Leetanee Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Thanks for listening. When swtor launched we had a fairly good community here and although I have seen a lot of the usual rants and insults I'm used to seeing to on certain other mmo-related websites, I'm sure you guys are still out there. I'd like to speak out in favor of this game and the developers and I argue that we need to give them more time to address the issues before we go ballistic. Given the amount of complaints you see in many threads around this one, this might surprise. It might surprise even more if I tell you that I'm playing Republic and that I can't even land in Ilum anymore now, much less quest there, so I'm definitely on the receiving end of patch 1.1. In addition, my server lagged out several times yesterday, I had some interface lag in warzones and I was disconnected a few times. And lastly, it might surprise even further if I tell you that I've cancelled my subscription for the time being and that I don't intend to come back to swtor for let's say half a year. Despite these circumstances, I have found swtor to be a great game and I'm quite happy with the design decisions they have made. I intend to come back to swtor in some months and I intend to stay for the long haul. I also believe that they listen to community feedback and they respond to it faster than *any* other mmo developer out there, often within a single day. I speak in defense of swtor and the developers and here's why: Bioware is not a traditional 'mmo' studio, whatever that would be to begin with. Same as that 'icy storm' developer wasn't when they made the mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance out of their previous non-mmo games. Bioware has created some of the best story telling there is in games like Bioshock and Mass Effect and they managed to bring in their expertise when they created swtor. And that's excellent because it would have been a crying shame if they had wasted their potential just to mimic what other mmos had done. Luckily, they didn't. Swtor feels like a Bioware game, not yet another Everquest clone, and that's a promising start. The leveling experience in swtor is amazing and I dare you to provide arguments to the contrary. You have never experienced such a dense and well-told story spanning level one to level cap. By coincidence, my first character was a smuggler and the evolving story is a wild chase and space adventure from character creation to Ilum. I have played that mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance from 2005 till today, throughout every patch and every expansion, and I have leveled all classes to 85, through the old content and the revamped content which followed a cataclysmic event. There is no comparison at all. Bioware has provided a denser and more rewarding experience right when they launched than that other mmo provides after 5 years of optimization. I'm not too surprised, having seen Bioware's single player games already, but I'm glad they managed to transfer their knowledge. Not to mention that solo questing in swtor is much more challenging and hence interesting, for a change. The player community is hopelessly biased towards the Empire faction as I happen to know. When I land in Ilum I get ganked by an ocean of red-based players who farm the shuttle point for valor. Shall we blame the developers for that? That seems odd, to say the least. The decision was ours and most of us wanted to play Empire. Period. Furthermore, we all made this decision *PRIOR* to creating our first character and hence prior to everything Bioware did with these two factions. We installed the game and clicked on the Empire logo when asked which faction we wanted to play. Maybe some Empire classes have an advantage in PvP, at least until that is balanced by further patches. Maybe some of their story lines feel even better than the smuggler's one. I don't know and it has not influenced our decision to play Empire anyhow, so we can discard this consideration. We were unaware of how the game will be at 50 when we decided to create an Empire character. We had, however, seen the new Star Wars films, as I am sure is not to far-fetched to claim. And George Lucas has decided to make the Sith look a lot cooler and probably much more appealing to children in the new films than they had come across in the old ones. The bias towards the Empire is nothing that's in the hands of Bioware. It's part of the image the factions have in the franchise and Bioware can't change that. In fact, given how LucasArts handles franchise decision, they wouldn't even be allowed to change that, if they wanted to. I'd predict that action figures of this Darth something with the red two-bladed lightsaber sell a lot better than their Jedi counterparts. We can try to assign blame for this or we can take it at face value. What Bioware must do now is to find a solution to this dilemma, caused by the franchise and by us, not by them. And since we, the players, have caused the skewed distribution with our decision, we should be constructive and try to help them as best as we can to see how you can alter the areas and the rules so that they can still be played in by two vastly unbalanced factions. Or, if that's not feasible, we can try to come up with good ideas how you can provide an incentive to play on the Republic side for a change. As for the bugs and the interface lag in warzones - they do fix bugs very quickly, don't they? And changes to the engine will not be quick fixes, we simply have to give them time. Again, I draw my comparison to the launch of that other mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance in 2005: You were lucky if you were among the few privileged ones who got to experience laggy content. Most of us were stuck at the log in screen, which liked to crash for hours. Some bugs were fixed a year later, some were never fixed and became a feature until the entire mechanic was silently phased out in a later expansion. A month after the launch of swtor we are all still 'early adopters'. Compared to the competition, Bioware is really fast in addressing issues and you simply have to allow them half a year to respond to engine issues and faction imbalance. These are not small 'bugs' that could be fixed next Tuesday. Rather than being ganked right at the loading screen in Ilum by a 10:1 welcome party I'll take half a year off from the game now but as I said at the top: It's a great game and I intend to return. Let's keep our feedback constructive. They respond to it quickly, as we know, so the better and more fleshed-out our proposed solutions, the quicker we have the online experience we seek. Rants, unfounded opinions and other spam in these threads merely dilute our feedback and that is not in our interest. Swtor is a great game with serious, but fix-able issues. That's really not bad for an mmo at launch. Let's see what we can suggest to address the issues. cheers, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
