We started hard modes for the first time last week, due to people starting late and a lack of people bothering to rush to 50. (I missed the first month). Before that hardmode night, our gearing had consisted of 2 prior normal mode runs. Where we 1-shot both raid instances. We went into hardmode with a group of semi-geared casual players, most of which had more PvP than PvE gear. Our 2nd healer had dinged 50 the night before, was in lv45 quest blues and a couple of craft epics bought off the AH on the way in. Our lineup included casual non-raiders who were new to the concept of not standing in fire, and a couple of people who i could swear were using the keyboard to turn. We cleared EV up to the jungle section puzzle boss, which bugged out on us and wouldn't reset, so had to switch and go KP. We then cleared all of hardmode KP in the same casual raiding session, including a 1-shot on Karraga with several people who had never seen normal mode Karraga. I was using FRAPs, but have since deleted the footage as the content was so casual that uploading the video would have been embarassing. The collective ventrilo reaction to Karraga dying, on the first pull, was 'meh' and "hardmodes..". Next week we do "insane".

In This Thread: People with poor memories wax lyrical about how things used to be, in the imaginary fantasy land that exists in their heads. Then create faulty internet arguments with their own brand of facts, plucked gleefully from the rose coloured clouds of high cow-excrement. All aboard the nostalgia train! CHOO CHOO

A lack of any adequately challenging content, and a lack of any labouriously long XP/rep/grind timesink, are not the same thing.

All current raiding content is trivial to the point of irrelevance. While the game probably has quite poor class balance (we'll have a hard time proving anything untill the combat log is added) there is no fight in the game right now that isn't so easy that group composition is meaningless. Maybe you'd have some difficulty if you ran with zero healers, not sure, haven't tried that one yet. In the event that you're trying to 4-man the 8 man content and actually have to worry about class composition, refer to this for melee classes:

Yea that mouse smoothing is obnoxious, very first thing i noticed the first second i took control of my character at the launch of the game "*** is up with this camera". Can we add to those 2 issues, zoomed out camera with pivot enabled frequently gets stuck in mid air looking at the horizon about 20 meters above your character, and zoomed out camera without pivot enabled stubbornly refuses to zoom back out to the selected distance every time terrain forces it to pull in. The camera zoom in/out function should set a fixed distance in game units that the camera should continually return to, quickly, whenever it has to move in for whatever reason. While we're at it, why on earth is the sensitivity of camera movement tied to your framerate? Which genius thought that up.

For *VERY* small values of 'everyone'.

Idiots, and also prone to inappropriately assign causes and effects. You got into some groups with arseholes, but a LFG tool doesn't create arseholes, it only groups people together. Given a server-wide LFG system and a function that prevents you from being grouped with people on your ignore list, the people you will get from a random LFG queue are no better or worse than anyone you would pick up from your first efforts /1'ing in Fleet. You then have the option of friending people who you like playing with, inviting them to your group, and then using the LFG queue to fill the rest of your group up again. If you don't do that, and consequently get randomly matched with people you find less tolerable, it's not the fault of the tool. Of course, in a game with a large enough active playerbase who are all willing and able to run instances, the chances are you won't meet the same people very often. In a sense, this can mean that your actions in a group are less important because you are more anonymous. Again, this is nothing to do with the method of forming a group, it's a function of the size of the player pool. The sort of community situation where you know all the people regularly raiding, know their reputations and their history, doesn't exist in a successful modern MMO that makes group content accessible. It also never exists for the casual player that doesn't spend a large amount of time online. The lack of this type of community is nothing to do with the method of grouping people together, it's to do with the size and activity of the playerbase. This is when we get to the nostalgia trip. What most people are longing for are not 'the days before LFG tools'. They are longing to re-live a certain time where they were a very active member of a small community of people running content together, where everyone knew eachother and reputations mattered. This situation can only exist if you spend a lot of time online performing an activity that a relatively small number of people take part in, all of which also spend a great deal of time online. It doesn't exist in succesful modern MMOs, because modern MMOs like to make content accessible to their playerbase at large. So instead of only 50 people at max level actively running a certain level of content, MMOs now strive to make that number 500 or more. The nostalgic moment people are searching for won't return, it is now replaced with the guild system and raid content. It wouldn't be as good as you remember it anyway, nothing is as good the 2nd time around. People like to blame the end of these good-old-days on new changes such as LFG systems, but really it's a sign of MMOs succesfully getting more people into this content, and making the endgame community much larger. The larger community isn't as cozy, but the majority of people who never got to experience your golden days due to time constraints are now much happier that they actually get to run dungeons with people.

