Update on Roadmap

[leehambly]

If he hasn't already communicated the roadmap to the people in his department then things are worse that I had hoped, and to say that nobody working for him is capable of putting together a draft for his approval would be really, really sad, and I hope that is not the case.

 

Again, you seem to think its simply writing a list, its not... its all the work behind that, the list is merely the output from it. You really think he would not want to be intrinsically involved in all discussions at this stage? A couple of days away is nothing... we were damned lucky we didn't get a 30, 60, 90 day wait for the new guy to turn up and make do with a caretaker producer in between!

[masterceil]

in any event, 130% speed? it's fine but i don't want to see it get much quicker than that, prefer to let the scale of the map remain very large and it taking time to get around, the sense of it shouldn't be ignore for instant gratification.

 

So don't buy the perk. Hell, don't buy a mount. You can even tap \ and walk as slow as you want. Don't deny other players faster mounts because you want to stop and smell the roses...

[Celise]

Callous came to mind.

 

Okay so if you told me fully graphic details about a successful operation you just gone through on your never regions to remove a cancerous lump, don't think that would be considered oversharing details? to me all i want to know from something like that is if you are fine, thats all, i don't want to know where it's taking place, who is with you or any of that, that is your private business.

[AscendingSky]

Okay so if you told me fully graphic details about a successful operation you just gone through on your never regions to remove a cancerous lump, don't think that would be considered oversharing details? to me all i want to know from something like that is if you are fine, thats all, i don't want to know where it's taking place, who is with you or any of that, that is your private business.

 

Keith didn't overshare details like that. All he said was that he spent some time with his dad. He didn't give us an itinerary of his visit. You're comparing apples to oranges here. Calm down.

Edited May 9, 2017 by AscendingSky

[Celise]

So don't buy the perk. Hell, don't buy a mount. You can even tap \ and walk as slow as you want. Don't deny other players faster mounts because you want to stop and smell the roses...

 

if you want instant gratification, thats your business.

[Lunafox]

Thanks for telling us. It's nice to know what's going on.

[Celise]

Keith didn't overshare details like that. All he said was that he spent some time with his dad. You're comparing apples to oranges here.

 

and you're taking details out of context to suit your biased view. don't overreact.

[dr_mike]

Personally, I don't care. I await the day Keith starts answering the backlog of Ben's emails. I doubt it will ever happen.

 

A couple of days away is nothing

 

Weeks.

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=9284442#post9284442

 

04.19.2017 , 06:50 PM

 

20 or 21 days depending on how you count it.

 

Having said that, yes, family comes first and I have no problem if that is what happened. I have quite a lot of doubt in whatever a staff member posts here.

Edited May 9, 2017 by dr_mike

[LtGeneralGezlin]

and you're taking details out of context to suit your biased view. don't overreact.

 

Isn't that what you did? "Do as I say, not as I do", Right?

[AscendingSky]

and you're taking details out of context to suit your biased view. don't overreact.

 

I'm biased and overreacting? Project much? You're literally calling Keith unprofessional for daring to apologize to us for being late with his road map because he spent some time with his father.

Edited May 9, 2017 by AscendingSky

[Celise]

I'm biased and overreacting? Project much? You're literally calling Keith unprofessional for daring to apologize to us for being late with his road map because he spent some time with his father.

 

case and point. i'm ending this here because both of us are blowing this whole thing up needlessly.

[Glzmo]

Hey everyone,

 

Wanted to provide an update on my first Producer Roadmap, but getting it published is taking longer than I anticipated.

 

I honestly thought I would have had the roadmap done and communicated already, but, I realistically need more time to finalize it. Translated: That means end of this month, but with full intention of delivering it sooner. <sad face> This is not something I wanted to tell you, but I promised to keep you up-to-date on what’s happening.

 

While you continue to wait, here’s a few highlights of Game Update 5.2.2 scheduled for mid-June (yes, in 2017):

0. Thank you very much for your update. What's the reason 5.2.2 is happening next month? Will there be no smaller updates in between? 5.2.2 sounds like a smaller update, perhaps you should call it 5.3 instead?

 

• New Character Perks to increase your speeder piloting speed to 120% and 130%

1. I hope that you can also get these things unlocked by reaching level 70. Or at least that it's a perk you can unlock for the whole account and are actually affordable.

 

2.Are you sure the engine can handle the higher speed? It's been having trouble with the current top speeder speed to begin with. Are improvements coming? An upgrade to a 64 bit client, perhaps, to utilize more RAM, an optional Vulkan/DirectX 12 rendering path might help, possibly a full upgrade to the latest version of the excellent Frostbite Engine that is used by all EA Titles nowadays (I realize the latter is unlikely unless you have a whole team headed by people from DICE working on that, but still)?

