"We wanted more instant gratification : kill, get treasure, repeat."

[Enako]

You must not have been around the Forums in BC days. There was a poll asking what race you would like to see in wow, 2 years running Pandaren won by a massive margin.

 

There was a horde protest that Bloof Elfs were the BC race over padarens. Some guilds refused to allow belfs to join them for a long time because of that protest.

 

And lastly Pandaren were almost the alliance race in BC, but it was changed late in development as they felt it would further imbalance the factions.

 

and have you seen what went on in wow forums when pandarens were announced ? i was there. and it was VERY ugly, unanimously.

 

You say 600k, mostly Asian country, subscriptions is a huge lose. But even if we go for the year lose figure of 1 million, that is still only around an 8% loss. In a market as fickle as the MMO one is, I'd say that sounds pretty normal, just for wow it is on a massive scale.

 

you are considering 18 million EXISTING subscriptions. not PAYING subscriptions. if you look at it that way, i am also STILL a subscriber in wow with my credit card and account details intact in battle net system.

 

yet i havent paid them for over 1 or 1.5 years now.

 

my subscription also stays in champions online system. lotro, and a few other games. im not paying any of them since im not playing any of them.

 

i just didnt get arsed to remove my subscriptions, thinking that i may play them occasionally if i like it in future. and many people are like me.

 

so, 600 k actual cancellations of subscriptions actually is a major, major number. for, it means this cancellations are from PAYING subscriptions.

[krinaman]

Every MMO I ever played had someone claiming that "harder" = more subs and "casual" = "less subs". However, I've never seen anything to back those claims and often seen the opposite.

 

WoW for example seen it's best numbers when it was extremely casual and those numbers dropped when they started making content harder again.

 

Rift started off "harder" and when they were bleeding subs by the 1000's they moved towards being more casual.

 

Lotro's last couple 12 mans were supposed to be the hardest ever in Lotro, the "make it harder" crowd praised them. Then they flopped miserably as no one played them.

 

I get that some really want the game harder and that's what they enjoy but it's not what most players want.

[McRuffles]

Hmm,

 

no offence intended to anyone who find the game too hard. It's hard, in places, or more specifically, in the right places.

 

There are elite/champion mobs. They are a challenge. There are packs with large numbers, they are a challenge. There are flashpoints, where some of the mechanics require you to communicate and co-ordinate, these are possible challenges.

 

All the above raises the difficulty above and beyond the usual groups of mobs, and for good reasons... they are supposed to be that way.

 

I do get the feeling reading alot of opinions on this forum that people expect all content to pretty much be the same difficulty. Maybe they do expect some mobs to have more HP than others...

 

To say the game is too hard, is possibly over egging it a little. You may want to utilise all the tools of your class of which all seem pretty balanced. Games like this are punch and counter punch. You want to survive that big attack? interrupt, stun or out heal it. Don't just mash your damage abilities hoping you'll out DPS a mob that is intended to have a higher rate of DPS than your character at the same level.

 

I suppose it's a bit like boss fights in single player games. If you stand still and hit punch repeatedly you'lre gonna die. You need to jump to that safe platform or stun the boss by whacking its many varied eyeballs etc...

 

I wouldn't say that this game is by any stretch of the imagination too hard...

Edited December 28, 2011 by McRuffles

[DarthVohbo]

I think it's more a matter of improper tuning and highly varying difficulty levels than the game being too hard as a whole.

 

Some of the hard mode flashpoints are just very buggy, or require rather specific group setups. My main complaint is that the tuning for some bosses is completely out of whack with the rest of the instance. Oh, and there is way way way too much pointless trash that provides no challenge at all but makes instances take 2 hours.

 

I'm pretty sure that even casual players don't mind an occasional challenge, but there are a lot of mechanics in place that just plain suck and are unfun. Those should be fixed or changed, the difficulty level itself seems fine.

[Uruare]

I run around almost constantly with my RL significant other, and the only content we can't duo are about half the Heroic 4's and on-level Flashpoints. Operations and world bosses nonwithstanding, we've found plenty of challenge that was a lot of fun; the right kind of challenge.

 

The kind that made us sit and discuss for a minute or two which dude to whack, which one to CC and/or what to do about the patrolling mobs and so on.

 

Frankly, we're loving it. We give most of the Heroic 4's a shot with just the two of us and our two companions, and sometimes it goes slowly, gruelingly but successfully...and other times it's a faceplant and a shout-out to General or to a guildmate or two.

