Potential resub here. Well actually not a potential resub in truth, more a potential enhanced FTP player here. I really prefer throwing my money at the secret world in truth and playing thsi game part time, which genuinely means that im exactly the kind of player that they should be marketing towards. Unfortunately it feels a little overly restrictive. Please, for the love of all things, before i continue, hold back the need to flame me with the "well, subscribe then!" misnomer. Im not going to subscribe. Ive already got a game im thoroughly enjoying paying my subscription fee on. Im not paying for two. What i am willing to do though is pay for the one i like best and throw a bit of cash to the one i dont like as much but still kinda like. The game isnt trash, so thats the first thing. Im not here to hate on the game. I want to play it, but in a straight subscription war for my $15 it loses out to TSW. (FOR ME, not necessarily for you - i can appreciate and understand you might prefer this game - i like it too). But let me just mention a few things that a FTP brings in an attempt to help the conversation progress along a bit: 1. Money. Not as much as a subscriber likely (though some will spend a fortune, most probably wont). Still, we will drop cash on some things now and again when we want something. The whole pull back to FTP for a lot of lapsed subs is of course that we like the game, but dont necessarily want to throw out $15 on it. I like warzones. They break up the monotony of questing. I like the stories. And i like popping into flashpoints now and again. Im sure id like operations, but cant seem to get into endgame. What FTP brings is customisation and a sense of fairness. I dont have to pay for all the stuff i dont want to do, but i am more than willing to pay for the things i do want to do. Im getting a nice deal and bioware are getting at least some money from me rather than the zero money theyd definitely be receiving if the option didnt exist. Free to Play brings CHOICE and options. This is great for the entire playerbase. 2. We bring atmosphere just by our presence. A few threads on the forums have already remarked how the hubs are feeling livelier and more interesting. This creates a positive environment for all players which mean a) subs are happier with a less stagnant set of players, and b) non subs might be more inclined to sub or at least stick around because the atmosphere is fun. This is win win for everyone, and all it requires is bodies on the ground (assuming of course that no ones stuck in a queue to log on). 3. We pop queue times. I guess this might be more warzones, but more people means more warzones going off which means less waiting for PVPers. Assuming again that the server caps arent being breached, then this shoudl mean lots of happy players. 4. We buy stuff and sell stuff by actually being a part of the game economy. This helps to foster a healthy market where everyone benefits (though omg, when will the GTN improve its search?). Im sure there are others, but im er, slightly half cut at the moment happy playing the game with my 2 action bars. What i want to stress though is that the above is a virtuous cycle of (un)intended consequences. And it should be part of the aim of a good FTP system. Unfortunately i dont see this one working and heres the top three reasons i can think of as to why: 1. Overly restrictive. UI restrictions which honestly should be taken for granted, make just everyday stuff a chore. I know, please, i know... its only THREE DOLLARS!!!! etc, but the point is that its a first impression and its going to drive people away immediately. NOT, and i stress this, because they cant afford $3 but because theyll feel that a PTP game style isnt really a long term option in this game. 2. Character unlocks. People invested time in their characters. Deleting them to play through a new storyline every time you hit 50 means that FTP is not a long term play style that is being catered for in this game. 3. Restricting core parts of the game is fine. Making you pay the same as a full subscription (when you factor in teh cartel coins for subbing) to play one aspect of the game means you might as well just sub. Some people will argue thats exactly the point. Argue away, but again, this simply means that PTP is not a long term optional play style that is being catered for by this game. The key point in this is that this is supposed to be a hybrid option. You can pay the sub, or you can pay for the bits and time you actually want to play. The problem is NOT (and again, i have to stress this because people really arent digesting it) that restrictions exist at all. The problem is that it is simply *too* restrictive to retain former subs in the alternative paying model. If they wanted a subscription theyd obviously still be paying for a subscription. They do however have an interest in the game or they wouldnt even be on these forums or taking advantage of the FTP features. The problem is really that you have little more than an extended trial, with an option for subscription at the end of it. I know you may disagree, but i urge you to make a new account and see how long you enjoy running without a sprint, or having your xp massively curtailed and very limited means to increase it outside of grinding through tunnels of mobs, or having 2 hotbars, or having mismatched clown gears, or having to wear some fugly helmets or whatever else youll find annoying. The point is that instead of looking at the free fun parts and the very fact they can play the game at all, theyll naturally be looking at how constricted their character feels, and how ultimately useless it is to even reach end game on their character let alone remain moderately competitive thereafter. Actually thats another thing i forgot to mention above. End game doesnt exist in this game for a FTP player. You cant work it anywhere near the cost of a sub, so once again, sub or leave. The whole function of a FTP system is supposed to be that it sits alongside the subscription model and offers the player a choice of playing style. If i want to remain competitive ill certainly have to pay for some features, but not necessarily for the whole thing. It should require a bit more of a challenge and subscribers would necessarily have some essential advantages, but im not completely locked out of end game and of final progression. As it currently stands though, even just unlocking one core feature is the equivalent of the sub price making it a straight choice NOT between a FTP style and a sub style (the supposed aim of this FTP system), but between subbing and not subbing. FTPers simply lack any real playstyle choice. If they want to play the game long term, they are frankly compelled to buy a sub. But by biowares own admission, they dont want one. So FTP, the apparent solution to bringing down the barriers to access (the very thing bioware talked about in their reasoning for introducing a FTP alternative) offers no constructive solution, and under the current conditions therefore likely restates the very problem (barriers to access) and thus cannot succeed. Which of course begs the question, why spend so much time and development money in creating a FTP system at all then if its simply going to reproduce the exact same conditions as the allegedly failing game (no alternative to a subscription)? Since the restrictions make it an inevitable choice between subbing and not subbing for anything outside of story grinding, and since a trial already existed for new players to familiarise themselves with the game, this leaves one very cynical reason for its existence. And im genuinely surprised subscribers arent more mad that theyre now expected to pay extra for things which their subscription is supposed to already be paying for (the ongoing development of new features, races, items, and areas).

