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In response to a thread that I started

(Read: http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=lightspeed&message.id=103962 )

Here are a list of the things most players on SWG can stand behind that they want fixed.

To the Dev’s: Having been part of other development teams, I understand how daunting some problems can be in light of time, and pressure to fix things that the company feels are important vs. the needs and desires of the gamers. I also understand the phrase “You can please some of the people some of the time...etc) be mindful that these requests are not things that the community are demanding be repaired. Or rather, they are demanded but that some of these requests are at cross-purposes with OTHER people in the community and/or corporate requests. That is not what this document is about. This document is merely a request by the community for answers in regards to the problems outlined below.

To the Players: Having said that I have previous development experience is something of an overstatement. I have worked in the software industry and have worked at a bank fixing DNS issues and server compatibility. This required me taking a sample of user requests and implementing them on my servers. A truly time consuming process. Even more so then normal since I was part of a development team of 2 people. But that does not mean I understand the troubles these people are going thru completely. To outline briefly what they are probably going thru would take quite a few pages so I will try and sum up for you.

1) Combine two games into one with complete seamlessness.

2) Fix multiple issues with both games at the same time, while trying not to break anything else.

3) Add additional content to the game that is challenging but not impossible to finish while removing dated or unfixable content from the game without breaking anything new or currently ‘working’

4) Min / Max player characters so they can enjoy the game without taking experience away from others.

5) Respond to 100’s of 1000’s of bug related issues that are submitted by players. This can include things that are game critical to just a player with a bad attitude making up bugs to aggravate the Dev’s. These are all submitted from the game and put into a Q&A database that ranks by how many bug reports have been put in for the same problem and severity level. What this means to you is that the more often a bug is reported in the game, the higher priority it will be given.

6) Follow SOE corporate policy in regards to player issues regarding balance and connectivity. Since we are not made privy to what those policies towards player issues regarding game stability I can only wager to say that it most likely has alot to do with Lucas Arts and requests (pressures most likely) they place on SOE and the developers to keep to THEIR policy regarding Star Wars merchandise.

I could go on about this, but those are the highlights. Remember that the developers (just after Customer Service) are the most overworked and underappreciated people in the business. This Especially applies to anyone in Q&A. They not only have to respond to the pressures of the players, but to the pressures of their own company plus the client (The Client being Lucas Arts) They are under constant attack from all three sides. Believe me, it is not an enviable position. Considering one Development Team has either left or been fired is of little surprise to me. All this being said, here are the requests (The Big Ones anyways) that all players seem to agree on. I am cutting and pasting the best responses to my thread directly into the document. To all those that responded, many thanks and I’ll try and give credit at the bottom of this document.

1) Can't sit without warping away from your seat. Oddly enough this appears to be one of the top five biggest complaints.

2) There were battlefields, and although they weren't used much (it was hard to get to them before mounts/vehicles/player shuttle ports), if they were fixed they would provide a great place to fight.

3) There are GCW Bases (no not the player bases). These bases swap sides and they were supposed to define who was winning the GCW. (I believe there were 7 across the galaxy). No-one bothers with them because they were bugged from day 2, and in the last 9 months, they haven't spawned any troops.

4) The turrets are the worst implemented things ever.

5) There are the player bases which have been a constant nightmare. One they really don't provide anything that player cities don't. (They were great before the cities) They are bugged to high hell, sometimes you can take them over, sometimes you can't.

6) Faction equipment is useless. By this I believe they mean that the Equipment you can have given to you is WAY overpriced and doesn’t work half as well as equipment you buy from a player. Getting 10,000 faction points for a piece of armor is more time consuming and costly then simply going on 20 or so big missions and getting the cash to spend on getting a custom piece of armor.

7) Faction ranks mean very little and can't be seen.

8) There is no involvement in the GCW for crafters/healers.

9) The TEF system has always had issues. Not entirely sure what is meant here. I think it has more to do with Jedi and faction fighting then anything else. I’ll try and get a follow up.

10) Buffing/Armor Stats/Weapon Stats/Creature Stats has really screwed the PvP stuff compared to the PvE stuff (hence the 75% damage reduction for PvP). Basically what I mean is... that for players to compete with 50k+ HAM creatures, they have to do a lot of damage. When you use that same character against a guy that's only got 900-3000 HAM, we'd toast each other in one-two hit(s). It is just really whacked.

11) Title bug where once you chose to display a title overhead, you will ALWAYS log in with one. This was an issue that was even more important when people started becoming Jedi & couldn't conceal their identities when logging in.

