Doctor Archive

Without respecting the balance of power and interdependence of theprofessions we will be making it hard for the devs to give us anything. For example healing while mounted would greatly increase the power and importance of doctorsand it would reduce the abilities of fighters to kill. And getting the ability to survey for our resources would remove the dependance resource sellers have for us as customers.Demand and prices are toohigh. Demand is artificially high because there is no where in the game where a seller can advertise to more than afew buyers at a time. There is no place a buyer can go tosee who may havemore than a handful of units, much less compare prices. The Trade Forum doesn't really work.It is not part of the game andit can'tsupply items that have to be commonly sold. It can't be organized enough to deal with the amount of transfers necessary with ease and quickness.All common items for sale at prices higher than the Bazaar maximums suffer from these problems.Maybe surveyors could sell some location coordinates in the Bazaar? Maybe what we need is a second bazaar for Masters?

Hard to know what to put here

I assume we should not reiterate the items in this thread

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22459

Since this is not the vote.

Are those items in that list which are not corrected assumed to be on the next top 5 vote?

1. The quickheal ability uses mind pool and causes wounds to the doctor even if the target does not have any damage (only happens when they have an enhancement -- not necessarily Health or Action, any enhancement, ie. could just be Quickness).

2. The cure poison and cure disease packs do not have an effectiveness rating once produced (I saw some C's for sale which did, but my B's and A's did not -- although they were produced pre-pub7, so I'm not sure if this is already addressed).

3. Player faction buildings do not givebonus aspublish 3 patch notes stated (see PVP and GCW section under http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/recent_updates.jsp?o=60890).

4. Examine window should list current enhancements and time remaining (this taken from another thread, not my idea).

Message Edited by Kamlan on 03-19-2004 06:01 PM

Greetings,

I find myself nearly in total agreement with Wolfbane:

We should not in any way tamper with our dependancyupon other professions. If we want to see any kind of balance it needs to start somewhere, and as I see it, the Doctor profession while not perfect, seems to be the least broken.

I have been in the Medical profession since I created my character, and have played ONLY this character, EVER.

Right now there are some issues that should be addressed, some are more severe than others.

From the viewpoint of a coder, the changes required to remedy a number of our most pressing concerns would seem to be somewhat minor compared to the more drastic re-writing that would be required to fix some of the issues I've read in other profession forums.

One would think that if these changes are soo minor, why have they not fixed them to get them out of the way?

It depends on your style of problem solving. There are generally two approaches to solving coding issues:

Correct the easiest issues first; devoting full attention to the more difficult problems inascending order based on complexity.

or

Correct the more complex items first (usually the most pressing or game breaking) and work your way down to the simpler ones.

Personally, I follow the latter. I prefer to do the hardest part first, then work my way down squishing the tiny leftover bits once the big ones have been neutralized.

It is for this reason that when seen from the perspective of a coder, our profession seems to be littered with numerous tiny "tweaks", rather than large ponderous chunks of code that may, or may not break something else when you try to fix it.

Basically, it's either go swat at those gnats buzzing around the Doctors, or try and kill off those "Starship Troopers" sized bugs that have a habit of gnawing the limbs off our Droid Engineers....

This latest publish (7) seems to have made some progress in this area, and perhaps with a bit more patience, we may find that with some of the larger issues out of the way, the tweaks and bug-fixes may start gaining momentum.

To get back on topic, prioritising our most grievous issues would certainly go a long way to help make sure that no momentum is lost when they get to us. Looking at them from a coding point-of-view, here is how I perceive the issues mentioned in this thread thus far:

In order of complexity or gross galaxy affecting ramifications:

#1: Resource shifts. Yes, I agree, it sucks that for nearly an entire month Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel did not exist in the Valcyn (and perhaps other) galaxy(ies). However, this has an added effect on our player based economy. Those who make a living doing resource management would clearly benefit (and many did) from targetting those rare resources used almost exclusively by physicians. As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfectly viable and acceptable business practice. Just because it sucks to be us, does not mean we have to beg for it to be changed so that it sucks to be them....

