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robiwan
Moderator
1035 Posts |
 Posted - 22/08/2008 : 08:30:19
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Pyro's quick review of fan faire day 1
1) Station Launcher will soon have vivox enabled, with persistent guild channels and eventually an ability to call into the channel via your cell phone. This will help the issues of not being able to talk with your guild mates during loading screens and such
2) The trading card game: the art on these cards is PHENOMENAL guys. every swg subscriber gets a starter pack (50 cards) and 5 free boosters (15 cards) q month. The cards from free booster decks are NO TRADE. Cards from booster packs purchased from soe ARE TRADEABLE. Loot cards are redeemed within the TCG which then hook into the vet reward system so they are available on any toon on that account with the /claim command. Standalone client can be played by folks who do not have an active swg subscription. Loot cards include new vendors, storage increase items, house decorations, a DINER structure, and some buff items. Drop rates are about 1 loot card every other booster pack. Cards will be lootable from elite/boss 90 npc's during special promotional periods in the game. Cards may also be obtained while crafting stuff or giving entertainer buffs, and some other unrevealed ways. Expect August
3) Traders/Ents (Blixtev and Loche)
a) Devs are looking for new house decoration ideas. Please pass ideas for "things/widgets/objects" you'd like to see in as objects that would help you build other things. Blixtev is looking into ways to maybe have these sorts of decorations NOT count towards the item limit in a house.
b) suggestion by Yivvits of the yivvits and mr bubble podcast to make the one time use schems for the various plants permanent use, and to get the other plants in game.
c) no gardener this year
d) droid commander: they envision droid engineers building modular droids, and DC's coming back to them periodically to install new modules. No idea how droid "abilities" will eventually play out but they will likely come via modules.
e) elite gaffi sticks and elite tusken rifles not getting the heroic weapon bonus during the re-construction stage was an oversight. Loche plans to try to automatically update the weapon damages if possible, rather than forcing us to re-craft them.
f) GLCs will not be deconstructable. Blix may consider boosting the dmg of a crafted Heavy Lightning Cannon (the one from the profession wheel) to make it a bit more competitive with the GLC which will never get a socket.
g) Weaponsmith's being unable to deconstruct a currently un-biolinked weapon is an oversight related to the way that the radial menu gets populated.... bio-link and deconstruct both share slot 5. He'll fix it.
h) a request was made from one ent in the community to have a fame system, or a "gig" system where ents can be contracted by cantinas.
i) Blix liked the idea of a terminal that traders could use to monitor all their harvies. Maybe not add to their power or maintenence remotely, but definitely monitor the display.
j) image designing of vendors was brought up and they said they'd look into it.
k) shipwright helper monkeys are missing, they didn't realize it, they will fix that issue.
4) Combat (Shadowbrak, Blix, Hanse)
a) There are two separate tables, a defender table and an attacker table. Certain things trump others, like Criticals > Glances, or Miss > Hit. Stacking one thing does not hurt stacking the other things, finally squashing the rumor that stacking block harms your glancing blow chance.
b) no npc or debuff in the game is capable of decreasing evasion chance.
c) during their powerpoint they displayed BadgerSmaker's excel chart of how stats affect the various combat modifiers. Therefore I would consider his reference (http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/posts/list.m?topic_id=265090) as gospel when it comes to how mods affect what
d) offical confirmation from shadowbrak that the old system of prone/kneeling giving a crit bonus is now gone, and that manual targeting gives a straight 3% bonus to crits rather than the dynamic cummulative buff that capped at 25%
e) dark jedi dps was mentioned by the crowd as overpowering, along with light jedi being too weak. No specific comment was made by the Devs on this topic.
f) Devs definitely do not want to change officers to be able to use rifles or carbines, nor wear mandalorian armor
g) Medic area heals bugging out... may sometimes be related to interference from familiars or pets? possibly a server/client location discrepancy? They will look into why medic area heals sometimes (? often) miss their targets.
h) Medic bacta bombs AND rezs: they will fix the issue where if two medics try to rez the same player, the second medic's cooldown for rez (or bomb) IS NOT ACTIVATED. They already do not make the medic lose action, they just didn't realize the cooldown was being reset.
i) Stasis still has problems with dots getting thru.... Shadowbrak's final solution will be to simply remove stasis from the combat checks altogether. If you are in stasis, that's it, no more checks for dodges/evasions/dot ticks/ everything.
j) the spy update has the prelim idea work on it done, expect news after hoth.
