Development Cycle Archive
Thread: State of the Game Letter from JustG
the content sounds AWESOME...
but I AM left wondering about all those "wait for the combat balance and it will make sense" responses...
I'm pretty happy right now but there's a LOT of prof's that are gonna be looking for answers now, methinks. (Commando, CH, Pikeman, Carbineer, and the professional rifleman/CM/TKM haters
)
on a brighter note, THX AGAIN FOR THE WOOKIEE ARMOR!!!!!
This game sucks. My account automatically renewed. I thought I would be asked to be billed again. Nope. SWG wont refund my money, either. So I got a bogus account with a broken master pistoleer and master smuggler open till May. **edit**... May?! Gemme a break... like anything will change between now and then.
Bottom line: this whole game has been one big beta test. After the space expansion is when you'll see the game running and functioning properly. Until then, enjoy paying money to beta test.
Lantus wrote:
Limbonik wrote:And regardless of what sells more boxes now as opposed to everyone who wanted the game before the promise of everyone being allowed a Jedi, the bottom line is the Devs have always held the majority opinion over that of the minority. Now, you tell me that that's okay...as long as it doesn't interfere with the hologrinders? Please. These guys don't even contribute to the game - they just want to play as a Jedi...just like you can in most every other LucasArts game already released. Hologrinders/Holocrons have ruined this game since the ass-tastic Christmas gift we all got. Seasoned players who you could always count on...afk macroing their way to Jedi...so they can then complain that Jedi isn't what they had previously expected.
The scary thing is... the PERCEPTION of the majority is the number of (AFK) flags you see over people's heads. To me, that says they're still holo-grinding. Would be interesting to see a set of Astromech stats on THAT, but I imagine there's no good way to tell how many players are truly interested in (and working towards) becoming jedi.
I'm sick of rationalizing for the development team, I really am. I try to cut them a wide berth of slack for dealing with all 200,000 of us (or however many there are). It can't be the easiest thing in the world, going from coders-doing-their-thing to a group that gets yelled at by many and is silently (as far as players NOT letting off a burst of pi** and vinegar on the boards) reviled for their lack of action in addressing things we all know are or perceive to be broken.
Many (how many? A figure we'll likely never learn. I wouldn't release it if I was an SoE bean-counter either..) have pulled the lever on their "vote of 'no confidence'" by cancelling their accounts. Part of me understands that. Another part of me says its a cop-out. I'm conflicted on my opinion of folks that just get fed up and take off. I can't tell them what they should get fed up with and what they shouldn't, that's a call only they can make. I know for myself, I'll be sticking around, through nerf and revamp, "well done!"s and "that sucked!"s. Why, when the professions my characters are involved in (musician, artisan, architect, bio-engineer, droid engineer) have seen some combination of no love at all, love in the form of "we don't know where else to put this", undocumented secondary leftover-love, and more swings of the nerfbat than your average turn in a batting cage? Because I have faith that this too shall pass. Its a process, one we as players don't always see eye-to-eye on with the Devs, but that's how these things work. Look on the bright side, they can't screw us all over at the same time, that'd take more coordination than they've managed to show us so far.
But they're trying. Man are they trying. Profession correspondents pull just as much hair out as the grunts they serve down in the trenches. JustG's on the right track, communicating the development team's intentions to the player base. Where they fail is in addressing the comments to these letters. Responding to threads on the boards in general really. There just isn't quite enough communication going around to give the appearance that things are being done. Many players feel they're spitting into the wind with their posts on the boards, and given the lack of dev response to many of these threads (even the ones Devs start themselves) says a lot of these players are RIGHT in that feeling. The devs would do themselves a service by giving us a pat on the head, a note of thanks in some of these "hey, help us make this better" threads. We interact with a small number of them on the boards, rest assured there are many, many more behind the scenes. Whether or not those that don't creep out into the limelight are any better at "public relations" than the current set we see regularly remains to be seen. Fact is, we'll always outnumber them, and they'll never keep us all happy all the time. Can you just imagine being picked by a lottery to "go deal with that mob out there complaining about .. well.. EVERYthing"? It'd take dozens more than we have access to now.
Ever notice a lot of Dev threads get started around quitting-time on fridays? Five or six pages of responses get generated over the weekend without a dev reply, and that gets irritating from a player perspective. If the devs are going to ask us questions, and many of us jump at the chance to speak to what appears to be a "live body", we'd appreciate a little evidence that the message was received. JustG will be sitting at his desk tomorrow flipping through some of these responses I'm sure. His eyes will probably glaze over about a third of the way through, he'll go grab some lunch, and promptly forget about responding to any of it. Can't say I blame him some of the time. Others though.. well thought-out responses, even the ones that ARE full of pi** and vinegar but have valid concerns and offer some constructive response.. when those go unanswered, it makes me angry. Can't expect them to respond to EVERYthing, but a little more visibility can't hurt.
Show us our concerns are at least being heard. Thunderheart, bless the man, he tries. He tells us he'll bring things up in meetings. That's great, but I can only imagine how thick his stack of notes are for each of those meetings at this rate. Have you guys fed him since the superbowl? We need three or four of him. One to take the notes, one to give us the "I'll bring it up at the next meeting" lip-service, one to go to the meetings, and the fourth one.. this guy's key, the fourth one gets to tell us what actually HAPPENED in the meeting. That fourth TH has been missing for a long time.
Erm, that got a bit long. Anyway, back to Limbonik. I couldn't agree more that hologrinders don't contribute to the game. One of my characters is a master musician, has been since the middle of August, and remains one. I don't care WHAT they're working towards, the AFK crowd has ruined what I used to call the most entertaining part of the game; hanging out in cantinas. They were given a bad system to attain a lofty goal. Players cried out that holocrons were too hard to obtain and the Devs caved in and gave them to us for Christmas. They regret the error, I'm certain, but regrets don't fix it. According to JustG's letter, the fix is on the way. The only date attached to any of that timeline is associated with the wookiee armor. They might just surprise us and push harder on the development cycle so the rest of those things happen sooner, rather than later. Yeahyeah, I'll believe it when I see it, just like you.
Thank you, JustG, for shedding a bit of light on the schedule and the process. We need more of this, and more often. Set an example for the industry and TELL us MORE. Its not like we have an SWG Construction Set to take your paychecks from you. Blow the industry away with an innovative and informative communication process with your paying customers and who knows, maybe it'll give Blizzard and iD and Epic and Atari and whoever else you feel you're in competition with lately.. something to think about. Force THEIR development teams to develop new methods to attempt to surpass your own (hopefully) improved record of customer feedback, communication, and support. Yeah, the great majority of the team needs to keep their noses to the grindstone, but we as players need a bit more communication than you're giving us. Deal?
(Now tell me why a post this long doesn't launch me into Community Veteran status and 100 '/bump' posts does?)
What I find even more disturbing is that two of my replies to this thread, mentioning WoW got deleted within seconds, yes seconds!
So, let me get this straight:
The first thing you do is "balance" Creature Handlers and their creatures into near insignifcance, but we were all assured that once the entire combat system revison was complete, we'd see it was a good idea.
Well, you've nerfed the snot out of CH, and now the karate kids and the player tanks don't get the rebalancing that was promised?
What is this nonsense?
You guys have all the crediblity of Condoliar Rice right now. Which means zero, zip, nada. All the communication in the world is useless if it's based upon lies.
Meantime, the bugs introduced in publish 6 persist to this day with no visible progress in addressing them?