Doctor Archive

Lifty & bcasey SInce that is a Bug, look on the BUgs list. You dont need to worry about 8 pages of posts, just the stuff stickied on the forum.

You can also find the Dev Response to that issue stickied on this forum as well.

So if you want to continue pushing that issue with the Devs I reccomend going to the Gugs List and voting for that Issue (and any others that may be important to you) there.

1. 3

2. 18

3. 13

4. 23

5. 10

6. 17

7. 2

8. 26

9. 16

10. 4

If it is at all possible, I would like to add/change my voting (it's on the first page)

it goes to

1. 31

2. 1

3. 2

4. 13

5. 10

6. 17

7. 28

8. 20

9. 23

(I bumped everything below #3 down, and added in issue 2 to the #3 spot)

Hope I don't cause too many headaches

1. 2

2. 1

3. 3

4. 4

5. 5

6. 31

7. 18

8. 7

9. 6

10. 13

1) 20.Accidental Cloning
2) 31.Mounted Healing

3) 13.Enhance Drop Notification

4) 16.Auto-Retaliate
5) 22.Power Selection for Factories/Harvesters
6) 32.Getting Docs Back Into Med Centers+

7) 12.Med Center Grouping
8) 10.Droid Low Power Notifications
9) 23.Droid Recharge Rate*
10) 29.Droid/Pet Change Concerns

[Edit: Added Dev Response to Issue #6]

Gameplay Issues

1.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 Medic 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.

2.Medic Content

There is concern that there is a lack of Medic 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. Other professions have mission terminals to facilitate some of this content and Medics are wondering where such terminals might be for them. Such missions could be construed as a method of alleviation of the issues concerning how Medics 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

3.Droid Recharge Rate

Droids seem to need to be recharged every 20 minutes. We’d like to see batteries lasting longer, at least an hour, but something like 2 hours would be far more appropriate (keeping it in line with the length of an Entertainer Buff, for example.) This would improve droid viability in the field without making it unduly cumbersome for Medic’s to use their droids. Another proposal for consideration would be to allow multiple charges to be stored in the droid, like putting quarters in a parking meter allowing it to last longer that way. Adding in the ability to see what the charge rate currently is on the droid would also be of great assistance.

4.Combat Queue Heals (or removal of) &

(Partial and To be Fixed)

There should be a graphic display of heals in combat queue OR complete removal of heals from being affected by the queue at all, just like posture change actions are now. The fact that heals actually queue up in the combat queue already confuses a large number of Medics. If they must be queued 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. 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

In response to the Combat Medic Top 5 issues on 12/19/03 Pahdbacca referenced the Medic Top 5 response (listed below).

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=18281

In response to our Top 5 issues on 12/20/03 Traigus reported the following response:
"We love this, but its very difficult (coding-wise). We don’t know if this can happen, but we will investigate."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=9053)

5.TEF Notification and Getting Kicked Out of Med Centers

Medics are requesting notification of when a TEF might be incurred to allow the Medic to NOT heal a character that would give them a TEF in a potentially deadly situation. 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 Medic 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. Providing either a visual indicator of when a potential patient has a TEF, or at least a pop-up box stating they are TEFed and asking if we want to heal them anyway (as long as we can also turn off the box in case we are in a situation where we just need to heal fast) are some possible solutions.

Requests have also been made suggesting that Med Centers be no-fighting zones. Perhaps Medics “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.]

In response to our Top 5 issues on 12/20/03 Traigus reported the following response:

"The Devs are currently monitoring the TEF issues across the whole game. Please report any TEF abnormalities using the in game /bug tool. A reminder that a player TEF flag has been added to the UI since this was written. Thanks Devs!"

It should also be noted that there are several other specific responses to some TEF situations which can be found at the referenced link below.

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=9053)

6.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.)

(*Dev Response:
On 12/22/03 KStarfire posted the following Dev response on the SWG Discussion forum:
“We agree. Which key is left that you think we should use. Please test any suggestion against all current configurations.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=971494)

7.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.

8.Droid Low Power Notifications

Droid “Low Power” messages are too obscure and difficult to read, often only appearing to pop up off of the droid itself or barely showing up in the communication box, which can be hard to read and especially difficult to notice if you aren’t looking at the droid or text box directly. This is causing a great deal of confusion and a lot of folks are thinking their druids are broken when they only need to be recharged. Better notification of the “Low Power” condition, instead of the standard, “You must be in a camp, blah, blah, blah, to do that” message is needed.