 

• Companions will gain influence through standard crew skill missions

3. That sounds like a great quality of live improvement. I hope it will be a good amount.

 

• Full Tier 1 gear available from existing Fleet vendors using Command Tokens – this means you can obtain a full bonus gear set for under 800 Command Tokens. You will be able to choose the type of gear you want to purchase (DPS, Tank, or Healer).

4. Sounds good. Maybe dial the cost down a bit to make it more accessible, though.

• We made a variety of changes to Galactic Starfighter – primarily aimed at reducing the cost, increasing requisition rewards, and offering all players a Gunship and Bomber as standard ships (available in your hangar).

5. The reduced cost and increase of requisition rewards are great - but wait, giving everyone a free Gunship and Bomber is your "solution" to Gunships and Bomber spam/nests ruining dogfighting with (what Star Wars is famous for!)?! No rebalancing so Gunships (for example, tuning down the railguns, making them true glass cannons and super-vulnerable in close quarters, etc.) and "Bombers" (drone/minelayers - why not make them real bombers like they are supposed to be in Star Wars and add missions where you have to take down enemy capital ships to give them more use) aren't that overpowered so that bomber pilots can't just sit in their nests AFK and have their railgun drones etc. rack up kills, XP, command XP, etc. for them anymore? What the heck?! Do you realize that will make even more people use bombers and gunships (and right off the bat) instead of learning how to fly proper starfighters Scouts (althoughs higher Tier scouts could use some balance tweaks as well) and especially Strike Fighters (the heart of Star Wars space battles!) be used even less? A bunch of Little deathstars that hide behind a field of automated drones that hit pretty much every time and can shoot you from long distances without you being able to get close (what do automated drones have to do with PVP - those are PVE things) is NOT FUN and DOESN'T FEEL LIKE DOGFIGHTING IN STAR WARS at all! Maybe you could limit each team to one gunship and one bomber active at once? But even so, do a proper GSF balance pass that makes every ship viable to fly is needed. For the Force's sake and don't increase and cater to the problems that have been ruining GSF even more!

6. What about the numerous bugs in GSF? Are you going to fix them?

 

7. What are you going to do about low population servers with empty queues that take eternally long to pop for PVE and PVP and no people to play with in PVP, PVE as well as Roleplay? Can we expect server merges to merge all servers in a region to megaservers so everyone can enjoy a healthy server population? It would be nice to just have one or much less populated servers for each region with all the guilds, guild perks, characters, etc. transferring to it automatically without cost to the player, just like it had been done with server merges in this game in the past. You should be able to adapt the PVE/PVP instances to create different language instances with comparable ease as well, for example, and create one European megaserver with PVE and PVP instances for each language.

 

7. What about that long-awaited and long-promised option to enable chat bubbles/overhead chat text for your client for player /say, /yell and /emote chat?

Please tell me you have finally added it to the roadmap and are going to put an end to almost five and a half years of waiting, broken promises and stringing players along this time around. Since you haven't published the roadmap yet, there is still time to put them on it if you haven't already!

 

And before people start spreading misinformation again, yes, there were performance problems with Chat Bubbles in Beta five years ago. They only applied to peopel with 512-768MB of video RAM, because they took up 400MB of video memory alone, which with the lowest end video cards of today coming with 2GB of video memory is a non-issue (or you can turn them off, it's an option). So it wouldn't be an issue even if the old, unfixed chat bubbles from beta were brought back. But it should be easily fixable, since it's the same fix they applied to nameplates before launch.

Here is the actual explanation of then GUI developer Cory Kolek:

Nice. That should come in handy, especially at high resolutions.

Since you're a GUI guy, would you be the person to work on chat bubbles as well?

 

I don't have much else to say on the topic than what was already said in that thread.

 

I can get a bit more technical on the topic though. As it was said before chat bubbles were a huge performance hit on the game when we had initially implemented them in beta. We're talking upwards of 400Mbs of video memory used on chat bubbles alone. Nameplates had the same issue. We fixed nameplates but have not had time to do the same with chat bubbles. If you played in beta and saw our initial implementation of them they weren't very pretty or as fully featured as we'd like them to be. So, yes, we would like to implement them again, but when we do we want to do it right.

 

Edited May 9, 2017 by Glzmo

[TUXs]

i honestly don't care about the problems keith has, his private concerns are his business and it should remain as such. the only part i really care about is the part he mentioned that he's got his head back on and getting back into his job.

 

i don't mean any disrespect about it but i really don't want to know, it's just not my business to know.

Problems? Like...he took time off to be with family? That's not a "problem", nor is it an "excuse"...it's simply the reason WHY he doesn't have it finished yet.

 

I prefer honesty over secrecy any day.

[AscendingSky]

Isn't that what you did? "Do as I say, not as I do", Right?

 

That's exactly what they did. Why bring up the concept of someone oversharing intimate details about a surgery to the nether regions and then compare it to someone saying "I'm sorry I'm late, my dad was in town and I spent some time with him." The two situations have nothing to do with eachother! It's silly!

