Glorified battlegrounds with no impact on the greater game as a whole so pretty useless really.  3 faction PvP needs to be designed into a game from the ground up not tacked on with sticky tape afterwards.

Fallout

Originally posted by dubyahite

Someone correct me if I'm wrong about this, because I'm not seeing any threads, but are they really going with a sub AND a cash shop?

 

I have been very cautious about getting interested in TSW because of Funcom's history. Lately though, it has been getting a bit more interest from me. The setting, factions, story, classless/levelless progression has all been grabbing my attention lately.

 

Really though? A cash shop and a regularly priced sub? I don't know if I can deal with that. I mean, any game would have to be some kind of crazy awesome good for me to tolerate that.  

 

When I pay a sub for a game, I expect to get access to everything the game has to offer. Maybe if the cash shop is 100% cosmetic would I be ok with it, but even then it really bugs me.

 

I'll be playing the weekend beta along with everyone else, if the game is really really good maybe I'll get over it, but right now I'm extremely dissapointed.

 

Am I crazy for thinking this way? What's the general opinion about this out there in mmorpg land?

No pay to win items and you can get everything that is in the cash shop in other ways apparently; youtube has vids on it if you want to check them out.

the ending isn't the end.  It's a way for EA to keep the players buying DLC.  If you check the savegame editor you will see that there are three states for the save after you decide which route to take, one for each of them including 'lives to fight another day'.  If this were really the games end then BW would have completely destroyed the ME universe with the destruction of the mass effect relays and with it any possibility of future ME games.

There are clues throughout the game that give hints to what is going on starting at the very beginning with that child.  The official forums are full of various theories but one post to my mind has probably got it right.  It states that Shepard is in fact indoctrinated but not completely; the choice to control the reapers is giving in to the indoctrination ( shep dead, reapers win).  The synthesis choice is simply doing nothing ( shep dead, reapers win).  The destroy the reapers option is fighting the indoctrination ( Shep lives, reapers are destroyed).  These outcomes would fit with the three states that the savegame can end up with. 

Think about when they are running towards the beam and get hit.  When Shep comes around he/she is not wearing armour, has a pistol that never needs to be reloaded and that takes out a marauder in just three shots; the same pistol that has no effect whatsoever on the keeper where he appears.  Look around before heading for the beam and everyone is dead; Anderson however states that he followed you into the beam and on the citidel he doesn't look like a reapers main weapon just gave him a makeover; even his uniform and cap are unsinged.  There are many hints but you will have to check the main forums as I'm not listing them all here.

If it's anything like the recent game of thrones SP game it will be the 2nd largest pile of crap this year; the SP game being the 1st.   

The major mistake that most developers make when implementing FFA PvP into a sandbox is lack of consequences.  A Sandbox as the article stated is a world created for the players to populate and evolve.  In order for this to be a success it must by definition mirror the real world in some aspects, and in the real world there are real consequences if you just walk up to a helpless kid and smash him across the head with a baseball bat ( in the virtual space of course this equates to griefing, noob killing or whatever you wish to call it ).   CCP went partway with Eve towards adding the consequences, with Concorde showing up to blow the crap out of you if you grief in high-sec space without good reason ( kill rights or war ) but they didn't take it far enough and that is why we see so much griefing going on in high-sec.  I just used Eve as an example but the concept is valid in any sandbox setting. 

The hard part of this is in deciding just how severe those consequences are; not severe enough and they do not act as the intended detterent, too severe and you lose players as the perp now sees himself as the victim and rage-quits.  Without these consequences in place though you end up with a low pop sandbox struggling to survive ( Darkfall ) where 90% of the sandbox elements are ignored in favour of the FFA bloodbath and grieffest.

Sounds good apart from constantly shouting out your build / skills etc. to the group;  Needing to discuss or call any type of game mechanic during a fight just breaks the immersion.

At least Yatzee tells it as it is regardless of EA's advertising budget, enjoy :)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/5323-Star-Wars-The-Old-Republic 

I remember before the release of L2 a large portion of the code wa supposedly stolen which led to exploits , bots, gold farmers under every rock etc.  Now Nc say that the source code for L3 has gone the same way.  Either NC has the worst security ever in the games industry or they release portions of the code on purpose ( afterall they didn't exactly rush to get rid of the farmers in L2 did they ).  This time however it seems that someone has had the nerve to actually use it in the production of another game instead of just finding the loopholes that can be exploited in L3 so out come the lawsuits.  Here is an idea NC, keep the bloody code secret you morons.

OP missed option four in his where do we go now list:  Saying that themeparks were a nice distraction but for a truly sustainable game it's time to go backwards to go forwards, back to the sandbox.

Originally posted by NeoCount

Originally posted by eric1000.

.......Anyone shouting for ToR to fail is asking for the MMO genre in general to slide into an obscurity of low budget titles.

 

And who said that's a bad thing? The age of obscurity and low budgets broguht us of some the best mmo's we've ever seen. The largest budget an mmo ever recieved was... that's right: SWTOR. Did all that cash help to create a better mmo? I think the answer is pretty clear here.

 

Actually you are wrong there.  You need to look at things in context.

When the likes of EQ1, DAoC, Ao etc. were made they were considered pretty high budget endevours and are still remebered fondly and still played.   Can you name me a couple of low budget titles from that era that can claim the same?

