f13.net

I have been souring on MMO's for a while so I need to make that admition before stating anything else.  Simply put I don't think that any MMO can offer the immersive experience of a single player game.  I was hopeful in ToR and I really wanted to like it.  However after leveling a BH who couldn't seem to heal Hardmodes and now after loving my 50 assassin up to the point where I was nerfed to abject uselessness, my saga is over.

I cancelled today and though I will admit the nerfs drove me over the edge, it wasn't what brought me to the edge.  Here is what my biggest problems with the game are:

1.  Interface Lockup bug.  Every day and 3-4 times per warzone I sadly have the interface lockup bug.  If you haven't had this, your lucky and I am jealous.  This bug results in the interface locking, and you can't do anything to it except reload using Control + U twice.  Sadly I am tired of the reload time and you can imagine what being unable to respond does for you in pvp.

2.  I simply don't understand the game at all.  I tried to min max my character but without actual feedback, I found it next to impossible to understand what i was supposed to be modding with.  

3.  Customer service:  God help you if you should really need them.  My Bodyguard BH got stuck in the class quest where you have to kill two strong rebel guards that healed each other.  Simply put I couldn't beat it, I couldn't leave and I couldn't bring in help.  It was three days before the droid contacted me wanting to close the ticket WITHOUT HELPING ME OUT!

4.  Falling through the floor.  This bug has happened to both my characters, and it happens regularly. I have picked the second body type and for some reason you seem to fall through the world at an alarming rate.  When you fall through you land in this checker floor, where your stuck.  In the fleet (Empire side) you can jump off into space and you resapwn at Zeiost.

5.  I can't successfully access the content.  I almost never have the opportunity to go to a hardmode as my guild is past the first few, people rage quit if they die, and more seriously in my opinion when you do find a group chances are those people aren't as geared.  This leads to inadequate dps and rage timers that go off.  Rage Quitting follows.

6.  Every patch the game seems to get worse.  Instead of making new stuff and quashing the bugs that affect me every day, the team seems dedicated to nerfing me to abject uselessness.  The changes to Raze just destroyed the only build that I was able to find that was both unique and interesting.  It was a fatal blow to the dot assassin that I enjoyed.  Bioware seems to really be pushing Assassins at least into vanilla FoTM builds.  Which of course begs the question why give the option in the first place???

7.  The trees seem broken.  This was ampllified even more this patch.  Despite reading the raze description carefully, I have no clue how you get Raze to proc anymore.  I am not sure why its even still an option for Assassins to get other than developer lazyness.  Deception is full of uselessness throughout the tree.

8.  Did I mention that finding groups is a problem?  Well it is.

9.  Did I mention that I opened 17 champion bags and got nothing.  Well I did.  Conversely on my BH I have opened 26 bags and have 3 duplicate pieces.

10.  With Ilum broke, i can't even enjoy PvP.  I am waiting sitting around cruising forums while online because well I am that damn bored.

11.  Crafting is a joke.  If it was viable, I could at least have fun doing that but as it stands there is a lot of effort and no reward.  In this respect it reminds me of the half ass job Jessica and the Liars Ken did at Turbine with the upper tiers of armor in Asheron's Call 2.


The one thing this game does afford me is ample opportunity to relish on how much nothing there is to do for me.  I just don't see the point in paying for that.  So I am not going to pay for it any longer.  This was the last chance MMO for me as I don't enjoy the mouse wheel very much, so I think it will be SP games for me from now on.  

GL to those still playing and I hope things improve.

Investing heavily in an MMO eats up so much time anyways and you miss out on so many good SP games.  I've still got a lot of "hit games" I missed while playing WoW that I haven't gotten around to playing.

Enjoy the angry posts you'll probably get telling you to just go away because you're trolling the STWOR forms.  :uhrr:

Absolutely not. He's spent a good amount of time playing the game, put in the honest effort, went in with the right mindset, and had legitimate problems with the game.

The only thing I can say in response is that hard modes are a lot of fun when you get people to enjoy them with you and have the time.

Not a single one of your complaints that follows has anything to do with your summary of your problem with the game from the beginning of your post. It's just the same list of nerf nerd rage and UI/bug complaints we see for every MMO launch.

I mean, you could have made an interesting post. Then you didn't.

Constantly falling through the floor has a way of breaking immersion.

Edit: That said, I don't look to MMOs for immersion.

I'm souring on MMO's because after 14 years they have become boring.

I mean really, it is the same thing in all the big money releases  isn't it?

After the initial rush of Star Wars universe novelty, this one wore off after about 3 weeks.

Re: "Stop trolling"  Yeah, what Paelos said.  Continuing to come in and post the same one-line or one-note posts when the topic veers anywhere near your personal vendetta? Trolling.   Saying "These are my issues, this is why I stopped," and then either leaving or only part in the conversation as it ebbs and flows, not.   It's internet 101, I fail to see how anyone can come at it differently.

That said, I haven't encountered any of those bugs, Morn.  It's weird that you've encountered them all and so frequently. Is there something about your machine that could be causing it? An older rig? A tweaked OS? Odd hardware?

The falling thing is a total cock-up, yeah.  I've seen other complaints about it even though I haven't experienced it.  My Marauder is BT2 and hasn't fallen once, though.  Which is what makes me wonder if it's a processing thing.. like a poly flakes out on a user's PC and fwiip there you go. 

The textures that seem to get blown or flicker quite often are my peeves.  Well, that and the incredible number of clipping problems that seem to happen with Twileks on Republic side.  My consular keeps clipping her chest through her robe for some bizarre reason during cutscenes.  It's irritating and drops you right out of the scene.

Mostly it sounds like you're burnt on the genre, though. I suppose that's why you chose the "last MMO" subject.  The nerf/ buff cycle is inevitable and yes, it sucks to have picked two opposite sides at the wrong times.  I've done that before and it's burned me on a game long before it should have. There's always those who, despite being vets, still don't see it coming and rage when it happens I guess.

As Margalis said, I don't play these for immersion.  It's all about the other people and/ or the loot grind and endgame experiences.   TOR is lacking on the endgame experiences right now and I don't have the time for loot grinding like I did in my late 20's and early 30's.  C'est la vie.

Well, I am glad folks are taking my advice from the predictions thread.  But remember I requested these posts be accompanied by a youtube video of your character dying repeatedly in PvE/PvP with a voiceover explaining why this game is terrible.  Get on that, chop, chop.

All my dudes (three of them, and I've played two to 40+ and the other to 30+) ( :why_so_serious: ) are body type 2 and I've never fallen through the world either, so whatever it is fucking that up, it's proooobably not the body type.

Haven't had a single case of falling through the world either, be it body type 2 or the other ones.

With the mentions of run hacks and such wonder if the character movement isn't left for the client to handle, and so maybe that's a side-effect of the hardware/client falling behind when stressed more than it can handle, or smth.

I've never fallen through the world once or had a locked ui.

I've been locked up on a conversation before, that's pretty much it. And some error 9000s.

Also for some reason last night, the game just logged me out mid-convo. That was odd.

Well...

- I get the UI locks all the time, but they seem to only occur in pvp. 
- I have also fallen through the world a couple of times (body 1 and body 3 toons), so it doesn't seem related to the body type. 
- I have opened well over 20 bags in a row with no gear.  It's the RNG. 
- Crafting is a joke.  I've decided to quit bothering with anything but treasure hunting/slicing while leveling and biochem at endgame. 
- Ilum is broken and it's a disappointment.  I'm actually more disappointed in the players than Bioware.  Ilum could be fun if the players chose to make it fun.  Instead, they are all chasing a carrot. 
- The UI is fine though I hate the changes that came with the last patch.  Now I can't tell when some abilities are up and it tells me that my channeled abilities are cancelled when they really aren't.
- Customer service is a joke.  Two guys in my guild have had to resubmit the same ticket on 6 different occasions (by CSR request) and the runaround is laughable.

Still... I manage to find the game entertaining and worth the $15 a month.  Yes, the game has some problems. Yes, it appears that Bioware got in over their head by making this an MMO when it could have been a spectacular single player RPG.  Yes, it seems that we're seeing another reskin of tired old mechanics. 

I'm having enough fun to keep playing.  That's all I care about right now.   

I'm sorry you don't like it. I'm still having a blast. Then again, I'm not looking for the same things you are, so that could be why.

