State of the game: Maintenance-mode and milking whales?

[cool-dude]

No clue if the game is dying or not. I'm not going to waste time guessing about it.

 

Here is what I do know:

 

On Harbinger, it feels like 90% of the people online are on the fleet , the origin planet, or the capital. However, since Command ranks have been introduced, the origin planets seem to of taken a hit, but they still have more people on them than any other planet. Game feels alive as long as you don't leave the origin, capital, or the fleet. When you venture off though, it feels like no one plays the game anymore.

Edited March 19, 2017 by cool-dude

[Divona]

No clue if the game is dying or not. I'm not going to waste time guessing about it.

 

Here is what I do know:

 

On Harbinger, it feels like 90% of the people online are on the fleet , the origin planet, or the capital. However, since Command ranks have been introduced, the origin planets seem to of taken a hit, but they still have more people on them than any other planet. Game feels alive as long as you don't leave the origin, capital, or the fleet. When you venture off though, it feels like no one plays the game anymore.

 

Thats because of new changes in 5.0 that is not new player friendly let alone alt friendly.

Before 5.0 you only had to level up character if you were new player and then join guild and start gearing and having fun. Now? Its opposite. You need to start grinding at level cap and for each character!

This will end any population growth and will be opposite. Its already happpening. With 5.2 it will get even worse for new players so only old players are pretty much left playing IF they want to seriously progress in this game continuing grinding rng/cxp.

 

Mark my words they will introduce new packs or boost this year for high price to get certain ranks because no one with common sense would start grinding from 0 to tier 5 example.

Edited March 19, 2017 by Divona

[mmmbuddah]

If the game rebooted to 2.10x but kept the QoL improvements 3.x+ brought ... and then kept up a content release cadence comparable to other MMORPGs out there ... do you think that would be enough to bring this game back? I ask this because veteran awards won't help. It's fluff. We're sick of fluff. Besides, our luck we'd get more droid parts.

 

Rather, veterans simply want their MMORPG back. We haven't had a real expansion in over 3 years. Reboot to at least pre-KotFE and give us a full expansion like this ... or this ... or this and I guarantee veterans would be returning in droves. I'd even trade back 2 of those huge & explorable Legion zones (each is the size of Belsavis) for main story that my wife and I could level through together. I would pay $60 for a SWTOR expansion of Legion's scope, scale and magnitude ... $100.00 if they brought back all 8 individual class stories for it.

 

This is supposed to be a Imps vs. rebels epic-galactic-warfare save-the-galaxy-with-your-hero-friends (think Luke, Leia, Han & Chewy) Star Wars MMORPG (like what we had prior to Shadow of Revan) ... not a low-budget single-player monologue with some copy & paste co-op thrown in. This whole thing sucks.

 

Divest KotFE's and KotET's stories into a single player KOTOR III using KotFE's Eternal Championship for end game ... and give us our damn MMO back!

 

That is exactly what needs to happen. Taht is what i meant by bad design. It was getting better for a while, then it just took a swan dive into a lava lake.

[americanaussie]

No clue if the game is dying or not. I'm not going to waste time guessing about it.

 

Here is what I do know:

 

On Harbinger, it feels like 90% of the people online are on the fleet , the origin planet, or the capital. However, since Command ranks have been introduced, the origin planets seem to of taken a hit, but they still have more people on them than any other planet. Game feels alive as long as you don't leave the origin, capital, or the fleet. When you venture off though, it feels like no one plays the game anymore.

 

Strangely enough during the dvl event I found more people on the Bastion were on the rest of the planets than were on harbinger's other planets.

 

I therefore concluded that:

Many players on the bastion enjoyed more solo content (not saying they all did)

More on harb fleet sit/pvp

 

When the great migration of pvp players from bastion to harb occurred, it left mostly people who did smaller group content. those didn't fleet sit. they were all off doing their own little thing. Go to fleet, see 11 people on. Go to Yavin 4 and there would be heaps more.

 

Smaller pop servers also don't have need of people playing the market since there isn't much on there. Many on harb have stated they aren't there for the story content or play through it once and that's it.