Investors are what drive the industry forward and if they are chased away from the MMO market then that market suffers as a result.

Here's something to think about before this thread devolves into an us versus them flame war.

If ToR becomes a resounding success then we can look forward to more of the same for the next millenium; and nobody wants that.

If Tor fails in grand fashion then investors will become nervous and development money will leave the MMO genre and plant itself into more secure projects; and nobody wants that.

The best thing that can happen is for ToR to be successful enough so that the investors see a small return on their investment but nothing spectacular.  A return that will keep them in the MMO space and ready to invest in new ideas as they come along.  Anyone shouting for ToR to fail is asking for the MMO genre in general to slide into an obscurity of low budget titles.

Originally posted by ukforze

As per usual we the EU get shafted once again, if its not release dates & centralised EU depts

for customers services, it maintenance at peak times to suit the americans gaming times, which

i think is an insult to a large part of their & every other games playerbase.

 

Servers went down at 10:00am & will stay down until 4:00pm WTF!? 6hrs.

6hrs!? what the hell are they doing for 6 bloody hours?

 

So far this game has consisted of 1-3hr ques allday everyday (unless you get on at 8:00pm)

now most of my precious gaming time is to be taken away only to have the game be handed

back later with a que of about 1-3hrs again...

 

Very dissapointing tbh 

 

/rant over

 

First of all I am playing on the Kellian Jarro server and have never had to wait in a queue.  Secondly you can't please all the people all the time; if they did Eu maintenance after the US one so that nobody got interrupted at primetime you would have EU players complaining that the Americans got the patches and updates before us.  As for the six hours; it's patch day not just routine maintenance and these always take longer.  Couple that with it not even being one month out the gate yet and you have your reason.

Turn off bloom in the preferences; this is badly optimised and eats system resources.

I would choose a completely original IP owned by the devs so that they could make their own vision without the constraints of existing lore.

Originally posted by tixylix

Why does every new MMO do this? It's hardly massive, we see all these massive fights in the CGI trailers so why can't we have that gameplay with thousands of people fighting for planets? Instead we're just given your traditional MMO and you're just split up into 100 player zones. I just don't class that as an MMO, EVE online is an MMO where you can have 2000 people in one zone, 100 is smaller than Joint Operations.

Don't forget the extra player that always shows up when you have thousands of players on screen at once, Mr.Lag

Originally posted by Amaranthar

See, each one of you don't "get it". How many times did you log on and go to a specific place just to meet up with friends to see what you could find to do? To talk about what's happening in the game world?

I have no doubts that each of you can reply with a "yes". But my entire point is that that was not the norm in SWG or any of the other games. At least after the game was established. One of you (sorry, should have made note of your name) made the comment that I must not have played early on. And that is true. I started SWG after a few months of release, but it was before the changes. If players acted that way in the beginning, they didn't anymore by the time I got there. And again, that's my point. The game's design, whether they called it "levels" or not, had the level gaps. Heck, they had levels of mats to go with it. That does not foster "Sandbox", it fosters level grind. And it divides the player base. And that's anti-social for most of the game, whether a few of you played socially or not. What you did wasn't the norm, because the norm was playing for level gaps, and that was by design.

Sorry but I get the impression that nothing we say will change your opinion and as of your experience with SWG I can only say that either you played the game for 5 minutes or you didn't actually play at all.  You didn't appear to know about wounds or fatigue and mats did not have levels as you put it, they had qualities;  what's more the quality of any particular mat, for instance a ferrous metal did not dictate who could use it.  If you wanted the highest quality mats you either went out prospecting or paid for what someone else was selling; some of the best mats may have been found on the more difficult and dangerous planets but again this is where the social aspect of the game came in.  If you didn't have a guild there were merc guilds out there that you could pay to guard you while you were prospecting or sorting out your harvesters etc.  The best crafters became very well known on the servers and their goods were highly priced and sought after; not because they were higher level but because they took the time to find the best mats and to perfect their skill.  Do you realise that pre cu / nge some classes couldn't punch their way out of a paper bag as they had zero combat skills?  These were the social classes like entertainer etc. and suited what the people who played them wanted from the game, a social hub where they could have fun, be useful and chat away with anyone that came along; what's more social than that?

Originally posted by Sourd420

Cutting corners or just bad hardware.. discuss

the best efforts of mice and men mate.  these things can happen for any number of reasons and is why BW are letting people enter the game in waves.  Don't forget that ToR doesn't actually launch until the 20th so BW's main aim will be to have all the servers up and functioning properly by midnight on the 19th.

Originally posted by Romanjisan

Yes, gamers like us know about the stuttering of a big launch and can take the hiccups in stride.  It's not us veteran gamers that I'm worried about.  It's the totally new people that I'm worried about who have never played an MMO before.  They're the ones that are going to come this game by the boatloads.  They're the ones that will be lost if the hiccups are severe enough.  This game could potentially expose the gaming industry to millions of new people that have never experienced gaming of the MMO type.  I'm not worried about we, the veterans.  I'm worried about getting some new blood into our beloved MMO's to discover the joys of this hobby without having to deal with melted down servers or getting ganked by some Sith Inquisitor.  ^_^

 

But is this a bad thing?  The last time we had an explosion of new, fresh faced gamers we ended up with the beast that grew into the WoW community 0.0

I felt a disturbance in the force; as if a million email servers suddenly cried out in terror and were repeatedly spammed.