Droid Engineer Archive

Thread: SWG Correspondent Summit

Page 6 of 6

Previous Next

Snikrop

Mon Aug 30, 2004 4:32 pm

TheRealTK421 wrote:

Snikrop wrote:
TheRealTK421 wrote:
I have no way to stress how big of a change this represents (for the
better) so I'm still trying to wrap my head around this very question.
I don't like espousing an opinion until I'm pretty sure that I know
how things will go.

OK, then why wasn't the message from Sony before the Summit, "We're
going to bring all the folk down to Austin, but they won't be allowed
to tell you a god damned thing for at least a week or more until we
fix what they told us to?"
Many of the Corrs announced this (including
me).

Post summit in the cases I could find, and the
onus of the NDA disclosure was on SOE. They were trumping this up as a
way for us to get down to fixing things fast via better communication.
If they can't get what they need from you without being in the same
room I have bigger doubts about the entire correspondent program and
they better have plans for 30 some odd bunks to be added to the Austin
offices. I understand you feel that the communication changes
orginally announced around X-Mas are pretty much accomplished, but
based on your comments we're weeks from seeing the info and months
from seeing changes. Heck, these are combat changes and that means
crafting fixes/revamp are at least 8 months off, let alone some
movement forward in the plot of this game. Story Arcs are disabled,
the GCW revamp is a dream at this point (perhaps a bit more solid than
the DC profession, but still months away) and they still haven't found
someone to come in after TH's promotion. (not an easy hole to fill for
certain!)

It's not all that uncommon for us to work on stuff
'behind the curtain' due to the fact that we can't just TALK about
stuff without many of the players on the forum losing their minds. I
hear your frustration over this.....believe me. We want to get things
out to you ASAP too (and the Devs do as well). Pulling the trigger on
it before it's vetted some is a bad idea. Think about
it...

The combat revamp is a change that was discussed and became a default
promise/solution months ago. I see the scope of the changes has
increased, but that ultimately points to a rushed launch of an
unfinished product. We've put in a year of fees only to have the end
result be, "Uhh yeah, we want to fix that too, just give us time." In
an MMORPG time = money out of my pocket. Frustration is all rooted in
the simple fact that we're a year or more from having the game that
should have launched.
Regardless of movement inside the hive in Austin, things
have gotten much worse in terms of communication of what the hell is
happening.

And I say...that is patently false. To the
general forum going public, that might appear to be the case. For us,
it's not. The Corr. program is intended to address this specifically.
You communicate to us, we do to the Devs, the Devs to us and us back
to you. When they can, they come straight to you all.

However, you need to be aware that a serious amount of data we saw
shows that they ARE watching. They ARE listening. They DO read the
forums....they DO hear your/our issues. I know it doesn't seem that
way but I can personally attest to seeing proof that it's
true.

Them paying attention to what's not working is
simply their job, it is not nor does it come close to equating with
communication to us. I still think there needs to be a bug list with a
date and a plan next each of them like they put up with some of the
extra buggy publishes early on. Failure to list bugs in this manner
breeds an environment of inattention, or perhaps for us non-corr's a
feeling that fixing bugs is less important that rolling out new blocks
of code, expansions, and things that should have been available much
closer to launch(cities, vehicles, mounts, an interesting path to
Jedi, droids that are both functional and "Star Warsy".

If anything, since the exit of Q-3PO things are much more vague, SOE
is on the JtL march and customer relations be damned.

Yea..I know you all don't get the info you'd like
to get. I hear you, man. Should I just spill the beans and get
myself kicked out of the program?
Honestly, it'd be
primarily SOE's loss, so hell yeah. I have always appreciated your
honesty, and emotion so I'd be upset to see you go. If they were
willing to throw you out just because their planning of how to handle
information at the summit was flawed, it'd be a glaring example of
another silly corporation failing to calculate human capital.

