Standard response to valid complaints zzzzzz.... In response to the thread, Bioware's staff are obviously fans of Dead or Alive. You spin me right round baby right round like a record baby...

I think the attitude you have toward F2P is just a habit developed over the course of playing subscription based MMOs; after enough time and enough repetition of content, everyone inevitably starts to feel that the only thing that's really driving them to play is the need to "make their money count". I'd say that's a function of you speeding through content and getting burnt out faster than the payment model itself, but I can definitely sympathize, as the greater part of my last two years playing WoW were mostly driven by a sense that I just had to put the money I was throwing into subscription fees to good use. However, I do have to side with Vindictus on this one: I think personal investment in the development of your characters and the need to "keep them up to speed" is what really drives people to stick to one particular MMO. I will digress from Vindictus' claims, though, and say that I believe the most important factor is guilds, as developing relationships with real people in a game is definitely the strongest reason to keep playing a game.

Your point that having full voice acting causes delays and concessions to be made for content? I said we'll see if it proves true when the game comes out for a reason; I meant that we'll see if Bioware's failures are a result of spending so much on voice acting, or if they're just plain terrible at making an MMO. You missed my point, in that I'm saying that Elder Scrolls has the same aims, but if it turns out to have vastly superior content it will prove that the failure is Bioware's fault alone, and not some catch 22 intrinsic to spending so much on voice acting. If anything, it's a wild card that could support your point or prove it completely wrong; we can't know until it comes out.

Elder Scrolls MMO purports to have fully voiced characters as well, so we'll see if that's really the case when it comes out.

What are you even talking about? I never accused you of anything, I said that anyone who plays an MMO (by example of when you're playing SWTOR when I said the game, not GW2) is spending far more time playing the game than admiring the "amazing voice acting" in conversations. And just to be snarky, I knew you would reply this... since, of course, I did ask for another brilliant response.

The sad part is that I honestly think I would have been more contented had I not run into server population issues after such a short time, denying me the ability to do pretty much anything at max level. As for requiring a gaming mentality to be interested in something such as this, I tend to disagree; games such as Madden and movie tie-ins disprove this, as people who otherwise know nothing at all about games and who care about them even less are driven to buy them and play them for no other reason than because they like what it's based on. Movie tie-ins are notorious for being absolutely awful, due to low budgets, short development times, and extremely limited design choices, yet people continue to buy them just because it shares the name of an upcoming movie that excites them. These are the kind of people that I feel Bioware and EA marketed toward, and they knew that the Star Wars franchise alone would be enough to attract even non-gamers to at least purchase the game.

Because it's not out. Next brilliant response, please.

Too bad that GW2's gameplay is completely different, and is receiving very positive feedback. And I'm preeeetty sure that you're playing the game far more often than you're sitting there admiring the "superb voice acting".

And you must not have read my post much... it's in your selective quote that I said they will undoubtedly get people who complain when the date rolls around and they don't fulfill it, but I suspect that far more people are pissed off by the fact that no date is given whatsoever. Devs are the ones who post the threads that announce these due dates, and you can be damn sure that when a dev makes a thread, people pay attention and swarm it with responses. When said threads aren't made, it doesn't mean that those aggravated people magically disappeared, it means that the people who want an estimate simply aren't posting threads, and they don't do so for multiple reasons. Assuming that just because there isn't a single thread with thousands of angry replies that there are, in turn, no people pissed off by the lack of an estimate is completely wrong.

Sounds like a typical excuse that implies nothing is ever Bioware's fault. I'm guessing your graphics are picture perfect and are no different inside or out of a conversation? If you answer that by claiming they're the exact same inside and out, you're blatantly lying: Depth of Field for conversation is a graphics option for a reason.

