Star Wars Galaxies: Holo responds to his PM's!

Being a compendium of scattered replies to some of the PMs I got yesterday! Part the First.

First off I'd like to thank you for this game. You did a knock down bang up job during the last days of beta with all the fixes. (I had the opportunity to be a beta 3 member) And you have a nice website (Even with all the Viagra farmers posting to it!) Can you answer a few questions for clarification?

What do you mean when you say Maxxed out? I've Mastered Squad Leader (dropped it just as quickly since its a useless profession atm), Mastered Teras Kasi, Mastered Smuggler, Mastered Scout (droped it also) and now I'm working on my Master Pistoleer.
I've also gone about 1/4 up the ranger tree before dropping it and I've gone 1/2 up the Creature Handler tree before dropping it. I've been to all the planets and have done a lot of the quests. I've made (and given away over 1 million credits)

I'm not bitching I constantly find neat stuff to do. I do unique quest item hunts (for housing decorations) and now I'm a Warrant Officer II in the Rebel Alliance.

I'm going to continue to finish out the Rebel Alliance side (soon as you fix the themepark that is) and do some more questing. But can I be considered having had a character maxxed out?

Well, in the post you're referring to, I was actually going off of what the original poster meant, which sounded to me like "spent all skill points" or "reached the top in his chosen profession."

Given SWG's advancement system, I think either of those are a fine definition, and I also think you qualify. I'm glad you're enjoying it though!

On the one in a million shot you see this..can you please explain why CM can't get simple typos fixed in our crafting schematics? Yes there are much larger issues, but fixing these little problems that take away our best tools would make waiting on the other issues a LOT easier. Correcting a coupla numbers should only take 5 minutes. PLEASE i'm begging. I'll do anything. I'll pay double the subscription for three months. Just fix the numbers.

I'll ask about the status of these, if you can tell me which typos they are exactly. (Yes, I know that I can probably read the CM forum for a few hours and find them, but if you tell me more specifics here, I'll both read it sooner and have more ammo to beat a designer about the head with).

Seriously holo, what are you devs trying to do? Kill the tailor professsion as a means of trying to support onself in game? The effects of the bugged no decay have already taken its toll on my business, my sales are dropping, why? Because everyone has what they want, and it will always be there, never a need to repurchase. This will KILL the tailoring profession. I already have intentions of taking down my store due to the proposed vendor changes which obviously don't consider the tailoring profession as well will put me deep into the red. I am very angry with these changes and certainly don't expect to hold out on this game for any extended period of time with no purpose.

Tailoring hasn't had decay since sometime in the last phase of beta. We used to have a decay system whereby every item decayed every time tick (whether you were online or not, whether it was in inventory, in a bank, in a house, or anywhere else). Usage XP was then sent to the item's creator when the item decayed.

This got taken out because people hated having to constantly maintain their items, hated the fact that they could lose stuff from being off the game for a week, say on vacation, or something, and so on. We put in damage-based decay for weapons and armor, and turned off the time-based decay on everything else.

This had the result that entire classes of items that previously decayed stopped having market turnover. Clothing, furniture, and tools were all affected.

We've been reluctant to put in use-based decay on these because some of the items are used passively, some like clothing aren't "used" at all but instead are worn, some of the items are used frequently, and some aren't ever used. yet we want economic turnover to create ongoing demand for these items among tailors.

Rather than write special-case (and possibly obnoxious) code for each type of item there, we'd like to find a solution that cuts across the board. Our current thought is to make all carried items suffer a bit of decay when the player is incapped. But it's certainly true that say, entertainers, wouldn't often have decay happen to their belongings.

I just wanted you to know, in lieu of all the negativity people put in these forums, there are many of us who appreciate the jobs you an the rest of the staff are doing. I knew coming in to this game there would be some bugs and snags, which are common for any new system of any complexity.

Some people get disappointed when fixes or percieved bugs/balances don't get immediately fixed. It is a good thing to see you take time to carefully observe and study before considering a fix. Please keep this up, as it allows for a more informed view on problems.

Have patience with the players, even though many of them don't show much patience or even civility towards you. A great deal of us appreciate the work you have put into this, and look forward to hearing and seeing more changes in the future.

Come on, you know I had to include at least one positive post, right?

Seriously though--I get a lot of PMs like this, usually a half dozen a day or so. The general tone on the boards has made those who enjoy the game reluctant to post, which I think is a shame. We need to see the positive feedback just as much as we needto see the negative, so that we know which aspects of the game are working well for people.

I'm a non-ch and a guildmate gave me a couple of pets to mess around with. I could have sworn that I was getting combat xp from my pet when it would make a kill and we were grouped when I first got them. Now I'm not seeing any xp at all if my pet kills. Am I nuts or has something changed (ok, I know I'm nuts no matter what the answer)? As far as I can tell, I'm not getting ANY kind of xp if I send in my pet and let it kill something without firing a shot..

I think you're nuts. Players have never gotten combat XP from a pet.

Who is the Dev that watches over the DE forum? Because we have not had a Dev post there in weeks and weeks.

There isn't really one, in the sense you mean. There's a designer who works on Droid Engineers, and he's also in charge of general crafting skills. He does try to read the DE forum when he can, but it's not like part of his job in the sense I think you mean. But he doesn't have permission to post there anyway--when you see one of the other profession forums get a post from "their dev" it's because either someone asked them to write something up for them, or because they saw something they wanted to reply to, and they asked me to post it.

Any given profession should definitely not feel like they are being intentionally neglected because they haven't gotten a dev post in their forum. We don't have specific devs assigned to forums. Instead, we're trying to rely on the correspondents (I know, I know. We have a long ways to go on that front).

