Ardrossan
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Posts posted by Ardrossan
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I would not want AI to replace VAs, the writers' strike is based in part on AI taking their jobs, I wouldn't want that happening to Grey DeLisle or Steve Blum just to save bioware a few bucks, that entire concept sounds gross. That also to me smacks of a lack of gratitude to these amazing voice actors and the work they've contributed to this game over the years. Unless you're hearing impaired as some posters have mentioned, or hearing other language versions (still VAs in that case though) then you've benefited greatly from an incredibly talented cast, even if you didn't bother to learn their names.
For those thinking that fans or *shudder* bioware staff could record VA instead...no. Just no. We have plenty of examples in games where amateurs voice stuff, or mods that try to use unvoiced cut content (kotor2 has a bit of this in the restoration mod) and the results are really bad. Someone mentioned mass effect above, generally the VA for that franchise was superb and on par with SWTOR, the immediate exception would be Diana Allers in ME3 voiced by Jessica Chobot, a gaming journalist they included in the game so she'd write them a nice review. She sounded like trash and made that cringe character even worse.
No, you need people who are professionally trained to do character voices and the way to do that is not to suggest shortcuts like AI or be fine with kotor costcutting, but to demand better. We're paying them, we can make our priorities known to them, and they should listen, and if they don't, vote with your wallet and find a game that does listen to its playerbase!
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20 minutes ago, Diamaht said:
Advice that encourages ways to ignore and sweep under the rug a bad gameplay experience that helps lead to the decline of the game is not well-meaning.
If you believe the game difficulty is an issue that requires cumbersome steps to skirt around (and you clearly do) then stand up for something better.
If you don't like the game as it is, you are free to make suggestions to bioware. And bioware is free to ignore you[1]. And you are free to leave the game. And they allow you to do so. And this entire transactional experience has absolutely nothing to do with what forum randos may say.
[1] You are here
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17 minutes ago, Diamaht said:
Your like or dislike of the argument is irrelevant. This is how people who play games, any kind of game, react to trivial content. It's a major factor in the declining population over the years.
Citation please
17 minutes ago, Diamaht said:It astounds me how fervently you gate keepers vote against your own interests. Making the game as a whole far more appealing to a larger audience, while costing you almost nothing, gets you the budget for all the things you want.
You seem to be under a few misapprehensions. We don't 'vote' for anything. You made your pitch in a thread and assuming there's more than just a couple guys on the swtor forum saying it, they may or may not do something. Probably leaning on the side of not since they've avoided altering story missions for years. But who knows, maybe you got through. It's not my decision, and it's definitely not your decision.
Second, you have no basis to claim that game difficulty is a major factor in declining population, or indeed any factor whatsoever. You don't like it...but here you are anyway, weeks later, still complaining on the forum about it. Are you still paying for a sub? If so, why? Clearly game difficulty is not a deal-breaker for you.
It costs not almost nothing, but absolutely nothing, to make suggestions. But you're not on the suggestions forum, you're on general discussion, because you think you're speaking some kind of universal truth about the game rather than "It would be nice if bioware did this" like the suggestions over there.
Idk if you're getting this crucial point because you've never acknowledged it, but I'll say it one last time and then I'm done. If you do the things that have been suggested, you can make your own difficulty. It's not a perfect solution, but it might tide you over until bioware makes the necessary changes if they ever do that. Or you can do nothing, and continue to sulk, and continue to complain about players 'gatekeeping' and 'voting against your own interests'...all of which won't help you a jot in the actual gameplay you're so fervent to change. I made my choice a long time ago, do what you want, but enough with blaming players, we aren't responsible for what bioware chooses to prioritize.
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1 hour ago, Diamaht said:
What you guys are not acknowledging is that players do not enjoy self sabotage. It's what you want people to accept so that you don't have to suffer through any changes, but it's not a viable way to attract players to the game. Its actually exclusively a way to repel.
Yes, I acknowledge that you want the best armor mods, be as overleveled as possible, with a rank 50 companion, and expect to still be challenged fighting Skavak. That is not this game. That has never been this game, even in the glorious 1.0 launch era you envision through rose-colored lens as a magical time of peak difficulty. It never happened like that. Overleveling would grey out your combat, the only difference between then and now is that you still get xp from what we'd have called greyed-out quests. That was the era when you could beat world bosses solo just by being sufficiently high level.
I'm done with this. Follow the advice offered or don't, it makes no difference to me. Good luck convincing bioware.
