f13.net

Q4 numbers out. (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ea-sales-beat-targets-star-wars-takes-hit-2012-05-07?siteid=yhoof2)

As usual, the truth was somewhere in the middle of the predictions of the hopeless optimists and the doomsayers.  Subs at the end of March totaled 1.3 million, down 24% from 1.7 million.  So subs have not fallen off a cliff, but they are down.  I'm sure both the glass half empty people and the glass half full people will have plenty of ammunition for their arguments.

Devs also clarified that the 'expansions' listed in the article refer to major content patches (ie: 1.2 and the upcoming 1.3), not a paid box expansion.

The 1.3 million also includes players currently under free time per the promotion with patch 1.2, so these numbers are padded to some extent.

Are you talking about the free month given near the end of April when the quarter being reported ended on March 31st?  That free time?

:facepalm:

Edit: Reading the report (http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120507006548/en/Electronic-Arts-Reports-Q4-FY12-FY12-Financial) it isn't clear whether SWTOR has 1.3 million subs now, or 1.3 million as of March 31st. Judging from the last time they gave subscriber numbers, which was 1.7 million from a press release on March 9th, I'm guessing the 1.3 million number they gave us is current, not as of March 31st.

It's almost half a million subs in less than 3 months. It's almost a *quarter*'of their subs and we are only 6 months into the game. Diablo iii is out next week, and then GW2 later on in the year plus Mists of Pandara.

The sky is absolutely falling in - and it will only get worse because more and more servers are dead due to the fall in population. Unless they start to hand out free copies of Diablo 3 with their game as well ToR will be under 1 million subs in 3 months time easily.

Given that the report refers to the 1.2 expansion as shipping in Q1 2013, I'd wager on subscriber numbers being from Q4 2012.  Otherwise, there'd be talk as to the "jump" in subscriber numbers due to the Legacy release (and associated free time).

...though this doesn't really bode well for the numbers 3-6 months from now, agreed.

On the other hand, all the people who bought the game, tried it and didn't like it have now likely already churned out.  It seems to me the biggest problem is they did open too many servers to handle the demand when they released, but it was something of a catch 22.  If you open up too many, servers feel underpopulated later on.  If you open too few, people get pissed off and cancel because of the wait times just to log onto their server.

Now they have another dilemma: if you start to actually merge servers, it gives the perception that the game is shrinking and who wants to play a 'dying' game?  If they don't, they'll have some servers that are stuck being underpopulated.  We'll see how cross server queues in 1.3 affects things.

Rift did it by telling people who were getting merged that their servers were getting turned into "trial servers". Why this fooled anyone, I'm not sure, and I am sure if SWTOR tried it people would see right through it.

Rift players probably didn't care much given that many of them were already used to transferring servers for free. The announcement about trial servers was also smartly combined with an announcement about Rift Lite (free 1-20), so the announcement seemed suspicious but held some merit.

Free character transfers and trial servers came out at the same time, June 2011. (http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/general-discussion/211683-character-guild-transfers-more-details-info.html)  Rift Lite was three months ago.

Edit: There was a mass server cannibalization with Lite though (http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/431/view/news/read/23195/Rift-Server-Changes-Confirmed-Clarified.html), but the practice was already in place.

As I was saying, not sure why this fooled anyone...

The huge number of 'trial server' converts was paired with the Rift Lite announcement. If it hadn't been, I think you would have seen much more doomcasting. A small number of server merges or voluntary transfers (something WoW has done plenty of times in the past) isn't news of the same scope as something like the WAR merges, or what SWTOR is going to have to do soon.

Edit: Man, the description from that announcement post is rich:

Having a hard time finding definitive lists of server conversions and the like.  But, there were already ~30 North American trial servers by the time the batch for Lite was switched over (source (http://[url=http://forums.riftgame.com/rift-general-discussions/general-discussion/283494-shards-becoming-trial-51-out-99-a.html)).  The majority of those came off the bat back in mid-2011 (source (http://rift-wire.com/2011/06/29/trial-shards-are-these-a-good-idea/)).  The ones inbetween were pretty piecemeal from what I remember at the time, but the rest came in pretty big chunks.

Any way you want to slice it, Rift has 16 proper servers in North America roughly a year after it had over 50 (http://telarapedia.com/w/index.php?title=Shard&oldid=35746).

I'm sure they give the numbers taking advantage of the free-month boost, that was clearly the point of it. The "game-changing" 1.3 patch having come out and not really impressed anyone means I see no reason the decline is temporary.

The next test will be the frequency of content updates as an indication of whether EA/Bioware are still strongly committed to growing the game. But with negative growth and a pretty poor reputation I think it will be very difficult to halt the slide. WoW-like growth is effectively impossible, so the game probably counts as a failure in EA's eyes.

Rift had pretty different expectations and investment. Being the first game with a unknown IP from a unknown development house. I suspect it's done alright by them.

Out of these 3 I think the only one that will have a major effect on TOR will be Diablo 3. I just don't see anyone outside of these boards who is excited for GW2 and Mists of Pandora is being greeted with scorn even by people I know who still play WOW obsessively.

I don't think some other MMO will "kill" it because none of them are following the same path or have the same IP. The decline will be driven by short-comings in the game itself. Which I would expect to be either the concept there is nothing left to do (as people build up their stable of level 50 classes) or no one to do it with.

Reposted from elsewhere: http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/1675578999x0x566984/c10f605c-3487-488e-ad86-b5bb74fe2408/Q4_FY12_Script.pdf


So yes, the numbers are padded by the free time promotion.

Some would have, but then there are those players who buy a 3 or 6 month sub at launch because it ends up being cheaper.

And I've heard some grumbling that the above figures are being brought up by SWOR's launch in different countries within that time frame.

From memory WAR and AOC saw their player base dive by about 50% the first quarter out from launch, so comparatively SWOR is doing great!  :awesome_for_real: But from EA's point of view, would they have been expecting such a big drop, or would they have been expecting a flatter decline (or even post-launch growth)?

It also doesn't help that BioWare's Daniel Eriksson came out saying, "No way our player base has declined; it's just concurrent server numbers that are down," only for this drop to be announced. I get he's a writer, but 400k players down is a big drop.

Investors expected a 10% drop, which is why the market reacted so negatively to the news. Riccitiello is trying to calm the investors by downplaying the importance of TOR, saying it's not in their top 5 properties and is less of a priority than upcoming SimCity title, etc.

Which countries?  There was the 38 additional countries, again at the end of April which wouldn't be in these Q4 numbers.  Were there some other ones earlier that I forgot about?

The numbers are from the end of April, re-read post 16.

There's no way even if the sub numbers are counted from the end of April that they'll include data from a 4/26 launch.

That must be a typo, since the quarter definitely ended on March 31, as shown in the first line here (http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/ERTS/1855861377x0x566942/0a817daf-08b4-4e2d-bc35-c00d03059369/FINAL_Earnings_Release_withPressTables_1204pm_PDF.pdf).

If you look at the 38 countries, there are like 3 that might make a small blip on the radar in terms of sub numbers (Turkey, Ukraine, Israel), while the others are basically names on a list (like, uh, Moldova, or Afghanistan). From what I read, most people who want to play SWTOR in these countries just imported it and played because SWTOR isn't region locked, and it's not like EA is going to be opening servers in Afghanistan now, so it makes fuck all difference to their play experience.

You can expect a massive boost of a few tens of thousands of subs from this "launch", at most.

Real talk is when they launch in areas like China and Korea, but localizing this particular game is going to be especially painful.

That doesn't matter. Previous sub reports have been of the sub number as of the call, not the sub number as of the end of the reported quarter. And according to their own words, this is the same.

Are you suggesting they lost 400k subscribers in less than a month? That would be the case if the subscription numbers are from March 31st, as their previous 1.7 'current subscribers' announcement is from March 9th.

It's not a typo, the numbers are from the end of April. It's the only way the free time promotion makes any sense for EA.

This just in, people who don't like TOR think it's doomed; story at 11. 

I agree with Nevermore's assessment about most of the haters and chasers (that one magic mmo...someday!) have churned out and BWA is left holding too many servers. Free transfers and a consolidation would be nice, as would a few more character slots to accommodate folks like Nebu who rerolled on other servers...though honestly you're not winning folks like that back.

The number of servers wouldn't really be too much of an issue if they had cross-server LFG.

They don't though, so it is.


/captain obvious AWAAAAY  :why_so_serious:


Shien is actually pretty decent still, compared to the numbers I'm hearing from people. Pretty healthy fleet numbers and we still get PvP matches going fairly quick at honest hours.

The 1.7 million subs is from the February 1st earnings call, for the Q3 ending December 31st.  From my quick reading of it, it's also rather vague on if the sub numbers presented are from the end of the quarter or the date of the call, as they used terms like 'to date'.  Is there something out there from the first earnings call that I missed that specifies that the sub numbers are specifically through the end of January?  Seems odd to me that a call that details a specific quarter would talk about absolute numbers like subscriptions (as opposed to projections, which they do a lot) outside of the actual dates of the financial reports.  Not to say it isn't possible since I'm not terribly familiar with that can and can't be said in an earnings call, but I'd just like to see something explicit given how strict GAAP is about what can be reported withing the specified dates in the actual financials.

In any event, it actually wouldn't really matter much either way unless you think a significant number of people who got free time would have quit during the month of April.

It's hard to say how many subs would have expired in April but didn't because of free time, but a 'buy one month, get one month' sale for previous subscribers must have also attracted some people back too.

Between all the upcoming competition, the spread population & LFG problems, and more people finishing class storylines, I would be surprised if they weren't under a million by the next investors call.

I wouldn't be so sure about MOP. A lot of my guildies are very excited for it, and they are part of the 'disaffected WOWers', having subbed for 2 months total in Cataclysm. (they have subbed for most of WOTLK though)

My guild 'churned out' from swtor after the free month + first month of sub was up. The game is not omfg terrible, we just sort of ran out of things to do and couldn't really do any group content - I don't see why we wouldn't go back to swtor for a month here or there if they added some longevity stuff (sidekicking, x-server lfd/lfr and dual specs being the three big things).

Pretty much every WoW player I know who isn't currently playing is saying they'll re-sub for MoP "just for a month or two to check it out". Whether a sizable proportion of those people will stay subbed for any length of time is hard to predict, but some might.

In comparison, not a single one of them who also played SWTOR says they'd go back to it, for any reason. It's something that gets discussed a lot because a lot of us were very disappointed with TOR and had higher hopes for it.

If 25% of people have unsubbed that probably means 30-40% aren't logging in much any more. All those people are haters? I find it just weird that you can spin widespread dissatisfaction with the game as "hate", as if no reasonable person could genuinely find it lacking. Even though in these very forums probably more than half the people looking forward to SWTOR came away disappointed.

It's not "hate" to try a mediocre game and find it mediocre. What you are doing is like some weird twist on sour grapes - we didn't want those players, they weren't sufficiently devoted enough anyway!

I'm very curious why a "hater" would buy the game. What does that even mean? Like, they hate Bioware and Star Wars and thought SWTOR was going to be garbage but then they bought and played it anyway? And that's 25% of their subscribers?

Calling people who stopped playing because the game is middling a "hater" is just absurd. You've latched onto it because you can't stomach that a lot of reasonable people just don't like the game - instead they are all biased or something. They have Bush Derangement Syndrome Star Wars Edition I guess.

The reality is "haters" didn't buy the game or pay for subs. The people who did that thought they would enjoy the game.

By the way, for people like Nevermore and Sky who think the haters have churned out and the numbers will level off - throw out some numbers. Where do you think subs will be at 3 and 6 months from now?

I'm going to say that a large number of people have stopped playing regularly and will unsub soon, and a large number will make it to end-game or finish their first alt and unsub.

I'm going to say that in 3 months they will lose another 25% of what is left - so from 1.3 million to 950k or so. At 6 months around 700k.

You guys think higher?

By the way, EA has said that to feel "really good" about their investment in SWTOR they would need 1.5 million subs a year over a 5-10 year span, and 1 million a year over than span to feel like it was a worthwhile investment at all. Seems hard to believe they are going to reach either of those.

Fuck the numbers, just go with facts.  Servers today are down in pops, just login at prime time and you can see how few of them are now heavy.  Mine is down from heavy to standard and the number of people in fleet is down every day.  We know subs are down, server transfers are coming and they can likely drop a good 20 servers off the list from launch.  My starting guild of over 150 people now has 10 people online on average, rarely above 15.  Personally I could care less, going to play D3 Tuesday and GW2 whenever it comes out so Im done with TOR, but I hope sometime down the road they make it worth playing.

Unless they can keep the number at a million plus, I cannot foresee them justifying full voice acting on every subsequent patch/expansion pack for the future.  Unless someone at EA/BW/Lucas does just not straight give a fuck about money, which in Lucas' case may be a possibility  :why_so_serious:

Not doomcasting, but a bit of a different perspective - I'm a MMO player and have been for a long time. I'm also a decently-sized Star Wars fan (of sorts). I'm the prime candidate for Star Wars-does-WoW

but...

I've got a lifetime sub to LotrO which is F2P anyway, a copy of Guild Wars, and I returned to WoW with the buy-a-year-get-Diablo3-free deal. I also bought into WAR and got horribly burned.

so...

I decided to play wait-and-see when it comes to KOTORO. Hoping that it would be pretty good and they'd get the bugs out by the time my WoW-year expires, because fuck 3 MMOs at once. Prognosis isn't good.

(http://skiffleboom.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/pavlov-dog-labs.jpg)

I'm in it for the haul, 'cause fuck WoW, D3, GW2 and pretty much everything else out there and on the horizon right now. Unless TSW and PS2 blow me away, I ain't goin' nowhere.

Why you hatin' on GW2? :cry:

[Also a very delayed <wave>.  You logged on yesterday right as I logged out.]

Folks, I'll tell you what I know about this with no bias from my CPA standpoint.

The stock is getting clobbered today, setting new 52 week lows. In fact, I believe the last time the stock dipped below $14 a share was 1999. Of course, that was 2 stock splits of 2:1 ago. Investors are getting wind of the facts represented in the financials about SWTOR and ME. Also it's interesting that the company set aside $27M for a lawsuit settlement likely relating to the case lodged by the NFLPA against Madden.

The company is carrying an absurd amount of Goodwill on the Balance Sheet as of 3/31/12. At over $1.7 Billion, the Goodwill is $600M higher than the period 12 months ago. I'm personally not buying that as an accountant, and I question the valuation of Goodwill for impairment. Also, I'm suspicious of their $391M markdown due to a change in the deferred revenue related to digital content. What they are doing is trying to smooth out the losses by extending the revenues over the estimated life of the project. Whether or not that estimated life actually matches with subscriber numbers? Who is to say. It's not an audited set of financials. Either way, expect that number to come back around when they start posting GAAP losses so they can show Non-GAAP gains. 2011 FYE is a good reference point for that behavior.

Game did not strike me as compelling enough for booting into Windows.

Yeah, no doubt, I will draw ire for that statement here.

But I think the age of mega-blockbuster Windows-only games has past.

Even looking at browser stats for sites I manage heavily trafficked by an older crowd, the Mac % is approaching 15-20% (and the sites where the viewing audience skews younger, that mark is 30-35% Mac users). Throw in mobile (counting Android, iPhone, iPad, etc.…) users that is now approaching ~20%, and you see that Windows platform does not enjoy computing monopoly like a did a decade ago.

So any game that precludes almost half of computing users is not going to be a blockbuster -- at best, it's a successful niche game.

Diablo 3 will be a blockbuster, but just like all previous Blizzard offerings, it's a cross-platform game.

I'll play your game after you point out where I called anyone a 'hater'.  Nice rant, though.

I'll predict they'll be below 800k subscribers by July 1 unless they continue giving out free months.

Let's try another perspective:  When did WAR hit the skids?  Approximately from launch?  And when did MJ leave? 

If you look that those dates, and throw in the time Schild tried to explain to MJ what was wong, then that might give a better estimate of when EA will put the pressure on the BW leadership.   Only then after those dates should we consider life/death scenarios.  If EA said "you have 6 months to make your target", then that's when we can start expect big changes like cross server LFD to come.

Cross server LFG is already on its way.  It's coming in 1.3 iirc.  I'd say the single biggest mistake Bioware made was not launching with a robust LFG system already in place.

Uh, the top brass are already trying to disassociate themselves from the SWTOR project. I'd say that's the impending doom sign. A lynchpin product promotion when it was released is suddenly no more important than their Tiger Woods franchise? It's not in the Top 5 of your franchises? Oh, and then they blamed those crappy "casual" gamers for sinking the project.  :oh_i_see:

This isn't the game you're looking for?  (handwave)   :why_so_serious:

I think Subs will continue to keep dipping down and down until they release a new content patch that actually expands the class/companion story lines. That's where the solo players investment is currently and that's what will actually bring people back in huge numbers. It's what they've failed to deliver on so far, that constant stream of personalized story.

There are a lot of other things that are needed and if/when implemented will help numbers too, cross server LFD/LFG, dual spec, a end game gearing system that doesn't look like a best hits album of TBC WoW. (The End game PvP gearing system has changed dramatically no less then 3 times since launch, causing a power gap each time and shunning people off)


But the big "We have saved the game!" stop the bleeding and increase in sub numbers, will come if/when they can deliver more class/companion content.

I agree with that. I keep asking my buddy who signed up for 6 months at release,

Me - "So are they are Chapter 4 yet?"

Him - "No, some dungeon thing just came out tho..."

Me - "Pass. Thanks. Let me know if they release the new storyline."

So the key to keeping subscribers is more expensive, non-repeatable content that players with only one class at cap will see 1/8th of? Got it.  :oh_i_see:

It's not a sustainable model, and it's going to be even less attractive to EA with their numbers dropping. It would be awesome if they could pull it off, as it's clearly the content people want most, but I don't see it happening. Expect to see more repeatable level-cap content and little to no patch content for class stories.

I would agree with this as well.  Although I really want LFG just so I can finally see the rest of the flashpoints, the real reason I play is for the stories of each class.  And since Rokal thinks it's a bad idea, then it must be the right way to go!  :why_so_serious:

Fixed. It would be exactly the content they should be making if they didn't dig themselves into a hole by making class content so expensive to create and with such a small return.

You don't even need it to be capped content for the classes. All your companions (except the first one you get) have a bunch of moments that SHOULD be companion quests but are just your companion going "wehlp BRB!"


Then on your ship, you add a little holo diary/journal, that lets you repeat companion quests/dialogues for fun after you finished them.

Not our fault they chose to sell their business on something they can't produce.  Just as it is for my company, it'll be the death of them.

I always thought it was very odd that the companions just...left.

I was thinking, man I'm the biggest badess JK in the galaxy but they don't trust me to help them do their home laundry? What's that about?

I thought it was hilarious when the warbot left on his wacky missions.  I thought that was, like, his thing.  Then it turned out pretty much all the companions do that except your first one for each class.   :roll:

But it was still funny when I thought it was just him!

I'm fully in favor of companion characters having their own shit that I don't need to be a part of.  But more companion stuff in general is always welcome.

LFD should have been in this patch.  I would have gladly sacrificed parts or all of the Legacy thing in order to get LFD in and working ASAP. 

I don't know if I agree with that. Legacy brought a lot of interest in me playing alts I was otherwise not giving two shits about.

Agreeing with Fordel here, a couple of my alts only exist because of the Legacy stuff.

Now if only I had the will to consistently farm dailies to buy all the perks...   :uhrr:

Well I did say 'parts'  :oh_i_see:

I'll agree that they did the Legacy system well.  Whether it was the best priority over other things they could have done is debatable.

You probably didn't notice, but a lot of the dialog in the stories is reusable and is used multiple times.  I think you overestimate how expensive it would be to produce an Act IV.  Your 'small return' comment also leads me to believe you underestimate how many people play the game for the stories.

Rokal was in favor of the changes to WoW during Cataclysm. He has absolutely no clue what makes a game successful.

'Small return' was in reference to the fact that any given story content they produce could potentially only be seen by 1/8 of classes. They could produce class story content that was largely the same between classes, but I don't know that it would be very satisfying for most players. That reduces the appeal of repeating that content on any other characters you might have, if the class story is covering the same areas, situations, or npcs.

For comparison, Blizzard has stated that class-specific content was not worth doing because of a high cost for content that a small portion of overall players would see. That's without factoring in how much additional writing and voice acting are required when doing the same thing in SWTOR. At a minimum players will be expecting that their character and all of their companions will have voiced dialog during the quest. That's already a huge expense with 8 classes, two genders for each class, and a slew of companions.

SWTOR is not a game with a paltry amount of content, but "I ran out of stuff to do besides rolling alts" seems to be the main reason people quit. There is plenty of content in the game, it's just extremely fragmented based on two factions and 8 classes. It took them 5 years to make the amount of story content you currently see and make no mistake: that's what the focus of development was. Why you imagine they could suddenly start churning out satisfying class story content at a fast speed and high quality, I don't know.


To put it another way, they seem to have focused 90%+ of their content creation time on non-repeatable quest content (story, leveling). If this is not a recipe for success, do you really think they're going to keep putting out large amounts of class content in patches? Much more likely that they're going to try to develop repeatable, cheap, end-game content.

EA are going to put all of the Bioware studios on a very short leash, if they haven't done so already. Fucking up one IP is careless. Fucking up two begins to look like incompetence.

Not me. LFD would be nice, sure, but the Legacy stuff is way more relevant to *me*.

My only sorrow about the Legacy stuff is I can see all the stuff they're going to add in the next round and I'm going to have like one character left that might benefit from most of it.



Really need more character slots.  :why_so_serious:

The legacy stuff was a much better fit with the game they built than LFD will be. They turned playing alts into a tangible end-game.

Player value isn't the relevant metric here, but how long it keeps players subscribed for.  A "chapter 4" gets you a month or two of subs from people and that's it.

That needs to get you a lot more subs that you wouldn't otherwise get with content that gets people to stick around for twice as long.

So what you're saying is a game that has been knocked for being too much like WoW should be more like WoW in abandoning the class stories, which is the foundation of the game and why a large number of Bioware fans bought the game.  I also had no idea you were such an insider to be able to provide such specific percentages and assurances of how much development time each system of the game took.  Thanks for sharing.

The key thing you seem to always miss is everyone is not like you.  As Paelos pointed out, you tend to be more the exception than the norm when it comes to what players want in an MMO.  There are a lot of players who 1) like the stories and play largely for the stores and 2) make a lot of alts to experience the stories of the various classes.  The big difference between WoW and TOR is WoW was never about individual stories for the different classes, so there was little reason to continue to make more when there were so few to begin with.  On the other hand, the entire point of TOR is the class stories, so to abandon them now would be suicide.

