Doctor Archive
Thread: Doctor Correspondece 7/25/03
Listed below, for those who may be intersted, is the first email I sent to the Devs as the Doctor Correspondent. Those of you who already read the Big List won't find any surprises or real changes here beyond very minor ones. Once again these are what appeared, to me, to be the top 5 issues that Doctors here on these forums, several other forums and through personal discussions with other Doctor characters appear to have brought up the most often. This is not MY top 5 issues list (i'd only put one or 2 of these in my personal top 5) but what folks out there seem to be discussing most.
We'll see what kind of response we get and if I receive a personal response, instead of having he Devs post here publically, and they do not otherwise forbid me from disclosing sucn an email (I can't see why they would do that) then I will post that here as well. I fully expect that if there is any response at all, it will be directly to these forums for all of us to see. So without further aso, here is the Top 5 Dictor Issues.
Here's the top 5 list of issues I was able to cull from those most interested in the Doctor profession, at large.
1) Factories, more often then not, do not pull subcomponents from crates in Factory production. CSR response is simply that we will need to pull the items one by one from the crates in order to get the factories to work corrently. Apparently not everyone is having this problem, but it is proving to be probably the most frustrating concern amongst Doctors at this time. For more information you may wish to reference the following threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1201
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1224
2) Mind damage appears to be a major concern amongst both Medics and Doctors. It seems to be a fairly major issue discussed in multiple threads on multiple boards out there in the community and perhaps part of the problem is simple frustration in being the person everyone is counting on to keep them going when you can only watch helplessly as someone's mind is being damaged and there is nothing you can do. Suggestions have ranged from leave it as is, since it is a balancing factor to keep combats from being too long to either letting Doctors or Advanced Medics (or Combat Medics, even) heal mind at a 1:1 rate or possibly better (although most admit that healing at a better ratio would be fairly exploitable since a medic could then stim their mind faster than they would lose it) or even giving mind stimming ability to Entertainers or Chefs or as a form of /rally command for Squad Leaders. One of the more popular suggestions is to simply reduce the amount of damage given with mind hits, or reduce their frequency.
While there may not be a consensus on the issue there does seem to be a HUGE amountof interest and concern on the topic and I am sure the community would at least like to get some feedback and or considerations from the Dev team on what they see as the balancing factors between mind damage, healing mind damage and perceived problem with nerfing the Rifleman profession.
I would suggest referencing the following threads to get the majority of the viewpoints involved, but should a tighter synopsis of these threads and their suggestions be needed, please don't hesitate to ask me for one. (I know, one of these is from the Medic forum, but there are a lot of Docs piping in on the issue, and one is from an outside forum that sees a good deal of traffic and interested from the Doctor community.)
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1299
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=785
http://dynamic6.gamespy.com/~swgcraft/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1315
3) Money. This topic comes up very frequently on the Medic threads, but just as frequently, if not more so, on the Doctor forums. There is a lot of concern about how a focused medical character should be able to make money. By this I mean that we are talking about a character who's primary skills and interests are in the healing arts (which would include crafting of meds) and not, necessarily, combat. The self-sufficiency of the profession does not really exist except in a few small methods, of which the primary one for making money IN the profession would be production and sales of Small Stimpack Bs. There is a much smaller niche market for medical resources and components, but most Doctors seem to feel that resource gathering and sales, while obviously an integral part of the Doctor profession, is more of the realm of the artisan and such sales would be, in effect, making money as an Artisan, and not as a Doctor.
The other methods of making money seem to be far less reliable, or are not well supported by the game. Primarily, for those interested in providing services such as Healing or Enhancing, there is no secure method of trade to ensure that the Doctor is paid for their service while also ensuring that the customer gets the service they are requesting. Suggestions have included some form of secure trade window, like is done for normal trading, having a Doctors healing actually use packs that the customer has on their person, instead of the ones on the Doctor (and thereby the Doctor could sell the medicine to the player and then heal him with those), lowering the Med Use requirements on some medicines such that anyone could use them, thereby opening the market for more pharmaceutical products that Doctors could then sell. Having the Med Center charge patients some kind of fee assessed on the amount of wounds they have or money they have available and splitting that amongst the healers. Or even just providing healer in the Med Center with some kind of game produced icome while there. Again there is no true consensus on the issue other than that most of the Medic classes tend to rely on other methods of subsistence and take time doing those things that they may not be interested in (the usual, delivery/destroy missions, for example.) The issue is an important one amongst the player base and receives a lot of attention on the forums and in-game from many of the medics and Doctors I have spoken with.
