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Lheim

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Everything posted by Lheim

  1. I suppose box sales have nothing to do with all the pre-launch hype and marketing - remember RIFT? 'You're not in Azeroth any more?' Heh, yeah, they all said they were different. Massive sub migration away from these games all said 'Yeah, you aren't.'
  2. Yea, seriously, the question isn't about there being complaints on any given forum. The question is their severity; how legitimate are they, and how much of anything else is being talked about as well. As I write this, SWTOR's general forum has about four topics on non-ranty issues on page one. TSW's forums..? Huh. About four ranty topics total. WoW's probably has six or seven non-ranty ones on main page. TERA's about half and half.
  3. Actually, the quicker movement sooner probably amounts to more added xp/hour than any of the 30% bonus ones. You realize the quest xp bonus is only for CLASS quests? They're rediculous.
  4. They're not exclusive categories. I think 'sandboxy' features can add a tremendous amount of longevity to even the themeist theme park mmo, and vice versa. Even little things like mini-games; little things that players can do to just.. blow off steam, that are just for fun, that don't 'end', that are in some part controlled by them - imagine a pazaak ladder tournament, say. As it stands now, I'd say the most sandbox MMO out there is EvE. TOR's probably the most theme-park. Yes, much more than WoW. I think we need a new term for MMOs that try to strike a healthy balance. I propose 'jungle gym'.
  5. So.. this thread got to twelve pages. When all the OP did was fabricate a strawman argument against people who like the f2p model.
  6. It's a difficult issue. But, in essence, a lot of people on the fence about a particular game just balk at sixty dollars plus a monthly fee. If you lower the barrier, a lot more people end up trying and hopefully liking your game. It's impossible to overstate the importance of having a healthy crowd of fellow gamers on your MMO - they're the lifeblood, the best part of the experience. Good experiences with people, and lots of them, end up selling the game way more than asking somebody to fork out a prohibitive sum up front. At least, that's the theory. We'll see how they gate what new content they put out. Hopefully it'll be buyable for a few buckx as a sorta mini-dlc 'a la carte' thing as well as included in the monthly sub 'all you can eat' style deal. Also.. http://penny-arcade.com/patv/episode/microtransactions
  7. If they implement it well, it could be a very positive thing. Let's be honest, there's a certain subset of the gaming culture that's ideologically opposed to free-to-play regardless of implementation, and the forums are going to be erupting with them for ..ever, after this announcement. Done well, though - free to play can make the gamer feel like he's getting a fairer shake for his dollar, let him set his own budget for access to whatever parts of the game he cares for. Free to play 'losers' create a more social atmosphere through sheer volume, there's not the rather perverse urgency to play despite everything that paying for a service can provoke, and the game'll come out with a lot more customization and different gameplay modes for those who care about such things. Done well, that is. I'll stipulate that. There's been a lot of free-to-play conversion boondoggles. Looks like they're modeling themselves after some fairly successful predecessors though.
  8. It's definitely not the lack of class stories. It's just.. endgame. SWTOR is similar to WOW in endgame terms, nowadays - that is, it's one raid plus dailies. And frankly, that's causing huge uproar for WoW fans too, to the point where Blizzard is spending huge amounts of effort trying to broaden the spectrum of possible activities at end game for their next expansion. More fluff. More fluff. Worthwhile crafting, dungeons that aren't outdated by one eternity vault run. Etc, etc. That's all I want; I don't want years of outdated raid content already accumulated in SWTOR. Don't believe it's an issue for wow fans, too? Check out http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/4879017939 The major issue that thread discusses is difficulty of content, but an underlying theme is that people feel like there's just this one really repetitive, non-challenging thing that's worth doing. I'll quote a few excerpts: Welcome to altcraft! More alts more content > DafuwQ i write...
