Kynesis
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Posts posted by Kynesis
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The Suggestion Box is generally intended as one-way communication - a box in which you drop a suggestion.
1. nfi what you're on about.
2. Use the Fleet Pass.
3. Crafters / economy
4. There's quite a bit in the way of storage options already, totally valid suggestion but consider what a solution would look like & how it would differ from simply having your alts in a guild.
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Let them be, they've got to be under immense pressure. Clients constantly demanding updates, meetings phone calls and general assurances is very distracting and often quite draining.
The forum mods swear that relevant information / posts gets passed on to the right areas of the business. Remember, the vast majority of the people you most want to hear from are programmers and managers - technical people who've been launched into the spotlight. Just like the rest of us, they've got jobs to do and want to go home at the end of the day.
Good communication with the community is a really great thing to have, I can't imagine that they're not working on improving it. The single best MMO site out there is mmo-champion for WoW - completely separate to the business but probably drives more business to them than just about any advertising venture. Maybe SWTOR fans will develop something like it in a few years - it took a good five years of WoW before mmo-champ came about and until we get a mod developer community SWTOR won't be starring on the Curse network.
Twitter and the fan sites are generally good sources, oldrepublic.net, dulfy.net, darthhater.com
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There was talk of a mute for the ship droid, is that still lurking around somewhere?
(Quick thanks for all your hard work btw).
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It does make things feel more alive, but hearing identical lines repeated verbatim, over and over does wear thin - if it's in a high-traffic area, it probably is worth at least setting a limit on how often they say their lines, particularly if they only have one line to repeat.
Audio clips overused do quickly become annoying.
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I disagree, this isn't the type of game for chat bubbles.
So.. you're happy with /say being broadcast across an entire zone?
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Hi BW,
Please consider the use of a slide-out sidebar/s to convey information instead of traditional windows.
Nearly every display sold in the past few years has been wide-screen, the closer one gets to the centre of a display, the more valuable the screen estate. Peripheral areas are very 'cheap' in this context.
Most information presented in dialogue boxes and traditional windows don't require immediate attention or action.
Information in a sidebar could be stacked with a small text-bite, close & open buttons with great efficiency.
I've just realised while writing this that Apple will be implementing a very similar idea in Mountain Lion, I encourage you to look it up.
On a side note, the red text offered during combat is extremely difficult to read, both again because of it's position and its very low contrast (against a highly active and often red-coloured palette).
When I'm in combat, half my attention is on my cool-downs and most of the rest is where my character is standing - i.e. NOT inches from the top of the display. There's a lot of work, visually to constantly scan amongst bright pyrotechnics at the top of the screen while trying to focus at the bottom, and then to try to sneak in a little appreciation for the action we're actually participating in.
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Are you for serious?
What's the point of a exploring another class and its story if all you want to do is skim through to the last page?
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wow... now that is impressive.
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Hi BW,
If there's only one choice available from say, the subsequent menu shown after clicking on a door... just trigger the action.
- Can we also have bigger 'close box' buttons on windows.
- Click-through companions (clicking on a companion is never desirable & always interferes with whatever we were in fact trying to click on).
- More quick-slots (we have more abilities & items with triggers than quick slots), particularly with the new abilities being made available through Legacy.
- Estimated time for Warzones (and LFG when it's in). I know there are good reasons for not doing this, but even just a ballpark figure so we can plan around it.
- High-contrast UI elements (black & silver, for example... black 'leather' and chrome would be even nicer... no, I didn't mean that way. i meant like a luxury car). Perhaps even a simple switch / slider so people can choose amongst a range of colour sets. I imagine you'll save this for mod-makers to sort out but it'd be easy enough & more efficient for you to do it. It'd also (potentially) lay a great framework for them.
- I've always felt the mount method (stand still, several second cast-time then animation then start moving at vehicle speed) is terribly clunky, is there any chance it might see an update, perhaps something more active (maybe a Tron style of mounting as the character runs) with vehicles accelerating when moving from a standing stop and slowing to a stop rather than just instantly stopping or moving frictionlessly, with perfect velocity in any direction.
- An option to not trigger audio / visual alerts when friends / guild mates go online/offline.
- *Move the vendors located at the hangar doors on the Fleet or better yet, make the various hangar doors signage more easily checked.
