It's not a L2P issue! Gawd! You white knights are so annoying!

They better not! This is my thread where I am voicing my objection to... whatever it is that I shall find... objectionable.

Just at work right now and haven't been able to log in and play, but I wanted to reserve the space to whine about something when I do get home. I figure the title is both catchy and ambiguous enough to cover just about anything I may wish to complain about this evening. Carry on.

Not sure I understand: is the OP unable to solo the elites in the instances, or is he unable to solo the heroic?

I think the reason for the poor pacing on content post Oricon was because BioWare over-committed to, and miscalculating the popularity of, Galactic Starfighter (that's why GSF got so little support later on: it wasn't popular enough to justify it). They thought they had a hit that would take a lot of people out of the ground game, but it ended up not going over as well as hoped and drawing a lot of resources into a mini-game that didn't really pan out for them. Stongholds didn't help in the matter in that they didn't really bring any new ground game when the game had been lacking new stuff for quite some time, but I feel like they at least got the balance of developer resources right. Overall, I felt the first 12 months following 2.0 were a big success, the final 8 months were marred by the underwhelming performance and bad management of GSF taking away from the outstanding pace seen previously.

SWTOR's very "unfree" model is built specifically to push players towards subscribing: it helps them avoid moving into the true gray areas of "near P2W-ness" that many other MMOs get into when they go free to play. The truth is that subscription income is the most stable income, thus it's difficult to plan content development for your game when you have constantly fluctuating levels of revenue. So the choices become this: either sell an item(s) in your cash shop that provides players with a huge advantage over those who don't use them (things like loot lockout resets, crafting/gathering enhancers, "catch up" endgame gear, unique stat boosts) and "must be" purchased on a regular basis; or else you create a restrictive "free" game that allows players to do almost everything for free if they're willing to work for it, but that realistically pushes players towards shelling out $15 a month. EA and BioWare have decided that the guaranteed income from a moderate subscriber base is preferable to the uncertain income from large base of "burst-y spenders". Whine all you want about the gamble packs on the CM, they're far preferable to things like instant max level toons, or loot lockout resets that have players spending hundreds of real world dollars per character to gear up a BiS set in three days. When a game updates its cash market with "useless" cosmetic items and gamble packs on a regular basis, it means they're trying to actively avoid creating P2W items.

This is exactly the right time for SWTOR to release an xpac: it's called counter programming. While there are a lot of people going "hey a new WoW xpac", there's also a lot of people saying "this xpac is the last straw for me" and are moving on (no particular slam against WoW here: every xpac for any MMO will contain some type of major change that is a deal breaker for many players). And there are the players that return and remember "oh yeah, it's still World of Warcraft and I'm still tired of it". And that's why WoW's largest competitors are also launching high profile content patches around the same time: to pick up the numerous players who aren't impressed enough to stick with WoW and/or those who are finally done with it.

This is true, but in their shareholders reports they explain how they come up with the number of subs based on Westerns subs and some weird formula for calculating how the Chinese market is counted into that sub number: as long as you explain your creative accounting to your shareholders and the math adds up to what they report, it's not lying. But, regardless of the fact that the actual subscriptions might not be exactly over 10 million as defined by Webster's Dictionary, even after ten years WoW continues to dominate the worldwide market, which means they're definitely doing something right over there. Not that I'll ever know: I truly hate Tolkien-esque fantasy, which WoW falls squarely into; thus in over ten years of playing MMORPGs, I've never played it.

Parts two and three of the article at Massively are now up. I'm on my phone which is crap for posting text links, but go check them out. The second two parts actually say a lot of what has been stated by others in the thread already., but it's a good read.

Blame that on developers for making solo oriented content unchallenging. Opening up the content to soloers to make 4 Ultimates per day means they would still have to grind for a year to gt a full set of top gear (and this is something I advocate), and in that year it's still likely that they player won't make 100 million credits.

