For me, times up, been cancelled for a few weeks. I check the boards to see if they are even remotely working on resolving issues. I am a gamer, so I like to see the state of things for any game (I even check in on how FTP games are managing their systems). They are in a losing battle as many of their problems can not be remedied with a simple patch. The entire progression of the game is damaged (too fast of leveling, poorly thought out progression times and rewards, and too many "appeal to quick success" mechanisms). They did some things right, but people don't applaud the good in a pool of bad when it comes to the meat of it. I think this game "could" repair itself, however it will require such a drastic change that such would only anger those it currently appeals to. Its a lose/lose battle for them as those they currently appeal to will succumb to the lacking in the games design (they always do, that crowd is a fickle one) and if they do fix the problems, most will have moved on to something else with a very hesitant feeling of coming back. This game is FTP fodder if there ever was one. It is the only way they will survive and I personally never found a reason to play a single FTP system to date. Sorry Bio-ware (ie EA), you made your bed. Take your profit on the initial sales and run, its what your investors wanted anyway.

They made a huge mistake putting the system in (allowing point accrual) before they implemented it. The reason is because now they are going to have problems when the put it in. Many people having been gaining numerous points and those who have the most points will set the standard on the cost of rewards they will be applied to. They have to do this as if they don't, they will end up putting in a feature to which many will have maxed the points for it already, leaving no progression for the system. The Legacy system will either be a feature that is over and done in a single day by most, or an excessive grind system with those who do not have lots of points seeing each reward being an enormous time sink. They should have just left it out and added the system when they were ready.

Let us do some math here. If you play 3 hours a night, for 7 days, you are at 21 hours. Now 3 hours in a night is nothing. Most people watch more TV than that. We haven't considered weekends specifically though. For instance, it is not uncommon for a person to play 5-6 hours on a weekend night or even more if they break it up over the course of that day, 2-3 hours in the morning, 5 hours that night (which is extremely reasonable, considering how many people sit and watch sporting events on the weekends). So, 15 hours during the week + 10-15 hours on the weekend = 25 - 30+ hours. I did this while working 60 hours a week and had a family life, read a book a week, and exercised 30-60 mins a day, etc... for many years. Most of my friends in their 30s to 40's did this as well and many have children, are married and lead professional careers (engineers, IT directors, etc...) That is what casual used to be defined as. Hardcore was a person who played while at work (if they worked at all), raced through to get to the end contested content as fast as they could, and were often required to be on call to log in for any given raid at any given time. They averaged about 6-8 hours a day and about 12-24 or more on the weekends. What you are thinking of is called an occasional player. They play maybe an hour a night, sometimes every other night and their weekend session may be around 2-3 hours total. They usually have little time to group, often can't spend more than 30 mins at a time at the screen without having intervals away for various things they need to do. Many are distinctly different in their play focus and desire everything to be summed up in a rather short period (running a dungeon in 15 to 30 mins, having a leveling curve that allows their play time to reach max level in a few weeks) There is nothing wrong with being an occasional player, however the content of an MMO designed to fit that desire results in what we are seeing consistently released and consistently complained about.

Any experienced gamer understands when a mechanic is poorly designed and poorly implemented and makes suggestions to improve it. The current system is ridiculous for its mechanics of play. Can people "master" the system? Sure, but what idiot wastes their time jumping through hoops in a system that is obviously flawed rather than simply making a suggestion of reason? There are mechanics for some classes that are severely hampered by the interface and targeting system. For instance, with the operative healing, you rely heavily on reactive abilities to open up short timed bonus activations. Problem is, you have to constantly jump back and forth between your damage targets and your healing targets to do so. This results in you spending an enormous amount of time either playing whack a mole with your mouse or fast keying back and forth between targets to do damage, then do a heal on your target. There comes a point where the input impedes the play. The skill should be in the selection and use of your skills as it concerns the dynamics of the fight, not how fast someone can move their mouse or spam keys, that is how action junkie arcade play is designed and even then, those systems have flexible and logical inputs. Most other games have thought put into their targeting system that accentuates the combat style and focus of the skills in the game. This game functions like a first generation MMO, which would be fine, but most first generation MMO's had combat systems that were much slower and allowed for target switching without requiring the player to be jacked up on red bull. The biggest problem with this game is that its user input and interface function as if it was console port, not a PC game.

