B
BadgerSmaker
Guest
Stratics will be doing an interview with Tony "Teesquared" Tyson on all things SWG, what should we ask him?
Post your questions here and we'll try and fit them in.
Here's a rough outline of what I plan to ask:
Q1. You've been both the SWG Producer and Technical Director for around 15 months now, in that time we've seen some SWG Dev staff move from SWG to to other SoE games and other studios. SWG seems to retain a core of dedicated Developers who are churning out some impressive content and fixes, what are the challenges in keeping the level of quality high and what is the team usually focused on?
Q2. The Witches of Dathomir content is now on Test Center which we assume will be "Game Update 19". We've seen the GCW Leaderboard, Fishing Leaderboard and Rare Loot system go live in the last two months, all badged as "Hotfixes" to "Game Update 17" with "Game Update 18" being the Galactic Moon Festival. What constitutes a "Game Update" these days and the associated marketing push that goes with them, often drawing more new and returning players to SWG?
Q3. We've heard from players attending the last Fan Faire that you've had DevH working on a server side spam filter to block out all those pesky "credit spammers", is this now nearing completion? Were you able to make any improvements to the chat system as part of this work, for example, will players be able to join chat channels on other servers?
Q4. There seems to have been a concerted effort by the Dev team recently to address some of the more dull and repetitive systems in SWG that lend themselves to being played via unattended macro. Pet Levelling and Reverse Engineering have both had a pass and code was added to the Rare Loot System to prevent drops going to unattended players. Do you have any other systems in your sights for similar treatment?
Q5. You've previously hinted at system that are in the Dev Roadmap for SWG such as "GCW 2" including "Space Invasions", "Unique Spawns", Player City improvements and profession updates for Officer, Entertainer, Chronicle Master and Storyteller. It seems like this will certainly keep you busy for the forseeable future, how do you prioritise which gets done first, how flexible is the Dev Roadmap and are there any particular challenges in reaching your goal of adding all this to SWG? How is work on all these new systems coming along?
Q6. "Game Update 18" introduced some of the first new emote animations available to players for a long time. Do you have any plans to add more of these? We've heard SWG roleplayers are after new emotes along the lines of /drink, /surrender, /liedown, /brandish, /ignitelightsaber and /handsonhips.
Q7. With such a busy Dev Roadmap, when do you get time to clean up any unfinished business such as the "Double Socket" exploit? How big a problem is this exploit given that the ability to "Double Socket" was only live for four hours?
Q8. Do you have any plans to address the huge GCW gains possible by Entertainers in GCW Invasions which result in making it trivial for Entertainers to top the GCW leaderboards? There is also an issue where Smugglers can deliberately and repeatedly fail the terminal slicing minigame to generate battle fatigue for Entertainers to cure, which can all be done unattended, any plans to resolve this?
Q9. One of the most common complaints from SWG Players seems to revolve around server side lag, especially on Starsider where the population has exploded since the Free Character Transfer. How much of this really is server side and what can players do to help your team isolate causes of recurring server side lag as they did with a recent fixes to Starsider, Chimaera and Farstar? How does the current popuation of Starsider compare to previous population levels over the years, is the server just at critical mass or can it cope going forward?
Q10. We've seen you attended a number of in-game player events recently, is this something that you enjoy doing? What kind of insight on the different server communities do you get from attending Events and what other activities do you enjoy in SWG?
Post your questions here and we'll try and fit them in.
Here's a rough outline of what I plan to ask:
Q1. You've been both the SWG Producer and Technical Director for around 15 months now, in that time we've seen some SWG Dev staff move from SWG to to other SoE games and other studios. SWG seems to retain a core of dedicated Developers who are churning out some impressive content and fixes, what are the challenges in keeping the level of quality high and what is the team usually focused on?
Q2. The Witches of Dathomir content is now on Test Center which we assume will be "Game Update 19". We've seen the GCW Leaderboard, Fishing Leaderboard and Rare Loot system go live in the last two months, all badged as "Hotfixes" to "Game Update 17" with "Game Update 18" being the Galactic Moon Festival. What constitutes a "Game Update" these days and the associated marketing push that goes with them, often drawing more new and returning players to SWG?
Q3. We've heard from players attending the last Fan Faire that you've had DevH working on a server side spam filter to block out all those pesky "credit spammers", is this now nearing completion? Were you able to make any improvements to the chat system as part of this work, for example, will players be able to join chat channels on other servers?
Q4. There seems to have been a concerted effort by the Dev team recently to address some of the more dull and repetitive systems in SWG that lend themselves to being played via unattended macro. Pet Levelling and Reverse Engineering have both had a pass and code was added to the Rare Loot System to prevent drops going to unattended players. Do you have any other systems in your sights for similar treatment?
Q5. You've previously hinted at system that are in the Dev Roadmap for SWG such as "GCW 2" including "Space Invasions", "Unique Spawns", Player City improvements and profession updates for Officer, Entertainer, Chronicle Master and Storyteller. It seems like this will certainly keep you busy for the forseeable future, how do you prioritise which gets done first, how flexible is the Dev Roadmap and are there any particular challenges in reaching your goal of adding all this to SWG? How is work on all these new systems coming along?
Q6. "Game Update 18" introduced some of the first new emote animations available to players for a long time. Do you have any plans to add more of these? We've heard SWG roleplayers are after new emotes along the lines of /drink, /surrender, /liedown, /brandish, /ignitelightsaber and /handsonhips.
Q7. With such a busy Dev Roadmap, when do you get time to clean up any unfinished business such as the "Double Socket" exploit? How big a problem is this exploit given that the ability to "Double Socket" was only live for four hours?
Q8. Do you have any plans to address the huge GCW gains possible by Entertainers in GCW Invasions which result in making it trivial for Entertainers to top the GCW leaderboards? There is also an issue where Smugglers can deliberately and repeatedly fail the terminal slicing minigame to generate battle fatigue for Entertainers to cure, which can all be done unattended, any plans to resolve this?
Q9. One of the most common complaints from SWG Players seems to revolve around server side lag, especially on Starsider where the population has exploded since the Free Character Transfer. How much of this really is server side and what can players do to help your team isolate causes of recurring server side lag as they did with a recent fixes to Starsider, Chimaera and Farstar? How does the current popuation of Starsider compare to previous population levels over the years, is the server just at critical mass or can it cope going forward?
Q10. We've seen you attended a number of in-game player events recently, is this something that you enjoy doing? What kind of insight on the different server communities do you get from attending Events and what other activities do you enjoy in SWG?