Did the gree event a little today and it felt like a preview of just how awful it's going to be with them trying to crowd everyone into the same planets/areas. Ability lag, waiting on objectives and mob respawns. The one upside is there's a mob type you have to kill 3 times for the heroic that would have been easier to do dynamically with shared tagging. With not having that, somebody got a group going with me and a couple others and we went to the PvP area cause the other ones were being camped or just spammed in general by other people. There was one where a group seemed to be just farming it for no reason, camping the respawn long past 3 kills. Anyway, reminded me of how fundamentally ignorant it is for anyone to think they can shove people into the same areas in this game and have it work well, and really comes across like "new design lead(s) who don't understand the game" who made some of the key gameplay decisions for 7.0. Until they go back and address the awful infrastructure that can't handle any remotely significant numbers of people well without lag, it's always going to be a bad decision to try to crowd people together. Sick of people who don't even understand this game on a basic level making decisions for it.

If you've never spent hours in a character creator or mixing and matching pieces of outfits, then I guess it wouldn't be obvious that cosmetics are content for some people. To give an example, I've spent hours in The Sims 4 character creator before on a single sim and then don't even play the game itself as much. I can understand if this point seems odd though because the video game industry has spent years, if not decades, hammering people with the idea that cosmetics are superficial things that don't matter so they can justify making them the core of MTX. It should be apparent how BS that is though, when you consider how much money it makes them ("It's just cosmetic!" they say, as they make millions if not billions in revenue on cosmetics). Like if cosmetics were as superficial as this industry makes them out to be, people wouldn't pay so much money for them. The ugly truth is that cosmetics are a significant part of the creative and expressive potential in video game design and those of us who experience them as content tend to get the short end of the stick, while others usually get all their content for a somewhat capped price. Not that anyone is really winning in this MTX mess the video game industry is immersed in (well, other than the investor class).

So a few months is "nothing in the grand scheme of things" for somebody else's priority being delayed (weapon designer), but not for yours (story). Pretty contradictory. You can just say you hate the idea of 7.0 story getting delayed again and not at the same time try to downplay weapon designer getting delayed. Like I can sympathize with being starved for content and hating the thought of another delay (though I don't see how it would get delayed by this point), but I can't get behind downplaying people having downgraded use of something they paid a bunch of money for at the arbitrary whim of SWTOR's design decision-makers. Granted, said decision-makers probably expected it would be ok because of weapon designer, but it's still their fault for creating this no-win situation. Now this I agree with. It shouldn't be that hard to tide people over with mods until they can figure out whether weapon designer will ever actually come out and when. And iRating-based vendor sounds like a good idea to me.

May not matter much to you, but think about the kind of people who, before weapons were sold directly, bought tons of lootboxes trying to get that 0.01% drop or whatever. Or heck, just someone now who spent $40 on CC to afford a single direct sale CM weapon. Some people are going to feel very ripped off and rightly so. For people that really care about that stuff and have put a lot of money into it, it's almost akin to 7.0 just taking away what they paid for. Not strictly that, since they'll technically still have the stuff and can use it on chars 75 and below, but very close to crossing that line. Even if you don't personally care about it in your gameplay, it should be evident how shady and non-trivial it is, from the standpoint of people getting what they pay for vs. having it arbitrarily taken away for an unspecified amount of time. That's a concerning precedent to get away with, in an industry that increasingly wants to turn everything into a rental ownership model, while simultaneously setting no real limits on the amount of money you can spend.

I would say quality took a dive in this industry in general ever since F2P started being normalized, though it was already on that track with the introduction of microtransactions as a whole. Studios realized they could fund games with whales (huge spenders on MTX) and all they had to do was keep those whales happy and they'd make a tidy profit, more than they could ever make with a single purchase or sub model. A lot gets said sometimes about people supposedly wanting stuff for free, but it's not as though video game enthusiasts ever asked for F2P model to be normalized. Your sentiment is probably shared by many others, who would be happy with paying a decent cost for an expansion and sub fee and get something that's good quality, like the MMO part of the video game industry used to be before F2P took over. I mean, in those days things like cosmetics you'd get through normal gameplay are often MTX now and are way overpriced by comparison. They nickle and dime us on MTX and lootboxes now and don't even give the option to pay for quality content. The only option to pay more now is to buy cut out bits of stuff that used to just be part of a sub in the old model and doesn't incentivize them to produce content, but instead just incentivizes them to optimize MTX profits more. It's a sad state of affairs.