 

Same deal for Flashpoints thus far.

 

We're being pretty thorough on each world we're hitting, doing most of the missions and the bonus series content. Wouldn't want to miss the storyline stuff or the commendations, after all.

 

So, we do pretty alright gearwise. I PVP a little on my own time, and snag a few PVP things here and there, and on the whole, I really like the warzones and huttball.

 

They're things I could see myself doing repeatedly and having fun with repeatedly. Others' mileage may vary, to be sure, but my experience has been fun.

 

 

Sith warrior is broken, by contrast. Trying to play one solo is several kinds of the wrong flavor of 'hard mode', and not a day goes by when I don't see someone, either in General wherever I'm at or in my growing circle of random mission connections going 'This is borked' and dropping it altogether in favor of anything else.

 

The credit sinks being steep and harsh in many places are another flavor of what I'd call the bad kind of challenge. Gets tough to afford class training if you're even being tactically modest in running crew skills for things you will need for your crafting.

 

The AH is clunky and painful to use and though I've listed many, many stacks of mats I no longer need as well as schematics of myriad types, I only rarely sell anything, and half the time, what I've sold is either a schematic for some orange gear piece or a piece of purple gear.

 

Crafting = not fun so far. Tiresome, tedious, expensive and hopefully worth the hassle after all this bad investment grinding.

 

Credit farming = not fun. Pretty sure none of us watched the Star Wars movies, saw the SWTOR trailers and went "Oh MAN, I can't WAIT to spend hundreds of hours mindlessly grinding mobs and nodes so I can afford to putt around at the speed of frigid mollasses on one of numerous hideous, fugly 'speeders'!"

 

I'll just leave that right there.

 

Cheers.

[RocNessMonster]

wow lost 600,000 subscribers the moment they made their game 'challenging' in cataclysm. in just 3 months.

 

AND they are still losing subscribers as we speak.

 

 

Well let's see, WOW is what seven years old now. Of course it's bleeding subs and this isn't something you can just blame on Cataclysm. Cataclysm was great until the whining started and the ****** devs bent over for them.

[Tic-]

game wasnt ready - but not for the reasons you are advocating. for :

 

 

 

in that 'has very little to do game', the guild i founded has grown from 2 people to 120 people in 1.5 years, set up the biggest player city in eclipse server in dantooine (along with approximately 5-6 other major cities manned by similarly crowded guilds - and ours was even mid-range guild), and has engaged in activities and trading for a total of 2.5 years.

 

granted A LOT has quit after nge was done. but that is not mainly due to hardcoreing necessities or this or that - it was because soe had been totally erasing all the effort that was made characterwise - they made you grind 22 professions to open jedis, and then made jedi available to all. they had made people used to a very flexible, very engaging skill/talent system, and then totally erased it to dumb it down to a wow clone.

 

.............

 

the game was not ready due to myriad of bugs that were existing in the game from the start. excuse me, but i and my guild, neither the approx 6+ over 100 man guilds that has participated in the 'server wide rebel alliance' meetings in swg after a year had had found lack of anything to do in the game.

 

you come out as a hardcore progression gamer type who wants to see a path in front of you that you can progress, in set fashion. i know, because by then i was also someone like you, and i was rather out of my element in swg initially, while all those people were busy doing a lot of things, i was wandering around - with only thing i did being setting up the city and managing it into prosperity.

 

and i enjoyed it very much.

 

so, your argument is basically a hardcore gamer's perspective as opposed to a casual gamers, again. and it shares the same propositions like any other argument that has been made in same fashion.

 

I am quite the opposite of what you portray me as, so your last two paragraphs were for nothing.

 

As to you and your guild, congrats to that, but i don't think i said the game collapsed and shut down, yes of course there were guilds still left and people were playing.

 

From the release of the game, to the NGE, the game was bleeding subs, badly, thats why they tried anything to stop it. The NGE didn't work as they hoped, obviously.

 

You say SWG was the biggest MMO at the time of the NGE, i say hogwash.

 

I led a guild there from UO that was a 100+, as well... There was apprx. 3 of us left when the NGE hit. UO at the time was not a progression MMO with set paths, as you like to describe my gaming choice, so me and mine found the game as dull as most did.

