Originally posted by sanosukex

Originally posted by Starpower

 

Sounds to me you base your entire argument on you being bad at chosing guilds. First step to remedy that is not to accept random invites

 

I could be the author of your post 5 years ago on WoWs main forums, back when I made some poor choices joining guilds going nowhere myself

many people are playing in guilds are mostly their own friends.. not much you can do when all your friends ditch the game...

You follow them to the next game. Wisely several of my friends held fire on ordering ToR and now two months in they won't be playing it based on the experiences of myself and other friends who did play. I wonder how many more people there are out there whose friends have left and told them 'don't bother'?

Originally posted by Eliandal

Originally posted by BilboDoggins

All I have to do to see this game is rapidly declining is look at my guild where we have 110 members and in the last 20 days only about 30 have logged in. Of those 30 maybe 10 play daily.

I have played many mnay MMO's and SWTOR is just lacking to many damned features, has to mnay bugs, and a boring and poorly designed endgame. I'm not telling anyone they have to dislike SWTOR but it's pretty obvious a TON of people feel the same way about it as me. Outside of the story this game has nothing new or better to offer and story offers little replayability unless you are an altaholic.

 

 

  Ooohh..I can play that game too....Two weeks ago, my guild only had a little overf 100 people on average logging in - but this weekend - we had over 200!

 

  What's your point again?

What's yours?

My God there are some fools on here. Total denial as usual from the Biodroid. I don't care, your precious game sucks, see you in GW2.

Originally posted by MosesZD

Originally posted by holifeet

Originally posted by Zlayer77

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=294210

Lots of other threads but I think this one just shows that the mayority is either leaving.. on the fence or just to blind to see what is going on...

 

So the majority of SWTOR players fit on 11 pages of replies to a single thread do they?

The way you put it anyone that says they might leave one day is leaving asap, and anyone that is basing their decision on other games is on the fence umming and aahing. Anyone who wants to stay and enjoy the great game that SWTOR is is blind.

I think that last fact opens your bias up for the whole forum to see.

First it was month one, and everyone predicted the end of SWTOR. Month one passed and everything is going good. The servers are still busy and people are happily enjoying the game. So now the attention turns to the end of month two.

Are we going to have a 'SWTOR is going to die' thread from people at the end of every month?

Find something better to do with your time, people. Making up trends from a few pages of replies is a sign of madness.

 

Here's the deal, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see what's going on with the game.    In January they sold 300K copies of the game.    That was, essentially, a 20% increase in the install base.   espite that, server traffic dropped 40% from January 7th to January 28th.   It has continuted to drop.

 

In February, to hide the drop in server traffic, BioWare changed the sever-status thresholds to make people think the servers were more populated than they were.

On February 1st,  3% of servers registered as heavy.  60% registered as light.

On February 2nd, 3% of servers registered as heavy.  54% registered as light.

On February 3rd, 2% of servers registered as heavy.   58% registered as light.

 

On February 4th, 18% of servers registered as heavy and only 32% registered as light.  

On February 5th, it was 25% heavy and 31% light.

Those numbers on the 4th and 5th were barely behind peak post-holiday useage on the 7th and 8th of January.    The game had not even approached those numbers since January 15th and 16th.     Further, now the weekly load is averaging over 10% heavy and peaking at 25% on the weekends...

Sales are down.  People have been clearly leaving...   Yet, (not) mysteriously the servers suddenly have bigger populations?   You believe that?   You believe an MMO that only sold 45K (or so) units the week in question can increase server  population that dramatically?   Over 215 servers?    Really?

 

Whatever...

I'm assuming these are US servers? I play in the EU and it's a fact that on release 100% of the servers were heavy, now it's probably 1% with the rest mostly Standard with a few Light and I see more Light appearing every week. The are FACTS, make of them what you will

Originally posted by Dinasty

Rift was fun for about 3 weeks.

So are you.

Originally posted by xDayx

For a themepark it is pretty good. But themepark has to be your thing I think.

I'm not keen on themeparks but every mmo now is a themepark so i'm forced to play themeparks. Can you point me in the direction of a sandboxx mmo thesedays?

Originally posted by evilastro

Regarding forcing people to watch cutscenes, I have to disagree. When doing a quest on the second or third character I like to skip them, I have already watched it and dont need to see it again. Doesnt mean that I didnt appreciate it the first time I watched it though.

True, I hadn't thought of that.

Originally posted by evilastro

Originally posted by Matt_UK

Originally posted by Zlayer77

So my point.. less Bugs, more content, and 3-5 more voiced over storylines after Tortage and Age of conan would have been a smash Hit...( and done away with the Instance thing, because it got annoying). As you can see BUGs comes at the first of the list and more voice comes last

 

I agree. Although to be honest AoC was never buggy for me. I loved it. The reason I left was lack of content around 40ish. I went back recently and it seems there is more to do now.

