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cromartyfive

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Everything posted by cromartyfive

  1. The thing is, most of the people still playing the game love the storylines but are just ok with flashpoints and operations. Coming up with 8 new storylines for the classes and new sidequests is gonna take forever and all you got in between is new operations. Alot of people are gonna be disappointed.
  2. The people who attack and defend this game by listing features and bugs are really missing the point in what makes a game successful. Skyrim has a ton of bugs, people expected a ton of bugs because Bethesda always has a lot of bugs but people still play it cause they have fun exploring an open world. SWG may have had a lot of problems but people were hooked on all the freedom you had in that game. WoW took what hooked people in previous MMO's and put it all together and then some. It was exciting to level, get new abilites, get gear and explore. People had so much fun doing that that they played in spite of bugs and missing features. The only hook on SWTOR is the story and it's not enough to get a sizable amount of people to overlook the other things. Also I really don't see how they can possibly add more story content at a fast enough pace. A new planet of quests would take people a few hours to do but would take them 2 months at least to make. The next update is supposed to be in march and it's an operation and flashpoint I think. Plus the legacy system, whatever that will be. An expansion that needs 8 separate storylines with voice actors and sidequests and flashpoints and operations has got to take over a year. A few planets worth of quests, most people will be able to do in under a month. So it would end up being like KOTOR 4 is $75 for the game and 1 month play time.
  3. When I got the game, I was required to activate a subscription to get my free month. I think this accounts for up to the end of the year, when the game was out for 10 days, really don't tell us much more than how it released. As for the difference, there's plenty of people who bought it as christmas presents and the person didn't activate yet, remember it's over a vacation. Or resellers, or people buying multiples. I don't think anybody will know for sure what the long term prospects are for a few months when things have time to settle down.
  4. I think the writing could have been better. The story is great by video game standards but the bar is pretty low. People mention the Empire blowing up a planet to show how evil they are. This game has the opportunity to explore much more of the choices than the movie does. Maybe they blew it up because they wanted to end the rebellion as quickly as possible and lose as few Imperial lives to do it. Sounds like the United States dropping a nuclear bomb on Japan. Yes this is only a game but they could have made complex stories and choices with morally ambiguous motives. Instead they went with you get to chose to a) be nice b)be neutral or c) be a mustache twirling villain in a cartoon that kills people just cause they're there.
  5. I agree too. I just kept thinking how does this society function and grow when everyone is killing each other and corrupt. I understand it's a game and based on Star Wars but it was something I just couldn't help wondering about. Instead of complexity, they went for cartoonish.
  6. While I agree that exploration adds a lot of immersion and fun to an MMO, I think it's a decision by Bioware to limit it. The storyline was always the center and stories have to be linear to get the set ups and payoffs. Making a bigger world to explore would have meant a tradeoff in the story and they weren't gonna make that choice.
  7. Now that I think about it Cata was like this too. Going from hub to hub and because of the phasing, you didn't see as much people around you. People didn't really seem to notice. It just feels kinda extreme in this game. I know there are other issues like the instances for group quests and class stories and sharding but I think this is something that is easier to change in upcoming content additions.
  8. I think the problem is you move through zones so linearly that you don't see others. People who got to the planet first are ahead of you, people starting later are behind you, and you never cross paths. I think this is a big reasons why players don't intersect more often and the worlds feel empty. Bioware really needs to somehow design zones with more crossing over but without feeling like backtracking or wasteful travel time. Not sure how to do that but I'm not a game designer.
  9. It's not just your screen though. It helps you know when others are taking damage and what the cause was. Not to compare this to sports but going over combat logs after a wipe is like a football team watching videos of their own game figuring out how to improve. It gives them time to go over things that they might have missed in the heat of the moment. Without logs, you either need to make content easier so logs are not necessary or groups will wipe several times without knowing what's going wrong.
  10. Perhaps you didn't see the sentence about if you want difficult boss fights, you need combat logs. Current bosses are easy, hence no need for it now.
  11. Combat logs aren't just dps meters. If your trying to kill a new boss and you all die, it's handy in checking how much damage the boss did and what spells did the damage. Then you can see if people are taking damage they can avoid or maybe you need to pop a cooldown when a certain ability is going on. If you want easy bosses where you stand there dpsing till they die and you don't have to worry about anything, then not having combat logs is fine. If you want varied, complex and difficult boss fights, you really need combat logs.
  12. I never realized there was so much hate for macros there was. I think people misunderstand what you can actually do with them.
  13. Healers have to click on people they're healing. This just show's how little you understand about the mechanics. They problem is a healer has to click on who he wants to heal, then press the number to heal them, then click on the next person and repeat. The laggy UI doesn't help.
  14. The zones weren't designed very well. They're like a golf course, you go from one hub to the next till you reach the end and leave the planet. People starting later than you go along the same path, never crossing yours. That's just poor planning.
  15. All these negative responses combined with Bioware's design choices just show this is a game for casual players and nobody else. It's a shame cause they're leaving a lot of money on the table.
