Droid Engineer Archive

I hope your not actualy suprised by this sudden shift from devs. How soon you all forget... /sigh We've been lied to and BSed for 6 months. Face it, our profession isnt getting fixed withen the span of most of our gamming time in SWG. Most of us will be long gone to other games (that actualy work) by the time SOE stops talking and starts fixing our profession. Ive learned one thing about SWG in the past 6 months... This game is temporary, till a new game comes out by another company.

Sorry everyone.... Ive lost any hope or respect I might have had for this game and SOE. Im only here because Ive made a few friends in game and to pass the time for now. Im at the point now where I could give a chuba's puddle if anything gets fixed, added, broken again, patched, updated.... blah blah blah...

I share your concerns on this.

Until I see the new droids no TC, I'll take everything I hear about future plans with a grain bucket full of sand.

Yea. My post got 1 starred too. Must be a CH pissed off and trolling our boards

Graf VonSoden MDE

---

Ryde wrote:

The animosity between CH and DE is truly frightening.

---

It is? I don't see huge flame wars between the two. Often, when on the main boards, DE's do NOT ask for a nerf of CH pets, but rather, that droids be brought up to par.

I don't know, but I am guessing the one-stars came from people who didn't like rants... but can't say for sure as it wasn't me that one-starred your post.

---

Philomorph wrote:

Ok, so now the HoC chat goes on, and JustG says:

We are going to add weapon capabilities for existing droids, as well as some new combat droids,
in the first quarter of next year. We are going to be devoting ALOT of energy to Droids.

Nice. 1st quarter goes until March. Does this mean the January publish is going to have like 2 new things in it, and the rest will be spread out over 3 months?

---

This does not represent a "shift by the devs". There are a lot of changes coming, and they are going to take time to phase into Live. It's not like you'll see nothing until March. What's being said here and has been said before is that you will see some changes in January, some in February and maybe now some in march. That should make people POSITIVE - there are more changes than they can roll in a month!

And as has also been said before, they will be announcing their plans for the January patch next week. There is no point in being negative until that is announced and we can see what is actually in store for us.

So the devs give us a plan awhile back, said combat ability for current droids.

We all pull togeather abd tell the Devs thats stupid.

Devs ask us what we want, we tell them.

Devs say thanks for the info.

Devs say first 1/4 we get combat ability for current droids.

dubya tee eff? If I can put any form of weapon on any of the current droidsother than a Probot or Fugitave Tracker Droid I will quit the game, period.

Well i have a new character on infinity now...a CH and its proving to be most fun to play, compared to DE which has begun to make me sick. Nothing i make proves to be a fraction of use (excpet droid chassis which look cool in my house)

BTW i alwasy thought star rating was to show u agreed and thought the post was good?

Adding to what Kurt_Mendelposted..

Something else that needs be considered is that what JustG posted a few weeks ago still applies, since the changes still have to go to the Test Center first. A patch that hits TC in January might take until Febuary until it is pushed to Live. The same applies to the Febuary patch. JustG never stated that the changes would hit Live at those times, he only stated that we will see the changes in January or Febuary.

In the last few publishes what has happened? Player Cities and mounts are now spread across all the galaxies, Vehicles have changed the way that we travel, and the profession that was given the first message about getting some DEV lovinhas beenrevamped.Bio-Engineer was in worse condition than we were and now that they have had some DEV attention, manyof our 'flesh' brethern are now very happy with their profession.

Outof all of the DEVs that I have seen post, and running around on TC, JustG and Vass have earned myrespect because ofwhatI have seen from them. With JustG at the helm, I have faith that most of us will be happy inby the time March'rolls' in.

---

Drashk wrote:

With JustG at the helm, I have faith that most of us will be happy inby the time March'rolls' in.