Or would you rather trust that all the profession Corrs. are doing
their job (which they are..and splendidly so) and getting your hot
topics and gripes to the Dev peeps that need
them?
When information goes up
the chain but doesn't come back down it's not communication. The
player base, and from them the correspondents, tirelessly suggest and
impart, but SOE needs to put up or quit. Perhaps the move away from
Sony with the Japanese release is evidence that Lucasarts isn't
finding what they want.

In many cases, we don't even need to do that cause they are already
aware of stuff even before we bring it up.

You'll just have to trust me man.............................they DO
hear this stuff.

In general I do trust you, I don't trust SOE.
Trust is earned and the simple fact is that consistently, and even as
recently as a month ago, SOE was willing to burn credability in trade
for $$$. I can't help but wonder if Q-3P0 got wind of what was coming
and got the heck out. The free ship for 6 months of continuous
subscription is a tell-tale sign that they knew the cancels were on
the way. The opinion of the non-SWG players and most of the video
gaming press out there is that the game is irreparably broken and will
always underdeliver. I probably should stop defending it to those same
folks when all I'll ever hear from SOE is that it's "on the way" or
"something we'd like to try." I'm not raggin' on Dev's as I fully
support their efforts and recognize their dedication to produce a
quality product. Marketing and management are a different story.

When I read the above statement from you I'm forced to ponder what the
heck could be so big that you can't handle the ramifications.

Then you're not quite understanding that a core
systems combat rebalance/revamp has ramifications that are simply
giant in scope. Would you rather I be able to give you some tidbit
that caused 10000 more questions that we'd not yet be able to address?
That's why the Devs want to vett the data with us beforehand to
minimize this to the best degree that we can.

I think with the months of promising "it'll be
handled in the combat revamp" it's time for more than tid bits and SOE
knew that before they brought you to Austin. They had to be aware that
cries for info would come and decide that it's okay not to answer it
on anyone's schedule other than their own. Is it a good idea to make
sure your concerns are fully assimulated before posting, sure. Was it
certain that this would bring on more frustration? yes. This seems
stupid, when they could have fully described the plan and saved this
complete argument with you. If they don't care enough about your time
to forsee this I'd be upset, and I am

You're a smart man and a faithful DE, so what... are they adding a
real-time FPS mode?

Well, this is an "RPG" game. It's not going to
have an action/shooter style feel to it..it's not supposed to really.
What it will do is make the tactical aspects and choices in combat
mean a TON more. For example, spamming your best
special at all times (as we all know we end up
doing).....yea, you're not gonna do that anymore.
Send me a message in-game and I'll
mail you my City of Heros install disks and my l/p. The combat and
general play style is very action/shooter style and feels very solid
compared to walking through every object inside a house or getting
one-shot'ed through a building, for example. It's been more fun all
summer than any combat scenario I've seen in Star Wars and I'm
currently hanging around as BH/pistoleer from the "hollow"-grind cuz I
just can't make myself make any more droids. I've played in faction
battles and seen what a lag fest they quickly become and I think a
focus on combat needs to address the systematic problems with combat
that prevent things like the "Galactic Civil War" from ever
existing.

I think I'm okay to say that they aren't thinking about making SWG
into Quake or anything like that...

(That's just about the only thing you could save combat in this game
and be as "ground breaking" as all the Corr's are saying the changes
are).

The issue is that SWG isn't supposed to be an
"MMOFPS", it's an MMORPG. As such, it will always have a combat
system that's RPG-like in nature, not FPS. I think it's fair to say
that on the other side of the CB/CR, you're going to have play a far
better tactical game than is necessary right now (a la constant
spamming of your best special, which they know makes combat boring).

Like I said, you're
missing out on what the combat could be and I'd like a chance to show
you the future.

Thanks for coming out and saying you are under an NDA, cuz it sure
would have been nice if SOE layed out the format of this pow wow
publicly and with the honesty they have with the small group of you.

Even though I'm no stranger to frustration, I ask
that you try to tone it down some. I understand, believe me.

As an interesting anecdote: They had a little contest about the Corr.
that flamed TH the hardest before they became a Corr.

