Originally posted by vmoped As much as I enjoy the IP and the past products of Bioware I have to agree that the game feels like a single player game with dungeon and pvp lobby. This wouldn't,t bother me so much if it didn't,t have a sub, but the current status of the game on my server is sad. Outside of fleet I am lucky to see more than 2 unique players on a planet... I am the only remaining member of my guild and have had no luck finding another one. $15 is just asking too much IMO. The game was fun when it had a population. Cheers!
Now this is an interesting turn of events!
So you're saying the game would be good if it had been B2P because it really is just a singleplayer game?
Okay, maybe it is high time for security measures to be put in place that confirm that the purchaser of a game is actually, well, not a moron? (not you of course!)
Not to offend anybody but you bought the game assuming that you are buying a MMO - which IMO SWTOR very much is but let's go with your view of things.
Then - for you - it turned out to be a singleplayer game.
Well, why didn't you just cancel your subscription?
See, I'm sure - just like me - you've bought this or that singleplayer game that you've played for a few days, weeks and then dropped because it was finished/got boring?
Or maybe even just played it for a few hours, maybe just minutes and then uninstalled it because it's a stinker?
Yeah, you lost the purchase price for the box, but that's it... maybe you even had a bit fun, maybe a few weeks long?
If you could venture a guess what would you say, how many hours did you play in the initial 30 days with SWTOR?
Because, if you were realistic, I'm sure you'd see that - even with the box price of SWTOR a bit higher than your normal new release game - you've probably gotten your money's worth for a singleplayer game.
Afterall you said yourself that it was fun when it had a population - which depending on when you bought it I'd say was for most of the first 3-4 months after release a given all the time for your initial 30 days... or a bad server choice on your end.
So why, if you felt like it was failing, didn't you then cancel your subscription? Because the population was still strong after your initial 30 days? And therefore you were still having fun?
See, this is what I really don't get: you buy a singleplayer game, you play it, you are done. - $60
You buy a MMO, you play it for 30 days (which in total playtime is probably more than what you get out of a singleplayer game), you feel like you are done with it - $60... just like a singleplayer game.
But with a MMO if you go past the initial 30 days, you are paying a fraction of the full price of a boxed game and still get to play...
With singleplayer games this usually either means you are now on a new game or requires the purchase of some expansion or DLC, which more often than not will cost you just as much as a month' subscription... if not more...
so, what's the fuss really about?
Can't be the money... because unless you rip your singleplayer games, well, with MMOs, even if you see them getting boring after 6 weeks, 2 months, you will have payed less than playing (and in turn obviously buying) singleplayer games.
Is it that you just feel cheated? "SWTOR should have been that great game, it should have made me be together with my guildies all the time, it should have been a game that forced other players to play with me..."?
In the EULA, did you anywhere read that by accepting this agreement you are selling away your free will to the game (and in turn to BW and EA and potentially even LucasArts?
I don't really think so...
whether and how you - and everybody else - is playing SWTOR is still - mostly - up to you.
And just to drill bthis home: Nobody will really mind if you complain about a game you purchased that turned out to be udder crap. (That's why I try to check out games in beta to see if the game is something I'd like to purchase before there'll be an official trial/demo be released.)
But by your own words the game isn't even bad, it's just that there aren't enough players on your server...
which ALWAYS(!) makes me scratch my head: if I'm on a train and my car is completetly crowded, but I can see that the other cars are pretty much empty, wouldn't it be considered normal for me to pick up my things and move to the next car?
Of course there is the "comfort factor" because maybe I have a load of bags, and my laptop case and a suitcase, all of which needs to be moved... which you should translate into having one or more high levelled characters.
Well, d'oh! If I really feel that bad in the crowded car, I will move - DESPITE of all my stuff! (Read: start on a new server even if I have to start a new toon on that server. Because, frankly, creating multiple characters IS part of BW's gameplay concept for this game!
I'm sorry maybe it's because it's early morning (somewhere in the world) but it always fumbles my mind how people claim that something is somebody else's fault when it is clearly their own fault...?
I'm not sure if it's really just a matter of mental capacity i.e. being a moron vs not being one, or if instead it's something to do with human nature...
but to everybody who claims that SWTOR is right now failing him because there are just not enough people to play with there's only one thing I can say: grow some social balls!
If you actually look, you will find other players! Maybe not in your guild (or what's left of it) or on your server/your faction.
Originally posted by vmoped As much as I enjoy the IP and the past products of Bioware I have to agree that the game feels like a single player game with dungeon and pvp lobby. This wouldn't,t bother me so much if it didn't,t have a sub, but the current status of the game on my server is sad. Outside of fleet I am lucky to see more than 2 unique players on a planet... I am the only remaining member of my guild and have had no luck finding another one. $15 is just asking too much IMO. The game was fun when it had a population. Cheers!
Now this is an interesting turn of events!
So you're saying the game would be good if it had been B2P because it really is just a singleplayer game?
Okay, maybe it is high time for security measures to be put in place that confirm that the purchaser of a game is actually, well, not a moron? (not you of course!)
Not to offend anybody but you bought the game assuming that you are buying a MMO - which IMO SWTOR very much is but let's go with your view of things.
Then - for you - it turned out to be a singleplayer game.
Well, why didn't you just cancel your subscription?
See, I'm sure - just like me - you've bought this or that singleplayer game that you've played for a few days, weeks and then dropped because it was finished/got boring?
Or maybe even just played it for a few hours, maybe just minutes and then uninstalled it because it's a stinker?
Yeah, you lost the purchase price for the box, but that's it... maybe you even had a bit fun, maybe a few weeks long?
If you could venture a guess what would you say, how many hours did you play in the initial 30 days with SWTOR?
Because, if you were realistic, I'm sure you'd see that - even with the box price of SWTOR a bit higher than your normal new release game - you've probably gotten your money's worth for a singleplayer game.
Afterall you said yourself that it was fun when it had a population - which depending on when you bought it I'd say was for most of the first 3-4 months after release a given all the time for your initial 30 days... or a bad server choice on your end.
So why, if you felt like it was failing, didn't you then cancel your subscription? Because the population was still strong after your initial 30 days? And therefore you were still having fun?
See, this is what I really don't get: you buy a singleplayer game, you play it, you are done. - $60
You buy a MMO, you play it for 30 days (which in total playtime is probably more than what you get out of a singleplayer game), you feel like you are done with it - $60... just like a singleplayer game.
But with a MMO if you go past the initial 30 days, you are paying a fraction of the full price of a boxed game and still get to play...
With singleplayer games this usually either means you are now on a new game or requires the purchase of some expansion or DLC, which more often than not will cost you just as much as a month' subscription... if not more...
so, what's the fuss really about?
