All Posts by SioBabble

Originally posted by Suvroc

 

Originally posted by bobfish

Catch 22 situation. Maybe in a few years when the market has grown sufficiently that the risk of being different is less, then we might see something truely different.

 

I agree, but I think that time is now.

The MMO market is becoming saturated, and a game needs to stand apart to ensure it's longterm survivability IMO.

We will not see a "blockbuster" again until the industry begins innovating.

This was something that the software industry in general does not do.

So WoW got people's attention.

Two toons per server is the limit now.

There is the Jedi unlock exception but that need not concern anyone in this day and age.

As indicated above, there is the chat restriction.  You can get around it with /tells and in groupchat.  But no other flavor of chat, or emotes.  The devs patched the holes the spammers were using.

On vet trials, at least, you can still plant houses.

As for a level restriction, it's news to me, with the exception below...

The situation now is much better than it was last summer, when they were restricting the 14 day trials to the n00bie station, and you couldn't get to Tatooine.  You can't advance beyond level 10 on the n00bie station.

Originally posted by salvaje

Basically all MMOs designed on the WoW model are nothing more than treadmill grindfests for ever increasing level caps and ever happening planned obsolescence of good gear.

Eventually people will get tired of paying for that.

Until someone takes a chance and finds the next big thing.

Originally posted by Arawon

   If you are a crafter....ie a TRADER.......does that not preclude you from a combat profession such as a Jedi ? Sorry for being so slow on this...stayed up too late last night playing the game .   

The catch is that traders don't get any combat specials, nor can they earn combat XP.  Their level advancement is earned  through trader XP (that is, by crafting items) only.

So a trader can use a CDEF pistol or a curved sword or something they're certified to use (via player level) to shoot at say womp rats or similar things.

Trader is a class unto itself.  While you can use any weapon in the game you're certified for (only Jedi are certified for lightsabers), you're not going to be as effective in combat as a combat profession toon at the same player level is, simply because they receive special attacks and abilities that are combat oriented.  Traders don't.

Traders have been known to advance through the GCW ranks to general, it's not like you're excluded from combat like traders once were.  Much of your ability to engage in combat is tied directly to your player level.

A level 60 trader can take on mobs that would instantly kill a level 20 commando, for example.

Originally posted by Arawon

"ONLY THE TOON THAT CRAFTS  A  LIGHT SABRE CAN USE IT " .  Now I am confused....so you cannot craft and sell Light sabres on the market or for your own Jedi characters?? And If you are a crafter (TRADER)how can you be a Jedi and xp as a Jedi ?

Crystals (both color and power) and krayt pearls can be bought and sold.  They can't be used in a lightsaber until they're tuned by a Jedi, and after they've been tuned, only the Jedi who tuned the crystal or pearl can use it in a lightsaber.

Only Jedi can craft, equip, and use lightsabers.  No other player class can do anything with them at all.  Well, not true.  They can die at the hands of a Jedi using one.

Originally posted by Arawon

Ok...so to support our Jedi.....I need a crafter that is dedicated to making Jedi weapons  or a differnet crafter who makes Jedi clothes. Can these crafters be any race ? And the profession they choose at creation  is TRADER ????

 

There is no mail system.....so early on I have to rely on another person to give goods to one of my other characters ??

To transfer crafted goods from one character to another, drop it in your house...or in a cabinet in your house.  If the second character has admin rights to the house, they can pick it up.  Exception: "No Trade" items (which include lightsabers).

You can add additional toons to your structure's administrator list by targeting the structure control device, bringing up the radial menu (use the ~ key to do this), and selecting the appropriate option.

The exception is lightsabers...only the toon that crafted a lightsaber can use it.  Your Jedi will be able to craft a lightsaber at level 26, and as you progress, you'll be able to craft more powerful lightsabers.

Race is utterly irrelevant to crafting; any race can be any crafter.  At one time some races had advantages in some crafting fields (for example, humans had a bonus to artisan crafting, moncals had a bonus to armor crafting).

Originally posted by fozzie22

Koster has to take his share of the shame for designing such an unbalanced game in the first place..

I don't think he designed an unbalanced game, so much as the game's design wasn't fully tested.  Remember that a lot of specials were just plain broken when the game went live, so the design was never stressed as it was intended to work.

What was released was unbalanced.  But also, player expectations of what "balance" should be were not what Koster had in mind.  PvP dueling balance seemed to be the be-all and end-all of the most vocal PvP crowd.

My experience with SWG is that system RAM is more important than your graphics card.

Run it with 1GB RAM and you'll be OK.  512Mb?  Not so much...

Originally posted by Antarious

 

Originally posted by Terranah

But what do they do...admit they made a mistake, say they will not change it, and if you don't like it move along.  Mean...very mean.

I agreed with the rest of what you said.. I don't however, agree with this being correct or should I say accurate.