Turns out i can post.

In truth, and im not saying this to troll, but isnt the management of public perception of this game biowares job? Asking the general public to tailor their opinions (whether positive, negative, or downright acidic) is rather silly. If they want to talk down the game, why shouldnt they? The whole idea that it hurts themselves is kinda absurd as well. Not all of us have a long term vested interest in the game. Not all the potential players sitting on the fence will have a long term vested interest in the game either. Indeed, one might argue two fold that first: artifically creating a sunshine and rainbows level of positivity about the game creates an unsustainable level of happy clapping that will not only put off new players when they encounter a wall of silence from the devs about continual crashing, bugs, and the throng of negative threads like this one (anti-community threads). Second, it lowers expectations which might actually make new players come into the game and think "omg! the sky isnt actually falling!? This games actually alright" The point though is that its not our responsibility to temper our opinions. Its the responsibility of the people who want the game to succeed and grow. And i dont just mean players, i obvioulsy mean the marketing staff at bioware. The players wanting the game to grow i assume already do this - albeit a little too hysterically i would add which is also seriously off putting when youre contemplating the game - every small criticism is descended upon like youre an agent of blizzard trying to bury the game. But its the job of forum moderators to moderate content in the forums. And sometimes this is about the public perception that they want for the game. Fair enough, but clearly the past couple of weeks have seen a serious slide in this (though honestly i always felt the moderators really were more like housekeepers, tidying away threads, locking negative posts but rarely engaging in debates or discussion about the game and its direction - which i think is a massive shame to be honest. The game has a lot of problems. Its game play is unimaginative. Its quests are repetitious. Its environments though rather elegant, are static and lifeless. Its end game, well i dont honestly know, i just level alts... but i havent seen much praise of it to be honest. Warzones are pretty pointless when youre gearing up so you can grind warzones???? At least in raiding theres another tier around the corner... well, sometime... Theres plenty more, but thats the bear bones of where i am and why i aint resubbing in truth. Its also ridiculous to ask me to self censor on these issues so that "potential new players" to the game might not realise it has some (though id obviously argue, all) of these issues. Chill out, stop watching what everyone else is doing. If you want the game to be successful then build a community on your server. Create events, flood ilum or whatsitmaface in tatooine. Help lowbies run through dungeons. Let people get immersed and enjoy the story by not spamming SPACEBAR FFS!!!! Be helpful and nice to new players and dont give them grief because they dont understand the flashpoint or where theyre going or what aggro is or a million other things. The game is successful when you play it and engage in it positively, not when you sit around on forums yapping about it. If you want it to succeed then lead by example and build a community. Dont post up threads telling the community at large that theyre the reason the game is going to fail. We arent mystic mog. Play it if you enjoy it, and unsub if you dont. As for forums, its your life, if you want to spend your time ************, moaning or whatevers, you do that, but really its up to the people in charge of the forums to look after them and moderate the content to their image of how they want the game to be seen publicly.

Hey relativist. Karl Popper wants a word with you (falsification). As does Wittgenstein (private language argument).

Random DC still. Guess they didnt fix the one thing you probably need to pull servers down for an emergency maintenance to fix :| Go team...?

Ill log in and if im still disconnecting then ill agree with you. But i assume that was the real purpose of the maintenance. If its just for the thing mentioned there, then its absurd as ever... though ive only got about 6 more days of my sub left, and it aint being renewed anyways

Im gonna graciously admit that they need this one. Continual server dcs (about 1/hour) are a bit silly. It needs fixed asap in truth. So no panties in a twist from me on this decision.

i was actually going to moan about this exact thing after being focus fired and chain stunned. Pretty tough work being a (marked usually by the other team) healbot. Clearly DR isnt working.

