Doctor Archive

All of those threads floated at the top were driving me nuts, so instead I'm going to risk one really long post that nobody will read. I've decided to go ahead and consolidate all of the categories into a single thread of issues. They will till be categorized, but they'll jsut all be in the same thread for discussion.

Please comment on the wording, titles,workaroundsor anything you like about the following issues. (Please wait until all parts are posted before commenting, though.) The clearer, more succinct and more descriptiveI can make an issue andits title the better this whole list can become. So please provide your feedback and feel free to let other folks know that this list is here so they can peruse it at their leisure for finding out what to expect in the profession as well as what workarounds we have found.

Please note that the Questionable Issues issue is actually a duplicate of an issue on the Bugs list. That is because it did not recieve any votes in th last polling. So feel free to discuss if you think it is still an issue or not.

Bugs
1.Enhanced HAMs Sticking
2.Experimentation Issues
3.Med Use on Enhances from Crates Bug=
4.Resuscitation Timer Issues
5.Enhances Dropping on Logoff and Not Allowing New Buffs
6.Enhances Dropping on Resuscitation
7.Enhance Action -v- other Enhance Pack Resource Disparity
8.Stat Drain/Stat Loss/Stat Stick Bug
9.Droid Med Module Rating Overrides Location Ratings
10.Crafting Schematics with Unused Ratings
11.Enhancements not Assisting Armor Wearing
12.Factory Hopper/Inventory Window Refresh
13.Incapacitated Player Location Problems
14.Room/Dungeon Wound Healing Problems
15.Multiple CRDM problem
16.Rooms/Dungeons and /DragIncap
17.Factory XP (or lack thereof)
18.Battle Fatigue Notification
19.Enhance Pet Radial Menu Request
20.Unable to Use Enhance Notification
21.Radial Menu and Heal Options Bug
22.Enhance Timer on Pets
23.Skill Enhancement Concerns&
24.Healing Negative Wounds Bug
25.Usage XP Inconsistencies
26.Food Factory Deed
27.State Pack Schematics with Range
28.Wrong XP on Some Schematics
29.Player Hospital /register Faction Problems+

Exploits
1.Enhance Stacking Exploit Bug
2.Drag and Clone Exploit
3.Resuscitation on Cloned Corpse XP Exploit
4.Tumble/Healing Exploit
5.Pet Re-Enhance Exploit

Gameplay Issues
1.Mounted Healing
2.Doctor Content
3.Enhance Packs Variability%&*
4.Enhance Drop Notification
5.Droid Recharge Rate
6.Combat Queue Heals%
7.Enhance Griefing/Override&*
8.TEF Notification and Getting Kicked Out of Med Centers%*
9.Enhance D Med Usage Level
10.Target Friendlies
11.Auto-Retaliate
12.Droid Low Power Notifications
13.Heal Targeting Persistence
14.Resuscitation Pack Usage on Faction Pets
15./diagnose Refresh
16.General Inventory Search for Meds
17.Healing Range/Distance
18.Accidental Cloning
19.Factory/Harvester Status Notifications
20.Cure Pack Effectiveness Ratings
21.Power Selection for Factories/Harvesters
22.Target Self
23.Med Center Grouping
24.Heal Pack Selection Methodology Clarification
25.Droid Crafter Rating
26.TEF Documentation and Faction Healing (including Neutrals)
27.Getting Docs Back Into Med Centers
28.Crafting Schematics Clarification and Documentation
29.Factory Identical Components
30.Droid/Pet Change Concerns
31.Resuscitation Pack Usage on Battlegrounds
32./registerwithlocation Command
33.Title (none) is Not Sticking+
34.Player City Hospital Benefits+
35.Calling Medical Droids Anywhere+

Balance Issues
1.Medical Surveying
2.Master Doc Benefits
3.On Fire Cure&
4.Faction Points
5.Money
6.Medical Harvesting
7.AoE Cure State Pack and Poison/Disease Cure
8.State Pack Persistence/Immunity
9.First Aid Improvements
10.Mind Damage Healing for Doctors
11.Ease of Mastery
12.Crafting XP Speed Imbalance
13.Pet Stimpacks
14.Medicine Use Skill Granularity
15.Pet Healing XP (or lack thereof)
16.Crafting XP from Complex Schematics –v- Components

Wishlist
1.High Level Wound Pack Consolidation
2.Resuscitation Consent Request
3.Crate combining
4.Medical Bag/Inventory Search for Meds
5.Factory Completion Timer
6.Window Persistence
7.Component Crate Size Increase
8.Med Center Crafting Station
9.Factory Speed
10.Factory Input Hopper Access During Operation
11.Factory Crate Size Selection
12.Medic-looking Clothing
13.Surgeon or other Elite-Elite Medical Profession
14.Groupmate Numbering
15.Correspondence Response&
16.Factory Email Notifications
17./diagnose Damage Level Display
18.Groupmate Highlighting
19.Non-Combat Diseases
20./registerwithlocation Terminal Request

Questionable Issues
1.Wrong XP on Some Schematics

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 (generally, 4-8 weeks.)
% - Denotes some part of Issue will be fixed in either this publish or the next (generally. 4-8 weeks.)
& - Denotes an Issue acknowledged by the Developers that should be fixed at some undisclosed time in the future.

