Doctor Archive

Bugs

1. Player City Cantinas count as Med-Centers (and the reverse)

Player city Cantinas and Med-Centers are effectively interchangeable. Please have these two buildings operate in their respective areas only.

2. Experimentation Issues

Experimentation does not seem to work correctly or consistently. Even with experimentation risks being listed as 0% there are still a great many critical failures, failures and some moderate and standard successes. Wholly inconsistent with the 0% failure rating guaranteed by the crafting station. Having highly experimented crafting tools and stations do seem to alleviate the problem a little, but not by very much. At least some think that having some possibility of failure is acceptable, but they do wish to have some indicator of what the possibility really is since obviously it is a greater than 0% chance and some would suggest it is really as high as a 5% chance. Amazing successes, on the other hand, appear to be far more rare than critical failures and do not produce as nearly drastic improvements as critical failures produce in reductions, there is simply no good trade-off here. Even experimenting by 1 point at a time seems to produce the same results (with less risk) as using as many points as possible, which is counterintuitive to what most folks expect, where they expect that taking the greater risk should provide some greater reward other than keeping the complexity low enough on an item that it doesn’t take quite as long to manufacture.

Part of the problem might come where recent experimentation with the crafting system would suggest that a crafting tool with a negative rating (up to –14.99) is far superior to a tool with a positive rating (+15). Apparently the values seem to be flipped for experimentation calculations, we think. We really would like more consistency and a more reliable, documented, experimentation methodology.

Further Malleability ratings do appear to affect the difficulty levels of crafting an item, but this is not otherwise annotated anywhere, not even in the Advanced Guide on Crafting on the main SWG website. Better documentation for experimentation needs to be made available.

3. /registerwithlocation +25 bonus for faction bases (as noted in pub 3 publish notes) is broken.

Testing after the static buffs were added in Publish 7, showed doctors that this posted bonus is not working in the proper facilities.

4. Resuscitation Timer Issues

Resuscitation seems to now be subject to a timer that does not allow a corpse to be resuscitated. The timer is inconsistent and otherwise undocumented. If there really is to be a timer we need to know what it is supposed to be or provide the dead player with some kind of indicator or countdown timer, but some folks are reporting that even given immediate access to a corpse they are unable to resuscitate the player.

For more info:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=15729

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18255

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21297

5. Server lag and character placement affects Doctors in combat

Listed heal times can be delayed quite a bit by server lag, even while the combat queue is empty. Characters to be healed are not always where they are expected to be, and can be a good distance out of range, even when they apper to be in-range for healing actions.

6. Enhance Action -v- other Enhance Pack Resource Disparity

Enhance Action B+ packs use simple Organic and Inorganic resources, while the rest of the B+ Enhance series uses Avian Meat and Reactive Gas. It is often considered a problem in that the Action packs should be brought into line with the rest of the Enhance packs, or the stringent requirements on the other packs lessened. Occasional questions also arise about the 2 or 3 BEC requirement that seems to fluctuate between some of the higher end Enhance schematics. Some consistency would make things less confusing or at least some clarification on the reasoning for these inconsistencies.

7. Stat Drain/Stat Loss/Stat Stick Bug

The 60-second stat drain after Resuscitation persists beyond 60 seconds. Food/buffs/spice seems to rectify this problem. Likely this is related to stats getting stuck at lowered levels after taking wounds until those stats are kicked back to normal by doing something to affect the stat. Please fix.

8."/" commands and macros are not working on items in backpacks.

Player crafted medicines, not in the inventory, are not recognized by any UI toolbar action outside of dragging and dropping the actual med in the toolbar. Due to the extensive inventory requirements fo Doctors, this limitation makes it very hard for doctors to have a full set of medicines in the base inventory screen at all times. Making backpacks transparent to th UI would go a long way to help Doctors operate in combat wil la full suite of medicines.

9. Crafting Schematics with Unused Ratings

There are several schematics that use resources that do not have stats required by their schematic. In particular, on the D-level schematics for all Enhance packs other than Action the schematics require Avian Meat and Reactive Gas, neither of which have UT rating which affects the charges available. The same is true for the top-level Cure Disease and Poison packs.

10. Enhancements not Assisting Armor Wearing

Buffs seem to have some problems when used to assist in the wearing of armor. Sometimes other buffs methods seem to assist. It is likely related to Mind encumbrance in some manner, but the error message, which always states "'You are not healthy enough" seems to imply it is a Health related problem, when in fact it could be mind or action related, or even related to a substat of those. A more descriptive error message may help in alleviating some of these problems.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=9640

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14508

11. Factory Hopper/Inventory Window Refresh

Factories (and a few other inventory windows, but this is most prevalent and reproducible on factories) are not refreshing properly. When moving an item into the input hopper on a factory, the item actually moves in all other respects (inventory size goes down, hopper size goes up and so on) but the graphic of the object does not move from inventory until either a window is closed or the "Change View" button is pressed to force an update. This still happens sometimes.

