Please stop insulting the devs

[Baletraeger]

They aren't stupid, They know what they are doing and they know the risks associated with them.

 

The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.

 

For players who are unhappy (like me) we just need to understand that our investment of time and money are not important, making a game that makes as much money as possible into the future is.

 

It's just business after all.

[TrixxieTriss]

These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.

.

 

Like making us stop playing 🙄

 

Where is the business sense there? Unless certain BioWare elements want the game to fail so they can personally be moved elsewhere in BioWare or EA.

[DarthCasus]

Like making us stop playing 🙄

 

Where is the business sense there? Unless certain BioWare elements want the game to fail so they can personally be moved elsewhere in BioWare or EA.

 

Hop in, Anthem 2's announcement is just around the corner

[casirabit]

I don't really think people are "insulting" the devs, they are just wanting answers which they refuse to answer as most of us can see the handwriting on the wall. It is actually like they are killing the game but that really is not insulting the dev's.

[Pirana]

They aren't stupid, They know what they are doing and they know the risks associated with them.

 

The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.

 

For players who are unhappy (like me) we just need to understand that our investment of time and money are not important, making a game that makes as much money as possible into the future is.

 

It's just business after all.

 

From what I've read and I haven't perused the entire forum, nor do I care to, people aren't insulting the developers. What people are wanting are answers, which they rarely divulge that information, unless it actually benefits the consumers, us. If you've been here from the beginning, in other words, beta and/or the launch of the game, then you would know this is nothing new, this is their MO.

 

Lastly, put it into perspective, if the Devs knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be, probably for the seventh or eighth time, changing how gearing works in this game, yet again. That's not someone or a group of people that knows what they're doing.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Pirana

[kage_goomba]

In all fairness - aside from "insulting" the devs - I'm beginning to think they don't play their own game.

 

Just saying.

 

If they cared - I'd think we'd be seeing some more QoL improvements in the game itself and less about flipping the table on gear overall.

[ForfiniteStories]

Years ago I called for a developer to be fired. Never again!

 

While I am not entirely satisfied with the state of the game, nor do I approve of all the decisions they make, that's just a stupid line to cross.

 

On another note, you can make a good game and make money at the same time. These two things coincide. Designing a system to solely make money can in fact have the opposite effect. I.E. Massive exodus from World of Warcraft in recent months.

Edited November 6, 2021 by ForfiniteStories

[Ulrah]

Sure, most developers are just coding what their boss tells them to.

 

So allow me to clarify:

Not all of the devs are morons, but it seems the ones in charge of systems design for this expansion are ignorant at best.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Ulrah

[kage_goomba]

Sure, most developers are just coding what their boss tells them to.

 

So allow me to clarify:

Not all of the devs are morons, but it seems the ones in charge of systems design for this expansion are ignorant at best.

 

As someone who does in fact work for a game company (obviously not this one) Some Devs ARE morons....trust me.

 

There is plenty of blame to go around.

 

Frankly if both devs and "managers" spent a little more time playing/using their own product...we would see a very different result as opposed to them counting their money

 

Yes its subjective - yes I don't know all the details - but this issue is impacting all major games/companies frankly.

 

Very little quality and too much focus on profit.

[TrixxieTriss]

but this issue is impacting all major games/companies frankly.

 

Very little quality and too much focus on profit.

 

What’s sad is if they focused on quality and player enjoyment more than profits, they’d actually make more money in the long term because more people would want to play their games.

[velvet_illusionZ]

we are not insulting the devs, we are just trying to make clear to them, that their actions will cause reactions from us....if their goal is to strip the game of its complexity, maybe they gotta live with the reactions and be unemployed in a few months, thats how economy works.they gotta understand we don't to play their game, but they need us to play their game to safe their jobs...

[Lakemine]

Like making us stop playing 🙄

 

Where is the business sense there? Unless certain BioWare elements want the game to fail so they can personally be moved elsewhere in BioWare or EA.

 

They are already working on ME4 and DA4. Plus the leadership shakeups over the last few years due to the scandals havn't helped much.

 

But I agree with you, where is the business mindset of "make our players mad so they leave." compared to "make our players happy so they stay and either continue to pay money or have a higher chance of paying money." Wouldn't people go for the latter mindset? Yet so so SO many devs atm (different companies) seem to go for the former......

[Lakemine]

I don't really think people are "insulting" the devs, they are just wanting answers which they refuse to answer as most of us can see the handwriting on the wall. It is actually like they are killing the game but that really is not insulting the dev's.