I can imagine what would happen...you would get some people, probably less than those who complain about having no date at all, complaining that a date wasn't given. Giving an estimate is very different from setting a date in stone, and most people simply want an estimate. Even if you can only give a worst case scenario estimate, honesty is far better than just keeping us out of the process and either assuming we're too stupid or too opinionated/biased to understand that things might delay you. A crucial part of securing a community that trusts its developer is communication: letting us know estimates on the release of content, giving thoughtful and developed responses to sincere and meaningful questions asked by a good portion of the forum community, and not making assumptions about the intelligence or amicability of your playerbase are all very important parts of this. As it stands, all three are being handled exceptionally poorly, and no amount of people brown-nosing and calling others dumb for questioning the almighty devs/moderators when you post in threads will change that. Your post in this thread is appreciated, but it doesn't solve the problem and it's merely a subtle way of saying that you're too afraid of any more negative attention to take a risk and reach out to your community. Tell the other devs to think, just for a moment, about what they stand to gain if they endure a bit more negative attention in exchange for gaining a substantial amount of trust from the community by actually acknowledging that we and our thoughts, posts, and subscriptions are all integral to your game succeeding.

The graphics are fine...in conversations. I play on max settings, and yet whenever I'm not in a conversation the graphics are 10x more muddy and the textures go to crap. The expectation was likely that you wouldn't be looking at your character or textures much outside of conversations...too bad other problems such as server population give me plenty of time to stare at my character. As for bugs, how about the loading screen issue that started recently, wherein you'll get stuck at a loading screen that never loads. Bioware hasn't pinpointed the cause after a week or two now, and the issue is happening to quite a few people; worst of all, it happens completely at random, and there's no indication that doing anything specific in game triggers it. Having to alt+f4 and restart your game two or more times a day is pretty significant.

Agreed, but the sad part is that even when people do make reasoned, well developed and specific criticisms of MMOs, they inevitably get swarmed by enfranchised drones and diehards who forbid that anyone dare utter a word about what's wrong with their precious game. If it's not one side's fault for being stupid, it's the other.

While it may not prove much, it's certainly worthwhile to note that Warhammer was also published by EA, and that, coincidentally, a lot of Warhammer's developers are now sitting at Bioware. Though it may not say anything concrete, it's certainly a dire omen for SWTOR's future.

Hm, if he's really that bad then he's deserving of some doubt, I'll give you that. Still, it may just be that he's overzealous and takes a negative stance when he should give the benefit of the doubt and investigate further, and not that he's taking a negative stance because of some ulterior motive. Either way, he does make valid points at times (taking note of a couple of agreeable posts in the "25% subs lost" thread) and so it's at least worth reading his comments for consideration. But who knows, you may be right.

I never said TOR was going to lose any subs, I said it wouldn't gain hardly any, if any at all. And when I say that Diablo 3 and GW2 will steal subs from WoW, I'm not saying they're sub-based games; I'm saying that people who unsub will move on to play these games actively, sub or not.

Is it so hard to imagine that people can acknowledge the failures and faults of something while still continuing to use it? America has plenty of stupid, counterproductive, and utterly contradictory laws, but people still abide by them. I suppose, then, everyone is crazy or secretly an anarchist for following laws despite understanding that they're incredibly flawed or broken? The point is that you may think he can just choose to quit and go somewhere else, but he may play because there are no better options around, and hell, he may even want the game to succeed and just has enough of a brain and the courage to see what Bioware does wrong and to voice these findings.

All of the LS/DS decisions make me facepalm. They're so thoughtless and arbitrary most of the time it's not even funny. As noted in a few other posts in this thread, letting the general in BT live is an LS decision, while killing him is DS...yet almost every other let live/kill quickly decision is DS/LS, respectively. Pretty humorous overall, and this is just one example of the laziness of whomever made the LS/DS decisions:

I respect your opinion and all but...I kind of stopped listening to the VOs when 5 male characters in a row all had the same voice actor. Kind of kills the immersion it's supposed to create when you realize there are over 200 quest NPCs with a total of maybe 40-50 VAs. Also, unless you're on an RP server I can assure you that more than 50% of the population either skips through all dialogue or will get tired of hearing the same NPCs a thousand times over. The novelty of the whole conversation system wears off fast when you realize that your choices in conversation mean absolutely nothing...companion affection can be bought, LS/DS points are pointless beyond gear restrictions, and even killing quest givers/quest characters is meaningless to the story in 9/10 cases.

