You are right it is not easy. I will give them that. However, are you honestly asking that their customers design solutions for them? Do you contend that they are not competent enough or do not have the resources to do it properly?

 

They are a supposedly a fully staffed and funded game development team with designers and developers that have years of experience. In this context it should be quite easy to design and implement a proper system.

 

It is deeply concerning that they continue to keep such half hearted designers and developers on the team. Especially when there are hundreds of developers out there that would kill to have an opportunity to work for Bioware.

No we shouldn't be doing their jobs for them (unless they're paying us), but I think you may underestimate how difficult it can be to get a computer to do what any grown human can easily do at a glance.

Computers can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division very rapidly. Turning that ability into something that resembles intelligent decision making, for instance figuring out if Fliesintorocks really isn't contributing or is just a really bad pilot in a bomber, is not all that easy. It's even worse, because the computer will do exactly what you tell it to do and not the really obvious thing that you meant it to do and which any halfway sensible person would have understood the context and gotten right.

As far as resources goes, I'm quite confident that GSF is not rolling in a giant pool of manhours and money. On the PTS before 2.6 it was so badly broken that you couldn't really even playtest it. That doesn't exactly scream, "we've got resources to spare." As far as expertise goes, well general programming skill is well and good, and there are some things that would even transfer from MMORPG building to a 3D space battle game, but I didn't hear anything about them hiring a large team of people with many years of experience in flight/space sims. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that a lot of GSF's problems come in part from developers learning as they go rather than drawing on extensive past experience. It's even entirely possible that they're getting told, "You can't spend more than x hours on this until/unless GSF revenues (or SWTOR revenues) go up by y." Or possibly, "It doesn't matter if it's not tested yet, it has to go out in the next patch."

Partly it may be a matter of marketing. They say, "Play our great new starfighter mini-game," when instead they should be saying, "Please give us feedback on the alpha and beta features of the starfighter mini-game that we think will be really awesome when it's done 8 or 9 months from now."

By now in the above, I mean late Feb 2014.

Disappointment is partly the gap between reality and expectations. The marketing may have pushed expectations for GSF higher and earlier than they should have been.

The original afking, was a modest problem. The 'fix' has turned out to a serious problem. Maybe now the programmers will be allowed enough resources to fix it properly.

We can hope at any rate. In the meantime I've mostly just stopped flying in GSF and gone to leveling tank-ish alts.

No we shouldn't be doing their jobs for them (unless they're paying us), but I think you may underestimate how difficult it can be to get a computer to do what any grown human can easily do at a glance.

 

Computers can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division very rapidly. Turning that ability into something that resembles intelligent decision making, for instance figuring out if Fliesintorocks really isn't contributing or is just a really bad pilot in a bomber, is not all that easy. It's even worse, because the computer will do exactly what you tell it to do and not the really obvious thing that you meant it to do and which any halfway sensible person would have understood the context and gotten right.

...

I dont really need a lesson on what a computer can and cant do. I have been a professional software developer for 12 years

The extremely lazy fixes on everything lately (not just gsf) can only mean one of two things. Either they have severely cut the team down or they have focused the real devs on new content and they have the scrubs doing maintenance.

I got the "you are now AFK" message less than 3 seconds after scoring a kill, and then "you are no longer AFK" when I died a few seconds later. Like you said, it's fubared.

I get this message a lot now in regular fighters (not just GS or bombers). Even though I'm using the mouse to fly and the mouse buttons to shoot, unless I use one of the keyboard keys the game thinks I've gone AFK. The delay is obviously shorter than standing on the fleet and I'd bet credits to dustcrepe the issues of the OP and this are linked to the changes in the anti-non-contributor system.