Man I miss these days.

Good stuff

It seems the right time, after playing it for a good 2-3 months, to give my verdict on the latest and most expensive MMO in recent memory, namely Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'll preface this by saying I have a (maximum) level 50 Marauder in full Tier 3 (Rakata) raid gear, so I am somewhat familiar with the game and how everything works. TOR is a good game, but it isn't a great game. The ironic thing is that BioWare have gotten a lot of the difficult things just right, and then made some rookie mistakes that severely detract from the whole experience. For story, TOR is the best MMO on the market to date, hands down. BioWare took all of their craft and storytelling from making the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, sprinkled Star Wars secret sauce on top and came up with close to perfection. Every class has its own distinct storyline that you will progress through, and they are by far some of the most interesting and varied quests in the game. At points you will think you are playing an offline single-player RPG, because the voice acting and writing is of such a high standard not usually found in MMOs, where story is often a passing afterthought, placated with a few paragraphs of quest text. I can only speak for the Sith Warrior storyline, which was outstanding, but I am assured by my friends who are playing other classes that their personal stories were of an equal quality. Unfortunately for reasons I will explain, this is both a blessing and a curse. MMOs to date have usually concentrated on endgame content, with the old joke being that "the game begins once you reach max level". In WoW all of the best content was reserved for the highest-level players, who had their own battlegrounds and raids and had begun to make their characters extremely powerful. In TOR, you get to level 50 and find that...that's about it really. Yes there are endgame raids for level 50 characters, but they are both a) quite easy, and b) quite buggy. It also used to be the case that level 50s did not have their own warzone brackets in PvP, so fresh-faced level 10 characters (the lowest level at which you can queue for PvP) would sometimes go up against some level 50s in the same warzones. Their stats were boosted to level 50 equivalent, but they still lacked most of the super abilities of awesomeness that were available to the 50s, and so got their asses handed to them as a result. Thankfully BioWare have already fixed this, and now level 50s only queue against other level 50s, but you are still rolling the dice since the only other bracket available is 10-49. This brings me to PvP. TOR has a very clunky PvP system. There are three instanced warzones that you can queue for, however you cannot queue for specific ones you like, only a single queue which is randomly any of the three. Some of the PvP warzones are interesting in their own way, but are really nothing to write home about. There is also an open-world PvP area on the planet Ilum, which is extremely underwhelming. The first few times I went there the Republic and Empire forces would simply trade the control points back and forth, since that was all that was required to finish the daily and weekly PvP quests which is how you obtained tokens to buy the best PvP gear. BioWare then changed it to where you had to instead gain a certain number of kills to complete the quests, which sounds good in practice until you realise that the Empire has a substantial population superiority on many servers, including my own. This means that Republic players spent most of the time sitting in their base - where they cannot be killed - except for the rare occasions where they temporarily have more people and so venture forth looking for Empire people to kill. The upshot of this is that the PvP quests become extremely difficult for either side to complete, and accordingly the number of people going to Ilum has dropped dramatically in the past six weeks. And as for obtaining PvP gear itself, you complete the aforementioned PvP quests and obtain PvP bags that in turn contain tokens which you can use to purchase PvP gear. The bags have a small chance to contain a piece of PvP gear directly, but there is no guarantee it will be a piece you need even if you do happen to get lucky enough to find one in a bag, so duplicates are commonplace. As I said, it's a very clunky and poorly thought-out system that is a clear placeholder and is being completely overhauled when patch 1.2 comes in a month or so. Moving on to the UI, which is one of TOR's biggest problems. In short the UI looks like it was designed by my children, with blocky elements, action bars which cannot be moved or resized, and a UI for the Galactic Trading Network (TOR's auction house) which is so bad it has to be seen to be believed. BioWare have acknowledged these issues and have promised a revamped UI in the forthcoming 1.2 patch, but to have let the game be released with something that looks so bad is astonishing to me. This brings me to probably one of the biggest gripes that I (and a lot of other people) have with the game: there is no combat log. That a game could be released in late 2011 with no combat log is nothing short of mind-boggling. What just hit me? How did I die in PvP? What enemy ability just crit me for 6000? How much DPS does one spec of mine do over another? Fortunately all of these questions are moot, because they cannot be answered without a functional combat log. You might be thinking, Gaff, you have hammered TOR to death, so why are you still playing it? Well, for all its faults (and there's a lot), it's still fun in short bursts, and a lot of my friends are still playing it. But with games such as The Secret World, PlanetSide 2, TERA and Guild Wars 2 all scheduled for release in the next few months, I'm not sure how much longer I'll be playing TOR. I was hoping that it would be "A Clash Of Kings", but it has unfortunately turned out to be more like "A Dance With Dragons". BioWare got so many of the difficult things right in TOR but then failed so spectacularly with the easier things, you really do think that six more months of development could have fixed these annoyances and would have set the game up to take over WoW's mantle as King of MMOs; it would have been a slam-dunk. But no combat log in a 2011 game? Really? The good news is that most and perhaps all of these issues can be fixed by BioWare in patches. Their problem is, as I stated above, that there are several big MMOs scheduled for release in the next few months, meaning that time is not on their side. I hope they succeed, I truly do, but some of these missteps are so egregious that sooner rather than later I will probably be moving to greener pastures in another game...where hopefully they have a gosh darn combat log.(fixed) http://www.gaffonline.com

Appreciate it. Some of the more "professional" *cough* guilds were getting a little out of control. At any rate, how are you scoring fights like pylon and council?

