3501

Especially in betas, which are the first refuge of people looking for an MMO that isn’t WoW, be it because they’re burned out on WoW or because they never liked it to begin with.

3502

My experience with SW:TOR’s general chat in both this and the other beta weekend I participated in was that it was a cesspool of fanboyism of all stripes, and correspondingly dire.

3503

And the funniest bit was their claiming how the community was so much better. Well of course it is… it is beta and all the barrens chat folks haven’t joined up yet. In fact, since TOR is the new shiny I expect WoW’s community to actually get quite a bump after TOR’s release.

3504

Do you play a lot of MMOs? I only ask because at some point, when it comes to raiding and/or end game content, these games tend to rely on choosing the tank with xyz armor or else they can’t get them to survive abc mission/quest. I don’t know that Star Wars is doing this or going to, but that is a hard mentality to break from other games. Also, Bioware punishing peoeple who don’t min/max is nothing new. My character, as usual, is falling in a neutral area and therefore excluded from some of the more impressive gear as a result.

3505

I’ve played a couple others but it seemed really over the top this weekend.

Oh well, I hope both games do alright because I could see spending a bunch of time in each of them. Between TOR and WoW 4.3 it’s a good thing I saved up some vacation time for Christmas.

What sites are you guys looking at for TOR news and item databases? I saw that the wowhead guys have a towhead site up that seems ok. I wanted to read up on the crafting since I kind of ignored that during the test.

3506

This is a big concern for me. I like to make my choices by the seat of my pants and not be forced to choose the right response if I don’t like it.

Spoiler discussing one choice made as a trooper.

"

As a republic trooper, I was trying to role play the dark side but it was going a little far when they basically asked me to sacrifice an entire orphanage of children. There’s evil, and then there’s EVIL and I went ahead and chose the dark path and only got 50 points? Really? That’s not worth at least 1000?

3507

I read the beta forums a bit. they have a section for feedback relating to items and crafting.

torhead is pretty good for basic info, but it isn’t mature enough to be as useful as wowhead. Once swtor is out it will likely get all of the comments and proper info which made wowhead so useful.

3508

really enjoyed the last few hours after the install finally worked. Looking forward to writing it up tomorrow.

3509

Also, why can’t I sit in chairs in this game? The RP servers are going to be so frownyface. We’ve got this cool cantina with nice music but nobody can haz sit. I guess we’ll just battledance.

3510

Wow, there is a $5 pre-order fee if you buy the digital standard edition through Origin.

Edit: Oh, I guess that already factored into the price they list on the main page.

3511

Bye bye, beta. Ended it all dancing on the bar in the fleet republic cantina. Good times, good times.

Now it’s time to go check out the new WoW stuff tomorrow and then back to TOR in a couple weeks. Looking forward to seeing the Sith story stuff.

3512

Some random qs for betatesters.
Do choices you make in quests effect other quests down the line? Do the environments change over the course of the quests - like wow phasing. Do you have to go through all the zones in order or do they have multiple zones in the same level range that you can choose between.
What are the plans for patch content will they expand the class stories - it seems like adding hours of voice dialog in patches would be hard to do. Hopefully they have all the main voice talent available on retainer.
How often do people say " I bent my wookie" in general chat?

3513

Coruscant was empty for me and a friend even though General chat said naked people were dancing.

Are the planets instanced/lobbies/sharded?

3514

And all my characters are parked in Cantinas. Never know, release might get pushed back and they’d need more weekend betas ;)

Re: general chat: I found it helpful to turn it on just long enough to get information about things like the terrain-sticking bug that was going around Saturday and the missing-companion glitch a friend of mine had. People were quite helpful on those occasions, but I’ll be darned if I’m going to have general chat turned on for more than a few seconds in a game with a story. There might only be one person in a thousand who wants to play Snape Kills Dumbledore, but it’d be enough to senselessly diminish my enjoyment. And in exchange for what, Barrens chat?

Glad to hear it finally worked, albeit late.