Can't be the money... because unless you rip your singleplayer games, well, with MMOs, even if you see them getting boring after 6 weeks, 2 months, you will have payed less than playing (and in turn obviously buying) singleplayer games.
Is it that you just feel cheated? "SWTOR should have been that great game, it should have made me be together with my guildies all the time, it should have been a game that forced other players to play with me..."?
In the EULA, did you anywhere read that by accepting this agreement you are selling away your free will to the game (and in turn to BW and EA and potentially even LucasArts?
I don't really think so...
whether and how you - and everybody else - is playing SWTOR is still - mostly - up to you.
And just to drill bthis home: Nobody will really mind if you complain about a game you purchased that turned out to be udder crap. (That's why I try to check out games in beta to see if the game is something I'd like to purchase before there'll be an official trial/demo be released.)
But by your own words the game isn't even bad, it's just that there aren't enough players on your server...
which ALWAYS(!) makes me scratch my head: if I'm on a train and my car is completetly crowded, but I can see that the other cars are pretty much empty, wouldn't it be considered normal for me to pick up my things and move to the next car?
Of course there is the "comfort factor" because maybe I have a load of bags, and my laptop case and a suitcase, all of which needs to be moved... which you should translate into having one or more high levelled characters.
Well, d'oh! If I really feel that bad in the crowded car, I will move - DESPITE of all my stuff! (Read: start on a new server even if I have to start a new toon on that server. Because, frankly, creating multiple characters IS part of BW's gameplay concept for this game!
I'm sorry maybe it's because it's early morning (somewhere in the world) but it always fumbles my mind how people claim that something is somebody else's fault when it is clearly their own fault...?
I'm not sure if it's really just a matter of mental capacity i.e. being a moron vs not being one, or if instead it's something to do with human nature...
but to everybody who claims that SWTOR is right now failing him because there are just not enough people to play with there's only one thing I can say: grow some social balls!
If you actually look, you will find other players! Maybe not in your guild (or what's left of it) or on your server/your faction.
But they are there!
Even if English is your second language, you need to rethink how you structure your writing. I don't know any language that would structure it the way you have.
That being said -
I will preface this by saying that this is not only my feeling on the matter but speaks of the feeings of the many when it comes to MMOs. MMOs are different from single payer games in the amount of crap a player is willing to wade through in exchange for prolonged and social gameplay. That is why people have different expectations and requirements for MMOs.
Generally a single player game is not allowed to be filled with excess fluff and grind the way an MMO is. It is asked to be compelling and content rich from the start and have a solid ending. The quests and story missions are held to a higher standard of variation and depth. MMOs on the other hand exchange that for the promise of extended gameplay where suffering through something uninspired and monotonous will be rewarded with an edge or a level that puts you more on equal footing or puts you past the other players who do or don't make the same sacrifice. I wish it weren't so, but in MMOs we deal with a lot of excessive, bloated questing just to get to top level and then accept a level of grind as we interact with others at the end game. The boat in a game like SWTOR is what makes it a poor single payer experience vs the other KOTOR games and not worth the $60 for the initial month. The time taken to complete the "stories" is extened by mindless grind. It is like being asked to wait for 3 hours for your McDonads while you sit in the drive through. There is time value here, and it is not being well done. We are playing essentialy a 30 hour single player game over many times that many hours since it is bloated.
In many ways MMOS are glorified chat rooms. We need enough game to keep people compelled to play this and therefore more access to the people for social reasons.That is why we ask that games be good enough to hold onto a solid population. We want to be able to group and share experiences and have our glorified chat room filled with people ranging from elitists to stay at home moms. If a game is not that good, the quality of people you can communicate with is reduced as well as the quantity. You will be talking to people who don't know there are other options and are somehow willing to play a shit game.
All said and done - MMOs are a different animal. They need gameplay, story, etc. But the expectations of recurring gameplay and a strong population are the reward for sticking through those boring levels and quests. SWTOR just doesn't have that.
It is a bloated mess when viewed as a single payer experience, and it is surviving solely on the Star Wars name as an MMO.
Originally posted by vmoped As much as I enjoy the IP and the past products of Bioware I have to agree that the game feels like a single player game with dungeon and pvp lobby. This wouldn't,t bother me so much if it didn't,t have a sub, but the current status of the game on my server is sad. Outside of fleet I am lucky to see more than 2 unique players on a planet... I am the only remaining member of my guild and have had no luck finding another one. $15 is just asking too much IMO. The game was fun when it had a population. Cheers!
It really did feel like a single player game much of the time. When I got together with guildies it felt like co op, but I've played team based fps with a lot more people then I ever saw in game. It never felt 'massive'.
It's nice to see people think that "massive" (or rather "massively") means you have to have 100+ people standing on top of each other in a small spot... at least that's how your post feels like...
Part of my PC gaming history goes back to the classic FPS online/LAN deathmatches followed by Team Deathmatch and CTF of the mid-/late 1990s.
Now, if you go back that far you may remember a game called Starsiege: Tribes.
THAT was a huge eyeopener for me because where up to then the game was up to 16 "players" (upped by bots if needs be, which was usually the case) chasing each other on a tiny map, suddenly the number of possible players on the field double (at least) and - aside from goodies like controlable turrets, vehicles, different character layouts, etc. - the maps grew epic! This was going to be a game that would allow a completely different style of playing.
My friends hated it!
Because the maps were so big, because there was no option for bots, it was all just too far spread out...
I'm just telling this to show how people may have different perceptions of how things are and how they should be.
In SWTOR I rarely found places crowded - with the exception of Fleet - but other places were definitely far from really quite empty.
Of course, some planets may have held a bigger crowd - just because there was more to them and you were willing to take your time exploring and completing all the quests, or maybe it was just that these planets were locations from the earlier parts of the story, meaning while maybe someone may not have levelled up his alt up to Hoth, he probably would have done at least to Nar Shaddaa.
And yet, while you may not see that many (or few) people squeezed into one tiny hub on the planet, I pretty much always came across some fellow adventurer here or a pair there.
I'd bet that with most of your team based FPS, the number of players was not higher than the actual number of players on any planet SWTOR has to offer. Obviously using around primetime for both games otherwise your FPS would have a clear "team assembling" advantage ;-)
It just felt like there's less players because you don't see them immediately.
Which takes things a step further: where does a "map" end in SWTOR?
I mean in most team based FPS things are pretty clear: that is the size of your map, there are amount X of players (and bots) in it.
But in SWTOR, would you consider a "map" to be a zone on a planet? A whole planet? The whole universe?
