Game Guides Archive

Dear God. I saw the feature and thought - "Finally, the've fixed the tapes and armor attachements.. "

Then I read it.

And just to make sureI read it again.

You've got to remove thatFriday Feature ASAP people.

It's embarrasing. And innacurate. And misleading. And all the other things said in the above posts. I don't expect a response because, well, I just don't expect responses from you people anymore. But quietly take it down. And soon.

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ReptileSpit wrote:

I think they're scrambling to fix this in game ASAP so they can come back to this thread and go "Huh? This works as advertised....go in game and try it yourself!" and pretend this messup never happened.

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• TH plays a lot, enough anyhow. And maybe a few weeks ago, he finally got on the whole SEA bandwagon along with all the rest of the hardcore players. He's behind the powergaming curve, but leading the casual gaming wave by a bit. He says, "Wow, this sure is cool. I need to get the casual gamers on board with this stuff. Lemme make a Friday Feature about it. I could experiment with these things on my own, I could read a zillion posts from people on the forums (knowing that it's a 30/70 ratio of good info to crackpot hallucinators), or I can just go to the guys who developed and coded it and find out the nitty gritty details."


• So he goes to the guys who thought it up (never the same guys who coded it) and asked them. They tell him how theydesigned it to work.


• Because the thinking-up-stuff guys are always the ones farthest removed from reality, and spend all their timing thinking up stuff, not coding what's been thought or playing with it once it's out (there's more things to think up and not enough brains to think of them), they don't have the first clue that the system is so badly broken.


• TH goes to the blue-collar end of the building, where they run the coders' sweatshop, to ask them if SEA's are working like the thinker-dudes say it is. It's a simple yes/no question, they give him a quickie "uh, yeah, of course it is," response.


• The coders don't know that SEAs are borked, because even though CS knows all about it, the guys running CS and the other guys running the sweatshop get together to figure out what the coders need to know to fix, and because there are about seven billion other bugs to fix, and lots of new content (such as it is) being coded, the guys running the sweatshop tell the guys running CS not to send over the SEA bugs. They've got *real* bugs to fix, after all.


• So, having obtained the design scheme from the thinker-dudes, and having confirmed that it works with the sweating-coder-dudes, TH skips back to his office, and writes up this Feature, innocently oblivious to the reality that everything he is hard at workwriting (cuase the 37 pages of SEA design material he got from the thinker-dudes has to be condensed to 1000 readable words) is no reflection of actual live game that we all, even him, play.


• He promptly heads out of the office Friday night at 10pm, and doesn't check the boards till Monday morning, at which time 6 pages of flames await him. Welcome to Monday, TH.

See, what many TH haters seem to miss is that the CS teams and the Development/Coding teams are kept as far apart as the State of California would like to make Micheal Jackson and all little boys. You want to keep the Thinker/Doer guys as oblivious to reality as possible. Reality confuses them. The guys who run the Thinkers/Doers carefully regulate the flow of information from the CS department, and I'll bet that the glass jar they keep the Thinkers/Doers in rarely sees the light of reality. Also, they keep TH as far from the take from CS as possible, because the last thing they want is to let the Great Liason actually be informed about the state of the game that we all play everyday. What little knowledge TH has of SWG reality is probably whatever he's gleaned from his own personal experience at home when he's playing for fun.

Don't blame TH for this document of lies, one chock full of enough to make even the likes of Nixon and Clinton proud (tapes? what tapes? --- and it depends on what the meaning of the word "stacks" is). It isn't his fault. Blame SOE for a faulty business design.

Either way, I hope this Friday Feature is removed soon. Many more prople read Friday Features than read these forums, and of the small percentage who read the forums, even fewer have read up enough on the SEA's to understand how misleading the Feature is, and lots of SWG player cursing will be attributable to this fantasic work of fiction.

Bravo.

This article would be funny if it wasn't for the possiblity that someone will waste several million credits worth of CA's/AA's following the advice given.

I shudder at the thought of someone dropping a +9 armorexperimentation CA into a shirt that already has a +5 in it.

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Scorus wrote:
I was hoping this would illuminate us as to why BE is the only profession that there are no skill tapes for?

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Message Edited by Jeassa on 03-01-2004 03:16 PM

From the Friday Feature:

Just above where an item's number of available sockets is listed is the total Skill Mods the item of clothing or armor gives a player while wearing the item. In the clothing item above, the current Skill Mods the shirt gives is a Melee Defense of 4 and a Defense Vs. Stun of 17. These values can be further increased by adding additional Skill Tapes, or a player may choose to add skill tapes to the existing sockets for different types of Skill Mods.

As other's have stated through out this tread, the above info is incorrect...You can not further increase by added skill tapes...the only way to increase a +4 Melee defense is to add a +5 Melee defense...and when you do the +4 disappears and all you are left with is a total of +5 Melee Defense...PLUS...adding a mod of the same type DOES eat up another socket...so even though you lost the +4 Melee Defense, you still use another socket (i.e. if add the +4 Melee defense to a 4 socketed item, you are left with 3 sockets...then when you add the +5 Melee defense, it replaces the +4 Melee Defense and you are now left with 2 sockets)...

The Friday feature also does not cover Multi-Mod SEAs...are they suppose to lose the lower value mods or are they al suppose to attach? What's the point in having multi-mod sea's if they don't all attach...or at the very least, let us choose which mod attaches from the multiple list (say I have a +5 rifle accuracy, +3 Armor Exp skill tape, let me have the ability to choose the +3 Armor Exp instead of the +5 rifle accuracy auto attaching).

TH...it would be helpful if you or another Dev could address these issues as they have been ongoing since beta...Until they are resolved, unfortunately the Friday Feature is displaying inaccurate information that will lead to players losing valuable mods and inturn raising frustration levels.

Are they going to take this horrible friday feature down before people waste their valuable SEAs?

Also, why aren't there any skill tapes for BEs? Can you say +BE assembly and experimentation? How about +DNA sampling?