Doctor Archive
Thread: Dev Response to November Top 5 (12/18/03)
Obviously Traigus and I have switched out the forum we are responsible for wading through, but since we started out the last Top 5 we figured it would be best to see them all the way through on our original professions. So consider this my last official act as the Doctor Correspondent. Here's the reponse to theTop 5 we sent in on 11/11/03.
[Edited: To include the full text of the issue. Issue color listed in white, Dev Response now listed in Gold.]
1. Medical Surveying
Docs seem to feel the need to survey for their own resources and dislike the need to use skill points in Artisan in order to do so. Let's face it, anyone getting into the Doc level had to craft to get there, so the SWG version of a focused Doc is, in fact, a crafting profession and they want the abilities to self subsist in that capacity in the same way as Artisans do.
Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so and that CMs have been given a basic scout skill in Terrain Negotiation, providing a partial form of /survey in the Doctor line would not too unreasonable according to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea put forth previously by the Dev team that Doctors could always just buy their resource needs. However, Docs have many very specific resource needs (Dantooine Berries, Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel, Avian Meat, Lokian Wild Wheat, etc.) that very few, if any, other professions, other than Medical Professions, truly need. Considering the prevalence of the Money issue for Docs, the market for surveyors to cater to the medic market is simply too small to be successful in comparison to what a surveyor could make catering to one of the artisan professions. In this way it could also be argued that rarely would Doctors be able to actually compete with Artisans on the resource market simply because their normal resource needs are not the needs of other professions. Worthwhile resources for any good medicines are just rarely found on the bazaar, unless that resource also overlaps with an artisan need, and then the price on such an item will be driven by the artisan ability to make far more profit on the item than the average medic pulls in.
Suggestions include providing survey only capabilities to increase with Organic Chemistry (the most common line for ALL of the Medical-based professions) or Pharmacology, much in the way it does for Artisan Surveying, but disallowing the sampling capability and perhaps with a smaller range. Others have noted that without some ability to sample (perhaps limiting Docs to only ever being able to sample 1 resource per sample tick, capping out resource samples so none are ever pulled up if there is more than our minimum, 8, or our maximum, I believe that’s 36, of a resources in inventory, or even just letting the survey tool show the resource values that only a Doc would use from those resources), to test the qualities of a resource if nothing else, the simple ability to survey alone wouldn’t be very useful. Suggestions have also included making the ability part of some kind of decayable survey tool made by artisans that let a Doc survey, ensuring a continued resource stream to artisans to compensate for those few Docs that try to make money as miners instead of as Docs. Or the use of a DE created resource seeker droid that might be able to locate a high concentration of a given resource within some given range and possibly provide either a single sample or at least some of the required stats for that resource, possibly even providing additional capabilities for those with the Artisan Survey skill.
For reference the following thread 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
*Dev Response:
We have reservations about implementing such a change. The Surveying skill is considered integral to the Artisan profession and skill point expenditure is a basic challenge in the game and all professions have to make such choices.
However we acknowledge that the Docs feel some kind of problem exists on a root issue for this matter. As such a continuing discussion will be ongoing to ensure proper determination of that root problem and to hopefully find a mutually beneficial solution to that issue.
2. 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:
We agree and we want to help. Below is a summary provided to us from the Doctor Correspondent of suggestions that we will be looking into and seeing which, if any, of these suggestions may be appropriate to enhance the benefits of achieving the Master level. We have been told that the lower on the list the more likely the suggestion is to be a bit more controversial and/or the less of a consensus there is and we wanted you to know we are aware of that. This is not a promise that we will be able to implement any of these suggestions at all, but we are looking at them and thank you for offering such wonderful suggestions.
·Immunity packs providing resistances or immunities to states, poisons and/or diseases for some given period of time or negating the first 1 or two applications of those states.
·Doctor-centered AoE cure packs for Poisons and Diseases.
·The /healmind command
·Novice scout level of /harvest
·Consolidated Wound packs (such as a Body Pack A that heals Health, Strength AND Stamina with one application, or one Master Wound Pack A that will provide heals to all physical wounds.)
·The ability to “sell” excess Healing or, likely more appropriate, Med Crafting XP for a pool of extra Experimentation Points, such as getting 1 extra EP that can be used in one crafting session for every 10,000 or 40,000 XP “sold back, or for some other purchasable special schematics or components. Similar to how Smugglers can sell FPs for credits.
·A “cure” for spice downer to eliminate or reduce the downtime from the condition.
·A “called shot” ability, since Docs should be great anatomists, providing a reduced chance to hit but providing increased damage and/or allowing a particular pool to be targeted no matter the weapon used.
·Advanced Ressing ability that allows a Master Doc, when Resuscitating, to reduce or remove the reduced stat downtime.
·Improved Bleed and/or /tendwound healing abilities.
·Special “Master Doctor Only” clothing (obviously made by Tailors and possibly with BE components) that provide stat boosts to the Mind stats.
·A cure for the On Fire state (listed here, although most folks think this ability should be available probably in the Medic levels.)
·Some for of /survey and possibly /sample ability. (Obviously this would tie into Issue #1 above, but limiting it further to only Master level whereas that issue is meant for more levels of Docs and/or Medical professionals.)