  16. When you play a game, you want to think of what you need to do, then have that happen in the game as quickly as possible. Macros allow for more flexability. Take a healer for example. The fun part of healing is seeing the incoming damage, maybe planning ahead too, and figuring out what tools in your toolbox of healing can you use best to keep people alive and manage your resources and cooldowns to last the whole fight. As soon as you decide what to do, you want that happening in game as seamlessly as possible. It's not fun clicking a few times to make what you want happen. Clicking isn't fun, deciding what abilities to use and when the best time to use them is fun. People complain about how macros do all the work for you but they don't understand the work is watching what goes on, deciding what ability to use, and managing your resources and timing. Clicking 2 or 3 things for every action you need to do is cumbersome and boring. It gets in the way of the fun part.
  17. Great thoughtful post. I agree with most of what your saying. The game does feel rushed though ( GTN ui, republic fleet copying the imperials but looking much worse, all the bugs). Theres a difference between being rushed and adding content as time goes by. I do think your giving Bioware more credit for the design than they deserve. For example, everyone thought crafting was awesome at first but now it's pointless. They designed it based on complaints people had of crafting in other games to make it easy as possible but didn't realize you need to make crafting have some sort of value to be worthwile. Also, not balancing credits in game well so that people have way more credits than they need for anything. It devalues their own work on items in game. I don't know how they can possibly add enough story content in a timely manner. It would just take too long to do 8 stories with voiceovers and sidequests to churn them out every few months. That combined with it being hard to match the epic feel compared to the current stories has me worried about the future of the game. An expansion would be a handful of planets and 20-30? levels. There isn't as much time to set up a story and pay it off in a satisfying way if they keep the leveling pace as it is now. All complaints aside though, people playing for a few months might be enough in subscription money to keep this going for a long time with people coming back temporarily as they add content.
  18. SWG had a lot more stuff to do that took a long time. SWTOR is for casuals and the problem is a lot of them will leave in a few months after they finish their main story.
  19. I don't understand why people on the internet need to brag about their short attention spans by saying TL;DR. Some things are complex and take time to explain.
  20. There are a lot of people who consider themselves casual that are 50 with nothing to do too. I wonder if anybody at Bioware even plays MMO's. They made so many questionable design choices.
  21. Most time sinks in previous MMO's were either optional, or fun at first and became a time sink if you wanted to max out your character. Leveling is quick and easy at first, then takes longer after your hooked. Raids are fun seeing new bosses, but if you want to get drops and fill out every gear slot, you need to grind it. Pretty much every grind in other MMO's either started fun or were optional so some people with more time could do them. SWTOR cuts out the endgame grind, but that cuts out a large group of players that cancel their account and leave Bioware with less money to invest in new content. How long do you think it's gonna take them to do 8 storylines worth of quests and voiceovers? I bet it's over a year for any significant story related content unless they just do one story that every class does. By then, most people will be long gone.
  22. LOL, they should hire you for their customer service center.
  23. Things that are grinds now, were fun at first. Leveling when your new to the game and getting new abilities is fun at first, but after a while it takes longer and is more repetitive at higher levels and becomes a grind. That's why you need rewards to keep going. Operations and Flashpoints can be fun at first too but once you beat them, they become grinds and the reward of killing a boss on harder difficulties and getting gear help people keep doing them, when they become grinds. Everything in this game feels like a grind much earlier and there's no rewards to encourage people to keep doing them. That's the problem. A lot of people happy with the game now seems to be taking their time leveling which is fine but a lot of them will quit after a few months. I really don't see how Bioware can release content at the rate even the casual players would want. Making 8 separate storylines with sidequests all with voice actors is gonna take forever to do. The casuals won't be happy with a new operation every 6-9 months if they could even do it that quickly.
  24. People focused on how grinding sucks are forgetting that people endure grinds to get some reward after. They don't do the grind cause grinding itself is fun. It's a careful balance of making people work toward a goal so when they get there they enjoy it. I keep seeing posts about how all those MMO's in the past had grinds and that's not fun, good thing SWTOR isn't as grindy, but they're forgetting what kept people playing those games were the rewards you got from grinding. It could have been levels, xp, gear, new abilities, new crafting, exploring. That's what kept people playing those games in spite of the grind. The problem with SWTOR is the only real reward is the story. Grinding for hours to see a few cutscene's isn't as repeatable or as exciting to a lot of players. Leveling happens so fast that people are actually avoiding getting xp to not out level content. Gear upgrades come so fast that you don't really appreciate any quest rewards. (You don't even know what quest rewards are till you get them) It looked like this game was designed by looking at complaints and trying to give gamers what they wanted. Faster leveling, gear, crafting, more credits. But people complained in other games cause those things had value. Bioware gives us so much of those that they no longer have value and are no longer rewarding. I've leveled a Sith Inquisitor to 33 and a Smuggler to 30 and I noticed (potential story spoilers but I'll try to be vague) after the initial opening story, you get told there's 2 or 3 things we need to go on, and each is on a separate planet. It feels like they're saying, "see you in 12 levels to continue this story." I wonder if other class stories are like that. I noticed there are a good number of post about people losing interest around those levels. When story is the only reward, it might explain why. People who compare this game to early WoW say WoW had more bugs and less content and it's true but the very core of the game was funner for more people. Bugs get forgotten as soon as they're fixed and content gets added later but the core of SWTOR just doesn't have enough rewards or reason to keep playing. What this boils down to is more people leaving, and less money to add content for the people who do enjoy this game. So many posters on this forum attack people who point out problems when we're really trying to help them fix things so this game is funner to more people and everyone wins when there's more fun games to play.
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