Game Guides Archive

More than anything, we need a level system that continually gives us a feeling of advancement. A hallmark of the computer RPG is the (sometimes small) satisfaction of constantly impoving your character. But after you've played SWG game for a few months (or less), this disappears.

I appreciate the intention of the skill cap, which encourages diversity and player interdependance. These are good things, and SWG needs them. But surely there are ways to keep the diversity/interdependacne and still give us the satisfaction of ongoing advancement.

AC's exponential increase in level requirementsis a good idea. Players in SWG could earn more skill points with a system like this. Orattributes themselves could be increased in this way. Combat ability could be separated from skills, allowing the master merchant/droid engineer to very gradually become a capable fighter. Certain skill combos could be made incompatible;completing certain quests could amke them compatible. Advancement could be tied to factors such as age of account, actual play time, badge accomplishments.

Certainly the Space Expansion will include more professions. Hopefully the skill point cap will increase. If we were periodically receiving new professions and simultaneously getting more skill points, the legacy players would get to advance again without reduction in character diversity. This would still only be a partial solution.

I'm maxxed out, happy with my character, but Ireally crave that sense of playing and advancing. I don't want to have to leave my server and take time away from my main guy just to get that again. Hopefully someone is listeing and taking this to heart.

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NACHODEWI wrote:

I 100% disagree with this! What I see is someone who wants the financial benefits of the Merchant profession butstill want to be a great combatant! Make a choice. Either combat or comerce! Don't let greed cloud your judgement. If you got your wish then no one will need to buy anything from you because they would be able to craft whatever they need and still be capable fighters. And no they should not increase the skillpoint cap. That would severly hurt the player economy because people could make whatever they need instead of buying it.

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If that's what you got out of my post, then I'm miscommunicating my position. My interest is in keping the game active through continual advancement. This isa hallmarkof video RPGs, and a key elementin my enjoyment of them. "Greed" and financial consideration doesn't enter into it.I brought up Merchant/DE as an example of an unlikely combination which would be extremely difficult to achieve. Note how I suggest that certain profession combos could be made incompatible to ensure game balance.

That said, I dohave a lot of sympathyfor the dedicated merchants and crafters with low combat abilities. Despite SOEs intention to create a non-combat oriented game, most of the advanced and dynamic content is combat-oriented. Unless SOE plans to expand content into areas which cater to these professions, and drastically shift the focus of the game, the only solution I see would be to increase the combat opportunities for these classes.

VERY nice post.

I struggled to leave DAOC for this game, a 3 month struggle before I finally let it go.

There is no struggle to leave this game.

terrific original post... it gave me an idea

let's take me for example.... been around since a month after launch.... have all the POI badges, the COA badges, the theme park badges (minus the rebel) and a handful of mastere prof badges... the unique ones like the COA badges get lost and people dont' wantto sift through all the tripe that is "...has seen the majestic falls of theed"... once you get all 45 get a badge that says something like "... has seen all POI's" or something more verbose... i dont' care... make it a color... then after a time eliminate those POI badges and create new ones... then have another verbose badge about seeing all of those POI's and then do it again...

also... i just mastered pistoleer... and then i keep getting pistoleer xp with what i kill... it does nothing but sit there and when/if i decided to drop it i can always pick it back up pretty quick cuz i have all that xp... why not after reaching your cap of 400k or whatever it is get the option to trade that in... you get something (not in your inventory but on your character page) saying that you traded in that max... then you continue to rack up pistoleer xp... however this xp is different... it accumulates just like normal pistoleer xp but if you drop master it disappears and you lose all the previous xp that is nowrepresented by adifferent badge of some sort that only you can see on your character page... anyways, you keep racking this stuff up and the cap is a higher ammount.... mabye 1mil or so... and then you do it all again... anyway my convoluted point is, once you get say 5 or 10 of these special badges (and each badge requiring an exponentially higher ammount of xp) you trade them in to get a special title.... a generic one if you chose like "Noble" for instance... or profession based like "Legendary Gunfighter", "Feared Bounty Hunter"or whatever would be awesome to display above your head for working so hard at arhiitect or merchant or any of the other profs... or what about a unique schematic only available to a crafter that has logged 100 mil crafting xp after they have become master? or a new pistol cert after logging 1 billion more pistol xp...

I know this is a hard to read post (i'm typing as fast as i can, for time is of the essence) but what i'm trying to incorporate is something that rewards longevity with a profession...I was a master arch for the longest time and eventually dropped it cuz it wasn't fun... i had nothing to shoot for other than more money, which i didn't need, and the satisfaction of 800 /tells as soon as i log on every day.... give a master a reason to be a master and stay a master... i like the easy of mastering a prof cuz it makes you competitive at a faster rate within the community, but make it fresh and make me want to stick with it

out

Good read! I agree with alot of your points, and I hope that SOE will ponder some of them as well.

Well, I won't speak to badly of the devs, it is apparent that they're trying and the ideas I've read for future plans seem promising.

My biggest gripe with this dev team though is their seemingly nonchalant attitude towards fixing long running bugs. The boast all the time in their "state of the game" letters and when they do interviews with other websites or magazines, about how they quickly squash all gating/game stopping bugs. Well, I hardly see that as the case as I play this game often and am typically plagued by the same very annoying bugs over and over for months on end. The worst part of which, these are bugs (a lot of times) they've claimed to have "fixed."

Vehicle auto-storing, warping when dismounting a vehicle, the endless list of GCW base problems/turret problems, xp not being shown properly, UI resetting to default every so often, etc.

I mean I could go on, some of these are bugs that happen every time you play, I'd call that a "gating" bug, that needs fixing. Some of them are seemingly small problems, but dealing with a single small problem, multiple times in a play session, every time you play, quickly makes that small problem, not so small.

I commend the devs on the good things, the new dungeons are great, the new loot is refreshing, they're keeping their deadlines for monthly updates (aside from the monthly story), I mean the game is starting to shape up, but the bugs still persist and seem to be ignored for long periods of time and that is not good.

One way they can reward longtime players is to NOT RECYCLE LOOT! All the paintings, quest rewards and Theme park loots should be available for a time then should be gone forever. I would hate fot them to make these loot available for players to craft at some later date. A year from now I want to be able to have stuff thats no longer available to someone joining the game. That is the kind of thing that would make me think twice about leaving.