Friday with Means - December 4th, 2008

[crattey]

It boggles the mind that you think Sil ran off to AoC in order to avoid your whining.

Hardly, it's just that whatever promises Sil made left along with him and it feels like we have to start from the ground up again. (Not that we ever got anywhere with Sil, really, other than having acknowledge our concerns)

[Technogen]

Means, due to the difficulty the dev team is experiencing with the mines for engineer, I'd like to suggest that you change this to a hand grenade instead of a mine. This suggestion originally proposed by IHaveHugeNick but I feel to cut down on dev time and make the device work properly that the grenade option would be best.

Thread in engineer forums discussing this option. OLD
Thread in engineer forums discussing this option. NEW

[Esproc]

About the changes to ICC Shuttleport,

Will that mean robot junk is back in and if so could we have Antonio (and/or the side vendors who don't really sell much) offer the items to tradeskill junk armor?

Granted the QLs would be a bit limited by character lvl but some classes already have le that ups tradeskills and it'd be nice to be able to use them on SOMETHING in there.
Or possibly a quest mob who will make it for you.

Maybe make neutral newbies able to see both of the sided newbie channels?
Or allow both sides to use the neutral one.
Fairly often you'll see someone asking for help on an otherwise empty newbie channel
while the other 2 are full of discussion (and people who may be able to help).
Those who didn't wish to see a channel have always been able to turn it off but for someone trying out a new game talking to yourself in a 'public' channel can be kind of discouraging.

Also some incentive to get people teaming on the island would be kind of nice.
Making the alien ship on the isle work like an LE team mission would be interesting.
More dialog for Unicorn Fixx?
Maybe have the Medic offer team missions (so what exactly is on the other side of that door on the back of the island?).

I'm sure this is a very low priority with all the new content and rampant pestilence plaguing the team but at least a few people would appreciate something like this.

[Snakebite]

Good job keep it up.

The skies look great, not like the sludge we have up there at the moment.

Well, the Terraforming plants haven't stopped, it's bound to get better one day! ^^

[Lupusceleri]

Heya Means, chiming in for a bit again (I'm kinda on a break-thingie for now).

As for the engine, I have one big question. Will the "new" Anarchy Online get native support for Linux and/or Macs, since Ogre is apparently an opensource and crossplatform engine? I mean it shouldn't be THAT much trouble to compile the thing two or three times (one for win, lin, mac) right? Correct me if I'm wrong here, because I'm a noobcake at developing software.

Then as for the agents. What nanos WILL we get after all now, besides the fear/knockback related nanos being FPable? Will you give us enough other nanos to make another mimic than Doc actually viable?

[MajorOutage]

It boggles the mind that you think Sil ran off to AoC in order to avoid your whining.

Doesn't matter why he left, just that he did.

Hardly, it's just that whatever promises Sil made left along with him and it feels like we have to start from the ground up again. (Not that we ever got anywhere with Sil, really, other than having acknowledge our concerns)

Wait...you fell for his patronizing? lol

[Ayria]

Note: Calling me an "incompetant ass-monkey", while admitedly is extremely amusing, does nothing to quantify what exactly, if anything, you would like to see changed in your/someone else's nanos. Let's work this out together to make sure it doesn't bother us for years to come.

Never have I seen "incompetent ass-monkey" used so professionally

Good news as always, pics look great.

/signs on wanting to know about Agent FP updates...

[Ktaul38]

Wondering when (and where) I can pre-order booster ...... any word?

[Autohead]

Wondering when (and where) I can pre-order booster ...... any word?

It should be available for pre-order by Summer 2011.

[erozc]

Means, due to the difficulty the dev team is experiencing with the mines for engineer, I'd like to suggest that you change this to a hand grenade instead of a mine. This suggestion originally proposed by IHaveHugeNick but I feel to cut down on dev time and make the device work properly that the grenade option would be best.

Wow, that sounds very selfless - can it be?

[Rulzie]

I have one big question. Will the "new" Anarchy Online get native support for Linux and/or Macs, since Ogre is apparently an opensource and crossplatform engine?

