Hi folks, Thanks for the tips! I've gone from "suck" to "middling" -- but I'm still totally out of practice.

L50 Battle Master (with 1 piece L50 War Hero) with 1188 expertise. As I understand things, that's a little more than half the expertise a newb in PvE greens would have. Haven't played in over a year.

D'oh. That stings.

Related question ... Returning player with a L51 bounty hunter in full BM gear. Am I better off pulling the mods from the BM gear and sticking it into orange pieces? And then replacing the remaining BM pieces with cheap greens off the market? Or is there something creative I can do with 1k cartel coins and 43 planetary commendations? Otherwise, I'm cash poor and converted all my regular WZ commendations into ranked. TY!

Howdy, The game's bleeding subs. Going for low-hanging fruit like gear tinting isn't the Big Thing that will keep people around, bring in fresh subs. And, frankly, maybe there isn't that One Big Thing to revitalize the game. But I don't think 1 op (and, honestly, what percentage of players even DO ops?), cosmetic changes to some gear, some balance tweaks, and some bug fixes are exactly the excitement-inducing changes this game needs in order to remain viable.

Yowza, Meridian 59 and UO? That's quite the pedigree. Good luck, Rich! My $0.02 is that games often shed their executive producers post-launch -- the set of skills required to get a game launched aren't always the same ones required to to maintain and expand it.

There aren't that many players like you left (and, note, I recently chucked my beta CDs for both UO and EQ 1, so I've been around the block, also). FWIW, Cryptic's CEO owned up to having made the mistake of assuming players would pay it forward. If you're interested, there are a couple interviews with him that touch on how the market has changed since WoW was released. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6041/not_so_cryptic_neverwinter_and_a_.php?print=1 http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/08/23/massively-exclusive-jack-emmert-speaks-about-neverwinter-and-a/4 Jack is ... ummm ... well, yeah. But it took stones to admit that his assumptions were wrong and that gamers' expectations have changed.

What was their first design choice? To me, it looks an awful lot like the dev team implemented all the main features of an MMO (PvE, PvP, factions, a market, crafting, guilds), but never really went above and beyond "good" for anything beyond voice acting. What would've kicked PvE beyond "good," for instance, is making it easier to put teams together. It's simply dreadful to try and get a guildie to help you; the travel times make getting some help so annoying few people bother. The devs bungled teaming. It's really that easy. And, while a dungeon finder might be a kludge, it's based on something already in game (PvP queue) that people use. FWIW, you can look at the bucket list of gameplay features the devs have delivered and find all sorts of niggling annoyances that keep these features from being "exceptional". And the problem is that this game, SWTOR, does not exist in a vacuum. It has well-established competition competing for your $15 a month, and those games have smoothed out their bumps and hiccups already. MMO gamers no longer pay it forward -- when an MMO is released, it's judged against how well it stacks up on day 1 to games that have been under constant development since their release. Face it, gamers no longer play their subscription fees under the anticipation that things will get better. 'Cause the things that they're looking for -- PvP with no subscription fees? Robust crafting? Marketeering? Easy teaming? Some game already has them. The market's changed, dramatically, since SWTOR's development started. But I don't think EA / BioWare really noticed that until recently.

The game's far too linear and scripted to feel alive and vibrant to me. Example: my trooper pisses off Garza in one cutscene for flagrantly violating direct orders. A few minutes later, he's the hero of the galaxy getting a medal. Ditto with his ex, the one he watched getting blowed up real good, showing up in a recent mini-quest talking about old times. Really? Really? The story is like space combat: it's on a rail; nothing you do will alter it. I expected something better, deeper from BioWare. But, no. You can't play a tormented trooper who switches to the Empire because he's become frustrated with the bureaucracy and corruption of the Republic. It's Star Wars: where's the space-based PvP? It's an MMO: why does everything but the fleet seem empty? The game IS good, but it doesn't seem to have anything particularly unique going for it that makes it seem worth my $15 / month.

Hmmm ... In the short term, it would mean that updates take longer as the new staff members chew up resources getting trained, learning the ropes, and pestering their co-workers. Depending on the industry and position, it can take anywhere from a couple weeks (burger flipping) to two years (law) for a new hire to stop being a net drain on resources. I know that when CoH hired a bunch of new bodies a while back, it took about 6 months to see increased release cycles. I wouldn't get too excited.