I've never min/maxed any game because I never saw the point. I'm not playing to dominate all comers, I'm playing to enjoy myself and min/maxing is just to goddamn much work.

Hardmodes? Never done one, probably never will. Again, I've got better shit to do and people rage quit over the stupidest shit, so yeah.

The only bug I seem to run into consistently is the auto run after a conversation bug and the occasional getting stuck in or booted out of an instance, all of which I can live with.

PvP? Fuck that.

I will agree that finding groups is definitely a problem. I tried to do Maelstrom Prison yesterday and failed to get even one other person to join me.

Again, I'm sorry that this game was the straw that broke your will to MMO and I do agree the genre has gotten a bit stale, but I'm still enjoying my time, so I will end this with the obligatory, "Can I have your stuff?".

Yeah I'm starting to immediately put the quitting posts into two categories:

1 - They quit over pvp, and I ignore those.
2 - They quit over content lack, and I respond to those.

Sorry to hear you're having so many problems Mour. I've never had half the stuff you wrote about happen to me.

One of your items listed is about Ilum kills not counting. That was patched this morning and should be fixed although I cannot confirm since I'm at work.  If I'm not mistaken that is only like 24 hours after it being broke. Annoying but not horrible. My guild has a few people that live around the Bioware campus and know a few of the employees there. Although the employees don't/can't talk about the game much, I was told last night that PVP in this game is a very sour subject with them.  They (Bioware) know they got it incredibly wrong and Ilum in particular is getting alot of focus.

Min max thing, yeah its hard with no combat log but there are plenty of posts by people who like math in the forums.  I know my buddy who plays an assassin used a guide in the official forums last night and was loving the spec.

Hard mode enrage timers are a bit tight. That I cannot disagree with. But with just about every MMO I've played, its a gear check. Some fights are healing checks as well. Sounds like your group/guild mates needs to either gear up a bit or work on their spec's a bit. I also get the feeling you don't like the guild you're in? That usually goes a long way with my enjoyment of a game.

There have been several posts about crafting from Bioware.  Changes are coming. You certainly aren't the only one who doesn't see a point to them currently.

I think pretty much everyone can agree this game was rushed to go live.  I would expect some pretty drastic changes to happen to each class as they try and make it "better". 

I can understand people leaving for both reasons and I don't have a problem with either.  

1 - Star Wars is a galaxy in conflict.  I was expecting the game to capture at least a little of that given the names working on the design.  So far the pvp has been a big disappointment.  Not really in terms of class balance or gear grind, but in terms that it has been put on rails just like the rest of the game.  Generating an interesting battleground wouldn't have taken much development time and could have kept a decent number of people busy for months. Ilum was pretty poorly conceived and implemented.  Allowing players to only participate in 3 warzones, with no choice in which they get to play, was just lazy.

2 - If you're quitting over the lack of content, you're not experiencing the content.  I've made this complaint in the past and I've had to re-think it.  There is a ton of content in this game in terms of the class story lines.  The only downfall is that you have to repeat quite a few quests in order to experience it.  The addition of the space combat was also a nice diversion for players.  The endgame flashpoints do get old rather quickly, but the raids can be quite fun if you have the bodies to complete them.  Short story: There is plenty to do if you seek it out.  If you're unhappy with your choices, then quitting the game is a good call.  Noone should pay for a game that they don't enjoy.

  

I know I'm burnt on MMO's, especially those of the same type. But it has nothing to do with the idiosyncrasy or the buggy state of each title, but more to do with the commonness and sameness of those titles.

That's all I really have to add.

Can I have your stuff?

Even with all the extremely valid complaints the "nerfs wah!" whining always gives me a l2p noob visceral reaction.  If nerfs bother you then yes you are better off staying away from MMOs.

For me the issue is less what's not working (though for the record I've had most of these issues except for the UI lock myself at some point) as I honestly do accept the usual fan-defender trope that all MMOs or in fact any multiplayer title is buggy at launch and will need six months of patching. On patching and fixing, all I ask is that it go in the right direction--when an MMO starts to break more than it fixes or when fixes betray that the live management team doesn't even remotely understand the cultures of play that have sprung up within their game--then that alone is a reason for me to quit, as it tells me that there is no future to the game. I don't feel I have a sense yet of whether the SWTOR team is going to get their sea legs and move things towards technical and design improvements.

The real issue for me is more what Bloodworth points to: the underlying mechanics and design premises of DIKU-derived MUDs are unsalvageable even if Jesus, Zombie Steve Jobs, Brainiac 5, Christopher Nolan, Leonardo da Vinci and 10 quadrillion dollars were involved in designing one. There is just something fundamentally off about the whole idea--and I say this as someone who has played virtually every one ever produced and enjoyed many of them. But I consider myself like an aficionado of sumo wrestling or curling or John Cage music in this sense: it's a weird, broken art form, an acquired taste. It's a thing I do but I don't ever expect that more people will do it in the future and I honestly don't think they should. In many ways, it would be best if they died out so that something potentially better at scratching this itch could rise in their place. I think that as far as subscription games go, SWTOR is not just Mourn's last MMO, it's the world's last MMO. Maybe Guild Wars 2 will be, if you decide that the sub fee is just a business model rather than an intrinsic feature.

I'm a bit of a broken record on this point in my crowd of game-studies neckbeards, but you have to think back to when people were playing UO, AC, EQ. Remember how we used to talk lovingly about "second generation", "third generation", etc. MMOs to come? The expectation was that somehow they'd leap the fence of the DIKU-derived mechanics and we'd be "living in a world"--that the relationship between play and setting would become more seamless, the environments more richly appointed and boundless, the AIs more complex and lifelike, the combat more twitch-like if not fully FPS in its design, the affordances for organizing guilds and groups better, the ability to build in and affect the terrain and the world would expand dramatically, and so on. Some of the "next generation" of MMOs feinted or stepped in one or more of those directions and generally fell flat on their faces, sometimes because of the fecklessness of designers or live management, but always also because DIKU mechanics simply do not support any of that evolution and they never could. Nobody can fix PvP in a DIKU because it will always pit people whose primary skill set is "I have a lot of time to dump into playing this thing" against "I have good reflexes and understand tactics" against "I just want to have some fun". That is not just Bartle-type differences in player psychology, which is what Raph has inferred at times--it is an active creation of DIKU-styled mechanics, a playstyle Frankenstein wandering the moors looking for children to push into a lake. Nobody can fix balance: it is broken by design. Nobody can patch in a changing, interactive world: the move to extensive instancing is a natural, sensible response to the design paradigm.

The only way MMOs will grow from their senescent, Alzheimer-y sickbed is to start over. EVE, for all that I really just can't get into it, has better lessons to look at. Or Wurm. Minecraft has things to teach, so does Dwarf Fortress. Skyrim and RDR have lessons too. Maybe even Zynga, though I think most of the lessons are the "Do not go to Z'ha'dum" kind there. Somebody is eventually going to figure out how to scratch our itches in a way that feels a lot better, and maybe not just those of us who actually like sitting around picking at the scabs.

Ok if Sky can do that one liner then surely I can do my derptastics:

We're burning out on MMOs because we need a duck whistle.  Remember in the SNES Zelda, when you spent enough time walking around you got the duck whistle.  "You've done this walking around shit for long enough.  Fly from place to place now so you don't die of boredom." 

MMOs in general need to achieve universal duck whistle.  Even with new games, we've fucking explored the map.  We've leveled.  We don't need to do these things again.   Developers should know full well what has produced longevity and customer satisfaction.  Car manufacturers don't sit around and say, "Sure, the windows roll down in Chevys.  Do ours need to though?  Can't we wait a few years to roll out that feature?"  Study the fucking genre and streamline this shit. 

I agree with Mourne's post, but I still hold out hope that someone is going to give the genre a duck whistle.

The problem is people continue to blindly copy WoW and missing the point that WoW was a massive step forward from what we had previously.  Voice acting doesn't give me the "this feels so much better" feeling that just going from griding to quest based leveling did, or flying on gryphons from place to place instead of getting sodomized by a wizard for a port.  There was a sense of wonder and newness when playing WoW that made it feel "next generation" compared to all the games i'd played before that everything since then has completely missed in order to be just like it.

Has meme potential.

I'm very burnt on MMOs; but I'm not ready to be done with them.  I have only been subbed for a month to various games since the mid-WotLK period.  Prior to that, I was constantly subbed.  

