This is so naive I don't even know where to start. I mean honestly, really? I could go on all night blasting the muppets at BWA, but my sub literally ends in less than three hours and this will be the last post I ever make here so idgaf. Actually, I've already done that with several lengthy posts which were all deleted. I get that some people still like this game, and good for them. For a while I did as well. But don't be ridiculous. You're talking about the most unresponsive community manager I've ever seen (in ten+ years of online gaming) who protects BW behind a wall of ambiguity, empty promises, and straight up lies when he does actually bother to communicate with us (e.g, his job). Oh, and Ben? Really? This is a guy who comes into this and gives us two-years of single player DLC - the man doesn't even know what an MMO is. The man who wrote a long-*** post last may assuring us that the game was in fact not falling into a ravine (it was), in which he talks at length about how awesome rehashed content is and how *exciting* and *awesome* but super-secret stuff was coming. That turned out to be uprisings BTW. Oh and he just said on twitch that the GC grind is exciting so there's that as well. The other guy I don't even know, except from the one time he said on one of the streams I bothered to watch that the staggered chapter release was a mistake on his part - so he's definitely a winner as well. But sure EA games is the devil and BWA is the greatest developer ever. Peace out and GL.

It's like the Battlefield games with them, if they don't do as well as Call of Duty then **** it let's try again next year. Battlefield 1 has barely even come out and actually isn't half bad but they're already talking about this year's release - SW battlefront 2. That and madden and so forth, yearly installments and constantly trying to hit it big with title after title - they are not used to the whole MMO idea of releasing a game then supporting it for years. If they decided SWTOR would never beat WoW or significantly tap into the millions who subscribe to that, I don't see how EA could look at that and rationalize or justify bothering to spend money on improving this game.

WoW also has an app that lets you mess with your character, use the auction house, chat in guild chat, and so forth on your phone and is over a decade old Meanwhile BioWare Ausin can't even write accurate patch notes

Handing out gear doesn't keep players invested (e.g, subscribed) - when you're not making content, shove them in a hamster wheel and keep leading them on with empty promises.

If anyone is expecting anything other than vague, non-committal, empty promises they haven't been paying attention.

How long have you been playing? A month?

A poorly implemented idea? From BioWare? Impossible!

too bad swtor doesn't have addons like wow's **** which is funny because wow is 12 years old too

To be fair you will probably have fun leveling with the stories and there's enough content at endgame to keep you engaged for a quite a while. The animosity and frustration you are seeing is from players who've been here for years and have already finished all of that - and are tired of BW expecting them to just replay the same content indefinitely. For example, they have not released a new operation in over two years yet they've put the old ones into the grind for this new gear system - grinding to access ops they've already beaten dozens of times. Another issue is that for the first three years of the game they actually focused on the overall MMO aspects (pve, pvp, etc.) but then inexplicably the last two expansions focused entirely on single-player chapters which left many wondering what kind of game this is now. Then there's everything else. Their lack of communication with the community, their empty promises, the bugs and glitches that constantly seem to find their way into everything they do, and so forth and so on.

I think the issue is that people can see the potential the game has, but over the years they've also seen BW fumble their way through terrible ideas and bad decisions one after another and never really meet that potential at all. I can't speak for everyone else, but I have absolutely unsubbed/unsubscribed (as a founder) and this is the last week I'll ever be on these boards. I'll probably watch their stream on thursday just for a laugh then I'll forget this game even exists - five years of empty promises and mind numbingly idiotic decisions from BW is enough IMO.

It's the same story repeating itself over and over again. Why even bother telling them - they won't listen, and even if they do they're too incompetent to do anything constructive about it anyway.

The token gear sets that came with Makeb were actually pretty ******. Also this. The original war hero bounty hero gear was probably the best looking set BW has ever made. But let's not forget that awful battlemaster knight set though...

el oh el

To be frank, if you can describe the lifespan of SWTOR over the last 5 years in positive terms then you have absolutely no business throwing the word narrative at anyone. People are bringing up valid and legitimate concerns and you just throw them aside with semantics and disregard everything they say. Good luck with that whole trying to whitewash the truth from existence in a naive attempt to bring in new players thing, though. My sub ends next week so i'll be honest I don't care, but I am rooting for you all the same. Can you save BW Austin from themselves and help improve swtor, and bring in new players...by arguing with people on the internet? Time will tell. Good luck, we're all counting on you.

Yeah all of that made DA:I the best in the series for me tbh. And you're right it wasn't like the zones were empty or boring, they all had rifts, dragons (those were ****** fights too), and even sidequests with cool background stories like that one in the dessert where you figure out what happened to the family of surface dwarves. Or that random haunted mansion (I think it was in emerald graves I can't remember though), or the temple frozen in time in the 1st dessert area. That stuff was awesome. It also extended the game's length to almost 100 hours (for me at least) which is triple what I spent playing the first two games. So yeah if andromeda follows suit with something similar to that I'd be all for it.

They didn't create the alliance because they thought it would make a good story. They created the alliance because it allowed them to make one story for every character regardless of faction, class, force usage, everything - because that was cheaper, easier, and faster than making separate stories. Less assets to create, less voice acting, less dialogue to write and encounters to script, faster turn around etc. They've been doing this for years as well, so I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you.

