RNG is perfect for SWTOR and I'll explain why.

[Aowin]

And yet, you continue... people have given you links where BW has stated what was the problems with the game, their mistakes etc. And you keep on spouting more and more assumptions you fabricate. Give me 1 statement from BW saying we made SWTOR as a single player game with MMO elements...Till you do, you are just making things on the way and i won't take your word for it.

 

Assume much again? I mentioned i don't have the time to do the same content yet again under the premise of Galactic Command, RNG is not for me and i will not do.

Everything else you pulled out of your ... behind ...yet again...

 

Don't take my word for it. Listen to BioWare:

 

SWTOR is the most expensive MMO in the history of the genre costing an estimated $150 million dollars. Most of that money went into the story, voice acting, cutscenes, etc. not the MMO supplements. The entire video shows that this "hundreds of hours of content" was built around the idea of players engaging in the class stories, not operations, warzones, or flashpoints. Again, those features were meant to compliment the story, not be the main experience.

 

This is a BioWare game. I don't know if you've ever played one before SWTOR, but their focus has always been on story, whether it's single player or multiplayer.

 

If you are not satisfied with Galactic Command and you refuse to do content that is years old, why are you still here? Talk with your money and don't invest in something you don't like. As I've already said time and time again, Galactic Command is a great system for the majority of players and there are far more benefiting from this new equalizing system than not. The fact that more players have access to quality gear than ever before is evidence of that, regardless of the RNG mechanism involved.

[Alloou]

SWTOR is the most expensive MMO in the history of the genre costing an estimated $150 million dollars. Most of that money went into the story, voice acting, cutscenes, etc. not the MMO supplements. The entire video shows that this "hundreds of hours of content" was built around the idea of players engaging in the class stories, not operations, warzones, or flashpoints. Again, those features were meant to compliment the story, not be the main experience.

.

 

Highlighted the part:

Ohlen began his presentation by dispelling some misconceptions about the creation of Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some journalists and fans attributed much of the upfront cost of TOR to its scripting and voice acting. Ohlen explained that this belief is erroneous: "[Voice acting] was a known entity, and cost was quite low in comparison to the cost of the rest of the project." In other words, BioWare had been there and done that with voice acting already in its other games and budgeted accordingly. However, BioWare did not have a tested platform to build an MMO. Much of the cost was funneled toward creating an engine that supported a team of over 300 people working on it at the same time and adding choice and consequence to the MMO story.

 

As for second part, read my signature.

 

This is the last time i reply to you. If you still refuse to acknowledge what people are telling you, no point in discussing.

[Vember]

 

This is the last time i reply to you. If you still refuse to acknowledge what people are telling you, no point in discussing.

 

That goes both ways, Pot.

[Digzzy]

I like this new system. great for us people coming back to play after a year or so nuttin like a good grind.

[IanArgent]

I was reading recently an article about games and why people stay/leave the game.

 

And since the title is RNG is perfect, i urge you all to have a look at this article. I found it very interesting.

 

http://www.gameanalytics.com/blog/16-reasons-players-leaving-game.html

 

EDIT: for those too bored, go to point number 10 and onwards.

 

Points 2, 4, 7, and 11 explain why BW might have made a lot of these changes. Point 10 is valid, for the min-maxer. NOt so much for the casual player; who will accumulate CXP more or less from doing what they are already doing, and aren't rushing towards the hardest content in the game.

 

2. Your game’s sessions are too long.

Hence Uprisings being tuned towards the 20-30 minute range. Hence chapters (for the most part) being self-contained content chunks, with defined start and end points and boundaries. (At the expense of open-world, unguided play, admittedly. I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of solo PvE open-world content beyond heroics and farming, for the times I have time to waste).

 

4. You are targeting a saturated fringe of the market

They were targeting the WoW market (IMO, but not just mine). That didn't work out for them, though they made a heroic effort. Now they're refocusing, moving away from that play and game style. They're moving back to what made Bioware famous (storytelling). Is it working? Mas o menos. KotFE storytelling was somewhat mediocre. KotET looks better, from what I've seen so far.

 

7. Your game is too hard to pick up.

When I started, the learning curve was pretty steep. Ever since then, they've flattened the learning curve in all major and most minor updates.

