I have a couple of bank tabs filled with orange gear and, bar none, this is my favorite ensemble: http://i.imgur.com/klmTK.png RD-07A Vendetta Bracers R-55 Searing Disruptor Fervent Battle Vest RD-07A Vendetta Gloves TD-07A Panther Belt RD-07A Vendetta Leggings RD-07A Vendetta Boots (I prefer to hide my headgear, but the TD-07A Scorpion Headgear goes quite nicely with this outfit)

Dear OP, No one is impressed. No, we're not jelly and we aren't just saying that because we're mad bro. We just aren't impressed. At all. Not even a teensy little bit. If you want to feel superior with your ability to play the market game, go do it in EVE. It will be far more fun for you and you will get far more validation for your efforts to boot. Or, better yet... go do it in the real world. Maximum fun, maximum validation. I particularly liked the part where you took sole responsibility for keeping the market alive on your server. That was pretty good. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is... 4/10.

My main gripes: * no free text search (at least not prior to categorization... but I usually don't know which category I want ) * no by-slot organization (boots vs chest) * filtering by rarity does not rank orange/moddable gear separately, which means finding all of the moddable gear available requires scanning thru every... single... page... It's not awful, and is certainly adequate and usable. But it's far from impressive or even particularly good.

No, it doesn't. First, there is no single "appearance tab" system. Many games have different versions of this, all with their own nuances, details, and restrictions. These are all things that swtor would still have to figure out for itself as well. Which is exactly the growing pains the current mod system is going through right now. Second, an appearance tab doesn't provide stat customization AT ALL. The mod system can/should easily support that with nothing but a bit of extra itemization (more mods with different stat balances but equal budgets). So you either stick with the mod system and just tweak it, or you throw it out, replace it with an appearance tab, and then STILL need to come up with a stat customization system on top of that. Third, an appearance tab certainly gives lots of flexibility and options, but that's not necessarily what the game designers want to allow, and I'm OK with that. What we need as a feature is the freedom to not look like clones of one another. That doesn't necessarily mean that we need the freedom to look any way we please. I like that the current mod system preserves the light/medium/heavy silhouettes, and even some class silhouettes, because you either cannot or don't want to (for armor value reasons) wear gear outside of your armor range. Could you replicate this with an appearance tab? Sure, but then it's yet another set of rules and restrictions for the new appearance tab to figure out (which is just the first point all over again). Fourth and finally, the mod system plays really well to potential complexity and content for crafters. Rare mods, rare orange patterns based on grinds or, better, epic quests, and RE'ing existing stuff for orange patterns all work very nicely as simple future additions to give crafting some more content and love. Yes, all this stuff can be done in ways that work with an appearance tab too, but again, that means change from the ground up rather than just a few tweaks to a system that is nearly 100% functional already.

What I see is Kip arguing that it is a LIKELY CAUSE, which is completely valid. If you were an outside business consultant hired on by BW to figure out why their patching QA has been so poor, I can guarantee that the very first red flag going up is the fact that it's been outsourced; possibly to 3 different places no less. Obviously we cannot debate pure fact in this thread since none of us work at BW and none here are privy to their internals. We will never be able to say for certain what part of their QA process is failing so badly in their patch cycles. But it's disingenuous to claim that outsourced QA isn't a highly probable suspect.

If you think spreading QA out across 3 separate groups in 3 separate countries, all removed from the core dev team, is somehow a good thing for a project then you sound like... well, you sound like a mid-level business manager, actually. Yes, outsourcing happens regularly in the software world. What also happens regularly are failed projects and horrible QA. Time and again outsourcing proves not be the magic cost saving bullet it was hoped to be. Outsourcing CAN be effective when used appropriately, but it's not some wondrous thing that works every time for every task. Even in cases where it ought to work, inexperience with the process or the simple logistical overhead can kill what would otherwise have been a successful outsourcing setup. In short, like any revolution in business process, it is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of its efficacy in specific scenarios until results prove otherwise. And so far, going by the QA we've seen on TOR patches, results are certainly not proving otherwise...