12. Incapacitated Player Location Problems

Incapped players seem to always change location from where they, apparently, dropped down, even when you are on follow. As such the player who may not have moved since the last time you were close enough to heal them just a few seconds ago, is somehow no longer within healing range, even if they look like they are at your feet. Workarounds have included using the /DragIncapacitatedPlayer command to get them to you, but sometimes the location is so screwed up that even though the player appears to be at your character’s feet, they are still outside of the 20m drag range, although this does seem to be occurring less often lately. A possible solution is using the same location algorithm for locating the "body" that heals were using on the live player (where the player WAS close enough) when they are incapped and allow the /follow command to actually work on incapped players and corpses to get us close enough to them to perform the required heal function.

(*Dev Response:

The system designer in charge of combat, Dan, wrote in a thread regarding design issues and considerations for the combat professions on 9/18/03:

"Melee Out of Range issue:

This is caused by the object on your client being drawn in a different location that it exists on the server.

The proposal to fix this is to increase the melee range of all weapons to a value that is closer to the margin of error between the client/server. This will make combat look a little funny as you’ll be able to hit a target further away, but I think this is an appropriate tradeoff."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=565036

[Z’s note: This may fix the range errors caused by this issue.])

[T's note; This has not been expanded to healing actions at this time 3/22/2004]

13. Room/Dungeon Wound Healing Problems

Additionally non-combat healing actions, such as Wound Healing and Enhancing, that would normally require a Droid, do not function within Caves/Dungeons.

14. /quickheal will activate and cause the using Doctor mind wounds and damage even if the target has no damage, if te target has any kind of buff on.

While this is a rare occurance, it is a real bug and can create a lot of problems for people that use hot-buttons to heal, trusting the button to stop working when there is no need for the skill to work anyymore (which is how the majority of healing actions behave).

15. Rooms/Dungeons and /DragIncap

We’d like the ability to /DragIncap from a room or Cave/Dungeon.

16. Factory XP (or lack thereof)

Factories currently do not seem to be providing the 10% Crafting XP they are supposed to provide. We are uncertain if this is a problem with no XP being provided at all, or if there is a timing issue where the XP is being provided at an extremely slow rate. Several folks are trying to investigate the issue further.

Gameplay Issues

38. Mounted Healing

The /healdamage command does not appear to work when mounted. While at least some consider that it may be understandable why healing cannot be done for others while the Doctor is mounted, we are wondering about having at least the ability to heal damage and/or states on ourselves while mounted. Please consider allowing these abilities as they may at least provide an otherwise support profession at least some ability to surviving an unwanted fight while trying to get away.

39. Doctor Content

There is concern that there is a lack of Doc specific content, such as missions to craft medicines or to heal an NPC someplace or to go someplace to heal folks until X number of wounds have been treated and so forth. Such missions could be construed as a method of alleviation of the issues concerning how Docs make money. (See the Money issue)

For reference:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14257

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14888

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194

40. Allow Res and other heals to be used while suffereng from a state.

While it makes sense that under some states (stun for example) that Docs could not use medical abilities, currently Docs cannot use any cures while under any state (except poison and disease).

41. Enhance Drop Notification

There is no notification of a buffs expiration, as folks cannot see that stream of lost numbers while in First Person mode and may not notice that they have lost their enhancement. There has been a report that there is some notification, but that it easily lost in the other "spam" normally sent or is simply not very noticeable. Possibly some other graphical notification of what buffs you currently have and possibly a blinking warning that those buffs are about to expire would be helpful. Allowing the buffing medic or groupmates to see who has what buffs would also be very advantageous. One suggestion was made for a type of Pie Chart as an icon on the HAM, like where other states are shown, that slowly cuts away slices of the color until it is getting low, perhaps blinking for the last minute or so of the Buffs duration. Even simply converting the Duration rating from seconds to an hours:minutes:seconds format would be helpful, or providing the recipient with a Confirmation box , requiring them to give /consent, or requiring that they be grouped in order for enhancement to occur.

42. Heals don't always cross boundaries

Characters standing on the other side of doorways may not be healable... Outdoors, sometimes what apopear to be server boundaries have the same effect.

