To the Anonymous Insider

[SWJon]

Seriously? Group finder and UI customisation are the examples you give? Are you actually trying to tell me that the moment someone mentions "group finder," they must automatically be wanting a WoW feature because only WoW has a group finder? Not Rift, or DDO, or LoTRO, or Aion, or any other MMO?

 

But WoW was the first. All of the MMOs you listed were post-WoW and were borrowing from their design, which is now considered standard-faire in MMOs. So yes, those are valid examples. Esp since I remember reading several posts like, "Why don't we have a group finder like WoW?" Discount this how you will - he asked for examples, and we gave them.

[Selvec]

Blaming customers for the decisions of the business has to be one of the most unprofessional moves I've seen in a very long time. Its up to the business to decide what's best for its product, and if they choose to feel that what's best is to listen to the convoluted yammering of all their fans, then that's their choice. Don't blame the fans for your choices Bioware/EA. CCP doesn't listen to ALL its fans ALL the time, because it knows some of the suggestions made by fans are foolish and misguided. Blizzard doesn't listen to its fans all the time, because it knows a lot of what the fans says are not plausible or sustainable. You made your choices, now live with it.

[Kharnis]

But WoW was the first. All of the MMOs you listed were post-WoW and were borrowing from their design, which is now considered standard-faire in MMOs. So yes, those are valid examples. Esp since I remember reading several posts like, "Why don't we have a group finder like WoW?" Discount this how you will - he asked for examples, and we gave them.

 

Actually, no. Dungeons & Dragons Online had it first. It was part of their Social tab. It was bare bones, and was pretty much exactly what TOR's original group finder was before the LFG in game now, but it was quite a bit before WoW's LFG.

 

And as for the "I remember reading" defence, I also remember reading things. Several posts where the players specifically said they never played WoW, had no intention of playing WoW, and so had no idea what was in WoW. But they do remember what was in the game they did play often, and wanted things from those games. Things like a Group Finder, or add ons, and so on.

[Valkirus]

You can so almost anything to WoW UI, with a couple of the good mods

 

It's not even close.

 

You missed my point about not using mods did'nt you? Looking at it with no mods...I think TOR's is much better.

[Geoduck]

I had to laugh when I read the link in the original post.

 

More like KOTOR than WoW? What was this "Anonymous Insider" smoking?

 

This game has much more in common with WoW than KOTOR.

 

The REAL reason? Read my sig,

[Geoduck]

I've been here since march 2011, and seen some really cool things in beta that got changed because of the fanboy whining.

 

Beacuse of that whining, the stat system was dumbed down, the modding system was dumbed down, and people whining that they don't feel like they're progressing because nearly everything was moddable, we lost a ton of useful armor styles.

 

Because the wow pvp fanboy whining, we got expertise which ruined level 50 pvp.

 

Because of wow fanboy whining missing Dalaran, we got the fleet added late. Which killed planet traffic.

 

I'm not saying all BW did was bad, they did make some good changes. For the longest time they refused to link the taxi hubs, and you had to make one hop to the next. That's the only good change I can think of right now.

 

I predicted in the beta forums what was going to happen. They'd sell a ton of boxes/downloads, but they'd be merging servers 6 months after release. Contrary to what BW calls it, it was in effect a merger. The game wasn't ready for release, and still isn't.

 

The only reason I am still here is hope. I don't know how much longer I can hang on though.

 

QFT

 

This game was awesome until the end of August, 2011.

 

The build after totally WoW-ified it.

 

I still have to laugh about the "Insider" claiming it is less WoW-like.

 

I wonder if it really just Georg Zoeller spouting sour grapes.

Edited July 23, 2012 by Geoduck

[hyuplee]

Hi, i currently work on the side for nasa. i would just like to inform you that in 1974 we were invited by aliens to a meeting in space, we had to build a space station as our atmosphere is deadly to them. All technological advances we have had since 1976 are a direct result of this alien race who i cannot name due to fear of my life so i cannot tell you my real name to prove who i am.

 

This is all soo true, honest im an insider.

Hi. I'm a freelance journalist who happens to be investigating these rumors. As much as I hate to inform everyone, everything this man has posted is legit. And I now fear for this man's life.

Edited July 23, 2012 by hyuplee

[Dejoblue]

The people that wanted to play KOTOR 3, GOT to play KOTOR 3 and left. Many others were forced into a linear leveling experience that was nothing more than an interactive movie with no MMO or end game at the end. Who is left are the players that wanted to play an MMO, although many like myself wanted an MMO (NOT KOTOR 3) and got to the end, yes the end, and there was nothing.

 

The story was great. The voice acting was great, but I hated that it was voice acted at all. I CAN READ, THANK YOU. I WANT to read. Same difference between a movie and a book, the book is ALWAYS better, you get to imagine the voices yourself, make them into your own character, your own version.

 

One of the biggest mistakes was the on rails class questing system. I am not saying it was not a cool experience, it was, but it was like playing a single player game and this huge investment into exclusive class story/quest lines was at the expense of storylines and quests that everyone can do. This on rails exclusive class system with nothing else available took out a large chunk of what could have made an open world where you get to roam around and do what quests you want to do.

 

You were also all but forced to do every, single, quest. ALL of the Bonus series', simply because you needed the XP. XP was pretty scarce to find, and this is coming from a veteran EQ2, AOC, WOW, RIFT player. It is as if they made all the quests, then got out their calculator and divided the total xp to get to 50 by the number of quests in the game, total. Terrible.

 

If you want more story you have to start over, and play a different class. This is counter to the point of an MMO, persistence for the sake of progression of your character. I dont want to play every single class to get ANY more story.

 

I got my BH to 50 and it wasn't the fantastic leveling experience many claim. It was a lonely experience. I even leveled with good friends and it was a PITA to organize all three of us to go here and there and then find out that so and so has to get to this point in their class quest to pick up this other quest so everyone can progress together at the same time. Much time was spent on our own part of the map doing small class quests to get to bosses where we all trudged to each others boss to help. Very single player and tedious.

 

Open world and quest system that everyone regardless of class can access, not on rails exclusive storylines that force you to abandon your character and start over to experience other content.

Gameplay, not Voice acting

MMO, not tacked on multiplayer. (it is as if none of the developers ever played an MMO, SOOO many basic features missing, still missing.)

[Lt_Latency]

You missed my point about not using mods did'nt you? Looking at it with no mods...I think TOR's is much better.

 

What point?? WoW has a system that gives them a much better overall UI.

 

If you choose not to use it, thats your fault.

 

It's like me saying WoW story is better because I choose not to do SW:ToR story

Edited July 23, 2012 by Lt_Latency

[Dejoblue]

“If I’d listened to customers, I’d have given them a faster horse.” - Henry Ford

 

We got a horse...in spaaaace!

[Emeda]

bioware has done the leveling perfect as it doesnt feel like a grind i almost never lok at my level bar and am suprised when i do level they have done that perfect.

 

but as sooooooo many have stated the endgame sucks, almost nobody likes doing fp over and over and over and over same with dalies but you have to do that just to get into the god dam ops which is the only contect left that people wont have played.

 

WoW could do it cause they were out at a time when mmos were few but now there is so many people are sick of it, we want alternatives like mini games and parts of sandbox elements thing that can mean you mix it up a little not " well time to go to work on those dalies again"

 

and yes i am speaking for the player base cause you only have to look in the first 20 threads and most players will have posted that they want it.

 

The leveling process is a joke. The reason it doesnt feel like a grind is because you level up to fast and dont have to worry about gear. You can kill NPC,s with gear 10-15 levels lower than you are. You get so much XP for the missions and they are so easy and fast to complete and the map gives you the location to goto to complete it. No thinking involed just follow the rail.

 

Will agree the endgame sucks because you only have one path in endgame. There is nothing else to do at endgame but PVP or OPS/FP.

[SWJon]

So which would you ratherhave - an easy leveling process or a ridiculously stupid grind? Is there a middle ground that would be better?

[Spectus]

Well, first of all this "anonymous BioWare employee" post has so many factual errors in it that its credibility goes from zero (the infamous "anonymous insider" thing redux) to sharply negative territory the moment it talks about BioWare opening up the forums to the public only a few months before the game went live.

 

Seriously?

 

I've been trol... erm, POSTING... on some version of an official SWTOR forum since October 2008, when BioWare first officially announced that SWTOR was in development. And people (myself included) were jonesng for a BioWare Old Republic MMO on the BioWare forums for years before that.

 

Yeah, there were always the KOTOR-3-as-single-player grognards, but ultimately the choice for how this game was designed rests with BioWare. THEY kept this game under TIGHT wraps for years, with iron-box secrecy over their vaunted iteration process. The ONLY thing they shared with the community was odes on how great the Hero Engine was to work with, and how easy it was to rapidly cook up prototypes for internal testing.

 

Even when the game was in Beta, we testers were warning BioWare that the game was very linear, and that "endgame" content might be a bit thin.

 

What we DIDN'T find out was how badly the game would bog down under heavy populations in concentrated areas. We had to take it on faith that the Hero Engine coupled with the Complex Event Processor software add-on would actually work as well as they were saying it would.

 

It didn't.

 

It worked well enough in Beta, but in the post-Launch environment, with the much-heavier player load, it does not.

 

That's not the players' fault.

 

So now BioWare's playing catch-up. We've got mission terminals instead of NPC quest-givers in the Black Hole District, and few seem to miss the NPC quest-givers for the dailies. Denova is coming; it will be interesting to see if BioWare broadens its approach to world design to make them seem less like an on-a-rail experience and more of an open-ended exploratory experience. I figure it will have all the usual "signpost" quests leading players from Quest Hub "A" to Quest Hub "B," but I'm also hoping for a world big enough to allow players to feel like there's more "white space" around the questing zones than has been the case in previous worlds.

 

But the sky-is-falling prognostications predicting SWTOR's imminent demise? Please. Such things strike me as the spewings of rabid, ravenous fans who are too close to their product for objectivity.

[Macabrae]

This article is also bogus and "BS". The so-called "source" does not even have this article and I could write in as a BW employee and do this as well. This whole article is complete crap. They tried there best making it look from a real source but it isn't.

[Spectus]

So which would you ratherhave - an easy leveling process or a ridiculously stupid grind? Is there a middle ground that would be better?

Grinding is not "harder." "Tedious" is not "harder."

 

The "middle ground" I am looking for is challenging combat.

 

The thing is, the character classes themselves introduce some huge variables in how 'hard' a quest may be to finish. I myself found that a murderously-difficult quest for my Consular Shadow (such as the climactic fight at the end of the Alderaan Consular story) was faceroll-easy for my Consular Sage.

[Nyoro]

Good old anonymous insiders, got about as much credibility as my pet dog. Wouldn't surprise me if it's some imbecile from 4chan.

 

Nice to know we've got people taking it seriously though.

[Cuillin]

Never trust a person who posts their computer specs in their signature.

[Macabrae]

Good old anonymous insiders, got about as much credibility as my pet dog. Wouldn't surprise me if it's some imbecile from 4chan.

 

Nice to know we've got people taking it seriously though.

 

 

This as I stated earlier. That article the OP is posting about has as much credibility as a "two dollar ****** trying to convince me she's still a virgin". Even the "So-called" source link is bogus as it isn't even the source.

[Spectus]

Hi. I'm a freelance journalist who happens to be investigating these rumors. As much as I hate to inform everyone, everything this man has posted is legit. And I now fear for this man's life.

I live near Marshall Space Flight Center, and interact on a weekly basis with NASA engineers. What this person is not telling you is that the person he's referring to has been eaten by a species of intergalactic beetles from Sagittarius-Beta-5, and that the International Space Station is overrun by these beetles.

 

The beetles are sentient, and have established a colony inside Nancy Pelosi's head (which came perilously close to being exposed during the debate over ObamaCare, when Ms. Pelosi insisted, "We have to pass the bill to know what's in the bill," causing observers to wonder whether she'd lost her mind) and are planning to use her private 747 to seed Australia in January 2013. From there, they plan to island-hop across New Guinea and Indonesia, and make landfall in Vietnam, then track north to reunite with a sleeper colony inside the corpse of Kim-Il Sung. (The Dear Leader was killed by the establishent of this colony.) From there, they plan to tunnel their way into the Marianas Trench and trigger a massive tectonic shift that will unleash a 950-mile-long plume of magma that will vaporize the Pacific Ocean and convert the Earth's atmosphere to a permanent 98% humidity level, allowing them to relocate their entire planetary population from Sagittarius-Beta-5 to Earth and live in comfort, with an abundant supply of Democrats for dietary protein.

 

All of this information has been given to me by sources within NASA that wish to remain anonymous, but are utterly reliable. I could identify them to assuage the inevitable skeptics, but then I'd have to protect the secrecy of the mission by feeding you to the beetles. As it stands, the secrecy of the mission remains intact, because no one will believe you.

[Emeda]

So which would you ratherhave - an easy leveling process or a ridiculously stupid grind? Is there a middle ground that would be better?

 

I would rather have a long grind with no actual levels. Like SWG leveling system.

 

I would also like all the endgame content to actually be hard and not made so everyone can complete it before the next content comes out. If you want to do something then you have to work on it and be better than it.

 

Now I am not saying that if you cant do something you shouldnt have anything to do. Even someone who just wants to log into the game should have something to do. Just not the same stuff as someone who has been playing this game since launch etc.

[Emeda]

Good old anonymous insiders, got about as much credibility as my pet dog. Wouldn't surprise me if it's some imbecile from 4chan.

 

Nice to know we've got people taking it seriously though.

