As a paying customer what's wrong with that? Especially since he's asking on behalf of the convenience of not just his personal convenience but that of a large portion of the playerbase. That's why you don't normally do events like this in MMO's. Some poor dude who booked two weeks off back in january to start today is going to be out of luck. There's never a 'good time' for a time limited event. Winter holidays? Lots of people are traveling. Middle of some random month? People have jobs, and kids etc. There's always something. When you're a developer you don't want to make content people can't experience, that's just wasting money. Making content that is, intentionally, narrowly time limited is expensive and wasteful. E.g. with the rakghoul event they could have just made the plague time limited, left the rest of it in as a dailies grind for anyone who wants it enough. They could have even pushed it off to a separate phase/instance and let people deal with that who cared enough. An MMO is not my job, it's something I do for fun, denying me fun to make it time limited completely misses the point. One of the big things we worry about in the industry as a whole is digital archiving precisely because you might not ever be able to experience a PS1 or a coleco vision or whatever game the way it was originally done, it' s just hard to produce that stuff. With an MMO the time problem is compressed quite a lot, but when you take stuff out you do take away from the whole range of potential experiences, and that's bad.

if you didn't play any of the closed betas leveling was about 100 hours. If you knew your way around more like 80 or less if you picked a class you knew particularly well. There are 168 hours in a week, and only need about 45 of sleep. Since the game wastes a lot of time (included in the hour figures above) on loading screens and travel in general you can actually fit other activities in (bathroom breaks and eating) while still progressing pretty easily. So basically if you took off the week of the 13th - 20th you could have pretty easily managed. I hit 50 just as the server went live and worked 2 days in between. Because my boss fails at reading when I book time off.

While I disagree with your second paragraph based on the performance of the austin studio thus far, I think your first paragraph nails it. They only envisioned (within the budget they had) space as a minigame. For whatever reason they must have looked at jump to light speed, which was a freeform space combat experience and thought something about it was bad. Now sure, from the moment they announced it was going to be an on rails shooter people were clamouring for them to change it, but it's definitely what they wanted the experience to be right now. Making a full blown space game that allows you to, for example, gather resources and 'progress' in raids or the like would be a significant amount of work, so I can see them wanting to give that a proper treatment down the line. If I were (and I'm not) running it, I'd be thinking the first major expansion should be a proper space game with space progression and new ground raids, the expansion would expand ground leveling with some new space raids and sort of go back and forth like that.

Sure. The question is more of a 'why 4 hours'. Which is a legitimate problem. In game development Art can be a problem where you just throw more bodies at it. Need 300 unique trees? 300 artists doing 1 tree a day can have them tomorrow, or one artist can be done in just over a year. The debugging stage of programming, can take a really long time because it takes as long as it takes to get it working. One programmer might take an hour, another a month. Depends on whether or not you diagnose the problems correctly and know how to fix them, even a really good programmer who diagnoses a problem slightly wrong can waste a lot of time.