43. Combat Queue Heals

There should be a graphic display of heals in combat queue. The fact that heals actually queue up in the combat queue already confuses a large number of Medics. Most Doctors have come to understand how heals do queue up, but it would be very nice to actually see at what position they are queued at. It has also been suggested that heals should always be considered a priority queue item that jumps immediately to the front of the queue to be the next action accomplished. Although it should be noted that the preferred method for healing actions would be to treat them like non-queued actions, such as posture changes, so that they take place without any delay.

(*Dev response:

Holo wrote presumably as a response to our initial Top 5 issues on 8/22/03:

"Healing tasks that aren’t making it in this update, but are on the list as high priorities:

· Look into making healing go into the combat queue 100%."

Ref:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=394421

[T's note: We still ahven't seen this 3/22/2004. ]

44. /medicalforage is useless.

Please make this skill do something useful, or remove it from the game. It confuses new players, and has now useful function in the modern SWG.

45. TEF Notification and Getting Kicked Out of Med Centers

(Partial Fix, modified name of issue)

Doctors are requesting notification of when a TEF might be incurred to allow the Doctor to NOT heal a character that would give them a TEF in a potentially deadly situation and some representation for covert characters to know when they are under the effects of a TEF. Not to mention the additional problems of getting TEFs from inadvertently healing covert opposing faction members, which allow your own faction mates to attack you. The addition of getting booted from a building for gaining a TEF further exacerbates the problem with concerns that a Doctor might start a Med Center from their house or as a public Med Center in a Player City and then get booted out of it for 5 minutes healing an overt or TEFed faction member.

Requests have been made suggesting that Med Centers be no-fighting zones. Perhaps medics/docs registered at a Med Center would not incur a TEF, but when healing away from there (or perhaps if not registered) they could incur a TEF as a possible solution beyond notification that may help the problem.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=8267

(*Dev Response:

Holo stated to a similar issue listed as "Onscreen notification that you have received a TEF flag. I see this happening as a 'state' icon in your character's HAM window." on 9/13/03:

"-- we are already working on this and I think it may be in an upcoming update."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=533754#M533754

Additionally added by Q3P0 on 9/16/03:

"Can we have a Temporary Enemy Flag indicator for when you are covert? Yes, but this is going to take some time to get to the live servers. Given our current priorities with that programmer, expect over a month. It will get done."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=552985

Ben "Marvelin" Hanson suggested on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum that he would need to pass this issue on to the folks who would more directly work with and handle PvP issues.

(*Publish Notes on 10/8/03: "No longer allow neutral players to help neutral non-players with enemy flags of any sort")

[Z’s note: There is now a visual "flag" indicator for when you have a TEF.])

[T's note: People are still getting booted from med centers 3/22/2004]

46. Liquid petrochem 4 seen to be too rare.

Docs would like the frequency of petro 4 spawns to be increased. It is very rare on some servers, and the few times it has spawned on a few, it has been of very low quality.

47. Target Friendlies

A request is made for a quick way, like Tab (perhaps a toggle to make Tab work through enemies or friendlies) for quickly scrolling through friendly (or at least non-aggro) targets. (Note: For those of you requesting this for groupmates, Ctrl-Q is already mapped to do this by the default keymap. You may reassign it to whichever mapping you prefer.)

48. Auto-Retaliate

The ability to turn off auto-retaliate when fighting has been requested. The reason being that for healer characters the actual fighting process slows down their heals, and can sometimes cause confusion about who/what is targeted occasionally causing heals to go in the wrong place. Some medics prefer to avoid having any weapons in hand in an attempt to not have attacks being fired off from them that might slow down their ability to heal. The possibility of ensuring that heals get priority in the combat queue by going immediately to the front of the queue may help to alleviate this at least some.

49. Dolovite iron seen to be too rare.

Docs would like te frequency of Dolovite iron increased. it is very rare on some servers, and the very few times it has spawned, its quality has been veryu low.

50. Heal Targeting Persistence

It is requested that Heals that go into the Combat Queue remember who it was the heal was targeted at initially instead of trying to heal the current target.

51. Resuscitation Pack Usage on Faction Pets

Resuscitate pack usage on pets has been asked for. Since this obviously does not apply to true beastie-type "pets" as they no longer have perma-death, I believe this request still applies primarily for NPC-style faction "pets".

52. /diagnose Refresh

There have been requests for the new /diagnose command to either have a refresh button added to it, that it automatically refresh at some interval (perhaps every 15-30 seconds or following the wound timer), or that reissuing the command will refresh the current window instead of opening a new one.

The window comes up rather small and it is not the easiest display to read. Perhaps something more like the Ctrl-C display or coloring the names base on their appropriated HAM section would help some. As would autosizing it to display all of the stats or at least remembering the size and position of the last /diag window used.