 

Yep. Its better to be honest and answer questions, even if they are difficult. Then to give the silence or lies.

[Pirana]

What’s sad is if they focused on quality and player enjoyment more than profits, they’d actually make more money in the long term because more people would want to play their games.

 

This is accurate.

 

I'll steal a line from the movie Field of Dreams, "If You Build It, They Will Come". People initially came to this game because it was Star Wars and the newest toy for gamers. I won't get into what happened at launch, then within a year the game going FTP, it's too long and people can easily find that information online.

 

This game has a long history of making very questionable decisions, and it's about to happen again. Take a game like FF14, their initial launch was complete crap, they took the game offline and all but started over. I played the game in recent months, not a huge fan myself, but I understand the allure. The people that play the game, the bulk of them absolutely love the game. Check out the General section of their forums, there's very little hostility and most people praise the game and look forward to Endwalker, their next expansion that's about to hit. Then you read the forums here, notably this section and especially the PTS area and there's a lot of disappointment. Which leads me back to the thread starter regarding insulting.

 

It's always hard to gather someone's feelings over the internet, but from my experience, it's typically not insulting, but people that are passionate about a game, or Star Wars in this case, and instead of people thinking through their thoughts, they post what first comes to mind, but I would say, more often than not, it's passion and disappointment rather than vitriol. People have invested a lot time in this game, only to have certain aspects of the game turned upside down or changed for the sake of being changed.

 

This is the only legitimate Star Wars MMO on the market, there is no reason this game should have a player base this small, and it's simply because of the strange and often times, undesirable changes that have plagued this game since launch.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Pirana

[Toraak]

They are already working on ME4 and DA4. Plus the leadership shakeups over the last few years due to the scandals havn't helped much.

 

But I agree with you, where is the business mindset of "make our players mad so they leave." compared to "make our players happy so they stay and either continue to pay money or have a higher chance of paying money." Wouldn't people go for the latter mindset? Yet so so SO many devs atm (different companies) seem to go for the former......

 

You can never make players happy. That is the main problem. If you make any change at all, you risk making a part, possibly a large part of the community mad.

 

The simple truth is people do not like change of any kind.

 

Something else to consider here. When this game came out it drew a large group of people that were not MMO players because it was Star Wars, and because it was an RPG made by Bioware (due to Kotor). That is why it had problems at launch many wanted this to be Kotor 3, which it clearly wasn't. The fact is that many players today still years later look at this game with the same outlook because of the story, so while many of the changes coming in 7.0 are good from an MMO view, they are not so good looking at them from a RPG solo player view.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Toraak

[xordevoreaux]

TLDR: In my opinion, couching the changes in a coherent manner up front, the reason being shared with us in its entirety weeks ago, would have helped tremendously to dispel the umbrage we're experiencing on the forums now. We're asking why, and we shouldn't have to. We should know why by now. Every last detail why.

 

TLDR: Development isn't a piece of cake even on the best of days.

 

As someone who does in fact work for a game company (obviously not this one) Some Devs ARE morons....trust me.

In 1998, I was already well past college age and working for an online software company as the company's one and only technical writer. One morning I'm holding the carpet down walking around with my cup of coffee socializing before I got geared up for the day. It was early, and I was walking through the dev area being my usual social butterfly self while people were barely out of their cars and sitting down to get the day started. Our typical morning ritual.

 

In one corner of the room I hear this young programmer slam his palm on his desk, so I wander over to see what his conniption is and I see he's got an MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Component) error staring him in the face (no idea why they were using that to support the back end of a web portal, but in those days people were trying anything and everything).

 

So I'm standing there holding my coffee cup, chit-chatting with the product development manager, just staring at this kid's code over his shoulder, and Mr. English Major here has to point out to this programmer that you cannot have an MDAC record set pointer traverse across an empty record set, it'll return an error, so check for end of file and beginning of file both being true first, and if they are, you're dealing with no data, so in that case don't try to move the record pointer across something that doesn't exist.

 

So he programs a quick conditional above the line where the error was happening, runs the module, boom, no error, and the whole time he's thanking me and I'm telling him you're welcome I'm thinking where the hell did they get you.

 

Another time, and remember this was when Netscape Navigator and Microsoft were still in contention with each other, I'm walking past someone I didn't even know, I think she had just started with the company, but apparently my reputation for walking around with my coffee cup saving developers from themselves had already reached her, so she stops me and complains that she can't figure something out.

