Droid Engineer Archive

Sox, how long is Gorantoth's bug list? Has any droid engineer ever said "Oh, please don't fix the bugs"? I don't think so. They haven't fixed a single bug on that list since launch. Plus if the devs would listen in the first place, we wouldn't say "no" to their plans, because they'd be based on stuff we actually want.

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BlueMorgoth wrote:
Look what has been posted by the devs, and every time the DE community has turned around and said "no, go away and think about it again". From a developer's perspective, that means I would shelve my existing plans and start formulating another lot. That could, potentially, be 2+ months of design work that has just been tossed for zero outcome. Therefore the horizon for seeing any changes arrive now gets pushed away by another 2 months. The reason that horizon hasn't been seen yet is that we are the ones responsible for pushing it away.

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And that bug list is getting shorter. See the patch notes and Drashk's reports. The community has become so fixated on the DH issues, that they have ignored the fact that progress is being made in other areas. About half of our major issues have been attended to and fixed in this coming publish. What a lot of DEs are not seeing is that almost no other profession has had their bug list attended to either until this month. Pikemen are still screwed, so are Squad Leaders, Smugglers etc etc. They won't be getting their equivalents to Gorantoth's list addressed until the next publish either. Each profession, this patch, has had a number of small things attended to, but not a complete removal of all "existing issues" (except Chef, but you should have a look at what is happening over there. I know Sly know's a lot about it) . Unfortunately what I see here in the DE forums is a lot of self-interest and inward looking navel gazing, and not enough looking at everything that is happening as a whole and working out whether we are getting favoured more or less than everyone else. Sly has managed to see both sides of the attention that devs can bring (he's much more well known on the Chef boards than here) so if he decides to leave, that's cool and I understand and respect why.

Two posts in one reply here:

Virtanis, in this case, yes I am defending the devs. I'm a software developer myself, so i also know what it's like to be on the other side of the fence. What I am trying to point out here is why, from this side of the fence, that no apparent progress is being made.

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Fribble wrote:

err Blue, I think you missed hmmm, 4-5 months of Dev's agreeing that our bugs were going to be fixed and taken care of as a "Top Priority"... and then never following through on those promises.

Then to be told "January will be new DE content and fixes", then "Febuary will be new DE content and fixes", and then finally "July will be DH BS and no meaningful bugfixes" isn't exactly overwhelming to most long term DEs.

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Ok, it seems you missed the point of my post there then. When they first announced that, they also put out a post or two on what they were thinking they were doing. We, as a community, then turned around and said - "no, bugger off, fix the other stuff first, but we want combat droids too". Again, with my developer's hat on, I would not have made that post before having done some sort of planning. That planning would have involved looking at the codebase and architecture, trying to decide what to do to achieve some of the goals within those bounds, having numerous discussions with the actual coders involved, then putting something into paper, clearing it for publishing with management, then finally posting to the boards. That could easily be 2months of time. So if TH made those posts in November, with a 2 month timeline from then of January, then we've told him to go back and re-evaluate, then off course a January timeline is going to be missed. Right now, given everything else that we've said no to, the devs would have at least 3 months before we see something on TC - new modules, art design, community interaction, and so forth.

We have had some of our bug fixes attended to, and most importantly the highest priority one of the nested cluster modules, and plenty of other smaller ones besides. Yet almost all the community is completely ignoring this. It's not 6 months form from now that they will arrive, it's in the next 2 weeks. They're already on TC and will be arriving on live very shortly. That's not some pie-in-the-sky date in the future, nor some vague promise. That is something that is fixed and real today. Nobody will ever have "no bugs", just a much shorter list than others.

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BlueMorgoth wrote:
About half of our major issues have been attended to and fixed in this coming publish.

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Umm.... no, they're not. Repair modules still can't be used in repair droids. Droids can't be healed. The things that are being fixed on test are trivial, like the storage compartments not granting DE xp. The few fixes on test come nowhere near half of the bugs on Gorantoth's list. The CH profession was completely reworked. The chef profession has been completely reworked. The BE profession was completely reworked. And yet, arguably the most "Star Warsy" profession in the game has been utterly ignored.

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Hillslayer wrote:

Don't consider yourself the only dev in the crowd either Morgoth.

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I don't, but there are a lot of non code-cutters here, so I'm just trying to explain how things look to them from the other side of the fence. Sometimes a little understanding helps explain problems and calm down the ranters that don't have that different perspective available to them.

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duncje wrote:

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BlueMorgoth wrote:
About half of our major issues have been attended to and fixed in this coming publish.

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Umm.... no, they're not. Repair modules still can't be used in repair droids. Droids can't be healed. The things that are being fixed on test are trivial, like the storage compartments not granting DE xp. The few fixes on test come nowhere near half of the bugs on Gorantoth's list. The CH profession was completely reworked. The chef profession has been completely reworked. The BE profession was completely reworked. And yet, arguably the most "Star Warsy" profession in the game has been utterly ignored.

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If you want to pick out a few individual points, go for it. It does not prove your case either. For each individual thing you point out is not fixed, I could equally point out one that is fixed. For example: cluster module stacking is now fixed. Teh CH profession and consequently the BE profession were fixed so early because there were some extremely serious game-breaking issues with it. The DE issues are not game-breaking, they don't cause a serious economic imbalance to the game, thus why we haven't been subject to an "emergency fix" like CH got (and it was more than CH too, everyone was impacted by those changes). No matter how you look at it, the inability for a repair module to work in two droid chassis (out of 12) is not a serious disaster that is completely destroying the economy or causing server crashes. This month is the first month that the devs have focused on fixing non-game-breaking issues and professions. I am sure there will be many more in the months to come.

Simple answer is: Yes.

Long answer: They did approach us months ago, back when TH made his infamous exploding-mse-droid post. He posted "here's what I think you guys are after having read your forums. Is this correct?". Had we said yes to that one, we would have code arriving now for us to play with. Since we said no, back to square one and run around in circles again starting the clock from zero.

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BlueMorgoth wrote:
Simple answer is: Yes.

Long answer: They did approach us months ago, back when TH made his infamous exploding-mse-droid post. He posted "here's what I think you guys are after having read your forums. Is this correct?". Had we said yes to that one, we would have code arriving now for us to play with. Since we said no, back to square one and run around in circles again starting the clock from zero.

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