AscendingSky
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For people in your position I think that is a perfectly valid complaint. So then is the problem the Galactic Command, or is it a dearth of new content that players feel motivated to work towards mastering? I think the "standard" needs to move away from "raid", and instead maybe introducing other forms of challenging group play into the game needs to be looked at. Maybe that's what they are trying with the difficulty modes for Uprisings.
Both. People are trying to defend GC with "You people just want to get the best gear in a week with no effort!" But that's not true. We want to go back to the same stuff we were doing before 5.0 hit. We want to beat our heads against the same walls we were trying to bash down in HMs and NiMs. Many ops groups and guilds were in the midst of trying to clear various ones of those before last week. Unfortunately, EAWare has now jacked up the levels and HP of all the old, creaky content, so now if we want to go back to doing the exact same things we already were before the new expansion went live, we have to get new gear. This is extremely frustrating. We're being asked to grind on a brand new treadmill just to get back to the status quo.
And then, to add insult to injury, we don't have any reliable way of getting the gear we need just to do the same things we were doing before last week. It's all random. We can try to tackle the hardest content in the game, spend hours upon hours trying to beat it down, and get the exact same chance of a reward as someone who got into a GSF deathmatch and repeatedly kamikazied against nearby rocks to make the match end faster, or who AFKed through 99% of a PvP match.
And again, it's only a chance of a reward. We can't do runs to help our teammates get the gear they need anymore, because all the Command crate drops are random (and usually junk). No one wants to switch out to an alt to fill a needed roll on a raid team, because then you'll never get the gear you want for your main. You can sign up for a HM FP or a HM/NiM operation, get partway through, then have the group collapse, turning it into a complete waste of your time.
And all of this, ALL OF THIS, just to do the exact same content we've been doing for the past five years!! The two problems compound eachother into one giant gurgling vortex of suck that has drained away all my motivation to even grind CXP. What's the point? I don't have the time to turn this game into a second job just to gear up my DPS main, to say nothing of gearing up my healer and tank alts I made specifically to support my teams.
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I think you'd probably be able to find over 4000 threads where somebody is posting about not liking something the devs have done.
I'm more concerned about them basing their future vision on the metrics of their current vision. I'm trying to point out that the numbers are going to be more skewed than ever because many people are doing things they wouldn't normally do, often things they don't even want to do. I've been playing PvP and repeating certain other content over-and-over-and-over because its optimal, not because its fun to me. I assure you, I had much more fun grinding on elites than I did some of the other content I've been doing just because it was an efficient way to earn cxp.
They're keeping metrics, and so are many players. I know I use a spreadsheet that shows me what the best cxp per minute is, and it affects my gameplay. If you look at a breakdown of my time spent before 5.0 you'd see a person who spent most of their time leveling alts and occasionally flashpoints and h2s. But now you'll see I PvP, do h2s, dailies, uprisings, and certain flashpoints.... all on a single character, and not touching alts except for crafting.
That's how my playtime would be split up too, both before and after 5.0, just with the addition of RP time. People are doing whatever gives them the fastest reward of CXP per hour spent on it, not what they want to do. It's like how children can be coerced into eating food they don't like if they're promised ice cream if they finish. Well, except in this case the kid's parents roll a d100 to see if the kid actually gets ice cream after he finishes his dinner, and unless they roll a 95-100 he's out of luck!
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Way too many got spoiled by 4.0 gearing (just do EV/KP HM and you got best gear in the game without even trying).
I agree the highlighted HM system was a bad idea (at least with EV and KP in the rotation)--especially when added to the fact NiM ops didn't even drop 224 gear! But they could have solved that problem pretty easily by just... not having highlighted operations anymore. RNG is not a solution--it's a whole new problem EAWare are trying to coerce you to buy stuff with real money to make slightly less of a problem.
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I would counter that a steady reward stream, or the possibility of a reward, is a staple of the MMORPG genre actually. Maybe the "goal" of the game isn't gear, but people gearing too quickly does tend to result in "nothing to do" syndrome, because for a good number of people the reward structure of content acts as a prime motivator. You can absolutely give players access to gear too quickly/easily.