They've managed 3 actually in a single year which has to be some sort of record. They don't have an IP left that isn't marred by controversy, fan dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Except Jade Empire!

When did I ever say more story content wasn't the main draw of SWTOR, or what people wanted most? It was the main appeal for me too and it's what I'd like to see as patch content. I'm not looking for more dungeons, raids, or repeatable content.

It's still what you're going to get based purely on costs and the desire to keep people subbed for longer. Spending 4-6 months of development time to make two new raids zones and a few dungeons is going to be less expensive and potentially keep people subbed longer than spending that same amount of time to do Act 4 for 2 classes, content which MMO players will eat through like locusts and be left with nothing to do yet again.

I don't see how it's a controversial opinion/belief to hold that "SWTOR story content costs more to produce on a character-level-by-level basis than it does in WoW or other MMORPGs."

And yes, that's why a lot of people picked this game up in the first place, but that doesn't change the fact that it's charging $15/month just like all the other games as well.

If this is going to turn into another Rokal vs f13 thread, someone hit the Abort button now.

He didn't express personal preference or a negative judgement on other peoples play-style preferences that I noticed. He identified that producing fully voiced, well written and cinematic story extensions multiplied by all class choices is really slow and expensive and will be quickly consumed and forgotten. You only need to look at the amount of content in the patches, and probably the reduced interest for massive new investment on the part of EA, to form a suspicion that there will never be any substantial extensions to the story lines no matter how much you like it.

Which of course was the flaw of TOR from the start. Basing an MMO on extremely expensive hand crafted and specialized content and then thinking you can put that out at a pace, quality and cost which will keep every player happily entertained was overly optimistic.

Player value of something is exactly what keeps people subscribed to a game.  But I think I know what you're trying to say, that if you produce something that players value as much, or at least almost as much, but it's cheaper/faster to make then that's the way you want to go since you're getting more value for the effort it takes to produce.

But that's the rub.  What other content are you able to produce that both cheaper/faster and will get people to stick around for twice as long?

You seem to have missed the original point that was being made.  It's that if Bioware wants to keep the Bioware game fans (as opposed to the MMO fans) engaged and subbed to the game, they're going to have to keep delivering the same kind of content that got them to buy the game to begin with.  It will be up to the bean counters at EA if the cost of doing so will be worth it.  But I'm confident that if they don't and just try to half ass things with the occasional new flashpoint and operation, then they'll keep losing subs.

I fully agree that this is a flaw of their own making, and it's been said from the beginning that the biggest obstacle they'll run into is providing more of the storyline content.  But that's the bed they made so now they need to lie in it.  Let's be honest though; Bioware wasn't ever going to make any other kind of game.  With the exception of a couple of games very early on, it's the only kind of game they've ever made.

And everyone LOVED Jade Empire!  :grin:

(Actually, I did, but the combat system was completely unbalanced to the point of infinite one-hit kills within any mook combat scenario.)

Jade Empire was one of two Bioware RPGs I only played through one time (well I haven't done Mass Effect 3 playthrough #2 yet, but I will), mostly because I hated the combat.

That's not a point, that's just wishful thinking. I'm sure Bioware would love to present rich slices of story based content on a monthly basis it's just incredibly unlikely to happen. Even with the full team it just takes too long to develop the content, and with diminishing subscriptions there's a fair chance that team will start to be whittled down making it even less possible.

Have they released, or announced they will release, any new story content? I seem to remember them promising "A year of content ready to go" and "we'll be keeping the full development team" prior to launch but I'm not seeing it in their patches.

Not so much hate, as that would require some sort of emotional investment. I tried really hard to like GW and it just left me... Meh.

The retarted thing is the rest of the game is so fucking bland. I can understand a game about the stories. But then it's tacked onto an anemic, underperforming WoW clone. And that, IMO is where they fucked up.

'Wishful thinking' or not, it's what Bioware was banking on and it's how TOR will live or die.

Bioware over-promised and under-delivered.  It's going to be the demise of this game.  Too many resources focused on the wrong things.  It's too late to get everyone back that they need to turn the ship around.  As they say "That ship has sailed".

I agree, they should cut out pvp and operations asap.

I don't care what they do.  If it made the trip from 1-50 more fun the 3rd time, 4th, and 5th time, I'd resub.  Spamming the space bar to avoid bad voice acting and lousy story did nothing for my playing experience. 

Bugs like this are not helping them.
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4302754

They will attempt to live by refocusing development towards repeatable content. I'm not saying it's going to save the game (I don't think there is anything they can do at this point to get the numbers they hoped for), but it has to make more sense for them than more expensive, non-repeatable, fragmented class story content. As Kageru pointed out, the design of the game was flawed from the start. With declining subs that likely can't justify huge expensive class-tailored patch content (if it ever could have), you're going to see repeatable patch content that aims to keep people subscribed as long as possible. PvP, Daily quest hubs, dungeons, and raids. The legacy system was a good example, encouraging players to repeat leveling content they've already seen most of to level up their legacy level. Any story content you see will most likely be like the Rakghoul plague event: content shared between all classes and both factions, most likely staggered so that you can't blow through it in one day.

Anyone expecting Act 4 for their class as patch content, in the same individually class-tailored style as Acts 1-3, is kidding themselves. You might see that in an expansion pack if EA decides to bankroll one.

Same here.  But I won't resub till there's LFD.  Too many times stuck on empty planets with Heroics just sitting there.

I'd wondered what country list you were talking about, and Google is my friend: New Europe and Middle East list (http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20120426).

Not on that list was the Asia Pacific country launch into Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Hong Kong (http://www.swtor.com/info/news/news-article/20120214) on March 1.

I'm not suspecting that any one country provided a massive bump, but the sum total helps hide declines in the original launch countries. After all, they've launched in over 40 countries since January and their player population is down by a fifth.

I doubt it added any meaningful numbers. Launching months after the US release date is fine if they have positive word of mouth and the money for a local advertising campaign but they had neither as far as I could see. So pretty much the only people who moved to the Australian servers would be the Australians who'd already been playing for months on the US servers. Singapore and HK probably stayed where they were since US latency is probably about the same as their latency to Australia.

I do suspect the numbers are more rosy than the reality. Free trials, discounting the box price, a free month and a lot of people buying long subscription periods at launch will all conceal some percentage of people who still count as subscribers but are far from active and unlikely to remain subscribed. The decline is probably steeper than it looks, and even the "level on of each class" people will burn out unless they can deliver some pretty compelling new content.

Though they really need to get serious with server merges. Maybe they can actually do that now that they've squeaked through another investor presentation.

This is where the shittiness and short-sightedness of their MMO game design really becomes apparent. Because they completely painted themselves into a corner. Instead of delivering continuing story updates to 100% of their players (already daunting), they have to deliver 8 separate story updates at a time to 1/8 of their players each (basically impossible).

They could try just going with a generic continuing storyline that all classes can get involved in, but that's not what the single player game was for people. That's not how they sold the boxes either, and that's not what drew people in. And currently they've been trying to do that in a half-assed way through Ops and FPs, which is definitely not the avenue appropriate for the casual single player audience.

It's the base design of the game that's broken. You get retention either through solo grind (vanilla wow leveling) or multiplayer repeatable content (EQ leveling, vanilla WoW end game), and the draw of this game was neither of those. Leveling is too fast and accessible, and has to be in this day and age, for long term retention, and the repeatable content is precisely NOT what people are playing TOR for.

1) Play like a single player RPG for 50 levels to finish your epic class story! Brought to you by Bioware, RPG artisans extraordinaire! You've beat the game!

...

2) soooo ... please continue to play our bog standard WoW end game? Please? $15 a month isn't much, it's less than a cup of coffee a day!

If they spend a lot of money on story, retain a decent number of players, but lose money per sub the game still dies.

They don't appear to have any sort of clever production tricks for creating decent story quickly and cheaply. Creating high-quality story content has a high fixed cost, which might be justifiable with huge sub numbers but makes little sense without them.

They spent a ton of money on a lot of story and already have a bunch of people unsubscribing, and many more who don't log in much and are going to unsub in the nearish future. There's no way they can spend comparable money unless there is some reason to believe the new content will be more cost-effective. And a lot of people aren't even complaining about the story as much as about LFD and mechanical issues and such. It's just a question of how expensive is the fixed cost of story creation vs. how many people more story content will retain.


There's no incentive to keep Bioware fans if doing so is monumentally expensive. I had a friend who worked at CarOrder.com - they lost money on every car they sold. They had their "best" month (in number of cars sold) a month before they had a hiring freeze then went out of business.

Creating high-quality story content will lose Bioware money unless they can amortize the cost across a large number of subscribers. I'm not going to claim to know exactly how much their content costs to create but it's hard to imagine that the value proposition is there.

I disagree that it is too easy to level in TOR. In my package of solutions to fix the game I'd change it the other way:

- quadruple the experience gain from questing and killing.
- reduce the number of non-class quests on each planet by half, maybe more. (they flat out suck!)
- cut the number of planets you need to visit by half, and use the other worlds to cate alternate storylines. It's stupid having every character visit every world for every storyline. Make it so at level 20 I get to chose between Nar Shaada or Tatooine, and there's enough content on those worlds to get me to the next pair of planets.

Also the Rokal hate from cata is silly. He has a completely valid point re. building of more content.

It would be interesting if additional characters after you have capped one had a significantly different path. Use the legacy system to increase the XP payout and decrease the shared quests with each capped character. Maybe even add some random events, perhaps referencing your other characters, to juice up the experience. They won't do it though because that's a lot of work (in terms of making the quest flow flexible) for a group that's already proved they're willing to repeat quests indefinitely in order to level alts.

Subsequent characters do level faster, since the Legacy system gives you presence bonuses for each capped out companion (and a fat 100 points for hitting 50 with a human.) This significantly increases the power of your next character's companion characters, so you get through things faster, can take on Heroics with fewer people than before, etc. Doing 'everything' on each planet so far on this playthrough has me significantly outleveling each one by the end, and that's without even touching alternate sources of XP like space combat, flashpoints, or PVP.

It's also been pretty trivial to skip large sections here and there when we don't feel like doing them again, as well - especially since there are the bonus quest sections on each planet that you can sub in on various playthroughs in place of stuff on other planets, etc. Don't want to do much on Tattooine, do the Nar Shaddaa bonus instead, that sort of thing. The leveling experience is not as repetitive as people would have you believe (until Act 3, anyway - it does seem to slow down enough there that you can't skip as much, which is why Belsavis feels like a bit of a roadblock every time).

Supposedly they're working on having your characters make cameos in each other's stories at some point down the road, it was mentioned in some interview or another as something that Legacy might allow them to eventually do.

I still say (and this has been voiced by many others on this board) was that the fundamental flaw of this game is that they designed it to compete with WoW circa 2005 not WoW circa 2012. 

No respecs?
No Lfg?
No world PvP objectives?
Ridiculuous travel/loading screens?
No wardrobe funciton to swtich gear?
No easy way to customize appearance?
Poor combat repsonsiveness?  (although this has improved).

I feel like they locked themselves into a bad engine early on that has made making these features avialable lot more difficult than it should be.  That's a management/design problem.

This only applies IF you've capped out a companion or hit 50 with a human.  I've been in since the head start, have two 50s, and none of this applies to me.  (Vette is my highest companion at 9k.  Most are sub-4k.)  The only Legacy bonus I have is the Inquisitor/Warrior buff added to all my characters.

Duoing also makes a massive difference over soloing in advancement.

Sure I'm better than a newbie.  I know lots of tricks, have the mechanics down, and can support alts through crafting.  However, there can be a huge difference in boost between two players depending upon their choices.

What many of your are suggesting as the way to economically solve the games problems really boils down to a bait and switch on the consumer. It won't work.

It's not from capping out affection but from finishing all their quests and dialogues.  For most the last one is in that 9.5k range though.

And I just bought the Human unlock for 500k as I'm never making any in the first place.  190 bonus presence (human, 9/10 companions on my 50s) and my Vanguard's first companion has just been a wrecking ball for a few planets now.

There isn't much difference since they are restricted by affection.

It'll be a long time before I have 500k I can spend on an unlock.  I'm still working on getting speeder training on one 50.

This is why I love when you make such declarative statements as though you're in the room with the developers and can pass off some kind of inside knowledge as 'fact'.  From the March guild summit (http://dulfy.net/2012/03/05/swtor-guild-summitlive-blogging/):


You all keep arguing against the straw man than continuing the stories would be easy and/or inexpensive.  No one is saying either one.  It doesn't matter how expensive, time-consuming, inefficient or unlikely continuing the story arcs is; all of that impacts the ability of Bioware to produce the content but none of it changes the desire of players to want the content.

As the above transcript shows, Bioware is either planning for a paid expansion this year (has any MMO ever had a paid expansion within the first year of release?) or they're planning on one of the content updates to extend the stories.  There's a rumor flying around that Bioware has even moved people off of Dragon Age III and pushed back its release to help with TOR.  My uninformed guess would be if that's true, its probably to help with the story aspect since it seems unlikely DAIII devs would be pulled for their expertise in cross server queuing or PvP.

Edit:

More stuff from that guild summit to reinforce my ponit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=EverQuest_II_expansions&oldid=484690252 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=EverQuest_II_expansions&oldid=484690252)

Kunark (EQ1) and The Second Age (UO) miss that cut-off barely.  A few others are in the year-and-a-half range: CoH, LotRO, SWG.

E: Shrouded Isles was 13 months after DAoC came out as well.

They can and will introduce 'story' as patch content, it's just probably not going to be in the expensive format players want. The Rakghoul plague event was story content, and it's the sort of cheap/efficient story content you're likely to continue seeing.


As if developers never have been dishonest, or had their grand plans cut down when their publisher decided that money planned for them would be better spent elsewhere. At PAX the SWTOR devs also said that after 1.2 patches would be coming monthly, want to bet on how that pans out?

We can wait and see just what sort of patch content they end up putting out. You can either make the logical conclusion that 1.1 and 1.2 were hints of the sort of content you'll be seeing from patches (QoL and repeatable content) especially with subs falling, or you can read into what developers have said about their underperforming game and hold your breath for class story content.

Bioware Didn't Have to Lose 400,000 Subs - Guild Review (http://www.lotd.org/showthread.php?p=287725)

I think that the free 30 days padded the real number of people who are leaving or have left the game, and that the next quarterly report will be bad.  I do think they will stay between 500,000 and 850,000 subs for their first year, but short of an awesome expansion they won't be anywhere close to 2 million subs again. 

SWTOR feels like it has no community soul because they gave us no real community tools, and the game launched without too many features that gamers of 2012 expect from an AAA title.  Certainly they will be profitable for a while, but I think they underestimate the pace at which they can lose customers.  Warhammer and AOC had awesome launches too, sold a million+ boxes, and a year later both games were considered failures because they ignored the key issues that made their games unfun.

SWTOR can turn it around and be a good MMO, but it depends on how many people they are willing to lose before they put in the mechanics that their customers are demanding.

I don't think that's a realistic conclusion to draw given that the two kinds of content exist on completely different release schedules.  No one should have expected chapter 4 within the first handful of major patches (unless "major patches" were released at a glacial rate, which they really haven't been), so it not being there doesn't belie anything.

New features and a smattering of level-cap content is pretty much what I expected to get this far into the game's life.  Didn't see a world event (but that's because I don't really care for them) and might have liked to have seen a new bonus series in the ~40s, but I can see the logic of not having that instead of the new set of dailies.

They need to be able to crank out quality content in short order, address bugs, and add modern features. Those're tall orders individually.

And from the latest raid tier, I'm doubting they can do it. Denova is basically like "Ruby Sanctum" only it takes longer and is harder/less fun.

Many of the black hole vendor pieces are, statwise, inferior to the Rakata. I'm glad we can socket pieces, but I still don't like the itemization on the black hole non campaign stuff.

I haven't looked at all of the black hole stuff in a while but ironically I think the non-campaign stuff for Vanguards is better itemized than the campaign stuff.

I wish they would've done the reitemization they said they were going to do since my gear is shitted up with gobs of literally useless accuracy.

Having not seen the new dungeons, do they still have the trash balance that the older stuff did? One of my complaints on the Rakghoul dungeon was that the trash was both more obnoxious, more abundant, and tougher than the bosses.

I assume you mean "no switching ACs," because actual respecs have been in since the beginning.


My solo characters are also facerolling the shit out of things. We definitely do not need to duo at this point in our respective presence lives in order to run roughshod over everything, we just like to do it. I know I have a ridiculous presence compared to someone with just one level 50 (by the way, presence appears to have a cap at the lower levels  :why_so_serious:), but ... I do not understand why or how you only have one companion capped out of two level 50's. I can't imagine that is standard.

Well ok, yes, if you want to ignore them, sure. I don't think that is normal play behavior for the average player though.

Dual spec.

That isn't a "respec."  :heart:

Anecdote <> data, but excepting my romance companion on my first character, I didn't have a single companion on any of my characters above 4k until 1.2 went in.

Since then, between my pocket Armormech and getting more and more companions' storylines completed, my alts are regularly facerolling groups 3-4 levels higher than them.

The trash is obnoxious in Denova but most of the worst is skippable if people can pay attention. The bosses are a pain in the ass and not very fun on hardmode.

I'd say my style is rather closer to average than Mr. MinMax. :-P

Unless you're considering average the MMO Min-Maxer.

I had no idea building my companions' rep was going to do a goddamn thing when I maxed most of them, wanting more story in my story-based MMO is hardly "minmax."

EDIT: That said, yes, I suspect the weirdos who didn't max their companions previously because there was "no reason to" have several carrots they will merrily follow to max that rep now.

The presence is certainly a bit of an incentive to get one of my companions out from -1000 in the near future.  But I wouldn't do it had they not taken the cooldown off of gifts, so now it goes 10x faster.

I am really not sure why they had that cooldown in the first place, it was very silly.

We do need to stop encouraging the lunatic fringe by making it normal behavior. BUT I DIGRESS.

I capped Mako out pretty early (somewhere in the early 40s, iirc), but I got lucky on several vectors: I played tank spec and she's a healer; I played light path BH and she was tuned to almost every decision I made; she was the romance character (lots of extra affection). I never played with another companion outside the very few forced moments.

I had maybe a couple hundred on each of the others, and Skadge still doesn't like me. I'm not going to grind affection with gifts, that's just lame; I'm not going to use a companion that doesn't make sense for my build (ie; gimme heals). And as I'm finding on my new Sage, when the appropriate spec companion is not compatible, you gain almost no affection through story. Qyzen barely tolerates my Sage but I need a tank.

I still think one of the bigger mistakes they made, given it's a Bioware game, is giving companions too late. Obviously more story for the non-starter companions is a must. And dropping the idea of the customization kit slot affecting the companion's role was just nuts. Best you can hope for was my situation with Mako, otherwise it's varying levels of compromise and frustration.

I guess I should put my voice on the boards, since they tout listening to the playerbase, but I just want to play the game and leave the design to the designers. Catering to the loudest and most persistent fans is a recipe for awful mmo.

Again, I say: Wanting more story out of my story-based MMO via my companions is not a min/max issue. I didn't do it because "oh man I will get more presence" or "oh man they'll crit more when I have them craft." I did it because "I want to talk to my companions." I have a hard time believing a majority of players playing this are straight up refusing to raise the rep of their companions because of some vague objection to gifts or whatever.

EDIT: I mean shit, I have held back on doing the Last Conversation with a couple of my companions because I don't want to be utterly done speaking to them yet.

On my trooper, I only really gave a shit about the wardroid's conversations, because he was funny.  Everyone else was just languishing down wherever they were from whatever random gifts I happened across while leveling. 

When the Presence bonus went in, though, I maxxed them out ASAP (well, 4 of em, mr. bombadier is still in-progress, he is clooose but he is fussy about his gift types).

I also want a lot more out of my companions. My point is, the game does its best to get in the way of that. How do you raise outside of gits? I'm probably the only one who hates that mechanic, but you have to admit it's a pretty retarded way to cop out on the fact that you won't be getting affection unless a companion is a)useful to your build; b)the correct mind-set for your character's conversational choices; and c)unlocked early enough.

I'm not attacking the fact that you want more story, we're totally on the same page. But it's eminently in the doman of min/max if you HAVE to use gifts (on my BH on 4/5 companions) to unlock dialogue options, whether your goal is dialog or stat bonuses.

I like Torian, and I guess I could put him in dps mode and be ok, ditto Blizz. Both would be ok with the way I converse...but how much affection do the dailies give (though dailies are another crappy mmo tack-on). Maybe for chapter 4 stuff I can use teh guys....if gearflation doesn't force my hand back to Mako. Skadge and Gault are pretty much unavailable, though I do make concessions to light/dark paths having some unique companions. But again, I think it's a cop out for not having light and dark paths for each companion (especially jedi with the heavier ramifications of alignment on them).

I am always pretty much up to my ass in gifts anyway (that is how I level mission skills, as the low level blue mats are pretty useless in the long run.)


This statement makes no sense to me at all.

C isn't an issue.  You get more affection on the later companions than you do the earlier ones.  Nadia, the last consular companion, is the first companion I maxed out even though I never used a gift on her.

Yeah but (Mr.Obvious here) you have to bother playing that far to get that last companion.  The fun died for me mid-30's and nothing on the companions seemed to be improving.

Oh, I forgot, if it's not something you, personally, feel like doing, it's obviously something you'd only do to min/max, even though there was absolutely no clear reason to do so when I did it.

I AM A CRAZY FROTHY MIN/MAXING HARDCORE POOPSOCKER RAAAAAAR

I don't deny I play the shit out of this game, as I play the shit out of any Bioware game, but frankly the "boo hoo, giving presents gives me a sad, therefore anyone with more than one maxxed companion is a CRAZY MIN/MAXXER" thing is fucking stupid. It's not a fucking min/max thing. It's a giving the tiniest bit of effort in the ways provided to you thing. The gifts are there because you just can't max affection on everyone. You can't. I can use whoever the fuck I feel like (and I do) on my trooper, and he still needed to use presents. I did it because I cared to do it, not because OH GOD MUST MAX ... NOTHING AT ALL, BUT TRUST ME I AM MAXXING IT.

That I am now being rewarded extra for it is just a happy surprise.

Gift Giving isn't Min/Maxing. It's just Maxing.


If you didn't have gifts, THEN Companion affections would be a Min/Max thing... but you do, so you can purely pick dialogues with them on RPing instead of affection gains.

