Doctor Archive

Please, to those of you needing medical xp to comeplete the doctor tree, don't buff without asking first!

I'm a master doctor but I'm considering master commando (cuz my holo told me too) so I need massive amounts of unarmed xp in order to get novice commando. Since I've only been a healer and pretty much suck at combat, I've been achieving the combat xp necessary through my own buffs. So there I sit, in the Coronet Medical Center with my Master Doctor tag up buffing myself. Someone asks to buy a buff and I comply. Someone else comes in with Master Surgeon title showing and buffs me, without asking, a whopping 349 on my health bar. Major, major inconvenience. When I point out to this Einstein that I'm a master doctor and I don't need his buffs he gets an attitude whining about needing xp. I just hope he asks me for training when he gets all his xp so I can say NO.

The morale of this story, if you need xp for the Doctor tree, ask before you buff.

/rantoff

i absolutely agree. my customers know and like my buffs. and it's dissapointing and annoying when they're getting geared up for an evening of pvp or a nice hunt and i have to tell them that some shmuck in the med center stealth buffed them.

i'd like to see people have to be grouped with you or give you consent (like a res) for you to buff them. image designers have to get permission, so why souldn't buffing be the same?

---

Glasi wrote:
i absolutely agree. my customers know and like my buffs. and it's dissapointing and annoying when they're getting geared up for an evening of pvp or a nice hunt and i have to tell them that some shmuck in the med center stealth buffed them.

i'd like to see people have to be grouped with you or give you consent (like a res) for you to buff them. image designers have to get permission, so why souldn't buffing be the same?

---

Where's our correspondant? This is genius, and not the first time it's been mentioned either... consent to buff, it needs to happen with the current way buffs work. I always explain to docs who buff me out of the blue, saying it's rude and someone might not have wanted it. When I had it, I would throw up my Master Doc tag after they buffed without asking and tell them that sometimes someone might not want a buff from a Novice Doc and they should ask first [respectfully said of course, but to the point].

(waves).

For every person wanting group only buffs, there are people that don't want it .

Overall, it would stop all the buff grief, and stealth buffing.

I'd rather see overwriting of buffs by higher buffs if we were to get 1 thing to fix this issue though.. We'd get more distance / general use out of it, in addition to fixing the problem.

-T

Its not only those that do it on purpose, but I have done on accident before. When I was working my way up the doctor tree I would buff myself in the medcenter if I was going to go hunting or whatever. Well someone new walked into the medcenter and I clicked on them to check to see if there wounds need healed and totally forgot to click off of them to buff myself and bam - weenie buff on a commando with a master doc friend. Needless to say they weren't too happy. It is a bad situation.

Ode - Master Doctor

(waves back)

Understandable if it's a mistake [regarding the last post], but most times it's not. And most people will understand if it is, I would anyways, so no problem there.

As to the people that wouldn't want to go with the group only buffing... it's already there for training people in skills, something every single character has to do eventually and as such it makes no sense why we shouldn't be able to enforce a similar standard for buffs. I can't see any feasible reason why this shouldn't work.

If we could overwrite buffs, that'd be quite nice, but there might be some med xp problems with that, as in making it too easy to get it. Not like it's easy enough as it is, allowing buff overwriting would allow someone to buff with an A and get the xp from that, and then buff with a B and then a C if they are that far along. Perhaps make it so only the first buff will give xp? And buffing over another buff will just give the new value and no XP at all... could use the existing subsystem for determining if the stat already has a buff on it.

Well, I'm not sure if all I've said really made sense, I'm kinda preoccupied and tired, but oh well. *tosses in his 2 creds*

If it went in, only getting XP for the difference in change would be the best choice IMO. They new stats screen seems to allow Devs to separate buffs and encumbrance from the stat itself.


I start w/ 900 health

+A pack for 150 (doc gets XP for a 150pt. buff).

+D pack for 1500 (2nd doc gets 1350 [1500 - 150= 1450] buff points to calculate XP).


If I put the A pack on myself, I get no XP for self buffing, but the guy w/ the D pack still loses the 150 pts. worth of stat point calculated buffing XP.


This makes trying for a "perfect buff" not cost effective... (buffing over and over to get 3000 from 2500 would use a lot of Cr. worth of packs) but allows the player to get rid of low buffs.

Because of material costs, Docs that price based on points gained, would probably charge by total buff, no matter what buff existed before, unless they were writing over their own low buff.

Again, that's how I would do it.

Making buffs group-only, is probably easier to code. :/

-T

Also, a system already exists for consensual buffing, for musicians and dancers. It suffers from the opposite pronlem to doc buffing, in that you have to be out of group, but at least the buffer has to /setperform (choose to buff the buffee) and the buffee has to /watch or /listen to receive it. I haven't had a problem receiving entertainer buffs using their method.

I'm not saying that for one minute this is a perfect system, or that it would be easy to reuse the entertainer buff code for docs, but it might be nice to get some parity across the buffing mechanism.

I would much rather have them slap the existingconsent/group system for the resuscitate code on the front of the buff code than risk them writing totally new overwriting code for buffs.

How would the game remember that an A buff pack had been used, and that your D is able to overwrite it? AFAIK right now the game just records the amount buffed and the time it lasts. That's more new code, and we all know where that leads... more bugs. If they just slap the existing resuscitate consent/group code on the front of the buff code we have a solution to the ninja-buffers and hopefully minimal new bugs.

Ruda, Master Doctor, Naritus

I would just add that this is on the issues list, and has been for some time. I believe it is currently Gameplay Issue #7,Enhance Griefing/Override.

I think that it probably is not in the current Top 25 for vote because we've already gotten the response that they will be giving us the ability to overwrite a lower power buff. Although it should be noted that the issue does list the consent and grouping suggestions as well.

The oerwrite option, though, would kill two birds with one stone by addressing both this griefing issue and providing a form of answer to the massive variability problem with Enhances.

getting buffed by a n00b Doc wouldnt be so bad if I could cancel them. Im also a MasterDoc/Swordsman, there has been times that I went to the med center to heal wounds and b4 I knew itsomeone started buffing me with the low level buffs. There needs to be some way cancel/neutralize buffs. There has been times that Ive buffed myself and wished I could cancel the buff. Come to think of it, wouldnt be a bad CM skill =)

Oh yes, I'd have to say it would be much easier to code. Having some programming background myself [limited, but still there], using a pre-existing system is much easier than changing the foundation of another. The system, of course, being the "Consent" sub-system. Rez, drag and droid coloring use this system, and require either /consent or grouping. Throwing buffs in with those shouldn't be too much a problem [but this is SOE, so... *bites tongue*].

Thinking on it though, being able to buff over lower ones would not only be useful in the current state of buffs, but if I'm buffing a customer and bust out a real low buff [everyone get's a >1000 buff every now and again], I can correct the wrong there. Same on myself of course. These are changes I don't see coming anytime soon with as much as they have on their plate now, as such I think using the consent sub-system would be a justifiable and excellent way to temporarily deal with the problem.

*looks back* Ya, that makes more sense than my last post... slowly theturmoil of thoughts in my head are starting to come together...

So, that should say <1000, as in "less than 1000" ... but, I still don't have an edit button so I guess I'll just bump my post count up another notch.