The thing is that obviously the further you spread your gaze, the more players there may be - depending on the overall server population, but picking the "right" server is obviously your choice ;-)
So, frankly, I don't think that "massively" means that I need to feel a huge crowd of players around me - it's great if one does - but rather that there is a large player base I can interact with.
Whether that means travelling to a different zone, city, continent or planet, that I'll leave open.
And yes, I bet that even those guys who were complaining that while they were sending out a LFG (and after an hour left because nobody came to them), will say that there was definitely a great number of players (e.g. in Fleet) spamming away LFG... ;-)
Yes, SWTOR is just as "massiively" as other games... having played both the TSW and the GW2 BWEs, I found that yes, while there are certain zones (part of the starting zones, the EB, in GW2, the village of Kingsmouth itself in TSW) once you leave these hubs the number of visible players drops significantly: in Kingsmouth between the skate park and the scrapyard, I met just 1 2player team in over 90 min; I walked around the zone around the Orochi Group post for about an hour without seeing anybody; on the Diessa Plateau I didn't see a single other player soul, only after about 4 hours of exploring when I got to the path leading into the Wayfarrer Hills I started seeing people again, and yes, around Hunter's Lake there were a good many people milling, so please no "it was just a bad time, at other times the plateau would be full" excuse.
The same for the EB (and yes, my server had a fairly strong population): venture away from the big clash you can go for long minutes without seeing any of your allies or player character enemies...
and sadly I think this is the norm: once a game has lost its "new car smell" people have hit "endgame" which means that they'll concentrate onto very few locations, which is further not help by obviously those players who actually have left the game because they figured out it's just not their cup of tea.
Bigger world, less people, always a feel of less "massively".
Even if English is your second language, you need to rethink how you structure your writing. I don't know any language that would structure it the way you have.
baritone3k, can I return that advice straight back to you?
Because, frankly, your posting left me scratching my head more thahn once going "what is he trying to say?" Maybe it would be easier if - in general - postings in forums would have to be done as pictographs...
Now, from what I gathered from your posting, I think we come from 2 completely different schools of, well, gaming.
Now, I won't go and say that one is right (mine of course) and the other isn't, because that would make as much sense a discussing whether playing soccer in a real stadium with 2 real teams is the better form of gaming over playing tetris on your PC in your mom's basement.
For me, RPGs HAVE TO BE bloated.
Because the game is not about having your character in "endgame", it's about his progess, his way there. The "end" is sort of the (anti-)clymax.
I understand when you are saying the game is too bloated for a (good) singleplayer game.
And I'm torn whether to agree or not.
I took the liberty of playing one of my characters completely without stress , sort of casual, without any PvP, pretty much always doing all quests. It took me about 4 months to get this character to level 50 - despite or maybe rather because of the character being huge fun to play. And more importantly, now after 5 months I still haven't completed his story.
I could have fasttracked this character up to lvl50 like all my other characters but, well, I guess - in general - I had too much fun playing him.
Yes, of course, there were moments when I wanted (and actually did) speed things up forward, which is where I would agree to a certain "bloating" alas, just because I didn't like these passages doesn't mean they are bad. You may have liked them. ;-)
Yet, I would still rather invest all that time than getting to play a reader digest version of a singleplayer game.
Which seems to be what you are asking for?
Comparing MMOs to chatrooms is... well... a bit of a weird but technically correct look. Remember that MMOs find their origins (amongst other) in MUDs.
Allowing people to gather in an electronic space is, well, not much different from you gathering your mates on a Friday evening in your flat: you have a bunch of people gathered.
Now, the problem is what to do... because, well, if you don't find a way to entertain them, people will leave, "chatroom" or flat.
Which makes things complicated as we don't all tick alike!
From the early 80s, not even 10 years old, I was playing D&D with a core group of friends. Some friends fell away naturally (moving, loss of interest, etc.) but the core group stuck.
Of course each member of the core know other people who knew people who knew people, etc.
So, once we had all grown into hormone raged teenagers with this huge chaos called "social life" other things started happening, and I'm not referring to girlfriends.
Suddenly there were drunken parties to be had out in some guy's house or the woods, or grouptrascks out to the city's musical and club hotzones, etc.
Followed in the mid-90s by... the computer! Cart your PC from A to B for an evening of LAN deathmatching!
Now, if we were all alike, we'd probably all have done everything together.
Instead me, I didn't care about seeing my buddies puking their guts out on booze night, they didn't have the drive (or money) to go to that gig of that new rock band...
In that sense the "chatroom" fell apart or at least was less frequented... while everybody still had fun, in their own way.
So, to get back to your picture:
Yes, a "chatroom" needs to have "game" to keep people coming AND staying, all of that is as you say.
The question is just what is this "game"?
Frankly, if I play some FPS for a map or two, yeah, it's fun, but it will not make me want to come back as soon as possible (usually).
On the other side, if I can progress my character in a game further AND I include in that helping the poor adventurer who bit off a bit too much and is about to be clubbered to death by a mob, a character I've never seen before, hey, great!
But no matter if I just hop to help, actually team up or just go solo on my own, what I have in a MMO is a vast, alive (at least partially via pre-programming) (PvE) world.
In short: if there is enough content to let me have fun growing up my character, I couldn't care less if there are other players around or not... it would just be nicer.
And yes, as I said based on the singleplayer "aspect" of SWTOR, to me there is enough.
Unlike in GW1 where after stepping out of the starting city and just doing 3 missions as well as a bit of exploring and killing a few monster I found my character to be lvl 8 within 4 hours... with a level max of 20? And not just 2 further episodes to go, and an expension, but I actually hadn't even started this episode yet at all!.
There may be lots of content but if all the progress I'm getting is moving thru the story and getting new gear but no further character progress, f**k it, I'd rather play something else!
And yes, heck, where were all the people? Not one single other PC character outside the starting city!
To you, "expectations of recurring gameplay and a strong population are the reward for sticking through those boring levels and quests", allowing to send my character off on a new adventure and helping my fellow player man or woman, when they need help, that's, well, I'm not calling it "the reward" but rather the fun of playing the game, with problably having fun as the reward...
That's why I'm saying we come from different schools of MMO gaming... to me BW has actually done a good job with SWTOR because you have 8 character classes each with their own story. Which should already raise the "replay value" of the game to 8.
Of course, if you didn't know better, if you completed every single (side) quest on your first toon, if you didn't keep some Heroic quests for toon number 2, 3 and 4, well, then of course you can only work with the "replay factor" coming from playing a character of the other faction.
Now, you may have noticed that I was looking at the whole thing rather PvE focused.
This is not because I don't like PvP but rather because PvP is a rather complex thing to me.