·Rebalance the Med Use levels of enhances so that secondary Enhance Ds (which come available at Master Doc) start off with a Master level Med Use level.
·Move Resuscitate to Master. (Pretty controversial)
3. Enhanced HAMs Sticking
Stuck HAMs on buffed players are proving especially annoying to many Doctor characters. Either the HAMs stick after being buffed so that the player cannot see when they are getting damage (Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, but less often), they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation)(Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, although it appears it can be worked around by disbanding from the group, running out to 100m away, running back and rejoining the group.), they stick for both the Doc and the player (Fixed?), or they simply do not scale properly so that the buffed bar simply goes out past the edge of the window and any damage sustained to that attribute is not seen until it gets below the point where it can be seen inside the window.
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16354
*Dev Response:
There are various fixes out there that have resolved some of these issues. We are aware of the problems involved and outlined for us by the Doctor Correspondent and we are looking into seeing what we can do to implement some fixes on the issue.
4. 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 will produce the same results (with less risk) as using as many points as possible. 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 on for experimentation needs to be made available.
*Dev Response:
The QA team is looking into the issues around experimentation to determine if there are any bugs in the code that need to be rectified. Outside of that we may also need to do a balance pass to ensure that experimentation is working to a proper degree.
5. 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
*Dev Response:
We are aware of the concerns surrounding this issue and are looking into it more closely.
Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-22-2003 09:42 AM
For commentary let me add that the #1 issue here is also pretty much one that cuts across all of the Medical professions, so I'll still be trying to see that one through on the Correspondent forum.
However, after some dicsussion with Traigus, I think that we should probably consolidate the Doct Harvesting issue back into this one and reword it. After all the core issue here is not so much Doctor Surveying, although that could be a possible solution, I think that the core issue is really just that we need some way to either be brought in line with the "true crafters", i.e. the Artisans, who we sare so much in common in relation to complexity of our schematics and rarity and speciicity of our resource requirements, OR brought more in line with the "hybrid crafters", such as Scouts, Rangers, Smugglers and Musicians, so that we have a better position to work from with less complex schematics and resource requirements. So I think our core issue here is not necessarily getting Survey abilities, it's having the method for taking care of our crafting abilities without undue, and unfun, burden on us.
I think that is more of the core issue that we really need to push and discuss with the Devs. I think it would be great to hear any other ideas folks have had for achieveing that, as well. (Although I feel pretty well up on those solutions it never hurts to see if folks have thought of some other ones.)
Totally not surprised that issue number 1 met with a fair amount of resistance with the Devs. Ah well.
Zarlor, you had a nice suggestion list in thereunder issue number 2. I sure hope some of those make it in, in a reasonable amount of time.
So, now that Thunderheart has produced a first round of Top 5 responses, do you get the feeling that he has managed to streamline the process somewhat, such thatthe next round can be produced in a more expeditious manner?
Thanks for you hard work here on the forums. Best of luck to you in your new roleas the Medic Correspondent.
H.
Im kinda wary of those responses. They seem to be saying "We will look into it" for every single one of them.
We waited what? 5, 6 weeks for this?
Now don't get me wrong. I am not blaiming anyone here. Zarlor ofcourse did awsome job. TH got the answer and Dev gave it to us. And we got what is there to give us.
I am not upset about that at all.
What I am upset if that THIS answer took over a month to get a clearance?
wow, I knew I was gonna be dissapointed no matter what after such a long wait but this is, that is, wow!
This can only mean we won't see any change for our profession for at least another 4 months.
They are going to be busy taking care of the DE and CHEF.
#1. Has been in the Doc #5 for how long? Weare not goingto do anything even thoughthis has been an issue for Docs months! COME ON! There are numerous suggestions on how this could be implemented, lets figure something out and do it.......This is just dumb at this point.
#2 We are looking into thisand may or may not do anything to make the title of Master Doc a worthy accomplishment.
I guess I am disappointed that none of our issues are truly being addressed.
Houdani: Streamlined? Yes and no. As Ilya pointed out this particular round took just over 5 weeks. The last two responses only took maybe a week (for us). The response before that actually never came at all (so call it 3 months of absolutely nothing.) The two fast responses we got I actually feel lucky about simply because our Dev was doing at least some responding on the Corre forum at the time. I know there have been some changes amongst the Dev responsibilities, though, and a few promotions and what not so I have no idea if our Dev at that time is still the same person. In all, though, we got lucky. Other professions were left in the dark. At least with this round TH is making sure ALL of the professions as well as the 3 areas Correspondents get a response to their Top 5, even if it's a "we'll look into it response.
So TH is at least beginning to create a standardized process for us to work from. Likely the whole Top 5 thing will change from it, in fact, because he felt that this one took so long.
Ilya: The only thing I can offer on this one is that the Devs were so hot and heavy, and I think under pressure, to get the vehicles patch out the door. I don't think professions were allowed to be a high enough priority to get more detailed responses. Hopefully that will change some on the next go around, but the whole process seem to be ever evolving.
