4401

People use headphones at work?

4402

I do…?

4403

There are a lot of quest in SWTOR that involve killing a boss in a area where you compete to kill such boss. The game is designed so the first player to damage the boss will get his quest complete. So even if you do 99.99% of the damage, you will not get your quest advanced. It will be common, at release day, to have groups of 5 or 6 players camping these boss. Is not a fun experience, often is frustrating because the most greedy normally take over the boss. Or the most frustrated. You can be there 1 hour, and this don’t give you any advantage, the next guy that come can “steal” the boss from you.

Maybe its a good idea to wait a few day, or weeks, until the bigger group of people has moved to the high level areas. But before the first wave of nerfs standarize the game too much.

4404

I am not completely unaware of the WoW format. :P I do know plenty of other people who have played it (and I played DikuMUDs for many years). For me, the difference between TOR and WoW is that the story forces its way to the front in TOR, and makes itself a integral part of the experience, whereas in WoW (and Eve too), the quest text is basically fluff 95% of people don’t even read because they want to see the “bring me 15 bear butts” upshot and get on with it. TOR seems to be more about the journey and the context, whereas WoW is just about doing the rote tasks.

4405

TOR seems to be more about the journey and the context, whereas WoW is just about doing the rote tasks.

technically, it’s really up to whomever is playing the game, the only difference between WoW and SWTOR is WoW use quest text, while SWTOR use VO. Wow have some interesting quest like SWTOR. player can just choose to ignore context in both game.

4406

Again, I’d point out that KOTOR and Mass Effect are also a lot like WoW when the talking is done. You go somewhere and engage in real-time RPG combat against multiple small groups of enemies. You fire off your special abilities and wait until you can fire them again.

4407

In SWTOR the choices you make can also affect quest outcomes, which is an important distinction IMO. In WoW, every time you do a quest it’s the same quest, and you have no real input into it. Even just the ability to select different dialogue options sets SWTOR’s questing apart from WoW’s.

4408

Did you actually play the game in beta at all? I did not see many quests that involved kill a single named mob that weren’t in a story instance. The one that I did on Dromund Kaas had you interact an item to summon him, so you just waited (or even helped) the other group and then spawned it yourself. Additionally, the worlds are sharded (or instanced in Bioware’s terminology), so you’ll only ever be competing with a certain number of players at a time.

Even on the biggest stress test beta weekend I could count on less than two fingers the number of times I had to wait around for a mob, type of mob, or item to respawn.

I could definitely understand waiting until later if technical issues show up (like the inevitable queues), but this game isn’t like WoW, where you’ve got a couple hundred players in a single zone all hoping to tap a Hellboar to get 5/12 boar ribs for your quest.

4409

but WOW use instance phasing, so it make the player feel that whatever they did actually make an impact in the world, which something SWTOR lacks.

4410

I’m with Black Isis. To me it feels exactly like a classic Bioware RPG. Combat-wise it’s less like Mass Effect, since it’s not shooty at all. But it is very much like KotOR or any of the old Bioware games pre-Jade Empire. You’ve got a bunch of powers that are all timed, you hit the one you want, you wait for it to execute. Is that not how KotOR, NWN, and Baldur’s Gate all worked?

I also don’t get the “there are groups of three bad guys sitting around” comment. That’s exactly what happened in KotOR.

I haven’t played WoW, but I’m finding the storylines more involving than AoC, Rift, or LotRO. How much of that is the voice acting vs. good writing? Hard to say, I’d say a lot of it though is better story writing. Maybe it’s 50/50. FWIW I’m a player that always reads all the way through the text dialogs on non-voiced games.

4411

Did you actually play the game in beta at all? I did not see many quests that involved kill a single named mob that weren’t in a story instance. The one that I did on Dromund Kaas had you interact an item to summon him, so you just waited (or even helped) the other group and then spawned it yourself. Additionally, the worlds are sharded (or instanced in Bioware’s terminology), so you’ll only ever be competing with a certain number of players at a time.

the one I remember that was really annoying was the Bounty hunter quest on Hutta. you need hunt down 4 targets, those target spawn in a normal area where everyone can attack them. they have around 3-4 minutes respawn time, it was a pain in the ass.

4412

As someone who was tired of WoW’s mechanics and initially poo-pooing SWTOR for not innovating enough, I’m very impressed so far and am convinced that giving the quests rich context and narrative makes collecting bear-asses actually fun. Maybe that was the problem in the first place, not the game play.

4413

First off, this is in part why they are phasing people in in waves, otherwise there would be an absolutely massive wave all going through each area at once. And doing it by pre-order date is IMO a lot better than just randomly choosing people. At least it’s something that you had control over, if you wanted.

Anyway, what’s been going on in games is mostly when I come up to a boss that everyone is camping, someone that’s waiting invites me to join a newly formed party. We all kill the boss, then the party disbands. I did have someone kill still an objective right in the starting fields (I took on the mobs, and they went behind me while I was engaged and grabbed the quest objective), but other than that one experience everyone has been very helpful and good at forming groups for bosses on spawn.

Also the Character Storyline bosses tend to be in very short phased instances. Probably mostly so no one can mess with your game cinematics, but this has the side effect of no one can kill steal. I don’t recall having much trouble with the non-Character open world quests, where there are quest givers scattered around the world that need help for various things. Most of the shared bosses are from the bonus quests which you pickup as you start killing bad guys in a particular area – where you get a bit of extra XP when you kill x number of bad guys. These are usually followed by a “now that you’ve killed a whole bunch of henchmen, go kill boss named x”, these do tend to be over subscribed, and there’s often a bunch of people all sitting around waiting to kill the boss. I’m a completest, so I have been doing these, but they don’t have any storyline associated with them and really can be skipped without missing much of anything.

4414

WoW used to have a lot of quests like that. Now if you need to kill a specific dude in the open he usually drops a chest or something that anyone can loot to complete the quest. That way if you get there and someone already is fighting the guy you can join in and not have to wait forever hoping to tag the respawn.

4415

They aren’t going by pre-order date or even the pre-order registration date, it’s some sort of randomness. I pre-ordered and registered, and got the confirmation emails, on August 1st and yet people that claim October registration are in and I’m not.

I’ve been trying the launcher every hour or so since yesterday morning. No dice.

4416

Actually in Cata some of the kill the foozle in the open quests rewarded everyone that got on the mob’s threat list, regardless of if they got credit for the kill. The one I remember specifically was the giant in Tol Barad, and I’m pretty sure there were others.

4417

Yeah, plus a lot of the stuff in the Molten Front dailies works that way.

4418

Did you actually ENTER your preorder code on Aug 1?

4419

Yes. This is the email I got back, dated August 1st.

                                                        Thank you for registering your Pre-Order Code. You are now registered for the following items:
                                                                                                                                                                                                     Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ Digital Deluxe Edition Pre-Order
                                                                                      Early game access
                                  Color Stone (Virtual Item)
                                
                                  We will keep you informed about early access to The Old Republic  as we get closer to the game's release.

If you have any questions about your Pre-Order, please contact a member of our Customer Service Team.

4420

I’ve put over a hundred hours into SWTOR in the various beta tests and my early access yesterday and I never experienced spawn camping. In the rare times multiple people needed something, we simply grouped and disbanded afterward.

As for the first hit getting credit for the kill, its a much better system than most damage. I can’t remember the number of dps races I was in on Mustafar in SWG. There is nothing worse than waiting for a mob only to have another player or group come along and steal it in mid-fight.