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Rolodome

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Everything posted by Rolodome

  1. I've seen you say some contrarian things that are arguably just a matter of opinion, but this is just pathetic to see coming from you. I don't care if I get in trouble for saying it, you sound like a scared child who is fearful of a brand getting in trouble because you are too invested in it; the panic coming from you because someone said class action. You can strut around with your programmer experience any time programming comes up, go ahead, that's an area of expertise for you, but you need to swallow your inflated sense of self importance for once and stop talking about graphic design cause you obviously don't understand the first thing about it if you think this inventory design is anything like looking at a blank white page in a word processor document. Stay in your lane. Nobody needs to hear your patronizing faux analysis on a subject you don't understand. People in physical pain trying to enjoy a product they paid for and you really thought you were saying something telling them to go to the doctor and mouthing off about word documents. You have clearly gone too long without anyone calling you out on your BS. Consider this a wake up call if you get a chance to read it before I get punished for "personal attacks." You are fully capable of being better than this, but you have to work on decoupling your sense of self worth from trying to be the smartest person in the room all the time. I know from experience, I struggle with it myself. If I can learn to listen more on matters I don't understand, so can you.
  2. I think I've come to terms with the most likely explanation as being that the same institutional rot that created Anthem has come to destroy what's left of SWTOR and it will prob continue to plague this company until its last studio finally gets shut down from too many failures. None of the other explanations people come up with really hold together all that well on closer examination, but if you look at what happened with Anthem and imagine that same environment applied to this game, it starts making sense how we got 7.0. Just imagine management that is head in the clouds ambitious + can't make up their minds about what they want, tech that is very hard to work with, workers crunched til they have breakdowns, "BW magic" belief from higher ups that it will all work out in the end. If you think about what could possibly produce this charlie foxtrot of an update, that seems like a clear fit. It would also fit with the radio silence about the whole thing, despite so much ire. If management couldn't make up their minds and was head in the clouds ambitious, then naturally, they wouldn't want to stand by this update because they prob think it's awful too (tho maybe not for all the same reasons). And falling on the sword of their massive failure in such a way might put their career at risk, so they'd rather hide, keep schmoozing, and see how they can leverage it to fail upwards.
  3. Her situation makes me think of this scene: (for context, the character Jim Carrey is playing had just gotten hired on as VP of communications - also, the movie was inspired in part by what happened in RL with Enron)
  4. I appreciate the thought, but I don't think that's gonna save my interest in video games. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's not like it's a switch I can just flip off. I've modded extensively, I studied video game design, I've made at least one (very small) game. It's a lot to contemplate leaving behind, but the headspace I'm in right now, I think there's just a lot about the environments surrounding them and the direction they've been going that is very unhealthy and I don't see a path forward right now that leads to an upswing in that trend for games without great societal change relating to the, ah... "social mechanics" of what has brought us here to begin with (I am being intentionally vague bcuz I'm trying to avoid getting into depth on the controversy-attracting P word).
  5. It's been a long time coming, but I might just quit video games entirely. I've watched the trends of the video game industry over years and I've seen how awfulness gets normalized time after time. I've watched as people turn on their fellow players and tell them off for having any standards at all. It's like going into the trenches of an ideological war just trying to have a conversation on a video game forum. And now, in this update, I see a combination of some of the worst growing tendencies in this industry manifest into effectively destroying what was a decent game and replacing it with a half finished, incoherent mess, without even anyone who produced it being willing to stand up for it and defend it as being in some way coherent. The spinelessness of it is appalling and the silence is deafening, and because of how narratives have been created, spun, and normalized over the years, my putting it that way will be instantly mentally categorized by some people as "a gamer taking things too seriously." As video game enthusiasts, we have been progandized into a corner where we are unallowed to have standards at all passionately because that's "gamer rage." We are unallowed to want a quality product for what we spend because that's "being entitled." We are unallowed to sound at all dramatic because "it's just video games" and [insert example of some 1 out of a million "gamer" who went way too far to represent millions of people]. It's exhausting, demeaning, and unhealthy to spend time in an environment like that on a regular basis. And it's exhausting and demoralizing to know how poorly the workers in this industry get treated too, the type of nonsense they have to put up being told to turn this medium more and more over time into virtual casinos. People are so starved for anyone who cares anymore, they'll hear an ounce of indication that a company is listening and it's like water in the desert. This industry is already on its way to leaving video game enthusiasts behind, except for the ones it can successfully turn into payers more than players. It only makes sense for me to consider leaving it behind before there's nothing left to enjoy. I've been playing computer games heavily for a long time now. But nowadays, most of what's left is nostalgia for the games that captured my imagination years ago. I wish the newer folks could see what it was like then, so they'd understand why I have the standards that I do. It didn't have to go down like this. This medium has way more potential than gets explored anymore.
