SWTOR

[Nebu]

I have a love/hate relationship with large market games for the reasons cited above.  You need the market to justify a large budget title, but in marketing to the mass market, you're forced to water down content to a point of triviality for those wanting a challenge.   FPS games are wildly popular despite the fact that you lose more than you win in them.  If MMO's had challenge appropriate to that in FPS, they'd go out of business.  This means that even 5 man content should be doable by the masses.  I want some content to be HARD for a group to complete.  Something like a 50% success rate for even a skilled team.  If that happened, the forums would blow.   It makes me sad.

[Evildrider]

It's cuz the the top 1% think they are better than the 99% amirite?   

[Fordel]

I have a love/hate relationship with large market games for the reasons cited above.  You need the market to justify a large budget title, but in marketing to the mass market, you're forced to water down content to a point of triviality for those wanting a challenge.   FPS games are wildly popular despite the fact that you lose more than you win in them.  If MMO's had challenge appropriate to that in FPS, they'd go out of business.  This means that even 5 man content should be doable by the masses.  I want some content to be HARD for a group to complete.  Something like a 50% success rate for even a skilled team.  If that happened, the forums would blow.   It makes me sad.

Well they have that in WoW for raids, and will be adding it for 5 mans in the next expansion. They'll even be gear neutral, where they just bump or lower everyone's stats to a pre-set for the challenge.

FPS games also have the advantage of being able to find a new server/game very quickly and not having any expectation that you'll be a pwnmobile.

[Zetor]

Players always want "more intelligent mobs" that "act like players" right up until they actually run into them.  Then it's nothing but bitch, bitch, bitch, "wahh, this is too hard" and "wahh I have to use more than 3 skills."

I remember the arena boss fight in BRD that was part of the tier 0.5 set quest. The fight was supposed to mimic pvp, where the enemy ai would attack healers and more fragile targets first, and would attempt to use interrupts and such. It was a response to "why do all the enemies just attack the least vulnerable target (tank) like idiots" and it was completely not fun.

Different strokes... that fight (and the Delrissa fight in Magister's Terrace which was more of the same) was one of my favorites (and my guilds'). I can fully accept that we're the exception though. 

Regarding mob difficulty, this vid shows a level 50 arsenal spec mercenary BH with a healing companion soloing a lv49 and lv50 named elite boss 'at the same time' (keeping one of them CC'd for the first half of course). WARNING: may be boring to watch

[Sjofn]

I always liked the "pvp" fights myself, but they seem to generally be loathed when they're thrown in.

[Wolf]

Some people really need to get over the ZOMG PARSES ELITIST RAIDERS 50 HOUR WEEKS POOPSOCK mentality. There are plenty of people that enjoy raiding and do it on a schedule - raiding 4-8 hour weeks over 2 to 3 days, and these guilds manage to finish tiers on time. They do that by not throwing themselves at bosses again and again, but by analysing where the mistakes happened and what can be done to avoid said mistakes. Combat parses help do that in the middle of the raid.

As an aside the one fight they showed in that one video - if that's any indication on what they're trying to pass as raiding content in this day and age, lack of addons to parse combat logs won't even come close to their biggest issue.

[Velorath]

Velo - It's not even a mod, it's just a parsing of the base combat log after the fact. It's also pretty hard to have total vision and awareness of everyone's actions during a raid in real time. Any encounter in which you CAN have total awareness of everyone, is usually a pretty straight forward and simple one.

There's a reason you will never see me do a raid in SWTOR with a group of 16 or 24 people.  8 is a good number.  From playing DAOC for good length of time, I know it's possible to have a good understanding of who is doing what, just from watching the screen.  I don't even care if they end up giving out better loot for people who raid with larger groups as long as I at least get to experience the content with a 8 man group.  I've got zero desire to spend time figuring out which of the 24 people in the group wasn't pulling their weight and then trying to explain it to them with charts.

I was talking 10 mans in WoW.

Played DaoC for half a decade. DaoC 8 man groups were so not a good example of anything in terms of PvE. DaoC is not a good example for PvE.


The Awareness from PvP is a different ball game entirely and not really applicable... be it 8v8 DaoC or 5v5 WoW.

I'm not holding up DAOC as an example of good PVE.  I'm holding it up as an example of being able to see the majority of what's going on in groups that size and that I can typically see when somebody fucks up.  Really for me this doesn't even come down to an argument of mods or no mods.  It's about raiding generally being a shit idea the way it's implemented in most games, and mods are typically a way of dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease.  Rather than bolting stuff onto the UI to make it easier to micromanage a group of 10-20 people, just don't make me group with that many people to see all the cool endgame shit.