I have hopes that GW2 will break the cycle for me.  If not, I don't see another potential contender.  I might start getting into CCG/LCGs more instead.  

I'm hoping that the legacy system is a means of obtaining the duck whistle or at least a way to freaking holocall in some of the quests.  The running, particularly below level 14, seems like a really unnecessary timesink.

Quick travel needs to drop to a 5 minute resuse or less.

Your ship needs a quick travel terminal.

From the ship you need to be able to quick travel to any planet.

The psychology behind this is why PvP should not provide more power as a reward.

Couldn't agree more.  Particularly in gear centric DIKU type MMOs.  I've been burned too many times at this point to expect it to ever happen, but if someone manages to put together a good system, I'll dive back in head first.

But the problem is that when you win you get more stuff. Otherwise, nobody would have ever tried to conquer anything.

The problem is that nothing gets actually conquered, and that everyone can move at all to the winning side.

 :why_so_serious:

+1

I really do wish someone would take a step back and create something that is an evolution of UO in the same way WoW was an evolution from EQ, instead of trying to evolve WoW into ... well... better/different WoW.

For me right now all those problems are secondary to the "OH MY GOD MY EYES" GCD thing implemented last patch. It really makes playing the game unenjoyable for me, and also makes my eyes get really sore quickly from constantly looking through that blue haze to the very dark grayed out skill behind.

I fucking hate it with a passion. Two other people in my guild are refusing to play anymore until its fixed. I have been playing less also. The UI should fade in to the background not distract and obscure the info you need.

I don't get this one, at all. Yeah not having a way to parse dps or whatever is annoying, but it sounds like your problem is a little deeper than that.

You know some folks form my guild say the same thing, but myself?  I didn't even notice they made a change...  (I play a Medic IA and rarely look at my bar because I have no reactionals and I have a good sense on my 30 and 60 second cooldowns).

I find it completely awful and distracting on my JK, but don't really notice it on my smuggler. Probably down to how spammy they both are and the relative numbers of things-with-cooldowns.

Yep, it's nightmarish on my JK as well.

It seems a real stretch to call something in a niche market that has 11 million customers an acquired taste.

JK has a ton of ability icons that look nearly identical, so there's that too. It hasn't been an issue in my BH but I'm still not a fan of the change.

Everytime I read the thread title, I get this image in my head... I have no idea why   :awesome_for_real:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0ktKSRs6a4#t=4m41s

So does Marauder.

"Oh look, another ability that is the outline of a head and shoulders, surrounded by red flames. This will go perfect with my set of 5 others."

I have years of practice with the WoW paladin (glowing hand or glowing hammer, THE END), so the sameness of the icons for some of the classes doesn't faze me at all.  :why_so_serious:


JK is totally the only class where the new cooldown shit annoys me visually, I don't really need to look at my bar as much for the other classes I've played since the patch (operative and sage).

Playing my sentinel last night, some of the abilities look 'greyed out' when they're actually active.  It's rather confusing.

Which 30 day period of UO would you like to bring back?

If you give players freedom, they use it to intentionally or unintentionally fuck over other players. If you don't give players freedom, then you remove the toys from their sandbox and it becomes a theme park.

The underlying mechanics behind DIKU MMOs could be improved, but BioWare was not going to be the company to do it.

Pretty much in the same boat. I pre-ordered SWTOR because I figured it'd be the swan song for the genre. It really had to be. The budget was way too big to take any real chances on, because the way to get that amount of money is to use proven models and concepts. The more money, the more proof, the more you must knock off. But all that requires a market of uninformed players, which was always going to be the problem for them. After years of WoW, it's not like there's another 13,000,000 people waiting for a game just like EQ but better.

So I wanted to be there to say goodbye.

To a veteran like me, the small titles are either retread old concepts, or good concepts wrapped in painfully derivative/generic settings I've seen dozens of times already. The game mechanic itself kinda qualifies as easy to learn/hard to master, except the "hard to master" is more a question of lifestyle choices than anything else.

I run with an awesome guild of folks I've known since they saved me from "A Orc" near Kelethin. But after 10 years, and multiple life changes, it's hard to look at the same slog through the skill-learning/social-climbing/lifestyle-changing ladder again and be as inspired as that first time I stepped out of Felwithe or Camelot. Especially when that slog remains fundamentally unchanged in retrospect. And especially when the video game industry has up and gone making some freakin' awesome PC games again.

Thanks for all the fish!

I pretty much have to stare at my bar 100% of the time on my Shadow so 1) I can see the tiny little Particle Acceleration buff appear when it procs and 2) so I can see when the cooldowns on Slow Time, Force Breach and towards the end of the fight Spinning Strike are up.  Plus I have to be staring there to see my force, too.  Needless to say, I'm not a fan of this latest, completely unnecessary change.

If there's any good to come out of this, it's that a dev posted that the next iteration which will hopefully be out in around 2 weeks will include preference settings so people can pick and choose the aspects they like.  We'll see how that turns out.

Seems like as good a thread as any.

My interest in TOR is waning fast. The single player online is fine, but not worth a subscription. All of my friends are different levels, and so I can't group with them. Looking at their progression, it may be months before everyone is 50. Some are fast, and some are slower. I have zero interest in PUGing this game.

So far the MMO aspect of TOR gets a D- from me, and that's only because we did manage to group a little bit before the level dispartiy got too bad. Otherwise it'd be an F.

I canceled my sub as well. I tried to play my brand new BH alt but as soon as I got to Dromund Kaas and talked to the dude with the jungle beast quest, my eyes just glazed over and I couldn't summon the interest anymore. On paper SWTOR is just great, but after the Star Warsiness wore off, playing it is like chewing cardboard.

Sorry for not being very specific. I meant the 30 day period of UO from July 13th to August 12th, 1998. Either that, or I meant the general concept of UO's "world > game" approach. I'm no longer sure.

Anyway, there is giving people freedoms, and then there is giving people freedoms. You don't have to make Darkfall to make a sandbox MMO.

I'm really surprised people don't complain about this more.

It seems absurd that friends with differing time /played are blocked from playing together in a multiplayer game in 2012.

It is a problem mmog designers continually ignore despite simple solutions being available since CoH, and despite the fact you would never get away with it in any other genre.

Can you seriously imagine EA setting the pointless ME multiplayer up with a restriction that you can only play with others if their Shep is +/- 2 levels of your own?

EQ2's mentoring was a really good implementation, too.

Adding some sort of mentor/side-kicking would indeed let me keep a sub.

My number one issue with this genre is levels as blocks to playing with friends.

The lack of chat bothers me. Everyone can go about their business in a guild with 8 people online, and nothing will be said in guild chat for 30 minutes at a stretch. That's not a good sign for the game.

I disagree strongly.  The person acting as the mentor was grossly overpowered due to poor scaling of gear bonuses and abilities.  While being mentored, you still felt like you were being powerleveled... which isn't the point.  I preferred the sidekicking system in COH/COV though it had its own issues (one level lower, etc.).

People still use Text chat? I mean, other than linking and asking the occasional questions.

Depends on the guild really man. My old wow guild was mostly on vent and in private/group chats ingame, with occasional spouts of /g chat.

Meanwhile, goon guildchat is pretty much nonstop and that's including a usually loaded ventrilo server.

Yes.  I prefer text chat.  It takes an act of the heavens to get me on a headset.

I find that when I'm in a guild of friends my age, we do a lot of text chatting, because we can't really afford to have the headphones on and completely shut out family.

Here's one of the things that really strikes me as a sign of ill-health. I'm in a guild now on my server that seems to be mostly 20-somethings, reasonably nice if utterly typical gamers in various respects. They're on every night. They mostly do PvP, but not because they are PvP-centric in their preferences. The guild formed pretty early in the history of the server. They're fairly hardcore games, pretty intense. They're working on the Karegga operation, that's the guild's main PvE.

So I confessed that I hadn't run any of the Flashpoints after Red Reaper yet because I'd pugged the others and no one on the entire server wanted to pug anything from Directive 7 onward. Turns out almost no one in a 60-person guild had really bothered doing any of the endgame 4-mans. They were kind of interested if, you know, the chance came up, but they all felt sort of unmotivated about it. There is no one in general chat looking for people to do them. I asked a couple of people in the two other large Republic guilds, and they're sort of the same way, not really bothering to do 4-man Flashpoints much, a few hard mode tries. Almost no one thinks it's worth just doing some like The False Emperor to see the content. No one really likes the hard mode gameplay, especially not in 4-mans.

