Droid Engineer Archive

I take my hat off to Q-3PO. It's good to see a response. We all learn from our mistakes. Perhaps they'll try not to hotfix us on Saturday morning the next time.

So, when this fix happens tommorow, does that mean that something else important, like programming droids wont work????

Something tells me I owe someone 50 credits.

But if you don't accept the apology, then at least give them a chance to demonstrate their plan of action.

"What about the three months (and all that time in beta)?!? You smoking something Woody?"

If you've actually waited that long than you can afford to wait another week. At this point, what have you got to lose? You're obviously still interested or else you would have left the DE profession long ago. And for those that haven't been waiting that long (but seem to scream the loudest), then you can look at those who have been waiting the longer for inspiration on the virtues of patience.

"An apology doesn't mean anything without action!"

You say talk is cheap. I think it's better than that. I think it's free. They can give me all the talk they want, and it will cost me nothing. So in respect I have nothing to lose and everything to gain. If they don't do anything then I've lost nothing, but if they indeed do actually do something then I've gained a better profession. Either way I'm out nothing.

"What about the $15 bucks! You're out that by paying to play a broken profession."

I pay because I enjoy the atmosphere and the world, not because I want to see them fix something. If the logic dictated that they had to fix it because I'm paying, then I'd have to stop paying at the end because the work would be done. No. While I would much rather play a profession that worked, there is no gun to my head holding me here and forcing me to pay. I choose to continue paying because I can find happiness in it regardless. If I didn't then most definately I would stop paying.

Now don't think this lets you off the hook, Devs. I don't want to be stuck in a broken profession any more than the others. Happiness is a relative thing. My happiness should scale equally with those in the other professions, and if we continue to slip more and more behind on this intuitive Joy-O-Meter, then obviously I will stop paying. You've made the apology and you've promised to set things straight, so now I suggest you come through with the action. Otherwise the needle will dip too low and I seriously doubt there will be any Droid Engineers left when you finally get round to correcting problems that should never have been here to begin with.

I suppose that's about it. I should end this with a witty comment, shouldn't I? How bout something like:

"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." -- Maurice Wilkes, designer of EDSAC, on programming, 1949

Ok, now its time to back off Q3P0 for a bit. We asked for an apology and we got it. I know we will all be watching for the fix tommorow. I for one will now wait patiantly to see it.

Heck, I have waited this long for things to get better another day or so will not kill me.

Thank you Q. Your apology is accepted by me.

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Warrhawk wrote:

Heck, I have waited this long for things to get better another day or so will not kill me.

Thank you Q. Your apology is accepted by me.

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Waiting for things to get better isn't the issue here. We're waiting for things to return to the buggy, but at least functional state we were at last week.

I agree if does show some action that shows they will committ to our profession then by all means they'll earn some trust and their words will carry more weight. So far though they've given us no reason to believe anything. We've seen no action plans, time tables for improvements, or even basic bug fixes. What we have seen are repeated nerfs and patches that break our profession more and more. So at this point the apology that Q puts forth is a step in the right direction, but is absolutely meaningless without further action... Only time will tell.

Comming from an old EQer.. This is the first time SOE has EVER said "opps, sorry" about ANYTHING!!!!!

This is really great!

/faint

Kamayyk

Master Artisan

DE 4-3-2-4

Note that he didn't say that the Devs love our profession. He just said they don't hate it.

It's all in how you read in between the lines.

Lol, the Dev's do not hate the profession...

Man, I've had a good laugh there.

I kind of have two views of this....

First, everyone is right so far in that talk is cheap. Until we see results, both for the sudden bug and (more importantly) for the core issues that have plagued us for four months now since release, I won't really be *too* excited about what "plans" they have in store. Trust is like credit, you have to build it up....they've talked a lot of talk over the past few months, but they haven't yet delivered. They tried to on a minor issue like Droid Customization, but we see how that got botched up. Until they really deliver, I can't give them a whole lot of credit.

On the other hand....we, the community, came out and asked for an apology for all the crap we've been going through. And after a bit of time, Q-3PO swallowed the bullet and apologized in public. He admitted that we've had it rough. Basically....we said we felt we deserved and apology, and they decided that, yes, we did indeed. That's something impressive, if nothing else. Let's not be the type of people that screams for something, and then whines when we get it.....we screamed for an apology, and they gave it to us. We should be happy at least that we got that! Now, our other problems still remain, of course. But at Least we got an apology.

Remember that Q's job is community relations - he is paid to placate the customer base. Its his job to 'swallow his pride' when required.

Unfortunately an apology, in the MMORPG world, counts for very little. Granted we are their customers but as long as enough people keep playing/paying SOE then its easy to 'fob off' the 'unhappy few' as long as possible. Unless something causes an unacceptably large (to the SOE accounts dept) number of players to quit, you can expectthings to get fixed when they are good and ready to.

I played an Engineer in AO long enough to know that the majoritory of the customers get seen to first, regardless of who needs it most, unfortunately its just business practice - if you keep 75% of the customers happy you only stand to lose 25% (which you can probably tolorate), but if you only keep the 25% happy...... (figures picked to illustrate point).

The other thing AO showed me was that initially any group of players who feel neglected by the Devs will be happy whenever a devs pops in with a post - however its only a matter of time (and its started here already) before this too is just seen as a 'brush off' tactic.

We need communication - but we also need action, we need it badly and we need it yesterday!