Purely suggestions & things I personally would like to have. Thanks.
- Can we also have bigger 'close box' buttons on windows.
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You can pretty much guarantee this is on the 'wall of crazy' already (things they could / would / should do but just can't right now).
There's really no need to shoot down suggestions like this by being so narrow-minded and negative.
Creating an App like this would use quite a different skill set to that used on the game itself, the guys working in C++ probably aren't interested in or specialised in Java or Objective-C. For the most part it could even be outsourced, particularly where they'd need Objective-C programmers.
However you look at it, they'd almost certainly not be taking people off existing projects for it.
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Great walls of text, Fatman!
I'm totally with you but I suspect there's rather more to the issue than pride (though there does seem to be a fair dose of it). They probably either had to spend quite a lot of money or call in some special favours to get all the extra servers around launch and in doing so have found themselves in a situation with EA that doesn't have any easy answers or quick fixes... whatever the case, my money's on somehow being over-committed to a deal they can't extract themselves from without causing greater pain.
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Good questions to ask, even if everything is the best it can be, it's always good to question the premise of your designs.
The core problem with "kill 10 rats" is that there's no surprise, you know from the very first moment you become aware of it, exactly how it's going to play out and therefore no matter how interesting it or your class is or how wonderful the world is, it's already the same quest you've been doing every day you've played on every character for the last decade.
Area quests are a recent innovation which a couple of MMO's have begun to investigate and they're definitely a step in the right direction but you can't use them all the time, they're one tool amongst ... well, amongst very few currently.
Most people (myself included for the most part) typically equate 'spontaneity' with 'sandbox' - this needn't necessarily be the case, story elements seem like a great way of adding extra elements to quests beyond the "kill 10 rats" paradigm and I do think BW particularly, are well placed to recognise this & do something with it.
Sandbox play isn't necessarily the answer, without the features of a good story, without direction and purpose they quickly lose their appeal, ending up relying ever more in gimmicks (frequently physics effects).
Ultimately the answer as to "why are we still in the kill 10 rats era.." is that game developers are programmers and story-tellers typically go off and write novels or scripts for movies - they're very different kinds of people who generally just don't mix. When Steve Jobs left silicon valley to work in hollywood he described two very different cultures with very different business models that neither culture could explain to the other.
We're only just beginning to see people appreciate the confluence of both art and science... there are a great many people who just aren't ready to accept any kind of art in their science (or vice versa) and feel very strongly about it (though they probably never think about it in those terms).
Game companies are really at the forefront of this meshing of cultures, it'll take time.
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Just out of curiosity I went on a web search and have found lots of professional articles both for and against light text on dark backgrounds, for every article against it there seems to be another strongly in favour of it for exactly the same reasons.
Light text on a dark background has the additional feature of low power consumption, which on battery driven devices is a serious issue. It wouldn't be too much trouble for them to add an extra button for people to switch the site to a higher contrast colour palette, arguably a good option for every high-traffic forum.
If you're using a Mac, you can activate a system-wide colour reversal by hitting CTRL OPTION COMMAND 8
and use the same again to toggle (switch back & forth).
On Windows you can do the same with ALT SHIFT PRINT-SCREEN
Given the growing popularity of battery-powered devices, it's a pretty safe bet we'll be seeing many more forums that feature light text on dark backgrounds, well worth learning those keyboard shortcuts imho.
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So... just did some super simple cross-browser testing... it's messed up for Internet Explorer 6, IE7 and IE8. Looks mostly OK in IE9... Chrome isn't picking the right font either.... It's not broken in Safari though, looks quite good there, though I do see your point about the contrast in places being too subtle for such a broad audience (though I personally like it this way, I'm clearly in the minority here).
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You know, the overall design isn't that awful. The graphics are fine for the most part. The color scheme could have a little bit more contrast, but it's passable.
The thing that really destroys the readability and overall flow of this site is the exaggerated vertical spacing. It's like someone took the website, made a silly putty imprint of it, and then stretched the whole thing vertically 50%. It's extremely tiring to read.
Can you PLEASE ditch the narrow/light fonts, and tighten up the vertical spacing a bit?
Can you post a picture? I don't see this effect at all.
Which browser are you using?