 

11. The game requires a big time investment to become enjoyable

Hence faster levelling, easier access to content, etc. It doesn't matter what the experience of players in a good guild is; because new players have no knowledge of what a good guild is, or how to get into one, or why pugging doesn't work to get gear.

 

Other points (in no particular order):

 

12. A toxic community

I play in the forum PvP game. Nuff sed.

 

8. Sudden rises in difficulty

Less than there used to be, but there are still random difficulty spikes.

 

3. You are not targeting the right audience for your project

They're changing audiences. Audacious move, but will it work? Stay tuned. I don't like their odds, myself.

 

5. You didn’t run enough tests

Getting better; but needs work.

 

9. Grosbilling or a backfiring grind

Flip side of difficulty spikes. A bit of a problem in some parts of the game, but doesn't become evident to new players immediately.

 

As for point 10 in particular:

 

10. The game relies too much on grinding, lacks intrinsic rewards

For the new/casual player, every crate is a valuable reward, and simply playing the game rewards them crates. It's the veterans who are used to speed-gearing or are in areas of the gameplay envelope where the minor percentages matter who are impacted.

[Tsillah]

I don't believe I ever claimed you were the individual who hated everything about this new direction BioWare has taken. I also don't believe I ever directed my post at you. That being said, there are plenty of posters in this thread who would be more than happy to see everything since 4.0 scrapped and go back to that "traditional" model of new raids, new daily areas, and nothing else.

True but since you've made some sweeping generalisations it's hard to tell who you are directing it at and as I said there are many people who said they liked KotET as far as the story is concerned. So I guess my question then is, who exactly are you directing this at, because I don't see anyone who fits those generalisations you applied.

 

Galactic Command is a system where we can't go back, and I think many folks who have been holding out for a return to the past are finally realizing that reality is setting in.

Well they certainly won't go back, but they can abandon it by 6.0 as they've done with other things in the game. You're right though. It is the reality and it won't change anytime soon I don't think. That's why a number of people like myself have already unsubbed and even stopped playing altogether.

 

Doesn't keep me from giving my opinions while I can. Now I am very critical but I am also one of the people who doesn't say the game will die and who does realise that plenty of people are fine with this crap. And that's fair enough. But considering the way BWA communicates with the community, it should come as no surprise that these forums explode for a while from time to time.

 

And clearly, there is no escaping the fact that with 5.0 this game is no longer the game for me.

Edited December 7, 2016 by Tsillah

[Alloou]

That goes both ways, Pot.

 

Agreed 100%. That's the basis for a conversation / discussion.

[IanArgent]

And here's the thing. If I would unsub for say 6 months before, I could come back to the game, get a toon geared up to baseline gear in a couple of days and join the HM team and all's good. I am saying baseline gear ok, not the top gear. I'm saying this because there are some idiots out there that think that people like myself want top tier gear for free. No, just enough to get into HM since I've done the SM ops way too often already and they're not interesting anymore.

 

BW does not want you to take 6 months off and then come back and gear up in a few days. They have decided that they don't want a F2P endgame. (Why? Don't ask me.) The end-game is marked "subscribers only" now. Pay them their money to play the endgame.

[Alloou]

-snip-

 

I hope you found it an interesting read.

For me it was very enlightening, didn't know half the stuff there.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

Only read the OP and surprised this has so many pages considering how inherently incorrect the logic is.

 

It favors new players?

 

What about new players who join in 3 months and are 3 months behind in grinding to get gear to be equal? Previously they could have got gear much quicker than now via operations.

 

Poor logic used in the OP it would seem.

[Aowin]

Look at eve online. Almost as old as wow, subscription, F2P and the option to buy playtime with ingame currency, hard learning curve, long time required to be good at it, passive skill development, no active level process, you fall -> buy new gear. Doesnt look like its going away soon. Its one of the few games left that forces players to learn how to play to be even decent at it.