First, it should not be "endgame": nothing should be "endgame", because at "endgame" you have reached the end of the game, the final confrontation... so, jumping in a game straight to "ndgame" is just like jumping to the end of a movie because, well, you want to know how it ends... but don't care why it ends that way, how things go there this way...
PvP should be something that is constant. Which only becomes a problem if allow characters to progress within certain brackets too fast: nothing wrong if you man up your toon within the first 10 hrs so that he can deliver a fair share of damage and also can take a fair beating so that he doesn't have to go hunting rats anymore as the top of his feelings...
but do we really need to see our character jump from lvl20 to lvl30 (even when just playing casual) when the lvl max is 50?
Of course... because gamers need the "reward" of getting a new lvl, of getting that extra spell that they can now use once per day, etc.
I'll reference back to me and my buddies playing D&D: We had whole strings of weekend session over a couple of months without anybody (or maybe just one of the characters) hitting a new level.
We still got rewarded, our reward was to see that we had just received 312 XP (not to mention the looy that had come over the course of the session) which meant we only needed 6481 more XP to get to the next level.
How many times have you played an MMO and actually checked the XP progress bar after a fight to see how much closer this fight had gotten you to the next level?
Small rewards are just too small for today's gamers.
Yes, I'm getting back to PvP: Imagine if with quick influx and slow progress you were to grow an ever increasing pool of available players for PvP fit for your level. And not just your level but pretty much every gamer having enough enemies to pick from that are of a suitable level for him?
And even more: while of course you will slowly see an "elite" forming, those who just go crazy spending 100 hrs per week in game, even their progress is slow enough to not put them in contact with any "endgame" content from the game within the first 9 months.
This will allow the game designers to work with less stress on getting new low-/mid- and high-level content added to the game.
But back to PvP:
Yes, there may be an "elite" but if you've actually understand where the real benefit of a 3 faction PvP system rests, then you'll also understand how "rusty" the feet of this "elite" actually is: just have 3 lvl30 team up on a lvl40 "elite" and down he may go.
Or maybe it's 6 lvl20s?
You get the idea...
And now, what if we actually make the whole PvP even more interesting: assets, objectives, so that the whole PvP gets away from simple "let's see how often I can kill you in the next 15 min."
And now, how about this radical thought: if you work with some sort of scoring system, make away with the idea that the only way to score is thru killing!
I mean after all we are pitting human minds here against each other... and as little hope as I have for Mankind, there is still that small spark (fuelled mostly by seeing what is done in other game genre) that a battle of wits - attacker sneaking up on target, defender having successfully pre-setup countermeasures, attacker needs to find way to counter these countermeasures, defender needs to make judgement calls if he feels like his defense is losing strength, potentially by doing so actually creating the hole in his defense that he was afraid of was already there, etc.
A team based PvP match doesn't have to be a Chuck Norris Delta Force action flick, it may also be much closer to a heist flick...
Okay, okay, lots and lots written... why nobody will probably read. Or understand. *shrug*.
So I'll just close this in a very simple way: I like SWTOR because for me it works in most ways, it is fun to me (please note: not in all of them)
Other people don't like it for whatever reason, which I can accept.
The thing is just that even if you ldon't like it it doesn't makes the game a definitely bad one.
BW promised a living SW(TOR) universe: check
BW promised a story driven game: check
BW promised a feel for the game akin to a SW experience: check
Did they proomise a game where you'll be drowining in a sea of players? Nope
Did they promise that the game will be all about PvP? Nope
It is really simple: if the game doesn't work for you, whether on your 1st day in, your 29th, your 32nd, your 89th or your 264th, if it just doesn't work (anymore) you should leave...
but remember that potentially it was you who could have made things better, and I'm not talking about sending the devs a mail listing the latest (unresolved) bugs, but instead actually using the community to create something if the community is thinking that something is missing for the community of the game.
Sweet BeeJeeBuzz! Wall of text just hit me for 10,000 damage!
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
BW promised a feel for the game akin to a SW experience: check
holy mother of text.. anyway I quoted this because it's probably the single biggest thing I think this game failed on it does not feel anything like a SW experience to me at all.. feels like a very generic themepark MMO with a sci-fi skin on it pretending to be star wars.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Even if English is your second language, you need to rethink how you structure your writing. I don't know any language that would structure it the way you have.
baritone3k, can I return that advice straight back to you?
Because, frankly, your posting left me scratching my head more thahn once going "what is he trying to say?" Maybe it would be easier if - in general - postings in forums would have to be done as pictographs...
Now, from what I gathered from your posting, I think we come from 2 completely different schools of, well, gaming. Now, I won't go and say that one is right (mine of course) and the other isn't, because that would make as much sense a discussing whether playing soccer in a real stadium with 2 real teams is the better form of gaming over playing tetris on your PC in your mom's basement.
For me, RPGs HAVE TO BE bloated. Because the game is not about having your character in "endgame", it's about his progess, his way there. The "end" is sort of the (anti-)clymax. I understand when you are saying the game is too bloated for a (good) singleplayer game. And I'm torn whether to agree or not.
I took the liberty of playing one of my characters completely without stress , sort of casual, without any PvP, pretty much always doing all quests. It took me about 4 months to get this character to level 50 - despite or maybe rather because of the character being huge fun to play. And more importantly, now after 5 months I still haven't completed his story.
I could have fasttracked this character up to lvl50 like all my other characters but, well, I guess - in general - I had too much fun playing him.Yes, of course, there were moments when I wanted (and actually did) speed things up forward, which is where I would agree to a certain "bloating" alas, just because I didn't like these passages doesn't mean they are bad. You may have liked them. ;-) Yet, I would still rather invest all that time than getting to play a reader digest version of a singleplayer game. Which seems to be what you are asking for?
Comparing MMOs to chatrooms is... well... a bit of a weird but technically correct look. Remember that MMOs find their origins (amongst other) in MUDs. Allowing people to gather in an electronic space is, well, not much different from you gathering your mates on a Friday evening in your flat: you have a bunch of people gathered.Now, the problem is what to do... because, well, if you don't find a way to entertain them, people will leave, "chatroom" or flat. Which makes things complicated as we don't all tick alike!
From the early 80s, not even 10 years old, I was playing D&D with a core group of friends. Some friends fell away naturally (moving, loss of interest, etc.) but the core group stuck. Of course each member of the core know other people who knew people who knew people, etc. So, once we had all grown into hormone raged teenagers with this huge chaos called "social life" other things started happening, and I'm not referring to girlfriends. Suddenly there were drunken parties to be had out in some guy's house or the woods, or grouptrascks out to the city's musical and club hotzones, etc. Followed in the mid-90s by... the computer! Cart your PC from A to B for an evening of LAN deathmatching! Now, if we were all alike, we'd probably all have done everything together. Instead me, I didn't care about seeing my buddies puking their guts out on booze night, they didn't have the drive (or money) to go to that gig of that new rock band... In that sense the "chatroom" fell apart or at least was less frequented... while everybody still had fun, in their own way.
