Entertainer Archive

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SOETyrant wrote:

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Panthu wrote:

If you can't stand the waiting and would be happier quitting till things are fixed, you should and you shouldn't feel guilty about it. I was told to pass that along and I chose not to because it sounds extreme to me. It's true though I guess, if you aren't having fun, no reason to have an active account until things are improved for us.

Currently, prof revamps are scheduled to be before the GCW, but that could change at any time. I have no idea about dates... because they aren't sure things yet. Order is a little more stable, but that can change too.

I don't rock at the Bake Sale thing myself, but I know that's our only choice for those of us who choose to stick it out. I'd like to make a positive impact on the rest of the player base and preserve our Ent community as much as we can until things are handled... if you can't or don't want to, you shouldn't beat yourself up about it. You can always come back.

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1) We do take the unattended macroing issues seriously, and this ability will go away, but we are not going to address it this month. It is a big technical change, and takes a serious amount of development and testing. It is being done by a different team than the Combat Upgrade folks so it is not gated by that effort.

2) Yes, the other professions (including all Ents) are scheduled to be revamped right after the Combat Upgrade and before the GCW. This is our stated development strategy. When we start that process we will engage with the community on the design in the In-Development section of the website to ensure what gets done enhances the gameplay and fun within the Ent professions.

3) There is another team doing fixes on all the professions not covered in the Combat Upgrade in the meantime to address immediate issues, bugs and low (dev) cost enhancements. We will being doing some interim fixes to the Combat Upgrade professions too, as warranted. With over 30 professions they have a lot of ground to cover but Ents willl be getting their share.

4) SWG as a whole is an entertainment experience which integrates lots of gaming and social elements. It is intended to have an entire series of compelling and fun activities. Not all of these activities are working the way you or we would like them to. I don't think it is healthy or appropriate for people to continually do things that make them frustrated or angry. This seems like common sense to me, but common sense appears less common all the time as I get older. When I'm not having fun at something, but I still love it at some level, I take a break. This seems better than driving myself to an emotional breaking point. I would hope the same for our customers, as I don't like it when people leave us angry. I would rather people took a break, than got to their breaking point with us, because when they get to that point, there is no chance they will ever come back (it is a divorce, not a breakup).

All the devs, myself included, work every day to try and improve the fun within SWG. We all get sad when we see people leave the game because we couldn't fix it fast enough to save them from leaving. We don't want anyone to leave the game, we want them to enjoy the SWG that so much of our effort and emotion is invested in.

I think that unattended macroing doesn't belong in our game and it will be removed. I have committed us to this, and I remain committed to it. When more people play AFK than ATK, we haven't done our job very well, and we need to fix that.

Thanks for listening. We haven't forgotten your issues and we will work to ensure the Ent professions provide the social gaming experience you deserve.

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SOETyrant wrote:

BTW, one of the two characters I'm spending all my play time on is an Ent (dancer/muscian). I get that the experience needs help, and the challenges of the cantinas. That experience does not match the first two months of the game and I'd love to get back to something closer to that original experience (or better).

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SOETyrant wrote:

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Shaizann wrote:
Thank you for your concise explanation of the developer view of things, SOETyrant. It's certainly not the case for me that I'm no longer having fun playing an SWG entertainer, but the experience is curtailed by its many flaws. The most glaring of which is the ability to macro the professions functionality. In additinon to that we need a fun and engageing methodology for Entertainer Healing mechanics to work on. The passive idea just does not work as intended in the present game environment.

I just do not understand why you folks just came to this understanding. We've been jumping up and down for ages trying to get comment or attention on these issues. Don't get me wrong,I'm very pleased to hear from you, but "what took ya so long?" Perhaps it is the "Jedi Blinders" or something similar. Another thing that worries me is that you are only one person on the team, and I am concerned that the other members of the team may not be as commited to the elimination or AFK play (an SWG-wide problem, not just an entertainer problem) or our issues in general.

Any comment you could give with regard to a soft-timeline would be appreciated. Although I know that it is hard to do so given many players take any timeline as a hard and fast promise. I hope I can get a slot in the Combat Upgrade (the activity formally known as the Combat Rebalance, go marketing spin, go!) to help work my input as an entertainer main on how some of the battle fatigue/mind wound mechanics work.

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I think we made the initial announcement on our intent to remove unattended macroing within 60 days of my joining the project. Not everyone on the team (or in the game) is going to be happy about this change. In fact, your current irritation is just going to be moved to another group of people who are just fine with AFK play when we make this change.

Through Publish 9, 10 and JTL, our development schedule was "on the rails". Combat Upgrade does not need a huge part of the team to succeed, so now our plan is to operate on several different development tracks, which is why we are fixing bugs and adding the new loot mechanic. We will have an announcement about our development process in a couple of week giving more visibility into this.

While I am only one person, I am setting the direction for the game development moving forward (in conjunction with our team leaders and LucasArts). We (the combined team at SOE and LucasArts) will drive the game to be more fun, more accessible and more Star Wars.

Concerning future publication times. Almost every time we give a timeline we lie. And we *never* do it intentionally. Poop happens, that is we have emergencies, unanticipated challenges, the bugs take longer to resolve than planned and just the general friction and chaos you could associate with any large multi-location team organization combined with the large city of people who are our audience. Going forward you will see us state our development strategy, and when we are ready to work on something it will show up in the In-Concept, In-Development sections of the website. We will engage the community on the majority of the development we do. And most importantly we need to publish things when they are actually done, that is working as designed with a very high quality level.

Removing unattended macroing is a priority item. But it's not simple to do, so it needs both a fair amount of resources and time.. I will push to get it in progress soonest is what I can promise.

Message Edited by SOETyrant on 11-05-2004 08:35 AM

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Esharra ěsh-äŕ-rä, noun
1. Entertainer
2. Bounty Hunter
3. Smuggler

"One man's oddity is another man's routine." -Bertos Goodner (a dancer)