To those judging SWTOR for now.

[thecoffeecup]

You obviously weren't around for WoW's launch. They had server crashes for 9 months after launch...I was there.

 

 

I was there as well. From what I can remember, they had more stability problems than SWTOR had a launch, but it isn't nearly as bad as some people say.

Edited January 27, 2012 by thecoffeecup

[Laeris]

I see that you're going to a place where it doesn't matter what features you have at launch.

 

 

Rift had a lot of things people consider "standard", which really aren't because most of these "standard" features are relatively new features. But anyway Rift had a lot of stuff and still plummeted in it's subscriptions 3 months out. So apparently having all of those nice extras doesn't have any bearing on whether or not your game wins or fails.

 

Although people like to pretend it does.

 

And Rift, in case you're one of those trolls who doesn't know any better, is growing by leaps and bounds right now. They recently doubled their server population limits and closed several small pop servers and consolidated the core pop to 14 heavy pop servers on the NA cluster in preparation for their XPAC coming soon-ish.

 

You can go look at riftstatus.net if you don't believe me. Look at the trend...they're all going up where all of SWTOR's are going down.

[TyphoonMidget]

Its the vocal minority that preach the "sky is falling" mantra every time a game is released, it happened with WoW/Rift/EVE etc... I will only accept that when the game is 6 months down the line and there is an obvious negative trend in population, but ONLY then.

[Bregah]

I may be still new to the game but it still kind of bothers me how many people are judging this game when it is still new. New MMOs need time to become the good MMO people expect it to be despite how you may feel now.

 

It may be new, but that doesn't give the game the right to suck, which is what you are implying.

 

If it were new and still free, then by all means they can take as long as they want to fix things, but if I am going to spend $15 a month to play an MMO, then I'm going to choose to spend that where I think I'll have more fun. The newness of the game will never come into consideration when I'm thinking "fun".

 

As it stands now, I'm still having fun, but I'm having less fun that I was 2 weeks ago, as my server is clearly dying (not even always "standard" in prime time now). PvP is suddenly an avenue of potential fun that doesn't even exist for me 90% of my playtime.

 

I'm in a guild with over 20 50's, so generally hardmode FP's aren't hard to get going, unless we have a lack of heals around (I'm a tank, so lack of tanks actually makes me more desired), as when you couple a dying server with awful LFG tools, you find it very hard to pug people, especially since my guild is around 1/4 of all online 50's at any given time, and some of those other 50's (around 6 are still left) are begging people to queue for PvP as they only play for the PvP).

 

Like I said, I'm still having fun, but not as much as 2 weeks ago. Merge my server with 2 or 3 other similarly pop'd ones and I think my fun level would go up instantly (as it would feel like I was playing an MMO again).

 

Also, along the lines of "give it time so it can develop to be good", um...if there weren't so many subpar things that they have to fix/tweak/upgrade from launch (specifically talking UI, Ilum, lack of dual spec/LFG tools and the like), I might have faith that they WILL get it right.

 

But at the moment the update I can look forward to will give me resizable UI elements, and the video bills it as a big thing - brand new feature, and it likely won't be out until March.

 

That fact alone has me worried so much about Bioware's ability to run an MMO, but if you couple that with Ilum, both pre and post 1.1, and the near silence about PvP since 1.1, and I'm confident their PvP team is clueless as well, as it appears to me that they are doing absolutely nothing except letting PvP die (excepting some few servers here and there).

[Bregah]

And Rift, in case you're one of those trolls who doesn't know any better, is growing by leaps and bounds right now. They recently doubled their server population limits and closed several small pop servers and consolidated the core pop to 14 heavy pop servers on the NA cluster in preparation for their XPAC coming soon-ish.

 

You can go look at riftstatus.net if you don't believe me. Look at the trend...they're all going up where all of SWTOR's are going down.

 

The other thing that Rift lacked (which I admit, for me at least, Star Wars has) is an interesting world.

 

By that I mean that Rift's world may be interesting, but for me, it was so close to WoWs that it wasn't interesting ENOUGH.

 

Rift did have the best feature set at launch I've ever encountered, and if you could take Rift's systems designs and put them into TOR, I think you may have a game that rivals WoW.

 

But for anyone who likes/loves WoW, TOR's features/interface/systems are turgid pieces of poo, and I can't see many switching (unless they are looking to get away from WoW at nearly any cost - but if someone is looking to get away from WoW at any cost, Rift is easily the better designed game, albeit in too much of a similar world to WoW's for me).

[Rogueish]

I played late Beta and from launch for about a year. I never had any of those problems.

 

If I remember correctly, WoW had a pretty smooth launch. SWToR launch was pretty smooth as well but WoW just started, over 5 years ago, with more features and more content than SWToR has today.

 

WoW's launch was an unmitigated disaster for a very large percentage of its user base. I started on day one and have maintained a subscription since that time. The server I started on was unavailable for 2 or 4 days (I can't recall) because they had to rebuild the entire back-end infrastructure to account for the server load.

 

Remember loot lag?

 

My account status says I've received over 30 days of free play time due to all of the issues. A few patches here and there over the years have netted as much as a day of free time, but the bulk of that time came from the very beginning of the game.

 

As far as features, SWTOR absolutely has more features than WoW did at launch. Aside from external interface mods (which is more a design choice than a required feature set) what functionality did WoW have in the first month that is lacking in SWTOR? I think people forget just how many things (both large and small) Blizzard added over the years to make WoW what it is.

 

Content is hard to say, but if you throw in the voice acting (which I know people have mixed feelings about) then SWTOR wins hands down.

 

Bioware seems to have taken the tack of more content vs being feature rich, at least at the start. I don't think that was a terribly good idea, though, given how fast people chew through content. You can NEVER have enough truly unique content for the power gamers, so I think they should have opted for features. Hopefully they'll change tack.

[LogicalPremise]

You need to understand, when you rant about lack of end game, that you are in the minority, and your concerns will be addressed, when there is time.

 

I saw , quite literally , the EXACT same quote on the STO forums, 4 months before the game bled out and almost to death.

 

You need to understand, when you blindly ignore that even though the fact the free 30 day trolls are gone that more people are unhappy about the game than happy, that you are NOT the majority.

 

Every MMO that has gone down has had your argument put forth. It has never, ever, EVER been proven correct. The model either blows up and crashes (APB) or dies a slow ugly death (STO, Warhammer), or reinvents itself entirely (CO, RIFT).