53. General Inventory Search for Meds

We would like to see better management of medicines that are in inventory, such as allowing searches from the /healdamage command to search for a stim in packs if it cannot find it in upper level inventory.

(*Dev Response:

Possibly addressed in part according to Holo’s response presumably as a response to our initial Top 5 issues on 8/22/03:

"Healing tasks that aren’t making it in this update, but are on the list as high priorities:

…

· Add smarter find medicine code."

[Z’s note: This "update" likely refers to the October Publish, meaning we likely should not expect this until the November Publish at the earliest]

Ref:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=394421)

[T's note: selection from main inventory still seems odd]

54. Healing Range/Distance

Heal range is annoyingly small. Just enough so that at the normal follow range healing simply cannot be done. Is it possible to increase the standard range just a smidge, to 7-8M, perhaps, or to decrease the standard follow range?

(*Dev Response:

The system designer in charge of combat, Dan, wrote in a thread regarding design issues and considerations for the combat professions on 9/18/03:

"Melee Out of Range issue:

This is caused by the object on your client being drawn in a different location that it exists on the server.

The proposal to fix this is to increase the melee range of all weapons to a value that is closer to the margin of error between the client/server. This will make combat look a little funny as you’ll be able to hit a target further away, but I think this is an appropriate tradeoff."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=565036

This may fix a few of the range errors caused in healing, but may still not exactly address this specific issue. But it may help.)

[T's note: this is still happening, though brawlers did have their range increased.]

55. Accidental Cloning

Typing while a corpse and hitting enter sometimes is accepted as a Yes response to clone, often to the default cloning center of the closest facility, even if they player would have preferred their bind point. This is a problem for Doctors in that a player may have been attempting some message or communication and accidentally have cloned when a Doctor was available, sometimes even just about to, Resuscitate them. Please look into removing this default behavior.

56. Factory/Harvester Status Notifications

Requests have been made for more notifications from harvesters and factories. While the current notification when at 50% maintenance is nice, it would be far more useful to receive notifications whenever a harvester stops and for what the reason was, such as ran out of maintenance, ran out of power or the resource is no longer available. The ability to set notification when maintenance or power reach a certain level would also be a nice addition, but even a set rate, such a notification when harvester is down to 24 or 12 hours left on either of those would be useful.

57. Wookies can't wear Doc's crafing apron

Wookies need some loving with the skill bonus clothing.

58. Power Selection for Factories/Harvesters

Power management on factories (and harvesters for that matter) is fairly annoying in that there is no way to tell the structure which power from inventory to use. It is not even possible to hide a power source you do not wish to have used (such as radioactives) in a container. Of particular annoyance here is that a radioactive, usable in some components, will be used preferentially over something like Solar Power, which has very few uses in med production.

59. Animals don't drop resources appropriate to body type.

many animals athat apper to be a certian type (say avian) drop materials that do not seem to match their outward appearance. Whiel this is a general issue, it greatly affects Docs, because Avian meat seems to be the rareast meat of them all.

60. Med center grouping

Docs woudl be interested in some kind of bonus for being grouped in medical rated areas with other doctors.

61. Heal Pack Selection Methodology Clarification

Many would like clarification on the methodology for heal pack selection from inventory when using, for example, the /healdamage command. Is it simply the last Stim in the inventory chosen? The strongest? The weakest? The one with most/least charges? Alphabetically? By Stim serial number? Could it be made to be more consistent and possibly follow one of the methods listed above, such as always using the pack with the least number of charges, or the highest base heal rate, or even intelligent selection choosing lower level packs for smaller heals and higher level packs for bigger heals. Perhaps we can at least try to sort our packs in the manner of pack selection, if nothing else, to try and order our meds so they will be taken in the order we would like to have them used.

62. Droid Crafter Rating

We’d like to be able to see the Food & Chem Crafter rating when a droid has one built into it.

63. TEF Documentation and Faction Healing (including Neutrals)

Better documentation is needed to explain the TEF healing problems. Many neutral Doctors cannot understand why they cannot heal a factioned player, or why they cannot heal an otherwise apparently unaligned player who had just been in a duel or some such. Some notification other than it being "unwise to heal such a person" would help to provide clarification. (Personally I like to see it as to heal a Rebel is to bring down the wrath of the Empire, while to heal an Imp would also bring down their wrath, since they only trust their own Docs. However you wish to explain it, though, the message needs to be clearer on why it is "unwise".) Other suggestions also include allowing the healing, but allowing the Doctor to incur a TEF, even a stacking TEF, that they are notified of. So that if a Neutral Doctor healed an Overt Imp player, they would gain a Rebel TEF, if they then turned around and healed a Rebel player they would ALSO gain an Imp TEF, thus being fair game for either side in the conflict, since being neutral could be maintaining non-aggression between both sides, or it could be viewed as equally aggressive to both sides. Some Doctors have expressed interested in being able to expand their role-playing options by healing whomever they wish, even if there are penalties involved as long as those penalties are well known.