So, to get back to your picture:
Yes, a "chatroom" needs to have "game" to keep people coming AND staying, all of that is as you say. The question is just what is this "game"? Frankly, if I play some FPS for a map or two, yeah, it's fun, but it will not make me want to come back as soon as possible (usually). On the other side, if I can progress my character in a game further AND I include in that helping the poor adventurer who bit off a bit too much and is about to be clubbered to death by a mob, a character I've never seen before, hey, great! But no matter if I just hop to help, actually team up or just go solo on my own, what I have in a MMO is a vast, alive (at least partially via pre-programming) (PvE) world. In short: if there is enough content to let me have fun growing up my character, I couldn't care less if there are other players around or not... it would just be nicer.
And yes, as I said based on the singleplayer "aspect" of SWTOR, to me there is enough. Unlike in GW1 where after stepping out of the starting city and just doing 3 missions as well as a bit of exploring and killing a few monster I found my character to be lvl 8 within 4 hours... with a level max of 20? And not just 2 further episodes to go, and an expension, but I actually hadn't even started this episode yet at all!. There may be lots of content but if all the progress I'm getting is moving thru the story and getting new gear but no further character progress, f**k it, I'd rather play something else! And yes, heck, where were all the people? Not one single other PC character outside the starting city!
To you, "expectations of recurring gameplay and a strong population are the reward for sticking through those boring levels and quests", allowing to send my character off on a new adventure and helping my fellow player man or woman, when they need help, that's, well, I'm not calling it "the reward" but rather the fun of playing the game, with problably having fun as the reward...
That's why I'm saying we come from different schools of MMO gaming... to me BW has actually done a good job with SWTOR because you have 8 character classes each with their own story. Which should already raise the "replay value" of the game to 8. Of course, if you didn't know better, if you completed every single (side) quest on your first toon, if you didn't keep some Heroic quests for toon number 2, 3 and 4, well, then of course you can only work with the "replay factor" coming from playing a character of the other faction.
Now, you may have noticed that I was looking at the whole thing rather PvE focused. This is not because I don't like PvP but rather because PvP is a rather complex thing to me.
First, it should not be "endgame": nothing should be "endgame", because at "endgame" you have reached the end of the game, the final confrontation... so, jumping in a game straight to "endgame" is just like jumping to the end of a movie because, well, you want to know how it ends... but don't care why it ends that way, how things go there this way...
PvP should be something that is constant. Which only becomes a problem if allow characters to progress within certain brackets too fast: nothing wrong if you man up your toon within the first 10 hrs so that he can deliver a fair share of damage and also can take a fair beating so that he doesn't have to go hunting rats anymore as the top of his feelings...
but do we really need to see our character jump from lvl20 to lvl30 (even when just playing casual) when the lvl max is 50? Of course... because gamers need the "reward" of getting a new lvl, of getting that extra spell that they can now use once per day, etc.
Okay, when I mentioned the structure of the writing I was referring to the breaking up of the paragraphs which are jsut a few steps less frustrating to read than a wall of text. Your content makes sense. I was just referring to how your paragraph structure being so disjointed made it tough. I edited some of your prior post to make it fits more natural paragraph structure.
I dig most of what you are saying, and we do disagree on SWTOR. The game is not 8 times a single player game. It is a bloated mess of a single player game so repetitive and uninspired that more than 1 replay on either faction will result in 10% variation in story and interactions.
The gameplay is also weak. If God of War was this unresponsive and static, the teens would not pick it up.
In terms of paying in boredom along the way in MMOs, it is done with the expectation of a pay off. If they game is shit at tend game or otherwise, those times you weren't jazzed to do that quest or interested in what was around the corner ended up feeling like they cheated you out of your time. The player ONLY ENGAGED IN THOSE SHITTY ACTIVITIES with the hope of a later payoff which enhanced the game. If the game ends up being crap, the time was wasted. As opposed to say perfecting a level in Super Mario Brothers or more rectenly Rayman: Origins and have a direct result of feeling accomplished regardless of the later results. Dark Souls and Demon Souls function on an excrutiating level of jeopardy for your character. The reward is in the art, story and sense of accomplishment of competing the game or progressing. SWTOR doesn't have a reward, because the game is easy enough that 90% of the population can compete it, the art is weak (IMO), the "choices" are paper thin and the only strength being that it is the most current non-dance Star Wars game on the market.
So for the cehckist - you missed one.
BW promised to make an MMORPG - NOPE.
They made a bloated single player game that will only serve as an MMO to people for whom a McDonald's cheesebuger would serve as a NY Strip.
I trusted Bioware enough to buy this game and hell i lasted longer in the horribly bad Perfect World
SWTOR is just soooo boring and waaaay to easy. I lasted 2 weeks of really playing then on and off for a week then cancelled my sub.
My friends were pissed at me but of coarse all of them quit in the next month due to boredom.
And now im a full time GW2 fanboi until it comes out :P
Playing: PO, EVE Waiting for: WoD Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
And now im a full time GW2 fanboi until it comes out :P
Isn't that always the case with the current MMO scene and the same problem with swtor at beta. People always waiting for that next big thing, then they get disappointed and move on to the next.
...In SWTOR I rarely found places crowded - with the exception of Fleet - but other places were definitely far from really quite empty...
...But in SWTOR, would you consider a "map" to be a zone on a planet? A whole planet? The whole universe?...
...Whether that means travelling to a different zone, city, continent or planet, that I'll leave open....
and sadly I think this is the norm: once a game has lost its "new car smell" people have hit "endgame" which means that they'll concentrate onto very few locations, which is further not help by obviously those players who actually have left the game because they figured out it's just not their cup of tea.
Bigger world, less people, always a feel of less "massively".
A lot of words...very little content... if you were trying to use a writing style that simulates in words what it's like to play TOR, job well done
But you're bending reality. I was there in beta and release. The quest hubs were appropriately populated back then. So much so that competition for quest objectives and mobs caused friction in chat. Groups were findable for planetary group quests. Other than in the 1st 2 planets, that just does not exist now.
And your premise that if you want to find people you can expand your horizons and go find them in other places falls flat simply because this is an extremely linear game with just one area at any given time that is level appropriate. It's not even a match for WOW in that respect where you at least have optional level-appropriate areas for the first 40 levels or so.
