Couldn't agree more with this. The worst part is that this time last year they were talking about building their endgame differently from everyone, specifically not having all the PVE progression funnel into players into raiding (in interviews like: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/wildstar/1227411p1.html and http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=33270 ). Honestly, that's what attracted me to Wildstar. Even now, for all their talk of wanting to add more "five minute content", "make the game more casual friendly" and "get the message out that it's not hardcore: it's play your way" they're still creating the same old endgame that we've seen for ten years: push all PVE progression into raiding, despite all data showing that the majority of players don't do large group content. You can get that in any MMO out there these days, but probably with a lot less tedious grinding and RNG. Additionally the lack of megaservers at launch and the insistence on the sub only model that no one can make work these days shows a development house that is completely out sync with what the modern audience expects out of an MMO.

You might not like; you might consider it simplistic: but to call it dumbed down would mean that at some point it was a more complex system, which it never was. EQN is probably going have combat similar to Wildstar/GW2/DCUO. Faster paced with a Limited Action Set. If you consider that to be dumbed down, you're probably not going to like the game. Of course, this is all just speculation right now.

It's only dumbed down if the game was originally designed for the PC and then ported to consoles (like Diablo 3). When a game is designed from the start to run on both PC and console it can't be dumbed down because the game is what it was designed to be. You might not like cross platform games, but they're only dumbed down when ported to the console after the fact.

LAS = Limited Action Set. It means that instead of having all of your characters abilities available at all times on multiple quickbars, you have a limited number of abilities on one quickbar. This is the type of more action oriented/twitch combat that you see in DC Universe Online and Wildstar, as opposed to the traditional tab targeting style of SWTOR and WoW. Both styles have advantages and drawbacks. LAS allows for very fast paced combat, and cuts down on ability bloat; but it's downside is that most abilities have multiple effects, which means that you often have to skip a utility in your loadout because the two good effects are outweighed by a third effect that can lead to a team wipe. The traditional ab targeting style (aka turn based) does allow players to always be prepared for anything all the time; but frequently leads to huge UI clutter and massive ability bloat with multiple powers that tend to be ridiculously situational.

I kind of expected that is was going to be on the PS4: it opens up their potential customer base considerably and more action oriented LAS style combat seems to be the trend in newer MMOs, which works very well on consoles. Looks like the game is going with a buy to play scheme, similar to GW2: so those who hate F2P aren't likely to find something they're interested in this one. Given that console players statistically have less money than PC players, and are thus more likely to spend what they do have on items that affect game play (as opposed to cosmetics), this one might end up really just being for the same crowd as DCUO. Only time will tell.

The only Star Wars game that is being made on the Frostbite engine is Star Wars: Battlefront 3; and it's not BioWare that is building the game, but DICE the studio that built the engine to begin with.

Landmark is the building part of the game, and it's literally a separate game. EQN is more of a standard MMO, but gets back to the old days of free roaming questing and discovering the world as opposed to the WoW model of the largely singular route to max level with little to no tangible rewards for exploring the world.

I've read both the Massively and MMORPG.com articles and neither one is exactly great. MMORPG.com mostly tossed out a bunch of softballs; when they didn't, Donatelli and Moore gave them waffling, non-specific answers that received no follow up. This was probably a series of written questions submitted to Carbine, so they had control of the answers and no possibility of follow up (look at that answer to the F2P question: have you ever seen something that made so little sense?). Massively undoubtedly had some pretty loaded questions, and is clearly behaving like a lot of the former and current players in essentially saying "the time for non-specific answers is over: there are fewer of us everyday and if you want to keep any of us, then start giving some definitive answers with some definite timetables." It's definitely a more combative stance to be sure, but this is what the players want to know.

