Regnor
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Posts posted by Regnor
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They have to do something more than 1.2. Cross-server FP tool *might* be enough, but unlikely. How about something like this: free game time from May 1 to July 1? Radical move, but big ideas are needed to counter big threats. And this would have the benefit of helping players avoid the temptation that could suck them away forever.
I'm glad I'm not the one responsible for coming up with ideas because neither of the above would keep my wife and I. But I'm going to keep an open mind for the next couple of weeks to see how they respond to their first major threat.
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Well, my wife and I have geared 85's and left after Cata, but we're not crazy about MoP and we were REALLY looking forward to SWTOR. I'm not sure what happened, it just wasn't as revolutionary an MMO as I had expected. Nice storylines and cinematiics, but now that we're doing dailies and HM's, we are spending more time with the spacebar than ever before.
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Oh, and I should have added that I spent a couple of hours shouting in General for a FP group on my main before rolling on The Fatman. Finally got one, but it was a pain to put together. Met some nice friends, but the truth is, I'd have rather had a cross-server DF tool to put it together instantly. There's really not that much community left to hurt, after all.
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I rolled a new toon on The Fatman, just to see what it was like to play on a "FULL" server with a queue time. I was 965 to get in, so I had dinner and came back to find myself at 9. I got in, rolled a Sith Warrior and started in on the Class quest.
I was amazed at how many players were running around doing the same thing. On my main server I traveled to Coruscant to trade in my legacy gear and it was empty, empty, empty. Even the Black Hole and Fleet were empty. I remember at launch when I thought that 250 people running around Coruscant was low, and now there are less than 50 in Fleet.
I'm not going to try and speculate why all the diminishing populations, and I'm not going to wait around for the server merges, either. The only question I have to decide now is, do I take the one year WoW sub and get the free Diablo3 download, or just shell out the $60?
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The claims of nerfs happening due to lfd tools is shear coincident.
It may had speed up the need to tune the zones but the demand would still had come once the players moved into them even with out a lfd tool.
Just look at all the so and so zone is to hard on these forms and we dont have a lfd tool.
Over time game companies collect in game metrics and adjust the zones depending on the fail/success rates. Lfd tools especially cross server ones speeds up the data collection process since they have a lot more people running the zones. Showing the game companies where tuning (nerfs) need to be made to meet their expected success rate.
Now it is close to impossible to define what is to hard or to easy since its a subjective view point. Since ones man to easy is another mans to hard. Game companies then have to set a success rate they are comfortable with and one they think will keep the MAJORITY of players playing. Fact of the matter is the lesser skilled player base pays the bills in these games. So if they cant reasonably complete the zones then it has to be tuned so they can or they will leave for a game where it is tuned for them. One can only expect a person to fail so many times before they quit.
I personally find this game pretty easy. Yet i meet people every day who find it hard.
In no way to me does this make them bad players. It just reflects my years of gaming experience compared to there first gaming experience.
The mmo genre has evolved over the years to meet the demands of the majority of the new player base that has been brought into the genre.
The new majority of the mmo player base these days are a much more casual player.
These are players that come from such games as wow,farmsville and other online games of which there are many. I am not going to sit here and insult those players. Clearly they enjoy those games and those players number in the millions.
Those players are migrating to our mmo genre. Any game company that wants to make a profit would be silly to not make room for those millions of players. Make no mistake BW did not make this game out of the goodness of their heart for us hardcore games to play. They made this game to make money!
These players have limited time and are accustom to log on and have fun. Insult them if you will by calling them instant gratification baddies or what ever.
But they are the future of the mmo market player base. As it has moved out of the area of us geeks with our high dollar systems and into the area of the every day online user.
A cross server lfd caters to these players which IMO is a good thing.
Its even good for us more skilled/hardcore player. It brings in more money for more dev time.
What we can hope for is more settings that tune up the difficulty for us while keeping the easier settings for the others. BW has proven that they can do this since it is done in raids/ops already with 3 levels of settings. Normal, hardmode and nightmare. All that needs to be done is apply the same concept to 4 man flashpoints and leave nightmare mode of the lfd system.