For some further suggestions can be found here in some of the comments:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=11777

(*Dev Response:

Ben "Marvelin" Hanson suggested on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum that he would need to pass this issue on to the folks who would more directly work with and handle PvP issues.

Patch notes on 10/8/03: "No longer allow neutral players to help neutral non-players with enemy flags of any sort")

64. Getting Docs Back Into Med Centers

There have been expressed concerns lately, especially with the newfound prevalence of those VERY long-lasting diseases, about the lack of Doctors to be found in the Med Centers. There is very little content to encourage Doctors to be in the Med Center and available to the average player to provide their services. (Yes, this issue is closely related to several other issues, such as Money and Doctor Content.) There have been several suggestions to alleviate this apparent problem to include; add medical missions and/or quests that pay for healing some number of wounds or states or patients in a medical center (kind of like the Explore Hunting misions), decrease the risk of failures on crafting when in a Med Center, Increase the xp generated from each craft/stim/wound done, pay Doctors to be in the Med Center (kind of like an insurance plan), In player city med centers generate tax from each heal, recharge medical robots while inside for free, Make crafting take less units of resources while there, make groups of doctors share XP instead of compete for it much like bands or put a public medical factory there.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=20985

65. Crafting Schematics Clarification and Documentation

Crafting schematics do not seem to properly reflect exactly how they are utilizing their formulae. For example some basic testing has shown that a schematic states a Stim should get it’s power rating though 66% OQ and 33% PE and it’s Charges through 66% OQ and 33% UT. However, it appears that using an Inorganic with a PE rating does NOT yield additional power, as the schematic would imply. Clarification on this, such as annotating on the schematic that only the Organic affects Power and Only the Inorganic affect charges, should be made if this is truly supposed to be the case, or it should be rectified to properly select all ratings available from all components in other to create the final product. It would appear from further testing that like attributes from different resources are actually averaged, and not additive, which is counter-intuitive to a crafter’s expectations. We would really like some clarification on the issue and better documentation of it.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=5996

66. Factory Identical Components

There has been a request to alleviate the requirement for factory identical components. It is possible this would not really be considered a problem if Medics had some decent ways to make money (see the Money issue) as then they might actually be able to afford a factory, or at least be a viable market for other Doctors running factories to sell to them. Right now it is considered a rather non-productive market to sell to, primarily, other Medics (although a few are making it an acceptable market in this respect.)

67.Droid vs. Med-Center power issues

While there is not a set opinion on this. The idea that Droids are more powerful then a building full of medicla supllies seems a bit odd. Some docs find it a bit odd, that they need to step outside a Med-Center to heall better. The Balance between med centers, player med centers, ranger camps and droids need to be reworked in a more logical manner. Some docs suggest that droids should make any location be more powerful then before when a droid is present.

68. Resuscitation Pack Usage on Battlegrounds

Upon death in a battleground players are immediately removed from the field, rendering the Revive skill useless. It has also been pointed out the relative uselessness of buffs in that arena as well since mind damage is highly focused upon in PvP battles. These two issues combined make a Doctor virtually useless in that arena considering that Buffs and Resuscitation are their two primary Doctor abilities and practically the pinnacles of the profession. It has been requested that there be at least a short delay upon player death in the battlegrounds so a doctor may attempt resuscitation.

69. /registerwithlocation Command

While considered nice, Docs would have like to see this command more widely published (it was NOT in the publish notes). They would also like an annotation someplace besides the Planetary map, as few folks will be using the planetary maps. Instead it would be nice if their Overhead (Ctrl-M) map and/or the building itself have some obvious indicator that it is manned, such as an asterisk and (manned) at the end of the name on the overhead map and a big flag that flies outside the building when it is manned that may have "sign" attributes that allow it to named with indicating text showing if there are any medics or doctors on "duty".

70. Player City Hospital Benefits

Some players have expressed concern that Player City Hospitals offer little benefit over a large house and almost no benefit over a Cantina. Houses can be used for all forms of wound healing. Cantinas can also be used for wound healing, are available on the overhead and planetary maps, and autoheal all forms of wounds and Battle Fatigue. A Hospital only appears to add the /registerwithlocation ability, which is only usable by members of the same faction, if a factional player placed the structure, anyway and is of fairly limited usefulness. Are there other benefits that we are unaware of? If not suggestions have included providing a healing bonus to those /registered there, a free vendor for the placing Doctor to use for med sales, not allowing wound healing in player cantinas and cloning centers, or some other benefit.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22342

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22986

71. Request for increased animal drop rates.

Animal harvested materials are very rare. Docs would liek them to be more available to the economy.