Yeah I hadn't thought of that. The gifts do act as a safety net for people who want to give particular answers even though they give -points with the companion they're using.

I did find it strange how trivial it is to cap the last companion (I got Yuun into the 8000s without taking him on any missions, and maxed "the last consular companion" in less than a planet's time and kept her for the rest of chapter 3 because, well, she was the most useful companion for my heal-spec sage) and how hard it is to cap the first one. On my trooper I was basically glued to Dorne (2nd companion) because that's the only sane gameplay choice for a tanky vanguard... maxed her affection out fairly easily as well.

I am a min-maxer and decided to max my trooper's companions out for the crafting bonuses anyway; they were fairly easy except for Vik. Screw Vik.  :awesome_for_real:

I had Vik at -75 affection at once. Then reconsidered becuase he has the craft skill bonuses for my craft skills.  :oh_i_see:

I used to doomcast this game because, in my opinion, the cool story bits were not enough to hide the outdated "everything else", or "feels like wow with less fun". And I was concerned about longevity, as I couldn't see the sticky in it once once you are done with a couple of stories. Replaying the game with the other faction works, but to stomach the PvE all over again just to see a few different cutscenes for another class is a thing for devoted ones only (and it seems there's less of them than Bioware anticipated).

I used to say that he game would have been OK... with no subscription fee. That the kind and amount of content, tacked to an outdated WoW clone, was going to have the lifetime of your typical single-player Bioware game: a couple of months.

Turns out I was right on everything, except one thing: I am one of the very few who is still paying and playing after 5 months. That's weird I know, and it's all due to the fast-paced PvP action and some real life friends that are in it with me. You could say I dislike everything about SWTOR, or that it all ranges from "OK" to "Meh..", except the actual PvP combat (when you are not perma-CrowdControlled) which turned out to be fun and responsive after some around-launch patches. So regardless of the shortcomings I've been able to get a lot of fun out of it, and until GW2's release I was happy to keep paying for it. It's my "daily shooter", we treat it kind of like a Team Fortress or a DOTA. We just fire it up, we have some fun, and that's all we ask. A glorified, dumbed down, multiplayer team based game. But that's fine.

You know where's the irony? That I'll have to stop playing very soon since no one else wants to pay for this anymore, so warzones don't start anymore.
My server, which used to be the second most crowded in EU (outside of French and German community ones, which seem healthy) is down to a whopping maximum of 15 people in fleet during peak hours. Fifteen. It's about 3 or 4 during the day. If that isn't a dead server on a dead game I don't know what it.

Like many other here, I wanted to like the game. That's why I bought it right away despite the negative impressions. Patches can happen, right?
It was simply impossible. Irritating from day one for countless stupid choices and disappointing technical limitations, it failed to ever turn the boat around or even just tip it, and the butchering of every possible PvP aspect (PvP is supposedly self-generating content) pretty much falls in line with the lack of things to do when you are a PvE player at 50.

So the same question I asked before launch happens to come back hauntingly: with all the decent free to play DIKUs and WoW clones out there, and with the Mass Effect saga already out, why should people pay a sub for this? Cause, you know, lightsabers only bring you that far.

No, I hate gifts, too.  They're an unnatural barrier in the way of what should be a natural progression.

See, it's a passive trait.  You don't even realize you're doing it. :-P


Yikes!  I was referring to Ingmar.

You just play the shit out of Bioware games as you say.  (Which does go back to my original point about the average player.  Neither of you are the average player.  At all.)

Well for the first time, in a very long time, my guild had 2 people online during prime time.  PvP queues on my server are now taking 30 minutes to pop. Which is essentially keeping a very large portion of my guild from logging in.  If cross realm pvp queues or server mergers do not happen soon I'm going to guess we will be losing a large portion of our players. 

After talking to a few of them, they are going to try Diablo 3 even through that game style doesn't really suit them. But its the best of the options out there.  WoW ran its course, SWTOR doesn't have players pvping, and Rift didn't have sticky with them.  The majority of people are waiting for GW2.  The sad part is we were running two 16 man raids a week. Last week we had to cut it down to one 16 man raid and one 8 man. The 16 man raid we had to scratch together 2 filler slots at the last minute so we could even go.

I think most of our players are starting to realize if the decline in population continues they won't be playing this game in a few months.  If they aren't playing this game in a few months, why log in now to work on advancing your character?  Which then spirals into everyone not logging in because their friends aren't online.

I got a sorc and jugg to 50 and only the sorc had managed to max out a companion (khem) just through conversations, and the occasional gift when there wasn't an underworld metal mission available. My jugg recently hit 50, and they were at ~9k, 6k, 4k, 3k, 3k. Khem was the only one with some quests out in the actual world rather than the exit stage left stuff everyone else does. They were just average, but they were there at least.

My sorc had to run dailies picking the options that gave points for whoever I was trying to max (regardless of how badly they went against how my char should act) and keep guys out on gift missions. I was doing that for the crafting bonuses and to see what little story each companion had. Now that there's legacy stuff, my jugg will just get Pierce maxxed as I need a ranged tank unlock. Probably let my jugg's other  companions languish as so far the companion stories haven't been worth putting up with more Belsavis and Esh-ka and I want to run at least one republic character before I quit.

I don't know why you're trying so hard to make this adversarial. I'm just bitching about the gift mechanic.

I do agree with Fordel's revision that it's maxing rather than min/maxing.

What's the alternative?  Saying "no story for you" if you didn't perfectly set-up your responses and companion selection?  (Which would be actual min/maxing.)  Is grinding repeatable missions better than gifts?  Or would you just get rid of affection?

Gifts are an amelioratory mechanic, like ME3 multiplayer is.  It's a system one can spend some time/effort in that makes another system easier to live with for completionists while also keeping logical coherence.

Yep.  G'bye.  They're already gated by where you are in the overall story.  There's no good reason to not allow them to pop up when they're ready, and they'll flow more naturally.

That runs into its own set of problems though.  Namely why the hell are we talking about their deepest and darkest when my actions are otherwise abhorrent to them?

There are plenty of non-affection-requiring lines of dialogue that focus on the task at hand already, the affection ones become rather personal rather quickly.

If your actions are abhorrent to them, a couple of trinkets shouldn't change that.  "I know how you hate when I kill entire villages, but I got you this really cool memorabilia.  We cool?"

Then we're at "no story for you".  Moreover, I have a lot easier time suspending disbelief over having to do something that symbolizes relationship building (as much as I'd like, "Go out for drinks with Vector." to be a conversation) then just having affection-style conversations trigger because I hit a certain planet with no effort made by me to court their favor.

It's an RPG, bars going up or down mean other things, that's just the language/limitation of the genre.  But dialogues proper are something I hold to a much higher standard.

So in addition to full light and dark path (and I guess grey path) stories, there should also be positive and negative affection stories. Which would be a lot of fun with Skadge!

But to be slightly more serious, the suspension of disbelief is pretty significant with companions, anyway. If Skadge hates me, why is he still on my ship? I would imagine at some point he'd engage in some conversations just because he's tired of sitting on the boat and looking for scavenged stuff on ebay.

That's unfortunately something they had to cut a corner on because people kept doing stuff like killing their companions off in beta and then being unable to progress, etc.

If I could change one thing about the companions - and this would've been a huge drain on resources and I am sure it's half the reason why they didn't do it this way - it would be having a friendship/rival system like DA2 had. It's not positive/negative exactly, it's "we are besties, we agree on everything!  :awesome_for_real:" versus "our worldviews are wildly different but I respect you anyway." One of the best things about DA2, and one of the things I'm most hoping they realize worked really well from that game.

Like people bitch about how Tharan clearly hates them just because he gives minor rep hits when you start going "blah blah mystical jedi bullshit blah." But that would really just be a prime example of "different approach to the world, just a rival instead of an ENEMY," as he doesn't actually hate force users or anything, he's just a scientist and prefers. You know. Science to platitudes. But because it's just a "make number go up" system, people don't really see it that way.

It's all part of the damage from trying to tell story in an MMO. Because the character is going to be long lived you can't limit what they end up with, so all the companion and companion missions need to be available. Whereas in a single player you could kill them, have them abandon the PC, have deeper stories and more romance options on the assumption that the player will play through again if they want to see different selections and outcomes.

Short little article. (http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/03/08/behind-the-scenes-of-star-wars-the-old-republic-throwing-people-at-the-problem/)

Very short actually, and it's PC Gamer but what I found interesting (besides the size of the staff) is their goal was just 1,000,000 subs, which seems pretty realistic and probably a lot less than people thought their goal would be.

I'm sorry but that's crap. Thats just back peddling at a horrendous rate to avoid embarrassment.

We had *numerous* indications from EA and Bioware about how big this game was supposed to be. You don't spend $200millon to be a distant second place to the leader, and they were very clear they were aiming for WoWs top spot in the genre before launch. This is just the same hand waving that happened in the recent EA conference call where suddenly TOR isn't even in their top 5 priorities despite previously being the game the entire company was betting on.

With reference to the actual article - every time I read about game development it just sounds awful. Spending the last 6 months cutting deaths from the game doesnt sound right I have to say. I u derstand the need to avoid feature creep and lock the final game down but that seems excessive compared to what we see their companies doing, and clearly didn't help their game be that much more stable in the long run either. As many have said they should absolutely have pushed back the launch date and got some of those vital features into the game for launch.

Note the article date of March 8th. It isn't backpedaling - at least not in the sense that it has anything to do with the numbers we just heard now.

Almost 650 employees (not including overhead) at the peak of SWTOR development. Pretty sure this dwarves the development team size for any previous Western MMO. It's no wonder they spent north of $200 million on the game.

EA has always said over 1m is their magic number. What that doesn't say is over 1m active players means in terms of ongoing development and reinvestment. Or how long the active player base would need to remain 1m+ for SWOR to be considered successful internally.

They knew the retention rate long before it was announced and in much greater accuracy.

I agree, furious back-pedaling. You don't have a team that size, with this IP, to do an "experiment".

That much QA staff and you launch with a game THAT buggy? They really must've had their time table moved forward.

Dual spec is what I meant.  Apologies for my imprecise langauge.

I know we all love our narratives here, but that 1m number is a lot older than March.  2 February 2011, same thing (http://www.gamespot.com/news/star-wars-the-old-republic-needs-only-500k-subscribers-ea-6297338):

They probably outsourced it to China,

Q: "How many faults have you found?"
A: "How many would you like?"

Whether or not EA considers SWTOR profitable will become clear in the depth of their content patches. They're never going to acknowledge it as a failure as that will just drive population away and gain them nothing.

Don't you know that substantially profitable means FAILURE at f13?

Nothing to do with pass/fail.  I have no doubt it will be profitable at 1milsubs(though I don't think they'll be staying above that for much longer)  but if anyone believes that EA/Bioware was estimating 1mil subs and anything more would be "happy extra" then you are just delusional.  1mil was the line for profit and the public motto but I can guarentee the game is seen internally as a failure for the investment.

Depends on what they mean by substantially profitable.

If they spent $200M on the game, and that's been the standard estimates, and you had about 2M in box sales, then you can make the following projections since EA operates at a 60% gross margin.

$100M in box sales gross profits $60M, leaving $140M to cover by subs. At $13-$15 per sub, average pricing plans would be $14M for one million users. $14M at 60% is $8.4M, which would mean you need 16 or 17 months to get a breakeven gross on your initial money.

Also, I would estimate that the majority of the $106M increase in advertising from FY11 to FY12 is due to SWTOR. So that's another 12 months you have to cover in subscriptions to make money.

So yes, after two and a half years of sustaining subs at one million, the game is most likely very profitable. That's assuming they can sustain those levels.

The real problem is that the game is too inflexible and slow in both attitude and content to hold the subscribers they currently have. At no point can I see subs increasing. Best case is that the subscriber count stabilizes.

What we're discussing here is how fast the descent, where the level-off is, and where the 'underwater' line is. Assuming the level-off is above the underwater line, the game will be profitable. I'm not sure you can consider it a 'success', though.

My personal opinion is that by this time next year, it'll be equivalent to vanguard. We've got a very strong lineup this year for this genre and so I'm pretty sure this game is fucked.

Look, the problem is that there's no way in hell they are gonna keep 1 million subs. Not with this game, not with what the game is now. Maybe 500k. Maybe. But I wouldn't bet on it. I'd say lots of you are still overestimating this silly little game with a huge IP. It didn't save SWG, and I don't see anything here that is indicating SWTOR's good health. You are all free to point me to it though, and no "_I_ am still having fun" doesn't count.

All Test\QA teams find more bugs then can be fixed.

Management and development\content creators determine a game's technical quality.

They really screwed up in having the end of the story match reaching max level.  Chapter 1 took me to level 30 or so, then the next two got me to 50.  At that point you might as well roll credits and pop up an unsubscribe button for most people because their endgame is horrible.  Chapter three should have been their endgame, give players something to do at max level besides dailies, heroic dungeons and battleground farming.

Absolutely correct.

The bean counter argument "well, it met the requirements to break even after x months and produced a stream of income afterwards" is like the bargaining step in some Kubler-Ross model for a dying MMO.

Outdated I believe. More recent quote:


http://files.shareholder.com/downloa...Transcript.pdf

I brought up that instance of it to counter the claim that the number was the result of "back peddling at a horrendous rate" and "furious back-pedaling", but that's a useful quote for the tea leaf readers.

This.  It is kind of astonishing to watch.  

Is the advertising budget included in these development figures we're putting up?  Because that was a LARGE amount of advertising.  Going from covering the side of buildings to "play free this weekend" in less than a month's time has to be some sort of phenomenon.  But the sky is not falling...I know this because of the title of the thread  :grin:

Not saying they ever back peddled, I'm saying those quoted expectations are a lot lower than is realistic.

Seriously.  The whole idea seems fucking idiotic to me.  Just let me pick the responses and reactions that my companions will have as a default and call it a day instead of having gifts that allow me to kill whoever I want/steal/act like a general douche.

That's actually a good idea. You could add an appendage to the line like the prefix for alignment gain:

 /I love puppies (Make +10, Skadge -10)
-Puppies are easy to sell on the GTN (Gault +10, Mako -10)
\ Mmm...puppies (Skadge +30, Mako -30)

I remember reading estimates Lucas takes 30% of the profit. Though obviously I don't trust the figure I'm sure he's taking a healthy slice which eats into EA's profits.

Bleh, that encourages you to play for the gain/loss rather than the RP factor. The light/dark thing is already annoying enough that way. I guess if you could turn it off like the light/dark thing I could choke it down.

I turned all mine off.

I SHOULD turn mine off, I stopped looking ages ago.

I didn't like what it did to my lovely blue complexion, so I toned it down. Also helped that I was trying to bang Ensign Temple by then and she loved all my LS choices.

Random data point: I hit the unsubscribe button just now, because the server is just deserted during my core play time.

Yeah, it's my own damn fault for playing on a us server from europe, but it's not like it was a problem in the beginning. Now I have to wait forever to join any pvp and calls for FPs are also pretty damn rare.

I still have the full free month queued up in my account, so I'll keep logging in during that. But an MMO without any people to group with isn't worth putting any more money into. Too bad, because I really enjoyed the pvp when it happened, but if I wanted to sit around for hours waiting for fun stuff to happen, I'd play Eve.

(plus Diablo, but that was just the final push)

I can definitely see some effects of D3 in that since it released my GTN sales volume has dropped off a cliff. Obviously too soon to say if it will have any lasting effect on population long-term.

Fleet pop has been ass as well.

I read that as "poop" :ye_gods:

I'm sure that's ass also.

Poop ass.

Conversely, there are currently 22 people on Republic Taris. Normally there are maybe 2-4.


Maybe all the non-diablo folks have the same idea and are leveling their alts.  :why_so_serious:

I've noticed that Coruscant, DK, Taris (Lazy Reps) and Balmorra (Filthy Imps) generally always have notable populations.

Could definitely be an alt craze sort of thing...

When you realize the level 50 Warzones never start cause there's not enough level 50 willing to wait in a queue for hours, then you make an alt and enjoy 10-49 PvP. As a result, even less level 50 Warzones start. So depressing.

Cross server warzones cannot come soon enough.

Warzones are pretty much all I do now - queues have become terrible even in primetime, and on my server, the Republic has gone from largely dominating lvl 50 warzones, to getting absolutely crushed as most of the better PvPers (and most of the healers) on this side have upped sticks and left. All in the last week or two.

I had no intention of leaving in the short term, but there may be nothing left for me soon.

For me, what's unfortunate is that they keep trying to improve the 'endgame' when there isn't one, as far as I'm concerned.  I finished my class story.  Great, I'm done with that character.  Switching to another one.  As far as I know, they have yet to add any actual new class story content, which is only one of two pieces of content that would keep me interested for more than a day (the other being if they finally put the same-sex romances in, cause several of the female romance interests are really neat but I'm not going to listen to my character having boring male voice for 50 levels to experience them).  And if to experience any of this new 'story' content I have to group?  No thanks.  So if any of these raids or flashpoints they've been adding have new story, I'm never going to see it.  I tried out the grouping system and the 'roll for dialogue'.  Gave it a real solid chance.  Hate it.  I can't stand having my character's decisions ignored - not overruled by an argument, just utterly ignored as she stands there without comment.  So I'm not grouping anymore.  At all.

So, pretty much the same problem I expected from the beginning - not adding story at a solid pace.  Good chance I'm cancelling soon, as soon as I finish up the remaining storylines I'm interested in - which I'll be rushing through, because I'm tired of planet quests.

My goon guild can field like two 8 mans now...the 8-man I'm in is #3 and on its last legs due to no-shows which I'm guilty of as of Tuesday since I actually got home real late and passed out without sending any messages. Whoops.

Denova is just a shitty, boring raid.

There's no gear grind in the 10-49 bracket and a few key abilities are missing which makes games more manageable.


Conversely a few key abilities still exist without any real counters which makes some matches really one sided, I'm looking at you Sage pull  :why_so_serious:

But yea, by 20 most specs are competitive and by 30 most specs have 95% of what they're about at 50 too.

I don't want to PvE, at all, I hate it in this game. I can't stomach one more second of it for the life of me. So I am leveling an alt through only PvP, just to participate in the 10-49 bracket, but it's very slow and in the meantime you get creamed badly. People even target you simply because you are low level. I do not play to win, but the fun of being a perennial lowbie with a limited set of skill that don't even complete a build wears off pretty quickly.

But yeah, that's all we have as of now (aside from Diablo 3  :why_so_serious: ). Funny to notice how they changed the daily from "win 3 matches" to "play 6 matches", considering that on some servers there's no way to win any of the very few matches that ever start. Goofiest bandaid ever.

Yeah, I don't really get it, either. The folks they are trying to please can't be, and will be the first to bail for TNBT. Their bread and butter are folks like us (and sjofn, but nobody can create content THAT fast). Chapter 4 should be coming at some point, and honestly even though my play time is down as I diversify a bit, I've got a ton of content left to go through.

May I humbly suggest you're in the wrong game? Not wanting to do PvE at all in TOR is sort of like playing ShadowBane (back when it existed) and not wanting anything to do with PvP. Just saying is all. Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy TOR's pvp when my side isn't getting facerolled because the other side has twice the number of Sages/Sorcerors than we do (seriously when one class determines who wins its time to take a good look at that class) but even I know it's an afterthought to the bread and butter of the game.

And yes, I noticed the daily change too but I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good change personally since frankly, if your side loses all the time people stopped queueing.

Edit: On rereading I realized my post may have come off a bit different than I meant it to. Falconeer can play however he wants I just am not sure playing TOR only for the PvP is worth it. That's all. :)

They put in raids and pvp so they could tick boxes on the 'fully featured mmo' list.

This game is about story and that's about it. Everything else is a diversion when you want a break.

Riggswolfe, I am totally in the wrong game. SWTOR is a filler while waiting for other things, that are sadly late. But as a filler its PvP action proved to be much more fun than I predicted and I was happy to stay in it for that. I know what you mean, something along the lines of "how can you be surprised they are not supporting the PvP aspect considering it's an afterthought in an otherwise story driven PvE game?", and I'd agree with you. I shouldn't be surprised. I am just pissed cause I found one thing worth salvaging in this pile of bland whatevereness, and they are letting it die (with my subscription, and a few others) in a sad sad way.

Hey, I still have a couple of class quests to go (SW and BH have the bulk of theirs left, and I haven't quite finished the SI and smuggler).

Don't judge me.

Poop. Ass.

Besides leveling and raiding maybe 1-2 times a week. 90% of my playtime is PvP.  I have 3 toons valor 70, 74, 83.

I really like the PvP in SWTOR, they just need to get the server transfers and junk going and add some more wz's and turn Ilum into a siege area.

Ilum needs to be entirely reworked from the ground up. New Objectives, New Terrain, New Balancing, New off-hours activities.


I wouldn't even know where to start.

Lum's posting on his Facebook that BW:A is currently going through "The Culling"  No official announcement yet, but he's hearing from folks he's personally in contact with.  Evidently it's not a small number of people.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=462269

Welp, let the bloodgates open.

Yeah, firing a bunch of people always helps a game that needs more content/polish to retain subs and pull more people in.

This does seem a bit early for a game (particularly one of this size) to be hitting 'maintenance/subsistence' mode.

Counterpoint: EA probably expected better than "We managed to fiddle the subs numbers so we could just about hang onto 'one-tenth as successful as WoW' for the first quarter"

How can this be? SWTOR was the best mmo ever made just a few months ago. I am completely shocked to hear this news.

 :facepalm:

That was eulogy I didn't expect for a few more years at least. Yet another blow to A³ MMO hopes. Now would be the time for Blizzard to stick the boot in with a killer expansion like...  :oh_i_see: ...  :ye_gods:

Help us CCP, you're our only hope.   

So...is the sky falling now?   :grin: :why_so_serious:

I'm fairly sure even WoW has had their dev team reduced in the past.  The sky will have fallen when subs take a Conan/Warhammer dive. 

By the way, how many people have been laid off?  TOR had an enormous dev staff last I saw so I'm curious how bad the bloodletting is.

If the sky falling means they didn't hit their dreamy number that allowed them to keep an entire expensive dev team on the books, yeah. Chicken little wins! Good on ya.

Lum said he's hearing close to 200. No idea what percentage that is of BW Austin though.

Did it finally include Paul Barnett?

The SWTOR developers seemed pretty quiet. Which might have been them, having advertised they kept the whole development team into live, working on a massive additional content patch. The fact nothings been announced apart from deep cuts means that is less likely and their subscription decline will continue.

No, but the axe certainly is.