[Amaron]

I want some content to be HARD for a group to complete.  Something like a 50% success rate for even a skilled team.  If that happened, the forums would blow.   It makes me sad.

What?  WoW has that.   Hardcore raid modes will destroy even skilled teams.   Even the top 1% can't do hardcore usually.   The actual numbers are something like .1% for he hard bosses and around .5% for the normal ones.

[Ingmar]

Velo - It's not even a mod, it's just a parsing of the base combat log after the fact. It's also pretty hard to have total vision and awareness of everyone's actions during a raid in real time. Any encounter in which you CAN have total awareness of everyone, is usually a pretty straight forward and simple one.

There's a reason you will never see me do a raid in SWTOR with a group of 16 or 24 people.  8 is a good number.  From playing DAOC for good length of time, I know it's possible to have a good understanding of who is doing what, just from watching the screen.  I don't even care if they end up giving out better loot for people who raid with larger groups as long as I at least get to experience the content with a 8 man group.  I've got zero desire to spend time figuring out which of the 24 people in the group wasn't pulling their weight and then trying to explain it to them with charts.

I was talking 10 mans in WoW.

Played DaoC for half a decade. DaoC 8 man groups were so not a good example of anything in terms of PvE. DaoC is not a good example for PvE.


The Awareness from PvP is a different ball game entirely and not really applicable... be it 8v8 DaoC or 5v5 WoW.

I'm not holding up DAOC as an example of good PVE.  I'm holding it up as an example of being able to see the majority of what's going on in groups that size and that I can typically see when somebody fucks up.  Really for me this doesn't even come down to an argument of mods or no mods.  It's about raiding generally being a shit idea the way it's implemented in most games, and mods are typically a way of dealing with the symptoms rather than the disease.  Rather than bolting stuff onto the UI to make it easier to micromanage a group of 10-20 people, just don't make me group with that many people to see all the cool endgame shit.

The reason you could tell what was going on in DAOC, is that nothing was going on.

[Falconeer]

My very brief comment about SWTOR:

It's beta, but as of now it doesn't hold a candle to Rift outside of the story. As someone else pointed out, it's a mediocre WoW clone whereas Rift was a very good WoW clone if not an improvement.

SWTOR has great story (and that's a plus over any other MMORPG), and if you are into that a great license. It's all good to entertain players for the first couple of months, but it's not gonna hold after you reach the cap, and then you will find yourself surrounded by a game that is not so fun to play. It's not that fun to play to begin with, but the story pushes you forward. Also, and I am not talking about balance, PvP is equally bland.



EDIT: It's fair to state that I feel exactly the same about LoTRO. I loved my first 2 months there, and then I left for good and never looked back. So you may want to use that as a frame of reference to gauge my comment.

[Fabricated]

You pretty much need some sort of a mod API or a competent interface with features that people put in mods for raiding unless you can literally do whatever you want and still beat the encounters. I wasn't jonesing for interface mods during the last beta weekend but I wasn't doing any endgame content either.

Sperg's gonna sperg, no matter what you do. Even if you make the encounters easy and block log parsing...someone is literally going to write some third-party program that parses DPS from screenshots somehow and everyone who raids will "have" to install it. Don't play with spergy assholes is the solution, particularly for endgame content. The "heroic" 4-mans will be at least as bad as WoW's in terms of community LFD tool or not, that's just how it is when you do anything semi-difficult with random people.

Bioware can get it right if the base difficulty level of raiding is very accessible, and considering the smallest group size is 8, I think that helps. You have any idea how many times my guild was short like 1-2 people on raid nights? A lot.

[Shatter]

My very brief comment about SWTOR:

It's beta, but as of now it doesn't hold a candle to Rift outside of the story. As someone else pointed out, it's a mediocre WoW clone whereas Rift was a very good WoW clone if not an improvement.

SWTOR has great story (and that's a plus over any other MMORPG), and if you are into that a great license. It's all good to entertain players for the first couple of months, but it's not gonna hold after you reach the cap, and then you will find yourself surrounded by a game that is not so fun to play. It's not that fun to play to begin with, but the story pushes you forward. Also, and I am not talking about balance, PvP is equally bland.



EDIT: It's fair to state that I feel exactly the same about LoTRO. I loved my first 2 months there, and then I left for good and never looked back. So you may want to use that as a frame of reference to gauge my comment.

Rift was solid but I think a lot of people just had a hard time getting into the game.  I played it a lot longer then I should of only because nothing else came out to play.  I like TOR because I'm a Star Wars fan and can get into the game much more then I could Rift.