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 a Dev that states “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 if no further issues arise with the fix.

(Edit: Listed Enhances from Crates Issue as Fixed since it appears to be an unfixable issue. See http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22475for details.)

(Edit: added Gameplay Issues #33, 34 and 35.)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-03-2003 01:51 PM

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-08-2003 12:31 PM

Bugs

1.Enhanced HAMs Sticking

Stuck HAMs on buffed players are proving especially annoying to many Doctor characters. Either the HAMs stick after being buffed so that the player cannot see when they are getting damage (Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, but less often), they stick so that the Doctor cannot see that their groupmates are getting damaged (a very dangerous situation)(Mostly Fixed, still seeing reports of this, although it appears it can be worked around by disbanding from the group, running out to 100m away, running back and rejoining the group.), they stick for both the Doc and the player (Fixed?), or they simply do not scale properly so that the buffed bar simply goes out past the edge of the window and any damage sustained to that attribute is not seen until it gets below the point where it can be seen inside the window.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16354

2.Experimentation Issues

Experimentation does not seem to work correctly or consistently. Even with experimentation risks being listed as 0% there are still a great many critical failures, failures and some moderate and standard successes. Wholly inconsistent with the 0% failure rating guaranteed by the crafting station. Having highly experimented crafting tools and stations do seem to alleviate the problem a little, but not by very much. At least some think that having some possibility of failure is acceptable, but they do wish to have some indicator of what the possibility really is since obviously it is a greater than 0% chance and some would suggest it is really as high as a 5% chance. Amazing successes, on the other hand, appear to be far more rare than critical failures and do not produce as nearly drastic improvements as critical failures produce in reductions, there is simply no good trade-off here. Even experimenting by 1 point at a time seems to produce the same results (with less risk) as using as many points as possible, which is counterintuitive to what most folks expect, where they expect that taking the greater risk should provide some greater reward other than keeping the complexity low enough on an item that it doesn’t take quite as long to manufacture.

Part of the problem might come where recent experimentation with the crafting system would suggest that a crafting tool with a negative rating (up to –14.99) is far superior to a tool with a positive rating (+15). Apparently the values seem to be flipped for experimentation calculations, we think. We really would like more consistency and a more reliable, documented, experimentation methodology.

Further Malleability ratings do appear to affect the difficulty levels of crafting an item, but this is not otherwise annotated anywhere, not even in the Advanced Guide on Crafting on the main SWG website. Better documentation for experimentation needs to be made available.

3.Med Use on Enhances from Crates Bug=

(Added Dev Response)

After the November Publish enhancements in crates made before then which may show a Med Use rating in the 70s in the crate when pulled from the crate shows a jump, on the individual enhancement, to a Med Use Rating on the 90s. In effect a retroactive change in Med Use rating for previously created items. Since there were no Patch Notes concerning such a change we’re pretty sure this must be a bug and would like to see it fixed.

(*Dev Response:

See http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22475for the details. Issue appears to be unfixable.)

4.Resuscitation Timer Issues

Resuscitation seems to now be subject to a timer that does not allow a corpse to be resuscitated. The timer is inconsistent and otherwise undocumented. If there really is to be a timer we need to know what it is supposed to be or provide the dead player with some kind of indicator or countdown timer, but some folks are reporting that even given immediate access to a corpse they are unable to resuscitate the player.

For more info:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=15729
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18255
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21297

5.Enhances Dropping on Logoff and Not Allowing New Buffs

Enhance buffs are 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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=15995

6.Enhances Dropping on Resuscitation

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).

7.Enhance Action -v- other Enhance Pack Resource Disparity

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 or at least some clarification on the reasoning for these inconsistencies.

8.Stat Drain/Stat Loss/Stat Stick Bug

The 60-second stat drain after Resuscitation persists beyond 60 seconds. Food/buffs/spice seems to rectify this problem. 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.

9.Droid Med Module Rating Overrides Location Ratings

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.

This is also 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.)

10.Crafting Schematics with Unused Ratings

There are several schematics that use resources that do not have stats required by their schematic. In particular, on the D-level 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.

11.Enhancements not Assisting Armor Wearing

Buffs 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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=9640
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14508

12.Factory Hopper/Inventory Window Refresh

Factories (and a few other inventory windows, but this is most prevalent and reproducible on factories) are not refreshing properly. When moving an item into the input hopper on a factory, the item actually moves in all other respects (inventory size goes down, hopper size goes up and so on) but the graphic of the object does not move from inventory until either a window is closed or the “Change View” button is pressed to force an update.

13.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, although this does seem to be occurring less often lately. 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

[Z’s note: This may fix the range errors caused by this issue.])

14.Room/Dungeon Wound Healing Problems

Additionally non-combat healing actions, such as Wound Healing and Enhancing, that would normally require a Droid, do not function within Caves/Dungeons.

15.Multiple CRDM problem

Enhances (and other Advanced Meds as well) that use multiple CRDMs do not seem to be reading the Power rating correctly. Preliminary suggestions seem to imply that the power rating from the CRDMs are not being read at all. Further, thorough, testing needs to be done, however. (Anyone wanting to help out on this front, please jump right in.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14087

16.Rooms/Dungeons and /DragIncap

We’d like the ability to /DragIncap from a room or Cave/Dungeon.