Not so much desperation as just resolving to turn WoW into a cash cow. WoW more or less died with Cata, and Blizzard knows it; therefore, they're just pulling out every incentive they can to keep the subs going for as long as possible so that they ensure WoW makes them money to its last metaphorical breath. This is purely conjecture, but if WoW takes another significant hit in subs, it may give Bioware a moderate incentive to actually put some effort into improving this game so that they can snatch up Blizzard's lost subs. As I said though, that's conjecture and very unlikely, as I have no doubts that GW2 and Diablo 3 will grab far more subs away from WoW than SWTOR could ever hope to (Diablo 3 being the more likely I'd say, since enfranchisement is a powerful force).

My comment may have suggested otherwise, but I understand that Bioware isn't the first and certainly won't be the last company to falsely advertise, I understand this well. The only reason I had to include those examples is because I know that I would have gotten an endless sea of trolls hounding me had I not. Regardless, the point stands in that we, as in you and me, are gamers; this means that we tend to be informed, knowledgeable, and intelligent when examining the potential of a game and whether or not it's worth our buy. The average person, however, cannot make these deductions like we can, and it is exactly that kind of person Bioware aimed for with its marketing. As much as we as gamers are getting more intelligent in our buying habits and our criticisms of game developers and publishers, it means jack all in the scheme of things, because we will likely be the minority long past now. The fact of the matter is that there are millions of people who have never played a game in their life, or who just don't give a crap about anything beyond exactly the game they're buying, and it is those people that developers and publishers are targeting, because they know that this crowd is easy, easy money. I have a sneaking suspicion that those people compose a good chunk of the initial buyers, as well as composing most of the 200k or so that never subscribed after the free month. All losses beyond that were likely people on the fence or those who couldn't stand this game's faults (and rightfully so). Just as an addendum, I think that the PR sham would be discussed in place of the lost subs because people only tend to complain about ethical or moral issues when it involves something they're passionate about, and just because false advertising really is more or less the status quo does not mean that is the way it should be. Regarding expectations, mine were not anywhere close to met. Though I didn't expect the "epic adventure" the PR tried to sell to us, I did expect an MMO that would be enjoyable, relatively bug-free (within reason, I understand that launches are almost always bugged to high hell), and most of all that would keep my attention and give me reason to keep playing. Sadly, I found the first and third in small doses, and the second overflowing (after 3 months of so many issues and idiocy from the QA department, I stopped giving leniency). Frankly, while I love the Star Wars universe, think they did a good job overall with integrating the stories and developing the OR universe, and that some of the armors and equipment are good looking, I just can't get past the utter lack of interesting and engaging content, the horrendous pvp, the promises for content in patches broken or delayed, and the general lack of polish to the game's mechanics. I love my Sith Marauder, but it's sad when the best I get to do with him is stand around and do nothing for more than 60% of my playtime.

I agree entirely, and I certainly hope that GW2 will keep its status quo from GW1 and keep the purchased content to nothing more than cosmetics and aesthetics. As for SWTOR following that model, I only agree up to the point that we would then be focusing on a different question, that being the business ethics of Bioware's initial sales, which were so high due to a deceptive, ambiguous, and slightly misleading marketing and advertising campaign. So I don't leave that statement bereft of evidence, just look at the class videos they released, as well as the alpha Black Talon videos: the former show zero real gameplay, instead using "cool animations" and "heroic encounters" to impress the viewer and divert their attention from how the game actually works. The Black Talon commentator embellished almost all aspects of the gameplay, focusing chiefly on the "consequential conversations" and otherwise making false claims about the level of intricacy of the instance and the gameplay as a whole, which, to any experienced MMO player, was clearly no better than your standard keyboard masher dungeon.

Let's just hope that cash shops prove the lesser of two evils; if it ends up being pay-to-win, GW2 will find no shortage of controversy itself. If forced to choose between the two, I'd rather pay an arbitrary fee to play on the same, level ground as others (relatively speaking of course) than to have a system where those with money to squander can cheapen the efforts of those who put in time and effort for their accomplishments and gear.

Don't forget to mention that once you begin doing hard modes, conversations in instances just become a chore of mashing your spacebar to get through the conversation you've already had 20 times before. End-game content essentially turns the game's main selling point into a hindrance in flashpoints.

Encouraging at least, but it would be nice if Bioware could at least give an ETA, even if it's far off. Vaguely stating "soon" for every question doesn't give much reason to have faith in them.