This was mostly a programming and UI update. This are the hard parts of software development. Spitting out art assets usually isn't prone to random things being wrong that you can't figure out, it's work and it's hard to gauge just how long the creative process takes, but it's just work. Programming is thinking. If you look at the patch notes they're actually quite extensive, so I'm sure there was a lot of dealing with all of that. But the new systems stuff, well lets look at it. Group finder: You need UI elements for all of this, and any description needs to work in multiple languages. You need some 'queues' of people that they join into. That's probably a variant on the warzone queue, but done by role. Then you need a mechanism to teleport people wherever (variant on some teleport developer code that I'm sure exists). So it doesn't seem all that hard. But then all of the sub parts are actually tricky. What can a player queue for, how do I know? Should we hard code that a level 50 can't go do the alderaan bonus series from the group finder? How do you handle premade groups? Unlike the warzone finder, where it would be one giant queue, premade groups in this are actually quite tricky. Even a 2 person group. If people only queued individually or as full groups this would be easy, have an individual queue for each 'role' (what if you double count someone because they selected 2 roles?) and then take the top person from each role to make a group right? Right. But now you have a premade. It's not hugely complicated, now you're trying to match people from the regular queue onto people in the premade. But that's all new programming and buggy. On top of all this are the network effects. What you can do with hero engine in bioware studios and what you can do with players spread out across multiple countries all connecting to a data centre are slightly different. Things like timeouts waiting for users to connect and so on are actually really tricky. Passing players in a way that absolutely cannot fail from cluster to cluster in a laggy environment is non trivial (but might be guaranteed to work due to enough existing code). But wait you say, what if I want to vote to kick someone? What if loot in a group finder event does something weird, can a CSR fix it? So now you have backend tools for the support people to use to try and find stuff that went wrong. Ranked warzones is a lot of maths to figure out rankings, and then making sure that when they fix bugs in one type of warzone that they don't linger in the other, and that sort of thing. If I were to guess, I would say around this time last year BioWare made the decision to not have a group finder at launch. Between then and the start of the weekend betas and then into the open beta was a long series of whack a mole with whatever problems existed. And then the game launched. And oops, ilum, warzones not giving credit for wins all of the time etc. etc. etc. They've been trying to triage problems that were arising. After making all those changes to go back and look at group finder is basically starting from scratch since they have all new loot/commendations/difficulty etc. One of the things that went with group finder was retuning a lot of the flashpoints. Sure, they should have had a group finder at launch. But they fundamentally misunderstood so much about how to design and test an MMO from the get go that they had to deal with all of those problems first before coming back to this one, and this is the sort of problem that has a lot of layers of complexity to it, that touch a lot of other systems and require a lot of changes that aren't directly related to the feature (retuning for example).

The problem isn't so much that the text isn't clear. The text is quite clear, it just seems like a stupid idea given that they basically made crit crafting augments irrelevant for the moment. There isn't really a situation where you'd craft gear worth anything that a 3% bonus to augment crit chance would be worth 300k. The 'we need a response from bioware' is more of an incredulous 'is this really what you intended it to do?' and probably more relevantly 'is there some reason to think this would be a good idea going forward?'. I mean, bioware could be adding in 'high end' crafting where you would make a significant number of comparable to raid level pieces, where the 3% chance would pay off in the end (think black hole gear), or they could extend it to all crit. But currently as described the ability seems bafflingly dumb. Or they could actually intend for us to be making lots of black hole gear for example. That's fine, it's just not clear what their intent behind the design is, or if it's just a waste of money. In that sense you could say the neutral GTN on your ship was in the same category. It very clearly was what they wanted it to be. And in the broader context of making all GTN's the same makes sense, but it seemed like a stupid idea at the time without that information.

EQ2 never got that big. http://mmodata.blogspot.ca/ tracks data for this stuff. EQ2 only ever peaked around 400k subs and yes, that was very early.

Some people in my guild had a lot of rage about this. They'd raced to log in dec 13th or whatever the absolute first possible moment was to get their names, and then to be forced to change them because BioWare wrecked the server we were on did no make them happy people. And rightfully so, people cared a lot about their names and BioWare didn't even try and resolve the issue in a fair way, so I'll probably need to recruit more people and bioware will lose some more subs. Serves them right.

My guild transfered yesterday and just about everyone had that problem. It seems to go away eventually. It's probably related to doing a move then copy, they probably have do one extra 'move then copy' on the target server for some reason (maybe for renaming or whatever). It's possible the character you can't access is in your 9th character slot, which is hidden from players and only really there for bioware technical stuff.

It's standard on a competing product. And it's purely a convenience issue, but this game wastes enough of my time, a few thousand or small tens of thousands of credits a week is immaterial. It's the time wasted making sure I get the right spec for tonight, depending on who shows up. And then changing back to my old spec (wastes more time). Worse still is that you tend to need to respec because someone had to go or the like, and you're trying to fill in, which means the time you spend respecing is not only wasting your time, but it's wasting 7 or 15 other peoples time. Clicking buttons to set a spec, and then set bars back up isn't fun. One can argue about whether or not choosing a spec can be fun, but there's nothing 'fun' about trying to select the right talents quickly when you already know what you want them to be. it's a time waster, and importantly, it's not a fun time waster, it's busy work, and busy work should be done by computers, not people.

