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Talorya

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Everything posted by Talorya

  1. No new gear appearances from the looks of it, still using 1.2 crap armors for the features... Only cathar huh...sigh, new races for dual faction games need 2 races per addition, not just 1. 1 might be fine if the game didn't already have a ton of human palette swaps... I was interested in having cathars back like 3 months ago, now, it's not enough to get me to come back, even with level cap raising (just more grind). There's still no barbershop/race change in the game, couple with no additional character slots means I won't get to make cathars without deleting one of my existing characters, so no thanks. Good to see new content nonetheless, but you've got a lot of work to do if all you put out is more raid/warzones, again, that is NOT how you continue a MMO. You need to improve or release content for ALL playstyles, the new planet looks promising but likely, to be a max level planet. Constant revisions to the original planets needs to happen, or they'll be empty waste of space that could have instead been great places to revisit.
  2. Blind fanaticism = fanboy. True fans admit the faults of their beloved products, but fanboys simply don't believe in faults in their games and praise their games to ridiculous ends and attack anyone that says otherwise. Fans are not to be confused with fanboy, there are differences in their intelligence and ability to debate their games' pros and cons. Fans are good for sure, fanboys that do nothing but attack anyone who doesn't share their taste are bad.
  3. A MMO is only as successful as it's current state, it is an ever living and evolving entity that is constantly under the scrutiny of its paying and active users. No matter how well it launches, if it fails to maintain the momentum or improve over the following months, it is not a success. 6 months into a MMO's life is usually an indication of whether the game will continue to "succeed" under its current state or make plans to transition to a different payment form. A successful MMO should be gaining subscribers or hold them steady, not lose them and have a decrease in concurrent users at all times. Growth is absolutely essential to a MMO due to the nature of the content and the emphasis on "massively multiplayer". If there isn't a "massive" amount of players, the game can no longer be a MMO, and content can no longer be accessed as readily and enjoyed, leading to a decline of quality for the users. The usage of server transfers and mergers only delay the problem, not fixes them, as the problem is why people are leaving, not just about how many of them are left. Those are the facts, and the problem with online games, especially MMOs. SWTOR is NOT growing, that is a fact.
  4. The game doesn't have the tech to handle something like that, and I'd rather they work out the rest of the content improvement before they attempt to work on something like this. Good idea, shame the game didn't have it in the plans.
  5. Indeed, aside from the voice overs, this game has little to offer in terms of MMO basics. With the voice overs, the game is fantastic and bearable, without, it's just another grind and borefest. The problem isn't with VOs, but the base design and content they're coming out being outdated and inadequate. This isn't VO issue, but design, gutting VO would still result in the same spacebarring and not reading with repeated quests. Solution? Rotate out the quests, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, or change the quests slightly with different goals and rewards. They always record more lines than they use, this is a great way to use it and keep player interest high at all times. Again, the real issue is with the game design, not VO.
  6. Server transfers do not generally accommodate inactive accounts. Server Mergers do need to take inactive accounts into consideration and continue to preserve those accounts and characters until the game ends service. Transfer isn't a big issue unless the server is then closed, at that point all the remaining character data should be transferred to another server for safe keeping. This is just proper business, you don't screw your past customers over just because they haven't bought anything for a while, you always need to be ready to smile and show them what they've been missing and entice them to come back.
  7. Server mergers won't bring on queues. Free to play after server mergers will bring on queues. It's been the case with MMOs, just because the servers merged it doesn't mean everyone will come back. Only the existing players will continue to play while some will leave and some might return. The numbers don't change much even with server mergers on subscription based MMOs. What matters is the core of the game, why are the servers going empty in the first place? People will continue to pay if there's content and fun to be had, and they'll keep logging in if there's something of interest to them to keep playing on. If there isn't, then people stop logging in, and stop subscribing, and empty out the servers. Server mergers don't work to improve game quality, the developers actually need to improve the game in order to retain their existing users. THEN market the game again with incentives to draw back the previous players and attract new ones if they want the game to gain subscribers. But most games fail on all accounts, no improvements, lack of re-marketing, and continue to keep the game at high cost to players, and people don't come back until it goes free to play.
