Squad Leader Archive

Looking at the 'TychusTM' post JUST SHORTEN that post and submit it:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=squad_leader&message.id=3261

Except remove:

#1) "The proposed changes do not address the existing issues raised through the correspondent process."

This is a fancy way of saying "YOU DIDN'T DO WHAT WE WANTED". If they WANTED to do what we suggested they would have. They DON'T; they are VERY SURE there ideas are an order of magnatude better that ours. (Right or wrong.) Bringing this up does not help us.

CaptainVemnox ,

Thank you for puttingthe reporttogether. While I don't necessairly agree with every single item you have listed, I do think you have done an execellent job of articulating the concensus opinions of the SLs forum. Likewise your advocacy skills really shine through in this report.

The only item I would ask that you reconsider is the note on the group stance. I think many posts have stated that while the offensive or defensive bonus is helpful, the corresponding penalty tooffense or defense significantly lessens the the usefullness of this skill. This is particulary truesince the "stance" is applied to the entire group, where some players need offensive bonuses and some need defensive bonuses.

Thanks for quoting me! If you have time, I think you there is a typo in my name. It should be "jphillips1868". Of course, the substantive issues should get higher priority.

Vem,

Upon further reflection, I think DiLune is right: let's keep our suggestions out of this particular letter. Just focus on the response to the proposed new abilities. Mention that the community has come up with a considerable variety of possible revisions, which we can provide under separate cover if desired.

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gwoodruf wrote:
Looking at the 'TychusTM' post JUST SHORTEN that post and submit it:

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=squad_leader&message.id=3261

Except remove:

#1) "The proposed changes do not address the existing issues raised through the correspondent process."

This is a fancy way of saying "YOU DIDN'T DO WHAT WE WANTED". If they WANTED to do what we suggested they would have. They DON'T; they are VERY SURE there ideas are an order of magnatude better that ours. (Right or wrong.) Bringing this up does not help us.

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Actually, I was just saying they didn't address our original top 5 issues, which were about things we though were broken, not new suggestions. As in, they didn't even give us the "we're looking into it" or "working as intended" response that all the other professions got.

Captain Vem,

You can organize theresponse anyway you like. The current organization is fine, but I think shorter is better. I would just hit them with the main reasons you feel they need to reevaluate their suggestions to upgrade our class. Gwoodruf has made a good start on it already. Then I would request that they give us a response to our top 5 issues we sent them ages ago...

For the record, my main grief is the PCcontrolling aspect of the new upgrades. Acompetent SL won't need them, and an incompentant one will likely give SL's a bad reputation if they use them. It also takes away from the quality and richness of the game. So what if a noob kills us the first time he goes on a raid with us. They normally don't make the same mistakes twice. The fact that its hard to lead a team is what makes doing large group encounters rewarding when everything finally comes together.

More comments later, but on first read:

Please do not submit the /assist issue as a Squad Leader issue.

Reasons:

1) its a general game issue not a Squad Leader specific issue - lets use the space to request better things for our class

2) I don't think its broken, it functions as intended (you help without targeting it specifically)

3) /assist is really not that important to me as a squad leader. My squads don't have too much trouble picking out a target. I make sure and communicate well which is the target, and we attack it together. /sys macros with %TT, combined with added detail like distance and relative position (the XXXX on the far left, the XXXX at 61m, the XXXX that YYYY will shoot first, etc

I just think there are better uses of our very limited submission space... My $0.02

Borion, Sunrunner
Skwaad Leeedur

I seriously can't believe you guys are all so very afraid of saying anything to SOE or the Development Team by way of a system they put into place.

Acting like they think we are all idiots and that anything we say will incur punishment and wrath from them is really kind of dumb. Many of you say they don't care enough about us in general to do anything for us, while at the same time saying that if we say the wrong thing to them, OMG OMG they'll beat us with a stick. I want all of you to really think about this. I don't know what terrible gaming environment you've been playing in, but if every time you complained or asked for something to be fixed or (God Forbid) asked for what you wanted you got beaten, and robbed, and they came to your place and set it on fire, or made you hold their jacket while they made out with your girlfriend, then I feel very bad for you. We have a HotLine for that kind of abuse. The number is 1-800-SILLYLIES. The healing begins now.

As for the document being too long, you have seriously got to be kidding me. What sort of person do you think Vem is sending this document to? Just because you have trouble reading anything longer than 500 characters worth of a grammatically incorrect sentence doesn't mean the rest of the world is like that, and I certainly doubt that someone in charge of reading, digesting, and acting on player responses has hard time with multiple paragraphs or even multiple page documents. The report is long because we have several things to address.

Nothing will murder this class quicker than you people treating the Dev Team like angry, wrathful Gods who can't be bothered with the concerns of men. And don't gimme that line about how our community isn't showing a consensus and how that's bad for us - the reason we aren't showing a consensus is because we have a huge bucket of issues and not everyone is going to agree about everything. But I'll tell you what - if you really want a majority, lets look at the chart:

Position Number of Votes Total Percentage

Against Totally : 29 : 59.2%

Totally For : 9 : 18.3%

Wait to Test : 5 : 10.2%

Fix Current SL First : 6 : 12.2%

I happen to be in the "Against Totally" bracket with some hopeful leanings towards "Fix Current SL First". That means that we have, by way of majority voice, shown a consensus and that we as class do not want the new proposed changes at all. So your hope for a united front lies only within telling the Dev Team that we want nothing to do with an overhaul that has nothing to do with us.