SWTOR as an entity is in trouble if enough people leave. LucasArts doesn't want another SWG on their brand, nor does EA want to keep pouring in the resources (especially the LA licence) to a product that's not making enough money. What those cutoff points are is hard to say, because obviously EA may be willing to run at a loss until they have something else near release that would replace. The problem we're into is what are they going to try and do to either attract new subscribers, retain the ones they have etc. They may not radically change the game, but they might start trying a lot of things that end up being complete disasters.

Doesn't really work that way. This was a "leave on these terms now, because we're not providing guarantees about what's happening to you later". If you don't leave you're now left with a vacated server, whether it was able to plod along previously or not. All ways around this was bizarre. I wouldn't say stupid, although stupid is probably correct, I could be wrong. They're emptying out most of the severs leaving them unplayable and concentrating populations. But it's not clear what's going to happen to the vacant servers. Anyone else would have shut down servers and moved people to target servers (mid size or otherwise). BioWare seem to be resisting the need to 'close servers' so they're going to basically have a bunch of abandoned servers that are no longer viable, but are sticking around for no apparent reason. Concentrating servers is good (give or take how they're resolving name conflicts badly, and then the guild and and guild bank problems). Concentrating people into some servers and leaving others mostly empty is strange, probably stupid, but definitely strange.

There's nothing really wrong with having a space mini game. This is a much narrower and more efficient use of art assets than a full blown space sim, and given the problems they have everywhere else I can see needing some time to get it all together. SWG didn't have JTL for a couple of years after all. But you're right in that BioWare was told the moment they announced an on rails shooter that people wanted a proper space game. Whether they have one coming or not is hard to say, but they should be up front about what the plan is for space. Adding another space mission to the existing system doesn't really hurt anyone or do any harm. It's not like the programmer time to make an actual space game is being used on the mini game missions, and the art assets may as well get used somewhere.

yes, but WoW has a much lower entry point cost wise than SWTOR has, as the price of the base game dropped repeatedly over the years. They've also had all sorts of things to try and persuade you to get your friends to join (including free trials for friend invites). Recruit a friend has been around since 2008. The market place has changed too. When WoW came out the only real competition was EQ, and it was dated by that point (and had a lot of problems). By now lots of MMO's have betas, trials, RaF type programmes etc. SWTOR shouldn't be any different.

And WoW and EQ2 are both natural progressions of EQ1. Sometimes they differentiate themselves for the sake of being different from each other, and sometimes they steal good ideas from each other.

Raising the level cap lets them add new stuff at a much higher item level so they can wipe the slate clean on all of the stuff in game that's a disaster, and they can completely rehash skills or the skill trees etc. to be much more functional if they feel they need to without wrecking how people do content right now. That doesn't mean they won't charge for new levels, but there's a good argument for say giving away up to 55 for free, wipe out all the current level 50 gear/spec/itemization problems they do have, and work forward from there. Also, this is a game that is supposed to largely be about your own story. Adding more levels certainly extends that story and gives you multiple reason to complete a new planet with a whole quest chain on it.

Raising the level cap lets you: Progress your character story (insofar as it has one in games other than SWTOR). You can add new abilities in some controlled fashion rather than just dumping 3 new abilities on players that they have no idea how to use. You get to add in a new tier of easy to get gear that is almost as good as top tier raiding gear (if not better). This means everyone can start into the new raiding tier at roughly the same level gear wise. You get to trivialize old raid content (insofar as it wasn't trivialized already). You get to wipe out all the weird stuff with current gear. Think reusable biochem stuff, augment slots that are inconsistently understood. Armour that's useful but can't have mods removed etc. Just wipe that slate clean. Hard mode flashpoints is hard to say. This isn't wow, and this is, like a lot of missed opportunities for SWTOR, a chance for them to do something different or interesting. Whether they will or not is another matter. In WoW it would mean all new flashpoints and the old ones would become trivialized irrelevant content (like a level 50 doing normal modes sort of thing). They could scale some of the current flash points to the new level, or junk them all and start afresh with new flashpoints that are more even experiences. yes, the game is very much a hampster wheel of progression. Every now and then you need to stop the wheel so new people can get on. Right now isn't so bad, but one more raid tier like this and it would be a real pain to come into the game and try and gear up (not impossible, just a pain) to be able to do 'current' content.

