Smuggler Archive
Thread: Expansion 2
Would only be logical and really, really cool! Message Edited by JediNizar2 on 03-09-2005 12:12 PM
kovusreturn wrote:
OMG... an idea did just strike me here at work...
Maybe the cyber limbs (which is about the only thing I would look forward in the expansion anyway) can be sliced by smugglers!
I so hope SOE did think about that, too.
I think they won't let us do that. "Because it will unbalance the combat."
We've seen that, it will happen again. 
SmugglinZane wrote:
In response to the question, what could be more Star Wars than Kashyyk (sp?).... If it were Star Wars we'd be in the trees, and would hardly ever see the ground. The second someone touches the ground they should be attacked by some insane predators, of course this is going on what is actually Star Wars and the EU.
Mentski wrote:
The Kashyyyk in the game will be the one seen in Episode III, for the most part,which has land dwelling wookiees and beaches, along with the tree cities, thats the problem with the EU, its only canon until Lucas decides its different. Kashyyyk has had that treatment.
Hopefully there will be some denser jungles reminicent of EU Kashyyyk, this pic looks promising, as long as we can reach that area
As part of this reorganization we have set the team up as a series of strike teams, each working in their own development environments. These strike teams include:
Live - Responsible for service issues, bugs and small (in terms of development time) features and enhancements to gameplay. Many of the cool changes in recent publishes have come out of the Live strike team.
Infrastructure - This team works deep down in the engine room of SWG, improving the underlying technologies the game depends on. Most of what they work on you would only notice by the *lack* of bad things occurring and improved developer productivity, though they also work on features for Live that require longer development cycles.
Combat Upgrade - This team is working on upgrading our entire combat system to enhance the experience of combat within Star Wars Galaxies. Their mission is to make combat more fun, interactive, and Star War-sy. We have been taking extensive design feedback from the correspondents and alpha testers and are driving towards an alpha test which will open in a few weeks. Over the next six weeks we will be releasing more information to all players on the exciting things the Combat Upgrade will bring to SWG.
"Secret Team" - It's no secret that we're going to continually work on expansions, but we're not allowed to tell you right now what we're working on for our next expansion. It will be cool though, we can promise that!
Content (includes Spawning and Loot too) - This is a new team made up primarily of people who are new to SWG. They are working on new directed content while simultaneously improving our spawns and loot system. You've seen some of their work already and I expect their output to ramp up every publish as they get more fluent with their tools.
GUI Team - Another new team focused on improving our GUI. They are working with the Combat Upgrade folks and are going to be revising and adding new options for our standard game GUI.
Events Team - This team brings you the Live events on our service, but they're also working to bring many of their tools and goodies to the players so you can use them directly. Watch for new player-empowering elements to appear in future publishes.
Note that the relative amount of features and content in a given publish may change, simply because some of teams above may be on a longer development cadence than two weeks. Some development efforts take multiple weeks or months to complete, and when they are ready, they will come in to the game in the next publish.
Quality Assurance - We have also expanded our QA team to support this increased development effort. This team is working closely with the developers to help identify and correct issues prior to publication of these new elements. With these new additions to our team, the goal is to continuously refine the quality of our publishes and the overall game. You can help us increase the quality of the game by checking out the new features on Test Center as they come online and using either the In-Testing forums or the /bug command to report any issues you might see. We really appreciate the help in bringing you a higher quality game!
Community - We have also worked to improve our communication with you via our website and boards. The new message board structure has allowed us to gather feedback on issues better and the website and launchpad have both seen a flurry of updates. Much of the content from the recent publishes has come directly from player feedback and ideas gathered from the boards and we hope to continue that trend. We have also expanded our message boards to include a customer service board and a community relations board, both of which allow you to give us direct feedback on how we communicate with you.
Customer Service - We have recently completed the implementation of CSR's to specific servers. In the pilot it was clear to us that this is a much more effective way for us to be closer to the issues and to fully understand service problems as they affect the various servers. In conjunction with this effort we also opened up the Customer Service Forums which can be found here. The addition of these two new CS programs has already had a positive impact on the service. For the future we plan on offering a look at what the issues are from the inside out. We regularly circulate our "same page" newsletter internally to communicate what issues we are seeing and how we are handling them. Our plan is to post a public version of this so you can be on the "same page" with us.
That "secret team" is the one that developed the expansion we are all arguing about. The "content" team would be the one assigned to our revamp. So I honestly don't see why you're getting upset over it. Was it a poor allocation of resources? perhaps, perhaps not. we will have to wait and see. but no one was upset about it until just now
WesBelden wrote:From reading what's on IGN, I really like what's going into this expansion. Hopefully Smuggler content will be included or penciled in; I'd like to see things such as Smuggling weapons to wookies, getting people on and off planet that're wanted by the trandoshans/Imperials etc. Whether anything like this materialises, I guess I'll have to wait and see
Yeah, it would be nice to have ways of doing things like smuggling weapons to wookies, but seeing their track record, do you REALLY think that SOE is going to think that hard about this? Read between the lines and you'll see what this is.. an expansion that takes advantage of the hype around Episode III. Technically speaking, nothing in the expansion is something earth-shattering and game-changing like the JTLS expansion. This one is a downloadable expansion, much like the expansion-lite stuff that SOE put out for EverQuest a few times. And yeah, it looks like someone said "hey, we should do an expansion to take advantage of the RotS hype" and they said it like 2 weeks ago.
I don't know.. I'm still looking at this and feeling like "eeehhhh".. my only hope is that they take what works in the Kashyyk missions and repeat that success across all worlds like Rori and Talus, which are basically dead worlds. There is so much that they could be doing to tell a decent story across these worlds. Nym's Themepark is another example of a complete waste of a good opportunity.
heheh, don't we all, man. Don't we all
SmugglinZane wrote:
I guess it's just the fact that I expect the worst and hope for the best. However, every week I become more skeptical and even more cynical with regards to the devs and what they do.