To me, that looks like a community of players who are on the edge of not playing any more, even if they're not saying so as such yet.

Ditto, if i wanted to talk to people i would go outside.

It's also a sign that the playerbase is becoming more sophisticated and looking for something even a little different.  While the flashpoints are fun the first few times that you run them, it doesn't take anyone long to quickly identify the grind ahead.  As most of the playerbase has experienced WoW and/or other MMO's, they aren't as enamored with the allure of the shiny like they used to be.  They want a little more substance and a little more of the game feel in their MMO.  

I have been playing these games a long time and know what faces me every time I start playing one.  For some reason, SWTOR made me aware of the leveling/gear grind far sooner and in a more obvious way than many of it's predecessors.  That can't be a good thing.

Pic of Paelos irl:


As far as end game stuff, I'm not a fan of the gimmicky event-driven stuff I guess became big with WoW. So it doesn't bother me too much not seeing the HM FPs or Ops. But I'm not surprised at the utter lack of an interesting end game, since I knew going in that I don't like what every other mmo passes off as an elder game.

"Broken mic" 5 years running for me.  I type just fine.

Wow, ok. I'm not talking about pubies. But people I have been gaming for years with. You guys do not use VOIP even in that case? Must be fun on dungeon runs....

I mostly completely ignore text.  

Hate using mic/headsets as well. I used them in competitions before but never in a mmo.
It breaks the immersion for me too much. I might be convinced to listen in during a raid, but I'm just as likely to not go on that raid.

Also, I quit my sub as soon as I had experienced the new UI. It made it clear that they dont have what it takes.

I've gotten on voice comms with SLAP maybe a half-dozen times.  We read just fine and can all type at a reasonable speed.  Now there are a few people who if they asked me to get on voice I would, but they share my preferences, so they won't.  We do have one member whom if I group with I'll do so if asked because it's much easier for him to communicate verbally.

A large part of my preference is that I 'talk' and understand a lot more with typing than vocally.  I process the written word much more easily.  I can rearrange my thoughts into something coherent.  Unless I know someone really well, I hardly talk at all, and then I have to be in the right mood.  Typing though?  I probably prattle on a bit too much then.

I'm rarely logging in. And when I do I get bored in less than an hour or two. I hope I can make myself level at least one character to 50 in the month and a half I have left on my sub :)

Yeah, pretty much the same thing here. My guild gets on Mumble when we're doing a full guild run of something (esp. if it needs coordination) and 2-3 of us occasionally use it for for pvp or arena. Most of the time it's just typing, and we do hang out in an IRC channel 24/7 so we can chat even if some of us are not ingame / at work / not subbed to the game-of-the-month etc. Ditto with Steam voicechat vs. Steam text chat.

Considering that I'm in an international guild with a Hungarian, a Dane, a Brit, several Norwegians, Canucks, and of course quite a few Americans (both coasts), text is a much better medium for all of us to communicate in -- accent bonanza or not. (read: my written English is a lot more understandable than trying to cut through my bad microphone AND my horribleawesome accent  :awesome_for_real:)

I've fallen in to a pattern of playing three or four times during the week, typicaly for about an hour or so, a little longer on the planned wednesday group. On weekends I'll probably log a couple hours as well.

So maybe, 5 - 8 hours a week in the game per week. 20 - 32 hours a month of entertainment for $15. Yup, pretty much exactly the value I'm looking for in an MMO. Hell, I'd consider $15 a month a value if I was only logging two hours a week. What the hell else entertains me for 8 hours for $15?

I get it, this isn't for everyone (especially the PVPers apparently). Most of you are burnt out on the genre. Personally, I came to this having been out of WoW for four years. It scratches an itch and it does it quite well.

Sorry this isn't what you were looking for - it is however exactly what I was looking for.*

*assuming they do put out additional content at a pace higher than Blizzard. It will take me likely another three months to reach 50 on my main. I'm hoping to have hints of new things to inspire my Alts by then.

You're almost exactly mirroring my situation.  I play maybe an hour a night (sometimes just 30 mins) after I'm done playing LoL.  I have a lvl 26 BH and a 24 smuggler. I haven't even seen the inside of flashpoint or participated in any pvp.   :awesome_for_real:

• Four film rental deal from Blockbuster
• Unlimited two-disc deal from Lovefilm.
• 2 20-mile LDWA (long distance walking association) events.
• 2 bottles of v. cheap vodka.

Yeah, I've already had this debate and I'm entirely in the same situation as you.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, we would not get along at all.  I can't stand it when people ignore chat.

I'm sorry?

You could just talk you know.  :grin:

This discussion could be a thread all it's own I'm sure.  If I'm playing ranked games of League of Legends I always use voip.  If I invite someone and they say they can't/won't/whatever get on it I boot them and find someone else.  I've played MMOs with guilds where raids were the same way, someone not on voice isn't even allowed to come.  (They don't have to talk, but they have to at least be able to listen.)

And that saves us the hassle of having to put up with those types.  I wouldn't want to be a part of a guild that takes things so seriously.
Listening to accents is one of the few things I like about voice chat.

Thankfully I have a fairly neutral American accent.  For most words.

What's killing me right now is the lack of LFD. Most people just do dailies or go do the awful PVP on Ilum. It's literally easier to convince the guild to do a pickup Eternity Vault raid than it is to get someone to run a flashpoint which is just weird.

If you're going to make everyone stop whatever daily they're doing, zap back to the fleet, and go through like 4 loading screens to get into an FP (after which they'll have to go all the way back), it better be worth it. It isn't, unless maybe it's a raid. And that scenario is literally the most efficient one.

If your Emergency Fleet Pass is on CD or you didn't buy a Fleet Pass (from the authenticator vendor), it's awful. If your Quick Travel is also on CD and you're not to the area where a fleet transport is on whatever planet you're on it's hilariously awful.

-Ride to orbital station ship.
*loading screen*
-Take elevator to ship hold.
*loading screen*
-Fly to station.
*loading screen*
-Take elevator to interfleet transport.
*loading screen*
-Fly to ship you need, take elevator to FP entrance area.
*loading screen*
-Opening RP, enter FP.
*loading screen*
ACTUAL CONTENT.

You should be thankful there's no LFD.  If the level of pvp ability is any gauge of the talent of this game's playerbase, I don't want to run a hardmode with 99% of these people.  Ever. 

Also my current largest gripe and the one that will drive me away if not rectified within a couple of months probably. I've seen hardly any of the FPs - I'm on at different times to most of BC (being a euro) and the server is very, very quiet when I am on.

As for voice comms, I use them all the time. I'm levelling an alt with a mate who's only on in the evenings and we're on Vent all the time. Even when he's not around I'm on vent with other friends (who are mostly playing STO). It feels really weird in the daytime when I'm playing and haven't got any voice chat going on. That said, I totally understand how some people don't like to do comms so I watch the text chat too, I'm used to it.

We do make everyone get on Mumble to at least *listen* for raids, we just enforce it through guilt instead of rules.  :-P

Like most of the people in the thread, I have no real interest in sitting on a voice server the entire time I'm playing, but for raids it is fine/necessary.

I always have vent going for raids, not because i've ever found it in any way helpful but because it is required of me.

Yeah, I am in the hate-voice-chat club.  If I wanted to talk to people I would see them in person.  I would rather wipe a few times and figure things out intuitively than have someone blabbing unnecessarily in my ear, but sadly, this would be asking a bit much of our skills as a whole in WoW and so I would sullenly listen and drag out the mic for the rare occasion I was tanking and needed to grudgingly mumble something.

I also think there is also a generational divide here - those whippersnappers love the Skype.

I like it for raids and small groups. For regular everyday play? No.

I take it you're not actually leading the raids. There are things that have to be communicated quickly sometimes that just can't wait for someone to type it out, especially if the person talking has to be doing anything complicated play-wise while the communication is going on.

I lead raids in EQ and WoW up to Naxx without voice chat, also lead a pvp group up to grand marshal without it.  I quit doing it when people started relying on someone else to tell them what to do rather than just knowing what they are supposed to do.  I didn't sign up for simon says, i do my job just fine without someone having to tell it to me.

So long as people are actually listening to it, Vent lets you react really fast in encounters. Being able to tell someone to move when they don't notice Gharj is going to pounce -immediately- is pretty helpful.