17.Factory XP (or lack thereof)

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.

18.Battle Fatigue Notification

The Battle Fatigue affecting your heal rate should be giving notification at 200 instead of 400, according to the last known clarification on this, back in Beta. Please provide the notification or give us some indication that things really are working “as intended”.

By the same respect the player being healed should also receive the notification message, if there should be one, 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 there who are not healing to their potential because of this.

19.Enhance Pet Radial Menu Request

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.

[Edit: modified Issue #3 to add Dev Response.]

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-03-2003 01:52 PM

20.Unable to Use Enhance Notification

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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1168

21.Radial Menu and Heal Options Bug

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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18435

22.Enhance Timer on Pets

The timers on Pets are 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.)

23.Skill Enhancement Concerns&

(To be Fixed)

Since it has been confirmed that the cap for Skill Enhancements s supposed to be +25 the UI on the Skills page needs to be fixed to reflect that maximum.

(*Dev Response:
Dave "Keldarin" White wrote on the Correspondent forum on 11/3/2003 in regards to a question on if the UI is bugged or if the perceived +25 cap on skill enhancements is bugged:
“There is a UI issue there. The highest bonus you can have to any one skill is +25.”)

24.Healing Negative Wounds Bug

There are situations, generally involving buffs and armor, where a player might have wounds that show up in the negative values. These negative values (previously responsible for causing more than a few problems with perma-incap situations) do not seem to be getting healed properly. Reports suggest that when healing a stat that has negative wounds that the Doctor doing the healing is actually “hurting” the patient lowering the maximum value on their stat. For example someone who has -145 strength wounds and a 500 strength value when fully healed has that that -145 wound healed, their max strength drops to 355. Until they clone. Please fix.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=20904

25.Usage XP Inconsistencies

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.)

26.Food Factory Deed

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.”

27.State Pack Schematics with Range

The State Pack schematics all have an experimentable trait for Range that is set for 0 and is not improvable. It should probably be removed.

28.Wrong XP on Some Schematics

(No Votes in Last Polling)

Some items do not seem to be giving proper XP, such as Resuscitation Kits providing 0 XP or that experimented items, having a higher complexity, do not give more XP than their unexperimented versions.

It has also been noted that despite the increased complexity and resource requirements of something like an Advanced Liquid Suspension over a standard LS that the standard LS will still provide more XP (35 as compared to 25 for an ALS).

29.Player Hospital /register Faction Problems+

(New Issue)

When a Player City Hospital is placed by a Doctor who is a member of a faction (either Overt or Covert) then Neutrals or members of the opposing faction (either Over or Covert) cannot use the /register command at that hospital.

Exploits

1.Enhance Stacking Exploit Bug

Apparently the bug that allows stacking of Doctor Enhancements is back. Please fix.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18488

2.Drag and Clone Exploit

It is possible to have a player Clone while being Dragged as a corpse allowing them to clone “in place” instead of being forced to the cloning center.

3.Resuscitation on Cloned Corpse XP Exploit

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.

4.Tumble/Healing Exploit

Healing XP can be macroed and easily gained by having someone use any of the Tumble commands to cause themselves damage while the healer stims them for XP.

5.Pet Re-Enhance Exploit

A pet can be Enhanced for XP then Stored and pulled back out again removing the buffs and the buff timer from the pet, thereby allowing them to be buffed again immediately for XP.

Gameplay Issues

1.Mounted Healing

The /healdamage command does not appear to work when mounted. While at least some consider that it may be understandable why healing cannot be done for others while the Doctor is mounted, we are wondering about having at least the ability to heal damage and/or states on ourselves while mounted. Please consider allowing these abilities as they may at least provide an otherwise support profession at least some ability to surviving an unwanted fight while trying to get away.

2.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)

For reference:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14257
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14888
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194

3.Enhance Packs Variability%&*

(Partial To be Fixed, added poll results)

Since buffs seem to have such a wide range of healing levels we would like clarification on how this massive variability is generated (what’s the formula?) 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 Ds buffing for 3000 on rare occasion if they can get rid of the occasional 600 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, 1800 point enhancement, only to have it go off for 800 or impressing one customer with a 2300 buff only to get an extremely negative response when the other gets a buff for only 600. 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. Or just a general lowering of the buff range would also be acceptable. Some have also suggested allowing the overriding of lower level buffs as a possible alleviator for this situation.

(*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.”

