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

[Ardrossan]

2 hours ago, JakRoanin said:

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.  

We got THREE 🥰 OMG!

Do I hear four? Going once? Come on this is your chance to applaud a piece of genuine swtor history, ok here's the elevator pitch : Vitiate...WITH A FAMILY WOW thrilling, no pinhead VA but still! Ready for some more? Ok, just picture it: it's the epic continuation of the Jedi Knight story...played by all eight classes for some very rational and perfectly well thought out reasons! Now spoiler alert but this is going to blow you away because we've got for the first time choices that matter! Yes this is your chance to kill companions you always wanted to kill and incidentally bricking those characters forever, and then at the end you get the incredibly rewarding choice to be either space UN leader goodygood or emperor of the galaxy wielding cosmic power until this sentence ends!

Going twice? listen, KOTFE brought us a huge expansion of (un)forgettable companions, the newest HK droid played by that increasingly insufferable VA from kotor, um walker mounts i think, did I mention companions already  because we've got a lot of fun in store for you with extremely popular and beloved companions like Kaliyo and Yuun getting primary focus while saving up several romances like Mako, Risha, and Corso until the story's over, very suspenseful, and I know you male inquisitors out there are going to love how they reintroduced Ashara--great fanservice.

Let's see where was I...Iokath dailies, weirdly unsettling romances with genocidal dictators and, coming soon, the dictator's cat, uprisings, star fortresses and many more content opportunities that people play to this day perhaps.... 

SOLD to aw drat, but hey, I'm sure there are legions of kotfe fans on steam and reddit just dying to give all the praise bearable. And another way of looking at it is that it's not *only* three, it's at least 3 kotfe fans, huh? Pretty snazzy, right?  

Edited June 5, 2023 by Ardrossan
le epic storytelling wowzers

[JakRoanin]

I respect your right to dislike them but do you have to mock people who do? Maybe that's why you don't hear from them, why discuss something with some who hates it?

[Ardrossan]

3 minutes ago, JakRoanin said:

I respect your right to dislike them but do you have to mock people who do? Maybe that's why you don't hear from them, why discuss something with some who hates it?

I mean, if you're going to restrict yourself to discussing kotfe only with people who won't mock you for it, well, I'm sorry but I just think that drastically limits who you can talk to about these kind of things. It's just my opinion. 

More specifically I'm mocking bioware, as well as the expansions themselves. I don't see that i've said anywhere that you're a bad person for liking these literal unholy abominations and the source for all evil. 

Edited June 5, 2023 by Ardrossan

[JakRoanin]

I assure you I've talked to many people of both opinions quite rationally. I fear that won't happen tonight.

[Shayddow]

Quote

 Hoth is a low point for every class imo. 

For a Chiss female Imperial agent, I have to disagree. Love me some Chiss Aristocra!

[casirabit]

On 6/4/2023 at 11:07 PM, JakRoanin said:

I respect your right to dislike them but do you have to mock people who do? Maybe that's why you don't hear from them, why discuss something with some who hates it?

Just for the record, I enjoyed those expansions and since my boyfriend doesn't come to the forums he did to (so there are 2 more that did)

[Estelindis]

Well, from the sounds of things, letting someone else (well, a different company with a lot of the same people) run the game is precisely what EA is planning to do? 

Star Wars: The Old Republic Going Third-Party as BioWare Focuses on Mass Effect and Dragon Age - IGN

[sharpenedstick]

21 hours ago, Estelindis said:

Well, from the sounds of things, letting someone else (well, a different company with a lot of the same people) run the game is precisely what EA is planning to do? 

Star Wars: The Old Republic Going Third-Party as BioWare Focuses on Mass Effect and Dragon Age - IGN

Yeah, I've seen those reports. This could be positive because SWTOR will obviously be a higher priority for a smaller studio. But it could be negative, as the resources they will dedicate to SWTOR will necessarily be less than what the game currently receives.

But since I think a lot can be done with small fixes and a steady stream of updated rewards to existing content, while larger releases are progressed in the background, there is reason to hope for improvements after a move.

Especially if they clean house with the dev staff, instead of moving them over wholesale as some of the reports I've seen indicate may happen.

[sharpenedstick]

On 5/31/2023 at 1:16 PM, SteveTheCynic said:

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

Are you so sure? Have you seen what happened with the daily resource matrix? Did they remove the entry? No. It says "[ARCHIVED]"

 

Check. Mate.

[Nee-Elder]

4 minutes ago, sharpenedstick said:

Have you seen what happened with the daily resource matrix? Did they remove the entry? No. It says "[ARCHIVED]"

Yeah i noticed that too and was like "wut tha heck rush job?!"

On 6/7/2023 at 11:06 AM, sharpenedstick said:

 This could be positive because SWTOR will obviously be a higher priority for a smaller studio. But it could be negative, as the resources they will dedicate to SWTOR will necessarily be less than what the game currently receives.