  9. You know, I'm not sure I buy the whole 'complaining generation' thing - hell, I was born in '77, but I know how people act nowadays. I would actually put the blame in some very specific places; i'm not going to claim that the nature of the human beast as a consumer has changed all that drastically. First off, with regards to TOR - marketing. The marketing machine for this game was in operation for literally years, and each person on the dev team said things about how the game would be. I'm not misremembering when I say that some of those things turned out not to be on the table when the curtains were finally raised - now, i'm not saying it's intentional. I'm sure at some point they had plans for an enormous variety of things; I just wish that they had stuck to talking about stuff that was already 'baked in', so to speak. There are ways in which consumers will overhype themselves and dissect every word a developer says .. but less 'pie in the sky' stuff so early on would've lead to less of a disaster now. It's not to say that the game wasn't released early. But realistic talk from developers .. I'm convinced, would lessen the furious howls come release day. Better yet.. release when ready. Don't sell your long term viability short for a short term injection of cash. Marketing, overmarketing, political campaign hype about things beyond humanly possible, you see it all over nowadays - marketing is less about picking a message and more about carpet bombing people. And we as consumers have long memories, and feel - even if we don't know why, exactly, somehow cheated when reality catches up with the fabulous dream world we were told to expect through a whole variety of sophisticated methods. The dark side of marketing is this backlash phenomena. Second off? The whole anti-pirate/DRM thing that has stripped us of our right ... and hell, even of our expectations, for the ability to get a refund for an unsatisfactory product. You can get a refund literally any other industry or product on earth, but not video games. A guy spends cold hard cash, gets something that he's sure isn't living up to the years of marketing he's been subjected to.. and instead of having the reasonable outlet of getting his money back, he's got nothing to do but complain and moan. It's the only catharthis possible. The lack of options for the dissatisfied consumer probably hurts companies more than they realize - those horrible metacritic reviews sting, financially. The vile state of TOR's general forums stings, financially. We live in a world where, unfortunately, box sales are profitable enough - and apparently, they believe consumer memories short enough, that this kind of cold calculation - selling off trust for that initial burst of box office/box sales, is worth it. Greed does funny things to people; morality is the first thing out the window. It's so insidious that any one particular step - 'Hey, should we inform consumers that our philosophy's changed a bit, and our map design won't lead to the awesome world pvp we hyped a while back? Naw, you kidding? it'd hurt sales! or.. huh? I don't care, whatever, that was a year ago we said that, move on!' never seems so bad. Call it the movie mindset - they care about opening weekend, regardless of how heavily the movie flops in the weeks following. In that respect, the leaders of the game industry show themselves just as humanly stupid as all the rest of us - they never realize that a new MMO is never going to attain the kind of powerhouse quality and userbase it could unless they treat it as a long term thing - do what their users want to do with an MMO, which is essentially to marry it for years on end. Of course.. marriage requires a radically different foundation. Trust and honesty, instead of suave seduction leading to a weekend fling in a cabin in the woods.
  10. Wow had an LFG channel. It had wolves running after rabbits and eating them. It had a freaking auction house search that worked. It had music that played in areas for more than a few brief bursts every few minutes. It had world design that didn't require minutes-long loading screens very often at all, as opposed to several in a row to move between planets, and mountains you could actually freaking CLIMB rather than just be forced to hike around. You don't seem to get it; I'm not trying to be a savior. I'm doing exactly what you said - I explain why I am, as a customer, dissatisfied with the product I've purchased. And I've quit paying for it. The only reason I'm still able to post is because they tried to bribe us all off with a free month.
  11. I don't think my expectations were unrealistic - as I said, I wanted an open world with npc activity, ambient music and sounds, some basic polish features like useable auction house and a way to find people to group with that wasn't limited by PLANET for heaven's sake.. and gameplay that, if similar to wow, at least didn't end with me doing dailies and grinding badges again. What'd I get? Stone dead silence in the senate tower, the beating heart of a galaxy spanning civilization. Worlds that were frustrating to navigate, full of cliffs and one-way passages. The most slack first-pass auction house and LFG system I've ever yet seen. Gameplay that wasn't only similar to wow but identical, right to dailies and badge grinds. I'm not lying; they talked about having open immersive worlds, sand box elements, bustling npc activity, superb interface, etc. As it was, I played for six months being 'loyal', and now the game is basically in a releasable state after my patience has worn out. Still no sound of wind on Tattooine, though. Still no cure for Corellia's baffling architecture and unscripted NPCs. Still no cure for load times that are pathetic in comparison to GW2's - load times for areas that are smaller and less bustling, but far far longer. Are those unrealistic expectations? No. WoW would've met them, day one of release. TSW, GW2, yep. Hell, LOTRO too. DDO, sure. I don't ask for much. My LFG woes could've been solved, day 2 of release, by the implementation of a server-wide lfg channel for heaven's sake.
