Squad Leader Archive
Thread: On Being a DEV
Some random thoughts...
The SL community, on the whole, has had a lot of good ideas on how SLs should work. Our correspondent put together our suggestions and sent a report to the DEVs. The DEVs then "responded" with what they plan to do with SL in the near future. This plan had little to do with what the correspondent reported to them. Why?
Either
a)it was all ignored (maybe I'm not cynical enough, but I don't think this is true) or
b) our suggestions are just so far different than what they are trying to accomplish the suggestions didn't make any sense to them or
c) the DEVs are haphazardly coming up with ideas and throwing them into SL
I suspect c) has the largest grain of truth in it. Many of the proposed things have been suggested at one time or another on this forum...maybe some DEV saw that suggestion, kind of liked it, implemented it and threw it in the stew.
This brings up a question: How much of a vision should DEVs have and how much should they be swayed by the player base?
To me, it seems that they should definately have a vision that is the overriding influence on how they develop the class (I'll skip asking why are we still developing since this is no longer beta). Of course, there are many details that have to be worked out when developing a class to make sure it it both useful and not overpowered. This is where the player base comes in. We play a lot more than the DEVs do (this probably shouldn't be true, but it is) and we may have additional insights on what is needed...sort of a view from the trenches instead of a view from the General's office. Our suggestions should be used to help achieve the overriding vision for the class...this may mean a lot of our stuff gets ignored.
So, I'm OK with some (most?) of our suggestions being ignored. The problem, it seems, is that the DEVs are not showing a consistent vision. This applies to classes other than SL, but I'm more concerned with SL since I like its potential so much. The vision statement for SLs that we all operate under is:
Squad Leader: A soldier whose very presence in a group provides benefits to all group members.
This is nice, but more visionthan that isnecessary...for instance, what constitutes a benefit? What kind of benefits should SLs generally be giving to their group? I think the players as a whole have a surprisingly consistent vision of what SLs should be doing for their groups. The DEVs, on the other hand,appear to have a lack of vision for this class. This is what causes frustration to the players...not only do the DEVs not appear to have the same vision for the class as we do, they appear to have no vision whatsoever.
This is where communication from the Lead Designer(s) to both the DEVs and the playerscan make things much more enjoyable for everyone involved. The DEVs will have a clear picture of what the class needs to do (and therefore can implement it better)and the players will know what to expect and will be able to choose their characters' classes accordingly. Sure, some people will be unhappy that the class isn't more to their liking, but they won't be bitter when they spend a lot of time, money and effort on their character only to find they can't do with it what they had planned. Not to mention that given knowledge of the DEVs vision, the players can give feedback that is of more use to the DEVs.
I suspect I am again sounding pompous, but I do think that if the DEVs (especially the Lead Designer)would go to the effort of writing up (and posting here) a short paragraph detailing their vision for the class, we'll all be happier.
--Ze'ev
"I think the players as a whole have a surprisingly consistent vision of what SLs should be doing for their groups. The DEVs, on the other hand,appear to have a lack of vision for this class. This is what causes frustration to the players...not only do the DEVs not appear to have the same vision for the class as we do, they appear to have no vision whatsoever."
This is my perception as well.
Why are we posting here? Seriously. I know the Devs never ASKED us to do things like this, these complete workdowns and build-ups. I would hope that the fact that we DO them ANYHOW would impress upon the Devs both our commitment and our understanding of the issues.
I think we've tried to keep things pretty realistic. No one asked for +100% damage bonuses or triple attack speed. No one wanted ridiculous bonuses for the group. In fact I think the most important things we asked for were the small increases to ability mods, thus increasing the overall efficiency of everything the squad does.
Right now my "very presenece" in the group provides the benefit of extra message spam appearing on the screen.
Perhaps the Devs have a different concept for Squad Leader than we do. I suppose that's so. And maybe the real question is who should be making those decisions? The Devs certainly have a right to do so. It's their game and their baby. They also have a responsibility to keep the game balanced and interesting. But interesting to who? To the Gamers? If they are designing something we hate, whether or not it fits in with their concept for the game, doesn't that still defeat the purpose?
Aden_Nak wrote:
Perhaps the Devs have a different concept for Squad Leader than we do. I suppose that's so. And maybe the real question is who should be making those decisions? The Devs certainly have a right to do so. It's their game and their baby. They also have a responsibility to keep the game balanced and interesting. But interesting to who? To the Gamers? If they are designing something we hate, whether or not it fits in with their concept for the game, doesn't that still defeat the purpose?
This gets at the main point I'm trying to make. I believe the game will be best served by having a strong vision for the game. That vision should of courseinclude making it somthing players will enjoy, but that doesn't mean pandering to everything we ask for. I look on the main SWG discussion board and I see Holocron asking people things like how should medic xp work! Why? Doesn't he already have a strong idea of how it should work? If he's going to react to the player community too much the game will never be balanced and will never be stable (today group A will have more loudmouths and tomorrow group B will because school let out early....etc).