Edited May 9, 2017 by AscendingSky

[TUXs]

Okay so if you told me fully graphic details about a successful operation you just gone through on your never regions to remove a cancerous lump, don't think that would be considered oversharing details? to me all i want to know from something like that is if you are fine, thats all, i don't want to know where it's taking place, who is with you or any of that, that is your private business.

Wait...what the hell??? Take a step back...you're WAAAAAAAAY off track with this kinda crap.

[AscendingSky]

Problems? Like...he took time off to be with family? That's not a "problem", nor is it an "excuse"...it's simply the reason WHY he doesn't have it finished yet.

 

I prefer honesty over secrecy any day.

 

As someone who's been called a 'hater' on this forum before, it makes me rather sad to see other people literally lambasting EAWare employees for daring to be human beings rather than robots. I bet this same person got upset that the class balance specialist took off time when their kid was born too... I mean, how dare he let his family get in the way of getting his work done on time, right?!

 

Again, that last bit was sarcasm, for anyone who couldn't tell.

Edited May 9, 2017 by AscendingSky

[TUXs]

As someone who's been called a 'hater' on this forum before, it makes me rather sad to see other people literally lambasting EAWare employees for daring to be human beings rather than robots. I bet this same person got upset that the class balance specialist took off time when their kid was born too... I mean, how dare he let his family get in the way of getting his work done on time, right?!

 

Again, that last bit was sarcasm, for anyone who couldn't tell.

No kidding! I bet you're absolutely right too lol - I'd check his post history if I cared enough...but I don't

[masterceil]

6. What about that long-awaited and long-promised option to enable chat bubbles/overhead chat text for your client for player /say, /yell and /emote chat?

Please tell me you have finally added it to the roadmap and are going to put an end to almost five and a half years of waiting and broken promises this time around.

 

Hey everyone - I asked Lead Designer Damion Schubert if there are any new updates on this topic. We still do not have an ETA for the implementation of this feature, but we're definitely aware it's something players want. We did attempt a version of chat bubbles once, but they introduced some severe performance issues, and we'll need to address that before they can be implemented. Thanks for your patience!

 

Maybe it turns out they're just unfeasible with the game engine they're using

[Costello]

Loving the optimism but I'm not seeing how these changes are going to do much to improve the game. As I type this all but two servers are light, sadly I suspect if there was a lower setting many of them would be on that. I was on Iokath earlier and there were 2 republic people on it (or at least republic aligned people). I don't see going to the people I used to play with that have left and telling them the great changes that are being made will bring them back.

 

Nightlife - Guys guys they are bringing the Nightlife Event back! You can spend 16 million credits click on a box 160,000 times and win a uniquely recoloured mount. Yeah I know you can only use one mount at a time and all the best ones are sold in the cartel market and you have a mount and your happy with it and clicking on a box for 6 hours doesn't sound like much of an event but there is more!

 

Your mount can now travel up to 20% faster! Okay you can't use them in combat and nearly everything in any area is hostile so you will probably be dismounted but if not you can get from point A to B 20% quicker. No there isn't anything to do at either point but you can get to them quicker, I appreciate that you auto port to any quest area that gives Galactic Command but there is more!

 

You know GSF where you always complained about Vets one shooting you and not being able to do anything about it. Well now you get a free bomber and gunship, of course they are the naff ones, and yes you already have a gunship cause that was the reward from when GSF was launched. But now you have a slow as hell bomber which will take 2 shots for a full upgraded gunship to take out! Yeah I know that given the speed they travel you will never close the 15000 meters before you take two shots and your going to just get killed the same but there is more!

 

You know those companions you never use cause you have 30 of them now, all generic copies, well now every time you send them out on a crew mission they will get influence. Okay I appreciate if you used them you could get their influence up with gifts sold on the fleet and it will no doubt be a cheaper option that sitting for hours sending them out for a crew mission to get their influence up and this and how many max influence companions do you need 7? But there is more!

 

If you grind out 100 levels of galactic command you can now purchase the tier 1 gear. Ultimately you may think this still leaves you with 200 levels of galactic command grinding and then 100's of hours of getting random lock boxes at tier 4 to be reward blue relics, implants and ear pieces which you will scrap. But for your alts you will be able to purchase it so they can do anything with a bolster and have set piece gear. Yeah the only new content this really applies to is one operation boss. But now instead of random lock boxes for tier one gear you can buy with tokens good for those alts, though okay yeah after tier 1 its back to random lock boxes. But there is more!

 

By the end of the month maybe we will possibly get a road map and class balances, clearly none of this will be coming in June cause it hasn't even been finalized and we know what is coming in June.

