Doctor Archive
Thread: Please Join Us if You Disagree with the New Experimentation System
Point taken Matchstick. Logistics are always a factor. However, this is not a single issue where the Devs have said the coding is too hard. It is an ongoing pattern. If this is the case, then perhaps they should pull back from so many changes, focus a greater portion of their time on fixing current issues and then move forward to new things. It is nonsensical to have each Publish come through with so many issues--many since launch--unresolved.
You are right about the Geo cave. It is fun, but too easy. Well, it is fun until the exploiters stop byand use the corpse bug to hit everything for 20k+ damage per shot. However, I want to see anybody go soloing a cave of Nightsisters these days (which I do not think we should be able to anyway, but the point being that no enhancements now can make you bulletproof to the real top mobs in SWG--we just need more of them in more locations to keep us going on fun, hard hunts).
Vinaddar
MatchstickNaritus wrote:
I disagree competely. It's a logistics issue primarily. There a 1000's upon 1000's of manhours worth of effort that are already scheduled to be invested into this game. Between expansions and all the other fixes going on. At some point you reach a level of effort where it is not feasible to make EVERY single change. Not doing something because the level of effort isn't within the scope of what they can spend on this PARTICULAR change isn't poor customer service... it's effective project management.
Sorry man, I disagree with you....any person that says "we aren't doing it because its to hard" is just lazy. And for a SOE as a company to say this, discreditsthemselves as a company to its Consmers. I've spent hours in the CSR Tech Chat, and the CSR's have NO IDEA what half the people are even talking about; NOR do they even make an effort to help. The generic response is "Contact Techsupport". The TS anwsers "we need this this and this." and that is the last you ever hear from them. Mainly because the CSR's are forwarding 99% of the "problems" to techsupport which is obviously extremely understaffed.
I've been playing games for a long long time, and SOE is by far the WORST company I've ever dealt with, and I'm frankly just getting sick of dealing with it at this point. I understand that games have bugs, but when a company doesn't take time to fix themBEFORE adding new "content" (if you wanna call it that) then the company has some serious issues it needs to deal with. You can't keep adding new stuff and new bugs every day and expect customers to just ignore the stuff that doesn't work. And from my view point SOEhas not made any effort at ALL to fix issues that have been pending for months on end.
And you're wrong about not letting us stand toe to toe with the nastiest of critters. Soloing the Geo Caves was proof enough that the player base as a whole is over powered compared to it's environment.
They already took a 27K HAM krayt with 60% resists to 300K HAM and 90% resists... how much harder can they make the environment? At somepoint they have to bring down the players too.
/agree This game is extremely unbalanced, and for a MMORPG I'm very suprised anyone can solo as much as we currently can.
My biggest problem with the new system is the way it makes experimenting in more than one branch practicly useless. For example you have 2 stats that you would like to effect with experimentation. For the sake of this example ill call it a buff pack and make up some numbers. With the resorces your using you have the potential to get as much as 40% total experimentation in uses and because you focused on quality you have the potential to get 80% in effectiveness. Now to get either the 40 or 80 % you need to invest all 10 points in that branch. Also meaning your only going to get a bit 4 % for any point you put in uses. Not putting all the points into one chosen atribute will suck much worse than it does now. Making having 12 points a lot better but realy hurts people that try and balance items. A ingame example is stim B's. I make mine up to 400+ heal and stick the rest in uses. that works good as i can usualy end up with some realy nice stims with a good heal that last a wile. Under the new system it will take me more experimentation to hit the 400 and ontop of that i will get less uses for any points i stick into uses. I dont see how stim b's are unbalancing the game or how lowering their quality is going to help things.
As for things being over powered in this game id agree..the game is to easy now. But reducing our ability to add divercity effectively to items we craft is not an awnser. People killing to fast is not because of uber weapons and armor...ok partialy because of the ultra high end armor. But for the most part its because of the over balanced combat skills that are out there. Your 90% composit wouldent seem to good if you couldent crank out your strongest special every second for 5k damage....Take away the ungodly damage and defence people have with some well tought out stacking of items buffs and foods and its a prety hard game.
The balance to make combat harder should come from tweaking the combat system...Reducing a crafters effectiveness and divercity has a large effect on the crafter but in the end will only make the combatant take what...1-2 more shots?
sorry for typos etc but my spelling sucks and i typed it fast heh.
Something you should know, Doctors are trhe second least affected by the new crafting system (medics are the least, BE are 3rd because clones don't use materals properties anymore, but their tisses do).
Most professions have far more materials and are hit much harder then we are. Chefs are probably hit the owrst, since al lof theiritems need 4+ stats and multiple materials.
I'm bringing ascros the dev arguments.
Sif, actually it is easy. Long term crafters have HUGE stockpiles of all materials except meat. When was the last time any of you long time master docs didn't make ANY advanced components due to lack of ANY (ever crappy) rare components? Materials can be easily stockpiled (except milk, meat etc.)