  6. Ultra elite players, good lord. Imagine using this language for any other hobby. "Horrifying that amateur knitters could get access to the same high quality fabric that the ultra elite knitters were using! What reason was there to even knit at that point?" Video game enthusiasts really need a perspective check on some of this stuff. Some of the stuff people think is normal would sound like pure nonsense to anyone who doesn't play video games.
  7. Honestly, I think somebody else should be speaking up, else it's like that Jim Carrey movie where he gets hired on to represent a corporation right as it's crumbling; just not fair to the community person. The lead who is most responsible for these changes should be the face of them, instead of a go-between. Cause if they can't take responsibility for it and acknowledge there are major issues, then I don't think a community person is going to be able to either, as they are just a messenger with some people skills.
  8. Yeah, this goes beyond matters of taste. I've had people on reddit try to tell me that the UI changes were necessary because the UI was outdated flash infrastructure. Even though the UI was still laggy for me when I played on 7.0 release day (no indication the infrastructure was touched). And not to mention, I know for a fact from modding community insights that The Sims 4 uses actionscript for parts of its UI and it has not been changed away from that and runs fine. The talking points people use are so weak and desperate.
  9. Tell that to the people getting migraines from the new UI, you thoughtless _
  10. The thing about reddit is it's technically not supposed to have staff from games like this running subs, but it's not like anyone can stop a mod from taking instructions under the table. Plus there are so many power tripping mods on that platform, it's easy to believe such a thing could be the actions of one rather than company influence, which would make it even easier to hide if there was company influence, since people will tend to just assume it's a power tripping mod.
  11. I felt like I was being paranoid after reflecting on the major sales in december/jan and it was giving me this "everything must go, clearance sale" vibes, but now it just seems more realistically like a sign that they were themselves concerned this was going to tank (if not intentionally trying to tank it) and were trying to squeeze out what they could before people realized how bad it was going to be, using the anniversary as a cover. I myself spent some money then and feel rather foolish about it now.
  12. I'm not gonna say modders could deliver the voice-acted cinematic stuff BW does easily (just cause of the lack of in-house-tools to build it, if nothing else), but the rest of it, yeah, I mean if this was a single player game, there would likely be oodles of QOL stuff done by modders over the years. I myself would probably have been a contributor.
  13. Thanks for the analysis. Really informative.
  14. If they don't do something major to turn things around within a week or two, I expect the loss in players from quitting + the further loss a bit later from initial expansion boost dying down will be enough to kill what's left of the budget to a point of virtually nothing (and we already weren't getting much), if not full official maintenance mode. As BipolarJuice pointed out, the cash shop may be able to keep it alive longer, so it's not necessarily a given it would get shut down even if the content budget was axed. But it seems like the most important question is whether you can even tolerate the new changes if there is still life left in the game. Some people are actually literally getting headaches from working with the new inventory UI.
  15. I'm doubtful this studio as an institutional whole even wants to be in video games, let alone anything customer facing. They have a distinct antipathy toward taking their customers seriously and it has gotten them into trouble time and time again, almost like clockwork. This time I think they are going to find out the hard way that there are limits to how many times they can do it before they have no one left to do it to. But maybe deep down, that's what they want. Maybe they just want out and never wanted to do this to begin with. The ones who had the enthusiasm to put together the class stories, many of them were gone not all that long after launch. The ones remaining were left with a terrible infrastructure, slashed team and budget, and because of that, a drastically narrowed set of possibilities for the game going into the future. I digress, kind of, but the point is, they don't seem to have it in them to not be silent. Whether it's institutional apathy, antipathy, whatever, they don't even pretend to take us seriously and I'm not sure they ever have.
  16. This makes me sad to read, I'm sorry you're dealing with that. I suggest leaving a brief (so you don't have to be in-game long) message for your guild about what you're dealing with, maybe ask someone you trust to take over, at least for the time being. I'm sure they will understand. You should not have to deal with a migraine to play a game for fun. You could also try chatting with who you need to through discord or something so you can explain it to them and figure things out without needing to be in-game, if there are details you feel will take more time to hash out. Or maybe send a DM on the forums if there's somebody in the guild you know who uses them. Anything so you can avoid that migraine again, just ludicrous to be dealing with that over a video game. This studio has a lot of apologizing to do.
  17. 1st of all, it's not your business to tell another player what should or shouldn't be a complaint. 2nd, what you are saying is technically partially true, but also kind of just straight up wrong. Although it's a pretty common thing in MMOs to raise level cap and also raise gear level, doing so is usually accompanied with a sizable amount of new content. The pairing of the two is what makes it make any kind of RPG sense. You have stuff that is new to explore, so your power level increases and so does your gear. What BW did here is make people overall weaker, increase the level cap, make new gear harder to get, take away their set bonuses so they have to regrind them too, and not even add in new content (other than a tiny bit of story) for people to increase their power on. So it's all the treadmill without any of the substance and from an RPG standpoint, it makes no sense at all. It's just making people regrind so they'll keep playing, despite having nothing interesting to do it on and acting like that's normal is disingenuous as hell.