 

EVE predates WoW. It is the last shining example of a dying breed of game that used to be numerous and commonplace in the MMO genre. It's also worth pointing out two things. One, since EVE really is the only highly-recognized sandbox MMO now, most of us who played Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, etc. all went to EVE after most sandbox MMOs were shut down. Secondly, EVE is the exception and not the rule. Most MMOs are WoW clones and all focus on the same features that WoW does. FFXIV and ESO are two examples of games that were initially nothing like WoW but were homogenized into WoW clones in order to be more appealing.

 

It wasnt kind to players new to MMOs. But thats normal EVERYWHERE. You start somewhere. The next one will be easier to learn because of experience. Why would anyone want an easy game without the educational value?!

 

I agree with you there. But thats the mentality of the community that only thinks about raiding aka battlefield style, everything else is just a means to an end.

 

The reason WoW succeeded and became a phenomenon is because it was kind to players new to MMOs. It was accessible on a level no other MMO had ever achieved. It's the reason the genre's player base grew substantially and WoW had 12 million active subscribers at its peak. Now, every single MMO since has been trying to become more and more accessible. It's this notion of accessibility that is largely killing MMOs, and that all started because of WoW dumbing down the experience and guiding players through the game.

 

Raiders, in my eyes, aren't really MMO fans. They enjoy the same dungeon crawl scheme over and over with valuable items no one else can get at the end of the tunnel. While raids were certainly an aspect of MMOs, that was never the definitive experience. I think comparing raiders to fps fans is appropriate and truthful.

 

Good watch. Sadly mixing eve online's sandbox with a wow style gameplay wont work. As I said, the players of the latter are not tuned for choosing their own playstyle. They need someone to direct them towards something. Its like you have a democracy with free thinkers on one side and a theocracy on the other. They are fundamentally incompatible.

 

I wish I had a solution. But in the end, why would the devs all of the sudden listen to players about how to fix problems they willingly created?

 

I don't believe EVE is necessarily the right template for an MMO. In fact, I never really had an interest in EVE. There were plenty of other sandbox MMOs I thought were much better. EVE, largely because it was developed by a relatively independent studio, was able to survive while many sandbox games that were run by large 3rd party publishers were shut down.

 

Where I disagree is I believe many players could ultimately choose their own play style, if the game has enough systems in place to make that experience seamless and appealing. SWG, and many other sandbox MMOs like it, failed because there was no tutorial, no direction, and the game was incredibly complex and not newcomer-friendly. I believe a sandbox could work if it had the user-friendliness of a theme park without that in-depth experience being diluted and destroyed by the "on rails" and limited roller coaster that theme parks provide.

 

Alas, that game is not SWTOR and never has been SWTOR. Galactic Command is an attempt to further move towards a more accessible and appealing environment for new players, and for SWTOR's purposes I think it largely works. It just so happens this system isn't ideal for individuals only interested in immediate progression raiding.

[IanArgent]

I, for one, am happy we did not receive more daily zones. I have never liked dailies. I remember when the game first came out and I was doing daily content on Ilum. I thought it was placeholder content until BioWare implemented more endgame. To my bewilderment, BioWare thought dailies were a "good idea" and apparently some folks even enjoyed grinding the same cookie cutter missions every single day. Not me.

 

I can tolerate heroics since we can at least teleport to them and they are a decent source of credits. Dailies, on the other hand, are an absolute waste of time typically with an arbitrary reputation layer placed on top to encourage "replay value."

 

I certainly am looking forward to new content, but hopefully dailies will never rear their ugly heads in this game ever again. Anything but dailies would be a great direction for this game to go. If you are really that desperate to participate in dailies, there are tens of hours of daily content already available to you in the game. Have fun.

 

Sums up my view of dailies. They're nice the first few times, but then you have the stupendously long grind for rep (which only gets you access to be able to spend credits), and once you do max out rep, there's nothing left rewarding for them.

 

If the rewards for doing dailies weren't basically self-contained, I wouldn't mind so much. I do a lot of heroics, despite the monotony of it, because credits are good for so many things in the game. CXP too, now. And if they ever get around to awarding CXP for dailies, I might change my mind. But each daily zone being its own self-contained, capped, rewards silo ... doesn't work for me.

[Hichitsuki-hime]

Only read the OP and surprised this has so many pages considering how inherently incorrect the logic is.