 

There was a recent interview with a person from LEC who stated that...  They were not having talks with SOE over a pre-nge server (that was his term.. not pre-cu... but pre-nge) because the game was doing so well.

People from SOE have also stated that there were no "internal" talks with LEC about this.

Thus it would be apparant this is something SOE cannot do unless LEC signs off on it.  So saying that SOE says they won't change and if you don't like it move along.. isn't really correct.

Without LEC approval.. they can't change it.  Why not ask some people at LEC why they don't push to have this done?  Then if they do and SOE refuses.. you can repost it as accurate.

I think LEC was just not happy with Koster's design, so eviscerating it is just fine with LEC.  Instead of sitting back and taking a look at why SWG-Koster wasn't wildly successful (early release with an unbalanced, high end untested combat system) they blamed the design itself, not their own failing.  It is so much easier to blame Koster than to blame their own greed for pushing the game out the door before it could be throughoughly tested at the high end and balanced with everything working at the high end.

Originally posted by Arawon

My wife and I are playing Jedi. What would be the craft specializations We might want to consider that would support the jedi profession ?

You might want to pick up Beast Master to craft pets.  But that costs expertise points.

Other than that, you're excluded from crafting.  Unlike in WoW, where crafting is an add on for any of the combat classes, crafting is a full time job in the bastardized WoWized SWG.  This is because before the abomination that is the NGE was imposed, toons were not restricted to being combat, or an entertainer, or a crafter.  You could mix and match skills to your hearts content.  You could be a heavy swordsman and an armorsmith, if you wanted to be. What the NGE did was impose rigid classes based on the existing skills oriented profession system.  Which meant that combining combat skills with crafting skills was taken away in favor of rigid classes.

Nowadays, Trader is one of the lockstep iconic classes of SWG, and there are four different types of traders, as Obraik outlined above.  At the lower levels they share schematics they can use, but as you advance and get more advanced, you get exclusive schematics that only your particular flavor of trader can use.

AWOL isn't a serious crime.

I know of one individual who went AWOL in the 70's and has never paid the price for that crime.

His name is George W. Bush.

How about a world that has zones, but is seamless?

You can swim across the river on the southern edge of the Alwynn forest and enter another zone, which is of course Darkshire.

The ideal situation is one that allows you to visually detect that you're crossing a zone boundary, but you can physically do so if you so desire.  it's not advisable to swim from the Alwynn to Darkshire if you're a level 9, but you can do it (and die quickly!) if you so desire.

Smedley is totally obsessed with revenue...he has no clue as to how to deliver what the customer wants, but he sure as heck has ideas on how to pick the customer's pocket.

Originally posted by tman5

Before you guys get too worked up, the community manager posted that the problem is a display issue, not a bug with actual creature stats.  The baby critters are fine.  Nobody's work is being wiped out.

I posted a link earlier, but my browser hosed and left a blank post.  Too lazy to go find it again.

But it is silly, the Devs posting "hints" then panicking when the players outsmart them.  They should know - the players will always outsmart them.

 

"Display Issues" are still evidence of developer incompetence.

I've gone back for the free trials, but the problem is while the worlds are there, the people I enjoyed them with are not.

Also, because of the way they mucked with the mechanisms of the game, there's no longer that much to do.  It's difficult to find groups to take on the high end content, mainly because the NGE destroyed my guild, and so many others, and there are fewer high level players around to do things with.

They've screwed up so many aspects of just being in the game as well.  The UI sucks Rori swamp water, they've eliminated mounts as RP objects, by making them store when you dismount, the mobs have been dumbed down by the level system, and PvE combat is purely pounding on rocks now.

The last vet trial I really was into things despite knowing how broken SWG had become for several days...enthusastically surveying for resources and planting harvesters, but then realizing that it was somewhat pointless to gather resources for crafting when crafting has been so made irrelevant by changes in the game and the loot-centrism of the economy.

It's sad, really.

Originally posted by azgarth

The beast master and general forum from the oficial site is again on fire.

It seems that the developers gave a few clues about how beast masters could create mutations. Some cracked the clues and so the developers decided it was time to make some changes. On patch 7.1 the color combination for a mutation changed, and it is now needed a type 1 mutation before further ones. Type 1 is the one that changes a creature stats.

The beast masters asked for this not to be implemented, but the developers once again didn't listen.

The patch was rushed to Live, and the creatures in incubators, on any stage of the mutation process, got reverted to normal creatures. The beast masters are closing their accounts, and are quite angry.

Where have we seen this before? Will they never learn? 

The devs dropped some hints about how to get mutations (this was mistake number one, btw...never show your cards to intelligent people...and never underestimate the intelligence of your playerbase).

The players took the hints, did some experimenting, and found ways to get mutations.

So, now that the players know how to get mutations to come out consistently, so the devs decide to change the mutation rules on the players.