Tbh, I think it's the industry in general, not just MMOs, though this studio's culture seems to be arrogant more so than some. With MMOs, the problem is people put months or years of their lives into an MMO (and god knows how much money with the way they add MTX to them now) and then those people are expected to just sit there and take it when some dev team leader gets "inspired" to drastically change the way the game works. At least with single-player games and dev arrogance, it's usually pretty straightforward decision for the player: if you're ok with what they produced, you'll buy it. If you aren't, you won't. (Though even that is becoming a problem with the normalizing of "live service" that sometimes includes unwanted changes to a single player game people already paid for.) With MMOs, it's like you're expected to be a guinea pig for some c level's failing upward career advancements and pay hand over fist to be part of it, and then if you're unhappy, well then it's all "just leave if you don't like it." Why should that be normal? Why is it normal for a game's community that is funding the whole affair to have no real say in what happens to it and be expected to "just leave" if drastic changes are made that ruin their fun? (I know technically it's the company that is funding it, but without players paying for something somewhere, there is no keeping the project alive. The gov certainly isn't giving out grants to keep it going.) It's just really strange what is considered normal in video games when you take a step back from it.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I took xor to mean that it's $25 for swag because some people don't want to pay for store stuff or its currency to begin with, they just want game sub (e.g. CC or items are all the same to them, part of the same thing you'd call "swag")

Yep. Pushing people into the same areas and only doing shared tagging as a consolation is making things worse overall. Not intended to be comprehensive, but things I can think of that are still problems even with shared tagging: - objectives - respawn timers - getting a hit in before an important mob dies I don't know what to even say for solutions though because the original design of it is so inconsistent. For example, some objectives can be clicked with no visible change and so there's no wait period. Some are a cutscene, so they can be clicked with no wait period. Some objectives have a visible change that could probably be removed, but some change in a way where another part of the objective is revealed after a visual change, so you can't just remove the visual part and be done. /facepalm Then there's mobs that drop important things or whose death is a key objective, but die too fast or take way too long to respawn, so shared tagging will really just mean a handful of high HP boss mob objectives are easier to share a kill on. And if I'm not mistaken (hopefully I'm wrong about this) I think someone said that the tagging only applies to the mobs you hit, not the whole aggro group, so like with The Face Merchants, good luck landing a hit on the right mob to loot the quest item drop. What they really need is to reevaluate the objective design of most of the quests in the game and make some choices that follow a consistent design aimed toward shared objectives and quest progress, but I don't see that happening. Best I see happening is more patchwork solutions like this that don't really get to the root of the problem.

Oh yeah, it's like night and day. The way I compare it is like, with SWTOR the difficulty of the jump puzzles is working out how to use the janky jump controls and physics system. With GW2 jump puzzles, it's the jumps themselves that are difficult.

I know it's been very playable as a casual solo game in the past, like the way the maps are designed is you'll go into an area in the open world and there'll be local objectives that can be worked on by everybody together without formally grouping up, so it's like having people around, but without any strings attached and you don't have to compete for objectives in the open world like you do here. There are also world bosses with people meeting in the area where they are informally and fighting it together, and people are able to rez each other and stuff, so again, it's like grouping but without any hassle of doing it formally and needing to organize it all, if that makes sense? Then Heart of Thorns expansion, there were complaints of the maps it added being more rough on solo players and a pain to navigate solo (I was one of the people who was playing it casually solo and Heart of Thorns was something of a pain for me). But I quit some time later and wasn't there for Path of Fire (the expansion that came after Heart of Thorns), so idk what it's like now, if new areas are still leaning in that direction of being rougher solo or if they are more like the base game areas. There is also a solo story path, though if I remember right, the cinematics are more akin to a visual novel than what we see in this game and I don't remember any choices in it. There's more to the game than that, but that's the main solo aspects I remember about it. The nice thing about it is it's "buy to play," so you don't have to pay often; just if there are expansions, you have to pay for them to get access to their content. There is a store like with SWTOR, but there's no subscription setup. TL;DR: I would say it's got a significant solo core to it, though as is common with MMOs, you won't be able to do all the content solo. I played it for quite a long time in the past without doing any formal grouping.

