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Last Questions:
http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=dev_archive&message.id=42192
Here we go with this week’s 19 answers:
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
Architect
Can you, and WILL you change Resource Stack size (currently set at 100k) to allow for up to a million units to be combined into a single stack, and Crated Components stack size be increased across the board to allow for a minimum of 100 per crate? If so, can we be given a "target" publish/mini-publish date for this? Upon doing this will this then help open the doors to reworking the storage capacities of certain structures?
No, we will not change the resource stack size. It should be mentioned that manufacturing runs of 1000 items happened because of a UI bug early on. The slider only went up to 100 items, but players soon found out they could type in 1000 units on the manufacturing schematic. We haven’t fixed this bug because we know players will consider it a big nerf, so we have hedged against doing this for the time being. There have been discussions and debates (and posts) in the past contrary to this position, but it was ultimately decided that is not going to change. The team will be meeting to see what is possible on the technology side and what is healthy for the game on the design side.
Armorsmith
Even though the Giant Dune Kimogila is the hardest and rarest of all the creatures that drop RIS components, its drop rate is by far the lowest. Will the drop rate for the Giant Dune Kimogila scale be raised so as to be commensurate with the other RIS components?
No, the drop rate for Giant Dune Kimogila scales will not be increased. RIS armor is equivalent to “epic quest” armor and as such, the drop rate is one of the only ways to control difficulty. RIS armor is meant to be this difficult to acquire. Because the various changes since launch, it certainly doesn’t seem that RIS is epic armor, but after the combat balance, all of these details will make more sense.
Artisan
What steps are being taken to make Master Artisan a more valued and unique profession, whether it be through harvester bonus/certifications or through more valuable items (not including any items in the upcoming JTL expansion)?
There are no current plans to further enhance Master Artisans at this point. We gave Master Artisans the ability to craft vehicles and vehicle customization kits in the Vehicle Publish. Going forward, there are other master boxes that should be enhanced, but this is only a guideline. Whenever any opportunity comes up to improve a profession, we certainly will. The way this would happen is if during the course of development, a new object was made and we needed to place the cert, we’d look at the opportunity and put it in. Again, let me emphasize that with the GCW revamp, all professions will be touched and gameplay will be enhanced. I’ll be putting up some In Concept threads in early to mid June on this topic to get your feedback.
Bio-Engineer
Currently a bio-engineered pet which is crafted under the current system can still get the "pet invalid" dialogue box when a customer tries to tame it, forcing the customer to change the creature's statistics or CL. This means that a bio-engineer cannot sell pet deeds with any confidence that the pet he or she has created will be valid. In what publish or mini publish will a system be put in place in which either 1) the bioengineer cannot create an invalid pet or 2) the bioengineer is able to check the pets' validity during or immediately after its creation? To us, this is a game-breaking issue that needs to be addressed.
The formula used to determine the level of a BE pet during the crafting process is the same as what is used to determine if a pets stats are valid. In fact there is a buffer in pet validation code to prevent exactly this possibility. It should never be possible to craft a pet that is considered "invalid" when calling it. Obviously there is a bug, but due to the nature and complexity of these calculations it is very difficult to track down. We look into the cases whenever we find repeatable cases on TC that cause this bug, but we haven’t been able to repeat it internally which makes it very difficult to track down.
Chef
Many players are upset that their stomach filling does not clear after cloning. Foods are the only buff type that has this limitation; all others can be reapplied immediately. What were the design decisions leading to this functionality choice, what game systems is this intended to balance and what are the chances that the filling will get cleared in a future publish (and if that is done what changes would be made to food's power)?
Foods have this limitation because there are some foods that are really powerful. The reason stomachs don’t clear is so you can’t stack them after death and it’s partially a small death penalty. Some foods give a very large bonus for a short time with a large filling (Flameout, Breath of Heaven, Vercupti, Ormachek, Blue Milk and a couple of others). The major drawback to these is the fixed filling decay rate; the effect wears off before the stomach space is reclaimed. If any method was available to negate this cost, these foods would either become unbalanced or would have to be reduced in power.
The other thing to think about is that as a buff, it’s not the same as other buffs. The reason it is the only buff type with this limitation is because it’s the only buff that uses the player stomach. Other buffs have time delays and other sorts of limitations. To balance the many advantages foods have (they are portable, usable by anyone, does not require skill point investment or special location to apply, can be done during combat) that some drawback must be included; that drawback is filling and a fixed digestion rate that cannot be bypassed.
Core Systems
Some time ago we were asked about what kind of new animations we would like to see. Is there any plan for new animations? Things like more furniture sitting/laying options? IE: laying down on a bed, more then one person on a couch ect. As well animations for things like eating and drinking and possibly species specific ones? If so, any estimated publish/time?