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7 hours ago, xxSHOONYxx said:
You can also close your eyes or chop your arms off to make the game more difficult. Those are good advices too
Here I thought you were merely the voice of ranked pvp (such a shame it's gone
) and nightmare raiding (lol ditto) but I see you're also something of an expert in histrionic forum melodrama too. Maybe we could start our own guild 
You and anyone else are free to ignore the good, well-meaning advice offered by people who have been playing this game and trying to find strategies to make up our own difficulty for vanilla combat in ways that feel satisfying to us. As I observed before, I'm sure it is also a kind of satisfaction to complain on the forum until bioware deigns to notice you
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Compare the vanilla version of this game: You accept a quest from a cat lady on ord mantell which has a DS/LS choice attached. When you're done speaking to her you can click her sprite and she'll have another line of dialogue (1), often a recap of the quest (bioware seemed to think players had goldfish memories or something). Once you finish the quest you can either go back to her or a different guy (LS/DS), and whoever you go back to will have another dialogue line, usually to thank you (2). Then if you so choose, you can go back to the other questgiver who you didn't hand in the quest, click on their sprite...and they have something else to say (3).
All quests from 1-50 have at least 1 and 2 extra lines of dialogue. Most quests from Illum to Yavin IV also have these extra lines. They stopped doing them in KOTFE, which is where they introduced the KOTOR-style dialogues, yet another reason to hate those expansions imo.
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3 minutes ago, OlBuzzard said:
I strongly disagree! IMO she has a job to do! She is (more than likely) not a programmer neither in charge of making final decisions as to the direction of the game! I would doubt that those PM's would be more than two or three scattered over the entire time she has been here! BUT in the context of what was said (and NO I will not share them) ... she is the genuine article as far as a community manager is concerned! I do not agree with everything that is said (from her standpoint of view) ... but I can also appreciate what it means to manage / interact with .. this type of setting.
At this point we are getting into personalities ... and I think the rest is best left alone!
Yes, she has a job to do and that job is communicating openly with players, not lurking and chatting up a few randos while she's in complete control of the conversation. That is not community management. IDC that her concern feels genuine to you. I'm sure she appreciates having a sympathetic ear rather than someone who would actually hold her accountable and demand better. I care that finding these things out based on rumors is both completely unprofessional on her part and exactly what I expect from this studio. Yes it is about personalities--this is the legacy of having Musco in charge, bioware acts like they've been collectively traumatized by the playerbase, so 10+ years later this is the game culture we're stuck with, community managers who are afraid and suspicious of their own fans. It's outrageous!
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10 hours ago, OlBuzzard said:
@JackieKo I know that she does care! I have received PM's from her from time to time (unprompted). That just doesn't happen unless that concern is genuine!
This is one of those comments that you think would land better than it actually does. To me it says that we don't have a community manager, we have a lurker who has a few forum favorites
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6 minutes ago, WayOfTheWarriorx said:
That's a good idea.
And in the same vein, in addition to Cartel Market certificates, maybe they can make some sort of conversion vendor. So maybe you could convert Season Tokens to one of the other forms of currency (if they're going to insist on keeping so many of them.) So maybe you could convert 1 season token to say for example, 100 OP-1 Catalysts, 200 FP-1 Stabilizers, 500 Tech Frags, 300 Conquest Commendations, etc. etc.
This way there is bound to be some of these that every player will be able to have some use for depending on their needs at the time.
They can still keep their crapy Season Vendors as they presently exist if they want, just add these to the list of options to spend Season Tokens on.
Right, this would be a good way to make a credit sink too by adding a surcharge for the conversion process. What we need is like a shady dealer npc who can convert currencies back and forth while taking a credit fee. Of course, if we could do it for all the currencies you mention it opens up the possibility of converting CCs to credits or vice versa. Maybe tie in the shady dealer with the way amplifiers used to work, so the more you use their services in a given amount of time (like a conquest week), the more exponentially expensive the fee is. Alternatively, you could buy the shady dealer as a utility deco using season tokens and once set up in your stronghold he'll offer services at a slightly reduced rate.
smh this must be how people in the suggestions forum must feel, like we should all be working for bioware if they could only be bothered to read any of these posts.
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I'd rather they eliminate tokens as one of many currencies we don't need, and instead offer cartel market certificates, which has a wider vendor list.