[HuaRya]

It's no surprise you saw an uptick in players during the DvL event. If you were doing the event right you moved around to all the servers of the game leveling up a toon on each faction.

 

The real question is that now that ME4 is done will they move the programmers who made SWTOR operations back to Austin ...........

[Tsillah]

Totally agree with your observations about the viscousness here. I would like to add that I was using "Addict" in the sense of we all like the SW ip, and currently don't have any other sci-fi mmo readily available. So it is a situation where we are all sort of stuck with either playing swtor, or not playing any mmo.

 

Well, then let's ask the question: what's wrong with not playing any mmo?

 

I would say that mmos are great vehicles for addictive behaviour and looking back at the years myself, there's been some interesting moments.

 

I think currently I play mostly because it's what I'm used to. Been playing it for over 5 years and you kinda get used to being here. For me there have been a few defining moments but I think stopping to buy cartel packs some time ago was the best decision. Honestly, a sub (or time cards) are not a lot of money for a game you spend a lot of time in. That's not where it's at, but the addiction really comes into the cartel packs. I think that looking back it's a lot like getting a new fix each time and the combination with a lack of new content for such a long time only nailed that addiction hammer into it more deeply.

 

It's a shame for a game that really has a lot going for it, but the move to f2p because they failed their player base completely in that first year, did save the game but also destroyed it. How much greater would this game have been if Makeb would've continued the class stories that were originally planned instead of being the expansion that killed them? How much greater would this game have been if they hadn't been so arrogant about thinking they could manage an unfinished game engine?

 

It's just a couple of examples but it's sometimes hard to believe they didn't make some monumental mistakes and wasted a lot of money in their state of seeming euphoria. And so looking at it now, the game has a lot of good things in it still but the cartel market is something that has gone out of control. Sure, it's people's own choice and money but it does capitalise on this far too greatly and eagerly. No one can really state, even if you're willing to blow money on it, that the cartel packs ever came at a fair, representative price. BWA didn't do anything illegal, but there is still a difference between legality and morality and people forget this sometimes. Just cause it's legal doesn't always mean it's ok or a responsible way of doing business. Besides, it's not just adults playing this game.

 

There is definitely an unhealthy pattern in some of this things. I have to agree with Andryah on that, but I also think that BWA is not innocent in this.

[IanArgent]

Honest question - why the belief that there would be class stories on Makeb, when the endgame of the original story channels first into faction-specific and then factionless story elements (Illum, the BH and Section X dailies are factional, and then the False Emperor FPs and all the Ops are factionless.)

 

Anything other than the "size of Makeb?"

[Tsillah]

Honest question - why the belief that there would be class stories on Makeb, when the endgame of the original story channels first into faction-specific and then factionless story elements (Illum, the BH and Section X dailies are factional, and then the False Emperor FPs and all the Ops are factionless.)

 

Anything other than the "size of Makeb?"

 

Well the size of Makeb is definitely an indication to me that there was more planned but it's not evidence.

Also, the original planets all have planetary story arcs for each faction. Makeb had those and there it was. What added to my belief was also the incredible increase in xp gain for the quests on Makeb. That difference made me feel like they patched up the loss of xp from what would've been the story arcs.

 

Then there is the timing and commentary around it. BWA pretty much admitted without actually saying it that they needed to bring out the expansion more quickly than planned. You have to remember that this all happened when in the first year the game almost died and f2p and the cartel market were introduced as saviours of the game and the expansion was announced also. I also remember how disapppointed a lot of people were with it because it was lacking.

 

I cannot give you evidence. I won't be able to support this in court, so take it for what you will. But for me all of the elements (there's more but I won't bore people with a wall of text here as it's still circumstancial) combined are enough for me to believe it was not their original plan to abandon class stories.

 

Ilum might've even suffered that fate already for the sake of releasing the game when it did. But aside from that Ilum was designed as an endgame planet more than a story planet. BWA of course never admitted or denied anything but the Makeb expansion was a clear sign that things would not be like the core game anymore.

