layed out for them by the devs.
Military cities could have similar places. I know cities can have factional bases, but imagine if they came stock with trainers for all combat classes. Really REALLY difficult factional destroy missions or kill missions. NPC soldiers patroling the city's streets. Walls around the city with sentry points. A mine field. All stock. And none of the stock stuff goes against the limits of the city.
As you can see these are all ideas that would help get people to go to the player cities. That's all there is to it. I know that this may all be difficult to implement but I can almost garantee that it would help. And to help support the player cities more, I would suggest increasing the pay outs on player city mission terminals even more. They really need to be alot more noticable.
Now, to scale ships, my suggestion would be. Start from the inside and work your way out. I have to tell you, while the current transport ships are big. They aren't big enough. So I suggest, while making them, start with a character, build the cockpit, look around in it from the character's pov standing in the middle of the cockpit. Is the character able to stand with out half of their head crammed into the bulkhead that is the ceiling? Sit in the pilot's seat. Are the controls close enough? Etc. Then design the layout of the ship and walk through the corridors. Are the ceilings tall enough? They should be about 2.5 meters tall. Are the halls wide enough? They should be about 3 meters across. Unless this is layed out like an airplane with no halls just a cockpit, galley, cabin, and head. Then the cabin would probably be about 11 meters across (1 row of9 one meter seats, with two one meter aisles seperating the 9 seats into 3 groups of 3) and 24 meters long (16 rows of seats about 1.5 meters thick.) So all together the corellian transport ship you currently are using should probably be about6 meters tall (Outer hull 2 meters + belly storage 1 meter + interior hight 3 meters {7 if landed [landing gear 1 meter]}), 12 meters wide (interior width 11 meters + outer hull 1 meter), and 35 meters long (outer hull 1 meter + cockpit 2 meters +galley 2 meters +cabin 24 meters +head 2 meters +engine housing 4 meters). I say all that simply because I feel that the model used for the ship as it is, seems too small for me. But I could also just be picking gnits with that (I'm kind of a stickler for details). At any rate I would suggest you did that will all structures and such, and not just speculative measurements (I could also be guessing that the game designers did that. I could be wrong and find that you do infact have a team of draftsmen and architects who do all of your designs on paper before you begin to render them. I would just like to ask that you check your scales again, cause **edit** the ship seems small)
Well, I'm willing to bet that you readers are getting bored with my appearantly traditionaly long winded posts, and I think I'm out of ideas for now. Good luck and may the force be with you.
Raynor Talos - Interplanetary Knights Of the Republic - Gorath