Smuggler Archive

Hi TH!

Please feel free to browse around in your borrowed time if you can There are some interesting ideas floating around.

Happy Holidays.

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Thunderheart wrote:

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Heltain wrote:
He, while Scorus is probably like me a burned child from the BE days i've to agree,
People post pages upon pages of ideas, they get filtered discussed by the community and edited and forwarded by the correspondant. This has been going on for a few month and in various professions.
And every time a dev pops up and posts something along the lines TH did, which kinda strongly indicates that everything the community did prior went directly to the paper basket
That is slightly discourageing imo.

But perhaps TH you can clear up what the dev crew was thinking when they implemented the smugglers that can't smuggle and what their vision was that would help i think ...

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Well its a tricky issue and Im on borrowed time atm.

The thing is that smugglers essentially are a "space based" profession (at least the way we think of it)and giventhe inherent client/server limitations, its atough proposition any way you look at. For instance, lets say Imperials do a search for contraband at starports. Can you imagine the lag if we even did an item check for everything inevery player's inventory as they entered and exited a starport? And then there are the guys that run back and forth across that threshold just to lag things out. This is one tiny piece of a larger puzzle. It has to be a cool game mechanic and work in the game system and in a big MMO environment.

The key here is that while I was in beta and I knew everyone (I actually have almost all of it saved on my hard drive, but doing a search on "smuggler" with 12 gig of materials would be insane). Further still, that was a while ago. I want to hear YOUR ideas and Ive worked with the devs and correspondents to focus communication so that correspondents can get me information and also in a way that I can both share it with the devs AND catalgoue it.

Its all a process and we're working on it and its going to take time. The devs want to make a good game, you and I want to play a fun game and as a community, I believe we can make this whole experience very cool.

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But TH, don't you understand?

Many of us were in beta just like you!

Veteran members of the community have given those ideas over and over - and you did not really answer the question here.

Same thing happened when you posted in the droid forum - you asked us for "what do you want?" type information when our corrispondent had already stickied the exact answers to your questions in several threads at the top of the forum.

You really didn't answer the question here - just gave the "Go team!" pep talk, which we have heard before.

While sifting through beta postings would be relatively inane right now, asking people to constantly repeat themselves now is getting very old.

Just looking at the sticky section of almost any profession would give you enough ideas to make a whole game out of just that profession - if you guys want our continued patience, you'll need to justify it by recognizing what we've already done before you ask us to do more.

Audio

These are not answers. These are the same canned responses to most every other issue/suggestion.

SOE Translation = We have not really been following up with anything submitted here but we'll keep it on file.

I see that 6 months of idea's are just thrown out the window. you have 12gig of info and by the time you get the new info from everyone you'll have that again are you going to throw that out to and ask for more.

Star War's top three char. were: Luke the jedi, Han the smuggler and Liea the politicion. Seems to me that most the ppl making this game forget where it all started. Take the time that should have already been take and read that 12gig. you mit be surprized that it would help all char. in the game.

Whoa whoa whoa...I understand the limitations of people, and to a lesser extent, I understand the limitations of hardware, but when you start to say things like "can you imagine the lag if..." it means, to me, WE ARE NOT THINKING HARD ENOUGH TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM.

Don't check the player's inventory over and over. Check it once, whenever loading after travelling via shuttle/starport.

if (inventory LIKE "spice" THEN launchImperialPatrol())

I will give you more leeway than most people on human issues, such as deciding what to do and how to do it. I will give you very little when it comes to technology issues, such as "well if we did that it would lag." We have the technology. Make it work. No excuses on that point.

I just love it that we're "spaced based" when the space expansion isn't coming out until God knows when. Hopefully this doesn't mean we have to wait until then to do anything that resembles the name of our profession, but I have a sneaking suspicion....

Seriously though, if you don't want to read through your hard drive, there are some great and well thought out ideas about what we'd like to see/do on the front page of the Smuggler forum at any given time. I know you're busy, but honestly, if you go through the other professions' Top 5 Lists and see how detailed and well thought out the dev answers are, and then look at the Smuggler's, something is very obviously lacking, like anything more specific than extremely vague. We've been hearing the same kind of comments for a while now, and they're starting to get a bit old. Oh well, here's to hoping.

TH, thanks for responding. Appreciate that.

However...

Along with the ideas that we pass along. How about you help us out to. Since as long as i can remember (back in beta) we've been asking for the lowdown on slicing. What makes it tick. Can we improve our slices with experimented tools, etc. No one has given us answers.
I pm'd you once before regarding this. Your response was "Friday Feature". Not the kind of response we were looking for. Taurin also responded with the same answer pretty much.
Help us to help you.
Get us the info on slicing as it stands right now
Tell us the ins and outs of it. What the min/max slice levels for each level of slicing are. Tell us if we're able to improve our slices with high quality goods, and if stats of the resources we use affect our slices too. etc.
Give us the info that we've longed for, for so long it hurts
We have all felt that we've been given the brush off more times than not. We were promised that Greenmarine would begin working with us to fix things. That never happened. Instead we now hear he's gone to fix Chef instead. In the months beforehand, he could've at least begun some work with us that could've just been acknowledged and perhaps a mention from him or something saying "hey guys, i am working on things, but right now the Chef profession needs help far more. So i'm putting Smuggler on hold for a while to allow me time to work with Chef and help them too".
These are things we would love to hear. Instead all we got was silence. A long, cold, lonely silence.