Yes, but the problem now is that we're being given a long, randomly rewarded grind we're required to complete in order to... go through the exact same content we've been doing over and over for the past five years. That's not an appealing carrot. That's an ancient carrot buried in the back of the crisper drawer that isn't orange anymore and drips a foul liquid.
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In 4.0 gearing was fast. And ppl got to learn and practice NiMs, got to PvP on new toons etc. Just because ppl got geared fast, life hadn't stopped.
Now we have Eternal Grind to get gear to be able to play what we want.
GEAR IS NOT THE GOAL OF THE GAME
I don't know if I can make that any clearer. I don't play swtor because I want 346 rating gear. If 208 was enough for NiMs and ranked, I'd not care. I want to enjoy the game (what enjoyment is left...), but GC stops us from that very thing.
Yes, exactly! Gear is not the end result. Gear is a means to an end: clearing harder content, which is tuned in the assumption you have a certain level of gear with set bonuses. People will not stop playing when they get max gear. They will start going after all those FP and ops achievements they haven't done yet. They will help their friends and guildmates run through content to get them gear too. They'll stop queueing in normal PvP and try out ranked instead.
All of that... which is now gated for us behind an RNG grind. No thanks. I don't need a second job.
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Funny you say this, as Beta testers gave them feedback as "adults" and yet, they still got ignored? But sure, keep shifting the blame to the community rather than the devs who did not listen to beta feedback. If they were going to "listen" they would have done so with Beta feedback.
Even people who weren't in the closed beta warned EAWAre that RNG was a bad idea. They tried that in 1.0... you know, back when there was a mass exodus of players? Not only did they go to free to play after that, but they got rid of the RNG system because everyone hated it.
EAWare had tons of warning and prior experience in this area. They should have known better. But they ignored all of that and went ahead with it anyways. And now they're acting startled at the negative feedback.
Whether they'll stick stubbornly to their terrible idea, I don't know. Maybe this will turn into the NGE of TOR and the game will shut down in 2017. Maybe in two months they'll go "Sorry, we're going back to the old system" or "We're adding loot tokens back to bosses in ops/flashpoints so now you have a choice of how to gear up." But by then, it will be too late for me and a lot of other people who are tired of this nonsense.
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Galactic Command sucks!!! I mean, I would MUCH rather gear out my toon in max level gear in 2 weeks then NOT be rewarded in anyway for playing end game content!! Who doesn't want to endlessly grind on a main toon, spend credits to rip out mods and move to alts so THEY get geared without actually being played?!?! After all, who needs to learn to play a class when I can simply overgear and get carried by guildies that know how to play?!?!?
This Galactic Command system requires me to continue playing and gives me something to work for which is garbage!! I would much rather gear up quickly then spend countless hours posting on the forums, chatting in fleet and Reddit that there's nothing to do!! After all, without Galactic Command, I wouldn't have anything to threaten to cancel my subscription over!!!! I've been posting since RotHC that this game is dying and I'm canceling my subscription!!! What about traditions?!?!?!?!!?
***For those readers who didn't catch it, this is sarcasm. If you hate the game changes that much, find constructive ways to voice your criticism. Ranting on a forum and verbally abusing the Devs in any way is not likely to bring a sympathetic ear. Voice your displeasure and criticism in a better way and it might be listened to in the end. After all, when people are insulted, they tend to stop listening. Not saying you can't be outraged or upset. Just saying, treating the Devs like they are beneath you then being surprised about them not listening seems to me like "cause and effect". Besides, ranting and raving on the Forums and berating the Devs comes across more to me like a temper tantrum of a petulant child than anything else. By all means, voice your displeasure at ANY game changes you feel strongly against, just do it like a grown up and they MIGHT actually listen.
1) You don't understand how Galactic Command works at all, if you think it's somehow better than what came before.
2) Mass ad hominem attacks, ahoy!
3) You know what a 'constructive' form of criticism is? Cancelling our subscriptions. If that's what you want, sure, but don't then complain later when the game shuts down due to lack of income.
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and that mean the alliance crate use that ? the DvsL Reward use that ? and now these new weird crates we get use that ?
And the chances to get anything good..is like the Lotto right ? ¸
Cose I have yet to get that top armor I wanted lol
Exactly. There's some coding in the game that simulates a random number generator, and that's what determines what you get when you open all those boxes. Just like playing the lottery, except we don't know what the odds of winning are.
