Ranger Archive

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VeriBeri wrote:


OK, I think my #1 concern is that a dev (or, more realistically, a fraction of a dev's time) should be dedicated to the Ranger profession. As long as this is in place, lots of things can get fixed very easily and quickly.

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SeanBlader wrote:

#2 would be the penalty for grouping. So if I want to harvest the most stuff I have to go out solo, but then I can't go after the toughest targets and get the harvest I could if I was grouped. I'm screwed either way.

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Oh wow! I totally agree with you here. My husband and I, back when we both had the Scout harvesting lines filled, grouped up to harvest something. When I was solo I was getting like 30 hides or meat per harvest and when we were grouped we would get about 33 between us on one harvest. What kind of a group bonus is 3 hides/meat?

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SeanBlader wrote:

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VeriBeri wrote:


OK, I think my #1 concern is that a dev (or, more realistically, a fraction of a dev's time) should be dedicated to the Ranger profession. As long as this is in place, lots of things can get fixed very easily and quickly.

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I'm pretty certain they don't have enough developers to go around for all the professions, nor do they have the management team to approve any changes that individual developers would be attempting to implement. There's too much risk for a simple error that would cause some bug that could bring down a server. So if there was one programmer for every profession, Test Center would never operate, and I imagine we'd never get any updates. Just imagine the chef programmer posting an update to test center a few minutes before the smuggler programmer. When TC goes down, they don't know who did what and they both spend another several hours going over what they just did to find out who broke what, while none of the other developers are able to try out what they've done.

That said, my #1 priority would be my ineffectiveness against creatures. It'd be better to be Swordsman/Carbineer with novice Scout than to be Ranger/Carbineer.

#2 would be the penalty for grouping. So if I want to harvest the most stuff I have to go out solo, but then I can't go after the toughest targets and get the harvest I could if I was grouped. I'm screwed either way.

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Well, here we go:

1. You are right about too few SWG developers. That's in fact my real point. There is simply no excuse for having too few developers. In various contexts, you hear the argument that 'we want to fix/add x but it is not possible to do everything at the same time'. Yes, but a large number of improvements can be done in a short time if SOE stops being stingy and puts the right amount of resources into development budget.

2. There are methodologies to subdivide projects and tools to track changes committed by individual programmers. No large project would be possible without the ability of large teams of developers to work more or less autonomously without stepping on each others toes. As an example, you can check out the Linux development. It is a very large project, involving literally tens of thousands of developers, across hundreds of organizations. It is managed just fine using simple tools, a lot of open discussion and a bit of executive decision making by leaders of the community. Compared to Linux (or even compare to any of its major components), SWG is peanuts.

3. In a system like SWG, no patches are pushed to live by anybody without reviews, approvals, and regression testing. There is no need to fear that a lone programmer can cause havoc if left unsupervised, because such controls are part of basic project management. (However, because of the complexity of the live server environments and their dynamic nature, full testing seems to be possible only on a facsimile of a live server. Hence, the need for TC-Ahazi, TC-Bria, and real live players as testers.)

Don't be afraid to ask for improvements...we may get what we ask for.