I can run this game much better than EAware (which isn't saying much)

[Otowi]

Oh yeah, the walker missions and the crashing Vaylin's party one are bad. I dread the party one, as it's a horribly designed map, and the so called "help" they give you is all but useless, so you run around in circles trying to figure out where to go next.

A chapter skip would be a most welcome QOL in the Knights expansion, but I doubt we will get something like that...

[Ardrossan]

2 hours ago, Otowi said:

Oh yeah, the walker missions and the crashing Vaylin's party one are bad. I dread the party one, as it's a horribly designed map, and the so called "help" they give you is all but useless, so you run around in circles trying to figure out where to go next.

A chapter skip would be a most welcome QOL in the Knights expansion, but I doubt we will get something like that...

It's incredible that this is what fans of the expansion chose to highlight as good content. If I were to pick something good about the expansions it might be the havoc squad chapter in KOTFE, or the DK chapter in KOTET with Acina. Perhaps they thought that this stuff is different from other stuff in the game, which is true--they're bad different. Whereas the stuff I mentioned is good because they were one of the few moments of the expansions when I actually felt like I was playing my vanilla character class and not the generic Outlander.

[OlBuzzard]

On 5/25/2023 at 11:58 PM, Nee-Elder said:

Sorry but lol  "common consensus" .  Even if there was such a thing, how would you quantify it?

Truth is, just like nearly everything on the interwebs,  it's probably  split 50/50  love/hate with  KOTFE/KOTET.

For myself, i got lucky and not only managed to avoid all *spoilers*  before starting those Chapters  fresh but also waited to run them my 1st time all together in a row  nonstop straight thru  ( rather than having to wait month-by-month ) .   As such, i personally had a total blast and found them to be epic & unique ( in both the cut-scenes as well as newfound mechanics, like Walker battles and Disguised-at-the-party  and such ) .   So much that i not only completed them solo on mastermode twice , but have also played thru each Chapter again & again  on storymode for 8 of my ALTs, so that all of my subsequent different 'choices' mattered more to me per each character's Class & Alignment.

Furthermore, the pre-launch cinematic trailers for both KOTFE & KOTET  were very well done imo ( by 'Blur Studios'  , who i believe also did the original cinematics back in 2011  , iirc )

So yeah, opinions vary.

I agree completely!

To me:
** KotFE / ET stories were (in some cases) better than vanilla!  
** Some of the companions I gained from the "crossover" were much better than the originals that I was STUCK with ( some of those companions on the Republic side were outright idiots or otherwise total azzhls !!)
** I gained a LOT from the alliance.
** I liked the ability to "replay" chapters and attempt them at a tougher level.

That being said ...  there were some distinctly BAD decisions that were made as well.
** Dumping ALL companions (pretty much) on a permanent basis (money saving idea really).  Some of the so-called returns were just badly done!  Al lot of players actually MAX OUT the levels of their companions.  A LOT of folks had just dumped a lot of credits into that very process ... then POOF .. gone!
** Gearing mechanics.
** All of those pointless crates we opened ...  someone remind me what we were doing with all of that stuff to keep track of again!!
** One size fits all for ALL characters story line.  IMO this was the one item that was at the TOP of the list of bad ideas.  A JK probably wouldn't have chosen to be the commander in the first place.  They might have reluctantly taken the responsibility for a short while ... but then step aside and relinquish that to someone else that they felt wouldn't betray them or the alliance.  A smuggler and a JK or Sith will simply not make the same decisions and certainly would not share the same dialogues even under similar circumstances.

In short ...  the negative / bad decisions have so overshadowed the story line (the FE and ET) with the dominion of the emperor ... Vitiate that the sour taste left behind is still remembered to this day.   IMO 7.0 was just about on the same level.  We lost a lot more than we gained!  It's still left a really bad taste to a LOT of people!  The current story line(s) at least have the potential of some really interesting ideas and carry with them high potential.

Stuff to do!  I need to run!  More later (maybe).
 

[black_pyros]

On 5/26/2023 at 10:29 AM, TziganeNZ said:

if I could choose which chapters to play and which to skip in KOTFE/ET

You can. Just skip them all and start Jedi Under Siege*. From that moment on, you will get all chapters unlocked and you can then play any you wish to play, skip any you wish to skip, replay any, or even play in any order.

*In case you just wish to skip some KotFE chapters, you can skip to KotET instead of Ossus.

[TrixxieTriss]

5 minutes ago, black_pyros said:

You can. Just skip them all and start Jedi Under Siege*. From that moment on, you will get all chapters unlocked and you can then play any you wish to play, skip any you wish to skip, replay any, or even play in any order.