The players are pissed that once again, for the umpteenth time, the devs capriciously change the rules and deny player accomplishments.

Cancel buttons are hit.

No, the new set of developers are just as deaf to player wants and desires as previous sets of developers, and again ignore one of Koster's key rules: you can't take back things you've given to your playerbase without pissing them off and causing them to hit cancel buttons.

They will NEVER learn, or they're trying to kill off their own game.

Originally posted by outlaw101

Originally posted by SioBabble

SWG fanbois drive me nuts.

How many times to they swallow the "of course the sky is shocking pink!" line before they open their own eyes (after being incapped by a Nyax goon) and stare up at the orange sky of Corellia to realize the SWG devs lie without the slightest hesitation?

Your the fanboi, because all you do is hate on SWG and love the flawed outdated game.

I was critical even of Koster when he was still there, because it seemed to me that he was a master chef who had abandoned his kitchen to MickeyD's frycooks.

SWG fanbois drive me nuts.

How many times to they swallow the "of course the sky is shocking pink!" line before they open their own eyes (after being incapped by a Nyax goon) and stare up at the orange sky of Corellia to realize the SWG devs lie without the slightest hesitation?

Originally posted by Jim125

1 Enzyme Extraction Tool
5 Hydrolase Enzymes
1 Lyase Enzyme
2 Isomerase enzymes
1 DNA Sample
1-5 Enzyme Centrifuge(s)
15 Enzyme Centrifuge Separation Trays
1-5 Element Processor(s)
15 Element Processing Canisters
1 Enzyme Re-Processor
1 Enzyme Re-Processor Capsule
1 Incubator Unit
50k Geothermal Renewable Energy

I need all of this to make an incubator to put my beast mastory to any use?! HOLY CRAP... I have like one of those items. Should I even bother with this?

Sure, you can craft a crap pet just as a mount or a companion, but serious combat pets that justify the use of expertise points are very expensive in terms of consumable crafted components...and time invested in grinding them up.

Originally posted by CasualMaker

 

Originally posted by SioBabble

 The armor and doctor buff situations were not exploits.

 They were designed that way, but the developers never bothered to test out the high ends of these professions, taking into account that maxing out crafting takes six months of resource collection to achieve.

They never bothered to run the numbers of high end crafted buffs and armor, to see how they would affect the combat system.

So, once the players figured out how to craft the best doctor buffs and armor, all the sudden players became gods in PvE, and not being buffed in PvP was committing suicide.

Personally, I would argue that the armor wasn't broken either. The uber resists were not unbalanced ... as long as encumbrance kept them in check. (Yes, it does makes sense to need buffs to function in the very best and strongest armors.)

 

My reading of the intended design is that the devs intended a tanker/nuker dichotomy. You could maximize your defense by wearing the heaviest and toughest armors; but then your secondaries would be low enough that you would want weapons with low special cost, and depend more on autoattack and low-end specials. Or you could maximize offense: use weapons optimized for power and speed (with no concern for special cost) and spam the highest-damage specials. But you would be wearing little or no armor.

This design broke down because the devs didn't notice that they made buffs too strong. There was no need for trade-offs when players really could have their cake and eat it too.

In my view, the ability to buff up the secondaries, particularly the action secondaries, undermined the entire tradeoff system for both armor and weapons.  If you make armor encumbrance trivial with buffs, it takes away the tradeoff between protection and agility.  It also takes away the action cost of weapons specials as another tradeoff and its complement to armor encumbrance.

With the doctor buffs taking away the tradeoffs for combat toons, it also undermined the tradeoffs for armorsmiths and weaponsmiths.  Action secondary buffs nullified the tradeoffs crafters were supposed to make, that is, whether to craft for encumbrance or protection, to craft for action cost or damage.  A snowball effect rippled through the balance mechanisms because of this one particular set of buffs.

Thus you have combat players able to both protect themselves with protection enhanced buffs (with no encumbrance trade off) and spam specials repeatedly (with no action cost tradeoff).  The original concept of the carbineer who could kill himself before you could that was joked about was a thing of the past with action secondary buffs that made spamming specials every bit as trivial as wearing the most protective composite armor you could get your hands on.

The other flaw was the depletion of a single pool being incapacitating, particularly the mind pool, which was (with the exception of the limited CM mind heal) an unhealable pool in combat.  Take out the mind, which docs and CMs couldn't toss canisters to heal, and you'd win.  So the rise of the rifleman, the heavy swordsman, and the CM (all with the ability to target the mind pool specifically) in PvP had arrived.

I might add that the snowball effect for PvE was made even worse when the devs massively nerfed creatures in Dec 2003 in order to "fix" the meatshields of the Creature Handlers, to make CH a poor choice for PvP.  Coupled with the effect of buffs as they rippled through armor and weapons, PvE became ridiculously easy for most creature mobs except for the ones the devs buffed up (Krayts, Kimos, etc) for elite profession toons.