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ToppDog wrote:

I am one of those who will not recommend JTL right now due to issues in the ground game, & I am currently beta-testing JTL & know its potential as well as its problems. Although I never mastered a combat profession, or got into PVP, I do understand where those guys are coming from. We still have many bugs present in the game from when people were beta-testing THAT one.

And for me it's not just the issue of not getting bugs fixed or putting things off until later... It's the way SOE treats it's paying customers with such disregard. They are constantly ignoring the bugs & other drastic design mistakes & focusing on finding ways to add in time & money sinks instead.

For me the issue is Jedi... because I bought this game for one reason only - to be able to fly an A-wing & wield a saber with the same character in the same gameworld. If I wanted to do that in separate games I could go back to playing the X-wing series games along with JKII, JKA, KOTOR, etc.

I had a dream when I bought this game... a dream of creating two twin sisters who would have secret Jedi identities as well as being superior fighter pilots for the rebellion. As far as I know, they would have been the first "true" set of twins where the mains & Jedi chars would have been played as alternate identities of the same characters. I ground over 34 professions between them, only to find out as I was getting close to my goal that SOE was doing a complete 180 in the Jedi revamp & now the mains would become the Jedi instead.

Why? Why would they change the system after almost a year & not give players who had notunlocked yet a way tonot have theirmains become the Jedi? Many roleplayers were understandably upset. Many had purposefully saved the ideas for their Jedi based on the fact that it HAD to be the second slot character. Knowing these previous rules, they had made mains StarWarsy characters that were never meant to become Jedi, & some even had chars that were of races specifically unsuitable to be Jedi in SWG.

The players made many very good suggestions to solve this problem, such as having a checkbox to decide which char should become FS when the second slot was opened, or allowing a one time name, race, & gender change for the mains so they could assume the identity of the intended Jedi char & then create the new char as the previous main.

Did the devs listen to any of this? No. And, in the interest of adding in additional time sinks, they further complicated the problem bymaking it so you couldn't open the second slot until your mainwent well past becoming FS & reached the full rank of Padawan. Now roleplayerswere even more upset, & again very understandably so.

But as upset as we were, TH & others still offered us roleplayers a glimmer of hope that they could still one day realize their dreams. They told us that even though the current system is more immersive by forcing the mains to become Padawan before opening the second slot, that we could still make our new chars the Jedi we always intended, & drop Padawan & whatever FS skills we wanted to revert our mains to a previous non-FS template if we wished.

They also said that doing the FS quests would be an incentive for players who just wanteda second slot, & that either or both chars could be non-FS. The FS skills were designed to benefit non-Jedi chars specifically for this purpose. TH & others said the second slot would be the reward for doing the FS quests, & that whatever we decided to do with either char after getting the second slot was totally OUR CHOICE.

Now (many months later) publish 10 has finally gone live, & all the promises that kept us waiting & paying our monthly fees seem to have been broken yet again. Players are reporting that they cannot drop FS skills like they were supposed to be able to. Questions are being raised& are getting completely conflicting answers from all levels at SOE. Some are saying that they cannot be dropped, whileat the same time others are saying they can be dropped as long as you dropall the skillsabove them as in the current non-Jedi profession trees.

Tiggs even posted this answer to a question regarding this issue:

6. Not at all. A Jedi can revoke all Force related and Force Sensitive related skills and continue playing as a normal character.

And, then later that day the post where this quote came from is deleted without any explanation regardless of how many times players ask for clarification on the issue.

Then, around the same time, this extremely vague blurb is buried 100 or so lines down in a "Misc." headingat the tail end of alog-on update screen:

Misc

You can no longer revoke the force sensitive title skill as a non-Jedi. (Jedi's already could not revoke this).

Could they be a bit more clear? Is it because it's a bug?Or is it because they changed their minds & are afraid to be more upfront about it than this one tiny statement buried on a screen where it will be gone within a week anyway? By the way, Jedi were also promised that they could drop all of Jedi & FS skillsat anytime& revert to non-FS templates if they decided they no longer wanted to be Jedi. It was an additional way to keep the Jedi population down - if they don't like it, let them revert their char back to a non-FS char.

But, if this isn't a bug that they intend on fixing either soon or further down the road, then it would appear that SOE is simply doing business as usual, & trying to milk us out of more dollars without giving us anything in return. Roleplayers have already paid their subscriptions for 6 or more months based on what they were promised would happen once publish 10 went live. And if SOE keeps quiet about it, many players will pay for another 6 months or so before they finish the FS quests & find out the truth on their own.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I will not recommend anyone doing business with this company until I see a definate change in their business practices & their attitudes towards the players in general. Not only will I not recommend JTL to new or existing players... But as much as I'm dying to have my twins in a pair of A-wings flying in formation with my 3 other chars, I will not be buying the 5 copies of JTL that I so despirately want to.

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See... my point exactly. He was hurt in the ground game by policy decisions or revamps and decided to express their frustration by not purchasing the expansion without giving the devs the benefit of the doubt. So basically, you are saying... i am in JTL beta but my decision to not buy it is rooted in the fact that i don't like the way they handled the ground game.

Most of the problems you wrote about here were actually decisions made not by the SOE development team... but rather the producing team from LA. Jedi revamp - LA decided that one... SOE had to design it but the LA team gave them what they wanted to see. The decision to make mains the Jedi was decided by LA, the decision to not allow people to change race/sex is a LA decision. As for the force sensitive box things... /shrug, sounds like a database issue, rather than an intentional means to screw people over.