 

It favors new players?

 

What about new players who join in 3 months and are 3 months behind in grinding to get gear to be equal? Previously they could have got gear much quicker than now via operations.

 

Poor logic used in the OP it would seem.

i know right. this favors those that have the chance to play close to 24/7; those who get VERY lucky with RNG. the rest can go and get f***ed.

 

i know we're not getting back to the old system, but there has to be SOMETHING that can be done to level out the field for those people who 1) have very little time or 2) have VERY VERY bad luck.

 

oh and maybe do something about the constant silence from our devs and customer support lol. :eek::D:D:D

[Aowin]

As to your comments about the "old system", it was never just raids and daily areas. RotHC and SoR both had story arcs to complete and, tbh, KotFE and KotET weren't so much better than those that I would agree they make up for the lack of daily areas and raids that were introduced. KotET was certainly a large step up from KotFE, but BW has a long way to go if they want these story chapters to keep players like myself subscribing.

 

I've been here since closed beta. ROTHC and SOR were definitely expansions made for raiding, daily areas, and flashpoints. The "story" in both were brief, atrocious, and vastly inferior to the individual class stories that were produced at launch. KOTFE and KOTET were an attempt at going back to a game that focused on BioWare Story similar to launch.

 

If you really aren't interested in the story chapters, I doubt BioWare will ever convince you to change your mind. They are clearly targeting a specific demographic for these last two expansions and it may just be that demographic is not you.

[Tsillah]

Don't take my word for it. Listen to BioWare:

 

SWTOR is the most expensive MMO in the history of the genre costing an estimated $150 million dollars. Most of that money went into the story, voice acting, cutscenes, etc. not the MMO supplements. The entire video shows that this "hundreds of hours of content" was built around the idea of players engaging in the class stories, not operations, warzones, or flashpoints. Again, those features were meant to compliment the story, not be the main experience.

 

Well, nobody said BWA is good at managing their budget. I am sure they had some costly things in the development but I am sure a lot of money was lost into mismanagement, wrong choices (engine for example) and massive change arounds pre-release.

 

In essence, yes it was expensive, but I also believe that aside from the license cost for the IP, BWA wasted a ton of money developing because they felt they could get away with it. The general euphoria that came from the BWA camp surely came to a big halt when there really was a mass exodus in the first few months of the game.

 

As for your comments about it being story focused:

 

During the E3 in 2011 this was the video they showed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladPZqW8-HQ

Sure, story was on the forefront but the video ends with the promise of flash points, pvp warzones and yes, raids. Plural and raids, not even operations.

 

No matter how you spin that, this was something that a lot of players would react to. Then the game goes live and there is one buggy raid. Really they should've been more realistic themselves.

[Aowin]

..

 

You certainly have a lot of quotes, yet you never cite any of them and apparently I'm just supposed to believe what you type. Not to mention, reading a random article on the internet does not prove it's true, especially when it comes from a 3rd party source and not this studio. Your statement does not make any sense for the simple reason that BioWare licensed a 3rd party engine, called HeroEngine. They did not build it from the ground up, as the whole point of using it was to save development cost.

 

Of course, you conveniently ignored a video straight from BioWare telling you what the main focus of the game was about, so this will be my last response to you as I'm clearly talking to a brick wall. I hope you find a game that caters specifically to your tastes. I'd recommend WoW, FFXIV, Rift, or Wildstar if all you care about is raiding.

Edited December 7, 2016 by Aowin

[Alloou]

You certainly have a lot of quotes, yet you never cite any of them and apparently I'm just supposed to believe what you type. Not to mention, reading a random article on the internet does not prove it's true, especially when it comes from a 3rd party source and not this studio. Your statement does not make any sense for the simple reason that BioWare licensed a 3rd party engine, called HeroEngine. They did not build it from the ground up, as the whole point of using it was to save development cost.

 

Of course, you conveniently ignored a video straight from BioWare telling you what the main focus of the game was about, so this will be my last response to you as I'm clearly talking to a brick wall. I hope you find a game that caters specifically to your tastes. I'd recommend WoW, FFXIV, Rift, or Wildstar if all you care about is raiding.