ETA: can i add this too? It matters not a jot what each mobs abilities are. They are a color - standard; silver; gold. I know exactly what to do in every fight against every mob in the world based entirely on that classification. Maybe two fights in the entire game have forced me to break my strategy. The first was against my boss at the end of act 1 (imp agent), and the second was against that dude at the end of voss. I LOVED those fights because they both forced me to rethink my strategies (and my companion choices). Everything else, every other story quest is the exact same strat. For a healbot its this: Standard: stealth, backstab, shiv, grenade, close shot, mob 2, grind down asap, mob 3 is dead from companion, mob 4 grind down. Reheal, next group. Silver: stealth, hidden strike on first dude, cap him down fast, and then on silver, debilitate, eviscerate, backstab, shiv, cover, explosive probe, corrosive dart, mob is now 20%, grind down fast. Reheal, next group. Gold: Pretty much same opener until corrosive dart, then look after companion and throw out explosive probe and corrosive dart. Every mob. Actually not every mob, healers offer a decent challenge but ONLY if you dont spot them at the initial attack. Healer golds are a massive pain though. Which is a GOOD thing at least. It gives you a bit of a change Basically same fights, same expectation of dying (almost none), and same outcomes. Pretty dull stuff. And ALWAYS with the fighting... Im a light side sith, i honestly have no idea i can be light side anything with the body count ive left behind me. :? Im not saying this to troll, im saying this (often) becuase i want them to knwo we know their quests are very poor gameplay and so when they come to redesign the game, or add to it, they dont just throw out yet another corridor leading to a big room leading to a corridor leading to a big room, leading to the boss quest. I want a bit of variety. The stories deserve so much better.

Theres a lot of grinding in the game. The truth is that most of it you can kinda forget about because the next cut scene gives it a kind of function. And its fine to go that way. We all level our own way. For me though i kept seeing the same types of quest, and it started to bother me. It takes a while for the covers of the hamster wheel to slip away and the conclusion to your first act is always awesome. But its when you hit somewhere like taris (for empire) and realise that the speeder you have is not really making things any faster, its just allowing you to cover the much longer (arguably unnecessarily so) distances in map scope. You might be travelling 90% faster, but the map is THAT much bigger that it feels like youre making a backward step. Not to mention that now you have to pummel through a constantly static world that you now start recognising to be static through the sheer volume of mobs standing around waiting for you, the hero, to attack them. And then theres the constant narrow corridors and dungeons and the repetition of environments. You start seeing the same rooms, or the same layouts over and over and it starts grating on you. The only difference seems to be the levels. But they are scaling according to your level. Only now youre sick of fighting them, so if youre a stealth class you buzz past them... and on the next planet you find yourself two levels behind because stealthing has no benefit at all. Which cleads you to your next revelation... if you want to level 1-50 by questing, and you have a stealth class and you dare to skip those mobs, by the next planet youre borked. Youre two or three levels behind and you have to farm those mobs just to make it all back up. There even comes a point in your characters life where he or she will likely contenplate regrinding through the respawns for xp instead of using the quick travel once youve completed your missions in the area. Its time sink after time sink and so MUCH of it is in grinding trash. And this doesnt even come to the quests themselves. Think about this... how many quests have involved going through a series of corridors or into a 'base' area with 2 roaming silver elites, 6 static groups, 2 or 3 silver duos and three blue switches to trigger. Even if those switches are radar stations to blow up, or computers to hack, or whatever else, its grind through all these very static lifeless mobs and very static pathing elites and click three blue things. This leads to an elite, kill them and their two bodyguards and complete quest! Its an absolute disgrace that they took such beutiful environments and such fun stories, and delivered them to us in the least imaginative manner possible. This is the heart of the grind. I hate grinding. I dont hate working for an objective. I dont hate having to work to get my cutscene or my reward. I recognise the hamster wheel and understand it. I just hate when the mode of getting the reward is the exact same every time.

op 46 medic. Had scorpio tanking him first, but too complex to look after her in close range and stop his healing as well as putting out dps. Came here, followed the advice on using temple and staying just outside range... had a bit of a poor start with bad timings and being just too close to the bad guy (jump him from range if you use her). Pulled her on passive, let him heal back up. By the time he got to us, we were all healed back up for round 2. Stayed on top of interrupts, used other two as well, and no problems. She is woefully undergeared in truth, but the result was 1-0 to the empire. And a win is a win no matter how ugly it looks. If youre having bother, just use temple, stick her at range, leep the dot up and interrupt every second heal (and every heal when you have the 2 biggy cooldowns). Should be fine.