5) Content (Teesquared, Fiasco, Swede)
a) they provided power point demos of their development tools that they use for creating quests, npc's, conversations, and worlds.
b) they didn't have time to go into what sorts of content people might want down the road after hoth and droid commander and spy update.
c) this session was more about HOW they do it rather than WHAT they will do, so it did give some insight into the process. Strangely enough, questions from the audience included house packup, as something that should happen continually.
d) One guy asked about making all the random npc's in the game have some sort of background, some sort of story line. The folks from Bria in the row behind me said focus more on the GCW. It got heated at one point.
e) I did corner swede and hanse at one point during times at the booth, and i include this here just for convenience sake. I pitched an idea about ways to make smuggling better, and the idea focuses on 1 - making contraband useful, either as an subcomp in the crafting process or as pups; 2 - having ways that players, like a trader or whatever, could hire smugglers to bring them that contraband, either thru a smuggler mission npc "handler" or "fence"; 3 - making these missions space or ground, pve or pvp. I can elaborate if you wish.
5) space content: again, this is something i corned loche, hanse, and swede about outside of the content panel, but it is relevant to the topic of content. They do want to add more space content
i) Loche said he worked on trying to make the space AI harder.... but the original system was designed in such a way that there was no room to grow. The old ai works in a way such that the game decides if the npc is a tier 1-5, then randomizes the stats based on those requirements. When loche added tier 6-10, he had to "trick" the system into using the base stats for a tier 5 to then randomize the stats for 6-10. He spent 2 weeks trying to get the ai to be smarter in terms of turning on a dime, etc. I begged him to post on the forums just to explain that fact so that pilots understand they did try to make the ai harder.
ii) I asked Hanse to take a look at the gunboat shield thread. He did mention to me that the original design plan for the gunship buff, which was never communicated to the pilot community, was to have the players on board actually have to do something to each weapon panel, like use a tool or a radial menu, to get the "shield buff." It was never meant to be "I have a player in turret 5 therefore i get a buff of x amount to my shields."
iii) i plan on asking more about space during the panels today.
iv) i am happy to elaborate on any of these areas, i am trying to be brief.
6) I did not attend the roleplayer/storyteller panel.... sorry folks
7) Annual address.... dunno if any of you folks listened to this in game on vivox, but he had very little to say about galaxies beyond what we already know namely hoth and the trading card game. Definitely no expansion.
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I have waited and planned and built my strength for fifteen thousand years. I have evolved. It is time.
(Omnius Evermind)
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Feyd'Rautha Saresh (Medic, Rebel Alliance, Europe-Chimaera), Robe Saresh (Force Sensitive, Rebel Alliance, Europe-Chimaera)
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robiwan
Moderator
1035 Posts |
Posted - 22/08/2008 : 08:31:48
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Pyro's Fan Faire Day Two
Booth time:
1) vehicles, like the hover chair, will probably never work in structures because of tech relating to houses and how they are like containers
2) fix to the display icon for Blister debuff (from clenched fist of hate) should have the stack number when chapter 11 goes out.
3) shadowbrak will look into the easy mod bug of clenched fist .... now that i let it slip that it only happens when he uses his fists and doesn't pull out his sword. Sorry folks....