The winner?

/flex (and...I don't want to wear that badge
really, cause TH is really a super cool guy).

Seriously, man. Just chill out and trust us that our general feel on
the outcome of all this is that combat is going to be a LOT more fun,
interesting and engaging than it is now...
/bow

Respectfully,

Like I said above, the frustration isn't that I don't think the Dev's
listen. I work in IT and spend a large chunk of my day doing customer
relations. I'll save my sugar for my customers, as the occasional poor
attitude is not something easily fixed and sometimes is unrelated to
the situation at hand.

I'm not even really that interested in Combat in an RPG. I've been
/killing things since the text MUD days and love the non-combat
options in this game. They need the equivalent focus _NOW_ so that all
these monkeys running around shooting each other will have crafters to
make the things, healers to heal and politicians to lead. (to name a
few...) Heck, even though I'm glad there's a crafting system, the fact
that it can be mouse macro'd means it'll take a lot of work to become
an intellectual pursuit and has seen much less dev. focus on making
gameplay fun.

Now combat is finally seeing a revamp which will debut at least a year
and a half after the launch of the game. I see your posts about hand
crafting and I'm interested to see where that goes, but as always
"When?" is the question. If the GCW revamp is on tap for next year,
and the pace of development will surely slow as Devs are pulled away
for the next expansion pack, it could quite easily be a year before
the plot of the game moves forward and crafting professions see the
attention given to combat to date. What we don't need are more
publishes like the droid "focus" that ultimately yielded something
sub-par to swgcraft.com and a temporary reduction in starport spam.

I'd hate to see you go, but I'd like to see Red Names posting
regularly about these changes without the filter that is the
correspondent forums. It's just not communication.

-A worthless, plain-ole' player/customer's .05 credits

" When you go to sleep, if you in fact sleep, does it take two star wars fans' blood to calm your nerves or are you higher than that now?

justG - When I am trying to go to sleep, and I am tossing and turning at night, the things that keep me up at night are combat, and jedi, and spaceflight, and things like that. Let me tell you this, we absolutely LOVE our jobs. And we LOVE this game. We are dedicated to doing whatever we can to enhance your play experience. And it usually only takes one fan's blood to drift off... " JustG

TheRealTK421

Mon Aug 30, 2004 7:40 pm

#67

Snikrop wrote:

TheRealTK421 wrote:

Snikrop wrote:

TheRealTK421 wrote:
I have no way to stress how big of a change this represents (for the
better) so I'm still trying to wrap my head around this very question.
I don't like espousing an opinion until I'm pretty sure that I know
how things will go.

OK, then why wasn't the message from Sony before the Summit, "We're
going to bring all the folk down to Austin, but they won't be allowed
to tell you a god damned thing for at least a week or more until we
fix what they told us to?"

Many of the Corrs announced this (including me).

Post summit in the cases I could find, and the onus of the NDA disclosure was on SOE.

Actually, no...many (including me) had some basic, or 'better', announcement about the Summit well beforehand.

They were trumping this up as away for us to get down to fixing things fast via better communication.

No...the purpose of the Summit was always to go over the details of the CB/CR and get our reactions to them for the purposes of ensuring that they hit the mark as close as possible.

That was always the reason for it......always.

If they can't get what they need from you without being in the same room I have bigger doubts about the entire correspondent program and they better have plans for 30 some odd bunks to be added to the Austin offices.

See...that's just it. They needed us to be in the room cause the material to be covered was of a size and scope that it all but demanded it. Going over the same amount of info in that level of detail on the Corr boards would have taken us months...(and that might be pushing it).

I understand you feel that the communication changes orginally announced around X-Mas are pretty much accomplished, but based on your comments we're weeks from seeing the info and months from seeing changes. Heck, these are combat changes and that means crafting fixes/revamp are at least 8 months off, let alone some movement forward in the plot of this game.