The Forum Debate is heated, because of a minority of single issue lobbyists who have to make themselves heard whenever the topic pops up. How do i know it's a minority? Easy - because if most of the community did not want to use a LFG tool, then there would be no reason to complain about its introduction. A LFG tool forces nothing on the playerbase, it's an optional method of forming a group, ideally used to fill the gaps in a party after you manually invite your friends and known players currently available for the content. If people don't use the tool, the game doesn't change. If the majority of the community doesn't want to use a LFG tool, then they simply don't use it, and we're back where we started. The reason there is heated opposition to it, is precisely because these crusaders know that most people will use it. They'll use it because most people don't infact like sitting in Fleet spamming the general chat and whispering everyone from a /who list one at a time for hours before finally giving up on actually playing the game and logging off. It's precisely because the majority do want this feature, that it will have an impact on the game and change the way SWTOR is played. Specifically, it'll have the impact of encouraging people to actually group and play the game together, instead of just standing around and talking about it. Since this little bunch of housewives are violently opposed to the idea of people being able to play the game, they will fight it tooth and nail, and so you have this thread.

So you won't have any issue continuing to manually invite people from that massive pool of potential group mates, which a LFG tool does not prevent you from doing, and will not be impacted in the slightest then. What was your argument against the tool again?

*Looks at WoW* *Most succesful MMO of all time by a jaw-droppingly painful margin* Good argument there buddy.

Your post does not describe the action of 'playing the game', you are describing a barrier that impedes people trying to play the game - the process of finding people to play it with. Playing the game is what happens when your group has formed and you actually get into the instance.

Are you implying that anyone in this thread is still 1-49? Are you implying that making it easy for alts to find groups for content, after the initial month of the game where the lower levels are empty and underpopulated, is a bad thing? Are you implying that the levelling process is more than 10% of the current gameplay?

I don't think you understand what the word challenge means.

Apparently you haven't played SWTOR. There are currently 4 locations that exist in the game for level 50 characters: - Sat in Fleet trying to gather people together in general chat because there isn't a proper grouping tool that would allow them to leave Fleet while their group forms - Sat in Fleet queueing for WZs to farm PvP gear, because it's easier to form an 8 man WZ group to gear up than it is to form a 4 man HM FP group. - Sat in Illum farming Valor while queueing for WZs to farm PvP gear - Actually in a dungeon, accessed from a portal in Fleet, because all the instances are located in Fleet anyway so there's no reason to travel anywhere in the world. Making complaints about the idea of being teleported to the dungeon by a LFG tool hilariously pointless. Oh, that's 3. My Bad.

You appear to be playing the wrong game, it seems you were looking for a Massively Multiplayer Online Real-time People Gathering sim. I can deduce this by your delusion that the game is about trying to get people to join your party, instead of being about trying to fight through dungeon challenges and work together to clear content. I suggest you try Facebook instead, it appears to be the type of game you're looking for. Keep pushing that crusade son.

Hey look, you stirred up the tiny and very vocal forum minority of people with a crusade against good game design. Yes plebeians, tell us how times were better back when you spent 10 hours a day online in an MMO and knew 50 other people who did the same and constantly wanted to run UBRS with you, all day. Community was so fantastic back then wasn't it, because you just happened to be in the perfect position to form groups constantly whenever you needed to, and knew every other unemployed person on the server. Tell us how in the good old days back when games didn't provide proper grouping tools, you had so much fun being the only geared healer and being online 24/7 so you were constantly able to play with people without being involved in a guild. Tell us how we can all be in the same position if we just learn to 'talk to people', and 'socialise', because doing those things will magically create the classes you need out of thin air. Tell us how asking for people who want to run an instance in general chat 'is not the way to do it', but then don't elaborate on how you expect groups to magically form without that kind of announcement, and without a proper grouping tool. Lets all skip down the yellow brick road to nostalgia-ville and pretend that our first novelty experiences with online interaction were fantastic because they didn't involve a LFG tool, and not simply because they were our first novelty experiences, and the idea of communicating with other people over the internet loses some of its magic after the first 100 times. You're not going to leave at the introduction of a LFG tool, you'll just whine on the forums about it like a neighbourhood of housewives feigning outrage at your topic of the week because you have nothing better to do with your lives. Carry on crusading.