Rift recently introduced this type of system to there small man content with master modes which are not on their cross server lfg listing.
If you want to do the really hard stuff you got to make your own group and run to the instance yourself. The key here is that these master mode zones are so tough that a true team needs to be put together for them or you will fail.
yes rewards would need to be adjusted but that is simply a matter of some dev time.
Simple fact is that done correctly a game can support both hardcore and casual players at the same time.
it can also support a cross server lfg system while also allowing those that want to form their own groups to do so.
Hopefully as the genre evolves more the game companies find ways to still keep the ole style players at least semi happy while also allowing the genre as a whole to develop with the times!
The claims of NO it will kill the server communities are false if done correctly.
I even forsee in the future of games moving away from the concept of single server games.
Such innovation to the mmo genre such as cross server lfg systems, cross server ignore and friends list. help me to see this. Games like eve have already done away with it.
Way back daoc did so in away by creating clusters of servers. While it was done to combat falling population on the servers it did show that even years ago it was possible to allow more than one server to interact together in common zones.
The year is 2012 and the genre doesnt need to be stuck in time!
I know that some players prefer the ole way and it starting to sound like my grandpa with his back in the day i walked uphill to school in the snow!
I have a gramdma that refuses to use the new flat screen we got her for xmas.. She dont like it and still has the old 100 pound monster tube sitting in her living room.
ye yea i am a wind bag and its 1am! good night!
Please tell me that English is not your first language and that you are not a product of the American school system. Please?
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There's obviously some variance between the different server populations. But I'm guessing that my experience isn't unique and that more than a few of the servers are experiencing diminishing populations.
I'm also guessing that with a cross-server DF tool you'd have a lot more people playing FPs who don't want to play with players they might have to see again, to be perfectly honest. Not because they suck or because they're griefers, but because they want to experience new content without having to deal with the kind of player who responded in this thread that "if you can't rustle up 4 players to do a hard mode then you don't deserve to do a hard mode".
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That's the argument against it. But as I travel across the world I see less and less community to kill. I have always agreed that a DF tool has a definite impact on the community, but it's becoming apparent that diminishing subs is having a greater impact. Either that or they're all playing D3 beta (which makes me shudder to think what will happen to the community post May 15).
Anyway, I think the argument against a DF tool needs to be reconsidered in light of the thinning population. I went to Coruscant to trade in some legacy rewards expecting to see it bustling with new players or at least new alts. It's a ghosttown. From a dev standpoint, which is better, consolidating servers or adding a DF tool?
I don't know, maybe it won't make a difference after 5-15. I'd like to try it and find out before giving up.
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I think that settles that. We are not even columni geared yet so we've got some work to do. I doubt we'll be able to pull it off at this stage, and it probably wouldn't be as much fun anyway. Thanks all
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My wife and I (Tank-specced Guardian w/ Kira, and Heal-specced Sage w/ Nadia) are proficient with our classes and have duo'd a number of challenging things, but have never done a HM and want to start working on that and our dailies.
Are any of the HM FP's duo'able with this set up or is this just fantasy? I can accept any answer and we're happy to start grouping up, but it's just a question so please keep it civil ;-) and on point, thanks!
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Just back after a necessary month absence. What's all this talk about low population servers and server mergers, is the community shrinking?
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Nice. Too bad it's only Medium armor, got me all excited there for a minute.
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No, my wife and I quested all night and experienced nothing you've described.
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Crafting armor is currently entirely pointless except as a means to work really hard and be able to better outfit one, maybe two, of your companions, and possibly help yourself have a slight edge while leveling.
But only if you burn a lot of time, mats and money; in the end, you pay way more for crafting your own armor than if you just ate the occasional repair bill and comparatively brief running-back time to die one or two more times at worst.
Armstech and artifice? Again, same deal; mere supplements to commendation vendors that allow for more customization of your secondary stats than comm vendors do while leveling.