[*Z’s note: Voting on the issue suggests that a clear majority of folks actually want a reduction of variability, but not a removal of it. At this time Mr. Hanson was only able to offer either complete removal of the variability factor, which would mean that Docs would always buff for the average of what they are buffing for now, or to keep things as they are. The poll of Doctors on the forum show only 52% in favor of removing variability altogether. That information was passed on to Mr. Hanson but while he has not offered any comment as of yet it is my personally opinion that 52% is not a clear enough variation to make the change worthwhile. However, this does not preclude that at some point in the future, if time and priorities allow, he could instigate a reduced variability option.}

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“Currently they are thinking they will go ahead and leave the variation as is, but enable us to overwrite existing buffs. There is the problem of determining which buff is better (is 500 strength, 3000 duration better than 750 strength, 900 duration?). But, they expect to figure something out there. (Anyone have any suggestions?)”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920

[Z’s Note; A poll was concluded on 12/1/03 regarding the question regarding power or duration which was overwhelmingly in favor of higher power buffs overwriting even a longer duration, but lower power, buff.]
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21356)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 06-26-2003 04:13 PM

4.Enhance Drop Notification

There is 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 been a report that there is some notification, but that it easily lost in the other “spam” normally sent or is simply not very noticeable. Possibly some other graphical notification of what buffs you currently have and possibly a blinking warning 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, or providing the recipient with a Confirmation box , requiring them to give /consent, or requiring that they be grouped in order for enhancement to occur.

5.Droid Recharge Rate

Droids seem to need to be recharged every 20 minutes. For Doctors, who already have a great deal of items they must carry in inventory, carrying droid batteries and having to almost constantly recharge the droid is more of a hassle than its worth. We’d like to see batteries lasting longer, at least an hour, but something like 2 hours would be far more appropriate (keeping it in line with the length of an Entertainer Buff, for example.) This would improve droid viability in the field without making it unduly cumbersome for Doctor’s to use their droids. Another proposal for consideration would be to allow multiple charges to be stored in the droid, like putting quarters in a parking meter allowing it to last longer that way. Adding in the ability to see what the charge rate currently is on the droid would also be of great assistance.

6.Combat Queue Heals%

(Partial and 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. Although it should be noted that the preferred method for healing actions would be to treat them like non-queued actions, such as posture changes, so that they take place without any delay.

(*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%.”

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

Publish Notes on 10/8/03: “Made /dragIncapacitatedPlayer visible in action list”)

7.Enhance Griefing/Override&*

(To be Fixed, added poll results)

There is 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, but not allowing a lower or same-level buff to be replaced (due to possible exploits in such a situation). Other possibilities include only allowing buffs on groupmates or those who have given /consent.

(*Dev Response:
Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“Currently they are thinking they will go ahead and leave the variation as is, but enable us to overwrite existing buffs. There is the problem of determining which buff is better (is 500 strength, 3000 duration better than 750 strength, 900 duration?). But, they expect to figure something out there. (Anyone have any suggestions?)”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920

[Z’s Note; A poll was concluded on 12/1/03 regarding the question regarding power or duration which was overwhelmingly in favor of higher power buffs overwriting even a longer duration, but lower power, buff.]
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21356)

8.TEF Notification and Getting Kicked Out of Med Centers%*

(Partial Fix, modified name of issue)

Doctors are requesting 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. The addition of getting booted from a building for gaining a TEF further exacerbates the problem with concerns that a Doctor might start a Med Center from their house or as a public Med Center in a Player City and then get booted out of it for 5 minutes healing an overt or TEFed faction member.

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.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=8267

(*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.

(*Publish Notes on 10/8/03: “No longer allow neutral players to help neutral non-players with enemy flags of any sort”)

[Z’s note: There is now a visual "flag" indicator for when you have a TEF.])

9.Enhance D Med Usage Level

After the November Publish Enhance Ds, which had been crafting to around a Med Use rating in the 70s, now craft to a default level in the 90s. While some Doctors think this enhances the usefulness of the Master Doctor level, it was not mentioned previously as a consideration in the past Dev responses to the Master Doc Benefits issue nor was it mentioned in the patch notes. It should also be noted that few other professions have Usage ratings that seem to start in the 90s. We would ask that this issue be looked at and official word given on if the Med Use rating change was intended.

(*Dev Response:
Paraphrased response posted by the Doctor Correspondent on 11/18/03:
“The Devs are aware of this issue and that it is a high priority for us and they are looking into it. No timeframe can be given at this time, but they will see what they can do”)

10.Target Friendlies

A request is made for a quick way, like Tab (perhaps a toggle to make Tab work through enemies or friendlies) for quickly scrolling through friendly (or at least non-aggro) targets. (Note: For those of you requesting this for groupmates, Ctrl-Q is already mapped to do this by the default keymap. You may reassign it to whichever mapping you prefer.)

11.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.

12.Droid Low Power Notifications

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.

13.Heal Targeting Persistence

It is requested that Heals that go into the Combat Queue remember who it was the heal was targeted at initially instead of trying to heal the current target.

14.Resuscitation Pack Usage on Faction Pets

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”.

15./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 following the wound timer), or that reissuing the command will refresh the current window instead of opening a new one.

The window 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. As would autosizing it to display all of the stats or at least remembering the size and position of the last /diag window used.

16.General Inventory Search for Meds

We would 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.

(*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 October Publish, meaning we likely should not expect this until the November Publish at the earliest]
Ref:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=394421)

17.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.)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-02-2003 04:14 PM

18.Accidental Cloning

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.

19.Factory/Harvester Status Notifications

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.

20.Cure Pack Effectiveness Ratings

We would very much like to see an effectiveness rating listed on the DoT cure packs. Although we know that we can experiment on the Effectiveness not being able to see what kind of rating we are giving the pack calls into question the usefulness of that experimentation. It also makes it very difficult to test balance issues between Docs and CMs.

