Buying KOTFE and KOTET master mode runs for (Steam) achievements for 2 bil credits

11 years later, the bizarro world of SWTOR development (or should I say stagnation?) continues. As far as I know, this is the only MMO which releases an expansion without an expansion (even way back when, the Makeb expansion was akin to normal WoW content update), and somehow is still able to convince players that upscaling old content is "new stuff". On top of that, this loyalty is rewarded by players being forced to grind Eternity Vault for new gear after 11 years lmao. On top of that, the delayed expansion without an expansion will be getting actual new content 6-7 months after the release of 7.0. And once again, this new content barely constitutes a meagre update that other MMOs produce. Ngl, I'm surprised each year this game still has servers running, and I'm certainly not complaining about that, it's still my 2nd best MMO ^^

It's 2022, and I'm still waiting for dx11/12 and multi-core optimization, so 16 man Ops don't run like garbage on 5ghz core CPU and RTX gpus.

Man oh man, it's 2022 and Bioware is still upscaling old content (Black Talon and Eternity Vault still relevant lmao) and calling it new content ... why am I cursed to keep returning to this content-forsaken game? It's also sweet you keep referring to nightmare mode ... I am also so old in this game I keep calling master mode NiM ^^ Truth be told, WoW Classic spoiled me a bit, SWTOR raiding in 7.0 is kind of refreshingly hard, I sure hope Blizzard won't release Wotlk classic soon, would like to see some master modes first (Dxun looks nice, and it's from KOTOR!). P.S. Totally need your help regarding Steam achievements for KOTFE and KOTET master mode *wink wink

wow ... much levelling, much content, much story

***, the price went from 1800 CC to 90 CC

http://www.swtor.com/user/ce/5zshf

Mind = blown

If you want a sneak preview, go play current WoW. That's it, there's your new talent system - less brain cells needed in what/how to play, more options for utility skills. You'll be able to change "specs" (meaning utility skills) from boss to boss in a few seconds, it will be less cumbersome and far more noob-friendly than it already is. Picking mandatory skills like "increase total Cunning by X" will be a thing of the past, and, to be perfectly honest, such skills only provide the illusion of free choice anyway. A skill like that is a perfect example of "filler" and noone will miss it.

SWTOR cannot into backtracking, learned that the hard way long ago ...

And ... latecomers need acheeeves as well!

Yeah, I know, I know, you don't have to say it out loud ... the guild lost its touch when I left. Without your homeboy Kog you ain't ... good enough

Still haven't cleared DP NiM?

I'm just waiting for someone to barge in and say "but hey, SoO in WoW has been out for 8 months!" ^^

