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EricMusco

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EricMusco last won the day on September 23 2023

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  1. Hey folks, Coming off of 7.4.1, there were obviously some changes we made that received some feedback and I wanted to talk through them with you! I think we can put them in three buckets and in each there are some problems from our side that I want to address. Those buckets in order are: Removing Reputation tracks from GS / Blueprint Fragment confusion Changes to Reputation Conquest Objectives Missing patch notes Where is the Rep Track?! Simply put, the intended functionality of a Rep track does not pair well with the functionality of Galactic Seasons. For us, we want a rep track to be something that a player can engage with over a long period of time, to work through, earn rewards and titles, etc. Since a GS is only available for a limited time we didn’t want to push into a FOMO feeling or anything like that. We want Rep tracks to be tied to things like Daily Areas. However, there was a similar expectation of those items being on the track, of those Achievements being earned during the season, etc. And so as a middle ground we replaced the rep items with the Blueprint Fragments which could serve a similar purpose. The problem here is that our messaging and overall user experience for these could use some work. We didn’t communicate this change clearly up front and more importantly, Blueprint Fragments themselves don’t do a great job of communicating what they or what their purpose is. Going forward, it is our intention to stop doing rep tracks for Galactic Seasons and reserve them for content where it makes more sense (like Daily Areas). The Conquest Change This is surely the place we saw the most feedback here in the forums following the patch yesterday. First off, why did we even make this change? Well, this Objective is quite a bit outsized in just how many points you get relative to its effort. Not that we don’t want a range of Objectives, some of which can be completed very easily/quickly. But this Objective was a very large amount of points for what was required of you, and that’s why we ultimately nerfed it. In connection to the first section is that although we lowered the points from this Conquest, our goal was to add in new objectives so that players who were jumping in for quick sessions and progression through Galactic Seasons, could then also be gaining Conquest points (the new Objectives focus on gaining GS levels). Now, all of that being said, we definitely hear your feedback. We know that we hit this Objective pretty hard. And although it may have been needed to pull it into balance, we are actively discussing what adjustments we can make and I will let you know once I have those details. But, Where was the Patch Note Ok so before I peel back the curtain a little I want to get something out of the way, we didn’t try to hide any of this, it was just missed (I’ll tell you how in a minute). We know that a nerf like this is never fun and you having to discover it on your own adds so much more friction to the situation. But to be clear, any change that is player facing should be communicated to you, whether that is through patch notes, social media, forums, or some combination of all of the above. A change that affects you that is missed is never intentional. I know ya’ll appreciate some behind the scenes when we can and so this is a good opportunity, so here goes. Let me walk you through how our patch notes are built to illustrate how this was missed. And amusingly a little bit of how Musco of the past and Musco of the present combined for this one. Also usual reminder I am going to be doing a bit of oversimplifying here so don’t take all of this as 100% 1 to 1, but to be illustrative! Ok so when we pull patch notes we do so mostly in two ways: Highlights - These are the big features we know and track across a whole lot of teams, usually have marketing blurbs written, blogs, etc. Bugs - The important one for this section, we pull our bug fixes internally based on a query that Musco, Community Manager of the past, helped write. This pulls from our internal tracking of all of the bug fixes we made for a particular release so that Jackie and the Live team can convert those into patch notes! Now fast forward. As of late we’ve really been trying to squeeze in more stuff when we can and often this stuff is small. So not a whole big feature, but also not us fixing a bug. From a project management standpoint, those things are tasks. This is something Musco, Producer of the Present has been helping to drive internally. You can see this in things like Ancient Armaments or the new Legacy Perk. Well, when we are building our patch notes as I already described, we are typically looking at our highlight features and bugs (thanks Musco of the past) and in that query we now realize we were missing some tasks. In fact, both of my examples of tasks from above, Ancient Armaments and the new Legacy Perk, were missed on our first internal draft of the patch notes until we caught them on review. You can probably see where this is going. The changes I’ve been talking about in this thread were all captured in tasks and so when we were writing the patch notes they were just missed and then weren’t caught on internal review. As you already can guess we are updating our process to make sure we are throwing a better net on catching those tasks in the future. Anyways, this is a long post and I have thrown quite a lot of information at you. Thank you all for the continued feedback and I will pass on any more information as I have it. -eric
