Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by Soandsoso

Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by Omnifish

 

So has SWTOR failed for you as a player because you didn't need to care about the player next door? 

No, for me TOR has been more fun than I've ever had in an MMO before. I don't care what the "crowd" thinks, as their not the ones paying my sub. All games get old at a certain point and I know there will come a time when I decide to take a break from it. I know a lot of people on this site think MMOs should be a place to live a second life in for years and years, but I never have., If I quit TOR tomorrow I will not consider my time spent a failure. I just don't get the mentality of some people that think that just because they quit after leveling a character to max and playing for months that their time spent was wasted because they didn't feel like spending the rest of their gaming life there.

What you describe is a single player RPG. MMO's aren't designed to be played for a few months and then move onto something else.

Funny, because that is exactly what most players do.

 

and that should tell us something maybe

Whether people today play mmo's for a few months and then move on doesn't really matter; EA didn't plan on them moving on (see their statements in the last quarterly results etc.).

Was SWTOR a 'bad' game - I don't believe so; not everyones game of course but not a 'bad' game.

But not a game to play for 'a long time' and in that sense it has failed as an 'mmo'. More bugs / misisng features than it should have had for sure probably because EA agreed with LucasArts that it had to launch by year end; probably a penalty as well because LucasArts could have agreed with SoE to keep SWG going longer.  Disappointing but not a disaster.

But not a game to play for 'a long time' and in that sense it has failed as an 'mmo'.

A B2P game with paid for DLC and a small yearly charge for the co-op stuff would have worked much better imo. 

Remains to be seen what EA say on Monday at their results.

Originally posted by Omnifish

 

 

So has SWTOR failed for you as a player because you didn't need to care about the player next doo

 

EDITED, INVISIBLE INK

Originally posted by Sandbox

Originally posted by Omnifish

Fundamentally it's my view that the focus ona very insular story is why this game doesn't earn more subs from me. It's a design flaw that I didn't realise till I played other MMOS again/or new. 

I don't want to be rude, but have to ask...  you heard no warnings about this before you bought the game?

You don't want to be rude - I find that hard to believe. 

If you didn't want to be rude, you wouldn't question someone's insight. You would merely keep it to yourself. 

Originally posted by Omnifish

It's a terrible thing to say, I defended the game against many people and in many ways I was right too.  I did enjoy my time playing, I still beleive a lot of people hated the game for who developed it rather then what it was. Saying that, I was wrong, I'm sorry, I thought the game would sustain me more long term then it did as a Bioware fan since BG1, (and I don't really support any other developers, I have a product based mentality).  Since I played EQ1 for 4 years COH for 3 years and WoW for 5 years I have had longevivity in MMO's before, I expected SWTOR to last me longer. 

 

I subbed for three months and thats up now, I won't be going back.  Why is that? I'm not so sure really, I do belive Bioware are doing there best but I can't shake the opinion that KOTOR 3 would have been the better option.  The game lacks something that makes me feel like I ,'have', to play, whether it's the uninspiring classes or the surronding gameplay of, 'kill smash quests', that I resent, but know I have to complete to do the class quests.

The question I have though is, was something like Bioware's approach to MMO's ever going to work? I never considered it before, but keeping everything so insular in terms of my character and how they were doing, rather there there interaction with the world, was a major problem.  I have been playing TERA and GW2 recently and though they lack in the personal story department area, what they both do well is that they bring something different to a world I share with other people.  It's also a world I have to group with others to succeed, something I feel I'm rewarded for.  Maybe it's new gameism, I won't be able to tell for a while, but I feel a sense of engagement with those worlds, espcially my limited play session with GW2.

 

So has SWTOR failed for you as a player because you didn't need to care about the player next door? 

It could have worked if they:

1) Provided multiple leveling paths to make rolling alts more fun

2) Shipped with a group finder tool (Flashpoints and Ops)

3) Shipped with multiplayer 3D combat

4) Shipped with incentives to join and build guilds

5) Fixed combat before releasing

6) Restricted voiceovers to class and main planet quests.  Too much dialogue was written for this game in the area of menial quests

The game was released too soon.  The games main problem is end game, not the class quests.