This is the result of a fast leveling curve. I never understood why these companies put in such fast leveling to max when they don't have any solid end game content other than expecting people to raid excessively. The early games took an extremely long time to get to max level so the only people you had to be concerned with for end game was hardcore players, which tended to be large raiding guilds. They were appealed to by making extremely difficult (flawless execution required) raid content that kept them busy while new content was being developed. The casual players (people who played 20-30 hours a week), usually were just hitting cap or had a few more levels to go by the time an expansion was released (expansions ran every 6 months and were FULL featured and rather large expansions). The only problem was that back then, most games dealt with leveling by using "mob exp" as the means to drive progression, so as games that began to use "questing" as the vehicle, content became more of an issue as it took a bit more time to produce the questing content (story, scripts, etc...) than it did simply placing an area with a bunch of mobs to kill. These days however, the technology exists to fast pace quest design and implementation allowing them to fill the gaps of the content needed to provide a long leveling experience. So why don't they? Because there are multiple factors to which discourage them. 1) They already are providing much less content and releasing it in much longer intervals. People keep buying the games, so there is no incentive to provide more. 2) They have found a means to provide the same type of grind content of the older game systems (mob grinding), but through gimmick concepts such as token collection, faction grinds, etc... 3) Most people playing these games these days do not have the tolerance for long term development. They want their game to progress like a single player game (40-80 hours and they have won) and object to it taking a long time between levels (even if there is plenty of content between them). 1 and 2 are more of the result of number 3 these days. People want to see the levels fly by or the game to progress fast because it makes them feel like they are achieving something. They have a narrow view as to what they think they desire in the game and this is often joked and criticized as being impatient or having a sense of entitlement. That is, people tend to have short attention spans and believe that fulfillment in a game is should be consistent and timely reward mechanism. Problem is, nothing easy is ever satisfying. Until they go back to much longer leveling curves (with valid content, not gimmicks to fill the content), people will surge to the max levels quickly and expect the same fast paced progress and reward as they experienced leveling up. This can not be achieved as the amount of effort and time required to provide such would be so enormous that a company could not sustain it. So, we get 1 and 2 as the solution. Less content and more pointless mind numbing grinds. Funny how we came full circle. We started early MMOs by killing mobs over and over for hours on end to doing the same thing, but simply having a repeatable quest with a token as a carrot. Personally, if I am going to do pointless grinds, I prefer it to be spread out over the entire game so that at least I always have some aspect of progression to look forward to. Spending hours farming for gear that will be invalidated by the next content release is not simply pointless, but insane.

I see it as two groups that are gamers today predominately. You have one group which are MMO vets, already have a pool of friends they play with through many games and don't care for the average personality of players today. They rarely add random people to their groups because they do not need to and their experience with them has generally been horrid in past games. So they avoid them and keep it in house. Then you have those who are the socially immature. They have tons of baggage with them such as immature looting ideology (mine, mine, mine), impatient, poor social skills, and have a problem following directions or working with others. My friends and I stopped random grouping around the time of early WoW. The player base just isn't mature enough to handle social interactions and most of my friends and I are older gamers who do not feel like raising children when we play.

Well, I only say problem in response to those who go on about how they want a realistic economic system, but never considering what that really entails. People forget about all the things you mention, yet those things really are the "key" to an economic system. That is, if you have to pay numerous costs and fees just to store your product, then there is an incentive to sell it or face the consequence of not only a loss of profit, but actually losing capitol completely. The point is really that economic systems in these games will always be suffering from this lack of balance. Add in the problem with enormous influxes of cash through gold sales and economic systems really are just a gimmicky side show mechanism.

