Jump to content

sharpenedstick

Members
  • Posts

    550
  • Joined

  • Days Won

    1

Everything posted by sharpenedstick

  1. Ranked has suffered throughout the years by the same poor and aimless development characteristic of EAware's tenure (and almost certain to continue under Biosword, since they left all the same time-serving devs in place). The matchmaker is horrible, and they have no plans to fix it. They were largely unable to prevent win-trading. Class balance is poor. Balance passes are rare and generally not effective. They couldn't figure out how to make ranked 8's work, so they introduced arenas. Arenas were not fun, which is born out by the fact that now ranked is gone and players can preferentially queue, WZ pops are common but arena pops take a long time (because people aren't queueing for them). Biosword doesn't even pretend they are going to put any dev resources into pvp or gsf.
  2. The renown system had issues, and I'm not sure I really want it back. However, the current system of absurdly proliferated currencies and the wretched addition of Hyde and Zeek is far inferior.
  3. Heck, that makes more sense than my smuggler somehow defeating an IMMORTAL GALAXY EATING FORCE GHOST.
  4. 99 currencies and Hyde and Zeek are objectively terrible gearing systems, but it's what we're stuck with for the foreseeable future. But please, please, please give us a convo option like "I've heard it all before" that lets us skip directly to getting the item deconstruct quest. The dialogue isn't good. The characters aren't cute. But even if they were, we don't need to hear it every time on every character. Clicking through it every time is just a chore. Do us all a favor and give us a skip option please!
  5. That explains why it failed so completely. And sadly means we'll see Biosword try it again. And again. And Again.
  6. As with most things in the SWG vs SWTOR comparison, SWG's space system was far more ambitious than SWTOR's, but it also relied on more player agency to actually create content. SWTOR was developed as essentially a Star Wars skin laid over WoW's gameplay. The Star Wars name is literally all that keeps this game alive. If it were "Space Battle" and it had "Monks" instead of Jedi and "light swords" instead of sabers, this game would fold. That's not to say there aren't well done things in the game, or that it's impossible to have fun in it. But essentially, the development philosophy that has governed SWTOR during its entire existence has been mediocre and meek. People forget this, but the game failed as subscription-only, and without F2P and microtransactions, SWTOR would have folded after maybe two-three years tops. SWG, by contrast, was amazingly ambitious in so many ways, but it didn't always deliver on the execution, there wasn't nearly enough provided content, SOE's management was so bad it is now a cautionary tale, and many of SWG's systems were beyond the devs ability to keep balanced or active.
  7. One of GSF's persistent issues is the new player experience isn't great. I frequently hear things like "oh, I tried it once and had no idea what was going on." The frequently poor quality of games doesn't help in this regard, but the difficulty in the onboarding process is its own issue. And it's one that, in light of GSF and PVP's general neglect from Biosword, is unlikely to ever be addressed. Out of curiosity, does anyone know when the last time it was that a dev actually posted in this subforum?
  8. The damage boost is mostly a noob stomper. I refuse to use it. Regarding groups, premades should just be removed from solo queue. Queueing with one other person should be allowed, and also it should be allowed to queue for premade and solo at the same time (just like how you used to be able to queue for ranked and standard pvp way back in the day). We all know premade queue will never pop because premades are just looking for easy wins and have virtually zero interest in facing other premades, but the option would be there. They really need to add some rewards to the GSF vendor, including some rewards that take 10k fleet comms to unlock. This way it will take a considerable amount of games to get them all.
  9. There are vendors that haven't received updates in years. I think the ViP vendor hasn't received one in over a decade. So the fact that the Galactic Seasons vendor gets any attention at all is already way above the curve.
  10. Is there ever too much time to spend on the forums? That's definitely true at the corporate level. One rung down, at the dev level, they're more worried about not getting fired and getting to play out their pet projects. The saddest part of being an MMO player is that you know whatever you get from devs is based on the random fancies of their minds, and only tangentially (if at all) related to the player base requests. I mean, just look at the recent GTN revision. Personally, I didn't mind it, but some people seem to really hate it, and I feel like not many people were asking for it. There are plenty of other bugs and QoL issues that seem far more important to more people?
  11. I doubt the devs take feedback from any source into much account (if any). But to say the fact that not all players are also forum users doesn't mean that forum sentiments aren't accurate. In fact, the forums have such a breadth of opinion, and support for virtually any position can be found in at least one poster, that repeated trends become notable. So the fact that the ubiquity of KOTET "bashing" was so reliable in view of its defenders is itself an indication of its reception. Nor can the non-posting population be taken as an endorsement of the game or any specific content of it. The non-forum users aren't showing their support by not complaining.