Especially if they clean house with the dev staff, instead of moving them over wholesale as some of the reports I've seen indicate may happen.

hmm, looks like your OP had an effect.... https://forums.swtor.com/topic/930077-follow-up-on-swtor-development-update/

[sharpenedstick]

19 minutes ago, Nee-Elder said:

Yeah i noticed that too and was like "wut tha heck rush job?!"

Now it's clear why we have so many currencies. They don't actually know how to remove them.

[Darcmoon]

4 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Are you so sure? Have you seen what happened with the daily resource matrix? Did they remove the entry? No. It says "[ARCHIVED]"

 

Check. Mate.

When the game launched the crew skills window was the companion management window.  They made a choice to separate them when KOTFE came out.  It was a design choice that they are separate windows.

[sharpenedstick]

9 minutes ago, Darcmoon said:

When the game launched the crew skills window was the companion management window.  They made a choice to separate them when KOTFE came out.  It was a design choice that they are separate windows.

The companion management window included functionality the crew skills window did not (for instance, alliance alerts). It's not at all clear to me that they knew how to make that work together, and since they can't even manage to remove a currency entry promptly, let's not give them too much benefit without doubt.

But even if it were true that they intentionally made the companion management window to manage the new functions, it's not clear at all why those functions couldn't also include crew skill management.

[SteveTheCynic]

11 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Are you so sure? Have you seen what happened with the daily resource matrix? Did they remove the entry? No. It says "[ARCHIVED]"

 

Check. Mate.

In an absolute sense, no, I'm not *sure*, but at least I'm aware of my lack of knowledge.  I proposed it as a design choice because the "N" panel would have been catastrophically crowded (it's already pretty big, and would only get bigger if they went down that route) and slightly weird if they had kept a unified panel with crew skill launcher buttons as well as all the rest.

But that's *design* questions rather than "coding issues".

And notice that I haven't mentioned any of the behind-the-scenes stuff in there.  (Putting the summon buttons back in the crew skills panel would have been a good idea, but *without* taking those buttons away from the "N" panel.)

[sharpenedstick]

4 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

But that's *design* questions rather than "coding issues".

It becomes a "coding issue" if they do not know how to effectuate their *design* goals in the existing UI. In fact, it becomes a "coding issue" even if they know how to effectuate their *design* goals, but it is too difficult to do so.

The inability to remove a currency row is not encouraging in that regard. At least for your argument.

Whether a window would be cluttered or not is:

a) subjective

b) assumes they couldn't manage a design that isn't (though at least here you're less generous than I regarding their abilities) 

c) potentially acceptable to people who prefer fewer windows over all, or having all the relevant information in the same place.

Ultimately these details and the other points I (and many other people) have raised on the forums comes down to whether you think EAware does a good job with this game. Personally, I don't really rate their performance much better than a C+. What frustrates me isn't that they aren't pulling down an A. It's that I don't think it would take that much to get a B-, and they still won't do it.

Explain how it's too complicated to add new rewards to vendors that have been neglected, in some cases, since launch?

Why do simple bugs linger for years?

Why can't currencies that are no longer in the game be removed from the display?

Why can't any dev manage regular communication here?

These are the truly low hanging fruit. And if EAware can't be bothered with resolving these, I'm not sure why it should be believed that they'll manage big things.

Edited June 26, 2023 by sharpenedstick

[SteveTheCynic]

3 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Explain how it's too complicated to add new rewards to vendors that have been neglected, in some cases, since launch?

I very much doubt that it's in any way complicated to do that, from a technical or even artistic point of view.  What's more complicated is the human process of managing the projects so that everything they want to add to all the vendors (say) gets done in the required time-scale.  They don't have an infinite number of people available to work on SWTOR (even if they had a more generous budget, it still wouldn't be infinite), so they have to choose which things they build first/second/.../maybe-if-they-have-time/never.  OId vendors for rewards first released ten years ago will often lose out in that calculation.

That said, they could do better, subject to some worries about the amount of whining on the forums about that old vendor there that requires the CE to access it, or this one that requires a weird currency that's hard or even impossible to earn, or requires the player to play that old event yet again.

3 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Why do simple bugs linger for years?

Because they decided something else was more important.  I wouldn't want to say that this or that priority decision was *right*, of course, but they have to make those decisions.

3 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Why can't currencies that are no longer in the game be removed from the display?

No idea, and I'm not willing to speculate about it.  (It strikes me as odd, too, especially as it leaves behind a row with a zero in it.)

3 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

Why can't any dev manage regular communication here?

That's a human problem, of course, not a technical/artistic one.  It's also one of my complaints, although I don't usually bother mentioning it.

3 hours ago, sharpenedstick said:

These are the truly low hanging fruit.

Prioritising work is in no way a "low hanging fruit", not least because if you ask six people which of these ==> things is more important to work on first, you'll, as they say, get seven answers.  (Er, if you're lucky, you'll get as *few* as seven...)

[sharpenedstick]

2 hours ago, SteveTheCynic said:

Prioritising work is in no way a "low hanging fruit", not least because if you ask six people which of these ==> things is more important to work on first, you'll, as they say, get seven answers.  (Er, if you're lucky, you'll get as *few* as seven...)