#2: "It would be unwise to help such a patient." This has got to be the single most frustrating message in existance for us.

I am a Doctor. I am also neutral. I intentionally do not take part in the Galactic Civil War, because at the moment, I do not favor either side. I have friends on both sides, and I do not play favorites. If I'm in my Medical center, it is not my concern that you were just blasting Rebels, or Storm Troopers. My concern is that there is an injured person in front of me, and for no rational reason, I cannot help them. If you want to penalise me for helping one side or the other, fine. But let ME make that decision, and take the risk of someone from either side taking offense at me doing what I was trained to do. It was my understanding that this was supposed to be already implemented, but it has been my experience that this is not the case.

#3: Consent. I have often received emergency requests for medical assistance by groups in extremely volatile situations. If I am close enough, and able to respond, I usually do so immediately, dropping whatever I'm doing, pulling out the Swoop and heading for the coordinates of the medical emergency. It is extremely frustrating to show up at Fort Tusken after responding to a tell asking for a rez, knowing that I have to get to the patient ALIVE before the time limit expires, only to receive the message that I must either be in their group, or consented. Wait for the person to finnally consent me, only to find that it's too late. I like the idea of a pop-up consent request. I also favor the idea of having some optionalparameters in our configuration to filter and allow certain professions/PA members/Individuals giving auto-consent under player specified parameters. But thats a chunk of code right there.

#4: Dragging.I believe this issue is likely closely related to issue #2 from a coding standpoint.

#5: Medical center and Registration. It was my understanding there there was in fact a bonus applies to your abilities when you were registered with a location. If this is not the case, I highly reccommend it, otherwise I would have to agree with the standpoint that a Medical center and Cantina are interchangeable. I reccommend either enforcing the same restraints on player buildings in general, as on established world buildings, or give incentive to use one over the other.

My time is running short as I'm at work right now, but I hope I managed to contribute somewhat amidst my tangent riddled semi-rant.

1. Cloning with a full stomach. I usually die due to loss of mind often because I'm too full to drink anymore blue milk or mindbuffing food. Although I'm getting better about managing food it's still very frustrating to be killed, clone, ride back out to the fight and still can't eat or drink anything else because I'm too full. A new clone should not have a full stomach.

2. Need some sort of bonus or incentive to use medcenters. It's just absurd that the best way to do anything is with a droid. The bonus if registered that's been mentioned might be a good idea. Although I don't think many players are aware of howthe registrationsystem works and I don't think it works correctly anyway. I used to check the map to see if there were prospective patients in the med center whenever I came into town but stopped because it started counting NPCs in the med center as well as PCs. Anything that would move people into medcenters and reduce some of the clutter around starports would be great.

3. Multistate cures would be nice, possibly as a master doctor item. Depending on the situation some states are worth removing and some aren't. For awhile I kept all 4 state packs on my toolbar so I could pick and choose but I just don't have the room and now use the healstate button. Unfortunately, this means I lose control of what state I'm healing and in some cases a player picks up another state while waiting for my heal to make it through the que and I end up healing the new state rather than the one I intended.

4.Realign the meduse requirements. I believe stim As were originally intended to be used by anyone but it makes no sense that As and Bs have the same med use requirements considering the difference in strength. Bumping Bs up to med use 10 or 20 would make a lot more sense. Although this may be more of a medic issue and a doctor issue.

5. Surveying. Although I recognize the need to balance the professions it's sometimes hard to find people looking for the same things we are. Most resource gathers seem to focus on poor quality stuff for grinders or things that are used in real large quantities. I've resorted to medicalforage to test for decent organics and when I find one I get an artisan to track it down for me but it's a real hit or miss proposition and I have no way of checking for decent inorganics or knowing when those rare inorganics do spawn. I just don't use enough resources to make it worthwhile for someone to put the effort into tracking that stuff for me. I would like to see some sort of limited survey ability granted at novice doctor. I've kept scout for terrain negotiation as well as harvesting so I can get to people in a fight so I can still collect animal resources but using another 15 skill points just to be able to survey is too much.