72.State packs use too much mind

Since states happen so fast and frequently in combat, healing tyhem uses far too much mind ot bother. Healing states uses so much mind that a Doctor could nto be able to heal damage. Please lower mind cost on state heals.

73. Crafting XP from complex schematics vs. components

Crafting components seems to give more XP then craftign final medical items. This lends to the idera that people should 'grind" doc with components rather then actually craft their way up the tree as they go along. OCudl we check to see if medicines are indeed giving good/correct XP?

74. Master Doc Benefits

The benefits of being a Master Doctor seem like a bit of a letdown to some. Suggestions have included moving Resuscitation packs to that level for creation and/or use and/or raising the Med Use requirements on that pack, others feel doing so would be a nerf to non-Masters and suggest only working with additional content in this manner. Other suggestions include Inoculation packs for some form of immunity or resistance to various states. Point-Blank (Doctor centered) AoE state cures have been mentioned as well, as has the ability to harvest creatures at a low level of ability. Mind Stims, especially since Master Docs could care less about any way of exploiting something like this for XP (generally speaking.), consolidated wound packs (also look at the Inventory Issue) or a method to convert Med or Med Crafting XP at Master levels to Experimentation points (since there otherwise no need for that extra XP) or some other purchasable schematics/items.

For a sampling of the discussion see:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=7596

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=8075

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10330

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14389

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14638

(*Dev Response:

Ben "Marvelin" Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:

"I'm open to ability ideas for master doctor."

[Z’s note: I have passed on the ideas already listed in the above issue, not to mention those in the threads noted above.]

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben "Marvelin" Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:

"They really like many of the ideas for extra doctor abilities in the threads we listed. In particular things like AOE cures, dot resistances, multi wound packs, etc. All seem pretty interesting to work with. They do agree that the doctor could use another reason or two to get the master box. This particular issue may take quite some time to get to and code in, however."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

75. Faction Points

Docs are interested in seeing a share of Faction Points in the same way that we are getting Combat XP. It is considered inappropriate that a medic professional would be out in the field and, being unable to assist in taking out an opposing faction NPC or player (because they are healing those who are doing so), they will not gain FPs and so will progress much more slowly in faction gains, while providing at least as valuable a service as the person providing the offensive capabilities. Other considerations have included gaining FPs for healing Overt faction members, especially considering the dangers involved in gaining a TEF in this manner in a place that is known for finding unsuspecting TEFed characters (i.e. The Med Center, see TEF Issues).

76. Money

This topic comes up very frequently on the Medic threads, but just as frequently, if not more so, on the Doctor forums. There is a lot of concern about how a focused medical character should be able to make money. By this I mean that we are talking about a character whose primary skills and interests are in the healing arts (which could include crafting of meds, for the Pharmaceutically inclined Docs) and not, necessarily, combat or resource management. The self-sufficiency of the profession does not really exist except in a few small methods, of which the primary one for making money IN the profession would seem to be the production and sales of Small Stimpack Bs with some income coming from the sale of the service of enhancing stats (not nearly as useful an income source until Master Doc is reached). There is a much smaller niche market for medical resources and components, but most Doctors seem to feel that resource gathering and sales, while obviously an integral part of the Doctor profession, is more of the realm of the artisan and such sales would be, in effect, making money as an Artisan, and not as a Doctor. Overall these markets are really on fully viable once Master, or at least Level 4 Doc Crafting, is reached.

The other methods of making money seem to be far less reliable, or are not well supported by the game. Tips for Doctors and Medics seems to be a small market except in a few locations or servers and medical professionals are often subjected to all manner of verbal abuse for suggesting payment should be made for the service. Primarily, for those interested in providing services such as Healing or Enhancing, there is no secure method of trade to ensure that the Doctor is paid for their service while also ensuring that the customer gets the service they are requesting.

