Doctor Archive

I'll start with a summary of the issues so you all can see what changes and additions have been made to which issues since the version that everyone voted on. Hopefully this will help out the folks who've already read the issues a much easier to read set they can skim through to just look for changes and responses. After that are some quick notes about the Issues themselves. Next post will start of with the details of the issues.

As usual PLEASE provide any comments on issues you like, including problems you may have with the wording or improvements that could made. If you have an issue that is not on this list, the best way to get it on the list is to start a new thread about it. With some support from your fellow Docs for the issue (3+ star ratings and/or supporting responses) it will get added to the list.

If youa re unhappy with the prioritization order, be sure to start some discussion that will help to move the issues you think are important up, or to encourage others not to vote for issues you think should be moved further down on the list.

A summary of the issues are as follows:
1.Doctor Surveying/Medical Forage*
2.Mind Damage *
3.Heal/Enhance Consistency*
4.Master Doc Benefits*
5.TEF Issues*
6.Enhance Packs %
7.Experimentation Issues *
8.Faction Points
9.First Aid Improvements =
10.On Fire Cure
11.Combat Queue Heals =
12.Medicine Organization and Inventory Management %
13.Factory/Harvester Problems *%
14.Money *
15.Healing Range/Distance
16.AoE Cure State Pack %
17.Crafting Schematics %
18.Doctor Content
19.Resuscitation Issues and the Stat Drain Bug/Stat Loss Bug/Stat Stick Bug
20./diagnose Refresh
21.High Level Wound Pack Consolidation
22.Pet Healing
23.State Pack Persistence/Immunity
24.Damage/Stim/State Timer and Bug
25.Correspondence Response
26.Factory Identical Components
27.Auto-Retaliate
28.Crafting XP *%
29.Medicine Use Skill Granularity
30.Target Self/Groupmates/Friendlies
31.Droid Med Module Bugs
32.Skill Enhancement Concerns *%
33.Surgeon Profession
34.Pet Stimpacks
35.Med Center Grouping
36.Medical Vendor Type
37.Incapacitated Player Location Problems
38.Combat Medic Components
39.Schematic Trading *
40./registerwithlocation Command
41.Med Center Crafting Station
42.Quickheal Uselessness =
43.Medic-related Clothing
44.Wound Stat Pack Selection & the /Heal Commands
45.Battle Fatigue Notification
46.Title Sticking
47.Droid Messages
48./DragIncap Use in a Room
49.Non-Combat Diseases +

Notes:
* - Denotes Issue has had some change or addition made to it since last posting.
+ - Denotes New Issue since the last posting. (These will always be at the bottom of the listing.)
= - Denotes Issue is listed by Devs as being fixed in either this publish or the next (i.e. 2-8 weeks.)
% - Denotes some part of Issues will be fixed in either this publish or the next (i.e. 2-8 weeks.)

Please note that items listed as (*To be Fixed*) refer to the fact that the Devs have acknowledged the issue and expect that the issue will be fixed in either this publish coming up, or (more likely) the very next publish thereafter. In general this will probably mean a minimum of 2 weeks before such a fix will reach the Live servers but that it will more likely be closer to as much as an 8-10 week delay. Few of these items, if any, will rate a Hotfix so in order to ensure complete testing these kinds of delays are necessary. Be sure to check the date the statement was posted for a fix and add 8 weeks to it before considering if there is a problem with the fix not getting out. Please do not mistake the wording of “Fixed such-and-such” in these cases to mean that the item is actually fixed. It is simply a patch note method and the problem may not actually be fully fixed or even ready to go out in the next publish yet. Add the words “Will probably be” before that “Fixed” and you’ll have a better idea of how it should be read for now.

(*In Test*) refers to the next step where the issue has been placed onto Test Center for public testing. In general this means a 1 to 2 week test period before the issue will actually make it out to the Live Servers, presuming there are no undue problems. Again, please check the date of when the fix went to test before considering if there are any undue delays for getting the fix out.

(*Fixed*) Means the issue has been fixed and the fix is currently active on the Live servers. Items marked as Fixed will be removed from the very next issues listing.

And for those who may not know but were curious, Ben Hanson is the primary Medical Professions’ Developer (among other things).

1.Doctor Surveying/Medical Forage

(Added Dev Response)

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.

One could argue that this is related to the problems with the /medicalforage command being of no real value to the profession. Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so, this request doesn’t seem too unreasonable to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea put forth previously by the Dev team (or Holocron at least) 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 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.

It should be noted that some are also having this issue in regards to scout skills and the need for some meat requirements. Again the situation tends to revolve around the idea that scouts will make far more profit from catering to the Hide/Bone needs of Artisans than they will from catering to Medics. In general these needs by Medics are not nearly as high as the artisan requirements and there seem to be far fewer folks who have as much of an issue when it comes to harvesting meat, but with the recent reduction for single scouts/rangers in groups this is starting to become more of a concern and should be noted as present at any rate.

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

(*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.”)

2.Mind Damage

(Added Mind not Incapping suggestion, Added Dev Response)

This appears to be a major concern amongst both Medics and Doctors (and Combat Medics, for that matter). 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,(or all of the above) 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, even though once you hit Master, who really cares about exploiting Healing XP anyway, possible modifiers to that would be stims that are mind specific, are at higher levels (say Mind A becomes available when you would normally get Stim C) and can be used on others only, not for self-healing. However it could also be argued that even if the medic simply were not allowed to stim their own mind, two medics could help each other to heal indefinitely, but it has also been pointed out that this is, in effect, what a Doc or Medic already provides for combat (and entertainer) professions in allowing them to ignore their special costs by healing them so they can use their abilities endlessly. Giving mind stimming ability to Entertainers or Chefs or as a form of /rally command for Squad Leaders has also been suggested. Mind stimming only mind incapped players has also been suggested (a Doc could still never stim himself that way for any exploit purposes). Even the ability to create Enhance packs, of the usual Doctor skill ability, has been suggested as at least a better method of staving off the damage potential in a manner befitting what Docs are capable of compared to food and spice and entertainer buffs, even if that buff is not given to Doctors to make. One of the more popular suggestions is to simply reduce the amount of damage given with mind hits, or to reduce their frequency. Removing the ability to incap from Mind (you’d still be limited in not being able to heal more, etc.) and letting the “head shot” moves, such as those of the Rifleman, actually take large chunks of both Health and Action instead, have also been suggested, or not allowing Mind Damage incap to incur a Death Blow or not allowing Mind to incap at all. In all cases it is acknowledged that any form of Mind Healing would also require rebalancing the mind-damage-dealing professions.