Compared to traditional tab targeting MMOs like SWTOR, WoW, etc. Wildstar is twitch oriented combat: it has manual targeting and attack dodging, as opposed to stat based chance to hit/dodge/etc which originated in tabletop RPGs; it removes much of the defensive and offensive feats accomplished by the character out of the hands of the RNG and puts them back into the hands of the player. Unfortunately, they took all that saved RNG and slapped it into the loot and crafting systems. As for the long term health of Wildstar... I really enjoyed the game at it's core and I'd love to have it available to alternate with SWTOR (a few months in one, switch before getting bored, and repeat), but I just get the feeling that there's too many problems there to solve in a live environment. Many of the players are pinning their hopes on megaservers and Drop 3 to "save the game", but dungeon and PvP queues are already cross server (and take quite some time to pop) and there are huge problems that won't be solved in that update, which is really just a bunch of bug fixes and a new daily area plus solo dungeon. Yes there will some players who return to check out the new stuff, but raid attunement will still be tedious (only slightly less so), loot will still be ridiculously RNG based, soloists and non-raiders (ie. the majority of all MMO players) will still have no real progression at the endgame, world PvP will continue to be virtually non-existent... the list goes on. Many who return to check out Drop 3 will just turn around and leave again, probably with zero possibility of giving the game a third chance. Drop 3 won't go live until early to mid November, which means that Drop 4 (which "should" fix the other problems that Drop 3 won't address) won't come until February at the earliest. This is a lot of time going by for a game that's in trouble. Going free to play? That will only make problems worse if they do it before Drop 4; but if they wait that long, how many people will be left, and how much bad press will there have been that will simply keep people from trying it out, even free? I really love the game, and want to be wrong, but I think that it's Tabula Rasa all over again.

LAS = Limited Action Set Essentially the more twitch based MMOs like Wildstar and DCUO don't allow access to all of a class' abilities at one time, instead making players choose a certain number of powers to place on a single action bar. Having to choose the right abilities before important fights is meant to be part of the strategic process in the game.

Back in May when I went to a Community Cantina event Eric talked about it briefly, but his answer was a bit non-specific: he said that they are dealing with the Lucasfilm story group everyday, but he didn't say flat out that SWTOR is or isn't canon. Anyway, if it's important to you the best way to think of it is that it's canon until Disney releases something that contradicts it.

Quinn Doc Dorne Lokin Talos Cedrax Tuno Mako I know you said five, but I felt there was some sort of pattern there...

I haven't heard about bugs in the attunement process for over a month now; my comment there was actually a veiled poke at all the people who clamored for a "return to when games were really hardcore" and then whined when they got exactly that. Now the process is going to be an account wide unlock, which I think is like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul: it essentially removes content from the game. Instead of fixing it to make it fun, they keep it tedious, but you only ever have to do it once.

You know, I've been playing Wildstar since the beta. I think there is a lot of fantastic things going on there: paths are an interesting addition; not being hard so much as it's eliminated the hand holdy-ness that has become so prevalent in video games is an absolute breath of fresh air; the combat is fast and fun; and the graphics, lore and stories create the feeling of playing within the world of a really cool Saturday morning cartoon. That having been said, and as much as I love the game, unless the devs at Carbine pull off a miracle with their next game update I honestly don't see it making it to 2016, regardless of whether or not they move to some time of free to play model. I really don't. More than any other "boom to bust" MMO launch of the last five years, the fault for the rapid loss of players is squarely the fault of the Developers than it is on "changing market forces" or whatever external forces you want to blame. There is the saying that insanity is defined as doing the same thing repeatedly expecting different results, and NC/Carbine did exactly that with Wildstar, only worse: they saw all the mistakes the others had made, made plans to avoid those mistakes, and then ignored the plan and did what all the others did. As much as you see raiders complaining tedious endgame grinds, they weren't the ones who began the exodus: it was solo/non-raiders, who had been assured that for the first time there was going to be content and progression for them at max level, were the ones who began leaving without a word. They'd been lied to yet again, only it was even worse: instead of reaching a dead end within two or three weeks of hitting max level, this time the best gear that they were ever going to see was available on the auction house the moment they hit level 50 because there was no real progression planned for them, and alt-ing is a tedious/unrewarding process due to the complete lack of variation in leveling. The majority of these players don't give an MMO a second chance, so now NC/Carbine are left the "hardcore raiders" ("hardcore" yet they find the raiding attunement process too difficult) whose numbers are not sufficient enough to support a triple A MMO. "Casual players", aka "the silent majority", don't trust these guys any more and it's a huge uphill battle that they're looking at to get them back, whether they go free to play or not. I would love to be wrong about my prediction because I honestly do enjoy Wildstar, but even with the players having free transfers to consolidate on certain servers before the magaservers are in place, more and more players are leaving. Yeah a bunch will come back to check out Drop 3 (including me), but from all indications they're still going to find too much of what drove them away to begin with: too much RNG, a tedious raiding attunement process, and no meaningful endgame progression for non-raiders. I'd love to be wrong, but even when they change their business plan (which I expect sometime from November to January), I think that NCSoft will still be announcing server closures by late-September next year to sunset the game by December 2015.