Suggestions have included some form of secure trade window, like is done for normal trading, or having a Doctor’s healing actually use packs that the customer has on their person instead of the ones on the Doctor (and thereby the Doctor could sell the medicine to the player and then heal him with those), requiring or allowing some form of insurance, possibly whereby either the patients set a price they are willing to pay for healing that will be deducted from them if their healer accepts that rate or the Doctor sets a price they will heal for allowing the patient to accept, allowing A packs or stims only to be usable by anyone thereby opening the market for more pharmaceutical products that Doctors or Medics could then sell (for those who are more crafting oriented, although it should be noted that some recent controversy is beginning to surface over this idea, thread is listed below- Doc #11491 & Medic #6938.) Having Doc-specific missions, like the artisan or entertainer missions. Giving Doctors some sort of Vendor ability to encourage pharmaceutical sales. Paying Docs some rate simply for manning a place where they can /register. Some of the threads below show some of the solutions suggested in greater detail.

Again there is no true consensus on the issue other than that most of the Medic classes tend to rely on other methods of subsistence and take time doing those things that they may not be interested in or may not be fun for them (the usual, delivery/destroy missions, for example.) The issue is an important one amongst the player base and receives a lot of attention on the forums and in game from many of the medics and Doctors I have spoken with.

Of notable reference are the following threads:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1768

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1197

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1650

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=6196

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10665

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=11491

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=6938

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14257

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14012

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14888

(*Dev Response:

Ood Bnar wrote on 9/24/03 in a thread about Image Designer UI issues:

"We talked about adding a payment option, but this gets into the bigger 'payment for services rendered' issue which I will leave to the designers. They are working on the problem now."

[Z’s note: This may or may not imply anything, but it seems that there maybe some consideration being given for some methods of handling payments for services universally, if possible, opening part of this issue to a possible need for a wider solution which may provide assistance on this issues as well as for other service-related sales.]

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=image_designer&message.id=2796)

77. Medical Harvesting

Some Docs are having issue with wanting to have some form /harvest scout skill and our need for meat requirements. The situation tends to revolve around the idea that scouts will make far more profit from catering to the Hide/Bone needs of Artisans than they will from catering to Medics.

78. State Pack Persistence/Immunity

Docs are wondering if it would be possible to get some level of persistence in Cure packs for States, Poisons and/or Diseases. The states appear to be regained upon the very next hit by a MOB or player. For example, why unblind someone when they are just going to get blinded again before they can even get their own attack off. Some persistence in the state cure packs would provide some level of immunity to being afflicted with the state again immediately. Another possibility would be that state cures offer a temporary increase in resistance against that state.

It should also be noted that many states do not seem to have some very obvious effects and with the timer-related errors involved in state pack usage, few Doctors, or their patients for that matter, bother with State healing, apparently. Considering the defense bonuses now being fully applied to moving characters, getting to a character to apply a state cure is even more difficult (because they keep moving around in order to avoid being hit.) Clarification on the effects of various states, review of their effectiveness and review of their persistence on healing would be welcome.

Some discussions can be found at the following:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=10613

79. First Aid Improvements

There is some concern that the new First Aid improvements may not be enough. Some Doctors feel that First Aid should improve further as they move up in the Doctor Profession. Suggestions would be that by Master Doctor a Doctor should be able to completely remove a Bleed State in a single application of First Aid.

80. Mind Damage Healing for Doctors

Doctors would like to have the /mindheal command made available to them. Suggestions have included having it be a Doctor-only command, perhaps even only available at Master Doc. However there seems to be a bit more consensus (a polling would need o be done to ascertain the exact degrees of this) towards giving /mindheal to Master Medic to provide a little something extra for those reaching MM level, as well as then providing the capabilities to both Doctors and Combat Medics. In this way the command is at least closer to being as available as healing of the other Bars is to maintain the proper level of balance for the medical professions. Some have also suggested that the command might also be well served to also go to Entertainers and/or Squad Leaders. Others suggest that that command should only go to Entertainers or Squad Leaders. Some of the threads below will offer more insights into the various viewpoints.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16728

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17017

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16865

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18644

(*Dev Response:

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben "Marvelin" Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:

"It has been decided for now that mind healing is going to stay with Combat Medics. Combat medics have been in need of another unique healing ability, and they feel this fits the bill nicely."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

81. Ease of Mastery

Some have also suggested that perhaps Doctor is simply too easy to Master. I am still uncertain whether this is intended or not and whether or not it is really balanced enough compared to possible speed of gain rates for other professions. It may be a situation where, as Holocron has told us before, the game simply does not start until you completely allocate all of your skill points and that philosophy being somewhat counterintuitive to how many other MMORPGs are played. Or if this is truly a valid concern that having Master Doctors within their time frame is unbalancing to the game. Perhaps guidance of the Dev thinking on the issue is needed, or the rate of gain should be adjusted. The crafting requirements will definitely need to be more balanced, however, in most players’ experience, some suggesting either making it easier, or making the rest of the line harder or somewhere in between.