Until they simulate the full costs associated in a real economy, no. People will not accept such a system. That is, if people had to deal with the costs associated with bringing something to market, storing it, transporting it, selling it, and all of the additional fees and costs that come with products, many would stop playing. Few understand what it takes to truly do business, they only quote off things like "supply and demand" as if this is the only functionary within the system. They never think that in reality, they couldn't put that item up for a ridiculous price and expect to sit on it indefinitely until someone passes by and stupidly over pays it as to do so would eat them out of their profit. This is why in reality, most businesses have to evaluate cost to bring it to market and then price it to sell. Sure, some ride the fads to which people will over pay, but this is extremely risky. If a business isn't pricing competitively and they aren't pricing to sell their item, likely they will eventually go out of business. The problem with game economies is they do not simulate all of the costs associated with a real economy. If people want to experience games that do, they have to look through many games of old that were designed specifically to be an economic system game (I think there was one called Capitalism), but I doubt you would see many willing to play such a system as the consequences to such are far too "real". Lets face it, if making money in reality was as easy as it is in games, all gamers would be rich beyond their dreams in reality, but they aren't and that is because gaming systems in no way shape or form truly emulate reality.

And the type of people playing back then were actually gamers, while the people today are simply passerby players looking for some quick entertainment who view any effort, conditions, consequences, or restrictions as getting in the way of them being entertained. In short, you have a different player base and like it or not, they are the majority and they unfortunately are the ones that drive the design of them. We liked it because we only had 15 min and 10 min buffs before. We liked it when they increased it above 30 because we felt wasting time just to put buffs on was a pointless task that got in the way of the strategy of content. Honestly, there are many things to appreciate about the early game systems, but this isn't one. A better point would be how casters had limited slots to memorize spells to which they had to think about the fights and their spells very thoroughly so they could be prepared for a given situation, not how long a buff lasted. Instances allowed for a more dynamic content (having mobs have full blown mechanics and time based encounters/interactive aspects). The reason you had to mob camp in the world was because the only means at the time to avoid people killing the rare mob constantly or getting the drop every time (removing risk/reward/rarity) was to have place holders and then random the chance of the drops on top of it. This was a design limitation (camping), not a "feature". Instances allow players to progress through a dungeon and obtain more of a realistic feel to the adventure (a small party searching and overcoming the danger of a given dungeon) and not a city of people calling out in the dungeon, training other players, getting in spawn arguments, and sitting idle doing nothing but killing PHs for hours hoping some mysterious rare would pop. The only desire someone would have for contested content is the competition and the aspect of constantly running into other people while playing, which again doesn't work well with the type of players today. If you thought the fights, petty arguments and griefing were a problem at times in the older systems, insert today's socially immature gamer into the mix of such and watch it become a nightmare. Raiding was ridiculous as this is where the term "hardcore" and "casual" truly had their meaning. We didn't define someone as hardcore strictly by their play time, many casual players were on 3-4 hours a night and a healthy chunk during the weekend (people who worked 60 hours a week like myself). The problem was that the "hardcore" player was the one who logged in any time during the day (to catch contested content), and guilds would require peoples play times to be that of someone who didn't work. That is, the game was their priority, they were hardcore players. Add in also the problem with time zone players and you had issues with certain guilds taking all of the content, doing underhanded things to players to keep them from progressing. You don't remember the constant complaints about the European players taking all of the raid content before the western players could even get on? Sorry, but instances took away the issue of fighting other people over stupid stuff and placed the focus on the actual raid content allowing "normal" people to actually attempt difficult large number content. I don't know about you, but I did not appreciate staying up to the early morning hours on a week night (going to work a few hours after the raid) trying to organize 70+ people to do a raid that required all of them to be on their toes and diligently executing their tasks for several hours non-stop on a single fight. I am not saying it wasn't fun in my youth, but the bulk of the problems with it was trying to get people to pay attention and follow orders and as I said, the "players" of today are not capable of such effort. I stopped leading raids after a bit of WoW. Different players today and they are in no way shape or form... gamers. The problem is not instancing, it is what they are doing with it. Instances are no longer long crawls of difficult content that take effort and dedication (using strategy, little room for error, and requiring thought on skill use and tactics) from the team of players to which the reward is simply being able to get through the entire content or to successfully master each fight