Player Associations Archive

PA's do work fairly well currently. There are of course some issues that we all hope to some day address. The horrendous filter on the guild titles for one thing. Not being able to give people actual ranks in the guild is annoying. Displayable guild ranks would be very cool.
Last log in times for members would be good so we could see who has not been on for awhile verse who just plays at times most people are not online. There are lots of ideas on ways to improve.

This is true Rothin. However, after over a year there has certainly been plenty of opportunity for some of these ideas to come to fruition. As a software designer and leader of a team of developers, I can wholeheartedly confirm that seemingly small changes often involve a myriad of details and issues that make them far from small to actually implement. However, there also a great many seemingly huge changes that end up being extremely simple to implement. Such is the way of software. The critical issue is that we as a community express a clear agenda with high specificity as to what our priorities are so that the devs can easily decide what is hard, what is easy, and what is worth the investment. As a community, we really don't know which are which - we can exercise common sense as a guide but we really must rely on the devs for guidance as to what is practical. But certainly SOME THINGS are practical, and as near as I can tell the only real PA enhancement in a year was the recent decrease in lot requirement of PA halls. That was nice, but really not something that was going to do much to improve gameplay in general

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CaseytheHutt wrote:
This is true Rothin. However, after over a year there has certainly been plenty of opportunity for some of these ideas to come to fruition. As a software designer and leader of a team of developers, I can wholeheartedly confirm that seemingly small changes often involve a myriad of details and issues that make them far from small to actually implement. However, there also a great many seemingly huge changes that end up being extremely simple to implement. Such is the way of software. The critical issue is that we as a community express a clear agenda with high specificity as to what our priorities are so that the devs can easily decide what is hard, what is easy, and what is worth the investment. As a community, we really don't know which are which - we can exercise common sense as a guide but we really must rely on the devs for guidance as to what is practical. But certainly SOME THINGS are practical, and as near as I can tell the only real PA enhancement in a year was the recent decrease in lot requirement of PA halls. That was nice, but really not something that was going to do much to improve gameplay in general

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Very true, but you also have to consider that PAs are currently a functional and working system within the game. All of the development time thus far is being spent on non functional systems as it should be. With all the changes being made to fix professions, crafting system, drops, mobs spawning, warping, etc.. PA development is obviously going to be a lower priority since it is *working* After they get everything else to a working level as they'd like to see if that's most likely when it would be our time to ask for some of our ideas to be implemented. When would that be? After the Combat Upgrade, Profession Revamps, and so forth. It's likely another 6 months or more away easily, but our job until that time is to come up with what we would like to see and keep adding to the ideas so that when they are able they can properly devote the time to our ideas and for them to determine which we'd like to see most and which are technically feasible to add to the game.

I mean it's just all my opinion, but I do understand the development side of the fence here but that doesn't stop me from wanting us to discuss things we'd like to see in the future. The devs can't consider ideas we haven't voiced and discussed. So let's discuss them. It doesn't hurt anything to say what we'd like to see as long as its constructive.

I understand your reasoning Rothin, but I respectfully disagree. Of course larger game-system issues must be the priority and of course any big changes that we might like to see to PA's will have to wait - but with software of this type there are ALWAYS "urgent" issues to deal with. Just because PA issues aren't "urgent" doesn't mean they aren't "important" though. With software development it's very easy to find yourself in the trap where you spend so much time dealing with the urgent that you never actually even stop to think about what is actually important. The combat revamp and the GCW revamp are both urgent, and also both important, so they naturally float to the top of the list. Same with the much-needed smuggler changes. But the ties that bind our in-game society together (and PA's are a principle part of that) are THE thing that keeps people playing this game - lets face it if game mechanics were what really mattered we'd have all quit long ago. So any easy change that can be made to improve the PA system has the potential to drive right to the heart of what really makes this game compelling and is a chance for the devs to actually get out ahead of the curve and be proactive for a change (instead of just reacting to whatever is going wrong). That's not to say that any idea we have for improving PA's should take priority over the revamps in progress - of course - but if we have good ideas that can be implemented without derailing those other efforts it is our opportunity to make the case to the devs that these are things worth looking at now - not later.

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CaseytheHutt wrote:
I understand your reasoning Rothin, but I respectfully disagree. Of course larger game-system issues must be the priority and of course any big changes that we might like to see to PA's will have to wait - but with software of this type there are ALWAYS "urgent" issues to deal with. Just because PA issues aren't "urgent" doesn't mean they aren't "important" though. With software development it's very easy to find yourself in the trap where you spend so much time dealing with the urgent that you never actually even stop to think about what is actually important. The combat revamp and the GCW revamp are both urgent, and also both important, so they naturally float to the top of the list. Same with the much-needed smuggler changes. But the ties that bind our in-game society together (and PA's are a principle part of that) are THE thing that keeps people playing this game - lets face it if game mechanics were what really mattered we'd have all quit long ago. So any easy change that can be made to improve the PA system has the potential to drive right to the heart of what really makes this game compelling and is a chance for the devs to actually get out ahead of the curve and be proactive for a change (instead of just reacting to whatever is going wrong). That's not to say that any idea we have for improving PA's should take priority over the revamps in progress - of course - but if we have good ideas that can be implemented without derailing those other efforts it is our opportunity to make the case to the devs that these are things worth looking at now - not later.

