Merchant Archive
Thread: Timeline for fixes
Mini Publish 10.1
Top CS/ QA/ Correspondents' issues
In the past it said
http://starwarsgalaxies.station.sony.com/team_comments.jsp?id=61526&page=Team%20Comments
Publish 11
GCW Revamp
As mentioned above, this revamp is going to transform the GCW into the "elder game" for high-end players. Runesabre is working very hard to ensure that everyone - regardless of profession - has a role they can play in the GCW. Again, more details to come as the design takes shape.
Merchant Vendors Revamp
I am a current master merchant and plan on keeping it. The main thing I am concerned about is the possibility of the 150 item limit per vendor. As an architect and resource seller I typically have 200-500 items up for sale. I split resources into 5k, 10k, 25k, and 100k blocks, and I have furniture in single items, crates of different sizes etc....
In the last letter the only thing specifically mentioned is the removing empty vendors form planetary maps. But are the vendor fixes considered top correspondent issues? I would be surprised if the correspondent was for the 150 item cap.
I know there are tons and tons of posts on this, but most are so long and filled with arguments it isn't worth going through. I am curious what is confirmed for when.
DocSavag wrote:
Those publishes look about the same as the information that I have. I don't have a final proposal on vendor item limits. I continue to press for a final proposal but the way these things work they usually don't give us one until it is either on test or almost on test. I know that it won't be 150 items at Master Merchant. What I dont' know is what the upper limit will be or what the lower limit will be at the bottom of the tree.
I keep struggling with the suspicion that it is because they really don't know, thatdesign details area random choice by whoever writes the code. There is discouragingly little evidence that any design material gets written down before the coding starts. One positive note on this subject is that Green Marine in a smuggler posting actually mentioned writing down a design proposal!
Hopefully, you could have phrased your comment "I know that it will be more than 150 items at Master..." The risk that it comes out less than had better be so low as to be ignorable!
Haruspex77 wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
Those publishes look about the same as the information that I have. I don't have a final proposal on vendor item limits. I continue to press for a final proposal but the way these things work they usually don't give us one until it is either on test or almost on test. I know that it won't be 150 items at Master Merchant. What I dont' know is what the upper limit will be or what the lower limit will be at the bottom of the tree.
I keep struggling with the suspicion that it is because they really don't know, thatdesign details area random choice by whoever writes the code. There is discouragingly little evidence that any design material gets written down before the coding starts. One positive note on this subject is that Green Marine in a smuggler posting actually mentioned writing down a design proposal!
Hopefully, you could have phrased your comment "I know that it will be more than 150 items at Master..." The risk that it comes out less than had better be so low as to be ignorable!
DocSavag wrote:
Its really not possible to manage a project like SWG without pretty detailed design documentation.
p4Samwise wrote:
DocSavag wrote:Its really not possible to manage a project like SWG without pretty detailed design documentation.
Actually, we have evidence that they don't have any such thing. For example:"The reasoning for limiting merchant vendors will forever be hidden in history’s shadows. It was a decision that was made during beta and no one remembers *exactly* why."(from TH's most recent 19 Answers)Does this sound like a project with "detailed design documentation"?Never mind the evidence we see in the game itself, like schematic ingredients that don't spawn any more (e.g. the droid toolbelt)...
The fixed the toolbelt last publish
p4Samwise wrote:
DocSavag wrote:
Its really not possible to manage a project like SWG without pretty detailed design documentation.
Actually, we have evidence that they don't have any such thing. For example:
"The reasoning for limiting merchant vendors will forever be hidden in history’s shadows. It was a decision that was made during beta and no one remembers *exactly* why."
(from TH's most recent 19 Answers)
Does this sound like a project with "detailed design documentation"?
Never mind the evidence we see in the game itself, like schematic ingredients that don't spawn any more (e.g. the droid toolbelt)...
I've never had a design document that told me "why" something was to work the way it works. Design documents typically tell you what it should do and how it should work.
Uhhh WOW (and where the hell would you get this info!?)
Always been curious how many players are subscribed. For that matter - always been curious as to how many people are on server atany one time.
UniformMarshal wrote:
It was in thier friday feature, they have approx. 300,000 registered houses. If every house was owned by a person, then thats 300k x $15 = 4.5 mil, or there abouts
DocSavag wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:
Never mind the evidence we see in the game itself, like schematic ingredients that don't spawn any more (e.g. the droid toolbelt)...
I've never had a design document that told me "why" something was to work the way it works. Design documents typically tell you what it should do and how it should work.
In certain areas, such as UI design and game balance (and skill sets fall under "game balance"), the design document should always include WHY a particular change was made, since the reasoning behind the design itself is part of "how it should work". Otherwise, progress that was made gets undone later.
It's also part of good SCM process to associate functionality changes like that to defect reports or enhancement requests that have complete detail (what the original problem was, and how this change will fix it). Changes like that should never be made without documented reason.
Also, that droid toolbelt thing... cmon now. It made it to live servers. Where was the design document that said what ingredients were needed for that schematic? Wouldn't someone have noticed somewhere along the way that one of the ingredients was no longer craftable? It seems far more likely that it was thrown in there at the last second by some grunt coder who had very minimal knowledgeof the rest of the crafting system, and was never reviewed.