Except that the combat animations they use constantly show blows/laser bolts/arrows/whatever landing full force on you, blood spurting everywhere, etc. There's absolutely no sense conveyed by the animations in most MMOs that the health represents anything other than exactly how much blood you have left in your body...

And you are more likely to make a mistake when you are tired, which is a relatively easy thing to capture. Replace "health" with "stamina" and, voila... blocking/dodging/whatever is tiring, eventually you get tired enough to make a mistake, and bam, there's the killing blow that finally lands. Of course no game mechanic is ever going to replicate real armed combat in perfect detail, but still, it doesn't mean the tired old health bar and "squish. ow! squish. ow! squish. ow!" flow of current MMO combat is the pinnacle of design in this area...

Yup, I've been waiting for a game to come out with this mechanic for years. This has nothing to do with light sabers... even in the fantasy world with regular old steel swords, anything but a glancing blow, even on armor, is very likely to be fatal or at least highly injurious. Give people a stamina meter (or whatever you want to call it instead of health) that behaves exactly like health, and make all the combat animations appropriate versions of dodge/parry/block/shield/whatever. When your stamina hits 0, the next hit will be the killing blow that you finally couldn't avoid.

Yeah... the commendation duping bug introduced when they fixed the bug of being unable to grab commendation attachments from mail messages is so ridiculously classic. You can actually imagine the developer smacking his forehead on that one. It's such an obviously epic mistake, the likes of which every dev has done at least a few times in their career. The difference between a good shop and a meh shop is whether or not something like that makes it out the door to the public eye, because that's a lot of forehead smacking going up the lead/QA chain...

Meh, the first paragraph is a perfectly valid point and the second paragraph is CLEARLY MARKED as a subjective opinion. And even then it has objective validity because BOTH end-game planets that offer dailies are thematically similar, which is a questionable choice regardless of which specific theme they picked. So even if you disagree with the subjective opinion about Belsavis, it's completely legitimate to wonder why they didn't mix the dailies across two planets with the two major themes the game has going for it (city vs "natural"). It would make sense in an attempt to appeal to as many people as possible, rather than sticking them all on two natural planets, both of which are ice-themed to boot.

I think the crux of his complaint is that open-world PvP deaths should not increase the rez timer. As far as I can tell he is not complaining about being ganked, or about the rez timer from a PvE perspective, or any of that. I can kinda agree with this point in the generic sense, because lots of people LIKE to revive continually, dozens of times if they want, and continue trying to fight; it's sort of what drives PvP. Being completely prevented from doing so by the escalating timer is a big kick to the open-world PvP groin. tl;dr - getting killed in a PvP fight in open world should always just apply a static rez timer (say.. 1m?) to encourage continued PvP, rather than the escalating PvE rez timer it incurs now...

I would hope not. The average salary of most line developers is not 6 figures in any industry. That's kind of the whole point. Your team and product leads absolutely need to be those few developers who CAN command 6 figures. They do exist, and they are worth every penny (even in the gaming industry after the standard game developer discount is applied). And while waving internet claims around is kind of pointless, it's fun and I'm bored today so I will add that I'm quite cogent of the average developer salaries in both Edmonton and Austin, and fairly up to date on the game developer discount, which isn't nearly as steep as some people think. The sacrifice for working at a game shop these days has more to do with the expectations around hours worked, crunch cycles, and the inevitable layoffs and instabilities that go hand-in-hand with one-shot retail product development teams. My assumptions are based on 1) the # of bugs identified as fixed that re-occur or weren't actually fixed, 2) the number of bugs that were introduced by other fixes which points to a severe QA issue, and 3) the number of bugs simply not in the patch notes. 3 is most interesting because it speaks to the surprising reality of complex software development that there tends to be a fairly constant number of bugs that can be expected to exist in a project of given size, regardless of the build team or the project domain. There's also a well-understood pattern of bug fix frequency post-build; it's so well developed that it's frequently used to decide when a build has reached certain stages of maturity because you can make statistical claims about the likelihood of how many critical bugs probably remain unidentified and so forth. Based on the BW patch notes and other products in the same space, we can assume that either 1) their devs are really slow, or 2) their devs are fixing lots of bugs but most don't make it into the patch notes, or 3) most of their team is working on the next major content patch instead of post-launch patches, or 4) their project is statistically anomalous in the number of bugs for the size of the project. I highly doubt 4 and, frankly, I highly doubt 1 too. 2 or 3 is most likely. If 2, they have inexperienced/clueless QA and team leads. If 3, they have inexperienced or clueless product leads and producers. Most of this would be quite forgivable anyway except that one expects quite a bit more from an established shop like BW backed by the funding of EA. Plus, as a consumer, I get to complain about anything I want to... I could be the King of Siam for all it matters. The truth will out...