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What do you mean "lacking the skills"? Do you mean they simply are not skilled PvP players and are inexperienced or do you mean they are joining, taking their gear off, and just throwing games? The first is not Bioware's problem, they cannot account for player skill and the community has to either teach those players, wait for them to get better, or form their own selective PvP groups. The second should be solved, because it is griefing people.
When EAWare incentivizes inexperienced PvPers to join ranked matches simply because dying fast means they get CXP faster than other methods of doing it, then it is EAWare's problem!
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No, it's just the moderators are removing posts so that the forums appear to be less toxic.
Yep. Every negative thread is moved to Off Topic--which explicitly says in its sticky post authored by Musco that the Off Topic forum is supposed to be for topics not related to the game.
It's a very poor and pitiful attempt at a cover up job.
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*cough cough* Why should folks have to grind out anything to get back to clearing the exact same content that they have been clearing for the last 5 years?
Yeah, that's one of the most putrid details of the whole RNG gearing fiasco. If there were some brand new operations to clear with different mechanics and challenges, there'd be a lot more reason and incentive to work on gearing up. But they're asking us to do a whole new grind for the exact same content we did the last five years of grinds to clear. They want us to put in months (or years, if you account for alts and not just gearing your main) of effort just to return to the status quo. When we haven't had any new ops content for OVER TWO YEARS after they promised we'd never go more than one without it.
No thanks, EAWare. I don't need a second job, and I'm not a masochist.
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IMO the stream told us everything we needed to know. It all makes sense now. RNG is here to stay. The plan for the foreseeable future is simply the monetization of GC QoL improvements.
We already see it and more is coming. CXP boosters are live. They have less value at lower CXP gain rates. They will be more attractive after the upcoming changes. They are raising Gold values. They will raise again I am sure, they just need to figure out the lowest number people will still grind at. Because grinding is certainly an activity that makes boosting attractive.
You want to gear up your alts? CC
You want to have catch-up mechanics? CC
This was the entire point of GC.
I'm so tired of pinhead theories such as "It's more new-player friendly!" Seriously, shut the **** up with that crap. The entirety of GC is monetization. Period. Anything else you might think is simply something you fell for. There's no happy unicorn point to any of this. Wake up.
BWA had a consultant come in earlier this year. They advertised for the role, it was on their site for everyone to see. They wanted someone to come in to help them better monetize this game. And look what happened in the next six months. FTP - dead. Incentives to build a stable of alts while exposing everyone to the "itch" of opening crates. Get 'em hooked. Raise the level cap for no discernible purpose aside from creating a gear grind. Throttle that grind as much as possible.
And then? Pay-to-Win. OK - maybe not completely. But Pay-to-not want-to-blow-your-brains-out.
Listen, I'm sorry but no sane, intelligent person is going to create Galactic Command and think it's going to be well-received by this playerbase. I'll admit they've done a damn good job marketing it as if it's a credible idea. Certainly there are a few people on these forums that have fallen for it. But there is literally no universe in which a GC-like system without an RNG element is not superior in every possible way.
Except monetization potential.
They want us to hate it. They've modeled it. They'll lose a bunch of subs now, sure. They know this. They get this. They don't care.
This is the long con.
I gotta say, well played gents. Out of touch? I'm not sure if I'd say that - because this is some diabolical ****. And nicely done.
Now if they really wanted to take this all the way - I mean if they're in this for the big win - they'd announce Ops in January. Certainly they won't actually work on them, but they'll say they have Operations in the early planning stages. Picture the one-tooth guy, with that throaty laugh from all the parody videos. Doesn't matter. Everyone'll pay, we gotta get our gear on for Ops. They'll clean up.
It'll all come crashing down someday, but these guys checked out long ago. There's no passion for the IP in that studio. Not one drop. Because in that whole damn building, there isn't a single person with the vision and stones to point out that they didn't need a suicide switch. Because their consultant had blinders on. Because they never belonged in a spot where this game was in their care.
This is *********** Star Wars. It is still kicking and breathing despite Bioware, not because of their vision. Or their "story". What a crock. There is no gameplay here. There is no sense of community among the studio and its playerbase. There is no sense of the direction this game is going. It's just one giant cash grab.