Haven't done it in ages, but that's how I remember it too. Also, idk if your playtime(of day) is flexible at all, but if you do it during less active times of the day, the PvP itself might actually go faster, assuming you don't mind doing other things in-game while you wait for queue to pop lol. Reason being, I'm pretty sure that if queues are struggling to fill, it's more likely to pop 4 man and those are resolved pretty fast. Unless you get actually balanced teams, each would likely be two quick rounds of your team or the other team being curbstomped and the match is over. And you don't have to learn objectives with 4 man, you can just pick a focus target in chat with others or run in wide eyed and innocent and get the getting rekt over with quickly if nobody is bothering to play like a team. Anyway, yeah, that's all I can think of that might alleviate the annoyance for non-PvPer.

It is tricky, isn't it, because safeguarding against accidentally vendoring CM items you haven't unlocked in collections or might want to sell on the GTN is important. For these legacy bound items, you can't sell them on the GTN anyway and if they unlock just from having them in your inventory, those factors shouldn't be a problem for them to make it vendorable for 0 credits or whatever. But I think they would need another solution for CM items and claimed copies, since making them vendorable comes with certain risks (unless they make two different versions and have the claimed version be the vendorable one and not otherwise).

True, and despite that we've probably all had times we got swept up in buying something we don't really want and will never use because we were told it's discounted or a limited time offer so we'd feel we're going to miss out if we don't seize the opportunity. Incidentally, that's one reason it's a good idea when shopping to go in knowing what you want, or if you just want to buy for some reason and don't have anything specific in mind, set a budget limit, so you don't get caught up in all the "deals." Putting frugality into practice can be hard sometimes with all the mind games that are played and I am no exception, but I try to defend against the tricks when I can. Usually I keep it to myself, gotta pick my battles, but this "deal" is a really egregious case, all things considered.

It's only a good deal* if you were already going to: buy one month of sub (and not in bulk for a discount), buy 2400 CC ( and not in bulk for a discount), and you were going to buy the items in it (if they became available in the CM)(edit: another qualifier to make it even worse, it's only if you would have bought them by buying more CC, so this is also assuming you don't have enough extra CC to spend you would have been able to afford them already if they became available in the CM). How is that irrational? That is a rational analysis of the pricing and it barely qualifies as a deal under highly specific conditions. *(relative to SWTOR's normal prices, if you put it in perspective beyond that it looks even worse)

Thanks for sharing this, that is refreshing to look at, I'd almost forgotten what an actual expansion looks like. Really making me think about the sunk cost fallacy and how little reason there is to have any patience with this studio that sinks to new lows like a sort of reverse aspirational pattern, where it's trying to compete with itself to become the worst studio it can be.

Lol @ indie dev company. Tbh tho, indie devs usually do a better job than what this company puts out. They have to if they don't want to go under. This studio is like "the kid of wealthy parents" equivalent of a video game company. Hey dad, can you fund and promote my "art project." Sure son, here's a blank check and if you fail, don't worry, people will buy it anyway because they recognize the family name.

They aren't whining or begging, they are talking about not having an option to pay for it still.... Going on ebay to get it sounds like an absolutely horrendous deal with how much people will mark up the price and even more so if all you want is the digital vendor access and don't care about the physical items. Talk about throwing away money for nothing.

I was thinking more along the lines of quarterly revenue to make up for anticipated 7.0 flop, but that works as an explanation too. Either way, yeah, this thing can hardly be called a collector's edition or a deal. It's an aggrandized store bundle that they are calling CE and making limited time to induce FOMO.

Idk, credits and crap like most of the rest of the content when you're running it for the 20th time lol? Do you play any other parts of the game? Nobody gets interesting rewards on the 20th time in other parts of the game. Video games in general fail at making things interesting on repeat when the incentive is rewards instead of making the content itself enjoyable to repeat in its design. They've trained us to expect rewards instead of enjoyable content and that's just sad. Million and one hobbies we could be doing that are actually doing the hobby for the enjoyment of it, instead of doing it for carrot on a stick. I don't think the current system on live is anything amazing, but it's better than some of the stinkers they've had over the years. Now it's looking like they want to do another stinker instead of improving on the system they have now.