[Sheepherder]

Bioware can get it right if the base difficulty level of raiding is very accessible, and considering the smallest group size is 8, I think that helps. You have any idea how many times my guild was short like 1-2 people on raid nights? A lot.

You'll still end up with a regular raid crew of 8 people, as your spares will lose interest because they get benched every other week.  Then one or two of your regulars won't show up because life happens...

The holy grail here would be flexible raid sizes, by letting you sub a companion or two in or out, or by adjusting the boss difficulty.

[Fabricated]

Bioware can get it right if the base difficulty level of raiding is very accessible, and considering the smallest group size is 8, I think that helps. You have any idea how many times my guild was short like 1-2 people on raid nights? A lot.

You'll still end up with a regular raid crew of 8 people, as your spares will lose interest because they get benched every other week.  Then one or two of your regulars won't show up because life happens...

The holy grail here would be flexible raid sizes, by letting you sub a companion or two in or out, or by adjusting the boss difficulty.

Yeah, but that's one of those things that just seems easy to do. Fudging some the numbers up/down 1-2 people on a raid automatically is easy, but your encounter mechanics are limited by the minimum number of players.

[Outlawedprod]

Has anyone considered that the devs haven't put combat logs into the game because of immersion?

They want you to immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe and the story of swtor.  If you die it is not because of bad DPS, standing in the fire, failing it use cooldowns, or situational awareness.  The answer is always far simpler.  It is because you simply were just not strong enough in the force.  To succeed in PVE you must stretch out your feelings and become one with the keyboard.  They are telling you to put the blast shield down and L2P

[Ironwood]

Not sure if serious.

[palmer_eldritch]

Rift was solid but I think a lot of people just had a hard time getting into the game.  I played it a lot longer then I should of only because nothing else came out to play.  I like TOR because I'm a Star Wars fan and can get into the game much more then I could Rift.

Should have.

[Numtini]

It's beta, but as of now it doesn't hold a candle to Rift outside of the story. As someone else pointed out, it's a mediocre WoW clone whereas Rift was a very good WoW clone if not an improvement.

I keep going back to Rift because on paper it's a fantastic game with a lot of what I want from a game, but something just doesn't grab. I just get no compulsion at all to play. I feel like I've seen and done it all even though I really haven't at all. If I had a guild I'd probably stick around and raid or whatever, but while I can see it being this great game on paper, I dunno. Something just doesn't work that I can't even articulate. I can say the world is bland or the macroing is annoying, but I know I'd put up with both of those otherwise. Just not sure what it is.

Even being in the "keep add ons out and just allow passive mods" camp, the UI is a huge problem in SWTOR. It's also kind of stunning that in a game this complex, they didn't understand this is a big deal. Ditto for the dungeon finder. We know the forums will erupt until it's in, so why isn't it in a game this big? On the other hand, I had a blast and that included the instances. In the end, I think there is some impossible to define "fun factor" in a game and all the systems being right on paper won't make a not fun game fun and everything being wrong won't make a not fun game not fun.

[Falconeer]

It's beta, but as of now it doesn't hold a candle to Rift outside of the story. As someone else pointed out, it's a mediocre WoW clone whereas Rift was a very good WoW clone if not an improvement.

I keep going back to Rift because on paper it's a fantastic game with a lot of what I want from a game, but something just doesn't grab. I just get no compulsion at all to play. I feel like I've seen and done it all even though I really haven't at all.

Yes, exactly. I agree with that. Rift held me for 5 months and honestly it's more than I was expecting from a diku in 2011, but with each iteration I am less interested. And a game that would have gotten me addicted for years in 2003 now only lasts a few months.
I think that SWTOR has even less to offer than Rift, plot and license aside, and it's way less smooth and clever, so when that beautifully handcrafted content will be over (and I suspect that will take precisely a few months) I'm afraid it will hold as "bad" as Rift, considering there's not even that much to play around with classes or PvP, and customization is very poor so far, from characters to the locked UI. Bioware did for 50 levels what Age of Conan did for 20. Remarkable, but similarly short lived in my book considering there's a smelly dinosaur under the hood.

[schild]

[Ironwood]

That captures my feelings entirely.

[Pezzle]

The things that come to mind when I think of WoW are simply not present in this game.  Let people scream and kick their feet for mods and group finders etc.  None of it is really needed.  You do not need to grind the same shitty instance over and over for a set.  Grab a friend and run a few quests.  You have fun, everyone wins.  Sometimes if my regular partner is not around I will roam about helping other people just for fun.  Remember fun?  You do not need charts and graphs and meters and mods for it.  Some people spend a ton of energy trying to turn this game into something it is not.

