Community Q&A – May 11th, 2012 Blog Discussion

[JeramieCrowe]

The problem is, WE NEED FORCED MERGERS NOT TRANSFERS. TRANSFERS PAID OR NOT DOES NOT ALLEVIATE THE ISSUES!

 

Actually, I believe they're going to transfer everyone off of dead servers and shut them down. This is INFINITELY better than a buggy, convoluted merger.

 

So, no, we do NOT need mergers.

[DesonEQ]

I would love this, cant see why you wouldent be allowed to delete some recipes, i mean certain of the ones you buy just to get your crafting skill up you just dont want to have anyways.

 

Would solve ALOT if you could just delete recipes you dont want in your crafting book!

Would solve a lot more if there weren't so many that are a waste. Crafting needs a rethink and redo. Most of the stuff you can make isn't stuff you really want to.

[Fallensbane]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon. We've taken your feedback and we wanted to be able to choose new questions that result in in-depth answers from our developers. This way, we can accumulate questions for two weeks and choose from there.

 

We'll definitely monitor community reaction to this and then decide from there if we want to continue to do weekly or bi-weekly Q&As.

 

2 weeks, 3 weeks, 4 weeks it don't matter. If something has not been implement there will always be someone who will ask the same questions over and over. Your 'two week' thing is not going to stop. There are plenty of questions you could answer, problem is they are questions you DON'T WANT to answer.

[Anti_Bodies]

Question: The Imperial Agent's stealth is nudered from carrying the Huttball, shouldn't the Jedi pull/leap also be nudered?

 

Question: Any plans on future races, like Wookies? Or is that seen as too big a challange?

 

Question: Can we get a broad time frame for 1.3?

 

Question: What is it like working on this game? Do you guys get a chance to play it and enjoy it?

 

Question: What is the talk of server merge? Is it at all likely?

 

Question: What do you guys percieve as the biggest challanges for the game?

 

 

Six decent questions EZ. Surely you can find 4 more and make an update. Picking and choosing questions so brazenly just makes me think you guys aren't being open. What is it about companies and politicians being so secretive? It's such a turn off Bioware.

[Kaoslion]

Things I hope the Dev's change.

 

1. I would personally love to see more open world interaction/war between Imps and Repub's. I think it would be a great filler and game boost till they have their vision of endgame tested and in place. (whole reason people bought this game is to rage on the opposite faction.)

A. Imagine if you actually had to group up to quest on PvP servers because its dangerous and you could get ganked. It would also make people play more together and help build the community more.

 

2. Develop or implement taking opposing factions npc's hostage. Imagine the fun and fights that would ensue if the daily giver was a npc and held hostage and a faction had to rescue it to do daily's.

 

3. PvP wz's is more of a stun fest or knock back war. I'm all for those abilities but some class abilities should be redone in my opinion. Or at least made a higher level ability.

 

Its late and surfing forums before bed sorry for grammar mistakes.

[Eszi]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon. We've taken your feedback and we wanted to be able to choose new questions that result in in-depth answers from our developers. This way, we can accumulate questions for two weeks and choose from there.

 

We'll definitely monitor community reaction to this and then decide from there if we want to continue to do weekly or bi-weekly Q&As.

 

Yea, right.

1.Pick the questions that can be answered with "Soon™"

2.Avoid all important things like class balance, HUGE server population issues, ranked warzones

3.Can't answer with "Soon™"? Just cancel the Q&A

4.Give a random reason

5. http://i.imgur.com/jMlh7.jpg

[RustyDiodes]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon.

Even if only 1% of us are asking new questions about old content, that is way more than you need for a 10 question Q&A. Adding more hay to the stack will not help you find the needles.

 

My question for the week: Why do PvP & PvE have different gear? Gearing up for end-game is an epic quest already without having to do it twice.

[Uzzzi]

Gidoru: Currently in Huttball, certain classes have huge advantages, to the point where, without them, you have a considerably lesser chance of winning. The classes I speak of are namely Sages, Guardians, and their Imperial counterparts that are able to leap and pull across the map granting great mobility. Any chance of changes that prevent the ball carrier from using abilities like leap or being pulled?

 

 

Gabe Amatangelo (PvP & Endgame Designer): It is something we considered early in development of the map. However, we aimed to ensure every class had a role as opposed to effectively turning classes off when they carry the ball. Granted, some of those roles are not as obvious or have a steeper learning curve than simply getting the ball over the line (i.e. controlling the middle, cover defense, controlling hazard lines, etc.). The team composition win ratios suggest those roles are playing out for the most part. For example, teams with all Sages and Guardians do not even appear in the top 100 win ratios and the composition with the highest win ratios include a fairly even distribution of Advanced Classes. That, of course, is not an absolute conclusion, especially considering full team compositions rely on matchmaking. We’ll pay close attention to the variance in composition win ratio considering rating when full team queuing is enabled.