We are currently developing our veteran rewards program and there are going to be a lot of new emotes as part of this program, though none for furniture sitting/laying down at this time. It is something we do intend to put in, but considering all the states and animations a character can be in at any given time causes it to be a pretty big job.
Dancer
We have compiled a list of things we believe would help us put on a better show called Performance Enhancements. Our most immediate desires are for dance tools such as:
- /groupchangedance – Musicians have a command like this
- /groupstartdance and /groupstopdance – Musicians have commands like this too
- /groupsyncdance – so we could all be on the same animation cycle even if we came in at different times
- Short animations to travel forward, back, left, and right – It would be nice if these could be done in or out of the dance state… the most important thing is having an easy way to change position or formation with out breaking out of the dancing though.
- /mirror and /tempo – one to flip the animation for a “mirrored” effect with other dancers… the other to set the speed of the animation for variation in look (a group command would be nice here too)
- /fall – A lot of Dancers would like to be able to trigger a fall, many Dancers would like to see our fall rolls have a toggle if it needs to be a roll only. Note: Musician do not have a failure rate like this and most Dancers skip this roll by equipping a weapon (a toggle would be more immersive)
- Props – Hand props, stage props, big ones, small ones, red ones, blue ones… we have a whole huge list of ideas and suggestions
We feel like we need these things and more attention to and control over what we look like. Our question is, when we can we start seeing some of these things?
There are a lot of exciting ways we want to grow the Dancer profession, but these things are above and beyond what is going to be added in Publish 9 and that puts these types of developments into post-JTL time frames. With the GCW revamp, all professions will be seeing new playability though the nature of that professional growth is undeveloped at this time.
Doctor
Why are birds on Endor herbivore meat and not avian, and why are there no avians on Endor nor Dantooine?
This is one of those questions where the answer is, “because that’s the way it shook out”. This is a very big virtual environment with thousands and thousands of variables. It is definitely something we can think about changing after the Jump to Lightspeed. I’ve spoken to the dev and if the opportunity comes up before then, we’ll take advantage and make the change.
Droid Engineer
- "Droid Engineers are finding it much harder to effectively cope with the 5 PCD/droid limit in our Datapad as well as only having access to one "utility" droid called at a time. Many feel that an excellent (and needed) 'perk' for MDEs would be a "+1 droid in Datapad" and/or "+1 utility (non-combat only) called" addition.
- We realize that item storage is part of the issue here. Therefore, I would highly recommend that change have a 'check' in place when an MDE attempts to "Ready" a new deed for a droid. If there are 5 PCDs in the Datapad that already have Item Storage installed, the "Ready" request is denied. Only when there are less than 5 PCDs in the Datapad with Item Storage would the new readied droid (#6 total, in this case) be added and available.
- AudioOrgana correctly pointed out, when the "+1" change was made to the pet system many weeks/months back, that MDEs controlling (or having access to) more than one utility droid was mentioned specifically as a possible exception to this situation.
- If either of these changes were put in place, they might well be an excellent 'baby-step' / precursor to the eventual addition of the DC/DH profession (or whatever system is employed for adding high-end combat droids). This means a bit of the work that's known to be needed can be coded/tweaked now...and ready to have available for use when a high-end combat droid solution is coded.
To summarize: Will MDEs be able to have more than 5 droids in their datapad and/or an extra Utility droid activated at the same time?"
A change of this nature is absolutely possible, but not trivial. Don't expect this level of change in the next few publishes, but again, this is something we can re-visit in the future.
Entertainer
Presently the only class that has very much incentive to get master entertainer is musicians. Master entertainer is very popular among musicians, in fact. Those musicians who aren't master entertainers stare longingly at the mandoviol and ceremonial. Dancers get a reward that does not mean anything to most people. Image designers don't get any help at all from master entertainer. Has there been any consideration of new abilities in master entertainer that provides some worthwhile benefit to dancers and image designer as well as musicians?
Not at this time, but as I said, we do want to enhance many of the master professions boxes in time.
Image Designer
Recently the Image Designer community was informed that the ability for Image Designers to makeover Merchant NPC vendors (who are often created and deleted by the dozens as players attempt to find one suiting their aesthetic requirements) was being pursued. Both the Image Designer and Merchant communities have been anxiously awaiting word on whether or not this ability will be granted, and if so when we might expect to see it in the game.
We do want to grant these abilities in the future. Players won’t be able to select any image the way a player can because it takes up database space to store all of those individual variables, but we want to add a series of pre-selected choices that an Image Designer could choose from. This would definitely be after the Jump to Lightspeed.