We want to make things work better, but we need your help to do this too. We need to know about things such as Slicing as they currently function, so we can get a better idea of what we can actually do to help suggest new fixes/ideas, etc.

I sincerely hope you read this. San, would you help bring this to TH's attention possibly? A lot to ask, i understand. But without knowing some of the things we should expect to know, i believe it makes it harder for us to suggest new ways to implement and revamp this profession.

1. Will renew my subscription? .....i dont know i will look into it

2. Will i tell all my friends who planned on buying the game not to? ... not enough data at this time

Great posts everyone.

I'm really tired of waiting. But TH had a point, that Smuggler and the Space Expansion are tied together. You can't have smuggling content without them. This is what our profession needs the most in my opinion. While there are important issues that we have (spice experimentation, exact info on how slicing works, and an update in our master box, etc.) it's these important issues that we want addressed, an it's the fact that all it would take is someone to make a few changes that could be done in a hot fix (the master box update) and an explanation that wouldn't take more than 20 minutes to type up. Why we can't get this is beyond me, because it would seem that an explanation is easier than an overhaul that we are now being promised.

Here's what I want to see in this smuggler profession:

• some sort of consensual consequences for "smuggling" such as bounties placed on us for failing a smuggling mission, or city police TEFs


• a land based "delivery"mission for smugglers only would be nice, many have made great suggestions on these boards there


• the ability to choose at master what gets sliced


• a reason for having the +100 language comprehension


• a complete and detailed explaination of smuggling

if you gave me that before the Space expansion, I'd be happy. as it stands now though, it looks like we won't have the space expansion for another 3-6 months (because of the combat revamp, and then who knows what will come after that besides the SE, and I personally want all the professions fixed before the SE as well).

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" Just looking at the sticky section of almost any profession would give you enough ideas to make a whole game out of just that profession - if you guys want our continued patience, you'll need to justify it by recognizing what we've already done before you ask us to do more. "

Yep

Thunderheart-

You may not read this but its all good. Knowing that you are collecting information for the Devs and working hard to get these professions balanced, I'll go ahead and throw this out there.

This may be Uber cheese to some, but how about throwing the Smugglers a bone? I'm not going to say this will be easy to implement so I'll leave it up to you and the Devs:

Smuggler mission terminals:

While doing Jabba missions you'll notice that there are some missions where you go to a spawned building out in the desert and "flip a switch" causing it to blow up, etc. Why not create mission terminals that use a modification of this mission type? Instead of blowing it up, the smuggler needs to head to the location and slice the terminal gaining much needed intel and the reward for the mission. Throw in some baddies around that term/building and you've got yourself a missions. Mind you, this is no fix for the profession but its something, a band-aid of sorts.

I personally, would find this same mission type get a little old doing it over and over again. So,if anyone else has some ideas that could be easy to implement (those who have been playing a while know the basic capabilities of the system) throw them up here. If we can get a couple "do-able" missions for smugglers we may just get a term.

Master Smuggler (me)using 99% clamps and knives (ace copper) with 99% ace copper upgrade kit....got 13% slice on my 81% adv.compostie helm not even 96hrs ago (no lie) standing in front of GoCanes +43 matching crafting station (I do the 99% gear and slicing near matching crafting station for weapon/armor because to date, not a single soul formally or informally knows if we get any, ANY benefits from this over the most awful clamps, knives and upgrade kits).


Anyway, moving on to why I write (lol) "all their eggs in a row" ?? Sounds like a Dilbert Newsletter submittal about funny workplace mis-quotes by cow-workers, hehehe. Master Smuggler needs, must have and will get (because it's uber proper and logical) as the NUMBER one priority (saying otherwise by fellow Smuggler posters will make you a laughing stock) the ability to pick the slice upgrade (dmg/speed or encumber/effect) and nothing anyone says can change that fact (if not 100% ability to pick, then at least some interface to chose with a chance like 50/50 or 75/25 of hitting our intended slice). Right? RIGHT????

Secondly (heck, lastly) comescontent/spice/underworld (these three things take a back seat to the glaring need for the ability to have more control at Master over slicing by picking upgrade AND/OR getting confirm on quality of equipment affecting the avg % of our slices...THIRTEEN PERCENT on my own top-notch helmet, at least it wasn't a customers or I'd have been utterly, utterly ashamed).

Then, coming in dead lastafter spice (we should be able to stack until we overdose) content (eh) and underworld (I'm learning it's not uber awful as I hit my 3rd month as Master Smuggler and use Underworld skills btw) comes the pre-req and/or weaving Unarmed more into our profession.

oh and by stack spice I mean pop more during a downerof whatever kind we want (or at least the matching kind) even if we get say, reduced effectiveness and/or duration (but that's a compromise). Then we die (actually die like a deathblow) if we don't stop soon and "wise up" or "sober up" for a bit. As you know, none of us is REALLY to fond of the thought that better recs would reduce downers and/or increase effectiveness but that's not a horrible idea as most of us have become wealthy and/or wise enough to handle that kind of shift in approach.

However, seperate from that and of almost zero importance to me compared to the slicing and general spice/content/underworld issuesis this...spices could still use a tweak like the above stacking thing or at least allowing us to take 2 at once as Smugglers like the DE gets to call out 2 droids. If the 2 spice at once allowance it could even be restricted to not of the same kind (like Pixie then Muon for a body/mind combo...although I've compensated for this by drinking Angerian Fishak Surprise with my Pixie, hehehe) because buffs by Doctors and Entertainers makes us pieces of rat meat with our stupid, pathetic spice.