Droid Engineer Archive
Thread: UPDATE -- there is no update ...
Slythetove wrote:What I'm saying is that any reasonable person can assume they are not pleased with the class. They don't need to keep telling us that. They have asked us for ideas. Provide them.
We have. And they responded with basically more questions and vague "fixes" to come time later. When? Are we talking weeks? Months?
There is no need to keep e-mailing the correspondant at this point saying "yes, we got your e-mail thanks".
Yes, they should respond with that. Its curtesy. It conveys a sense caring and understanding of our issues. Again, all I think we need right now is some ballpark of when we can expect some attention. I'd be thrilled if they just came out and said "we are targeting the end of September for droid love". Instead, because they've said nothing, we're all sitting here feeling like the black sheep of the Star Wars family.
I'm sorry I think they are within reasonable limits at this point still. Some of you are looking for changes or decisions too soon.
Again, not looking for the changes to be happening right now. I agree that the actual changes could take time. I'm just looking for some information. Honest communication with the client is always the KEY to having a good project. Having no communication is a very bad thing. Having excessive communication with one small part of your client base, while having absolutely none with the other is even worse as it lets everyone know how they feel about ya.
IMO Sly it is called for. I mean, Rifle and CH aren't completely unusable, and yet they get enourmous attention and immediate fixes. We've been patient with a completely worthless proffession for 2 months, and one uncalled for nerf. It's time for them to tell us what's going on, not ask us a bunch of questions when the answers are posted in dozens of different threads over and over on this board.
We're getting no response, and no real fixes. Sin is within her rights given the response and immediate fixes unbroken classes are getting. Balance works both ways, you can't just balance the high part and figure you'll take care of the broken low part when you get around to it.
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and yet they get enourmous attention and immediate fixes.
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The reality of this is that more players are playing those and are hurt by inaction, so intelligent resource allocation puts them at high priority. Furthermore, I've seen some fixes already to droids, and I see more coming. The people in this thread, in general, are asking for what they say is professional courtesy but supporting a person who says a developer sucks. That's not professional on this side of the fence.
Again, it's been a week. That's not that long. It's not a large amount of time, and certainly no reason to personally malign another human being who's doing a job.
If I go to Taco Bell and they mess up my burrito, I ask them to fix it and I wait while they do it. I don't tell them they suck and they should tell me every minute that I wait that they are still working on it. It's exaggerated, but the analogy is basically there.
I ask Sin to step back, take a deep breath, and recognize the immaturity of this post. I'd go so far as to say he / she owes them an apology. Just because we're anonymous on the internet doesn't mean we can't treat each other with respect.
If it had been 6 weeks, then I'd say it was warranted, but 7 days? No way.
Slythetove wrote:http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=droid_engineer&message.id=14223
It's been one week since they posted this. That's pretty short on the timeline to expect even more communication.
Seriously, it's been one week.
That's good communication from them.
I'd buy that logic if it were true across the board. Furthermore, the changes they made to the droid class in the last big patch totally destroyed the DE's profession. Making droids perma-die, while making creature basically immortal (yeah, I know, in SOME cases creatures can die permanently, cry me a river), simply made our class nothing more than a profession that provided a "convienience" to players if they felt like spending a lot of money for a mobile crafting station. They destroyed one aspect of our profession with not so much as a peep as to what their logic was. That's why I think the "it's only been a week" arguement doesn't hold. Our class was made worse by the patch, not better. yet, we've heard nothing. They're response in the link you provided doesn't even address that.
They have questions. They don't have answers yet. Why would you need them to repeat that within one week? They already said it.Communication is the cornerstone of business, but they are well within reasonable limits. Taking the time to reply to every e-mail Sin sent in with "hey we got your e-mail" would defeat the purpose of e-mail.
I need it within a week because we see how much attention other, less broken professions are getting. And again, they broke our profession WORSE after the last big patch. Also, I don't think it is unreasonable to ask for a rough guess as to when they *might* be getting around to us.
Believe me I'm in the boat with you guys. We all want changes, but this type of statement from our rep
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Yeah, I am pretty bitter .. especially after reading the response BEs, Rangers, Scouts and CHs got on their board. Our DE dev sucks.
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is uncalled for within 1 week of their last communication.
Relax.
Agreed, saying our dev "sucks" is a tad harsh. Although, I doubt that is really going to offend anyone since I doubt we even have a dev.
