Patience I have, but a game that is actually playable should not be an unrealistic expectation.

How dare you indeed.

Can't seem to find even basic schematics.

We need them. The other night on Begeren Colony, there were only 8 people on each faction queuing for warzones, and I was on the weaker team. No wins in 6 hours. I've also been on the other side of that, and it isn't much fun either. Was able to be convinced to pick up GW2 as a result, and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Thirty? I've seen well over 100 on an event and I've never once dropped below 30 FPS at max sets. SWTOR drops below that on 16 man Nightmare Pilgrim.

1. transfers/character slots 2. Mod removal cost cut 90% or eliminated entirely 3. Operations vendors for droids

Why not put quests like the Collected Writings of Tiethiagg (the one with the mirrors and the hour long queue) inside the instanced heroic mission areas? That way it's you and your group and no one else. Not all of them need be like that, but if you're aiming for some complexity that could be undermined by too many hands, that's the way to go.

Problem with Jung Ma is they offered three destination servers for the other RP-PVP, Ajunta Pall. I moved mine to Begeren Colony to be with friends who still played instead of Jung Ma. Worked out great for me, not so much Jung Ma.

Vanguard. Then everyone wanted to roll sith. So the Vanguard sat at level 43 on a dead server until transfers.

I have two level 50 tanks on Begeren Colony, a juggernaut and a vanguard. The problem is really that I don't need the gear or coms right now. Neither does anyone else in my guild--the last person got his very last piece from HM EC last night. I've been Best in Slot for months now, so I'm either playing low level alts or PvP. Might not even raid until 1.4 at this point because no one needs the gear.

The static power relics are better for DPS classes than any campaign proc or activated relic, in most cases (and always in PvP). I'd only make exceptions for the procced tank PvE relics, as the short internal cooldown, combined with diminishing returns on shield/absord/defense, make for a better equipped slot on any boss with a lot of tank switches (particularly Kephess final phase).

Good vid. I was watching it and had a good idea of how to monetize the world events cost effectively without pissing off the subscribers. The last world event could have been done with a skeleton crew. I had a post earlier about how easy this would have been to do in the Neverwinter Nights toolset. No art assets, limited VO, and simple drag and drop missions from existing assets in existing terrain. This should be standard with whatever developer tools are available for the Hero engine. If not, this game is in deeper trouble than most of you can imagine. So what if we had more of these world events? One, it would keep some people on the bubble subbed, as the world events have been well received, despite the bugs, even by the commentators in the video. And having them more frequently would simmer down a lot of the "where's my class gear" complaints from other threads. You give *most* of the world events away for free. The story, the quests, the cosmetic stuff--free. However, if you want some in game power from it? You extend the storyline into whatever the current tier of story mode or hard mode operations might be. Let's say a "bonus" mission from the world event sends you into EC, to kill say the second or third boss. Well, subscribers get this for free, so they'll be ok with it. But the guys on the F2P side, they hear about the cool mission reward (say, a rakata level main hand) from this quest, and think, "ok, for $3 for the access for the week, I'll give it a go." Or maybe there's an item from the new warzone you have to acquire, and you need just more than the weekly limit of free to play. There's a couple bucks more from a group of F2P people, while not gouging the subs. It's win-win all around. And maybe some of those F2P people like it so much, they sign up for a subscription.

Play with people who use it correctly instead. There are plenty of them out there, and most in high end progression know how to use recount for more than DPS. It's PuG leaders who tend not to know what they are doing.

I'd also buy a piece or two of the sand warrior armor, for transferring armorings or later use for a new alt: They are going to be upgraded to bind on legacy. If you can come up with 140 for the full 7 set and 40 or 60 more through trade for the bowcaster, you'll be good to go.

You hit the nail on the head, there, with "unnecessary complexity". This is the point of the thread, and if true this is absolutely a design flaw on the part of tools programming. No art was added, it seems, as the Chevin models were already there as well, so this should have been literally a drag and drop quest chain, with minimal technical design elements and next to no art (possibly none). You know, I wrote a persistent quest system for Neverwinter Nights. Everything was done with templates, and all the designer had to do was plug in variables from a simple table to make everything from repeatable dungone lockouts to loot to camera angles work automatically, even with multiple players vying for the same result and all the abuse they could throw at it. If I can do that, with previous training only as extensive as QBASIC from the 1990s, there's no reason it couldn't have been made easier for the professionals of today. None. You can still have very robust tools without unnecessary complexity. That is the lesson that should have been learned from NWN.

Heh, don't i know it (OP clerics). But what happened with this world event was Nar Shaddaa was already built. So were Coruscant and Dromund Kaas. So was Tatooine on the previous event for that matter. A better comparison would have been to have taken your completed city, and put the event in that city, because that's exactly what happened here. And it was 10 quests, which barely exceeded the level of content for the story quests of one class for one or two planets. There are thousands of quests in the Old Republic. If 10 quests takes months, this game should have been in development for decades. That's all I'm sayin'.