While there may not be a consensus on the issue there does seem to be a HUGE amount of 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 problems with nerfing the mind-damage-dealing 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 interest 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
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2177
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=3612
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=6471

(*Dev Response:

Holo wrote the /healmind command several time in a thread that was presumably a response to our initial Top 5 issues on 8/22/03.
Ref:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=394421

In a thread of Holo’s PM responses on 9/4/03 regarding giving entertainers mind heals:
“We don't plan to allow medic types to heal mind, because it opens the door to lots of exploits for them, as you point out.

Your idea is interesting, but it does make entertainers more bard-like, which I am not crazy about (but perhaps some entertainers are?). The Squad Leader alternative is also interesting.

Frankly, this situation is a bit of a loophole in the design. We did not catch the medic exploit until too late, so we removed the mind pool heal from them, without creating an alternative. Mind is not supposed to be the determining factor in a combat.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=476570#M476570

Holo wrote in a separate thread addressing the above response on 9/8/03:
“We don't know yet. Several possibilities have been discussed. I've participated in discussions about:

·letting squad leaders heal it
·letting entertainers heal it in the field
·letting medics heal it, but take mind wounds
·letting someone heal it but slowly, so they have to stand next to the healee for a substantial amount of time (and need covered, etc)
·adding a new camp type that only heals mind pool

I'm sure there's even more ideas floating around.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=502726#M502726

Ben “Marvelin” Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:
“We are considering putting some sort of limited mind healing ability in the game. We're still hammering out the specifics so as to not make it overpowering. Suggestions are welcome.”)

3.Heal/Enhance Consistency

(Added Dev Response)

Since wound/damage healing and, especially, buffs seem to have such a wide range of healing levels we would like clarification on how this massive variability is generated and were wondering if it would be possible to reduce the variability ranges we are currently seeing. I think most folks seem to suggest that they can live without their Enhance Bs buffing for 500 on rare occasion if they can get rid of the occasional 150 buff and maintain a more consistent level of buff. Buffs are considered part of the bread-and-butter of Doctors and some level of consistency in them that we could determine from our base enhance number on the pack and our skill level would make these buff far more marketable. There’s nothing worse than selling a buff for a flat rate and telling the customer the buff averages out to a, say, 300 point enhancement, only to have it go off for 150 or passing on a Master Doc buff for 1800 and impressing one customer with a 2300 buff only to get an extremely negative response when the other gets a buff for only 500. The negative responses are the ones that are truly remembered by other possible repeat customers and this is definitely a difficult issue when making our skills sellable.

A suggested alleviator would be to not only allow experimentation on base heal, but experimentation on heal variability as well. Thus a Doc who spends most of the experimentation points on Base Heal would still see a great variability, while those who spend on heal variability would get less mega-heals, but also less low-ball heals, providing a more consistent heal range. (See the Money Issue.)

(*Dev Response:

Ben “Marvelin” Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:
“Part of the reason for randomization is to put more emphasis on the higher-powered meds. Character advancement not granting additional hitpoints has made making meaningful healing power increases a little tricky. In most games, a healer's low level heal ability of 50 points is very effective for a low-level character with 100 hitpoints, but pretty worthless for a high-level character with 5000 hitpoints. That big hitpoint increase gives plenty of room to ratchet up healing powering as the healer advances. In SWG, however, virtually all characters have hitpoints in the 800-1000 range. Therefore, there's not a lot of maneuvering room when even the lowest level medics have to provide some reasonably effective healing. The average value of a StimC will more or less do the trick in most situations. StimD's and StimE's average value tends to be overkill. The low end of the range after randomization, however, is about 50% of the average value. Therefore, Stim E's no longer become overkill if you want to be guaranteed a high probability of getting a complete or near-complete heal.

That being said, I will agree that this reason doesn't hold true for enhancement packs. Enhancement packs are randomized simply because they use the same code pipeline that healing does. I'm more than happy to remove the variance for enhancement packs. Since the randomization as a net 0 effect on the base value, this will not affect the average power of enhancement medpacks. It will, however, eliminate the chance to get extra high results. Of course, on the positive side, you won't get extra low results either. I'm fine with doing this as long as everybody realizes that this will significantly drop the high end of the buff range.”)

4.Master Doc Benefits

(Added Dev Response)

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.), or consolidated wound packs (also look at the Inventory Issue)

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

(*Dev Response:
Ben “Marvelin” Hanson wrote on 9/30/03 on the Correspondent Forum:
“I'm open to ability ideas for master doctor.”

[Z’s note: I have passed on the ideas already listed in the above issue., not to mention those in the threads noted above.])

5.TEF Issues

(Added Dev Response)

Notification of when a TEF might be incurred to allow the Doctor to NOT heal a character that would give them a TEF in a potentially deadly situation and some representation for covert characters to know when they are under the effects of a TEF. 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. Requests have been made suggesting that Med Centers be no-fighting zones. Perhaps medics/docs 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.

Also, better documentation is needed to explain the TEF healing problems. Many neutral Doctors 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 Docs. 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 Doctor to incur a TEF, even a stacking TEF, that they are notified of. So that if a Neutral Doctor 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 Doctors 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=8267
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=11777

(*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.)

6.Enhance Packs

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.

Enhance buffs are being lost whenever a character dies, even after being Resuscitated. Previously only when cloning would buffs, understandably, be lost. With buffs no longer remaining even after Resuscitation that skill is becoming even less valuable. We are hoping this is just a bug and not a new situation stealthed onto us (it was NEVER mentioned in any patch or publish notes).

Enhance buffs are also being lost on occasion when logging or in rare situations when crossing (or so it seems) server boundaries yet the enhance timer remains active, as if the player still were buffed. This one is proving to be of some difficulty, especially for higher level Doctors who have longer Buff times.

The timers on Pets are also screwed up in that if a pet is enhanced using the same buff that is used on the Pet’s owner at approximately the same time, after the buff wears off normally from the owner, for example, the Pet’s buff will also wear off. However the Pet’s timer will still be active, so even though the owner could be re-buffed, the Pet cannot as the game states the pet already has an enhancement to that attribute. (Storing then recalling the pet is a likely workaround for this, but also a possible exploit since it allows unlimited buffing of a pet for XP.)

There is also no notification of a buffs expiration, as folks cannot see that stream of lost numbers while in First Person mode and may not notice that they have lost their enhancement. There has a been a report that there is some notification, but that it easily gets lost in other notifications or is simply not very noticeable. Possibly some other graphical notification of what buffs you currently have and possibly a blinking notification that those buffs are about to expire would be helpful. Allowing the buffing medic or groupmates to see who has what buffs would also be very advantageous. One suggestion was made for a type of Pie Chart as an icon on the HAM, like where other states are shown, that slowly cuts away slices of the color until it is getting low, perhaps blinking for the last minute or so of the Buffs duration. Even simply converting the Duration rating from seconds to an hours:minutes:seconds format would be helpful.

