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Ozzone

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  1. The problem lies completely at BW's feet for two important reasons. First of all, BW should have anticipated the launch better. They deliberately capped the servers too low at launch which forced players to wait for queues. While it made some sense since their goal was to allow some time for the first players to get on the server to level up and spread out to eliminate zone congestion as more and more players created chars, they blew it when instead of incrementally raising caps and opening a few servers as needed for overflow, they opened tons of new servers which spread the population out too thinly before they raised the caps. This didn't seem to be a problem with the flood of new players coming in, but it was an accident waiting to happen once the initial onslaught of players started thinning out. Unfortunately, by this time, many players were well into their 20s and 30s (at least) and were not about to start from scratch on a different server since population was sufficient on their server. By opening tons of new servers, they were painting themselves into a PR nightmare corner and probably didn't see it coming (which they should have). Secondly, legacy added a massive complexity to transfers/mergers. It should be pretty obvious to most people that the whole point of legacy is damage control for lack of endgame. Legacy wasn't designed to benefit endgame but clearly herd players into re-rolling over and over. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that. Legacy should have been put on hold until population issues were resolved in the first 3-4 months but BW couldn't wait because tons of players had level 50s with very little endgame and legacy was the carrot on a stick to keep player subbing. Of course it was packaged as a massive feature to enhance the game experience, but it's clear to anyone with half a brain it is really meant to keep players from being stuck with endgame that really doesn't exist. The reason I am discussing the past mistakes is because BW is at the point that they have to figure out how to get themselves out of the painted corner they put themselves in. With no viable endgame any time soon, they had better do something soon or they will continue to see tons of servers become absolute ghost towns. The less people log on due to low population only exacerbates the problem for others on the server still trying to hold on. As many have pointed out, when there's only a few dozen players active during prime time, community becomes non-existent which is the lifeblood of MMOs. BW better deal with this soon or the PR nightmare (which they are trying to avoid) only becomes worse.
  2. Yeah, gotta give BW credit for putting out such an awesome solo MMO with the best unsupported co-op playing.
  3. Well it's either that or they open their mouths and prove to be fools like they did before 1.2.
  4. Yet another attempt of deflecting blame away from Bioware and placing it all on the players. Sounds like something a Bioware employee would post.
  5. New era of MMOs? By all means go back and show us what older MMOs didn't have gear grinds. Now list the ones that did and compare.
  6. Actually, a lot of the Mythic dev team moved to SWTOR development when Mythic merged. The principles, which really count, Gabe Amatangelo, from Mythic, is lead game designer at Bioware, and speculation is that he is in charge of the direction and scope of PvP in SWTOR. We have no idea how many Mythic devs actually work(ed) on SWTOR, but we do know that a bunch did. The key point is that it doesn't matter if the entire dev team was or was not from Mythic, it's the leadership that steers the game and Gabe is in leadership. Your statement appears to be a weak attempt to muddle the truth Xsorus. Now, unless you can back it up...
  7. Please continue to contradict yourself. It is amusing.
  8. We shouldn't be surprised there's no real community in this game. It was developed from the ground up to primarily cater to the solo player. They spent a fortune making the game enjoyable for a casual solo player (cutscenes, voiceovers for class and side quests) but didn't put enough time/resources into developing anything large-scale. Both Outlaw's Den and Ilum were complete failures and BW decided to shelve RvR and focus on instanced pvp. While the future of RvR is in doubt, maybe some time in the future it might come back. Most planets were designed to completely segregate empire/republic as much as possible. This makes it easy for the solo player to do quests without having to worry about getting ganked but it also makes worlds feel lonely which further contributes to the lack of community. In the first few weeks after release, there seemed to be a sense of community only because there were enough level congestion on planets to afford players the ability to group for heroics. It was easy to get heroic groups going then but once players started spreading out (especially after hitting 50 and rolling alts), that ability quickly died. Getting groups together became problematic to the point that it became nearly impossible (except for large guilds that had several members coordinating groups). In the old days of MMOs, community was necessary for survival. UO was a classic example. Rarely, if ever, did you see solo players running around hitting dungeons because 1) the mobs were too hard to solo most of the time and 2) PKers were almost everywhere especially focusing on attacking small/weak groups or solo players. Everquest, while not a PvP game, also forced players to group up to advance. While there were some situations where a player could solo camp, those were rare with most situations requiring a full group just to solo mobs and large raids to kill bosses. You almost had to be a member of a large guild to do endgame content. A lot of that changed with WoW offering more and more content to casual solo players. Warhammer was a two-fold issue where PvE was plentiful for solo players, but open PvP was geared to large groups which was pretty much the endgame. Rift also jumped on the casual solo player wagon with offering a lot of content that could be done solo or in small groups. While Rift had fairly decent raiding endgame, it further reinforced the notion that community wasn't necessary. SWTOR has taken that to a much higher level with the bulk of the game, 1-49, completely doable solo. Not to mention all the cutscenes/voiceovers made it difficult to have a lot of cohesion with guilds using ventrilo as the voiceovers constantly interfered with vent chat. In older games, players congregated in vent but in SWTOR all too often players grabbed their own vent channel (if vent was required) so they didn't have to listen to vent chat and npc voice dialog at the same time. To get community back, 1) the game needs to make that a primary goal, 2) quit making everything soloable, 3) less cutscene/voiceovers (or at least give players the ability to skip them entirely and not spacebar through them), 4) bring RvR back and 5) create specific subforums for servers and not group them like they are now.
  9. LoKiei, do you work for Bioware?
  10. Every game forum is a very good representation of the player bases thoughts. When it's getting slammed with discontent, something is definitely wrong with the game.
  11. You guys missed it. There was, by accident, a Jawa hidden deep in Tatooine that was selling War Hero gear dirt cheap. That's why they rushed 1.2.0a out, they had to remove that NPC before the word got out. Lucky I was there before the servers went down.
  12. Ok, did anyone understand this? I can't read mumble.
  13. If I were CEO, the first thing I would focus on is some housecleaning down in Austin.
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