  8. Fun is subjective... But things that will help MMOs in the future, -Rotational events instead of "quests". -Freedom of choice for players (from appearance to progression style). -Active developer presence in games via scheduled events. We've done enough of "go here and kill X things" and then return to the guy and repeat every few steps. Things need to happen when you're in the area, not because you've talked to some random guy somewhere. Have a stock of things that you can swap out, so while this week this area's doing this, you can swap it out to something else next week, so people constantly have something to look forward to no matter how long they've played. Players need to have more freedom in how they choose to play, and less emphasis on the structured linear method we've been getting for years. Let the players make however they want to look like, wear whatever they want to wear when they want to, and play through the game by choosing to do whatever they decide to dedicate themselves to. If the developers actually play the game with the community, participate or conduct ingame events, you'll see immediate feedback on what to do next, what the people can handle and what they expect to see in other content. If the developers are always sitting in the office and mess with the codes and play on their own builds, you're going to be more and more detached from the people who are playing the game. Forums aren't enough, it's only the few select people that aren't in the game that are posting, so why not get feedback directly from the currently active players more often. A few things to help MMO futures, though doubtful these will be taken and applied anytime soon for most titles in the works.
  9. I did play all 8 class story lines. Finish them? Nope. They got pretty bad in terms of quality and lost interest at certain points of their story lines, aside from the Bounty Hunter I've completed (blizz made it worth the time), everyone else I've left at 18-40s. The other stories just aren't interesting enough to keep me playing, especially when I have to go through the same planet stories as well. My thoughts on the other stories, The stories just take too long to get interesting, and Act 1 is most often ridiculously long to get through and doesn't change the goal at all. Even act 2+ doesn't change the stories by much, and most are just stalling for time and sends you on yet another fetch quest. With the BH it made sense as that's how I made my living, hunting down one target after another and get loads of credits for them, but for everyone else? It was just boring.
  10. Sigh, adaptive gears, waste of time and resource and probably won't work for companions at launch.... Legacy stuff = more credit sinks, awesome... Rest is all augment and LFG, honestly, augment slot was a bad mechanic in the first place. Minor stat bonus is one thing, but having massive boosts from it is what caused this whole issue to get this big. It's more or less evolved to a "must" instead of optional/luck, we'd be better off if it was removed altogether...
  11. And yet they're still wasting time on things like adaptive gears? Instead of putting appearance tabs into the game that people told them months ago to put in and put an end to all frakkin customization issues? They're certainly not doing everything they can to make the game better, they're only doing whatever they want to make it seem better. Plenty of actually valid suggestions and feedback have been given since the game was in beta, and almost all of them were ignored and the game's been stripped every step of the way to be added back in as a feature. The PTS is completely ignored once again and is now operating under their policy of "only for major patches" when it should be used for every single patch that's going to hit live. What's the point of a TEST sever if you're not going to test patches on it before it hits the live servers? The risks are hundreds of servers vs 1, anyone with a working brain would say the PTS would have less damage incurred with a broken patch than going straight to live. Even if they care, it's about their own egos and self confidence that whatever they come up with will "work", despite how crappy and pointless it is compared to real solutions. Until they use the PTS more actively, quit wasting time with more cash sink "unique" ideas that doesn't do half the job it's supposed to, they're not even close to doing everything they can to make the game better. Plenty of valid solutions have been given since beta, and they're simple not listening.
  12. 100 million credits, still nothing worth buying...even after 1.2 Legacy...
  13. Possibly, but remember what they did to butcher 1.2....over a month of testing completely undone by them removing a chunk of the patch out less than 24 hours to putting it on live... Even if 1.3 gets tested, i wouldn't be surprised it they screwed it up again by pulling things out at the last second and push it on live without testing it, causing yet another massive wave of unnecessary patches and downtime so we really wouldn't get 1.3 till 2 weeks after they released it.
  14. This isn't about the voice, this is about game design and progression variety. There isn't much choice for the players, therefore you're spacebarring through the dialogues. If they had designed a more active and living world, then even on alts it could be different voices and worth listening to. Voice is what set this game apart from other clones, it was just a pity they didn't make the same effort to other parts of the game. Voice isn't the problem, the core design is, outdated and rigid, incapable of change from their original plans dated almost a decade ago isn't going to work too well when many aspects have already been massively improved.
  15. No, the article that nobody read was all speculation, none of it was confirmed facts, just some analyst's "beliefs" that the teams are being shifted and DA3 delayed because of SWTOR. We don't even know if DA3 is delayed yet for crying out loud...EA hasn't exactly said which title was delayed, but everyone's been going on about DA3 being delayed when it wasn't even close to shipping anyways due to completely scrapped and in the process of being improved massively.
  16. Community Q & A, May 4th 2012, DannerSwa: What was the reason why "Unify" was strictly linked to chest and not designed to let the player choose which slot to unify to? I may like the color scheme of the gloves over the chest but would still like keep the current chest model. Was this an oversight, conscious design decision, or just too complicated to implement? Daniel Erickson (Lead Game Designer): Conscious design decision. The chest piece is by far the hardest to get in each outfit and the primary acquisition driver. It also “owns” the outfit’s color palette. It’s important to remember that “unify to chest style” does not solely mean “match color.” The design is to give good looking outfits that match the design and color layout of the set the chest piece came from—not to pick one color and make a monotone eyesore. Aka, they didn't want to make a full on gear dye/paint system in their crusade to be "unique".