Eh, I kinda liked how most of the zones in DAI were set up because it added a lot of content to the game with all of the rifts and whatnot to do in the open world. The armor was disappointing though yeah, but it will probably be like mass effect 2/3 where you can customize your outfit with the sliders and components and all of that

I know others like them a lot but I've hated every Logitech mouse I've ever used. I bought a razor naga years ago and it still works great in other mmos and swtor when I still played this game. Mine was a pretty basic model (still about $90 but worth it imo) with 6 buttons on the left side which you can set to work as either the number row or the numpad on the keyboard. I went with the numpad because I already had the numbers bound to other abilities and didn't feel like changing that. I don't remember having to enable admin rights (isn't that a windows thing?) to set that up and it was easy to do via razor's synapse program. It also has macro support but swtor doesn't really allow that iirc and I've never explored that tbh

My sub ends next week and I've already uninstalled, so I legitimately don't care anymore. After five years of waiting for this game to reach its potential (it never will), and five years of listening to BW's crap - I'm done and I highly doubt I'll ever be back. I'm also long past the point of optimism, and I have zero interest in their overly hyped stream next week because we've been here before and been disappointed every time. But that said, the biggest problem with BW is that: 1.) They don't have a vision for this game. Every update isn't part of a larger plan or a healthy evolution of the game, it's actually just a random idea they will probably abandon the next time they're distracted by something else. GSF, strongholds, even these KOTFE chapters which they're now moving away from apparently, and so forth. How exactly are you going to keep players invested in your game, when you constantly change the entire premise? Operation players have been waiting for two years for raids, after getting at least one every year since release - and now, story players are being shafted in 2017 after having two years of content focused on them. The chapters are 100% single-player content and as the bulk of content released over the last two years, it also raises questions as to whether or not they even know what kind of game they want this to be. 2.) They do not communicate at all, and when they do it's hapless and pathetic. I've been gaming for years and across most genres (other mmos, fps, rts, etc.) but in all that time I've never encountered a more absent developer. Months go past with nothing from them at all, their website is flooded with outdated and useless info, and the few times they do actually say anything it's vague, non-committal, and largely hurts them more than helps them. Not exactly going to appease frustrated players waiting for tangible information (e.g., a reason to stay subscribed and invested) by following this route. Not even going to go into their epic fails like "heal to full and make them pay!" or more recently "RNG is fun!" for the new people. Oh, or the times they've said something then done a complete 180 or forgotten about it completely - like the original queue window for ranked declaring cross-server matchmaking was in the pipeline, or them saying 16 person raids would soon be on group finder, and so forth and so on I don't feel like typing all of this out. 3.) They've lost their way. I remember the first rakghoul event, back in March 2012 I think it was. It started on a weekend and was unannounced and completely unexpected. I realize they copied an earlier event from WoW almost completely, but the point I'm making is that at the time it showed they actually cared enough to put in something like that as a surprise for the players. Now, five years later, we get recycled carbon-copy "events" that just make them seem disinterested and oblivious. Flipping a switch to turn these on and off is apparently such a big deal now that it is one of the few things they will talk about - but it's the same thing, over and over and over again. The entire reason they only last two weeks is to create artificial content by making them seem new or exciting - when actually it's exactly the same thing, only it's been six months since you last did it. Going beyond the events, these uprisings were the final straw for me. It's bland, uninspired, recycled content and this is what Ben Irving was talking about last spring when he mentioned group content coming? If that's something they think they should be proud of, or the result of nearly a year of work then it raises serious questions about their capacity to create future content.

Can't wait for their stream next week. I'm at the edge of my seat here with excitement about 2017 and SW:TOR.

The open-world pvp in ESO is pretty good - GW2's is better, but it's not bad. The pve at endgame never really seemed that impressive to me. I have it on xbone though and it's not as fleshed out as the PC version, like it's hard to find a guild with just area voice chat so I mostly just used the group finder to get into dungeons when I felt like doing them or when friends from other games came on. If you're just doing it for the stories/leveling I'd say the daggerfall covenant had a pretty sweet story (vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc.) but I hated the aldmeri dominion. Way too much focus on the bosmer. I guess now with one tamriel it doesn't really matter though.

I remember a long time ago there was something about t-shirts with the different class insignias available. I don't think it was through this website but I remember Eric talking about it iirc and I think they were at least partly sanctioned by BW.

I can't really think of any streamers from SWTOR other than snave, but other games I play with more active communities have at least a handful of well-known streamers. It's not just about watching someone play the game in silence though, like the best streamers I've seen will joke around and keep it entertaining while also communicating with chat. Sharing the experience and the game we all like. But I will say that I think the money involved with that is sketchy af. Few of the streamers I've watched more than once will ever just ask for money outright, but a lot do. Supporting someone via twitch's subscription plan for like $5/month is one thing, but I've seen people straight up ask for thousands of dollars which is pretty much the same thing as standing on a street corner with a cardboard sign imo.

You summed everything up perfectly. I've seen guilds disintegrate and friends leave time and again in SWTOR, and it's always because of the same handful of reasons. And the whole time BW seems completely oblivious as they bumble along, with hapless ideas one after another and no actual plan or vision for the game. Mismanagement, incompetence, apathy, so forth and so on. I've been going through other MMOs and it's really pretty hilarious what other games are doing while BW flounders and squanders the potential this game has. I mean honestly even WoW which unless I'm mistaken is over a decade old at this point has cross server queues and a freaking app that lets you mess around with your characters gear, list stuff on the auction house, talk in guild chat, etc. I mean come on. I should have left years ago.

Even if that were true (Makeb actually came out more than a year after SWTOR was released), what you're saying is that players should just accept SWTOR as it is despite the numerous other competing MMOs on the market with better content because....it's the best BioWare can do and it would be unfair to judge them? "A for effort" and participation trophies etc. No offense but that is the most naive thing I have ever read on these forums.