Metrics, Serious Raiding, SWTOR Has None

[va_wanderer]

Any self-respectable MMO player who is interested in improving his damage and play-ability is 100% interested in those kind of number-crunching statistics. They're very important if you're trying to min-max.

 

And there lies the problem.

 

I look at the Trooper boards. They're really friendly places. They don't have precise number-crunching abilities. People work for "better", because they can't precisely measure "best"- and it means that since they can't prove they're perfectly right, they don't sit there having math wars and flamefests.

 

I can remember the Mage boards on WoW. Your "number crunching" and "min-maxing" tools made it a place of acrimony and hissy fits, of bemoaning the constant cycle of buff and nerf Blizzard uses to keep the pot stirred.

 

And I did my share of raids from Kunark-era EQ, FFXI, and WoTLK. I know hardcore. Hardcore was pre-nerf Pandy Warden or Absolute Virtue. It wasn't fun. It was masochism paradise, the pleasure you got from finishing them wasn't anything but the release from a self-induced torment.

 

Hardcore raiders are MMO poison. They embitter the playerbase, spread acrimony like a cloud, and devs that listen to them find themselves deafened to nearly everything else by the endless screeching and demands.

 

SWG wasn't for the "hardcore", either. I don't want SWTOR to be sucked into that all-consuming maw, for the game that kowtows to "raid style content" is the game that like the Sarlaac will find a thousand years of suffering being slowly digested by the hardcore raiding guilds and their acidic torments of the game.

[va_wanderer]

Do you want the reputation of a having our guild, leader a former Ranger instructor, or some similar raid leader barking orders at your raid as to when to dps and when to stop dps because there is no threat meter in game? That is old school hardcore QQ causing casual eating mentality.

 

How about we don't have content that takes your ex-military type barking orders nonstop like he's having a drillground flashback instead?

 

If the current difficulty level has less than 40% of the players at 50 doing even ONE OPERATION, then do you think increasing the difficulty will somehow increase the number of endgame players doing those raids? No! It'll simply decrease the number of players doing the content in the first place while attempting to placate an ever decreasing percentage (but surely ever louder, every MMO I've seen they get louder and louder) of the people who get their character to the level cap.

[swpoop]

We are certainly looking for content that can't be beat the first day it comes out. Our guild has provided tons of feedback to the dev team and we believe they are listening.

 

Some key points from the summit:

Raids are too easy as stated by Gabe

 

1.2 will not contain nightmare mode so it can be developed of metrics gained from hard mode and further test for bugs

 

All 3 levels of difficulties will introduce new mechanics besides just raising HP and damage taken

 

Nightmare will truly be a nightmare as stated by several Dev's

 

 

So with those being said, you want to make make the worlds best raiding for the worlds best players the basic tools that we are accustomed to should be provided. I do not care about a threat meter, but he basic parsing should be there. Figuring out who is doing what, what is being done when, and to whom is vital for start forming. Time will tell but the indications we have received Bioware wants to create a hardcore raiding scene..

[tekkamansoul]

ITT: SERIUS gamers.

[AJediKnight]

Only 38% of the level 50 player base raid. Of those what percent do you think are "hard core"?

 

I don't (well, 'didn't' now, since I've cancelled and will not be coming back) raid in this game not because I am incapable (I raided since the Ony/MC days of early WoW), but because I have been utterly underwhelmed by the PvE experience as a whole. Over half the bosses in the game are nothing more than simple tank-and-spanks and, what's more, many of the dungeons are clogged to the gills with pull after pull of needless, horrendous trash.

 

Step it up to nightmare mode, and things that are 'a little broken' in normal raids become night-ending bugs. I once listened to my guild over mumble wipe on a NM encounter for over three hours, not because they couldn't get the mechanics of the fight down, but because a random bug kept cropping up and wiping them. It happened again and again, to the point where the pain in their voices was palpable. It was like the C'thun bug all over again, only, in a way, a thousand times worse, simply because, had the bugs not been there, then the NM content would have been utterly facerollable.

 

Like the OP, I can't take the raiding scene in TOR seriously, and I laugh when people tell me that they're big into operations. But, given the fact that my 'night' in PvP has essentially been reduced to a trio of WZ wins before logging, both facets of the game are dead to me. I'm going back to WoW.