The game is nearly 100% bug free now, and the end game is very enjoyable. If you havent played the Khitai content I would recommend trying it.

I have stopped playing because the content releases were a bit slow, but I would recommend everyone try the Conan endgame, it was a lot of fun.

Yes i've got a Khitai assassin. The Khitai content was the best in the game. I think I stopped because the game kept crashing when I tried to enter the next area after the initial zone, and I could never get it sorted so I rageuninstalled. Might revisit in the summer if GW2 isn't out.

Originally posted by evilastro

Voiceovers made the game much more interesting. I dont see why anyone would consider it a bad point.

Also, the vast majority of quests in SWTOR were not 'kill x mobs', those were just the bonus optional missions. In fact I dont recall ever being asked to kill a certain amount of things, that was always just a side mission, and the quests usually had a solid motive / reasoning behind them.

Listening to the voice overs is optional, you can skip ahead if you dont care about ambience or motive while you play games. Also you are working on the assumption that not having voice overs would mean a better quality base product, when the biggest constraint for the programming would have been time, not money.

I dont see why you would want less options in a video game than more?

 

The problem is, as soon as one person hits the spacebar to skip a cutscene with VO, the whole idea has failed. I wonder what it would have been like if there was no spacebar skipping allowed? Maybe it should be compulsary to watch the cutscenes since they spent so much time effort and money on them?

Originally posted by Zlayer77

So my point.. less Bugs, more content, and 3-5 more voiced over storylines after Tortage and Age of conan would have been a smash Hit...( and done away with the Instance thing, because it got annoying). As you can see BUGs comes at the first of the list and more voice comes last

I agree. Although to be honest AoC was never buggy for me. I loved it. The reason I left was lack of content around 40ish. I went back recently and it seems there is more to do now.

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by Matt_UK

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by elocke

  

Again.  No.  Now I'm only basing this off of my own experience with multiple characters in both LOTRO and WoW.  With WoW, vanilla I could STILL level up more than 2 characters and not see one identical quest if I so chose.  In Lotro, it's a little less "large" but I remember skipping lone lands completely on my RK and then skipping most of North Downs on my hunter.  I remember skipping Evendim on my LM, and so on.  

Sorry man, that's just not true about either WoW or Lotro.  I played both games for years, including Vanilla WoW just after launch.  There is simply no way you could play WoW all the way through a second time without re-doing quests.  Unless you levelled up strictly through dungeon runs, which you can also do in TOR for the most part.  

As for Lotro, yeah, you can skip parts of some sections, and there is overlap with North Downs and Lone Lands.  But you have a lot of redundancy in that game as well, just as much as ToR.  And remember, we're talking about launch content, not content as it currently is.  At launch, or shortly after when Evendim came in, you had some leeway between North Downs and Lonelands and that was about it.  Evendim gave you a little more variety when it was released, but you still had to basically do the same zones in the same order.  You had the option of skipping certain quest hubs, just like you do in TOR, and moving onto the next zone.  

Again, I'm with you 100% on wanting to see more alternate levelling paths for TOR.  I don't think anyone wouldn't want that.  And Bioware has said they will bring that in future updates.  All I'm saying is that it's unfair to rail on TOR for not having alternative options in terms of choosing zones when games like Lotro and Rift didn't have them either at launch.  Hell, Rift still doesn't.  

 

 

How come you played all these games and didn't like any of them? Was it some kind of bet?

What are you talking about?  I played WoW for 5 years.  Loved it.  I played Lotro for 2 years.  Loved it.  Just got bored of both of them after a while, as many people do in MMOs.  I'm just explaining that neither of those games gave you a ton of levelling options at launch, either.  

 

Lighten up, it was a joke. Stop feeling the need to explain yourself.

As for ToR, after going back to Balmorra with my Sentinel (after already doing it with my Sorcerer ten levels lower) and now sent back to Nar Shaddaa for more of the endless generic warehouses and tunnels, i'm unsubbing.

Replay value? It isn't even interesting once through.

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by Matt_UK

I don't get this argument. We can forgive Bioware because this is a game just starting out? Are you saying they shouldn't have learned anything from all those other games you mentioned? Surely the point of any genre is to improve with every new release not start again at the same point ad infinitum?

In terms of content?  Hell yeah they should be "forgiven" for not having multiple zones for every level during the questing process.  You're kidding, right?  No game in the history of MMOs has ever been released with tons of alternative content available at every level of the process unless it was a specific design choice by the game, in which case we probably aren't talking about a themepark game anyway.  