This thread sorely lacks perspective on how different people experience games and what they intend to get out of them. The word Game is most commonly used to refer to some form of competitive sport. Consider typical uses like the Roman Games, the Olympic Games, card games, ball games, board games, games of skill. Computer games have always traditionally had a competitive slant to them, even the ones which were single player. Space Invaders can be seen as a score attack arcade game, and games with no scoring system which were rare in the early days can still be thought of as self-challenges to continually progress further. People didn't repeatedly die in Ghouls and Ghosts for countless hours because they wanted to see how awesome the ending credits were, its appeal came from providing a constant challenge to the player via a game of skill. The reward was the satisfaction of overcoming something through practice and your own ability, in otherwords the appeal of the game came from actually playing the game, not from a carrot at the end of each section in the form of a cut scene or story/character progression nugget. The idea of games as merely an interface for some kind of story, where the game itself provides no real challenge other than the amount of time invested, and the appeal of the experience is supposed to come from reaching the next carrot of story progression, is a recent one. It's only in the last decade really that we have seen games such as Heavy Rain which are effectively choose your own adventure books in computer format, and offer no challenge or competitive aspect to them in any form. These types of 'games' have become popular with certain demographics, but i would make the point that they are not really games at all. So we get to this thread... What you call CONTENT, by which you clearly mean voice acted story progression carrots fed to you in the form of barely-interactive cut scenes, i call irrelevant fluff that gets in the way of me playing the game. Your idea of content is meaningless to me, because i'm here to play a game, not to watch a story. My enjoyment comes from the challenge of manipulating the game mechanics to their limits in order to continually out-perform myself and other people. This is normal, because this is how video games are usually consumed. Some of the recent gaming generation might be forgiven for not realising this, but your lust for visual or narrative fluff is a strange departure from how gaming works in general. From where i am standing, your position looks like a group of people trying to play a game of football while roleplaying various dungeons and dragons characters, and rolling for initiative. My content comes in the form of ever increasing challenges for myself and the group of people i'm playing with. That's challenges as in challenges of skill, not challenges of patience. I describe the levelling process as a grind because it offers no challenge beyond the initial learning process of figuring out how best to use each ability as you aquire it, which takes about 5 minutes. The remaining 99% of the levelling process is simply a repetitive time sink necessary to reach a max level where actual challenging content can be found. My content comes in the form of competitive PvE and PvP challenges, among people of max level with the full compliment of abilities available to them, with appropriate gear trying to exploit every game mechanic available to them to maximum effect. 'More content' means greater challenges, which in PvE would mean bosses with more complicated mechanics that involve higher levels of organisation, concentration and skill to complete. So when i hit max level, and then clear hard mode Karagga's Palace in 1 night with a group of casual raiders in so-so gear, and then complain that the game is light on content.... i'm not asking for more voice acting, i don't want more levels to grind out killing trivial mobs and completing quests that don't challenge me in any way, i want more GAME. That's GAME as found in the traditional meaning of the word, and you can shove your semi-interactive movies up your arse.

So are you saying you want a list of my PvE achievements as well before you'll cut your bollocks about 'pretend knowledge' and try to present a real argument? I know exactly what your position is on the matter, and it reads like this: "The last expansion i played before i stopped was the worst one"

Haha, my knowledge is pretend? I didn't post about myself in the OP because i intend my points to stand on their own merits. I don't need to wave an e-peen and argue from authority, but since you want to make this about me, you can take a look at this: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-GB%3Aofficial&client=firefox-a&hl=en&q=cache:pQRHazCTjWwJ:http://www.wow-europe.com/en/contests/test-of-honor/index.html+teoh+fleetwood+twilight%27s+hammer&ct=clnk The cached page of the Vanilla WoW test of honour competition, tabards awarded to the player on each server who farmed the highest rank in the original world PvP honour rank system, prior to the introduction of BGs. 7th from the bottom, Twilight's Hammer. The original WoW honour system was a time orientated grind, it rewarded players for spending as much time killing people in the world as possible. It was a bad system, and beyond the initial novelty only a very tiny portion of the playerbase made an effort to farm it. I know, because i won the damn thing. It was a bad system, and that's why it was replaced by various other ideas in later expansions. To claim that it was this system that was responsible for WoW's success, and that the game fell apart when it was removed and improved upon, is utter lunacy. Infact, if you asked the millions with active subscriptions during BC or LK what the original vanilla PvP system was, i would wager a majority could not tell you.

Alright, but there's a numbers game here. WoW makes the process of getting to that end game content and attempting it simple, as such it allows a very large number of people to try their luck. That only the very few manage to complete it does actually speak highly of its difficulty. By comparison, EQ puts immense barriers in place that exclude most of the player base (which even before those barriers was not at wow-levels) from ever trying that content, before the question of playing ability even comes into the equation. In otherwords, while WoW provides a true competitive challenge that most people can participate in, the EQ players clearing the end game could be described as big fish in a small pond. Oh yea, and WoW's early raiding content was quite horrific by their current standards. Let us never speak of Lucifron > Golemag ever again.