MMO changes happen slowly. /shrug

Story Arcs are disabled, the GCW revamp is a dream at this point (perhaps a bit more solid than
the DC profession, but still months away)...

MMO changes happen slowly (more slowly than we want and more slowly than the Devs want).

/shrug

...and they still haven't found someone to come in after TH's promotion. (not an easy hole to fill for certain!)

No comment.

It's not all that uncommon for us to work on stuff'behind the curtain' due to the fact that we can't just TALK about stuff without many of the players on the forum losing their minds. I hear your frustration over this.....believe me. We want to get things out to you ASAP too (and the Devs do as well). Pulling the trigger on it before it's vetted some is a bad idea. Think about it...

The combat revamp is a change that was discussed and became a default promise/solution months ago. I see the scope of the changes has increased, but that ultimately points to a rushed launch of an unfinished product.

While that's your opinion, mine (now) is that they are making a very serious attempt to give us the better product/service that we all want...and some demand.

[snip]

And I say...that is patently false. To the general forum going public, that might appear to be the case. For us, it's not. The Corr. program is intended to address this specifically. You communicate to us, we do to the Devs, the Devs to us and us back to you. When they can, they come straight to you all.

However, you need to be aware that a serious amount of data we saw shows that they ARE watching. They ARE listening. They DO read the forums....they DO hear your/our issues. I know it doesn't seem that way but I can personally attest to seeing proof that it's true.

Them paying attention to what's not working is simply their job, it is not nor does it come close to equating with communication to us.

How they communicate a lot of stuff is through the Corrs. When they can, they post stuff themselves.

I still think there needs to be a bug list with a date and a plan next each of them like they put up with some of the extra buggy publishes early on.

Never gonna happen....

Failure to list bugs in this manner breeds an environment of inattention, or perhaps for us non-corr's a feeling that fixing bugs is less important that rolling out new blocks of code, expansions, and things that should have been available much closer to launch (cities, vehicles, mounts, an interesting path to Jedi, droids that are both functional and "Star Warsy".

I'll let Drashk report to you on how often (and how much time) he personally spends with QA peeps working on bug stuff on TC.They aren't inattentive to bugs but there's no way that they could fix them as fast as we'd like. And, as an IT person, you know that it's possible to "fix" something that breaks 3 other things elsewhere.

If anything, since the exit of Q-3PO things are much more vague, SOE is on the JtL march and customer relations be damned.

Yea..I know you all don't get the info you'd like to get. I hear you, man. Should I just spill the beans and get myself kicked out of the program?
Honestly, it'd be primarily SOE's loss, so hell yeah. I have always appreciated your honesty, and emotion so I'd be upset to see you go. If they were willing to throw you out just because their planning of how to handle information at the summit was flawed, it'd be a glaring example of
another silly corporation failing to calculate human capital.

Well, see...since I was there and have (I hope) a pretty good understanding of what the CB/CR means, how it will look and play out, etc., you need to understand that I think that holding back the info until it's fully vetted and ready IS the right move for them.

If you say you appreciate my honesty and tend to agree with some of my assessments, listen to me when I say that it's right for them to hold back on the info till it's fully ready to roll to you all.

Or would you rather trust that all the profession Corrs. are doing their job (which they are..and splendidly so) and getting your hot topics and gripes to the Dev peeps that need them?
When information goes up the chain but doesn't come back down it's not communication. The
player base, and from them the correspondents, tirelessly suggest and impart, but SOE needs to put up or quit. Perhaps the move away from Sony with the Japanese release is evidence that Lucasarts isn't finding what they want.

The chain of info/communication often goes...

You all --> Me
Me --> Devs / TH
TH / Devs talk about all things, prioritize, etc.
TH --> Me
Me --> You all

It's right for you all to want as much info/communication as possible. I understand (now) that it would likely be detrimental, ultimately, to try to force the actual red-names to handle ALL the info back to the public. It's just a fully productive use of their time. /shrug

In many cases, we don't even need to do that cause they are already aware of stuff even before we bring it up. You'll just have to trust me man.............................they DO hear this stuff.

