All Posts by Dracus

Originally posted by Stuhero

 I cant understand how someone can do this to their kids, it is absolutely rock bottom unforgivable.

Hard to say since we do not know the reasons or factors, and most likely never will.  This could have been a bio-chemical imbalance of the brain, making a person think and feel in terms of black or white, no middle ground.  A life-long constant low-level depression of which the mental pain can turn to a physical one.  Granted of which there is medication, but certain environment events can overcome the use of medications or treatments.

Then again, maybe it was nothing to do with the genetic makeup, perhaps only environmental, maybe both.  Just something to consider.

If Darkfall was Sci-Fi I would join in.

So it looks like it will be Earthrise...  Or I'll stick with StarQuest.

Makes me just want to log in to see what is left...  I assume just green grass and flowers.

Where there was once a mighty industry, now there is nothing but the grass...

With the economic crisis with the US and some of its states, expect Sales Taxes to occur.

Hopefully not to the point of taxing players based on in-game wealth and property.  I wish I was joking about that, but the IRS has held conferences with that matter.

Originally posted by JestorRodo  

I will buy one month to transfer off Kauri - would you?

Only if I was paid to do so... well if a trial account could work and assuming my character is still around, I just may.

I'll make a bet though to anyone, that the Character Transfer Process will have its problems and bugs, causing the stats of items to fluctuate, but not in the favor of the player. 

Which does make me wonder what would happen to 2 crates of Pre-Nerf Pre-CU FWG-5's during a transfer or let alone pull a FWG from the crate?  Could a server crash occur?!  Most likely not... but then again when old data from old code, which was not purged or scrubbed gets reintroduced into a new environment...

How about making that into a bet?

I would actually be very surprised if they were still there.  My partner and I let the maintenance expire and eventually saw them all ablazed.  The reason was since we were both leaving, figured to let no one have them.  In hindsight I should have taken some screenshots, as it was similar to the pictures of burning Iraqi oil wells.

They are hard to miss (assuming they are still there) as there are about 120 mostly in a grid, with another 30 or clumped together about 200-300 meters away.  Originally located by the Watchmen PA city of Harkis, though I expect no such city exist today.

Originally posted by kefkah

The Guestbook for Jeff's Obituary which can also be found in the link posted by his brother in this thread. Posting it because his brother mentioned that he and his family had been reading our comments and wanted to them to know directly our thoughts without the forum protocol.

http://www.legacy.com/News-Journal/gb/GuestBookView.aspx?personID=118224322&eid=viewgb_100108

Thanks for the link.

/signed

Going through the phases leading up to suicide is well, a very terrible experience.

I do not know of how this came to be, be it genetically (ie: bio-chemical imbalance), environment (ie: financial debt) or both, but there is always a means and a path to take to avoid sucide and survive its ordeal.  Yes life sucks at times, and there are those life-lessons and failures to be experienced; but give time and effort, they and learned and overcome.  The measure of success is how high a person can bounce after hitting the bottom, as Patton would say.

Unfortunately we will never know how high Freeman could have bounced back.

The LORD replied:
"My son, My precious child, I love you and I would never leave you,
During your times of trial and suffering,
when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you."

Farewell Freeman.

I wonder if that 150+ harvester farm on Talus (Naritus) somewhere (I forget) near the Imperial Outpost.  I was in charge of 45 of them.  Hummm... do I feel e-vil today and activate my account only to get those things running...

Originally posted by Gutboy

<Message by Developer> 

Thanks for the update.

To help address the server population concerns that have been brought up by the community we will be implementing a Free Character Transfer program early next year.  I do not have specific dates to announce now, but I do know that it will only run for a limited time.

I think I have read that before.  Interesting that the proposed transfer program is sometime next year, about 3 to 6 months out, assuming no delays.  And then there is that money trap time limit.  I'm guessing it will be good for one or two months, with favoring one.  For those who were too late (or didn't know better and were too early), shucks, going to have to pay.

Any transfers made before the program kicks off will not be refunded.

Another example of customer service and of how much both companies care about customers.

Both programs will have some cool rewards associated with them (marketing made me say that ).

Pictures and figurines?  And why are there cool rewards for participating in both programs?  Well, one is to provide incentives to get players motivated (and that is great), but the other reason is due to the bugs that will occur. 
Example, during character transfer, that great set of armor...
Well, yeah, uhm, sorry, it was lost during the migration and we are unable to restore it.  But you do get a choice of having one of these three cool paintings.

As a huge lover of Halloween, monsters, horror films, and everything frightening one of the most exciting projects for me to work on since I've joined the team has been the Galactic Moon Festival. Our first ever Halloween event, the Galactic Moon Festival is poised to launch to the community at large on October 14th and will run through November 7th.

I'm all for new content being provided, however, some questions need to be asked about the priorities of the new content.  The amount of effort involved with this temporary content may have been best used for a new city/facility/field which would be permanent and been ICONIC and STAR WARS'Y.
What about a new face-life for Coranet?  Or stage a campaign that turns one of the cities (say Rori just as an example) into a desolate battlefield (non-instanced; suited for PvP and PvE with faction spawn points)?
Was there a mob of players who provided feedback of what cool things could be done? Or more of the out-of-touch management of SWG thinking that they know what is best?

And in case this one line was not caught, this is the verification of what those cool rewards will be:

I look forward to seeing what all the interior decorators around the Galaxy will come up with!

Originally posted by ihatenoobs01

Currently, the early game has a steep learning curve  ...