Still inferior to having someone who notices wtf is going on by themselves.

Which is fine, until you have to tell your friend with the morphine drip sorry you can't join our club.

We'd all love to play with players who are up-to-date, read the strats, know the fights, realize their job, and maintain appropriate gear.

Then you realize that even though you're playing in fantasy land, that's never the case. Also, you have to ask yourself: why you would bother playing a game that's so complicated or esoteric that you are required to spend time outside the game, reading about the game, just so that you can beat the game?

I got really good at giving instructions during WotLK. Early on I'd type them out and then answer questions on mumble, but once most of us knew the fights and there was just one person who was new or whatever, I'd say their specific instructions (as a healer, you just heal and don't stand in shit, as DPS, you're going to have to switch to adds during phase blah, that sort of shit), remind everyone not to stand in <whatever>, and off we'd go.

The only time it was a "problem" was when this one other fellow was in the raid, he liked to give everyone the run down (verbally) after I was finished. And he um. Took a while doing it. But he's such a sweetheart, who would stop him? No one.  :heart:

Conversely I am terrible at giving directions.


"Handle your shit people"

[armchair designer]

In retrospect, I would have made the flashpoints scale like the PvP mechanism, and give everyone their own level appropriate xp and lootz. Set up the flashpoints so the mechanics go from simple -> complex as you unlock them.

[/ad]

That's the worst part of it.  Their warfront scaling is already very very good, before geared 50s took over a level 10 felt like they could compete against anyone.

I like to do bad accents, does that count?

I think Iain stabbed me through the internets once.

Yes. Please let all the other MMO game developers know that when you next visit the clubhouse.

[minirant]Text chat is a hygiene system and one that should still be considered the default form of communication in-game, yet too many MMOs - WAR, DCUO spring to mind - fail in offering any kind of basic functionality. I don't want to say that both of those games failed against expectations because their text chat sucked, but it really didn't help them build up a player base either.

Yes, we know there is voice chat, but not everyone wants to or is able to vent chat when they play. My experiences (of playing on US servers from Australia) have been very choppy at times, and if I can't hear what someone says, there is no point in being on vent. Text has failed me less than vent.

It's a text chat system. They've been worked on for a good few decades now. At the very least it should be as good as a free IRC app. If it isn't, players will notice and complain about it.[/minirant]

So, what you are saying is. You don't like talking to people.

I'm not sure why "I don't like using voice chat" means "I don't like talking to people." I like talking to people fine, I just don't feel any huge need to do so over voice chat. Especially in a game like this, where I am trying to listen to voiceovers.

Shit, sometimes if I have something to say to Ingmar but it's during a cutscene, I use party chat instead of talking out loud. We both have headsets on, we're both listening to what's being said in-game, it's easier that way. :P

This is my last MMO too.  I can see the grind too quickly, and after 13 years (Jesus) since I started in EQ, I'm tired of level grinds.  It's not you, it's me etc.

One other thing I have found interesting, is related to the storyline.  I had a similar problem in kotor.  I find it hard to get involved in any old republic storyline, since I know what will happen.  Whatever crisis will pass, and the republic will carry on fine for another 2000 years or so until the clone wars.  So I have real problems getting "into" the storyline.  I realize how ridiculous this seems since the whole thing is make believe, but it's my suspension of disbelief, and this is how I'm going to deal with it dammit.

Anyone else had similar thoughts, or am I completely off on a limb here?

While the Republic isn't really in any danger of falling, it's not like anything short of its destruction can't be terrible. That's how I look at it anyway. Yeah, if I fail, the Republic will survive, but it's more about making the people in the Republic have a less shitty/wartorn/whatever existance. I can let X happen, the Republic won't fall, but it still makes a difference to Joe Quest Giver if I succeed or not, as his base gets wiped out or everyone involved in a project dies or whatever, you know?

I've heard such thoughts about other stuff. Like the SW prequels even. I just don't grok it. To me, it's like saying you can't enjoy Saving Private Ryan because you know how the war will turn out.

You don't watch Saving Private Ryan 7 times a week though (unless you're insane).  :why_so_serious:

But SPR is a story about characters, struggle, the human condition, etc.

SW is a fluffy epic space opera about laser swords and shit. Knowing that absolutely nothing of consequence happens in the story is a downer. I mean, if you look at what happened in the original trilogy, planets were destroyed, the Death Star was built and destroyed, the empire was overthrown, etc. Big events.

IMO prequels often feel this way. You already know what happens, you know it is of little consequence, you know it's to some degree a cash-in. It's hard for me to think of prequels in any genre that have a sense of urgency and excitement to them.

Star Wars is a story about characters. Luke, Leia, Chewie, Han, Lando. It's as much their stories as the story of the big events. Just like *gasp* SPR.
I understand the argument, I just don't feel it.

I actually had the inverted problem with SWTOR. I used to (kinda) enjoy the SW EU material, so the KOTOR series worked well for me. A whole new part of a universe, at a different time with different things. I also enjoyed the Simarillion, the Commonwealth stories from Peter K Hamilton spanning different eras, the Culture series, etc.

The problem I had with SWTOR was the hamfisting they did to bring it up to canon.

I ran into Dodonna, Madine, Organa, etc, however-the-fuck-many thousands of years before ANH. Walker tech, hover tech, "could kill [Solo] because it's experimental" carbonite freezing all of the rulers of Taris, blasters, architecture on Tatooine that hasn't changed, stupid generator tech on Hoth that hasn't changed, Star Detroyers, all of Coruscant, "we've been destroying whole planets for millenia" super weapons, and so on. In fact, the only things that looked really different were some of the space craft.

I accept that SW is largely one dimensional, single-geology planets with a handful of races they always rotate through, and that lightsaber tech hasn't ever changed. And I get all the EU material in the world is one video edit away from retcon'ing. And I totally get why they would feel compelled (or be externally compelled) to bring it close to canon.

But I felt that all these references made it more jarring that you'll never meet Crix Madine, Leia Organa, that the shock value of the Death Star in ANH is diluted by the succession of super weapons, that carbonite isn't new and experimental, yadda yadda.

Dumb rant, but there it is :)

Also: text chat and a head phone. I don't have the lifestyle, nor give anywhere close to enough shit to lead raids nor game competitively. But I can listen just fine.

But business-wise, if you're game world is overly large, your dense areas too few, everyone's already noticed all the servers went from Heavy to Light, and general chat is largely empty outside of Fleet, it will feel empty.

Doesn't matter if it is empty. Just matters that it feels that way.

I totally agree Darniaq. Saying "it's 3000 years before the movies" and then making it all look exactly the same constantly grates for me. Especially when they could have just said "100 years" instead of 3000 and it would have been fine!

Wow was littered throughout with pop crude references. Nestor is littered throughout with one pop culture reference.

No, I like being able to ignore people and catch up on the conversation when I come back from an impromptu afk.  I also like to listen to music or have a show on and still be able to follow the chatter in the guild & zone.

Plus, deaf people rather like knowing wtf is going on, too.  (Which segues into a mini rant about you guys saying "just tint it" for the GCD.  Color blind people hate joo. No, they need to put big damn countdown numbers on them and be done with it. No more flashy/ glowy/ colored bits.  Just fucking numbers. It's not hard.)

Right because we really need to design for the colorblind and deaf.  :oh_i_see:

At this point I'd just say that's what mods are for, but they fucked that up too.

This is actually my biggest problem with the game.  Bigger than trying to be WoW-in-Space.  KoTOR felt like Star Wars, but in a different era.  SWTOR feels like it's set during the time of the movies.  More so than even SWG.

That's because it's Empire versus Alliance Republic with a slightly different logo


Note, the logo actually devolved over 2000 years. Probably due to lack of funding.

Empire though?

Fuck the colorblind!

(We have like at least 3 people in SLAP that are colorblind, including Ingmar. It made him tanking that boss in Mechanar a real hoot  :why_so_serious: )


--

I have no more issue with StarWars being eternally at the same level of technology then I do LOTR or any other fantasy setting. I also have no issue with this conflict only being important to the people of this Era. The movies aren't any different really, in the grand scheme of the Republics history. They are what, 50-80 years of conflict? That's a footnote in terms of Republic History.

Heh. I totally agree. When I saw the dudes frozen in carbonite, I was like "Wait, what?" Sometimes TOR feels like My First Star Wars by Fisher Price.