It should also be taken into consideration that while some other professions had issues that would either require a full revamp of their profession (such as the combat system revamp) or were the kinds of bug fixes that are needed just to keep those professions going, we are in relatively good shape. Our number 1 issue is absolutely not something I think they could get implemented overnight. It's going to take some time and a good dialogue to make sure we are on the same page just on the root problem, then there's the added implementation of a good solid solution to that problem that will have to be considered and coded in. Most of our issues are pretty darned in-depth, really. Nothing that can be taken care of quickly or easily, I wouldn't think.
CLab2021: The Med Use levels suggestion for Master Doc is actually not particularly relevant now because it was, inadvertently, implemented after those suggestions were made. The fix to allow us to properly experiment on Ease of Use actually jumped the Med Use levels of Enhance packs back up to where they were supposed to have been to begin with, which actually put both primary (Health & Action) and Secondary Enhance Ds up into the 90s for Med Use level. They have stated (as seen in the separate thread on the Dev Response for Enhancements from Crates problem) they will do a balance pass on our Med Use levels, though, and I am hoping that will mean that only Secondary Ds will be in the 90s, while Primary Ds more reasonably belong in the 80s.
It should be noted that the lower on that list something is, the more controversial it is likely to be and I've let them know that so they can take it into consideration. Not that it mattered in this case, though, because it was part of a different issue.
chutz30: Why overwrite was not in this Top 5? Probably because a lot of people though it would be better to try and at least have a few fresh items in the Top 5. Overwrite has already been promised, so the only response we could get on that Issue would be "Like we said, we'll do that. How many time you gonna ask us?" Now voting it into the Top 5 does try to push an issue into the Devs face saying "We know you'll fix it, but it's REALLY important to us!", but it still won't change their response any.
As for the Artisan/Scout thing, it's really not that simple. It has more to do with how the Medical professions fall into the differences between "true crafters", as in Artisan professions, and "hybrid crafters", like scouts, rangers, smugglers and Musicians. Docs have the requirements of the Artisan professions when it comes to the things we do, but we are treated like a hybrid crafter in all other respects. It's an imbalance in game design that is keenly felt and definitely noticed by many in this profession. The Holocron grind has driving the price of resources so high now that it is even more of a problem for the Medical professions than it was before. There is a real issue here that is not so easily solved by constantly dropping and picking up another profession.
HighRoller3K wrote:
Im kinda wary of those responses. They seem to be saying "We will look into it" for every single one of them.
You caught that too? I didn't read any actual answer in there other than "We'll look into it" and a convoluted "We don't think so" about surveying...
Actually this was on our last one, too. They also responded taht they agreed we need stuff to make Master more intersting and they listed probably the top 4 or 5 of those suggestions as ones they liked. So as far as I can tell they will be looking to impliment something there, but considering ALL the work that really still needs to be done on so many other aspects of the game... we'' should it really be that high of a priority to code in some new bennies for Docs who already have a pretty good working professions? I'm sure they'll do it, but with all the problems wiht Flame DoTs and getting vehicles out and palyer city problems and BE problems and Chef problems and Squad Leader uslessness and so forth and so on, I'd say we really are in pretty darned good shape. I'm actually glad that this kind of stuff is all we have to worry about (other than some of thsoe really obnoxiously annoying Enhancement bugs... I wish those would get voted up higher.)
Cas_Lowca wrote:
#2 We are looking into thisand may or may not do anything to make the title of Master Doc a worthy accomplishment.
Zarlor wrote:The only thing I can offer on this one is that the Devs were so hot and heavy, and I think under pressure, to get the vehicles patch out the door. I don't think professions were allowed to be a high enough priority to get more detailed responses. Hopefully that will change some on the next go around, but the whole process seem to be ever evolving.
It should also be taken into consideration that while some other professions had issues that would either require a full revamp of their profession (such as the combat system revamp) or were the kinds of bug fixes that are needed just to keep those professions going, we are in relatively good shape. Our number 1 issue is absolutely not something I think they could get implemented overnight. It's going to take some time and a good dialogue to make sure we are on the same page just on the root problem, then there's the added implementation of a good solid solution to that problem that will have to be considered and coded in. Most of our issues are pretty darned in-depth, really. Nothing that can be taken care of quickly or easily, I wouldn't think.
I guess that makes sense. I wasn't upset about the content of response at all, I actually expected something similar to it although ofcourse I hoped for more. But if this is all the answers they have, then they aren't gonna make up fancy answer just for my reading pleasure.
What really kick my goat was that given the "bland" nature of their response, this took way too long. I guess as you pointed out that they are trying to get the system setup and going, to make things better in the future. And I guess last few weeks of vendor trouble, vehicle trouble, /citywarn trouble, etc, etc would take presidence over getting this back to us but hrmm... well I guess I am always wanting more.
Oh well it's not likely to change so I better get ready for the next one.(I am talking about me wanting more not changing, I am definately sure that SWG in general and Doctor profession in particular will change great deal even if I have to go over there and kick start the change. I am willing to do anyting! eat tons of ice cream, drink gallons of expensive wine, date supermodels, I will make this kind of sacrifice just to get some change implemented! I am that kind of guy!)