I'm not suggesting weekly. The content created by an amateur NWN scripter or module designer isn't held to the same kind of scrutiny as a AAA MMO. But that's an individual, not a specialized team. Here's how it would go. Writers come up with the concept for the event. There wasn't a whole lot of dialogue involved in either yet released event, but it still needs a story. I can't see this taking more than a week. They pass this to the technical designers and artists, and then go back to writing other things. The technical designers come up with the code for interacting with placeable objects, spawning enemies where needed, along with cutscene work and dialogue node work, then onto the item creation (stats), then go back to technical design on other things. The artists, if needed, make a new model or two, or rebake a few with new textures, then go on to other things. Script is passed to the sound guys, and the VO is recorded in a day or two (and you get the picture). Then it's passed to QA for a week or two, depending on scope. The final revisions are sent to Lucas Arts for approval, and then it goes live. Seems like a month to 6 weeks, right? Well that's because it is. But each component could be done with different departments only spending a week or even a few days each on it. And we're not even talking about whole departments here (other than writing, they are going to get together), just a few guys and gals here and there. If it's not as trivial as I am describing it, then the underlying tools architecture is quite simply, not even as good as the Aurora toolset from 10 years ago. Which is my point. They should have learned from that.

I liked the Rakghoul event more, even though I got more gear out of the more recent event. We need more of these. They're small projects comparatively but create a lot of buzz.

Oh yeah, definitely not putting down the event, I have two bowcasters and a full set of soon-to-be-legacy adaptive armor, which is nice. I'm just thinking about one, these kind of events driving persistent world servers in NWN, some of which are still running today, 10 years later, and two, that other MMO with its dozen world events. This is easy stuff. Some placeable objects, some code, a little bit of art and sound assets, QA, LA approval, and presto--fun for the whole family. Warzones and operations required an order of magnitude more art and QA. Still want to see those, too, don't get me wrong. But these fun little events, particularly if they are new writing and not mostly static like those in the other MMO, could make the game stand out.

Funny thing about that is, two dudes (Adam Miller and Fabian Cerutti) by themselves put out more content for NWN in their spare time than the entire staff of Bioware has put out for SWTOR in the last 5 months. Development costs and times, given good tools programming and practical use of middleware, should be going down, not up.

I was on for 1.3 quite a bit. Did quite a bit of testing on group finder, but could never get a ranked warzone in. And yes, character transfers should be automated. If I'm going to be testing nightmare EC or the new one on hard or nightmare, I'm going to want my current fully campaign geared and augmented sniper rather than my augment-free rakata copy withering away there.

Let me reflect on the latest world event. I thought it was pretty cool. But you know what? This is something any competent NWN scripter could have done (and many did). I'm serious here, because I've done it before and seen it before, in both modules and persistent world events (in fact the event reminded me of a PW server DM event). Now that's not to put down the event or the team in any way; I liked it and would like to see more events. My complaint is in the "spacing" of these events. Why do they take so long? Why such a gap when these things are comparatively small projects? Let's talk about what kind of bottlenecks we're looking at. How much new art content was in the world event? The Chevin models and maybe the speeder? The bowcasters have been in art assets since beta, and the pet and armor are simple retextures. You used existing terrain, so no slowdown there. IP holder approval? LA approval can't be taking that much time. QA? Well, yeah, maybe you do need more QA, given that there were bugs, but that's a staffing question. The actual code behind the missions in the event was trivial (or at least should have been), so why not speed up the pace? You could be putting out these world events much faster, and rather cheaply. If not, your tools are suffering from a functional deficiency that should be remedied immediately. Everything in the world event could have been done with the Aurora toolset (and a hakpak for VO work) by a single amateur, in under a week, and if it were me, it would have been bug free because I QA the hell out of my own work. And you have staff for that. Professional staff. Events such as the one I just played should not be on an 18 week schedule as they're too cheap and too easy compared to ops and WZs. You know it, I know, and the players now know it.

It's like there's a saboteur on the dev team, potentially being paid under the table by Blizzard, potentially a disgruntled dev expecting a pink slip in the next round of layoffs. I'm actually entertaining the possibility that this is the case, because I just don't want to believe that Bioware is this inept. It's shameful.

Cosmetic surgeons are already in the game: http://www.torhead.com/mission/dBIOiXf/the-face-merchants They're for low level NPCs only, though. But at least it's repeatable.

When you hit 50, you get more power through gear, and sometimes abilities through gear (relics and set bonuses) and your legacy. Welcome to the MMO genre.