Buffs also do seem to have some problems when used to assist in the wearing of armor. Sometimes other buffs methods seem to assist. It is likely related to Mind encumbrance in some manner, but the error message, which always states “'You are not healthy enough” seems to imply it is a Health related problem, when in fact it could be mind or action related, or even related to a substat of those. A more descriptive error message may help in alleviating some of these problems. One of the links below is to a thread further investigating this issue. (#9640)

There is also the possibility of griefing involved with buffs. Should a Doctor use lower level buffs on someone they could be, effectively, locked out from getting a better buff. Some other method of replacing lower level buffs should be allowed. Perhaps allowing a higher level buff to simply override and replace a lower level one.

(*To be Fixed*) Experimentation on Ease of Use on Enhance Packs makes them HARDER to use, not easier. Very frustrating for the lower level Medicine Use individuals who gains access to higher level Doctor Crafting in that they cannot use these packs in the same way they had gotten used to being able to use Stim Cs at a lower Pharmacology level. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Fixed experimentation on enhancement medicines so that skillModRequired is reduced, not increased.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

(*To be Fixed*) Enhance pack radial menus also are bugged. As posted by Kamat (and tested on the Lowca Galaxy) “Selecting a target then going into inventory, selecting the item, and then selecting the enhance target always causes me to enhance myself. I cannot use this to enhance any target.” (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Fixed the enhancement medicine radial menu so that target self actually targets self.” and relatedly, “/healState and /healEnhance no longer require an argument. It will automatically select a medicine if nothing is specified. This enables these commands to be used in the toolbar.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

The Pet Radial menu does not show Enhance options (it can be done manually, but it's not on the radial for a pet). Please add it to that menu for consistency sake.

Enhance Action B+ packs use simple Organic and Inorganic resources, while the rest of the B+ Enhance series uses Avian Meat and Reactive Gas. It is often considered a problem in that the Action packs should be brought into line with the rest of the Enhance packs, or the stringent requirements on the other packs lessened. Occasional questions also arise about the 2 or 3 BEC requirement that seems to fluctuate between some of the higher end Enhance schematics. Some consistency would make things less confusing.

Enhance Packs have been related to a perma-incap bug, as well, since these buffs, in effect, allow you to take more wounds when buffed than the character actually has. Once the buff wears off the character is left with a negative wound level. (Logging may correct this problem to give the character at least 1 positive wound.)

And finally, Enhance A packs can be made at a lower skill ability than Advanced Wound Treatment and are given a low enough med use requirement that most Doctors will have no problem trying to make and use one as soon as they acquire the ability to do so. Unfortunately trying to use the packs without Advanced Wound Treatment means that they do not work, but they also do not give notification of why they do not work. This proves to be very confusing to many new Doctors. Same for Cure Poison Statepack. (And possibly Disease as well). Please provide some form of error notification when trying to use these packs.

More information on the last item can be found in the following thread:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1168
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=5278
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=9640

7.Experimentation Issues

(Added Crafting Tool rating problem/workaround)

(*Updated*) 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. 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.

Also 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 Malleability’s affect on experimentation needs to be made available.

8.Faction Points

Docs are interested in seeing a share of Faction Points in the same way that we are getting Combat XP. It is considered inappropriate that a medic professional would be out in the field and, being unable to assist in taking out an opposing faction NPC or player (because they are healing those who are doing so), they will not gain FPs and so will progress much more slowly in faction gains, while providing at least as valuable a service as the person providing the offensive capabilities. Other considerations have included gaining FPs for healing Overt faction members, especially considering the dangers involved in gaining a TEF in this manner in a place that is known for finding unsuspecting TEFed characters (i.e. The Med Center, see TEF Issues).

9.First Aid Improvements

(*To be Fixed*) Allow First Aid to be a skill that improves. For example if a patient is hit hard enough to bleed it may currently take a Medic with FA2 6-10 times to cure that bleeding, and a Master Doctor will take the same amount of heals to cure that bleeding. Perhaps once someone is into the Doc levels of wound treatment their skill would reduce the number of times needed to stop the bleeding to, say, 2-4 times or even less. As it stand CM Poisons (another form of bleed, really) can sometimes be cured in one application, but bleeds simply cannot and are far too overpowered in comparison to that. Providing better First Aid would greatly assist in alleviating that problem. Other suggestions are that this improvement top out with Master Medic, or that the improvement, being trauma related, be given to Combat Medics. A suggestion for a craftable bleed state pack, a Band Aid if you will, could even be created for this purpose to ensure a resource drain for the skill improvement. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Increased the power of firstAid. It now reduces bleeding at a rate of 3 times the medic's injury treatment.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

10.On Fire Cure

The ability to cure the “On Fire!” state created by several attack forms has also been requested.

11.Combat Queue Heals

(*To Be Fixed*) There should be a graphic display of heals in combat queue. The fact that heals actually queue up in the combat queue already confuses a large number of Medics. Most Doctors have come to understand how heals do queue up, but 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.

(*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%.”
[Z’s note: This “update” likely refers to the September Publish, meaning we likely should not expect this until the October Publish at the earliest]

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

12.Medicine Organization and Inventory Management

It has been suggested that some kind of equip-able Medic Bag exist that would allow a Doc to put all of their medicines (and only medical items) in that allows sorting and that would also be searched, alongside of type level inventory, for the purposes of finding medicines with the use of some medic-related commands. Presumably this would be in addition to the wearable Travel Pack. Another possibility was mentioned of consolidating med-packs into single types. Like having a Healpack-C instead of one each for Action and Health, or a Curepack-A for curing ANY state, not just dizzy or blind, and so on. This last suggestion may also help the Developers in greatly reducing database bloat. Even changing the naming conventions of Medicines to a more standardized form so that all Med Packs and Stims, and so on, can at least be sorted better alphabetically. Shorter names wouldn’t hurt either (after all, why are there Small Stimpacks, when there are no Large Stimpacks? Why waste putting the word Large in there?) Stacking of meds in some way or putting things back into crates has also been suggested.

We would also 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.

(*To be Fixed*) A possible alleviator to this problem would also include the ability of the /healstate command to act like /healdamage does now, and simply use any Statepack required to cure the first state encountered on a selected target. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “/healState and /healEnhance no longer require an argument. It will automatically select a medicine if nothing is specified. This enables these commands to be used in the toolbar.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

We’d also like to see persistent windows and persistent sorting. Far too often we can set up our multiple inventory windows just the way we like/need them, with items sorted in a particular order so we know exactly where to look for them in a hurry (and we ALWAYS need them in a hurry, it seems) but as soon as we clone, log or take a shuttle all the windows close down and the sort order is completely lost. We have to go through the trouble of reopening all the windows and resorting everything in order to be useful again instead of jumping right back out there. Please provide some method of persistence.