4) LUC -- travis has looked at this thread multiple times.
a) the problem with chassis balance is partially related to the data table. Data table for radial accel is 0-1000 and factors in the chassis mod and the pyr of engine. pre-ROTW interceptor chassis were in the 350-380 range. JSF is 600. Even if they made all chassis 1000 there would still be the fact that the jsf is the size of a gnat.
b) players might have to eventually accept that current firepower potential on interceptors is too much ... the dev team feels this must be accepted before chassis would be tweaked.
5) space content - also I asked about this during assembly.
a) Producer Fields feels that content is preferable to chassis tweaking and more ships. In fact most of the team would rather see more content rather than more ships. Team also feels, regarding the LUC, that if you give ships a purpose, then people will fly them. simply tweaking numbers will not grant them purpose
b) shadowbrak liked the idea of blockades in space affecting restuss commendation cost or static pvp base rewards ... doesn't like idea of travel restrictions
c) they will address the issue of players going afk in turrets even though they fire their guns
d) no color kits for n-1 fighters due to canon/licensing issues
6) falling thru the floor in rryatt: this is actually the same bug as walking thru front door in mensix, or walking into space in pob ships, or walking through a doorway and nothing being drawn. .... this is always going to be hard to fix. Even different serial #'s of pentiums will calculate the floor to floor connections differently every single time. its a client related issue and not a server one. but Shadowbrak will look into making /unstick get you out of those situations.
Panel: Collections: (loche, teesquared)
1) expect panoramic vistas collection (photos of pretty landscapes)
2) expect new collection for holo pet emitters, and holo pets will need to be made by BM's
3) they like the idea of species (player species) collections that aren't slayer collections.
4) ideas for badge counters, collection progress bar ui elements, and just generic tracking of stuff you do (how many nightsisters i killed, how many widgets i made)
5) the team likes the idea of putting c-3po's comlink in the newbie tutorial so that new players get the coaching of collections
6) team would love to bring back story arcs, a 'la crisis of alderaan, via collections that unlock quests
7) magseal collection still pending.... they need to figure out why the magseals cannot have their contents picked up even though the team has them flagged for universal opening
8)team will look into drop rates of exceptional milk
9) team will look into method of speaking to an npc to choose to reset the existing repeatable collections, rather than doing it automatically.
10) they plan on looking at counting the "you have collected x number of badges" as a badge, as well as missing badges for professions you obviously had to have mastered, i.e. the elder master bounty hunter who has the elder scout badge but not the elder marksman badge
11) missing hidden dagger badge will be added
12) ship inspection collections still in the works.
13) pm loche with missing badges from collections that have been completed.
Panel: Heroics (shadwbrak and hanse)
1) axkva min was the real reason for the medic rez changes, in case anyone was curious
2) hoth will be more like mos espa than the others, i.e. splitting into teams
3) orbital strike animation/particle effect by admiral kenkirk in the isd instance is actually a bug.... Hanse said there is supposed to be a torture droid that is doing the animation.
4) shadowbrak said he would look into the load failures for isd instance.... (i.e. group member is booted back to cnet) ... may be related to the fact that the pilot loads earlier than that group member, despite the current delay. May make the pilot wait longer to get around this issue.
5) echo base (more was said during assembly below)
a) mos espa would fit 4 times into the battlescape
b) driveable at-sts, snowspeeders
c) towcable mechanic not part of the instance
d) rewards will include snowtrooper and rebel cold weather armor, and the rifle
e) they may have programming look into temporarily flagging neutrals so they can participate.
6) meta grouping (groups of groups): very hard to balance heroics for this ... e.g. would a meta group of 24 (3 groups of SMILEY that had 10 medics and 14 other profs have any sort of challenge in the game
7) animations, like the underslung carbine ... hard to implement these on the fly because you need an animation for every degree of angle your character may be standing in, as well as FOR EVERY SINGLE MOOD SMILEY geo cave/corvette may be completely re-written from the ground up as a a heroic rather than a revamp. this is something shadowbrak really wants to do. they would also love to have a racing heroic ... especially if some mechanic exists for vehicle upgrades.