Not surprising given the current market for MMORPGs. At this point, everyone has figured out that sinking tens of millions into gimmicky rip-offs of WoW doesn't work, but none of the big dogs is really sure of what to do; so they're waiting to see if SOE's gamble on EQN works out. I think that the time of trying to create broad base appeal MMORPGs has passed: concentrating on more specific interests with the MMORPG sphere is more likely to create a better ROI and allow developers to build these games for less. I think that the next phase of these games that we start to see will actually will concentrate on particular areas of player interest rather than trying to lump everything in together: some will be single player experiences in a shared world; some will be massively PvP focused; some will be a continuous leveling experience; some will all about role based team raiding; and so on. But the idea of trying to bring casuals and hardcores under one roof, or lump soloists, raiders and/or PvPers all together into one game while keeping all the different segments happy doesn't work anymore, and maybe never really did.

It's not really that the rate of new content has slowed down, every two months since October 2013 we've seen large patches that have brought us three new tactical flashpoints, a complete first season of ranked PvP, the start of a second season of ranked PvP, a new Huttball map and of course Galactic Starfighter, which has consumed a large chunk of the last three updates and this is in addition to the Nightmare mode of an existing Op and extensive class re-balancing. So there's been a ton of new content delivered since that point, but it's just the content that has been delivered hasn't been to your preference. Undoubtedly you've had 6 or 7 pages of people saying this at by now, so none of this is news to you and I'm seemingly beating a dead horse. But there's a point behind me listing all that content all over again: I'm about to slam the Devs for that content now. Prior to October 2013 the updates worked out to the pace of a new raid and new daily area being released roughly every four months; not by exact dates but as an average of that time period. In the eight months since October 2013, we've seen no new raids and no new daily area. Three new flashpoints isn't exactly a flood of PvE content and certainly nothing compared what we had been seeing. I can't speak for whether or not the PvP crowd has realistically been served well or not during this period: according to many of them, PvPers haven't gotten much at all since launch, but I have no data that tells me whether or not they have received new content in proportion to their percentage of the overall player population. Either way, nobody is happy. The real problem with 2014 in terms of new content hasn't been the pace: it's the fact that they over committed resources to Galactic Starfighter. GSF was probably a more ambitious project than it needed to be be to begin with: a simple off the rails version of the existing space mini-game would have likely sated the desires of those who wanted more (yes, there would still have been those unsatisfied with anything less than a new version of SWG's Jump to Lightspeed), but instead the developed a much more complex, PvP only mini-game. But worse than over committing to GSF was the assumption that a PvP only mini-game was going to be so popular that players would spend so much of their time playing that other endgame progression could be put onto the back burner for 8 to 10 months, possibly longer since we have no idea what is in 2.9 in terms of playable content (is Part 2 of the new story more flashpoints? A new daily area? A new raid? we don't know), so it is very possible that might not see any new zones or raids for a full year. I think you're right to be concerned about housing: now we're waiting for 2.9 with Strongholds, which is again another project that is probably a hell of a lot more ambitious that it had to be. I don't recall people asking for vast multi-room apartments or flagships that enable "conquering planets" (whatever that is going to be); I do recall people asking to be able customize their starship interiors and guilds wanting a physical meeting place that only members could access. This all sounds too familiar: an overly grand response to modest requests. The problem is these grand gestures are coming at the expense of the updating the most played/popular content types that already exist in the game. This is an unfortunate characteristic of this development team: committing too many resources towards grand ideas at the cost of making sure they've taken care the basics.

Bring it back to my original issue: under the current system non-raiders end up pretty much maxed for progression within a month. Yes there are plenty of things to do, but without that feeling that you're working towards something motivation to continue playing dwindles. As a progression raider, you should understand quite well what it feels like to not have anything new to work towards.