The EA live press conference just finished like 1 minute ago. They probably have to wait until that is over. The other thing is that SWTOR got about 4 minutes of time. There might be more stuff at E3 related to SWTOR that didn't make the main presentation (rightly, the main presentation is about actiony things that make for pretty pictures, their talking about social stuff was for franchises 10x the size of SWTOR). They may also have all of their staff you know...watching their corporate overlords propaganda reel and they are just now free to update it. Need to pad that active viewers number somehow right? Ok I'm being slightly overblown, but it's not like anything they announced is coming tomorrow, so it doesn't really matter when it gets posted. And really, given the job they've been doing testing so far, it's probably for the best it's not coming tomorrow.

Agreed, but those are too technical for an E3 presentation. They'd make sense as an announcement here, but not at E3. Player housing is basically a non starter. As I said, an actual space combat game is more expansion territory, not really E3 this year stuff. They don't want to have a situation where they announce something today and next E3 we're all wondering where it is. I can't imagine a proper space game could be done particularly quickly and be done well. They really deliberately didn't want a decent space game at launch. I have no idea why that is, but they deliberately did it the way it is. Changing that up to an actual space game would require quite a lot of lead time work. Social activities and mini games don't make for good presentation material. Definitely not E3 quality. Compare to what everyone else has which are very intense action sequences (sports, FPS, driving etc.). Social games and mini activities that take more than 5 seconds to convey would be unsuitable.

Uh... what exactly else is there? New planet with some new quests. New raid, new space zone, new playable race, new companion. That's pretty much the entire game. Core combat systems subtle things like how group finder will work, guild management or whatever is not really suitable for a 4 or 5 minute presentation. Major revisions, like an actual space combat game would be nice sure. But pretty much 'more of the game' is well... what you'd expect. Whole new systems I'd expect to be expansion pack territory, and they aren't there yet. Interesting to compare the screen time SWTOR got to the sims, BF3 or medal of honor [sic]. But they make for much better presentation material than an MMO does.

There's a big spread there. Bioware probably bought the fastest computers they could in 2006 which ended up being commercial parts in 2007, and that set the minimum requirements of a nvidia 7800 or ATI (yes ATI still) x1800. That limits you to directx 9, because directx 10 never really added much, and directx 11 was too far off in the distance to have built tech to support it meaningfully that far into the future. But the spread between a modern top end GPU, like a GTX 680 and a 7800 is something like a factor of 7 or 8. (A GTX 680 is almost exactly 6x faster than an 8800 GTX which it itself somewhat faster than a 7800). It's completely impractical to take advantage of the GTX 680 and still have it workable at all on the 7800. There's a huge industry problem here in explaining to people than an 8400 series is probably worse than a 7800 and therefore not up to minimum specs, and even if it was up to minimum specs why would you voluntarily subject yourself to trying to build a game to run on hardware that old. The 7800 was a decent enough card, and on a smaller monitor it's probably viable, but a slower card...eeeewww. The big performance problem with SWTOR is really load times anyway. Solid state drives help a lot, but you can't count on everyone having an SSD yet, and even then, it's still terrible performance in general. They really screwed up with weekend testing because the really bad planets (notably corellia) didn't get hit with the weekend tests, and well, it shows. Probably there is a combination caching and file format problem. That or they're doing some networking during the load times and that's not working out. At this point, any lower settings and you start really having problems with designing gameplay. Visual effects for spells etc... can only be turned down so much before you have to turn them off or do some terrible 2D hack to make them visible. If you have people trying to play with ultra low settings they simply won't be able to see effects as well as people with better hardware etc. It's a disaster gameplay wise.

Has anyone, ever, in the history of software development made a product fully to initial spec and on time? /sarcasm Games are both creative and technical endeavours. MMO's are more technical than other games in that you have a lot of complex interactions between systems, mathematics that needs to be much much much much much much much more precise than anything in a single player game. A 10% over or underpowered ability in a single player game is a non issue. A 10% overpowered ability in an MMO can have major spillover effects into people re rolling, community problems etc. etc. etc. On top of that, just because you want to do something, and have a fairly good idea how to do it, doesn't mean you can get the implementation to behave the way you want. Writing code can be like that.

