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I would like to start off by showing a deep appreciation for all of the Player Correspondents both past and present. They have all contributed much of their time and a great deal of effort into helping make this process a success. Granted, these are the first few steps and we have a long way to go, but as a larger community effort, this is a great start. It has been a fantastic experience to have been part of a strong and active community for over three years now and it’s good to see this level of continued involvement and interaction by everyone.

Many thanks to all of the correspondents and to all parts of our community.

Why so long?

I know many of you have waited for these Top 5 responses and I want to thank you for your patience. You may curse me for being late, but please understand that the length of time it took to accomplish this task directly relates to my desire to do the best job possible and as such, involved a lot of in-depth learning, investigations and to earnestly get these issues into the realm of progress.

Over the course of this process, many of the Top 5 items that were fixed early on, some were changed or repaired over the duration of this Correspondence effort, some items that will be fixed in the January publish and someof these issues are part of larger efforts than will span longer periods of time. For instance, the Combat Balance, the GCW and other large-in-scope game reiterations are all underway and will take more than a single month to address. As such, many Top 5 items will take longer than a month and the developers and I had to determine a course for future actions.There wasn’t a “quick and easy” answer that could be provided, so we needed to take the time to put together realistic answers. We, as a team, had to decide on a course of action and commit to it and it took a little bit of time to get everything in order. Getting that information from you, to the correspondents, to me, then to the devs is all a process that had to be agreed upon or it just wouldn’t have worked. As we go forward and address some of these larger Top 5 issues, I will be working with you and with the correspondents to gather the best of our community ideas and present them to the development team. This will be my main order of business when the New Year begins.

The Player Correspondents

Player Correspondents play an important role in the development of the game and the “Top 5” is a key part of the process. The player correspondents and I interact and talk about player issues; game play, rules, technical challenges and a great many things. There are Correspondents for each profession and 4 additional aspects of the game that are of key importance. Those four additional aspects arethe Galactic Civil War (GCW), Player Associations (PA’s), Star Wars and Test Center. The GCW correspondent focuses on elements of the war and PvP, The PA correspondent focuses on Player Associations, guilds and that set of features while our Star Wars Correspondent focuses on general issues like missions, the interface, playable species and most importantly, the “star warsy-ness” factor of the game. Then there are the Test Center folks who work very hard to help tweak changes, find issues and give us clues on a daily basis. All of the correspondentsread your posts, get information to you and represent your sub-communities in the larger group and it is important that we all support that process. Their issues are your issues.

Going Forward

The first couple of months of this Top 5 effort have taught me many things and making commitments to thousands of people over the internet sounds like a difficult thing to do, and it is. Weall want it to be part of a larger world building effort and these are the first steps of a longer journey. Without further adieu, I present the Top 5 issues as they are today and hope to see everyone get involved and add their feedback as we go forward.

Architect – In progress. _-ArchAngel-_ will be posting an update soon and I will add it to this index.fficeffice" />

Armorsmith – We are transitioning a new Correspondent. Correspondent has initiated a new effort

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=armorsmith&message.id=25873

Artisan

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=25587

Bio-Engineer

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bio-engineer&message.id=40194

Bounty Hunter

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=bounty_hunter&message.id=120707

Brawler - In progress. StGabriel will be posting an update soon and I will add it to this index

Carbineer

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=carabineer&message.id=14526

Chef

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=chef&message.id=16898

Combat Medic

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=18281

Commando - Transitioning a new Correspondent, LordSeckmoth. Top 5 list Pending

Creature Handler

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=creature_handler&message.id=141562

Dancer – In progress. Ravenmist and I are still discussing some issues.

Doctor

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=24681

Droid Engineer – Sintrosi has retired and left for the holidays. We salute the work of Sintrosi and the Droid Engineer community. Last week I posted a run of 22 questions to the community and going forward in January after the holidays, please check the “In Concept” part of the web site. Well have some information outlining some of the feedback we’d like to get from everyone.

Entertainer - In progress. SlickRiptide is retiring and we have some hanging issues to button up. Ill post a link as soon as I can.

