Does anyone else feel like were paying for beta?

[Rutrict]

No I do not think.we are paying to Beta Test SWtoR. HOWEVER............it seems the Developers are having a major identity crisis with this game. Do they cater to the PvE Rading crowd or try and salvage Open World RvR to prevent MASSIVE bleeding of subscriptions when Guild Wars 2 is released.

 

If they totally scrap World PvP/RvR, and only give PvPers 4-6 Warzones to play in.... the PvP playerbase will erode to nothingness.

 

This is the only game I considered leaving DAoC for just because I grew upon Star Wars....however I love RvR/PvP and I cannot justify paying a subscription fee with subpar PvP and NO RvR in the game at all

 

Im giving them until GW2 releases...I beta tested it last weekend and ita the closest MMORPG too Dark Age of Camelot that Ive ever played...which.is great:)

 

lol as if to verify what I said earlier....

[HanzoV]

so meny BIG problems.

2 of my biggest was.

ILUM and VALOR.

You think you would want to make them work b4 you release the game?

 

Your post appears to be in Beta. You should have cleaned it up a bit, before going "Live."

[OddballEasyEight]

so meny BIG problems.

2 of my biggest was.

ILUM and VALOR.

You think you would want to make them work b4 you release the game?

 

I feel like I should be charged extra to have to read your mangled version of the english language.

 

EDIT: also, do you feel this way with all other games that are released with bugs (like, oh, every other game released this year and last year)

Edited May 3, 2012 by OddballEasyEight

[Kubernetic]

You guys need to learn what a Beta test really means.

 

If you think this game is "in Beta", you're misusing the word by a large margin.

[WereMops]

No, I don't feel like I'm paying for beta. I feel like I'm enjoying a young mmo which keeps improving.

 

*raise shield of negative replies* (imagination is too awesome...)

 

+1 for this, I feel the same way

[uniz]

We're not paying for beta, but we are paying for a game that's going to become free to play soon. With GW2, D3, Tera and Pandas coming out within the year. SWtOR will slowly die, servers will be grouped into the 3 remaining servers and it'll be free. With BioWare taking their sweet time with Rated Warzones and not fixing the bugs in the game in a timely manner... people are flocking to other games. Server I am on went from 3 prominent raiding / PvP guilds on Repub side.. now there is barely enough people on Repub side for a guild. Sith side has 2 raiding guilds, 1 only logs on to raid and the other I am in just started 16 man from 2 8 man. Went 3/4 on HM EC. We're bored, the new content is great and we're very impressed.... but once we have Nightmare Pilgrim and EC cleared there's nothing else end-game to do. I hate to see this game die so fast but BioWare isn't putting out enough new content fast enough to keep their people subscribed.

 

gw3 is pvp centric. this game is not

 

d3 is mostly single player and will be played by d1 and d2 fans mostly. it isnt a mmo only a online single player.

 

tera is a great game but most ex wow players will hate it because of its grindish leveling format and real time combat. you cant press one button in that game to play like many ex wow players are used to. it will be a nice game to get away from the kiddies though. taking half a day to get 50% exp from lvl 14 to 15 in a lvl 60 capped game wont keep alot of people for long.

 

cant comment about the panda's. must be a wow referance. stopped playing wow in fall of 2006. best decision i ever made mmowise.

 

game wont be f2p anytime soon. the star wars fans will keep it going like they are now. all of the mmo jumpers have left. the ones that wanted this game to be leet pvp which it never was nor will be and the self proclaimed high end raiders thinking that 7 years of raid content would be in at launch.

 

at first i kinda thought like the op about this being a beta but later changed my mind after a friend reminded ourselves how wow was during its first months. this game has far more now than wow did at one year.

 

the game is new and young with alot of new invocative features that require some time to work the kinks out. they cant look at other mmo solutions to resolve them because of this. howerver server populations isnt one of these. which appears to be the most important issue right now in regards to its future success.

[terminova]

We're not paying for beta, but we are paying for a game that's going to become free to play soon. With GW2, D3, Tera and Pandas coming out within the year. SWtOR will slowly die, servers will be grouped into the 3 remaining servers and it'll be free. With BioWare taking their sweet time with Rated Warzones and not fixing the bugs in the game in a timely manner... people are flocking to other games. Server I am on went from 3 prominent raiding / PvP guilds on Repub side.. now there is barely enough people on Repub side for a guild. Sith side has 2 raiding guilds, 1 only logs on to raid and the other I am in just started 16 man from 2 8 man. Went 3/4 on HM EC. We're bored, the new content is great and we're very impressed.... but once we have Nightmare Pilgrim and EC cleared there's nothing else end-game to do. I hate to see this game die so fast but BioWare isn't putting out enough new content fast enough to keep their people subscribed.