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Do they even have a web designer?
The default font for the entire site is just painful for me to look at.
Arial... the font is Arial 14pt
According to reliable sources (like this one http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResults.shtml)
Arial can safely be assumed to be installed on 99.9% of computers - i.e. it's going to look pretty much as the designer intended and without any aliasing (jagged corners) or surprise font selections by the users computer.
I have no affiliation of any kind with BW but I'd have to wonder, do you know anything about design?
Look at the colours: light non-white text on a medium-dark background with a soft, simple, relatively large font and black borders... short of reading it all to you, what do you want them to do to make it easier for you?
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Living in your own little world, James... I appreciate that building a group finder that actually achieves all of its goals, works reliably and sustainably for millions of people churning through it 24/7 is a major challenge, I greatly appreciate BW pursuing it.
Zone populations are absolutely tiny, even at peak hour (right now)- I've got my warrior on Ilum right now with a total population of 2 people, the rest of the pug I'm with are on the Fleet searching in vain for a healer (population ~100).
It's been over 20mins and we've not had a single bite of any kind, it's like this all the time.
Despite having FOUR level 50 characters, I've started, let-alone finished in all that time, maybe ten group quests while levelling. They're a huge part of the experience, have great loot and are great fun... but they take forever to form when they can be formed (again, population) but 90% of the time simply have to be skipped because there's just no viable way to even start them.
My server and many others, for whatever reasons, simply don't have the population either on individual worlds, zones, level ranges or per server to get groups, even with the most amazingly awesome group finder ever devised.
I totally understand that adding cross-server features is a big challenge but ultimately, if we can't play the game it's useless.
PS: very nice changes to the website!
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Events like this are a fantastic way of bringing the game to life and encouraging people to get together.
I absolutely encourage you to produce more in-game events like this, particularly if they can be done in an economical (time/effort/asset production) fashion.
Having them stand still in a clump for long periods to try to churn out materials/quest rewards/whatever seems like a major flaw in logic for all sorts of reasons but I think we can let that slide as a learning experience for the Dev team.
I've seen a whole bunch of excited kids on today, if there's one thing they seem to love more than explosions, it's being an explosion
Looking forward to jokes along the lines of "If you're not part of the solution you're part of the .." *Boom!*
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In some conversations, the voice sound cuts out completely. Lips move, but no sound. Weirdly, it's seemingly random sentences between conversation decisions.
Ex = On first pass, my trooper "skipped" the third sentence. On ESC, the second sentence was now "silent" but the third sentence could be heard.
Ditto random sentence silence of the various NPCs I was talking to.
No pattern that I could find, however, I did put in the "sound when windowed / minimized". Clicking it off didn't fix it though, so, it could be a coincidence.
I have this trouble as well, often characters voices only come through the left speaker though for the most part the game is mute with occasional and totally intermittent audio.
An interesting aspect of this I think, is that in conversations characters are mute - they don't move their lips but when the audio kicks in, they speak normally (their faces animate as expected).
Having said that it may just be me but the audio (where it works) seems much improved in many cases.
It wouldn't be explained entirely if it were just a case of them mixing up audio assets or setting too many things to mono where they're supposed to be stereo but it does feel like it's something along those lines.
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The OP is right, it is a great game, there is a lot to like and there's a ton of potential but the criticisms which overshadow all of that are warranted and the issues that need resolving really are extremely important.
I suspect they're preparing for a tough 4-6 months and will be working on a comeback for Christmas, something to drive as much interest and excitement as the initial release.
Unless they just don't have the resources to do this, which is also a distinct possibility - pssst BW... build a team for this purpose if you haven't already. They've lost a lot of goodwill and will lose more over the next few months, it'll be very difficult to earn it again but at least a big christmas release (or something of the kind) might buy back subscribers.
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A combo system may not be the ideal answer but it's definitely worth considering and exploring.
Ignore the nay-sayers, too many people are overly familiar with their comfort zones.
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Absolutely fair points, Jaesa's transition was so abrupt that I do think I've not given enough credit as you say, to the soul-destroying process she went through.
I think I fail to give that process enough credit because I essentially "did it wrong" - I tried to use the subtle, thoughtful approach rather than I think as the story intended, a rather more brutal approach - the Jaesa I drove to the dark side essentially lost a debate and only really got involved after I'd spent a good lot of time and effort on her master; breaking him was much more involved and traumatic.