But seriously, the thing is, they created the correspondent program to help the communication between the devs and the community. The correspondent has a special, direct email address to the devs (or whoever her liason is), yet, she's getting no responses. However, you look over at some other boards and find multi-page write ups on how they're going to continue to improve the CH class, or how they're totally revamping the Ranger class or how they define their vision for the CH class, or how they're fixing the BH class (which, honestly, does help us a *tad* (i.e. the 5 use seekers)).I don't think the two of us disagree nearly as much as our discussion would make it seem.
I agree that it is too early to expect any real changes to the DE profession. The crux of my issue at the moment is that they broke the DE profession even more after the last patch and we haven't heard word one as to what they were going to do to make the DE profession viable and useful in the near future. The response they provided last week didn't even touch on that topic. It was vague and talked alot about the "future" without telling us when that would be.
I guess my whole take on it is from their side not our side, because I do this for a living as I have stated. They don't have anything to really say yet. That's the whole thing. I feel like it's too early to say that because they don't have anything to say within a week that they don't have any intention of saying anything.
I don't need reassurance that they are still working on it, because it seems fairly obvious that they are. I realize nobody is asking for changes here, rather they want communications. However, my take on it is that they really don't have anything to communicate yet, and it's too early to decide that is wrong or bad or "sucks".
Let me be clear, Sin has done a fantastic job of presentation up to this point. Knowledge, passion, logical development of ideas all good. I want to continue to see him/her as our correspondant, but I think this particular thread post is an overreaction to a non-issue.
I'm really trying to provide feedback to our feedback provider.
This community (DE) stands a chance of being the best community for a while precisely because the uber d00ds see no reason to play one. That means we have a chance to be more professional, more respected, more favored by the devs if we play our cards right. I just want to help add to our hand.
Help us, Sintrosi, you're our only hope!
Stay on target. Staaay on target.
Use the Force, Sintrosi...
Well i hate to say this but this game is starting to remind me of another... Anarchy Online. That game didnt become playable till about a year after launch. Oh well i'll probably make a CH on another server and play that till they fix the DE profession.
"I hope your clients are more reasonable than the people up in arms after waiting a week for more info. If not, your boss is terrible at his job of managing expectations."
And who is managing our expectations? The very same thing can be said about SOE in regards to our expectations of the game, the correspondent system, and our profession. They have not adequately communicated what we should expect at all, and this is the very thing about which we are complaining. We want more communication regarding what we should expect. We are not asking for a product right now. We are asking for a prospective product's feature list! We are not the customer coming to you asking when it will be ready. We are the customer going to your boss asking what we can reasonable expect from your company!
-Raystonn
I'm no coder, but I work in the support field for an international telecommunications company. I'm sorry Sly, but just saying 'it has only been 7 days' does not wash. If something breaks in my job, we're expected to respond to within 15 minutes to 24 hours depending on the severity of the problem.
Heck, 48 hours would be more than reasonable, considering the nature of SWG when something goes bad for even a small segment of the game. I think the main problem is that the Devs know that we can give up on a profession and change to another--thus we're not locked in stone. Therefore, there's a sense that a problem with a profession or two aren't serious since the players can just go and play a working profession.
Hrm...the problem with that viewpoint of course is that it skews all of the stats and metrics that the Devs use to balance the game. But that is what is happening, everyone bailed out of professions that didn't work the way they were supposed to (BE, DE) and jumped to professions that did work (CH). I know of several who were going to be BEs, but dumped it when they couldn't do anything...in favor of CH since natural creatures were better than anything they could make. Well, now some of the DEs are doing the same...dropping droids in favor of creatures.
To sum it up, 7 days without a response is inappropriate from a support point of view as well as a dev point of view. The longer it takes for a response, the fewer people will stay with a 'broken' profession as well as the more things that break from unforseen problems caused by other fixes.
And to prevent from totally jacking this thread, you're doing a great job Sin. I doubt there is anyone around here who will say otherwise. The problem is up amongst the people who actually get paid for the job, not the volunteers who are paying for their jobs.
Abeg of Abeg's Droids and Stormlight Musical Supplies, Naboo, Chilastra
The Creature Handler designer response thread had 2 follow up postings within 2 hours of the original post. It then had another follow-up within 1 more day. They then had 2 additonal new thread postings 1 more day later addressing some other CH issues... each of those with at least 2 or 3 follow-up postings.
Again... it is not necessarily the lack of a response... but the blatant disparity between us and other professions. (or maybe just CH and other professions)