Doctor Archive

All of this is a non issue as we never impact their decision making - nothing we vent voice or scream matters one single little bit to the development team... they make their decisions outside what we want - god knows we dont know whats fun or desirable in a game,they know whatsbest for us - well they are not gods - they spend alot of time acting as if what we say means nothings and what we ask for is ridiculous or out of whack with the this mysterious plan they choose not to share with anyone... but most of the time I feel at odds with the development team and their NERF AT ALL COSTS and asses the damage later ... I see alot of threads that all basically the say the same thing - yet for the large part most of it is ignored and left to dryrot on the desert of these pages.... its sad too the mechanics of the game are steadily getting worse - not better - the balance is growing less central not more.... TKA ? wow theres a class for ya that needs a 2x4 in the knees - but I digress ... my personall favorite was the week that started on monday with q3p0 posting that NO WAY NO HOW would SWG be an UBER loot game - NEVER ! would they let this happen ... it wasnt in the plan --- thats not how the game was setup and so on and so forth -- Wednesday opened with the announcement of holocrons. ... yes holocrons and the madness has steadily marched forward --- same with the logic of restircting all but 3k auctions to everyone except merchants - talk about choking an economy designed to function entirely on the crafting community. Thats forcing specialization on specialization - I for one would allow as many people as possible to trade on the bazaar.Many many people trade on ebay and make alot of money doing it and they dont have marketing degrees or even 2 college credit hours in business or accounting or sales. Thats not stopping them and it should not stop us... Merchants should be shop keeps - not some higher class of access to a public vending terminal --- wow Im off topic but- this is a good example of cart before the horse thinking... when faced with this - what do they do ? They take color away from crafters to make the merchants more secure ? what the hell is that ? HELLO McFLY ?

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Kaledos wrote:

That being said... If I were to find a simular problem with code I was working with, and after fixing it, found that the values output were very different than what had been coming out in the past. I would have to check how well the old values worked.

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Actually I think that is where the problem came in. IMHO, these guys are pretty short-staffed so they never noticed that the output was wrong to begin with. Then when they fixed it they probably didn't look at the output then, either, or if they did it looked right to them because that is what they were expecting it to look like in the first place, never ralizing that tey had let the wrong output go to live to begin with. The question is whether this one little section of the game would have warrented that much scrutiny to check those variables to begin with, and considering ALL of the borked up stiff that inevitably ends up in so much gaming code no matter who makes it... Well, it's not like they are making missile guidance system or working for NASA here.

It's easy to find the problem if you have the manhours to find the problems. I think the real problem here is one that plagues most every MMORPG (actually the entire gaming industry, IMHO) in that there is just too much code and not enough manhours to handle it and a very strong pressure to get code out. In other words, it's likely a management issue. Always has been.

As for working on new content and less on bug fixes, the sad but true fact of the situation is that a MMOG lives or dies by new content more than by bug fixes. A management decision has to be made to how much programmer time will be alloted to working on fixes for existing code to hopefully keep the current customers happy and how much will be spent on new content to both keep current customers interested as well as attract new customers. I don't think they have the manhours available to them to simply do both as quickly or as efficiently as all of us would like. It's true for every MMOG I've ever known. (Heck you can find entire collegiate dissertations and books about this very thing.)

In other words how many people will they lose because of a problem like this compared to how many they will lose AND gain by putting in player cities, mounts and vehicles. It's trying to find the right balance there, the compromise point, that management has to constantly weigh, And that is where the stuff we say on these forums (and especially stuff I pass on, one would hope) helps to weigh in on our position in that never-ending time management battle.

Lumache: You always post in threes?

Galliaon: Yeah, the Devs said that the Med Use on Ds full range is 70-100, so I would expect you would see a 100 on crit fail (just like before the change you would have seen a crit fail get you a 70 whereas now you'd need top-notch resources and full experimentation to get it to 70. I.E. you'd have to fill out that experimentation bar all the way to 100% and then you'd see a 70 show up.)

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Zarlor wrote:

As for never getting to 70, according to my understanding that should be complete hogwash. Have you tried using 1000 OQ/PE/UT/DR/MAL resources to make an enhance pack yet? THen tried to only experiment on Med Use?

Yeah, it would make a pretty powerless enhance, but it should be achievable because the formula that allowed us to have that low of a Med Use is the same one that was there before, just reversed.

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Welp I did more testing.