 

Currently the game just is a Jedi Knight story. It's rather class specific but for only one class really. Sure other force users can get away with it but really, it's just written around the JK class.

 

Listen the 8 stories were a big selling point for the game and still are really. But now we can buy tokens to skip all but the newest chapters. This game has gotten the wrong type of bloat by adding levels and levels each year with a story line that gets more boring, inconsistant and singular with each expansion. Although KotET was an improvement over KotFE I still have only played a couple of characters through it because there is no point in going again. There is no way anyone can argue that the class stories were not a good thing for this game. They are a unique selling point that is actually one of the greatest strengths of this game....and they abandoned it.

 

I simply cannot believe that they would've done that if they weren't forced by big cost cuts caused by their failings in that fateful first year of the game. Makeb just was pushed out before it was done. It also came at a cost and it felt incomplete from the start.

 

Do I have irrefutable proof? No. But having been there in those times seeing the game fall and barely get up again and Makeb being announced and discussed, I doubt very many people believed Makeb was the full expansion it was originally meant to be.

 

But really, the quests were boring and lengthy and yielded an excessive amount of xp by comparison. They had to be or there wouldn't be anywhere near enough xp to get to level 55 back then. That in combination with lots of space that wasn't used (which is a waste of resources by itself) really just drove it home to me that Makeb was just an unfinished product that was pushed out asap to keep the momentum of the game after bringing in f2p.

Edited March 19, 2017 by Tsillah

[IanArgent]

Thanks for the serious answer; and I can see why the belief is there. They certainly left themselves room to do class stories at Makeb; even if they didn't start them up. It's my own personal belief that they were planning to have more class stories up until release, when they realized they wouldn't be able to get away with the kind of release schedule an MMO demands. We know from contemporaneous dev statements that they had no idea how fast their "core constituency" would consume their content, and then demand more immediately. I suspect their release cadence was rooted in the "single player RPG" world where Bioware made their rep; where a multiple-year delay between installments is considered normal; and a new engine for each installment is allowed. Not so much in MMOs, as BW found out to their sorrow.

 

I suspect they wanted to do more on Makeb, and couldn't. Developing new story isn't hard, it isn't expensive. But it is time-consuming. Recording VA's takes time. Setting and staging cutscenes takes time. They had the better part of 3 years to do the 8 class stories + 2 faction stories for the launch content. And then the game flopped. I have no way to prove it, but I'd be a little surprised if parts of RotHC were not already in development by launch. And they had to have had at least the basis of the "end" of the story arc at Yavin IV in mind from the beginning.

[Talon_strikes]

I think we all know the state of the game 5+ years in lol. I used to be a huge vocal critic, and that got me in trouble a lot. Is there really any other reason to continue beating this dead horse?

[Nightblazer]

I'm really hoping come 6.0 things start to turn around for the better go back to a 3.0 gear system, leave that and just focus on actual content.

 

Nothing wrong with updates to features, or making cosmetic improvements, that's expected but when a formula works such as in gearing for example it just needs to be left alone. That's all. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

 

So much resources are spent on fixing issues players are upset about that it could be used for things like bug fixes and content updates.

[Valceanu]

I'm really hoping come 6.0 things start to turn around for the better go back to a 3.0 gear system, leave that and just focus on actual content.

 

Nothing wrong with updates to features, or making cosmetic improvements, that's expected but when a formula works such as in gearing for example it just needs to be left alone. That's all. If it ain't broke don't fix it.

 

So much resources are spent on fixing issues players are upset about that it could be used for things like bug fixes and content updates.

 

personally i want it very simple gear wise... traditional MMO style. PvP can keep it's component for gear system as far as i am concerned... im not a fan of the PvP specific stat as i enjoy both PvP and PvE and i hate carying around 2 sets of gear... either way these components should eventually enable you to reach BiS quality items. Ops schould also give BiS items. HM Flashpoints should give the tear below and SM the one below that. Simple. Most of the gear should for me be BoP... true to the RPG model as far as i am concerned...