21.Power Selection for Factories/Harvesters

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.

22.Target Self

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. 23.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)

24.Heal Pack Selection Methodology Clarification

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.

25.Droid Crafter Rating

We’d like to be able to see the Food & Chem Crafter rating when a droid has one built into it.

26.TEF Documentation and Faction Healing (including Neutrals)

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=11777

(*Dev Response:
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.

Patch notes on 10/8/03: “No longer allow neutral players to help neutral non-players with enemy flags of any sort”)

27.Getting Docs Back Into Med Centers

There have been expressed concerns lately, especially with the newfound prevalence of those VERY long-lasting diseases, about the lack of Doctors to be found in the Med Centers. There is very little content to encourage Doctors to be in the Med Center and available to the average player to provide their services. (Yes, this issue is closely related to several other issues, such as Money and Doctor Content.) There have been several suggestions to alleviate this apparent problem to include; add medical missions and/or quests that pay for healing some number of wounds or states or patients in a medical center (kind of like the Explore Hunting misions), decrease the risk of failures on crafting when in a Med Center, Increase the xp generated from each craft/stim/wound done, pay Doctors to be in the Med Center (kind of like an insurance plan), In player city med centers generate tax from each heal, recharge medical robots while inside for free, Make crafting take less units of resources while there, make groups of doctors share XP instead of compete for it much like bands or put a public medical factory there.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=20985

28.Crafting Schematics Clarification and Documentation

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

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

29.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.)

30.Droid/Pet Change Concerns

Droids and pets seem to be undergoing some considerations for major changes, particularly the single pet limitations. Many Docs use Droids in many situations and wanted to pass along some thoughts and ideas about the Droid and Pet changes being proposed as they affect the Doctor Profession. As the ideas are quite diverse I only wished to list the links rather than try to attempt to summarize them at this time. So please see the links below for all of the concerns and ideas being expressed.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17437
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18213

31.Resuscitation Pack Usage on Battlegrounds

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.

32./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”.

33.Title (none) is Not Sticking+

(Re-Added Issue)

If you set your title to (none) on the Character Tab of your Personal Information Sheet (Ctrl-P) it will reset on the very next login to the last title you had set instead of keeping no title.

34.Player City Hospital Benefits+

(New Issue)

Some players have expressed concern that Player City Hospitals offer little benefit over a large house and almost no benefit over a Cantina. Houses can be used for all forms of wound healing. Cantinas can also be used for wound healing, are available on the overhead and planetary maps, and autoheal all forms of wounds and Battle Fatigue. A Hospital only appears to add the /registerwithlocation ability, which is only usable by members of the same faction, if a factional player placed the structure, anyway and is of fairly limited usefulness. Are there other benefits that we are unaware of? If not suggestions have included providing a healing bonus to those /registered there, a free vendor for the placing Doctor to use for med sales, not allowing wound healing in player cantinas and cloning centers, or some other benefit.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22342
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22986

35.Calling Medical Droids Anywhere+

(New Issue)

Some Docs would like some way to pull out their medical droids anywhere they are. As these are not, necessarily, combat droids it is felt that pulling them out anywhere would not be unbalancing since we don’t need them for stimming damage, only wound heals, buffs and crafting anyway. Some suggested methods of implementation would be to only allow such calling for the non-combat droid chassis, having some form of camp usable by Docs (or anyone, for that matter) only useful for calling droids or even having droids stay out all of the time (but pathing issues and other such problems would need to be fixed first and they’d likely need a lower chance of being attacked in combat than they seem to get now.)

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=22860

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-08-2003 12:32 PM

Balance Issues

1.Medical Surveying

Docs seem to feel the need to survey for their own resources and dislike the need to use skill points in Artisan in order to do so. Let's face it, anyone getting into the Doc level had to craft to get there, so the SWG version of a focused Doc is, in fact, a crafting profession and they want the abilities to self subsist in that capacity in the same way as Artisans do.

Since CHers seem to have been given the ability to heal pets without having to take Novice Medic to do so, and CMs have been given a basic scout skill in Terrain Negotiation, providing a partial form of /survey in the Doctor line would not too unreasonable according to many Docs. The other problem comes from the idea put forth previously by the Dev team that Doctors could always just buy their resource needs. However, Docs have many very specific resource needs (Dantooine Berries, Class 4 Liquid Petro Fuel, Avian Meat, Lokian Wild Wheat, etc.) that very few, if any, other professions, other than Medical Professions, truly need. Considering the prevalence of the Money issue for Docs, the market for surveyors to cater to the medic market is simply too small to be successful in comparison to what a surveyor could make catering to one of the artisan professions. In this way it could also be argued that rarely would Doctors be able to actually compete with Artisans on the resource market simply because their normal resource needs are not the needs of other professions. Worthwhile resources for any good medicines are just rarely found on the bazaar, unless that resource also overlaps with an artisan need, and then the price on such an item will be driven by the artisan ability to make far more profit on the item than the average medic pulls in.