Medic
Are the resource requirements and/or gathering methods for medical schematics being looked at more closely? We know our Correspondent is supposed to be having a dialogue with the Devs on this issue, but he hasn't told us anything new about that dialogue actually occurring or what might be going on "behind the scenes".
This is something that comes up in development discussions and it is something we want to enhance, but there are no plans to do this at this time. The correspondent has provided the developers with all of the data needed to re-assess it when the time comes.
Merchant
The current system for categorizing items is in serious need of revamping. There are categories with no items in them, there are items that have no category. There have been major additions to the game (Vehicles) which have no proper category. When can we expect to see a revamp of the categories?
We also want to update the bazaar and vendor interfaces. Currently, we are at the tail end of a back-end re-write of the commodities system to improve functionality and reliability. That work has to be completed before we can think about the front end of the commodities system.
Musician
Will Musicians get the ability to buff their own Focus and Willpower? Also, can we get our buffs to last as long as Doctor buffs -- say, three hours? And would it be possible to improve the buff interface so that we can when we're buffing properly, how much time remains til the buff is done, and (most important) whether the buff actually worked?
Musicians will not get the ability to buff their own Focus and Willpower. As the system currently exists, if players could buff themselves, they would get experience points every time they buffed themselves and that is bad design. In the future, Keldarin wants to change the system and then it would be possible. As for extending buff durations? It is hard to say since much of this will be changing with the combat balance.
Whether or not a player is buffing properly or if it worked will be displayed in the buff icon window and the character sheet. If the icon appears and your stats change, then the buff worked. As for the displaying the buff duration information in the buff window, the answer is “not at this time”. All the UI programmers are working on JTL.
Player Associations
Would adding a very nominal amount of storage to PA Halls (say, 50, even just for decorative purposes) be considered unbalancing?)
We understand that players want some leeway with storage space and we are considering different ways to do this, but there are some other back end concerns (such as the commodity system revamp) that have to be completed before we can tackle the design side of this request.
Politician
The "city cap" prevents cities from advancement if the planet has reached its capacity for the next rank. Many politicians that have well qualified cities for advancement are frustrated since they cannot advance without another city losing its rank. How does the game determine which city gets advanced if another city drops a rank, and will there be plans to raise this cap?
If the opportunity to increase in city size occurs, the city with most residents moves up to the next level. There will be no more increases in city caps, but we do plan on revisiting the ways in which cities can gain and lose rank. That won’t be happening until after JTL though. The developer who developed the city system is on the JTL team and any major overhaul to that will need his oversight. The most likely city changes that will be coming up will have to do with the GCW revamp.
Tailor
Necklaces have been bugged since release. A tailor cannot view the necklace in the crafting window, which makes colorization complete guesswork. Necklaces do not show up in the examine window which makes it impossible to sell necklaces on vendors, because the customer is forced to "buy blind". In response to our December top 5, the devs wrote: "We hate that bug. We hates it alot. We are working hard to make it die.." However, this bug has not been fixed. 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.
The invisible necklaces are something that the art and programming folks are looking at. It is a strange bug in a complex 3-D rendering system and while it has been around a long time, it should be fixed in the next couple of publishes. I know it’s a huge Tailor pet peeve and makes selling necklaces a hassle. Ood_Bnar is working on it as fast as he can.
Note: Since the correspondents and I first started assembling these answers, Ood_Bnar and the lead programmer have made additional schedule arrangements to get a fix in for this soon.
Test Center
TC Rewards / Veteran Rewards Program. Will this be different than the veteran rewards? If they are, how? Whatever program they are... what kind of perks do you have in mind and who will be eligible?
The “Veteran Rewards” program will be the same for all players regardless of which server the play on and that includes Test Center, but we are looking into ways to reward the dedicated folks on TC. As soon as we have details, we will announce them.
A good example of how TC rewards will work is how it happened with the Jedi Revamp. We need a lot of people to test out the new Jedi system and dedicated TC folks were flagged with Jedi accounts based on their login activity. It’s a great bonus for playing regularly on TC this is how we want to do things like this in the future.
Weaponsmith
Looted schematics were a sight for sore eyes after many months without any new weaponry, but now they're so prevalent that they've become a chore for most Weaponsmiths. Managing the storage for hundreds of different dropped items and schematics on top of the already heavy load of running an established business quickly becomes tiring. Is this "limited use schematic" route going to continue to be commonplace, or will we see better alternatives (droppable certs, crafter-oriented quests) to providing new permanent schematics to Weaponsmiths in the future?
In the future, we will both see additional looted schematics and permanent schematics added to the profession.