I tried to use best stuff I can but it's been lean lately so I think I only got to about 800/1000

I only concentrated on Overall Quality & Potential Energy since both effectiveness & ease of use use 2/3 OQ & 1/3 PE

I made 5 not counting any that had failiure of anykind I tried 3 with 2 block at a time and twice with 1 block at a time. Picked the best result out of them.

Adv. Bio (21 Power / 14 Charge)

Adv. Chem (66 P)

Adv. Solid (56 P)

Avian (826 OQ/363 PE)

Gas (946 OQ/346 PE)

Here is the results.

Enhanced Health D

Base : 21 charge, 323 buff, 94 Med use

Experiment all on buff then rest on med use best of 5(all great success result)

725 buff / 90 med use / 21 charge

Experimented all on med use rest on buff again best of 5 (all great success result)

430 Buff / 78 med use / 21 charge

And here is Enhanced Health C

Experimentd all on buff rest on charge best of 5

441 buff / 76 med use / 23 charge

And here is the stat before the "fix" (made with almost identical components except little worse adv. chem)

710 Buff / 72 med use / 22 charge

yea, they said half the people were let go after Beta was over so they are really short staffed. As of July, they said they were looking to hire more people because they were caught under staffed. Not sure if they actually hired more people.

That's poor management there to let all the people go after release when they knew full well that this game was still 6 months away from being released. If this game was released next week with Vehicles,Mounts,PCities, you wouldn't have seen half of the 300,000 subscriber canceled or bored to death or wanting to kill this game

I'm quite happy with where enhance pack Ds fall now. With my resources, I usually end up with a 94 med use rating. A quick 2 point experiment on ease of use, and its usable by doctor's knowledge 4. So, I can sell to dabblers (just as I do with stim Ds in medic), or I can make them even more powerful for my own personal use. Added to my bonuses for being Master Doctor it can sometimes make quite a difference and makes me the more preferable choice when soliciting buffs.

BTW. the absolute BASE for enhance Ds is 100. a critical failure on ease of use will show you (much to my horror).

Wait. You have 3 wives?

Shh I cant afford anymore !

Whe you do everything in threes - you tend to end up with three wives - but the one I have is enough work for three men let me tell you -

And in keeping with tradition-

Lumache: You always post in threes?

I thought all men did everything in threes ? Thats why my wife is so nice to me ? you mean you guys dont... uhm .. well ok ... nvm *blush*

"my personall favorite was the week that started on monday with q3p0 posting that NO WAY NO HOW would SWG be an UBER loot game - NEVER ! would they let this happen ... it wasnt in the plan --- thats not how the game was setup and so on and so forth -- Wednesday opened with the announcement of holocrons. ... yes holocrons and the madness has steadily marched forward"

So true! lol

Zarlor,

Thanks for your patience with the community. It's good to see someone is reading the posts.

That said, I'd like to offerfour (count 'em)solutions to this problem.

The med use is obviously stored in the crate's labelling string. It should be possible to parse out the med use value and apply it to items created from the crate. Yes, this is a band-aid, but it would fix the problem and make a lot of the customer base VERY happy and NOT leave the game and stop paying money.

If this is unpalatable, then another solution is to write a script to search the database and fix the med use modifier on crates that have a label with a modifier in the 70's. It's even okay to set this to a "maximum experimented med use" value, since the range is 70-100.

If they cannot spare the dev cycles todo either of the abovefixes, an alternativeis to provide an avenue for CSRs to easily hand fix a customer's crate. Again, this just involves changing the med use modifier to the max if the CSR sees the med use on the crate is in the 70's.

The final solution if neither of the three above is chosen, is toannounce a code revert week. There is afinite number of existing bad crates, so if players havea chance to remove items correctly,the bad crates will no longer exist. Now, the important thing to remember when doing this is to list this fix in the patch changes notice. That way,anybody logging in will be aware and can take action. The downside to this is that some players will run out of room in their houses... but we can live with this if we must.

There! Four perfectly good solutions to the problem. Now let's go solve this and make the customers happy, mmmkay?

Finally,it would be nice to know if the devs are going to fixold enhancement crates or if they are giving up on this problem entirely. I, for one, would like to know if I should be deleting all my old inventory that I spent a great deal of time and money creating. It's taking up my house storage space if it is garbage. On the other hand, if I destroy it all and they go and fix it... well you can imagine how I would feel. Bottom line iswe would all like to know for sure.