And I suspect the wider ramifications is that a lot of other publishers are going to be looking very closely at their MMO plans (except for Blactivision). Because if BioWare + EA + US$200 + Star Wars is unsuccessful, then whatever they have planned is going to have a rough time of it too.

If there's anyone left thinking in that range, they're either new to the genre or already five years into development and operating on inertia.

The rest have moved over to mobile and social by now  :awesome_for_real:

I don't think so. As long as WoW is still printing cash there'll be people who think they deserve to be the ones in that position. So they spend a lot of money, aim at the broad market, emulate WoW without actually understanding it and then fail. They're what are called "bad games".

Mobile and social? It may indeed be a large market, at some point, but it's an almost entirely disjoint market.

Most people with $200 million to spend have enough sense to now realize that spending that $200 million on a WoW clone is a bad idea. There aren't that many publishers with pockets that deep, and many of them have been burned. If you see more pricey WoW-clones it will probably be in the vein of 38 Studios - using creative financing from people who don't understand the risk.


You've been asking for them to produce story content as good as shipped with the game, at a pace at least equal to what they did pre-release. Kind of hard to do that now no? What is a significantly pared-down live team going to get done?

No, I haven't.

I think from numbers thrown around, it's probably half or a bit more than half.  I could be entirely wrong on this, however.

Rumor is Stephen Reid is gone.  Also I heard some of the contracted QA ppl got tossed.

That's my main concern now. Massive layoffs do not bode well for my Troopers Chapter Four story anytime soon.  :sad:

The chance of that appearing has not significantly decreased.

Lum posted on somethingawful that he heard about 40%.

I see what you did there.

He confirmed that on Twitter https://twitter.com/Rockjaw/status/205290607856455682

They should have fired James Ohlen.

 :rofl:  Way to go, EA corporate overlords.  Fire one of your most prominent CS and Community Liaisons.  Surely that will give everyone the impression that all is well  :why_so_serious:

Seconded - always thought he looked either scared or bored as if thinking "wtf am I doing here?".

Also, why is it the same gits (Walton, Vogel, et al) are always seen at or around the scene of the crime when an MMO is murdered? This is (at least) the second time Walton has waltzed off saying "my job here is done" only for the game to launch and go, if not tits  actually up, then staggering in the manner of one poisoned and soon to assume the position.

How do these people continually get hired?  :headscratch:

Mobile and social? It may indeed be a large market, at some point, but it's an almost entirely disjoint market.

a large market, at some point, but it's an almost entirely disjoint market.

but it's an almost entirely disjoint market.

disjoint

(http://rlv.zcache.com/son_i_am_disappoint_sticker-p217717094514513567envb3_400.jpg)

As for why the same gits are always around? They've got the experience and the money men don't. The same reason the same shitty CEOs always seem to land on their feet in other companies. Boards like hiring people with track records, even if those track records are shitty.

So apparently the LFD tool is going to be server only.

So big of a fail.  Sooooo big.

Because the whole industry is borderline built on low-grade systemic corruption? edit: Well, I should modify that to say that the MMO industry. I'm really down on the way most of these assholes conduct business.

If you fail at something, you're supposed to learn from it ergo someone with a list of nothing but expensive failures on their c.v. must surely be the sort of experienced developer/manager/etc. you need.

Or something.

I blame Rich Vogel. Seriously. Fuck that guy.

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=6214.msg166773#msg166773

Maybe we can get a kickstarter going to have him killed.

Or does that violate the terms of kickstarter?

Margalis covered the first paragraph. Eight years of very public records on everyone else trying to print money the way WoW did, testament yet again to the competitve advantage Blizzard had that no one else can touch.

Mobile and social games, not mobile and social "mmo". It's disjoint as heck, but that's the current perceived goldmine. Is it actually one? Probably not for most players. And already the social scene seems to unraveling a little. Who knows. Maybe it'll swing back to consoles so we can all re-pay for the same games with better graphics or some shit.

Anyway, traditional AAA MMOs are likely dead. See "one server" thread :) I called SWTOR the likely swan song for this type of game (expenditure, mechanic, etc). There's nothing on the horizon that convinces me otherwise. I'd love to be wrong though. Still so much more that could be done if we could just stop giving the same jobs to the same core cast :P

It won't if we can be creative enough and title it "performance art".

SWTOR is not sufficient evidence AAA MMO's are "over" as it was based on the false premise that "story" is enough to usher  in the next generation of MMO's and supplant wow. They are being punished for their error because as people finish the story, and look at what is left, they leave. I'd consider the MMO era being over if GW2 and Titan do really badly and there's nothing else on the horizon.

I'm sure mobile and social games are a goldmine (or at least "hot" and assumed to be one) but a good mobile or social game generally makes no sense on the PC/Console and no AAA PC/Console game would have been better made on a mobile (though tablets are basically in-between). The design focus is just going to be different. Though we are in the MMO section so no idea why it even got brought up here, it's not going to make MMO's unprofitable directly, blizzard is still printing money-hats.

Hohoho... saving this for posterity and an amusing blast from the past (original article (http://www.actiontrip.com/link.phtml?http://www.videogaming247.com/2008/10/24/wow-is-the-target-with-the-old-republic-says-lucasarts-and-ea/) from 2008).

Has it been in development that long, christ.  :why_so_serious:

We were talking about this game a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

All they had to do was duplicate WoW, put a Star Wars skin over it, and add story/lore. 

They succeeded with the last two points, but with the first, they half-assed it.  They duplicated WoW alright; vanilla WoW, devoid of any of the QoL features and mechanic/gameplay polish that came after vanilla's inception.  One could say that those things are what kept WoW going and ever increasingly popular.

It's like a goddamned car.  People these days expect features in new cars that were perhaps luxury/extra features as standards these days, esp. safety stuff.  You don't put out a car in the year 2012 of our lord Zeus without a fucking airbag, let alone an accessible Aux port on the stereo, A/C, power steering, and the other effects.  Likewise, you don't put out a game in late 2011 that essentially recreates the same experience we had six+ years ago and expect it to be the second coming of Christ.  Hell, after we landed on the moon, ratings for the subsequent moon landings fucking vanished, because nobody was getting a whole lot of thrill over watching a couple of dudes on low-quality video feeds bouncing around on barren landscape.

That they've dragged their feet on addressing the QoL stuff while still trying to maintain their vision of post-launch production shows that there's still a number of 'vets' in the MMO genre that both don't understand their audience and/or don't care.  It's their baby, their child, and they'll damn well do what they want with it, critics be damned.  I loved it for the longest time when Mythic would take that stance with DAoC, and when some news kids finally showed up on the block that did the things that Mythic's critics had hounded at them for years to do/fix/address, they still stuck to their guns.  At least, until they started to see those subscription numbers vanish like a fart in the wind.  But by then, it was already too late.

Testify. I quit WoW in summer of 2005, approximately 5 minutes after I got my main to the level cap. All I could see to do at that point was alt leveling, the pvp that was available then, or the raids that were available then. Those alternatives were either uncompelling, or downright repulsive, so I laid down the game until BC came out. Blizzard has added so much to the game since they launched, that I wonder if any newcomer can really compete. Even a competent newcomer.

A truly competent newcomer would start with a smaller scale world/ leveling curve but have all the key systems in place.  You then provide something to occupy players while more content/ level cap increases were generated - quickly.

So many games have failed because they were concerned about content over systems completion.  Content is easy, they're just time consuming to create.  Systems that work well and aren't broken/ incomplete/ buggy as fuck are hard, evidently.

A newcomer that wanted to succeed would renovate the combat away from the hotbar. Otherwise, all the rest of the devs are hyenas circling the big kill.

Systems require content and content requires systems.   They are tied together.  There is no easy or hard.

Systems get many of the benefits from computer science while content does not.  Content is hand created.  The worlds best do not make 10x more content like the best programmers.

All the games I have tested the split bugs between system and content consistently at 50%/50%.  Naming scheme for VO files is just as important as your foundation game objects in the engine for example.

Games fail due what the features are and then building them in the time\money available.  The decisions made about quality and number of features as time moves before shipping once the building starts.

For realz.

Making an MMO is pretty easy if you just look at it from a macro level:

1)  Do you have a Looking For Group tool?  No?  Keep working.
2)  Is your UI completely customizable and moveable?  No?  Keep working.
3)  Is the bulk of your content for leveling?  Yes?  Keep working.
4)  Is your end game comprised of PVP battlegrounds and daillies?  Yes? Keep working.


Beyond that, stop creating games that require 4 hotbars and a mouse with 10 buttons.  I can not go back to playing MMOs that aren't like GW2 and TERA.

0) Are you copying other games?  Keep working.

Going to disagree though.  You should copy what works and what doesn't work.  The tough part is figuring out which one is which.

Unfortunately, trying to add the features WoW adds as it goes from expansion to expansion is, pretty much, feature creep, from a dev's point of view.  I can see why they took version 2005 and froze their design document at that.

To add to the list of things I think they did wrong, my reason for quitting was their abysmal CS, actually.  I would have been perfectly happy to solo my way through a few class storylines over a period of 6-8 months, but their CS just pissed me off.

I did pretty much the same except I waited until Lich King to play it again and I loved it. Cataclysm made me unsub within a month of release though.

If you're smart enough to figure out what works and what doesn't, you don't need to copy other games.

RIFT is the only game I can think of that tried to copy and came away with a good game, and frankly the copied bits hurt more than help.  They made a good game because they understand what makes a good game, not because they copied WoW, and their best bits are more due to culture, method, and uniqueness.

GW2 is doing its own thing while incorporating lessons learned from themselves and others.

TOR is failing because it copied.

This is true, but it's much easier to see in 2012 than 2007.

It's amusing to see so many of the detractions of this game come down to "it's not WoW."    :oh_i_see:

I still don't know what exactly people want in a non-hotbar style combat system.

Something like DCUO, DDO, or TERA.  Or at least  Hybrid like GW2.  Or maybe something like D3 even.

Maybe I don't get what people are talking about then regarding the term. Last I recall all those games had hotbars.

One major different is in GW2 and TERA, positioning matters.  You can fire off abilities in a single direction whether or not you have a target and you can hit something, or miss something.

In TERA you are essentially playing off your mouse and chaining attacks together.  Some classes can just use the mouse, some need a few extra keys.  Most abilities require timing and are situational.  In GW2 this is the case as well except you're using your keyboard to fire off attacks with standard hotbar controls, but you have to work in timing and aiming.

In hotbar combat (in RIFT/WOW) all you do is stand still and go through a rotation.

I think they just want a simpler 'looking' game.  I admit, the 10k hotkeys and buttons one gets from playing a single class in EQ2 is pretty severe.  TOR has that problem as well.  WoW 'did', but again, time and polish has helped address that.  While you may have a bunch of skills, you're by no means required to hit all of them, depending on your roll and spec.  This will get even simpler in MoP with the changes being made to class specialization and how spec specifically gets what skills.

Surprised no one has mentioned Social.  Regardless of the pantsonheads PUGs or evilclownelitistjerks types we meet, having the ability to form some kind of community -- if only for a few minutes/hours per play session -- I thought was another important factor that lead to success of MMOs.  But launching without good guild tools, without casual friendly non-joiner tools (LFG/LFD), without inclusive event mechanics (e.g. WAR PQ's, RIFT's rifts) was another sign to me the game was lacking.  

I like hotbar combat. /shrug

Mount and Blade.

This seems like common sense but I believe it is actually wrong.

The problem with copying is it invites comparison, and if you invite comparison to WoW you will come out behind. There are games that don't have cross-server grouping where people don't complain about not having it, because comparing the game to WoW is more apples to oranges. If your game is sufficiently different you can no longer get dinged for missing feature X or having your version of feature X be worse.

The problem with copying what works is that most of WoW works, so you end up copying the entire game. You go with "best in breed combat" (aka WoW combat), "best in breed UI" (aka WoW UI), "best in breed endgame features" (aka WoW endgame), "best in breed PvP" (aka WoW PvP), and you just have WoW but without the cooking time, polish, or established player base. And there is the problem that if you copy the PvP structure and the endgame now you almost have to copy stuff like cross-server play, travel options, etc, since those latter systems support the former.


It's not though. It's like a goddamn thing, and instead of creating your own thing that can be literally anything you decide to make a Yugo. A toaster doesn't need air conditioning and yacht doesn't need wheels. Once you go down the road of "we need all the standard features" you are locked into at best a slightly better version of what exists and much more likely a worse version. And even if you create a better version of an MMO you have to deal with existing player base inertia.

Server merges hinted at (http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/05/24/swtor-devs-hint-at-mega-servers/).

I hope this is exactly what they do.

Thats silly though.  
WOW has swords and dragons!  Our game can't have those.
WOW has a LFG auto-group tool.  Our game can't copy that!
WOW has instanced dungeons and raids.  Our can't do it!?
WOW has a class system with talents...
WOW has two factions...
WOW has a moddable UI...
WOW has damage meters...
WOW has flying mounts...

If I had to copy from the MMO Market and iterate on that I would copy:
1.  WOW's LFD/LFR system.
2.  RIFTs dev tools and iteration process and speed.  
3.  RIFTs texture alteration of the world on the fly tools (whatever you call creating Rifts that alter the world around you temporarily.)
4.  SWTOR's crafting/gathering system with companions.
5.  GW2's server architecture and queuing system.
6.  TERA's network code.
7.  GW2's quest philosophy.
8.  Rift's and TERAs in game moddable UI without addons.

Personally, I wouldn't use WOWs end game, combat system (hotbar combat) or PVP.  If I had to pick a game to mimic for PVP it would be a combination of GW2 (as far as we know) and TERA.  I actually don't like any current game's PVP at all.

It's still stupid though.  They should work towards developing a way to put every single player playing SWTOR into a pool for dungeon queuing.  Even if they have to make a pitstop in creating server pools first.

I wonder what server merges does to my Implant monopoly.

I just hope it doesn't fuck with names/legacy names.

Of course it will. How can it not?

All the non-quickbar combat I have tried in an MMO, I have not been a fan of. And frankly, people have a hard enough time with "don't stand in fire," adding anything more complicated than "push buttan, hit mans" will just tear my soul in two in group settings.  :why_so_serious:

In my experience, "don't stand in the fire" is a problem because of hotbar combat.  People staring at their icons instead of at the game world, etc.

These conversations always seem to come down to listing game features that you believe would be popular, I think the sensible approach would be to make a game you'd like to play.  Assuming you don't have really odd tastes, there's a better chance there's a market for it.

The impression I got from early Blizzard games is that they love their games, that's partly formed by reading about Diablo 1, some reviewer visited the studio and thought it was really odd that the receptionist was enthusiastically playing the game at her desk.  I'm not that fond of recent Blizzard games myself but I think that's more down to me than them, I'm not sure it's possible to pick a feature set and then decide to love it afterwards.

I did not feel any more engaged trying to clickclickclickclickFUCKCLICK in DDO, though, and we still had people dying to random shit because of lag, not noticing something, poor timing, etc. Plus once you know your rotation, you don't actually need to stare at your quickbar. :P

I agree with most of this except 3. Then again I think one of the biggest issues in this industry is the whole "end game" obsession of devs and players. I die a little more everytime I see a new game coming and the threads all seem to be "what is the end game? I want to see it?" Which basically boils down to raids/pvp.

I will say that although I like hotbar combat, I do agree that the number of buttons is sort of getting out of control. I don't need two hotbars worth of crap to keep track of. When "stuff I actively use all the time, forever" gets above six or so, it gets obnoxious. I don't mind having oh-shit buttons off on a sidebar or whatever, but I do not need huge numbers of standard shit, you know?

They fact they didn't get it done within 2 months after launch means they cannot get it done due to bad project management or poor technical forethought.  The comments about server capabilities for larger populations only reinforces this to me.

SWOR is having problems because:

 - it cost too much to develop,
 - the subscription model doesn't hold onto players at the same rate any more,
 - story is a two-edged sword when it comes to retaining players,
 - BioWare has always suffered in the games mechanics department, and
 - EA wanted to beat Blactivision rather than just create a successful MMO.

The first one is the most important issue. SWOR had to be at least the second biggest Western MMO by a long way just to break even financially. There's not a lot of room for problems at that point. Which is why SWOR is the second biggest Western sub-based MMO by active player numbers and is still considered a failure.

I'll rephrase the statement then.  If the measurement of time the bulk of your content is designed to last is measured in hours, you're doing it wrong.  The reason people obsess about the end game is because the majority of time spent playing MMOs is at level cap.  These days, level cap is where the game really starts.  Gone are the days where you spend months leveling up.  Design a small amount of content so your character "levels up" then spend the rest of your time figuring out how to design content that lasts longer.

Just look at Rift.  They designed some interesting zones, but the majority of the time is spent in 3 of them (prior to ember isle).  It should be the other way around.

GW2 has no more a chance of being ginormous than GW1 did. It'll be a great game I'm sure, but it has none of the marketing nor branding muscle that the big IP attempts had.

I didn't mean to imply that AAA MMOs are dead. What I was getting at was the idea that spending hundreds of millions on one is probably dead. There aren't any more IP big enough to even consider it, and nobody is going to spend that much on an unproven brand. No other studio is left that can generate such rabid fan-faith (maybe Valve but I believe they're too smart to try MMOs). Subscriptions are dead for newcomers. Large sprawling worlds that harness the promise of persistent 24/7 environments aren't that relevant (really, you could convert all of WoW to CoH's style of auto-instantiated zones with small caps and nobody would notice).

And to Draegen's points raised after, as soon as you announce you're "making an MMO", you're immediately like WoW or doing it wrong, which means inheriting conventions that are at the heart of why this genre can't really evolve. The commitments you need to make in building an MMO are simply too expensive to take too many chances. Heck, this is true for most genres, and especially true for Blizzard.

And Titan I'll believe is coming when there's actually something to look at. :)

I brought up mobile and social not because they're a good comparison. They're just simply where a lot of the iterationi is happening. They're low risk experimental sandboxes. Some ideas evolve, some die, but you didn't need to toss 300 people out on the street because you guessed wrong four years ago.

When you're making an MMO, you and in the process of creating the game, the public doesn't even know you exist really.  You should have all those things on the list ready to go when you present yourself to the public after a few years of dev time.

This isn't a game design - it's just a list of features. There's no actual game in what you described. As in there is no actual game concept or any coherency.

What I'm saying is start with an actual game design. Of course you can copy some aspects of other games or go with some proven ideas, you don't have to be 100% new with everything, but rather than some recipe that says take X from game A and Y from game B come up with a game concept and then borrow the systems that make sense in that context. Companions are cool, but it only makes sense to borrow companions in game where companions make sense. LFD? So you've decided your game has dungeons run by fixed groups, before even deciding what game you are making. (And you've ruled out making Minecraft, Eve, etc)

Um, GW1 was the largest western MMO after WoW. It sold million and is still actively played today by what appears to be a decent number of people?

They thought cinematic story telling and brand would carry them so they could no-effort it everywhere else. They where wrong because MMO's aren't particularly great platforms for telling stories and money spent on stories give a relatively poor return in long term retention.

This has probably been linked elsewhere but it fits here too, A Rant: Enough Of Single-Player MMOs (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/05/23/a-rant-enough-of-single-player-mmos/)

All this talk of WOW comparisons and whether or not it's good to copy:  WOW wasn't exactly an original concept by any means.  The game just flows.   Also addons.

It's a good thing he labeled that a rant, because that article seems to boil down to "MMOs don't tell stories as well as single-player RPGs, so they shouldn't even try."

Which is horse poop, unless you want all future MMOs to have the storytelling chops of EVE. Which is perfectly valid, don't get me wrong. You just have to have a business plan that makes a profit with EVE's sub numbers.

I actually agree with this.  If I want story, I'll play a single player RPG.  In an MMO, I want the players to create the story with the tools provided them in game.  Instead of wasting resources on story, voice acting, and cutscenes, just give me more content, solid combat, and a rich world.  

Sadly, none of this will never happen as today's mainstream gamers want their experience in rails.    GW2 is doing a decent job of bridging the gap... but still feels a bit too much on rails in places. 

This.  A thousand times this.  I create my own characters with their own backstories and that's the foudation of my immersion.  Any story the game throws out breaks the immersion. 

What's hilarious about this is the GW2 'personal story' is even more on rails than the TOR class stories since in GW2 you don't even have the illusion of influencing your character's personality like you do in TOR.  Your character will act one way and one way only, regardless of how you might have imagined her in your head.  Oh, and GW2 also has story, (poor) voice acting and (poor) cutscenes.

I'm sure nobody is shocked to know that I completely disagree with Nebu here. I want story in multiplayer just as much as I do in single. The setting in particular needs to be at least somewhat coherent, compelling, and relevant to what I'm doing for me to be interested. That's the biggest part of why EVE always fell so flat for me - they seemed to put a fair amount of effort into having a setting with factions, etc., but it was 100% irrelevant to anything you'd ever actually do. That's why I couldn't stand Rift for more than a couple hours, and why Champions Online was such a piece of crap.

Played, yes. So is UO. Printing their own money in a way that other companies, especially niave ones, create new business plans in the hopes of emulating? No. They're doing well. And kudos to them because GW1 was fun and competently crafted. But the Guild Wars brand isn't the blue light to the moths that "anything from Blizzard" or "KOTOR" or "Star Wars" are. Hence my skepticism that they can be put in the same "also doing a AAA MMO like WoW" category that SWTOR was in.


Trouble is, big development budgets are granted only when the promise of success is believable. In order to get there, you're either showing up with a lot of unarguable precedent (big IP, reknowned studio, "like X but with Y", investor spport, guaranteed bond from a niave government, etc), or you are already so successful you don't even need to ask for investment.

Most only have "unarguable precedent" to lean on. :smile:

Those things all come with rules. Brands/IP have rules about how it can look, act and feel. "Like X but with Y" thinking is rooted rules already established by your reference experience. Free money from investors comes with their own performance milestones and metrics, and only being granted because you proved your case on precedent. Blizzard is a master at all of this.

So while your eventual audience isn't yet aware of you, everything you are already doing is bound by the constraints put in place just to get started.

The key is to differentiate by making it better. Because it's far easier to get funding for that than it is to get funded for something new.

You can also completely ignore that personal story and still have a great and (perhaps even more) fun game to play, if you ignore it in SWOR you might as well go watch paint dry.

P.S.: There is also a bit of 'kill the puppy'/'hug the puppy' choices going on in some GW2 cut scenes, nothing on the 'level' of SWOR, just sayin' it's not completely devoid of that like you're making out.

The only choices I ever saw in GW2 were related to that 'personality' system they have, and the only times I ever got personality choices were in a few pure text dialogs.  In practice it added almost nothing to the character's personality.