 

What role did you have in mind for the "light" DPS Merc spec in Hutball? Before you answer that consider a class with more utility which could easily do the same thing. I believe the "light" DPS Merc spec to be the anti hutball and would like to see an option in the future to remove hutball (or any WZ for that matter) from the players que. So when I que up I can basically say " I DO NOT want to be pulled into a hutball match"

[Rafkin]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon. We've taken your feedback and we wanted to be able to choose new questions that result in in-depth answers from our developers. This way, we can accumulate questions for two weeks and choose from there.

 

We'll definitely monitor community reaction to this and then decide from there if we want to continue to do weekly or bi-weekly Q&As.

 

This is total BS in my opinion. There are plenty of questions unaswered each week because you dont have the balls to address the real issues.

[Metalmac]

When are you going to ACTUAlLY address performance issues with Animations that favor Imperials in PVP?

[EbonFade]

Useless QA.

 

No one cares about alacrity!! Its like number 3000 on my list of most important things i'd like to know about.

 

Obviously I disagree with the interpretation and spin regarding Huttball (which I do think is an important topic) where it will be very obvious who wins 8 man Huttball games (where using naive metrics will admit almost no correlation at all).

 

However SERVER population issues and TTK are by far the most glaring, horrible problems in the game right now and its just completely been glossed over. Yea ok, we get it, you are 'working on servers' and haven't even acknowledged the latter issue. What does this mean exactly!

[Ntranced]

I don't get the idea of picking 10 questions, most of which are only actually interesting to less than 5% of the player base.

 

Instead why not just go through PVP/general discussions/each class forum and specifically answer what the hot topics in there are each week?

 

Or would that mean that you actually need to address server population, ranked warzones, TTK, broken classes etc?

[EvilHamhawk]

I just want to add my voice here.

 

I am strictly against moving to a 2 week discussion question timescale. The reasons for this are pretty simple. Only a few questions are answered per week. Those few questions are "cherry picked" to be what Bioware wants to answer. What would be better would be to address MORE questions per week. In a situation where you guys are losing large quantities of subscribers it would seem more intelligent to give more feedback to the subscriber base rather than less. To offer less is simply counter-intuitive and in my humble opinion, foolish.

[BJWyler]

Stop acting dense. People have been asking important questions. BioWare has not deigned to answer them in favor inconsequential ones.

 

Not dense at all - which is why I said "Perhaps by the community asking more important questions, we might actually get useful answers." Asking for too much, perhaps in regards to the community if these forums are any indication, but c'est la vie.

 

BJ

[Inncarnate]

Im starting to think that massive budget use had for this game has been spent at a hooters bar rather than on the development of the game what was it again 100+ million if i recall and what have u provided...... yes some very nice story based quests which has been a complete masterpiece and then it all falls apart. Server population should be ur main focus and no its not a hard process though moving alot of players might take a few days not months to sort out issues ¿ Pvp would be next with ttk and full premades that keep u grped after a warzone. i meen seriously u have all the foundation work there what sort of technical issues could possibly take so long. Also u need to give ppl the option to choose which warzone they want to participate in not everyone enjoys huttball 10times in a row of corse this meen nothing until server pop is addressed. I can't believe use are talking cross server pvp when u can't even ranked warzones and transfers sorted, mabey months down the track lmao. Im not even going into crafting im completely dumbfounded with the direction use are trying to take there. Onto end game content its alright though alot more needs to be done considering some guilds could probably 1 nighter ever op how bout a nice big op something with 10 -15 bosses? As for pvp end game and open world u need to make 2-3 planets that are all pvp areas where u can have events every 4-6hrs to fight to capture/defend a citadel or where destroying the opposing factions base gets extra rewards or just dailies that bring u into contact with opposite faction. hell could do something similar to wow where there is an op that is only available to the holders of a planet. I expected so much more when i started playing this game and although i have enjoyed it alot it could have had more. My final topic i want to bring up is the legacy, i can't see how use can justify the price of the unlock i think u have something wrong with ur heads!

[DapperDab]

At least I know why the warzone vendors were taken out.

 

Here's an alternate suggestion for the repair:

 

Why not use Warzone Commendations for the payment of the repairs? I'm not talking about 100 comm repairs, but a simple 10 commendations would work right? That's basically a match right there, would make sure people actually play the match.

 

Just have the vendors spawn five minutes after the match or something. Three minutes... Something. Long enough that it's not worth a quick queue for a repair.

[lELADRIN]

Well I looked at the Q&A questions asked this last week and there were several pertaining to Ranked WZ's Open world PvP and the like yet AGAIN no response. You at Bioware are avoiding these questions and you NEED to answer the PvP questions. Yes you all screwed up with your pvp, yes you killed your open world because of this, what we want to know is what if anything is being done for open world pvp. Were not asking for a timeline on open world pvp yet we just want to know if your doing something if not tell us.