Incidentally, there has been a developer change since SWG release. A lot of the original developers have left, and the remaining team and the new ones are picking up the peices.

Message Edited by PresiaSan on 10-09-2004 06:03 PM

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Billpom wrote:

Hello everyone:

I want to say before I start that this is -not- a flame. Merely a request for comment by players in regards to something I keep reading on most of the forums (both beta and live)

I see people saying "I will not recommend SWG or JTL until the ground game is fixed."

I have been playing SWG for about 5 months. The only BIG complaint I have is that the repetition and monotony of the ground game got to me after awhile. I didn't want to be a twink and go for Jedi, I figured that once JTL came out I'd have more fun and be able to become a smuggler or anything else. I see that as far as I can tell I will be able to once JTL goes live.

Now, I know everyone has said more or less the same thing about the ground game, but perhaps for my own education what do people mean when they say "The ground game needs to be fixed before I will recommend SWH and JTL to my friends / guildmates"

Thanks!

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KzinKiller wrote:
No, it's really simple for me ... I won't recommend it because the game has been poorly managed and maintained since Day 1 (when I joined) ..... I'm back for the 10-day to wave to friends, but nothing has changed. It's still just not a very good product. Why would I recommend to friends that they buy something from a company that gave me bad service?

They just haven't given me any reason to think they've learned a single thing in the last year. Bad code and bad decisions just keep on comin' ..... there's no reason to think having even more code to maintain with a limited and over-extended staff will improve things.

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KzinKiller wrote:
No, it's really simple for me ... I won't recommend it because the game has been poorly managed and maintained since Day 1 (when I joined) ..... I'm back for the 10-day to wave to friends, but nothing has changed. It's still just not a very good product. Why would I recommend to friends that they buy something from a company that gave me bad service?

They just haven't given me any reason to think they've learned a single thing in the last year. Bad code and bad decisions just keep on comin' ..... there's no reason to think having even more code to maintain with a limited and over-extended staff will improve things.

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see... butt-hurt /hi5.

I love the game. I have fun in the game, and i would and i do recommend it to friends. I love it because, in some odd way, it resembles the Star Wars universe. I enjoy the things i can do in game and the friends that i have in their. If i get frustrated with the game and upset... well, i unplug and play something else, but i still like the game. Besides, its one of the best MMORPG out there right now. Of course when WoW and EQ2 hit, that may be a different story...

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PresiaSan wrote:
They mean that they don't believe JtL is as good as the people who are testing it (like myself) say it is.

They think they're going to spend alot of time on the ground. I don't know why, except to make some quick money (missions pay decent, but not as much as running Jantas for half an hour). The Good PvP and PvE is going to be in space.

Message Edited by PresiaSan on 10-09-2004 06:03 PM

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Billpom wrote:

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KzinKiller wrote:
No, it's really simple for me ... I won't recommend it because the game has been poorly managed and maintained since Day 1 (when I joined) ..... I'm back for the 10-day to wave to friends, but nothing has changed. It's still just not a very good product. Why would I recommend to friends that they buy something from a company that gave me bad service?

They just haven't given me any reason to think they've learned a single thing in the last year. Bad code and bad decisions just keep on comin' ..... there's no reason to think having even more code to maintain with a limited and over-extended staff will improve things.

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I understand what you mean, but can you give me specifics? At one point you said "It's still just not a very good product." What makes it a bad product? Further you said that "Bad code and bad decisions just keep on comin'..." What bad code do you speak of and specifically, what bad decisions do you think have been made?

Finally, where those bad decisions reversed and code re-vamped so that you felt your views were being addressed would you return?

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"Not a very good product" refers to the imbalance in the current system or maybe the lack of ingame content.

"Bad code" no doubt refers to the few bugs that keep cropping up. The sitting bug for instance. A lot of the coding has been retooled but that bug is still out there.

"Bad decisions" is more than likely either the CB pushback or far more likely because of his sig... the jedi decision.

...and no, knowing his type, he would not return. He feels himself above this game now and won't come back to save face. Instead he will try to draw off as many people from the game as he can in hopes that he is proven right.

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Cuality wrote:

Hmmm... a post that actually asks a decent question... not another whine or a flame... who are you? and why are you posting here?

Anyway, the people who do not want JTL until the ground game is fixed are essentially the people that got butt-hurt when the Combat rebalance and the GCW revamp got pushed back for the expansion. They claim that it is the core game and needs to be fixed first... but they fail to realize that JTL isn't so much an expansion as the other half of the game. When JTL hits... everything will change, and once its in... then they can fix everything else. The people who tell them to fix the ground game first are just the selfish people who want what they want now and say: screw the rest of the community who wants to fly in space. Incidentally... if you look at the post history of people who say JTL sucks... they are among the bigggest voices crying when the ground game got pushed back... coincidence?

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Hi there!

I see what you are saying. My reason for posting was to get the kind of response that you and Kzinkiller have posted. I'm trying to see if there are specific issues that SOE or the Dev's haven't addressed somewhere else, or if it's a specific problem related to gameplay.

Refer to my responses below. Hopefully, more people will respond so I can get a good idea of what is going on and seeing if I can help somehow.

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BoveApako wrote:

Is this one of the devs posting with their personal account?

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