9.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.

10./diagnose Refresh

There have been requests for the /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.

11.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.”

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

12.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.)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-24-2003 12:07 PM

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-29-2003 02:03 PM

13.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.

14.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.

15.Target Self

The ability to target self when clicking on your own HAM bars or character, such as in a group, which would function in the same way as using Ctrl-1 would.

(*Dev Response:

In response to our Top 5 issues on 12/20/03 Traigus reported the following response:
“The issue here is with the ‘targeting box’ that would have to exist around the player, so we would have a place to click. This invisible box was in Beta, and people had trouble clicking on anything near themselves, without accidentally clicking on themselves.

The Devs pointed out that clicking on empty space in the world would functionally target ourselves, if we found the default hotkey item (CTRL-1) too cumbersome. This functionality can also be re-mapped to different keys then CTRL-1. It is also possible to use ‘self’ as an argument in’/ macros,’ such as ‘/healdamage self’ (without the quotes).

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=9053)

16.Med Center Grouping

Grouping for Medical classes in the Med Center has been brought up. The consideration would be that healers could group, in much the way Entertainers do, for minor healing gains and/or minor XP gains or even for simply lowering the variability of heals as many would simply prefer some greater consistency there. The suggestion for auto-splitting /tips was also brought up in conjunction with this idea, perhaps with a /tipsplit or /grouptip type of command for the patient to use.

(*Dev response:

Holo wrote on 8/29/03: “We agree with many of the issues you raise, but most of them are not easy to fix. We'd rather fix medical forage than remove it, for example. The group bonus isn't that easy to do. And so on.”

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443645#M443645)

17.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.

18.Droid Crafter Rating

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

19.TEF Documentation and Faction Healing (including Neutrals)

Better documentation is needed to explain the TEF healing problems. Many neutral Medics 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 Medics. 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 Medic to incur a TEF, even a stacking TEF, that they are notified of. So that if a Neutral Medic 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 Medics 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
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=25047

(*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”

In response to our Top 5 issues on 12/20/03 Traigus reported the following response:

"The Devs are currently monitoring the TEF issues across the whole game. Please report any TEF abnormalities using the in game /bug tool. A reminder that a player TEF flag has been added to the UI since this was written. Thanks Devs!"

It should also be noted that there are several other specific responses to some TEF situations which can be found at the referenced link below.

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=9053)

20.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.

For those interested in what we do know of the crafting formulae I need to fill out this paragraph to explain it better, but the Doctor FAQ (stickied at the top of the Doc Forum) does a decent job of it.

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

21.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 Medics 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.)

22.Droid/Pet Change Concerns

Droids and pets seem to be undergoing some considerations for major changes, particularly the single pet limitations. Many Medics use Droids in many situations and wanted to pass along some thoughts and ideas about the Droid and Pet changes being proposed as they affect the Medic (and Doctor) Profession. As the ideas are quite diverse I only wished to list the links rather than try to attempt to summarize them at this time. So please see the links below for all of the concerns and ideas being expressed.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17437
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18213

23.Title (No Title) is Not Sticking

If you set your title to (No Title) on the Character Tab of your Personal Information Sheet (Ctrl-P) it will reset on the very next login to the last title you had set instead of keeping no title.

24.Calling Medical Droids Anywhere

Some Medics would like some way to pull out their medical droids anywhere they are. As these are not, necessarily, combat droids it is felt that pulling them out anywhere would not be unbalancing since we don’t need them for stimming damage, only wound heals and crafting anyway. Some suggested methods of implementation would be to only allow such calling for the non-combat droid chassis, having some form of camp usable by Medics (or anyone, for that matter) only useful for calling droids or even having droids stay out all of the time (but pathing issues and other such problems would need to be fixed first and they’d likely need a lower chance of being attacked in combat than they seem to get now.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22860

25.B-level Schematic and Crafting Station Requirement Inconsistencies

The B level schematics appear to be inconsistent as to their need for a crafting station or not. Many Medics feel that some of the crafting confusion could be allayed by making all B-level schematics not require being by a crafting station in order to create them.