And finally, 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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=9797

(*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.”
[Z’s note: This “update” likely refers to the September Publish, meaning we likely should not expect this until the October Publish at the earliest]

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

Response by Holo on 9/13/03 to some UI issues:
“Organize/reorganize the inventory window, so that you can keep things where you want them, instead of the seemingly arbitrary and random method that's currently used. This might be done by use of a ‘Lock in place’ radial menu addition to any/all UI windows, for example. < or > How about a grid system for this where we can simply place the item in any square of the grid?

·I could swear that at one point we were working on this, and I don't know what happened to it. I'll inquire for sure.”

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=533754#M533754)

13.Factory/Harvester Problems

(Reordered to move the crate size/split issue to the top, added fix notes, added schematic listing limit of 50)

We’d like to see a slider or box that allows adjustment of the factory crate sizes produced. While 50 is a decent size for something, many times it would be nice to make 10 crates of 10, instead of 2 crates of 50, for example. The ability to combine these crates in inventory would also be a very welcome addition.

(*In Test*) Also the ability to split crates would also be very helpful.

Factories currently do not seem to be providing the 10% Crafting XP they are supposed to provide. We are uncertain if this is a problem with no XP being provided at all, or if there is a timing issue where the XP is being provided at an extremely slow rate. Several folks are trying to investigate the issue further.

There are times where if the factory does take some resources and/or items from a crate to begin making an item, but then fails to make that item, it will eat the resources/components and 1 item off of the schematic without producing anything. We would like to see a factory double check that it’s requirements for all items are fulfilled before it actually processes those items and the count down on the schematic.

There are times where a crate will not dump an item into inventory. The whole crate just seems to be stuck and will not give up anything. (Reports are less frequent of this happening, at least, but it still does occur. In some cases this appears to just be a server lag issue were a crate will take several minutes, or even tens of minutes, before it finally dumps the items removed into inventory.)

Factories currently, when sharing or providing admin rights for another player character to use the factory, sends all email about what is happening at the factory to the Factory owner only, not including whomever loaded the schematic and pressed the start button. Is there some way to grant this notification method? Continuing to notify the owner is fine, but adding in the individual doing the crafting is also very much needed.

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.

A request to check the status of a factory has also been made. Being able to open the input hopper during the factory run (to add resources if needed, or remove crates or at least see how many have been made even if the window is only made viewable, but inaccessible) would be a big help and provide some ease of mind that things are working as they should be. (Although it should be noted that the Output hopper can be opened, and is refreshed automatically, simply by selecting the Option item from the radial menu on a factory during the run.)

A request has also been made for some kind of Time-To-Completion timer being added to the factories radial menu, or even in an email sent at production start. Obviously game time is not always going to be accurate, but an estimate at the beginning of production would still prove useful, nonetheless.

Consistency is also requested (and this applies to harvesters as well) between the maintenance interfaces and displays and the power interfaces and displays. Perhaps changing power to show in a days and hours format like maintenance does.

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.

The Factory schematic for Food & Chem. Factories needs to be renamed. They currently state only “Food Factory” on the schematic and far too many medics, and far too many architects, get confused enough by the name to think that some other factory, such as the Equipment factory, is needed for making meds. Please Fix to read “Food and Chemical Factory.”

Some suggestions have been made to speed up the rate of production in a factory. This may be more noticeable for medicines than some other items where the absolutely lowest complexity on an item is 10, meaning it would take 80 seconds (not quite a minute and a half) to produce 1 item in a factory, whereas by hand crafting the same items they can often be produced faster. It has been noted that factories do allow for a more consistent product run (as well as being an alleviator of the tedium of hand crafting) and that factory components are practically a requirement for upper-level meds, so the current rate may have been considered acceptable in that manner. Considering the requirement, in many ways, to have a factory some increase of speed would generally be appreciated (or perhaps just the lowering of the complexity ratings on many meds and their components). There are, however, many dissenting arguments on this issue.

(*Added*) Schematic lists on factories seem to truncate by only showing the first 50 schematics that are in the Doc’s Datapad. Request that the listing be expanded to show all schematics that were created.

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
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2466

14.Money

(Added Dev Response)

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 could include crafting of meds, for the Pharmaceutically inclined Docs) and not, necessarily, combat or resource management. 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 seem to be the production and sales of Small Stimpack Bs with some income coming from the sale of the service of enhancing stats (not nearly as useful an income source until Master Doc is reached). 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. Tips for Doctors and Medics seems to be a virtually non-existent market except in a very few locations or servers and medical professionals are often subjected to all manner of verbal abuse for suggesting payment should be made for the service. 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, or having a Doctor’s 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), requiring or allowing some form of insurance, possibly whereby either the patients set a price they are willing to pay for healing that will be deducted from them if their healer accepts that rate or the Doctor sets a price they will heal for allowing the patient to accept, allowing A packs or stims only to be usable by anyone thereby opening the market for more pharmaceutical products that Doctors or Medics could then sell (for those who are more crafting oriented, although it should be noted that some recent controversy is beginning to surface over this idea, thread is listed below- Doc #11491 & Medic #6938.) Having Doc-specific missions, like the artisan or entertainer missions. Giving Doctors some sort of Vendor ability to encourage pharmaceutical sales. Some of the threads below show some of the solutions suggested in greater detail.

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 or may not be fun for them (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.

Of notable reference are the following threads:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1768
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1197
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1650
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=6196
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10665
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=11491
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=medic&message.id=6938

(*Dev Response:

Ood Bnar wrote on 9/24/03 in a thread about Image Designer UI issues:

“We talked about adding a payment option, but this gets into the bigger 'payment for services rendered' issue which I will leave to the designers. They are working on the problem now.”

[Z’s note: This may or may not imply anything, but it seems that there maybe some consideration being given for some methods of handling payments for services universally, if possible, opening part of this issue to a possible need for a wider solution which may provide assistance on this issues as well as for other service-related sales.]
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=image_designer&message.id=2796)

The On Fire cure needs to be in the top 5, if not #1. Of the top 10, it is the one that causes the most deaths and so, is the most life-threatening. That needs to be addressed very quickly. Not to mention it's very unrealistic for a master doctor to be able to bring people back from the dead but not be able to put a patient out.

15.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.)