P.S.: Personally I don't see why anyone would want to play a game were you can just skip the story entirely, but then Eve is still running so I guess there's a market for that.  Of course since WoW subs > Eve subs I can see why some people might get the idea that a game that provides a story for players might attract more players than a pure sandbox.

It's ok.  I still love you.   :heart:

A bit of a tangent, but have you checked out player-made content systems in games that have them? (COH, STO, and sorta EQ2 if we're sticking to AAA stuff) Yeah, Sturgeon's Law applies, but still...

I didn't realize you are going down to pure basics.  I'd assume we're talking about an avatar based game where you kill bad guys.  Then have options to kill bad guys with more than one person.  Essentially what every single MMORPG that is coming out in the next year or two have.

I would say it's pretty hard to have a "rich world" with no adequate story whatsoever. DAoC is the only one I can really think of off the top of my head, and they got away with it because they set it in a place where the "lore" was pretty much already known by basically everyone. It's also part of why, I suspect, Albion was the Fat Realm on so many servers. We generally "know" Albion better than Midgard, and definitely better than Hibernia. :P

A Star Wars game might get away with it in the same way for the same reasons, of course. But that's not what they decided to do. And personally, I am glad, because that would not have interested me at all.  :awesome_for_real:

Is that a backwards jab at my beloved two mushroom town?

Nah, not really, it's just most Americans I know can tell you all about King Arthur, tell you some stuff about Vikings, and will sort of shift their weight and go "I dunno, leprechauns?" about Ireland.

Next you'll say my forest isn't cursed at all!

Cursed Forests do not have unicorns. I will believe this until I die.

What's a "rich world"?

I disagreed with the RPS rant because it ignored the fact that a lot of noise was made about MMOs having bad stories, no-one reads the quest content, etc etc. There's a group of people out there who want the option of playing single player OR with friends / groups at a moment's notice.

I actually find myself agreeing with it.  The things I remember in MMOs aren't generally the story.  ...well ok, actually I do remember the story because I've always been a huge story nerd, but not the kind of 'spoonfed through quests' story that any newer MMO has offered.  For an MMO, EverQuest's story (such as it was) was, I think, far better than most recent games, including SWTOR.  SWTOR's story (stories, actually) is pretty good...for a single-player game.  Class stories?  Those ARE single-player (because no one else can even influence them, even if you can bring someone to help you).  Planet storylines are pretty neat, but they too are basically single-player even when they can be played multiplayer, because the dialogue system is a massive fail due to not actually adding anything when there's multiple characters involved - it just randomizes which character gets to pick the next line of dialogue.  EQ's overall story was better for an MMO setting because it wasn't something for one person to 'do', it was just scattered across the world as dialogue or items or books and such.  For those who cared about it, it was pretty awesome.

But none of this has ever really gone anywhere toward what MMO's could do if they focused on the MMO aspect instead of trying to give us more single-player content to consume.  I don't know how to do it better, and I get it.  It's hard.  It's a matter of figuring out how to actually take advantage of a medium that has very different strengths and weaknesses to traditional games.  But come on, we've been at it for 14 years.  Early Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Shadowbane, and EVE are the only games that come to mind off-hand that actually did very much with the medium that is special and unique to this medium, and really tried to build to the strengths of the MMO rather than shoehorning single-player stuff into an MMO setting.  Also maybe Lineage II and its castle sieges, I guess?  Wouldn't know since despite playing for months I never saw one. 

If developers would put money and time into figuring out 'how can I make having 2,000+ players online at the time significant in a gameplay sense?' and 'how can a persistent world be an advantage?' we might start to get games that actually play to the strengths of an MMO.  But right now having 2,000+ players online at the same time has no meaning because 1,970-1,995-ish of those have no direct influence on any other player at any given time.  A persistent world isn't an advantage because it doesn't ever change, and the actions of others while you're offline have no effect on you.  I don't really know what mechanics can be used to take advantage of this.  Like I said, it's hard.  But somebody really needs to start by asking "We have a couple thousand people online at the same time, and the world is always-on.  What can we do with this that cannot be done without those conditions?"  And some kind of story can probably be worked into this.  But not a single-player story, which is what we've been getting since WoW's quest lines shifted the MMO focus into 'do whatever the guy with the exclamation mark says'.  UO had lots of story, all created by the players.  EVE has similar story, a history, in fact.  Asheron's Call, I am sad to say, I never did more than dabble in, but from things I've heard over the years, they changed the world based on player actions.  The live team actually took into account what people did and altered the world to match, and different servers had different histories, from my understanding.  That's the kind of thing that you cannot get in any other medium.  That's the kind of story that MMO's need to focus on.

I was hoping SWTOR's story system would be interesting and manage to combine story and multiplayer in a cool and effective manner.  It really didn't, sadly.  It also didn't take advantage of having thousands online - it could just as easily be a 4-player co-op game, and would probably be far better in that manner.  And I bet they could have made it as a 4-player co-op for far, far less money, sold more copies, and overall made a bigger profit doing it that way.  Because there's nothing I can think of in the entire game that requires thousands online simultaneously, or that requires a persistent world, or that takes advantage of anything unique that the MMO platform has to offer.  Even the warfronts could be set up through Origin or something.

What about the Lesser Faydark?

Cursed Forests do not have unicorns.

DAoC had about as much to do with the Camelot we all know about as SWTOR had to do with the Star Wars we all know about. They used the set pieces but ignored absolutely everything else. SWTOR wanted you to care about the story, which is a good idea insofar as at least it's different from whack a mole. But it had a higher barrier because the setting itself was KOTOR, though they did take great pains to ensure everything *looked* as close to the movies as possible.

Also, DAoC gets almost all of its pass because it was the first MMO to launch that was playable on launch day at a time when the whole world didn't even know what an MMORPG was, and those that did were reading a certain unmentinable's charts for EQ1s latest numbers.It was laughably incomplete at launch, the Albion advantage was mostly because Hibernian had almost no content and Midgard not yet balanced. But this was fine because everyone in the genre then flocked to it simply because it was not EQ, AC nor UO, AO was still laughingstock and L1 and D2 were still being categorized as "not for us" or "not MMO" respectively.

In other words, that game shouldn't be used as reference for anything built in the last nine years.

This boils down to the fact that MMOs are not generally made with any purpose these days.  Every game I play I ask myself 'why was this game made to be massively multiplayer', and I constantly can not come up with any idea based on the gameplay. 

Why make this game a MMO?  Was there some compelling reason that this particular game, mechanics, gameplay and all needed to be massively multiplayer?   Oh yeah, they needed to make money.  But not because it makes sense from a gameplay perspective. As a massive fanboy from the TSW beta I will just say that story-wise it is TOR done right, but I am still pissed it is a MMORPG.  It shouldn't be.  It should be Vampire: Bloodlines, part deux, with awesome Tornquist writing.  But instead they cock it up by making it an MMO.  I'll still buy it, but I am not pleased.  Just I was not pleased with TOR being an MMORPG.  It was utterly purposeless from a game development perspective except as a moneygrab.  The only difference between TOR and TSW is I actually like the writing and story in TSW.

That may have been true for some people, but by and large if you ask someone if they'd rather play an arthurian wizard versus something called a "spiritmaster," the wizard is going to win. People know what a wizard or minstrel or paladin are. They're iffier on a runemaster or skald or thane.

Troll thanes were awesome. "Look at me! I'm The Thing-Thor!"  :awesome_for_real:

This. This. This. A million times this.

Go play Eve.

Eve?  No. 

I want DAoC 2, thank you very much.

Story is great, it adds flavor to the gameplay... but the error SWTOR made was thinking watching a cinematic is gameplay. Doubly so when the multi-player balance and demands for content duration mean they can't have deeply branching story paths, powers varying too much or companions dying. And indeed that most of the story scenes will branch into extremely generic MMO gameplay invalidating the cinematics.

Or put another way there is a huge gap between Eve (supplied story is some lore hidden away somewhere) and SWTOR (excessive money wasted on story elements). GW2's option of character models running standard emotes while a bit of text is read out (and lore dumps on the web) is fine, WoW's modern model of NPC's acting out the story is excellent but expensive so not even they can base the game on it, SWTOR spent way too much money and effort on story telling that wasn't supported by game-play and have pretty much proven that it has a poor return in terms of long term retention.

There is a huge opportunity in MMOs to have ambient story through environments and such. Through cutscenes not so much.

There are hardly any 'cinematics' in SWTOR. There are lots of Bioware-style dialogue scenes, where the player is a participant.

EDIT: Contrast this to something like Uldum in WoW, which is full of actual, non-participatory cinematics.

That's the biggest problem (besides the terrible voice acting) I have with the GW2 story elements.  Their 'personal story' cutscenes are non-participatory cinematics instead of interactive dialogs.  You wouldn't think the Bioware version with multiple choices all leading to the same result would be all that different, but it really does give a much better illusion that you're making choices for your character instead of just watching a pre-determined story.

And they don't all actually lead to the same result, for that matter. I've noticed a lot of spots on playthroughs subsequent where different choices do have at least minor effects on things - different objectives on missions from certain choices, extra fights from others, etc. Most often from making different dark/light side choices.

Funny, the youtube videos I watched had long scenes of models talking through and animating a scene which went on for quite a while. That's a cinematic approach to story telling done through the game engine. The fact you get to make a choice at certain points doesn't make it less a cinematic.

I disagree.

...you still haven't actually played the game, have you. Would you care to share your opinion on any books you haven't read or movies you haven't seen as well?

EDIT: I would say by definition a cinematic has no interaction. /shrug

If it's something you sit and watch, it's a cinematic. A choice ever X minutes doesn't change that. That's been the case since Dragon's Lair.

Some population calculations on the official forums (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=449144). Basically a guy went and did a /who scan when the server changed population status in order to work out what the numbers were for the various reported states. The outcome being:

Light is up to about 500
Standard is up to about 1,500
Heavy is up to about 2,250-2,500(?) (Let's call this 2375 for now...)
Very Heavy is up to about 3,000
Full is greater than about 3,000

most of the servers are light. Using the census data over a two week period the average logins for all servers is ~72k people (with a significant margin of error). Though of course there's no way to work out how many people are paying but not playing. Even so that puts the games activity at roughly the same as Eve but spread over way too many servers.

The difference in heavy is apparently because the launch servers, and those opened after launch, have a different value for what constitutes a heavy server.

Doubling down on the wrong doesn't make you right.

Why would I be interested in the uninformed opinions of someone who has never played the game?

Dragon's Lair is not a cinematic. There isn't much there in terms of mechanics or in making periodic dialog choices but there's at least something.

My comment about cutscenes (which I think periodic dialog choices do fall under) was aimed at the fact that in an MMO you need a world, locations, NPCs, etc, and you can say a lot in their design. You absolutely have to have that stuff so might as well use it to deliver ambient story. Cutscenes you have to create individually and are not part of the core gameplay, they are an extra burden with extremely limited use. Single player games like Bioshock generally do a better job of environmental storytelling than MMOs, which is kind of backwards.

What's the bar at which dialogue stuff becomes "core gameplay" and not an "extra burden" though?

Does it need to involve some button fiddling, and therefore the Sakura Taisen games and Fahrenheit count?  Or does there need to be no proper/traditional combat system in the game at all (because that's how we categorize games)?

I just don't think you can call a major selling point and game system of a title not "core gameplay" just because it doesn't involve punching people.  That said, I agree that SWTOR (and many other MMOs not called LotRO) could do a lot more to make their environments a key part of the storytelling process.

I've never set myself on fire either because I used analysis to predict that shit would hurt.

Just as SWTOR believing "story was the 4th pillar of the MMO" was clearly flawed long before the game released. Besides, by the time they released it in my region the writing was already on the wall. But if you want to actually argue that SWTOR's investment in narrative and cut-scene was a good use of their budget I'd be very interested to read it.

In theory I agree that dialog stuff can be the core gameplay. But SWTOR is mechanically WoW with some story stuff on top, in part because the nature of an MMO is to try to get people to play for hundreds of hours and story stuff just can't last that long.

There's only one way for you to be sure... I suggest you get to it ASAP.

Build a man fire and he'll be warm for a night. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

The one real thing a MMO could deliver that a single-player game cannot is radical change to the world in which we play.  Last night, while you decided to watch Archer, the town of Brandelweis was destroyed by the nearby volcano.  When you log in the next time, the map is new.  There is a new dungeon.  New mobs have appeared.  All the cheat sites laying out the quests and maps are obsolete.

Ideally, those kinds of changes could happen as players are actually playing.  NPCs could be shouting that "Abandon the city!" and players who can teleport start ferrying PCs and NPCs alike to other parts of the world.  This is how the game would create stories for its players.

Can this model be done cost-effectively?  What if one keeps the world small and the playerbase limited?  If the devs know that the game can only support 3,000 players, how can they design efficiently for that? 

RIFT apparently had the tech to do that but their primary tests showed that players like familiarity with the world.  If one guys tells another "hey I did this cool thing here last night" and the second person goes to see it and it's gone, he had a frustrating play experience.

But RIFT said they had the tech of towns being over run, destroyed and changed.

I think they really fucked up on that end if that tech was there.  Maybe we'll see it with an expansion or with Defiance.

I'm probably wrong because I haven't played it myself, but this sounds like how GW2 is handling shit in PvE areas, you know, with dynamic/public questing and shit.  Or something.

Even in GW2 it all resets back to normal at some point I am pretty sure.

I don't see why it has to.  You establish sanctuary areas, sure; safe places that people logged off will get respawned to if the area they were parked at gets retaken by the bad, but what's wrong with the bad having a little fun while I'm away or something?

It resets to normal pretty quickly, usually with another dynamic event that reverses the first one.  Because having something happen only once that only a few lucky people who happened to be there at the time can experience would be stupid.

Because the 'event' is the part that matters gameplay-wise. If it never resets, nobody gets to see the event.

But that's what we're talking about, isn't it?  Environmental/gameplay changing events that have lasting effects on the world.  If you weren't around to see it happen, too bad.  It happened.  Are you going to use your character to explore/fight back the changes, or just /ragequit because the game isn't the same way you remembered it from yesterday?

I spent months retaking empty keeps in the Midgard frontier every night. It was not what I would call compelling gameplay. So yes, I will probably choose to play a game that actually lets me participate in the interesting parts on my own play schedule. GW2 to its credit sounds like it will do this.

"Lasting effects" are not a plus or a minus in any kind of inherent way. What matters is having interesting things to do.

But there's a difference between PvP and PvE actions (and I'm pretty sure you know that, unless by your choice of example you think there isn't),.  PvP has you at the will(s) of the opposing players, while PvE has you at the will of the AI.  I'm right there with you in getting burned out on DAoC keep-hopping, if that you could only do it if you were fortunate enough to have the numbers online to do so, and also lucky enough to strike before the opposing force is either not there or is delayed in responding to your attack.

With PvE though, that stuff can easily get auto-scaled in difficulty and magnitude depending on who's in the area at any given time.  Like Draegon mentioned, RIFT could have done this with more gusto, but chose not to.  I don't think it was a failure-point for them not to have, but it certainly would have made the game more interesting, for me at least. :P

GW2 events, from what I've seen, are all static scripted events with different branches.  They all can eventually reset or changed back easily enough.  It's pretty fun, but most of it is apparently cyclical and doesn't really give a sense of major change.  But most of this was observations of lower level areas though so it might get more complex in later areas.

Essentially they are dynamic Public Quests as in sometimes they spawn, sometimes they don't.  Sometimes they work up to a huge event, sometimes they don't.  They are often extremely repeatable as they go back and forth depending on player interaction.

What is lacking are events that happen randomly and have a large scope of change.  Again, only low level observations though.

No one would argue with you.  But what if  one night those keeps were gone and a new river was there?  Or a huge hole in the ground with new nasties coming out?  I would love a game with dramatic geographic changes several times a year.  Think about how the economy could change if a new vein of iron ore suddenly appeared while that old vein of cobalt that everyone was mining like crazy vanished?  How about if bridges got washed out and the players had to gather resources for an NPC to get it rebuilt? 

I am not talking about canned shit-ass stuff that occasionally happened but really just became a quest node. I am talking about dramatic events that introduce mayhem and chaos into the game world every few weeks.

There have been a few games that did do something like that. The Sleeper in EQ was a "once only" mob and pretty much supported the idea that players don't like "missing" content, WoW did it with some of the the expansions in having an event leading up to a world change and Horizons had "server craftable" permanent changes to the map which was a cool idea trapped in a bad game. They're still all scripted though so you are spending developer effort for a very limited return.

I Like what GW2 is doing. They're going harder on dynamic events and with chaining them into a sequence you get some interesting but controlled dynamics. I think, if it works, you'll see other games pushing that idea further.

Yes.  It's interesting because it seems to be highly variable, but even they aren't to World-Changing Event levels yet from what we've been shown.  That's not something you want to do in newbie areas anyways.

All of their events are more or less scripted.  To do one-offs with regularity, you would need a system which can move about mobs and NPCs and dynamically alter terrain a great deal.  If RIFT can do such things, they should add a couple of zones which use it.  There's nothing wrong with have safe areas where players can feel comfortable, but why not use that tech somewhere?

I know people have ... 'mixed' feelings about SWG here, but I thought the idea of different crafting materials changing their quality over time in different areas was inspired, at least as a member of a reasonable size guild. Finding what materials were good where in any given week, and having the guild go out to plonk down harvesters or kill birds so that the doctors could make the best meds was great.

Dynamic worlds sound good in theory, but the reality is that it is a lot of work for only a very small pay-off. You've got to make a big enough impact on the world for it to be noticed by players, but that can make it hard to keep repeating that approach. Plus players get annoyed when the area they knew they could go to for RESOURCE1 is over-run by grelmins and they are stuck being unable to do what they logged in to do.

Plus unintended consequences always pop up. CoH/V had a Zombie Apocalypse that would pop up that certain vocal players came to hate because it caused the mobs they were actually looking for to all run away and hide.

And at the end of the day it doesn't seem to retain players. Fallen Earth blew up a starter town (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/11/05/the-mmonitor-fallen-earth/) and tried to go the live events angle; it's down to three full-time developers right now. The Matrix Online tried to have an evolving story that kept players involved and altered the world; it didn't do that well either.

Maybe Pathfinder Online will be the savior for people who desperately want that feature.  :why_so_serious:

Well that's sort of a chicken and egg problem. If you designed the game to be about gathering resource1, but threw a monkey wrench into their daily grind, then yes I agree. If, however, you designed the game based on dynamic changes bring the biggest rewards?

One place the MMO industry at large has been reluctant to take development is towards the explorer mentality. They've covered achiever very well, killer sorta well, social very well, but never really tapped explorer well at all. And yet, I can point to games where people mine things for fun, always searching for the next great section of land or resources, as extremely fun.

I don't think MMOs ever can tap into the explorer archetype very well to be honest due to the nature of the design. The fact is you are sharing the world with a LOT of other people, which totally breaks exploration  for me. For example Skyrim was fantastic for exploring, but add more than a few other people into that world and it would lose that aspect. To explore you need wilderness and emptiness, and MMOs don't do that anymore.

EQ only really managed it due to the very small population numbers for each server and the insane number of zones as each expansion rapidly increased the size of the game world.

(plus, once you making exploring out of the way places give a reward you find they don't stay out of the way for very long!).

One thing MMOs don't do very well anymore is a sense of danger in a zone. Even Icecrown felt totally safe as a player when adventuring in it. I would really like a return, in some small way, to the idea that there are areas of the game  that are never safe to go to.

I agree that this is the case if you put a system like that into current MMORPG design.  I think if you make it so that the dynamic stuff small enough, but used in quantity, goes a long way.  Lots of little things with the occasional HUGE EVENT.  It would take an incredible design team to do that though, and a lot of time.

You shouldn't have to log into a game and find Town A has been taking over... again.  But you should be able to log into a game and find that there are seasons, city traffic, new farms, a town slowly building new buildings.

The key is SLOW change, and not immediate change.  The only time you should log on and find that you can't do what you were doing before is that if you took a 1-2 week break. 

I disagree completely.  The largest-scale systems they had when I was playing, Invasions I think, were still a massive pain in the ass.  When I ran into one when I was leveling and the zone had like four people in it, my options were to trek over to some other zone in my level range and work my way up to doing something productive or just logging out.

I just logged out after the first time.

GW2's structure is also susceptible to this, just because its quests are backwards doesn't mean there isn't X amount per level range.  The implementation is a little more civilized though as at least when I was playing they were relatively minor in area and duration (and never touched anything important).

Well that's where design issues come into play.  They tried to shoe horn a invasion system on top of an old and boring questhub -> breadcrumb system.  If they designed a system similar to GW2s where your main advancement was participating in these events, you would of had a better time.

The fail here is on Trion.  Your main gameplay and leveling experience was via quests.  You logged on to do quests.  You didn't log in to do invasions.  If an invasion was rampant, then you were pissed.

Take out the quests, add more invasions, or whatever, and put your sole gameplay focus on invasions and you'd have a better time.  If you kicked an invasion out of a local area and got rewarded the same amount of xp as completing 4-5 quests, how would you of reacted then?  (Assuming kicking out an invasion was compelling gameplay.)

edit:

Wanted to add:

If the game taught you from the get-go that your main gameplay mechanic was fighting off invasions or attacks enemy encampments this would be a more entertaining situation.  For some reason, in the newbie areas, you had rift invader and you also had faction invaders.  Then they completely got rid of this mechanic.  Imagine if the game always had invasions of Defiants vs. Guardians going back and forth between towns in each zone.  Then when a major rift invasion happened, both Defiant and Guardian NPCs essentially forgot each other and banded together to kill Rift creatures.  You, as a player, then joined up along side of them to do various activities.

This would of done wonders for creating a sense of world and lore of the fight between G vs D.  As soon as you left the newbie zone, you never got this feel in the game anymore.

I'm simply not in favor of systems that, for the sake of worldiness, keep me from playing the game I enjoy and sat down to play.  GW2 events at a low level with a fuckton of people around, like Minor Rifts and those stronghold thingies, are similar to what I sat down to do that they're a fun bit of dynamism.  I really enjoyed them, as they never got in the way but were "there" if I felt like doing them.

How GW2 events will work at the edge case of a very low pop zone and higher complexity, I don't know.

The point is that if you design it correctly, you advance by heading to the place where the invasion is happening, not a predetermined static quest hub.

Therefore you wouldn't have a system that kept you from playing the game you intended to play. It would be the actual game.

This.

You seem to be reading past the point where the main gameplay is questing.  The main gameplay is doing invasions or whatever.  Maybe quests, a lot less of them, are the side things you do during low points of game play.