[Paelos]

That's pretty much my thought on it. I will play SWTOR as long as I'm having fun with it, and the elite raider mentality hasn't filtered down through use of mods and meters to the regular populace. Reason being, the regular populace has no idea how to correctly use those metrics, and they couldn't play at the level of the people who can use them, so they make everyone else's life miserable.

It's the WoW forums analogy where you see the people who have completed the regular raids telling everyone to L2P while living high and mighty, and the heroic completionists are dead silent.

[trias_e]

That captures my feelings entirely.

I started with the face on the right.  Then I pre-ordered SWTOR because there's something in my genetic code which forces me to buy new MMORPGs even though I know I will never play it past the first month.  

[Lakov_Sanite]

You do not need to grind the same shitty instance over and over for a set.

How many people are playing endgame stuff in swtor yet? You didn't do that in wow vanilla until 50, If you think you won't be doing the same instances(flashpoints) over and over...I've got a bridge for you.

[Sky]

Some people spend a ton of energy trying to turn this game into something it is not.

That's what f13 does.

[Viin]

And that's why we stop playing after 2 weeks!

[luckton]

And that's why we stop playing after 2 weeks!

And then come back to try it off and on after major patches 

[Ironwood]

The things that come to mind when I think of WoW are simply not present in this game.  Let people scream and kick their feet for mods and group finders etc.  None of it is really needed.  You do not need to grind the same shitty instance over and over for a set.  Grab a friend and run a few quests.  You have fun, everyone wins.  Sometimes if my regular partner is not around I will roam about helping other people just for fun.  Remember fun?  You do not need charts and graphs and meters and mods for it.  Some people spend a ton of energy trying to turn this game into something it is not.

This describes exactly how WoW was at the start and, to be honest, still can be.

But I'm burned on it.  Doing it 'with Lightsabres' is not for me.  Even browsing 'Torhead' gave me the creeps.

[Sobelius]

Has anyone considered that the devs haven't put combat logs into the game because of immersion?

They want you to immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe and the story of swtor.  If you die it is not because of bad DPS, standing in the fire, failing it use cooldowns, or situational awareness.  The answer is always far simpler.  It is because you simply were just not strong enough in the force.  To succeed in PVE you must stretch out your feelings and become one with the keyboard.  They are telling you to put the blast shield down and L2P

I turn off floaty numbers and health bars -- and am often tempted to turn off floaty names -- when I play solo in LOTRO. It's kind of a "faux surprise" thing, helping me pay more attention to what I'm doing and seeing and less to numbers.  I'm hoping to be able to do the same in SWTOR this weekend.

[Sobelius]

I have a love/hate relationship with large market games for the reasons cited above.  You need the market to justify a large budget title, but in marketing to the mass market, you're forced to water down content to a point of triviality for those wanting a challenge.   FPS games are wildly popular despite the fact that you lose more than you win in them.  If MMO's had challenge appropriate to that in FPS, they'd go out of business.  This means that even 5 man content should be doable by the masses.  I want some content to be HARD for a group to complete.  Something like a 50% success rate for even a skilled team.  If that happened, the forums would blow.   It makes me sad.

Most MMOs could do a better job at making more challenging non-combat activities. I like RIFTs puzzles, for example. Or the haunted hobbit burrow in LOTRO (not super hard but a little challenging at first).

I found that DDO had some hard content for small groups -- and not hard because you chose a higher level dungeon than your party. There were a number of dungeons that required multiple party members to have decent environment jumping skills, or coordination in opening/moving doors at the right time, or even just navigating multi-level ramps and twisty interior spaces ("The Pit" being the most notorious such dungeon). Even dungeons that "split the party" and forced them to fight their way back together.

I also really liked being able to block attacks in real time, and use a shield to prevent enemy missiles fire from hitting my party's wizard while the wizard tried to get close enough to charm the undead archers (yay for little pink hats floating over the undead!).  Or the requirement in some dungeons to have to jump and catch a ledge, then move sideways along the ledge, to get past an obstacle.  Yes, this kind of stuff has been around in 3-D adventure games forever,  but I don't see many MMOs supporting it. Perhaps too many casual players find it too hard to maneuver a toon in 3-D space?

[kildorn]

Man, fuck jumping puzzles.

[Ingmar]

Platformer shit: do not want.

[Pezzle]

Man, fuck jumping puzzles.

Then do not become a Cron hunter, holy shit.

[Mrbloodworth]

I support no jumping or LOS!