16.AoE Cure State Pack

It has been suggested that a counter is needed to the AoE poisons and diseases of CMs. An Area of Effect cure pack for each of those states would provide the proper counter. The argument could also be made for other states as well considering the AoE nature of some MOBs, such as a Kimogilla, that create those states on a group near them. Other suggestions to Poison/Disease counters include timers for how often a state can be applied to an individual, such as the new KD timers, or inoculation packs which would increase resistance to poison. Offering this skill to CMs instead, has also been suggested.

(*To be Fixed*) It has also been noted that the current CM poison strength, while now acknowledged as viable, does not have an acceptable counter in even a standard Doctor Cure Poison, in that it often takes a Master Doc with a similar Cure Pack to a CM’s Poison pack anywhere from 2-4 applications of the cure in order for it to take effect. Combined with the AoE issues above it would be utterly impossible for a Doc to even come close to countering a CM AoE poison. It has been suggested that at the very least the Disease and Poison Cure packs be boosted up a bit in capability. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Increased the power of cure poison and cure disease dots to make them more competitive with the strength of high level dots.” and “Changed the effect of wound treatment skill mods on curing poison and disease. It now acts as a % increase to the base medicine value. This puts it in line with how these mods work with other healing actions.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=6476
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=6618
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10727

17.Crafting Schematics

Crafting schematics do not seem to properly reflect exactly how they are utilizing their formulae. For example some basic testing has shown that although 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.

There are also several schematics that use resources that do not have stats required by their schematic. In particular, the Infection Amplifier and Advanced Infection amplifier use Reactive Gas and Aluminum, neither of which has a PE rating, 33% of the Power for that component. Dispersal Mechanism and Advanced Dispersal Mechanism Use Liquid Petro Fuel and Inert Petrochemical, neither of which has a Conductivity rating which affects the Range and Area of Affect on the component. On the final schematics for all Enhance packs other than Action the schematics require Avian Meat and Reactive Gas, neither of which have UT rating which affects the charges available. The same is true for the top-level Cure Disease and Poison packs.

(*To Be Fixed*) It has also been noted that despite the increased complexity and resource requirements of something like an Advanced Biological Effect Controller over a standard BEC the standard BEC will still provide more XP. By the same respect, despite the complexity of completed meds, such as stim or wound packs, theses also provide less XP, relatively, than grinding out components. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Increased the experience given for crafting advanced biological effect controllers so that it falls in line with other medicine craftables.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

(*To Be Fixed*) Additionally the schematic for Advanced Resilience Compound will not load into the crafting tool at all. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Fixed some problems with advanced resilience compounds. They should now be craftable.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

For more info the following thread is useful:

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

18.Doctor Content

There is concern that there is a lack of Doc 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. Such missions could be construed as a method of alleviation of the issues concerning how Docs make money. (See the Money issue)

19.Resuscitation Issues and the Stat Drain Bug/Stat Loss Bug/Stat Stick Bug

The 60-second stat drain after Resuscitation persists beyond 60 seconds. Food/buffs/spice seems to rectify. Likely this is related to stats getting stuck at lowered levels after taking wounds until those stats are kicked back to normal by doing something to affect the stat. Please fix.

Resuscitate pack usage on pets has been asked for. Since this obviously does not apply to true beastie-type “pets” as they no longer have perma-death, I believe this request still applies primarily for NPC-style faction “pets”.

Upon death in a battleground players are immediately removed from the field, rendering the Revive skill useless. It has also been pointed out the relative uselessness of buffs in that arena as well since mind damage is highly focused upon in PvP battles. These two issues combined make a Doctor virtually useless in that arena considering that Buffs and Resuscitation are their two primary Doctor abilities and practically the pinnacles of the profession. It has been requested that there be at least a short delay upon player death in the battlegrounds so a doctor may attempt resuscitation.

Typing while a corpse and hitting enter sometimes is accepted as a Yes response to clone, often to the default cloning center of the closest facility, even if they player would have preferred their bind point. This is a problem for Doctors in that a player may have been attempting some message or communication and accidentally have cloned when a Doctor was available, sometimes even just about to, Resuscitate them. Please look into removing this default behavior.

A request has also been made for a pop-up box to appear to the player of an unconsented corpse telling them that a Doctor is attempting to Resuscitate them, would they like to give consent for this action to occur? It was also suggested that a short delay, perhaps 30-60 seconds, would not be to out of line as an acceptable penalty for death before cloning is allowed. This also gives a Doctor a bit of time to get to a player and at least let them know that they are willing to Resuscitate them, if they prefer not to clone.

Corpses will show up in the cloning center before the avatar is fully cloned, meaning that a Doctor could take advantage of this situation to gain XP by resuscitating these corpses, to no ill effect to the recipient.

20./diagnose Refresh

There have been requests for the new /diagnose command to either have a refresh button added to it, that it automatically refresh at some interval (perhaps every 15-30 seconds), or that reissuing the command will refresh the current window instead of opening a new one. The window also 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. Adding in the HAM Damage levels (not wound levels, but damage levels) and the max level of a stat (to make it easier to check buff status) has also been requested.

21.High Level Wound Pack Consolidation

A request has been made for a set of low level wound packs (assuming no consolidation is done based on the Inventory consolidation issue) that would heal, say, Health and the Health secondaries all at the same time and another pack for Action and the Action secondaries. Perhaps limiting them to a comparable A, B and possibly as high as a C-pack, but no higher, at the highest of Doc crafting levels.

22.Pet Healing

The removal of Pet Healing XP has several Doctors a bit upset. Overall there seems to be some consensus that Pets are primarily being used as the main tank for a party instead of any standard PC class. As such there is now no method for gaining XP from healing the party tank since that tank will almost never be a PC.

Suggested solutions include singly or in some combination such ideas as giving no XP for ones own pets, but allowing full XP on other’s pets, providing reduced XP for any pet healing, capping the XP allowed to be provided from a pet on either a per heal or per combat session basis. Several other responses and suggestions may be found in Q3P0’s post regarding this subject below (#429220).

(*Dev response:
Q3P0 wrote on 8/27/03:
“We’ve been tracking your discussions regarding the recent change to remove XP from healing pets. This post is to explain why we did the change and to let you know what we are thinking of for the future (based on some of your suggestions).

The exploit was a person could sick their pet on a creature that it cannot kill but does a decent amount of damage, sit behind the pet and heal it over and over and gain experience 10x faster than normal. Our solution was to eliminate XP for healing pets.

You’ve brought up great points about this and we are reconsidering how best to handle the exploit. Assuming you agree that the above exploit is valid. How about healing your own pet gives no medical XP (just like healing yourself)? Healing someone else’s pet given less XP than healing another player but still gives some. This will make healers still valuable in groups with tank pets, but won’t allow you to gain XP faster than you would with players.

