An open letter to our players

[DarthDymond]

It's an open letter, so yes - those tend to be pretty one-way as far as communications go.

 

Also, its kind of amusing that so many people seem to have been expecting something like:

• Ben: "There is non-chapter content in the works, but we can't talk about it yet."
  
• RandomForumGuy: "We want you to talk about that stuff you said you can't talk about"
  
• Ben: "Okay, here is the stuff I said we can't talk about...."
  

[chrisforester]

I share the frustrations posted here. A founding subscriber, I have all but given up on the game now since we moved into the chapter per month of KOTFE situation.

 

For me, the game now fails on several fronts and has put me in a situation where my sub is cancelled and I may or may not resub one month to finish KOTFE out of curiosity....but probably not.

 

1. Fail 1: Kotfe is the opposite of what made the game good before. I loved the classic stories and it was sometimes worth levelling more than one of each class just to do the different lightside/darkside choices. SWTOR was a great game for "altaholics" like me and I enjoyed getting Legendary status. Classic companions were great with the romance possibilities etc, and the rising through the ranks of the different classes and where they ended up was also good. In addition, the strengths and flaws of Empire v Republic were great for immersion. The flawed democracy versus the flawed dictatorship; the blinkered Light Side and the self destructive dark. Everything's now been thrown away - everything, for me, that was good about game immersion. All classes follow the same route which whilst it made some sense in previous expansions, doesn't here. Companions, gone. All previous victories and advancements, irrelevant. LS vs DS - irrelevant now Marr spouts LS philosophies. Empire and Republic, irrelevant.

 

The story has really killed my first few years of playing and I kind of wish I had never clicked that fateful button launching the expansion, which did warn me that lots would be lost! How right it was.

 

My only hope now is that the last chapter ends when I wake up and realise it was all a force hallucination from Valkorion and Zakuul never existed:)

 

2. Fail 2 - Cartel Market. I've just become rather uncomfortable with the microtransaction focus. I think it promotes gambling and is borderline unethical as this is not an 18 rated game. Plus part of this fail is that Bio will always rush out some new thing to buy before they sort out real issues with the game.

 

3. Fail 3 - PVP. Having returned to WoW pvp (which will become gear free in the next expansion) then playing warzones in SWTOR what a difference. My endgame SWTOR pvp this week consisted of:

 

- Arenas popping that were, 4/5 times, hopelessly unbalanced. Why a simple system of assigning 4 players seems to be able to put fully geared healers and tanks in one team vs none in the other, or 3 vs 4 is beyond me. It really does encourage quit/requeue behaviour

 

- the usual server stability issues in spite of running top spec equipment over a great fibreoptic line

 

- several of those warzones where all everyone does is stand in a circle dps-ing/healing with no effect at all, an endless stalemate while watching the clock ticking down

 

- terrible seemingly never fixable class imbalance, unkillable sorc heals even 1 v 4, etc.

 

The only thing SWTOR pvp has over WoW is cosmetic racials, which means that not everyone in SWTOR rolls one race for the pvp advantage.

 

So I'm gone really. With a heavy heart. Really liked this game.

[Jerba]

Anyway what ever happened to Bruce? He not around anymore? I ask because this is how Bruce rolled and at the least we got some information on things we didn't know before.

 

Bring back Bruce and his lovely roadmaps perhaps?

Bruce stills works on SWTOR, in fact he gave an interview together with Ben last December.

But you shouldn't assume that the wording of this letter is Ben's fault; he could only write what marketing approved. Had Bruce written the letter, I don't think he would have been allowed to go into more detail. So in the end, I don't think it matters who writes the letters, but how well the game is doing and how transparent they want to be.

Edited April 25, 2016 by Jerba

[Cherubel]

Bruce stills works on SWTOR, in fact he gave an interview together with Ben last December.

But you shouldn't assume that the wording of this letter is Ben's fault; he could only write what marketing approved. Had Bruce written the letter, I don't think he would have been allowed to go into more detail. So in the end, I don't think it matters who writes the letters, but how well the game is doing and how transparent they want to be.

 

Would be nice to see the Austin office roster.

It prob looks like this:

 

- lead (who is asleep at his/her job as only that can explain how a MMO can be turned into a single player game)

- 5 environment designers (who ONLY make Cartel market s.hit)

- 1 programmer intern maintaining the SWTOR codebase (explains all the bugs after every new patch)

- 1 infrastructure intern maintaining the servers

- 20 marketing hype-makers / backslappers

Edited April 25, 2016 by Cherubel

[yeldarbnotned]

I just want to know where my $180 a year sub money is going. How much are they actually reinvesting back into the game?

 

It seems a very small percentage. $20 maybe? It is no wonder that EA is supportive and thinks this game is a "Huge" success.

[TUXs]

I just want to know where my $180 a year sub money is going. How much are they actually reinvesting back into the game?

 

It seems a very small percentage. $20 maybe? It is no wonder that EA is supportive and thinks this game is a "Huge" success.

It was FIFA 2016...money now goes to Madden 2017. ALL of your money goes to EA, not Bioware and sure as hell not this budget title.

 

This is an EA game...EA gets all the revenue. Bioware is given a budget...that's it. The idea that your money is being reinvested into this game is silly...that happens at Blizzard because W0W is Blizzard...but SWTOR and Bioware are very tiny tiny parts of the EA wheel.

[tummiswtor]

I hope they don't waste SWTOR (or maybe already did?). It's really good MMO, but start to listen player, and their opinion. Some of bugs reported here or by my friends in game are still. Keep adding new content, and make a game a bit more COOP, no single player. Heroic star fortress easy done by 1 person...

[DarthOvertone]

First off, I want to apologize for some of the issues you have experienced in the last couple of months. The monthly chapter release schedule is new and it has come with some unexpected bugs.

 

Thank you for stopping by Ben and taking the time to give a shout out to the peeps. If there is anything that would help maintain and actually lift the morale of the player base, it is better communication from you guys. In that regard, your post is a net positive. I just hope it's not a one and done thing where you guys come by, say some nice things, and then disappear.

 

In the past, we were promised better communication, roadmaps, and better quality releases by Jeff Hickman. None of those things happened. While I appreciate the apology, patches containing gamebreaking bugs are sort of par for the course for this game. I can't think of a major release going back to game launch that didn't contain a gamebreaking bug of some kind. You definitely need to better address your internal testing methods that allow these things to get through. BW has earned a reputation at this point of releasing bug-ridden patches for SWTOR and that perception isn't going to change anytime soon.

 

 

In the eyes of all of our partners, SWTOR is a huge success. BioWare supports this game. EA supports this game. Lucasfilm supports this game. Disney supports this game. In fact, for a game that has been live for almost 5 years, we are receiving an incredible amount of support from all of our partners. It’s both amazing and humbling.

 

This is very encouraging to hear, not just that the game is healthy and doing well, but that the partners are also supporting it.

 

 

The harder part to address, because you have to take my word for it, are all the features and content we are working on that we haven’t yet announced.

 

As a player, I think the content cadence has been very good. It's been steady and solid.

 

However, the content has been buggy, as you already acknowledged, and that has to be rectified. There are enough bugs and problems in game already. Adding to them is brutal.

 

Additionally, while content additions are great, there are existing issues like class balancing that are going untouched. You guys have asked what type of balancing we would like to see; more frequent, smaller balancing passes or less frequent and bigger balancing passes. We have actually seen neither for something like a year now. Class balancing is a vital component to gameplay in all modes, and right now class balance is only good for the most casual PvE endeavors like leveling a toon or doing dailies.

 

Additionally, while I am very thankful for the recent PvP update, it took almost two years to produce it. There are other parts of the game, like endgame Operations, that are in a severe content drought. While the recent content cadence has been good for the story part of the game, please don't leave other areas of the game, like PvP and Operations, swinging in the wind for long periods of time without any attention at all.

[DisIzMe]

It was FIFA 2016...money now goes to Madden 2017. ALL of your money goes to EA, not Bioware and sure as hell not this budget title.

 

This is an EA game...EA gets all the revenue. Bioware is given a budget...that's it. The idea that your money is being reinvested into this game is silly...that happens at Blizzard because W0W is Blizzard...but SWTOR and Bioware are very tiny tiny parts of the EA wheel.

 

The issue is,how much Star Wars MMO contract costs to EA. It is crystal clear that SWTOR development budget is a small fraction of SWTOR income, but greedy EA and all,i still think that lion share of profits goes to Disney.

If SWTOR was making big profits,it would not feature at bottom of the EA financial reports and general treatment of the game by EA and Bioware would not be that of unwanted burden they have to carry and that they are ashamed of.

[TUXs]

The issue is,how much Star Wars MMO contract costs to EA. It is crystal clear that SWTOR development budget is a small fraction of SWTOR income, but greedy EA and all,i still think that lion share of profits goes to Disney.

If SWTOR was making big profits,it would not feature at bottom of the EA financial reports and general treatment of the game by EA and Bioware would not be that of unwanted burden they have to carry and that they are ashamed of.

EA has the Star Wars LICENSE...it has nothing to do with a Star Wars MMO. The LICENSE allows them to produce OTHER Star Wars games, like Battlefront and Galaxy of Heroes. Don't be fooled into thinking this game is running because of some license deal they can't get out of...it's not.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

It's an open letter, so yes - those tend to be pretty one-way as far as communications go.

 

Also, its kind of amusing that so many people seem to have been expecting something like:

• Ben: "There is non-chapter content in the works, but we can't talk about it yet."
  
• RandomForumGuy: "We want you to talk about that stuff you said you can't talk about"
  
• Ben: "Okay, here is the stuff I said we can't talk about...."
  

 

Can't and won't aren't the same thing.

 

It's not like people are asking for specific details ... a simple "Yes/No operations are/aren't coming this year" would suffice.

Clearly you set your standards a bit lower than most in what we deem appropriate communication to the community but that's cool, each to their own.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Bruce stills works on SWTOR, in fact he gave an interview together with Ben last December.

But you shouldn't assume that the wording of this letter is Ben's fault; he could only write what marketing approved. Had Bruce written the letter, I don't think he would have been allowed to go into more detail. So in the end, I don't think it matters who writes the letters, but how well the game is doing and how transparent they want to be.

 

Yeah last I could find anything from Bruce was back in December also which made me wonder if he'd moved away from this game perhaps ... *shrug*.

 

I guess it doesn't matter who writes the letters but in the end it does say "Ben Irving - Producer" and he did write it so that is who I will direct my frustration towards in this thread.

 

I don't pretend to know what sort of authority the producer title carries within Bioware but I'm equally not about to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume some shadow marketing department has all say in what goes onto the forums etc.

I mean with Eric and his team I understand the vague posts at times ( my criticism has always been there general lack of interaction with the community as a whole - more threads like that downtime funtime one would go a long way to make them seem less seperated but that's a whole other issue ) but this time with a "producer" posting it would be expected to be less vague and full of fluff otherwise they should have just had Eric make the post as it's what we're used to and wouldn't have gained as much flack I'm sure ( still would be some of course, there always is, but not as much ).

[DarthDymond]

Can't and won't aren't the same thing.

 

It's not like people are asking for specific details ... a simple "Yes/No operations are/aren't coming this year" would suffice.

Ah, I did a poor job of communicating my thoughts - I didn't mean to say I was amused because Ben had said it was impossible and yet posters seemed to think he would go ahead and do the impossible, or even that the information you guys want is particularly unreasonable to want.

 

I simply meant that I was amused that people seemed to think he / they would actually do such an abrupt about-face on their plans. I should have phrased it as:

• Ben: "There is non-chapter content in the works, but we're not going to talk about it yet."
  
• RandomForumGuy: "We want you to talk about that stuff you just said you are not going to talk about"
  
• Ben: "Okay, I shall now talk about the stuff that I just said I was not going to talk about...."
  

Clearly you set your standards a bit lower than most in what we deem appropriate communication to the community but that's cool, each to their own.

"Most" as in "most forum goers" or as in "most SWTOR players"?

 

Because I'll grant that you're probably right with respect to the regular forum crowd, but I'm willing to bet that most people in the overall pool of players don't pay a lick of attention to whether or not there is any communication coming out of BW at all, let alone whether that communication is handled particularly well or not.

 

I completely agree that BW tends to do a poor job at communication - I've said that for years. I also freely admit that I don't particularly care. I subscribe to the game based on... the game itself.

 

They do an adequate enough job to let me know what I will or will not get depending on whether I let my subscription lapse the next time it's up for renewal (and when they fail in that, e.g. pushing back EC right before it was due to launch, I think that is genuinely problematic - but failings that egregious have been mercifully few and far between). Beyond that basic competency, the quality BW's communication matters to me about as much as what color the outside of an airplane is painted matters to me when booking a flight.