 

No MMO will ever satisfy the greedy content locusts like you. Ever. It's simply not possible. I highly suggest you simply cancel your subscription, uninstall the game and go find another game to go play so you can burn through all of it's content so you can complain you're bored, that there isn't enough new content to fill you up, and that they cannot put out new content as fast as you can go through it.

 

To keep someone like you happy with the amount of content available in the game, they'd have to start with at least 4 years worth of content, then put out new content every week.

[Sparklehorse]

She should give us all lottery numbers ...

 

Seems she's way to busy predicting the futures of video games and posting on the forums of a game she doesn't like.

 

I can't believe I've had to post basically the same thing in two threads in the same day. Let's talk about facts for a minute.

 

Smoothest, largest mmo launch in history...check.

 

Most feature complete, working , MMO ever released...check.

 

Least amount of game breaking bugs at and since release...check.

 

6 months in and 2 huge content additions and a patch that addressed one of the biggest community complaints (the UI)...check.

 

Promises from the devs to complete adding the rest of the convenience features the community wants and in a timely fashion...check.

 

Incoming free transfers as well as a paid transfer program...check.

 

Nah, I don't feel like I'm playing a beta at all. I feel like I'm playing a modern MMO, and a decent one at that.

[ThiborF]

so meny BIG problems.

2 of my biggest was.

ILUM and VALOR.

You think you would want to make them work b4 you release the game?

 

To an extent ...

 

with this and every single MMORPG I've played since I first started playing them in Dec'02.

[Varteras]

I subscribed to this thread to bring it back up @ the end of summer.

 

Sweet jeebus. I'll see you then!

[Drukoziz]

We're not paying for beta, but we are paying for a game that's going to become free to play soon. With GW2, D3, Tera and Pandas coming out within the year.

 

Haha, what? Why would that hurt TOR?

[Rutrict]

No MMO will ever satisfy the greedy content locusts like you. Ever. It's simply not possible. I highly suggest you simply cancel your subscription, uninstall the game and go find another game to go play so you can burn through all of it's content so you can complain you're bored, that there isn't enough new content to fill you up, and that they cannot put out new content as fast as you can go through it.

 

To keep someone like you happy with the amount of content available in the game, they'd have to start with at least 4 years worth of content, then put out new content every week.

 

Gotcha, you're one of those people who sits on Fleet all day doing nothing because you arne't in a raiding guild that gets past story..

 

I'm not expecting 4 years worth of content, I am just expecting what they promised. And they took Rated Warzones out of 1.2 eight hours before it launched.

 

Not to mention they've been working on this game for 6 years now... With 150m invested in making this game you'd think there'd be more to it than 3 end-game Operations. Soa is the most bugged fight ( still ) in this game.

 

" An October 2008 preview noted some of the 12 full-time writers had been working on The Old Republic for more than two years at that point." - Refrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic#Development

[demiposer]

I definitely feel like were paying for Beta. In beta I had a blast and came across little to no problems. Now I'm paying and still having a blast and have little to no problems at all. Seems very similar to me.

[Sammm]

I definitely feel like were paying for Beta. In beta I had a blast and came across little to no problems. Now I'm paying and still having a blast and have little to no problems at all. Seems very similar to me.

 

Good one.

[Slugkeg]

Gotcha, you're one of those people who sits on Fleet all day doing nothing because you arne't in a raiding guild that gets past story..

 

Here's a little hint for you, nobody gives a crap if you're in a raiding guild or not. It has nothing to do with the OP.

[Varteras]

The population issues are not as dire as some people make them out to be. At peak times during the week around 30% of the servers are Light. Light servers do not have enough players at peak times for Warzones, Flashpoints, or Operations to be run on a healthy basis. So for those on consistently Light servers, yes this is an issue. However, this is not an issue for the majority of the servers. While 30% of the total servers may be experiencing these issues, the fact that they are Light to begin with means that they do not even represent 30% of the playerbase.

 

If I had to take a guess I would say that between those people repeatedly logging in, those people who log on sporadically, and those who are simply waiting for their subs to expire the total amount of players seriously affected by this issue would be around 100,000 and that's likely being generous. Obviously 100,000 subs is nothing to sneeze at considering many MMOs struggle to maintin a few hundred thousand but when you compare that to the counts for TOR (between 1 to 2 million) it's not a dire situation.

 

I am in NO WAY saying to ignore people on these servers. Not at all. I just feel that this whole idea has been overblown. It's affecting a small portion of the playerbase by comparison.

[Sparklehorse]

Gotcha, you're one of those people who sits on Fleet all day doing nothing because you arne't in a raiding guild that gets past story.. [/Quote]

 

And you're that guy that lurks on a game forum, pouncing to attack the way other people play the game. Seriously, what exactly is wrong with a person who chooses not to be in a guild or raid or anything else? What if a person just logs on to craft or to chat or to have a pretty screensaver? They pay the same fee to play as you and their playstyle is every bit as meaningful to them as yours is to you.