82. Crafting XP Speed Imbalance

Docs are feeling a bit hampered by the crafting requirements of the class. While there are a few who simply do not like crafting at all, many seem to feel that crafting is acceptable, but only if it improves on par with use. An example pointed out on the forums was that a Stim E will often heal for 1500-2500, or about 600-700 Medical XP a heal. That 1 stim E provides about 500 Crafting XP. Since there are 41 charges on a stim E that means a difference of 41*700=28,700 Medical XP, as compared to that 1 stim providing only 500 Crafting XP. A ratio of 57:1 instead of the 3:1 that would be expected for proper scaling of raising the skills evenly. (Actually it has been noted that those numbers are probably a bit off, but the ratio is still approximately valid). Admittedly compared to the time it takes to use those charges enough stims could be made to equalize that ratio, but it is requested that the metrics be looked at again, especially now that Factory XP is back to where it should have been (well, if it is supposed to be at 10%, even though factories are not giving even that now, but that I listed as a separate issue) and that self UXP in components has been fixed and also keeping in mind that there are folks who are just grinding the meds for these lines to catch it up to their other med levels.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1383

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2020

83. Pet Stimpacks

Some Docs are incensed about the idea of giving pet stimpacks to anyone for healing Pets. (Not at the BE’s for making these packs, but that anyone can use them.) Something that was previously the purview of the medic classes. Letting some other class utilize stimpacks, even if it’s just for pets, seems like a slap in the face by giving anyone the ability to use an item that is otherwise exclusive to Novice Medic, when an integral skill required for Medics, Surveying, won’t even be considered for Medics because it would somehow interfere with Artisans (who already have far greater financial stability than the medical professions). Not to mention the ability of these new stims to heal mind damage on the fly when no other class in the game has this ability for use on player characters. Some clarification on the reasoning for this issue or some other form of compensation such as mind healing, a certificate system allowing Pet Stim A use by anyone, but higher levels only to be used by BEs and/or CHs, the removal of the mind heal component of the stim, removal of pet stimpacks altogether has been suggested.

84. Medicine Use Skill Granularity

Many would like to see more granularity in the base Medicine Use levels for different meds, to encourage balanced increases in the Medicine Use skill. Possibly even reducing some medicine use levels so that Medics can use some Doctor created items, while others could be made more difficult to encourage purchasing of the usage skill levels. This issua also includes Stim B levels in medic, and doctor's sales.

Some discussion on the topic can be found in the following threads:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=646964

85. Pet Healing XP (or lack thereof)

The removal of Pet Healing XP has several Doctors a bit upset. Overall there seems to be some consensus that Pets are primarily being used as the main tank for a party instead of any standard PC class. As such there is now no method for gaining XP from healing the party tank since that tank will almost never be a PC.

Suggested solutions include singly or in some combination such ideas as giving no XP for ones own pets, but allowing full XP on other’s pets, providing reduced XP for any pet healing, capping the XP allowed to be provided from a pet on either a per heal or per combat session basis. Several other responses and suggestions may be found in Q3P0’s post regarding this subject below (#429220).

(*Dev response:

Q3P0 wrote on 8/27/03:

"We’ve been tracking your discussions regarding the recent change to remove XP from healing pets. This post is to explain why we did the change and to let you know what we are thinking of for the future (based on some of your suggestions).

The exploit was a person could sick their pet on a creature that it cannot kill but does a decent amount of damage, sit behind the pet and heal it over and over and gain experience 10x faster than normal. Our solution was to eliminate XP for healing pets.

You’ve brought up great points about this and we are reconsidering how best to handle the exploit. Assuming you agree that the above exploit is valid. How about healing your own pet gives no medical XP (just like healing yourself)? Healing someone else’s pet given less XP than healing another player but still gives some. This will make healers still valuable in groups with tank pets, but won’t allow you to gain XP faster than you would with players.

If we go with this, it will take several days to code and probably some decent time on Test Center to test."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=429220

Holo wrote on 8/29/03: "Med XP from healing pets was seen as an exploit because of the hugely high rates of gain it provided. Do you guys not see it that way or agree?" Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443645#M443645

[Z’s note: The testing time would likely force such an update into the November Publish at the earliest. No word yet on when that publish way be scheduled for, but it will certainly hit Test Center first and I will update you all then if it was able to make it. If not then they MIGHT Hotfix Patch it in, but more likely it would get held off until December Publish. That’s assuming they even go with Q’s suggestions above at all.])

{T's note: none of this ever happened]

86. Pet buff save on non-radial command store.

Currently when pets store they lose their buffs. While it is understandable keeping buffs may be exploitable, rebuffing is not always possible, and pets often randomly store themselves at inopportune times.