Edited April 26, 2016 by DarthDymond

[MeNaCe-NZ]

"Most" as in "most forum goers" or as in "most SWTOR players"?

 

Because I'll grant you that you're probably right with respect to the regular forum crowd, but I'm willing to bet that most people in the overall pool of players don't pay a lick of attention to whether or not there is any communication coming out of BW at all, let alone whether that communication is handled particularly well or not.

 

I completely agree that BW tends to do a poor job at communication - I've said that for years. I also freely admit that I don't particularly care. I subscribe to the game based on... the game itself.

 

They do an adequate enough job to let me know what I will or will not get depending on whether I let my subscription lapse the next time it's up for renewal (and when they fail in that, e.g. pushing back EC right before it was due to launch, I think that is genuinely problematic - but failings that egregious have been mercifully few and far between). Beyond that basic competency, the quality BW's communication matters to me about as much as what color the outside of an airplane is painted matters to me when booking a flight.

 

Most as in most people reading this thread clearly. We could of course extend it to be a representation of the community as a whole since there is nothing to the contrary to say otherwise.

 

See you speak of "the regular forum crowd" yet perusing this thread there are really quite a lot of people who have gone to the trouble of posting their dissatisfaction and yet rarely ever post if at all.

 

For example going on this page and the previous I looked up 3 different posters ( who I didn't recognize ) posting on the more "negative" side of things ( 1 here since founding and is even quitting the game ) - 2 had not posted since January and 1 since February until this topic. To be fair I tried to do the same for "positive" posters - there is 1 on this and the previous page and he is a regular.

 

So it seems it's not just the regulars at all, especially since I've found the trend of forum regulars to lean more towards the positive.

 

I guess at some point weh ave to say "most" players are happy because the dissatisfied have all left so can't be counted into that camp. *shrug*.

 

As to how the communication matters to you well that's between you and Bioware I guess and as I said it would seem that most ( we'll go with posters in this thread to stick to facts ) are not happy with this communication at all.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Ah, I did a poor job of communicating my thoughts - I didn't mean to say I was amused because Ben had said it was impossible and yet posters seemed to think he would go ahead and do the impossible, or even that the information you guys want is particularly unreasonable to want. I simply meant that I was amused that people seemed to think he / they would actually do an abrupt about-face on their plans. I should have phrased it as:

• Ben: "There is non-chapter content in the works, but we're not going to talk about it yet."
  
• RandomForumGuy: "We want you to talk about that stuff you just said you are not going to talk about"
  
• Ben: "Okay, I shall now talk about the stuff that I just said I was not going to talk about...."
  

 

 

Why isn't it legitimate to think they might do an about face? Do you think he posted the letter expecting the type of response he has received in this thread? I personally doubt it and he truly believed that sort of letter would suffice to quell the communities issues, sorry but for the majority of players in this thread it has not.

 

That being said and assuming it's not the response he expected ( and if he did expect this then *** post such a crappy, self serving, information lacking letter in the first place ) it's not much to assume that they might be like "wow didn't expect quite that sort of response, maybe we should let them know what we're up to".

 

Without jumping down the conspiracy theory path too much it reeks to me of "no news is bad news" in this case when it comes to the likes of operations, that of course is just my opinion.

[DarthDymond]

Without jumping down the conspiracy theory path too much it reeks to me of "no news is bad news" in this case when it comes to the likes of operations, that of course is just my opinion.

I don't think it's a "conspiracy theory path" if all you're saying is that we're unlikely to get any new Ops this year or possibly even in the foreseeable future. I will be legitimately surprised if we do get any Ops before 2017. (I don't think they've quite given up on ever doing more in the future, but it wouldn't shock me if they ultimately go that route.)

 

But that's the sort of thing where a company's cost-benefit analysis kicks in with regards to communications - they would have to ask the straightforward question "what benefit is there in saying we won't have any new Ops for [X amount of time]?" If there's no benefit in such an announcement, I think they'll just stay silent on the matter.