12) NPC's warping or spawning directly on top of you so you have no chance of avoiding them, especially annoying to non-combat chars who can't even kill a beetle before dying.

13) Making AT-ST's pets instead of vehicles.

14) Allowing Taras Kasi Masters to be able to destroy AT-ST's by punching them with their bare hands.

15) Allowing any melee profession to deliver damage when they are clearly not even close to making contact with their weapons.

16) Adding in Buffs that were so overpowered that it killed spontaneous combat & forced everyone to always get a full set of buffs before engaging in any sort of combat because they wouldn't stand any chance of winning otherwise.

17) Taking the ability to do Stat Migrations away from the entire player base & forcing it on the Interior Design profession that never wanted it in the first place.

18) Forcing Interior Designers to remain in tents to do these Stat Migrations with absolutely nothing to do for ten minutes at a time, no reading emails, no chatting or answering tells, nothing.

19) Not realizing that this ten minute timer where the ID & their customer can only stare at an ID UI causes many players to repeatedly go LD due to being auto-kicked for being inactive for such a long period of time, & then still not doing anything to fix it.

20) Allowing player cities or player owned structures to be placed directly on top of, or extremely close to POI's & other important StarWars locations.

21) Not providing rentable apartments in the NPC cities, or the ability to add suburbs onto the NPC cities, which resulted in the main cities being ghost towns. I specifically remember one case where a brand new player was logged in at his starting NPC city & didn't see another real player for a whole 4 hours during primetime play.

22) Making badges viewable by all without giving the players a way to toggle that feature off or select which ones were okay to be viewed. This was again more important to Jedi trying to play the game correctly & conceal their identities.

23) Restricting item counts in PA halls so they would not hold more than any large house would.

24) Restricting item counts in general, using the excuse that they use too much data space, while at the same time having thousands of different versions of every possible resource when only one version of each would have worked fine & would have greatly reduced the strain on that very same data base.

25) Making all the vehicles decay at a hyper-accelerated rate where they are all smoking & backfiring & giving of flames within a couple hours usage, when simply making them require fuel or energy would have accomplished the same goal & been much more immersive & appealing.

26) Giving the Jedi robes that only they can wear when they are supposed to be in hiding during this timeline.

27) Attaching force defensive abilities to these robes instead of to the Jedi themselves where it makes the most sense & is more true to the whole Jedi concept.

28) Not realizing that those robes were never Jedi specific in the first place & were common attire for almost every citizen of Tatooine during this timeline.

29) Not making the main chars able to do quests to become FS themselves in the first place.

30) Then doing a complete 180 with the Jedi revamp & destroying a whole years worth of effort for many players without even trying to rectify the situation to be fair to those caught in the middle of the switch.

31) Making Ewok babies more deadly than full grown Wookiees.

32) Not alowing smugglers to smuggle anything.

33) Making the range that object render within be so small that they litterally pop up & smack the chars in their faces, & if they are on a vehicle or mount the chars will suddenly find the building spawning around them with them inside. This isn't in the bug category because the ranges keep being shortened on purpose to save on their hardware demands.

34) The whole concept of apprentice points, because as the influx of new players goes down, the veteran players have no way to advance, & therefore might have reason to not play anymore & cancel their accounts.

35) Not providing an NPC alternative to buying resources, services, or loot items in the game. Anytime a game has relied purely on a player economy without having an NPC check & balance system in place, it has always led to real fraud, inflation, & selling on ebay.

36) Not providing a worthwhile system for players to reliably find the things they wish to purchase in-game. Players wander aimlessly for hours from empty vendor to empty vendor. It may seem to be working as a time sink, but that's the kind of time sink that has forced many players to cancel their accounts. They had millions of credits & couldn't find anything to spend them on.

37) The failure to realize that reducing the number of Jedi automatically means reducing the number of paying customers. The two are linked & always will be, because the majority of players who ever bought a copy of this game did so with the intention of becoming a Jedi. This is StarWars, & StarWars equals Jedi, period.

Special Thanks to ToppDog & ToranTT for their input as well as the 50 or so people that replied on my post. Hopefully, more people will add their grievances to this one. I have high hopes that someone in Q&A or development will post a reply to this message with an answer to our questions. I feel that if we could even get some sort of reply other then “Combat Balance will Fix all” or “JTL will have these updates” will make the players at least believe that their requests and grievances will be listened to. Again, thank you to all who took part in my original post. I hope I hit all of the ones that people seem to complain about the most. If not, please reply.