5 Things I would like to see in the first minor patch

[Keldain]

Hi,

First of all I would like to say that I love this game. It's the first game I've played in ages where I've felt that sleep was an unwelcome interruption to my enjoyment. However, there are couple of things that I feel need URGENT fixing / improvement if this game is going to keep its momentum. So here's my list of the 5 "problems" I would like to see addressed in the first minor patch.

 

 

1. LFG - Spamming /1 for a Flashpoint or group quest is not fun for either the people spamming or the people reading. I would not, however, like to see a WoW-style dungeon finder in this game. What I would like to see is a more elegant solution than just doing a /who. My ideal system would be a UI element you could use to list yourself with a dropdown list of the Flashpoints you are at-level for and any group quests in your log. You could select these to list yourself for as many as you like, as well as show your available roles and add a comment. People looking for group members could then use this to find people as they needed to.

 

 

2. Fast travel to Instances / Group Quests - Another aspect of grouping that is decidedly not fun is that once you have a group you have to wait for that one member to trek (sometimes on-foot at lower levels) halfway across the planet to the instance entrance or quest area. We should be able to send a shuttle to pick up stray party members and bring them to us.

 

 

3. The Galactic Trade Centre - The Auction House system in SWTOR is incredibly difficult to use and clunky. It's hard to find how much things should be selling for and it takes too many clicks to browse a specific category. As a couple of quick fixes - make the list of your current auctions into a seperate tab and make the sell tab list other people's auctions of the same item whenever you drag an item into the box. For the buy tab, make it easier to browse the categories of items.

 

 

4. Ability costs - Seriously, the cost of new abilities is a huge drain on credits and seems unnecessarily punishing. I would suggest either lowering the costs across the board or keeping the current costs and removing the need to buy individual ranks of spells seperately and just allowing them to scale up with your level.

 

 

5. Preorder and CE/DD edition items and scaling - I really believe that the usable items such as the preorder colour crystal and the speeder should be scalable in some way. If the game doesn't really have the tech to do automatic scaling, then maybe just add faster / different stat versions of the items to the appropriate vendors possibly even at the same cost as the normal versions of the same thing, just allowing people to continue to use the same skin / graphic?

 

 

And bonus for getting this far...3 Things I'd like to see in a more major patch (though not too far off, I hope -especially no. 1):

 

1. Addons and Macros - Really at least one of these should have been available at launch. Healing is not enjoyable for most people because of this. You've spent so much time and development on making the transition from other games to this one smooth, but you've made it a nightmare for healers especially. Practically noone in WoW, for example, would ever dream of healing by clicking on a character potrait and then pressing their heal button. It's all either done with Vuhdoo / Healbot / Clique type healing (where you use various combinations of mouse-clicks on a set of frames) or mouseover macros. You're going to have a massive problem with not being able to get healers in groups as long as the system remains this clunky.

 

2. Movable / customisable UI elements - the UI should at the VERY LEAST be scalable. However, I would also really appreciate the ability to resize, move and reshape my extra action bars. I use a Razer Naga as my gaming mouse - in other games I have a 3*3 gride made for it on the right of my main action bar and another 3*3 grid on the other side which represents the Q,E,R / F,G,H / Z,X,C keys. I'd like to be able to do that here, too. Also to move the minimap to the top right of the screen instead of the bottom right.

 

3. Character Customisation - This game is so about character that it's kind of silly we don't get to recustomise the way we look in-game. Hair and beard style / tattoos and piercings, eye colour and hair colour as well as maybe even body type should be customisable at your friendly neighbourhood Bodymod Droid available in your fleet.

 

 

All in all, an brilliant game - with just a little more polish it could be truly breathtaking and far more enjoyable.

[bagler]

I agree with most of this. But there are a couple things that I think would harm the game instead of help it. The chief among these is the LFG system. I am one of the people that believes that putting in a cross-server dungeon queueing system would only be detrimental. Look what it did to Rift. And if they were going to put in this system they would need to add server transfers first. Because one of the positive sides to having a random dungeon finder, is the utility for guild recruitment. But it usually is at the cost of some servers becoming graveyards. But, survival of the fittest...

 

The thing I agree with the most here, is the need for macros. I don't think we need addons, because, they ultimately lower the amount of skill needed to play the game, and it forces the developers to create content around the most prominent addons, leaving the people who don't like the idea of addons hanging in the wind. But macros need to be added. There is no question about it.

[Kiriyea]

It is a refreshing change to have a game that does not have the macro system in place

[Nortro]

I completely agree, the game is excellent, just needs polishing.

 

Also - upgrade the forums! It's lame

[Tawkin]

Excellent post that pretty much sums it up for me as well.

 

A few additions to the list though.

 

Please add an option to enable pass-through casting. E.g. put your main tank on target and whatever you toss at him that is beneficial sticks, everything else passes to his target (e.g. the mob).

 

Please add an option to enable buffered casting. Today, if you press an ability while another one is being cast, or the ability is on cooldown, your input is discarded. Please allow for this second ability to enter a queue and activate once ready.

 

And on a side note, and more as a point of convenience, if at all possible - please allow us to pause the cut scenes. I know they're aboratble and re-playable, but the amount of times you get interrupted during a normal play session by people on your Teamspeak/Ventrilo server, your family, etc. is absurd - especially when you're trying to pay attention.

 

Otherwise, one helluva game. Enjoying it a lot

[Radamux]

Please no macros. If you have an issue with healing make suggestions to the devs to fix it. Mods and macros are a pain in the butt. I had a mod that I downloaded from Curse.com for WoW years ago that fried my system with a virus.

[Numerii]

I am completely against a cross-server LFG tool. I left WoW for about a year+ prior to its release, when I came back I noticed an astounding difference in the community of the game both on the server I played on and in the groups I ran with random people.

 

I am however all for a same-server LFG tool.

[iMate]

they need to fix the basics before they add stuff.... the game isnt even running smoothly as is... pvp is laggy / clunky.. people r skipping aroud.. abilities are non responsive .... just so many things they need to fix... before they ruin the game with LFG system

 

but yea

 

ah needs to be fixed... they need a customize feature for ui.... but for the love of god.. fix the actual gameplay

Edited December 23, 2011 by iMate

[Pisky]

I agree with most of this. But there are a couple things that I think would harm the game instead of help it. The chief among these is the LFG system. I am one of the people that believes that putting in a cross-server dungeon queueing system would only be detrimental. Look what it did to Rift.

 

What it did to RIFT? You mean make queue times more reasonable and enhance the players experience no matter your role when doing dungeons? Oh boy who would want that? LFG isn't detrimental at all it's something one person who had this obsolete and tired idea of MMOs a decade ago and "community" and refuses to let it go and everyone else jumped on the bandwagon give it up already, it's not detrimental at all. Too many people try to draw parallels between WoWs LFG system, too bad that's a horrible comparison, too many servers, not to mention an overall extremely casual game where as this game isn't.

 

The Game will NEED, an LFG system eventually, this game is far closer to what BC WoW was than anything like WotLK and Cata in terms of progression and grouping, and if you were around then forming groups was hell unless you knew people. Not to mention there isn't even a separate LFG channel tab so you're gonna make everyone stand int he imperial fleet spamming Chat because you're too stubborn to add an efficient practical way to group? Give me a break.

[CyberData]

Cross server LFG kill communities.

 

The game needs more side content.

[PurveyorOfTruth]

Basically what I would like to see done in order of importance:

 

1) Server wide LFG channel: *PLEASE NO CROSS SERVER* stuff. I agree with a lot of the people here that it ruins a lot of the fun and you also run into problems w/ not being able to trade items w/ eachother. A server wide LFG channel however would be perfect and easily implementable. People who don't want to get spammed LFG requests can just turn off the channel.

 

2) World PvP on PvP Servers: I'm mostly a PvE person myself, but it is a little absurd that you don't have full world PvP on PvP servers @ the lower levels. Now I understand Illum (or whatever) is a lvl 50 world PvP, but most people join PvP servers with the intent to world PvP from day one.

 

3) Movable UI: I'm not in a rush to have it customizable, but at least let us move the UI as we see fit. Yeesh sometimes my mission screen will block my item screen or something similar to that effect and it is frustrating to not be able to move the UI.

 

4) Quest reward information: Self-explanatory. Let us know what we get before deciding whether or not a quest is worth it. Story be damned sometimes, I need loot! (Although very good story so far BW, well done.)

 

5) Fix memory leaks: This really should be #1, but it hasn't been game breaking for many people as of late, so really I don't see the need to rush it. However it still is pretty high up on the list of important updates.

 

6) Free server transfers: At least for those of us that had EGA. Some of us chose servers that were Light or Medium at the time, but due to the large influx of people since EGA started, those servers have become full and now require some of us to wait long que times. Also this should alleviate some of the congestion on servers currently available since I tend to see a sporadic # of light servers available.

 

I guess that its for now. Somehow I feel like I'm forgetting something though.

[Truga]

My gripes with this game:

1) UI. Please let us move and resize elements. Nothing more, nothing less.

2) Less clunky LFG tool. The one that we have currently isn't very good. And, for some reason, people don't seem to know it's there? They keep spamming General instead...

 

That's pretty much it for now. The game sometimes feels a bit clunky, but I'm guessing that's going to be worked on soonish.

[Tortoises]

Macros yes, the mount from CE/DD should scale with riding skill.

 

LFG and Fast Travel (porting to instances), NO.

 

Of course if people whine enough about this, it will happen and another MMO will be ruined.

 

Unless we have a team of developers that finally sees the damage that it causes.

 

LFG and Fast travel trivialize content, cause the world to be empty, destroy server communities, encourage douchebaggery and ninja looting ( remember the formula for an internet F-Wad ) these things along with instanced non spectator Arenas that give the best items for PvP are big mistakes to a massively multiplayer game, a gaming genre that finds its strengths in social interactions.

 

I will keep saying it and keep hoping that my logic does not fall on deaf ears.

 

I think im turning cynical about it though.

Edited December 23, 2011 by Tortoises

[ShiryouOni]

I wholeheartedly agree with almost everything in here, definitely need addons and macros. And definitely need some more variety in regards to the gear or a way to customize your character more. I don't like how Ive had 5 different head gears and all of them looked identical except color scheme.

[Tortoises]

And definitely need some more variety in regards to the gear or a way to customize your character more. I don't like how Ive had 5 different head gears and all of them looked identical except color scheme.

 

I smiled inwardly when I read this.

 

I remember when this was one of the chief complaints in WoW.

[Merex]

I agree with most of this. But there are a couple things that I think would harm the game instead of help it. The chief among these is the LFG system. I am one of the people that believes that putting in a cross-server dungeon queueing system would only be detrimental. Look what it did to Rift. And if they were going to put in this system they would need to add server transfers first. Because one of the positive sides to having a random dungeon finder, is the utility for guild recruitment. But it usually is at the cost of some servers becoming graveyards. But, survival of the fittest...

 

The thing I agree with the most here, is the need for macros. I don't think we need addons, because, they ultimately lower the amount of skill needed to play the game, and it forces the developers to create content around the most prominent addons, leaving the people who don't like the idea of addons hanging in the wind. But macros need to be added. There is no question about it.

I'm kind of annoyed that when a LFG tool is made everyone always assumes that the only way of implementation is cross server. A LFG tool that is limited the server you play on is only beneficial to the game. There isn't a single negative.

[kemsu]

A very minor suggestion, and non-game-breaking, I believe:

 

Fix the 'show sith corruption' option in social tab of preferences. As it stands right now, every time game loads a new screen, my character looks corrupt again, even though I unchecked the box and applied. If I was a sith, I dont think I would mind. But as an Agent, it doesn't look right.

[EvanSnowWolf]

I am completely against ANY mod or addon that could become something that a guild leader or raid leader is going to FORCE me to download at max level.

[SunwindIon]

I want only 2 things;

 

Fix the graphical issues with jedi robes and the general low quality textures of armour being displayed instead of the high quality textures.

 

A third possible hotkey bar on the bottom-middle of the screen. two is not enough for me I have way too many abilities and I can't stick them on the side of the screen because they're too far away to easily click or glance at and see when they come off cooldown.

[Dharst]

I am completely against ANY mod or addon that could become something that a guild leader or raid leader is going to FORCE me to download at max level.

 

Easy solution- group with someone else. Don't force your deficiencies or querks on everyone else.

[J-Sheridan]

There are tons of social / special vendors throughout the galaxy that sell unique equipment options and it is going to be a royal pain to find them all so you can get them without visting each planet OVER AND OVER AND OVER.

 

1) Copy each of these equipment items and put them in the VIP Vendor store NOT the CE ONLY store. Thus people that pay for the VIP wristband can have access to ALL the social / special items in the game like companion customisations, unique clothing and items.

 

This improves the VIP room appeal and improves ease of access to see all the social items in game.

 

2) Ability to preview weapons and speeders the same way you can do so with clothing.

Additionally, it would be nice a store was created that allows you to see every clothing / weapon option in game.

Thus people can see the massive list of clothing options available to them and go hunting for the set.

 

3) LFG System, absolute must. It is extremely hard to find groups when the playerbase is scattered across multiple planets to the point your running around worlds that have barely 50 people in them.

Trying to find groups to do heroics, flashpoints or any major group activity would benefit from streamlining the process

 

4) Remove the extremely silly docking in planets.

The amount of area transitions seems extremely pointless and a waste of time when your doing:

Fly to Planet > Load to airlock > Load to orbital station > Load to planet

 

Would it not be much simpler to at LEAST

Fly to Planet > Load to orbital station > Load to planet

 

Why the hell do I have to load to a straight corridor which accomplishes nothing ?

 

5) ALLOW US TO REMOTELY SEE WHAT OUR COMPANIONS ARE WEARING EVEN IF THEY ARE NOT SUMMONED / ON A MISSION

 

Keeping track of what my companions are wearing gets extremely difficult over time thus I have to keep summoning them so I can see if the mission reward or inventory item is worth getting.

Instead of this allow companion specific rewards to automatically compare against what the companion is actually using.

 

Mission offers a weapon for companion X

Comparison bar shows what companion X has equiped even if they are elsewhere

 

Alternatively allow players to see what every companion is wearing on their ship by selecting them.