Edited April 26, 2016 by DarthDymond

[Cherubel]

But that's the sort of thing where a company's cost-benefit analysis kicks in with regards to communications - they would have to ask the straightforward question "what benefit is there in saying we won't have any new Ops for [X amount of time]?" If there's no benefit in such an announcement, I think they'll just stay silent on the matter.

 

They captured Martin Shkreli, locked him in a basement and asked him to make a cost benefit. He analysed and in the final report told em, screw the ******* consumers of your product! they will still be coming back for more. Make junk content (instanced planets on rails and increase in level cap) and dont fx bugs (that costs money). Your profits will be great, loyal founders will stil be there coz they are sad nerds that cant get themselves to stop playing this sad game. In fact abuse them even more by focusing on micro transactions 90% of your time. That will net you more money and who cares that the loyal playerbase leaves.

There are new movies coming out and that will generate you a entire new wave of new nerds to abuse and take money away from.

Oh and wait... Most of the content in this game is too hard to do if you try to solo it. Make the entire game solo able so that the new nerds dont need to interact with other ppl in this game other than to sling derogatory terms at each other when they are doing quests because somebody else just killed the add 4533 that they needed to complete their achievement.

Edited April 26, 2016 by Cherubel

[PlagaNerezza]

Hi there!

 

My name is Ben Irving, Producer for Star Wars: The Old Republic. I don’t often make posts in the forums, in fact, this may be my first ever post. Despite that, our whole team, myself included try to digest all of the internet for SWTOR information – The forums, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Recently there have been questions and concerns around the quality of our releases and the ongoing support for SWTOR and I wanted to stop by to address those concerns.

 

First off, I want to apologize for some of the issues you have experienced in the last couple of months. The monthly chapter release schedule is new and it has come with some unexpected bugs. It has caused problems for some of you and I want to say I am sorry. At our core, the SWTOR team are all gamers, just like you. We empathize with the excitement of wanting to play a great game only to be blocked by a problem. We spend all of our energy striving to make SWTOR the best game possible and when bugs and other issues get in the way of your player experience, we take it to heart. We are committed to doing better and I think Chapter XII: Visions in the Dark shows we are serious about listening to your concerns and making meaningful changes to address them - a high quality chapter, released on time that we hope has met the expectations of our players.

 

Onto the future. Is SWTOR going to receive ongoing support? The answer is absolutely yes.

 

It's worth starting with the things we have already announced, we talk about them on the monthly Producer Live Stream but I think they are still worth mentioning. We had the launch of Knights of the Fallen Empire – 9 incredible story driven chapters, 14 companion recruitment missions, Star Fortress, 5 new player levels, 30 flashpoints upgraded to be challenging again, 50 operation bosses upgraded to be challenging again, too many heroic quests to count, a revamp of the 1-60 levelling experience and a huge number of quality of life improvements. More recently we have kicked off our monthly chapter cadence and our third installment – Chapter XII: Visions in the Dark – was just released. That cadence will take us through most of the year ending with Chapter XVI, our story finale for Knights of the Fallen Empire. In addition to all the monthly chapters we have built great supporting content – Recruitment missions to explore the galaxy with some of your favorite companions, the Odessen Proving Grounds Warzone, the Rishi Cove Arena, the Eternal Championship and new levels for crafting. That’s actually more content following a major expansion than we have ever released and the team is really excited for all of you to play it.

 

The harder part to address, because you have to take my word for it, are all the features and content we are working on that we haven’t yet announced. If you follow Charles Boyd or Paul Marino on social media you may have seen some hints of this. The team recently visited our MoCap studio to create new animations. Charles Boyd spent a week at our VO studio recording more lines of dialogue for future story content. The two most exciting things to share are that our writers are deep into the plot summaries for the next season's worth of chapters and we have started the early design phase for new, non-chapter, content. You all know the drill here, I can’t talk about any of the specifics (yet) but what I can say is that we have some REALLY cool stuff to talk about later this year and the whole SWTOR team can’t wait to announce it. Soon. TM.

 

Knights of the Fallen Empire is the most successful expansion we have ever produced. It received critical acclaim from press and fan sites but most importantly, it has been successful because all of you have supported us through the expansion launch and the release of the monthly Chapters. In the eyes of all of our partners, SWTOR is a huge success. BioWare supports this game. EA supports this game. Lucasfilm supports this game. Disney supports this game. In fact, for a game that has been live for almost 5 years, we are receiving an incredible amount of support from all of our partners. It’s both amazing and humbling.