Unfortunately, once you hit 50, do your Belsavis and Ilum dailies for a week and you can get enhancements, mods, hilts and barrels that are better than anything you can craft -unless you get special raid schematics-, or yoink mods out of PVP gear.
So, raid or die. Funny thing is though, if you're raiding regularly enough to have a real shot at schematics useful to you, there's a really good chance you have no cause what-so-ever to care. If you could turn around and craft those better things and sell them at huge prices to the folks that can't or won't raid, it might almost be worthwhile for that alone, but, typically, BOP's the thing. I'll just say that I have by no means seen all the schematics that might drop, but those I have seen have near-exclusively been for BOP stuff.
if I'm wrong on that, funny, that should have made itself even theoretically apparent by now. The fact that it hasn't says a few things itself; they're not good or happy things.
Cybertech? Earpieces are nice, but you're just over a week of dailies away at level 50 from having raid-grade earpieces from daily commendations. Mods, armor mods, droid gear and ship parts?
...Does anyone even care about the ship parts? They're nice additions, but do they add meaningful value to the skill? What're you gonna do at 50 with your ship; farm fleet commendations for the better part of a month to get a level 50 purple box off the fleet commendation vendor?
Hell of an investment in a lottery ticket for a chance at a gear drop that A) probably won't be useful to you and B) is irrelevant compared to PVP gear, which takes a fraction of the time to get by comparison.
Biochem's good. The nerf looks like they're nerfing everything but that which needed nerfing, being adrenals, but implants suffer the same endgame problem as Cybertech's earpieces; they're only valuable if you can't or won't raid. The absolute best earpiece you'll ever make without a raid drop schematic will require you to invest way more time and a heck of a lot more money into making it than...if you just went and did your dailies for just over a week and got a raid-grade daily commendation earpiece.
Do it all and outfit your companions in crafted stuff and wear your daily and raid stuff yourself? Must be nice to live in a vaccuum wherein which we all have the time and dedicated focus to do everything at maximum capacity at all times.
If you don't, there's no point to most of these crafting skills. They are, in terms of credits and time, a total loss; a complete wash.
There are systems in place that are less time consuming and frankly, more fun to invest one's effort in. If you've got 18 hours a day to play the gorram game, you could PVP all 18 hours and walk away with two, possibly three or maybe even four champion bags.
Dailies? Well, they didn't do dailies all that well either; they're annoying and run you around in obnoxious circles. At least in WoW, they made their dailies something you could knock out in an hour and not have to burn your entire evening on...but, you can still get great gear and mods for doing them.
Better than you can craft unless you A) raid, B) get the raid craft schematics, C) get the raid drop components and D) have the right craft skill.
So really, for crafting to be worthwhile, you'll need six characters on a server, one with each craft crewskill, all of them at 400, all of them decently supplied with non-raid/HM mats, you'll need to farm your dailies at the mere cost of 5-7 hours of your life every day, you'll need to raid as often as the lockouts are off and you'll need to farm HM's as often as possible so you have the best chances of getting the schematics and components you'll need...
...to finally be able to do something relevant to endgame with crafting.
Boy, that sure is reasonable. Read my signature for my thought on that.
And while you're at it, Bioware, please take a well intended bit of advice: don't try to out-WoW WoW. You're embarassing yourselves. Seriously. You can't even set up dailies to be relatively minimal in the obnoxious department.
You have no grasp what so ever of scaling your content to basic truths of human psychology, in short. You don't have the years of dedicated experience that's brought WoW to being what it is today, for example; not in their arena. Not in making a raid-and-grind game that doesn't drive people insane as a function of its own systems.
And if you think I'm wrong...h'okay. You're the developers; you know best. Developers always know best, right? That's why games are always perfect on release and everybody always thinks everything's wonderful with no patches or nerfs or tweaks or overhauls to anything ever required, right?
Just, y'know...cutting that assumption's head off pre-emptively and all.