Usability matters in design and if people are not realizing the indicators are there, it's goofy to put it on them that they just "need to discover it." Personally, I never noticed the conquest tab has any indicator about that and it's no surprise why since it doesn't even say "event." It says next conquest and has the name of the conquest, which apparently happens to correspond to the event name in this particular case, but would mean nothing to a new player who hasn't seen the event before. Just something to keep in perspective... sometimes people get used to a system as it is, even though it's seriously crappy, and because they are used to it, it doesn't seem crappy because they internalized how to work around all its crappiness so they don't even notice it anymore. Then a fresh pair of eyes comes in and sees it in all its crappiness and it doesn't mean that person is wrong and needs to internalize how to work around it, it's a valuable sign that something could be designed better. Granted, it can be tricky to design such a system better without throwing off all the people who were used to the old system. But that's what iterative feedback is for.

Yeah, the trend of studios getting PR fluff from game "journalists" who run apologetics for their crappy decisions and praise them for doing the bare minimum may have caused some of them to start believing their own BS; namely, believing falsely that vocal players are mostly obsessive whiners who can be ignored because "they are a minority" and all will be fine. Rather than keeping the truth in perspective, that the most vocal critics are often some of the most dedicated video game enthusiasts who will stick with a game through a lot and sink hours for free into trying to communicate the wants of the playerbase in good faith. That truth is a PR nightmare for a studio to deal with if they are bent on making decisions they know players won't like because the dedicated players will call them out quickly and thoroughly, so then the truth becomes inconvenient and it's easier to believe those people are just wrong and don't matter, and go full speed ahead. *This is not to say vocal players always want the same things or should always be listened to without question. Just that the narrative I've seen over the years constructed to make it easy to dismiss them as fringe fanatics who don't matter is a big honking load of BS. Although there are actual fanatics who take things too far once in a blue moon, they do not represent vocal players, they just serve as a convenient reason to be dismissive of them.

Yeah, hopefully they'll revert that aspect of it. Best I can figure is either they made it non-vendorable so people wouldn't accidentally get rid of it (doesn't seem likely, since from what I've seen reported, the pieces unlock just from being in your inventory?) or they grabbed the data structure they typically use for CM collection items, made some minor adjustments so it could work with legacy bound items, and never thought about touching the part that makes the item non-vendorable. So hopefully it's just an oversight that they'll fix.

I take it a step further, personally: whether it's stats or shinies, players who want other players to have less so they can feel special... I find it hard to sympathize with them. It's easy for me to sympathize with someone's gameplay desires if it's just a preference they have that can be accommodated among others. It's another thing for the preference itself to be about simulating the feeling of being a rich/superior person in RL and inflicting it on real people in that virtual environment. Cause at that point, it's barely even a simulation, it's just a projection of RL elitism in a form where the consequences of it matter less. I tend to think achievements are more than enough to show off for this type of stuff; it's proof that you did it, to you and others. Shiny stuff and stats both have problems. Stats, I won't go into, I think others explain that well plenty. Shiny stuff because despite the normalization that has happened over the years w/ regards to cosmetics and them being "optional" to convince people that MTX aren't a bad thing, it's clear that for a lot of people, cosmetics are a significant part of their gameplay (I am one of them, I love mixing and matching stuff in games to get a unique and cool look). So when games lock some of the coolest cosmetics behind content I can't or will never seek out to do, that's disappointing because it's less cool stuff I can work with to get enjoyment out of the game. I don't make a big deal out of it and I don't expect it to change any time soon because normalizing exclusive/rare/expensive/etc. cosmetics seems to be a large part of how games make their money now, but I just wanted to mention that perspective. It's frustrating that even in a virtual world, we can't escape the creeping elitism of the world outside it.

The BW defender's creed: People aren't actually unhappy. And if they are, they aren't actually going to leave. And if they are, it's very few. And if it isn't, they were going to leave anyway. And if they weren't, the game is fine without them. And if it isn't, it's their fault for what they asked for anyway.

I read you won't be able to vendor the pieces anymore, is that right? Really silly, I'm trying to complete everything I need on live and have it in bank tabs before xpac hits, so I can just unlock it all after launch and never have to open the normalizing lootboxes, uh, I mean, "alliance crates" again.