Sometime in January, one of the correspondents asked me, “Will you answer 10 questions for my forum”? I said that I would be happy to do that. Then another correspondent asked and another and so on and so on until I had a ginormous list with over 400 questions on it and everyone has wanted "their ten questions" answered. The upside is that it’s a great way for me to get information to the players. The downside is that even if I did the lists one a week, it would still take too long to get them all in the eyes of the community.ffice
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Even still, it was a pretty popular request, so what I’ve done is changed it around so that it’s a weekly event. Instead of doing them one at a time, I’m going to do "19 answers". I’ll answer one question from half the professions on the first week and half on the next week. Then I’ll cycle around and do it again. So on Mondays, I'll post the "19 questions" for the correspondents to answer and you should tell the correspondents which question you feel is most pressing for your community.
The intent is to do this on Wednesdays, but sometimes verifying the information runs a little long. This batch of questions has a great example; I had to go into some low level code with one of the devs on the droid crafting station question to confirm it has a neutral effect on the crafting process.
The weekly breakdown of professions is:
Week 1:
Architect, Armorsmith, Artisan, Bio-Engineer, Chef, Core Systems, Dancer, Doctor, Droid Engineer, Entertainer, Image Designer, Medic, Merchant, Musician, Player Associations, Politician, Tailor, Test Center, Weaponsmith
Week 2:
Bounty Hunter, Brawler, Carbineer, Combat Medic, Commando, Creature Handler, Fencer, Galactic Civil War, Jedi, Marksman, Pikeman, Pistoleer, Ranger, Rifleman, Scout, Smuggler, Squad Leader, Swordsman, Teras Kasi Artist
Without further ado…
Architect: What is the exact effect that the effectiveness rating on crafting tools and Crafting stations have on the crafting process and are they working as intended?
The effectiveness rating on crafting tools and stations influences the chance of success or failure during the assembly and experimentation stages. These are working as intended.
Armorsmith: Will factional armor ever be craftable and if so, how will it be implemented?
This is definitely something we would like to add to the game. Planning for the GCW starts in mid to late June and we’ll be discussing all the possibilities for this at that time.
Artisan: Will you give Master Artisans an increase in Survey range, such as 512m?
Probably not. The reason why we wouldn't increase the range or it would be difficult to increase the range is because the information isn’t available at that range.
Bio-Engineer: When will we get more documentation of the cloning system and if we can't get it, why? Every other craft able item in the game with experimentation lists percentages of what stat affects the final product. Even the most basic documentation is lacking from cloning like aggressiveness of skins, and minimum CL. The larger percentage of BE's that do not read these boards have no access to this information.
Bio-Engineering was designed so that players could play out being a genetic engineer. Genetic engineering is not an exact science in that duplicating results is currently a nigh impossible task. Hypothetically speaking, maybe you want to add a gene to a bunny rabbit to make a green glow-in-the-dark bunny rabbit, and it works and you have a green glow-in-the-dark bunny. So then you want to make another green glow-in-the-dark bunny but when the second process is complete, the bunny rabbit only glows 5 days out of the week instead of 7 because of some recessive gene the scientist wasn’t aware of.
Based on giving the profession a realistic feel, the profession in the game is not an exact science either. As such, all of the formulas are non-linear. There are random elements designed into the process.
Chef: All dev communication I've been able to find regarding digestion (including the publish 6 patch notes) has indicated 30m to go from 100 units to 0. Pretty extensive player testing shows that this is not what's happening, the actual time (on both Live and Test) is around 45m (give or take a couple minutes). Is this actually a bug, or was there an undocumented design change?
This is a bug that was reported by players and is currently being looked at by the programming team.
Core Systems: Are there any plans to increase the "Star Wars" feeling in SWG by redesigning the current language systems to be more useful? This would allow droids like protocol droids to actually do something worth while, as well as give more useful skills to some professions like smugglers (underworld).
There are no plans to address this currently. That is not to say we wont do that in the future, but the team is focused on more sweeping issues such as the Jedi Revamp, Smuggler Revamp, Combat Balance, Space, mini-publish and content mini-publish. There is a goal to improve the use of languages in the underworld smuggling skill tree with the revamp, but it’s more focused on the criminal and roguish elements rather than the more typical species languages.
Dancer: Any plans on giving the male dancers some attention such as some outfits for men and some dances or flourishes with a more masculine flavor? (new: they want to know about a buffed Loot wear item now too, Males can't use the Jabba Dancer Reward leotard)
A male wearable similar to the Exquisite Leotard (Jabba's Theme Park reward) will soon be added to the reward table for that particular mission.
Doctor: When/how will the fake bank tipping problems be addressed?
Very soon - - it was pushed to ffice:smarttags" />Test Center today. The team is working on it currently.
Droid Engineer: What are the design rules/principles that DEs will need to adhere to when making proposals for DL20+ (Droid Commander) suggestions? Many want to help work up this system prior to Space so we have it fully tweaked and ready to go.