 

We can say it was a hospital pass and its all Bens fault, we can say its all EA's fault, we can say family comes first. But sadly unless everyone is buy 100's of subscriptions in support of the game (and who knows if any of that money would be spend on development clearly if you buy CM coins that money is spent on producing new packs) the servers are going to remain dead and people that have left are not going to come back just cause someone Dad came to visit.

[LtGeneralGezlin]

As someone who's been called a 'hater' on this forum before, it makes me rather sad to see other people literally lambasting EAWare employees for daring to be human beings rather than robots. I bet this same person got upset that the class balance specialist took off time when their kid was born too... I mean, how dare he let his family get in the way of getting his work done on time, right?!

 

Again, that last bit was sarcasm, for anyone who couldn't tell.

 

After what happened a few years back when some people on the Forums went looking for info about one of the class devs, I am not surprised that there is a subset of people like that on the forums...

[dr_mike]

After what happened a few years back when some people on the Forums went looking for info about one of the class devs, I am not surprised that there is a subset of people like that on the forums...

 

And yet when a deaf player tries to get account support and is unable to do so, they can't be bothered to accommodate.

[TUXs]

By the end of the month maybe we will possibly get a road map and class balances, clearly none of this will be coming in June cause it hasn't even been finalized and we know what is coming in June.

 

We can say it was a hospital pass and its all Bens fault, we can say its all EA's fault, we can say family comes first. But sadly unless everyone is buy 100's of subscriptions in support of the game (and who knows if any of that money would be spend on development clearly if you buy CM coins that money is spent on producing new packs) the servers are going to remain dead and people that have left are not going to come back just cause someone Dad came to visit.

It IS Ben's fault. Ben sank this game by wasting 2-3 years of development on a story that completely abolished everything we had done from 1-60...we even lost our companions. Expecting Keith to fix it in a month or two is just unrealistic.

 

And we KNOW they go month to month...that's how we've had updates the past 2+ years. MONTHLY. I know it's cool to think they had things planned out a year in advance, but it's clear they didn't...they had a new story written...that's it.

 

Rome wasn't built in a day...Keith taking a few days off to spend time with family, sure as hell didn't hurt the game anywhere near what Ben did over the past few years. SWTOR's current condition is absolutely NOT representative of Keith's doing...only Ben's.

[FlavivsAetivs]

Hey everyone,

 

Wanted to provide an update on my first Producer Roadmap, but getting it published is taking longer than I anticipated. Partly my own fault, as my Dad came to visit and I took a few days off over the past couple of weeks to spend time with him. This ultimately slowed my progress but I am back in full swing now and pushing to get the roadmap completed.

 

I honestly thought I would have had the roadmap done and communicated already, but, I realistically need more time to finalize it. Translated: That means end of this month, but with full intention of delivering it sooner. <sad face> This is not something I wanted to tell you, but I promised to keep you up-to-date on what’s happening.

 

While you continue to wait, here’s a few highlights of Game Update 5.2.2 scheduled for mid-June (yes, in 2017):

 

• The Nar Shaddaa Nightlife event returns with old and some awesome new rewards
  
• New Character Perks to increase your speeder piloting speed to 120% and 130%
  
• Companions will gain influence through standard crew skill missions
  
• Full Tier 1 gear available from existing Fleet vendors using Command Tokens – this means you can obtain a full bonus gear set for under 800 Command Tokens. You will be able to choose the type of gear you want to purchase (DPS, Tank, or Healer).
  
• We made a variety of changes to Galactic Starfighter – primarily aimed at reducing the cost, increasing requisition rewards, and offering all players a Gunship and Bomber as standard ships (available in your hangar).

 

I will continue to pass on roadmap updates as I have them. We do have an exciting year ahead of us and I look forward to sharing it you.

 

---Keith

 

Holy crap. This is amazing.

 

~ Eudoxia

[DarthSpuds]

If you need your high influence companions for mechanical reasons, and have lost them to story, you can retrieve them via the companion return terminal. I've done this a couple of times for high-influence companions. In-story, your companions are pretty much chosen for you, so if you want to be sure to have a high-inf companion in-story, you have to invest in a lot of them anyway.

 

The Companion Return Terminal is a effective (if a little ugly) compromise, and I almost wish it were more visible.

 

I disagree.

 

Getting a socially inert simulacrum of a companion back via the terminal is not the same as having the old companion back. Not even close.

 

All The Best

[Jagaimee]

After what happened a few years back when some people on the Forums went looking for info about one of the class devs, I am not surprised that there is a subset of people like that on the forums...

 

That was the 3.0 (or somewhere around there) sentinel/marauder changes, right...? I wasn't too involved with the forums at the time, but I caught the tail-end of the overreactive whining.

..."whining." Yeah, no. That "whining" was downright scary, actually. o_O

 

Anyway - thank you, Keith! Thanks for the heads-up and some news. Looking forward to the roadmap and future updates!