within it. Dungeons are more instant runs with quick results and fast rewards that result in nothing more than mind numbing grinds with the only purpose to obtain some shiny item that has no meaning. Look at LoTRO, their initial dungeons were long, well thought out, tactical and extremely difficult. They were broken into steps of progression disallowing entry to move on or pass the early content until people won the encounters in progression and obtained the key/item which would allow them to skip on to the other parts the next time they played. Again, as I said, this was changed, like in all games, people don't want to play a game, they want to be entertained and their idea of entertainment is simply being present and handed something for their attendance. What you are fondly remembering is not the mechanics exactly, but the effort, risk, and reward of content. Something that no longer exists in games due to the current majority player base. Again, player base problem. People don't like others to have something they do not. They don't like having to put in effort to obtain it. The result is a design methodology that serves to make everyone happy, regardless of the legitimacy of their issue. That is, games are designed not from a game designers perspective, but from a business model perspective. It is unfortunate, but as I said, games are made for gamers, they are made for people to be entertained. You could, but only if you were a specific class. In EQ, a wizard, necro, SK, druid and bard had the abilitiy to solo to max and they obtained such ability when they achieved the level to have the right combination of spells. Other classes were completely group dependent. Monks pre-kunark could only solo to up around 36 (using ID kiting which was very slow and random), everything had to be grouped after such. Other classes like warriors were group dependent from the beginning. I understand your complaint, that content should be more difficult, but the problem is not whether it can be solo'd or not (someone will always be able to achieve such through clever use of skills and mechanics), but rather the content takes effort and thought to overcome. Fights back then were much longer. There was no such thing as killing trash with a few blows. Most trash mobs were as difficult as the boss mobs in games today. Boss fights for groups were long, difficult and slow in their execution. The point is, fights were designed to be endurance and luck, or fast kill executions were not an option. People had to balance the use of their skills, but as I have said, this is something that appeals to gamers, not those simply looking for entertainment. Tiered access back then was silly in how they applied it. If you are speaking of PoP it was a guild expansion, for guilds, designed for them to grind with mass numbers to achieve things. It killed smaller guilds (small back then was 30-40 players). There is nothing wrong with tiered access, but they applied it in for the form of excessive grind camps and this took away from the skill/tactic aspect of play and left it to those with no jobs and the RNG. Not an ideal design. Like I said, the problem is they have dumbed down content at all levels leaving the only avenue to succeed as being "do this easy quest over a million times". That is not how I remember loving it. I like the difficult content, the length of group fights allowing for time to communicate strategy change ups and approaches during a fight. CC'ing was a requirement giving more requirement and flexibility to a given encounter. I liked the risk/reward being harsh, though I thought the reward back then was often short changed too often for the effort. I liked everywhere you went being dangerous and the only aspect of you being able to "solo" things being if you were clever and careful about your approach and use of skills. I liked how you couldn't simply run away from mobs for a short sprint and have them stop chasing, how the idea of a mob far above you happening upon you leaving no area "safe" for your level. I liked how you had to pay attention to pathers, and how rooting, mezing, stunning, etc... were a requirement to even be successful against a trash mob. I liked how the items won, were not big flashy with huge numbers, and the gear was slow and meaningful in its acquisition. I liked how group dungeons were not something that could be done by people who didn't learn their class. I liked how leveling itself took a long time with the content being the focus, not how fast you got to then end level. I liked how I could play the game "casually" (2-3 hours a night) and it would take me months to get anywhere near max level. I liked how death was something people wanted to avoid, not a tactic in traveling or indiscriminately testing things. Games lack risk, they lack appropriate rewards for risk and they lack consequence. This will not change though. As I said, games are designed from a business model, not a game design model and what drives that model is the majority of player behavior and expectation. You won't get what you desire by people demanding to be entertained. They do not know what they even want, they only know they want to have fun and that is not a design methodology as it is too broad, too vague.

console

Who the heck plays WoW anymore? Seriously, I am not making an argument for this game, but WoW was a dead end game long before the mention of this expansion. Try going back to the release of Burning Crusade if you want to talk about the recognition of WoW turning into nothing more than a pointless grind with no challenge or reward for effort. If people want to be disappointed with MMO's, they shouldn't be using WoW as the judge of it, that game started its death rattle the moment the original devs left Blizzard right before its release.

"If" text delivered MMO's are dead as you say, it is not because of TOR, rather it is because the player generation these days finds reading to be a difficult and cumbersome task.

