Thursday, November 06, 2008

Not much to report...

Things have been rather quiet since the introduction of guild halls and I haven't had much to report.

I haven't had any huge tasks related to the expansion since my main focus had been the guild halls for past several months. However, I have been busy working on two other features that you should see in the next month or two. Unfortunately neither of them have been announced yet, so there isn't much I can say about them. One of the features is a new UI element that will give you insight into information that previously has remained somewhat of a mystery. I think everyone will really like this feature and I'm looking forward to it going live myself.

Other than that I've been working on the occasional bug fix or random new feature. Today I added a feature that many people have requested for houses and guild halls. This feature will allow anyone with Trustee access to return a No-Trade house item to it's owner through the mail system. I also added the item level to the Supply Depot window so you can sort the items by tier/level.

The Persona window was also expanded to include quite a bit more statistic data about your character. Some of these new stats are related to the expansion like Critical Mitigation but many of them are existing stats like Spell Cast/Recovery/Reuse percent.

That's about all for now. I'll try to post again as soon as I have more to add. Thanks for reading!

14 comments:

Barx Atthemoon, Warden of Tunare said...

Hmm have you been hanging around with Domino? 'Cause now you're being a tease. ;)

Are the new features expansion-related, or just other features that you've been working on that should be finished soon(tm)? (I use soon(tm) in the good sense, meaning you don't know quite when it'll be finished and go live, not in an ironic sense).

Greg Spence said...

Haha. ;)

Neither of these two features I'm working on are expansion related. One of them is scheduled to go out in it's own update sometime in December, and the other will go out with GU51 which is the update right after the expansion. However, I'm not sure if GU51 will be in December or January due to the holidays.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the update Greg. :)

As a long time player it's just kind of neat to hear things, even tease things from the folks that have their hands on the keyboard so to speak.

It helps keep the game exciting towards the end of the content that has been added and before the new content is introduced.

I would ask one thing that be looked at and expect no response and I will not bring it up again.

The group window. The ability to organize the group window so that I could put them in order of ... shall I say importance, would be great.


What I mean is that as it stands now, if a group is put together and say the tank turns out to be the top of the group window and as such by default is F1, but they get disconnected and now they are F6 when they reconnect it's a pain.

Yes I know I can go into the options and change the F-keys around but in the middle of a raid that can be difficult to do.

However being able to put group members in the group window in the order that one would like... well yes it's a pipe dream but I thought I'd mention it :)

Anonymous said...

Hey there Greg,
Long time no speak. I think that I am still recovering from those Warp Core Breaches, that all of us drank just a little too much of.

Anyway, since you were on your topic of the little features and what not that you drop into EQ2 I thought that I might drop you a note and see if you can find the time to tackle 2 items on my wish list.

First one: The ability to import a Friends List from another avatar. This way when you roll a new toon you can just type something like /importfriends "avatarName" and presto! You do not need to enter all of your friends and their alts…

Second: I touched base with you at Quark’s for this one, but it was loud and hard to explain. A custom command list (aliases).

Now the way I see it this could be done one of two ways: the ability to call a custom made macro from the command line would do the trick right there. Or, if you put a file in your eq2 root folder that held the custom commands. Such as Alias.txt and in that file your aliases:
/tell BobhasAReallyLongName = /tell bob
/g Pulling a %T to here, stay put! = /pull
Etc.
Anyway, good to see that you are still doing well and all of that, you signed up for those pilot classes yet?
Ryessin (Najena)

Greg Spence said...

Heya Ryessin!

The idea to import a friend's list from another account is a good one indeed. I'll try to look into that when I get time.

As far as your second request, take a look at the /alias command. I think it'll do exactly what you want.

Anonymous said...

Something I /feedbacked a while ago was the idea of a global /friend and /ignore list, so that regardless of what character you were on of an account, it would have all that information. There are some folks I just don't want to 'hear' in chat. Period.