*In case you just wish to skip some KotFE chapters, you can skip to KotET instead of Ossus.

But it’s such a shame that doing so automates your companion decision making process based on wether you’re character should belong to the dark or light side. Ie Jedi light , Sith Dark. And then decides to who to kill off or keep.

Players have asked to be able to make those decisions themselves when skipping ahead. BioWare could do that with a small toggle questionnaire they could ask instead of automating with their selected defaults. 

[black_pyros]

38 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

But it’s such a shame that doing so automates your companion decision making process

It does. But if you want to keep companions killed during chapter(s) skip process, you can always bring them back via the terminal on Odessen, if I am correct.

[TziganeNZ]

50 minutes ago, black_pyros said:

You can. Just skip them all and start Jedi Under Siege*. From that moment on, you will get all chapters unlocked and you can then play any you wish to play, skip any you wish to skip, replay any, or even play in any order.

*In case you just wish to skip some KotFE chapters, you can skip to KotET instead of Ossus.

Yes, I know, and have done this on a couple of characters.  However, there are a number of individual chapters in both KotFE and KotET that I would like to work through and not have the default choices made based on faction.  Once you skip them all, you are stuck with choices that may not be what you want.  I wouldn't mind taking the default choice for individual chapters that I've skipped (not ch. 9, obviously), but not necessarily for the entire thing.

[TrixxieTriss]

57 minutes ago, black_pyros said:

It does. But if you want to keep companions killed during chapter(s) skip process, you can always bring them back via the terminal on Odessen, if I am correct.

True, but you can’t romance them.

[Shayddow]

I agree with some of the points the OP makes. However, when it comes to KOTFE/KOTET, there were some good things and some bad things about it. One thing is, story-wise - it is obviously a continuation of the Jedi Knight storyline, and as such, taking my smuggler thru it didn't always feel like the story "fit".

Companions - here, the problem was with implementation. Having other story-line companions available was good, but it also meant that whenever a companion was "brought back" they didn't come back the same. If there was dialogue on a planet story or even exploratory quest that you didn't happen to do the first time around, you could not get influence with the companion that "came back".  Some of the "choices" - the big one being the "Vette/Torian" one where you could only save one of the most popular companions - that just wasn't right, as you were theoretically the head of a large alliance which you could have delegated - sent minions to save the other character. 

Also problematic was making it "one size fits all" in both the story decisions (for skipping), and in the choices they came up with.  Typical of squeezing a non-force user into a force user story was the story where you make yourself a new lightsaber on Odessan. Very much a force-user thing. (While it had non-force user make a new weapon of their own. (blaster pistol/ rifle/sniper rifle, assault cannon). Non-force users typically don't do this type of thing in the lore. They buy their weapons already made from such companies as Czerka, etc. And while soldiers are taught to disassemble and reassemble their rifles, it isn't something that is absolutely necessary in order to know how to fire one. (Nor do pilots make their own bombs that they dropped from planes. Same idea).

I did like some of the chapters. The one with Aric Jorgan was great for my trooper, and I think Gault and Vette made a good team in their chapter.  And some of the newer content I'm glad to see the story getting some Bounty Hunter love on Ruhnik.  I've been a fan of Mando lore before the "mandalorian" came out. 

But one of the points the OP made with which I highly agree is the emphasis on COMMUNICATION between the developers and the customers (Players).

We need this, and I don't think any of the posters would disagree on that point.

[Khoxion]

On 5/26/2023 at 2:41 AM, xordevoreaux said:

As for things taking an hour to do, bit cavalier of an estimate:

1. I report bugs for the Document Foundation. I sit there and wait for the daily build of LibreOffice, and that sucker takes THREE HOURS. Count 'em. Three hours to compile. Most recent build, 3 hours, 10 minutes. Just to compile, even if all they did was make a one-line code change. The topology for that code base? The size of its footprint once installed? 422 megabytes of application and supporting DLL files. That's it. Even if we gave Bioware every credit in the world for making the most efficiently compiled program on the planet, code to finished compilation in under an hour is most likely a pipe dream.

2. And, if by an hour, all you're clocking are fingers on the keyboard to make the coding change, all participants on this forum, and I do mean all, are 100% ignorant of SWTOR's internal coding. We don't know how heavily Bioware has nested any object programming, how deep they've applied wrapper classes, how many mutually exclusive race condition fixes (mutex objects) they've deployed to kludge something, and we've no idea how much of the code is so old that the devs dare not touch it for fear of breaking something. I've been playing this game since 2013. I can't even begin to count the number of times Bioware released a small fix for a small reason, and BOOM, something absolutely completely unrelated breaks big-time, and out comes a hotfix. Way too many times.  Touch one thing, something else breaks. What we think might be a simple fix might be an absolute dog to do... right the first time.

