Avian Gamers Network

Friday, April 1st 2005

Welcome back to Blair's Blog on Combat Upgrade. My name is Grant McDaniel (aka Rogue_5) and I am the Project Manager for the SWG Combat Upgrade. I wanted to take advantage of this blog and give you all some more information about some of the things going on with Combat Upgrade. (Please don't tell Blair I stole his blog.)

Last night we opened up one of our Test Center servers giving everyone the first peek at what we have been doing with Combat Upgrade. We have been getting a lot of very useful feedback from everyone and are working very hard to sort through it all so that we can understand what you like and what areas we need to improve upon. Currently we are asking that everyone focus on the level 1 - 15 mobs Tatooine. Soon we plan on asking people to move to other starting planets and to start working their way up to more mid-level mobs.

One important part of this blog is to answer some of the most frequent questions we are getting about the Combat Upgrade changes. So here are the latest questions of the day:


1. Why is there no longer an auto-attack?

Actually there is still a way to do auto-attacks, though it no longer is a default auto-attack. We now give you the ability to decide what ability you would like to use as your auto-attack. Just Ctrl left click on a combat ability icon on your toolbar and it will become your looping auto-attack.



2. How do I achieve the "maxed character health" of 3000?

Under the new system, as your character combat level increases, so will your total health. Your character's combat level is determined by the number of combat related skill boxes that you have. Additionally doctor and combat medic skill boxes will count towards this level. So as you gain these combat related skill boxes you will be able to gain health up to the cap of 3000.



3. What defensive options will pure non-combat players have at their disposal?

Personal Shield Generators will be available and can be used by any profession, both combat and non-combat related. They are meant to give you a reasonable amount of protection for a short period of time. You can get personal shield generators from your friendly local Armorsmiths.



4. Is lightsaber now to be considered "energy" with a special effect of "lightsaber" or will it continue to be its own damage type altogether?

Lightsabers are now considered energy and they will have an additional elemental damage type based on the color of the crystal you used.



5. Is this the final rate of progression for gaining XP?

No, absolutely not. We realize that the current rate is too slow and we will be tweaking it over the next few weeks as work on balancing combat continues.



What we are we doing today?

Right now we are working on getting lower level creatures available to fight on Naboo and Corellia so that players can start to spread out across more worlds. Additionally, we are working on fixing any major combat ability problems and are working very hard to on the balancing of mid level combat. And of course we are gathering all of the feedback provided by the players on the test server so that we can work on bug fixes and any balancing and tweaks that need to be made.

Well, that's it for now. Keep an eye out because I may just take over Blair's blog again very soon.

Grant "Rogue_5" McDaniel
SWG Project Manager



Monday, March 28th 2005

Greetings...

Welcome to Blair's Blog on Combat Upgrade (CU). Every few days I'll give you a unique insight into what's happening with CU, what the next step is, and respond to some of your questions.

A note: Nothing here is set in stone. There will be changes based on design philosophy, playtest experience, and your feedback.

First, we posted the first of the combat upgrade documentation last Friday, and the thread is over 110 pages last time I checked. That's a lot of feedback! Thank you! Thunderheart and Tiggs worked to compile the thread into the top points for me, and I'll be responding to it over the next few days. We're also working on releasing additional documentation so everyone has a better understanding of all the changes. Expect to see more shortly.

An answer to an important question: Why are we doing combat upgrade? Many people are upset by the scope of the changes we are making. Many folks feel like the proposed changes will significantly change something they love. I understand. So why are we moving forward?

The answer is that the positives will outweigh the negatives when it is all done. Think about the original design of CU and how it was going to work.

* Players will have 3 pools: health, action, and mind.
* Players will have special moves that can do special actions on one or more of these pools.
* Professions will generally be better at targeting one of the pools overall.
* Players will expend points to execute special actions.

It's the last statement here that is the problem. Essentially, we are in a situation where you must do damage to yourself in order to execute special actions! Compound that with the following points:

* Players can wear armor where over 90% of damage is mitigated.
* Players can receive buffs that increase their overall health by more than 100%
* Crafters have created weapons where many weapons operate at their maximum rate of fire of once per second.

So, we are in a situation where some players must kill themselves in order to execute specials. Additionally, lots of players mitigate over 90% of the damage applied to them. How can we balance content and make combat fun when this is the case? If we gear toward the "with armor folks", everyone who doesn't have armor gets slaughtered. If we gear toward "non-armor folks", people with armor walk through the game and have no challenge.

We want to completely upgrade and improve the combat system inside a live game and replace it with something that will be more compelling, offer more choices to more people, and ultimately be more fun for everyone. If we aren't making the game more fun, then we are not living up to our commitment to our players -- this is a game after all.

On to the Questions of the Day: Questions you asked over the weekend based on the document we published Friday.

1. What's going to happen to all the existing items?
* We are going to convert all existing items to what they need to be. In some cases, the functionality of an item no longer exists, so we will adapt it to make it useful under the new system. Stims (Stimulants) fall into this category. Many of you are concerned about weapons. In many cases the speed and damage values of your weapons will change. As part of the conversion, we are maintaining the scale of all the weapons across the servers. This means, that if you had one of the most powerful weapons on the server before CU, you will still have one of the most powerful weapons on the server after CU. Though it is likely the stats will have been altered.
2. Is combat level going to vary by profession, implicitly recognizing that some professions are more capable than others, or is the intent to have all combat professions be roughly equal in value (though obviously different in execution)?
* The answer is the latter. All combat professions will be roughly equal in value, though different in execution. Note that I'm not saying all professions will do the same damage per second. There will be variations across professions but they will be balanced.
3. Will we be getting detailed information about the skills before we re-specify how we want our character's stats redistributed (respec)? Or, will we get a trial period (say, a week or so) when we can re-spec at-will to try everything out?
* We realize how important this issue is, so let me say what we hope to do, and add the disclaimer that we haven't done it yet, so it may change. We are currently working toward the idea that you will have time to play with your new skills and have the option of trying out different combinations. We don't know how long this will last, but I like your idea of letting players experiment with different iterations for a week before needing to make a final choice.
4. Entertainers in the CU... Is the intent for entertainers to have an actual combat role?
* Personally, I am not for this. I am of the belief that one of the gems of SWG is that we have social professions that have the ability to be successful without resorting to combat. There is no change to this philosophy from a CU point of view.
5. Please keep the particle effects sensible for the Star Wars universe. The Death Star had a big special effect for winding up a shot, but not much else did.
* This is a difficult balance. We all want cooler, more compelling effects, but as you point out we don't want "magic" for the game. It's a delicate balance, one we are trying to protect.

What are we doing today: We're gearing up for our next playtest which will be a mid level adventure fighting all manner of Tusken Raiders. We've got our base round of AI changes complete. Our AI teams of Matt Bogue, Pete Warner, and Jeff Freeman have worked hard to rework lots of the existing AI and take it to the next level. In a future update, I'll describe some of the inner workings of how AI actually works behind the scenes.

For today, they will finish the work needed to get AI special attacks in the game. This is slated to be done today, with a pass on adding the healer and grenadier types later this week.

That's it for today. See you next time.

Blair
Producer