The IP doesn't deserve this. It shouldn't be cheapened in this way. It deserves better.
This game needed pros. People with passion. People that thought farther than the next 6 months. People that understood how to build a playerbase. It's *********** simple. Create great content. People will play. Period. There's no voodoo. How pathetic is it that they dropped $150M (or whatever) to build this, had 1.7M subs, they've got lightsabers - yet we're 5 years in and this is their best plan.
I don't know if I'd say out of touch because I think they know exactly what they're doing. But they're definitely in over their head. This is literally the best they can do. A better studio would have not had to stoop to this level. And this game would have been *********** amazing. And that studio would be making a hell of a lot more money.
IMO it's just pathetic.
I think you're absolutely right. I've been saying all along that they nerfed CXP gains earlier to try to further incentivize buying the CXP boosters from the CM. But you took that logic one step further... and it makes sense. It makes so much damn sense. It's terrible.
Even with that theory, though, I think they've miscalculated. If you want to run a good long con, you have to make the terms seem appealing enough for people to buy in from the start, and give them enough reason to ignore that sinking feeling as the situation goes wrong and keep putting money into the con. The bonus from the boosters is too little (it doesn't affect those CXP packs from bosses, and it won't increase gains from the nerfed golds because of rounding down), they cost too much, and the rewards from Galactic Command are too random and too **** for people to put up with it for long.
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I am unsubbed. I am able to post for some reason. I have no idea why.
You will be allowed to post until your sub runs out or until they do the next server maintenance, whichever comes last, I believe.
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Yeah, there are a multitude of solutions that would have made it stronger, and they definitely should have had those considered at launch. GW2 has a similar problem, in that they don't have a PTR where things can get tested out, and where player feedback can actually stop or change an idea. Bioware just internally tests it, loves it (because they made it, and therefore its money), then throws it out for consumption, and then they're somewhat shocked when people don't like it. If they put it out in alpha and beta stages, then they could see how many people love it, how many people hate it, and if they hate it, what could they change about it to make them love it.
There was a closed beta for this game. I know a few people who were in it. From what they've told me, the beta testers were telling them RNG gearing was a horrible idea months ago. They saw how horrible it was and they said so. EAWare didn't listen, not to them, not to the forum posters, no one but their own mystical internal 'metrics'--which I don't believe exist at this point, I think they just use 'metrics' as an excuse for every decision they make because they don't respect their customers enough to tell the truth (i.e., "We want to squeeze more money out of you because EA isn't making a profit on us") or admit when they've made mistakes.
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I first became aware of this when they introduced Mara changes back in 2012 or so and prefaced their blog entry by describing how Maras currently are played and how "This isn't how we wanted Maras to be played."
I remember that instant because I found it strange that the devs' main reasoning was not improving player experience but enforcing their own vision/idea. (It may or may not have come down to the same thing, it wasn't something anyone had been complaining about, but to me the phrasing alone was a revelation regarding their stance/approach.)
That's really the major problem with the EAWare developers and producers, especially in this past year or two. They need to realize... it doesn't matter if they think the game is fun, or 'exciting', or whatever. If the players don't like it, players will leave.
Fun fact: most of the people who have ever played this game have quit already. The vast majority of those players didn't come to the forums trying to air their grievances, hoping EAWare will listen to them and make things better (which is what I have been doing). They've just walked. Which is why we're down from 100 servers to a handful, with only 4 of them active in the NA region.
EAWare employees can think the Galactic Command system is the best idea any MMO has had in the history of MMOs, but it won't mean a damn thing if so many players hate it and stop paying subscriptions that EA shuts the game down and gives them their pink slips.
They are refusing to look past the tips of their own noses, and I predict it is going to cost them, big time.
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Sigh. When people say ‘we’ and ‘all’ they don’t actually mean ‘everyone’ in the whole flipping community. You know what they meant, don’t be ‘that’ person.
P.S Looking at your past thread you certainly felt like a loser when the gold mobs were nerfed. Don't be that kind of white knight.
Yeah, her bitterness didn't stay long after she was forced to eat her toxic words like crow. She's gone back to being a nasty white knight again.