Combine that with factories (you only have to craft 3-6 times to get a schematic that will make 1000 of that realld good item (aterials depending)... and we do indeed have ease of making the best items in huge quantities. This is why most of the loot schematics are limited by drop compoonents and 6 uses. We are churning out million of items better then intended, and it is messing up the high lavel game
This stuff shoudl have been fixed first (before Vehicles and cities) IMO, before everyone got used to them... Now is a very late time to do this... and many people WILL quit over it. Everything in the game will come down a few notches, and any equipment not made with the best materials will be much worse on average. After al lthe legacy stuff decays out of the system, things will be much more difficult.. People won't be soloing the highest content, PVP will be more possible outside of uber templates... a year from now, the new player will have a better experience.
This is indeed a harsh thing to do to a live playerbase. In beta you can shrug it off, but we are no longer even close to beta. it seems that no matter what we do, it is going to happen. The best we can do is try to rebuild after is shows up, and do what we can.
AO had many of the same problems as SWG upon launch (I was a tester on that one too)... they took massive player loss to change and fix the game after release. Now, years later, it is a good game... the players came back. I think the same will probably happen (or close to it) to SWG. I'm not leaving this time... (I left AO and didn't come back). I'm gonna stick it out and try to be one of the people that help it make that recovery (though SWG is losing, at least up to this point, less people then AO).
The devs know about the complaints on this crafting system... I doubt they are gonna yank it back. If you keep your posts logical and respectful, you have far more impact then ranting (Doctors have been better at this then a lot of professions).
-T
would an acceptable solution possibly be to have 7 potential points rather than 10? that way the master will have 3 points left to spend on other things. thats my biggest problem with this, that i will have to use 10 of my 12 points (i know, WS, but taigus has been better about communicating, as per the post above, than logix as of late) to max out one stat. might be able to swing 9 to max out one line with an amazing, but i hate counting on that because sometimes i have tried for hours on end and have never gotten a schematic i liked. i think most of the complaints about this system is the fact that you will have to use all 10 on one line because the 10 potential points are filled in, a solution to this would be to uping the points filled in with assembly or reducing the potential experimentation points to 7 or 8, this would allow for crafters to still max out imporant stats, while still standing out from the pack, and the devs can still implement their new system.
i didnt say this would be easy, but maybe this should be considered and the new system pulled until we find a way to make it all work so that the community is happy. the crafting community is fairly small when compared to the combat community but are still the legs of the table that is the SWG economy
Traigus we still disagree on how "easy" we have it. As far as running out of good ingredients, I have--at least on 1 component. I have not seen any good liquid petro 4 ever and what decent stuff I had is gone. But aside from that, I cannot produce huge quantities of any enhance packs of good quality for lack of the ability to farm enough avian meat. My doc cannot and will not pay rangers to farm form me. The cost is simply too high to allow me to bother with buffing others if I have to go outside my own resources to make buff packs. This is a huge bone of contention with me because the argument that Avian is always available on most of the planets is simply not a realistic representation of the galaxy we each live in. Yes, most planets have avian up, but there is very seldom a truly good spawn on either Naboo or Yavin (the only 2 that offer even a chance for many of us to gather a good amount). Until they add more avian meat to the environment, we are seriously gated in our ability to gather enough of that resource to be able to produce large volumes. Notice we do not complain about herb meant. Why? Because there are plenty of large herbivores to hunt. Avian has no such equivalent to the Pickets and such we hunt for herb meat.
Regarding this Experimentation Change--
The Devs need to stop making excuses here about how hard the coding is and find another way to gate the specific items being made now that are concerning them. This current patch is their way of using a shotgun where a scalpel is needed. Not every item made by every crafter is overpowered, so go to the individual items and tweak them. I hate these broad, sweeping changes made to affect so many when it is specific changes to a few things that may be warranted.
If the changes go live as is, I know of many who will close shop--weapon smiths, armor smiths, architects, chefs, artisans, BE's, and us Docs. I am sure the rest of the community that posts here know of some who will do the same.
Thanks T , thanks Z, as always I (we) appreciate your efforts.
Vinaddar
Vinaddar wrote:
Traigus we still disagree on how "easy" we have it. As far as running out of good ingredients, I have--at least on 1 component. I have not seen any good liquid petro 4 ever and what decent stuff I had is gone. But aside from that, I cannot produce huge quantities of any enhance packs of good quality for lack of the ability to farm enough avian meat. My doc cannot and will not pay rangers to farm form me. The cost is simply too high to allow me to bother with buffing others if I have to go outside my own resources to make buff packs. This is a huge bone of contention with me because the argument that Avian is always available on most of the planets is simply not a realistic representation of the galaxy we each live in. Yes, most planets have avian up, but there is very seldom a truly good spawn on either Naboo or Yavin (the only 2 that offer even a chance for many of us to gather a good amount). Until they add more avian meat to the environment, we are seriously gated in our ability to gather enough of that resource to be able to produce large volumes. Notice we do not complain about herb meant. Why? Because there are plenty of large herbivores to hunt. Avian has no such equivalent to the Pickets and such we hunt for herb meat.