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5 hours ago, LauLin said:
I am attempting to do the quest for Beryl Thorne requiring my Smuggler to sabotage pirate crates. I cannot for the life of me locate them. The pink arrow indicates going down and when I go down a ramp it then changes to indicate going up. I'm quite confused. I rode all over and haven't been able to locate this cargo. Are they at the docks or in a warehouse? Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
See video walkthrough.
btw, this isn't really offtopic, you might have gotten a quicker response putting this in general discussion or new player help, just fyi for next time.
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7 hours ago, Shayddow said:
Also problematic was making it "one size fits all" in both the story decisions (for skipping), and in the choices they came up with. Typical of squeezing a non-force user into a force user story was the story where you make yourself a new lightsaber on Odessan. Very much a force-user thing. (While it had non-force user make a new weapon of their own. (blaster pistol/ rifle/sniper rifle, assault cannon). Non-force users typically don't do this type of thing in the lore.
I don't care what anyone says, that chapter was probably the most lore-breaking part of the entire game. I'm certain that bioware intended it to be early foreshadowing that Valkorian was messing with you and that Satele and Marr were intended to be his sockpuppets and not actually there in the first place--they do exactly what valkorian wants you to do, make you believe that you have to abandon your alignment because the eternal empire is soooo special and unique
and then get you make a magic weapon that is only good at killing arcann. Doesn't seem like a very Jedi thing to do. But for whatever reason they made it inconsistent with Satele's other appearances and you're led to believe that no, it actually really did happen. Just awful writing.
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7 hours ago, Shayddow said:
(An interesting footnote - I recently redid the HK-51 quest on a toon that already had it unlocked thru legacy unlock. Didn't get another HK unit, although I DID get as an "award" the HK armor - which was 118 droid armor. Amazed this stuff is still in the game when they eliminated droid armor in what was it, 3.0 or 4.0?). As the "new" existing mode of HK doesn't even have slots to put this in, I just vaulted it)
wow, I didn't know you didn't get an HK after redoing the quest. I tried it recently but I had to stop at Taris after getting nowhere with the search.
The droid armor prize seems reminiscent of the droid armor upgrade you used to be able to get to upgrade T7 in the JK finale on DK, after doing the bonus. That was scrapped in 4.0 I think and now all that's left is droid junk to vendor.
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1 hour ago, Diamaht said:
No there isn't.
Basicaly you need to, take off your gear, dismiss your companion, don't do most the content on the planets so you don't level to much.
It's pretty bad.
It's pretty clear you've done none of the strategies that I or @DWho have suggested if that's what you're taking from it. It's easy to maintain the same opinion when you just don't bother reading anything that disagrees with your own, huh?
Let's play devil's advocate and assume that you're right and all these ideas aren't even worth trying, you can't do anything about it on your own. Okay, well you've made and contributed to these difficulty threads and bioware has your feedback. And now you just need to wait for them to fix everything, right? Could be waiting a long time. In the meanwhile, I'll be playing the game, using the WAM, keeping track of the planet range, using green mods, because I know from long experience that expecting any studio, let alone this one, to immediately fix the problem, is a pipe dream. So if it's too much to expect you to try to create your own difficulty, I guess you're just going to have to be permanently unhappy on this forum. It's not like you can just play a different game that's more challenging, right
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10 minutes ago, SteveTheCynic said:
How did you not have Khem active at that point?
I dismissed him right after I got him.
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I died on Korriban recently with a new SI. I found out that it's almost impossible to kill the Teranterak at level if you don't have Khem in your party.
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8 minutes ago, DWho said:
Challenge in SWTOR is no different than any other MMO. When you massively over-level/overpower what you are fighting, it becomes extremely easy. Level Sync is largely ineffective on the first 2 or 3 planets because your abilities change so fast and it ends up being the abilities that are a major driver in how easy the content is at that level. Once you get past those first couple planets, level sync starts to "work" in that the fights become longer. The closer you keep your character to the level of what you are fighting the more "challenging" it becomes. You are not going to die often from the leveling content but you can end up taking lots of damage and with the increased repair costs, it can start to be a challenge to keep your gear repaired unless you are making major forays outside the basic leveling content to acquire credits (selling stuff on the GTN, running dailies and weeklies, and doing heroics). Even at launch, leveling content was not difficult, just tedious (and over-leveling was the way to solve difficult fights and even solo heroics, flashpoints, and world bosses).