The game's design is flawed when it comes to teaming. Huge planets with small level ranges. Long (compared to other MMOs) travel times to help friends / guildies. It's telling that the most common form of teaming I've seen is warzones. You click two buttons, you're placed in a queue, you're teleported to the location, and instantly placed in a team. No jerking around with ships, airlocks, walking, speeders, level differences between teammates minimized, &c.. The devs also need to give the players tools so they can build their own communities beyond glorified chat channels (errrr, guilds). Housing, event calendars, player-organized events, interesting open world PvP ... there are LOTS of options.

The imbalanced starts cause people to not join queues. I hope the power gamers are enjoying Void and Hutt

I worked my tailfeathers off in a WZ yesterday, was top on my team for healing, second in damage for the WZ, first in kills for my side, got 11 medals ... and 40 commendations and little else because my team lost. Dude. 35 or so of those WZs gets me a gun for 6+ hours' worth of grinding, plus time spent waiting for a WZ to pop. And that's assuming I don't end up on a team with under-geared teammates. I've been in a few WZs where I get 0 commendations because my PuG ends up against a well-geared premade. I see a lot of people l2p and "get better" comments, and there is some merit in that. However, gear in this game makes a MASSIVE difference in performance. And, under the current system, it's ... rather challenging ... to make up that gear difference. The rewards system currently in place is hardcore -- that's cool. It should be used for ranked WZs where the assumption is that it's experienced and geared against experienced and geared. But the current PvP experience is "everyone thrown into a blender". If you're on a PuG of fresh 50s against a premade in WH or BM gear, you're going to get rolled. It's entirely possible you're going to end up with 500 valor and, if you're lucky, 30 comms. You won't make up the gear difference in months of playing. What we need is a casual-friendly reward structure (pre-1.2) for standard WZs and the hardcore structure for rated. With world PvP where everyone meets.

If the PvP community ends being made of relatively few hardcore players, BioWare will pull the plug on PvP development in favour of PvE development. It's that easy. This game needs two separate, and possibly three, streams for PvP -- one for the hardcore gamer, one for the casual, and somewhere both camps can hang out. Right now, we have one for the hardcore. And the funny thing? For all the talk of sending casual PvPers "back to WoW", PvPers are among the most fickle gamers I've ever seen. They aren't into character development, they don't develop much, if any, attachment to their characters or the game's story -- they're into performance and new experiences. And it's easier to get the latter by switching games (just look at all the posts that reference GW2). It's amazing to me how few hardcore PvPers actually get that PvP has to appeal the general population in order to be sustainable. If it gets cordoned off from the rest of the game by build, guild, and gear restrictions, it becomes easy for the devs to ignore.

I'll try to keep this concise ... I've played about a dozen WZs on my main (50 Trooper, some Champion gear) and my L28 sage. The 8:5 matches blow -- they're almost always unwinnable. It is unpleasant to be ROFLstomped, repeatedly. Further, most teams cannot recover from the initial imbalance even if the team fills up 1 minute in. Worse, if you stay the course, you're likely to receive no rewards for being someone else's punching bag. If you're on a server with a population imbalance, chances are the more populous side also has more PvPers who are in it to win. Unfortunately, under the new system, they will likely gear up about one third (or more) faster than the less populous side. This will, in the short term, create an even larger performance difference AND help to reinforce the population imbalance. People don't like losing. Many "losers" will either re-roll ... or stop PvPing. It's a bad system.

So ... You're dredging up an old MUD / MMO meme by proclaiming you have spooky knowledge of some s00per 133+ widget, hoping for some attention (and perhaps grovelling), while revealing nothing? I've seen these pronouncements off 'n' on for 20 years. Most of the time (perhaps all of the time) it's bunk. Unless you actually come out 'n' say what's got your knickers in a twist, it really does come off as rather lame. And it comes off as rather pathetic if, in a month's time, you follow up in someone else's post about great things are with a "told ya' so."