If they are paying 6 figures to the devs and leads responsible for the post-launch patching process that we've seen so far, they should fire them. If they aren't paying them 6 figures, they should absolutely go FIND some worth that much and HIRE them, because they obviously need that level of expertise in the pipeline. And if you think that this tier of devs/leads doesn't exist and isn't worth their weight in gold, then you haven't been doing the job long enough.

Which is why senior developers pull six figures and have the experience and methodology to make sure that this crap never, ever makes it to the light of day. The complexity of this game is nothing special. MOST software projects worth doing at a corporate level are equally complicated, just not nearly as cool sounding. And in most of those projects, the patching issues we've seen so far would mean someone is losing a job. Maybe the QA lead, maybe the product manager, maybe a senior dev, but at this point somebody would be having a very uncomfortable meeting with management. EDIT: The funny thing, as someone else has pointed out, is that the actual game as delivered is not that bad. Better than many MMO launches (and better than many less interesting project launches too). The issues of interest here are specific to their patching and release procedures, which are absolutely painful to witness.

So what you're saying is, when you play you alt-z and get rid of the interface entirely because that's how you're supposed to play, amirite?

Pfft... a competent dev team would be fixing 2 trillion bugs a day. Amateurs...

Most of that article addresses complaints in the nature of "why are they releasing new hats when bug X still exists!" -- i.e. the fact that the resources in a dev shop are not fungible and a graphics artist is not the same as a programmer (edit: or more importantly, that one programmer is not usually the same as another programmer). That's perfectly legitimate and a fact some people don't understand so, kudos to the article for that. However, it does not excuse BW from having displayed, so far, a horrendous show of basic QA procedures and an overall abysmal rate of bug fixes. No, they don't get slack for being a game company producing a "hugely complex thing.. no seriously dude, it's more complex than you think it is!". We know. Large software projects are complex. They involve many interacting systems. Deploying a PC app is one of the more difficult deployment environments you can face. Any developer with half a brain knows this and many have worked on systems more complex and with more exacting requirements than this game. And as a result we all know it's NOT A VALID EXCUSE for bad QA and a ridiculously low bug fix rate. Especially when looking back into beta to see how long some of these things have been outstanding issues. In a nutshell and based on what we've seen to date, I would not hire a developer with a "worked on SWTOR" line in their resume, and I would be skeptical of any developer willing to cut them too much slack either because that says volumes about what they consider an acceptable dev standard. And if you want the most stark contrast you can imagine in the same product space... Trion (RIFT). Whatever you might think about the game and their gameplay design team, there is no question that their dev team is top-tier talent.