Please keep in.mind I am occasionally "opening my mouth before thinking". Stretching the current Oricon content out of over 12 months is not what I'm trying to justify or whatever. However, even releasing a new raid every 4 months wouldn't solve the issue. People will still use legacy gear to bypass lockouts and even if they didn't, large numbers of those players would still be running around in the highest tier of gear in a few weeks due to the combination of loot drops and comms, so they just farm the Ops for another 3 months until they get their BiS bonuses. Additionally, non-raiders will still end up capped out and under a glass ceiling within a month spinning their wheels for months at a time. I'm starting to think that we have to begin rethinking the entire max level gearing process.

The more people have chimed in on this, two issues become abundantly clear: 1. This an across the board problem, not just for non-raiders: players are gearing up way too quickly in relation to the content release schedule. 2. Legacy gear in its current state will undercut any attempt at overhauling gear progression. The thing is that fixing these two issues just means that instead of players complaining about content coming too slowly, they'll whine about gearing up taking too long.

There is no singular "silver bullet" solution to the present issues with gear progression in this game. My personal intent wasn't to try to redesign the system so much as talk about the issues. Legacy ger in this game is a mess. It's a "cheat" that was probably overlooked until way too late to really do anything about it. Any overhaul of gearing progression is going to also need to happen at the same time as overhaul of the Legacy system.

You're basing your objection solely on Nightmare mode, which can only be considered as a special circumstance and as such I see no reason to change the current method of acquisition. People aren't farming Nightmare modes for comms and gear to twink out alts; and Nightmare mode gear is not available via both loot drops and comms. Given it's highly limited availability, Nightmare gear realistically needs to be considered outside the normal gearing routine and as opposed to calling it BiS I would call it BiS+, and that's it's just a bonus for the few crazy enough to go after it.

Peeps loves their phat lootz and taking that away would not please anyone. But the loot drops could be designed differently, such as a wider array of unique vehicles, trophies (thinking about Strongholds here) and, more importantly in terms of progression, mid-tier gear drops. For example, right now entry level gear to the current DF/DP Ops could be considered 168/Elite gear and and you earn 180/Ultimate gear as drops in these Ops; so instead of 180/Ultimate gear you could have the bosses drop 174 rated gear (mid-tier), thus adding to the progression so raiders can improve via loot drops, but the best gear comes via comms, takes the RNG out of the equation in terms of BIS upgrading and allows the devs to control exactly how long it will take raiders to fill out a full set.

Harder might not be correct term, but I suppose it's as good a way of defining it as any. The content itself doesn't necessarily need to be made harder, but perhaps forced progression might be a key: not just in terms of gear but in raiding as well so in order to complete the later stages in Ops player will have already cleared the earlier stages multiple times in order to reach a certain level of "gear rating" (I hate that term, please don't hold my use of it against me); and that could be achieved simply by designing an Op so that it is literally not completable in the lower tier of gear players would start running it in. I also think that having the best gear come as loot drops might be a mistake: if you make the best gear available solely via comms then you can control exactly how long it will take a player to complete a set.

Your point is completely valid, and it's not like one should expect to never hit a ceiling in terms of gear advancement ever again. However, gear advancement in this MMO specifically has been designed to be far too fast compared to the rate of content releases, even under ideal circumstances. I have a few ideas on how that could be changed, but I'd prefer not to get into that topic unless it seems like the conversation as a whole needs to move in that direction. Perhaps it does need to be brought into the discussion though. Maybe we need to be engaging the development team in a discussion about not just progression tracks for raiders and non-raiders, but on how gear progression as a whole could be better made to work the content release schedule so the it takes longer before players hit that point where they feel like they're just going to be spinning their wheels for the next six months.

Because many of the readers misunderstood what I meant and possibly didn't read my follow ups, I've added a section to the end of my original post that should hopefully clarify my intention. Honestly, I am so not looking for easymode gear: I just want to feel like I'm still working towards something as I run through CZ-198 dailies for the 700th time. I am far, far more had-nosed about gear progression and group content than many assume: I think that gear progression should be enforced (IMO characters should have to unlock tiers of gear by having acquired the previous one); and I think that group content absolutely should require groups. However, there's really no point in dragging that into the conversation at this point when it's clear that I really didn't communicate my original intentions very well... again. And just so everyone is clear about where I stand on this: I absolutely believe that the most powerful PvE gear in the game should be exclusively the reward of those who have completed the most difficult large group PvE content in the game. I also happen to believe that those who choose not to run Ops should be able to continue to advance their characters, but just in smaller increments.