Edited March 7, 2012 by AJediKnight

[fungihoujo]

I've always been a fan of 'hardcore raider' mentality on this forum. "Operations are too easy!" Followed by "We NEED threat and damage meters, which will make Operations easier!"

 

 

Sorry you have to pay a bit of attention and test things out rather than having a program tell you that you suck.

[NotRonin]

To have almost 40% of level 50 having experienced end-game raiding is quite an achievement. WoW is only 5%, and Absolute Virtue in FFXI is less than 1%. Having 'endgame' that is easily accessible is a strength, not a weakness.

[Sotaudi]

You realize we can have everyone log out after each attempt and upload their parses.

 

The more I think about it, the more constraints there are the more I want I want them to implement this. It is a great opportunity to stop the raid and look over EVERYTHING with a fine tooth comb. I mean if we are going to have to stop to do this anyway why not look at it all.

 

SO, community, do you want raid leaders to stop the raid and do this or do you want us to have instant meters we can review, solve the problems within a couple of minutes and move on? OR shall we go through all of this none-sense and make sure that since we are having to waste this time that everyone is up to par.

 

let me tell you if we have to do this time will be even more valuable and if you suck you WILL be removed IMMEDIATELY.

 

This only makes things worse for the bads. Stopping the whole raid to see who messed up...I CANT WAIT!

 

The utter delusion that we are all just sitting around waiting for your, or any raid leader's, approval before we can raid is just mind boggling. This is what is just absolutely hilarous about these discussions. You get up on your soap box about how such tools will help build the game, help build community, when all you really want is a way to exclude people and create exclusive little clubs.

 

I really hope somebody stops a raid to demand that I upload a combat log. I look forward to telling him just exactly where he can stick it, then I will go do the raid with people who are actually trying to play the game, not pretend they matter just because they want to say they were the first to beat up a bunch of pixels.

[Dawgtide]

Well, SWTOR will lose those subscribers, sure. But one open question is: will Bioware gain or retain more players overall by choosing not to cater to the hardcore? We don't yet know the answer.

 

World of Warcraft has shown with Cataclysm that catering to casuals, with the dungeon finder, will get you a loss of 10% of your playerbase over the course of an expansion cycle.

 

[/b]

 

I will say this. I hope they learned from EQ. The mass exodus there was due to tiered raiding and endgame content that people could not beat.

 

Tiered raiding did not allow the casual player to keep up with the hardcore raiders. Planes of Power and Gates of Discord broke the backs of guilds.

 

Also, Gates of Discord was level 70 content released for level 65s. It was not finished on level and drove the hardcores away in mass. So I am not so sure, we always want too hard content.

 

I don't know a thing about World of Warcraft raiding, so I cannot comment on how hard it was for people or if they catered to the hardcore.

[Dawgtide]

You my friend suffer from a serious case of what I call “Red Slipper Syndrome”, you can’t go back to that time and you cannot recapture the newness of your first raid encounters and the challenges you faced then mostly because everything is a rehash of those experiences in one form or another and nothing will ever match that excitement and secondly those shoes aren’t really magic.

 

I could not agree more. It is hard to repeat the first memorable impression.

[va_wanderer]

We are leaving MMOs en masse. You have shunned us over and over, we have moved on to other generes or stopped playing all together.

 

Yet you keep coming to new games and demanding the same tired stuff over and over again.

 

MMO's existed before you. I should know. I come from an age that predates your kind, when we paid by the -hour- for our gameplay and could lose every piece of gear if we were stupid, where a treasured piece of gear could literally be hacked off your body and lost if you were foolish enough in the wrong places. One bad chunk of RNG and you could see your uber sword shatter into useless junk, never to be seen again.

 

I was one of the first "ubers", from Gemstone III, one of GEnie's first multiplayer games, the literal "ICE age" of MMO's. A Common Man Fighter, Kyreth No-Name, earned my Lord title, can remember falling out of the tree in Town Square and having my first wounds empath'd off me by Strom, who was the definition of "healer" before you were likely old enough to drink legally. We fighters looked up to a guy named Metaboculous, who was our "class paragon" if you'd call him that. Google it sometime. You might learn something. House Argent Aspis.