Edited March 20, 2017 by Valceanu

[mmmbuddah]

personally i want it very simple gear wise... traditional MMO style. PvP can keep it's component for gear system as far as i am concerned... im not a fan of the PvP specific stat as i enjoy both PvP and PvE and i hate carying around 2 sets of gear... either way these components should eventually enable you to reach BiS quality items. Ops schould also give BiS items. HM Flashpoints should give the tear below and SM the one below that. Simple. Most of the gear should for me be BoP... true to the RPG model as far as i am concerned...

 

Honestly, we need pvp gear back. Period. I know it wont happen. But it was much better before they removed expertise. You had some people whine because they had to use their brain stems for a second, but once they realized how easy it was to get a full set of pvp gear, it was all good. Now though, if you are unlucky, you are SOL. Literally NOTHING you can do about it.

[Valceanu]

Honestly, we need pvp gear back. Period. I know it wont happen. But it was much better before they removed expertise. You had some people whine because they had to use their brain stems for a second, but once they realized how easy it was to get a full set of pvp gear, it was all good. Now though, if you are unlucky, you are SOL. Literally NOTHING you can do about it.

 

i was used to it from when it was similar in WoW... but personally im not a fan of a PvP specific stat. Like i said, i despair to having to switch between PvP and PvE gear. Also, personally i do all forms of content as i personally think thats the way to go in an MMO... it also maximizes the chance of gear overall...

[Foambreaker]

lf you ever saw a game die you would know we are very far from that.

[GalacticKegger]

lf you ever saw a game die you would know we are very far from that.

I was there for Auto Assault's & Earth & Beyond's swan songs. By those standards we are less than 18 months away. But for IP licensing reasons Bioware has the luxury of dragging this game out indefinitely as a single player KOTOR III RPG. Which is fine for the single player KOTOR RPG fans. It's just not fine for Star Wars MMO fans, and it's a shame too because this game had both elements in spades before KotFE killed it and KotET buried it. We haven't had a real MMORPG expansion in over 3 three years, and what new story we have been given can't even be played through with another human being.

 

If a real Star Wars MMORPG had been released when 4.0 sent this game into single player RPG mode, then the Star Wars MMO fans would likely be there loving gaming life instead of here questioning BWA's motives. Count me and my wife as two of them. The decision makers probably figure that 10% of a MMO will be enough to keep Star Wars MMO fans around because it's Star Wars. And they are right ... 10% of the Star Wars MMO fans have indeed stuck around.

Edited March 21, 2017 by GalacticKegger

[jimmorrisson]

5.0 can be salvaged just by handing out Unassembled tokens with every Heroic/Uprising/Flashpoint. Sure the vendors are confusing, requiring one to back and forth between vendor rooms alongside a complex tier system. However at least some movement has been made back to gearing via vendor instead of gamepacks.

 

What 5.0 should have been is expanding on what 4.0 done: streamline currency, gameplay and travel. In addition to fixing known gameplay bugs and issues.

Edited March 20, 2017 by jimmorrisson

[Battilea]

i was used to it from when it was similar in WoW... but personally im not a fan of a PvP specific stat. Like i said, i despair to having to switch between PvP and PvE gear. Also, personally i do all forms of content as i personally think thats the way to go in an MMO... it also maximizes the chance of gear overall...

That issue could be easily addressed, though. Just have a gear tab that is for PvP, much like we have the cosmetic ones. If you're in a PvP area, it uses that automatically (defaulting to your PvE gear for the slot if the slot is empty). Boom, separate gear and no hassles with gear swapping or it eating up extra inventory space.

[GalacticKegger]

That issue could be easily addressed, though. Just have a gear tab that is for PvP, much like we have the cosmetic ones. If you're in a PvP area, it uses that automatically (defaulting to your PvE gear for the slot if the slot is empty). Boom, separate gear and no hassles with gear swapping or it eating up extra inventory space.

Now that is the best idea I've heard in a while.