In regards to the added stats to the Persona window, of course many of these have been done by custom UIs for a while, but there is a failing in the underlying dynamic data. For spell reuse, it only seems to display what is called 'ability reuse' - that which impacts beneficial and hostile spells as well as AAs. On my main, my reuse according to that dynamic data is 10, though my beneficial spells have 20 and my hostile have 21 if I add up the numbers from my items. You get similar results for spell cast haste, given that there are items that give separate hostile and beneficial rates.

Greg Spence said...

Wrapye,

We're aware of the issues with the spell cast/reuse/recovery stats. Those were added to dynamic data over a year ago before RoK came out with the idea of showing them on the Persona window. This exact issue is the reason why we decided not to add them because it could cause some confusion. The stats that we display are global modifications to all your spells. Other types of modifications that only affect specific abilities or a specific type of abilities (like beneficial) can't be shown because they don't affect every ability. Its basically the same as if you had an AA ability that reduced the cast time of 1 spell. We can't show that value in the global property. So for now people will just have to understand the difference. Since these numbers have been out for a year and many people are familiar with how they work, we decided to go ahead and add them to the persona window.

Anonymous said...

Hey Greg,

When you have time to look into the friends list import… hehehe, so 2010 ish. ;P

I remember playing with the /alias back in 2006, and I think that it does not persist, so any aliases that you setup are lost on log… however with the new Macro system, one macro could be created to run all /alias commands, will just have to run it each time I log on. Will give it a test tonight. Thanks for the reminder.

Ryessin.

Anonymous said...

In regards to the dynamic data, how much additional work would it be to include more granular dynamic data, so that there is a global spell reuse, a beneficial spell reuse and a hostile spell reuse. Clearly the internal code has them. It isn't like the player can't just look at his/her items and AAs to determine what those values are, so it isn't a normally hidden value (like hate value). Individual spell changes due to AAs are too granular and class specific.

Greg Spence said...

If its not a global change to all spells/ca's then its much more complex. Those values are not stored in a central location where we can just look quickly and see that you have X% decrease to cast time. We would have to loop over all of the effects on you analyzing each one to see what types of spells/abilities the modification applies to. And we'd have to do this every time a spell is applied or expires from your character.

If it had been relatively easy we would have solved the problem last year with RoK but unfortunately its not an easy problem to solve.

It would also be really messy to "hard-code" it to look for specific types of modifications like beneficial spells because there are so many other types of modifications we can do.

Anonymous said...

Where I am driving with this is that as it stands, the reuse value is kinda useless.

Take my main for example, which is a raiding coercer. +10 ability reuse from VP pants, +10 spell (beneficial and hostile) from mythical, +1 hostile from Usla's Bangle. If it weren't for the VP pants, the reuse value reported would be 0. There aren't a lot of items with ability reuse. Most, if not all, are from raid targets. Maybe ability reuse will be more prevalent in TSO, but I haven't seen any in the five weeks I've been in the beta. So it is something in theory would be nice to know, but in practice just doesn't mean much.

Greg Spence said...

So what are you suggestion, we take it out? It might not be helpful for your class, but it could be helpful to others. Third party UI's felt it was helpful enough to display it over the past year.

Making that number display all of the values is not possible. Not to mention it would be misleading because it would give a higher number but not all spells or abilities would benefit the same amount. You have to look at ALL the classes to see how we use these values. There are lots of AA lines out there that modify a specific spell, or spells that use a specific skill like subjugation. There is no way to display all of these data in a meaningful way. But to many people, knowing your base mod values will be helpful. Those values you see in your persona window will apply to all your spells/abilities.

Anonymous said...

I guess it is what it is, then. Perhaps some will find use for it, but I haven't on any of my characters - a mix of mages, fighters and scouts. At worst it is something cluttering the UI.

Anonymous said...

Hey Greg,

I just thought that I would follow up with the alias thing. Your right the alias command is just what I was looking for. Even though the aliases do not persist, the new Macro system that you guys rolled out a while back allows me to simply add all my aliases to a macro, and they are now just a click away when I log in.

Thanks again,
Ryessin