1) Try keeping your level on par with the content (don't use xp boosts wherever possible and avoid rested xp). You could also use a f2p account which gets 20% less xp that a sub account or if you have one, use a White Acute Module, available from a Gree vendor on the Fleet during double xp events, it is legacy bound so you can move it freely between characters through the mail or a legacy bank
2) Only use the gear that drops from the class story or planetary story missions (heroic gear is very over-powered compared to the leveling content)
3) Create a special toolbar that only contains the abilities you would have available to you if you were the same level as the planetary maximum and only use those abilities in combat. Using high level abilities against low level foes (even as few as 5 levels higher) can seriously unbalance the encounter since the NPCs were not built with those abilities in mind.
4) Only level your companions (Influence from Presence stat) through the story missions (no gifts or boosts) and keep them set to the role they had in the original game instead of using them as heals all the time. If you use high influence companions, they will quickly overwhelm the lower level NPCs ability to do damage (or take damage in the case of DPS companions).
5) On low level planets, collected datacrons in your legacy can be the majority of your stats making your character very overpowered for the level since as long as you are below the planet level, stat reductions from level sync are not applied. Playing storylines on the European servers from the US (or vice versa) is not particularly impacted by lag so you could start a new legacy there with no datacrons or boosts if your main legacy is filled out.
There are some places where there is nothing you can do to make the fight any more challenging due to the way level sync works on NPCs. The Emperor fight for the JK and the Baras fight for the SW occur on a low level planet and with level sync are now very easy with a high level character. This is something Bioware should look at fixing. Placing Chapter bosses in instanced areas set to the level they are supposed to be would go a long way to making these fights more interesting.
KotFE and KotET are a different story in that they have multiple levels of difficulty available for leveling but in the "easy" mode some of the fights are very challenging for certain classes when played with KotFE/KotET gear and level.
This is all great advice. Another thing I would add is to try to leave planets before level sync kicks in...this is easier to do with the WAM. Level sync comes into effect 1-2 levels after the planetary range maximum, which is why I use that (from the galaxy map) as my guide when to leave the planet. If you wait for level sync to go into effect, it will unbalance the combat. This is especially important on the earlier planets, it can get to the point where you might hit a planet (for me it's usually Taris/Balmorra) where you have to skip everything but the class mission to stay at the correct level (even with the WAM).
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9 minutes ago, eabevella said:
What Disney will do to the Old Republic era money cow? They already included the Old Republic symbol in their canon timeline during SWC but that's about it for now. They announced KOTOR remake but canceled it. But even if the remake is not canceled, how much of the original KOTOR game will be altered in the name of remake? Who know. Like you say, they might just cherry pick whatever they want and shove the rest under the rug. There are too many world building in SWTOR that Disney may not like.
Not just swtor if they put their hands on the whole kotor storyline. Lucasfilm hated K2 when it first came out and swtor has largely ignored it, it's safe to say that this game draws most of its inspiration from the first game and there wouldnt have been our K2 if bioware had developed it (to be fair they might have been able to come up with an actual ending). I didn't like seeing bioware's take on kreia, i would hate to see Disney's.
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1 hour ago, TrixxieTriss said:
Yep, it’s also a good spin on it & pretty much in line with having swtor 2.0 being set 100-200 years in the future to add a hard separation from the swtor 1.0 time period so there can be a fresh start.
I was thinking about something after my post about 2.0. What about races & character that live longer than that? Ie Scourge is what, 400 years old 🤷🏻♀️. In my head cannon for some of my characters, they have the potential to live hundreds of years.
It would be awesome if you could somehow run into those older characters or even companions in a new version of swtor 2.0.
Scourge doesn't have Vitiate superpowers anymore, he wouldn't survive a time jump. The droids would survive, like T7. Bowdaar and other wookiees could be around. The Yoda Jedi masters would survive, though not sure if they're any left in the endgame storyline.
Given the way the game hypes up legacy at the end of companion trees, it would make sense to play into that here, have children of Fem!SW and Quinn's ordered breeding, Jedi apprentices of our Jedi PCs, different generations of the SI's cult etc. You'd have to export your character to the new game so it could keep track of all your decisions, which would be a DAO-sized job unless they made a lot of cuts in what can be carried over. You can do the Malora intro quest on Korriban and it carries over your DS/LS choice when you meet her on Ossus, but there's not much difference in her canned response.
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Swtor 2 has been floated around for years but I gotta say, I'm pretty skeptical. Consider the incredible amount of work this game was in vanilla. People may have complained about lack of endgame and all the missing QoL stuff, but that's because they put so much effort into small details in the class stories. Compare that to the story drip content we get now. I fully believe that the original team could have made a swtor 2 set a century after Illum or something, but I don't believe this team would be able to give us anything more than Onslaught: the game, even if they had adequate funding.