[Deewe]

Thought this would be appropriate

 

I know you have high hopes and big dreams, but BW is giving you and your fellow hardcore fans the mushroom treatment right now. They are keeping you in the dark and feeding you a bunch of ****.

 

I know you don't believe me, but I REALLY want SWTOR to have a resurgence and a big comeback, but it ain't gonna happen and BW/EA knows it.

 

Look, here is the reality of the situation.

EA will be unveiling 3-4 new Star Wars games at Star Wars Celebration in a few weeks, all of which are rumored to be launching this year. Add to that, BW:A will be starting to chat about the brand new game based off a unique IP in the next couple months.This, according to BW and EA is going to be a multiplayer game that will bring players together in several new ways.

 

Notice that the talks about SWTOR are really quiet and pretty much off the grid at this point? The SWTOR folks won't even be at Celebration in an official capacity, Musco and Boyd are doing an offsite cantina event...

With this being a celebration of all things Star Wars and SWTOR isn't even going to the big show??????? This speaks volumes, unless you don't understand American corporate politics, then I'll explain, they (EA and Disney) don't want SWTOR to be associated with anything else they are doing related to Star Wars.

 

According to EA and Disney press releases the only game production studio's on site at SW Celebration, in an official capacity, are Dice, Visceral, EA and Motive.

 

Meanwhile, the other popular games out there are planning to drop 10x more content this year than SWTOR has released the last 2.

4.0 and 5.0 (thus far) are about 5 hours of content and this 1 boss fight isn't adding much to it...

[Valceanu]

That issue could be easily addressed, though. Just have a gear tab that is for PvP, much like we have the cosmetic ones. If you're in a PvP area, it uses that automatically (defaulting to your PvE gear for the slot if the slot is empty). Boom, separate gear and no hassles with gear swapping or it eating up extra inventory space.

 

yeah i could certainly get behind something like that if we absolutely had to have it. I still prefer 1 set of gear cause i do all types of content (PvP, Ops and everything in between) which would allow me to get BiS faster overall. If i had 2 sets of gear id have to grind out both. Imho the more forms of content you engage in the faster it should go. It's a conscious choice to not engage in one form or another... the game should be designed as a whole not seperate for PvP or PvE etc. Besides that it makes no sense flavour wise and there is an RP component to MMORPG... My character should change armor cause blaster fire and lightsaber cuts are somehow different coming from players then NPC's?! For my character they are all "the enemy"...

 

Ofc, either way i'd adapt and still play the game rather then start flooding the forums with rage-quit threads...

[Eli_Porter]

That issue could be easily addressed, though. Just have a gear tab that is for PvP, much like we have the cosmetic ones. If you're in a PvP area, it uses that automatically (defaulting to your PvE gear for the slot if the slot is empty). Boom, separate gear and no hassles with gear swapping or it eating up extra inventory space.

 

That idea isn't easy to implement at all.

 

Just make crits stop ignoring shield and defense, then no one has to change gear. Even accuracy will be more viable then.

[DarthWoad]

we have incredible big disparity between endgame damage in pve (sniper - sorc). But what really convinced me that we are in maintenance mode is that leaderboards have not been updated for over a week, so they cant even manage a webpage. A webpage.

I

 

Have you even seen the Holonet? They haven't updated that in years....

 

And btw, you're thinking what many other people are thinking, you are not alone. Ignore the attacks from people who disagree with you. There's only so much you can do to defend a game.

[DarthWoad]

right... what i dont get is why the people saying its dead or that they hate it are still here...

 

Well if that were to happen, the forums would be dead as well, it would just be a bunch of players praising the game and there would be absolutely no criticism of the game whatsoever.

 

Btw criticism does not equal hate.

 

Have you noticed how dead some of the servers are?

[Valceanu]

Well if that were to happen, the forums would be dead as well, it would just be a bunch of players praising the game and there would be absolutely no criticism of the game whatsoever.

 

Btw criticism does not equal hate.

 

Have you noticed how dead some of the servers are?

 

theres a difference between constructive criticism and "if you dont make it how I WANT i will QUIT" type posts.

 

And no i havent... i play on TRE...