 

Here ...

https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/29/gdc-2013-james-ohlen-on-how-f2p-saved-swtor/

[Hichitsuki-hime]

we can continue going back to what BW said in 2011 as much as we want. but it really has no effect on the topic of galactic crates RNG tho lol. or inclusiveness of newbies.

come on tell me i'm wrong, the game has been simplified in every update we get. every time there is some thing that gets dumbed down. so that's newbie friendly right there. u don't get more n00b friendly than 60 and now 65 toon tokens (ofc that also makes money haha). and then those newbies come into pve and into pvp and we all wanna bang out heads on the desks because a LOT of them are REALLY clueless. and this is not our fault. and it's not their fault. but it is indeed a fact. some of them respond well to advice. ur newbie is responsive to training? good for u. but others aren't and then they rage quit out of w/z or fps, or sometimes cause silly wipes in raids.

in such environment i can understand that new w/z or ops won't make those newbies want to stick around. but... come on, vets do deserve something that isn't some random piece of gear / mount they get in mail for being a subscriber lol.

 

it's a recurring thing in this thread - how the GC is making it equal for all. i'm not against GC.... JUST HOW IT"S CURRENTLY IMPLEMENTED. It can and should be changed. How? have ideas, no clue if they will work. but it's not up to me anyway (too bad that though haha)

 

and then... sense of said entitlement of us vets....... that's just such a generalization. at the same time it can be argued that casual players want same gear rewards as nim raiders or ranked pvpers without putting in the same time/effort.... why? because they WANT it. do they need it? with how casual content is atm? ofc not. so

1) BW needs to rethink the RNG behind the crates (or at least the loot list or wutever)

2) give pvpers and pvers some other way to earn their SB. (because yes there will be and already are people who might come halfway through a tier and got not a single upgrade, while the newbie that just rolled his token toon will be happy with every piece of 228 green gear because it's better than the crap he got as starting gear.)

[Aowin]

Well, nobody said BWA is good at managing their budget. I am sure they had some costly things in the development but I am sure a lot of money was lost into mismanagement, wrong choices (engine for example) and massive change arounds pre-release.

 

In essence, yes it was expensive, but I also believe that aside from the license cost for the IP, BWA wasted a ton of money developing because they felt they could get away with it. The general euphoria that came from the BWA camp surely came to a big halt when there really was a mass exodus in the first few months of the game.

 

As for your comments about it being story focused:

 

During the E3 in 2011 this was the video they showed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ladPZqW8-HQ

Sure, story was on the forefront but the video ends with the promise of flash points, pvp warzones and yes, raids. Plural and raids, not even operations.

 

No matter how you spin that, this was something that a lot of players would react to. Then the game goes live and there is one buggy raid. Really they should've been more realistic themselves.

 

As I said, I believe the largest factors for the cost of development was the size of the team, the scope of each class story, and the cost of voicing hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue with some of the biggest voice actors in the industry. People can argue BioWare is not new to voice acting, but this is still the biggest voice-over project in the history of entertainment. SWTOR at launch was literally the size of eight BioWare games made into one. It's not surprising at all the cost of development was so astronomical.

 

I never stated that warzones, flashpoints, and raids weren't part of the experience. What I did say is they were a supplement to the story, and that trailer form E3 right before launch merely reinforces that belief. Story was the focus with everything else there to compliment and bolster it. The ultimate issue wasn't even the lack of raids at launch but the mere fact that BioWare underestimated how fast players could consume content. BioWare expected it would take months for players to complete one class story. Obviously, they were way off as players were doing it in a matter of weeks.

[Jadescythe]

I've been here since closed beta. ROTHC and SOR were definitely expansions made for raiding, daily areas, and flashpoints. The "story" in both were brief, atrocious, and vastly inferior to the individual class stories that were produced at launch. KOTFE and KOTET were an attempt at going back to a game that focused on BioWare Story similar to launch.

 

If you really aren't interested in the story chapters, I doubt BioWare will ever convince you to change your mind. They are clearly targeting a specific demographic for these last two expansions and it may just be that demographic is not you.

