Is SWTOR the victim of WOW burnout?

[Andryah]

To answer the title:

 

No, but some players are. And some of them want SWTOR to rescue them from their own self-induced MMO misery.

Edited January 20, 2012 by Andryah

[darthdoll]

I'm going to bite.

 

If Ford released the T-model today you wouldn't be saying it's just fine and dandy just because it was the standard decades ago. Markets change, a game has to appeal to the expectations of todays gamers, not to those of years ago.

 

And for the record, I didn't have unreasonable expectations, I only expected some bare minimal features would've been met that are standard (a must even) in modern MMO's. Why should I wait say 4 months to get target of target for example? If such things aren't in the game on launch it can only spell too early of an launch. But I don't blame the devs, I blame EA.

 

TOT is in game, l2 use it without a picture maybe?

[ThanosTitan]

I dont think its burnout. Its comparison. alot of people came here expecting a service level comparable to what they had in wow for quite a few years. Biowares just not ready to run with the big dogs in this genre, and if your asking the same price people want comparable service.

[Andryah]

And for the record, I didn't have unreasonable expectations, I only expected some bare minimal features would've been met that are standard (a must even) in modern MMO's. Why should I wait say 4 months to get target of target for example? If such things aren't in the game on launch it can only spell too early of an launch. But I don't blame the devs, I blame EA.

 

Did you /rage-quit yet? You know, to extract peasant vengence on the Lords.

 

Tip: do not enter an MMO on launch if you in fact have such expectations. Save yourself (and all of us) a lot misery and just wait until month 6 or month 9.

[Asuka]

Armchair mmo developers are full of lulz.

[fro_do_fraggins]

For me it is. Despite what some will say, it is a WOW clone with a much worse endgame. I have no interest in WOW endgame. I would have stuck with SWTOR if they had a working Flashpoint finder that would port me to instances. That is, if it also didn't have ridiculous wait times.

 

Space combat is where they could have differentiated themselves but they chose the less risky approach of sticking to WOW like dungeons and bosses.

[KuusouRumba]

I dont think its burnout. Its comparison. alot of people came here expecting a service level comparable to what they had in wow for quite a few years. Biowares just not ready to run with the big dogs in this genre, and if your asking the same price people want comparable service.

 

Same price?

 

SWTOR costs $60 and competes with a $50 2004 game.

[Sarkav]

Personally I blame the burned out wowers who built unrealistic expectations.

 

Thoughts?

 

I definitely think that Wow has raised the bar for what is expected in an MMO.

 

Do you honestly think this is a bad thing? I have played MMOs almost constantly for the past 15 years so I have seen a lot of the good, bad and ugly. I don't know about you, but I have grown tired of justifying bad games by saying that such and such a game was just as bad. Its true, TOR is better than a lot of other bad MMOs, however I'd just prefer to play a good game straight up.

 

SWTOR has a lot of great things going for it, and the content has been great so far, but its not without its faults. And the faults are pretty bad - enough to prevent me from playing the game long term. What is wrong with being vocal about them in the hopes that they get fixed? I'd rather not have Pandas in my future, but I'm not going to play a game if I don't enjoy it.

[ThanosTitan]

Same price?

 

SWTOR costs $60 and competes with a $50 2004 game.

 

 

LOL, yeah I was more referring to the subscription cost. Wow is only 20 for Vanilla and BC together now.

[Andryah]

I definitely think that Wow has raised the bar for what is expected in an MMO.

 

Lowered the bar on lazy and entitled too, IMO.

 

Seems to have somehow induced temporal amnesia in some too, because they seem oblivious to the state of WoW at launch and want to hold SWTOR to a Launch+7-years standard. I guess this is the modern version of living in the moment.

[Aerolith]

Why would the game launch without essential features? This game was only released when it was to capitalize on the holiday season and cut their losses.

 

I know that if I were in charge of designing a game and if I really cared for it I would not release it until it was absolutely perfect. I would also know that I am in competition with WoW with GW2 and with other titles for a share of the MMO market. I would not release a product that is lesser in quality than those competing titles and without many of the features that they boast.

 

The lack of quality in this game is attributed to incompetence - not financial or time constraints. TOR's budget is estimated at anywhere between 200-500 million and had a six year development cycle. WoW had but a fraction of those resources (I believe its budget was around seventy million? not sure).

 

Your first statement makes no sense.

1 million subs @ $49.99 = 50 million.

Free month for everybody = 15 million LOST

 

Accounting for people who unsubscribed to not getting billed this month, people who bought gamecards as Christmas gifts, collector's editions etc, I'd say the game made somewhere along the lines of $75-100 million in total. Nowhere near "Cutting their losses"

 

 

They spent too much on the voice acting and leveling process, I'll agree. But it was damn worth playing the singleplayer aspect of the game, and if you level 1 of each class on each faction, you will REALLY love the story (if you're into that).