The industry after WOW started to thinking THE MORE QUESTS THE BETTER!  And started to brag that they had 10,0000000000.56 quests in their game and put that on their box.  The model is changing (finally) from masking the grind with stupid quests, to something greater.

Imagine if you can just create the game without creating 100 quests per level?  Imagine the saved dev cost from having writers write stupid shit all day that no one reads.  Imaged the save dev cost from your linguistic team from having to translate all that bullshit into 4 languages.  Imagine having to not translate hidden pop culture references or comb for offensive words in other languages.

Good stuff.  I just saved every dev company billions of dollars.

Explorer can be tapped, it requires a bit of different thinking though.  SWG was perfect early in its life.  I took scout classes to planets like Yavin IV and Dathomir where no one was.  There were little hidden quests if you got your faction high enough, resource hunting, etc.  It required being stealthy and careful.  But then they threw balance out the window and one person in good armor could pretty much kill anything.  (I'll refrain from going on that rant.)  Regardless, early in the game there was wilderness where only a few of us were crazy enough to trek through.

GW2 is actually pretty good in this regard.  There are lots of little hidden nooks and varied terrain.

So it is possible.

Neither do I, since I've only seen the early zones and low population was hard to come by in the beta sessions. But the events are supposed to scale to the number of people present and that seemed to be working.

Imagine logging in, finding that you just missed the previous invasion and now you need to wait for the RNG to trigger the next one.

Or you play on a low-pop server / off-peak time, and hear stories of massive battles against fantastic creatures, but your personal experiences is fighting 5 goblins who hop off the back of a donkey cart because there aren't enough people to trigger the good stuff.

And then there is the question of fast travel - do you have it so that players can quickly move to hotspots? Or does that also result in players using it to travel long distances and then ignore the event, but still count towards the event population and thus make it harder for players actually involved in the event?

And what happens when the players lose? If it is just about slow progress, perhaps it doesn't matter, but if the invasion is a big deal and players keep losing, they are probably going to suffer for their loss. Good luck in keeping those players logging in.

Quests work because they are always there. If you have to log out, they'll wait for you. There has yet to be a MMO that has offered major, world altering events that has been as successful (and even though people fondly remember Asheron's Call, the player numbers were with EQ and UO) as a game that just offered quests / static content. That doesn't mean it will always be the case, but history isn't on its side.

If you create a world, then tell players, "Go on - you have freedom here!" a large group tend to look blankly, scratch their head a bit then log off to play WoW.

1. Have lots of small events, a short duration between repititions and something else productive to do in the area while you wait for a repeat.

2. Have the event scale to people available (I remember this element being so annoying in warhammer).

3. Size and frequency of the event will determine how widely you need to pull from. If it's an irregular, server-wide, event you'd better have fast travel.

4. The next event/sequence is about recovering from the loss. I don't think anyone would argue permanently consumed content is a good idea, ultimately there has to be some cycle.

Though this mostly applies to the small-event model of GW2 (noobie zones). A full zone invasion model is going to work differently, though it could just as easily be emulated by linking smaller events and that scales better. You don't really want your entire playerbase congregating in one spot.

I don't dislike quests. The problem with them is they don't scale and encourage multi-player gaming. You are competing for completion "Killstealer!", they don't scale and being "lockstep" you can't just join in to someone else's quests. It's ultimately a solo game model and the next step will be doing better.
 

It's not "the actual game" though.  That's like saying traveling to and between quest hubs and locations is the actual game.  They're both systems that point me to a set of mobs that are more rewarding to kill (or any other mechanic) than other similar ones.  I think how I get to dispatch those mobs is much more important.  Any occasionally worthwhile narrative content is a plus.  (Since we're talking about games with dynamic systems, I assume "story" isn't the point to the extent it is in SWTOR.)

Since camping is pretty dreadful, both for the game and as a player at times, those systems need to exist.  But past some minimum point I don't see a large enough gain to justify the travel time, randomness, and hitting edge cases on much less tightly controlled systems.  But I can see how that math can be different for other people.

The one problem with many of the events is they spawn a champion type mob at the end.

A solo person is going to have a REALLY hard time killing one.

The point would be to defeat the enemy encroaching. Horizons sort of had this idea, but they completely cocked it up and ended up bailing on it for static areas.

I haven't read Kag's response yet (and my cursory glance seems that he's right), but here's mine.  What you're doing is creating designs specifically to make the game shitty.  I'll go point by point.

1)  Who said you have to design a system around needing a specific event?  GW2 designs their game around just doing events, enjoying them, and getting xp/rewards/pts that you want and need.  Stop creating a game in your mind that's trying to shoehorn in the WOW design.  You aren't doing invasions/events for specific items.  You're doing them because that's the game you're playing.  If it's loot, then all events of a specific level/tier/type whatever have the same loot table, or they all drop points to buy loot.  Whatever.  Details.

2)  Events can scale, GW2's tech proves that you can do this.  Instead of doing this with 500 PCs you're doing it with 500 NPCs.  Instead of there being 100 mobs, there are 20.  Instead of there being 100 elites and 500 normals, there are 1 elite elite and 5 normals and you're solo.  -- Also, who says you're even on a server?  GW2 style that shit and let people switch servers at will.  Get rid of servers all-to-gether and create a giant one that is just sharded/phased whatever when specific populations hit different levels.  Lots of solutions to the low pop stuff.  If off hour pops are still a problem after this, that's your own fault.  I can't give you everything.  But if you're used to off-hours, you're used to low pop stuff in current games unless you play with other regions of the world.

3)  I duno, GW2 allows fast travel and it's fucking amazing.  I'd put this in every game I make.  Even if you don't do this specifically, you can always allow players to teleport into the nearest hotspot or whatever you want to call it.  Shrug, plenty of solutions here if you design your game around this concept.

4)  You lose to a big invasion?  Ok good job.  The game doesn't have to be centered around one giant invasion.  There can be a lot of other things going on around the world.  They can also happen often enough that if you fuck one up, you'll catch another major one sooner rather than later.  -- DESIGN your game around invasions.  This way they aren't uber special.  This way they aren't "AWESOME EVENTS" they are just part of the game, part of a dynamic experience.  Failing a single invasion should never have you stop progress.  If you design your game and this happens, then you suck at designing games.  There should always be stuff going on in your world so that you always have somethign to do and one specific thing isn't cockblocking you.

Also design a game that doesn't create obvious cockblocks that piss people off.  Since invasions are the main source of fun in the game, there shouldn't be anything it's blocking since thats what you want to be doing.

5)  You're just not thinking out of the WOW box.  I do not want to create a game around major world altering events.  I want to create a game around small slightly shifting world goings-on.  Major events are great for once in a while, but I want minor things always happening.  Play GW2 to get a taste of what I'm thinking of.  Those events are always happening and they will always happen and when you log back in something else is happening for you to go do.  No one actually likes killing 10 rats and collecting bear asses or escorting retard AI walking down a road.  It's 2012, we can do better than that.

6)  I also don't want to see a world where the game says "GO!".  That's bad design, and I never said you have to create it.  You can easily have mechanisms in the game that point you a long. Log into the newbie world and you just see streams of NPCs running towards whatever.  You hear people say "c'mon!" and you follow through.  Then you leave the newbie world and your map and UI tell you where stuff is going on and each event will give you a check list or a bar or whatever metric you can thing of, visually, telling you how you're doing or what needs to happen or something.

There, you just told players what to do.  Again GW2 does this sooooo well, please go play it, this type of game system is the future of MMORPGs and it's still pretty basic because it's all static scripting.

The actual game is seeing shit happen in the world and jump in and kill bad guys that are doing shit whether you're there or not.  In any quest driven game you run into an area circled on your map, you kill a bunch of mobs that are standing in static locations waiting to be killed.  Boring. 

I'll repeat and shill for Anet some more, but please try it out.  Snag some of the beta keys they are handing out for June 8th and play it.  If you play for more than 2-3 hours you'll never want to play static quest hub games ever again.

I have, and I didn't care for it.

Edit: I'll add, having the quests be "out there" instead having to pick them up in place X and going out to do them in place Y isn't fundamentally different.  I'm still making a counter go up by clicking on or killing things.  Having the quests not always be there (events) isn't relevant, they are either there and I do them or they're not and I don't.

To put it philosophically: I don't think that the game-state doing things when I'm not there adds value in-and-of-itself, much less being something important.  I experience the game-state as it is when I'm there, not when I'm not.  The experience that I have is what matters, not that it is unique or shared or the product of vast modelling systems.  Dynamic systems (including world PvP in my opinion) do add variety though, which adds value on repeat playthroughs.

As a practical matter, dynamic systems like the ones described in these past few pages just haven't been shown to produce the same quality of experience as static ones on a consistent basis.  They appear to be harder to get right.

Of course, the ideal is highly dynamic, in that the game is giving you exactly what you're looking for at all times.  But that's also a very personal experience, so the need or possibility even for a communal objective game-state fades away.

I guess I disagree with you then.  For myself, quest driven content is oldhat.  I like a world that is driven by visual cues and not checklists and circles on a minimap.

The pull of a dynamic system, that is the primary drive behind content, is that you show up somewhere and something is just starting or finishing, or you come in the middle.  There are other people/npcs doing it.  You get the feeling that it's actually a living world rather than a series of things just waiting for you to show up to do.

I personally like that.

Dynamic systems have never actually been done. It's always been static worlds with dynamic veneers. That's wholly different, and people can see through it very quickly.

People FEAR change. They are by nature anti-change. However, we have reached the absolute limit of possible innovation within the toolbar/mmo/static world scenario. Without changing either the combat or the static world, or even (gasp) both, nobody will make big money on these types of games again.

This is a design issue.  Losing an invasion needs to equate to a different story path rather than a kick to the groin.

Since we're in TOR, I'll use a revamped Ilum as an example:  The two sides fight over this planet.  Both players and NPCs.  NPCs need to spawn to help balance numbers, because the goal is to dynamically scale to present at least a modicum of challenge.  There are four overall states:

1) Contested
2) Republic-controlled
3) Imperial-controlled
4) Truce

(1) will be the most common.  During this little hotspots will appear across the map.  They can be themed on which sides' base they're closer to, but the creators need to use some imagination.  Maybe a patrol is looking for the opposing side.  A surveillance tower is coming under attack.  The tower commander wants to plant bugs.  Chain events.

(2) (3) Eventually one side wins by having their main base taken over.  The loser falls back to a hidden encampment.  Now the zone takes a theme where the winning side is in control.  Patrols are looking for insurgents.  Wampas are savaging an outpost.  Guerilla strikes against the victors.  Scavengers to run off.  Make it so the dominating side cannot prevent a slide back to contested based on the events presented to them.  They can slow it, but not stop it.  At least if the side in retreat makes an attempt.  If activity is happening though, the state eventually reaches (1) and those sets of events start happening.

(4) If not much activity happens for a while then a Truce state is entered.   This can happen from any of the others.  It can be a transitionary state to allow a bit of a breather.  Exact implementation isn't important for this discussion.  Fewer direct conflict related events happen.  More logistics or even cooperative events occur.  Eventually it transitions into (1).  Stuff still needs to be happening though!

Individual events could occur with any state.  Others could be restricted.  Chaining events so there is a natural flow back and forth would be best.  But that's how you do an invasion.  Let it lead to new events, not a crushing loss for a side.

One is a solo experience "my quest" and the other is inherently multi-player "the event on everyone's map" which is the reason one better suits a MMO. Then again I would expect fans of SWTOR to also be fans of a single player experience in a MMO setting because that was its focus.

Or you are like me and play any MMO til endgame as a single player game.  I want to level as fast as possible and I've never found a game where grouping has made it actually faster then I can do it by myself.

I find I kind of resent other players getting in on my kills even when they're supposed to (WAR PQs for example.) This probably bodes ill for my enjoyment of GW2.

Maybe if you weren't such a jerkhole kill stealer yourself!

That's because Warhammer PQ's were designed as being competitive. Only the top ranked got the good rewards so every other player was your opponent and certain classes were just screwed because of the poor systems they used to measure contribution. In GW2 if you do even a bit of damage to a mob you get full loot and XP, and if you contribute even a bit to the event you generally get "gold" contribution, so more players the merrier. In the GW2 thread I quoted one of the designers saying that playing warhammer and having high levels cherry pick PQ's and make any lower level contribution irrelevant was one of the design inputs.

It helped me realise that I don't so much want to play solo as I hate LFG and the hyper-competitive "dungeon sprinting" the genre has become.

Of course if you are focused on getting to raiding then the whole thing is just a painfully extended tutorial to be skipped ASAP, but I'd be happy to see alternative end-games to the current raid model too.

Much like I only enjoyed PvP in WAR, I find I only like working with strangers in GW2.

It should be less of an issue as people spread out through the world, though.

Dammit, WAR, why did you wind up shitty!

(Sorry, I always feel like I should say that when WAR's PvP gets mentioned, since I, too, only really enjoy PvP in Mythic games I do not know why.)

Not sure if this counts as the same thing, but I remember reading recently that LoTRO was adopting AC's monthly content/story update model going forward. It'll be interesting to see how that affects their metrics.

No, I don't really think this was the issue for me. First off, I played a healer, and secondly I understand obviously that the content can't happen at all without them there. I'm not saying it is logical, but for me it takes away from the experience in PVE if I (and my group of people I know already) need help from outsiders to beat something. I like group content, I just don't like group content where I don't know anybody.

I feel differently about PVP with strangers but I'm not sure why. (EDIT: To clarify I don't mind PVP with strangers at all.)

That's weird, I also don't do much PvP in MMOs, but really enjoyed it in WAR (until it sucked, of course).  I guess for me it sort of felt like what Draegan is talking about with there being a difference between dynamic content that's there as a distraction from questing, and dynamic content that IS the game itself.  In this case, WAR PvP felt like it was the actual game, whereas in most MMOs I feel like it's this thing that people who really want to kill other people can do if they want.

I also think it was nice that, in that setting, there isn't actually a chance of peace between, say, Dwarfs and Greenskins.  In a setting like WoW, I always feel actively driven away from PvP because the "best" course of action seems to be that maybe the various people stop killing each other and instead fight the evil gods/dragons.  So PvP ends up feeling weirdly morally degenerate to me.  I guess I prefer a completely morally black and white (or just... black, in the case of Warhammer to some extent) setting if I'm going to be doing faction-based PvP.  Also, I kind of hate factions anyway if it isn't a completely black and white thing.

That does sound weird to me.  I thought GW2's profoundly co-operative game design was liberating.  You never have to worry about stepping on people toes.  If I see anybody fighting, is okay to help? The answer is always YES! Will passing strangers bother to rez me? YES!  Do those people over there want my help killing that giant demon thing? YES!  I have no idea want those guys are doing, can I join them? Yes!

I had no idea accurately counting the number of people giving you money each month was so hard.

The fact that rezzing other people gives you xp is brilliant. They really have gone out of their way to try and make every possible interaction with other players beneficial rather than competitive.

I'd imagine that massaging the sub numbers in such a way that EA doesn't immediately fire the rest of Bioware Austin for gross incompetence is actually quite a task.

My favourite bit was this:


I've seen him listed as a Lead Designer for SWOR. That's not something you want a lead designer on a MMO starting off his long set of topical comments with. Especially when he still doesn't talk in actual numbers.

In other clownshoes news, server transfers started today and they are allowing moves from 10 servers out of the 214 total. My server, of course, is not part of the transfer so I am STILL stuck in a DEAD town with no PvP match ever starting for who knows how long. Way to keep your customers' subscription money.

I wonder what the hell qualifies as a low-population server to them. I am pissed off.

As much angst as I have over them fracking up this MMO, I think it's alright for them to start this character transfer thing off small and slow and then ramp it up as things start to work.

Pretty sure the last thing you want to do is just have everyone wantonly transfer their characters where ever they want to without abandon on day 1.  When the servers crash and everyone looses their data and progress, you're pretty much done.

So, yeah, you're sounding like a flame-baiter.  Stop it.

If anything has ever been flame-baiting is telling someone to "stop it". Don't be that asshole.

Excellent...now we just need someone to come in to tell us both to shut up and stop acting like fools for the circle-jerk to be complete  :why_so_serious:

Edit: To be clear, just poking fun at the issue.  I need more coffee  :-P

I, too, am outraged that your whims are not catered to for a completely meaningless diversion.

Less angered comment is:

It's annoying having to wait some more (considering that, pretending things have been OK from January through March, it has been 3 months of dead nights on an empty Republic Fleet) after having been teased into hoping today was going to be move day... only to find out that no that's not the case.

Even if your point were valid Luckton, and from _their_ point of view it certainly is, I would have appreciated more communication about what servers were going to get a transfer and some sort of scheduling so even if I weren't in the first batch I could have still had an idea of when that was going to happen.

My point was just that once again Bioware is asking for patience. But while I understand that you can't code a functioning Looking-For-Dungeon tool overnight, or redesign a whole Open World PvP area in a week, let alone timely release the PvP ranking system you promised when you promised it, I think THIS TIME AROUND they could have just communicated everything a bit better and a little less vaguely. The way this came out today was really annoying. They could have at least put out a list of underpopulated servers, and not having done so led us (me) on obviously empty ones to assume we were certainly going to be moved. Finding out I am not is irritating.
Of course I overreacted, it's just a game.

Dev Blog post on transfers (http://www.swtor.com/blog/character-transfer-server-populations-and-you).


Looks like they might have fixed the bugged resource nodes in today's patch notes too, which is good.

Didn't Rift allow free-for-all transfers pretty early on? 

I must admit, I was really looking forward to having more information today.  IE Knowing whether my server will be a destination server or if we should start packing up the guild bank on alts in preparation for the move. 

Also be nice to know if raids this week will be impacted.  If we are a destination server I don't see much impact.  If we need to coordinate a guild move... that's a bigger problem.

Considering how utterly fucked their "create a character that's not a naked level 1 newbie out of thin air" system was in beta (it killed servers), I'd say it's for the best that they're starting out slow.

Speaking of, if you're still active Sky, can you set the withdraw limit to something more than 1 item a week?  Thanks.

I don't really have a problem with the slow startup, either. I'm guessing this is a big part of why:


If they just opened the floodgates all at once you can bet their recently-downsized Customer Service organization would be totally fucked with all the manual guild bank moves.

EDIT: Interestingly they don't seem to be forcing you to pick a specific destination server? That's not how I thought this would go down.

EDIT 2: Never mind, found the destinations - they're not listed on swtor.com/transfer but they are listed here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=4605947#post4605947

The article over on Darth Hater (http://www.darthhater.com/articles/swtor-news/20675-server-transfers-origin-and-destination-details) seems to list the designated source and destination servers.  They're also listed in the SWTOR account transfer page (https://account.swtor.com/user/account/transfer).

They've also apparently had 10 more source servers added since this morning, so "gradual" might be faster than expected.

I don't see the rage over transfers.  It's basically what they said they were going to do.

If "gradual" means that all transfers will be done in a few days of course I would be MORE THAN happy and my rage would be misplaced. If that will be the case I'll just apologise. If it means a few weeks, then let me be angry. It doesn't hurt you after all.

I'm sure it will be weeks. Focus your rage on your Blood Bowl match!

Which should be in a few hours. Do you need me to beat the lamaros?

I just want more replays to watch!

Bleh, I hope we wind up mooshed with Lord Adraas, because the only name of mine not taken on Ebon Hawk is Nellaria.  :oh_i_see:

Must've been some change; it was set to like 13348763, which is what got set when I tried to 9 it out (9999999999).
Why would either guild move? Last I knew Shien was decently populated?

I wish more games would do it like Planetside did. After the merger, I played my TR guy more because Komoto-K was such a cool badge to have (having been moved off Konreid).

Shien is getting worse overtime, so it may be worth looking into moving. Especially if the server moves away.

Shien isn't particularly well populated. I haven't seen it hit "standard" in ages, it's always just "light" now. Lord Adraas, on the other hand, is still hitting "standard," and they seem to be pushing to really fatten up the already chubby servers. Jedi Covenant and The Fatman both have big ol' populations (last night they were both "full"), and they're destination servers.

So according to someone's "source" the next batch of servers will be announced at 5:30-7:30 CDT.  I guess my server Kaas City will be a destination for Rubat Crystal.

The server that got moved to Fatman was one of the ones where they were complaining about having like 8 ppl on fleet at primetime.

Fatman is the server where people bitch about it being "crowded," though. There are a couple of reliably "standard" populated servers that would benefit from those eight people more, unless your goal is "YES GIANT FAT SERVERS AHOY." Which is fine by me, but makes it seem unlikely Shien isn't going to wind up being phased out.

As a Lord Adraas'er, beware what you wish for.  :why_so_serious:

[well ok, things may have changed A BIT since january, but still...]

I already have a character I play fairly regularly there, there's nothing wrong with it! Except maybe the fact the Republic sucks at PvP a lot of the time.

Yea, pvp was... interesting. We did have a heavy 'eleet pvp' imp population with maybe 5-6 republic people who were interested in pvp at all (lol Ilum) and supercatasses on the imperial side who hit like rank 70 in mid-jan and spam queued in 4man premades... but then, I'm sure people have caught up to them by now.

e: and if you see anyone from Jademoon (especially Aza/Tess), tell them Zaph says they suck. That is all.  :heart:

I haven't gone into the level 50 PvP (and don't intend to, the gear grind is retarded and I've no interest in it), but the sub-50 stuff has a lot of "aw crap, Imp premade" chatter. Although to be fair, the Republic people have yet to just roll over and say "let them win" or anything, so at least they have spirit or something. I just wish the billions of vanguards and shadows I seem to wind up with would remember they can taunt and guard and shit. I heal them! I heal them as hard as I can! I just wish they'd love me back.  :heartbreak:

Last time I was on, I found out that picking up an item from the guild bank, looking at it, and putting it back - counts as your one item for the week.

The pubs are so bad on my server that a portion of them have stated that all they do is kill and forget the objectives.  :(

From memory, Shien was about in the middle of the average server pop range on that guy's chart, so I figure it will take a few days to get to us.

30-40 on the fleet during prime time these days (since the 1.2/World Event rush), only seen the server pop below 100 total twice (and once was 15 minutes after maintenance ended).

(edit to add : Supposedly they are announcing the next round of from/to servers this evening)

(re-edited to add : apparently they found an issue with the transfers and are holding off on more until after maintenance tonight)

I have no desire to move.  If I lose even a single name I'll be rather unhappy.

Maybe they're doing a sort where lightest + heaviest go first, then so on down the line.
I think just moving it from one slot to another does, too...