This is a really useful view into white knight psychology. It shows the completely different standards of expectations, where some people are happy to receive anything, and others actually want to hold a product provider accountable.

If you think wanting a single new GSF reward in seven years isn't low hanging fruit, I don't know what to tell you. I guess you see any update to the BBA, Gree or Rakghoul vendors as herculean. To me, seems pretty low hanging. Scaling the Rakghoul immunity relic is literally just changing a few numbers. Apparently it's a trial of ages.

CE vendor. VIP vendor. A single item in 5+ years is too big an ask?

And then there's things like not doing damaging things. Like not taking away rewards from achievements, such as the pvp map paintings, and gating them instead behind pvp tokens. Asking them to not do a thing isn't low hanging?

When you use a gathering skill, then click another gathering skill and the name of the first gathering skill is still up top? That's not low hanging?

Actually removing a currency that's no longer in the game from the display window instead of "[ARCHIVED]" is apparently Nobel Prize worthy?

Basic checks to see if new decoration items match current item size scales is too hard? Space barbie / barbie house is a major factor that keeps the game afloat. You'd think they could spare five minutes to drop the decos in a SH and compare sizes.

The issue you have is you've decided to defend EAware's competence, when there's just clearly simple fixes that have gone unaddressed for years, in a desperate bid to claim EAware is doing a good job.

The reality is they just aren't very good. The devs in this game are basically at a C+. When I say I can run this game much better, a large part of that claim is the fact that the current performance isn't hard to beat.

Edited June 26, 2023 by sharpenedstick

[sharpenedstick]

LOL this thread has touched an official nerve, because now EAware devs have made my posts "hidden" and subject to approval, despite the fact that I haven't received any community warning or restriction.

Edited June 26, 2023 by sharpenedstick

[DreadtechSavant]

On 5/26/2023 at 7:12 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.

That's because..  just get fed up with players thinking they represent the majority. Which you do in spades. Which is also based on phantom figures pulled out of a hat based purely on your own and wants or overly biased opinion, same as you done with the quote by you I posted above.

As such I don't bother coming here as much as I once did. I go a week or so where I post a lot then nothing for weeks at a time.

I did like KotFE/KotET very much, yes some chapters less than others but over all I enjoyed it. Same as I've enjoyed the story since. 

Edited June 30, 2023 by DreadtechSavant

[DreadtechSavant]

On 6/26/2023 at 7:55 PM, sharpenedstick said:

LOL this thread has touched an official nerve, because now EAware devs have made my posts "hidden" and subject to approval, despite the fact that I haven't received any community warning or restriction.

Well, I have to take your word on that as clearly the rest of us can only see what is on the forum. So if post(s) are hidden or removed we would not know. However I certainly can see a lot of your posts within this thread. If some are gone, well...

 

Post are often removed subjects/posts to approval, if someone makes a complaint. regardless if the complaint is justify or not, or correct or not. Sadly this is the world we now live in. Try making a point on a lot of the social media or online news articles. Make these look good if nothing else.

 

I don't agree with most of what you put in your opening post. However as many have mentioned it was well written out. If nothing else, BW most likely will at least have a discussion on it, as they claim they read (or at least a member of staff) reads every post. However IMO they won't comment on the subject its self. Only post in this thread with the normal warning about being polite or however they phase it these days.

However your constant use of "white knighting" others should get your posts removed, it is a way of belittling others and undermining their point of view, which is against the CoC. A lot of us have had posts removed in the past for similar posts.

Edited June 30, 2023 by DreadtechSavant

[Ardrossan]

On 6/29/2023 at 10:24 PM, DreadtechSavant said:

That's because..  just get fed up with players thinking they represent the majority. Which you do in spades. Which is also based on phantom figures pulled out of a hat based purely on your own and wants or overly biased opinion, same as you done with the quote by you I posted above.

As such I don't bother coming here as much as I once did. I go a week or so where I post a lot then nothing for weeks at a time.

I did like KotFE/KotET very much, yes some chapters less than others but over all I enjoyed it. Same as I've enjoyed the story since. 

Where do I make phantom figures? I very specifically and deliberately said I've never heard anyone else say they liked those expansions. I. Me. In my subjective experience. Please let me know what about this is ambiguous or unclear to you because it seems pretty obvious to me that I'm referring to my own experiences and my own preferences. Which yes, I think do represent the majority, but I have not claimed that as a fact. 

On 6/29/2023 at 10:35 PM, DreadtechSavant said:

However your constant use of "white knighting" others should get your posts removed, it is a way of belittling others and undermining their point of view, which is against the CoC. A lot of us have had posts removed in the past for similar posts.

No name-calling needed in this case, your posts broadcast that 'point of view' just fine on their own. Ironic that you mention stuff going against CoC--italicized line breaks a forum rule that can be paraphrased as 'The first rule of fight club is don't talk about fight club'  let me know how that works out for you.

Edited July 2, 2023 by Ardrossan