Suggestions include providing survey only capabilities to increase with Organic Chemistry (the most common line for ALL of the Medical-based professions) or Pharmacology, much in the way it does for Artisan Surveying, but disallowing the sampling capability and perhaps with a smaller range. Others have noted that without some ability to sample (perhaps limiting Docs to only ever being able to sample 1 resource per sample tick, capping out resource samples so none are ever pulled up if there is more than our minimum, 8, or our maximum, I believe that’s 36, of a resources in inventory, or even just letting the survey tool show the resource values that only a Doc would use from those resources), to test the qualities of a resource if nothing else, the simple ability to survey alone wouldn’t be very useful. Suggestions have also included making the ability part of some kind of decayable survey tool made by artisans that let a Doc survey, ensuring a continued resource stream to artisans to compensate for those few Docs that try to make money as miners instead of as Docs. Or the use of a DE created resource seeker droid that might be able to locate a high concentration of a given resource within some given range and possibly provide either a single sample or at least some of the required stats for that resource, possibly even providing additional capabilities for those with the Artisan Survey skill.

For reference the following thread may be of interest:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=1540
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=5233
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14251
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21399

(*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.”

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“The SOE team is leaning towards adding a whole new set of items and such (medicines, components, and component enhancements) that can be yanked from the ground, sort of like scout, but with items specifically useful to medics. No final decision has been made, yet, but that's what they are considering at the moment.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

2.Master Doc Benefits

The benefits of being a Master Doctor seem like a bit of a letdown to some. Suggestions have included moving Resuscitation packs to that level for creation and/or use and/or raising the Med Use requirements on that pack, others feel doing so would be a nerf to non-Masters and suggest only working with additional content in this manner. Other suggestions include Inoculation packs for some form of immunity or resistance to various states. Point-Blank (Doctor centered) AoE state cures have been mentioned as well, as has the ability to harvest creatures at a low level of ability. Mind Stims, especially since Master Docs could care less about any way of exploiting something like this for XP (generally speaking.), consolidated wound packs (also look at the Inventory Issue) or a method to convert Med or Med Crafting XP at Master levels to Experimentation points (since there otherwise no need for that extra XP) or some other purchasable schematics/items.

For a sampling of the discussion see:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=7596
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=8075
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=10330
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14389
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14638

(*Dev Response:
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.]

Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“They really like many of the ideas for extra doctor abilities in the threads we listed. In particular things like AOE cures, dot resistances, multi wound packs, etc. All seem pretty interesting to work with. They do agree that the doctor could use another reason or two to get the master box. This particular issue may take quite some time to get to and code in, however.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

3.On Fire Cure&

(To be Fixed)

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

More information can be found in the following:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=13565

(*Dev response:
Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“They do not have a problem with adding some fire dot removal. Fire dots can get nasty on Tatooine where there are only two places on the map to put them out. Again this may take some time to get into the game, but at least it is being looked into now.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

4.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).

5.Money

This topic comes up very frequently on the Medic threads, but just as frequently, if not more so, on the Doctor forums. There is a lot of concern about how a focused medical character should be able to make money. By this I mean that we are talking about a character whose 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. Overall these markets are really on fully viable once Master, or at least Level 4 Doc Crafting, is reached.

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 small market except in a 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. Paying Docs some rate simply for manning a place where they can /register. 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
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14194
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14257
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14012
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=14888

(*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)

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-02-2003 04:15 PM

6.Medical Harvesting

Some Docs are having issue with wanting to have some form /harvest scout skill and our need for meat requirements. 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.

7.AoE Cure State Pack and Poison/Disease Cure

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.

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

8.State Pack Persistence/Immunity

Docs are wondering if it would be possible to get some level of persistence in Cure packs for States, Poisons and/or Diseases. The states appear to be regained upon the very next hit by a MOB or player. 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 resistance 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 now being fully applied to moving characters, getting to a character to apply a state cure is even more difficult (because they keep moving around in order to avoid being hit.) Clarification on the effects of various states, review of their effectiveness and review of their persistence on healing would be welcome.

Some discussions can be found at the following:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=combat_medic&message.id=10613

9.First Aid Improvements

There is some concern that the new First Aid improvements may not be enough. Some Doctors feel that First Aid should improve further as they move up in the Doctor Profession. Suggestions would be that by Master Doctor a Doctor should be able to completely remove a Bleed State in a single application of First Aid.

10.Mind Damage Healing for Doctors

Doctors would like to have the /mindheal command made available to them. Suggestions have included having it be a Doctor-only command, perhaps even only available at Master Doc. However there seems to be a bit more consensus (a polling would need o be done to ascertain the exact degrees of this) towards giving /mindheal to Master Medic to provide a little something extra for those reaching MM level, as well as then providing the capabilities to both Doctors and Combat Medics. In this way the command is at least closer to being as available as healing of the other Bars is to maintain the proper level of balance for the medical professions. Some have also suggested that the command might also be well served to also go to Entertainers and/or Squad Leaders. Others suggest that that command should only go to Entertainers or Squad Leaders. Some of the threads below will offer more insights into the various viewpoints.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16728
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17017
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16865
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=18644

(*Dev Response:
Zarlor passed along the following summation from Ben “Marvelin” Hanson’s response on the Correspondent forum on 10/28/2003:
“It has been decided for now that mind healing is going to stay with Combat Medics. Combat medics have been in need of another unique healing ability, and they feel this fits the bill nicely.”
Ref: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=17920 )

11.Ease of Mastery

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.