Did I miss something from Empire that said freezing someone in carbonite was experimental and new?  All I remember them saying was that the carbonite freezer in Cloud City wasn't designed for humans so Vader wanted to test it on Han first.  Given Lando's little operation was so small it was beneath the notice of both the Empire and the Mining Guild, it seems unlikely he had brand new, never before seen experimental tech.  I have no with carbonite freezing existing back then.

You continue to live down to expectations.

At some point in the near future the ADA is going to have it's own version that applies to software, so yes, sensible designers would be planning for it now.

It's a fucking game. Get over yourself.

Honestly the bleeding heart shit some of you people champion at times IN GAMING makes no sense to me.

In real life? Absolutely. In an entertainment arena? Fuck off.

Because only "normal" people deserve entertainment, you guys!  :why_so_serious:


Even if I bought into the "fuck anyone not exactly like me" mindset, there are a lot of colorblind people (it's something like 8% of all dudes, although practically no ladies). And for whatever reason, a lot of them are nerds. It's stupid not to design with those people in mind.

It's stupid not to design a moddable ui.

The rest of it is just people shoving their own baggage into the situation.

Yes, that's right. It's all "baggage."

How many other MMOs or just games in general, for that matter, are designed with the color blind in mind?

A lot of mmo's.  Isn't that why a number of them used icons in addition to color for their con system?   DAOC for instance used the grey, green, blue, yellow, orange, red, purple color system to show a mobs level relative to yours and then supplemented it with -'s and +'s for colorblind people.  I seem to recall that sort of thing being fairly common.

That's what you got out of my post?

In short:

 - text works and there are a lot of good templates for how such a system can look and what functions it can offer.

 - I've had technical issues with VOIP before (e.g. breaking up, too faint, etc) that means I don't trust it / think it reliable.

And, to add one in that wasn't in the original post:

 - I PUG a lot. I don't have a guild. I've had some PUG-related VOIP experiences that aren't uncommon but that I don't want to repeat because they take away from the fun of playing. If someone wants to lolfag me in text chat, they can, but then it's logged and easily reportable.

No, it's sloppy design. There are some basic "Don't do this and consider this" rules for when developing for the mass market that aren't hard to implement. However, it requires the devs responsible for those parts to think a little bit about it, which sometimes doesn't happen.

It isn't appropriate to think that mods will fix what should have been there in the first place. Improve it? Sure, but not add in basic things that were missed.

This is ridiculous on so many levels. First, mods add in new things all the time. Hell, mods for many other games add in complete worlds that get built on the engines. To suggest that it would someone be onerous on a minority community of geek males (who seem to be primarily the ones struck with colorblindness) to write a mod for the UI? TOO FAR! We save that kind of effort for dps parsers and threatmeters!

I don't think you guys are arguing about the same thing.

 :headscratch:

Meh probably not, I'm just firing into the dark at this point. It's Saturday and the college games are sorta boring.

I see text and voice as complementary systems. If I'm soloing I probably don't want to listen to someone chat about something that has nothing to do with me in game. So chat is a lower impact form of communication and easier to ignore if they're just talking shit that doesn't interest me (which is generally the case). I mean imagine zone general chat done as voice and that's the only communications interface. Of course if I'm doing something with other people, like an instance or a raid, it works the other way around because I don't want the delay of typing and I know that whatever they say is going to be relevant because they're in the same instance or group (and thus people I selected and am playing with).

On top of that most in-game chat clients are pointless. I can find a lower ping and better performing ventrilo or mumble server than the in-game solution, and most big guilds will have an established voip solution.

10% of all men are colorblind. Ignoring that in your design is stupid.

Yes, color blindness primarily effects geeks. Thanks doctor.

In real life, rather than your self-entitled fantasy land, color blindness is extremely common in the population at large and there are very simple things you can do to (partially) proof UIs against it. Things that also make UIs better and more readable for everyone.


I good UI will use color, shape, positioning and as many other visual cues as possible. It makes it easier for everyone to quickly pick things out.

For me, it's that they were frozen nearly exactly like Han at Cloud City. Same rectangular casing, same half-in half-poking out poses. Sometimes their references to the movies make sense, and sometimes they seem like concept cut n' paste.

You really get the feeling it isn't a knowing wink, but a just someone without any imagination copying and pasting.


Of course, both the prequels and the EU plumb the same depths so *maybe* this is a subtle commentary on the overexploitation of the core 3 movie canon.


OK maybe not.

I suspect the dearth of imagination about that stuff is more of a Lucasarts thing than anything else.

I believe a lack of imagination is a trademark owned by Lucasfilm LTD.

Actually I get the feeling that they wanted people to constantly feel like they were in Star Wars. So you see a carbon frozen man and go "good lord get original." I, and lots of people like me, see a carbon frozen man and go "cool just like Han!"

There is carbon freezing, but then there is carbon freezing everyone in identical poses and identical machinery.

Machinery? Hell my BH fires it from his wrist at every damn target.  Many of whom stand upright and stoically as they're turned into a living statue.. who then winds up looking like Han in the next cutscene.   THAT is what makes me all  :uhrr:

As to a lot of the rest of the "just like the movies!" stuff (Sith ships for example.)  They looked different enough in the original KOTOR series, so I'm going to blame it on wanting to look like the movies so as to not alienate the non-hardcore SW geeks.

(http://i.imgur.com/cCmWR.jpg)

Yeah, TOR in yet another "Not as good as WoW" shocker.  :awesome_for_real:

Like the other 8-10% of global males, I'm partially color deficient (on the red-green side). For those who are not, this isn't total color blindness, which is extremely rare. This is just having some issues differentiating between certain proximities of warm colors. If you look at an old standard set of Crayola markers, I can't tell the difference between the Red and the Brown caps. I struggled with the yellow and green orbs in Zuma until they put in color-blind mode that added gray orbs. I put my vote in for the - and + symbols they added to DAoC.

Having said that, I didn't have any problems with SWTOR. Where they used closely-related color symbols, they made clear the differences in the tool tips.

It was that plus C-3PO's "ooh, they encased him in Carbonite. He should be remarkably well preserved, assuming he survived the freezing process" all together which implied this wasn't some stock-standard consumer-grade tech, which therefore probably still had the kinks anything new does. It is kinda easy to argue it either way though. If one is a fan of the story in SWTOR, they could argue as you did: feh, "standard issue stuff but Lando's sucked". If you're critiquing the story in SWTOR, it's "retcon raawwr!" :)

Or you know, you could have half a brain and realize that carbonite freezing was intended to be not meant for humans.

That may in fact be the same feeling.

I think we should argue more stridently about made-up shit.

What they should have done is spend 20 man hours making 40 unique blocks of carbon frozen people in different positions so Eldaec wouldn't be offended by their lack of imagination.  Most people when they look at the one pose just think 'hey, it's carbon-frozen man', but they should have spent more time for that one guy who thinks 'HOW DARE THEY COPY HAN'S FROZEN POSE!'.

Edit:


Now see, I look at that same exact quote and what I see is a protocol droid spitting out common knowledge, as he usually does.  So if C-3PO actually knows about carbon freezing, it must be fairly common.

It's not just that they copied the pose, it looks exactly like han solo frozen in there down to the hair and face.

Well yeah, of course. Depending on your slant the game is some sort of callback, homage or pastiche.

I get the complaints that the game just takes stuff from the movies and riffs on them, but at the same time does anyone really want to see new stuff given how horrid new Star Wars stuff has become? I think at this point most people realize that from a creative standpoint the best days of Star Wars are decades removed - the best strategy for exploiting the IP is not telling exciting new tales of new characters in new places but rather "hey, remember the time Boba Fett flew around on a jetpack? Yeah, that was awesome!!"

It's comfort food.

I'll take Han Solo-shaped carbonite man over the Yuuzhan Vong or whatever the fuck they were called any day.

As was also discussed in some 300 page thread about stuff not changing much from the Old Republic setting to the Star Wars era setting, once you've perfected faster than light travel, effectively limitless power sources, and controlable AI smarter than most of the people using it the only thing likely to change much is the aesthetics.

So..I'm wondering. Is this thing Origin tied? So if that's the case, I can't really purchase an access over someone else's account is it? I mean, after they got bored of it, I can skip the box purchase and just re-sub under their name? No?

*Still not on the TOR boat*

Not tied to Origin, at least from my physical copy.

Oh, no question. I agreed simply because I got the same feeling that some of their callbacks worked and some kinda fell flat. But I managed to resist nerdraging and throwing my monitor out the window.