  12. I hear this asserted a lot. I don't know how true it is. I also don't know to what extent the forum population is representative of the interests of the larger community. People like you do seem to enjoy making this claim as a way to dismiss forum opinions though. But again, the devs haven't returned to KOTET/KOTEF either narratively or mechancially, so while you can rubbish the ubiquitous negative conclusion of the expac the forum users have, the proof is in the released pudding. I don't think I've ever tried to hide it. I like the people on these boards. I enjoy interacting with them. This is fun for me. It's why I don't chalk my comments full of insults.
  13. I'm not sure why you're so upset, but it is clearly impacting your reading comprehension. I said the earlier comments in the thread were lamenting the ubiquity of criticism "here," meaning the forums. I've noticed this pattern about you were you get incredibly emotionally invested and it makes it so that you lose perspective. I'm sure if you were calm, you would have caught "how ubiquitous the criticism of it is here" could have no other meaning than the population on the forums. I would never report you, absent you going on some kind of bizarre racist tirade (which I have no reason to believe you ever would). Your opinions are deeply held, and I respect that you're worried it could lead you into prohibited behavior, but in my opinion reporting for things other than legit abuse is bush league.
  14. I read it and I'm sorry you're upset that it took so little to dismiss. I can feel your frustration, and since I don't like knowing people are upset, I really do hope you can find the time for some mindfulness. The reality of the KOTET's failures are so well known that earlier comments in the thread lamented how ubiquitous the criticism of it is here. I'm sorry you were not able to muster up any factual defenses for it. Rest assured, nobody denies that your subjective enjoyment of it constitutes a defense. It is entirely valid to defend KOTET by saying you liked it. That's fantastic! I am in no way unironically happy for you that you were satisfied by what they offered. But most obviously weren't, not only for all the reasons already listed, but also because we never ever went back to it, either as a method of content delivery or as a narrative focus. That's all there is that has to be said. We both know it, and we both know you've got nothing to say against it.
  15. I didn't define well done. What I did instead is illustrate the ways it was not well done. When you say a glass is broken, pointing to the shards is sufficient to establish that fact without first defining what constitutes broken. Exactly. Eight years, and SWTOR doesn't use chapters and chapter groupings as release content forms. Eight years, and we don't re-use KOTET locations (except Odessen) for much of anything, the devs don't have the story revisit Zakuul itself or the ramifications of the KOTET/KOTFE story line. Eight years, and we don't explore a region of space that contained a society with its own understanding of the Force and power sufficient to conquer the galaxy. Eight years and we don't care if the player became emperor. We don't care if a planet got eaten. We don't return to any of the KOTET narratives because the player base does not like them. You can talk about how great you think KOTET is. The simple fact is everything after it ran so fast from it because the smell was horrible, and it's still lingering. That's not what cherry picking means. I didn't distort the nature of your position by finding a single solitary comment and use it to inaccurately reflect or ridicule you. What I did was narrow the focus, because a point-by-point discussion of the type you're apparently invested in is not worth my time (I mean that in an explanatory rather than offensive manner) and also tends to derail threads. Please understand going forward if you continue, such narrowing is almost inevitable as I only respond to the parts that interest me sufficiently.
  16. Certainly my opinion is not fact. But KOTET was not well done, and that is a fact. Not only for all the reasons I laid out, but also as we have seen, it was a model of both storytelling and content organization that has been completely abandoned. If KOTET/KOTFE was the raging success that its few supporters on the forums claim it is, we'd have seen future development go along the same lines. Game developers don't abandon their pet projects voluntarily. Devs are obsessed with making the game they want, and they do not really deviate except in the face of absolute necessity (though typically, it's more that they are canned and the next group putz around with their pet projects, while the players long standing issues are left to fester). Again, it's fine if people like the expansion. Go have fun, if that's what's fun to you. But the fact is, it's not swelling the game's numbers. It's not something players are asking to see more of. It's not something the devs are even trying to do anymore. You can imagine, if you'd like, that that's inspite of the great success KOTET is, but a far more reasonable conclusion is that the KOTET/KOTFE storylines are not what the player base wants, the chapters method of content organization is not how the devs want to release future material, and that the game would have been better off without it. Revan (a character somehow more played out than Malgus, if such a thing can be believed) is directly connected to KOTET. And KOTET was in works during Hutt Cartel. KOTET/KOTFE is a project that took years to develop. They knew where they were going when they funneled down to one. Rise of the Hutt Cartel may have been the content transition, but from a development standpoint they already knew where they were headed.
