Development Cycle Archive

Th, I know you're busy, but..

Can we please get something done about BH/Jedi missions.

Currently there are bugs on both sides, but by far the worst is facing multiple skillbox losses in one session.
Once a Jedi gets on the terminals, they get 20+ BH's camping the, every single one of these can kill you to complete his/her mission. Imagine 20+ deaths in one night, and the skill loss involved there.

Please consider either removing all current BH missions on you once one BH gets the kill OR removing skill loss from PvP/BH deaths.

Thanks

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Hedek wrote:

You can nerf the composite armor schematic and make the chitin better if you wished so without affecting all the crafting system : you did so in the past when modifying the FWG5 and Scatter Pistol.

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Hedek wrote:

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Hedek wrote:

You can nerf the composite armor schematic and make the chitin better if you wished so without affecting all the crafting system : you did so in the past when modifying the FWG5 and Scatter Pistol.

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And I must add to give another example than nerfs : when you made the accuracy on the DX2 pistol better. I don't remember you had to change all the crafting system to put that change in, have you ?

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Hedek, by now you should know that sound, logical, supported by facts argument does not work with the nerfherders of the dev team and their spokesmodel, TH.

About skillmod tapes and attachements, why don't you remove the non-functional mods and fix the bugs?

I know TH has seen this thread: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=csystems&message.id=7080since he's replied in it.

Please remove the non-functionalleftovers from the beta from the database that generates tapes. We're still getting worthless junk as drop from the game's toughest mobs.

And please, since you stated in your guide that multiple mods on a tape/attachement would work, make it so that they do.

Now that the borgle cave is closed, all SEA:s generated from now onare actually fair loot. Most old SEA:s exploited from the Borgle cave are allready placed in clothes or armor and wouldn't be affected. I think?

TH

We need the combat revamp asap! PVP is in total dismay and needs to be fixed. Without a good GCW and PVP system like we were promised this game is in serious trouble. GCW and PVP are they only thing left for most players to do. Fix our game for the love of god. Not everyone wants to be a JEDI!

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Thunderheart wrote:
Additionally, plan on seeing Smuggler NPC’s that will take you from “anywhere to anywhere”.

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no offense against the smugglers but I think that's a too big bonus for just one profession

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Thunderheart wrote:
Additionally, plan on seeing Smuggler NPC’s that will take you from “anywhere to anywhere”.

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Why limit the fun to NPC smugglers? How about letting Player Smugglers slice the travel terminals, and have the same effect? Slicing the terminal opens all Starports as a destination from their current location.

Example: Somebody is in a hurry to get to Yavin IV from Rori. They find their friendly neighborhood Smuggler who then slices the Starport ticket terminal on Rori, and now has ALL Starport destinations available to them. They buy a ticket to Yavin, and sell it to the customer (for a profit of course). The customer gets their shortened ride, the Smuggler made some cash (and did something sneaky by tricking the Galactic Travel Commission!) and everybody is happy!

ThunderHeart,

Is there any chance of the nalargon/ommni box targetting issue or the chair issue every being fixed? These things seem trivial to fix, and have been borken for a very, very long time.

When I'm on a vehicle now, I don't warp away from the vehicle anymore. I can target something and pull up the menu, I can select items from the menu and interact with the item in many cases, and certainly in all cases involving other players.

Is there any reason why the ommni box, nalargon and basic furniture items could not be "mounts," use the "/mount" and "/unmount" slash commands, and share the same logic?

It seems like if your code is reasonably well written, it shouldn't be any harder to check what the player is mounted on than what the player's current target is, and like it should be easy to register a listener on your mount objects so that a notification is sent when you dismount (which /startsong could bind to /stopsong). In most game engines, this would be a couple lines of code on the server to implement and certainly nothing monumental.

Also is there any word on when /vent will be upgraded to take a target so it works just like /join, /target, /trade, /attack, the emotes, etc. where you can specify a target?

Also a lot of the targetted commands including /join, /invite and /setp report:
You divert your attention to %TT

I think that this implies a bad architecture in your / commands of not using a centralized parser. In most MUD or MUSH engines, the % substitutions are populated before the code ever reaches the actual / command itself. It appears in the SWG engine that the % substitutions aren't occurring unless the command itself decides to.