In general I do trust you, I don't trust SOE. Trust is earned and the simple fact is that consistently, and even as recently as a month ago, SOE was willing to burn credability in trade for $$$. I can't help but wonder if Q-3P0 got wind of what was coming and got the heck out. The free ship for 6 months of continuoussubscription is a tell-tale sign that they knew the cancels were on the way.

Maybe the Vet ship was more of a way to say "Thanks.", hmmm? Afterall, they didn't actually really have to do it.

The opinion of the non-SWG players and most of the video gaming press out there is that the game is irreparably broken and will always underdeliver. I probably should stop defending it to those same folks when all I'll ever hear from SOE is that it's "on the way" or "something we'd like to try." I'm not raggin' on Dev's as I fully support their efforts and recognize their dedication to produce a quality product. Marketing and management are a different story.

And after spending the weekend there, most of the Corrs (many ex-ranter/flamers themselves) see reason to think that things will get better. As soon as all of us would want? Of course not.
But that's not the same as seeing that there's a real serious effort afoot to ensure that things do,
indeed, get much better.

When I read the above statement from you I'm forced to ponder what the heck could be so big that you can't handle the ramifications.

Then you're not quite understanding that a core systems combat rebalance/revamp has ramifications that are simply giant in scope. Would you rather I be able to give you some tidbit
that caused 10000 more questions that we'd not yet be able to address? That's why the Devs want to vett the data with us beforehand to minimize this to the best degree that we can.

I think with the months of promising "it'll be handled in the combat revamp" it's time for more than tid bits and SOE knew that before they brought you to Austin. They had to be aware that cries for info would come and decide that it's okay not to answer it on anyone's schedule other than their own. Is it a good idea to make sure your concerns are fully assimulated before posting, sure. Was it certain that this would bring on more frustration? yes. This seems stupid, when they could have fully described the plan and saved this complete argument with you. If they don't care enough about your time to forsee this I'd be upset, and I am

What they needed was a way to:

Cover a TON of ground in a very short period of time

Get a TON of necessary feedback in a very short period of time

Not be in a situation where forum postings could be misread, misunderstood or simply not fully nailed down.

I understand the frustration, man...you know I do. There's no way (if you think about it) that they could have realistically "fully described the plan". As stated above, covering what we covered over the weekend in posts would have take a VERY VERY VERY long time indeed.

Like I said above, the frustration isn't that I don't think the Dev's listen. I work in IT and spend a large chunk of my day doing customer relations. I'll save my sugar for my customers, as the occasional poor attitude is not something easily fixed and sometimes is unrelated to the situation at hand.

Precisely my point, my friend. The CB/CR isn't an "easy" fix...which is why the Summit was needed (not weeks or months of trying to get the same info set via posts).

I'm not even really that interested in Combat in an RPG. I've been /killing things since the text MUD days and love the non-combat options in this game. They need the equivalent focus _NOW_ so that all these monkeys running around shooting each other will have crafters to make the things, healers to heal and politicians to lead. (to name a few...) Heck, even though I'm glad there's a crafting system, the fact that it can be mouse macro'd means it'll take a lot of work to become
an intellectual pursuit and has seen much less dev. focus on making gameplay fun.

Well, the crafting Corrs are just getting moving on a plan to try and make crafting better (the 'Industrial Revamp/Balance'). We want to make sure that there's an analagous change to crafting (someday) to what will happen with combat. And...I think you'll likely dig what's on the way combat-wise.....of course, that's a subjective issue. But when I hear most every Corr basically state that they are pleased, confident and excited, I hope you hear what that means is on the way.

Now combat is finally seeing a revamp which will debut at least a year and a half after the launch of the game. I see your posts about hand crafting and I'm interested to see where that goes, but as always "When?" is the question.

When it's ready.../shrug

I need you to understand that a hand crafting change was just something we kicked around. It would have to be proposed, considered, approved, reconsidered, vetted, tested and other things first. It's by NO means a part of any development schedule...it's all just talk right now.