Regarding this Experimentation Change--
The Devs need to stop making excuses here about how hard the coding is and find another way to gate the specific items being made now that are concerning them. This current patch is their way of using a shotgun where a scalpel is needed. Not every item made by every crafter is overpowered, so go to the individual items and tweak them. I hate these broad, sweeping changes made to affect so many when it is specific changes to a few things that may be warranted.
If the changes go live as is, I know of many who will close shop--weapon smiths, armor smiths, architects, chefs, artisans, BE's, and us Docs. I am sure the rest of the community that posts here know of some who will do the same.
Thanks T , thanks Z, as always I (we) appreciate your efforts.
Vinaddar
/agree
If by making all these changes both past and present one could see an improvement to the game, a direction even, then I'd be more lenient. We are 7-8 months into the game (never mind the years of beta) and we are only just getting the features promised when the game went live. Meanwhile we have seen radical design changes many of which have simplynot worked; not to mentionnumerous bugs and broken aspects of the game. Now, as if we had not been through enough already, yet another major overhaul of the game is shoved onto test. From past experience I hold little hope that they will get things right this time either.
To be truthful I have absolutely no confidence in the game designers and developers. They seem to have no direction and no clue how to proceed with this game. Give them a chance people say, well they have had 2-3years of chances and opportunity to nail this game and yet it seems as they are going backward rather than forward. A MMORPG for me is a leisure activity and yet as each day goes bySWG becomes less and less fun.
As Vinaddar has said above, there is no need to make such a radical change to crafting. It seems to me that what is happening here, as with many previous changes, is .. "lets change this and see what happens". Well I am getting tired of being a guinea-pig. If I wanted to beta test something I'd sign up for it.
It looks like the Devs are going to fix a couple of "minor" issues most of us have had with crafting, like rate of crit fails, and use that as an excuse to reduce the quality of crafted goods. At the same time, they are increasing the quality, and necessity, of looted items. Meanwhile their spokesman, TH, tells crafters to stockpile pre-nerf goods. Something that will essentially reduce the effectiveness of the nerf and cause them to nerf something else. The power gamers and uber-templates are still going to have all of their overpowering goodies no matter what the devs nerf this time around. Partly because TH told everyone to make a whole boatload of pre-nerf stuff. Wouldn't it make more sense to balance the combat professions and then see what needed to be done to crafting? If everything they did to combat didn't balance everything, they could always reduce the quality of crafted goods. Now they're going to have a huge disparity in weapons that will still skew the effectiveness of the "fix" that they're about to undertake on the combat side.
Vinaddar wrote:Traigus we still disagree on how "easy" we have it. As far as running out of good ingredients, I have--at least on 1 component. I have not seen any good liquid petro 4 ever and what decent stuff I had is gone. But aside from that, I cannot produce huge quantities of any enhance packs of good quality for lack of the ability to farm enough avian meat. My doc cannot and will not pay rangers to farm form me. The cost is simply too high to allow me to bother with buffing others if I have to go outside my own resources to make buff packs. This is a huge bone of contention with me because the argument that Avian is always available on most of the planets is simply not a realistic representation of the galaxy we each live in. Yes, most planets have avian up, but there is very seldom a truly good spawn on either Naboo or Yavin (the only 2 that offer even a chance for many of us to gather a good amount). Until they add more avian meat to the environment, we are seriously gated in our ability to gather enough of that resource to be able to produce large volumes. Notice we do not complain about herb meant. Why? Because there are plenty of large herbivores to hunt. Avian has no such equivalent to the Pickets and such we hunt for herb meat.
Regarding this Experimentation Change--
The Devs need to stop making excuses here about how hard the coding is and find another way to gate the specific items being made now that are concerning them. This current patch is their way of using a shotgun where a scalpel is needed. Not every item made by every crafter is overpowered, so go to the individual items and tweak them. I hate these broad, sweeping changes made to affect so many when it is specific changes to a few things that may be warranted.
If the changes go live as is, I know of many who will close shop--weapon smiths, armor smiths, architects, chefs, artisans, BE's, and us Docs. I am sure the rest of the community that posts here know of some who will do the same.
Thanks T , thanks Z, as always I (we) appreciate your efforts.
Vinaddar
Please note I said except creature harvested stuff in my post.
The people on servers that have had good non-animal spawns are routinely turning out 850+ packs, when they do get avian meat. There was a lot of worry when they let inorganic harvestersd have higher BERs that something like this would happen. Some peopel ahve insane amounts of said materials, that can last them until the next good spawn.. The uber guild especially are doing this =/.
A lot of people are angry on the content vs. fix issues (we have a new dungeon coming on TC).
A lot of stuff in the next few months may go over badly... some of them seem to be non-debateable. We'll have tio try them, and comment after actual use on live.
-T