Yes, bigger worlds always feel less massive people-wise, but when a not-so-big MMO starts feeling downright lonely and even the innevitable gathering spots (the fleet) have 1/10th the population they used to have you know there's something not right. There is no denying that group content prior to the level cap is mostly irrelevant now--especially the planetside H2+ or H4 content--since you'll get tired of looking for a group long before you find one. Heck, even the max level content is mostly dead except for the one FP everyone does to grind the daily.
Nah... this is not how MMOs are or should be. It's no fun this way and I don't blame anyone who feels like it's dying or nearly dead because it is.
PS... before you ask, I play in one of the "busiest" and the friendliest NA server, Ajunta Pall. What I'm describing is the best multiplayer experience you're going to get.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
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“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
And now im a full time GW2 fanboi until it comes out :P
Isn't that always the case with the current MMO scene and the same problem with swtor at beta. People always waiting for that next big thing, then they get disappointed and move on to the next.
The difference is i was never excited for SWTOR, didnt think it looked particularly good and never in my life defended it.......I just have always loved bioware games (except DA2) and decided to get it purely off there name.
I am TRUELY excited for GW2 which is actually rare for me......i was not excited for WAR, AoC, STO, DCUO and didnt think any of them were going to be good.....and they were not.....luckily i saved my money and waited for free trial or F2P for all of these.
So yeah thanks for trying to generalize me with your all seeing knowlege
Playing: PO, EVE Waiting for: WoD Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Yes. The game is dead... wait.... except for the fact that they have 1.3 million subscribers.
Sure and when they activate every account that reached legacy level 5 and give it a free month, they'll be able to announce rising sub numbers next quarter. It all depends on how far you want to stretch the term subscriber.
What I dont understand is where the hell was all the outrage in all the beta and CB. If the game was this bad I wouldnt care about any NDA, I would tell them to stick it and tell eveyone what the hell was actually going on.
Honestly? They (we?) were all dazzled by being frontloaded with story and the fact that it was SW. But mostly, mostly folks honestly thought it would get better. People just gave Bioware the benefit of the doubt. If you looked closely there were those who saw the issues from the beginning but by then the hype train was in full gear.
Appreciate the honesty. Hundreds of thousands of players, mmo enthusiasts, saw issues from the beginning, and made their insights known, despite the sea of fanboism leading up to the games launch and beyond it.
The more vocal ones, that portrayed an opinion that was in conflict with what amounted to the worst display of editorial malpractice by sites across the net, were permanently banned. The market spoke none-the-less, whether it be sooner or later, despite the advertisers trying to shut them up. And as is the case, in the end, ad site reviewers contributed to one of the most fantastical displays of marketing a single-player/cooperative online rpg as a mmorpg for $15/month than has ever been seen.
Many consumers still decided to experience the game, yet decided to leave in droves. Look to those that wrote the 85-100 point scores on metacritic; they have no credibility. Look at who gave this game a 9/10 score on this site, who now redefined the meaning of the word longevity. Do not trust their opinions, but continue to read of the opinions of consumers and potential consumers that don’t have $kin in the game, rather than reviewers that work for advertising sites.
A lot of words...very little content... if you were trying to use a writing style that simulates in words what it's like to play TOR, job well done
But you're bending reality. I was there in beta and release. The quest hubs were appropriately populated back then. So much so that competition for quest objectives and mobs caused friction in chat. Groups were findable for planetary group quests. Other than in the 1st 2 planets, that just does not exist now.
And your premise that if you want to find people you can expand your horizons and go find them in other places falls flat simply because this is an extremely linear game with just one area at any given time that is level appropriate. It's not even a match for WOW in that respect where you at least have optional level-appropriate areas for the first 40 levels or so.
Yes, bigger worlds always feel less massive people-wise, but when a not-so-big MMO starts feeling downright lonely and even the innevitable gathering spots (the fleet) have 1/10th the population they used to have you know there's something not right. There is no denying that group content prior to the level cap is mostly irrelevant now--especially the planetside H2+ or H4 content--since you'll get tired of looking for a group long before you find one. Heck, even the max level content is mostly dead except for the one FP everyone does to grind the daily.
Nah... this is not how MMOs are or should be. It's no fun this way and I don't blame anyone who feels like it's dying or nearly dead because it is.
PS... before you ask, I play in one of the "busiest" and the friendliest NA server, Ajunta Pall. What I'm describing is the best multiplayer experience you're going to get.
Iselin, are you sure you played (the last couple of months) the same game as me? And played MMOs for a longer time at all?
First: of course are the "starting areas" going to thin out the longer the game runs. For this not to happen you would have to have either a constant stream of new characters being created, or the game would have to offer either replay value or new content for these areas.
The latter option is apparently something that will be tried in GW2, alas, how much new content and if any at all how quick it will be included remains to be seen, the "replay value" on the other hand... while downscaling may make old quests something of a challenge again (not that I really found any in the 3 starting zones, understandable as these are starting areas and supposed to make an easy start for new players) how much fun there is to once more collecting apples or gathering raven eggs, I really don't know...
The first option, creating new characters is actually something that BW build SWTOR upon (legacy system), but that is also not accepted by many gamers. Their take is: played my character, reached "endgame", I'm done.
So not utilizing that option is simply the player's choice.
Now, I don't know how far you played the game but if you call it linear, I'd say that you've played it only one of many possible ways:
Example: My first toon was a Smuggler, both in beta and after release.
I took him thru the - yes, somewhat linear drag - of the first few planets until finally I got my ship and was hunting for Nok's treasure. Which gave me 2 planets to go to: Alderaan and Tatooine, no indication which one I should go to first.
I picked Tatooine, explored my way around all of it, ended up more often than not in Imperial territory, wasted 2 days trying to get back to a data cron that sat nicely in sandpeople/Imp lands (first time I couldn't take it was because I had too many active missions and didn't know about it), snuck close to the Sarlacc pit avoiding guards that were about twice as powerful as me, etc. and finally ended up in the Light Spring. And failed there miserably!
Pissed off I flew to Alderaan, again started exploring, got to a point when I thought that I would progress on in the treasure hunt in a moment but obviously hadn't completed Tatooine yet, flew there, failed again, flew back to Alderaan, did more stuff there, went hours deep into lvl40 area (trader's circle) and even land that was exclusively meant for Imps - don't ask how much of a pain it is if your bags are full with non-grey stuff and there is no Rep vendor at all, just Imp vendors!
And yes, I flew to Ilum before even setting foot on Hoth. Just because it was there and I figured I could find some grade 6 resources.
So, in what way you are calling SWTOR a (extremely) linear game, I'm not sure... I wouldn't.
Especially as there are places that are reserved for higher level than the one you are most likely going to be when you are on that planet following the normal story course, e.g. the trader's circle on Alderaan, the Sep/Imp island on Ord Mantel, not to mention bonus missions that may lead you back to planets you have left levels ago...