What I really want to see is vision. I want a DEV to tell us what SLs are supposed to do and this is how it is going to be done. We can comment and tweak...but it should just be tweaking that we need to do...not wholesale rebuilds. I will adapt my gameplay to the game...but if the game is amorphous and constantly changing it is very hard to adapt to that. The only thing that is constant in SWG so far is that they have really nice looking terrain...I have adapted my gameplay to that with Ze'ev Adventure Travel...but I'd like more. If I had a clear picture of what the game was, I'd have more to do. If I had a clear picture of what they want SLs to be, I could use that and I'd have more to do. They showed some vision with Rangers...now do it with SLs.
--Ze'ev
Of course, that's not the case with Squad Leader. With Squad Leader Novice and Master are the same. Heh.
I don't mind when the Devs admit, "Hey, people that play our game every day for 4-5 hours a day understand how systems function better than we do." I'm glad they admit that instead of just assuming that everything works according to plan. But if they are going to ask us how things work, I wish they would do it consistantly.
I was thinking some more about how they set up Squad Leader this morning, and I have another thought. Perhaps they didn't turn Squad Leader into a Bard-like group buffer because they didn't want people to resent Squad Leader. They didn't want people saying, "****ing Squad Leader! That's the only reason you guys won!"
If that was the fear. . . they sure did succede.
But I had another thought. The Devs have a responsibility and a need to keep the Squad Leader population at around 5% of the players. Think about it. Groups max at 20. Now obviously not all groups get that high, but work with me (as it seems the Devs prefer theoretical maximums to real-game situations). Besides, if you factor in for all of the people that solo, it starts to even out. If more than 5% of the population are Squad Leaders, that means some of those Squad Leaders will have nothing to do since each group can only have one Squad Leader.
So maybe they didn't want to make Squad Leader a power buffer. Maybe they wanted to make it something different and specific, something that wouldn't even appeal to everyone. If so, congratulations! They did indeed do that. But sadly they made it far too "different" and reduced the appeal far to much.
It hurts when we put so much work into this proffesion, posting so many great, realistic (not overpowering) ideas and then just get ignored without a reason why.
Yeah our proffesion is obviously getting some work and has someone out there in dev world looking at it saying we need more fleshing out, but without any communication it's making it appear as if they are pulling these ideas from thin air, without any thoughts to the people who actually play this proffesion, and pay for this game.
Aden_Nak wrote:
But I had another thought. The Devs have a responsibility and a need to keep the Squad Leader population at around 5% of the players. Think about it. Groups max at 20. Now obviously not all groups get that high, but work with me (as it seems the Devs prefer theoretical maximums to real-game situations). Besides, if you factor in for all of the people that solo, it starts to even out. If more than 5% of the population are Squad Leaders, that means some of those Squad Leaders will have nothing to do since each group can only have one Squad Leader.
So maybe they didn't want to make Squad Leader a power buffer. Maybe they wanted to make it something different and specific, something that wouldn't even appeal to everyone. If so, congratulations! They did indeed do that. But sadly they made it far too "different" and reduced the appeal far to much.
This was another thought thats been circling in my mind lately. I have a rare situation on my server (wanderhome). Within my PA we have 3-4 aspiring squad leaders besides myself. I'm 4 boxes into it, we have another who's a novice and at least 2 others who are working towards the proffesion. Being a medium sized PA it might work, but in the long run I think we are going to have too many Squad Leaders within my PA to make the XP sharing "fair". Or theres the question of where the person who needs the xp, or the person who will benefit the group most on hunts.
And a thought popped into my head, why do squad leaders have to be the group leader?
A lot of the talk on these boards about our vision, as the players, is that we don't want squad leaders having commands/abilities that should be generic group leader commands.
I think a few of the proposed new changes are things that should be around for every group. Like the all follow command, or stuff like that.
I'd be happier seeing the squad leader fall into more of a bard roll, and having the group management commands stay as that, group management commands.
Then you could work in ways to have multiple squad leaders in group. I hate to copy other games, but maybe you have one squad leader running forced march, while another is "pulsing" an attack bonus?
Although now that i'm typing this out.. I seem to recall from past dev quotes during early early beta and development, one saying something about there being no bard-like class, and they don't want one. But maybe i'm imagining things again.
Aden_Nak wrote:
The truth is that the Devs need player input because they don't know how the systems in the game actually work on a day-to-day basis. I am aprtly agahst by this, and yet I can understand it. If the Devs PLAYED the game as often as the average SWG player does, they would never have enough time to WORK on the game. And just playing some maxed-out characters wouldn't cut it because many of the problems are internal, working up the trees.
I work a full-time job and I find enough time to play my character enough to advance him(6 boxes in SL, nearly 2 in Ranger, 2 in Rifleman, 2 in CH at the moment) AND scout out routes for Ze'ev Adventure Travel trips AND run the ZAT trips. There is no reason the DEVs should have less insight on this game than we do. We the playersmight have a few different viewpoints...but the DEVs have no excuse for not knowing how the game they developed works.
As for the 5% thing...you don't have to make SLs weak to keep their numbers down. I like the idea of only the actual leader of a group being able to give SL benefits. This means that SL powers can be larger. Since there is only one SL that can be giving bonuses, the bonuses can be larger than if there were 10 of them all giving bonuses. This requirement that you must be the leader of your group will naturally keep the SL population lower...your PA will naturally evolve to having the right number of SLs in it. That, to me, is a great way to design a game...same thing goes for all the crafting classes. You only need so many weapons crafters...when you have more than enough, there is a natural pressure that will reduce the population of them.
--Ze'ev