Congratulations, your dog has completed the tutorial. Now the game begins! You seem to hold the mistaken belief that the tutorial of levelling to cap comprises 99% of the game, and that endgame content is the final 1%, yet you contradict yourself. If levelling to cap is quickly accomplished by your dog, and you spend the next 1-2 years of game time playing the end game at the level cap... then the end game isn't 1% of the game, is it? You see, percentages don't work the way you want them to just because it makes your post sound more impressive. Really, that's funny, i don't hear of many unguilded players solo'ing the WoW endgame. Maybe those people are just so anti-social that they don't tell anyone about it? Perhaps the large community of raiders i socialised and played with were just some tiny unique minority, and everyone else was out there killing Algalon by themselves. That must be it. Maybe you need to get fancy with percentages again and tell me about all these people who played the game by themselves. "Because leveling is so **** easy", the field quickly evens out with everyone hitting level cap. This then provides a large community of potential players to group with and attempt endgame content together with. The fast levelling iin WoW is a key reason why it is such a good game for groups of players to socialise and play together in. Shove that in your pipe. I'm not sure the numbers help your argument much. Do i need to say it's the most popular MMO of all time? Really? Do we need to go there? You don't get to invent a truism like "everyone knows that such and such is bad" when all available information points to the exact opposite. If you want to claim such a thing, you're going to have to put some work in and make an argument for it.

Because they keep returning to somewhere. I don't think it's EQ though. Nowhere in my post did i say that SWTOR was the ideal embodiment of this idea, but i have to fight the mindset before i can quibble over the details. Lets give the details a go now: SWTOR makes it easy to get people together and raid, the levelling process is quick and so far there is no giant gear ladder that would be a barrier to starting content. There are few if any PvE time-sinks in the game as money is of little importance, consumables are limited, and gear progression is tied to raid and dungeon locks. For PvE in general, the game doesn't penalise you for not having excessive time to play the game. That's a good start. Here's the problem though - the challenges currently provided by the PvE raiding are limited. Compared to the latest WoW expansion for example, the first raid content is set at a much lower difficulty level. Comparing my first step into raiding armed with a bit of heroic dungeon gear in SWTOR versus the same situation in Cata, EV and KP on hard mode are tuned at a significantly lower difficulty level than the normal modes of Blackrock Descent or Bastion of Twilight. The content is too easy, this means that skilled raiding guilds will very quickly clear everything on insane. Don't take this as an appraisal of your argument though - my point is that SWTOR would be better off more closely copying WoW in terms of raid mechanics and difficulty. I stand by my oriignal post. Then there's PvP... the current PvP system in SWTOR is a mess precisely because it is a straight up time limited grind. Gear can only be aquired by grinding bags for a long period of time untill you happen to have lucked out on enough drops, and achieving Valor60 is almost entirely a function of time invested, not ability. By comparison, PvP progression in WoW Arena is very closely linked to performance. While it is possibly to quite quickly 'grind' entry level gear, the top tier of gear is limited by rating, and rating can only be achieved through ability, not by grinding out time in BGs. In order to mimic this system SWTOR would need some form of competitive PvP, as they have no way of measuring and rewarding performance right now. The obvious choice would be rated 8v8 premade BG teams.

Which WoW was this, and how many world firsts do you hold in it.

What about the social skills of bringing together and leading or working with a group of 30+ people to complete team encounters, using voice comms, organising strategy through a guild forum, agreeing on fair player rotation and loot distribution among yourselves and dealing with inevitable group drama and fallouts that arise from such a large group of people working together. How about those social skills lad? What does gear rating have to do with that exactly? WoW goes out of its way to encourage and facilitate this type of social interaction, by removing the barriers that would normally prevent people from playing together. Getting people levelled up doesn't take long, getting them geared isn't difficult, because of welfare gear, getting them online to participate in raids isn't difficult, because there are no excessive time requirements. You can run a successful end content raiding guild full of people with day jobs who log on to raid for 3 hours 3 times a week. That's a casual schedule, they just need to be good. You don't *need* to play the game in the first place, you don't need to do anything. You could pay your subscription and do nothing other than run in circles around the bank roof all day. It doesn't matter if you needed to spend your life online or not - the game explicitly rewarded you for doing so. If you didn't spend countless hours on time sinks, then your character would be notably less powerful than the character of someone who had performed repetitive tasks day in day out for a longer period of time than you had. In some cases the difference would be insurmountable. It's a game design that directly rewards time invested, as opposed to any measure of performance, and by doing so it destroys the concept of playing the game "well". If a paraplegic monkey facerolling the keyboard can achieve greater progression in a game because he has the luxury of being online 12 hours a day and so is rewarded by your time sink MMO, should we praise the monkey? If the encounters are easy, and the rewards are immediate, why had less than 0.5% of raiding guilds cleared HM Lich King by the time the stacking ICC buff hit 30%? Your entire viewpoint is based on the idiotic assumption that WoW progress was easy. Since you repeatedly reference things like LFG queues and gear score, i'm going to assume that you simply never participated in organised raiding. Perhaps your social skills weren't up to it.

Oh so what you're saying is that WoW's subscriber numbers grew through its first few years, and then after a period of several years began to level off, before eventually starting to decline, yea? Thanks for the info.