 

Edit: Fun, just sitting here, I'm watching build 1426 grind through its compilation. Just watching the spinny little green thing a while. Nice and relaxing, at least until it turns red if the compilation bombs.

Most of the things requested by the OP that you refer to, are UI related and should be client sided. Maybe the ignore list limit increase would require recompilation of parts of the client, but the client serves a very specific purpose and is high likely not bloated to cater to the needs of everything and everyone; not sure why compilation times of an openOffice fork would matter here.

I just had a quick look at the client files (there are unpackers/readers that community sites use for builders etc) and everything related to UI functionality seems to be in XML; if it was possible to get some basic addon support for the community, the requested changes would have been done ages ago, including some QoL stuff like buttons to let companions repeat their last gathering mission, saved state of the UI element as it was when the character last changed it (eg sorting by "rating" in the crafting UI, instead of reverting to "difficulty" all the time, or the filter settings in the GTN), additional ability filters (active/passive abilities) and maybe generally a better design for that window, etc pp.

If community access to basic UI functions was restricted for security reasons, they should at least do the bare minimum to fix and update the UI/UX to a level that doesn't annoy the player every single day. This should indeed not take too much time, shouldn't require a senior coder and would be a one-time task for the foreseeable future.

[SteveTheCynic]

3 hours ago, black_pyros said:

It does. But if you want to keep companions killed during chapter(s) skip process, you can always bring them back via the terminal on Odessen, if I am correct.

Except Arcann, because if he was killed, he wasn't ever a companion.

4 hours ago, TrixxieTriss said:

Players have asked to be able to make those decisions themselves when skipping ahead. BioWare could do that with a small toggle questionnaire they could ask instead of automating with their selected defaults.

I suspect it would be a *big* toggle questionnaire, or some decision or other that *someone* wants to be able to skip-but-choose-anyway would be left out.

[Ardrossan]

7 hours ago, Shayddow said:

Also problematic was making it "one size fits all" in both the story decisions (for skipping), and in the choices they came up with.  Typical of squeezing a non-force user into a force user story was the story where you make yourself a new lightsaber on Odessan. Very much a force-user thing. (While it had non-force user make a new weapon of their own. (blaster pistol/ rifle/sniper rifle, assault cannon). Non-force users typically don't do this type of thing in the lore. 

I don't care what anyone says, that chapter was probably the most lore-breaking part of the entire game. I'm certain that bioware intended it to be early foreshadowing that Valkorian was messing with you and that Satele and Marr were intended to be his sockpuppets and not actually there in the first place--they do exactly what valkorian wants you to do, make you believe that you have to abandon your alignment because the eternal empire is soooo special and unique  and then get you make a magic weapon that is only good at killing arcann. Doesn't seem like a very Jedi thing to do. But for whatever reason they made it inconsistent with Satele's other appearances and you're led to believe that no, it actually really did happen. Just awful writing.

Edited May 28, 2023 by Ardrossan

[eabevella]

If KOTFE/ET was doing so hot, it won't got axed.

The story doesn't make sense at all for tech users. It's tailor made for a LS JK. The Alliance makes 0 sense for DS toon. It destroys the individual-ness of the 8 classes, or whatever little left for them post class story. It's bad writing unless your toon happens to fit the writers vision of the "Outlander" (I also [censor] hate the [censor] Outlander title).

I only suffer the first 9 chapters of KOTFE it IF I have a toon who's going to romance Theron. I'd skip the first 8 chapters, that are basically torture btw, if I could jump to ch9 and lock the romance. That's how much I hate KOTFE/ET and how much I love Theron.

Edited May 29, 2023 by eabevella

[WayOfTheWarriorx]

On 5/26/2023 at 1:36 AM, Jdast said:

We've both presented our views and I feel very comfortable allowing other forum-goers decide for themselves who has the better argument.

+1 👍

That would be you. 

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by WayOfTheWarriorx

[Balameb]

Disclaimer, i'm a guildmate. This is a friendly joke post:

On 5/26/2023 at 3:51 AM, Nee-Elder said:

Over the past 6 years , i have personally recommended at least 100's of players ( some guildmates, some friends, some randoms )  to go play KOTFE/KOTET Chapters ....and only 1 of them that i can remember ever told me afterwards  "i hated it and i hate you more for telling me to play it!".