If we go with this, it will take several days to code and probably some decent time on Test Center to test.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=429220

Holo wrote on 8/29/03: “Med XP from healing pets was seen as an exploit because of the hugely high rates of gain it provided. Do you guys not see it that way or agree?” Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=443645#M443645

[Z’s note: The testing time would likely force such an update into the September Publish at the earliest. No word yet on when that publish way be scheduled for, but it will certainly hit Test Center first and I will update you all then if it was able to make it. If not then they MIGHT Hotfix Patch it in, but more likely it would get held off until the October Publish.])

23.State Pack Persistence/Immunity

Would it be possible to get some level of persistence in Cure State packs? The states appear to be regained upon the very next hit by a MOB. For example, why unblind someone when they are just going to get blinded again before they can even get their own attack off. Some persistence in the state cure packs would provide some level of immunity to being afflicted with the state again immediately. Another possibility would be that state cures offer a temporary increase in defense against that state.

It should also be noted that many states do not seem to have some very obvious effects and with the timer-related errors involved in state pack usage, few Doctors, or their patients for that matter, bother with State healing, apparently. Considering the defense bonuses no being fully applied to moving characters, getting to a character to apply a state cure is even more difficult. Clarification on the effects of various states, review of their effectiveness and review of their persistence on healing would be welcome.

24.Damage/Stim/State Timer and Bug

A timer on these like we have for wound packs to let us know when we are ready to heal Damage or a State again would be very helpful. As it stands now we simply have to continually hit the appropriate method of healing or attempt to keep an internal track of times between heals.

Relatedly the State packs (and when a Doctor stims themselves) seem to ignore Diagnostics level in that they notify the Doctor that he must wait, say 3 seconds before healing again, but after three second it continues to give a command stating you must wait before you can do that to what would appear to be the full delay of someone who had no Diagnostics skill at all, or about 6-9 seconds, in effect doubling the delay rate. Please fix.

25.Correspondence Response

(Added fix comments.)

(*To Be Fixed*) Many Doctors feel slighted by the lack of direct response to our correspondent issues. We are most interested in providing what input we may into improving the Doctor profession, and the game in general, by whatever means we can and since the correspondence program is the most official method provided, it is felt that a more timely, and thorough response to the issues the correspondent forwards is needed. Such responses should be public and posted directly to the forums and address the issues as presented. Without proper input on Developer considerations on the issues we cannot provide better feedback in the continuing development processes.

Threads of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=418706
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=515848&highlight=#M515848

(*Dev Response:
Holo wrote on 8/29/03:
"We don't see you as a red-headed stepchild, but as a key part of the combat loop, because, duh, you are.

Every profession is going to feel like they're being ignored at some point. (In fact, I am pretty sure that every profession already DOES feel that way! ). We're not doing it on purpose, and to say that we're intentionally trying to neglect a given profession is to just muddy the waters and stir things up, to no real purpose.

I tend to agree that the medical profs didn't get too much from this round of profession updates; we simply ran out of time. I'll try to make sure you guys are a higher priority on the next pass."
[Z’s note: The “updates” referred to likely refers to the September Publish, meaning we likely should not expect to see the higher priority ratings until the October Publish at the earliest.]

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

Holo wrote in a thread of PM responses in this case to a question about if the DE designer reads their forums on 9/4/03:
“Any given profession should definitely not feel like they are being intentionally neglected because they haven't gotten a dev post in their forum. We don't have specific devs assigned to forums. Instead, we're trying to rely on the correspondents (I know, I know. We have a long ways to go on that front).”

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=476567#M476567

Holo wrote in a thread asking for assistance in how to improve communication on 9/10/03:
"One of them is the challenge of even listening. No day goes by when I don’t get someone complaining that we haven’t posted in their profession’s forum, or that we’re not current on the issues for that profession. After all, “there’s dozens of threads on the front page right now about it, open any of ‘em.”

The fact is, we’re hard-pressed to read just the threads we do, and then follow-up on our posts—much less skim every forum. The detailed answers people want to both correspondents and to their own posts take a sizable amount of time to research and then answer. When I say sizable, I mean anything over ten minutes.

This is of course what the correspondent program was intended to address. But what we found was that in the correspondent’s lists, around half the list or more were line items that could EACH take three or four hours to discuss, much less arrive at an answer. And the result was, we blew it. We blew it bad, because we invited the commentary and the input, and then failed to uphold our end of the bargain.

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=514535#M514535

Holo wrote in response to the above thread on some of the items he bulleted that needed work on 9/10/03:
"Better direct communication between the devs of a given profession and the correspondents--and less of me, since it isn't really my job anyway. -- have to figure out how to best do this. We may not want to have the email address for individual devs leak out, so we may have to create special correspondent email addresses or something...

Weekly IRC chats with the correspondents (log posted later?) -- need to get them coordinated with a bunch of folks, so this might take a bit."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=517019#M517019

Holo wrote in a thread about the communication comments he asked for above on 9/12/03:

"That the discussion the other day has not been forgotten. I'm working on what we can do. Some, we're already doing (mostly, the stuff I said "easy, done" to). But today and yesterday we've had visitors at the office, etc, so I haven't been able to read one word on the forums in the last 24 hours, and probably won't today either since I will be at the Austin Game Conference--no, not just hanging out and having fun. Part of hiring is finding out who else is out there.

The mods have sent me a string of threads to reply to and I promise I will pop in on them either tonight or tomorrow."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=526944#M526944 -Note: no responses have been forthcoming to the Medical Professions as of yet

Holo wrote in a thread about Pistoleer issues on 9/16/03:
"We've asked the designers to try to keep up with the forums for the professions they are in charge of, but generally they don't have time. The correspondent program is supposed to help with that, but as you know, it ain't going so great. We're trying to fix that."

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=553309#M553309
[Z’s note: A private correspondent forum was created on 9/18/03 to facilitate communication between the Developers and the Correspondents and this step may at least partially address this issue. You may note that some of the responses from there have already been added to some of the issues throughout this list. On 9/30/03 we actually received a full response on the Top 5 Issues, further indicating that this issues is being worked on..])

26.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 Doctors 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.)

27.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.