12.Crafting XP Speed Imbalance

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 on par with use. An example pointed out on the forums was that a Stim E will often heal for 1500-2500, or about 600-700 Medical 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 Medical 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, especially 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 even that now, but that I listed as a separate issue) 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.

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

13.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.

14.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.

Some discussion on the topic can be found in the following threads:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Development&message.id=646964

15.Pet Healing XP (or lack thereof)

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 November 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 December Publish. That’s assuming they even go with Q’s suggestions above at all.])

16.Crafting XP from Complex Schematics –v- Components

Despite the complexity of completed meds, such as stim or wound packs, these provide less XP, relatively, than grinding out components.

Wishlist

1.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.

2.Resuscitation Consent Request

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.

3.Crate combining

The ability to combine crates in inventory would be a very welcome addition.

Message Edited by Zarlor on 12-02-2003 04:15 PM

4.Medical Bag/Inventory Search for Meds

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 Small in there?) Stacking of meds in some way or putting things back into crates has also been suggested.

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 October Publish, meaning we likely should not expect this until the November Publish at the earliest]

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

5.Factory Completion Timer

Requests 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.

6.Window Persistence

We’d 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.

(*Dev Response:
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)

7.Component Crate Size Increase

Some Docs have requested an increase in crate size for components to allow a full 1000 run to go into a single crate. This would allow making completed items easier by only requiring a single large crate to be used instead of forcing us to carry and load multiple crates for final product runs and make sorting and organizing them much easier. (Especially if combined with the ability to combine crates as suggested in another issue on this list.) No to mention it may also help to alleviate the ever-present DB size issues the Developers are always mentioning.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=21502

8.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.

9.Factory Speed

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.

10.Factory Input Hopper Access During Operation

A request has been made to be able to open the input hopper during the factory run (to add resources if needed, or remove crates or at least see how much has been used) would be a big help and provide some ease of mind that things are working as they should be. (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.)

11.Factory Crate Size Selection

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 some things, many times it would be nice to make 10 crates of 10, instead of 2 crates of 50, for example.

12.Medic-looking Clothing

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

13.Surgeon or other Elite-Elite Medical 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. The relevant threads below would provide far more important details.

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
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=doctor&message.id=16025

14.Groupmate Numbering

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-#.

15.Correspondence Response&

(To be Fixed)

There is concern amongst the Doctor community that response and communication between the correspondents and the Devs is still not up to par. While there have been improvements and some responses have been forthcoming, there remains a rift in getting a dialog going concerning some of the most pressing issues in the profession. Nobody is expecting a quick fix, or even that our suggestions will be fully accepted, but we would like to know that our position is known, understood, debated and given due consideration. At this point it feels as though some of our issues have simply been dismissed out of hand. Further clarification and discussion on the reasons for these dismissals is very much needed, in our opinion.

16.Factory Email Notifications

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.

17./diagnose Damage Level Display

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) to the /diagnose display has been requested.

18.Groupmate Highlighting

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.

19.Non-Combat Diseases

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

20./registerwithlocation Terminal Request

Some have indicated that having a terminal prominently located in the Med Center buildings (it appears that 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.

Questionable Issues

1.Wrong XP on Some Schematics

Some items do not seem to be giving proper XP, such as Resuscitation Kits providing 0 XP or that experimented items, having a higher complexity, do not give more XP than their unexperimented versions.

It has also been noted that despite the increased complexity and resource requirements of something like an Advanced Liquid Suspension over a standard LS that the standard LS will still provide more XP (35 as compared to 25 for an ALS).

Seeing as how funding is less of an issue since players are catching on to the benefits and buying Buffs we have a fairly consistent merketable service. Those Doctors who haven't reached master and can't sell the top of the line buffs are still hurting financially. I'd still like to see some form of Medic missions brought in to help us out. Here's a few ideas for the content of those missions (I don't remember reading these before, so I apoligize if they have already been suggested).

1) Random NPC's with wounds walk into the Med Center for Medics to heal. I was thinking they could have 10K Health and Action bars completely wounded that any medics in the area could heal. Along with the XP they could pay out 1 or 2 credits per wound to any medic that heals them. It would scale the payouts somewhat, as higher level doctors with the better wound packs would get more of the payment. It would also get medics back in the med center, since that is where these NPC's are going. Also I think it would improve the /tip situation, since players are now competing with NPC's, who will pay, for the medics's attention they would need to similarly pay for services and would greatly increase our income. May have a drawback of medics camping the med centers, but adjusting the payouts could minimize this.

2) The terminals could call an NPC into the Medical Center with various conditions. New medics get an NPC with a lot of damage to heal, and small amounts of wounds. Higher level medics get bleeding patients, master medic's bleeding patients have very small HAM's and if they die you lose the mission. Doctors get more of the same, but larger amounts of wounds or damage to heal. Doctors also get bleeding but poisoned and diseased patients as well, with HAM's adjusted accordingly so its a challenge to keep the patient alive. Perhaps very high level missions could be a squad of soldiers walk in after a battle with all manner of statuses and a great deal of damage and wounds that you need to attend to.

3) Terminals could give out missions to a camp of NPC's infected with some disease or poison that you need to run out and cure. Perhaps one of those little camps that spawn with the hermit NPC's.