To me, teaming ends up being a PITA. The game doesn't level shift one's teammates to the mission holder's level. You can only profitably team with people of your own level. Travelling's a pain in the arse if you want to help someone in your guild who's on a different planet. The automatic team-making tool only works for PvP. It is, IME, a no-brainer that it should work for FPs and ops. Many planets seem empty because they are, at the end of the day, gated so that only a narrow range of levels gets any benefit, at all, from them. In no particular order ... Expand the Warzone queue to include ops and FPs. And then expand to include granularity so that a team leader can specify roles he's looking for. In CoH terms, add a SK system to make it possible to find teams outside of one's level and feel like you're contributing (lowbie -> high level) and being challenged (high level -> lowbie). Expand the existing worlds to include higher level content. The centre of the Republic ... is a world for lowbies? Really? No wonder it was sacked. Add tools to bring one's teammates or guildmates together. Instantly. And, as the SWG refugee pointed out ... this game could do with some in-game tools for organizing events.

Ditto! FWIW, it also helps to foster a sense of cohesion in guilds -- i.e., the newbies can group with more experienced players without the more experienced players logging out and seeing if they have an alt within range. The crazy thing is that the game already has something like a SK system for warzones.

I like the pitched battles of Voidstar. To me, it feels closest to what open world PvP should've been. FWIW, I dislike Huttball. Intensely. I think we're seeing a split where some people like high mobility battles (Huttball) and some people like fighting over set objectives (Void). Alderaan seems to be the meeting place of the two camps.

Some MMOs have used patch notes such as "blah blah blah server stability" as a code that really means "attempted to fix undisclosed exploit(s)". The vagueness is because the devs don't want the particular exploit disclosed to the general playerbase in case the patch doesn't work and / or it gives the haxxorz clues to future exploits. Or it could really just be something in the background that doesn't affect the players. Either way, the only things I /really/ want to see in patch notes is things like bug fixes, changes to powers, new content, ui improvements ... i.e., the stuff that does affect my gameplay.

A subtle effect of the population imbalance is that the majority (not even a huge one, but still a majority) players who play to win play Imperial -- a disproportionate number of Republic players are not in it to win, but for gits and shiggles. A side effect of the overall popularity of the Imperial side is that it's tough to play through the Republic's group content -- some worlds, even on mid- to high-population servers have too few people to reasonably play through Heroic content. What BioWare needs is a system that dynamically boosts / decreases rewards for each side based on population.

I've been running a lowbie sage through WZs for the last little bit. I'm surprised how many votes I can get with her -- at least on my server, people do drop votes on heal-centric players. I've topped out at 200k on loooong maps (i.e., no one reached the datacore), but rarely get more than 40k damage and 20 kills. I'm also surprised at how few votes my trooper gets. I've had maps with top 4 healing, top 5 damage dealt, top 3 kills ... and nothing. People seem to not reward generalists and instead focus "top healer", "top DPS", "top kills".

Champions / STO / Neverwinter all use Cryptic's internally-developed engine. FWIW, Cryptic decided to develop its own engine after futzing with the one for CoH -- they figured that, if they had their own engine, they could control its specs and, importantly for them at the time, re-use it internally for their grand plan of releasing a new MMO every 18 months without having to pay licensing fees. Uhhhh ... It didn't work out all that great for 'em. They burnt through so much money on the engine, they skimped on content, spit, and polish leading to Champions' current lulzy state. So few people re-upped after the first month development of the game slowed to a trickle (many of the fixes are trickled down from STO). As for BioWare? They made the decision to go for solid PvE content and (comparatively) skimp on the engine by going pre-fab. There's no clear-cut answer for whether or not it's better to go inernal or external -- each case is different, each has potential pitfalls.

I live in EST ... but my prime time for playing is mornings. I do some work at home that involves a good deal of down time. So, yeah, most MMOs schedule their maintenance during my prime time. And that's a funny thing about MMOs -- they are always scheduling maintenance during someone's prime time. At the end of the day, they have to balance out how many people are affected knowing someone's gonna be **ssed. The wee hours of the morning EST seem like a good compromise, mind you. Of course, if something goes pear-shaped, the techs who have to fix things are working at less than peak efficiency. And for emergency maintenance? Well, let's just say if you could schedule your emergencies, they wouldn't be emergencies.

For Flashpoints, I'd like a queue. Open open the grouping window, tick off the Flashpoints you'd like to queue for, and the wonders of Force-driven technology transfer you to the starting point when a team is found and add the appropriate mission to your log. Much of the technology already exists via the PvP queue -- which leaves me curious as to why the devs haven't already extended its use to PvE.