The peak of SWTOR FP healing was in Lost Island, the first droid boss very much reminds me of the chaos present in Veteran dungeons in TESO. One of the reasons I left SWTOR was their decision to make FPs "tactical" ... if they continued down the road of Lost Island-like FP encounters, I'd have more reason to stay. So far TESO has very good entry dungeons and they pretty much remind me of SWTOR in its inception. I have yet to see the Trial runs, though. Healing isn't anything special, I liked SWTOR healing because of limited resources at your disposal (unlike WoW in which you have everything at your disposal, and the fights have to become disco light shows to compensate, meaning macros abound ...) and I like TESO for the same thing - you run out of magicka rapidly and, on top of that, limited action bar means adapting for individual fights. The kind of patch Craglorn is can be compared to the glorious patch 1.2 in SWTOR when the game tried to convince you huge updates like this were worthy of subscription. If they continue to push Craglorn-like updates in the upcoming months, the game is certainly worthy of my sub. Another reason why I can't stand SWTOR anymore is their minuscule patches and housing being considered as the main feature of an expansion. People talk of standards in MMOs and compare them to WoW ... well, for me, the kind of updates an MMO receives is a big factor in deciding long-term investment. The main reason why I stayed in WoW for five years was their massive updates. True, Craglorn could simply be a singular massive update, a coup de grace of TESO before it succumbs to the pressures of the marker and opts for F2P ... I've had first-hand experience with SWTOR regarding this subject and I certainly won't follow TESO down the same road. Grouping works for questing, I haven't had much issues. Phasing can cause problems, but if your party members are at the same stage/phase, everything is smooth. You don't actually need grouping for questing since there are people popping in and out everywhere and every mob/quest objective is public. Levelling is part of endgame, not the whole endgame, but right now a major part of it. For me in SWTOR, the blind alley of endgame awaited me as soon as I concluded chapter 3 back in December 2011. At least in TESO the blind alley is postponed and since questing is something I thoroughly enjoy, it's a refreshing experience, meaning I'm not thrown into dungeons and raids immediately, but rather phased into the enemy faction zones (with a little help from Meridia) and confronted with veteran difficulty which can sometimes be quite brutal. There are six difficult veteran dungeons made for veteran content and then there's a whole zone of content in Cyrodiil (not just pvp, but loads of quests as well). On top of that, dungeon achievements progress your Undaunted skill lines, which will probably be very useful for Trials. Blood Altar at the moment is very useful for quick AoE healing. MMOs will always trick you into grind-based activities to make you play longer than what is usually considered a standard in single player games. TESO decided to go for more levelling on top of initial levelling and more focus on dungeoneering than throwing you straight into raids. In other words, there's enough endgame content at the moment. A lot of people will be discouraged to reach Veteran rank 10, I definitely agree there. People will complain if reaching level 50 will take a few weeks and people will complain if reaching VR10 will take more than that, Zenimax can't win. Well, if one wants mindless levelling á la WoW, then, by all means, there's WoW. At this stage I'd like to think that TESO is more catered to a niche audience and that it can stand on its own this way. Craglorn will be made for VR10 players (VR12 will be max), so they're furthering the design, I hope they keep it that way down the road. SWTOR has nothing to fear? Of course not, the title of this thread is about two years too late. SWTOR had that fear (or, well, at least I had that fear for the game) after release - will there be enough subs to maintain the game as a sub MMO ... will there be enough content to keep those 1.8 mil subs they bragged about ... Is there enough variety to keep players away from Pandaland, etc. SWTOR is already F2P and lost as many subs as it can and convinced the remainder that Galactic Strongholds is an expansion worthy of a triple A story-based MMO. In fact, ESO has a lot to fear right now. It will probably go F2P eventually (all the signs pinpoint to that, including the hate bandwagon which uncannily resembles the whole "Tortanic" debacle), so I'll enjoy it until, eventually, the game becomes a dress-up mini-game *shudders About your post scriptum - you can laugh all you want, but the sad state of gaming today is just that - endless wave of whining and bickering over layers of unabashed opinions without any depth or real reasoning. There are huge issues with the game, but sensationalists like Angry Joe blow things out of proportion, meaning nitpicking details about two out of hundreds of quests and try to dismiss the rest of the game because of that. Duping and bot issues have become a staple of almost every MMO. There is no central AH in TESO, so complaining about duping while it doesn't even affect you is being disingenious at best. Then there's this whole debacle about immersion and what really cracks me up is the complaint (coming from Gamespot, which is all the more worrying) that the game doesn't work well because you can't roleplay a thief when there's people running around. There are conventions to an MMO genre, there are features and contrivances which are a standard ... that makes it a niche genre, more or less (WoW is an exception to the rule, and not for the same reasons). I really wish the reviewers would take that into account. In my opinion, a very good review came from IGN - http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/03/31/the-elder-scrolls-online-review simply because the reviewers evaluated based on the standards/conventions relevant to the MMO genre, and not a single player RPG like Skyrim.