  17. Please inform the team that the purpose of a PUBLIC TEST SERVER is to test CONTENT BEFORE it reaches live servers. Not to be used only for major content patches, and thus, resulting in major problems reaching live constantly. We've seen the internal testings done by the team, and so far, it's been abysmally bad when every patch breaks more things than it fixes. Let the players find the bugs and test the patches, and let your teams concentrate on fixing the content. USE THE PTS! We've been over this once before with pre 1.2, there's no point having a PTS if you're just going to ignore it most of the time. You have over a million people that subscribe to this game, use the resource available, If you actually put more effort into the PTS you'll get consistently improved feedback and increase steady usage by people. Release patch notes on the freakin test center for the test server and tell people that something new is up in the PTS and people will go and test. But by ignoring the PTS and being extremely selective about it you end up doing more harm than good by turning it into something people don't care about. Why would they come back to test major patches if this is just going to get ignored again? This isn't acceptable, downing one server VS downing all of them for patches, which is better? The team needs to wake up and work in 2012, you're lowering consumer confidence with every broken patch that could have been remedied by having an active and up to par PTS system. You're not getting much use out of it because you're not using it, it's never going to get better until the team realizes that it NEEDS to be fully supported when it comes to ALL patches. And get that character copy system up and running already for the PTS, it's been 2 months and no word has surfaced whether you intend to improve on that feature anytime soon.
  18. They did lay blame, by identifying these users that left and labeling them as "casual" is the "polite" way of laying blame on the users and saying they're just "casuals". If they didn't want this view to be generated in this possibility they would have refrained from using such labels and make something like this instead, "And as the service evolves from here, what we're seeing is that some of the initial customers have gone through a billing cycle and decided not to subscribe to the game." And as no clarification was made on "billing cycle", it could mean anything from an actual paid period of time post included box time, or any duration that matches the time of a subscription cycle (min 30 days). This would allow them to also use "billing cycle" as just 30 days and count the initial included time as a "billing cycle". Further contributing factors that suggest it as 30 days is the wording, instead of "not to continue to subscribe to the game" they use "not to subscribe to the game". This can suggest the subscription fee has not been charged, thus these people are in a "billing cycle" of 30 days but not paying subscription. The inclusion of "casual" meant they are actively thinking about this portion of the audience as non-contributors, discounting the new users who are still on their included time and saying that, "So the percentage of paying subscribers from our peak until now has actually gone up, and the folks that we have are as engaged as they were when they first bought the product." Now that there are less people that are joining the game and on the initial included time, the percentage of people on longer renewal rates are still around and classed as "core MMO users" and "paying subscribers". PR is a difficult thing to manage, as every word has its own consequence and tons of ways to interpret it, unless carried out in a very specific way to discourage unintended results. The label "casual" should never have been used, regardless of their actual meaning.
  19. Freedom of choice. -The freedom to create characters however I like. -The freedom to keep their appearance however I wish. -The freedom to play regardless of additional user inputs. Those are the fundamentals of a MMO for me, being able to make characters that I want, options to customize their appearance without sacrificing everything else, and being able to progress and play whichever content I'm in the mood for whether it's pve/pvp/exploration. Choice is the biggest thing I've come across as the main difference with standard SP games when it comes to MMOs, and those that favor choices tends to do well enough for me to keep playing. Being able to ask for help for more difficult content is a great bonus when it comes to MMOs, and when you've played with some of these people you can form guilds or get lots of similarly interested people to tackle even more difficult content. But it has to remain a choice that can be made, not a requirement. Content is there for people to decide if they want to tackle it or not, not be forced to do everything in a certain order all the time. Being able to make these choices is what sets a MMO apart from a offline SP game.