Money. Though one follows the other, you can't make players happy if you have to shut down the game due to lack of money. The games business is just that, business. Yes, we have this creative side of trying to explore new concepts, new worlds and tell interesting stories. But in the end the people who do all of that work, and put all of the rock and trees in those worlds need to be paid. If you have no money, there is no world. I consult on a lot of smaller indie/mobile/handheld type stuff on the side, and some of those games are hugely popular with the 5000 people who bought them. That gives you warm fuzzy feeling inside to have worked on them. And as long as you only spend half a dozen man months on the project whether or not it makes a pile of money, or just manages to break even and pay the bills with government subsidies is good enough. But if you only sell 1000 copies there isn't going to be a followup, no matter how rabid your fan base is. When you are the size of bioware with a payroll of 5 million dollars a month just for development for something like SWTOR it's a whole other ball game. If your revenue comes in at 3.5 million you're going to have to lay off a LOT of people and when that happens it doesn't matter how happy the people who gave you the 3.5 million dollars are, it's still miserable.

True. They spent 900 million dollars to buy bioware, which got them ME, DA and a partially complete SWTOR. They had to pile a few tens of millions more into SWTOR to get it out the door and drawing revenue. But overall, BioWare with it's 800 ish people on now 4 different franchises total is probably only running them 120 million a year. The 'per subscriber' cost of SWTOR (servers and bandwidth and support personel) count separately. But remember EA spends about 3 and a half billion dollars a year. Sure, if SWTOR had taken off to 10 million subs it would be a pile of money, but for EA in general PC games are probably no more than 15 or 20% of their business, and a title like madden or battlefield might run 70 or 80 million in development, another 150 or 200 million in advertising and generate revenue to support that. SWTOR costs a lot to make, a lot to licence and it has a relatively narrow release in that you can't do a console version and you are entering a market place where people already have a game they are playing. (Unlike say call of duty vs battlefield where players can play both and both activision and EA get money, people generally will only pay for one MMO, because they can't have time for both). The games business is a lot like the movie business. You are never quite sure if something will be a hit, and the big guys are constantly throwing money at a 100 different projects hoping 10 of them will become super hits and the rest you're happy to break even on. SWTOR probably won't ever break even for EA overall, not given how much it cost to buy BioWare and how much they've had to invest thus far, and how much they have to pay lucasarts. The 12 month profitability point was probably up around 1.4 million, and they'll struggle to achieve that, though they can pick up subs by launching in a lot more regions and repurpose all the servers they close, and of course they've cut costs by axing staff.

Interesting, when giving talks on supporting gamers with physical and learning disabilities I use SWTOR and WoW as full of examples of things not to do. I suppose it depends on which disability you have which is most problematic, and which version you're talking about (e.g. pre-cataclysm wow vs post cataclysm wow). To give a simple example. if you're colour blind SWTOR is manageable but not particularly friendly. You pretty much *have* to hover over all of the instance portals because you can't tell which is which apparently (I'm not colour blind so I don't actually have this problem). WoW on the other hand was pretty good. Until cata. Now some people cannot see the new fishing pools. At all. If you have a learning disability that impairs your ability to tie symbols to actions play a death knight in WoW and avoid Mages or anything in SWTOR like the plague. SWTOR abilities are organized the way a programmer would organize them (e.g. all melee abilities are orange with a lightsabre on them, all lightning abilities are purple with an electric bolt on them). For some people they simple can't figure out which button is which in a pinch and they all 'look the same' if you have a vision processing problem (not blindness, but a learning or mental challenge with recognizing symbols or structures, some people have "face blindness" from essentially the same type of problem where they cannot recognize faces because people look too much the same). People who have fine motor problems and have trouble with buttons benefit a lot from the ability queue system and companions, but neither WoW or SWTOR (or really any similar MMO's) have much help with things like controlling the camera effectively, or mouse moving. Overall I rank SWTOR as significantly worse than WoW, but better at certain things (notably WoW regressing is especially bad, SWG did the same thing on a much bigger scale, and that trust relationship with developers is critical to the whole process).