 

The entire first server was 120 players at any one time (which expanded greatly as AOL and GS IV came along). And you know what? Most of you pathetic "hardcores" don't even know your roots. Games come. Games go. (though Gemstone IV survives to this day).

 

Your achievements are meaningless in the end, forgotten in the mists of history. Mine certainly have been, because people like you fail to keep the lessons we passed down alive- and that saddens me.

 

My kind were your ancestors, the first MMO players who played head and shoulders above the "average" on the server. We didn't try to monopolize the game, or demand more for "us". We were part of the community, not "us" and "them", and we added our voice to everyone else that played to make the game better for all kinds of play, not merely the toughest and roughest content. We didn't have threat meters, our "parses" were screen captures. They are utterly un-needed for a tough game- and number-crunching isn't "playing". It's statmongering, the refinement of a machine, not the actions of a player. It is the transformation of a gamer into something as close unto a robot made of fleshy parts as you can get, dehumanizing and despicable. We contributed to the understanding of the game, but we didn't sit there sneering at people who didn't take every bit of advice in an effort to do as we had. They had fun. We had fun. The game prospered.

 

Go, and take your poison with you.

[VulcanLogic]

I'm not hardcore anymore. The four nights a week, 4 hours a pop, plus 20 hours of preparing for that, is no longer my thing. They could make nightmare mode a bit more challenging, and to be honest I'd be fine being cut out of that content, but to do so they really need combat logs. Not to have nightmare modes they don't, but to make them sufficiently challenging to the best gamers out there, yes they do. And we're getting that, so problem solved.

 

But threat meters? I'm not so sure I even agree with the threat mechanic balancing that WoW had in the past, because even WoW abandoned it. You can balance tank skill on positioning and how well a tank rotates cooldowns rather than DPS gear outscaling his.

 

Much more important for me would be a UI enhancment like Tidy Plates, done in house and made default by Bioware (along with target of target). Targeting sucks in this game. It really does. Admit it, even in a baseball bench clearing brawl you have a better idea of who is hitting whom than in TOR, given the same number of players. There is no reason the UI should not do a better job of relaying that information to the players, and Tidy Plates does it the best way I've seen. Do it.

[JediElf]

Yet you keep coming to new games and demanding the same tired stuff over and over again.

 

MMO's existed before you. I should know. I come from an age that predates your kind, when we paid by the -hour- for our gameplay and could lose every piece of gear if we were stupid, where a treasured piece of gear could literally be hacked off your body and lost if you were foolish enough in the wrong places. One bad chunk of RNG and you could see your uber sword shatter into useless junk, never to be seen again.

 

I was one of the first "ubers", from Gemstone III, one of GEnie's first multiplayer games, the literal "ICE age" of MMO's. A Common Man Fighter, Kyreth No-Name, earned my Lord title, can remember falling out of the tree in Town Square and having my first wounds empath'd off me by Strom, who was the definition of "healer" before you were likely old enough to drink legally. We fighters looked up to a guy named Metaboculous, who was our "class paragon" if you'd call him that. Google it sometime. You might learn something. House Argent Aspis.

 

The entire first server was 120 players at any one time (which expanded greatly as AOL and GS IV came along). And you know what? Most of you pathetic "hardcores" don't even know your roots. Games come. Games go. (though Gemstone IV survives to this day).

 

Your achievements are meaningless in the end, forgotten in the mists of history. Mine certainly have been, because people like you fail to keep the lessons we passed down alive- and that saddens me.

My kind were your ancestors, the first MMO players who played head and shoulders above the "average" on the server. We didn't try to monopolize the game, or demand more for "us". We were part of the community, not "us" and "them", and we added our voice to everyone else that played to make the game better for all kinds of play, not merely the toughest and roughest content. We didn't have threat meters, our "parses" were screen captures. They are utterly un-needed for a tough game- and number-crunching isn't "playing". It's statmongering, the refinement of a machine, not the actions of a player. It is the transformation of a gamer into something as close unto a robot made of fleshy parts as you can get, dehumanizing and despicable. We contributed to the understanding of the game, but we didn't sit there sneering at people who didn't take every bit of advice in an effort to do as we had. They had fun. We had fun. The game prospered.

 

Go, and take your poison with you.

 

The words, of a true game master.