 

They're working on the end-game, and hopefully it works out.

And if it doesn't, steam had some amazing sales in December. I know I took advantage!

[Lazzerswords]

If you are going to copy wow then do it right.

 

Live by the wow clone die by the wow clone

[byteresistor]

Lowered the bar on lazy and entitled too, IMO.

 

Seems to have somehow induced temporal amnesia in some too, because they seem oblivious to the state of WoW at launch and want to hold SWTOR to a Launch+7-years standard. I guess this is the modern version of living in the moment.

This argument has been refuted several times over. Why do people prefer iPhones instead of a Nokia from the 90's?

[djsmileey]

I totally agree with OP, but it's not just WoW.

 

WoW had it's rival at the time of release, and same with every MMO before it.

 

I actually bought EQ2 before WoW thinking that it was going to be the better game as EQ was so popular at the time.

 

Boy was I wrong.

 

WoW brought a much larger crowd to the table, and a much younger generation. You wouldn't find nearly as many kids(10 yr old through 20 yr old) playing EQ back in the day as there is/was playing WoW over the past 7 years.

 

It's only natural for that level of competition to be greater.

 

I just can't wait till the subscriptions kick in and the people who don't want to be here will finally leave. If they want to stay to play and complain, MORE POWER TO YA! at least you are being productive. But the hate mongering pointless threads I see pop up every 30 seconds by the same 50 people need to stop!

[Tiam]

I've read alot of the gripes and complaints on these forums, and i've come to the conclusion that the level of intolerance for bugs and tech issues is way beyond anything i've seen in any other game. The first few month of wow's launch, we experienced up to 20+ days of server down time. During that time i didn't feel the hatred i feel in the swtor forums. Personally I blame the burned out wowers who built unrealistic expectations.

 

Thoughts?

 

I think its more burnout from waiting for games in the years past that bellyflopped after looking so promising. Mmo customers are not as forgiving as they once were for poor game design/bugs etc. If you don't get them in the first 3 months they're gone for good, that's just how it is. People expect quality for their money these days or they move on.

[jdnyc]

No. The problem lies when people only have the exposure of WoW.

WoW stops being a game and becomes the genre itself. That's what has happened. Rift dealt with it. SWTOR is dealing with. Every themepark will deal with it. When the next game comes out that isn't similar to WoW, people will complain that it's not enough like WoW. Doesn't have addons like WoW. Doesn't have Arenas like WoW. Doesn't have a launcher like WoW. Doesn't have a website like WoW. Doesn't have a game designer with name Ghost in it like WoW. WoW WoW WoW WoW WoW.

 

What people are sick of, they want most. What's different must conform to the familiar.

[Wimzerr]

Lowered the bar on lazy and entitled too, IMO.

 

Seems to have somehow induced temporal amnesia in some too, because they seem oblivious to the state of WoW at launch and want to hold SWTOR to a Launch+7-years standard. I guess this is the modern version of living in the moment.

 

Wanting a finished engine that doesn't need two .exe's makes me a troll.

[LyriaFrost]

First of all SWTOR is not competing the MMOs of 7 years ago. It is competing with the MMOs of today (primarily WoW and in the future, GW2 and Tera). The market and expectations for ALL games were very different 7 years ago.

 

This is quite true. You have to compare an MMO to its CURRENT competition, not what their competition of X number of years ago. However...

 

The gaming industry has matured and today we all expect a certain level of polish in released games. Any comparison of SWTOR's release and WoWs release is wrong.

 

The gaming INDUSTRY may have matured, but GAMERS have not. If anything, they've gone in the other direction, becoming whinier, more demanding, and more immature about any problems they perceive. As an example, the huge number of "oh my god, <feature> isn't in this game?! The game is doomed to faiillll! EPIC FAAAAILLLL!", etc.

 

Essentially, gamers have become spoiled over the years by companies that, at first, released buggy, unfinished products, but slowly over time worked them up into something much better. People are used to the 10-12+ years that those games have been in existence, and expect any new game to have equal amount of "stuff" in it, despite only having 25-30% of the dev time.

 

While it would be nice if "no game were released before it's ready", what people seem to be expecting these days is a game to come out with a decade or more of development time, and everything is perfect. No game will ever match the expectations of the modern gamer, because, IMO, modern games have become incredibly spoiled.

 

Second, many of the issues raised by people are actually very viable ussues and not unrealistic at all. From ability delay to lack of playable engame content and lack of serious PvP are all very important and viable issues. In other words, most players up to now have not complained about that little stuff at all. So your characterization of unrealistic expectations is wrong.

 

If there are major issues, that's certainly a valid complaint. However, some of the things people view as "giant, game-breaking flaws" aren't even remotely so. They're bugs, to be sure, but they're not the end of the world.

 

I'm not arguing that companies should half-*** their products. But at the same time, gamers need to rein in some of their more idealistic expectations.