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I think that perhaps I didn't explain what I intended well enough, so I'll try again! Casey, I completely agree with what you've said. That was what I was trying to explain myself, though maybe I took the wrong approach. I believe more so than anyone else that guilds are the reason games last as long as they do above all content. That's why I have always been a proud supporter of them in this forum.

I've also been a long supporter of voicing our ideas in the hope that if one could be implemented that it would be. I think Jascentia can testify that I PMed her enough to try to keep our ideas fresh and submitted to the devs in the hope that somewhere in the development schedule that something could be implemented along the way. If something we've asked for or something that would enhance PAs could be added during another revamp because its simple or a developer had free time, there is no way I'd say 'no' to that, I'd very much welcome it. I love guilds and always have through all of my gaming experience over the last many years. They're always my top priority and if I were in charge, you'd probably have a super amazing PA system with little else, but hey, it'd last a little while.

The main thing I always try to express is the same as what the devs do, development takes time and we can't expect changes overnight. Right now there are more important things for them to fix first. And I do agree that you can't forget everything else in the process, but I don't believe they have. They listen to what we've been saying for the last year and a half and have prioritized it. We just need to keep discussing our ideas, keep refining them, keep submitting them to the devs in the form of a top 5 and other medians such as Jascentia's suggestion thread.

I hope I explained it better this time around and apologize if I gave the wrong impression on my priorities. I'm a priorityguild person 100%. Don't think that'll ever change.

I suspected that anybody who would advocate for guilds as you have wouldn't really believe that all the PA issues should just "wait till the important stuff was fixed"

Development does take time. More importantly, in a live game like this, nothing is ever actually "done" - there's always further you could take something. PA's are much the same way - the core functionality (letting people formally associate, have a shared chat channel, and the ability to do group emails) is "done" and has been forever. But in a way that is the Achilles heal of the Player Associations - because our core system isn't broken nothing we're generating is making it to the top of the "to do" heap, all the while a large number of perhaps more "urgent" but grossly less "important" issues are being addressed / features are being added. I thing the Player Association PC has one of the hardest jobs - he/she not only has to do the work of compiling the best ideas from the community for the devs, he/she has an up-hill climb to demonstrate to the dev team why these changes are sufficiently important that on occasion they do merit taking priority over something urgent somebody is screaming about. Given the total lack of any substantial PA improvents having been done or even any officially scheduled to come down the pipe in the near OR distant future (and the fact that I'm certain Jas was hard at work to make that case) I can only assume that it's a REALLY BIG hill to climb over. But it's certainly a challenge I welcome because I fundamentaly DO believe that this is a critical component of this game and one of the areas where devs CAN effect strong positive changes to the game without a huge multi-month revamp effort.

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Trobon18 wrote:

There a only so many things that we can change with PAs.

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Interestingly, this is an excellent illustration of the hill the PAPC will have to climb - even players actively involved in PA's in the game often don't stop to think outside the box and see the many many ways player associations in general are falling short of their potential as a building block for a better gameplay experience. I look through the prioritized list of PA requests and the list of PA issues and I see a wealth of very creative ideas. But most of those ideas either fall in the category of things that would streamline the life of a PA admin but do nothing to enhance gameplay or are frankly unrealistic shy of a large scale PA revamp (of the sort we're not likely to see in the next 9-12 months). The ideas that really have sizzle, or more importantly that there is some chance we could actually get accomplished any time soon, are pushed off in the corners. In fact, on the "prioritized list" I have to count down 24 lines on the list before I find anything with the potential to increase the fun-factor of SWG in any substantial way. Plenty of "that would be cool" ideas - I'd love to see some of them hit live - but there's a big difference between something that "would be cool" and something that would actually add to gameplay enough to justify the devs paying attention to it when they've got people screaming at them about other things. If Player Associations are ever going to move forward from their extremely stagnated current implementation, it's going to require us the community looking past the minor tweaks and "nifty things" that are of interest to us as administrators of Player Associations and start looking at what Player Associations in the larger scheme can bring to the game and how the game can work with Player Associations to help us have more fun. Process improvements to things like PA management would be nice, but we're never going to get dev priority for those kinds of changes. On the other hand, things like revamping PA warfare and allowing PA's to link to factions can give big "bang for the buck" in terms of dev time (big time good press and enhanced gameplay without a whole lot of coding) and who knows, maybe if we can get them working on those systems they could "throw in" a few of the process tweaks we need while they're at it (since he/she was in there monkeying with that code anyway...).

EDIT: typos typos typos

Message Edited by CaseytheHutt on 11-24-2004 06:14 PM