Wildwa
04-06-2005, 05:15 AM
<DIV>1. Mindset: Sony is ignoring Rangers because they think that the subclass has filled with Legolas/Aragorn-wannabes that will never see their 40's until at least a year after launch. It is <EM>very</EM> true that these people exist, but they are <STRONG>in addition to</STRONG> the normal number of players that would choose a class. I see plenty of respectable Rangers, as many as I see respectable people of any given class, but I also see plenty of 12 year-old morons who think they're awesome because they're like the guy in the movie.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>SOLUTION: If SoE's mindset is that it can mostly ignore Rangers because a very small number of Rangers will ever see high levels, they should ditch that mindset and get to work!</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>2. Ranger code-writing assignments: SoE distributed the assignments to program the various skills based on level range rather than skill type. If they did this, they made a grave mistake. While it is true that the game should vary from tier to tier, separating skills of the exact same type between different programmers virtually ensures that you will have to do PLENTY of debugging. The reason I think this is a problem is that there are many low-level skills that have the exact same functionality as their high-level companions, but the high-level skills do not work.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>SOLUTION: SoE doesn't necessarily have to go completely object-oriented if they're concerned about efficiency, where each skill would inherit attributes from a super-object, but they should at least have a template from which a programmer may copy-paste skill code from. Once they copy the code, they can just change the necessary variables that affect damage or accuracy and leave the rest of the mechanics alone. Since the game is no longer in its pre-release phase, I would say that they should use the functional low-level skills as the template and copy-paste from there.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>3. Game environment: This most definitely is a problem for at least one thing about Rangers. Agility and combat skills, as everyone knows, do not function properly. They are not a specific part of the Ranger class, as all classes have SOME defensive arts, including mages. Problems here are very complicated to fix, since a change to accomodate for one class changes things for every class.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>SOLUTION: As a temporary fix, place class-specific checks inside the game environment methods. Increase the rate at which defensive arts take place for any and all classes that do not avoid damage properly. This is a bit of hard-coding, and it may be discarded later, but it will hold players who have been handicapped because of the agility nerf over until someone comes up with a better solution.</DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV>If anyone else can think of anything, please add on to the post.</DIV>