Doctor Archive

Jut wanted to give an update to folks who were interested. There was noting in my personal email from the Devs (no surprise there). Holo has responded to several other folks in the thread that I repasted and made sticky for everyone to see about the remaining responses. At the same time he deigned NOT to respond to my posting on that thread, soI am left with the only posible assumption that those responses were, in fact, our final responses on the issues.

Below I willreiterate from that the original Issues were and what would appear to be ther Dev respones, to help put them into context. (For the full wording of hte original issues, please see the thread stickied above.)

1) Factories (primarily not pulling from crates)

Not mentioned in Holo's response, but we are all aware that some of these issues have been partially resolved, fixed, or are obviously being worked on. The new Factories issue (as you can see on the current Big List) has a few more items and issues in it, but that's not the one I orginally sent.

2) Mind Damage

Possible responses of relavence:

"Investigate /healmind within standard stimpack range and given the error "No Valid Medicine Found" when you have plenty of ranged stimpacks."

"There was a request to investigate /healmind within standard stimpack range giving the error "No Valid Medicine Found" when you have plenty of ranged stimpacks. This is fixed."

Neither response is clear enough to know if these are stictly typos, as it seems apparent he is talking about /healdamage and/or /healwound in the above commands. Or if, in fact, there is some consideration being given to some form or mind healing. At any rate in neither case has the issue been addressed with us as I think we need better information about what the Devs thinking and concerns are on the matter and if they see any of the solutions offered as viable in some form or another.

Our initial request concluded with the wording "While there may not be a consensus on the issue there does seem to be a HUGE amountof interest and concern on the topic and I am sure the community would at least like to get some feedback and or considerations from the Dev team on what they see as the balancing factors between mind damage, healing mind damage and perceived problem with nerfing the Rifleman profession." This specifically asks for a needed response to us.

As suchI would suggest that we have simply recieved no response to this issue.

3) Money

There are no relavent topics I can find on Holo's post dealing with this issue. There is a seperate post by Holo asking for feedback on monetary earning methods for Entertainers, but nono of the Medical professions are included in the request.

Here I would also suggest that we have received no response on this issue.

4) Stuck HAMs on buffed players.

Not addressed in Holo's post. Personal bars are still not resizing and there are still some, although less, reports of players still encountering stuck bars. So this issue may have been partially addressed in recent patches and/or the publish.

5) Enhance Buffs being lost but timer sticking.

Not addressed in Holo's post, either, however at least this issue was worked on fairly well in the last publish. However there are still some reports of the buff dropping while the timer remains active on those players who've logged out and then back in shortly thereafter.

Both issues 4 and 5 are currently consoliated into a single issue on the latest lists.

It should be noted that the original issues list was posted to the forums on 7/25/03, but due to an error on my part they were not actually submitted to the Devs until 7/28/03. In effect it took 3-1/2 weeks to elicit what response we have gotten.

Since this post does appear to be their actual response, however, I will make the further assumption that my previous mandate of not sending any more issues lists until the first one had been addressed has been met, and you will see a new "Big List" go up today for voting for the next Top 5. (Then again, should we even bother? It sure seems like a lot of work to not really get the Top 5 issues responded to or acknowledged in any meaningful way except for some bug fixes that didn't talk to us, the Doctors, at all.)

So, there you have it. If you've seen other Dev responses on those 5 issues in the past 3-1/2 weeks, please feel free to let us know.

Oh, I should note that Correspondents are allowed to offer a 6th item as a Pet Peeve. I did not place on in the initial Top 5 as listed above, however I did follow-up a day later requesting that at least Correspondents should be offered to have their character copied over to the Test Server (or at least given a character Master in their particular field) in order to properly see what of their issues may or may not ave been addressed by current patches. After all, why would all of you want me to waste an Issue as being a Top 5 issue if it will already be handled in the next patch. At the very least we could see in what ways that issue will be addressed by the patch and annotate on the final issues list where the patch meets expectation on an issue and where it may fall short.

The response (whIch I beleive I posted on this forum somewhere) was simply that SOE policy was not to allow that as they did not want players accessing High Level content before they should. Of course my further response was that i was already a Master Doc. How on earth could I sample any higher level content than Master Doc, especially since I was only asking for Master Doc abilities on the server which could have precluded the other skills my character had learned. Beyond which I mentioned that I felt he issues involved were more important than accessing such content and as a seasoned Beta Tester I was more interested in testing the issues than I would be in exploring content and that I felt it would probably be the same for ALL of the correspondents. t would simply help us to better perform the task we had volunteered for.

There was no response to that. So my assumption was the answer remained No.

However there was a recent thread where Holo did mention that consideration was given to copying a server's charactersover to the Test Center server.So the issue may be udner further considration by the Dev team, but they havre not otherwise provided communication on the issue.

think #1 should be...