WoW didn't have it.

Lotro didn't have it.

Aion didn't have it.

Conan didn't have it.  

Rift STILL doesn't have it.

But we're gonna trash TOR for not releasing with enough alternative levelling zones because they should have learned from all the others who have never done it?  Silly argument.

You missed the point. I can't be bothered to explain.

Originally posted by GMan3

    I'll say it again.  YOU had overblown expectations because you did not do the intelligent thing and actaully do some real research.  The information was out there, you did not seek it out, so the problem is your fault and blaming anyone else for not having the knowledge you easily could have is just plain weak.

    Of course the people at BioWare felt they had a good PvP game and talked about it.  Would you really expect them to intentionally design a game they felt was bad and then tell people they did so?  So they designed what they felt would be a fun PvP game and you disagree now.  The onus was on YOU to do the research and find out if the PvP game was what you wanted.  You did not do so even with months of beta leaks, a month of the NDA being lifted, AND the Beta Weekends. 

We really are doomed if developers listen to people like this guy. I foresee never playing a decent mmo ever again because if it's bad it will always be my fault.

Originally posted by Dracill
100% this.

Hardcore pvp players are leaving already. They aren't coming back. Change the game to please those players is going to do harm to the game.

But at this point I can only trust BioWare and hope they continue to please RPG players.

What roleplaying? Being bored for five minutes by a voice actor asking you to go find x10 data chips, again....

Originally posted by SanHor
 

For players it's not that big of a deal since you can skip it. But for developer to spend so much money on it just to see players skipping dialgoues is not encouraging.

Not in this case though. 100% VO was TOR's main selling point. The fact it was never done to such extent befor made it exciting enough for masses to buy the game and try it out. Just like 3D. Who cares if it is a good idea, it's fresh and exciting enough to sel. Mission accomplished.

Well I didn't buy it because it was 100% VO. I bought it because I love the SW universe.

Only an idiot would buy it on the premise of VO alone.

3D sucks as well.

Originally posted by Zlayer77

Originally posted by Matt_UK

Originally posted by arieste

First of all - if you're like me and you've always thought that wasting most of the game's budget on voice was a terrible idea, then you need not reply, i already know your opinion :) 

 

What I'm curious about is the updated opinions of the folks that - prior to the game's launch - thought it was going to be a game-changer and the greatest thing since leia's slave outfit.  

 

I'm seeing more and more people - people who're avid fans of the game - admit that really, having every single dialogue voiced gets to be a bit of a drag (at best) or downright annoying (at worst).

 

So, to you that were excited the voicing, are you still excited about it?  Are you looking forward to LISTENING to 200 more "kill 10 rats" quests with generic dialogue that is fully voiced?   Or would you rather see the dialogue scaled back to the more important & interesting areas of the game, parts that actually have interesting story and characters whose names you might actually remember?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.

 

The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.

 

I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.

Aoc dident Fail because they dident have voice overs after Tortage. It Failed because they couldent fix the Bugs fast enough. and the main story of AOC still had voice overs after Tortage... When you get your Tatoo removed etc.  I would go so far as to say that if Funcom had waited about 1 year before releasing the game, and had put in some more mayor plot lines after Tortage with voice over.. the game would have been a smash hit.

Also AOCs combat system was very skilled based from the begining, Items dident have a big Impact, you could kill people 20 plus levels above you without anny problem. But many Tab Target ability spam people couldent handle it, they got PAWNED horribly, because they lacked player skill. This also put many people off the product, they just couldent handle getting Rolf stomped by superior players. Another thing was Lack of content, after doing villas after villas ( small instances) to level my charecter it became boring....

Point being, If FUNCOM had explained more about the combat, had special training programs for NOOBS from other MMOS, Devs holding combat lessons in a BG Enviorment maybe?  And had enough conent so you dident have to do the same things over and over plus had about 80% less bugs at Release AOC would have been one of the largest MMOS today...

I didn't say it failed because there was no voice acting after 20, I said it was criticised. Read my post properly please.

I just realised you said it wasn't the lack of voice acting why it failed, it was the bugs, and then say if there was voice acting after 20 it would have been a smash hit. So the bugs wouldn't have mattered then if the game was better designed?

Originally posted by sekira

full voice over for the entire game is overrated.
 
As soon as you start spending more time in dialogue than it takes to actually complete the quest (not including travel time), this is when the game really disappointed.

It was a very poor design choice by Bioware because the voice acting loses its novelty very quickly from overuse. If they used it more sparingly for only the important quests, I think they would have better succeeded in that department because people would be less eager to skip the content to get back to playing the game.