 

If there is anything I would like people reading this to take away it’s this: SWTOR is absolutely being supported into the future. We have a lot of content coming over the next few months and even more exciting things to talk about later this year. All of us here at BioWare appreciate your ongoing support and we are committed to providing the best experience possible.

 

It’s because of you, our players, that this game continues to thrive. Thank you for playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.

 

Ben Irving

 

Raiders need new operations content. PVPers need bug fixes to the content just released. Class balance need to be touched up. Your story content needs to be diversified away from a single player story about a force user.

 

I'm going to basically tell you I hate KOTFE. You took 8 distinct stories and made 1 crappy story. What made the original work was my agent wasn't my smuggler who wasn't my jedi who wasn't my bounty hunter who wasn't a sith.

 

I'll leave out the massive plot issues I cannot stand in KOTFE. It doesn't work well outside the jedi and sith. This will likely get buried, but I know having 8 stories is impossibly expensive and not happening. Can you try and get these folks to at least do 2 stories. 1 for the force users and 1 for the non-force users. You go ahead and watch the bounty hunter story consolidated video. Now play the outlander as your BH.

 

Its not that hard to do the same plot with a slight change to accommodate the I am not the outlander. I'm not possessed by the emperor. Is that asking to much?

[Icestar]

You took 8 distinct stories and made 1 crappy story.

 

I think the story is awesome and I really hope we will see more chapters after this current story is finished

Edited April 28, 2016 by Icestar

[Cherubel]

I think the story is awesome and I really hope we will see more chapters after this current story is finished

 

What part of the story is awesome?

You do understand that the new chapters feature the SAME story for ALL classes in the game!

 

If that is awesome then I am sorry but no.

 

8 different stories for the classes is what made this game so AWESOME!

 

Not this KOFTE crap that they shoved down out throats!

[xkcurtisx]

I think the story is awesome and I really hope we will see more chapters after this current story is finished

 

sarcasm at its finest

[Opaknack]

After 9 days...

No answers to our questions

No bugfixes

No class balance (heal)

No nerf for sage/sorc

Solo ranked is still a joke

50% of all classes played in pvp are still sages/sorcs

Rishi arena is still buggy

50% of all BGs are still Odessen BG.

Nothing happens.

Nice job Bioware.

Rip Swtor

Edited April 28, 2016 by Opaknack

[foxmob]

After 9 days...

No answers to our questions

No bugfixes

No class balance (heal)

No nerf for sage/sorc

Solo ranked is still a joke

50% of all classes played in pvp are still sages/sorcs

Rishi arena is still buggy

50% of all BGs are still Odessen BG.

Nothing happens.

Nice job Bioware.

Rip Swtor

 

not sure what you expected. not sure why people are praising the Dev's (producer's?) post. it's just the usual rhetoric defending decisions, vague statements about important things and specific statements only about things that can make them look good. this is the same oral bowel movement you would hear from a politician.

 

who cares about an exploit that creates in-game credits?

• you have a broken arena map in the middle of a ranked arena season.
  
• you have one WZ popping upward of 50% of the time.
  
• you don't have a single new operation for raiders in the entire expansion.
  
• the only balance change that actually changed the balance in PVP made sins relatively irrelevant, but the same meta has been in place through 2 xpacs (2+ years!).
  

 

 

why in the holy hell wouldn't you take rishi out of the rotation until you fixed the glitches???? why do you even have to think about that????

 

also, all of these new chapters ("content") are great...on my first toon. it's infuriating to have to go through the first 9 of them just to unlock Odessen on my other 14 toons.

 

hate to say it, but these chapters are pretty bad. not the story. the story's fine (once!). but this all feels like something that I should be doing immediately. dropping one chapter every month is just artificially creating multiple "content updates" that are really just one thing that you chopped up a dozen times and now you're calling one content update twelve content updates.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

sarcasm at its finest

 

If only ... that may poster may very well be one of the devs "non dev" accounts that let them post on the forums "anonymously".

 

I shouldn't make fun though ... I guess some people really are that in awe of SWToR even after all these years and good for them if they're enjoying it. I would say such people are a rarity now though.

[spectreclees]

sarcasm at its finest

Yeah how dare someone enjoy the story.