Edited December 28, 2011 by Tic-

[RocNessMonster]

On this argument about how outsold who. Lineage 2 was the best selling MMO worldwide at the time. EverQuest dominated the western market with SWG then the minor MMOs (Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, EVE, that defunct space game by EA) trailing behind. Edited December 28, 2011 by RocNessMonster

[Hammerreborn]

People seriously think this game is hard?

 

Wow, you need to go back to playing hello kitty, because this game is a joke if you have three functioning braincells.

 

Long fights != difficult, it's a gear check. Can the healer heal for 5 minutes, does the tank take too much damage because his shield sucks. None of this is any indication of skill.

 

Let's take the boarding party for example. Where is the difficulty there other than you have to heal long enough for the dps to do 100k damage?

 

The mandalorian raider boss, other than don't stand near the edge, where is the difficulty?

 

This game is easy mode. I duo heroic 4s with my companion just because I want a challenge. This game holds your hand far more than wow ever did.

[darthmalrikk]

good thing that we 'casuals' as you name it, outnumber the hardcore types by a whopass majority.

 

just like the rest of the planet in everything else in regard to hardcore vs others.

 

 

 

and let me break something to you :

 

challenges and effort are for day jobs. as well as achievements. people who are doing these everyday in their daily life, -hell actually HAVING to do these in their daily life everyday, will NOT need any of these in their ENTERTAINMENT.

 

 

 

yeah. sure.

 

Sorry but i like a challenge i hate logging into wow now knowing i can just stand in a city enter a HC and not even have to open my eyes becuase i can faceroll the content without any effort whats the point in playing a game to have things handed down to you?

if they go down the same road as what wow has they will lose tons of subs in a couple of months... just becuase ppl want to be lazy and not put effort into gear... go play a CoD if you dont want to put effort into getting your toon gear...

[RocNessMonster]

. go play a CoD if you dont want to put effort into getting your toon gear...

 

Pst. At least suggest Battlefield 3 this is an EA game.

[Enako]

I am quite the opposite of what you portray me as, so your last two paragraphs were for nothing.

 

As to you and your guild, congrats to that, but i don't think i said the game collapsed and shut down, yes of course there were guilds still left and people were playing.

 

From the release of the game, to the NGE, the game was bleeding subs, badly, thats why they tried anything to stop it. The NGE didn't work as they hoped, obviously.

 

You say SWG was the biggest MMO at the time of the NGE, i say hogwash.

 

thats why you are utterly incorrect.

 

for a sandbox game to be PLAYABLE, there has to be quite a number of people providing content.

 

ie, you wont be able to set up a player city if the average size of guilds in your server is not 100. even the maximum level of a city required 120 people as citizens in the city, and multiple houses did not count.

 

moreover, you wont be able to do ANY trading in such a mmo if the server population is not high. and since a lot of very high level trading was going on, over exquisite armors, high level ship trade, and weapons, you can conclude that server population was alive and well into until nge.

 

there was a guy called stryker in my server. the guy had engaged in SO big a manufacturing and trading operation that, he was able to set up an entire city just by himself. everyone was selling his weapons as distributors, and even there were ones that were selling their weapons under stryker name under his license. the guy and his operation got so big that they decided on a whim to leave eclipse and move to another server, and funded everything with their massive cash from their operation.

 

so it seems i was right about my assessment regarding your inclinations then - if you werent a hardcore gamer, you wouldnt miss the fact that for any kind of sandbox of this scale to happen, there needs to be a huge server population actively playing, trading, manufacturing and buying things.

 

I led a guild there from UO that was a 100+, as well... There was apprx. 3 of us left when the NGE hit. UO at the time was not a progression MMO with set paths, as you like to describe my gaming choice, so me and mine found the game as dull as most did.

 

uo was a hardcore game with open world pvp with serious penalties upon death. it is as hardcode as a game could be. its no different from eve online. so therefore, indeed the assessment about hardcore inclinations hold true. uo stays hardcore even still as of today.

[Tychoe]

Some may disagree with me on this, but I think one of the things SWG did right was non-combat classes. I loved the entertainer who could solcialize in the cantina, give buffs, and change the appearace of other characters (for tips, of course!). I was hoping ToR would have something similar, but alas, I was disappointed on that front. I know some people were concerned that the environment seemed 'dead', that no one was socializing in the cantinas... well if you stuck a few entertainers in there, that'd fix that problem. lol

[KerinKor]

600 k subscriptions canceled in a quarter, is no joke. fluctuations dont go that haywire in games.