28.Crafting XP

(Added UXP concerns)

Docs are feeling a bit hampered by the crafting requirements of the class. While there are a few who simply do not like crafting at all, many seem to feel that crafting is acceptable, but only if it improves with use. An example pointed out on the forums was that a Stim E will often heal for 1500-2500, or about 600-700 xp a heal. That 1 stim E provides about 500 crafting xp. Since there are 41 charges on a stim E that means a difference of 41*700=28,700 healing xp, as compared to that 1 stim providing only 500 crafting xp. A ratio of 57:1 instead of the 3:1 that would be expected for proper scaling of raising the skills evenly. (Actually it has been noted that those numbers are probably a bit off, but the ratio is still approximately valid). Admittedly compared to the time it takes to use those charges enough stims could be made to equalize that ratio, but it is requested that the metrics be looked at again now that Factory XP is back to where it should have been (well, if it is supposed to be at 10%, even though factories are not giving that now) and that self UXP in components has been fixed and also keeping in mind that there are folks who are just grinding the meds for these lines to catch it up to their other med levels.

(*Partial To be Fixed*) Some items do not seem to be giving proper XP, such as Resuscitation Kits providing 0 XP or that a BEC will give 36XP in Practice mode while an Advanced BEC (using a total of 13 more components) is giving less than that as well as experimented items, having a higher complexity, do not give more XP than their unexperimented versions. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Increased the experience given for crafting advanced biological effect controllers so that it falls in line with other medicine craftables.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

Some have also suggested that perhaps Doctor is simply too easy to Master. I am still uncertain whether this is intended or not and whether or not it is really balanced enough compared to possible speed of gain rates for other professions. It may be a situation where, as Holocron has told us before, the game simply does not start until you completely allocate all of your skill points and that philosophy being somewhat counterintuitive to how many other MMORPGs are played. Or if this is truly a valid concern that having Master Doctors within their time frame is unbalancing to the game. Perhaps guidance of the Dev thinking on the issue is needed, or the rate of gain should be adjusted. The crafting requirements will definitely need to be more balanced, however, in most players’ experience, some suggesting either making it easier, or making the rest of the line harder or somewhere in between.

(*Added*) UXP seems to be quite inconsistent. Some preliminary testing suggests that UXP can often be had if the person using the item is right there with you when they use it, but of they are any distance away (possibly a server line issue) or if the Doc is logged off, UXP does not seem to be generating (even allowing for the possible 4 hour delay Holo once mentioned as a consideration for some earlier UXP anomalies being seen.)

Please reference the following for more information:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1383
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=2020

29.Medicine Use Skill Granularity

Many would like to see more granularity in the base Medicine Use levels for different meds, to encourage balanced increases in the Medicine Use skill. Possibly even reducing some medicine use levels so that Medics can use some Doctor created items, while others could be made more difficult to encourage purchasing of the usage skill levels.

30.Target Self/Groupmates/Friendlies

The ability to target self when clicking on your own HAM bars, such as in a group, which would function in the same way as using Ctrl-1 would. A request is also made for a quick way, like Tab (perhaps a toggle to make Tab work through enemies or friendlies) for quickly scrolling through groupmates (Ctrl-Q may already be mapped to do this?) or through friendly (or at least non-aggro) targets as well.

Additionally it would be helpful to list a number next to all of the group member names making it easier to know which one is associated with which Crtl-#.

It has also been requested that a selected group member be made to stand out more than with just a blue box outlining them and their blip on radar. Something like a flashing name and/or radar dot in order to better locate the targeted individual in a clumped up group.

31.Droid Med Module Bugs

Droid med module ratings are superceding the heal rates in other locations, thus GREATLY reducing the heal capabilities of medics (or increasing on those rare instances an experimented Med 6 Module is on the droid in question). Please check to ensure that only the best heal rate is utilized.

Droids are also now affecting the damage stim rates when they are out, greatly reducing what a stim would normally heal damage for with no droid around at all. While it would be nice to have a 10% increase with a well experimented Med 6 module, it is requested that droids either be taken out of the loop for heal effectiveness with stims, or that the greater heal rate of an area is also considered for stims, but where the standard heal rate is considered 100% irregardless of location (thus allowing for a 100 heal rate normally, but gaining the bonuses of a droid that has a higher rate if it is available.)

32.Skill Enhancement Concerns

(Added Fix notes)

There have been concerns raised that Skill Enhancing Attachments (SEAs) and BE enhancements (once fixed) will give a serious advantage to a non-dedicated Medical professional. For example, someone could get to Novice Doctor, take 2 levels of Wound Treatment and, with the proper Med Usage tapes be instantly capable of using D-level Enhance Packs. The concern suggests that certifications exist in other professions to prevent this same thing from occurring, as well as having special commands, so having the skill without the command is, in effect, useless. Solutions have included some kind of certification system for differing levels of meds or utilizing a few extra commands to granulate the levels of which meds can be used at what levels so they are not strictly dependent on a skill level.

(*In Testing*) At the same time it should be noted that SEAs do not currently seem to be working correctly. There are issues with having to socket them only when the clothing is not worn, that tapes cannot be removed from clothing once socketed, that clothing must be removed before logging out, or the tapes will actually prove to be penalties instead of bonuses, and there is also concern that beyond +100 the are utterly ineffective, thus providing that Novice Doctor, in the example above, the means to be as good as a Master Doctor with a +100 Wound Treatment, but that the Master Doctor cannot get better since +100 seems to be a practical limit. (Although this may just be an anomaly of SEAs not working properly to begin with, I am getting conflicting reports about SEA tapes working or not working above and below +100.) (Test Center patch notes show: “Make adding a Skill Enhancer to an equipped socketed item update your skill bonuses correctly.”)

33.Surgeon Profession

Suggestions and ideas have been bandied about for the concept of a Surgeon profession as a form of elite (or even elite-elite) medical profession. Varying suggestions have been made for what this class might entail, including such ideas as the addition of bio-electronic enhancements (such as Luke’s replacement hand) but that such replacements have some negative costs associated with them, such as slower XP gain or permanent reduction of some stat or skill or some permanent amount of Battle Fatigue.

Several ideas can be found here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=3831
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=9776

34.Pet Stimpacks

Some Docs are incensed about the idea of giving pet stimpacks to anyone for healing Pets. (Not at the BE’s for making these packs, but that anyone can use them.) Something that was previously the purview of the medic classes. Letting some other class utilize stimpacks, even if it’s just for pets, seems like a slap in the face by giving anyone the ability to use an item that is otherwise exclusive to Novice Medic, when an integral skill required for Medics, Surveying, won’t even be considered for Medics because it would somehow interfere with Artisans (who already have far greater financial stability than the medical professions). Not to mention the ability of these new stims to heal mind damage on the fly when no other class in the game has this ability for use on player characters. Some clarification on the reasoning for this issue or some other form of compensation such as mind healing, a certificate system allowing Pet Stim A use by anyone, but higher levels only to be used by BEs and/or CHs, the removal of the mind heal component of the stim, removal of pet stimpacks altogether has been suggested.

