Death of a Game.

[Tsillah]

Overall we can agree on a few things.

 

1. Most of the players in the game are SOLO players who want to enjoy story, RP, solo stuff

2. The game is not dead now, but is going downhill

3. There is still profit from the game eventhough the sub number may be around 100k-150k, coming mainly from microtransactions

 

So from this its pretty obvious that Bioware is "forced" into making simple soloable story content to please the majority of the game population that is actually making the game profitable. This means the PVP and raiding PVE population can basically leave the game as they wont be getting much attention. Of course they will get stuff from time to time as they are the loudest part of the game, but still, nothing fancy.

I don't think I agree with you. There is a lot of group content happening in the form of FP's, warzones and particularly SM operations.

 

Also by focussing to much on one area of the game they ensure a continued downstream in players. They simply don't have many people working on this game and are struggling to bring out content at a decent pace. So they made choices but, and this is important, when they went all out on story it didn't actually deliver and even though KotFE/ET have their fans, too many people didn't care for it.

 

And GC as reward system just sucked bad for a lot of players, raiders, pvp'ers and casual/solo players alike. This game actually has a lot of content if you look at it but the problem is that it's been mostly trivialized and that's what I think is killing this game. We need a much better umbrella than GC ever was or could be and maybe we need more than one umbrella to make different types of content relevant and stand on its own also. I think they forgot that if it doesn't really matter which content you play for rewards anymore that people are not driven to do what they like but what gives rewards the fastest. They tried to capture the high repetition of content with RNG rewards but that just reinforces the CXP per minute thinking. People make plans and if you don't allow that because you put everything unto one currency (CXP) with RNG rewards, the plan automatically becomes efficiency because that's all there's left. And this is then what dominates the game.

 

There are 10 raids (Ops) and like 40 dungeons (FPs). That's a fair bit of content...but people are just doing the quickest ones where they can skip the most. I don't think that's what you want because it's all about repetition and skipping. Not about enjoying the full content, not about challenge, not about sense of achievement. As I said, everything is just trivialized. People do 10, 20, 30 last boss runs in the GF each day. Bioware might think it's great that people are doing that content but I see that as a bad sign. It's my view that Galactic Command and Conquest are the reward systems that are not encouraging the right type of behaviour.

 

They said they were going to make changes to conquest this year. Let's hope they are effective and not just a streamlining that still encourages bad behaviour. And let's hope the next expansion whether it comes in summer (as I hope) or fall does away with GC and puts something back in its place that actually makes sense for the different player groups and no longer trivializes content.

[TalonVII]

I don't see why that should invalidate his, or anyone else's, opinion. I and many others were former SWG players, and while there are some things I would have preferred SWTOR mimic (space combat, more open PVP, crafting), I never expected this game to be the KOTOR expansion for SWG. In fact, having lived through the early days of the NGE mess, I hoped this game would be different and not make the same mistakes that were made with its predecessor.

 

There are no words for how excited I was to see a KOTOR MMO was being made several years ago. Especially after SWG went to hell with the NGE. I followed the development on this game more than any other. This was my go-to after CoH died. I want SWTOR to succeed and will sub till the servers go dark, but, man, it's hard to have a positive outlook these days. Especially when you see how much better other games in the genre are doing, and I'm not talking about the heavy-hitters like WoW and ESO. I mean the ones that manage to quietly chug along without major press, like DCUO, BSGO, and STO.

 

Here's to hoping someone at Disney or EAware comes along and sees the potential here and puts forth the effort to revive this game and make it into the game it should have been.

 

BSGO doing better than THIS GAME?! Don't make me laugh. That game is on more life support than this one.