4) 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, they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation) 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.
5) Enhance buffs are being lost when crossing zones yet the enhance timer remains active, as if player still were buffed. This one is proving to be of exceptional difficulty, especially for higher level Doctors who have longer Buff times. once a character crosses a zonal boundary, such as leaving the city, the buff wears of instantly far sooner that it normally should have, yet the timer on that original buff is still active meaning that the Doctor cannot reapply the buff. For a character buffed at the edge of a zonal boundary and just crossing it, that could mean a 45min, or longer, wait before they can be properly buffed again. Same situation if a player clones, the timer will be active, but they will no longer be benefiting from the buff.
aso? Dictor?
hehe ^_^
Dangit, Peko!
That's what I get for trying to type too darned fast. Ado , ado! 
What can I say. My hand-eye coordination sucks, as does, apparently, my error-checking skills.
Good work Z,
I was sooooo dissapointed to see 0 fixes incoming in the big upcoming patch. They absolutely need to fix the duration of the enhance buffs, this is killing us.
Well, we did have some fixes that came in that were relavent to about 6 items on the big list. None of them addressed what folks are talking about most as our top 4 issues. I'd have to check back on my big list thread, but I think the highest was #9. Personally I think some of the things they fixed would have been in my personal top 5, like /diagnose, but still. It sould easily be that out what are top priorities for a seeming majority of Docs out there jsut weren't what the Devs thought our top priorities were. (Some of these were top priorities in Beta, like /diagnose, so they may have been working with that list, for example.)
At any rate, I'm with all of you guys in hoping that at least wtih this correspondence thing we may have a littel bit better way of making our issues known. Who knows, they may even slide us a bone in this next patch that isn't in the current patch notes. If not, I guess we'll just have to wait another month to see.
2) I still think an ability with a reasonable timer given to Master advanced medic professions to heal mind would be an optimal solution. A 2-5 minute timer on a mind heal would make the medic decide between targets(including him/herself) as the recipient of the heal. It wouldn't be 'exploitable' at all even, in the sense that medics can't just heal up their mind on a whim.
4) I no longer experience "stuck HAM" after using buffs; stats appear to be displaying perfectly now. The generic out-of-the-blue stuck HAM is still an issue though.
5) After a lot of play time using buffs in groups I believe the problem with the enhance buffs is this: if the Enhances on a player are caused to expire prematurely in any way, like zoining, dying or being "revived" from the /healwound bug, the game will still leave the timer on the player. The timer will remain for the duration of the Enhance as if the buff never dropped. Once the time comes when the non-existent buff would expire normally, the player will be buffable again. On a side note, when buffs expire regularly, it causes "permanent" stat loss to Willpower...reducing it to 50 or so. Eating food will correct the stat loss but it's still annoying. I haven't looked into which buff exactly causes this problem yet.
Something that hasn't been addressed much on the forums is the issue with variance and how it affects ALL medicine use. Right now there is something like 60% variance on both beneficial and detrimental meds. Not sure about other people but it is quite irritating to buff someone for 2.5k action, then the next person for 1.1k action, then the next for 1.7k action, etc...especially since I just can't "try again" and overwrite the inferior buff. For poisons and diseases(a combat medic issue, I know), my attacks would tick for 800 one application, then 400 the next...it's very annoying. As medics a big part of our jobs depend on consistency and this whacky variance thing is annoying as heck.
Well I screwed up and sent the wrong email to the Devs at first. I've corrected that first thing this morning, though, so the list above did, finally, get sent in.
The response we've had so far was the same I have seen other correspondants showing which was:
[quote]
Thanks! I'll get this to the Dev Team. It may take us a little while to respond as the Correspondent program is pretty new.
~Kevin "Q-3PO" O'Hara
Community Relations Manager
Star Wars Galaxies
Sony Online Entertainment
[/quote]