Maybe they didn't want to hurt your feelings? 😅

Funny story here, relative recent. Not about KOTFE/KOTET chapters, but i when i got back after a few months out during 7.2, i remember you told me how much fun the new area Ruhnuk was...

Main Story.... i will give it a 'Meh' (still way better than 7.0 or 7.1)

Then came the daily Area...

.... Let's just say that after one test drive even the purple mission got stuck in my log for months...

Recently i decided to take my mirror alt into the story (to stay up to date)...

...My keyboard almost catch fire from all the spacebar friction...

And after enduring the purple mission (took me a couple days to rest my mind) and trying my best to do the dailies and heroics while i was there (not a wise thing to do)....

...to this day my thoughts is: "Was Nee High when he told me this was fun?" 🤪

On 5/26/2023 at 3:51 AM, Nee-Elder said:

( And he didn't even like STAR WARS  ---Which reminds me: Why do people ever bother playing this game if they don't even like Star Wars ?!  Always baffles me. )

Was that the one that never stop with the Star Trek jokes?

 

 

[Nee-Elder]

4 hours ago, Balameb said:

Disclaimer, i'm a guildmate. This is a friendly joke post:

Maybe they didn't want to hurt your feelings?

Maybe, but i doubt it  cuz  first, i didn't design/code/write  KOTFE/KOTET, so what doi care if people hate it?  And secondly, if there's one thing i know about the interwebs:  Humans typically feel like they can say just about anything from behind a keyboard.

Either way, i'd rather have some "uneven" content than no content at all.

Well, tbqh i'd much rather have more sandbox SWG elements into SWTOR, so players could make their own content with limitless imaginations,  instead of always relying upon BioWarEA's theme-park  feedfest.

Perhaps in the next SW mmo though.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Nee-Elder

[sharpenedstick]

lol I did not expect this thread to still be a thing when I got back from vacation.

No approach is going to please everyone. But the majority will follow behind a clear vision for the game, which I have demonstrated. Even most complainers continue on.

It's fine to like trash such as the KotET story and game play. Doesn't make you a bad person. And in fact, it's good for developers because it indicates there's a class of users who will be very easily satisfied. But the simple fact is there's no groundswell of opinion begging to revisit Zakuul. And in fact, my proposals include more of a look at what's going on there than we get from the current devs.

If the devs had a clear vision for the game and demonstrated an ability to provide consistent improvements and fixes, posts like this wouldn't resonate. But the fact is, they leave bugs in place for years, they don't update content or even rewards (for some systems, the neglect is almost a full DECADE now), they don't have a plan to fix the economy, they don't communicate, etc, etc, etc.

[Screaming_Ziva]

On 5/25/2023 at 2:15 PM, sharpenedstick said:

All three of those should be doable in an hour, tops, of dev time. There's so many ways to improve the player experience that requires very little effort.

Sounds like someone who has never looked at a line of code in their life.

[sharpenedstick]

5 hours ago, Screaming_Ziva said:

Sounds like someone who has never looked at a line of code in their life.

If you want to say it's going to take two weeks to change the ignore list size, I doubt it, but since currently issues go unfixed for literally a decade, I'd be happy with two weeks.

But aside from absurd claims that it'll take a long time to adjust things like ignore list sizes, there are indications that there's real coding issues. For instance, the Login & Season Rewards window should really just be tabs on the Log window, but it's not. The crew skills and the companion management screen should be the same, but they aren't either. Probably they don't know how to merge them, given the length of time that separated their creation, or it's not worth it for them to find out. This indicates a very poor culture of knowledge retention, documentation, and a lack of interest in simple improvements vis-a-vis moonshot pet projects.

[SteveTheCynic]

2 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

For instance, the Login & Season Rewards window should really just be tabs on the Log window, but it's not.

That's a design choice rather than a "coding issue".

2 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

The crew skills and the companion management screen should be the same, but they aren't either.

That's a design choice rather than a "coding issue".

2 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Probably they don't know how to merge them,

Well, they knew how to separate them, ...  But in the end it's a design choice, not a "coding issue".

2 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

This indicates a very poor culture of knowledge retention, documentation, and a lack of interest in simple improvements vis-a-vis moonshot pet projects.

Knowledge retention in the programming business is *hard*.  People quit jobs, and companies can only do so much to retain knowledge of how things work.  There are features in my company's codebase for which I wrote the code twelve years ago, and that nobody else really understands how it works.  (I left *huge* blocks of comments in places to explain how most of it works, but it's a bit scattered because the code itself is of necessity a bit scattered.)  I pity the poor sod who has to do further modifications if ever I quit my job.

