Merchant Archive
Thread: OMG EVERYBODY LOOK WHATS ON TC!!!!!!
Traie wrote:
ArclightX wrote:
Elyssa wrote:
Sometimes these things just take time.
The problem isn't always easy to fix and the developers do not make it a habit of reporting every little thing they're doing.
Stop making excuses for the devs. Even if this was a difficult bug to isolate, requiring 2 months to implement a fix is unacceptable in any software production environment. I make that claim from my own occupation and not just some impatient ranting.
Out of all of the bugs in all of the professions (including ones that can be and are game breaking) this one fix should have taken precedence over all of those? Granted, it annoyed the hell out of me, but if I needed a specific resource, I'd sit there until I found it. You need to take a step back and look at the SOE problem solving flow chart.
1) Jedi problems
2) Combat profession problems
3) UI and AI problems
4) Crafter's issues (Armorsmith's and Weaponsmith's)
5.......1000) Other crap
1001) Entertainers/Image Designers/Merchants/Creature Handlers/Smugglers
1002) Rangers
I feel a great disturbance in the Force... as if a million datapoints suddenly cried out, "Hey, what about Publishes 10 through 20?!?"
*groan*
Must not... open... Excel spreadsheet....
--Flatfingers
That said, I'd like to see patches 11 to whatever in there too. But I'd recommend adding a 'nerf' column. It might be difficult to distinguish a 'nerf' from a 'mod' though. I like how you sorted with negative numbers for mods (nerfs) and fixes (which meant they coded bugs into the profession in the first place). I'd give a larger negative modifier to nerfs than to bugs though. Either way, I think that you'll find that merchants rank high in the 'hate' column.
It's probably faster and easier to just make up the numbers though. And it's better for your health...
Dimear wrote:
Studies have shown that people who use real data to support their conclusions are 62% more likely to get herpies.
It's good to be part of the lucky 38%, then.
92% of those surveyed agree!
I'd recommend adding a 'nerf' column. It might be difficult to distinguish a 'nerf' from a 'mod' though.
Hmm... that's an interesting idea. The only tricky thing is the subjectivity -- one person's "nerf" is another person's "balance."
But heck, the whole darn thing is admittedlysomewhat subjective. I did the best I could to be fair, and always tried to give the benefit ofany doubt to the devs (not because I'm nice [although I am], but because if a hard conclusion emerged, it wouldn't be because I'd been unreasonable). Still, there's no question that the absolute numbers are slightly squishy despite my best efforts to be objective.
Having said that, I think the relative numbers are pretty sound.
As far as nerfs go, you can basically assume that they're all included in the "mods" category of the published data. If I were to break them out,it would be on the basis of defining a nerf to be "a deliberate reduction in capability." There might be a veryfew things pulled out of the "fix" column, but mostly it would be mods. Might be interesting to see how many mods weren't nerfs....
It's probably faster and easier to just make up the numbers though. And it's better for your health...
You don't know the half of it. The USB drive I was storing the spreadsheet on died -- and I didn't have the final version of my databacked up. And that wasn't all I lost.
Sigh. Twenty years and more ofprogramming, and I'm still not paranoid enough. Sad, really.
(Note:My new USB drive is backed up regularly. No, really. Say, why are you laughing like that?)
Hmm... up to Publish 20, are we?Hmmmm....
--Flatfingers
Flatfingers wrote:
As for the "normal" professions, Scouts and Rangers received numerous changes (modifications and bugfixes) -- second only to Creature Handlers/Bio-Engineers, actually. Of course, if you think that getting a lot of bugfixes and mods must mean that your profession is really fouled up, then maybe that's not a particularly attractive statistic.
Traie wrote:
look at the SOE problem solving flow chart.
1) Jedi problems
2) Combat profession problems
3) UI and AI problems
4) Crafter's issues (Armorsmith's and Weaponsmith's)
5.......1000) Other crap
1001) Entertainers/Image Designers/Merchants/Creature Handlers/Smugglers
1002) Rangers
1) and 2), yes... but I'm not so sure about the order of some ofthe others.
About 10 months ago I published as A Categorization of Every Documented Change to SWGthe results of a classification study I did on the changes to SWG. I took every documented change (from all the patch notes) up to about Publish 10 and categorized them, then summed up by category who'd gotten what kinds of changes.
Jedi and combat were definitely at the top of the list. (And this was nearly a year ago.) Crafting was next... and nothing else even came close.
As for the "normal" professions, Scouts and Rangers received numerous changes (modifications and bugfixes) -- second only to Creature Handlers/Bio-Engineers, actually. Of course, if you think that getting a lot of bugfixes and mods must mean that your profession is really fouled up, then maybe that's not a particularly attractive statistic.
Finally, although the User Interface got a lot of attention, AI didn't. In the period I studied, there were actually twice as many changes to how armor worked than changes to AI. Of the 73 categorizations other than "AI", over half(39) received more changes than AI.
Some relative numbers have probably changed in the ten months since this study, but I suspect not by much.
Just wanted to mention.
--Flatfingers
Message Edited by Flatfingers on 07-19-2005 02:38 PM
It was a tedious couple of weeks, I'll give you that. 
Fun to see the end result, though.
--Flatfingers
Traie wrote:
Out of all of the bugs in all of the professions (including ones that can be and are game breaking) this one fix should have taken precedence over all of those? Granted, it annoyed the hell out of me, but if I needed a specific resource, I'd sit there until I found it. You need to take a step back and look at the SOE problem solving flow chart.
1) Jedi problems
2) Combat profession problems
3) UI and AI problems
4) Crafter's issues (Armorsmith's and Weaponsmith's)
5.......1000) Other crap
1001) Entertainers/Image Designers/Merchants/Creature Handlers/Smugglers
1002) Rangers
(But it's true.)
Flatfingers wrote:
As for the "normal" professions, Scouts and Rangers received numerous changes (modifications and bugfixes) -- second only to Creature Handlers/Bio-Engineers, actually. Of course, if you think that getting a lot of bugfixes and mods must mean that your profession is really fouled up, then maybe that's not a particularly attractive statistic.
(Just not smashed open, everything dumped out, and put into a brand new piggy bank, like most combat professions got.)
DesktopSaki (always liked that handle, BTW ), if you read my analysis over in the Categorization of Every Change to SWGthread,you saw that I made it a point to acknowledge that myresults did a poor job of showing the relativeimpact of changes.
But in fairness, that's hard to do in any accurate way.
For one thing, I like to think that my guess at a change's impact would usually be fairly accurate, but there's no question that my evaluation would be very subjective.
And for another thing, changes affect a lot of players, many of whom experience the game in different ways. In other words, any change will affect different players to different degrees. The nerf of camps might have caused Player X who used them a lot to have less fun in SWG, but Player Y who never used camps wouldn't be directly affected. So how do I evaluate the impact of the camp nerf to fairly reflect the experience of both Player X and Player Y?
Rather than guessing at an impact, and then basing an analysis on that guess, I decided to just publish the raw numbers, and -- as an example of what could be done -- show one way to calculate the "love" that each profession has gotten. If you feel that most mods and fixes have hurt your preferred profession, you're free to create a calculation (as I did in a subsequent post in that thread) that uses a different weighting for the impact of those changes.
If you want to use the numbers to try to show that Scouts and Rangers have been punching bags, there's probably a way to do it.
But I'm guessing you don't need numbers to make that case.
--Flatfingers