Droid Engineer Archive

Yet more news as to why I think it will be a long time before droids are ever fixed. This post was made by a dev regarding experimentation:

This is really why experimentation is hard to work with:

1. We have to set up the experimentable data on the schematics and make sure its all correct.
2. We have to write a script that properly weights that data and assigns it properly.
3. We have to then give those result values meaning in some system.
4. Then we have to expose that data to the player in a meaningful way.

We aren't really skilled at doing all of that right now, but we are getting better. More systems will get more meaningful and fun experimentation as we go along. (And we'll revamp old ones to be better...)

Full post here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=TestCenter&message.id=18754#M18754

I'm sorry, but this game is just simply not finished. Period. I've always thought the people that screamed and yelled demanding refunds and free months of play were crazy. I don't anymore. It is simply insulting to be expected to continue to pay to play a game that is simply not finished. I know MMORPGs change often. I know they're released with bugs and issues. The SWG problems are so far beyond that its not funny.

I agree.

Seems like the devs responses often translate into "we're not sure how that should work" or "we haven't decided how we are going to implement that yet".

This stuff should have be finalized in the design phase of the game before the coders even started programming.

This is the first MMORPG I've ever played. I started with pistoleer but grew tired of that so now I'm heading for DE. I'm not at a level where the lack of experimentation really bothers me yet. But I'm reading post after post about how DE is screwed. Actually, from what I gather, alot of the professions are screwed. Do you think they rushed the release to satisfy the 1000s of whiners and criers on the boards?

No, I think they rushed the game to satisfy the whiners and cryers in their own financial department that were looking at the massive red numbers that they had accumulated over the years of development and wanted those red numbers to get smaller and turn into black numbers.

I don't get what they mean when they say "we're not really skilled at doing that now". They don't know how to work the game they made? lol.

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FeartheMullet wrote:

They don't know how to work the game they made?

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No. What he said was they aren't very good at trying to make the game they are making.

They know how to 'work' it...they probably just don't know why it works the way it does (or doesnt, in our case).


/bow

Respectfully,

No online game is truly ever finished because new content needs to be continualy added. ***BUT*** That's no reason not to finish and FIX what you already have BEFORE adding more.

Mullet, I assume that you're not a software developer by trade with that comment. For all but the smallest project, developers very rarely really know how to make the most of their own work. Sure they know how the code works, but they have their head too far stuck into the details to really understand how to drive the application to do a specific task. That's what users do. They typically understand the ins and outs of an application far, far better than the developer, particularly the quirks and making it do something the developers never really intended. This is an exponential effect too. One user finds a few nasty things, two users find lots of interesting ways (they probably chat with each other outside of the developer relationship). Ramp that to 300K users, and you'll guarantee that everything under the sun will soon be public knowledge. And, like any modern game system, there are the developers - code cutters - and the content developers. Two separate groups. What you're seeing here is the content developers learning how to use the tools that the code developers gave them. They're trying to work out how to do all those nifty tricks and corners in their tools to get us something fun - preferably without having to make the code developers go back to develop more code. If the ycan develop something new by using a number of tricks and sideeffects in ways that developers didn't intend, that's a lot of effort saved and means new stuff faster because only one level of QA needs to be done, not 2 ( though it really feels like they don't do _any_ QA).

No, don't you understand? They don't know how to work it yet because they haven't writen the 20th billion line of code to get the EXP to train up in the next level!

It takes time and grinding... Keep grinding SOE!

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We aren't really skilled at doing all of that right now, but we are getting better. More systems will get more meaningful and fun experimentation as we go along. (And we'll revamp old ones to be better...)

Full post here:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=TestCenter&message.id=18754#M18754

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OMG....... That is so sad. Who are these people??? Sure as hell arent the ones that wrote the game. They cant even figure out how to change anything. I would fire those morons so fast it would make thier empty heads spin. Seriously, hire some engineers. I would bet anyone a steak in Austin thatSOE hires starving kids out of school that will work fornext to nothingto be on the SWG team instead of experienced developers (they moved on to expansions and other projects).

-Dil

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LordRolan wrote:

No, don't you understand? They don't know how to work it yet because they haven't writen the 20th billion line of code to get the EXP to train up in the next level!

It takes time and grinding... Keep grinding SOE!

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LOL! Cute! I think they got Intermediate Software Development, Master BSing, and Expert Stealth Nerf, but they are completely ignoring the CS line.

"I am not a Droid Engineer, but I play one on Lowca"

Hehe very true... And that isn't even the Elite Skill Tree :-D

Did anyone here ever play WWIIOL when it first came out? If you didn't then take my word for it that it was about a million times worse than SWG at the initial launch. The game has been out for over 2 years now and it is just recently beginning to resemble what was orginally promised on the box when it was launched in 2001.

That said, I know that people are irritated by the fact that this game isn't fixed, but I gotta say for me personally I'm used to waiting (litterallty) several months between large updates in WWIIOL and those large updates don't contain nearly as much content as some of the medium updates we get on occasion from Sony. My point? No point really, just saying that for me Sony is much faster than I'm used to in fixing their game. I guess I've gotten to the point where I expect that a game isn't going to be "working" when I get it first and that I'll be waiting for quite a while before I can expect it to be in good repair.

That said, I wish that the Devs would get off their butts and at least aknowledge that there are hoards of DEs that are screaming into the void in the DE forum without getting as much as a "we hear ya, don't bother us right now, we're working on other things and will get to you ASAP". That is in my opinion something that just reeks of bad customer support. Just throw us a bone, none of us really expect that we're gonna get fixed in one day or something, but it would be nice to just get a nod in our general direction that says the Devs remember that they coded something called Droid engineering into the game and that it's not working right.