So please, quit trying to be WoW and, if you for some reason can't figure out how to not do a crappy job of carbon-copying WoW's models, at least learn from their experience in how to deliver that model?
Please? You wanna waste all your time and money developing story content for a playerbase that will evolve in suit to your raidgame fantasies, sure, go ahead, that lesson will teach itself starting...about three weeks ago for anyone paying attention, so I assume you'll catch it sometime in a couple years.
I don't think you're stupid, mind you. It takes intelligent people to make the stupendous and fabulous mistakes, after all, and you've got a couple already made and, for their making, you're aiming yourselves right at the bullseye of several more.
Right now, crafting's general and ultimate negative value is one such thing. If it isn't valuable to endgame and it can only be made valuable in the most fringe of fashions if a staggering list of time-devouring requirements are also met....why did you include it at all?
Who were you trying to fool? You think gimped and marginalized crafting systems are a new deal? Think you've invented some clever new yard of wool to pull over unsuspecting eyes?
Have you paid exactly no attention at all to a degree that must surely cross a few lines into outright denial on the evidence on plain display in other games wherein which crafting is identically irrelevant?
Does it look like the non-raiders in those games are -happy- with it? Congratulations, you've imported a years-old point of dissatisfaction from many MMO's before you by doing nothing any differently.
At least in some games, it really is irrelevant and they don't even try to make it look like it could be useful. But hey, let's look at your idol, World of Warcraft. Guess how much relevant raid gear is craftable? Only that which you get patterns for in raids, and nobody cares!
S'right, Bioware; nobody cares. Been raiding for years in WoW. You know what most of us do with those patterns? If nobody in any of our guild that has a crafting fetish wants or thinks they need it, we auction it. Isn't worth sticking in a gbank slot to save for anyone in the future to use.
Could it be, in theory, useful if crafted? Sure. But why give that much of a hoot when you can just...go raid and get better? If you're raiding already to get such drops in the first place, you have no need at all for whatever it is those patterns can make.
Absolute best case scenario is that you or someone you know can craft it and use it until they get a better raid drop. Absolute best case scenerio in WoW with those.
Here? You've made it three times the pain in the rump to even try to care.
Again, you have no demonstrable grasp of the macrosocial or individual psychological interplays involved in trying to emulate WoW, as you've copied none of their easement factors that...sure, get the wannabe 'hardcore' crying about how 'easymode' and 'welfare' a lot of stuff is, but ALSO don't drive the vast majorities insane and reward those that try to make something of it with a steady stream of pointless frustration.
You also very clearly have this idea stuck in your heads that gambling is just the best and most repetition-propagating thing ever. RE'ing in crafting is the equivalent of playing the lottery with your crafted gear.
Will I win a blue schematic on this one? Nope. This one? Nope. This one...? Nope. Get my roughly 1/6th to 1/4 return on the recaptured mats, try again.
Blues to purples? Blues take a substantially longer time to craft; that's fine, to a point.
But then we have to use -them- as lottery tickets too.
This would be pretty alright if the purple schematics we stand to get were even vaguely worth trying to get in general. But what the heck is the point of working and working and investing away in a craft skill to, say, make a set of purple level 49 armor for yourself...when you can invest absolutely nothing in a craft skill, save your time, save your credits and wind up equipped in modded blue-equivalents and decent greens with no comparative effort at all and then turn around at 50 and, since the assumption is that everyone has all the time in the world every day, go farm hardmodes for 50 purples and 50-modded oranges while you plink away at your dailies for the better mods, earpieces and implants?
It's a nice hypothesis that, again, emulating WoW, having raid-grade craftable gear schematics drop in raids will make crafting more valuable.
Too bad the vast majority of those things I've seen drop are BOP when crafted. If you can't personally use it or stick it on a companion, its vendor trash. Can't even benefit the community via trickle down of selling most of that stuff on the market.
You sure have a love affair with WoW's bend of gear elitism, eh? LotrO kinda does too, but you know what LotrO also does? They do a pretty good job of making the top end craftables accessible via numerous recipes available off daily vendors with a smattering of BOE recipes that drop in dungeons or raids.