So technology is perfect in Star Wars? Some sort of technological singularity?

Weird. I'd figure that would include personal jetpacks and immortality.

They have Jetpacks!

Not so sure on the immortality though.

I can rationalise this one...

The period between TOR and the movies sees the galaxy run exclusively by the republic.

The canon demonstrates the republic leadership to consist exclusively of idiots and hippies. Hence, no social, economic or technological progress for several thousand years.

only for the 1% :oh_i_see:

Goddamn stupid hippies.

We really don't know anyone's lifespan.. everyone gets killed in accidents or a hail of gunfire/ lightsabers.  Has Yoda lived 900+ years because of his race or tech? We just don't know!

Count that in to the equation of tech as well.  You think shit moves slowly because 80 year olds don't adapt to it here and now.  Imagine our world if we still had to deal with people who participated in the battle of Hastings.  The political parties they'd have to limit the free flow of information on devil's machinery like Crossbows and the freeing of 'beast races' from slavery.  Now extrapolate that to a galaxy with so many conflicting issues and races it's no wonder the Senate bogs down as does technology.

I think the most official canon would indicate that technology has simply been at a standstill for at least a couple thousand years.  There are many (especially EU) contradictions to that, but it's really just easier to assume this as a truth.

It's because all the scientists are busy inventing all sorts of planet-busters rather than new phones or whatever.

Explains all the god damn running around.  :why_so_serious:

In TOR, 3000 years ago they made their shit awesome, high quality stuff.  Look at the troopers for example, their armor can take blast after blast...even lightsaber dmg.  Now compare that to trooper armor of the movies, fricking arrows from Ewoks goes straight through.  Over those 3000 years they implemented cost savings and the quality of the workmanship degraded over that time.  Im sure much of its made with lead out of Coruchina.

Lightsabers had to be toned down from instant limb-cleavers to "burny light sticks" for the game to make any sense, thus they were. I'm fine with that.

It does look hysterically funny sometimes however. I pulled a group of sith for a heroic hoth quest and with 5+ duel-saber sith flailing at me it looked like I was in the meanest rave party ever.

I love people who act like there can be an authoritative social science position on the real nature of the longue duree of change in a fantasy galaxy that has a mystical Force pervading all life forms, completely fake if not as fake as Star Trek economics (e.g., it seems remarkably easy to create endless numbers of clones and droids as well as huge starships and planetary-scale cities), imaginary FTL which can be fitted in dinky little one-man vessels as well as big ships, and planets with completely homogenous cultures and ecologies. "oh, but of course, as we all know, once technology hits a certain pinnacle, very little will change except aesthetics" is the Star Wars fan version of "Captain, we've recalibrated the sensors to emit handwavium particles to induce singularity formation in a dilthium matrix!"

The explanation is that they decided that players want to play Star Wars and Jedi dammit, but the main storyline of the films doesn't allow for a galaxy full of Sith and Jedi beating on each other. So Star Wars and Jedi it is, just "an even longer time ago in a galaxy far far away". Don't try to ennoble a simple intellectual-property driven decision with imaginary sociopolitical theory.

As a someone that plays a scientist for a living, I can say that I turn my brain off the moment I play this game.  The thought of having to lead a target with a laser in the vacuum of space would otherwise make me a very crabby person. 

Actually in space combat you don't lead. You shouldn't actually. Your blaster shots WILL hit so long as long as the crosshair is over the enemy when you fire.

I know... but they visually bend.  There's no reason for parallax at visual distance in a vacuum.   

So long as they go "pew pew," I can forgive all kinds of science.

Yeah, no fucking shit. Show us on the rapedoll where nerd science-fiction rationalizations touched you. We all already know it's all bullshit, which is why we're doing it in a Star Wars videogame thread, citing other Star Wars videogame threads - all on a videogame message board. Don't worry though, if you're fast enough I think you can catch a thread in /co and let everyone know that My Little Ponies could never really shapeshift in to a bunch of hot bisexual girls. And you people seriously wonder why I don't always leave being a dick at the door of Politics? Seriously?

Wait.. what's this about hot bisexuals?

No, I don't wonder. I just figured it's because you're actually a dick.

I find it more amusing that laser cannons have recoil.

Actually, it makes a whole lot more sense if all those 'lasers' actually shoot something like superheated plasma moving substantially slower than the speed of light.  Just assume 'laser' doesn't mean the same thing in that universe.

That's pretty much what they are shooting yes.

Do they actually even call them lasers? I guess there are 'turbolasers'.

Nope.

Thank god I didn't have to come in here and start beating people about the head with the BLASTERS NOT LASERS stick.

I was just being sarcastic...

I enjoy the fact that I know nothing about Star Wars, Star Trek, Star Raiders, Star 80, or any other Star ___ you want to explain tech to me from. 

I think the only tech involved in Star 80 was silicone-related.

Only in a geek fight..

Wait a sec. Were the Yuuzhan Vong in SWTOR?! Or were you just ranting about the EU book series about them? I need to gauge my level of nerdrage on this one. There's a scale.

You want the Mass Effect thread. George Lucas says everyone is 100% straight in Star Wars.  :grin:

This thread delivers.

I never heard of any yet, but we could probably start a betting pool on how many expansions it takes before they come up.  They were mentioned in KOTOR I guess.

I can't remember any reference to them in KOTOR, and I must have played that game at least 5 times through.

I couldn't either, but Google proved me wrong.  But just one very small reference.

Ah, if the reference wasn't by name I wouldn't have recognized it, since I never read the actual stuff.

Well, there are also Chiss all over the place in this timeline, as well as Sith pureblood who seem to keep getting lost and found again through various parts of the Star Wars history.  Planets that have been lost, then found, then lost again.  Starships and armor that appear to be better than they are throusands of years later (though there are some canonical explanations for some of these).  Hell, nobody can even agree on what the Force is.

You have to be able to exercise a good deal of cognitive dissonance in order for this all to make sense.  Luckily for me, I am practically the Dark Lord of Cognitive Dissonance.

Ib4 parsecs are a measure of distance.

 :popcorn:

SWOR is basically the greatest hits mashup of all Star Wars material. As time goes on, I'm expecting to hear that a lot more EU material has entered the game.

Well, in more than one sense, this is basically already pure EU material.  But I think you know what you mean.  Even so, there is a bunch of non SWTOR specific stuff that comes from other EU sources.  I highly suspect, for example, that House Thul on Alderaan is a backstory on Raynar Thul, who is an EU character introduced post ROTJ.  I am not positive of this, but I would bet 10 bucks on it.  I think there are tons of things just like that in this game.

Huh, Blasters are really lasers? I always figured they were plasma weapons, which explained them not firing solid beams/hitting instantly. That's usually a good enough hand-wavey thing to make gun battles more interesting looking.

Too bad WUA went crazy. He'd have straightened us all out with a tome of a post by now.

 :facepalm:

Blasters ARE plasma and Wookiepedia has it wrong.  They're not even internally consistent as the Blaster page lists them as light & particle weapons, but the individual weapon pages list blasters as using plasma charge packs.  :awesome_for_real:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/DC-15A_blaster_rifle
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/E-11_blaster_rifle
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/SC_blaster_rifle

Every tech manual and cross-section book I've seen has always indicated a gas-charge system for at least ship weapons.  (Because firing damage-potential lasers into the vacuum of space with so many inhabited planets over thousands of years is seen as a generally a BAD IDEA.) 

Those I'd trust more because as Crazy as LucasArts cannon has gotten over the years, they at least have someone attempting to vette it into a cohesive jumble.   Wookiepedia does not and I suspect the blaster section of being edited by science nerds rather than fiction nerds.

We all know they have had to retcon the shit out of all this, but yes, all of these supposed blasters/lasers are gas powered weapons.  Like from the Tibanna gas that comes from Bespin that good old Lando was mining in the clouds there.  Lando or Han actually mentions the gas, but I believe its function was actually retconned in later.  So yeah, super heated plasma.

I don't know why they still call ship weapons "turbolasers" (sometimes, although there are deliberate distinctions made for blaster cannons).  At the end of the day, it is an imaginary universe, and it is silly to try to make perfect sense of it all.

Because it sounds cool. Like "hydrospanners". What, they're powered by water? They're used for fixing water? They're made of water? What does it mean?  Who gives a fuck - it sounds cool.