  2. Hey folks, I wanted to give you a quick heads up on our plans for the next little bit as we have 3 patches coming to you in pretty short order. 7.4.1a will be coming ASAP, likely tomorrow. This is to address an issue that the Join the Fight mount is not currently working at level 1 as intended. Jackie will be posting details once we have locked down maintenance timing. 7.4.1b is right on the horizon, targeting early/mid next week followed by 7.4.1c in the next 2-3 weeks. We are tracking a variety of emerging issues for these patches such as Ancient Armaments and Conquest/Rep change. I’ll be back later today or early tomorrow with a follow-up post about our internal conversations following your feedback on the Conquest/Rep changes. I’m gonna lock this thread for now and will respond here later. I will reopen the thread when I do! Thanks all, talk soon. -eric
  3. Ok, let's talk about this Mission and right out of the gates, what you are describing is a bug. We would be in agreement with your sentiment (although maybe not how you expressed it), that we don't want players to have to wait an extended period for a clickable item that is part of Mission progression. That's not how we would design a Mission. So if you see something like this, you should definitely raise it as you did but in the bug report forum (where I am going to move this). Also, as a note we are going to be fixing this in our next patch. Since I also like to throw out some extra nuggets of behind the scenes when I can, to answer the "oh my god how could this possibly happen". When we are building Missions with interactable objects like this, in our toolset the default time for respawn... is the time you are currently seeing for this item, which can feel pretty long when there are a lot of people all interacting at the same time. What happens is every time we create an interactable item for a Mission it is part of our process to override that default to our intended time. We just happened to miss it in this instance. Hence, the bug. That said our default being on the high side isn't great when we miss it. So beyond just the bug fix for this Mission, we're also adjusting the tool default internally to be much shorter. So if we miss updating the default in the future it won't end up feeling punishing to you. -eric
  4. Hey there, Ok so first, I super appreciate the enthusiasm in the thread. We always love to hear where folks' heads are at for suggestions or ideas on places to improve the game. Now, with that said, as much as I wish your suggestions were “quite inexpensive” or required “a little more time” that is unfortunately not true. I am hoping though that I can shed some light on exactly why that is the case since very often in software (game) development very few things are fast or inexpensive. Let me give you an example in each of your categories to be a bit more illustrative. Perfect, we've actually done this in numerous releases since 7.0 and it's going to continue in a number of releases I can already see on our roadmap. It's happened for armor sets/weapons (like the reforged set) and has also been a part of environment polish, the most recent example of course being Voss. I want to give more than one example so I am going to try to not go crazy here but just how "inexpensive" is this? Let's assume we are talking about updating environmental textures for an existing planet. Once we know what planet we are going to be on we need a full audit of the textures present. Typically this is done by our Environment artists. They are looking for wallsets, floors, etc. Textures they can update they will get the most bang for the buck. Also as the design of the new location (this is multiple teams work) starts to take shape, are there any existing props that we want to update to bring up as well. Less broad appeal but can be centerpieces in rooms etc. Ok all of that is highlighted, now what? Well, if we are doing some fancy new (what’s old is new) things we need to concept what it is going to look like, so over to the Concept Team to get started! Alright we are out of concept, time to start the updating machine, multiple teams get to work depending on the specific assets but it typically includes some combination of Environment, Character, and our Outsource partners. So I am on the 7th bullet, but I am honestly at almost the beginning of the process for when we are talking about “expensive” so let me speed it up. What’s left? Everything…. We get the assets back. We need to go through art review, licensor review, changes, integration into the game. It’s integrated, now what? Does it work? Maybe. Funny side (and totally true) story. Imagine that we did a sweet update to the texture of leaves to make our trees look better on one planet. Nailed it, it looks great, high fives all round. 3 weeks later our QV (commonly known as QA) team finds a lone tree on a completely different planet that looks bad (QV is incredibly valuable to everything we do, and these types of change are no exception). The leaves are entirely the wrong size and the fidelity is wrong, weird? You guessed it… it’s those sweet new leaves from the other planet. Game development is complex and weird. Now this is the part where I tell you about our Engineering and Tech Art teams. The tools and support they provide are invaluable. But you may not have realized that something like our Gameplay Engineering team would also be involved in updating textures on trees, but here we are as we had to bring them in to help us track down where some “textures got away from us” in other parts of the game. I also want to highlight that once we have the art in hand, taking art and making it the thing you see and experience