Doctor Archive
Thread: Priorities ?
Okay, maybe I am biased - my master musician is a buff bot, only used to buff my main. But it seems the general focus is a bit to much on afk people and more fluff skills, when our incredibly usefull buffing ability gets so little attention, and is so buggy.
The first time each day, my buff usually works fine, doubling focus and willpower for 2 hours - that fits great to the time of my doctor buffs. After that, things get ugly.
Often, for some reason, thebuff just does not work - and i wont now before I stop listening after 8 minutes. Give me a message directly, like 'This person is buffed allready', so I dont waste time.
Of course, the main problem is why it fails - sometimes its a crash, removing the buff but not the timer. Sometimes its a death, maybe its a server down time. Whatever is causing it, its happening once or twice each day since I mastered musician, and I cant take it much longer.
There NEVER should be a state where I cannot buff but my stats are low - its simply not something I can accept from this game. I will probably cancel both my accounts if this is not at least acknowleged as a problem soon, and fixed with the next publish.
I just posted this on the musician forums - I think it applies in exactly the same way to doctor buffs, just replace musician with doctor:
Okay, maybe I am biased - my master musician is a buff bot, only used to buff my main. But it seems the general focus is a bit to much on afk people and more fluff skills, when our incredibly usefull buffing ability gets so little attention, and is so buggy.
The first time each day, my buff usually works fine, doubling focus and willpower for 2 hours - that fits great to the time of my doctor buffs. After that, things get ugly.
Often, for some reason, thebuff just does not work - and i wont now before I stop listening after 8 minutes. Give me a message directly, like 'This person is buffed allready', so I dont waste time.
Of course, the main problem is why it fails - sometimes its a crash, removing the buff but not the timer. Sometimes its a death, maybe its a server down time. Whatever is causing it, its happening once or twice each day since I mastered musician, and I cant take it much longer.
There NEVER should be a state where I cannot buff but my stats are low - its simply not something I can accept from this game. I will probably cancel both my accounts if this is not at least acknowleged as a problem soon, and fixed with the next publish.
On the Doc side It's long been acknowledged as a problem and, at least in the case of buffs dropping onlogoff (but with timer remaining intact not allowing you to buff again) it was fixed at one point in time, bt the bug crept back in.
It's currently the #5 issue on the bug list, but voting ends tomorrow so that position could change.
IHeh, I better read it more carefull again and vote on it.
I think you're doing a good job here - maybe to good, are you sure the devs dont simply give up seeing your long lists ? I actually think doctors are one of the best workingprofessions in SWG, we do not really have so many problems.
The devs have acknowledged to me, at least, that they didn't have time to implement an optimal set of messages for our buff before it went Live. My impression is that they intend to improve this at some point, but I don't know when. It's not on the list of improvements now on Test Center, and indeed I've tested the buff on TC and haven't seen any change. I have included this item in my State of Profession post, and the devs are quite aware that Musicians are unhappy about it.
That said, I haven't had the problem you describe. I will try buffing my alt (Ronny) with my main (Master Musician Ricky) several times in one day sometime this coming week -- maybe on Monday or Tuesday night. My alt is a BE and needs all the Willpower he can get. In the meantime, are you sure your listener is /listening before your musician starts playing and types /setperform? Does your listener have any buffs up?(That stat bug was supposedly fixed in the most recent patch; it used to be that listening to music with a Doc buff up was a recipe for stat disaster.)
On a side note, I'm just curious: weren't you SWG's first Jedi?
I actually had the chance to buff my alt three times in a row tonight, and it worked every time. I did it in a player cantina. I start playing; I have the listener /listen; the musician types /setperform with the listener as look-at (i.e., mouseclicked) target; the musician plays for 5-10 minutes; the listeners then must either (1) type /stoplisten, or (2) choose stop listen from radial. Walking away doesn't always work.
The only difference between my test and your experience is that I didn't have any doc buffs up. If I can find a doc to buff me, I'll try it again tomorrow night. It's plausible that the doc buffs are causing the problem; that was supposed to have been fixed in the recent patch, but that stat bug was so immense and nasty that it wouldn't shock me if it had lingering effects still.
I know how the buffs work - I get it to work once or twice each day, without problems directly after logging on. But sometimes they drop and cant be redone.
Today I died once- could rebuff fine.
I died the second time, cloned, and cannot buff now. Will have to sit out two hours and wait for them to run out, by then I have to go log out anyway. Another game day ruined by this bug.
Just so I'm clear, the problem is that your main can't receive buffs -- not that your Musician can't confer them, right? In other words, your Musician can buff all night long, but once your main dies or is interrupted by a crash, the buff timer is still up but the buff itself is gone.
I'll report this to the devs, but I also want to try to reproduce it myself. My setup is actually kind of like yours, except that my main is my Musician, and my alt is a Politician//BEwho gets free music buffs all day long.Because my BE doesn't do much dying, I haven't had the problem you describe; in fact, I don't think my BE has died once. I'm kind of reluctant to kill off my BE in the service of Corresponding because, well, he still enjoys the three newbie death exemptions (if those are still in the game). I suppose I could unplug my PC after receiving the buff, but I'm not wild about thatoptioneither. Any other way I could try reproducing it?
Is anyone else seeing this -- recipient of buff dies or crashes, and thereafter recipient can no longer be rebuffed? I think I'll post this question in SWG Discussion because it's really more a question for recipients than Musicians. We Musicians buff, the listener goes away, and we often have no idea how long the buff lasts.
OK, Monika,I've posted a general inquiry about problems like this on the SWG Discussion forum. The thread is at
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=902447
I'll also post something in the Correspondent Forum. Rest assured, the devs responsible for music do read my posts there, and I almost always get some sort of dev response. They've made some improvements to the buff over the past few weeks -- it was in much worse shape before the stat buff was (mostly) fixed. And I know they intend to improve it further. So don't give up yet.
No answer yet from the devs, but the Doctor Correspondent has told me that doc buffs very occasionally encounter the same bug. The recipient dies or crashes, the buff drops, but the buff timer fails to reset. Apparently this is pretty rare for doctors.
Anyway, I will continue to pester the devs about this until I get some sort of reply.
Just happened to me again: Got poisoned three or four times by a combat medic. He got killed by a rebel commando, but the poisons incapped me three times, so I died. I got rezzed, but buffs vanished. Can't be buffed right now, tried two times.
I've received a dev response about this. The devs are working on a fix, but it might not make it into the coming patch. I have the impression that the fix may be related to the coming changes to the HAM system, which have been pulled off Test Center for the time being while the devs tweak them. So a fix is coming, but as is often the case, it's going to take a little time.
I'll keep you posted if and whenI hear more.
It happened twice again, yesterday after a death, and this sunday after server down, I was buffed before, when it came back up I could not use my buffs.