Personally, I've been having a blast so far. SWTOR was a definite improvement in questing over WoW for me, but TESO steps it up a bit, I believe. It feels more like the original iteration of SWTOR when questing was slow, difficult and very engaging (that is, before the horror of F2P and the eventual simplification of content). In TESO there are over a thousand fully voiced quests, and questing here very much resembles a single player RPG, meaning you can avoid killing waves of mobs and kill-quest objectives. If a village is under attack, your objective is to either kill the head of the attack directly, instead of plowing through endless waves of soldiers, or steal his plans for the attack. Sometimes you can just distract enemies and move through them, I like the options given and sometimes there are dialogue options, changing the course and ending of a quest (and with phasing the world changes accordingly). Also, phasing means that the world around you is changing, I really appreciate that, and I'm even more motivated to finish certain quest series just to see what will change and how the NPCs will react to me. Yes, the grouping could be done better, but everything is more or less open-world anyway. Phasing and megaserver mean that there's people everywhere and there are no "steal kills", everything is public. There are dark anchors, delves, public dungeons, world elites to offer variety when questing. For people who actually enjoyed the story in ES games and know something about the lore, and who enjoy questing in general, the game is amazing. I appreciate that group dungeons, especially veteran ones, are difficult and force you to look at the surroundings and react appropriately. As a healer my responsibility isn't just to heal, but to avoid damage coming from the encounters. I'm not saying healing is better or worse than it is in SWTOR (was an operative healer for almost 2 years), but it is different and doesn't let you have complete control over the situation (it's more or less automated and based on smart heals, but that doesn't mean it's not challenging), you have a limited action bar and numerous healing skills, it's up to you to find out which skills are relevant for certain situations (will you focus on shielding the tank, providing group-wide armor/spell protection, cleansing, aoe healing or simply single target strong healing?). I can't wait for Trials (12 man timed runs) in the upcoming Craglorn (coming in May, I believe). It will take me a while before I complete every dungeon and finish all of the achievements there, so no rush ^^ Furthermore, I appreciate single server technology and smooth performance. Not even WoW runs so smooth for me during massive battles (if I recall Wintergrasp ... well, WoW more or less hasn't focused on massive pvp since then). 100 v 100 battles run more smooth for me (around 30-40 fps) than SWTOR in 16m Ops or sometimes in WZs (when there are huge aoe battles at WZ objectives). It's not a revolution, it can't even be considered an evolution (some steps forwards, some backwards), it all comes down to preference, because absolutely linear progression doesn't exist in MMO history (nor any history, for that matter). I really don't know where people get the idea that WoW has done everything right since its first iteration Just because it's been going on for a decade, doesn't mean it's been progressing linearly since then. The whole class homogenization, LFR, mind numbing questing, overall simplification, mind numbing heroics, FOUR levels of difficulty for the same piece of raiding content ... as I said, it all comes down to preference. I certainly wouldn't refer to latter features as progression. Reviews á la Angry Joe are making a great disservice to the game and basically MMOs in general. TESO is an MMO first and foremost, and with that come certain features which are considered stale and too contrived to work in single player games. I vividly remember how people didn't even bother to reach endgame in SWTOR before judging the game or making an effort to find people to group up and finish the wonderful flashpoints (at the beginning SWTOR flashpoints were top notch). Some people are just not MMO gamers and it simply demonstrates that MMO is a niche market, it can't drawn in almost every player like Skyrim did. The Elder Scrolls franchise is both a curse and a blessing for Zenimax and I fear the damage has already been made. When people rather complain on the forums and write whole dissertations of complaints about MMOs, rather than playing them, then there is something seriously with both the genre and the gamers themselves. Angry Joe reached level 15 or so and quit the game, focused on two quests which were anticlimactic (two out of 1000+), zoomed in on a rock and found the graphics wanting (not actually realizing that you can't make Skyrim-like graphics with HD textures without causing major issues in world pvp or any major grouping activity) ... I mean, this is nitpicking 101 and there are so many other aspects to talk about here his review is nothing but reductive sensationalism, at best.

Lost Island and RIP, it's one of a kind and there will never be another one like it ... it's just blandness and derp-mode "tactical" FPs now. Oh, and I'd like to take this opportunity to say **** you to tactical FPs

Most of the sfuff in the pack is recoloured again, maybe you're the one who's colour blind for not seeing the obvious repetition of the same old models with different colours. Never in a million years did I think SWTOR would have even more re-skins than WoW during Cataclysm.

I think it's more of a poor man's version of DIII, it just feels "indie". It has more replayability and depth, but is it more fun? Depends. I certainly find D3's pure hack and slash (meaning destructible environment and physics) and overall polish a lot more entertaining.

Ok, here's how you exceed expectations - not only continue with the class stories, but bring an entirely new class in the fray; bring back Ilum massive pvp with a working engine, etc.

You're missing out on the best hack and slash RPG on the market, so your loss. Unlike Bioware, Blizzard can actually rectify past mistakes and they certainly did with patch 2.0, not to mention RoS.

Patch the game to 2.0.3 Enjoy the game as you've never enjoyed it before Jay Wilson is no longer working for Blizzard Stop crying Buy the expansion Profit

Yeah, this is exceeding expectations concerning how low you can go to call a certain update an expansion. I've never in my wildest derp dreams expected an MMO to call a housing update an "expansion". Coming from WoW and seeing Rift expansion, I was already embarrassed for playing SWTOR when they announced the miniscule Makeb as an expansion (and even charged for it) ... now I no longer play this bland MMO, so I am at least saved by further embarrassment. SWTOR - lowering the standards of AAA MMOs since patch 1.2 (since one of the Bioware founder said 1.2 is the "biggest update in any MMO")

Not everything is so terrific as you try to paint it here. A lot of content updates after F2P were developed and announced long before F2P (one gigantic patch was stretched out for a year), there's been a lot more CM updates to the game than the real playable content. There's only been two real HM FPs added, the Czerka ones, which still pale in comparison to Lost Island. When Makeb launched four previously existing FPs were simply scaled to 55, that's not new content. The method of adding raiding content has mostly been about extending the existing ones by adding a new difficulty mode - the laziest approach which Bioware seems to be proud of at this point. I could go on and on about how adding "tactical" FPs and removing HMs from the equation really means a step backwards, but hey, if X has been added after F2P, then it must be good, right? In comparison to other MMOs like WoW and Rift, SWTOR's cadence of updates has been abysmal. Stretching DF and DP raids for a year by adding a new difficulty setting is just pathetic at this point.

As long as the game doesn't transform into a Barbie wardrobe and doesn't prioritize fluff (and by fluff I mean re-painting the same model to the nth degree) over story based content like SWTOR, it's fine.