 

moreover, 600 k subscribers from 18 million is only something that comes into equation when those subscriptions are actually among the ACTIVE subscriptions that pay, and therefore will reflect in the quarterly or end year reports of a company.

And it could repeat that several times over and STILL have subscriber numbers Bioware will only ever be able to dream of.

[Enako]

Sorry but i like a challenge i hate logging into wow now knowing i can just stand in a city enter a HC and not even have to open my eyes becuase i can faceroll the content without any effort whats the point in playing a game to have things handed down to you?

if they go down the same road as what wow has they will lose tons of subs in a couple of months... just becuase ppl want to be lazy and not put effort into gear... go play a CoD if you dont want to put effort into getting your toon gear...

 

leaving aside the fact that wow subscription loss happened when they made cataclysm raiding harder,

 

what happened to FUN in entertainment ?

 

'liking a challenge' does not mean 'entertainment'. it is 'liking a challenge' as the name implies. it is basically a means to prove/overcome oneself. it is not entertainment - it is sports.

 

entertainment and sports are not mutually identical.

[merooo]

When we human beings are presented by a dificult challenge, we will fail numerous times but the gratification given from learning and evolving into something fractionally better is nice.

 

When we human beings are presented by a easy challenge, it has no impact nor long term fufillment..we just forget.

 

Yes, difficult challenge improve society, slowly generating individuals with higher intelligence. But easy challenge, in my opinion, cause disaster: sheepeople. Logic and individualism start become unfashionable.

 

Check average IQ (yes, one of couple type of intelligence) in world. Its higher in countries where people actually must overcome challenge different kind of then USA or EU. Ex- and communistic countries.

 

USA and EU are not all what it is. Majority people on this planet actually are required to thing if they wanna survive. If someone have some serious problems in RL in 'civilized' part of this world, then sorry, but there is something wrong with you and only with you.

 

And remember, writing something in this forum doesn't automatically that this is true. Example:

 

95% people like challenges - seriously like challenges . Its a common known fact. Why? Cos I telling you, and I now that from others.

[Raximillian]

Agreed. Dumbing down the game too much would not be good.

 

I still think they need to add more difficulty settings, not just normal and heroic:

 

Easy (rofl faceroll)

Normal (pfff... that barely grazed me)

Hard (someone get the license plate of that truck!)

Insane (The horror!! THE HORROR!!!)

 

There is no one or two difficulty settings that will cater to all. Developers need to add more options.

 

I never played SWG, but just looking at the video, I feel the pain that the players must have gone through. And that phrase just puts another nail in the coffin.

[kineticdamage]

I'm reassured to see we're not so few to search for a challenge after all

 

Also, don't know if anyone noticed, but easymode-demanding players do pose another problem :

They ask for easy things, but once they beat it up, they act just like challenge demanders ... they abandon the game.

Because once you beat up a content you've no use to run it ad-nauseam anymore, either you'd be a hardcore gamer, a casual player or a regular.

And where it poses a real problem is that easy content is beaten far more quicker than challenging one. See where I'm going ?

 

This is partly why I never understood that stance most MMO studios took by favorizing instant gratification & easy modes.

 

Once again, may I repeat myself, but WoW 4.3 patch was a perfect example to illustrate this post : just look at mmo-champion.com threads before 4.3 (Looking for Raid tool) hit, and look after.

Before it was "All hail the 4.3 LFR tool ! I don't care about any other game now !"

3 days after, it was all "I already beat everything the LFR offered to me, now I don't want to log in anymore".

And this coming majorly from players who admitted they loved the LFR tool because they were tagging themselves as casuals.

 

Isn't it a sufficient lesson to learn for studios ?

Edited December 28, 2011 by kineticdamage

[Enako]

im still waiting someone to explain, when did the definition of ENTERTAINMENT had become synonymous with DIFFICULTY.

[rlhaas]

My problem with this mindset is that a lot of people want to be special little snowflakes and think that A) stuff in the game should be 'hard work' (two words that shouldn't be in the same sentence are bolded) and B) that all others are lumped into the category of casual and that's just not right. I've been playing MMOs for 15 years. I'm used to them being harder than what has been produced since the release of WoW. WoW has ALWAYS been geared towards both 'casual' players and those who go nuts if their isn't some sort of progression raiding system in place. There isn't really anything to 'dumb down' in this game because it's already casual.

[kineticdamage]

im still waiting someone to explain, when did the definition of ENTERTAINMENT had become synonymous with DIFFICULTY.