 

I'm not expecting 4 years worth of content, I am just expecting what they promised. And they took Rated Warzones out of 1.2 eight hours before it launched.

 

They delivered everything that was promised with one exception. The fact that they pulled it hours before launch is a good thing. If you can't see that, I'm sorry. Reasonable, mature people see this for exactly what it was. It was not implementing a feature that people would abuse or maybe you weren't here for Trade Killum...I mean Illum.

 

In return for this, they gave everybody a free month and a promise that when the feature arrived, it would be good and ready. Again, reasonable, mature people understand this and are willing to extend the benefit of the doubt in exchange for a better game in the future.

 

Not to mention they've been working on this game for 6 years now... With 150m invested in making this game you'd think there'd be more to it than 3 end-game Operations. Soa is the most bugged fight ( still ) in this game.

 

I'm not sure you are entirely qualified to make a factual assessment of whether or not the hours of work or the financial investment spent on a product versus it's return were worth the effort. Who were you again?

 

My guild farmed SOA on Nightmare and Hard for weeks. The biggest bugs were in the beginning and the fight is virtually bug free now. At no point (with the exception of the first couple weeks after release) was he impossible to kill. There are thousands of people running around in rakata chests that can back me up on that.

 

" An October 2008 preview noted some of the 12 full-time writers had been working on The Old Republic for more than two years at that point." - Refrence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_The_Old_Republic#Development

 

Not entirely sure what your point is here. That 12 writers had been writing for two years in Oct. 2008. OK. That's a cool factoid. Thanks for that. Was there a point? Perhaps you think 12 was too many, or not enough, or something...

[monkeydud]

no. next question?

[ShiningKnights]

I'm less concerned about the bugs. Any game in the beginning will have lots of bugs. However, I'm more concerned about:

 

a) Really bad game design which seems to be getting worse everytime. Sometimes their "fixes" really take a step in a backwards direction (the latest one being the GTN search "fix", if you can even call it that)

 

b) Addressing all the non-priority bugs. They keep fixing minor bugs, and never address the real major ones. Not sure if this is due to the lack of quality engineers they hire or just because they are so out of touch with their playerbase. Part of me even questions whether they play their own game.

[Slugkeg]

And you're that guy that lurks on a game forum, pouncing to attack the way other people play the game. Seriously, what exactly is wrong with a person who chooses not to be in a guild or raid or anything else? What if a person just logs on to craft or to chat or to have a pretty screensaver? They pay the same fee to play as you and their playstyle is every bit as meaningful to them as yours is to you.

 

Exactly.

 

I'm in one of the most casual, vile spewing, guild of heathens and goofballs around and we have the Infernal Title. Anyone that brags about clearing any of the Operations is akin to having a monkey crap in his hand and celebrating that he threw it the furthest.

 

"Raiding" in this game is a joke.

[Sirsri]

To an extent ...

 

with this and every single MMORPG I've played since I first started playing them in Dec'02.

 

Agreed, I've been playing MMO's since 97 or 98(UO -> EQ -> too many to enumerate). MMO's are all living breathing evolving entities. In fact the first two I played are still going, and are very different than when I started. Playing an MMO is a relationship with the developer, do you trust them to add, fix, remove, iterate in a way that you will like, and that will help the game.

 

An MMO that does nothing about spammers, or scams or the like doesn't instill a great deal of confidence, so you don't want to play those. A game that emphasizes 'grind' gameplay isn't popular in the north american market (hence TERA has two versions of the leveling curve).

 

BioWare seemed to start out very bad at triage. That meant ilum was an unmitigated disaster. But I'm don't think it's a huge problem or plus that they generally left it in, control point trading was silly but not bad, the kill fest should never have gone live. There is lots of content on all the worlds that could have been connected to the quest plots, but for whatever reason isn't, and probably isn't all that polished. And they don't really seem to be doing a lot better. 1.2 was full of fixes for 1.0 content (ancient pylons bugs for example) that really had no place being held off until 1.2. There are glimmers of hope, but the string of 'bug fixes' that don't work or bug fixes which fix one thing but break something else aren't all that encouraging.

 

At this point we can trust BioWare to try and come up with interesting stories. But I'm not sure we can trust them to make them accessible. My guild in almost full rakata gear has been having trouble on enrage timers in lost island and story mode denova. That obviously means at least some of us are playing badly. But BioWare hasn't given us tools to identify and diagnose those problems, MOX raid parser helps, but I shouldn't need that when BioWare could do it properly. Ok so most of us think the art style for armours is a bit too goofy, and yes, that has a long lead time. So throw us a bone with some concept art or the like to give us a sense of what you think we want, so we can go from there. Their economic balance team hasn't earned any trust, crafting professions are still a mess. That sort of thing isn't really making for a great experience, and it's not like these are hard problems to solve, they're just solving them badly because the people who are working on it don't seem to understand, or able to implement. Either way, that's failing at the trust relationship.

