Scout Archive

All,

As the Scout Correspondent, I've been working with the devs for a while now on addressing our issues. I think we've made excellent progress. My communications with the Scout Dev have been frequent and in depth, and I've got no issues with him, or the hard work he's been doing. He needs a raise and some help.

But I am a bit concerned with the lack of information provided about the daily hot fixes. For example, today's hot fix reads as follows:

August 8th

Fixed an exploit with a terminal from a quest with Jabba's Palace, where you could destroy structures.

Fixed a problem where people would be unable to log in if they logged out of a house that had a turnstile that was on a server boundary.

Added a verification and notification message when you destroy a vendor, or pack up a house or PA Hall.

This is all good to know.

However, they were a significant number of items that were changed in today's hotfix that were not listed in this update information, nor were they mentioned anywhere else, to my knowledge. They include:

Baz Nitches are now aggressive creatures, who auto heal their lairs, and their lairs appear to be less vulnerable to blaster fire.

Added a notifcation when attempted to build a camp "Too Close to a Municipal Area".

Added a number of new Group notifications including "<Player> has been incapacitated", "<Player> has looted <mob> of <X> of items>

Added an automatic Group autosplit of monetary looting and a cycling of automatic looting of corpses, no matter what the range from the target to the player

Granted, I know the last one is a bug, because I was having random mob loot appearing in my inventory when the group I was with was literally 8000m away.

Not only was this added without us being notified, we are all well aware that the no-build zones around the cities had been removed as of Wednesday night. This was a major coup for us Scouts, yet none of us were aware of it until reports began trickling back in throughout the day on Monday and I had a chance to test it out for myself.

My criticism is simply from the perspective of public relations, being in that line of business (as part of my job) now. The Devs are doing some excellent work, and fixing the things we have requested they fix. But when they don't make the announcement, or focus too hard on getting the fixes done, and not enough on informing the community that the work gets done, they don't get credit for it, and they create frustration for the community.

Every politician sends out a monthly newsletter (or they should) saying what they've done for the community. We need to get those here - and they need to be full, accurate, and up-to-date. I want the Devs to get the credit (especially the Scout dev) that they deserve - and they'll only get it if we know they've done the work.

Not a rant, just some advice.

B

I agree that it would be nice to get a full set of notes on the patch but it is better they fix it and not tell us than not fix it at all. But its good to hear that Dathomir may be emptying out again. It used to be fun to hunt there. You've been doing a great job. Keep up the good work and good post.

I'm in total agreement. I didn't even know about those changes until I read them here.

Yep i agree, here i was still wondering when they were going to put in those fixes and come to find out they've been in since wed, blah i need to pay closer attention i guess....

Ae,

It's not that you weren't paying closer attention - it's that if you assumed that nothing had been done, you wouldn't even have bothered to take advantage of the changes. That's the downside to not knowing they've been implemented.

Like I said - had I known the no-build zones were coming down, I would have trumpeted that across our board, and it would have generated a lot of goodwill among the community for the Devs for helping to solve a major problem.

But it kind of sneaked up on us, so it didn't have the impact that it could have had - a lost opportunity in my mind.

I don't like lost opportunities.

B