As to population loss, and failing to find groups...
Honestly, I love how people put the blame for that on the game.
take a step away from MMOs, heck, even PC games: mid-90s my D&D (p&p) group had badly splintered: girlfriends, band practice, PC gaming, all left my people rather doing other stuff than sitting around a living room table with candles and minatures rolling dice.
Should I blame D&D (or to be exact: AD&D 2nd Ed.) and call it a bad game (after having served well us for over 6 years with other versions of (A)D&D before that for about 7-8 years?)?
Or should I have put on my marching boots, walked to our local RPG shop and checked if there were other groups I'd like to join?
There are choices each player makes when it comes to SWTOR, and I don't mean "should I choke that guy or slash him?"
You pick a server when you start, you pick a faction, a race, a class, etc.
but nobody says you can only make these choices once (well, actually due to the alt focus you are supposed to make the character creation choices repeatedly...)
so, if you've noticed that your server is f**d up and "dying", of course you can sit there crying until BW sets up character transfers, but obviously it is you yourself who is missing out if you just wait for it to happen and don't become active in some way, shape, form yourself. Whether that means getting people onto your server or hopping over to a different server, that is up to you.
See, I was "lucky": I picked my server based on the fact that a popular streamer was making that one her home. Of course there was the nerd in me who thought that maybe I'd join up with her. But there was also the smart guy in me who was sure that a good many other nerds would think like that and therefore go to and stay on her server. Despite a fair loss of people - the server was the unoffical but yet officially declared by the gamers APAC US server, so of course once APAC happened people down under went for their own servers - this server is still one of the strongest in US.
You could have been just as lucky... especially now that it has pretty much been established that Fatman is the most populated server.
Your choice if you rather stay on your server...
because what YOU are describing is not at all what I've experienced on The Swiftsure... sorry.
Which takes me to saying I don't know if it's something in the water, or something they pump in the air, or just that Swiftsurers are "better", but heck, life seems to be better on Swiftsure :-P
we could now go thru the spiel of analyzing if maybe you are playing at the wrong hours or if there is anything else going on, plus obviously that due to the fact that these numbers are averaged out other factors may come into play where the number on Swiftsure is at peaktime actually by far bigger than what Ajunta offers, but frankly, i can't be bothered because to stay on your server or to switch is your choice...
But let me say one last thing: from what I've seen on the forums as basis for complaints that a LFG tool needs to be added, it was always the same story: "went into Fleet, voiced LFG, saw all those other people spamming LFG, waited an hour for somebody to come back to me on my request, got fed up, logged out."
I have seen the LFG spam in Fleet with 2 different players LFGing (without details) repeatedly after each other. I dropped a line in chat why the two don't just talk to each other. Their spam stopped...
But what might be more important: for normal H2+ and H4 quests, whenever I felt like maybe doing one and I hopped to the planet, made my way sort of into that very general area of the quest, I always ended up findng players to team up with. Because, yes, of course, why would you be standing at the arse of it all when you actually are looking for action at the head end?
So, no offense meant, but maybe it's players trying to go the easy way that is disrupting the grouping in SWTOR?
What I dont understand is where the hell was all the outrage in all the beta and CB. If the game was this bad I wouldnt care about any NDA, I would tell them to stick it and tell eveyone what the hell was actually going on.
Honestly? They (we?) were all dazzled by being frontloaded with story and the fact that it was SW. But mostly, mostly folks honestly thought it would get better. People just gave Bioware the benefit of the doubt. If you looked closely there were those who saw the issues from the beginning but by then the hype train was in full gear.
Appreciate the honesty. Hundreds of thousands of players, mmo enthusiasts, saw issues from the beginning, and made their insights known, despite the sea of fanboism leading up to the games launch and beyond it.
The more vocal ones, that portrayed an opinion that was in conflict with what amounted to the worst display of editorial malpractice by sites across the net, were permanently banned. The market spoke none-the-less, whether it be sooner or later, despite the advertisers trying to shut them up. And as is the case, in the end, ad site reviewers contributed to one of the most fantastical displays of marketing a single-player/cooperative online rpg as a mmorpg for $15/month than has ever been seen.
Many consumers still decided to experience the game, yet decided to leave in droves. Look to those that wrote the 85-100 point scores on metacritic; they have no credibility. Look at who gave this game a 9/10 score on this site, who now redefined the meaning of the word longevity. Do not trust their opinions, but continue to read of the opinions of consumers and potential consumers that don’t have $kin in the game, rather than reviewers that work for advertising sites.
Dude, you know it's all about The Man! The Man is trying to stick it to ya, and if it ain't The man then it's The Man's wife or his white dog, man, you dig... man?
Jeez, get a grip on yourself! (But not in that way, maybe the other way...), reviews are in the end how somebody rated something, nthing more, nothing less.
Frankly, they may be fun to read but whether it is for a movie or a game or the latest cereal, I wouldn't use any such review as a foundation to build my house on. Just because these people are not me!
Their (positive or negative) reviews may actually completely realisticlly reflect their experience, their feelings (without any big money prompting) but their PCs maybe be better/worse than mine, they may be highbrow intellectuals/thumbsucking rockmunchers, need a crowded cinema/have to watch a movie alone, etc. which may not match me/my situation in the least and therefore their review is actually completely useless to me.
I trust myself to make the call. That's why I try to get into betas for games I may potentially be interested in.
I've had that fortune (without having to pay or getting paid) for SWTOR, GW2 and TSW (as some of the last few) and that's what I'm basing my judgement call on: GW2 is a game that offers lots of features but the substance in itself is just too bad or not even there that I can only call the game mediocre (when comparing the feature to how it was done in another game). No sale!
TSW fails to really get me involved in the start, later just doesn't make me want to party, but worst of all the coding/engine seems to hate system, as I never got above 4 FPS no matter how I teaked. Maybe I'll consider buying the game again, when I get myself a new system but that is a long many months from now. So no sale!
I played 10 hrs in the beta of SWTOR and I had loads of fun with my smuggler. Because of that I made up my mind to not just buy the box once the game was actually released, I actually also bought the early access.
Yes, in the months since release I've had a number of minor glitches. But to this day I enjoy playing SWTOR, at least enough keep the sub running even if I don't play 8 hrs per day (much nicer to just sit at the pool and get roasted). So, thanks to the beta SWTOR was sold to me, because initially I thought that my system wouldn't even be able to run the game...
In the end: you say that people who rate SWTOR great have no credibility (or people with no credibility rate SWTOR great), but in what way should we consider your credibility as given? Just because - maybe - you are NOT working for an advertising site?
