Pistoleer Archive

First of all, /applaud Randonb and the rest of you who posted information on pre-combat balance fixes and /cheer for Alotakijn for speaking his mind in such an uncensored fashion.

I have followed the development of this game for quite some time as well. I was invited into beta at phase 3 I believe it was (seems so long ago now) . I remember many things from back then that were broken and have seen progress from beta to now. Do I believe the game is where it should be a year after launch? My answer has to be yes and no. I know what was envisioned and what has come to be.

I waited for many months after beta just getting the newsletters and each month reading what had been added to the game and what had been changed, corrected, or improved. Finally a few months ago I decided to give it a chance as many things that concerned me as beta came to a close and the game was launched had been cleared up. I had hope the rest would come in soon. After all with only a week or so left in beta server stability was still poor for me as well as chat being horribly buggy. For instance during beta if I tried to start any group or tell message with the word "he" I would receive an error. I still have a screenshot of that for anyone that wants to see it. On any given day I could not be sure if any tells would go through to people or if groupchat would work. Descriptions of skill boxes and the skills them selves for some professions were incomplete. I again have a screenshot of the popup text for a skill box that says something to the effect of this currently does nothing, but will soon. I would send in roughly 3-5 bug reports each day, some things I would see fixed others I wouldn't. Some of those that were not fixed still are not working properly.

Some things have gotten better though. When I started I wanted to be a Bounty Hunter as many others did. Originally to be BH, master marksman and master brawler were needed. As there were no melee skills in the Bounty Hunter trees the bounty hunters were upset about needing all the seemingly useless brawler skills and it also made BH and Commando take the exact same skills to get to. Both professions had their prerequisites changed. BH to master marksman and master scout as it was until just recently. Command was altered to the way it is now I believe, although that change could have been a little later, as I said it seems so long ago now some exact details are hard to remember.

The point to that is improvements to professions have happened as well as the addition of mounts, vehicles, and player cities. These things led me to believe that after a rough start things were headed in the right direction. I spoke with some people playing SWG and they assured me server stability along with chat (the aforementioned groupsay and tell problems) was working correctly.

Since I purchased the full version (still wondering about that) of SWG a few months ago I have found various other things from beta that were broken that had been corrected in some form and others left untouched. Hearing "it will be addressed in the combat balance" brings back nightmares about the beginnings of Ever Quest and Abashi's constant answer of "that is not in our vision of EQ". Well after lots of community backlash and Abashi leaving SOE the "vision" changed and things were finally starting to advance down a good path. I am really hoping a change in management/developers isn't needed to get this game to where the paying customers see it heading, within reason of course, as it seems was the case for EQ.

As in most cases communication is the key to running things successfully. I feel the correspondents are doing a good job bringing us the information that they can, but as countless others have said the devs seem to be lacking in that department. I know they do hear some of what the community says and as anyone would agree with some and disagree with others. There is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that they in many cases when they disagree a different change is made without consulting or even informing the community of what will happen until it has happened. If SOE would stop thinking of the community as consumers and more as clients that they are designing a product for then maybe there will be better communication between all parties. After all I could never dream of making a change to something for a client without consulting with them first as it costs more to make something and give it to them, have them reject it and have to discuss with them what they really want/need from the product and then design that, than it is to consult with them up front and work out something comparable and do that. As stated I know the correspondents do this to a degree for us now, but when something presented by the correspondent is rejected by the devs they should present the other solution to the correspondent to bring back to us for our approval/veto.

Am I asking too much? The EQ devs learned the lesson and have made vast improvements to that game and after all SOE produces that game as well. So why not go with policies that worked in the past. No point reinventing the wheel when for this purpose it would work well.

As things stand now I will hang on still hoping for the better, but one can only hang off a cliff for so long without falling down...

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Randonb wrote:

Thunderheart was very vague in what exactly he was looking for, so I submitted all of them. It's identical to the Vision Document, but moreconcise. That seems to be the theme lately, putting things in a format that can easily be pasted into a spreadsheet. If it makes you feel better to read it, here it is:

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Squidwalker wrote:

I also have been tracking this game and was active on the development forums, about 2 years before release. It had soo much potential and sounded like it was truely going to be a break through for MMORPG's of all times. And I kept optimistic for the last year, saying that every MMO has it's rough start and take it time to get smoothed out.

But this project is not getting better it's getting worse. They are adding more bugged content then they are fixing existing bugged content. It's INCONCEIVABLE what they are doing. Like some have said, the management team needs to be fired and get someone in here who knows. Hell SOE has a great product and service going with EQ after all these years, take some lessons from the management and development teams they have. I really thought that when SOE, with their previous MMO successes, would have done way way way better then this.

I'm sticking in there for a while long, but this is just rediculous. Does it matter if adding space will make the game "complete" when its full of bugs that have been there since launch? They had better ignore the fixing of bugs in JTL after it's launch and get their butts back to fixing the orginal content.

Good luck Randonb, give them hell.

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If they'd looked at EQ's development and used it as an example for success, they would have been in a far better situation than they are now - using exhisting technology would have given them far more time to develop the actual content. Some of the initial devs of EQ are now working on 'Vanguard', which looks like it's going to be very nice. They're using the Unreal Engine and heavily modifying it for use in a MMORPG... but that work is far far less than writing an engine from scratch and the Unreal Engine is extremely nice. Hindsight is always nice, perhaps with SWG 2 they'll take it into consideration.

/sigh