I'm actually on that server.   I did a fist pump when I saw the transfer list.    Having 8 people on at fleet at primetime sounds too high.   I'm actually a bit worried though.   I already know several people talking about resubbing due to this.

There's pretty strong sentiment in general in favor of moving (assuming we aren't a destination) from Slap people I've talked to, just as a heads-up for everyone. Nobody wants to get left on a server that everyone else deserted, and some people really want a busy auction house.

The naming issue is really the only thing that is coming up as a negative.

If we're a move-from server I fully expect to have to.  I'm just hopping we're a destination server.

I was hoping for a transfer with options.  So I can get away from the douche canoes on my server.

Yeah, same. I should really have said the name thing is only the long-term negative; there's a lot of short-term annoyance with having to move all your alts and rename, I additionally have to manually empty the vault, disband the guild, open a ticket to get the new vault created, etc.

EDIT: It does give us the opportunity to rename the guild, theoretically, since we're like 3 steps removed from the original inside joke at this point and I think well more than half the guild wasn't around for the start of it.

The fact that the move is optional is just so they can say it isn't server mergers.   Anyone who doesn't transfer is going to be left on a dead server.

Yea, being left on the ghost town server is not an option. Fuck that noise.

How about Fledermausland?  :grin: FML is pretty awesome!

Agreed on the source/destination thing: if we're a source, it's time to move.

What's odd is the amount of people that don't want to transfer cuz they like being on low pop servers.   :facepalm:

If you don't pvp and you don't play the GTN and you don't pug....

So far GW2 is the first game since Planetside where I'd want to be on a high pop server. I would only be moving BC because everyone else would want to. It's not like I was getting a ton of groups when things were booming.

"Using the GTN at all" isn't really "playing the GTN." But yes, if you don't ever (and I mean ever!) use the GTN or plan to group or PvP or whatever, a low pop server is perfectly fine. I like having a functional GTN though and while Shien's actually isn't too bad right now (at least for me, for the stuff I buy and very occassionally sell), I imagine post-transfers it would be terrible.

If we got punted to Lord Adraas I'd have to pick a smuggler to keep. And it's not looking good for Kalah.  :ye_gods:


Honestly I kinda wish they'd say "OK, these are the destination servers, pick any one you want to transfer to." We have friends on Jedi Covenant, and it would be nice to punt at least one of my people onto that server for legacy purposes, and they feel similarly, I am sure. I definitely don't care about my legacy name at all, so that's not an issue for me. :P

Looks like you Shien folks are going to Ebon Hawk.

Well considering they dumped even more people to Fatman they really must have buffed server pops.

What a giant pain in the balls. I've been pretty casual about everything with this game and team, but I'm really not happy having to dick around manually recreating BC and dicking around with character name stuff. If we had been a destination server, thing might have been different. As is it, this might be the thing to turn me off of TOR.

Manual = lazy. They really should have developed a tool to migrate guilds.

Also, I have 6 or 7 alts on Ebon Hawk. Might get lucky on a few names, I guess.

Bat Country is dead.  Long live Bat Country.   :oh_i_see:

Anyone for Slap in the Darkside on Ebon Hawk?

So what's this rumour abour Vogel getting shitcanned, then?

E: Oh hey, Jeff Hickman is supposed to be his replacement. That bodes well.  :why_so_serious:

Yeah manual process is annoying. They probably couldn't do a tool to migrate a guild and all the members en masse, since that gets into player consent issues etc., but letting us move an empty guild with the GM character would have been nice.

EDIT: We were really hoping for Lord Adraas rather than Ebon Hawk; Fordel and Sjofn are going to lose a bunch of their names on Ebon Hawk.

My server (Giradda) still hasn't been put up on the block yet, but it's coming. I'm hoping they'll add Shadowlands (PvE East) as a third East PvE destination, as it's a fairly populated server and both my girlfriend and guildmates' names are all available on it.

Speak for yourself!  I had three names taken on Adraas and only one on Ebon Hawk.   :grin:

They are absolutely crazy transferring so many servers to Fatman.   This is going to blow up if people resubscribe.   

Presumably that is where their new 'super server' tech that they've talked about comes into play. We'll see I guess!

You think this could potentially present a problem?  Really?

I think the only way that this game could get people back would be if they a) implemented an amazing open world pvp battleground and/or b) they added ship-based pvp with an upgrade grind. 

The pve is pretty solid minus some balancing to the raid content.  There just needs to be more of it.  A LOT more. 

Well I just transferred 7 of my Shien characters over to Ebon Hawk.  I just assumed that if a name was taken I'd get a warning before completing the transfer. Apparently not.  All but one of my characters names were turned to gibberish.

That was the last straw for me. I'll be back for the next expansion.

I would also add:  they need to add LFD.  I don't want any chance of spending money to come back to an indeterminate waiting queue for PvE.  I want a high probability that if I select a FlashPoint, Heroic or Whatever, that I will have a very high chance of getting to play it within 30mins.  I resubbed to WoW as a tourist recently and I literally play a new dungeon every night that I never did before.   I want that for SWTOR.  I  would happily pay MORE than normal for that privilege.

Ye gods. What are they thinking? Is there a mechanism to get a new name?

When you log in with the character you get to rename.  It doesn't mean your name is taken, just that you have to rename when you log in.  

Already seeing issues on the official forums about players who have one set of chars on a transfer eligible server and another set of chars on the destination server (ie: they rolled Republic on one and Empire on the other).
I have to wonder how Bioware propose to deal with these situations. I'd suggest doubling the character slots per server; which I'm sure most people would like anyway, but also makes up for the large ammount of potential character slots that will be lost as the emptying servers are finally removed. But I don't know how on the ball Bioware are going to be about all of this. My gut feeling is 'not very'.

That would be the best way to deal with it for sure.

I just checked this out and I don't think it's true. Every single character that had its name turned to gibberish had its name already taken.

When I transferred one of mine his name wasn't taken but I still had to rename.

Weird. It doesn't really make sense. Why would they make you rename if the name wasn't already taken?  Why did one of my characters not have to be renamed unless it meant that the server knew the name was available?

Hate to restate what Nebu did but, yeah, not happening.  You get one shot anymore.  Unless there's some AMAZING turn-around I don't think this is going to be a problem.

Hell, I think most people played it as a single player game then left, meaning there'd need to be a full-blown X-pack to bring them back.

For me, it would take a complete overhaul of the combat mechanics.  Feeling increasingly less-powerful as I leveled-up while also needing to juggle more buttons totally turned me off the game.


WoW does the same thing on the test realm. I imagine it's just an automatic flag to rename.  Easier to handle than checking against the character database THEN flagging if a match was found.

I got transferred. Rage misplaced. Apologies to everyone for gaming related frustration built up over the last three months of waiting in Rep Fleet for a measly pvp game to start.

I'm not sure what you are doing.  Here is what I just did as a test procedure on one of my low level losers on Shien:

1. Made a temporary character with the same name yesterday on Ebon Hawk.  I log in, delete him.
2. Log into my account on the website, select the transfer thingie, start the 'transfer process'.
3. I get an email a minute or so later saying it's done.  I log into Ebon Hawk character selection and there he is with his old name, no prompting.
4. Legacy button is flashing, so I push that, am prompted for a new legacy name as the old one is taken, so I think up one and enter it, and my legacy level 22 w/all stuff is back.

So if the name is available, there's no prompt.

I didn't log in and create a temporary character to see if the name was available because I foolishly thought that they'd check that as part of the transfer process. It doesn't matter. I now have 7 randomly named characters on Ebon Hawk just waiting for the next expansion where I'll play it as a singlle player game again. :)

2 of the 6 I actually give a damn about are available. Pretty much pissed me right off to fuck over the whole 'preorder login get my names for once' thing I had going. Really was nice to have Sky for the first time since UO.

I'm ambivalent to the point of wondering whether I should even fucking bother transferring or just cancel and forget the game. I hate coming up with new names, and I had the ones I wanted. Now I don't. I can't imagine my legacy name is around, either.

It seems so trivial to many people but names are a really important part of a character to some players. They can inform gender, race, class, profession, even if they aren't explicit in their meaning; they just have an intrinsic value to their creator. When you're suddenly stripped of that name through no action of your own (ie: defying naming convention/rules) it can be very difficult to get back into a character. Several of my Shien names are gone on Ebon Hawk, including my main. I really don't know what I'm going to replace them with. I almost feel like this should come with some sort of means to adjust your character's race and features if you so need to completely rethink. On the RP-PvE origin servers, I can imagine this is a very wide issue.

I had that same thought, changing the appearance would help a lot with the renaming thing.

I agree that names are very, very important. That's why these days when I start playing a MMORPG I take the time to go on a bunch of servers other than the one I am playing on launch day and create a placeholder char with my name. It's a bit obsessive I know, and it doesn't always work (sometimes you end up merging or transferring to that one server where you didn't make the placeholder) but it saved me a few times. Like this one. All I had to do was to go on the server I was about to transfer to, delete my placeholder, and transfer with my main character. Gladly, it worked smoothly.

Not sure if it helps, but if you like me are the kind of person that cares I humbly suggest to try something like that in the future.

I am seriously considering just transferring one or two people to Ebon Hawk and just remaking a bunch of people for pretty much this reason (I am a special kind of broken, I know). I mean, I kinda expected to lose SOME of my character names, but not ALL of them except the one I let the random name generator make up for my BH that is all of level 12 and thus I am not really attached to at all.  :heartbreak:

AND I have to decide between my Lord Adraas smuggler and my Shien smuggler (poor thing, she is THIS CLOSE to level 50).

The thing that really gets me, though...you set up the entire mmo to be about YOUR PERSONAL STORY...and then you rip the person out of it. It's possibly the worst thing they could have done.

Letting the servers dwindle to nobody would be worse, though.

I understand why it was done. But it was done in a horrible way. Quite literally, Sky has fallen.

edit: I know I'm being a bit dramatic and whatnot, but I'm pretty pissed about this. And ambivalent at the same time. Pissbivalent.

Yeah no worries, totally understandable. I'm just trying to think of a way they could have done it that would work better and not really coming up with much. If they had whatever tech Champions had that lets people have the same name, I guess, but that seems like something that might involve ripping out a lot of stuff at a fairly low level to make it work after the fact.

EDIT: Trolled around the forums a bit, everyone sounds pretty happy about the transfers... EXCEPT the RP server people, who are pretty steamed about names. Which I guess is as expected.

EDIT 2: I guess it might have helped if they stole names back from canceled accounts like CoH/X did at once point (if I'm remembering right?)

If I could transfer some of my people to Jedi Covenant, I would be less annoyed, basically.

They did but only from lower level characters.

I got my Legacy name, but Fordel and Sturmvogel were taken as character names.


Now I am Fordell and Sturmvogell  :|

I somehow kept both my legacy name and all 7 of my characters' names...

(flees)

(edited to add : remember to reset UI template and cooldown types per character moved)

Ya because pvp has saved what games? Don't answer eve either as 90% of the playerbase never leaves hisec.

My pet theory is eve got a lot of swg ng refuges to grow it after it's poor launch.

Ok, are you shitting me? YOU HAVE BEEN PLACED IN A QUEUE.

Fuck off, BWA.

SOME people will resubscribe.   I think you misunderstood me though.   Fatman was already "full".   It was the server people went to in order to be on a full server.   Now they're allowing like 4 or 5 different servers to transfer to that server.

If even a miniscule portion of the people on those servers resub it will be a nightmare.   These are servers that were dead too so you can guarantee some people only cancelled due to low pops.    It's actually pretty clear the resubs are already happening too.   I've seen a lot of people from my original server online when before you could only see like 2 or 3.

Down to 130 from 200.  :oh_i_see:

Finally in just as two of the pvp servers went Full.

11 minutes for me to get on Ebon Hawk with a 150-person queue, not tooooo bad.  I'm hopeful they did their math right for populating and this is just because everyone who still had a subscription has logged in to move and seize their character names.

I suspect it's a character name gold rush, yeah.

So in the rush for claims, I got Komoto and Caviglia. No Sky, Bart, Haruspex. And out of my alts from another server I used for saving names and looks, I got one: Calc'avigli'ar (I was pretty sure that'd be safe). No Cicatrix or Zebulon. Naming total was 5 out of 15, and most of those were cheesy alts like Winth. So really 2 decent names and Sky and Haruspex were two of my favorites.

I was already scraping the bottom of the barrel for names, I can't imagine how tough it will be trying to rename Sky, Bart and Haruspex. Those guys are totally those guys and not 'Mkahhehua' or whatever the hell is going to be left.

We have over 500 on both the republic and imp fleets..  there were something like 15 pvp wz's going on at level 50 range.  This is good stuff for me.

As far as names go they plan to do super servers.   I imagine at that time they'll be forced to use a system that allows people to use the same name.

Just so you guys don't worry, the SUPERBUFF doesn't quite work right when you transfer your first character over. After you create your legacy again (and of ALL the names that WEREN'T taken on the server, SUNSTRIKE was not taken as a legacy name, color me surprised), you have to relog for it to remember what your buff should be.

Do you have any characters on Shadowlands at the moment? That's wear I'm mostly playing now (Republic side) - its a reasonable population, at least during peak hours.

This is why unique character names are stupid in MMOs. Have a unique account name (and that account name is unirque across all servers), but let characters be named whatever someone chooses. Because servers will merge and then you end up with this.

Cryptic did that bit right, at least.

So, f13 people who play with us, we are pondering taking this opportunity to change the guild name, since we're pretty well removed from the original inside joke that caused the name and we have lots of people who weren't even really around for it. Because we are silly people we are pondering one of these:

Droid Rage
Human-Cyborg Relations (currently winning!)
keeping Slap in the Force

Vote!

K never mind the voting, Human-Cyborg Relations was starting to run away with it after some more polling. Guild is made, my main dude is still Kayce so send me a tell for an invite whenever. (Also anyone can invite as long as I remembered to promote them from recruit).

The guy who was running the population survey (based on a change in server state) has a spreadsheet of all the transfers and expected transfers. The end result being a compression down to about 10 servers in the US (thread (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=449144&page=44)).

My SWTOR-playing guildie tells me that Lord Adraas is also being mass-transferred to Ebon Hawk. Which is kind of odd, I thought Adraas had a healthy population itself?

I was orignally thinking they'd cut the 6 East RP-PVE down to 2, with Ebon Hawk and Lord Adraas as the destinations, but I guess they decided to mush them all into 1. Probably the right decision long-term, really.

It is true, and the Adraas people are pissed because, as you say, they had a perfectly acceptable population. But I guess they want really packed servers for their LFD to work without having to do the cross server LFD shit.

If the retention rate is still trending negative it's better to err on the side of the over-packing the servers. From a PR point of view they won't be wanting to do this again for quite a while.

Someone tell me if "Riders of Lohan" is still avaible. I might resub to snatch that one.

Yeah, I'd rather wait in a queue than have to do this shit AGAIN in a few months.

I like the Guild Wars solution. No matter how soon I got in the beta, I found out my name was taken and I am pretty sure that's cross-server. On the other hand though, allowing players to create unique names with up to 20 characters and most importantly spaces gives so much freedom that it's not so hard to find a combination of first name/last name that works. That way, even with literally millions of unique names across all servers it's not too hard to come up with something original that isn't gibberish.

The Secret World on the other hand is going to face problems, as it has a cross-server system with unique names but no spaces or too many characters allowed. So good luck making sense. But that's why their "reserve your name" purchasable item is pretty valuable in this case: no chance of having that messed with due to a server merge.

Well, sure. When they can push away casual fans like me they won't need as much room. I haven't been playing much the last couple months, but for me mmo is generally an Oct-Apr thing. With this bullshit move, it's difficult to even transfer my characters over (I haven't yet). It was around 20 minutes just to log in and check my names. Now I'll have to log in and some point to delete them before I transfer over AND come up with new non-crap names for my guys....and that's really the biggest block for me. The very thought of it kills any ambition to log in and actually make the transfer...I'd rather actually play games than deal with their bullshit that will result with me losing out. Gee, thanks for that.

No, they've done something no other mmo has been able to do for me: give me a hard barrier to re-entry. Thanks for saving me the monthly fee, I'll just go play Planetside 2 and GW2.

I'll disband BC soon, and if I can log onto EH without a queue I'll set it up there and get the SLAP err H-CR folks in and officered up. Ingmar can run the show for BC if he wants to.

Are they closing the origin servers? I'm on Adraas and don't really feel the need to move. Swtor's been a single player game, even when the pop was high, and my sub's up in August. Figure I'll finish up agent and at least one Republic and be done. I doubt I'll be renewing. Raid progression isn't my thing and the stories have been ok, but not enough to warrant renewing a subscription to see them all.

Also, even with the higher rates, I still really hate reverse engineering. Just putting that out there.

They're not closing, at least not soon, but I would expect them to eventually. I'd *guess* they won't close them until they have paid transfers available as well, so you get the choice to take your free transfer off to a specific place, or pay to go anywhere, but I don't really know.

The "consolidation" is even more serious in Europe, seems like everything has been compacted into 6 servers. Down from about 50.

Yeah it seems to be 1 per type per region. US has 2 regions, EU has one? Something like that.

I don't really want to run both, pick someone else!

You already have been!  :drill:

Looks like I'm not quite right about this, there are at least 2 destination servers for East PVP (Fatman and Prophecy of the Five) so there may be a couple other types like this.

I'm still wondering what they're going to do with the remaining 6 English PvE launch servers (the seventh is the destination for everyone else). I'm on Hidden Beks and while it's not completely dead it's not exactly busy either. I thought they would have been announced in this mornings update but still waiting.

Same with us on Space Slug PVE West. Its not dead, but I wouldn't call it healthy by any means.

According to some person's post on the forums

West PVE

Destination Servers: 2
Servers Transferred: 15
Remaining Servers: 7
Total Servers: 24

**Drooga’s Pleasure Barge: 7
**The Harbinger: 8


My guess is the remaining will get tossed on one server.  Crossing fingers to be the destination and skip this headache.  :drill:

Yeah that's what I'm hoping too. Although at this stage I don't really care where I end up, I just want to bloody know!

Looks like my server (Giradda, US PvE East) is going to be left in the lurch until next week. There are 22 US PvE East servers left, and word is that Shadowlands and Krayt Dragon may be made into Destinations with the final 20 servers split between them. But of course Bioware isn't going to say anything, so there's only so many measures one can take to help mitigate the naming situation.  :|

I can do the Bat Country thing if no one else wants to, it's not very hard to be in charge of 5 people.  :why_so_serious:

Every server I had alts on is moving to Ebon Hawk.  :oh_i_see:

Were any of them over level 10?  :-P

Ha, guess I was wrong. One more round of server transfers today, and not only was my server on it, but I'm also being sent to the server I was hoping to be sent to!

:why_so_serious:

I wonder if biting the bullet, acknowledging the reduction and aggressively compacting the servers is also admitting that there's no large content addition in the near future that might have substantially boosted online activity. If the new content pipeline is empty, and one would imagine EA isn't going to inject massive funds at this point, I could see it going into something close to maintenance mode.

Considering SWTOR had zone instancing from the get go there is probably no real hardware limitation to them increasing the maximum server size.    They use BigWorld (same thing as World of Tanks) on the backend so maybe someone with experience there can say.

http://www.gamestm.co.uk/discuss/star-wars-the-old-republic-we-are-looking-at-free-to-play-says-lead-designer/

Welp.

My reaction:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7edeOEuXdMU&feature=player_detailpage#t=7s

Welp sorry guys you're not WoW after 6 months, so we're firing half of you and going F2P. - A retarded executive

I have to assume that guy was talking out of turn and bioware will quickly post something about how he was "misinterpreted", "taken out of context" or "drunk".

Chances it will be one of those ham-fisted implementations that will be reduced to a sucky game experience or just paying the $15/mo?

100%

Message them and ask how many reupped just to take the free move now so if they DID think about reupping in the future they didn't do so on a dead server.  I know I briefly considered it because a $15 fee to transfer ALL my characters for free now is better than $15 + $25x <whatever characters I move> later.

I guess it turns out that the assholes who said it would be F2P within a year were right.

This is a dumb move on their part.

It's EA with their hands on a space MMO - when has that ever ended badly before?   :why_so_serious:

(http://www.thesportsbank.net/core/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/old-english-40.jpg)

'scuse me while I pour this out for E&B and the dudes at Westwood   :heartbreak:

:smug:

Bioware? Making dumb moves? Inconceivable!

Also the article has now mysteriously been pulled. Looks like someone leaked something early...like, say, before all the server moves were completed.

F2P would be the best thing that could happen to SWTOR at this point. The gameplay model makes more sense for microtrasactions (pay for class X, pay for zone X for every class, etc.) since most of the content isn't end-game. Instead of having people blowing through all the content in 1-2 months and then unsubbing because they have nothing to do, you'll have two types of players:

1) Those that still blow through everything in 1-2 months, but spend $150+ to do so. They may stick around because it doesn't cost them $15 a month to do so.

2) Those that no longer feel pressured to blow through everything quickly to get the most out of their sub fee, and slowly level through classes. They most likely spend less than $15 a month (think the average thrown around was $8 for paying customers in F2P games? citation needed :p) and they permanently own the content they buy, so both the player and EA win in the long run.

I fall into camp 2 and I'll gladly return to SWTOR if/when it goes F2P.

I propose an overhaul.  A "new game experience," if you will.

Shrug, a "pay per story chapter" model would have worked wonderfully if implemented from the very beginning, it might be the only way to keep the content heavy story model going.

Next earnings report is 7/23 for EA and that Quarter ends in June.  So we won't have long to wait for a decision maybe.

So, regarding the transfertotallynotmerges: the new crowded server is a joy, IMO. PVP queues go off constantly, the GTN is packed, I log in at 11 pm server time and there are multiple fleet instances, every planet I've been to so far has 40+ people, crazy roleplaying people are doing their thing everywhere. It's awesome.

I would be unsurprised but incredibly disappointed if TOR goes F2P. The last thing I'd want to see are "TOR STORE" icons plastered all over the UI and the majority of the live team's focus shifted to shitting out cash shop items on a monthly basis while the already-slow storyline content updates come even slower.

You're assuming the worst case hypothetical outcome and ignoring the good F2P conversions that have happened. You could have said the same thing about DDO, which was an MMO in a very similar situation as SWTOR. An under-performing MMO with a focus on hand-crafted leveling content that most people played solo? Sounds pretty familiar. DDO has silly cash shop items like pets and cosmetic gear, but the additional revenue coming in (with a model that made more sense for the content) lead to much more content being added to the game. The game is just now coming out with it's first expansion pack which wouldn't have happened if it remained a subscription game.