It definitely went better than Ashara's, which felt particularly awkward but again, I think I essentially "did it wrong" there as well for not going in 'guns blazing' as it were.
Pity I didn't record them, I wonder if I'm giving due credit or if i'm being overly critical (I'm sure BW people reading this would say overly-critical
On a side note, I do remember feeling that some of the dialogue choices that were important slipped by as easily as the filler, the LS/DS choice for Jaessa to me, went by without the fanfare I think it deserved given the impact it has.
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I'm guessing some confusion about Ashara comes from the fact there are 2 distinct ways to meet her. One of these paths involves no coercion with her at all - no Sith Holycron, no shocking, and you actually tell her she can inform the masters of your arrival. There was no manipulation to destroy her masters. There is absolutely no reason she can't go back to the Jedi as she has literally done -nothing-wrong.
This happens to be the path I took, though I've seen the other one, and I agree it makes more sense, though I think it's still nonsense.
I don't hate Ashara, I just think her story on Taris is nonsense. I cannot comprehend why, knowing full well what the Sith stand for and what they are trying to accomplish, and having spent literally her entire life preparing to fight them, that in the space of 5 minutes she would betray every single oath and belief she has ever held in her life and enter into a life killing her friends and helping enslave her race.
Heck, she lives on a world -destroyed- by the Sith, who are actively working to make sure it stays destroyed. I had her with me in that final quest and the commander of the attack thanked me for helping keep Taris a horrific wasteland and she stood right there and said NOTHING. This was after she helped kill the Jedi commander in the space port. I just find that incomprehensible.
Any reason you give, fear of being alone, a desire to belong is fertile ground for exploitation and a fall to the dark side, but it never happens. What's more bizarre is you never even really try, and we know a ton of people -want- to. Why don't we?
And if she feels a strong sense of belonging, I'm guessing it's to the group she's lived with for 20 years and not the SI who she just met and who just killed her foster parents.
All I'm saying is that this behavior deserved an explanation, both for why she is doing what she is doing and why you allow her to live and travel with you.
I like that she develops, particularly as her story and some of what the inquisitor can learn that LS and DS are effectively yin/yang.
The meeting though and her reasons for joining are truly abominable.
She's a combatant in a war zone, on a world famously ruined by battle, by the Sith, in an age where battle is common and you swoop in on rather contrived reasoning to save her from... combat, and from there on she serves you loyally to fight by your side against everything she's ever believed in, or fought for.
Never once after that does she ask about her parents - if anything should ever sway her loyalty one way or the other, surely it has to be what happens to her parents.
There's no chemistry either, the only dialogues with her are about her trying to resolve her own issues, we're just spectators.
She was just as LS as Jaesa before joining their Sith masters and as mentioned elsewhere in this thread, jaesa is just as incomprehensible, going from totally nice & friendly to an extreme psychopath for no discernible reason. At least Ashara wavers a little from time to time but Jaesa's just straight down the line bat-sht crazy, and she's the one who at a glance, can see people's true nature. The only way it makes sense to me is that they mixed up the character sheets and somehow, nobody noticed till it was too late.
Ultimately Ashara makes more sense because her entire story is dedicated to resolving not just her personal conflicts but the big picture of LS v DS... this kind of story with these wooden characters would've made more sense (and been at least somewhat original) if they were going from DS to LS (with the consular or jedi).
Jaesa just murders people.
In being totally crazy though, at least Jaesa is crazy for the warrior as well so at least there's some kind of (scary, guaranteed to elaborately murder you in your sleep) chemistry there.
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Whether or not Resolve is working as intended, it fails to make any significant contribution to PvP.
SWTOR PvP is a total stun-fest, the plethora of stun/root/snare effects is just ludicrous.
Freshly soaked sea monkeys could design a PvP system with greater insight and capability than BW have achieved.
Can companions please always assist me?
in Combat Styles
Posted
I've often wanted my companions to attack my target, particularly while I was levelling on my Assassin tank (through January, I always use the attack command now to designate companion targets).
"With the force, I can do anything."
"Really? Anything? Attack my f'ng target"