If the GCW revamp is on tap for next year, and the pace of development will surely slow as Devs are pulled away for the next expansion pack, it could quite easily be a year before the plot of the game moves forward and crafting professions see the attention given to combat to date. What we don't need are more publishes like the droid "focus" that ultimately yielded something sub-par to swgcraft.com and a temporary reduction in starport spam.

If that's all you think we got, I feel bad. I personally feel we got a lot more but I understand that it's a subjective (and just as valid) viewpoint on your part. If it helps, we do get more 'love' via JTL.

I'd hate to see you go, but I'd like to see Red Names posting regularly about these changes without the filter that is the correspondent forums. It's just not communication.

I know, man...

When the threads get posted, I really do think that you'll be happy, especially as it starts to sink in how combat will made SOOOOOOO much better.

/bow

Out-of-breath,

TheRealTK421 a.k.a. "Doughbacca"

SWG DE Correspondent

Co-Founding member of Ahazi DENet & SWG DEA (Droid Engineer Association)

"I think all right-thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that ordinary, decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. ...I'm certainly not. And I'm sick and tired of being told that I am."

Snikrop

Mon Aug 30, 2004 9:12 pm

#68

They've taken TK, put sony Emotion Engine chips in and reprogrammed all our reps.

OrionsByte

Mon Aug 30, 2004 9:12 pm

#69

TheRealTK421 wrote:

And after spending the weekend there, most of the Corrs (many ex-ranter/flamers themselves) see reason to think that things will get better.

Aha! I figured it out... they slipped something in to your guys' vodka while you were dancing in the "special garment" they gave all of you... (go ahead and keep denying it TK... I think you had those puppies on the second you got home).

But on a serious note... I've said this before and I'll say it again: in a few months Star Wars Galaxies will be a completely different game. If that's the game you want to play, if that's the one you feel you should be or have been paying for, then why are you playing this one? Changes are happening, and just because they're happening slowly doesn't mean that they're not important to the dev team - some things just take time.

I work asa leadprogrammer writing proprietary in-house software for my company. Recently we hired a "business coach" to come in and help the company move towards our goals. He was talking with me today, trying to get a feel for what the programming team's sitch was. I told him that the language and database technology that runs our current software is woefully outdated (sidenote: has anyone ever heard of Superbase?) and as such, we're completely rebuilding it in dot Net (C# to be precise). He asked what my timetable was, and I told him probably 2-3 months. He acted like it was an eternity. Two to three months to completely rewrite a program that I built, maintained, and refined over the last 2-3 years, while 60-70% of my time is still being spent on other projects. If he'd understood that perspective, he might have seen that 2-3 months a little differently.

It's not much different with SOE. They spent several years developing this game, and now they're completely rewriting the rules for combat. Along the way, they have been and still are working on several other systems, features, and fixes. Could they drop all that other stuff and just do the stuff everyone's waiting for? Sure they could - but then we'd all be complaining about the lack of system maintenance, feature additions, and bug fixes. If you've read more than 10 posts on these forums you know it's true.

So try to have patience, and if you're really that fed up with the game, take a break. Seriously. Why are you paying for and playing a game that you don't enjoy? Come back after the CR and see if it lives up to your expectations at that point. If all you see when you log in to SWG each day is another day without your pet bug fixed, you're never ever going to be satisfied, and your attitude towards the game and the devs is only going to darken. Is it worth it?

Okay, I gotta go now. Our "coach" wants me to write an essay about "what purpose the company serves in my life." Joy.

Checking your spelling (and punctuation, too) will ensure that you're making sense to more than two people.
- ~~+----=X~~ Biranno Runningstar ~~X=----+~~ -
Master Musician | Master Droid Engineer | 4020 Artisan | 0/0/3/1 Fencer | Alliance Ace Pilot
Emerald Ridge, Naboo ~ Naritus
-I support ATK play!