in game is something different altogether. I am skipping a lot of steps and words but this part is big. And again, that is something we are stoked to do, taking an opportunity to polish up some of our older planets as we revisit them. So keep an eye out for more of that on the horizon. Now onto “a little more time”. Let’s talk about a new species. This is one we certainly talk about a lot internally, we always follow the “next new species” wishlists and whatnot. Not to understate it, new species is a monumental sized task. This is the kind of thing that touches nearly every aspect of the game and almost every discipline on the team. To give you a similar idea as I did above. The teams and places it touches and needs to be hooked up: Once we know what the species will be it goes to our Concept team. This will include the initial species along with color variations and conversations of what customizations would look like (hair, jewelry, patterns, etc) I will say this as a single bullet, but imagine this bullet is gigantic. All of that ^ now needs to get made. This will largely be on our character and outsource teams but depending on what the customizations are will likely touch other teams as well across our art disciplines. Ok, “new species” is done. Well, the game has no concept that this species exists in a number of very important places. Let’s talk about them one at a time as they each have unique challenges. The game - Yup, the whole video game. You want someone, one time, to say “Hey aren’t you a <new species>”? During your story. We can’t build that into the game if the game doesn’t know. Gameplay Engineers have entered the chat. Also, worth noting that *any* instance in the game retroactively where we wanted to acknowledge your < new species> would now need to involve at a minimum writing, loc, narrative, and world teams. Cinematics - I imagine you want <new species> to show up in cinematics. Do cool spins, take down bad guys, smooch people in space. This is going to touch a number of teams. First, we need our animators and VFX team to make sure the <new species> plays nicely with any and all existing animations (all of them) or clean up every instance where they don’t. Across the whole game. That’s more than a decade of content. Once those teams have done their checks, now our Cinematics team needs to do their passes on actual implementation to make sure things are firing in the way they would expect. CM / UI / Systems - This is another one of those bullets you should assume is gigantic. But you need a way to actually make yourself the new species. Purchase it, unlock it, create it with all of the sliders and options, change to it (if you are something else). All of that requires setup, adding it into existing systems or in some cases overhaul of existing windows/systems if they don’t currently fit. Etc. - This is just a catchall bucket for every other team. QV, engineers, tech art, tools, etc. who are all also going to contribute to this. Behind the scenes, the species you play touches an enormous amount of things, and so that means an equal amount of humans on the team are going to touch it. Ok, I have typed a lot of words. So a couple of notes. I am not saying any of this to say we wouldn’t do these things. In fact, the first example is something we have done already in the last year or so and have plans to do again very soon. Me saying everything above is to pull the curtain back a little and provide some insight, so when you look at an idea you have and think “how hard can that be?”, when it comes to game development the answer is often more involved than it might seem on the surface. All that said, keep the suggestions coming! Sometimes there are suggestions that we spot and someone goes “hey we can do that pretty quick” and they are the exceptions we can turn around quickly! Thanks all. -eric
  5. Hey folks, Apologies for the missed message yesterday, I somehow have a cold even though it is 1,000 degrees in Texas. We are confirmed for the Mission items in Collections. One note is that if you have already completed one of the Missions, or are currently on it, the Mission item will be added to your inventory or sent to you in the mail. You may need to move the item around within your inventory or to another character (since they are now Legacy bound) to trigger the Collection unlock. Stay tuned for comms on maintenance timing and info on any other fixes. Thanks all. -eric
  6. Hey folks, Alright, here is my update for today. I can't speak yet in 100% certainty as those mission items are not playing nice in getting in Collections but we are getting close (and that is still our intent). Looking good on that front, but should have a final update there Monday. Some of the other changes you will see are: The vendor (you can still get the items from the vendor for GS tokens instead of collections if you choose) will check your GS level instead of Mission progress. The Mission items will now be Bind on Legacy, in case you happen to claim them on the wrong character (especially relevant for the second or third Mission items). More details to follow on Monday, have a good weekend! -eric
  7. Hey folks, Getting late in the day but wanted to post an update. I was hoping to be able to give you a breakdown of the exact plan today (as Jackie alluded to yesterday) but unfortunately there is still one last piece in testing on our side. Plan is still the same as noted in Jackie's post, once we get a bit more testing tomorrow I should be able to circle back with details! Thanks all. -eric
