An update on the development of SWTOR

[Pirana]

51 minutes ago, DIVAvonFarstar said:

This comparison is an unfair one, as Galaxies only existed from June 2003 - December 2011. SWTOR launched in December 2011 and is still current, so the SWTOR developers had much more time to create content.

Partially true, while EAWare has had longer to develop content, SWG is a different game, it's open world, SOE had a different approach to gaming, until they realized their vision didn't match what the consumer wanted, then it was slowly changed until it shut down, again too late. The crafting there is arguably the best of any MMO out there. The crafting alone is its own game, Space is only rivaled by Eve Online and STO. Housing in that game is second to none, its architecture is dated, but what you can do with the structures in terms of decorating, in addition to creating your own city with shuttleports almost anywhere in the galaxy is second to none.  

There are a lot of little things to do at end game, but almost all of it is very niche, other than open world PvP and what little end game group PvE there is. Now, if everybody that played that game, enjoyed every aspect of it, then an argument could be made the end game is very good and has plenty to do, but therein the problem, most people do not, so back to square one, themeparks work, while open world/sandbox is a relic of the past.

Regarding the duration of both games, no it's not fair to compare the two games, developers had different approaches, while one worked, the other one failed. SOE's SWG final years didn't have a ton of players, so much so that SOE offered free transfers and most went to Starsider, their busiest server. I would hypothesize the main reason the game was kept around longer than it should have been was due to the success of EQ and EQ2, which are still releasing updates and expansions.

I've enjoyed both games over the years for different reasons, but it should be crystal clear to anyone why one failed and the other one is still going, at least for the time being. lol  

Edited June 17, 2023 by Pirana

[Ardrossan]

2 minutes ago, jedimasterjac said:

It's telling to me that:

1. Multiboxing isn't just allowed but encouraged

2. Most players automate and macro literally every aspect of gameplay they can

3. The most popular servers, after the initial wave, have all made substantial changes to the game.

Fun! Although to be fairrrr, people in this game love 2xp because they can skip all that 'boring' vanilla content as quickly as possible and go straight to endgame. For some reason. Usually the same people who think vanilla was the best part of the game. 

[Pirana]

4 minutes ago, jedimasterjac said:

It's telling to me that:

1. Multiboxing isn't just allowed but encouraged

2. Most players automate and macro literally every aspect of gameplay they can

3. The most popular servers, after the initial wave, have all made substantial changes to the game.

That's pretty spot on for SOE's SWG. Legends is different, there are macro dump zones everywhere in the game now. Automated scripts was a terrible idea from Sony.

[meddani]

On 6/7/2023 at 11:20 PM, KeithKanneg said:

Whoa whoa everyone... I was hoping me telling you about the upcoming releases would help you understand this is a new beginning, not the end.

We have more stories, modernizations, and MMO content already being planned out beyond 7.4.  While details are being discussed and finalized behind the scenes, let's not spin this into incorrect theories.  I am asking you to hang tight and we'll follow up later with more details when we can.

-Keith

how did i miss this? 10/10 would laugh again, this is some grade A damage control lmao

[casirabit]

9 hours ago, jedimasterjac said:

Sometimes I hear all these cool things about SWG, so I boot up a swgwmu server and then I spend about an hour auto running across a mostly-empty map to get to a nest of dune beetles that proceed to kill me nearly instantly. 
 

At least NGE has more interesting combat and is more engaging,  ur it’s still dull compared to virtually every single mmo competitor. 
 

The one aspect I appreciate is social and community - having to get buffs from doctors in medbays and entertainers in cantinas is cool. But then again, those players are AFK and running macros, and what does it say that the most interesting part of the game is automated?

Not all entertainers were AFK.  I never ran my entertainer AFK  and it always gave me an excuse not to do pvp when my guild and friends wanted to pvp (I hate pvp lol) 

[xordevoreaux]

5 hours ago, Pirana said:

Housing in that game is second to none, its architecture is dated, but what you can do with the structures in terms of decorating, in addition to creating your own city with shuttleports almost anywhere in the galaxy is second to none.  

Beg to differ to that re: what you can do with structures. This is my base in Conan Exiles.

So much more you can do than anything I ever did in SWG. Here's another.

Not to mention houses I've built in Sims 4...

[Pirana]

10 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

Beg to differ to that re: what you can do with structures. This is my base in Conan Exiles.

So much more you can do than anything I ever did in SWG. Here's another.

Not to mention houses I've built in Sims 4...