  17. People hate on KOTFE/KOTET because it was bad by basically any metric, and the few defenders it has have no real understanding beyond their own personal play experience, which is why they don't understand how it was so harmful for the game. It's been explained before, but I'll lay it out again because it can be useful as a teachable moment. 1. It was a hamfisted attempt to force what had previously been sixteen discreet stories into one universal epic. Not only is the non-FU issue very well known, but even for the force users it had minimal relevance to the previous stories except for JK. Internally, it was the path forward that justified eliminating individual (or even semi-individual/grouped) storylines. This was ultimately a false economy. Yes, more storylines take more dev time. But they also create more playtime. Many people play multiple or even all of the stories. Remember DvL? That event was essentially "play the entire game again." If they had made the individual stories, people would have played them and that would have aided retention. 2. They completely destroyed the scale of the game by having us defeat an IMMORTAL GALAXY EATING FORCE GHOST. Every "galactic threat" has been trivial by comparison. They also gave us leadership of an institution that was strong enough to overthrow the Eternal Empire, a state that itself subjugated the entire galaxy in less than five years. You can't do that in an MMO, when the playable content relies on repetition. "Oh, you're the new eternal emperor? Cool! Can you get me five rat skins?" 3. They sunk all their effort into a deviation the majority community doesn't want. I get Pub v Imp is tired to some people, but it's what most players want. How do we know this? We see virtually zero calls to return to Zakuul or to create another non-pub v imp focus. 4. Although the VO was well done and some of the chapters were good, for the most part the writing was not strong. The focus was too much on the IGEFG. Felt very much like an RPG campaign where the DM just loves to death their little pet NPC, so we get to sit there and watch them. 5. The game play was somehow worse than the story. Endless three-man waves of ccing skytroopers. Stealth detectors everywhere. The glacially paced walker. Having to repeat Star Fortresses six times?! 6. Funneling sixteen previously separate stories into one meant essentially that new companions were going to trump old. This is why the only romances that got meaningful content post KOTET were with Lana or Theron or some other non-class companion. Because the devs had to write for a unified story, and that would either have meant picking between class companions that might not be relevant to people, or going with a new companion that was relevant to all. If you chose to renew your romance with your class companion when you rediscovered them, congratulations that is content that you will never receive any support for ever again until the heat death of the universe. 7. It was waaaaaaaaaaaaay too long. I don't have accurate info here, but anecdotally I have not seen people defend its replayability. And yet, when grinding an alt, if you don't want the choice flags auto skip gives you, then you have to grind it. This has the perverse effect of disincentivizing alt play. I have several alts that are essentially perma-paused because I don't want the auto-skip choices, but I also don't want to wade through this junk again. 8. It represented years of dev resources, and it is doing virtually nothing for the game today. The events of KOTET should ring through the ages, as they were so monumental. But the expac is so unpopular, that even though reusing those location assets would be efficient, nobody wants to return to Zakuul. I know some people liked it. I get that when you hear it's not well done, that makes you feel as though people are saying you're stupid to like it. You're not. Everyone has a right to their subjective preferences. But the simple fact is the expansion was not well done, it wasn't (and isn't) good for the game, and it is directly tied to many of the issues we see in the lackluster story developments since.
  18. This so much. On the list of issues the dev team should worry about, making it so that buyers can spite 1 credit uncutters is #995984129.
  19. That's the point. Resources are not going to permit new story content to represent a sufficient draw to retain, let alone grow, the player base. It hasn't for years, and it almost certainly won't under a known maintenance mode company. The scope and the pace are going to mean people may return briefly to SWTOR to see the new stuff, but the advancing storyline isn't going to offer enough content to sustain user activity. I'm not saying abandon new story content entirely, but I do believe it would be better if they invested most of their story content effort into repeatable content and building out smaller storylines that 1) aren't burdened by failed concepts and characters, 2) don't require extensive knowledge of 12 years of content to enjoy, 3) helps lead players into existing content they may not have tried up until now, and 4) don't require as much development resources (so that more can be done, and also so that failure doesn't mean the loss of nearly as much time).
  20. At this point, the story is not particularly relevant to my play experience. Updates are infrequent and brief, not particularly interesting (I'm sorry, how many times are they going to try and make Malgus a thing?), and the entire scale has already been imploded by having us defeat an IMMORTAL GALAXY EATING FORCE GHOST, rendering all the subsequent "galactic threats" trivial by comparison. I am probably in the minority here, but I'd rather they spent their story development time on new follow up quests for the rotating events (BBH, Rakghoul, etc) and new planetary quest lines instead of progressing an unengaging main story.
  21. Hah, yeah. That was actually the second restart. The first was installing new remote work software. The second was my cat walking on my case and somehow resetting it. When it rebooted, it worked! EDIT: Sorry, I meant third reboot. To install RAM. Oh wait, that was the fourth reboot. I forgot about the BSOD kernel security check that happened. I got scared after googling it and that's what made me buy the RAM. lol.
  22. Yeah, it did for me. The reboot was for reasons unrelated to the download issue, but after rebooting the download worked.
×
×
  • Create New...