Documentation is hard as well, not least because it represents an on-going maintenance cost.

And yes, I've been a developer for a few decades(1), why do you ask?

(1) Yes, decades.  I began my career as a developer in 1989.

[juliushorst]

On 5/26/2023 at 5:14 AM, Ardrossan said:

Compared to vanilla--or even RotHC--it was garbage. That's an opinion that from my vantage seems to be backed by common consensus, in the same way that the common consensus is that Mass Effect 3 had dumb endings

The idea isn't bad, it's the execution. You can't have a story-oriented expansion and make the story dull.

[Ardrossan]

27 minutes ago, juliushorst said:

The idea isn't bad, it's the execution. You can't have a story-oriented expansion and make the story dull.

But apparently people in this thread found the execution of it extremely interesting  lol I can't figure it out either. idk I like the consular story which most people hate so yes opinions are subjective, but I'd also freely admit that it's by no means a masterpiece or even very well written (same with the trooper storyline post Act 1) which no one in this thread who actually likes kotfe seems to be able to acknowledge about it. 

[Otowi]

7 hours ago, Ardrossan said:

But apparently people in this thread found the execution of it extremely interesting  lol I can't figure it out either. idk I like the consular story which most people hate so yes opinions are subjective, but I'd also freely admit that it's by no means a masterpiece or even very well written (same with the trooper storyline post Act 1) which no one in this thread who actually likes kotfe seems to be able to acknowledge about it. 

The Consular story is wieved as a bit boring compared to the action filled Knight story. It's not a bad story per se, but it certainly drags in places, particularly the Coruscant part.

It feels like the pacing is of somehow, and that means that people find it boring, because the story takes long before it gets anywhere.

Later on the story is ok-ish, but it still feels slower paced than most of the other class stories.

 

Another story that is ok, is the Smuggler, but they mostly do their own thing, and isen't really connected to the main story line of Imp vs Rep that much. Different but not bad, so different can work.

Edited June 4, 2023 by Otowi

[Ardrossan]

1 hour ago, Otowi said:

The Consular story is wieved as a bit boring compared to the action filled Knight story. It's not a bad story per se, but it certainly drags in places, particularly the Coruscant part.

It feels like the pacing is of somehow, and that means that people find it boring, because the story takes long before it gets anywhere.

Later on the story is ok-ish, but it still feels slower paced than most of the other class stories.

 

Another story that is ok, is the Smuggler, but they mostly do their own thing, and isen't really connected to the main story line of Imp vs Rep that much. Different but not bad, so different can work.

Yes, Consular Act 1 is the major problem. I don't think it's boring exactly, it's more that it's clearly intended to be run through LS and if you take a consistent DS path it makes no sense. 

I've honestly never heard much criticism of the smuggler story. I think perhaps the major issue in hindsight is that it's unclear how the stuff you do in Act 2 as a privateer connect to the stuff you do in Act 3. Like in both acts you're working for Dodonna but in the third act you're actively trying to dismantle Rogun's network (which helps the voidwolf) but in Act 2 you're...not? Are you a real privateer at that point or are you still kinda doing what the voidwolf wants? I think it's the latter but they don't really connect the dots. 

Honestly, none of the class stories are what I'd call perfect, they all have their sub-optimal Acts and planets that drag. Hoth is a low point for every class imo. But while we can quibble about these little details, I just don't see how anyone can compare the writing in the class stories on the whole with the writing in KOTFE. I could list something I didn't like about every class story, but I could also list a dozen great moments in each story. I can't think of a dozen great moments in the knights expansion. If someone put a blaster to my head I could maybe come up with three things. 

Edited June 4, 2023 by Ardrossan
kotfe sucks end of story

[JakRoanin]

On 5/26/2023 at 2:12 AM, Ardrossan said:

I fully acknowledge that you and Xor love these awful expansions and have said so many times. I've never heard anyone else say so, either here or in-game. I have also played through all eight of the classes through it, and imo there should be a cheevo not just for playing them but specifically for enduring such horrid writing and dreadful mechanics like the walker 8 freaking times. Thanks for reminding me that party chapter exists, I had nearly scrubbed it from my brain. 

I can agree that it was visually appealing, which is great camouflage.

Yes, you have, ME!😄I adore them. Do I think they're perfect? No. They were rushed and badly managed with narrative pacing. They were. However, on a conceptual level, and in the individual character arcs it was stunning and the Voice Acting SUPURB! Plus, yes, they were bloody gorgeous. So, I adore them.