 

No greater thing, has ever been said on this topic.

 

As someone who has gamed most of her life, I tip my hat to you sir. You are one of the last, the real, the guys who know what MMORPG really means.

 

I just wish more of you were around....we need you now, more than ever.

Edited March 7, 2012 by JediElf

[HellFlame]

To have almost 40% of level 50 having experienced end-game raiding is quite an achievement. WoW is only 5%, and Absolute Virtue in FFXI is less than 1%. Having 'endgame' that is easily accessible is a strength, not a weakness.

 

Having an endgame content which is boring and bugged like a foul apple is a weakness.

 

PS: Just give us threat & dps meters and combat log seriously... If you suck... you suck .. those tools dont change that. Sooner or later people gonna notice that anyways... (not stated against any poster)

[RowanThursday]

The utter delusion that we are all just sitting around waiting for your, or any raid leader's, approval before we can raid is just mind boggling. This is what is just absolutely hilarous about these discussions. You get up on your soap box about how such tools will help build the game, help build community, when all you really want is a way to exclude people and create exclusive little clubs.

 

I really hope somebody stops a raid to demand that I upload a combat log. I look forward to telling him just exactly where he can stick it, then I will go do the raid with people who are actually trying to play the game, not pretend they matter just because they want to say they were the first to beat up a bunch of pixels.

 

Sir, I salute you, and will sacrifice thirty Jawas in your honour.

 

The mind-boggling *arrogance* of this self-appointed "hardcore" mentality astounds me.

 

What do we hear, in response to practically *anything* that changes in game, from the "hardcore".

 

"Oooh, no, we can't have that, because of <fanfare> Balance!" .... or "No, we're not allowing you to implement this in your own game, Bioware, because if you let a Jedi Knight with a Smuggler in their 'family tree' have access to Dirty Kick... then when I meet a Jedi Knight in game I won't know exactly down to the very last action precisely what buttons he's going to click, and I might... sob... lose... and I can't lose because I have to be the greatest!"... and then "Waaaah, the game's too easy!"

 

If the game is too easy, then isn't making PvP unpredictable... so you have to deal with enemies as *individual* combatants, and adapt to their individual skills on-the-fly... and have to treat your team-mates as fellow players, rather than holding up some silly scoresheet and attempting to assert your tatty, self-invented authority... surely, isn't that good?

 

There may well be good reasons why a damage meter of some sort could be useful. However, a point illustrated in a dev's comments which one of the hardcore actually *quoted* up-thread: "We don't want people to be able to use it to judge you".

 

It's the hardcore, with their "RADINGG IZ SERIUZ BUSYNES" mindset, and the attitude that makes them seriously think that they *can* order another player to upload this data and submit to the self-appointed elite's scrutiny, who are the very reason that the devs are rightly leery of giving them the opportunity.

 

If a bully who likes to hit people with iron bars is stomping round the playground screaming his head off because there aren't any iron bars in the playground... then you don't give them to him.

 

The assessment is quite right- the MMO world has changed. The self-appointed elite *are* increasingly finding themselves unwelcome, as the devs of MMOs, instead of catering to them, are more and more acting to make the world accessible by dealing with problems... including cutting away from under the elite's feet, their means of treating the casual majority like dirt.

 

So... next time an Elite Min/Maxing Capslock King tries to tell you "MMOs aren't for you, go back to Farmville" because you just want the game to be *fun* and easy-going enough to be relaxing... turn back to him, and say "Go back to 2004, MMOs aren't for you any more."

 

Sorry, to the bullies... but you're actually not welcome any more. Bye-bye.

[Seldaris]

You deserve an award OP. Couldn't agree more, I've always been in that class of gamers that aren't hardcore but play with the same mentality with the time given and are always right in that competitive atmosphere. The guilds that take a bit longer to get to the content but when they do they go after the same achievements and goals. They want the challenge and want to push themselves but perhaps don't have as much time to devote.

 

With that said the issues of Meters and such doesn't make the game easier it makes people's performance transparent. I tell you as DPS its more about motivation...When you don't know what your numbers are and you don't know how well your playing you have no motivation to really push yourself or excel. Your playing in the dark...it isn't fun. Min/Maxers enjoy pushing themselves and they need to see the results. It's like a runner and a race without a time he doesn't know what to push for next.