4) Faction missions could spawn a small camp of troopers in a bunker that have just held off an attack and need damage healed. You run out and do damage heals, or possible use first aid for bleeding soldiers as well. As an option to it, perhaps the attackers are regrouping and will return shortly so you have to get the soldiers healed before the second wave arrives. As a side portion to it you could stay there and help defend against the next attack. Payment could be based off of how many soldiers survive.

The difficulty and payout should be based off of the Medical Use (and possibly Combat Medical Use) skills. Based on these skills the types of healing needed can be adjusted, light or heavy wounds, bleeding damage, poisons, diseases, light or heavy damage, size HAM bars of NPCs involved, and so on. Any medic groups can team up for them to increase the difficulty/payout just like destroy missions.

---

Vodo_Baas wrote:
Seeing as how funding is less of an issue since players are catching on to the benefits and buying Buffs we have a fairly consistent merketable service. Those Doctors who haven't reached master and can't sell the top of the line buffs are still hurting financially. I'd still like to see some form of Medic missions brought in to help us out. Here's a few ideas for the content of those missions (I don't remember reading these before, so I apoligize if they have already been suggested).

1) Random NPC's with wounds walk into the Med Center for Medics to heal. I was thinking they could have 10K Health and Action bars completely wounded that any medics in the area could heal. Along with the XP they could pay out 1 or 2 credits per wound to any medic that heals them. It would scale the payouts somewhat, as higher level doctors with the better wound packs would get more of the payment. It would also get medics back in the med center, since that is where these NPC's are going. Also I think it would improve the /tip situation, since players are now competing with NPC's, who will pay, for the medics's attention they would need to similarly pay for services and would greatly increase our income. May have a drawback of medics camping the med centers, but adjusting the payouts could minimize this.

2) The terminals could call an NPC into the Medical Center with various conditions. New medics get an NPC with a lot of damage to heal, and small amounts of wounds. Higher level medics get bleeding patients, master medic's bleeding patients have very small HAM's and if they die you lose the mission. Doctors get more of the same, but larger amounts of wounds or damage to heal. Doctors also get bleeding but poisoned and diseased patients as well, with HAM's adjusted accordingly so its a challenge to keep the patient alive. Perhaps very high level missions could be a squad of soldiers walk in after a battle with all manner of statuses and a great deal of damage and wounds that you need to attend to.

3) Terminals could give out missions to a camp of NPC's infected with some disease or poison that you need to run out and cure. Perhaps one of those little camps that spawn with the hermit NPC's.

4) Faction missions could spawn a small camp of troopers in a bunker that have just held off an attack and need damage healed. You run out and do damage heals, or possible use first aid for bleeding soldiers as well. As an option to it, perhaps the attackers are regrouping and will return shortly so you have to get the soldiers healed before the second wave arrives. As a side portion to it you could stay there and help defend against the next attack. Payment could be based off of how many soldiers survive.

The difficulty and payout should be based off of the Medical Use (and possibly Combat Medical Use) skills. Based on these skills the types of healing needed can be adjusted, light or heavy wounds, bleeding damage, poisons, diseases, light or heavy damage, size HAM bars of NPCs involved, and so on. Any medic groups can team up for them to increase the difficulty/payout just like destroy missions.

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Great ideas! I especially like numbers 1 and 2. Man, those would be so cool.

One other thing; on the TEF situation, we now know when we have a TEF the little flag icon works great but we can't always be sure when we are going to get one. Obviously attacking an NPC of the opposing faction gives you one and healing an overt player will give you one as well. Its not always clear how working with a covert player will effect you.

When you target a covert player you can't see the TEF status flag. So if a covert player walks into the Med Center and asks for a disease heal, being the benevolent Doctors that we all are we toss a Cure Disease hiw way. We don't know if the disease is from a Diseased Nuna or an enemy Combat Medic, we could ask if he's TEFed before treating it but it would be nice to just know.

In a situation like that its not much of a problem. If a raid is on its way or currently in progress (not that these are as common anymore) you may not have be able to inquire about TEFs on your patients. With the possible combat spam the message may fly through the window unnoticed if you do. Trying to be helpful you still heal him, then shortly there after are cut down by the opposing faction.

We can probably assume that the patient has a TEF since there is a raid in progress, but we trade on our good names. Thoughts like "He won't heal me because I PvP" won't be a shining mark on the old reputation.

Not a major issue, and certainly not game breaking. Just though it would be nice to have.

Medical Surveying

No. I strongly disagree with this. Tailors do not get special "hide" harvesting skills. Armorsmiths don't get bone harvesting skills. Even musicians have to have help getting Metal and Wood to make instruments. Resource collection is just fine as it is now.

This is a terrible idea, remove it.

Nope. I won't remove it because over 2/3rds of the Docs out there think this is an issue. In the case of these lists, it's a democracy and the majority rules. Even if I were to agree with you on this, I could not morally remove it from the list because it's not my list. It's the Doctors' list.

Notice, however, the issue is seperate from Medical Harvesting. Yes, Tailors don't get a /harvest type of skill, but they DO have /survey to find all the fiberplast and the vast majority of the resources they need. Same for all of the other Artisan professions.