35.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)

36.Medical Vendor Type

Food vendors appear to be available on the Vendor lists along with other types like Junk and Armor, but there are no options for Medical Vendors.

37.Incapacitated Player Location Problems

Incapped players seem to always change location from where they, apparently, dropped down, even when you are on follow. As such the player who may not have moved since the last time you were close enough to heal them just a few seconds ago, is somehow no longer within healing range, even if they look like they are at your feet. Workarounds have included using the /DragIncapacitatedPlayer command to get them to you, but sometimes the location is so screwed up that even though the player appears to be at your character’s feet, they are still outside of the 20m drag range. A possible solution is using the same location algorithm for locating the “body” that heals were using on the live player (where the player WAS close enough) when they are incapped and allow the /follow command to actually work on incapped players and corpses to get us close enough to them to perform the required heal function.

(*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 the range errors caused in by this issue.)

38.Combat Medic Components

The experimentation points and availability of components that are only usable by Combat Medics has caused some confusion. Having them in the Doc tree provides Doctors with an unfair advantage to experimenting on an item they do not use, while Combat Medics who have not taken any Doctor skills can only make those components at a reduced ability. It has been suggested that while increasing Medical Crafting through Organic Chemistry in the Medic field, that, even though it will be unused at first, Combat Medic Crafting also be raised. Or that crafting apply to combat medic crafting as equally as it is to Medic/Doc crafting. This may make a Doc/CM have an incredibly massive number of experimentation points (presumably 15), but then again they end up using so many skill points to get it I can see how that could easily outweighed the advantage that would bring.

(*Dev response:
Holo wrote as an answer to some PMs on 9/4/03:
“I'll ask about the status of these, if you can tell me which typos they are exactly. (Yes, I know that I can probably read the CM forum for a few hours and find them, but if you tell me more specifics here, I'll both read it sooner and have more ammo to beat a designer about the head with). ”

Then later in the same thread on 9/5/03:
“
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elimanning wrote:
Holo, the info you request re: CM crafting has been posted, thanks for looking into it!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Yep, and we're on it.”
[Z’s note: It is likely such an update would not occur until the September Publish. No word yet on when that publish way be scheduled for, but it will certainly hit Test Center first and I will update you all then if it makes it into that round of fixes.]

Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=481241#M481241)

39.Schematic Trading

(Added “invisible” schematic possibility)

Allow or fix trading of schematics. There could be a possible market for this outside of the Bazaar or on Vendors. Currently the only method of transferring schematics is through a vendor or a factory where both individuals have administrative rights. Both methods are really only a workaround for the much simpler method of being able to trade schematics directly in secure-trade. Some folks have suggested that they could trade schematics, but that the schematic was not visible in the trade window. (I have noticed this when trading a few other things from the Datapad, like pets, as well.) Rectifying the invisibility problem may be enough to rectify the entire situation.

40./registerwithlocation Command

While considered nice, Docs would have like to see this command more widely published (it was NOT in the publish notes). They would also like an annotation someplace besides the Planetary map, as few folks will be using the planetary maps. Instead it would be nice if their Overhead (Ctrl-M) map and/or the building itself have some obvious indicator that it is manned, such as an asterisk and (manned) at the end of the name on the overhead map and a big flag that flies outside the building when it is manned that may have “sign” attributes that allow it to named with indicating text showing if there are any medics or doctors on “duty”.

Some have indicated that having a terminal in the building (it appears to SOME med centers do have such a terminal?) would also make using the command easier for Medics/Docs by drawing their attention to this new object that they can use. It also adds a certain amount of in-game interactivity with turning on the sign, so to speak, beyond simply typing a command.

41.Med Center Crafting Station

The Doctors would also like to see a Public Food & Chemical Crafting Station in Med Center. The inconvenience of having to leave the Med Center to craft more packs for patients who want healing “right now” to both the Doctor and the Patient seem a bit much for such an easy fix. Admittedly this is more important as an issue for Medics, but the Doctors have brought this up as well and would like to see it implemented.

42.Quickheal Uselessness

(*To be Fixed*) Some people have mentioned they would like to see the Quickheal skill actually be useful. The mind costs and damage accrued are too prohibitive for actual use, and would never be used as a “last ditch” method in combat, simply because by the time a last ditch effort is needed the Doc will already have too low a mind level to use the skill. Suggestions tend to be along the lines of greatly reducing the mind and damage requirements of the skill, but greatly increasing the BF and mind wounds accrued through its use to balance that out. (Ben Hanson response to correspondent on 9/22/03: “Increased the power of quickHeal and reduced its mind cost.” As noted at the top the earliest we can probably expect to see such a fix would be in 2-8 weeks.)

43.Medic-related Clothing

There is a white coat, but other types of red, white, or white with red patterned-clothing for medics has been requested.

44.Wound Stat Pack Selection & the /Heal Commands

The Radial menu does not always provide the Heal options, even though the target is obviously wounded and/or the redial menu was just used to provide a heal. Please fix.

45.Battle Fatigue Notification

The Battle Fatigue affecting your heal rate should be giving notification at 200 instead of 400. By the same respect the player being healed should also receive the notification message as well to encourage them to get the Battle Fatigue healed at the Cantina first before going to the Med Center and wasting the resources of the Medics their who are not healing to their potential because of this.

46.Title Sticking

The (none) title does not save on logout.

47.Droid Messages

Droid “Low Power” messages are too obscure and difficult to read, often only appearing to pop up off of the droid itself, which can be hard to read and especially difficult to notice if you aren’t looking at the droid 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.

48./DragIncap Use in a Room

The ability to /DragIncap from a room or Cave/Dungeon.

49.Non-Combat Diseases

(New Issue)

Some folks think it may be interesting to add spreadable diseases that are not like the combat diseases but do other things, such as making temporary image changes, stat reductions or mood changes. Such diseases would be curable by Doctors.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=12242

SithlordAcid: Two things. First, could you please hold off until the completed list is put up before commenting? It would make it a little easier to read for most folks and it's already a pretty long list.

Second, as mentioned above in the very first post, the best place to rally support for or against any particular issue is by starting a thread on the Doc forum specifically for that purpose. That way you can try and convince other folks of the importance (or lack of it, as the case may be) for any particular issue so that you can convince your fellow Docs to modify their votes the next time around.

You got it.

Thanks.

WOW! Does anyone else think Zarlor's posts are just little TOO informed and little TOO well organized? I am not saying he works for SoE or anything, but I think if you trace his lines, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that his RL last name is Lucas.

Zarlor Lucas can be rearranged to spell

CZAR ALL OURS. Something to think about.

My top ten would be(From Zarlor's list):

#10, #9, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #19