6081

I totally agree. I can’t really speak for the people who enjoy Bioware-style games, maybe it’s a good one of those, but it’s certainly not a good MMO. Not in its current state anyway. I’m willing to see if the pace they improve things is sufficient, and I also plan on at least getting one guy to 50. But that’s only 2 months or so. I imagine a lot of people who were looking more for an mmo and less for a star wars game or a bioware game will feel similarly.

6082

I’m pretty much in the same place as Ultrazen. I’m only playing because a lot of guildmates are, and won’t be sad when they tire of it. I enjoyed my questline, but it’s just not a great MMO.

6083

I went in wanting to play an MMO and I’m loving the game. I like the way the story lines and quests are weaved together and I find the world interesting and very Star Wars-ish. The PvP needs some work, but what’s there is engaging and fun. The people I play with pretty much feel the same way. I could see why some people might be put off by the style of play, although I find some of the complaints to be odd in that they could be said of pretty much any of the big name MMORPGs out there.

6084

Their latest update on PvP changes:

[B][I]Fellow PvPers, thank you for taking on the challenge of player vs player combat in The Old Republic!

In the first week after launch there were over a million Warzone matches played, with nearly half of all players participating in Warzones. Bad news for Republic players, though - the Empire currently leads overall, having won 53% of all Alderaan Civil War and Voidstar matches (across all servers). Huttball has been played the most, accounting for 39% of all matches – and yes, we’ll be adding a new same faction vs. same faction enabled Warzone in the future.

We are all really excited at the tremendous volume of participation we’ve seen in PvP thus far. Your interest and demand dictates what we’ll be delivering in the near future. I wanted to give you some insight into where we are with PvP development and where we are going.

First and foremost here is what we are addressing as a top priority:

Level 50 Bracket Warzones: Level 50 players will have a bracket of their own, playing in separate Warzone matches to lower level players. This is something we have wanted to do for some time and now that there is an increasing number of level 50 players we will be implementing the feature in January.

Open World PvP on Ilum: The planet of Ilum currently allows for open world PvP even on a PvE server, but the mechanics and incentives of the planet are not in as intended yet. We’re working on longer term goals for the planet and for other PvP areas, but expect to see some interim adjustments in January - such as more respawn points to focus conflicts, restricting Companion Characters from the area, and revisions to rewards. Ilum will also become a major source of Valor. Valor buffs will increase and decrease based on the objectives your faction owns. These buffs increase the amount of Valor you receive per player kill. However they do not give anything in and of themselves, so players will still need to defeat other players for significant Valor rewards. Additionally, daily and weekly missions will require player kills to complete. Player kills for quests and Valor credit will have diminishing returns per player killed. So, the more players that are fighting other players, the better it is for everyone.

Combat Gameplay: You’ll see several optimizations come online in January, and we are going to continue to tune this as time goes on.

We also have other exciting features coming in the near future including Ranked Warzone Matches, PvP Stat Tracking, Open World PvP Loot Drops, more Warzone medals for different objectives, Guard Optimizations and Target Optimizations.

Additionally we’re looking at ways to enable team vs. team, more level brackets and the ability to choose which Warzone you want to play in.

This is not a complete list of everything we’re working on that’s PvP related, but we have to keep some surprises for later! Thanks again for all your feedback and please keep it coming. We read as much as we can then cross reference with metrics to take action on features and tuning the game to ensure an enjoyable and competitive PvP community.

Gabe Amatangelo
Principal Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer [/I][/B]

I quite like what I hear, and it’s more than I expected this soon. I hope they actually do what they say in january - but at least they’re aware of the current issues.

6085

You can tell when an MMO player isn’t having fun, because he’ll only play for 2 months or so.

6086

I don’t think it’s going to tank but there are some major structural flaws in the game. Some is pure Bioware - the large empty spaces and all the running around is straight out of their solo games. Other things though are even more significant. I haven’t gotten any orange gear myself but if it’s true that the stuff you buy off vendors and then just upgrade via slots is better than all the drops…that eliminates the carrot in front of the mule. Eventually the mule is going to stop. The lack of a real LFG tool, the interface problems, the terrible auction system, all must be fixed along with the gear levels to prevent a serious loss of players over the next few months. I’m encouraged that they’re looking at major changes to PvP already.

Bioware does have one major advantage over past MMOs, in that I think WoW ennui is so high right now that even people getting sick of SWTOR aren’t planning their return to Azeroth. I know I haven’t done more than login to WoW since this game launched. Right now I’m not playing either game. I want this one to be better, so I’m willing to wait a while to see if they will make it better. I won’t wait forever though.

6087

So yeah, I guess not being able to play this game for over a week hasnt been so bad after all. I can barely stand wow these days but no guild chat or party chat? WTF? It was bad enough that the guild leader couldn’t see chat…

Maybe I really am burned out on mmo’s.

6088

Yah I really don’t mean to be a hater, and I have a lot of fondness for Bioware in general. I guess it just irks me when I see what I feel are major blunders design wise. I can put up with bugs etc, heck I expect those. Honestly I feel SWTOR was a pretty good release MMO-wise. As someone who played Anarchy Online at release my standards are pretty low lol.

I also don’t want to give the impression that I’m putting anyone down that’s enjoying the game, far from it. Different people have different tolerance/enjoyment levels, for different things. I really wanted to like this game, and have been following it for a long time.

I’m a sucker for improving loot games, it’s one reason that I can still fire up a new game of Diablo 2 to this day and play a character for a while. The removal of the carrot is just such a huge blunder, and I think once more of the player base catches onto what oranges are really all about, it’s going to hurt the game in the long run. I just feel it’s a horribly thought out design choice and it bums me out. If this game had an engaging loot system, I’d probably play 4-5 characters to max level.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I didn’t want to leave the impression that people that liked that game were “wrong” lol. There is plenty to love in SWTOR, I’m just a jaded old gamer.

6089

Supposedly the current downtime is to apply a patch to fix Guild chat.

All servers were shutdown about 20 minutes ago, so that’s presumably why.

6090

I hope they put in cross realm pvp before they put in the bracket, but wait 30 minutes for a queue sucks.

6091

I personally love the game, although the single biggest flaw is how empty the game feels. My server has queues every night, yet i barely see a single other player in my 2-3 hour play time. I have had to skip most planets heroics as finding people for them wastes an hour or so of my 2-3 hours playtime.

Fix the appalling LFG system, and its a start, although im not sure how they can make the worlds feel less empty of people.

On the plus side, as i rolled a republic char so my PvP queue times are non existant

6092

I really hope they can stay away from cross-server technology, as I find it hurts the community too much. Naturally, if the only alternative is long queues - then it’s a compromise I suppose most would prefer.

Since I’m really only interested in world PvP - I’d just do that instead, but I guess most people really enjoy playing the same warzones over and over and over.

6093

world pvp is a zzzzz-fest in WOW and in SWTOR is free daily pvp bag + 3 weekly bag with 0 pvp because everyone just trade capture on ilum because imperial overwhelm republic 4 - 1 and we don’t want to scare off the one republic who is actually brave enough to capture stuff.

the whole hurting community argument is so overrated, most of the people don’t even interact much with non-guildies.

6094

This is sort of true. Orange gear’s stats can be removed and replaced with new ones as you level, but they won’t always strictly be better than drops you get along the way. It depends on the drop and how much you’ve been keeping up with replacing the stats on your orange pieces. Mainly the orange pieces are so you can keep a visual look you like while remaining effective.

All this changes at 50, where the mods you can put in orange gear no longer compare with the drops you get in pve and the pvp gear. And the mods in those are locked in place for some reason.

So they let players pick their look from 10-49 and stick with it. But then they have to abandon it at 50 and look exactly like every other player of their class. People are really gonna like giving up their character’s look when they hit 50, let me tell you.

6095

What do you mean locked in place?

6096

What he said. The sense of community that a small minority of players might feel is a lot less important than everyone else being unable to find groups. Like I said before, this problem is only going to get worse once the initial flood of users subsides, especially for those under max level.

6097

So they let players pick their look from 10-49 and stick with it. But then they have to abandon it at 50 and look exactly like every other player of their class. People are really gonna like giving up their character’s look when they hit 50, let me tell you.

easily solvable by either have social armor like lotro, or transmogrification from wow.

Also they already lock most of the classes in to a certain look, since social armor are consider light armor only, only consular and inquisitor actually are able to use those even in leveling. occasionally you have BH dress like a Juggernaut but that’s really the extend of the customization.

6098

You can’t remove any of the mods that come in end game gear (to place them in orange gear you like the look of, for example). Basically skipping the mod system altogether.

6099

Appearance is one of the many areas in which they (seemingly willfully) dropped the ball. They could have simply copied LotRO’s best-in-class solution, but instead they came up with their own “solution” that is more complex and less effective.

6100

Here’s the explanation on what’s going on with the end game mod gear:

  • End game artifact quality (purple) gear is now partially moddable. Why moddable? Because that allows the players to customize stats such as critical, etc. to their exact desire. Why only partially? Because mods are now extractable… Think of it this way: it is easier to defeat the first boss from an Operation than the last boss. So we want to reward the players with the best possible loot for defeating the last boss and that loot is typically the Chest piece of a set. The first boss drops less interesting stuff, say boots. This may sound old school, and it is. But by doing so, we ensure that both players that get rewarded by looks and those rewarded by stats are properly rewarded for taking on the most difficult challenges.

Now, if purple gear was fully moddable, players would simply farm the first boss, acquire 5 pair of boots, extract the armoring, mod and enhancements from the boots and slots them in their favorite Custom items. That actually sounds cool, but it really isn’t. Letting players extract the armoring mod from the purple items would trivialize end game gear progression and stop rewarding successful and dedicated players for their efforts.

So, instead of letting that happen, we prevented the Armoring, Hilt and Barrel from being extracted, but we also made sure of dropping purple Armoring mods of equivalent power as Operation loot. This means that players going the mod route can still take their favorite orange armor and make it as good as a operation purple armor (with some temporary caveats).

From the post sounds like they know there are still some issues with Orange gear and they are working on trying to find a good solution.