This depends on what they are using for sound/input/networking etc. (since OGRE is just a 3D graphics library, hence the name: Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine), and even if they use cross-platform libraries for all these, it's still not just a matter of recompiling it, if it isn't designed to be cross-platform from the get-go, it becomes increasingly hard to make it cross-platform as the codebase increases.

Also, yeah, great update as always.

[Gothy]

Still waiting to hear what developments the non-CC priviledged folks can look foward to.

[flyinguns]

What did rangeds advys got with the new booster?

[Boinky]

Something like a working market system or items transfer.

Market system doesn't work now? Or you mean the UNIQUE limitation? Item transfer other than > Hand to Fr00b alt > Hand to non-Fr00b alt? Or you mean for NO-DROPs?

[sturmalfar]

Means, I hope your wife gets better soon...

Most of us also can't, for the love of god, figure out why you guys chose to leave current content broken, and just move on to adding new toys instead.

The same goes for all the new knockback and fear nanos.. isn't PvP already imbalanced enough? Wouldn't it be a more sound choice to try and smooth things out a bit and resolve current issues, rather than adding more potential imbalances?

Crattey... THANK YOU for saying that! As an example, there are fixer perks introduced FOUR YEARS AGO that never did what they were supposed to do. And no matter how much the fixer community has complained, it has fallen on deaf ears.
Means, are you listening? There have been EXTENSIVELY detailed suggestions (to wit: http://forums.anarchy-online.com/sho...d.php?t=244108 and http://forums.anarchyonline.com/showthread.php?t=533700). Do the developers even pretend to care about game balance anymore? I don't want new powers as a fixer. I just want a working and competitive toolset.

Market system doesn't work now? Or you mean the UNIQUE limitation? Item transfer other than > Hand to Fr00b alt > Hand to non-Fr00b alt? Or you mean for NO-DROPs?

Boinky, I'll speak for myself here, and not for ninor. You're not thinking large-scale enough. The market system has major failings and annoyances that have been detailed in many threads ALL OVER the forums, MANY MANY times. Off the top of my head:

<rant mode on>
1) No GMS terminal in player shops. Eventually a bank was placed in the player shops, after players complained for years! Why not a GMS? I would suggest a mini-GMS for only the shops within that particular city, but that would probably require extensive coding, whilst plopping down a GMS into the player shops is such a no-brainer. I don't comprehend why it has yet to be done.

2) When you look for items on GMS, you don't see ALL the items within a particular search if your search pulls up more than 30 items. For example, if you're looking for all the "Essence of" nanos for sale, you'll get a truncated list with examples for each, and not necessarily even the best priced ones. The list should be just like hotmail: allow the players to select a maximum amount of items (25, 50, 100), and if more than 100 come up, allow a "next page" link.

3) You can't TAB between fields in GMS.... That's ridiculous.

4) You can't have more than 21 items in your player shop at any one time. OK, let's get this straight - only PAYING players who can access the Lost Eden expansion (basically full accounts) have access to a GMS. And all we get is 21 items to sell at any one time??? At any given time, I have easily over 200 items that are worth selling in GMS, and I only have one main toon, at only level 174. I sell items on one alt as well, but that's enough headache for me. I refuse to resort to using multiple alts and trading to a froob alt items just to be able to have enough sellable items in GMS.

I can't imagine it's an issue of server resources. This is a TEXT database. If every player could sell 100 items, it wouldn't massively increase the server load, esp. some many players don't use their current shop to capacity (even at only 21 items), and a few don't use it at all.

If for some reason the 21 item limitation is hard-coded and would require extensive changes to implement, here's an easier (temporary, for now) solution: allow each toon to rent more than one store at a time. I've been to many orgs that have plenty of "This shop for rent" signs in them.

And look, you can keep 75 bags in your bank at any one time. Why not in your store?

5) Speaking of bags.... how come you can't see what's in a bag without it being in your inventory? If I could sell bags of stuff, if not on GMS, at least on direct sales to players - and they could SEE INSIDE THE BAG - it would make things much easier to trade. For that matter, why can I not see inside a bag that is in the bank without having to trade it to my inventory?