Okay, you got it beat. lol Maybe I should have stated MMO's I've played. FF14's structures are also some of the best out there. But... can you create cities in the games you linked with shuttleports or ease of travel by other players. If the links are not MMO's, or at least multiplayer games that others have access to, then I stand by my original statement. I did also mention the architecture in SWG is very dated, it's what the overall concept that SWG offers that stands out. There are a number of games out there that probably offer superior structures and customization to what SWG offers.

[xordevoreaux]

24 minutes ago, Pirana said:

. If the links are not MMO's,

Conan Exiles is an MMO, and the base I linked is on a public MMO server, not sandbox mode on my computer. Sims 4 is standalone.

[Pirana]

13 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

Conan Exiles is an MMO, and the base I linked is on a public MMO server, not sandbox mode on my computer. Sims 4 is standalone.

I take it you can't create cities or ease of travel access from other players in Conan then? If true, other than better aesthetics, SWG still offers more. 

[xordevoreaux]

Just now, Pirana said:

I take it you can't create cities or ease of travel access from other players in Conan then? If true, other than better aesthetics, SWG still offers more. 

Conan Exiles has four different types of fast access, from "map rooms" you can jump to places, portals, and two different kinds of player-placeable waypoints, one that's public on the map and another private to the player.

[xordevoreaux]

2 minutes ago, Pirana said:

I take it you can't create cities

Depends on the server. If you're on a corporate-sponsored Funcom server, who publishes the game, no cities. Because of server resource loading, create too big of a sprawl and you can get wiped by admins.

On subscriber-paid servers where players are the admins, anything goes. I've seen some huge sprawls on player-rented servers.

Technically, my base qualifies as a sprawl, but on Funcom-hosted PvE servers, unless someone complains, nothing happens, and the server I'm on has some seriously huge bases on it.

[Pirana]

5 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

Depends on the server. If you're on a corporate-sponsored Funcom server, who publishes the game, no cities. Because of server resource loading, create too big of a sprawl and you can get wiped by admins.

On subscriber-paid servers where players are the admins, anything goes. I've seen some huge sprawls on player-rented servers.

Technically, my base qualifies as a sprawl, but on Funcom-hosted PvE servers, unless someone complains, nothing happens, and the server I'm on has some seriously huge bases on it.

That's fair, so they're similar other than the aesthetics, which SWG shows its age. 

[xordevoreaux]

10 minutes ago, Pirana said:

That's fair, so they're similar other than the aesthetics, which SWG shows its age. 

There are some notable differences. To be in someone's base in CE, you have to part of their clan, and clans are limited (again, that's an admin decision how large a clan is).

Also, fun fact, decay exists in CE just like it did in SWG.

If no one belonging to a clan logs on (and subsequently visits the base, important point), the base will vanish, and a more fun fact, because Conan Exiles is a survival MMO, a fully intact base falls into a state of decay 24 hours before the base vanishes.

While in that status, anyone outside of the clan can come along and demolish the base for its resources. I've cleared out several bases that way. Play or lose it.

Edit: Decay is always active on Funcom servers, but can be turned off on player-rented servers, and all the player-rented servers I play on have it turned off. The base I linked to is on a Funcom server, so I log into that server and visit the base every other day or so or the base goes bye-bye after 10 days with no one in the clan visiting it.

Edited June 17, 2023 by xordevoreaux

[Pirana]

8 minutes ago, xordevoreaux said:

There are some notable differences. To be in someone's base in CE, you have to part of their clan, and clans are limited (again, that's an admin decision how large a clan is).

Also, fun fact, decay exists in CE just like it did in SWG.

If no one belonging to a clan logs on (and subsequently visits the base, important point), the base will vanish, and a more fun fact, because Conan Exiles is a survival MMO, a fully intact base falls into a state of decay 24 hours before the base vanishes.

While in that status, anyone outside of the clan can come along and demolish the base for its resources. I've cleared out several bases that way. Play or lose it.

Decay was a questionable decision in SWG, but removing it didn't help the economy, along with all the afk bots, but I do like the premise Conan offers in regards to how the base functions, notably how it has decay and the resource aspect. Play or lose stuff should be enough incentivization to keep people playing.  May have to eventually check that out. lol I usually jump around from here to SWG, GW2 and mix in WoW when their expansions hit, always looking for something new though. 