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-24-2003 12:07 PM

26./medicalForage Uselessness &

Beyond some slight convenience offered in being able to sample random organics from a planet anywhere to see their stats (a still time consuming effort that barely saves the time it would take for a Surveyor to get to a spot to get those stats for you) /medicalForage serves no really effective purpose.

For reference the following threads may be of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1540
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=5233
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14251
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21399

(*Dev Response:

Holo wrote in a thread on /medicalforage on 6/29/03:
“This here is a proposal to tackle JUST one aspect of that. It felt a bit like we got overwhelmed with the sheer number of ideas proposed for medics, so I want to present just two things (one of them based on suggestions from you guys during beta) so we can discuss them, before we move on to tackling other things.

OK, the first suggestion is this:

•Make medical foraging find small herbs/bacta globules/bugs/whatever (think: aloe and penicillin mold) that can be used to make medicines. Not resources, in other words. Because they are not resources, we do not need to worry about undercutting the surveyors and scouts.
•Make the A level stims and wound packs use ONLY these.
•Make higher level medicines use smaller amounts of these, so that profession interdependency increases as you go up.

This would make new medics trying to make medicines a lot better off, I think.

The second suggestion is based on beta tester ideas:

•Make tending use a small device. This device lasts a long time but does eventually break, and is made by artisans.
•Have it have charges.
•Each item that you can medical forage up gives it a charge.
•Take out the current wounding/battle fatigue effect of the /tend commands.

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=192&highlight=#M192

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:
…
•Investigate making /medicalforage more useful.”

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

Holo wrote on 8/29/03: “We agree with many of the issues you raise, but most of them are not easy to fix. We'd rather fix medical forage than remove it, for example. The group bonus isn't that easy to do. And so on.”

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443645#M443645

Ben “Marvelin” Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:
“I don't want to make it like sampling since I feel that undermines the artisan skill tree. If as a medic you want something that works just like sampling, you should grab novice artisan. So the trick is, that it needs to be different from sampling but not more efficient than sampling for the artisan (I don't want /medicalForage to become a staple skill for non-medics). If you have some suggestions pass them along.

You can tell the players that this is on the radar for a complete revamp. I'd love to hear their ideas given the restrictions that I outlined above.”

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“The SOE team is leaning towards adding a whole new set of items and such (medicines, components, and component enhancements) that can be yanked from the ground, sort of like scout, but with items specifically useful to medics. No final decision has been made, yet, but that's what they are considering at the moment.”

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

27.Medic Vision/Usefulness

Some medics feel they are not wanted in groups. With the ease of XP to get through medic, the proliferation of Doctors and Combat Medics make the people that stay only in the Medic profession feel a bit inferior. Since medics are a field profession (no ability to /register in a med center) people are concerned about their role in the game.

28./tend Command “Magic” Problem

The /tend and /quickheal commands seem to have too much of a “magic” feel to them for some players. They feel that removal or change to those commands to incorporate at least some form of component usage (perhaps linked to something attainable with /medicalForage) would help to alleviate the immersion-breaking aspect of using these commands.

(*Dev Response:
Holo wrote in a thread on /medicalForage on 6/29/03:
“
•Make tending use a small device. This device lasts a long time but does eventually break, and is made by artisans.
•Have it have charges.
•Each item that you can medical forage up gives it a charge.
•Take out the current wounding/battle fatigue effect of the /tend commands.”

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=192&highlight=#M192)

1. 1


2. 4


3. 2


4. 3


5. 5


6. 6


7. 8


8. 9


9. 18


10. 20

1. 4

2. 3

3. 12

4. 26

5. 21

6. 15

7. 6

8. 1

9. 10

10. 2

Nice work, Zarlor! Fingers tired yet?

1. 9 Heal Targeting Persistence


2. 21 Factory Identical Components


3. 26 /medicalForage Uselessness &


4. 11 General Inventory Search for Meds


5. 10 /diagnose Refresh


6. 14Power Selection for Factories/Harvesters


7. 20 Crafting Schematics Clarification and Documentation


8. 23 Title (No Title) is Not Sticking


9. 5 TEF Notification and Getting Kicked Out of Med Centers


10. 27Medic Vision/Usefulness


11. 3 Droid Recharge Rate


12. 16 Med Center Grouping


13. 6 Target Friendlies


14. 7 Auto-Retaliate


15. 18Droid Crafter Rating

1) 4

2) 18

3) 26

4) 2

5) 17

6) 6

7) 13

8) 8

9) 7