 

This mentality of no meters is so care-bear its ridiculous. If your playing story mode nobody is going to care about meters. Casual's go have fun...if your decide to raid heroic/nightmare you have already signed up that you want to be competitive, so your performance should be checked/qualified to go. If you don't like this then too bad your basically wanting a system in which people will carry the bads without knowing who the bads are....and no competitive gamer is going to do that crap...We'll be back off to WoW next expansion, and you casuals will have a dead game...no money...no content...you gave us the finger and then your game died guess too bad now you got nothing.

[maxetius]

I don't (well, 'didn't' now, since I've cancelled and will not be coming back) raid in this game not because I am incapable (I raided since the Ony/MC days of early WoW), but because I have been utterly underwhelmed by the PvE experience as a whole. Over half the bosses in the game are nothing more than simple tank-and-spanks and, what's more, many of the dungeons are clogged to the gills with pull after pull of needless, horrendous trash.

 

Step it up to nightmare mode, and things that are 'a little broken' in normal raids become night-ending bugs. I once listened to my guild over mumble wipe on a NM encounter for over three hours, not because they couldn't get the mechanics of the fight down, but because a random bug kept cropping up and wiping them. It happened again and again, to the point where the pain in their voices was palpable. It was like the C'thun bug all over again, only, in a way, a thousand times worse, simply because, had the bugs not been there, then the NM content would have been utterly facerollable.

 

Like the OP, I can't take the raiding scene in TOR seriously, and I laugh when people tell me that they're big into operations. But, given the fact that my 'night' in PvP has essentially been reduced to a trio of WZ wins before logging, both facets of the game are dead to me. I'm going back to WoW.

 

your post is an awesome indicative and example of why your type is being catered to less and less. why should Bioware spend inordinate time and money to design content for an arrogant minority that will leave at any moment.

 

 

No offense, but really catering to hardcore players is MMO death.

[va_wanderer]

This mentality of no meters is so care-bear its ridiculous. If your playing story mode nobody is going to care about meters. Casual's go have fun...if your decide to raid heroic/nightmare you have already signed up that you want to be competitive, so your performance should be checked/qualified to go. If you don't like this then too bad your basically wanting a system in which people will carry the bads without knowing who the bads are....and no competitive gamer is going to do that crap...We'll be back off to WoW next expansion, and you casuals will have a dead game...no money...no content...you gave us the finger and then your game died guess too bad now you got nothing.

 

I don't think you quite get it.

 

More than half of the game population doesn't give a flying fig about Operations, aka "competitive content". You aren't the "money". In fact, to me players like that are a distraction from actually making a game better, vs. sitting there trying to give hardcore raiders another shiny hamster wheel to run on.

 

Over 60% of the game's 50s never touched an Operation. Of those, an even smaller percentage are the "hardcore gamer" you think you are (Hint: You aren't.)

 

You're from the generation who things micromanagement = better gaming. That works for Starcraft. It blows chunks for actual MMO's. WoW will welcome you with open arms because you've been well-trained to the endless cycle of grind.

 

EQ didn't succeed because of it's hardcore raiders. It's part of what shot it in the foot as they put more and more effort into appeasing them and less into an actual bigger and better game. Likewise, WoW has suffered in the long run. They'll keep more subscribers with a bunch of Pandaren and minipets duking it out than they will getting you to fight the next Arthas. After all, endgamers like you could care less about everything 1-49. It's just another obstacle to getting to the "hard stuff". It's the only part of the "world" that matters to you, and it's the only part that you feel really needs development. More endgame tools. More raid management. More hardmode ubermonsters. More shiny endgame loot so you can be that 1% better than everyone else.

 

The story doesn't matter. The universe doesn't matter. The only thing that matters about the game is how large an audience you can find to proclaim your superiority over others, and that disgusts me as to how much of a waste of energy you are vs. the rest of the playerbase. It's the people who want to experience the whole game, not the end game that are the bread and butter of the industry.

 

THEY are the majority, they are the "money", they are the players who put the big bank in Bioware's pocket and it's the denial of how little the "hardcore" really matters in the end. You want to see what kowtowing to that gets you?