  20. Casual players is what kept WoW going for years, and yet they decided to offend the biggest and easiest market to hold on to as paying customers? EA, bad move. People "leave" these games because it's not enjoyable for them, plain and simple, whether they're hardcore or casual doesn't matter. When it comes to MMOs people either stick around or they don't, gaming experience does NOT influence that fact. Hardcore players can blow through content, pvp and raid out the entire game within a few weeks, but if the content is enjoyable, they'll keep doing it for months to come. Tend to be more vocal, they know what they "want" and cry foul every time something doesn't go their way (yeah, I put them in the hardcore section). Casual players play at slower pacing in general, but it doesn't mean they're any less capable when they play. Casual is just a matter of time they can put in, and usually not as much and resulting in them going through the content slower. Whether they participate on the forums or not is not a priority, they have limited time available anyways, so why spend it outside of the game? I find them ingame more than out, people just happily going about their business and not caring if something is nerfed or bugged. They'll keep playing so long as they can keep enjoying the game. Both types can continue to subscribe for different reasons, but their interests in the game are different, which is why content releases aren't always of the same importance for both and leads to one side favoring the game in the coming months over the next. The quick leavers are the ones who never stuck around anyways, these people I refer to as the "trials". They try out a game for the first month, repeatedly refer to WoW as the go, and then leaves without seeing much of the game because they didn't really care in the first place. They're in every game at launch, few last into the second month and are all but gone in the third, fourth months. This is the reason why I always said to reserve judgement on the community until at least the 3rd month, when it's less immature. In the end though, it doesn't matter if the user base is hardcore, casual, or just trials, if the game has quality content, they'll all stick around. If and when the game fails to deliver quality and variety, then people will leave, no matter what type of gamer they are. People leave because the game sucks for them, not because they belong to a certain type of preconceived notion of gaming habits. Because let's face it, we play games because we want to have fun, not to pestered by bugs that goes unfixed for months or features that simply doesn't work and be nickel and dime'd every time we take a step in the game. We saw raids released within the first two months of the game, that's only accessible to level 50s. Later on, we saw what, another level 50 content flashpoint? So more content for the level 50s. We didn't see anything for non-50s until 1.2 came out a few weeks ago, and that was a limited timed event with its own share of bugs and problems. The direction the game is taking is obvious to those who have been watching, and more and more people are leaving because they don't like where the game is going. Never blame the customers, they're always right, even if they're wrong, because without customers, there is no business.
  21. I've got one of almost every race available from the start, but eventually I ended up making the same/similar faces as I remade my alts. Especially with so many parts all locked together so there were no complete package options that I liked, there were always some that I disliked more than I liked, sigh. There isn't much in terms of customization options when it comes to character creation. then again, BioWare has always sucked at character creators anyways. They confuse preset selector with character creator, two different things. Yet another outdated mechanic that they didn't improve on when they developed this game and won't likely to see any improvements on anytime soon since player appearance customization isn't at all high on their priority list. Any change to the appearances won't happen for months, and that's been confirmed by the devs when it came to armor appearances, let alone the rest of the customization options...
  22. Normally, respec reset is 7 days since your last respec. Occasionally, a patch with significant changes to skill trees will be released and those players affected will be given a respec upon logging into that character. But otherwise, no, respecs resets have always been 7days since your last respec.
  23. Curious, why isn't it BioWare's fault for making something that can easily become boring? Why didn't they attempt a more lively implementation that evolves as the players play more of? Why did they create such limited and restricted content and not expect people to get bored of it? Simulation room, hall of challenge, whatever one calls it, can be achieved for a more variable end game group option. -People group up, enters instance, loads into random "room" and battles the mobs there. -The group is moved to another room when ready (via vote or simply out of combat after 10~30 seconds upon completion of room). -Every 3-5 "rooms" a boss/mini-boss will appear, can be any existing boss/mini-boss ingame. -Rooms can also contain just a vendor npc every 25/50 rooms. -Repeat until players finish 100 rooms or defeated. -Gains loot upon challenge completion, not while fighting the mobs. -Can earn points that can be used to purchase certain things within this mode, such as self/group revive, stat buff, reward chance bonus, etc. -The whole point of this mode is that you don't know what's coming up next, and that people can try to get as far as they can, if their luck holds out. It's not about trudging through the same corridors and skipping the same dialogues but the simple concept of, "who's next?" and be surprised at the one that shows up. This is 2012, not 2005, it's disappointing to see that 7 years have passed and nothing much has changed and BioWare not taking the initiative to improve the genre and better their games. That is most definitely BioWare's fault, for lacking vision during their development of this game.
  24. Easy fix, low priority, waiting for major patch to maybe implement it. It's not about how easy it is to fix the game, it's what priority level they think it's at for them to implement fixes. They tend to also hold back on fixing things unless it's game breaking, exploits, and bugs that prevent people from playing the game. Visual preferences is not high on their priority list, hence my complaint about the splash screen still appearing upon being loaded into an area is still not fixed. The problem with priority systems, it rarely works out as intended.
  25. This has nothing to do with legacy... Solo is very easy and completely viable. You're probably missing the space missions, which can easily get you 1-2 levels when they're of the appropriate range. Doing everything yet you're still underlevel for Voss? That will be fixed within a few quests. So long as you do your class story and planet stories, you'll be fine. Voss is pretty sparse anyways, you're not going to run into tight areas and tons of mobs around. The minimum requirement isn't that important, as it usually is still soloable even while being under it and you'll level through it easily enough, provided you play smart.
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