(http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/pipe-wrench-1.jpg)

For fuck's sake, man!  What kind of nerd are you?   :oh_i_see:

Same here. When soloing in an MMO I like to listen to music, chat with my wife on the PC next to me (who might be playing or just doing stuff on her computer). I stop, play with the cat, alt-tab (I'm playing WoW right now, for example), watch TV etc etc. I have no urge to sit with a headset on listening to other people crap away about things unless I'm specifically in the mood for it (ie almost never).

Also, I find headsets uncomfortable as a rule.

I have a pretty awesome headset, but fuck using voice chat.  When people are really into it, text chat is way funnier.

Game needs chat bubbles though.

That's for damn sure.  Especially considering the instanced nature of this game, I don't see the spam danger.

I remember when I first started playing CoH, and it had chat bubbles. Before that I had only played DAoC. I didn't know I needed chat bubbles until I had them, now I miss them like crazy when they aren't there (WoW didn't have them at first, and frankly the ones they wound up adding were never as good as CoX's).

That's because CoX is still the undisputed Crown King of MMO Chat funcionality.

That you were able to customise what your chat bubbles looked like was icing on top; I always themed my bubbles to my char's colour schemes.

Yea CoX was always ahead of it's time with it's chat powers. You could chat across servers and shit years before WoW even dreamed of their RealID/BattleTags system.

Even Free Realms has customisable chat bubbles...

F chat bubbles, 80% of the time I send tells to people they never see it so how bout anytime you get a tell a boxing glove comes out and slams you in the head. 

I'd go so far as to say they're STILL years ahead with their entire back-end.  Chat, grouping, player customization, player experience and player differential are all just fantastically dealt with.   I'm still a fan of a lot of their systems from those standpoints.

It's the actual game and its mechanics that are a bit lackluster.

Not to mention an insane amount of content (more than any other game even without Mission Architect, imo), and the best player-driven content system on the MMO market.

CoH didn't have content, it had the same fucking warehouse filled with the same fucking goomba's over and over and over.

Hey now.

There were sewer and insane skyscraper maps, too.

It had tons of content, it's just that all the content was too similar to each other.  I'd still be playing the game if it had more to do than zone into building, kill everything, rinse and repeat.  Still, it's the only game I ever quit that I still have very positive feelings for (I guess GW could count too, but you don't really 'quit' GW) and it still has the most memorable characters I ever played.

For a game I only started playing as a stop-gap between DAoC's early death throes and WoW's baby-steps; CoX remains the MMO I've played longest and invested most in, both in terms of time and emotion.
It's probably the only MMO I wouldn't hesitate to resub to at any given moment. I quit because I felt the need to play other things but it never failed me.

Also, Super Jump > everything else in any MMO, ever.

CoX failed me once I finished making my character. Fuck I couldn't move and attack (I'm not sure I can still). I never got past 16 or 18, I don't remember exactly now.


I loooved making new people, but detested actually playing them.

This really cannot be said enough.

CoH/V ruined me when it comes to character travel. I couldn't stand a cooldown on a near useless sprint in WAR and I remember watching my RIFT character run up and down hills and thinking my CoH/V character would have just jumped over it.

It's sad that travel powers has either been ghettoised as 'superhero MMO only' or are have ridiculous limitations put on them in other games (i.e. Shadowbane's flight, from memory, Aion).

I used to take the slight hit to effectiveness with my energy/energy blaster and fight while flying. Because it's so completely awesome.

Thinking back, there may have been a hover that I used to switch to or something.

There was indeed a Hover for combat. Super Duper slower then flying, but no penalties otherwise.


It's not remotely surprising that PvP games have to limit travel powers, CoH is a clinic on how to not have PvP.

CoH was the last MMO I ever had any fun with PvP in. It was actually about skill, not grind and gear numbers. Aerial dogfights? Check. Superspeed jousting? Check. Teleport ambushing? Check. Taking control of giant deathmecha? Check. Fghting the actual big name Heroes/Villains when your side was getting a little too big for its boots? Check. Balance was all over the place, but the fun was undeniable.

Shhh... you'll piss off the vast number of PvPers that think gear acquisition is an actual skill.

As I understand the saga CoH was starved of content because much of the energy was being put into the next big thing which eventually became Champions. It's interesting to think what CoH could have become if it had not been starved, it certainly had the foundation to be extended.

CoH PvP was "everyone has stealth and 5 ways to escape any fight" you'd walk into their version of a BG that supposedly had 30 people in it and not see a fucking soul. The skill was who had the most patience to wait in teleport range of their own insta death guards and snatch the bored enemy when he finally starts dancing on the roof.

I had a lot of fun with CoX PvP at first, but because the balance was all over the place it really meant that eventually, cheese was required. Fun times with my Robots/Traps MM standing innocently in front of a gazillion tripmines, trying to look as afk as possible.

Webbing blasters out of the air into my pile of mines and robots was a lot of fun too.

It was fun until it was nothing but bunny hopping Ice Blasters.

It was far more about what class you played (and what travel power you took) than skill.

So, WoW druids? And if you remove the travel power constraint MMO PvP in general.

Druids couldn't fly in battlegrounds, or in combat. The comparison isn't even close to how unbalanced CoX pvp was.

CoH was hit before that with NCsoft's focus on Tabula Rasa - CoV didn't set the world on fire for NCsoft, so they cut back on investment on CoH/V and fed that money into the sure hit of TR. Which is why Cryptic started thinking that maybe they shouldn't tie their entire future into one title / publisher.

Or so it seems from the outside.

The big complaint about CoH though - lots of kill all in the same few warehouses / caves / areas - was true from launch though.

Defeat all.

Heroes don't kill defenceless clockworks.

I'm going to arrest those Vahzilok with my non-lethal flamethrower that I used after blasting them with my non-lethal assault rifle that looks like a super soaker.

Assault rifle became massively more fun when they let you pick the weapon model. That super soaker, while it fit the various aspects of the power, looked ridiculous.


It was more a suggestion that most PvE focused MMO's tend to consider the PvP portion very late in the picture and find powers that were fine in PvE are impossible to balance. The WoW druid in a game with capture the flag, Warhammer (and it sounds like SWTOR) pulls and pushes in maps with environmental hazards and yes... just about every travel power in CoH.

Way to completely ignore every point in his post in order to score a cheap debating point.

Warhammer doesnt even have that excuse, it was a pvp game.

While we're turning this into a CoH/V nostalgia thread, I loved CoH/V's Gladiator PvP - you could 'unlock' NPCs and build teams based on points to fight for you - but it was the least successful version of PvP. I'm not even sure it is even played.

Super serious!

I was just trolling gais.

Well, not my last, but I think I've seen everything I'm interested in seeing in this game. Maybe I'll finish my Sith Inquisitor. Funny thing is that the best experience I've had so far was enough to convince me that I'd had as much fun as the game offers. Was in Ilum two nights ago when it blossomed into a 50 v 50 thing for once. It got a bit slide-showy but it was amusing for sure for a good two hours of killing and being killed (mostly killing: the two big PvP guilds on the Republic side were unusually coordinated for once). But after it all started to die down, with everyone having gotten their weekly done, I thought, "Well, suppose that happens again tomorrow night? How long before we all start saying, 'eh, what's the point'? or before we start getting frustrated with trying to do twitch in a non-twitch environment? or before people start pulling some kind of serious exploitative bullshit?"

And then I looked at my level 48 Valor and said, "Do I really want to grind out 12 more levels and then grind some more to get my Battlemaster?"

And then I remembered the last time I tried to Scoundrel heal a hardmode operation and said, "Is that going to be even WoW-style unfun to try for a while?"

And then I said, "It's time to take another look at LOTRO." Or play Crusader Kings II. Or play Skyrim some more. Etc.

I'm holding out hope for GW2.  Large scale open world PVP is all I've really wanted since November 2005. 

If GW2 doesn't work out, I'll probably hold my nose and return to WOW or SWGemu.  Or (or!) quit mmos altogether and return to a halfway productive life.

The only time this happened to me in-game was when my Jedi Knight ...
Epic story fail.

Not a problem, we're in an alternate universe because Spock went through that wormhole - so anything can happen!

Badgers played it.

'Badgers' meaning 'those who went after badges', not 'Mr Toad's buzzkill of a friend' for those who were confused.

I don't think that the Gladiator system got much work on it past its introduction, though. But it was a great concept.