They also enrich the value of weapon crafting skills by tying the best weapons in the game to require a crafter that's done their craft guild dailies and has the recipes for 1st Age and 2nd Age legendary weapons/offhands to make them.
Crafted armor in LotrO? Yeah, raid sets you have to farm your face off to get are better, but if you never see better than the top end crafted teals (purples in our equivalence here in TOR), you are -not- doing poorly. You could hop right into a raid and not be holding your team back or needing to be carried due to gear inferiority.
Here? A difference between 14k HP and 20k HP is enormous, and the stat differences between the best non-raid craftables and gear you can PVP or farm out of normal mode ops? We're looking at a difference of around 1100-1200 in your primary stat and 1700-1900, and the same goes for endurance.
That's HUGE. Utterly unapproachable by anything even vaguely available to a crafter.
So, I've ranked every single craft skill you opened with to 400. I haven't invested a lot of effort into anything but Armormech and a smidge into Biochem and Artifice, but it's been telling.
I had 5 weeks of holiday leave to burn on TOR and boy did I burn it.
And boy do I feel burnt for what it's shown me.
You think you're going to out-WoW WoW. Your crafting is as annoying where it isn't moreso, you chew up way more time and, frankly, your provisions of craftable modifications doesn't hold a candle's worth of relevance to Enchanting in WoW, or Gemcutting...or Herbalism....or Cooking...or Engineering.
All of those have, over the years in WoW, evolved into things that are useful to everybody. Gonna go into a raid with your gear unenchanted, no potions, no scrolls and yno gems in your gear? Are you stupid? Invest in your community! Invest in your own experience and level a craft skill to make useful stuff!
Armorcrafters and weaponcrafters in WoW? Y'know, I seem to recall having bought a very nice set of blue resilience armor off WoW's auction house to go futz around in PVP with. Gemmed it, did my own enchanting, snagged a decent PVP weapon after racking up enough valor to snag one and...I could have done a lot more if I cared about PVP.
But I was able to go out there and be quite effective for a putz putzing around with my guild, and some crafter got to sell me some entry level PVP gear that, frankly, worked as well as my interest in investing in it required. Wasn't great, but it wasn't irrelevant either.
Can crafters currently craft anything with Expertise on it? Huh. No entry level PVP gear? No encouragement to crafters to give the community that bridge into your own PVP system? Farm warzones like you have nothing better to do with your life or nothing on that end?
Moreover, I was tanking, and tanking just fine I might add, with an iLvL 359 tank-statted sword in WoW until I finally won a much nicer tank weapon in a heroic firelands raid.
Could the same be done here? I suppose, but...why, when for far less wasted time struggling out the best weapon a crafter can craft you could just...PVP for a while and almost certainly get a better shot at a pretty heavily superior PVP weapon?
Ain't like the PVP weapon can't have the right stats on it. Heck, you're far better set if you do nothing but PVP and start raiding in Champion/Centurion/Battlemaster gear than if you waste one second of your life trying to go the crafting route.
You're funny people. You clearly tried so hard to not be WoW in the story immersion. You clearly tried to break away from the generic moulde of holy trinity class structures.
...But then you turned around and undermined those things by carbon copying the most annoying and raid-funneling engineered aspects of WoW. You built the need for holy trinity class structures right into it and, consequently, made several trees on numerous classes pointless to do much with, set the standard by which numerous talents on those trees are just plain stupid to take for anything, ever...
...and you didn't even come vaguely close to copying the WoW experience with anything resembling skill or proficiency. Just...stop trying. It's still early enough to save yourselves further embarassment, and you've got such a lovely thing going with the story immersion.
Really, you do. You folks generally tell a good story and have a well of potential to bring folks down a years-long epic, unfolding saga on the weight of that story.
But I'm just gonna go ahead and call it right now, for the absolutely no good it will do 'cause I doubt anybody that matters will even read this; you're not going to out-WoW WoW.