 

Since the start, it never was really about difficulty. It's about challenge.

Trying to solo a 16-man operation is difficult.

Trying to solo a flashpoint is challenging.

 

Understand the nuance ?

Edited December 28, 2011 by kineticdamage

[Uhuru]

I could not agree more with the OP. Bioware had the courage to make the game fairly challenging at launch, I hope they stay the course.

 

Removing challenge (especially elites) from most of the gameworld in WoW ruined the leveling experience. If Bioware were to dumb down the leveling challenge in this game it would be even worse since leveling is so much of a foundation to swtor.

 

A belated +1 to the OP.

[Tic-]

thats why you are utterly incorrect.

 

for a sandbox game to be PLAYABLE, there has to be quite a number of people providing content.

 

ie, you wont be able to set up a player city if the average size of guilds in your server is not 100. even the maximum level of a city required 120 people as citizens in the city, and multiple houses did not count.

moreover, you wont be able to do ANY trading in such a mmo if the server population is not high. and since a lot of very high level trading was going on, over exquisite armors, high level ship trade, and weapons, you can conclude that server population was alive and well into until nge.

 

there was a guy called stryker in my server. the guy had engaged in SO big a manufacturing and trading operation that, he was able to set up an entire city just by himself. everyone was selling his weapons as distributors, and even there were ones that were selling their weapons under stryker name under his license. the guy and his operation got so big that they decided on a whim to leave eclipse and move to another server, and funded everything with their massive cash from their operation.

 

.

 

huh?

 

so it seems i was right about my assessment regarding your inclinations then - if you werent a hardcore gamer, you wouldnt miss the fact that for any kind of sandbox of this scale to happen, there needs to be a huge server population actively playing, trading, manufacturing and buying things.

 

 

 

uo was a hardcore game with open world pvp with serious penalties upon death. it is as hardcode as a game could be. its no different from eve online. so therefore, indeed the assessment about hardcore inclinations hold true. uo stays hardcore even still as of today.

 

So because of harsh death penalties UO was a hardcore game? Even though i could walk to my house or bank in less than 5 minutes and be re-equiped in no time at all? or walk to a player vendor in even less time. The "serious penalty" was losing your stuff. But it was simplistic to get more stuff.. Crafting was not hard, nor time consuming.

 

Any other reason UO was hardcore? Certainly not gaining skills, i could max out a character in the fraction of todays games...

 

You really do want this game rather simplistic.

[merooo]

im still waiting someone to explain, when did the definition of ENTERTAINMENT had become synonymous with DIFFICULTY.

 

Sorry dude, its not possible to explain to you this fact. Why? Because you don't understand that people are different from each other. Some like color blue, some green, some are blind.

[Orvish]

im still waiting someone to explain, when did the definition of ENTERTAINMENT had become synonymous with DIFFICULTY.

 

It hasn't. It's synonymous with CHALLENGING. And challenging in the sense that it tests you to perform at a level beyond the normal vegitative state people assume as they slump down on the couch to watch TV.

 

It requires user input and feedback, not blind acceptance. It's one of the reasons I can't force myself to log into WoW anymore other than to do raids, and I only enjoy the raids because I'm doing them with people I enjoy being around. If I was raiding with a bunch of mindless, faceless drones Dragon Soul would be insanely boring. As it is now, we have to find ways to make it a bit more exciting.

 

TOR is wonderful in that it requires you to actually be present in a flashpoint. I can't just set myself to auto-attack and tab out to browse the internet (and yes, I do this as a tank. The 500% threat modifier destroyed any challenge to holding threat). Now, I have to actually pay attention and WORK to maintain my threat on mobs as a tank, something I wasn't required to do since Burning Crusade in Warcraft. I haven't lost a mob to a DPS when proper focus targetting was applied since Tier 11, when our Warlock would play as Destro and Bane Nefarian as he flew around, so he'd have massive threat when he landed.

 

And as far as your early arguments back on page 1 about not wanting a challenge, because jobs are challenging, that's just bullcrap. I work as an office manager at a fairly successful home healthcare company, and I still love going home and facing a challenge in a flashpoint in TOR, or working to take down a particularly hard heroic quest.

 

Challenge is what keeps a game interesting, because it encourages you to interact with it. Mindless tedium such as what WoW currently offers is only fun when there's new content added, and even then that's only fun the first few times.