  8. Hey there, Ok, so this is an interesting situation, thank you for bringing it up. First, a little history and then what we are talking about on the team to resolve it. For a long time we never had the PvP Mission terminals inside of Warzones or Arenas. And so there was a pretty logical reason to allow Mission sharing within Warzones and Arenas. However, since that change happened that need has certainly gone down or vanished entirely. We hadn't heard about players abusing Mission sharing as a form of harassment, so thanks for the report there. In addition to that we are talking about a couple of different changes we can make: Stopping Mission sharing in Warzones and Arenas - As mentioned above, since the addition of the terminals we are not sure we need to allow sharing anymore. Especially if it is being abused. Tie /ignore to blocking Mission sharing as well. Let us know your thoughts on both of these options. It is worth noting that we are at build lock for 7.3.1 (you should expect this real soon) so these changes wouldn't be possible until 7.4. Thanks again for the question and feedback. -eric
  9. As you may have seen in our "Game Update 7.3.1 is Coming Soon" Article, there are a few changes coming to Galactic Seasons starting this next season. With GS5, we are going to try something a little different, there will not be a seasonal Companion. We are doing this for a variety of reasons that we hope will improve the Galactic Season experience (along with creating some separate opportunities as well, more on that later). For starters, you can still expect a great character driven story within each season, it just won’t need to operate around the limitation of a single companion. That story will unlock based on your Galactic Season Progress. We obviously have a lot of companions in SWTOR, a lot. So when we make the decision to give you another one we really want to be sure that it is meaningful and more fleshed out where possible and we think that Galactic Seasons may not be the place for that. But we’ll see, let us know what you think. In that same vein though, we do have some ideas of places where we could achieve those goals with a companion, but more on that another day… *makes a quick comlink to Lane* Over to Joe who is going to update you on how we are going to adjust the reward to track to account for the lack of a Companion. -eric
  10. Hey folks, Ok, apologies for the slow response on this one as it took quite a bit of digging to work through what exactly happened. I will give the details further down but for the TLDR -- The skirt with the leggings is intended and so that version will stay untouched. However, given the nature of that fix happening we are going to add a version of the skirt without leggings in 7.3.1. So anyone who has acquired the armor set at that point, or who pulls it down from collections (for those who already own it), will receive both versions. Now for the detailed breakdown for those who are curious. So with some digging it seems that when this armor set was released way back in 2013 it actually launched bugged. The bug was that the leggings weren't showing on the character model but were showing up in almost every other situation (such as the plates and in the gears icon). Unfortunate that the place it was bugged was the most visible, which certainly makes the whole thing confusing as to what the bug actually is. As you know, once an MTX item goes live we are very, very hesitant on touching something someone has paid for unless it is very clear it was bugged. This skirt issue didn't present that clearly as a bug so it isn't something we would actually have changed. However, with our journey to 64-bit we effectively (and bear with my highly technical terms) jiggled the handle on every texture in the game. When that pass touched this armor set, it re-exported the skirt which was all that was needed to fix the leggings. We didn't actually fix the skirt intentionally, it was a byproduct of our move to 64-bit. All of that said, that is why our plan will just be to have both versions of the skirt for previous and future purchases. Appreciate your patience as we dug through this very unusual series of events that led us here. Thanks all! -eric
  11. Lane's story is not forgotten (and also not done)! It will continue in 7.4, but won't be concluded then. We'll have more details about the mission chain and the ultimate reward in the future! -eric
  12. Hey folks, One thing we have seen a little bit of confusion around is what difficulty modes exist on PTS and will be available for Shrine of Silence when 7.3 goes live. Since our naming conventions can be a little confusing sometimes let me reiterate what they are, and what they mean. Solo-Story: A solo-only mode where the player is often accompanied by characters relevant to the story and sees cutscenes throughout the Flashpoint. These are usually required parts of the main story in the game. Story - Easiest difficulty, meant to be completed solo. Veteran - Middle difficulty, meant to be completed with a group of any composition. Master - Hardest difficulty, meant to be completed with a coordinated group, built around the trinity (healer, tank, and DPS). With that in mind, a reminder. Shrine of Silence marks a shift in our philosophy around how and where we will deliver crit path storylines and our intent for Flashpoints (to be a place for engaging, repeatable content). Shrine of Silence has narrative relevance to Voss and the events happening around 7.3. However, it is not directly a part of the crit path like you have seen in our Flashpoints in the last few years. For that reason, there is no Solo-Story version of Shrine of Silence. The only cutscenes for the Flashpoint is a single wrapper mission (which is a KOTOR-style scene) that you can get before you go into the Flashpoint (this was not available on PTS). TLDR - Shrine of Silence will launch with Story, Veteran, and Master, as you have seen on PTS. -eric