The EXP in the game ruins everything. I have no desire to move on. Everything I focus on to achieve is out leveled far too fast, making achievement pointless. The only thing I have to look forward to is the end level, but then end game is really nothing more than a pointless grind until new content. After all, if you can beat the end dungeons, what point is there to progress to better gear? End game should be a late focus, not an immediate one which it is in this game as fast exp results in. What am I going to craft? The rewards from end game are better, so the fast leveling I dealt made focusing on crafting as beneficial pointless. What about all of the commendation gear I could have worked on while I was progressing through the game? The planets went by so fast that the rewards were always lacking. Ive played this game a while now. While some may like it, I see it as a complete failure. Not because of the content, they had plenty of that. Not because of the development system, because it had a lot of depth, but rather because they pushed you through it so fast that none of it mattered. I tend to quit MMO's at end game because I don't care for pointless grinds, but this game did in record time what most take a bit to achieve. That is, they drove the player base to an end game to chase nothing. Well... I think I am done. Good luck to the rest if you like it, but this game is dead to me.

BINGO! And this is why I am losing interest in even getting to 50. You might think "what? you aren't 50 yet?" and the answer is no, but the reason is because I have tried to avoid leveling as much as possible while I was trying to make crafting and commendations on the way up to 50 have some possible meaning. The result is that I am about 47 and I have only done the class quest, and the first two planets fully. The rest I have barely touched and now most of the planets are grey to me, but as you pointed out, there is no real reason to go back to them aside from the story as there is nothing worth while in terms of character progression. So now I find myself lacking the desire to log in, even though I am not 50 due to the fact that the bulk of the game was wasted due to an excessive leveling speed. /shrug

How fast someone gets to a certain level has nothing to do with "casual" or not. As long as there is content for someone to experience, it has no bearing on a casual player. Casual players complained mainly when the content was simply a pointless task of grinding to level due to lack of content. Having an extremely fast leveling pace is catering to the impatient and easily bored, to which those same people end complaining anyway about lack of content once they get to max level.

No. I like the attempt (in-depth crafting system, interesting quest system, and gear modding system), but their execution is lost due to the leveling speed. Many features are often missed out on as you level too fast to get any real value from it (pre-50 gear, quests, etc...). That and the fact that the game is filled with bugs and design flaws that are obvious signs of lack of understanding of network based games and PC based MMO's in general (There are a lot of signs of console based habits within the design of the game that are glaring).

Exact? He said he didn't get a SINGLE purple out of his work. He didn't complain about not getting the specific of the 5 purples, simply ANY of them. You don't see that as a problem with the system and how it is too random for the level to which he was trying to achieve this reward? Also, why should people have to "suck it up" when these are obvious problems with the games design? Shouldn't something like this be brought up so they can evaluate it and see if it is intended? I could see if the OP was whining about silly things, but seriously, this is a valid complaint and the numerous responses of "suck it up" only seems to reinforce the reason games are going into the toilet.

That isn't random. You do realize the issue of complaint here not simply things being random, it is the limitation of artificial random number generation. That is, if you have a poorly designed RNG (often a company will use the "out of the box" RNG function provided with a software library) that was not designed to be representative of true randomness (or even a "reasonable" means of such). The result is you get outliers that repeat so often that they are not random (such as some people constantly getting fails and others getting a opposite of success). This has always been a problem in such developments and it is not simply "fate" to which is handing them their result, but the pattern non-randomness in the RNGs function. Due to this, some companies will add in constraints to limit these outliers (could be a re-seed after a certain point to reset a consistent pattern or percentage adjusters, ie having code evaluate the intended result and modifying as needed to avoid such behavior) And here you ignore the problem and attempt to herd the OP along like a sheep telling them to accept the flaws in the game, and then you imply the invalidation of the content by claiming they should not play the games content, but skip on off to max level where the problem will not "appear" to be unreasonable. The solution is what the OP did, bringing up the issue and pointing out a suggestion for improvement, not sticking their head in the sand and acting like cattle led to the feed bin. /boggle You mean sometimes you get a streak of the RNG that hands things over without any time put in, and sometimes regardless of all the time put in, you get nothing kind of luck? That isn't luck, its called poor design. How about we take this concept and apply it to the boss fights? Sometimes you will walk in and one shot him, other times you can do everything completely right and the boss will one shot everyone? You know, leave it up to "dumb luck" and all that... I mean... that is what a game is right? Just dummies happening upon their rewards through luck? It is completely unreasonable to put in basic content as such and expect only rare chances of obtaining them. It completely invalidated the depth of the system. You have green that can branch into 3 blues and each blue that can branch into 5 different types of purples. Making it so that even seeing a single purple for a level item of gear to which is so easily surpassed by the leveling speed is not simply unreasonable, its asinine. Its poor design. The way the system is now, they could have saved all of the time making this complex system of crafting and simply made it return a single purple. As you are suggesting, it is a waste of time to try for even one, why bother trying for anything past that?