This is a tall order for a list of single questions, but it is a great idea. I will work with the dev team to establish some submission guidelines and get them to the correspondent.
Entertainer: We have heard that there is new music and dances in the works. Is it possible to get an ETA on when we will expect this? Are there any other non-specific details you can give us, such as how many new music and dances are coming, or whether they will go to the entertainer or the elite skill trees?
You can expect this in the Adventure Zone mini-publish for 9. The first set of new dances/music will probably be for the elite classes only.
Image Designer: Are there plans for our missing abilities to be made available? Bald, eye shape, male zabrak/twi'lek freckles.
Yes. This should all be part of the upcoming ID mini publish.
Medic: What are higher rated crafting stations and tools supposed to do for you, exactly? (Assuming they are even working, of course.) and how do droid crafting stations relate to the standalone stations, since we cannot see any kind of rating numbers on droids?
The effectiveness rating on crafting tools and stations influences the chance of success or failure during the assembly and experimentation stages. As far as the droid itself, it has a neutral relationship (does not effect) on the crafting process.
Merchant: Currently there is a lot of debate about the fact that there is no skill point check for managing vendors. Is it the intent of the development team that vendors operate normally even when owned by players who no longer have the Management skill required to place that vendor?
It was never intended for players to be able to keep and manage vendors after surrendering the Management skill boxes used to acquire them. This is scheduled to be fixed in a future publish and we want to upgrade vendors also, but it’s a bit early to start talking about that.
Musician: Can you at least give us some general timeframe for the arrival of new songs? 3 months, 6 months, a year, 18 months, an expansion pack, or (shudder) not until the Space Expansion?
Musicians will be getting a new song in the Mini-Publish adventure zone for Pub 9.
Player Associations: When will PAs be scheduled some development time?
As soon as I can manage it. I’ve been pushing hard to see some changes here, but it will most likely be a little bit before we can address some of these items. If I get an opportunity though, I will take it. My goal is to make sure that PA’s have the potential to play a stronger role in the GCW and maybe we can address some other issues at that time also.
Politician: To what degree do the devs want to involve cities in the factions and the GCW? Surface stuff like placement of Rebel and Imperial Banners, slightly more involvement might be on the level of allowing faction cities to pool faction points for citizens, or complete integration with the GCW including possibly attackable city facilities and substantial motivation for players to want to declare their cities to one faction or the other??
We want to involve cities in the GCW a great deal. There is a lot of opportunity, but it’s a challenging task with a lot of details to consider. To accomplish this, I’ve been working with the Politician Correspondent, Bajeezus on putting together a list of player proposals to work with the devs on. Since Baj is stepping down to turn his attention to his family and lil’ Baj that’s being delivered by the stork soon, it is a key issue that I’ll be looking for in the new correspondent.
Tailor: In response to our December top 5, the devs wrote: We are aware that items that have reached 0/0 condition are still equippable, it is not suppose to work this way. We consider this issue a priority for your profession and we are working to resolve it.
This issue is particularly problematic because completely decayed items not only are equippable but also still grant full bonuses from bioengineered panels or from skill tapes when equipped. In addition, there is a concern that if items become unequippable at 0/0, people will purposely try to "fail repairs" to get the item to 1/1 so it will never reach 0/0.
The Tailoring Community wants to know what steps have been taken to correct this problem, what additional progress still needs to be made, and when the bug fix will be patched in.
I’ve been pushing on this issue and it’s currently scheduled to be fixed in Publish 10.
Test Center: Will we be able to test the new Jedi stuff coming out in publish 9 or if we will be left in the dark to discover for ourselves (and effectively not be able to test it because of that). Meaning: will we be pointed in the right direction to start the path and begin testing of these next two critical Jedi publishes?
We are talking about this internally right now. We’re hoping to make a fun event out of it on TC2 (so as not to bring down madness onto TC 
). As I get more details, I’ll announce it.
Weaponsmith: When do you plan for the "Weapon Rebalance of January" patch to go in and can you give us more details about what this patch will include?
I’ve been pushing hard to get the Combat Balance back on the schedule and everyone agrees that its high priority so we are talking about how we can best accomplish this. We're in the planning stages now and should see these changes before the GCW revamp. I want to help set expectations as best I can here. At this early stage, I would make the following comments:
- The biggest change in the Combat Balance that will be a "sensation", and by that I mean something that players will consciously "feel" is the HAM rebalance. That will have the biggest effect on game play.
- The next biggest change in the Combat Balance will be the data tables. The data tables are all the combat stats; weapon variables, armor variables, speed ratings, etc. We'll balance these things so that the game is a challenge and fun, but these changes won’t be obvious to anyone who isn't a number cruncher.
- Specials. The team will be assessing all the combat specials and working to tweak and balance them so they are fun and useful.
Please feel free to discuss these in the professions forums.
You answered a Doc question that was in the patch notes today. Why not answer something we are still waiting for the answer on?