Honestly, if you guys aren't willing to stand up for yourselves I don't know what can be done for you. Vem's report is excellent and shows a true reflection of how we feel. If you don't like the picture that representation paints perhaps you should reconsider your role within the greater scope of the class and your own feelings about the issues we are faced with.

Also, Vem, I urge you to make your report as detailed as you see fit. If you can get on the bus full of people that thinks a Dev Team member might actually possess a high-school reading level and could also possibly have an attention span longer than 30 seconds, I implore you to.

OK, having re-read your proposed submission, and having read the thread.

Two main points:

A) I think the submission should be in form of 1-5 issues plus 1 personal. This is more editorial. I think its great, and should be sent, but as an additional message or as an addendum ("Addendum I : Community feedback on proposed abilites" or etc).

B) Here are what I suggest should be submitted as our issues, in straightforward fashion:

(1) Proposed abilites are strongly disliked by a majority of surveyed squad leaders (insert footnote with stats - post here, x responses, etc, but as a footnote they don't have to read if they don't want to). We DO NOT suggest these be implemented (which is the strong majority consensus, based on your statistics (combine the "against" and "fix" and that's 70%, thats a very strong majority).

(2) Novice squad leader needs something more than /sys as an ability. A passive buff that works would be best, or a fairly usable ability that actually does something (% damage increse, % defense increase, % speed increase, whatever). One of my favorite ideas is to scrap the mobility tree, and give novice squad leader a +25 terain, and master squad leader an additional +25

(3) Existing passive buffs do not seem to work well except for movement modifiers. Either fix these that don't work (melee defense, etc) or replace them with some buff that actually works.

(4) Ability to paint a target. (ed: seems to be the most univerally requested feature). This would be great for a novice squad leader, or would make sense as a level I skill in tactics, leadership or battlefield. Suggested implementations:
4a) make the target have a arrow (or button etc) over their heads, visible to all players. Still requires manual selection.
4b) give a new squad leader command option (this could open up all sorts of abilites if implemented) - squad leader issues an order, everyone can type /obey to agree with that order. So the ability would issue an order "make your target %TT" and each player in the squad would have a pop-up option to "obey" or "disobey" or etc. This could be used for actions such as auto-follow, auto-group, formations, whatever.
4c) give a new target switch, like tab switches between available targets, let a new set of commands exist to switch between leader's targets. or just a single key to target what the leader has targeted. this seems like it would be the easiest implementation - players could map to whatever key they wanted and would function 90% of what is most desired

(5) Squad leader experience is contrary to how it should work. Experience should be based off group combat damage with a smaller multiplier. Directly tying it to the damage we deal is contrary to the main fuction of a squad leader. Restated, Squad Leader XP should be a function of the group's combat XP, not the individual squad leader's combat XP. A smaller multiplier (maybe SL_XP = combat XP * group members * .75) could and probably should be implemented to make up for the change. We're not asking to level faster, we're asking to level for our leadership and not for our ability to directly do damage to targets ourselves.

(6) - just a suggestion, its your spot use it as you see fit - Let the squad leader's waypoints become visible to the other players in his squad, automatically. Would be even nicer if the players became visible to the squad leader, and he could "activate for group" thus directing groups to missions. This is my biggest frustration as a squad leader, running missions in a large group becomes an organizational nightmare just deciding on the next target - we end up just running through person by person regardless of distance unless someone yells "mine's closer" which causes a disjointed regroup and redirect to occur. I believe this ability was supposed to work (saw it as a holocron tip the other day), but i've never seen it work in practice. If this does work, nevermind

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Last but not least, thanks for doing this job. You do a better job than most correspondents, and I am very thankful.

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DiLune wrote:

Was I not clear enough up there? We have no master level skills. Nothing proposed is master level. You are going to send them a list of fluff. Great "hey we came up with this...can we please have all sorts of stuff you shouldn't have to take Squad Leader to get? You know, stuff you should get as a group leader." I'm real proud that we came up with that stuff.

Why not say "Give us mind heal at the master level."

or "Give us an active ability that makes the group 100% dodge for 10 sec but has a 5 min timer for re-use."

Lets ask for something REAL! Something that will make people go WOW, I need to get level 4 this! or I need to master SL. Paint target...I'm supposed to take a squad leader skill to get that?

and the last part was a joke since I was only quoted once.

