Community Q&A – April 27th 2012 Blog Discussion

Or you could give them time to figure out "such important issues," yes?

Good Q and A.

Terrible community.

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions for the community. There are many of us who do appreciate that this is a difficult tight-rope act and we thank you for it.

Obviously the only thing most really care about (Unless your on the fatman) is Server Transfers... And I cant believe how happy I am with what they have disclosed, I honestly thought they were living in a dream world and refused to admit they needed server transfers, at best I thought that at some time down the line they would say "Maybe server merges sometime next year". But this is good news I didn't read the other Questions lol.

It was a complex thing to design...2 months ago, if they don't have a clear design set in stone by now how much more patience should we have, I have payed and given BW my support for 5 months and now they are telling me to wait a month or two more, during which me and my guild can't re-roll to keep our selfs occupied and later have our legacies and mains transfered to the destination we choose, instead we are supposed to sit around doing nothing or PvP vs the same 20 people.

Before you say that they can't allow transfers anywhere, if we re-roll on a high population server today and have our mains transfered there at a later date will not change the playing population on the heavy server in any way shape or form, it simply changes the number of characters available to us on said server. To do that though we would have to pay extra...for a feature we effectively payed for already through our continued support by subscribing to the game.

It's a slap to the face to say the least.

QFE.

I wanted to step down and say that from my point of view this is what people are expecting.


...........Ex: server population/character transfer. People are disappointed it's not coming earlier but at least we now have word it's coming soon™.


On that very subject:

• Make sure to help balance faction population doing so.
• Fix the friend list so we can add players offline.
• Use it to make legacy be (optionally) servers wide, as players should not be penalized for creating characters on separate servers.
• Add a legacy ignore feature both in game and on the forums.
• Close a few least populated servers and merge them.

Now on the others entries:

Rakghoul Plague
...........The event did not felt SW to me, more Wowish/horror movie. Why choose such background especially since it's the first one and not even Halloween? Will other events be more Star Warsy?
Also why remove the vendor after the event, contrary to what's done in others MMO, especially since the event did not last long, wasn't well promoted (forums vs in game or real email) and the removal was announced only a few hours ahead. Players are still expecting an answer on that.
Also was PvP tagging intended to promote PvP on PvE servers? Wasn't it obvious it would lead to griefing?
Just a note: I found the event fun but not tailored for more casual gamers and not, once again, fitting SW that much.
Hint: you should have done rewards different on the Republic to encourage players to roll on the other side

Social Armor, Unify color for companions
...........A good start, top that with hiding head slot on companions and choosing to display either hood or helmet or both, please
Also at this point the mods management is a pain, UI related. Not only it needs way too many clicks and inventory room but also we have to maintain a separate spreadsheet to manage/compare them through our companions and characters.
BTW I would love to be able to hide shoulder pads and cloaks and really dye gear.

Dual specs/ group finder:
...........Good, just make sure to have cross server LFG be optional
For dual specs you want the switch also change the UI and key bindings

Playable species:
...........Good to hear even if I have the feeling they'll be humanoid head changes. So if not things like Wookies or Ithorians make sure to say so to the players way before hand so they won't be much disappointed and will be pleased with your choices instead.
WTB (in xpak) a droid specie/class.
And have legacy specie switches after character creation and more characters slots.

Datacrons
...........Legacy datacron unlock, appreciated.
A datacron visible in the open, does no makes sense. Maybe replace them with something more appropriate and move datacrons in hidden places or burry them and have players be able to sense (force users) or detect it on a with a specific radar activated filter.

Operation frames/UI
...........You guys did a great job on the UI in 1.2. As a (fair) UI modder on my spare time I know quite a bit about the deal Ok we can argue all that should have been @launch + UI mods, thanks none the less!
For now the main requests (apart mods), seems to be:

• Copy/save key bindings
• Separate UI frame for buffs/debuffs
• Add the chat UI to the edit mode
• Toggle for avatars pic & frame display
• Group and manage UI elements at once
• Dock UI element
• Improve the MAP UI

And for disabled/color blind people

• Differentiate more the colors (ex: the well known bluish rare loot vs normal and red/green class force fields)
• Remove hard coded key bindings
• Add mouse look toggle

On the UI side I'd appreciate:

• Right click + [modifier key: shift?] to quick equip a companion with a piece of gear
• [modifier key: shift?] + space bar: to directly skip dialogs to dialog choices (obviously for already done content, at least for me).
• Being able to change the font client side. Yours is too bold and not easy to read.

Final word: thanks for finally stepping in. Keep it this way, tune down the overdone features and especially, (no pun intended) try more not to look like venting yourselves in the marketing communications, well at least until you bring this MMO up to the main AAA ones ; polish an content wise.

Agreed. I tend to lose my temper with the people who get SO nasty with the devs at every opportunity. This is still a very young game and there's going to be some growing pains, but people should just relax a little and realize that they are paying attention to what the community is looking for, even if it's something they need some time to accomplish.

I enjoy the game. There's plenty I'd love to see added and/or changed but it's still a solid good time to me.

From "Known Issues for 1.2" in customer service forums:
From Q/A post:
Too bad this does not work for hard mode flashpoints or ops as via the "Known Issues" and multiple threads complaining about this. My question that I submitted last week was "When was this going to be fixed" and it seems we are still waiting on that.....

I was wondering if we will ever get guild star ships?

So, still not addressing the question about the massive performance issues thanks to your slapdash coding, despite it being the most frequently raised problem in all the forums. The people paying to play your game have apparently done more to identify the causes of these issues than you have. Yet you continue to sit there silent and inactive. The only responses given in these threads are from parrots who recommend things that other players have already posted. Are ever you going to give us something more than "it's being looked into"? Or do you guys just not give a damn any more and hope it just goes away?

So since PvP got the 1.2 shaft, and the 1.3 patch is about 'more legacy', when exactly were you guys going to tell us that the PvP department got laid off?