Yeah, steep learning curve, never did like that phrase when developers say it.  Tends to make people think they are not smart enough to play such a game.  That clearly no 13 year old could ever figure out how to play an Avalon Hill game such as Squad Leader and have fun.  That's old school, kids were much smarter then than they are now...

MMO's must be made simple to play, just like an arcade game; movement controller and maybe up to six buttons;

You pew-pew, kill, loot, repeat; and shake it all about.  You do the Hokey-Pokey and turn yourself around.  That's what it is all about.

/sarcasm

From my understanding SWG was a joint venture by both companies.  Lucas Arts had a development and Q/A team from previous Star Wars titles, while SOE had the MMO expertise of EverQuest.

A complaining gamer is a happy gamer, comes to mind.

Besides that, I can agree that he does end up getting threads locked.

One of the best things to do, though hard I must say, is to just make one point and then ignore the reply, but do reply to others in the same thread.

There has been a rumor going on for quite some time of license being expired, usually in the month of Feb.  Might just want to do a web search and see if the same words have been used, with just changes to the year.

I would add in two items for the original post:

- The WoW Factor is Not an Exception:  (Though mentioned in the post and in some others in this thread, it hasn't been really made into its bullet.)  The WoW Factor is a MMO having millions of subscribers, something which was believe to not be possible.  Rather than treating WoW as an Exception, the duplication of WoW's success has been considered the Goal.  Unfortunately, just as with Movies and TV shows, clones of the original success do not perform well; usually only the first clone does well with others getting the axe. 

Since WoW was a fantasy title, surely Star Wars, the largest Sci-Fi franchise could do the same or at least break the one million barrier.  And so the plan was set in motion to re-vision SWG to bring millions of new customers, even if it meant loosing the existing couple of hundred thousands.  Unfortunately for them, the gamble failed as has happened to other MMO's seeking to do the same as WoW's performance.

- Focus Groups are groups we made, of people telling us what we want to hear:  Focus Groups will provide feedback that may very well go against the plan, even purpose killing it.  However, the feedback of Focus Groups can be manipulated, with questions worded in a certain manner (biasing) or the survey being very specific without room for comments.  Essentially the groups become controlled, and the answer made favorable to the initiator of the project.

(Personally I would like to know who were the people in the original focus groups who wanted bare handed martial artists.  WTH is a Teras Kasi?  Never heard of 'em except for a failed playstation game title).

To see that SOE/LA care more about players than money...

Well the thing is, that it is all about the money, since it is a business; there is no interests of providing games out of the goodness of one's heart when dealing with large companies.

The purpose of the NGE was purely due to economics.  To make the most popular Sci-Fi IP have millions of subscribers, and to do so required a complete re-visioning, hence the NGE.  This was to attempt to bring in more people, while sacrificing the existing base.  After all, what does 250,000 existing customers compare to say 2.5 million new customers?  Very little and so worth the gamble.

Had either company cared about the existing customer base, there would have been some exchanging dialogue between the companies and customers; that never happened... well let me take that back; only 10 days of notice; and not allowing for feedback of possible changes, but rather for only testing purposes.

As for a Pre-CU or even a CU; such things will never happen either.  Again it is based on economics, not the wants of the players.  Bringing either system online will require an investment and the best possible subscriber count would be 300,000 (as to how those 300,000 would come back, that is a different topic).  But 300,000 pales in comparison of trying to get millions of subscribers.  That is the goal of the major MMO companies, to break into the millions.  Any system that is aimed for under 500,000 or 1 million subscribers is not worthwhile the investment.

Originally posted by Suvroc

I think Obraik is pretty close to what the capacity of a max server is.

Just about there.  The original capacity was 3,500* (when numbers, not words were used for server populations), but there were server upgrades which bumped the total up some more.  I do not remember the new number exactly, but I think it was 1,000.  So ~4,500 is the top limit, unless there has been some new upgrades since.

Perhaps taking a break for now will help out, though I would recommend against giving up on MMO's completely.  In about 5 years time, the publishers will have their power base shakened by the Indies.  Though I would like to post a white paper about this, to keep it short here on the forum, review the deconstruction of the Music Industry.

The major music labels are loosing money and have proclaimed the CD to be dead, along with all other forms of physical media.  But although the major labels are loosing money and putting out (even they admit to this during group meetings) junk, the smaller independent music companies and artists are making money.

The key point is this; Audio is the Trend Setter. 

What happens to Audio will eventually follow suit with the other forms of media (Video, Multimedia and Interactive Multimedia).  As of now, Video is now going through pains that Audio has had for the last 5 years; and we're just seeing the very initial stages with computer games.  Think of the game publishers as the major music labels and the games as music CD's.  The same thing will happen to the gaming industry; a collapse of the big publishers due to entrenched thinking, with smaller independent companies forming and growing by catering to niche markets with digital distribution.

Well he isn't really.  Just need to know the guy.

Though kind of an irony.  He prefers PvE in MMO's, yet he is a Formable Forum PvP'er.

I would personally let them be used as mentioned above there are many 3rd party programs to get around things (ask a Spammer).

But I do believe Macros can be abusive and need to be controlled.  But how to control Macros, if some can be used, there are 3rd Party programs, and scanning a client machine is not allowed?

Solution, behavioral patterns.  Set the behavioral pattern to check for repeating patterns that occur for a given amount of time, say 10 minutes.  Note it.  If the pattern keeps going for another 10 minutes, then execute an event to cause havoc to the macroing.  The event can be as simple as, opp's sorry your character accidently fell down by this passing NPC who happened to just appear.  Shucks... And it looks like that bot didn't put in a command to get up...