I raided the planes in… Velious era…? EQ, and ZG with a quite scrub-ish WoW guild. Obviously I can’t say much about WoW raiding just on the basis of what I’ve read and watched, but I do know of both practical, game-imposed gear checks and (from everything I’ve heard) fanatical player-imposed gear-checks over and above that necessity. Frankly I find the whole business diminishes whatever attraction raiding might otherwise hold for me. Solo and group PVE/PVP were fun, and so were old EQ raids and full-guild PVP events, in a messy shambolic sort of way. But if I wanted an MMO as a part time job, complete with demanding GM, I’d do it properly and play EvE.

Also, Bioware punishing peoeple who don’t min/max is nothing new. My character, as usual, is falling in a neutral area and therefore excluded from some of the more impressive gear as a result.

Erikson has said grey items will go in. I assume they’ll start at higher level requirements since “neutrality” doesn’t really mean grey decision-making at low level. Between LS gear, DS gear, promised grey gear, PVP gear which has been in and out, and social gear, I don’t really see the problem. They’re not going to put in some awesome item for one alignment without equivalents and require people to play the game in a moronic way. It makes way, way more sense to make the world’s scariest-looking hat require +10 evil to wear.

3515

what’s the point of jedi getting dark side or sith getting light side–so you can be the world’s worst sith?

3516

In response to Mouzone;

  1. Eh, yes and no. From what I saw there weren’t any huge effects most of the time. There were several quests that hinted down the line they would cause you problems. I let one guy go alive on my agent’s class quest and got an email from spy HQ later about it. Then in the first Sith dungeon “flashpoint” if you act one way (all players vote roll), it leads to having one extra boss or not.

1a. There are phases but the environment didn’t seem to change like in WoW.
1b. You’re locked in to the first planet until you complete your class quest line at lvl 9-10, beyond that I don’t know.

  1. No idea.

  2. None that I saw. Most were complaining about being haunted by the class companions or the evil orange dot.

3517

The Star wars universe itself is very black & white from all i can tell in every movie or game. The only exception to this seems to be kotor 2 which took great pains to make everything gray. You’re either 100% “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” or you fall to the dark side.

The gear thing is just a very human reaction to mmorpgs and it is reflected in real life too. Mmorpgs require people working together to progress. Unless the game is unbalanced, if a player is significantly underperforming, it will make your time worth less (ie it takes you 5 hours to do an instance that should take 1 hour). Thus it is in your best interest to play with people that don’t hold you back. The logical extension to this is that all applicants above the bare minimum are not equal. If person A does 10% more dps than person B, that might mean you can complete Darth mCBoneUrMomX 5% faster.

To give a wow example, in the early days, so-so guilds would go raiding maybe 3-5 days a week, like 5 hours a night. Really good raiding guilds would clear more content in maybe 4 hours total.

3518

You forget the “really good raiding guilds” had mandatory attendance where you’d learn the instances for days, weeks on end and to get everyone geared up for the express purpose of clearing stuff in 4 hours.

ie WoW as a 2nd job, something a girl at work does. It’s scary.

3519

I don’t typically raid or do much with guilds, but I am not going to fault players who know they can’t take on a mission if their tank doesn’t have xyz gear. Those games were designed that way, to cater to this min/max mentality. I enjoyed EQ a lot too only to come back and realize I didn’t have the right gear from the right expansion packs for the most fun areas. Fortunately, I have friends and people I game with who have patience or just don’t care about perfection. Even if we have one who likes to tell us no matter how interesting a location is… the XP is better somewhere else for less work. Again, that doesn’t draw me in as much as this ancient temple does.

I really don’t think SWTORO is designed in the way EQ, not sure about WoW never played, but I do not know for certain at this point. I won’t pretend to know with certainty. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to think players will just shift mentality because they say so… remember how there weren’t going to dedicated healers in this game, guess what my group has… a dedicated healer. Guess what a lof of the LFGs were looking for on my server… dedicated healers. I’ll believe the min/max is unnecessary and that Bioware is accomodating for people who play Sith’s with a bit of a light side and Jedi who might want to punch a loud mouth in the face once in awhile when I see it.

As for them doing one great item for one group and making certain another gets something similar or at least interesting, Bioware doesn’t always do that. I am actually a fan of Bioware, but in this area, history is working agianst them.

I’m on the fence about the game, which I enjoy, just not sure enough to give them their monthly fee.

3520

SWTOR really should have operated under the GW1 model.