[xordevoreaux]

14 minutes ago, Pirana said:

Decay was a questionable decision in SWG, but removing it didn't help the economy, along with all the afk bots, but I do like the premise Conan offers in regards to how the base functions, notably how it has decay and the resource aspect. Play or lose stuff should be enough incentivization to keep people playing.  May have to eventually check that out. lol I usually jump around from here to SWG, GW2 and mix in WoW when their expansions hit, always looking for something new though. 

CE is about to publish its 4th major release, which will immediately screw up the 50 or so mods I have downloaded, but that happened last chapter release too and I got over it. Every once in a while, a CE modder gives up after watching their mod's functionality get torched by an update, but them's the breaks.

[krackcommando]

7 hours ago, Ardrossan said:

Fun! Although to be fairrrr, people in this game love 2xp because they can skip all that 'boring' vanilla content as quickly as possible and go straight to endgame. For some reason. Usually the same people who think vanilla was the best part of the game. 

iunno about that. first of all, you need to play through the vanilla story to unlock comps and buffs. secondly, the streamlining of the leveling process makes it possible to only do the story. what it tends to cut out are the side quests and heroics, which made vanilla leveling much more robust. thirdly, level scaling makes it such that it doesn't really matter how fast you level, you're still going to "level" doing the vanilla stories, which makes going through them for the unlocks more desirable than playing through any other part of the game - maybe aside from 6.x. and 6.x is only desirable because the game still uses the same stinking mats in 7.x that were designed with 6.x. so if you play 6.x, you can gather mats you'll need for level 80 while continuing to level your gathering skills. 😄

[turbomagnus]

So, I have a question and completely understand if the current answer from Keith and the other Dev Team members is "We'll answer that at a later point", but I'd like to put it out there now.

With SWTOR moving away from EA and Bioware, how will that affect subscriptions and subscription payments (i.e. Recurring Payments, subscription days remaining, Subscription Cartel Coins, etc.)?

[Whykara]

21 minutes ago, turbomagnus said:

With SWTOR moving away from EA and Bioware, how will that affect subscriptions and subscription payments (i.e. Recurring Payments, subscription days remaining, Subscription Cartel Coins, etc.)?

I wouldn't be worried too much about that. EA as the publisher currently handles all the subscriptions and transactions and will continue to do so. 

[TrixxieTriss]

1 hour ago, Whykara said:

I wouldn't be worried too much about that. EA as the publisher currently handles all the subscriptions and transactions and will continue to do so. 

And current subscription Cartel Coins?

[Whykara]

7 minutes ago, TrixxieTriss said:

And current subscription Cartel Coins?

You and I both are only speculating here, since nothing has been confirmed. In my opinion it's highly unlikely that they will mess with Cartel Coins, since it's their main source of income and seems to be working quite well. But who knows.

[TrixxieTriss]

14 minutes ago, Whykara said:

You and I both are only speculating here, since nothing has been confirmed. In my opinion it's highly unlikely that they will mess with Cartel Coins, since it's their main source of income and seems to be working quite well. But who knows.

What about people who’ve accumulate lots of CC from their sub or seasons & haven’t spent them yet? I know a lot of players are feeling a little anxious about what might happen to them. I guess all we really need is some reassurance from BioWare/Broadsword that nothing will happen to them. 

[mastersdr]

How realistic would it be for Boardsword to pull off an FFXIV 2.0? the story seems to be going for a reset. I want to be hopeful but there are doubts

[KeithKanneg]

Poking in here to say that I made a thread that provides more info regarding this topic. You can read it in its entirety here. We are going to be keeping that thread locked and will add more info accordingly over time. So for now, please use this thread to continue discussion and conversation. 

Thanks, everyone.

-Keith 

[TonyTricicolo]

12 minutes ago, KeithKanneg said:

Poking in here to say that I made a thread that provides more info regarding this topic. You can read it in its entirety here. We are going to be keeping that thread locked and will add more info accordingly over time. So for now, please use this thread to continue discussion and conversation. 

Thanks, everyone.

-Keith 

I appreciate your candidness in the other thread, but I'm still skeptical because for the last few years all we've heard was big things were coming and not to worry about this and that. To be quite frank, I don't believe anything you guys say anymore. 

Edited June 20, 2023 by TonyTricicolo

[Sappharan]

Your most recent update, about 25 minutes ago as of writing my response, is the most encouraging yet.  It seems like good news.

Now, will you kindly address the obscene deserter debuff and 8 man premades after the migration?  That is, will you remove the debuff and reduce premades to 4 man?