 

In a way playing an MMO is like being an investor in a company. You want them to have subscribers, because subscribers means success, people to meet, people to play the game with, a vibrant economy and all those things. So you want the same things that investors to. If the game is going to close there's no more experience so you don't want to invest your time in it. With a single player game they can be great experiences and disasters from a business perspective. Think Fallout New Vegas from obsidian, that because it didn't make some stupid 85 metacritic score obsidian didn't get a bonus and had to lay people off. That's stupid in so many more ways than i can count. With SWTOR BioWare has done so many things wrong, which by itself isn't a problem, we all make mistakes. It's how you fix them and improve that matters, how do you build on the good parts and junk the bad parts? And right now, BioWare isn't exactly earning a lot of long term faith in SWTOR. As per the thread: are we paying for beta? No, this is definitely the game BioWare wanted to release, that just isn't the game players (and potential players) wanted, and it's not clear how they're going to go from where they are to where they should have been with the people they have.

 

If I were, to quickly digress into the same commentary about blizzard. They seemed to have done a very good job listening to people for a long time, and converting criticism (and lost subscribers) into a better game. And then they came up with Mists of pokeman and kung fu panda and lost a lot of that from their older subscribers (I don't think I know any 25+ males who are at all enthralled by pet battles or panadas). They probably shouldn't ever go live with most of that stuff. But they will, and it will likely cost them, a lot. Even announcing it cost them about 75 subs from my guild alone. BioWare needs to make sure its testing doesn't reproduce that, which given how terrible their testing has been so far might be a tall order.

 

Still, I hold out hope. 1.2 was largely a glimmer of hope that they're starting to play their own game and understand what it is and isn't, and most of their problems are fixable, it's a matter of whether or not they can get it together before we lose that critical mass of people that makes the game worth playing.

[Kubernetic]

Alpha testing is performed using in-house groups or perhaps paid or limited exposure groups of users so that the main structure of the software can be tested for basic functionality. This often occurs during the initial or mid-range development of the software and often touches on a limited set of features and is definitely not ready for public consumption on a large scale due to the number of bugs and workarounds still present in the software.

 

Beta testing is performed later, toward the end of the software development cycle, and often involves a larger group of closed-invite individuals, and sometimes tests open to the public to insure that the release-candidate software meets the criteria needed for launch, and often involves making sure that you ahve competent feedback, logs, and analysis from the beta test phase so that the final finishing touches can be made prior to full production and distribution.

 

Once that phase is completed, there's usually some final work that goes on in the dvelopment process and then the code is finalized and sent off for production for distribution media and release to the public through planned distribution channels.

 

Once this occurs, you really aren't in beta phase anymore, you've reached the production and distribution phase and the presence of continuing bugs or recurring bugs or a continued lack of some features (based on some users' preferences) does not mean you're still in beta testing. Whether a product is in beta or not is determined by the producers of that software, not by the users.

 

BioWare determined this game was complete and ready for launch and out of the beta test phase a long time ago. Opinions to the contrary are really meaningless in this regard. They get to decide the exact parameters of that transition—not us.

 

Now, the problem is that some software producers have recently taken to identifying products as "Beta" and then releasing them in a fashion that would usually be compared to a production/launch status, but they keep the word "Beta" in there anyway as a sort of "Get Out of Jail Free" card, so that if anyone has any significant problems, they can just wave their hands and say "Well it's still Beta, after all, we said so right in the title." This goes for some game software as well as productivity software and web site code.

 

Just because these publishers are doing this doesn't mean that the entire concept of "beta testing" now overflows into the production phase on every product, or that you just get to willy-nilly determine when something is still "Beta" and therefore proclaim that your being forced to pay for it is some kind of travesty or personal affront.

 

Ultimately, we all have free will. We're free to pay for the service or not. If you decide to pay for it, then that is your decision... no one forced you into it. And simply arbitrarily labeling it as "beta" 5 months after the game launched does not entitle you to demand services for free.

Edited May 3, 2012 by Kubernetic

[Dezzi]

I've been playing since August; the only thing that changed is that I started paying somewhere in-between.

[Thundergulch]

so meny BIG problems.

2 of my biggest was.

ILUM and VALOR.

You think you would want to make them work b4 you release the game?

 

You obviously have NO CLUE what a beta is.

 

INB4L

[Kubernetic]

I've been playing since August; the only thing that changed is that I started paying somewhere in-between.

 

Then the case can be made that the game was actually ready or nearly ready for launch back in August.

 

I know it was certainly worth paying for the game and paying $15 a month for it when I got my first chance at the open beta in late November.