There can be some really decent challenges. Theyve proved it in game. So it can be done, they just choose not to do it. End of act 1 for my imp agent was tough. I must have died 6 or 7 times to it. I only killed the boss (no spoilers) by taking kaliyo off tanking duties and kiting. Both two techniques and strats id never used as a healbot operative. Of course part of this comes from the really poor target box on charcters. Targeting the bad guy to keep the dps up on it (even if its meagre healbot dps) and then getting back to my companion in time to throw out a few heals was always tough for a clicker. In fact i think its because of that i learned to stop clicking on the screen and start clicking on the portrait. Maybe one day in the future ill even learn to use hotkeys instead. I digress. Tough fight, in part because of the poor targetting box of characters on screen, and it certainly qualified as a challenge. But heres the thing, its a GOOD THING to get spanked by the AI now and again and learn how to beat it. Thats one of the incentives to playing a game. I still have fond, interlaced with furious memories of trying to keep that $###% Natalia alive in the hardest setting of goldeneye so i could unlock the moonraker mission. It took me months of playing (and the endless misery of completing the first 5 minutes of the level without a scratch to get to the point where you might be in with a chance of clearing the last 5 minutes of waves of bad guys). I also have fond, but equally frustrating memories of mass effect 1 and that god damned immortal krogan at liaras dig site on nightmare. I still havent beat it. Ive even scrapped 2 characters because i just couldnt see a way past it (even if you have both the party members alive, i just couldnt keep them up against his charge, gank, roflstomp). So it always comes down to me v him, and even with radiation bullets, temp halting the regen, i just could never put out enough damage to stop the regen from bringing him back. Hes a tough monkey that one. And i dont hate the game for it. It gives me something to work at and figure out. I completed goldeneye after i came home from uni and hadnt touched it for almost a year. I hope ill get through the krogan under similar circumstances So thsi is my message for the future. Give us something infuriating. Some people like challenges and like figuring out how to down something complex and tough. Its those things that live with us 10 or 15 years later down the line.

I almost quit the game at Taris on empire side. The only thing that pulled me through it was the dream that i might one day have a conclusion to my class story. It was touch and go though mind. Levelling isnt fun. I know i sound like a moaner saying that, but once youve done your fortieth version of pretty much the same dungeon crawl and clicked the same three blue buttons to get to some master console which brings out the elite you have to fight, it gets super old. I did enjoy voss though. Or should i say i AM enjoying voss. Well... some of it. The healing shrine or whatever its called was nice, and the little vision quest was just about to be interesting (before the second, third and fourth steps all involved me battling yet another group of mobs/elites). No imagination. Anyone that thinks this is fun honestly has really low gameplay expectations. Its not fun, its a grind. A boring dull typical mmo grind to fill up time. The CUTSCENES (of your story and the main story on each planet) are FUN. The actual gameplay though is mind numbing tedium. When they make their expansion i hope they think a little more about this. You can still run the hamster wheel, but for goodness sake do make some effort to keep it diverse and entertaining. Give me varied quest forms. Give me different challenges outside of go here, fight mobs, click blue thing. So no, the actual meat and potatoes of leveling isnt fun. The rewards (cutscenes for your main story) are fun. The gameplay is dull and unimaginative.

i think thats mean to a new player to be honest. I did think maybe this would be fair, but it just lets people steamroller players and make them miss some of those OMG moments that hooked us in when we ran the flashpoints for the first time. However... i do like it as an actual in game feature. A lot of the choices are played on a dice roll and we dont always like that dice roll (like the time i dark sided everything only to light side the completion and refuse the reward on behalf of everyone - great funny moment to be honest, and requiring people to watch the cutscenes to create the build up to it to be honest). So why not add in a cutscene demolisher roll as well? It works for me. I just dont think its going to work for the people that have to design and write the code/script for the game. They need to keep the suspension of disbelief in a way to make it seem like theres a justifiable <in game> reason to explain the lack of correspondence...

Absolutely correct. If you want a spacebar run then advertise it in general. Since the dungeon finder doesnt have the option for you to choose a spacebar run, you should expect that you will be grouped with people who maybe want to see whatever cutscenes are available. And since its part of the whole selling point of the game, whether or not you want to bypass it, you should be willing to waste a whole 15 seconds per dialogue choice to let them enjoy it like you once did. If you join a designated spacebar run and watch the cutscenes youre a douche. If you join a dungeon finder run and expect everyone to spacebar everything, youre also a douche. If you join a dungeon run, and tell everyone its a spacebar run, youre also a douche. You arent god. You want to set the rules, you set up your group manually. Otherwise you default to the games design and let people enjoy the wild ride that you once rode (and are now bored of - maybe time to run something else). However, that being said, heroic runs... if even for your group mates, it really shouldnt be your first time running them to be honest. Go run them in normal, if only to find out some of the potential mechanics and layouts. Its not unreasonable to assume that youve run these already, so the default should be flipped about.