Game Guides Archive
Thread: Is buffing ruining gameplay?
The fact is, there will always be people who are uber. There is no way to prevent people from taking advantage of any standard rule system. I don't care about the combat revamp; afterwards, people will figure out how to take advantage of it.
If you want to play the game like it was "meant to be played," get a group of 20, don't use buffs, and go Krayt hunting. Hell, I'll even join you, sounds like fun. But when I buff out to my eyeballs and take out my stun comp and PSGs to go slaughter Rebel Jedi, don't complain to me about it.
The beauty of this game is that you can play it however you like. Your crocodile tears are raining on my parade.
AraDanBynobi wrote:Buffing is a very strange thing when it's as overdone as it is in this game. Its getting to the point where the Devs may as well have just charged 10K credits per day - IMPERIAL TAXATION
This is so true! And don't forget 3k for vehicle use, 6k for brandy and spices, 3k for travel costs, a few buck for armor and weapon repair kits...
You have to do a couple of missions "for the man" every play session just to keep up with the taxes! Now there's a reason for rebellion! Taxation without representation!
RideTheLightning wrote:
There are alot of things that got out of hand with this game, the Devs totally need better ways of testing this stuff.
You know this is very true. Over the months I have seen a lot of things go live with what seems was tested very little. P10 is definitely one that needs more testing also. The Devs seem to rush things to live for whatever reason. As for ruining the game. What people fail to realized is that everything that we are experiencing now which some believe is ruining the game have been in place since lauch. Once again the devs have failed to do extensive testing otherwise they would have seen how buffs and armor would make the game too easy.
A big problem I notice about this game is not that buffs or armor makes us overpowered or underpowered. It's the balance between PVP and PVE content and all the PC abilities VS the npc/creature abilities. First mobs have anywhere from 3 - 10 times the Ham that a player has and in some cases creatures/npc's can have 10 times the ham of a group of 5 fully buffed characters. Those same mobs can instantly kill you (still fully buffed) with one hit. Now even thought the corvette came after we discovered how powerful buffs are, buffs mean absolutely nothing there, nor does armor. You will die on the corvette. The only way to survive on the corvette is one of two ways.....stealth or a 100% organized group where every person in that group knows their role and what to do. Anything else and your whole group will just be cloning over and over again.
See PC's are too overpowered for the following reasons:
1) buffs
2) armor
3) we have learned the shortcuts, the macros, the tricks of the trade
4) we now have millions of credits to get everything we need
5) we have now been able to kill the high end mobs and get the great loot components that make our weapons and armor uber when a very skill AS or WS craft them since they can get SEA's to increase their assembly of these items.
6) The mobs/creatures in the game are not smart at all....they have no kind of A.I. logic. They run in a straight line when they chase you. They don't consider that when they are chasing you that their are other creatures around that are aggressive to them and will basically mop the floor with them.....for example a rancor will attack most other mobs but yet the other mobs will continue to chase you right paste a rancor.....creatures in real life and in star wars would see that rancor and stop chasing you and head the other way....as will you 
7) finally we know SWG like the back of our hand.....mobs don't change, the terrain don't change...nothing changes. When we go to fight nightsisters for example....we know exactly what we are going to come up against.....specials or no specials....we go totally prepared and in 90% of the cases we win because we are prepared. Ask yourself this....How easy would it be to take down a nightsister spellweaver when you have absolutely no idea what kind of attack they will use or what tactics they will use? Game won't be so easy then would it....but as they say, knowing is half the battle......buffs and armor make the other half something we don't even have to think about......
Add all of this up and you have a game that is too easy........
now the devs counter to all of this is usually backwards and counter productive. Their answer seems to be the same.....and that is to give the mobs more HAM, Higher resist, more powerful special attacks.
So then the logical solution is to give the PC's a little better weapons, armor, buffs...etc. since the whole community will start to whine and cry that the content is too hard as a lot of people did with the geo cave.
Now in the defense of the devs, I understand they have a hard job trying to keep the balance in the game....they don't want to force us to have to group all the time and they don't want to allow soloist to do everything by themselves either.
So the question is, What do they do? well, unfortunately I don't have the answer to that (that's what the devs get paid for)....and most likely it will take a little trial and error for which people like you and me will have to go through periods of the game being to easy or hard and/or simply seems broken or bugged. I for one do appreciate how far the devs have come with this game and what they have provided for us so far....it's not an easy process.....I still am appreciative of the job that they do....otherwise a SWG MMORPG would still be a concept on someones table and I would be playing another game wishing my favorite sci fi series would come up with a new game for me to indulge myself in.
So Yes, buffs and armor have ruined the game somewhat....but again people fail to realized their is no black and white way of doing things when one thing is always effected by another thing......buffs tie into armor, armor tie in to HAM, HAM ties into weapon damage, weapon damage ties into every pc, mob, npc, creature, destroyable structure in the game.......then theres the animations, the motion capture, the game physics, the mechanics, the A.I., continued addtion of new content to keep use interested.....so on and so on.
I guess what I'm saying is that you can't pinpoint one or two parts of a game like this as being the sole factor for it being or becoming ruined in some fashion.
Bottom line is that the buffs have always been their, the armor has always been their......it's just that early on in the game PC's were not able and did not have the understanding of the game to access those components that would potentially makeweapons, armor and buffsuber as wecannow (in pve). The devs made thier mistake by not testing this far into the game.....I mean, your a developer, you can fast forward as far as needed to test out whatever it is that you think or feel needs testing (your susposed to anticipate things as bigs as the game becoming to easy).....instead you test to a certain point (and pick up testing later when players get to the point where you finished testing) because you assume that players will take forever to get to a particular point when in fact they advance through the game a lot faster than expected....So here comes the attempt to quick fix things so that you can try and keep us as customers long enough for you to figure out a more long term fix.....meanwhile in those moments we get people disastified with things no matter how large or small it might be......and ultimately complain, make post like this one or worse....they quit.
People it's a bigger issue than buffs or armor being to good.....that's why combat is being revamped from the ground up.....that means the weapons, armor, HAM, specials, professions, abilities...etc. Basically all that means is we have outgrown the old combat system. We have found all the holes, exploits, tricks..etc and need a fix to keep the game from drowning and dying. If SWG was a game like KOTOR, Jedi Academy.....blah blah....then the combat revamp would basically be a sequel to the first game....but since SWG is actually an ongoing game that we play while it's being fixed or updated, it draws much more attention and sticks out really bad when the devs have to revampe a whole portion of the game.....normally we would not see the revamp process with games like KOTOR......all we would get is the...."KOTOR 2 is coming out...and will have a better combat system than before" type of statements.......we would get the sneak peeks, the beta screenshots....the game reporters inside reviews......and then wait....wait....wait....and wait some more until the game is ready for us to play........not in a MMORPG......so why complain when you understand this kind of process....it's gonna happen again in the future as soon as we find the exploits, quick tricks.....in the new combat system....nothing is perfect and as smart as the devs are....there are probably twice as many that are smarter than them but call themselves "hackers", "exploiters" or "reverse engineers"........They will always find the tricks and flaws in any system and then make the gaming community aware of them......what's the answer....devs go back to the drawing board and try to fix it again, and again and again.