Hello,

Ok, i know you all keep busy over there and i dont know if you actually will read this, however... the network status page doesnt get updated on a regular basis.. It would be nice if this would actually get updated to reflect any updates/patches that are going to be happening and downtime that is scheduled..

thanks

It's not really in my dept, but I'll check on this. I do know that we tend to use the first part of the Network Status page (the manually updated part) only for major downtimes, not for individual server downtimes. The second part of the page is automatically updated, I believe, but it's on a periodic refresh, every fifteen minutes or something. Often a server can go down and be back up between refreshes of the page.

Will make it short and sweet since I know you are flooded.

Is the fact that an ARMORSMITHS color choices for armor being directly tied to his TAILORING (clothing customization) skill intended. I want to know before I give up hard earned skill points to move into the tailoring tree. If it intended I want to ask why you would do this but I can wait on that explanation for a later date. For now I just would just like to know if it is.

A) Yes it's intended. Become a tailor.
B) No it's not but it will take a while to fix. Become a tailor for a little while.
C) No it's not intended and we will fix it ASAP. In fact it's the next update. ((Armorsmiths rejoice))

It's definitely a bug. Unsure how long it will take to fix at this moment, but I'm asking.

How about putting all the ideas for death penalties and giving us a choice. When you die, you get a dialog for "Clone with with penalty and no corpse" or "Clone with corpse and no penalty", etc?

That was actually the original intent of insurance, you know--you paid to avoid a corpse recovery, or you went and did the corpse run...

In EQ They Had Player Guides I pretty sure u know what i mean if u dont please Reply and i'll tell . well i was just wondering will we ever have that Cause i know most about this game and my friends go of at night and i play this game alone and i would love to help out people .. Well Thanks for Reading this

We aren't currently planning on having Guides in SWG.

There is a growing movement among players of medic-based classes that believes that mind damage should become the province of doctors and/or medics.

I believe this is not the solution - allowing doctors to heal the pool that they use to heal simply creates an upward spiral with no drains from the system. In the thread I link below, I outline an alternative, rough draft solution which better fuses entertainers with the combat professions.

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=entertainer&message.id=3748

Please, Holo, for the love of the game, do not allow doctors to heal mind damage OR mind wounds.

We don't plan to allow medic types to heal mind, because it opens the door to lots of exploits for them, as you point out.

Your idea is interesting, but t does make entertainers more bard-like, which I am not crazy about (but perhaps some entertainers are?). The Squad Leader alternative is also interesting.

Frankly, this situation is a bit of a loophole in the design. We did not catch the medic exploit until too late, so we removed the mind pool heal from them, without creating an alternative. Mind is not supposed to be the determining factor in a combat.

This may well get lost in the flotsam and jetsam of your inbox, but...

Instead of the proposed money sink for Vendors, how 'bout this?

Sales tax. Not a new concept, I know, but one with a twist. Mimic RL. By that I mean, look at the most heavily populated areas and tax them high. Look at the least populated areas and tax them low.

To turn it into an automated process, I can think of a few ideas:

1) Caluclate it on a pure planetary declared residence status.

2) Calculate it on basis of Vendors in a "x" radius.

3) Calculate it based on Vendors of that type in an "x" radius.

Why do it this way?

To even out growth. On Chilastra, the area around Theed is an Urban blight. And as teh game progresses, I anticipate it getting worse. Exponentially. Instead, this would encourage growth in areas such as Talus and Rori, which are relatively untouched.

Well, just an idea. Hope it helps, because I know for a fact that many of my friends who were vendors are picking up a gun and moving to a combat class, or quitting the game altogether. This is based largely on the Vendor nerf proposed. I'd rather it not come to that.

Sales tax is indeed what we are looking at putting in. Also, with player cities, mayors will be able to set additional sales tax, I believe.

I know you will probably dont read this, but I think these are some of the biggest content issues in the game. This game dont need new content as much as getting the present content to work.
1. Faction bases. The 6 faction bases that decide the GCW all spawn as rebel on ALL servers and are reset as rebel on server reset. So at the moment you cant raid them without being imperial. unless you can make a raid after a imp raid and before a server reset.

We're aware of this one, but it's proving hard to fix, because those bases were "built into the map" and therefore get "reset" when the map is reset. We need to migrate the tracking off of the "built in" aspect and store the data on an object that isn't part of the "world snapshot."

2. Rebel Theme Quest. This have been broken since day one after Han solos missions. Lt Lance seems impossible to find on dantooine and Akbar spawns in a imp mission you get in the imperial prison on dathomir. If Lt lance is just extremly hard to find and you need to have done alot of other stuff before you can find him(beside the prior rebel missions) a simple statement "This is working as intended" would be enough.

Finding out an answer.

3. Badges. At the moment I know of 2 working bagdes "mark of intelligence" and "project deadeye". I realize that there may be other badges that work, but not many or the community would have found more. Since most badges dont work I get afraid to finish big quest and not get a badge. Since prior statement by devs state that you wont get badges for quest you finished earlier if the badge wasnt working at the time.

There are more than that, but not many, you are correct. We're actively looking to add more badges.

Is this an exploit?
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=GCW&message.id=23092

The above thread details a method by which someone with a faction HQ can fairly easily create a farm for fp (and xp). In my mind, this is obviously an exploit. But some people defend the practice, and it would be helpful to have an official post to this thread explaining whether this is considered an exploit of the system.

Yeah, we'd call that an exploit. We'll probably make it so that the distance at which the missions spawns is much bigger. In theory, the changes we already made with the update that went in this morning should have fixed this, actually. Let us know if not...