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Wow now those are good idea

1. ham modifier short time big change


2. 100% dodge 10sec (nice one)


3. Mind healing for master lvl (now we are talking)


4. I thought of a hit modifer... like SL call "HEALTH DAMAGE" and itconvert half rifle mind damage or carbine action damage into health damage for exemple (this is brainstorming)


5. I think the heal group is a good thing... not to order a medic to heal someone but as a SL i keep an eye on my squad, and calling where the medic should go should be my job... medic dont have to listen but will have a good idea on what his SL wants from him


6. SL should be able to create GroupWaypoint... i know its possible to forward waypoint by mail but imagine im SL use groupwaypoint Command and it creates a Purple Waypoint to everyone in the group of where the squad leader wanna go.... MAX OF SQUAD WAYPOINTS to counter possible SquadWaypoint Spamming (i know some people like to spam other people just for fun)

Thats all i can thinkof atthe moment (its not much but its my part for the community)

plz give feed back

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Borion_Sunrunner wrote:
More comments later, but on first read:

Please do not submit the /assist issue as a Squad Leader issue.

Reasons:

1) its a general game issue not a Squad Leader specific issue - lets use the space to request better things for our class

2) I don't think its broken, it functions as intended (you help without targeting it specifically)

3) /assist is really not that important to me as a squad leader. My squads don't have too much trouble picking out a target. I make sure and communicate well which is the target, and we attack it together. /sys macros with %TT, combined with added detail like distance and relative position (the XXXX on the far left, the XXXX at 61m, the XXXX that YYYY will shoot first, etc

I just think there are better uses of our very limited submission space... My $0.02

Borion, Sunrunner
Skwaad Leeedur

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/assist is greater then all of the new SL abilities combined. /assist is all that you need to run as large a group in as flexible a manner as you can imagine with precision andcohesion. I say this from my large raid EQ experience where /assist worked properly. The fact that no one uses it right now in SWG is the strongest indicator that it is broken. They should fix this and all of the other non functioning /group commands.

Whether Vem wants to bring this up on his Correspondence report is up to him, but it is a SL issue for those of us who understand its value to a group.

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Raiderz wrote:

SL should be able to create GroupWaypoint... i know its possible to forward waypoint by mail but imagine im SL use groupwaypoint Command and it creates a Purple Waypoint to everyone in the group of where the squad leader wanna go.... MAX OF 2 SQUAD WAYPOINTS to counter possible SquadWaypoint Spamming (i know some people like to spam other people just for fun)

Thats all i can thinkof atthe moment (its not much but its my part for the community)

plz give feed back

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yeah i forgot the 2 in my max of squadwaypoints

where is my edit button argh

don't fret none Capt V... I work at a game company and I can tell you the more info you provide, the better.

1. The top of the list: No one is going to like everything in any report, anywhere, anytime. Everyone here disagrees (or, at the least, is displeased with) at least one thing in there. That is inevitable, and simply human. Nothing can ever be done to make everyone think on the same level or agree with everything.


2. The report is a consensus. I went back over the weekend and read 6 complete pages of threads over again. I write in a notebook literally 19 pages of straight-up notes and used MS Word to copy-and-paste some of the quotes I thought represented a lot of peoples' thoughts, but worded better.


3. While showing this consensus, I remained completly unbiased, but posting a number of quotes for or against, based EXACTLY on the percentages of people who agreed or disagreed with something.


4. Here it is from the job description: Can you objectively identify relevant issues and distinguish them from simply passionate arguments? There comes a point where I have to draw a line. As much as I, like you, would like to e-mail bomb scream at them "why the hell are you making me waste my time while I sit here and watch half a dozen people drop squad leader a day?" it's not going to happen.


5. I will be replacing the bad choices of wording that some of you reccomended.


6. I will re-write the formation bullet.


7. Here is my biggest point yet I couldn't wait to just holler about: I WILL NOT SPOON FEED SOE. You guys, look at yourselves! Asking me to snip this out or "don't include this". You're taking SOE for ignorant idiots (whether that's true or not ask me again in 6 months where Squad Leader stands). "Shorten it"? I think people are genuinely afraid someone at SOE will open the report and go "Hah! I don't have time to read this garbage, I

(sorry for double-post and early-post, somehow the pointer landed on Submit Post)

"... better things to do and more random ideas to pull out of my butt." I don't neccessarily disagree with you that that is what is going on, but I'd rather not take the company for fools until they go and patch it live. They didn't just thrust the new abilities on the server for that very reason. The report will either remain at or become even longer before I submit it. If they can't handle it, they can macro /wave, /kiss, and /bye on me. But I'd rather give them the benefit of the doubt.
8. If anyone tells you your ideas are weak, they are weak-minded and should be thrown to the Sarlaac. Joe Schmoe could come here and make his first and only post a SL idea and, at the least, I will respect it and consider it just as much as I would if Volartis came back and wrote a Squad Leader for Dummies book.
9. I will add the original top 5 to the list. That's the first thing we wanted responded to in the first place.
10. Keeping our suggestions out of the report will only make them pull more random things out of the air.
11. Please do not be afraid that me putting a game-bug in as an SL issue will somehow take immense priority over the SL issues. Some of you guys are so scared of SOE being able to accomplish 1 tinsy thing at a time (I don't blame you, but I don't think they are a 2-man company either).

SOE isn't a company filled with idiots and they are fully capable of reading and listening to everything we have to say.

That's how I look at it and will continue to. If they PROVE me wrong, then I'm wasting 7 hours of my weekend writing a bunch of mumbo jumbo they won't read.

Vemnox