Thats ok. I basically put their guild together for them. Pretty sure I'm owed loyalties.

Yeah, I was once known as FortySeven. I did stuff, and occasionally things.

Don't worry bro, just put on your money making jungle gear and you'll get it. Good times. Thanks for the fun ceph, always a pleasure Have a good night.

we have a winner winner chicken dinner! Glad someone in that guild is smart!

Its hard work being this smart. Yodellllllllleyyyyyyheeeeeehoooooo

There Has In Return Demolished Grunge Radiated Apothecary Demented Extra Rolling Every Aspect Delicious Ingrown Necro Gargantuan Levy Endurance Verification Enter Lifting Yes Out Under Heavy And Vertical Elimination

Looks like I hit a nerve. Troll harder.

ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff lolwut

Only speaking of NMM. Not an HM translation.

Strokety stroke. Thats why. For some people, achieving things in a game with lackluster starter content is very important (as evidenced by the people fighting for it). I assume at some point bioware will implement some sort of armory, and get all this worked out. Until then, enjoy beating off into each other's eye sockets.

Not that I care or anything, because let's face it, no matter how much work was put into this site, its still very un-accurate. You aren't taking into account the guilds who used the extra player per raid exploit either. Technically if a guild had a kill like NMM annihilation droid before the nerf, that is worth much more than SOA HM because it was harder tuned. Not only are these points in-accurate, but guilds aren't being honest. On a side note, despite Nox Imperius getting these kills, a majority of the ones who carried that guild formed Cali Killed Nox. I'm pretty much 100% right, not that it changes anything, but I couldn't let this go on in good faith without at least getting the brutally honest truth out in the air. Good luck with the rest of the site. Also, jurugar is right. If you aren't counting the harder kills as more of an achievement, then this whole system is hurr durr.

Not quite sure why everyone is scared to mention World of Warcraft. Even their lead design team has stated recently (in an IGN article) that they are fully aware of losing members to TOR. Having a cash shop is ridiculous. Its one of the reasons diablo 3 will be a disaster without some sort of limit. If they allowed players to sell things, I would just get a group of people, grind all day, and sell things at a ridiculously high price knowing someone would buy it. Going F2P would ensure the doom (well, its already doomed, so we'll say more doomer) of this game. Analytically speaking, they were the highest grossed and most subscribed game of all time, and those numbers fell of just as fast as they came in (recent joystiq article[TOR has already lost almost 500,000 subscribers and is now steady at 1.7mil, no longer growing]). This game will most likely end up on the scale of rift, or FFXI, or another equivalent of a game that can hold its own, but isn't the next big thing(shame). As much time as I put into the game, I'm glad I left for the most part because dealing with the lack of support, the insane amount of bugs, the whiny players, and lack of content was a giant headache. I wish BioWare the best, but this just wasn't it for them.

These guys are great, but only because shedari plays for them.

Having 20 guilds clear content within a week of it being out is pretty game breaking tbh. Not to say that they can't bounce back from it, but let's at least be real here.

The fact I think 8 man is harder isn't the point. The point (if you had even read at all ) was that both sets of content are poorly designed and easy to clear. Playing this game is the equivalent of playing Mass Effect, or Age of Reckoning, with a 15 dollar a month fee slapped on it. Sure, they are fixing things like the Trade Network, which would be fantastic, but there is 0 reason to sell anything in game, so another pointless fix. They are adding things like dual spec, when its extremely cheap and easy to respec anyway, instead of fixing the "soa bugs". Sure, Im sticking around for 1.2 to see what happens (mostly because i paid for a stupid amount of time at launch, and it still hasn't run out yet). I even ran 2 top 10 guilds before I decided TOR wasn't fun for me (not enough hardcore content) and decided to pursue other options. I'm even the reason that juggernaut was changed / is being changed to what it is because of all the feedback I gave. Point is, I'm not a TOR hater. I'm simply looking at things from a gamer perspective, and things I've seen in the past, and the future of TOR looks bleak if they continue down the path they are right now, whether is a casual, RP, or hardcore perspective. Here is to hoping that it changes for the better.

Which part is irrelevant? These points still apply, hence, the relevance. In fact, they apply more now then they did when this post was actually started, especially with the announcement of 8's being harder than 16. On a serious note, this game has lost more of a % of players this month then any MMO out right now in the past 6. Because of the lack of support for the end game, and absurd amount of money spent on VA instead of mechanics, its quickly downward spiraling into something it won't be able to pull out of soon.

That is correct. Use your head. I'm sure you'll understand its context if you look hard enough In all that was said, I'm glad you managed to pull something out of it and start an intelligent conver.....

1. I don't think Gabe would appreciate you calling him a ho. 2. Even if 16 man was harder (which is isn't) you are basically comparing two things that are the equivalent of Derek Jeter playing in a teeball tournament versus Kobe Bryant playing in a junior basketball camp league. The point is, both of these feats are incredibly easy and doable by anyone, so trying to compare the hardness of them both is lucrative and silly.

Because whether you like it or not, WoW is the standard.

I think this should be the standard response to people still arguing that this game is difficult!

Wrong. The correct answer is, 16 man guilds are trying to pretend that 16 man is harder when BioWare clearly stated it wasn't. Having cleared that content (well before some of the guilds on the 16 man clear list, hehe) I can safely say that the only thing that makes 16 man harder (if even) is the fact that trash isn't CCable. But even then the amount of people clearly make up for that fact. The real point is, starcraft 2 is a much better game, so lets all go play that instead. P.S. - Condemned is amazing