  12. Look, I'm .. frustrated by you. I'm not a fickle consumer. I'm not disloyal. What it is, is that I feel lied to and cheated. I'm a consumer who was marketed on a product, who expected the product to meet certain standards common to technology of the day and to meet the promises made in the marketing. If the company producing this product fails to deliver that, I don't owe them a year (at $15 bucks a month!) to make it better. They actually OWE ME. In any other industry I could ask for a refund; I could even walk out of a movie I just happened to not like, half way through, and get my cash back. Can't do that with gaming because we're apparently all pirates so eff us all. I feel like the guy who walked into Kangaroo Jack expecting a talking kangaroo movie.. huh. Wonder why I expected that, it's obvious .. oh, wait. The commercials all used that footage and only that footage. The funny thing about capitalism is this.. loyalty is a word which companies love, but which consumers should stay away from like the freaking plague. Loyalty to companies is for chumps; value is where the real calculation ought to be made - so long as, I concede, you factor in the intangibles like trust as well. Let Bioware fix their game. I'll come back when it's playable by my standards. And no, my standards aren't unrealistic. I don't want eight year's worth of old raid content. I wanted an open explorable world, gameplay that is even slightly different than what I've been doing for eight years, and in general things that look like they didn't slavishly ape their most significant competitor in every detail, only worse. It's not unrealistic because there are other companies coming out with just that, THIS YEAR. I remember several statements that Bioware made in their marketing and hype videos .. and if they had actually followed those statements, if they hadn't turned out to be lies, y'know this game woulda been pretty nice. I think that's my biggest issue with Bioware right now. Said the Mass Effect 3 ending wouldn't be A, B, or C. Said that TOR would have open worlds where empire and republic might cross paths while questing. Said that there would be sandbox elements in TOR. There's that intangible trust going down the drain. Didn't they say something about having vibrant worlds, about feeling like you're in a crowded metropolis when you're on Coruscant? Pretty sure I can go there and listen to the silence, in reality. Daniel Erickson and Greg must've been drinking themselves to sleep as launch approached. SWTOR is RIM's blackberry to Blizzard's iPhone. Facebook's Google+. If they'd been able to differentiate themselves? They coulda been Facebook's twitter. The iphone's kindle. Y'see how that works? Two different products there that provide different things and aren't in direct competition? Any way, I enjoyed the stories. That much was playing to Bioware's strength. But MMOs are different beasts, and they can't just feed us eight bioware stories and expect us to pay to play them over and over for years on end - specially when, as I said, the gameplay itself, as distinct from the stories, is stale and doesn't match the promises.
  13. Mm. I used to be morally opposed to F2P - but seriously, nobody is really playing the pay-to-win card. Otherwise? You know exactly what you're getting when you pay for an item in a cash shop. That's .. that's moral; that's capitalism and trust between buyer and seller. Whether it's a good deal is entirely up to you. Subscription MMOs? Hell, I used to be under the impression we were not only paying for access (which other games give free), but new content. I used to think that subscription was for a certain premium and polish level. With the polish of F2P games nowadays, with WoW in a 9 month dry spell and this game sauntering around like it's on laurels.. wow's cash shop items and macro-transaction account services, and this game likely to have them too.. I dunno any more. I don't know what I'm getting, for certain, by paying a subscription fee.
  14. People who are saying that fans were craving wow-clone features pre-launch miss a crucial point. WoW-like convenience features .. like a way to find groups that doesn't consist of LFG 4M! spam on fleet general channel, or customizable appearance, openly explorable world, easier transportation, etc, do not necessarily mean a game has to be a wow-clone. These features are usability and convenience things that could be strapped to any type of MMO - from SWG to EvE. When people asked for usability and convenience features, they weren't asking for raid tiers, more raid tiers, badge collection and dailies. Those are the things that make TOR a wow clone .. well, plus the whole class and resource and cooldown system, the holy trinity, quest hubs, power word: shield.. ah, hell, you name it. Others in this thread have it right. You don't leave WoW after 4-7 years of playing it, pay eager attention to a new MMO that claims to offer something different, and then buy it .. all to get the same bones of a game you were playing back in 2004 with a different skin. Bioware missed a golden opportunity - that games like TSW and GW2 are going for, for hell or high water - to provide the burnt-out wower something new and different. Let's face it; at this point.. nobody can ape wow exactly enough, and well enough, to pull people who adore wow out of their social network. The disaffected, the bored though? Open market. Bioware didn't go for them.
  15. Well, you can't make a game with every feature included, and every feature updated regularly, and every feature awesome. If they were really going story-focused .. why haven't we seen behaviour similar to TSW's recent declaration that they're going to release story updates and changes monthly? No, no. TOR went firmly into trying to steal WoW's audience, not to break or bend the genre. They're offering Bioware's Blackberry as opposed to Blizz's iphone - products that're substantially similar, but very different in quality and usability. The thing GW2 and TSW get right, regardless of success or failure? They decided to offer something significantly different; they decided not to compete HEAD ON with Blizzard.
  16. That's really very fine talk.. but if they were thinking that way, why would they include a gear treadmill endgame that virtually lacks any story at all? And not update their stories for 7+ months? Look, I'm trying to stay neutral and objective on the GW2 vs SWTOR debate, but it's plain that many people in this thread simply aren't trying that. It's the typical flame-fest that erupts prior to any new MMO release on any MMO forum ever - the battle of the supporters versus the haters versus the terrified-of-change versus the terrified-that-their-already-weak-community-will-suffer versus the trolls. Very few people in this thread are saying ANYTHING factual, about any game.