 

As far as ranked wz's we need them asap, all the changes you made to pvp gear were designed around ranked wz's which we don't have.

 

On the TTK issue certain classes have a distinct advantage in pvp now, tanks can't tank, healers die before they can heal, and your 4 force using dps classes (marauder & Sentenal being the worst) have escape mechanic's that throw fights even when outnumbered in their favor. These are the IMPORTANT PVP ISSUES YOU REFUSE TO ANSWER.

 

This has already caused some to unsub and soon more will follow, Answer some if not all of these questions and you may save some subs even if it's "were working on it' it's better than being treated like a mushroom (kept in the dark and fed ****).

[cashogy]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon. We've taken your feedback and we wanted to be able to choose new questions that result in in-depth answers from our developers. This way, we can accumulate questions for two weeks and choose from there.

 

We'll definitely monitor community reaction to this and then decide from there if we want to continue to do weekly or bi-weekly Q&As.

 

There are a boat load of questions that you could answer with in-depth responses. Some hard hitting, important questions. For example:

 

- What is the estimated time frame for the rolling out of ranked warzones?

- When will PTS be easily accessible to everyone?

- What is a reasonable time frame for dual-spec to be implemented?

- What are your plans for Ilum/world pvp in general?

- When can we expect actual balance in PvP again?

 

That is just a handful off the top of my head. For you to suggest that the community is "out of new questions" is absurb. Inevitably, after 2 weeks of collecting questions you will choose the easy-mode ones and answer those, providing no insight on the future of this game, which is very much up in the air right now.

 

Start treating the SWTOR community as an asset, and not as an audience.

[ItsMattsFault]

Concerning companions, I find what most people saying is reasonable but not entirely true.

 

I have a Sith Warrior, and I used Jaessa the moment I got her, and have used her the entire game up until I hit 50. THEN things started to go WAY downhill. Everything became impossible using her, and not only that, I couldn't switch to Quinn or Broonmark, because by this point they are far too under-geared.

 

Besides that, I was bummed out by the fact that most people I talked to felt they were locked into a healer/tank companion, simply because they felt that was the only way to go through the game. I hope BW takes all this player feedback into consideration, but for some reason, TORs track record is showing me the opposite.

[robjossa]

when the hell is there going to be character transfers biggest problem in the game i come on rush hour to see what 25 ppl on the fleet waiting 30 mins to get a wz match and with that amount of ppl on good f ing luck trying to find someone for hm or op's come on already i pay what 14 bucks a month i expect to be able to play the game ... kind of hard when its mmo and im just O lol

[DavidHunt]

Maybe I'm the only one blissfully unaware of this - could we elaborate a bit more what kind of limit we are talking here? Should I not learn every available (low level) recipe to outfit my other characters so as to leave room for potential "good" or "rare" higher level ones?

To clarify, we do not limit how many schematics you can learn. It's an internal soft cap such that if drastically increased the number of recipes in a short time we may encounter issues. It just means we can't universally allow all items to create new RE recipes at this time, but there's plenty of room for new recipes and you will be able to learn them all.

[Fhrosty]

No one cares about alacrity!! Its like number 3000 on my list of most important things i'd like to know about.

 

I care. And here, in essence is the root of the problem. What's important to some people isn't important to other people.

[matthewwilcox]

i have a question. i dont know if this been talked about. i notice now we cannot get into warzones or do anything group related because my server doesnt have anyone one it. is it about time to cut down on servers so we can do the things we want to do

[-Sev]

The social system and in particular social rank, will you be making changes to it so others can acquire it more easily than running say one million flashpoints and are any new social armors going to be added in 1.3 and in addition companions that are ranged or melee tanks have so many high threat abilities that it is just no as viable to pull them out when your a tank. Are there any plans to make abilities specifically for a dps mode or tank mode for the companions? Edited May 17, 2012 by -Sev

[Boufsa]

The reason (as stated in the blog) is so that we don't end up with a Q&A with the same questions asked over and over and the same responses from the devs about features coming soon. We've taken your feedback and we wanted to be able to choose new questions that result in in-depth answers from our developers. This way, we can accumulate questions for two weeks and choose from there.

 

We'll definitely monitor community reaction to this and then decide from there if we want to continue to do weekly or bi-weekly Q&As.

 

You must be joking! There are hundreds of question about the current system that are asked again and again and never answered to. You already said you didn't want to talk about future features, but what about stopping picking only questions you like, and beginning to answer to (maybe more complicated) questions about the current game system you designed?

 

For example what about answering the questions about the commando balance (gunnery and medic) and their obvious DPS lack compared to others classes post 1.2? But I am almost certain no developer have ever played a commando, everybody know that you prefer empire side, and every week some developer go posting in the BH forum, while I don't recall if commando forum has ever gotten a glimpse.

 

But the forum is full of math with a lot of interesting topics of balancing suggestions that would really be worth reading, go and take a look, and please explain the choices YOU made on OUR characters!