 

She was crafting the visual look and feel of what she wanted the page to display for visited, hover, active, and linked hyperlinks, and it wasn't working right. It worked fine in one browser but gave her fits in the other, so I explained that the rendering engine for Netscape is not the rendering engine for Microsoft, which (at the time) was fairly crude and adhering to its own standard.

 

I told her to switch the order of appearance in her CSS sheet of which hyperlink appeared before which. I kept telling her just think V, H, L, A... visited, hover, linked, active... visited, hover, linked, active... and put them in that order.

 

She was like what? That's crazy!

My response: Just do it.

 

My boss, director of Quality Assurance, and not this woman's boss, was at his desk and his office door was open directly across from this woman's cube and he yells "JUST DO IT IF HE SAYS DO IT" and she did, and of course the herald angels sang, animals started speaking, and the Milwaukee Brewers win the world series (they have never won the world series).

 

She looked at me like what planet did you just come from and asked how the hell did you know that and I replied I've no idea, I've just messed with it enough. Needless to say, browser rendering engines do a far better job these days handling CSS, and some browsers don't even exist any more to worry about.

 

And I was just the guy writing up our product's administrator guide. Not a programming class to my name. But I'd delved enough into enough places building MS databases for small doctor clinics that I knew a few things, and taught myself HTML / JavaScript, and constantly marveled how these people making a lot more money didn't know the intrinsic nature of what they were supposed to do.

 

To be fair, the Internet was still the wild west back then, and everyone was still cutting their teeth on an ever-evolving technology stack which was basically one giant swirling mess of kludged code, and my company wasn't using one lick of off-the-shelf code, which there wasn't much of at the time, and crafted everything from scratch.

 

I am currently an unpaid volunteer with the Document Foundation, helping them with bugs in LibreOffice. Bugs galore. Some of the bugs are absolutely asinine, like I can only guess that one programmer at some point must have used 0,0 for the graphical origin of the page for the Drawing program (good for them) and another programmer at some point in a different area of the code used 1,1 as the origin (Document Foundation has an army of open-source programmers from around the world helping to build LO). When you export a PNG from LibreOffice Draw with certain settings there's a 1-pixel gap on the right of the PNG where nothing renders (under one set of circumstances versus another). I logged that bug months ago, other people have verified it as a real bug, and it's still sitting there waiting for a programmer to tackle (one tried and gave up). And someone over there has no idea how to blend transparency across an alpha layer, but I digress.

 

Devs are sometimes their own worst enemies when struggling through code, whether they more or less know what they're doing but still manage to program themselves into a corner, or are attempting to pick their way through the code of a developer who left a long time ago and there's zero comments in the code nor anything coming close to being a home-grown software development kit for the product, not so much even a 15-year-old 3-ring binder gathering dust somewhere that would explain what's what.

 

So on one hand, I have massive sympathy for devs.

 

Their job is not at all easy, there are moving parts everywhere, and even when a company does its level best to standardize their own coding practices to streamline the process and reduce errors, there are obstacles to things that no one would in a million years would imagine would ever be a problem (V, H, L, A? Seriously? You gotta be kidding!).

 

When we complain about programming errors, remember: we're looking at the problem from the outside in. We are not privy to the source code, which, if we saw the code, would probably make us prefer to watch sausage being made.

 

It's therefore easy for us to complain about bugs for not knowing or appreciating the nuanced complexity of what they're attempting to achieve. Everything is connected to everything else. Laboring to get something to work in one area can unwittingly break something somewhere else, and that's possible in any program.

 

It may be harsh, and not being personally witness to the process also unwarranted, but (there's always a but) what I ding Bioware for is not always performing due diligence when it comes to in-house testing. Some bugs—profound bugs—have gotten to the live code where we players have been the ones to discover the issue in MERE SECONDS after a new release is deployed (fuzzy list of names in the revamped guild window).

 

So there we are, looking at such a bug and scratching our heads wondering how the hell did that ever make it to the live environment, and I'm thinking to myself... self-testing. They're not doing enough self-testing and relying on us to identify issues.

 

But fingers on keyboards is only one part of the problem.

 

Programming errors happen everywhere, every day, in every software development company. It's the way of things.

 

Were we dealing here with only typos in code, we wouldn't be collectively setting the forums on fire this week belly-aching about what is or is not in this release. They'd be just ordinary bugs and we're used to that and be like okay, fix it, people.

 

We're beyond that. There's a question about the direction of the product.