 

It gets you failures like Vanguard or FFXIV. It gets you wannabes like EQ2, forever stuck in the shadow of Blizzard. It signed the abdication of EQ as the dominant MMO over to Blizzard, who literally outspent them in every way to usurp their position....but not because of their raids. Because they made an appealing world and kept making efforts to get people to come back into it, to experience it. Even WoW never depending on the hardcore raider. You were just the big, loud PR stunts.

 

Go back to WoW. There will be nothing like it, because nothing else can be like it and succeed. Any game dev foolish enough to try to follow it's ever-increasing series of uber-raiding will find themselves outspent, outworked, and out-done because that path has "World of Warcraft" stamped on it so hard that you'd have to BE Blizzard to have the resources to match it or even come close.

 

There are no "WoW killers". There will only be games that find a large market that don't want a WoW mentality of endless raid cycles who will truly succeed. The more SWTOR seeks to emulate that pattern, the worse they will be off for it in the end. For every hour and dollar they spend on the game, they'll get more out of improving things for the average player than figuring out how to make your next super-opponent for something more than half the players will never experience, and even that 40% or so would have an ever decreasing portion of newer, "serious raiding" content because they'd burn out having to deal with the "guilds" needed to do them- and hence would avoid the whole song and dance.

 

Four Flashpoints > 1 16-man hardmode Operation for the game, and four big world mobs to fight > one HM flashpoint for useful content to boot.

[BoneEater]

Good post OP, agree with (almost) everything you said.

 

Endgame and the tools for such, have to be adressed in this game.

 

I might just go and see how awful pandas really are in WoW...not that I want to, but I hoped ToR would be a real alternative, not "only" awesome story.

[Seldaris]

I don't think you quite get it.

 

I don't think you quite get it. I love the story in this game, in fact I wanted Raiding with Story Driven incentives. Your hard-work and striving in raids should produce an epic climax that is well-written, aka Bioware quality.

 

If, 60% of you guys aren't raiding then I fail to see why any of you would care if the raiding population had the ability to meter its performance. We enjoy playing the game a certain way, let us play that way. We enjoy pushing ourselves to the limits, seeing what our capabilities with the mechanics/abilities can produce...You don't deserve to tell us how to have fun nor limit our endeavors. If you want to play your way nobody is asking you to join our guilds or use our tools. Our epeening as you want to call it can be limited to our group. I would call it proud of performance, and there are certain political ways of purporting it, that others could take a lead on. But the only time we typical attack back is on this sort of bs and the unqualified statements coming from the gallery. It's like a C student telling a Straight A Student how things really are in the A students field of expertise. You only have so much patience for the BS. The difference here is the A student loves to pull out his qualifications where the C wants to find a bunch of ways to ignore it. Perhaps why Plato abhorred a democracy, the whole mob thinks their right on whims.

 

Again it simply comes down to motivation, a runner in a race with a stop watch, a boxer going for the gold, etc etc. Or did you grow up where everyone got a trophy for showing up? Perhaps people should go read some Nietzsche, or read up on some Ancient Greece the founding of our whole Western Cultural tradition, they seemed to thrive on the idea of Arete. Competition drives us and without transparency there is no outlet for competition. True competitors want an equal opponent. True Guilds will compete with each other friendly and within the ranks its a friendly competition to better themselves.

 

I've played MuDs, EQ, EQ 2, DAOC, AoC, WoW etc. After you've lvled there is nothing to do but raid, MMO's are about group activity and completing tasks together. Forming quality teams is what min/maxers do... Those of us in between hardcore raid less, but find players that Min/Max and play their class to its highest potentials. Casual Hardcore consists of players with lifes/jobs playing and employing the same competitive tools/skills the Hardcores do...and there's plenty of us. As the rise of 10 man raiding in WoW saw.

 

Bioware's job is supposed to fill the gap with compelling stories and reasons for raiding in the background. With your model apparently everyone should just go roll alts and wait for story content...If thats the case why are we paying 15 bucks a month... should just wait for the Dragon Ages and Mass Effects...

 

Lastly, the 3 tiered system should allow for all mindsets to get along.

 

Story for the Casuals

Heroic for the Casual Hardcores

Nightmare for the Hardcore small population.