---

<RANT>
You make some good points, but March is simplytoo late.I know it's not your problem, but my best friend is going to leave the game in January if the DE profession isn't 10 times better than it is now. He's been playing since beta and I think asking someone who has wanted to play a DE in the Star Wars Universe since then to keep waiting this long is simply too much. I'm surprised he's held on this long, but he's given January as the drop dead date.

SOE doesn't give a carp about one player, I know. But if he leaves, that's one less pal I have to play with, and I've already lost a lot of them to other games that actually deliver on what they promise. I'm betting the end of January will see Doom 3, and the betas for Dragon Empires and Mythica (which we will likely be in). By March we'll have Half-Life 2 probably, and there simply aren't enough hours in the day to devote to playing a game that isn't really all that fun when there are all these other shiny new things to get into.

</RANT>

Also look at it from this point of view

Since that announcement, they've had to pull developers to work on the Vehicle Patch parking lot problem (2 supposedly), the Vendor loses all Item problem, and probably a few other problems I dont pay attention to because they dont concern me.

What do you think happens to stuff thats being developed when they get pulled to play whack a mole on the bugs?

While im on it, consider a Hotfix. They would basically have to fix the problem on the current version of the software (which may/probably be different than the static live) Go back to the Live source archive and make the changes to implement the hot fix, recompile and put in there nightly update process. Can you imagine how much time is lost there? and is it any wonder it doesnt work half the time? The fix may work great in the current codebase because of other work that was done on it which may not be present in the archived version. So everytime you hear hotfix, just think no newdevelopment for that day.

Even testing fixes must be a bitch. Its not like they can run the final code off their desktop. They undoubtably have to set it up on an internal server cluster which the rest of the team is fixing THERE code on. I doubt they can just shut it down and throw up there fixes at whim, since someone else may be in the middle of testing there problem. So you spend 15 minutes hunting down something stupid, 10 to fix it, and who knows how long waiting for a good time to test implementation, rinse and repeat.

Also consider that if they are going to patch on Jan 16th, they arent going to introduce features on TC January 14th.(at least they **edit** well better not). There is undoubtably a window that all new features must be ready for. Judging by the major releases, I would guess 2 weeks, which is a reasonable minimum for it to be checked over for bugs.

Lets not forget Xmas & New Years and all the down time and screwed up productivity that invokes.

When you read a programmers estimate, always read it as "if nothing goes wrong" and with SWG, just realize that "nothing goes right". A good programmer knows 90% of the time how long it will take them to code something. The problem is finding the time to do that coding, especially in group programming where you have to work with other people. Half their day can easily end up being in meeting hell depending on how things are run there. As a programmer, I used to get around such obstacles by staying long into the night when most people are gone (except other programmers) to get the job done in peace. Of course, I was much more willing to do that and for less in my 20s then I would be now in my 30s, since its totally unreasonable for them to be asked to do so.

Its disappointing that stuff takes longer, but the continual idea that SOE is doing it on purpose just to spite you is just rather foolish.

Does anyone even know how many actual code monkeys there are? I thought I read somewhere it was around 10. To me that seems insanely incorrect, though it would also explain a great deal. Hell, even if they add on another programmer, it would cause a dip in the schedule as someone would have to stop work to bring them to speed. Coding something like this isnt like filling out your weekly TPS reports. Can you imagine walking in one day and being told ok, welcome aboard, here's the droid code, make repair droids be able to repair! Thanx!

Should SOE have more coders and not have released the game so soon? Absolutely. But they did, and you bought it, so you are just as responsible.On the bright side the project wasnt cancelled like hundreds of other games every year.If you feel that strongly about being a beta tester in live, then drop your account. Or drop MDE, its not like getting there is hard. All it takes is money and about 10 hours of clicking to add to your carpal tunnel, holos have proven that. So make enough to buy yourself a few heavy harvestors harvest up the 400k steel and 250k fiberplast, and switch professions for a few months.

</rant>tired of seeing the same argument every 4 weeks. writing software isnt like building toasters.

This message has been brought to you by my clients, whose project is now another hour behind because I decided to rant here.