6) Why can you pull up one "shop" on your map at a time? I'd love to select multiple items from GMS and do a "shopping run", with each item I'm looking for listed. I don't need a GPS style "route optimization"... I can figure that out myself. But having to run back and forth from a city with a GMS to a player city, back to a city with a GMS, back to a player city (perhaps even to the SAME PLAYER CITY I JUST VISITED that has the item for me in ANOTHER SHOP IN THE SAME CITY) when I have 10 items to buy is seriously annoying. Yes, you can grid back to Newland from Neuts R Us, but it is still a unnecessary hassle.

7) I've had multiple occasions where I need multiples of a particular item, and lo and behold - a particular shop I stumble upon has multiples. But this is not listed on GMS if they sell the same item multiple times at the same price. So, there should be a "Quantity Sold" column on GMS.

Again, this list is on the spur of the moment, off the top of my head. People, feel free to contribute to this. If these suggestions are implemented, perhaps we could have a proper market-based economy.

In short, the graphics update is nice...new PvP environments are long overdue and also nice.... but what about the basics? Fix all the broken stuff... restore balance that was broken by SL, then AI, then LE, then 17.x "enhancements"... and only THEN "very carefully" upgrade content. I know, I know... "you can only please all the people some of the time, and the people some of the time." BUT>>>>> That's no excuse. Without a proper foundation, this game is a house of cards waiting to collapse. The cookie cutter setups elicited by the imbalances will only get worse as the game becomes more imbalanced. The graphics update will only increase the player base for a few months. If the fundamentals are not there, the population will decrease once again.

And, final rant.... WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY Y does Funcom insist on a internet provider who is WELL KNOWN to be horrible? If the game was consistently smooth perhaps more people would be paying players? Is this game such a loss of revenue that it can't even be given a proper backbone?

<rant mode off>

[Atheist]

What did rangeds advys got with the new booster?

What do advies get in general? So far there has been no news at all what any advy is getting.
The only thing close is "melee users may see an improvement soon" but that still is very 1 sided if
in fact it does go for melee advies also. It would be nice to see that FC would give something beneficial to each side. Possibly something specialized to each side. We're one of the only
classes that are dependent on only weapons for damage and yet haven't gotten a new
weapon buff. Maybe a new pistol/burst/fa buff for ranged and maybe a 1he buff for melee?

[ninor]

sturmalfar said it pretty much.

The minimum they should do is change the interface but somthing like WoW or other system would really make it work...

And about something "working" or not: Just because you can theoretically get something done underusing tool (maybe with workarounds for bugs) it's not working for me. If it is the efficient to use and proper way to aderess the user's need.. than it is working.

[Thymoglobul]

1) No GMS terminal in player shops. Eventually a bank was placed in the player shops, after players complained for years! Why not a GMS? I would suggest a mini-GMS for only the shops within that particular city, but that would probably require extensive coding, whilst plopping down a GMS into the player shops is such a no-brainer. I don't comprehend why it has yet to be done.

6) Why can you pull up one "shop" on your map at a time? I'd love to select multiple items from GMS and do a "shopping run", with each item I'm looking for listed. I don't need a GPS style "route optimization"... I can figure that out myself. But having to run back and forth from a city with a GMS to a player city, back to a city with a GMS, back to a player city (perhaps even to the SAME PLAYER CITY I JUST VISITED that has the item for me in ANOTHER SHOP IN THE SAME CITY) when I have 10 items to buy is seriously annoying. Yes, you can grid back to Newland from Neuts R Us, but it is still a unnecessary hassle.

These two points are the reason for the existence of the "portable GMS interface" that traders have. This is a small advantage but if you give it to everyone, you actually remove the advantage from the traders.
What you are asking is like "I am not a fixer but I want instant grid because it takes me time to get back to a city after mission" or "I am not a bureaucrat but I want to have access to my bank everywhere".
Just roll a trader and you'll have access to the GMS everywhere.

Most of the other points are not big problems for me: use the price min and max to narrow your search if you get more than 30 items in the search result. Come back to check your shop often and refill it if you feel that 21 shopping slots is too low. Sale at a bit lower price so that no items stays for ages in your shop.

[Lorddarcek]

WTB the new booster already.....

[SrslyNotEyo]

Friday with Means - December 4th, 2008

Friday with Means - Saturday December 6th, 2008

:O There's two days between Friday and Saturday!? GASP!?