 

My guild's leadership team is doing a really good job, a VERY good job, staying positive and putting out positive vibes to our members about the direction of his new release. Kudos to them, and I don't at all expect the wheels to fall off our guild's wagon after the 7.0 release. We'll be fine, and I'm not just telling myself that. They're putting in a serious, heart-felt effort to keep things rolling. Thank you, team!

 

But Bioware could have done a much, much better job up front—weeks ago—socializing these changes to us, explaining their thinking behind the changes in toto, not just piece-meal (a dev post here, a dev post there).

 

Just laying it all out at the get-go for the why—as much as the what—would have gone a long way to keeping us from carbonizing the forums.

 

There will always be those people extremely change-averse, and nothing but nothing will soothe over changes with them regardless of the nature of those changes.

 

For the rest of us, Bioware: Work on your self-testing, and please communicate fully, up front, all the time.

Edited November 9, 2021 by xordevoreaux

[ExarSun]

The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.

 

 

LOL. And the proof about this is where exactly? Has the game become better, has the game grown in content and population? No. And 7.0 debacle is about to hit, which we all know what will happen. This is what you get when you cater and listen to some random discord groups. From my point of view he has the opposite of immense knowledge about anything MMO related. We are not 2004 nor 2005.

[MystyqeofXev]

In any human endeavor, 49% of the people are below "average". Degreed or not. Experienced or not.

[OlBuzzard]

They aren't stupid, They know what they are doing and they know the risks associated with them.

 

The lead game designer has immense knowledge of game systems, other MMOs, what works and what doesn't. These changes are not being made without knowing the intended results and consequences.

 

For players who are unhappy (like me) we just need to understand that our investment of time and money are not important, making a game that makes as much money as possible into the future is.

 

It's just business after all.

 

You are quite correct (from a certain point of view). AND based on that point you should also realize that these changes of mechanics (not the story line) reach into so many parts of that game that it MUST be concluded that it will take MONTHS to develop. This means:

** That they have been working on this for some time now ?? OR

** It will be a work in process for months yet to come.

** IF IT is still WIP (and the probability is that the truth) ... then this "new system" will be around for a LONG TIME>

 

Bottom line: SOMEONE inside of the team has taken the time and discussed it at LENGTH with several members of the development team and PUSHED it through.

 

The OP is quite correct. They are NOT bad or stupid people ... someone KNEW where this was headed before we arrived at this point in time !

[ShieldProtection]

They supporting this game over the 5+ years with skeleton crew and under EA pressure and this is the only star wars game on the market for years that gets updates and not abandoned like jedi fallen order and new battlefronts.

 

Welcome to SWTOR forums, people are angry, hostile and aggressive.

 

Perhaps they would be extremely happy this game shut down and no SW game left to play. People just aint thinking, they just talk without thinking.

 

You know why EA CEO still at that office and counting his dollars? Because he is thinking in big picture, long term, without drama, hate him all you want but he is a perfect example of capitalism and no one can outrank him, thats how it works. Brutal, without morals but effective.

[Aghasett]

It's just business after all.

 

Exactly. This is a paid service. And as a paying customer, I'll criticize as freely as I wish, within civil standards, of course. And that shouldn't be a concern of yours, frankly.

Edited November 6, 2021 by Aghasett

[JakRoanin]

Welcome to SWTOR forums, people are angry, hostile and aggressive.

 

I'm not angry, I hope not hostile, and I prefer truly terrified to aggressive. I am so scared that I won't be able to play with my physical limitations because of the new gearing system. I want to stay that's why I'm pleading with them not to put this gearing system is the way we've been told how it works for SOLO players.

[Ulrah]

In any human endeavor, 49% of the people are below "average". Degreed or not. Experienced or not.

Depends on the distribution

[Phaedruss]

You know why EA CEO still at that office and counting his dollars? Because he is thinking in big picture, long term, without drama, hate him all you want but he is a perfect example of capitalism and no one can outrank him, thats how it works. Brutal, without morals but effective.

 

Out of all the terms used to describe a CEO you forgot: Out of touch with their customer and only thinking about money. We will see how effective that is if these changes get pushed through while pretty much the entirety of the community is screaming 'Do not do this.'

[Phaedruss]

Bottom line: SOMEONE inside of the team has taken the time and discussed it at LENGTH with several members of the development team and PUSHED it through.

 

The OP is quite correct. They are NOT bad or stupid people ... someone KNEW where this was headed before we arrived at this point in time !

 

And yet they held off sharing it with the community at all until a month or so before the expansion drops. They gave no time for feedback, knowing it was going to be overwhelmingly against these changes.