Like I said, scaling is not a perfect solution, but it makes more sense in terms of ROI than building your pinacle PVE content as something that will only be utilized by a small portion of the base. I literally said that in the post you're responding to. Now non-raiders are no longer glass ceiling capped in SWTOR, provided that they are group players: unfortunately, many still aren't group players and they are capped. As I said in another post, opening up the comms just a little bit more will change the game for the better for thousands of players. Also, much of the criticism is directed at MMOs in general, and not necessarily at SWTOR in the specific. As for buying upgrades via credits? A full set of 180 rated gear would probably cost upwards of 100 million: I've been playing for 2 years and have yet to see that much combined on my 12 level 55s. As for a less contentious community, if you rid the endgame of its exclusivity in terms of progression being solely the realm of raiders: you remove a point of contention, you have less to argue about, thus you probably argue less.

SWTOR has been opening up in the last year, which is fantastic, and I'm honestly hoping that we see the devs actually take that last step as we get past 3.0 and introduce a method for the solo player to acquire a few Elite and Ultimate comms everyday from entirely solo'able content; no Heroics in there either, I mean 100% you can do this all by yourself content. I don't mean a lot of Elites and Ultimates, maybe 8 elites and 4 ultimates per day, but just enough give the soloers some measurable progression (although very slow), and perhaps raise their interest in getting into group content: I know that tactic worked at getting me into more group content last year when they started to buff up the comms rewards for flashpoints.

Of course it's flawed logic. I didn't say that it's my perspective on the subject at hand, however it is the reasoning that a great many players are using when feeling disenfranchised by the current MMO set up of "funnel everyone into raiding" style of endgame progression that presently exists in pretty much every MMORPG: there are a lot of people feeling like their money is being used to subsidize minority interests. The point stands though: the current way of doing things doesn't work. WoW's great innovation was making solo play viable for leveling up, as that was a huge barrier prior. However, as that process was refined, we came to the point where not only did leveling up in MMOs start encourage solo play, in many ways grouping up during leveling is now seen as detrimental; as such we now have an audience that enjoys the non-isolated single player experience/ shared world game of the leveling experience, but is quite put off by the complete 180 that happens at the max level; in fact the drastic change from a solo game to grouping environment feels exclusionary to those who found the solo game more appealing. Whether you think "they're playing the game wrong" or not, it doesn't matter: it's a huge part of the customer base, and you have to start to develop your games for how players are actually playing your games, not the way you want them to. The longer that developers have failed to account for a large portion of the playerbase that is not interested in large group content, the more they have sewn the roots of their current player retention issues. There is an increasingly transient group that is searching for an MMO that doesn't treat them like second class citizens for not wanting to participate in what appears to them as something that should be a side game, given that group content, much like PvP, is introduced as optional during the leveling experience: players don't tend to react well when they're told something is optional, and then later told that it's "mandatory". My point in all of this was this: First: heavily scripted, large group encounters that are presently used by only a small portion of players have too low a ROI versus scaling encounters that could be potentially played every single player, whether solo, duo, or up to groups of 16. Second: non-raiding players reach a glass ceiling on their eldergame progression rapidly upon hitting max level; and this process should be opened up to heavily favor those who do large group content, but not exclude those who don't. It's not a perfect solution, from a player standpoint scaling encounters are "not as good as actual raids", but overall I think that's the beginning of what it's going to take to create MMOs that have more stable, long-term populations with overall less contentious communities.

The idea of excluding non-raiders from gear progression does not work anymore. In fact, it never did but there weren't any a lot of alternatives around when MMOs started up. When you expect 60 to 80% of your players to pay for content that they're not going to use while simultaneously getting their progression halted becuase they choose not to use that content, those people start asking "why they hell do they keep making stuff that so few people use, and why should I keep paying for it?" A big part of the reason for all the crash and burns we're seeing in MMOs has to do with the fact that the statistical majority are getting fed up with getting handed the short end of the stick.

The need to create multiple versions of the same instance only happens in 100% scripted content. Instead of the completely scripted instances you're used to, the way you make it work is by creating "guidelines" for instances. Instead of set spawn points for a set number of mobs, the instance spawns the mobs in varying numbers in semi-randomized positions throughout. Vets of City of Heroes know exactly how this works, but people who never played that game have difficulty imagining it because they're largely used to fully scripted instances.

I agree. It should be standard in every MMO, but even after ten years, no one has implemented anything remotely close to it.

Think content that scales like City of Heroes: scales to group size and player selected difficulty. Yes, that would mean that every instance would be solo'able, but every instance could also be a raid.