In most of these engines, there is a pattern for introducing commands, also, where you say something like:
DEFINE_COMMAND_TARGETTED("/join",&funcJoinCommand)

Apparently SWG isn't using such a system, due to the bugs -- an object system would also work:
CCommand defines a base command, CTargettedCommand defines a command with a target, etc.

The thing here is it sounds very much like SWG is about as well written as EQ was, which was described by the programmers involved in the last two expansions in publicly recorded chats as "some of the worst written code on the planet" (that is a direct quote).

I think that things would improve a whole lot from a game standpoint if you could balance things a bit more.

On the database issue for number of items...

Right now, the most effient way to store items in the in-hopper on a factory. One lot holds 100 items in this case, same as the bank. Equipment factories don't care if you put items in the in-hopper that they aren't using.

On resources, a resource-specific container has been suggested. I think this could greatly reduce database bloat if it were implemented correctly. Basically, you have a structure like this:

struct ResourceContainer()
{
const uint32 MAX_RESOURCES_PER_CONTAINER = 100;
uint32 ResourceID[MAX_RESOURCES_PER_CONTAINER]; // link to SERVER.Resource, a table with the detailed information on resource
uint32 Quantity[MAX_RESOURCES_PER_CONTAINER]; // Quantity of each resource
}

If this implemented your container interface (IContainer, most likely), it could present this as individual items. You could do this same thing on the galaxy bazaars to decimate the amount of storage for resources.

You can't do this on weapons due to the current weapon implementation, as each weapon is different. Same with components, since the components are all different, mob drops, etc. these things are all different so you can't reduce the storage.

You could reduce resource traffic on factory crate and resource items also very simply. I have to query every steel in the database to find the ones that I'm looking for. This is a long process, very frustrating. What I do these days is subscribe to SWGCraft's web service, and set notifications in Excel for when a resource with better stats comes into the system (is reported by a player).

If you simply gave me a facility to drill items down to resource class on the galaxy wide bazaar, or to specify minimum stats, this would greatly reduce the database traffic at the cost of potentially more complex queries. Similarly, if you could look for a weapon by its type, stats, etc. that would also greatly reduce database traffic. With appropriate indexes, you could run the queries faster and improve the user experience as well.

This is a comment from a rare Bounty Hunter forum poster:

As a casual gamer (you know, that class of people that SOE swore weren't going to be overlooked?), I've been working on BH since launch.

I finally hit Master not long ago, after weeding through all the bugs, and all the nerfs. I've kept it because of hoping that *someone* at SOE might pay attention to what they've done to this profession since day one, and work to rectify it (amongst other professions who are in need of some love, like our Smuggler brothers and sisters).

I'm at a loss. I have made good friends in-game, and don't want to leave. But this is a load of crap.

Got some thinking to do.

TH I know you, Ive Played with you, hunted with you, I know you want the best for this game. But to be honest... This game is so completlely broken. When are the devs going to just stand up to it, and fix it instead of walking around it with lack luster patchs?

Armor... composite needs to be nerfed and we need to see more kinds of armor.

Combat... 80% of chilastra is now a rifleman.... can we say balance?

Content... 1 dungeon a month is not enough... people are bored with this game.

Bugs... almost been out for a year now and we are still playing a buggy game!

/sigh

On the weapons damage issue, etc.

I don't believe that they ever stated that this was a major programming change -- it almost certainly is just a database change, but the issue here is the devs need to consider what the change impacts.

The issue here is balance, I believe, versus coding time. If they just change the damage categories, leaving everything else the same, the hits could be for different ranges. They need to be careful about these sorts of changes, because they can greatly imbalance the game.

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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.

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.

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Thanks for that response TH -- my question is, why even think of adding new armor to this game? Why not upgrade Faction Armor? Make it so to go Overt, you need a set -- give it a more "Star Wars" feel to it. (and make it FP cheaper, but like 40-50% reists,) that would solve the Armor issue in PvP. People may "whine" about it...but it would solve some major problems...as well as look cooler.

...just...give us Rebels a non-Fish dome helmet please.