Fencer
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=fencer&message.id=13305

Image Designer

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=image_designer&message.id=7054

Marksman

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=marksman&message.id=4800

Awesome Things are lookng up

So the politicians who basically are in game for the reason of well starting cities and placing a few measley buildings get looked over. This might be the reason why I want someone in the city that gets a fscs open to take up novice politician on their main char, because well there is no content for us beyond the making of a city. We use mainly external tools to calculate and record taxes, determine city layout in external programs too, I use excel. There is not much for a politician, its a very dry profession in my opinion and needs some tools and loving too, player cities might be great and all and you may say politicians are the key to them, but basically a monkey that pays SOE for a char and picks up nov politician somehow and assigns a few human militia can run a city.

Actually, I have a huge surprise for the Politicians. Plinka did a fantastic job, but had to retire for RL concerns.

We wish him well.

We'll have a new Politician Correspondent coming in 12/27-28 and Im very pleased that they accepted the spot and I know everyone else will to. He brings an amazing amount of gravitas to the position, though he wants to announce his arrival.

And overall, I realize progress has been slow, but its a big job and I really want to involve the community. I want this to be an honest exchange and community involvement and so does the entire group. Q and I know this is important and we worked hard with the JustG, Blair and the Dev team to get development time devoted to issues on a regular basis. We also had a big meeting about how to go forward in the new year. We'll have some new pages on the web site devoted to community involvement in the game and to do all this really required us to lay some pretty hefty groundwork.

Im looking to a very exciting SWG in 2004

TH, thanks for all the info...GO HOME AND ENJOY THE HOLIDAYS!!!

heh...Im trying. I just get so wrapped up in things...

Thunderheart, I can't be the only one out here who wonders what exactly is going on at HQ.

It seems to me that 6 months into live, we're actually ditching a large part of the three-year development process and starting anew. Combat itself is getting totally reworked. KeyStar Wars professions like Smuggler are being scrapped and sent back for "redevelopment," as if no input up until now has mattered and the profession we had before was a holding pattern.

In short, SWG seems to be dying and SWG2 is already rising in its place.

Granted, this is my first MMORPG, and it seems there are many people like me who have never seen a game develop. Is it typical that a key system like combat is taken out and completely overhauled after six months? That seems remarkable to me.

Have the remaining Devs decided that Holo's vision simply didn't work and agreed to take SWG in a different direction? Is this a sign of complete upheaval, or am I jumping to the wrong conclusions? I'd like to know what the Devs have in mind for this game, becausenow that the coire system is in place and the promised cities, vehicles, and mounts are in place,I get more signs that we're on the verge of a revolution. Am I wrong?

Please, Thunderheart, I've followed the Devs this since Beta. I just want to know where they're going and if it's a different place than we've been told up until now. I want to get my bearings.

Good to see things are starting to pick up on the inside TH.

Thank you for all your hard work and enjoy the holidays

-Vandar

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This is a nice breakdown of professions. Thanks for all the work.

I'm curious to find more information on the loot system.

I have posted a similar article on the discussion board.

Auto-loot should be forced on and not given to the char that causes most damage. That was a designI believeshould have changed early on. If the loot system was forced on,holo camping may not have been such a big problem.

If you have a group of 10 players and auto loot was forced on. Lets say as an example only, you have a mob that drops something every ten kills. With auto loot on after approximately the 100th kill everyone in the group should have received 1 item. If you have a group, everyone is participating in taking out the mob, they should all have a chance at recieving loot. Helping an uber master for 3 hours and not obtaining anything is a waste of your time. You just basically helped him recieve is loot and you are not compensated. Auto-loot is the best solution for everyone.

The master characters in different trees all have different damage totals and types, they will NEVER be equal. So you will always have one master with an uber weapon that will outperform another master of another proffesion. Auto-loot will take care of that problem.

I ask that you please consider a system similar to this. Giving players the option to turn this on which I believe was the original idea, should not be a player option, but a forced option which will even the loot system for everyone.

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Thunderheart wrote:

He brings an amazing amount of gravitas to the position, though he wants to announce his arrival.

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**edit** Cheney plays SWG, and is going to be the next Politician Correspondent??? Hehe... sorry, couldn't resist poking fun at the fit the media had playing with that word. That... and I'm a bit curious to see if this forum's filter, like some others I've used will mangle the VP's name to "**edit** Cheney". We all know what it does to that children's cartoon that ends in "...mon",

Laz

Thunderheart MERRY XMAS now goto sleep you fool stop working so hard >_<

TH- u forgot Jedi Profession....