  13. Hey folks, Coming off of the stream I wanted to make sure to hit a couple of the questions we didn't get to. Where is Master Mode R4? In short, MM R4 is not on our roadmap. The priorities for our encounters team right now is focused on making more impactful, engaging bosses in story content, delivering Flashpoints in all modes with modern boss mechanics, and making additional challenging 8-player encounters. Now, all of that said. I want to express that we very much understand how critical aspirational endgame group content is. Whether that is delivered through MM Flashpoints, World and Lair bosses, or even Ops. It is still something we will prioritize as a part of our roadmap going forward. Any follow-up from the Shae Vizla PTS? Again, thank you all for your participation and feedback! We have a lot of data and commentary to chew on before making a decision on what comes next for a possible APAC or fresh start server. That said, Shae Vizla was also another scale test for us having our servers "in the cloud" and so this test also helps drive us towards the goal of getting our service and our servers all onto AWS. Nothing specific to announce on timing or specifics, but know there is a lot happening behind the scenes still on these efforts. We'll communicate more when we can. Thanks all. -eric
  14. Fair question, let me clarify within your example: You are on Alderaan. You go to your Nar SH and then use return to Alderaan. NO COST (you never actually traveled to another planet beyond the SH) You are on Alderaan. You go to your Nar SH and then exit area onto Nar Shaddaa. COST (you traveled to another location) Generally speaking, Exit Area would have a travel cost and Return to Area would not. -eric
  15. Hey folks, First off, thank you all for the feedback here in the thread and especially for those who have jumped on PTS and played around with the changes. There are some great points of feedback and questions in the thread and I want to respond to some of the themes we are seeing. These changes are not enough! You are correct, and we know that, but it is a starting point. It is very important that we make these changes slowly and that we monitor their impacts closely. There are some excellent suggestions in this thread for further changes that are already in the works. As we said up front, you should expect to see changes that focus on the economy throughout the next few updates. We want to start small and in targeted ways. More changes are coming in future updates. Let me give you some specifics based on suggestions I am seeing in the thread. We know that players exchanging high value items will often trade outside of the GTN. Either because of its sale cap, or to avoid getting taxed at all on the transaction. This is likely the place you will see a number of changes coming after 7.2.1 to stop the loophole, and to start properly taxing high value trades. You're Not Hurting the Rich! Well, we aren't trying to, not specifically. Inflation in its simplest form is about the amount of credits entering the economy against the amount coming out of it. Over time we have shot ourselves in the foot a bit as we have removed or minimized most regular credit sinks (removing training costs, etc). The goal of these changes is to introduce passive, small credit removal to the game. This way we have credit removal a bit more in line with our credit generation. Removing singular batches of credits from a subset of players would not lower credit inflation (although it is an important component of it), and could not replace this type of passive removal. We Need Credit Sinks We hear you that it would also be great to have some more "spend a LOT of credits to get something specific" but one consideration is that many of the suggestions being made are one time purchases which do not continually reduce credits. As we have many systems that continually introduce credits, we need more things that reduce credits often and not on a one time basis. To help balance this, we have been steadily adding credit sinks over the past year or so. Most prominently would be the catch-up mechanic in both Galactic and PvP Seasons. The credit costs in those catch-ups can become quite substantial. Could You Bring Back Amplifiers? In short order, no. Our items are not built to have Amplifiers on them since we removed the system. However, the sentiment of this question is solid and is in alignment with what I said earlier, this is another example where we have removed some credit sinks. The Stronghold Change Particularly Sucks Yeah, let's talk about this one and our goal. As we are introducing a variety of passive costs to travel, players will inevitably look to find a way to subvert it, even if it is a small cost. One way players could do this is to use the SH travel to a planet and then Exit Area. Our concern here isn't actually for traveling to the SH, it would be a player trying to use that as a stepping stone onto the planet itself. With that said, we hear you on the sentiment of this one feeling especially punitive, paying to travel to something you paid for. So here is what we are going to try to change it to. We will not charge you to travel to a SH. Instead we would simply apply a travel cost to using Exit Area. Note that this is not how it is implemented currently so it will require a bit of time to switch. If we can't make this change in time for launch we will likely do NO charges for SH travel in 7.2.1 and implement the proposed credit cost as noted above in the future. Thanks all! Keep the feedback coming. -eric
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