It would certainly give them a more granular level of control on the success rate process. I never understood why they simply leave everything strictly to the RNG.

The OP makes a good suggestion about chance reduction. I never understood why developers leave a system as such completely up to the RNG. Let the RNG be the base to the calculation, then as the OP mentioned, when attempts increase, adjust the success chance. If they applied this type of logic, they would have a lot more control over the return. It would still give a random approach to it, but it would curb the outliers who end up getting a terrible run.

Sure, if a player has a level 50 character... but that is the problem here. At 37, the level to which most would be the level of making gear for that level 37 item, they will only have 3 deployable. An end level piece is acceptable to take a lot of time and resources, after all, its at the end of the crafting levels. A level 37 being at the mercy of an RNG is a poor design mechanic. Nobody is asking for easy rewards, merely some sanity in the effort process. I once tried to get a purple off a mid 20's item and it took me 300 greens to get the right blue, and 100+ blues to even get a random purple. I did it to see how long it would take and by the time I did get it, I was almost 10 levels above the item. The point is, the system is flawed as it is. Either leveling progress needs to be MUCH MUCH slower, or the return on effort to crafting on the pre-50 stuff needs to be adjusted to be more in line with the pace of the game.

1) What is the point of pre-50 content if the advice is to skip everything up to 50? 2) Because the point of a progressive development system is that as you level, you use the content (in this case, the person was using crafting) as a means to progress their character. 3) You just pointed out the flaw with this games system development system, to which you as well as others should be pointing out to Bioware rather than giving people who do point it out crap.

Story is important, but this is not simply an adventure game to which the entire point is the story (with no need for character development or action based elements). There is an underlying game mechanic to which is used to progress the story (character development which is used to progress the story content). The story could be absolutely award winning, but if the driving mechanic is severely lacking, the story will be a bitter/sweet reward. Now some certainly play the game just for the character development mechanic and view the story mechanic as secondary, but the fact that they do not care for story as much as they do the game mechanic does not invalidate their complaint about the game mechanic itself. That is, if the focus of this game were simply story, they could have designed the game to be similar to the Space Quest and Kings Quest series with no need for a combat engine or character development system. Story is simply a part, not the focus of this game.

Of all the things wrong with this game, why is it this has to be a major complaint? I mean, I understand the annoyance of the orbital station process of zoning a couple of times, but complaining about getting somewhere "taking too long" is getting absurd! In EQ it took literally 45 mins to an hour or more to get from one far place to another in the early game. Now I understood some of the complaints there, but as time has gone on with MMO's, it seems that ANY sort of "time of travel" is too much for people. It takes very little time to get between planets. If you have your quick travel up, it takes even less time. If you are simply moving from one part of the planet to the other, it can take 3-5 mins roughly depending on where you are, but in no way shape or form does it take a "long" time to travel, nor is it even anywhere near "game breaking". Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. how about complaining about the absurd leveling pace and how it outpaces the content? How about complaining about the numerous poorly thought out or missing MMO mechanics in the game? How about complaining about the absurd number of bugs that are so easily fixable that still got past beta? How about making suggestions about something that truly is wrong with the game rather than complaining about the most ridiculous and absurd issue? Nah, that would "take too much effort and time". /boggle

No joke. I am not 50 yet, but then I have done absolutely everything I possibly could (and still actually play) to avoid getting too much exp and yet I am still already 43. I swear, gamers today have become like a fat person who thinks touching ones feet is a major accomplishment.