 

The Casual Hardcores would want meters and such to compare themselves to that top 3%. We'll never invest that much time/energy for stated reasons but if we're within 10% of their performance we're quite happy with ourselves. This is the mindset of normal people trying to be competitive...I fail to see why the game can't accommodate everyone. As to WoW and why switch...it comes down to yes its just raiding and having some awesome story would be great...and Star Wars is a great IP as well.

Edited March 7, 2012 by Seldaris

[khreed]

While I agree with lots of what the OP said about the standard expected everyday MMO features to be here I also understand the opponents of what the OP said.

 

Truth be told there is no reason why the features and quality asked for cannot be delivered as an option to those that want it and able to be turned off for those that wish to not use it. It isn't hard to allow people to have meters and logs to help them min/max themselves as well as allow people to hide their numbers from others so that they can enjoy gaming the way they want to.

 

It really comes down to Bioware having to make everyone happy and the simple notion of that takes time....and lots of it. For those asking for harder content and stronger mechanics and more of the traditional treadmill of PVE that players have come to expect from a modern MMO following in the footsteps of other games, give BW time to deliver. Have some faith that the ONLY star wars game on the market will have the time and money to invest to deliver that content overtime. Also understand that while it may seem like there is not enough content to enjoy it is up to you to ultamatly decide whether or not to continue to fiscally provide to BW. So if you don't like what you see coming and/or you think it is taking too long or maybe you think that they are not listening to your wants and needs then let them know with your purchasing power. Nothing speaks to a company louder than the loss of revenue.

 

To those bashing the OP realize that while the % of players that are raiding is not the majority of players it is still a large amount of paying customers that ultamatly want what you want, a better game. It boils down to a few things though, first understanding that hardcore PVE-ers want this game to be as fun, energentic, and challanging as other games they have played. Afterall, that is why they are still paying to play, but when they are bashed for wanting BW to cater more to theri needs and wants there is little help given by the community that bashes their ideas. They have valid points in their demands for the game. I know lots of people that have played and are playing would like the game to at least have many of the features asked for by the OP to at least be an option for gamers to use. I also understand the viewpoint of those opposed to things like DPS meters and the PVE raid treadmill as it can (and often has) turned a certain population of a game into sub-human *******s that forget that behind the screen on the other side of the game is a person that does not want to be the reason any more than you do, to be the reason why a wipe happens or do "be bad".

 

I do believe that there is a healthy medium that cane asily be reached with time and patience on everyones part. to the "HARDCORE RAIDERS" the game is really new to the public and needs time to grow and mature and polish (and believe me when I say its hard for me to say this sometimes after wiping to things like SOA's NM reset agro invis bug cuz the tank is in a mindtrap bug thats been around far to long IMO) but it will happen and again it is on you and your power of purchase to make the final call on whether or not you are willing to wait to see where the game is going to end up.

 

To those that disagree with the OP understand that he wants what we all do, a better game for everyone.

 

to BW, good luck with that

sorry for poor spelling i r tired

[ViperD]

/signed

 

I agree with the op's points. The lack of support for hard core, even semi-core, raiders is appalling.

 

From what we learned from the guild summit, 1.2 is a baby step in fixing this issue. If subsequent updates leading up to and including 1.3 do not address the raiding problem then hard core raiders are going to be leaving the game.

[zargulis]

In this post, I am going to try to explain why some players are unhappy with TOR's endgame content - or at least, why I am unhappy with it.

 

Personally, I enjoy challenges. I enjoy the rush in the final moments of a difficult boss fight where you don't know if you're going to make it, and when the boss is vanquished, I feel like I've accomplished something. I have yet to experience this while playing TOR.

 

The game is simply too easy. Sure, it allows casual players to clear operations and gear up - but if it's that easy, why bother? Like it or not, players want to be rewarded for playing and rewarded for skill (i.e. gaining achievements are practically in every game now, new guns/perks such as in Call of Duty, Arena and Battleground ratings in World of Warcraft, Starcraft ladder rankings, new equipment, etc.) - but if the reward is easy to obtain, it becomes meaningless. This is particularly problematic for TOR because endgame content is not only easy but shallow. You beat it, and then what? There's nothing left to aspire to. Sure, you can roll alts, but ultimately you'll just cross the same finish line - a finish line without anything on the other side.

