Big changes are here
Posted: Fri Oct 24, 2003 5:51 pm
The big changes have been announced. Here is what was posted to the SWG forums which you can find by following this link:
<a href=\"http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=7098#M7098\">http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=7098#M7098</a>
Starting off, I'd like to say that there are a lot of questions and opinions in the first part of this topic. I'll be pulling questions and some of the constructive opinions from the boards and getting you some dev answers as soon as I can. For now, I'd like to address the logical conclusion of this Creature Balance and how it is going to effect the Creature Handler Profession.
Players have seen a rise in pet usage over the past few weeks because obviously, having a pet in a Massively Multiplayer game has a fantastic advantage. Players with pets essentially get their own private MOBs (Mobile Object) to fight with them and for them. It's a player's own personal tank and it's a boost to damage and attack, a blocker for attackers and the list of advantages go on. With that being said, that's all fun stuff, so we want to keep it in and keep it fun, but make it balanced. If you are curious, there is an easy way to test how imbalanced this can get. If a player and their pet can do a whole lot of things that a two players CAN'T do, then something is wrong. Otherwise, pets become replacements for multiple players. Go out with your friends who are Creature Handlers or who have really powerful pets and play the differences with them.
Another issue that is being addressed is that Non-Creature Handlers have pets that are of such level and ability that it is a free pass into higher level content. Those two advantages alone are an invitation for every player to have pets. In any MMO, that invitation passes by word-of-mouth like yelling \"fire\" in a crowded theater and it cause a stampede.
These are great advantages to have and a lot of players are leveraging these advantages (a huge number actually). Now, in the rush to claim this glorious, imbalanced prize, players are hitting the Creature Handler Skill tree pretty hard. Players are smart and they talk to each other and what's happened is that players are exploiting the Creature Handler Skill Tree by taking ONLY the left-most two columns to get the pets and that's it. So for the cost of two skill trees, players are getting full pet access. That bargain is too good to be true and it demeans the CH profession because they work through the whole tree without being rewarded much of an advantage.
Let me be clear here: it is not the Creature Handler Profession that is over-powered per se. It is the Creature Handler �dabblers� that are using two specific skill trees (in conjunction with out of balance creatures) to give over-powered boosts to other professions.
The goal of the change to the CH profession is the idea of reserving power to players who _truly_ master being a creature handler and make it so they have to really invest in all the skill boxes while reducing the power of \"dabblers\" and people spending the bare minimum to get the advantages of having powerful pets.
So here are the proposed changes.
To compensate for the lop-sided power-progression (two trees giving you more powerful pets and the other two trees only giving you the ability to train the pets with commands that are of questionable utility since you can just get a fully-trained pet from someone else) the skills have been re-distributed across the skill tree. Also, there used to be six different skillmods which determine whether or not you can tame or call a particular pet. That will be changed and now there will be only one skillmod which will tell players what level pet they can summon.
-- click the reply link to read the rest --
<a href=\"http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=7098#M7098\">http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=Developers&message.id=7098#M7098</a>
Starting off, I'd like to say that there are a lot of questions and opinions in the first part of this topic. I'll be pulling questions and some of the constructive opinions from the boards and getting you some dev answers as soon as I can. For now, I'd like to address the logical conclusion of this Creature Balance and how it is going to effect the Creature Handler Profession.
Players have seen a rise in pet usage over the past few weeks because obviously, having a pet in a Massively Multiplayer game has a fantastic advantage. Players with pets essentially get their own private MOBs (Mobile Object) to fight with them and for them. It's a player's own personal tank and it's a boost to damage and attack, a blocker for attackers and the list of advantages go on. With that being said, that's all fun stuff, so we want to keep it in and keep it fun, but make it balanced. If you are curious, there is an easy way to test how imbalanced this can get. If a player and their pet can do a whole lot of things that a two players CAN'T do, then something is wrong. Otherwise, pets become replacements for multiple players. Go out with your friends who are Creature Handlers or who have really powerful pets and play the differences with them.
Another issue that is being addressed is that Non-Creature Handlers have pets that are of such level and ability that it is a free pass into higher level content. Those two advantages alone are an invitation for every player to have pets. In any MMO, that invitation passes by word-of-mouth like yelling \"fire\" in a crowded theater and it cause a stampede.
These are great advantages to have and a lot of players are leveraging these advantages (a huge number actually). Now, in the rush to claim this glorious, imbalanced prize, players are hitting the Creature Handler Skill tree pretty hard. Players are smart and they talk to each other and what's happened is that players are exploiting the Creature Handler Skill Tree by taking ONLY the left-most two columns to get the pets and that's it. So for the cost of two skill trees, players are getting full pet access. That bargain is too good to be true and it demeans the CH profession because they work through the whole tree without being rewarded much of an advantage.
Let me be clear here: it is not the Creature Handler Profession that is over-powered per se. It is the Creature Handler �dabblers� that are using two specific skill trees (in conjunction with out of balance creatures) to give over-powered boosts to other professions.
The goal of the change to the CH profession is the idea of reserving power to players who _truly_ master being a creature handler and make it so they have to really invest in all the skill boxes while reducing the power of \"dabblers\" and people spending the bare minimum to get the advantages of having powerful pets.
So here are the proposed changes.
To compensate for the lop-sided power-progression (two trees giving you more powerful pets and the other two trees only giving you the ability to train the pets with commands that are of questionable utility since you can just get a fully-trained pet from someone else) the skills have been re-distributed across the skill tree. Also, there used to be six different skillmods which determine whether or not you can tame or call a particular pet. That will be changed and now there will be only one skillmod which will tell players what level pet they can summon.
-- click the reply link to read the rest --