The orange moddable gear is a great thematic system that handles the functions of both an appearance tab and customizable gear stats at the same time. There is no reason for BW to abandon it, especially when calling for an appearance tab only accomplishes HALF of the customization people want to see; you still need a system in place for stat customization as well. The orange moddable system accomplishes BOTH just fine (or it will, once the tier gear mod changes are in place). Don't get confused in thinking that an appearance tab is the "MMO standard feature" that we all want. The "MMO standard feature" that we all want is the ability to customize the appearance of our BIS end-game gear to a sufficient degree that we don't all feel like clones. There are multiple ways to accomplish this, and an appearance tab is only one way. Dyes are another possible approach. The orange moddable gear is yet another. Yes, BW COULD have just copied the solution to this as-is from other games, but I personally like the implications of the moddable gear idea as a unique part of this game and am glad to see them try a new idea for this in general. For one thing it has a LOT of great potential for crafters long term: mods, RE of existing stuff for more orange patterns, rare orange patterns that take an epic amount of work to acquire but that retain life-time value for a crafter because they will ALWAYS be relevant for players, etc. I also like that it gives the graphic designers some control over the light/medium/heavy/class silhouettes while still providing tons of customization options (of course, not everyone is on board with that). Now if only BW would get their heads out of wherever they've stuck them and illustrate that they have a basic understanding of the design principles behind the feature set moddable gear must provide to players, rather than constantly suggesting changes that would undermine their own system.

Nothing.

I voted terrible, and I'll explain why that's true for me just in case this thread gets more dev eyes than the other giant thread on the topic. The GCD is always active and it is the least important thing I care about. It doesn't take long to get a good sense of the 1.5s rhythm and, generally, as long as I have some clear visual cue that the GCD is up, I don't really care about it on a per-skill basis. So it makes absolutely no sense that it is the MOST dominant visual effect across every skill, all the time. Every other thing I care about per-skill is more important than the GCD; whether a skill is available or not due to range, resource cost, long CD time remaining, or pre-reqs on activated abilities. Yet the GCD effect completely dominates among the competing visual cues for all those other states. As an immediate fix, I would at least love to see the white border placed around the quickslot button during the CD wipe be removed. That simple change would go a long way to making the constant GCD wipe less visually distracting. I would also like to see any upcoming changes to the quickslot effects properly take into account the cover bar graphics, since this latest change did NOT. Really, I don't care so much about how it works as I do that it at least be consistent across all elements of the UI!

I'm not all that pleased with them, for two reasons. First up is the quest objective competition... really? The whole game I'm doing instanced quests and now I have to compete with everyone trying to grind out their dailies? Are you kidding me? If they wanted a timesink, just make the quests long enough. They don't need to add this artificial scarcity crap to boot. And if they were trying to encourage grouping well, that's what the HEROIC daily quests are for! The second reason is much more subjective but, really, Belsavis? I hate Belsavis. Green jungle? White glaciers? You know what it feels like I'm doing? Playing WoW, or some other lame fantasy MMO. I wish those dailies had been on Nar Shaddaa or Corellia; I love the city planets and the sci-fi vibe you get from being on them (and no, this is not a place where you can complain that the city planets are all just corridors and rails because Belsavis, and the daily area there in particular, is FAR WORSE in that regard... now if they were on Hoth or something, maybe you'd have a valid issue there, but they aren't).

Half of my primary skills are on my cover bar. I'm dependent on visual cues to figure out what's going on and I now have two DIFFERENT visual cues. What's the point of even HAVING a white border on those skills if it's not a consistent and reliable way to tell that a skill is on CD? For the kind of visual cues my quickslot bar is trying to provide me, consistency is really the MOST IMPORTANT aspect. I don't care how they resolve it with the green cover bar, but whether or not the colors match is really not my highest priority when trying to parse peripheral information about my skill availability. It's more fundamentally disturbing that they either a) didn't test this once with cover bars or b) don't care about consistent GUI design. Both options worry me...

Well, anywho, I can see I'm all alone in caring about this... *sniff*... /bug'd in game, hopefully they make this consistent someday and don't forget the cover bar the next time they make sweeping changes to quickbar effects.

Syylara (page 89) has already posted a video that disproves your rebuke. Gotta keep up with the thread, dude...