 

From what I read, he isnt anonymous but would rather not have his name mentioned.

 

They did a face to face talk with him where he would have to show somehow how he worked for Bioware. It wasnt some mailed letter with no signiture on it. I find it hard to believe that they would do an interview with someone without knowing who they were or not providing proof.

[turjake]

Strange interview of anonymous person who failed to say anything a ranting fan couldnt have said. Why did they not try to ask him(?) something that atleast tries to prove that he actually has some inside info. Now its up to the reader to decide if he wants to trust some neverheard journalist in some neverheard blog. Edited July 23, 2012 by turjake

[macumba]

please for the love of god. don't blame leveling up. if you don't like leveling toons tsw is for you (it's the reason I will not play it.)

 

ontopic: every mmo in the past (including wow) copied aspects of other mmo's before and added own stuff or improved.

 

pre wow you could not level up solo and never ran out of quests to do while doing so. people calling post wow mmo's a grind don't even know what that really is. killing 15-30 mobs isnt much compared to the hundreds you needed to kill (without a quest tied to it, just go to the spot and kill kill kill)

 

so what did I expect from swtor ?

 

1. copy all good things from other mmo's (not just one = wow) and evaluate what you copy.

adding group finder while not making it x-server is the way to go, because people who misbehave need to consider that they are building a bad reputation.

but I am missing things like the skill chains from aion especially with the skill bloat some classes have in swtor. I can't even imagine a jedi guarding getting cool new abilities in expansion because the bars are already full. I wanted to see things from swg that worked, never played it but coming from years of wow and tired of it, I wanted to see things other mmo's I missed did well.

 

2. Innovation & new stuff: it came to short. while it is there, there's not enough of it. I mean copy things from other mmo's you build the foundation of the game, but you need to add fresh things, because people coming from other games WANT a different game than they came from otherwise why leave ?

 

3. pvp the ex mythic staff had it's own reputation in being the best in the market since daoc and WAR, where is that here ? the only thing they really did well was low level pvp.

since, open world pvp does not exist, because ilum turned out to be a (maybe the biggest) failure, zones while questing are not deisgned to put the opposing factions together. pvp is = 4 battlegrounds.

pvp in an mmo should always be about massive amounts of players getting together ? where is that ? juts because wow did that wrong it didn't need to have to be that way in swtor.

 

4. misc stuff:

-levelpath planet1->planet2->planet3 etc etc rift is the same with its zones and its bad. when leveling up a new toon I might want to go a different path.

-mmo's were always a believable simulation of the world it's set to. you have npc's that sleep at night and go about their business (of course it stops at day/night cycles, so there you go)

- things copied from wow that totally backfired:

4.1 fleet: omg everyone counted people on the fleet and asked where the thousands of players were ? even if a lot of them were with twinks on other worlds, they expected them to be on the fleet.

4.2 the mentality to have the casual player pay but not actually log on, you can only do that if you have built up some kind of addiction over the years first. it turned out, that an mmo without people on the servers is no mmo at all, even if they are paying. right now the strategy must be to have everyone who pays a subscription want to log in as often as possible.

 

5. endgame after all the mmo's that bled subscribers due to this I never expected bioware to do that newbie mistake. this mistake is totally enhanced by the fact that leveling goes to fast (the beta players warned you here) leveling up is the buffer-time developers need to come up with new endgame content if players reach max level fast, they will get bored fast (simple eh ? yet too complicated to understand for BW). said it often and will say it again and again and again. sandbox elements will help the devs buy time, because that will occupie the player in between content updates. a themepark only mmo needs a lot of content in very short cycles and I cannot imagine any developer in the world to deliver the content as fast as it is consumed by todays players.

[Laris_Rai]

People are mistaking a MMO for a WoW.

I want a new MMO bioware not a new WoW.

That's exactly what this game has become, Space WoW with Space Battles, it dosen't even really have a starwars feel to it because of how similar their engames are.

 

And untill someone in bioware figures out the people don't want a Exact Copy of WoW, they will continue going downhill.

 

And yet how much "WoW has this and SWTOR doesn't!" do we see around here?

[Goretzu]

pre wow you could not level up solo and never ran out of quests to do while doing so. people calling post wow mmo's a grind don't even know what that really is. killing 15-30 mobs isnt much compared to the hundreds you needed to kill (without a quest tied to it, just go to the spot and kill kill kill)

 

I leveled a monk solo in EQ1 and even a Warrior solo up to L50 odd (he had a fungi tunic for L30 to L50-odd though - the monk didn't), it was possible, just hard and time consuming (even with solo classes like Necro or the later Beastlord).