Open letter to devs

[gorantd]

First of all let me start by saying this will just be a friendly advice and my observations over the years. I have no emotional attachments to this game, although I do love SW universe, so I will try to be as objective as I can.

 

I have played this game from the beginning, but it was always for couple of months at a time. I play couple of months, get bored, stop, then come back like a year later to see whats new. I came back few days ago because there are new things in KOTFE i didn't get to play and KOTET is coming out so I will be a sub for a few months for sure. But if history is gonna repeat itself that's gonna be it from me.

 

Here it goes.

You have a big patch coming and opportunity for some huge changes, positive changes to your game. But will you use it?

Everyone here realizes that you are not running all this for candy and people smiles. Although you may like your jobs, it's still a business, a company that needs to make a profit. BUT people smiles is what will bring you profit eventually.

The way you are going with this game is 'How do we make people subscribe?'. The answer is you don't, you can't MAKE people do anything if they don't like it in the first place. The question you have to ask yourself is 'What can I GIVE them so they will WANT to subscribe?'

If you look at the market today, and F2P games and their models, you will see a massive difference if we compare them to your game. SWTOR has by far one of the worst F2P models. You have locked away some of the basic features of any game behind a sub wall which is mind boggling. Things like chat and trade restrictions, money cap in your invenory etc. A sub should be quality of life thing, not affecting gameplay.

Lets be honest, your game is not blooming and growing with more players. You might experience incline due to the new expansion but after few months its just gonna die down. At BEST its gonna stay how it was couple of months ago, which is not great. You are trying to inject 'new' content and artificially extend its life, which works short term, but then 6 months later you are faced with same problem trying to come up with another injection.

You need to attract more people. You need more F2P players. As player base grows you have more chance to make profit.

How do you do that?

Well for start F2P must be 100% viable option. No gameplay must be affected by being F2P player. You can limit the number of flashpoints, operations, temper with cooldowns, exp and money gain, access to the new content obviously , but you cannot have things like limited number of quickbars in a game with 50 skills and 20 more stuff to click. Having limited amount of money you can hold, limiting how many levels you can have? Really bad idea!

Imagine a player who really likes his friends lightsabre looks and would spend many hours playing your game, trying to get money to buy that item, but he wont because you have limited so much what he can do in your game, and guess what....he just logged off and went to play another game.

Limiting end game content, gear ? Yes, that's fine in a reasonable way, but this new Galactic command system absolutely must be available trough cartel coins and marketable so even F2P can have some way to access it.

 

Now lets talk about PVP.

You have a game thats almost dead as far as PVP goes. You have to make some big changes and changes that you are bringing in 5.0 with no pvp gear is not helping at all. Why do I say that? Well imagine a pvp player that plays WZ daily and gets galactic xp and gear at certain rate. Now imagine a pve player that does hardcore nim operations that gets gear super fast and decides he wants to play pvp a bit. Ask yourself is it fair that pve guy will stomp pvp guy because of the gear he got in pve ? Do you think that pvp guy has desire to continue playing your game the way he likes it? You have to be VERY carefull about that balance.

Beyond that you have ways you can improve pvp experience. You can make unranked WZ free for all, with no limit for f2p players, and make subs choose a WZ they want to play for example. This would be huge improvement in my opinion, as this way I am forced to play maps I really don't like, and is one of the reasons I often quit. Yes you are running risk of finding which of your warzones suck and are not played, but isn't that supposed to be good information to devs? See what people like and make more of those in future?

Another thing is huttball. That's such a fun and unique game. You know how many times i wanted to play one more huttball and got 2 alderons in a row, got bored and turn off the game? You can use potential of this unique gameplay, make one more map, make huttball league for subs and see how much fun people have.

 

Those are just some of my thoughts I wanted to share with you guys..

I'm sorry for the wall of text, but you have a chance to improve this game, question is will you take it?

[TalonVII]

Umm FYI, wrong section of the forums.

[gorantd]

Well since I wrote about a lot of subjects I thought I put it here in general discussion.

If i made a mistake I apologize, maybe admins can help me and put the thread in the right section. Thank you.

[dr_mike]

general discussion.

 

That's here - http://www.swtor.com/community/forumdisplay.php?f=255

 

This sub forum is for discussion of Star Wars in general, not the game.

 

Moot anyway. These forums are mostly player to player forums with little to no staff interaction. At the last meet and greet in New York City, one staff member admitted that they pay little attention to the forums anyway.