 

If the game isn't enjoyable, take a break. Move on to something else. Come back in a few months to see if the issues you had are fixed. If not, move on. But demanding "FIX IT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW BECAUSE I SAY SO!" is childish in the extreme. But sadly, that's the mindset that a lot of modern gamers have. Maybe it's just the 20-somethings, that have been brought up in the "instant gratification" era. Who knows.

 

/soapbox off

Edited January 20, 2012 by LyriaFrost

[AkulaX]

Not sure where this downtime figure came from. Besides a very rare short outage the first month was almost downtime free on my server.

 

Is that why they gave everyone 15-30 days free? No they gave everyone that time because of the excessive down time. You have a short memory.

[Buur]

No. The problem lies when people only have the exposure of WoW.

WoW stops being a game and becomes the genre itself. That's what has happened. Rift dealt with it. SWTOR is dealing with. Every themepark will deal with it. When the next game comes out that isn't similar to WoW, people will complain that it's not enough like WoW. Doesn't have addons like WoW. Doesn't have Arenas like WoW. Doesn't have a launcher like WoW. Doesn't have a website like WoW. Doesn't have a game designer with name Ghost in it like WoW. WoW WoW WoW WoW WoW.

 

What people are sick of, they want most. What's different must conform to the familiar.

 

Except this game is similar to WoW and I think people wish it wasn't. But as it is so similar to WoW people wish it had the same amount of polish. It doesn't. Not even close.

[churp]

SWTOR is a victim of having the same exact endgame as WoW but with less. A victim of Bioware.

[djsmileey]

This is quite true. You have to compare an MMO to its CURRENT competition, not what their competition of X number of years ago. However...

 

 

 

The gaming INDUSTRY may have matured, but GAMERS have not. If anything, they've gone in the other direction, becoming whinier, more demanding, and more immature about any problems they perceive. As an example, the huge number of "oh my god, <feature> isn't in this game?! The game is doomed to faiillll! EPIC FAAAAILLLL!", etc.

 

Essentially, gamers have become spoiled over the years by companies that, at first, released buggy, unfinished products, but slowly over time worked them up into something much better. People are used to the 10-12+ years that those games have been in existence, and expect any new game to have equal amount of "stuff" in it, despite only having 25-30% of the dev time.

 

While it would be nice if "no game were released before it's ready", what people seem to be expecting these days is a game to come out with a decade or more of development time, and everything is perfect. No game will ever match the expectations of the modern gamer, because, IMO, modern games have become incredibly spoiled.

 

Second, many of the issues raised by people are actually very viable ussues and not unrealistic at all. From ability delay to lack of playable engame content and lack of serious PvP are all very important and viable issues. In other words, most players up to now have not complained about that little stuff at all. So your characterization of unrealistic expectations is wrong.

If there are major issues, that's certainly a valid complaint. However, some of the things people view as "giant, game-breaking flaws" aren't even remotely so. They're bugs, to be sure, but they're not the end of the world.

 

I'm not arguing that companies should half-*** their products. But at the same time, gamers need to rein in some of their more idealistic expectations.

 

If the game isn't enjoyable, take a break. Move on to something else. Come back in a few months to see if the issues you had are fixed. If not, move on. But demanding "FIX IT NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW BECAUSE I SAY SO!" is childish in the extreme. But sadly, that's the mindset that a lot of modern gamers have. Maybe it's just the 20-somethings, that have been brought up in the "instant gratification" era. Who knows.

 

/soapbox off

 

I truly wish more people would understand this concept.

 

I just happen to know most people are more happy being jerks and would rather spend their time trolling.

Edited January 20, 2012 by djsmileey

[SnoggyMack]

I've read alot of the gripes and complaints on these forums, and i've come to the conclusion that the level of intolerance for bugs and tech issues is way beyond anything i've seen in any other game. The first few month of wow's launch, we experienced up to 20+ days of server down time. During that time i didn't feel the hatred i feel in the swtor forums. Personally I blame the burned out wowers who built unrealistic expectations.

 

Thoughts?

 

You're not connecting the dots properly. You feel ... FEEL ... hatred in the Star Wars forums.

 

There's a lot of threads discussing a huge population imbalance. Most of these threads indicate that there are far too many people experiencing what it's like to be Sith.

 

Sith.

 

Feel.

 

Hatred.

 

/thread

[jdnyc]

Except this game is similar to WoW and I think people wish it wasn't. But as it is so similar to WoW people wish it had the same amount of polish. It doesn't. Not even close.

 

Some people indeed wish it wasn't similar to WoW. The vast majority appreciate its similarity.

[Blotter]

Thoughts?

 

Paid astroturfers trying to create buzz about what a supposed "disaster" SWTOR is in order to get people to quit and/or keep them from subscribing. It's not all tha crazy to think so. It's been a verifiably proven occurence in all sorts of venues, politics in particular, so I see no reason why giant game development companies wouldn't pull that kind of crap on each other.