  18. Also hurts my eyes. My sub was not recurring anyway, but I've already uninstalled, just thought I'd pop back in to add my voice to those whose eyes are hurt by the UI. I was squinting when I tried out the expansion yesterday dealing with it. It's not the only reason I uninstalled, but it's certainly a good one. There is no way in hell I'm "getting used to" (as some weirdos I've seen on reddit try to claim will happen) a UI that hurts my eyes to look at. There is no way I can immerse myself in a video game like that. Far too late now, but they should have added UI color/style scheme customizing instead, with some base presets, like classic style and new style, as well as the ability to put together your own. That would have made far more sense than inflicting this literal eyesore on the playerbase. Overall, 7.0 basically systemically dismantled everything that "play your way" put together and has left us with something most like the design of a mobile game that wouldn't even be fun as a mobile game. Like for all the flack mobile games rightfully get for their common business model, there are some that are actually fun. The most offensive (to the sensibilities) part of this expansion to me is that it doesn't even have a notably coherent design like some game changes do, as an excuse for its sweeping and unwanted changes. The closest thing I can recognize to a "theme" in its design is that the aim is to take things away and make people miserable. And the design leads who should be out here either explaining themselves and standing by their design, or apologizing and going back and forth about what to do next, are nowhere to be found, presumably hoping they can wait it out until all the people who hate everything are gone, so the defenders can say "see, people got used to it" while they fudge population numbers and say that missing players are just because normal expansion hype died down. I prob won't be here then even as a reader. BW has very little time left to do something about how poor this "expansion" is before patience on the more patient people runs out. Some are already gone. But history would indicate they are organizationally incapable of moving quickly, ever, so the damage is prob going to just be done and they'll do some minor placating over months for whoever is left, then the budget will quietly be slashed even more when they fail to meet their profit targets.
  19. I just want to make a note here for anyone who doesn't have much video game playing experience outside of this and SWG that this degree of drastically changing a game's fundamentals is not normal across the rest of the industry. Idk what it is about the SW brand that attracts this behavior in the developers, but most games that get changes are fairly consistent over time. There are major changes that annoy people sometimes (we've seen some of that here, where there is one or two key things that are a big issue and some of them get capitulated on later), but not typically in such a thorough fashion that ignores feedback as something like this "expansion."
  20. Yeah, it's rough. As awful as this industry can be, there is usually a decent amount of consistency in games that continue to get updates. But for some reason, the SW brand seems to be cursed when it comes to MMOs; instead of getting something with solid infrastructure that is built on skillfully over time, we get a buggy mess that nonetheless has a dedicated fanbase and then gets changed over time into something unrecognizable. First, SWG. Now this game in its own way, though its downfall seems a fair bit more like a whimper than a bang.
  21. You take care too! Have fun out there. Edit: I uninstalled myself. Between the eyesore UI, gutting class gameplay I enjoy, keybind wreckage, story that felt like it was taking creative liberties with my character to do an episode of a saturday morning cartoon instead of an RPG (I didn't even finish it all and have no desire to), weeklies gutting... and more! There's just nothing left to get out of it. Short of them doing a major apology and reversal that this studio is too prideful to ever even contemplate, I got no reason to stick around. On the bright side, at least I got something out of coming back, however briefly it was. Got to get a little more enjoyment out of the game before it was decimated and see some familiar faces again.
  22. Well one example is, IIRC (I already exited out in disgust with this trash heap, don't want to go back in-game to check atm) Scoundrel now can't choose both the talent for dodge cooldown reduction and dodge reflect because they are both part of the same horizontal row.
  23. It looks like you click one of the three slots in a horizontal row and the white outline indicates which one you've selected and... that's just a talent you've picked now and you can move it around as much as you want to change which one you've picked? Which... trivializes one of the reasons for loadouts, if you can just swap talents on the fly anyway? I don't see any kind of confirm button, I think you just move them around. Also, it seems you have drastically less options for customizing build now, since the choices are locked to one out of three options for each "point" instead of tiers.
  24. I've noticed that terrible box design is half finished in other areas of the UI too. It's so sloppy. Like the GTN search box is now that same awful blue outline black background style, while the rest of the GTN UI is more or less the same as it was, which is a terrible mismatch. I'd bet my left arm there's a stylesheet of sorts to it somewhere and they didn't even realize what all it would impact. Just embarrassing, put this expansion back in the oven, gonna give people food poisoning.
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