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New content wasn't the only reason. People complained about forming groups in general, puging, being scammed out of tokens via kick, having to gear alts as well, fighting with ops members, PC difficulties or just not being able to get a group at all. RNG fixes all these issues by giving players equal opportunity to achieve this gear without all the issues. Of course it doesn't just hand them the gear on a gold platter, but it does give them the same chance to gear as if they were in a raid. Lets be honest; not everyone in a raid walks away with a token, boss drop or epic piece of armor every time they run a raid. Same thing with the RNG system. It merely stimulates that chance factor outside the do or die confines of the raid.
...you don't know how operations loot actually worked, do you? Let me explain.
Let's take the easiest operation in the game, Eternity Vault. It has 5 bosses. In 4.0 that meant you would get 5 loot tokens if you did it on 8 man, and 10 tokens (2 of each slot that dropped) on 16 man (assuming it was not the highlighted hardmode that week; then it would drop DOUBLE that amount, half 220s and half 224s). These tokens were for purple 216/220/224 gear, depending on what difficulty you ran on and whether it was the highlighted operation that week. All of the armor tokens would give you a gear piece with a set bonus.
Those drops were GUARANTEED. Sure, not every single person would get a token if you distributed one per person (which is what pretty much every pug ops group I've ever been in has done, as well as most of the guild groups I've been in). But on 8 man, 5 out of 8 people would be guaranteed a piece of loot in one ops run. On 16 man, 10 out of 16 people would be guaranteed a piece of loot.
(Oh, and this is not even counting the randomly generated extra purple gear without set bonuses that would drop off every boss; we're just focusing on the tokens for now.)
Therefore, if you formed an 8 man group with your friends, you could easily run through that raid once a week, evenly distribute the loot, and get everyone that gear for their toon at about the same rate. Sure, it would take weeks and weeks of running to get everything (as two of the pieces in that raid were relic and earpiece tokens, neither of which can be transferred via legacy gear) for every member of that raid, but you knew eventually EVERYONE WOULD GET IT. IT WAS GUARANTEED.
Now? You take your 8 man (or 16 man) group into Eternity Vault. Some of them might earn a Command rank after completing the operation and cashing in all their CXP boxes from the bosses. Some might not (or might not be level 70 yet and unable to get CXP boxes at all). Of all of those who get boxes, 95% of the time they are going to get NOTHING but junk greens, orange cosmetic shells, companion gifts, reputation items (for reputations most of them already have maxed out), etc. So most of the time, no one will get ANYTHING for their time.
Furthermore, no matter how many times you run the operation, grinding for hours and hours each week for CXP, your odds of getting a gear drop you actually need DOES NOT GET ANY BETTER. Every box you open has the exact same loot table per tier, the same percentages, the same vast amounts of crap no one wants or needs. So you can literally run this operation DOZENS OF TIMES and have nothing to show for it if RNGesus does not smile on you.
Do you understand now? Do you see how the new RNG loot system for Command crates does not give you the same chance for loot as the 4.0 loot system did in ops? How it is actually MUCH, MUCH WORSE?!
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Again... missing, or deliberately misrepresenting, the point they made.
Doing it was fine, hence not an exploit. It was some people overdoing it that caused the nerf, because over doing it was something not intended by the studio.
There is a difference. If some guy had not deliberately farmed them to the level cap (that was north of 300K Cxp per week) in three days, they would not have been motivated to act with the nerf bat.
If they had a separate and lower cap for killing gold mobs, this would not have happened, and they would not have needed to nerf it. But then again.... players would complain about a lower separate cap for gold mobs. It's a no win for the studio.
I still advocate for separate caps for Cxp, by major content segment, gold mobs, Heroics, FPs, PvP, OPs, etc. That would be the closest and simplest mechanic to drive players in the direction they want them to go (which clearly is to diversify play of content while raising Cxp. Does not even need to be a hard cap for each segment... a diminishing returns cap would do just as well, without an abrupt cut-off. I do not advocate lowering the global cap for Cxp... as that discourages any play beyond the cap they set.
First off, in the livestreams, players were CHALLENGED to try to meet the weekly cap. Musco and Ben and all them said it couldn't be achieved without cheating/hacking/exploits. They were wrong. More than that, they should have seen it coming and not had the hubris to insist it couldn't be done when people very quickly figured out how it could be done. The fact they couldn't see this coming shows their level of incompetence.