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14 hours ago, Stradlin said:
Ok, now let's do Eric Musco!
When I heard they had actually made a former community manager into lead of the entire team, I thought of Bonnie Armstrong, the lead producer of an ancient MMO called Ultima Online. Her career trajectory is similar to Musco: countless years of work in various positions similar to community manager, steadily climbing the corporate ladder each time people left or EA moved folks around. Like Musco, she eventually landed as the leader of the small dev team that remained. I think she went from forum moderator/playterster into lead producer, without any programmer or game dev background. Her DNA and roots as a former community manager show so clearly. Incredible amount of outreach towards the community for years. She must have done hundreds of meet and greet things by now, as the lead developer. Little scheduled events where she shows up in-game, players gather and then they talk about Ultima Online, ask her questions, make suggestions. Visiting each server in turn. She was never a programmer or a writer or a developer, but she has played Ultima Online for decades, and worked on it for..about as long I guess.. She knows every..single..little..thing about the game, from players' perspective. During these meet&greets, players aren't some crowd that is expected to sit quietly and listen as devs read a literal script on livestream. These encounters are about interaction, Questions and comments of community and Armstrong's replies are the whole beef of these things.
If somewhat clumsy analogy is allowed, while lead dev is the captain of the ship, imo the helm is always located in rooms where the og expertise of the new captain was such that it landed him the position to begin with. Writer, or programmer, or community manager evolves into the final form of whichever pokemon they were pre-promotion.
There is virtually no normal organic real interaction between players and anyone from BW on these forums.
Lol it's an amazing comparison. It's pretty clear that Armstrong effectively used her community management experience not only to leverage the higher position she won but also that she remembered those experiences and continued to use it when interacting with the community.
And as that applies to swtor, it's equally clear that Musco and Jackie do none of that. Instead they make excuses for why they are never to be found on the forums and react defensively when it comes up. They promise greater communication which never comes--It's a miracle that she responded today, but the fact is that there should have never been a need to do a callout thread in the first place, the CM should be a visible presence on this forum, not just retreating behind locked announcement threads. Active participation, not just one-time, is the only way to reduce player frustration with this situation, and that includes bioware staff taking their lumps and acknowledging it as constructive criticism because they are not the only game in town and we can see that others in the industry have done much better in the same job.
So @JackieKo if this interaction is real and a positive sign of greater communication--then stick with it. Continue to post on a regular basis, not just to dispense information but rather acting like someone who enjoys this game like all of us here. Yes you will get criticism, and that criticism is valid because it comes from years of being ignored by this studio. I don't expect that you can change bioware's lackluster content updates, but I do expect you to be visibly around and receptive to player feedback because that is what will change hearts and minds, but it's a slow process. If you only want blind praise you are in the wrong business.
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I hate uprisings. Sub-only group content is short-sighted. You need people in queues, doesn't matter if they're paying or not. In the case of uprisings, the queue was so slow because people would rather do FPs or Ops. If they were soloable, even if they were a middle ground between story FPs and veteran FPs, I would absolutely do them.
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2 hours ago, Otowi said:
Oh yeah, the walker missions and the crashing Vaylin's party one are bad. I dread the party one, as it's a horribly designed map, and the so called "help" they give you is all but useless, so you run around in circles trying to figure out where to go next.
A chapter skip would be a most welcome QOL in the Knights expansion, but I doubt we will get something like that...
It's incredible that this is what fans of the expansion chose to highlight as good content. If I were to pick something good about the expansions it might be the havoc squad chapter in KOTFE, or the DK chapter in KOTET with Acina. Perhaps they thought that this stuff is different from other stuff in the game, which is true--they're bad different. Whereas the stuff I mentioned is good because they were one of the few moments of the expansions when I actually felt like I was playing my vanilla character class and not the generic Outlander.
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14 minutes ago, Bigfallenstar said:
This reads like those face book moms who think they know more than doctors. I don't what's worst: The fact he actually had the gall to post this, or the people who are taking it seriously all because he mentioned better communication.
My first post was sarcastic
but subsequent posts dumping on KOTFE were genuine.
I can run this game much better than EAware (which isn't saying much)
in General Discussion
Posted
But apparently people in this thread found the execution of it extremely interesting
lol I can't figure it out either. idk I like the consular story which most people hate so yes opinions are subjective, but I'd also freely admit that it's by no means a masterpiece or even very well written (same with the trooper storyline post Act 1) which no one in this thread who actually likes kotfe seems to be able to acknowledge about it.