The worst thing that could happen to SWTOR isn't a F2P conversion, it's staying the current course. If Bioware doesn't make large changes and adapt to a business model that makes more sense for the game they have created, the game will just become another maintenance-mode MMO like WAR destined to eventually be shut down.

Ha, DDO is high up on my list of shitty F2P conversions. It may've made Turbine a lot of money, but on my end it was awful to play with its crippled client and hideously overpriced store, which are both problems LOTRO's F2P has/had.

But apparently the original source article for the Bioware PR quote's been pulled, so it's a moot point anyway.

I'm not sure there's any reason to believe this was anything more than kicking the idea around as a just-in-case, which is probably something that all MMO studios do as a matter of course post-Turbine's-ridiculous-success, even Blizzard.

Didn't some survey earlier this year (posted to Google Docs, from memory) also hint at the game going F2P?  :headscratch:

With more twitchy gameplay!

There is also this quote from EA higher-up Frank Gibeau


and


Source: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-06-15-ea-confident-that-people-will-be-playing-star-wars-the-old-republic-a-decade-from-now


I've been perfectly fine with the pricing in the DDO store. $5 for 4-6 hours of high-quality repeatable quest content or $7-9 for the same with a raid as well seems fair to me. I still end up paying less than $15/month and I can play that content on my own schedule. LOTRO has been a little different. $5-7 for a large quest zone I'm fine with, but the prices have gotten pretty inflated with the last 2 expansion packs of quest content. Still preferable to either game being a strictly-subscription model for me though.

Meanwhile Rift purrs along with its sub model and a massive xpac on the horizon.

Honestly, I'm not sure what I'd buy in a f2p TOR.  Maybe if they added more involved space missions.  Space, for a side game, was VERY well implemented to me. 

Welp.

From the predictions thread:

Of course it remains to be seen how they'll do F2P, if at all. Will they put a level cap on it, like some games do?
Make the content pay-gated?
So many options.

They keep saying there's some fancy new space thing coming (and that they don't mean the new mission they're adding soon.)

Yes, Rift is still a subscription + endless trial game, but that subscription is often heavily discounted.

I wouldn't be surprised if they went the Turbine route of offering $10/month subs on medium-term plans later this year or in lead-up to the expansion.  Situation's a little different because of the lack of lifetime subscriptions, and Rift is still a young game at this point.

Edit: Thinking about it, "everyone" is playing around with subscription pricing.  WoW had the annual pass with free D3 and SWTOR's given away a decent amount of time.  But those are still sitting at higher monthly rates.

Wow is still on subscription as well.

Rift has that now. (http://www.riftgame.com/en/products/subscriptions.php)

Rift is also privately held so we have basically no visibility into what is going on there behind the scenes. We don't even have a good estimate of subscriber numbers, although one could speculate that if they were impressive there would be press releases and marketing built around that. They've merged servers themselves and are discounting subs, so I don't know that 'purring' is right. It might be, it might not, who really knows?

I meant more at the 3/6-month levels, but yes, Rift does discount very aggressively on the multi-month plans.  I think they had them down even lower (like $8.50/month for 1 year) as a promotion late last year.

Still, at regular pricing WoW at 6-months a pop is a full $2/month more.  Plus Remote being a couple bucks for WoW but free for Rift.

Rift has already discounted subs a few times. $29.99/3 months has been offered a few times and $99.99/year was offered around the 1-year anniversary. I like Rift, but it's clear they weren't successful enough to stick with consistent high subscription prices like WoW.

Rift had a 6 month subs for 10 bucks a month from launch, their pricing had nothing to do with their success or lack of it.

That was 'founders' pricing that expired shortly after release I believe.

I actually have talked to a lot of them now.   My server was actually a pretty active PvP server back in the day and a lot of people at least knew who I was from WZ's.    I didn't do anything like ask them why they quit or whatever.   The majority though said something along the lines of "I came back because FATMAN!".

I've no clue how well the game is doing overall considering they increased the server limits.   However bad some people see this game though the people who liked it sure as hell weren't going to play on dead servers.     They took too long but they did it right at least.    They're going to get back subs as word gets around.   Of course they may just bleed them out again.  

Interesting the article was pulled. It might also explain why they left all the old servers up rather than closing them... it means they have a lot of spare capacity sitting idle. Which if so means they'll probably go f2p sooner rather than later since it's also costing them money in hosting. Pretty much confirms EA sees the game as a massive failure, this wasn't the original plan at all, and it's still going to be a stretch to generate the revenue they need to extent the content at the same quality level.

A big problem I see with going F2P is that the cosmetic stuff in SWTOR is not particularly appealing. Attractive cosmetic stuff is cheap to produce, sells well, and tends not to piss off consumers.

To the best of my knowledge, RIFT cost US$50m to develop and has made that money back. Hartsman et al were focused on what they wanted to do with that game and kept development costs from blowing out. They self-published in the US and had publishing partners for Europe and Asia, meaning they kept a lot of money from the revenue that came in from box sales.

EA gave BioWare a blank cheque and LucasArts is allegedly taking a cut of revenue, so SWOR had to be massively successful just to break even. Then they hyped it up a lot and delivered something that was good, but not awesome. I won't be surprised if some kind of F2P offer is made available for SWOR. F2P means they have their client on lots of computers and the chance of people paying a few dollars, than requiring $15 a month from a much smaller and more critical group.

At what point can we say the sky has fallen?

I'm looking forward to the next news on subscriber numbers.  :vv:

This could be an incentive for them to produce gear that doesn't look like A: stuff hobos reject because they still have dignity or B: stuff designed by that japanese commercial guy with bananas in his ears.
I never bought any Store outfits in Guild Wars because I could usually cobble something together I liked out of what was available in game. SWtOR? I'm still struggling to find gear for my BH that doesn't look like I tripped over in landfill.

They could sell content packs like lotro does. You want to follow the next episode of your troopers personal story? 15$ thanks. A cool new companion? 15$ thanks. Also PvP advantages and convenience (character slots, races, bags) are easy money. Plus gating progression either through level locks or forcing people to buy planets.

However it still won't work. The money required to add new content at close to the level they've established is simply too expensive and slow for either sub or f2p. That's always been the problem that is inherent in their design. Instead I suspect they'll use f2p to extend the lifetime of the title, and probably conceal the subscription numbers, but I would be surprised if the game doesn't slip into maintenance mode and the dev team shrunk further.

I look forward to BioWare announcing same sex companions as a pay-to-play only.  :grin:

Pay2Gay, as I believe the term has already been coined here.  So good.

Maybe selling planet quest packs  beyond the first few might work and is way more the LoTRO model than selling personal story chapters. In LoTRO the book stories are free all the way through, as they should be. If they sold planet packs I think they'd get way better response. Also providing a bounty board system so they can pretend you can level without the planet quest pack would be an good idea. They'd need to come up with some modification on their achievements system to support points that can be used in their store as well. All this assumes they actually decide to go with the Turbine model. I think the reason the turbine model succeeds is that it gives the illusion you can really play for free if you work at it but in reality very few have the fortitude to stick with grinding deeds to get turbine points.

(http://www.myfacewhen.net/uploads/3890-oh-you-dog.jpg)

And thanks to the mergers, the queues are back. 40 minutes wait tonight for me. Oh stupid gamers, we are never happy, are we?  :oh_i_see:

I doubt that's going to be going on long term.   It's just the rush of the first weekend after transfers are available.

I haven't seen a Queue since the first night, all the RP'ers fighting over their names.

No queues on Canderous Ordo that I've seen. I have been absolutely thrilled with the amount of Warzones I've been able to get into, though. Subscribed for another month just to do that and space combat to pass the time until something else grabs my interest.

Meanwhile, back on Adraas there were 3 people on Corellia and 10 on Dromund Kass this afternoon. About once an hour, maybe less often, they put a system message onscreen about the transfers in big red letters. Who knows how long they'll bother to keep Adraas open. I'll enjoy having planets to myself in the meantime.

No queues on Shadowlands either. There are, as I type, 113 people on Dromund Kaas, and only 8 of them aren't level-appropriate. That is insane.

It's really quite awesome, sky falling or no this is fantastic for the people still playing.

the question is when is this game moved to the graveyard?

Yeah, it's made the game significantly more enjoyable. The auction house has pages of results for just about any inquiry instead of one or two items, Fleet is packed full of people, and battlegrounds are popping like mad. Best of all, they're almost never Huttball.

The name thing sucks though, and my legacy name was already taken. Bleh.

Reloaded the game to transfer my characters and there were 287 people on the Imperial fleet last night, I dont remember there being that many ever.  Lag was light but definitely tolerable.  Game is actually fun again after a 2 month break but then again Im playing 1-49 bracket and will probably quit again once I hit 50

To be fair, while I understand why so many don't want to subject themselves to the post-50 PvP, that's where the game shines. If it wasn't for the ridiculous amount of Crowd Control I must say this would be the most balanced and enjoyable hotbar-based arena PvP experience I've ever had, and I am totally looking forward to the ranked warzones. By the time they'll implement them pretty much everyone will have the best equipment or close to, which will level the field to "skill" and tactics.

Granted, none of that is even remotely visible with PUGs. You have to run with your team, which is the point of Ranked Warzones. But there's a layer up there which is really enjoyable (when you are not perma-stunned/rooted/feared).

Finally, allowing 8-players premades will make it all even better now that the servers are really full. While waiting for Guild Wars and the real deal, this is going to be a lot of fun.

Your contribution is sincerely appreciated.

I would agree, if Rift is there, TOR belongs there (with the massive merges). But your first post in two years?

Oooof. My 5 year old and I currently share my Sith Assassin and ranking is going to hurt. Not that he doesn't kill people, but it's usually because he's spamming Lacerate at the right time.

The merges have made it better than it was at release for me.   Even places like Hoth routinely have 60 people in the middle of the night.   I no longer have to skip nearly every heroic in the game.

I agree with you completely on this. Getting in a good PvP-only guild on Shadowlands and running premades has injected a lot more fun into the game for me, both before the transfers and after. There are a lot more PUGs running now, which are easy wins, but even when we were fighting other premades, the challenge was very satisfying. Ranked Warzones should be a lot of fun.

The only measure that I assume matters is the level of activity, but I dunno how they do the graveyard thing. EVE and WoW forums get less traffic than this one currently, could we be looking at no released MMOs outside the graveyard?  :-P

I'm surprised that old piece of crap whore WoW isn't in there.




 :why_so_serious:

Whenever I get around to it :awesome_for_real:

See, I don't think this is true. Maybe "pretty much everyone who likes grinding their e-dick against a cheesegrater" will have the best equipment, but I didn't even find a class I was good at in PvP until a few weeks ago, and there is simply no fucking way I'm going to spend the amount of time needed getting completely run over and destroyed to get equipment to have anything even remotely resembling fun in PvP.

It would be different if there was an Alterac Valley for me to hide in, where I won't immediately get marked and assist trained into a greasy smear (this already happens in some WZs, but at least in the pre-50 ones I have a fighting chance to get my ass out of it). But in 8v8, finding and marking me is utterly trivial, and I would be the tiniest of speedbumps. I don't like that, and there are a lot of people who don't like that.

The PvP gear situation in SWTOR is the stupidest thing about it, but they don't seem to have much of an issue with it, so it just means my answer for level 50 PvP is "don't bother."

The only thing I can tell you is that the concept of grind is subjective. I call "grind" every action you perform in a game in order to achieve something while not having fun. To those who love PvP the grind is non-existent as you play for the sake of playing, even when you die repeatedly due to inferior equipment, and getting better gear (therefore better performances too) is the added bonus. Sure, the goal is to even the field, but most of the people I know who prefer PvP to PvE are there regardless of gear.

In our old server me and my friends used to lose 8 matches out of 10, and while frustrated none of us ever felt we were grinding.

I totally see your point though, and as I said multiple times I greatly prefer PvP games where there is NO gear progression of any kind. But believe me when I say that lots of the post-50 players that vaporize you don't do it just because they have better gear (that plays a huge part, of course). They do it because they have played so much that they know exactly how to neutralize you as fast as possible in so many different ways. While I think that the human skill cap in games like SWTOR is pretty low, there's still a huge huge HUGE gap between causal PvPers and those* who take the thing dead seriously. A good example when it comes to that is Guild Wars: no equip progression, you are still gonna die like a fly. Gear progression is very important, but _sometimes_ it's an excuse we give to ourselves. In fact, I know lots of people with the top equip still dying a lot and performing terribly. In my opinion fun in PvP doesn't come with the equip. It doesn't even come from winning. It comes from the fact that you want to play against other humans. That's why PvE so easily feels like a grind to me, no matter how much I outgear the mobs.


* For the record, not talking about myself. I take it dead seriously but I suck.

If the ranked stuff moves the already-geared people out for the most part, and there are still enough ungeared 50s queuing to make zones pop at a decent rate, I could see possibly giving the level 50 pvp a try. That's a lot of stuff that has to go right, though.

Depends on just how good that free suit of pvp gear in 1.3 is, too, I guess. Although taking the giant pile of credits instead is probably too tempting for me. If the difference is a 10-15% sort of thing between starter gear and fully kitted out, that's one thing, if we're looking at more like a 50% difference then it doesn't really help.

I mean, I totally get what you're saying about the gear not making you automatically good, but lack of gear does kind of make you automatically bad, and there's a certain balance point where it doesn't matter how much you want to be PVPing, you're failing so much that it becomes unfun regardless.

You get about 900 Expertise out of the Recruit gear.  With full WH I just crack 1300.  Recruit is just meant to be so you don't get totally slaughtered.  You can tell the difference stepping up from Recruit to Battlemaster.   BM is way easier to get now than it was pre 1.2 though.

I predict a lot of pre-made groups hitting a wall when they only have to fight other pre-mades in ranked warzone matches.



There's like 2 or 3 tiers difference between the nooby starter suit and the battlemaster suit, let alone the inevitable WarHero stuff.

Over-modded War Hero stuff you mean...
The monsters scoring 800k+ damage in a WZ are certainly scary. But hey, there lies the challenge and the whole point of "ranked" Warzones.

The part that sucks is that you can still get Ranked people in your Unranked queue. It would be great if the two things stayed properly separated.

But how many people PvP again?   Isn't it a small amount?

Apparently, no. Of course I have no hard data to support this, but I am under the impression that there's a word-of-mouth thing going on about the fact that the PvP combat is pretty enjoyable, and that there's much more people into it than we (and them) would have imagined.

Then again. I have no data to support this. Just a hunch, based on reading around a bit, talking a bit around with fellow PvP nuts from older games, and logging in every day since launch and having seen the daily life of a dying server and now the daily life of the EU most populated one.

One thing pretty much everyone I know into PvP keeps complaining a lot about is fucking CC being out of control, but that is something Devs aren't over yet. Maybe next generation.

That and 95% of people don't know how Resolve works.

This is really beyond resolve. The resolve bar is a very cool addition. But the problem lies way beyond such a short immunity timer.

 :angryfist: Don't get me started on people who whine about resolve.   It's probably the best CC immunity mechanic ever.    It's basic CC itself that's retarded.

People have been bitching about there being too much CC since the dawn of time. The issue is the definition of "too much CC" changes to whatever amount of CC causes that specific player to die that day.  :why_so_serious:


The number of people who will dive into a Warzone once or twice a week is fairly large.
The number of people who play every day on a competitive level is far far smaller.
The number of people who THINK they are playing on a competitive level but are actually just farming the casual folk is also fairly large, but these people are incredibly fickle and will disappear at the first sign of actual resistance.

Yeah, exactly how I feel.
Not controlling your character = not fun. I can live with 3 secs CCs like the cryogrenade ones, but 8 seconds looking at the screen? Fuck that noise. I think it's a mechanic that has to go.

Cryo is 4 seconds.

All the 8 second CC's break on damage.



It's a non-issue.

CC doesn't bug me as much as all the fucking knockback does. But even that is more of a "eh, sux" thing than anything else. CC whining always amuses me, though.  :heart:

From a combat perspective they are fine.   I feel like in organized PvP the AoE ones will be too strong at objectives.   Especially when they can be chained.

In organized PvP if your squad is eating multiple AE CC's together, you got outplayed.

At least you can actually use target markers in SWTOR to try and be coordinated.  That always was a great irritation to me in WoW, especially when doing 3v3 or 5v5 arenas.

I'll get the occasional match on my healy scoundrel where I am completely useless and always getting the shit beat out of me, and I'll be like, what, do I have a giant target over my head?   And I probably do.

Why is break on damage a non-issue?
What part of watching the action going on for 8 seconds without being able to do anything is supposed to be fun gameplay? I am sure you know as well as I do that good teams can CC your fun into the drain if they mark you for that. This is only becoming more obviousnow that teams for Ranked are starting to form and are practicing chain-CCing on dangerous targets.

Sjofn, what amuses me is your rage for the Mass Effect

I thought you didn't even PvP seriously?  I'm not saying that makes your comment invalid or anything I'm just curious why you'd even care to debate pvp balance in high level play.

That has ... what, exactly, to do with anything? I haven't even mentioned it for months. People have wailed about CC since it was actually hugely shitty (whee, DAoC). I suspect even if it's a one second stun on a minute immunity timer, people will bitch about it.


And Amaron, don't confuse Fordel with me. I'm the one who ultimately gives no fucks about level 50 PvP (because I am capable of amusing myself in other ways), Fordel PvPed pretty relentlessly until the gear situation in SWTOR got WAY too stupid.


EDIT: Oh, and proudft, I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure people were marking other people in WoW arenas when I last wandered in. It's been ages, though, and I could just be high.

I'm probably confusing him with somebody else then.  I thought he was a card carrying member of the "diku pvp is retarded" crowd.

Sure people would complain about having control taken away in a videogame even if it were 1 second. What's cool about it? But trying to be more reasonable, there's a lot of difference between 1 second, 4 seconds and 8 seconds in a quick, furious match of... everything. Crowd Control should be reserved for mobs in my opinion. And yes, I've been complaining about it since An Ex Por, circa 1997. By the time DaOC came out I've been already wondering what idiot came up with that shit for about 4 years.

The Mass Effect thing was just a joke. We gamers whine about silly things, don't we?

You can mark your own team in WoW, not the enemy, if I remember that right.




I'm an avid PvP'er in every MMO I've ever played.




Falc- In casual play, break on damage CC almost never lasts 8 seconds.

In ranked play, chain CC-ing and prevent your own side from being chain CC'ed is all part of the game.

Correct, we always had each other marked for easier visibility, but we couldn't mark an opposing healer or anything like that.

I am pretty sure DAOC broke me for being able to evaluate what kind of CC is good or bad in other games. 8-10 second CC feels like nothing to me, I'm not bothered at all by it unless it is a stun.

In PUG PvP (which is all I do, obvs), I can count on one hand the number of times a non-stun CC has lasted its full duration. The number of times it gets immediately broken by someone on my team? PRACTICALLY INFINITE. And that's fine, it just means my CC is more like a ghetto interrupt (especially since my scoundrel's interrupt's range is assier than my AE mez). It also means when *I* get CC'd, it's probably going to be broken within two seconds, sometimes by the very person who CC'd me.

Using CC is just another skill set. I just can't get upset about something that is just as likely to save me as fuck me over (you know, like everything else you do in PvP).


EDIT: This is, of course, assuming CC that doesn't last. You know. A minute.

EDIT EDIT: And I arena'd a lot more recently that you have, Ingmar and Fordel, which is why I even said anything about the marking. I seem to recall being surprised by it.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: That said, I'd prefer you only be able to mark your own team in SWTOR, being assfucked by the assist train because I have a gear over my head sucks much more nut than any number of CCs.  :oh_i_see:

But this is what I am saying: it's a part of the game I despise. Not when it's a couple of GCDs, definitely so when it gets above that and as high as 6-8 seconds. Stupid.
Anyway, we obviously feel different about it. More than fine.

I don't mind this part at all.  I was talking about objective defense actually.  In particular I think flash bang from stealth might be a problem.  There's no real way to protect against an operative and some other stealther waltzing up and just capping your point.   You can use your CC break but in a warzone that's not always up.

In general though I think other CC is possibly fine.  It's hard to judge the cleanses though when the basic interface is so asstastic in the first place.

Yes there is, do not stand beside the actual node. If they have to walk even half a second distance to cap, the CC will run out before it finishes and you'll interrupt them.

If there is two of them and one of you and no one in a floating position to cover for you in such a situation, you were outplayed. They managed to generate a 1v2 situation against your team at WZ objective, you're not supposed to be successful in that situation.



Falc- Each CC could only last one second and good teams will still devise rotations that lock you in place for those multiple GCD's. As it stands now, you eat 8 seconds at most then get a full resolve bar to act freely after wards and they won't be able to repeat that duration of CC for another 45 seconds to a minute.

-edit- Basically, Action Denial is always going to be a part of any game where you aren't dead after the first few shots. Be it kiting, stuns, preventing positioning, whatever.

Hmm I thought the range on that ability was 30m for some reason.

I think just about every interrupt/stun/daze that can be used from stealth is 10 meters or less.


Sorc/Sages can spec to make their 8 sec mez instant and THAT is 30 meters, but they don't stealth. I've more then once capped a node with it though, I'll open with my 4 second stun, and start capping the node. The solo defender PANICS and uses their CC break to interrupt me, then I mez them and cap the node while they cry at their own impotence.

Using your CC breaker without a full resolve bar has ALWAYS been a bad idea.

Do roots still ignore resolve, btw?


e: also, DOTs interrupting caps was pretty much clownshoes (my ungeared sage could keep a zerg of 5+ from capping a turret for an entire rez wave's worth of time). Heard they changed that, though.

Roots ignore resolve, Dot's do not interrupt anymore.

Of course there's other problems, like if you happen to be up against an AoE-stacked team on, say, Voidstar. More than once have I seen the attackers just completely shut down at the first objective for the duration of the entire match solely because the defending team had the most Mercenaries and Sorcerers to spam Sweeping Blasters, Death From Above, and Force Storm with to cancel bomb attempts.

"Action denial" is not what bothers me. As I said, it's mostly the duration. 8 seconds in a fast paced game is in my opinion horrible, especially for certain classes and especially at a certain level of playing. It's a matter of taste after all, but I am very happy that the makers of Guild Wars 2 seem to agree with me.

GW1 monk healing was an entire order of magnitude more annoying than any CC in SWTOR.  Couldn't really grasp how that's going in GW2 but I'll take 8 second mez's over that crap any day.

That's probably why he said GW2 and not GW1.