Secondly, why are they punishing 99% of players of the game for the actions of 1% (if that) of players? So what if a handful of people had the patience to deal with the mind-numbing tedium of farming golds and champs all damn day to get to Command Level 100 in 3 days. I'd never do that, it would drive me crazy with boredom, but they did, and they got their Command levels out of it. So what? It doesn't hurt me. What DOES hurt me is nerfing all the gold CXP rewards by 90%, which is what EAWare did.
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The raids here did work similar, but now they don't drop any gear, so no point in discussing it really.
You are correct about the exciting part, they love it, as it is an easy tool to add that "wow, i got it" factor to what is often a pretty mundane way to spend your spare time.
But, some people cannot get into that, be it for bad experiences with the system, or just an inherent dislike for gambling aspect of it, so the devs worked out ways to remove that for people that didn't like it, by giving comms, badges (insert name of currency here) so that people could progress without dealing with it.
Its why the words incompetent, fools, idiots are being bandied about a lot in the forums lately, as this is ground that's been trodden by what are now old ghosts of games and "should" be common knowledge to people in the industry.
Hell, it hasn't just been trod on by other games: TOR tried two different RNG gearing system in 1.0, one for PvP and one for PvE. Everyone hated them, they were frustrating, you often didn't get anything for your time, it took way too much effort and time to get your set bonus gear, drop rates were row, people would get a dozen different headpieces before they got anything else... sound familiar? So people quit playing. But--and here's the fascinating part--the developers back then actually listened to their players and got rid of the RNG systems and moved to the set piece token drop system that we had until 5.0 dropped.
This isn't EAWare trying to innovate. This is EAWare repeating the same mistakes to an even bigger degree than they did before. I raided and PvPed in 1.0; this system is WORSE than those systems were in terms of fun and a sense of accomplishment instead of disappointment.
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Without the element of surprise, the path eventually gets beaten black & blue and that leads to the monotony being complained about prior to 5.0.
The monotony was the result of the fact we had not been given new group content in OVER TWO YEARS, and what little content we did receive was both exceptionally short (20 minutes or less per month), single player only, and had about zero replay value since choices did not matter. RNG is not the solution to that monotony, not when even the alleged 'new' group content in the game (Uprisings) all use recycled mechanics from old content.
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I've got some good news for you and some bad news for you. The good news is, don't worry, they aren't going to quit. The bad news is, they aren't going to quit.
Keep telling yourself that until the servers shut down. It's not like we've gone from over 100 servers to only a handful left--OH WAIT.
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Go ahead. Cancel. There will never be another Star wars game like this again. Story, Comps, Romances, Choices that matter; Not even Emperor WoW has been able to deliver this level of depth in all its years. If the game should shut down, you'll all regret leaving one day just like they regretted leaving swg when it shut down.
Why on Earth should people spend time and money on a video game if they don't like it? If they're not enjoying it? If they're bored with it? If they feel the company who makes it is trying to extort money out of them?
Because it may get better someday, maybe, if we're very very lucky and eat our vegetables every night? No, that's not a legitimate reason to keep paying or playing this game.
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Doh, you guys don't get it. The bonus is like a mini event, they'll move it around the content board. Next will be something flashpoints or operations. It's only one thing at a time and pvp only had it for a few days and now GSF has it.
So you all need to stop stressing. Your preferred content will come around soon, then it will move on to the next.
Even with the CXP daily bonus, PvE activities reward far less CXP per hour of effort than PvE and GSF.
They claimed this system would let you 'play how you want to play'. But instead it's 'play something you may hate because other ways are a waste of your time'.
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you guys are lazy stupid and complain all the time
do something to get good gear and not get it very easy before 5.0
i hope eric close every treat that is about the bad RNG in this game am getting very sick about it
If you don't like them... how about not reading them? No one's forcing you to, kid.
Don Meredith was right
in Off-Topic
Posted
I heard someone say once that after people try a new MMO and decide they don't like it, they usually gravitate back to whatever MMO they've spent the most time on in the past. This usually means WoW, simply because of how long it's been around. So there's a certain amount of inertia there.