By the time you acquire the proficiency and nuanced, firsthand understanding of the macrosocial and psychosocial details involved in the whole morass, we'll be two years down the road, everyone that was primarily here for the story will be alienated and have no faith left in you at all, if they're even still playing, and your forum will be full of people trying to play your raidgame like a raidgame and griping about how you keep sticking ove-relaborated story and dialogue into everything.
And even then, you'll still be dragging along in WoW's shadow, because WoW does one thing and funnels all its effort into that one thing; it all leads to raiding. There's lore, there's story, but it's of optional, secondary and, for many raid-minded folks, utterly irrelevant concern as anything but a very occasional talk point while waiting for Bob to get his dang flasks crafted so we can get on with this raid.
You're gonna see it as it is. You will see the ire rise over dialogue existing in HM flashpoints and operations. You engineered that yourselves; you're trying to run in two directions at once.
Go out into a hall and try this. Try to run in two directions at once.
Keep doing it until you get my point. You don't get it as of right now as far as anything presented even vaguely indicates.
But you will. Whether it's too late for that knowledge to matter or not depends on how long it takes you to figure out that you're not going to out-WoW WoW and you've committed yourselves absolutely to a very specific degree of immersive storytelling.
I feel like I'm explaining rain to someone that doesn't go outside to say it, but, if nothing else, I feel better. It's said.
I'm gonna go see what a new class' storyline's like now and try my best to ignore your sinkhole craft skills.
Peace out.
I don't generally give much weight to wall-of-text whining (let along re-quote it in full), but this message is so truthy and well stated, it demands the most serious attention. It's reassuring to know that BW will probably read it at some point, and I just hope that they are as brilliant as their game reveals them to be, and that they see the writing on the wall and start moving in the right direction.
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Bump after a TL;DR edit.
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Is Jedi Prisoner a 2-step FP that requires first Taral V and then Maelstrom Prison? My wife and I both have the Jedi Prisoner FP but mine says "Complete Maelstrom Prison" and hers says "Complete Taral V", even though we both finished Taral V last night together (and got the daily to prove it).
Any idea what's up?
Thanks!
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No one else has encountered this?
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There are perks, whether they are comparable or not is another question. Cybermechs can make their own speeder bikes and hover bikes, for example.
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If so, I haven't been able to. It seems they are meant to be, as their icon adds the text "Right click to Reverse Engineer" after you've hit the Reverse Engineer button.
So I'm assuming bug?
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Yeah, I will test it, but I would consider armor ratings to be part of what is meant by "base stats". If the armor rating is significantly higher on one piece, it would clearly be better than the other and that would kind of defeat the idea that "base stats are the same". I'm hoping that in fact, the armor rating (and other base stats) are derived somehow from the mods on the item.
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I've heard it said that all orange items of the same type (e.g., Lightsabers) have the "same base stats". Yet, when you compare items that require a different level you will see that the base stats for energy damage, for example, are different. Do I understand correctly that this is a function of the mods in the item, and that if you were to take out every mod in the item, all the base stats (including energy damage, for example) would be identical? From this I take it that this also means that the level requirements are really driven by the contained mods, and not the particular item?
Just checking because I want a moddable LS but I can't find one available that I like and I'm considering using one I had earlier that was orange but very noobish. If I can just mod it up to be equal to level-appropriate sabers, I'm good to go.
Thanks,
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Sorry, guys, but I think it's the RNG at work. Lately I've RE'd a couple of blues and had my purple after 5 tries, and then my wife popped a purple on her first attempt.
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Also, a better hard drive for gaming nowadays is SSD's. Look into them. Get a dedicated SSD for your OS, and a dedicated SSD for the game(s) you are playing
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I use an SSD for my Win7 OS but after my Adobe CS programs there's no room left for any double-digit GB games. A 2nd SSD dedicated to games is probably in my future. Thanks for the reminder.
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Someone in this thread said that Guides are crap, and there's a lot to that. But, the official atlas for this game is handy to have around for the maps.
So quiet
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Posted