  17. Can you two philosophy majors get your heads out of the sky and get down to a practical level where SOMEBODY MIGHT CARE? Morality and ethics I can understand. Wish-washing about who abstracted what from the jizzjazz, when wishwashing, abstracted, and jizzjazz aren't even properly defined terms.. arg, it drives me mental.
  18. Too bad you weren't paying attention a few days ago. There was a small hurricane of free beta key giveaways. Anyway.. I've played in one beta; I'm playing in this last one, haven't purchased it yet.. but yeah. Seriously, it really *is* as cooperatively flowing as I said.
  19. Well, I think it's too early for me to say if I'm going to snap up GW2.. but I've kept an eye on it. Short answer? It actually changes the standard WoW-clone mmo formula in more than merely cosmetic ways. Questing is very different. The focus in PvE is cooperative in the extreme; yet grouping is not forced .. nor even necessary. You just show up in an area, you're on the same quest as everybody else, and everybody gets credit for mob kills and xp for contributing to completion, and their own loot. It has a lot of small changes to old mmo tropes that .. once you see them, appear obvious in a 'Wow, why didn't wow have that eight years ago?' sorta way. It's free to play. It won't have a gear/stat treadmill. Though I'm not a pvper, the pvp is apparently reminiscient of the fan favorite DaoC.
  20. Why aren't you able to buy gear with money.. Because the game has a competitive aspect. Because some accomplishments in game should be about skill in the game, not about willingness to shell out the wallet. Because .. because if you want to just want to pay to 'finish' the game, what the hell is the point of even owning the game? Pay somebody fifty bucks, let them win the game for you, never touch it yourself. Same damn result. Because the journey matters. Because god-mode cheat fundamentally destroys the joy and emotional zing you get from becoming GOOD at a game through your own effort. Because it opens up a horribly divisive element in the community. Because it destroys in-game economies. Because it's bad for newbies, and for non-payers, who find themselves out in the cold unable to compete and unable to earn the suddenly-required millions of credits that would be needed to match anybody with enough spare cash. And paying for competitive advantage is morally bankrupt. That said, the game design does just fundamentally pad out the time required to get items. That's the fault of it being a subscription game. If they were a dang singleplayer game, it could afford to be honest and give you the gear after a single skill-testing 'clear' of whatever content.
  21. I dunno, check out TSW and GW2. TSW, you can pretty much turn in every quest via cell phone, and GW2 .. your quests pop up in your log as you enter an area, and autocomplete as you finish the requirements.
  22. Oh, the game's good - could've been greater, though! The VO is a unique element., the stories entertaining. The combat..? Well, MMO staple, but it works and looks fine. It's simply too bad that the game launched with some amenities not in place that really hurt the user experience in the months after launch. As for myself? I have criticisms of the basic design direction they took SWTOR In.. and frankly, I've come to the conclusion that the carrot/gear grind treadmill simply isn't for me, after burning out so spectacularly in WoW on the same mechanic. So.. really for my own best good that I just stop with this game.
  23. Yeah, dude, I'm calling bull. You might've made enough credits leveling several characters to feed ONE with all the necessities, including speeder cash and leveling mission skills AND augments - but not feeding a character credits at all, starting from zero and keeping solely to the income only that alt's made? No. Not with so much spare, not without selling crap on the GTN. Sorry. You skimped on something - you didn't train some skills, you didn't upgrade your speeder level, or you didn't gift your companion affection up.
  24. I'm not so sure about the necessity to have exclusive, hardcore-only content to work towards - or about the idea that the gear grind is necessary and it better be a dang long one. To me, that's talking like stockholm syndrome .. 'I walked to school up hill in the snow... both ways, and darn it, this younger generation will too!'. No, no .. what MMOs need, to me, is a variety of fun activities that feel rewarding in and of themselves. SWTOR needs .. dare I say it? Rep grinds for cute pets. Pazaak ladder tournaments - the nar shadaa casino CRIES OUT for this. Places to veg out and go farming mats for a while. Challenge modes on dungeons for unique titles - imagine if the number of commendations you got from a hard mode depended on earning 'pve badges' for speed, cc, and damage output. Chairs to sit down in, more stupid little toys like bubble machines and such. All of that stuff.. in addition to pvp and flashpoints and operations. That kinda thing would make the world much more of a long term investment for people, and provide meaningful, necessary distraction when the sheer nihilistic meaninglessness of the gear grind strikes you down.
  25. Since 1.3, I'm actually SEEING some of the flashpoints for the first time ever. Even on my alts. I find it especially rewarding - 5-man content is my favorite sort of MMO content.
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