But instead it becomes more of an annoyance because it distracts you from the game by constantly interrupting you. I don't consider sitting through chat dialogue making worthless decisions for mundane quests, to be meaningful gameplay.

It gets especially tedious when you come to a new quest hub and you see a crowd of quest NPC's staring you in the face, as you know its going to take you at least 10 minutes to simply pick up the quests if you actually intend to listen to the voice acting.

Good post... and then another 15 minutes running to where the mission is.

Originally posted by smh_alot
I think a lot of people aren't being completely truthful: when AoC had its voice overs extensively up to L20, I didn't hear people say 'fuck, why did they do that? I don't want cutscenes, dialogue choices and VO, I want my normal textbased questing'. Nope, instead most of the times I heard 'AoC sucks, the first 20 levels questing is great and then they switch to the same old questing that I done before'.

 

No one complained about the first 20 levels of cutscenes in AoC because it was possible to do Tortage in just few hours and then get out into the game proper. It's not just the cutscenes that are time consuming in SWTOR it's the running between mission hubs and mission. It Tortage everything was within reach and felt natural. In TOR I daren't count up all the minutes i've had to waste running back to my ship via a starport, then a lift loading screen, then a run across a hanger, then a cutscene of the ship taking off etc... What a waste of time and not at all immersive, just annoying. Thank God for the spacebar.

As for text based mmos, the greatest RPG of all time, Planescape, had pages and pages of text. Nothing wrong with text at all. I don't think cutscenes are more immersive (the most immersive mmos didn't have them) they are just a gimic in my opinion.

Originally posted by arieste

First of all - if you're like me and you've always thought that wasting most of the game's budget on voice was a terrible idea, then you need not reply, i already know your opinion :) 

 

What I'm curious about is the updated opinions of the folks that - prior to the game's launch - thought it was going to be a game-changer and the greatest thing since leia's slave outfit.  

 

I'm seeing more and more people - people who're avid fans of the game - admit that really, having every single dialogue voiced gets to be a bit of a drag (at best) or downright annoying (at worst).

 

So, to you that were excited the voicing, are you still excited about it?  Are you looking forward to LISTENING to 200 more "kill 10 rats" quests with generic dialogue that is fully voiced?   Or would you rather see the dialogue scaled back to the more important & interesting areas of the game, parts that actually have interesting story and characters whose names you might actually remember?  

 

 

 

 

 

I've got several characters in the 30s and i'm now just spacebarring through all the cutscenes thesedays, even the character story. I just don't have time to listen to all that guff and run around for twenty minutes between missions. The distances between mission givers and missions is a nightmare. It takes twice as long as other games to get the simpliest things done.

The voice acting and cutscenes were great at first, now they just get in the way of me playing the game and the short amounts of time I have to play.

I remember when AoC came out and everyone criticised it for having no cutscenes or voice acting outside of Tortage, because it felt 'unfinished' now i'm thinking FunCom were right.

Originally posted by Cthulhu23

Originally posted by elocke

  

Again.  No.  Now I'm only basing this off of my own experience with multiple characters in both LOTRO and WoW.  With WoW, vanilla I could STILL level up more than 2 characters and not see one identical quest if I so chose.  In Lotro, it's a little less "large" but I remember skipping lone lands completely on my RK and then skipping most of North Downs on my hunter.  I remember skipping Evendim on my LM, and so on.  

Sorry man, that's just not true about either WoW or Lotro.  I played both games for years, including Vanilla WoW just after launch.  There is simply no way you could play WoW all the way through a second time without re-doing quests.  Unless you levelled up strictly through dungeon runs, which you can also do in TOR for the most part.  

As for Lotro, yeah, you can skip parts of some sections, and there is overlap with North Downs and Lone Lands.  But you have a lot of redundancy in that game as well, just as much as ToR.  And remember, we're talking about launch content, not content as it currently is.  At launch, or shortly after when Evendim came in, you had some leeway between North Downs and Lonelands and that was about it.  Evendim gave you a little more variety when it was released, but you still had to basically do the same zones in the same order.  You had the option of skipping certain quest hubs, just like you do in TOR, and moving onto the next zone.  

Again, I'm with you 100% on wanting to see more alternate levelling paths for TOR.  I don't think anyone wouldn't want that.  And Bioware has said they will bring that in future updates.  All I'm saying is that it's unfair to rail on TOR for not having alternative options in terms of choosing zones when games like Lotro and Rift didn't have them either at launch.  Hell, Rift still doesn't.  

 

How come you played all these games and didn't like any of them? Was it some kind of bet?