GIVE US A F'in response!

Since I long ago promised that I would be sure to keep every bit of correspondence as public as i possibly could, I wish to keep to my word here as well. Here is an email I just sent to the email address we were given to send our Top 5 Issues list to. I leave it here for your consideration and/or comment. As I promised then, and reiterate in this email, any reply I receive will be made public, unless it is specified that I do otherwise otherwise. I will let all of you know at the very least if I do receive a response, but my preference would be that any response actually be right here on these forums.

wow, nice e-mail Zarlor.

Hopefully they'll at least respond, but I suspect thatsomeone high upjust thinks it's better PR to not say anything at all then to say 'we're understaffed, and haven't had time to even look at that yet'. In my opinion, I'd rather hear the latter. At least it is an acknowledgement of your work, and our issues.

Thanks, SlimJim. I'd rather hear that too.

While I'm pretty sure this is not a direct response to me,I did find this in my email this afternoon. It is a form letter but at the very least it IS an answer to my pet peeve issue about getting the correspondents a character to work with on Test Center. Again, this probably hasn't been "sanitized" so try not to read too much into it.

This one is from Q, BTW:

----------------------------------------------

Zarlor...u know what the problem with that form letter is?

if u just let people transfer from live servers to TC then u get zero problems with people no xping to get higher content...

that is such a f'in cop out of an answer that it makes me sick...

if u dot want to give free xp on tc then let people /copy over to TC then u have testers who have actually leveled their characters and know what the issues with them are since they actually played them...

this terminal crap the devs thought up...why would that work? i mean zarlor i guess u could go over roll a toon and decide to be a master BH and not a master doc/medic/CM...

and there arent enough correspondents to make a dependable pool of higher level testers...

god these people make me sick...if they had their heads any further up their arses....

Well, Ele, it could be argued that ther are already some good folks over on TC taht are working hard at testing and leveling. And if they picked the right folks for the job of correspondent, and I'm pretty saure there are some really good folks in those positions, then they will be taking their characters up the proper paths. I know that I personally will simply repeat my current template on TC.

Yes there are issues that need to be looked at through the level-up process, but there are also issues that need to be addressed that only at the top levels will you have the full acces to all the skills needed to fully test it out, such as access to all the schematics and buffs, in the case of Dcotors. Ture we do not have a CM correspondent right now, but IF I am allowed to level whatever I need to, you can be assured that I will eb repeating what I have in order to have a Master Doc/Master CM in order to look through all of the medical professions I can actually handle. I may even drop Artisan there and take Novice BE just to keep in touch with the Med classes all the way across the board.

That's my promise to you, and I am a man of my word, I can assure you.

So it is a start. On the other thread I mentioend in my inital notes in this thread there was also mentioen of a server copy being considered for one of the Live servers to TC for those who may be interested. But at least with this response we have a way fot he correspondents to annotate their issues lists with what is happening on TC and how the things they are patching into there may affect the issues we currently have.

I don't intend to stop playing my primary character on Eclipse, and I expect to spend the majority of my time there. However I do feel it would be my responsibility to work with a character on Eclipse, likely on Firdays during the day since I happen to have some spare time on that day. In this way I can still try to get a feel for what how the issues are being addressed. Heck, i'm not even certain that these XP terminals will work for anything other than for obtainnig or Correspondent professions so it may not even be possible for me to check out CM (or as you suggest BH) without leveling through it normally. We'll just have to see.

Oh and Ryce, thank you. I am sure, however, that ther are many other folks here who could easily do as good, or even better, a job of this than I am. But I take it as my duty to all of youand to myself to attempt to be as unbaised and level-headed in doing that job as I can. I cannot say it is a thanksless job, because so many of you have been kind enough to offer your support so very often (I love this profession and the folks who are playing it!) And for that I do graciously thank all of you.

But it sure would be nice to know that the work I am putting in really is gettign acknowledged and hashed over by the Devs.

Let's face it, we have some fairly thorny issues in that first list alone that included things like Money and Mind issues that are extermely complex.As I have said many times the best way we can try to work through those issues is with some Dev response. Some way that we can see better what the repercussions are, from their point of view, and to provide viable, workable solutions that will improve the game for everyone, and not jjust the Medical professions.

I WANT us to work with the Devs on this, I really do. I think the correspondent program might be a decent first step in the process, or else I would never have applied to do the job. At this point, however, it simply is not working for at least a few of the professions involved, apparently.

I'll keep at it. And MAYBE there is some small modicum of a chance that I may actually be able to ensure taht our issues and concerns are heard and, hopefully, acknowledged.

I think by far we have the best correspondent. I browse through the other professions (as im trying to figure out what i want to do second hand besides MD hehe) and Zarlor your the best

Keep up the awesome job you are doing.