The game as released was fine as a B2P game.

I also wanted and expected this game to last for longer than it did. It was the most fun leveling in an MMO I've had in a while with my first character. Leveling a second character though was more painful than in many MMOs I have played. This was a game that should have revolved around having multiple characters. The legacy system is proof that at least some of the developers felt that it should too. So why did they only have one leveling path ? That is probably the biggest downfall of the game design in terms of longevity. For a game that is supposed to give you "choice" you end up having NONE in where you go.  You follow the same sequence of planets regardless of class. Even comparing the Empire versus the Republic the leveling path is near identical after level 20.

The other major problem is the LFG and PvP. 1.2 ruined PvP, it just killed that entire aspect of the game. You can argue it did not, but after trying to play through it for a couple of weeks it definitely killed it for me. Which is a shame because I actually enjoyed the PvP a lot up to that point. It was so much better than WoW even with the terrible Illum. But the lowered rewards on a loss regardless of personal contribution(why?) , the fact that the match would go forward with less than a full team (why?),  and the tuning that made everyone explode and become unhealable even with full battlemaster gear. Just why? They had it reasonably well balanced and there was a fairly large community that enjoyed it where it was (fairly large being you could actually get a full team on both sides and there wasn't just one PvP game going, which was not the case on my server after 1.2 had been live for a week). Still, it would have been bearable with a cross server queue so that you didn't have the same matchup for 8 games in a row... which did not go live.

So from someone else that was subscribed for more than the first month, top 5 reasons for cancelling.

1) The number one, driving force for my cancel was server population. I was on a server that was live on launch which was picked by the guild creator and the population was never so much that on republic you would see more than 30 people on a planet. And THAT was at launch. Now you would be lucky not to be alone on most planets. Fleet usually has less than 40. It's just empty, and it makes doing any PvP or Flashpoints nearly impossible, especially on off peak hours.

2) Lack of options for leveling. For a game priding itself on it's different storylines, the choice to have a linear leveling path was stupid. It's the only thing I can call it, though stupid probably isn't strong enough. Especially after nerfing the experience gains from space combat and PvP.

3)PvP balancing in 1.2 . One of the worst, widest hitting "balance" tweaks I have seen. It affected so many classes and so badly hit healers and new players that it just killed off the supporting numbers of players you have to have so you don't sit for 40 minutes waiting for a game to pop only to be outnumbered 8 to 5. Being a healer they needed to tune it some, but they way overshot. Just atrocious management of "new" season of PvP.

4) Gear grind. I really got sick of it in WoW, and then they do it again. Tiered , steeply tiered especially, gear progression needs to die. There need to be other ways of advancing the character than purples that are more shiny than the last purples. It needs to go. If there was anything in the MMO genre that I think is deterimental to a lasting "end game" is that equipment becomes completely obsolete with every patch. Upgrades are fine, but there needs to be more.

5) Pace of the game. This is something that is hard to substantiate and give a solid set of causes for, but to me the amount of time you just spend running around was really high. The spacing of the quests, the quest flow, the amount of time it took to kill things in a flashpoint, etc... it just felt really slow. This becomes laughably tangible to me after playing Tera where even though the quests are hardly worthy of the name, it progresses you through an area with so much less running around which removes SO MUCH of the tedium for me.

I think there is a real mistake in the game design.

If you take games like vindictus, everything instance is good because it has a player hub to start from.

But with Swtor it's from an much more "open" world, everything instanced.

This is a real mistake in game design, it spread the players away from each other. With even more than hundreds of people on the server all planet still feel pretty much empty and liveless.

The group instance were really fun, i played about 2 month of the game and I could group a couple of times.

All the other times i gave up looking for a group for a specific instance because after 40 min shouting on the fleet, we were still with 2 or 3  player in the group.

This also was bad for  the game. Lot of player coming from WoW and can't group easily, ouch...