 

Players' reactions to the 1.2 PvP gear changes is a perfect example. Battlemasters are unhappy because PvP gear will no longer require any Valor ranking. A lot of players feel the Battlemasters are just whining because they won't have the gear advantage anymore, but I do not think this is true. Battlemasters are unhappy because all the time they spent to acquire the Valor and the gear is now MEANINGLESS. Suddenly, the ranks and items they worked so hard to acquire are practically being GIVEN away! Imagine you went to college for several years, and upon graduating and getting a job, you discovered that all the jobs in your field no longer require a college education. How would you feel? I'm pretty sure you would feel like you wasted all that time in college. The same applies to Battlemasters feeling they wasted their time grinding valor. If something is easy to do, there is no satisfaction in doing it.

 

As for addons and meters and such, I think the option should be there. If I'm in a raid and someone is not pulling their weight, I want to know. I want to know where players are making mistakes, and if they cannot correct them, they should be replaced. If a player is not willing to learn fight mechanics and/or learn to play their class in a competent manner, I should not be obligated to play with them. I haven't read anything directly from the Guild Summit, but if I understand correctly from some of the previous posts, BioWare does not want players judged based on their performance. Now imagine if BioWare applied this attitude to their business: it doesn't matter how poorly an employee is performing his or her job, we can't fire them because that would be judging them. Or how about if parents applied this attitude to raising their children? "Well, we don't know if what you're doing is right or wrong, so whatever." Ridiculous, right?

 

Meters are also important for praising players who perform well. Why shouldn't they feel the satisfaction of a job well done? It isn't always about being the top of the DPS meter, and as a tank, I'm always at the bottom anyway (or if I'm not, whoever is below me damn well better be a tank or a healer).

 

Regarding threat meters and raid addons, they aren't so much crutches as tools to streamline coordination. Think of a boss as a mathematical problem and raid addons as a calculator. Sure, you could use long division and multiplication on paper, or look up the appropriate trigonometry values, but that's a pain in the *** and distracts from the important part of finding the solution (i.e. algebra and calculus). Raid addons just mean the leader doesn't have to shout out every little thing on ventrilo.

 

Speaking of ventrilo, do you guys think that's a crutch too? I mean, if visual cues and the built-in interface are enough for everybody, players shouldn't be allowed to communicate outside the game either, right?

[Forduc]

If you take a look at the game you'll surely notice that it has very heavy focus for leveling. 8 class quests with lots of voice acting is clear giveaway. You'll maybe eventually have both levelling and hc endgame content. But seeing that if they want to avoid major outcry all future expansions will have to have extensive storylines, it doesn't look too likely.

 

That being said, hardcore raiding does not necesserily require metrics, enough suitably hard bosses is all it needs (and maybe few "bugged" bosses that will only be downed by guild or two before nerf). It's just a different style and will certainly feel wrong if you're used to some other style in some other MMO. But minimum metrics requirement is boss(es) that you can either kill or not...

[GrandMike]

I dont really see where people get the idea if they dont play game will fail.

 

Nobody cares that you did some content.

Nobody cares about your achievements.

You are not leader of anything.

 

In the grand scheme of things hardcores dont matter, ultra hordcores even less. They demand too much and pay too little.

 

Hey Rift has everything you want, why did people leave that en masse, eh?

WoW screwed up with cataclysm catering to hardcores and lost 20% of subs.

"old school" MMOs arent even on the radar, those are ultra niche. They failed miserably.

 

38% of lvl50 CHARACTERS raid, hell, in my guild most of people who raid have at least 2+ characters that raided (including me).

 

Too bad that they didnt show numbers on nightmare modes, how many people finished it, or even attempted it. In fact new raid nightmare mode was postponed. If you believe PR talk of "quality" and "getting it right" then rofl. That kind of content isnt viable to produce or spend any serious development time on.

 

In fact your post reminds me of a mad king thats convinced that masses love him and cant do without him, and is constantly reminded by his loyal brown noser that he matters and masses admire him, but in reality masses dont give a rats arse about him, and just write him off as a bit delusional.

 

In fact i want them to divert resources to PvP and fail that is Ilum rather than making redundant nighmare modes, it will make considerable number of people happy rather than handful of people with illusion of grandeur complex.

Edited March 7, 2012 by GrandMike