psysention Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 all i can say is tl;dr Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gehoornde Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Thanks for listening. When swtor launched we had a fairly good community here and although I have seen a lot of the usual rants and insults I'm used to seeing to on certain other mmo-related websites, I'm sure you guys are still out there. I'd like to speak out in favor of this game and the developers and I argue that we need to give them more time to address the issues before we go ballistic. Given the amount of complaints you see in many threads around this one, this might surprise. It might surprise even more if I tell you that I'm playing Republic and that I can't even land in Ilum anymore now, much less quest there, so I'm definitely on the receiving end of patch 1.1. In addition, my server lagged out several times yesterday, I had some interface lag in warzones and I was disconnected a few times. And lastly, it might surprise even further if I tell you that I've cancelled my subscription for the time being and that I don't intend to come back to swtor for let's say half a year. Despite these circumstances, I have found swtor to be a great game and I'm quite happy with the design decisions they have made. I intend to come back to swtor in some months and I intend to stay for the long haul. I also believe that they listen to community feedback and they respond to it faster than *any* other mmo developer out there, often within a single day. I speak in defense of swtor and the developers and here's why: Bioware is not a traditional 'mmo' studio, whatever that would be to begin with. Same as that 'icy storm' developer wasn't when they made the mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance out of their previous non-mmo games. Bioware has created some of the best story telling there is in games like Bioshock and Mass Effect and they managed to bring in their expertise when they created swtor. And that's excellent because it would have been a crying shame if they had wasted their potential just to mimic what other mmos had done. Luckily, they didn't. Swtor feels like a Bioware game, not yet another Everquest clone, and that's a promising start. The leveling experience in swtor is amazing and I dare you to provide arguments to the contrary. You have never experienced such a dense and well-told story spanning level one to level cap. By coincidence, my first character was a smuggler and the evolving story is a wild chase and space adventure from character creation to Ilum. I have played that mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance from 2005 till today, throughout every patch and every expansion, and I have leveled all classes to 85, through the old content and the revamped content which followed a cataclysmic event. There is no comparison at all. Bioware has provided a denser and more rewarding experience right when they launched than that other mmo provides after 5 years of optimization. I'm not too surprised, having seen Bioware's single player games already, but I'm glad they managed to transfer their knowledge. Not to mention that solo questing in swtor is much more challenging and hence interesting, for a change. The player community is hopelessly biased towards the Empire faction as I happen to know. When I land in Ilum I get ganked by an ocean of red-based players who farm the shuttle point for valor. Shall we blame the developers for that? That seems odd, to say the least. The decision was ours and most of us wanted to play Empire. Period. Furthermore, we all made this decision *PRIOR* to creating our first character and hence prior to everything Bioware did with these two factions. We installed the game and clicked on the Empire logo when asked which faction we wanted to play. Maybe some Empire classes have an advantage in PvP, at least until that is balanced by further patches. Maybe some of their story lines feel even better than the smuggler's one. I don't know and it has not influenced our decision to play Empire anyhow, so we can discard this consideration. We were unaware of how the game will be at 50 when we decided to create an Empire character. We had, however, seen the new Star Wars films, as I am sure is not to far-fetched to claim. And George Lucas has decided to make the Sith look a lot cooler and probably much more appealing to children in the new films than they had come across in the old ones. The bias towards the Empire is nothing that's in the hands of Bioware. It's part of the image the factions have in the franchise and Bioware can't change that. In fact, given how LucasArts handles franchise decision, they wouldn't even be allowed to change that, if they wanted to. I'd predict that action figures of this Darth something with the red two-bladed lightsaber sell a lot better than their Jedi counterparts. We can try to assign blame for this or we can take it at face value. What Bioware must do now is to find a solution to this dilemma, caused by the franchise and by us, not by them. And since we, the players, have caused the skewed distribution with our decision, we should be constructive and try to help them as best as we can to see how you can alter the areas and the rules so that they can still be played in by two vastly unbalanced factions. Or, if that's not feasible, we can try to come up with good ideas how you can provide an incentive to play on the Republic side for a change. As for the bugs and the interface lag in warzones - they do fix bugs very quickly, don't they? And changes to the engine will not be quick fixes, we simply have to give them time. Again, I draw my comparison to the launch of that other mmo with the Orcs and the Alliance in 2005: You were lucky if you were among the few privileged ones who got to experience laggy content. Most of us were stuck at the log in screen, which liked to crash for hours. Some bugs were fixed a year later, some were never fixed and became a feature until the entire mechanic was silently phased out in a later expansion. A month after the launch of swtor we are all still 'early adopters'. Compared to the competition, Bioware is really fast in addressing issues and you simply have to allow them half a year to respond to engine issues and faction imbalance. These are not small 'bugs' that could be fixed next Tuesday. Rather than being ganked right at the loading screen in Ilum by a 10:1 welcome party I'll take half a year off from the game now but as I said at the top: It's a great game and I intend to return. Let's keep our feedback constructive. They respond to it quickly, as we know, so the better and more fleshed-out our proposed solutions, the quicker we have the online experience we seek. Rants, unfounded opinions and other spam in these threads merely dilute our feedback and that is not in our interest. Swtor is a great game with serious, but fix-able issues. That's really not bad for an mmo at launch. Let's see what we can suggest to address the issues. cheers, I disagree with every point. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kamiosoup Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 plz you must always include a tl;dr for the mentally handicapped such as myself Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lowizi Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 (edited) This is waay too much text. And don't start with thnx for listening. Im not listening, Im reading. Well... I was. Till I noticed that huge *** piece of text and decided to spend my time writing this reply instead of reading through. Edited January 19, 2012 by lowizi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barathos Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 aww he actually thinks someone will read that isnt it cute ? LOL! Yeeeah... Sorry, but TL:DR. We're not mentally handicap, we just don't want to waste time on a post that will take us 15 minutes to read and then watch it sink to the bottom in... 5 seconds? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Aramyn Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Why do people write so much.. You could have made your points in 1/4 of that text. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SkateOnTrees Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 /tiny violins Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MartyCZE Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 (edited) didn't read it, but I disagree. Loved Bioware ever since I was a kid, grew up playing their games, but they are just, I'm sorry to say, incompetent at managing MMOs. I'm not unsubbing since I still like this game, but if things don't change fast, I'm not gonna resub when my 3 months run out. Edited January 19, 2012 by MartyCZE Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Halofax Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 He says "that mmo about orcs and alliance" 4 or so times. Does it make you feel smart to imply World of Warcraft when you could just say WoW? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Die_Scream Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 That is the longest "Leave Bioware alone!" post I've seen yet. Bioware get criticized because Bioware released a skeleton of a game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edgedy Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Long story short. You're implying that the fact they all play Empire isn't Bioware's fault. But the fact is that the Empire is glamourized by Bioware in every aspect of the game. Advantages in actual classes, advantages in storylines, and advantages in gear. Addressing these problems *might* help people switch back to Republic, but it's likely too late and based on the decisions made regarding Ilum without player feedback being listened to it is likely that future 'decisions' may negatively impact the factions more then actually benefit them by putting on a bandaid. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zgabu Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Yes, he does think someone will read it. People write things thinking people will read it. Is reading that difficult these days? I'll answer my own question: Yes. Seems a lot of the forum dwellers are only interested in nice little packages that they can quickly grasp and spew out again on another social site. Things can't always be summed up in 140 chars or less. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gehoornde Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 He says "that mmo about orcs and alliance" 4 or so times. Does it make you feel smart to imply World of Warcraft when you could just say WoW? I agree 100%. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
corbanite Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 (edited) Your first mistake OP was coming to the forums to defend the game. Your second mistake was assuming that the majority of people here are mentally older than 12 Edited January 19, 2012 by corbanite Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricanther Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 (edited) The "SUGGESTIONS" thread which, as last seen by me, is 71 pages long and not a sticky. See how much BIOWARE cares?? Edited January 19, 2012 by Ricanther Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Barathos Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Your first mistake OP was coming to the forums to defend the game. Your second mistake was assuming that the majority of people here are mentally older than 12 *Blink* Ok. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AutumnBard Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Just a quick correction before I delve into the rest of your post: BioWare wasn't responsible for Bioshock. That was 2K Boston, before they became Irrational? Um, Ken Levine's gang. BioWare are the Baldurs's Gate / KotOR / Dragon Age / Mass Effect guys. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Averran Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Hello all, Feedback is always important and we always appreciate constructive feedback, whether positive or negative. Allison has a great thread with information on what we are looking for in feedback. We know that the community is always looking for developer input on issues and one of the best ways to keep up-to-date on developer posts is through the Developer Tracker. A couple examples of what you can find on the developer tracker right now: a couple posts from Damion on the slicing nerf, and dungeon finder as well as Georg's comments on cover. There is also our new blog feature where developers will give their thoughts on certain aspects of the game as well as giving clarification on issues - upcoming patch notes can also be found on the blog. We are going to go ahead and close the thread but we did want to point out a couple of spiffy threads where you can give us your feedback on bugs and suggest features you would like to see in-game: The Suggestion Compilation Thread Ultimate Bug List Both are great threads that are updated regularly so we highly encourage you to add in your feedback to one, or both of those threads. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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