 

Who said I'm not interested in story chapters? I loved playing through the original class stories, but neither KotFE nor KotET have come close to capturing the enjoyment I got from vanilla SWTOR, strictly from a story, leveling perspective. KotFE was at best as good as SoR and RotHC. KotET was better, but nowhere near the level of vanilla SWTOR.

[IanArgent]

For the record; I think that statted gear and a gear escalation scheme is just terrible game design that should have been left in the 70s and 80s with other relics of the D&D-inspired reward schemes. (Along with class/level-based systems, and other hoary old cliches of same).

 

And in PvP, they should just apply a bolster and make gear irrelevant and be done with it. PvP doesn't have a separate gear track any more, so no reason to not make gear irrelevant.

[IanArgent]

I hope you found it an interesting read.

For me it was very enlightening, didn't know half the stuff there.

 

It confirmed a couple of my biases, so of course I enjoyed it

[Alloou]

For the record; I think that statted gear and a gear escalation scheme is just terrible game design that should have been left in the 70s and 80s with other relics of the D&D-inspired reward schemes. (Along with class/level-based systems, and other hoary old cliches of same).

 

And in PvP, they should just apply a bolster and make gear irrelevant and be done with it. PvP doesn't have a separate gear track any more, so no reason to not make gear irrelevant.

 

As much as you are right, there is a small issue to tackle.

Gear is there to serve the purpose of harder content e.g. Green gear -> SM -> Blue -> HC -> Purple -> NiM.

 

In the absence of gear, how do you bolster your character's stats to be ready for NiM OPs?

If the baseline character is weak, people wont pass SM. If character is too strong then everything until NiM will likely be faceroll.

Edited December 7, 2016 by Alloou

[Quraswren]

The ultimate issue wasn't even the lack of raids at launch...

 

I'm not sure I agree with that.. The ultimate issue was the lack of ops at end game. You can call it end game content or whatever but at the time it was ops bw was talking about. Launching with only one was a problem.

 

bw was new to the MMO market but there are plenty of examples out there of how leveling content is quickly consumed and not just leveling content. It was a bad mistake for them to make but no where near as bad as not actually having end game ops to run.

 

but the mere fact that BioWare underestimated how fast players could consume content. BioWare expected it would take months for players to complete one class story. Obviously, they were way off as players were doing it in a matter of weeks.

 

Massively misreading how quickly gamers can consume content would not have mattered if there was enough content to actually play at end game. Content consumption would have been the lesser of any fault if end game content was there for gamers to repeat and one ops wasn't cutting it at all.

 

bw seems to expect a lot of things about gamers but keep getting different results it seems from their expectations.

I think RNG gearing and the massive GC grind, combined with severly limiting alt play as well as hindering new and returning players is going to turn out vastly different than bw expected as well and not in a good way.

[Aowin]

Here ...

https://www.engadget.com/2013/03/29/gdc-2013-james-ohlen-on-how-f2p-saved-swtor/

 

Did you really read this article?

 

It states that it was the story and voice acting that made the costs astronomical because of the various choices and consequences that could be made. You have to realize since every dialogue scenario can play out in at least three different ways, the costs of that kind of development adds up quickly. Apply that to eight individual class stories as well as planetary missions and other voiced content and it quickly spins out of control.

 

BioWare wanted to have two operations in the game at release. I remember this quite vividly as I was in closed beta and BIoWare was scrambling to get Eternity Vault tested. They were only able to get one in with the first boss of the other. Never does Ohlen explicitly state that "SWTOR failed because we didn't focus enough on raids." All he did indicate was that they didn't finish the raids they had in development and this was largely because BioWare did not expect players to consume the main content, story, so quickly.

 

The rest of it goes on to say how F2P saved the game because it brought a new influx of players into the game, which is entirely true. F2P saved this game and nothing else. I think what is important to note from this article is the fact many seem to forget this is a F2P game that is largely marketed at appealing to new gamers. It is new players, and not veterans, that saved this game from being shut down.

 

Galactic Command is just the next step of incentivizing new players that are F2P to subscribe and witness the perks and wealth of five years of content SWTOR has to offer. As the OP of this thread indicates, Galactic Command and what it offers is really for newcomers. There is some content for veterans, but this system was really not for us.