9) space heroics: there is no tech for creating a space INSTANCE... however, a space heroic could be done in existing zones because mission targets are unattackable by other players... they'd have to be wary of the wild spawns. It is on the list for next year. (yay!!!)
Galactic assembly
1) Gasgano's podracer, as a vehicle, will be available as a trading card game loot card.... its big, and fast.
2) New wearable in the form of glowing red eyes or glowing blue eyes as the Guise of the Sith or Guise of the Apprentice, again, TCG loot cards
3) expect next expansion set for the TCG in winder with new loot cards including the diner ... takes two lots, not municipal, offers crafting bonuses for domestics and structures traders
4) Chapter 11, slated for october, will have Hoth, and replayability will occur via collections and tangential objectives
a) north field, echo base, evacuation area, and Wampa Fun Land are zones
b) folks, the video of hoth was awesome. this is going to be fun to fly in your speeders, shoot down walkers, or shoot rebels from your AT-ST.
c) objectives will be scaled in nature, naturally, the rebels lose, it will be a matter of how well or poorly the rebs lose. Finishing with lots of sucessful evacuations counts as an excellent completion. Players will have a stack of 8 speeders or AT-STs if their speeder gets destroyed
5) galactic moon festival for the halloween.
a) moenia and eisley will be the centers.
b) centers will be perma night during the event
c) npcs will hand out "costumes" for players allowing us to dress up as jawas, monkey lizards, droidekas, toydarians, and hutts.
d) rewards not finalized
6) life day
a) 3 main cities
b) gifts for self and friend
c) taking a cure from the holiday special, there will be random spawns of trees and presents throughout the city, rebs will need to decorate the trees, imps will need to smash the presents.
7) gu6 will be politician, PAs, and spy. GU7 will be domestics and structures. GU8 is up in the air
SMILEY 2009 will be droid commander. all crafting will be part of droid engineer's profession wheel. The entirety of droid commander expertise will be combat related. DEs will have new droid components and consumables that will be used.
9) Q&A session
a) yoda fountain in game possible craftable
b) new player senator requested update of the legacy quest for new players. lag in those zones was also mentioned
c) DevH is working on "something" for low pop servers
d) team may think about subdividing lots into harvie lots, building lots, etc
10) pilots: expect new content maybe gu8, which would be 6-12 months down the road. As i mentioned above, team much more concerned about content rather than ship balancing and new chassis. Not saying that new chassis wont happen, just that they'd rather do more gcw and more post-master pve content instead. ship boarding/docking, both for combat and social, will be investigated
11) LucasArts and SOE (i.e. management) are deeply committed to supporting our dev team. They would not comment on any other licensing, but George Lucas' son plays SWG and enjoys it a lot. Therefore George is interested in making sure the game suceeds (in theory)
12) no new player species and no housing on nova orion
13) they will look into persistent chat channels for guild alliances and folks with the "HELPER" tag
14) mentoring - they don't have a tech for temporary reduction scaling of combat level/abilities/gear and they want to get that working rather than any type of makeshift mentoring solution.
15) loche wants to looks at windows for player structures... One way looking out... treat it like a portal that you cannot go through. They will do a due dilligence document
Ask away!
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I have waited and planned and built my strength for fifteen thousand years. I have evolved. It is time.
(Omnius Evermind)
---------------------------
Feyd'Rautha Saresh (Medic, Rebel Alliance, Europe-Chimaera), Robe Saresh (Force Sensitive, Rebel Alliance, Europe-Chimaera)
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Edited by - robiwan on 22/08/2008 08:45:29 |
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Dromedarr
Junior Member
629 Posts |
Posted - 22/08/2008 : 11:47:38
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| ty woe :) pekny |
SWG, Europe-Farstar - Drom, Losos, Efiss, Casia' - R.I.P. SWG |
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