Nobody is talking the removal of repeatable content: they're talking about the removal of the heavily scripted, large group oriented content that is built exclusively for a minority percentage of the population while also excluding the majority from meaningful endgame progression.

Dang... at work, on mobile, and not enough time to give a full response... I'll just give a quick response to the actual question of the OP: Fully scripted encounters as we currently see them need to go bye bye: too much cost for content being used by a minority portion of the base. Furthermore, the progression funnel that pushes players into raiding also needs to go away: you're asking the majority of players to pay for content for a minority while also excluding the majority; that is a million types of stupid. Grouping should result in faster progress, not exclusive progress. Developers need to start utilizing technology for instance scaling better: creating epic instances designed to scale to group size means that all your content is being designed forall players to play in the way that is most fun for them.

Not going to happen any time soon, at least not the cancelling the current game part. In terms of the worldwide MMORPG market, SWTOR is the fourth largest in the world (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2014/07/19/world-of-warcraft-still-a-1b-powerhouse-even-as-subscription-mmos-decline/ ), and anecdotally seems to be the second largest in the Western market. Despite the loss in revenue in the last quarter (http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/11/08/eas-quarterly-net-revenue-is-up-apparently-in-spite-of-swtor/ ) from all accounts the game is still quite popular and profitable, and decline in revenue is most likely attributable to "pre-expansion doldrums" and an unfortunate lack of compelling main game content in the last year (love 'em or hate 'em, starfighter and strongholds are definitely side games), combined with a couple of high profile MMORPG releases stealing some players away (since we're looking at last quarter numbers, Archeage and Wildstar would be the culprits). Game's population flux over the last few months parallels the type of flux WoW had been going through prior to releasing it's expansion, so I personally expect to see the numbers bounce back up once the SoR xpac is released. But could there be a sequel in the works that will run parallel with SWTOR? Anything is possible. SOE has been running two Everquests for over a decade now and is looking to add a third in the next year or so. A post Episode VI MMO to tie in with Episode VII's release late next could do big business, but it's tough to say: EA might be scared a new Star Wars MMO could just cannibalize the existing one which would then defeat the purpose (using the SW license to expand market share).

All the techies pop in and no one asks the simplest question: did you happen to get a new monitor this year? Perhaps one with a significantly higher resolution?

As yet another long time CoH player, I'd love to see that. I think that the upward leveling would cause some serious problems due to how progression and story are so linked in the leveling process, but being able to at least "de-level" and join up with friends on lowbie toons shouldn't be a problem. However, I think that there would also need to be a system in place that encourages teaming up. The social system was supposed to do this, but it's more of a pain in the butt than an incentive. One decent thing that Wildstar had going for it was a currency called renown that was earned exclusively from teaming up with other players: a currency like that combined with a shop of some exclusive cosmetic items and consumables would be much better than the current social level system we presently have.

More likely that removing our current comms, we'll see all of our existing comms compressed/converted into Basic comms; I wouldn't be surprised to see the cap and weekly limitws raised/removed. We've been told that the present NIM gear will be entry level raid gear in 3.0, so don't expect the new gear to be as drastic an improvement as it was in 2.0.

It seems to be a combination of the standard post launch lay offs, which is standard in any MMO to release extra people brought in to push the product out the door; and major house cleaning. According to Carbine's listing at glassdoor.com (meaning this is really mostly rumors) there is a lot of cliques and buck passing amongst the management/supervisor level staff; so I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the more senior level guys shown the door were identified as "problems" and the standard lay off procedure was used as an excuse to get rid of them. However, the fact is that there were lay offs at all of NCSoft West's studios except ArenaNet, which combined last quarter's poor projections for Wildstar means that game's spiraling performance is dragging down NC's entire Western branch.

There are a lot of people out there who refuse to pay a subscription for a video game based on principle: they have no problem tossing out hundreds a month in microtransactions but just flat out refuse to ever pay for a subscription. Clearly, I'm not one of them, so don't bother trying to convince me how good subs are or how "wrong" they are, because it ain't my principles: I'm just saying that there's a lot of players out there who aren't paying subs for reasons that have nothing to do with cost. This is the most astute observation about Wildstar's troubles that I've seen.