And now im a full time GW2 fanboi until it comes out :P
Isn't that always the case with the current MMO scene and the same problem with swtor at beta. People always waiting for that next big thing, then they get disappointed and move on to the next.
The difference is i was never excited for SWTOR, didnt think it looked particularly good and never in my life defended it.......I just have always loved bioware games (except DA2) and decided to get it purely off there name.
I am TRUELY excited for GW2 which is actually rare for me......i was not excited for WAR, AoC, STO, DCUO and didnt think any of them were going to be good.....and they were not.....luckily i saved my money and waited for free trial or F2P for all of these.
So yeah thanks for trying to generalize me with your all seeing knowlege
My all seeing knowledge is with Silvermaker.
You admit you bought TOR as some impulse buy be it hype or name recognition. Now you claim to really be excited for GW2 but what do you truely know about it? My guess, you know about the hype and it's got you hooked. Your going to impulse buy it too right?
I admit I don't know much about GW2 and I don't care too, fantasy is not my thing. I truly hope it's a good game and have heard good things about it but I also heard many good things about TOR, Rift, LOTR, Warhammer, STO and others before they launched so I'm going with hype is hype until proven otherwise.
With all due respect, you are that bug that can't resist the light from the zapper. You are the target every gaming company banks on and are the reason we have had bad game after bad game for many years. You purchase off hype alone and therefore you and the rest of us have no one to blame for it than yourself. Thank you so much for your contribution in buying games off hype and not waiting for the game to prove itself as a good game 1st. Thank you for impatiently waiting for a game’s release, helping to contribute to the hype and not giving the game just one month after release to even have a clue if it lives up to its hype or not.
The difference is i was never excited for SWTOR, didnt think it looked particularly good and never in my life defended it.......I just have always loved bioware games (except DA2) and decided to get it purely off there name.
I am TRUELY excited for GW2 which is actually rare for me......i was not excited for WAR, AoC, STO, DCUO and didnt think any of them were going to be good.....and they were not.....luckily i saved my money and waited for free trial or F2P for all of these.
So yeah thanks for trying to generalize me with your all seeing knowlege
My all seeing knowledge is with Silvermaker.
You admit you bought TOR as some impulse buy be it hype or name recognition. Now you claim to really be excited for GW2 but what do you truely know about it? My guess, you know about the hype and it's got you hooked. Your going to impulse buy it too right?
I admit I don't know much about GW2 and I don't care too, fantasy is not my thing. I truly hope it's a good game and have heard good things about it but I also heard many good things about TOR, Rift, LOTR, Warhammer, STO and others before they launched so I'm going with hype is hype until proven otherwise.
With all due respect, you are that bug that can't resist the light from the zapper. You are the target every gaming company banks on and are the reason we have had bad game after bad game for many years. You purchase off hype alone and therefore you and the rest of us have no one to blame for it than yourself. Thank you so much for your contribution in buying games off hype and not waiting for the game to prove itself as a good game 1st. Thank you for impatiently waiting for a game’s release, helping to contribute to the hype and not giving the game just one month after release to even have a clue if it lives up to its hype or not.
Not sure about Nethermaster but it is true that there are plenty of people here that are like moths to the light. They think that the next release will be the ultimate game nomatter what.
To GW2s defense have it been toop of the hype list for 2 1/2 years so it is not as simple as it just is the next big game that stands for the hype, but that does not mean that it get those bungee players that gets hyped a few months before release, play 2 weeks and leave to never return.
They made a bloated single player game that will only serve as an MMO to people for whom a McDonald's cheesebuger would serve as a NY Strip.
Hey, that MMO/McD analogy is what I keep using... though we may use it in slightly different context, and of course for different games: to me GW2 with all it's features is really just nothing but a fast food place serving quick and easy to eat snacks, especially when you compare who those very same features are "served" in other "restaurants" (read MMOs)... in this context here comparing SWTOR story feature with the one in GW2, well, I don't think we need a long deliberation which of the 2 is the McD cheeseburger ;-)
I left the MMORPG off the checklist for a good reason:
it's rather hard (impossible) to objectively determine if a game is an MMORPG or not. At least not in this day and age.
Most MMOs have already dropped the "RPG", while still sort of following the old concepts. Alas, with random PvP having become ever more important, I'd voice my doubt how much that actually is a RPG feature.
Is a game a RPG just because it features burly men in plate armour and gay elves with bows?
I personally think that this definition from Wikipedia is rather good:
"A role-playing game ... is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines."
And for me neither "assuming the role" nor "acting out these roles" means "hey, I styled him cool in character creation, now I got him some skills and a power weapon, I'll be off killing myself some noob players",not really fit. ;-)
SWTOR's storyline system as well as the his choice options in general, yes, that do make a case for SWTOR being RPG. As does the WZ "background" and style (though, well Huttball... errr...)
The other 3 factors - "Massively" "Multiplayer" and "Online" - are a mixed bag of beans: obviously the game runs online, so that's ticked; multiplayer is everything that is more than 1 human player. You can do a lot alone, by yourself, in SWTOR, but certain things would require more than one player if you wanted them to make sense: of course you can complete a Heroic 2+ or 4 alone if you've levelled high enough past the recommended level for that quest. But you'll only get 5 XP out of it. Also, by the nature of the game, YOU can't restrict access to the game making it a single player game by your choice. BW could, but BW keeps the servers open... and I'm pretty positive that on each server you'll find at least 2 players. So yes, I'd tick that box as well... though maybe only with a pencil rather than with a pen ;-)
Finally "Massively": what is massively? There is no definition for the standalone term of "massively" in regards to MMO gaming.
The best I'd come up with is that it is actually "Massively Multiplayer" combined.
Which means asking at what number of players you go from normal multiplayer to "massively multiplayer".
In the late 90s it was usually 8 to a side, so 16 in total.
There were games that blasted past that and supported up to 32 players, maybe even had numbers over 100 as potentially possible attached to them.
These days we haven't actually gone much further with most games topping out at 32.
But just to cover our bases, would any number past 100 qualify as "massively multiplayer"?
Because based on the calculations I have seen every NA server has at least on average 300 players on it.
So just going by bare numbers that should make it "massively multiplayer", it's just that due to the size of the "map" (read the full server with all its planets, cities, zones) the amount of players just doesn't feel "massively"...
but neither did it feel like it at peak time in the GW2 BWE if you were outside the starting zones or when you were in the EB but away from those one or two big battles going on...
I'd say maybe seeing a game as a MMO is up to what the player is comfortable with: somebody may require 200 players all time around him for a game to be a MMO, for others it's 50, 20, 10 or maybe just the promise that you can have a large number of gamers in there... afterall if you look at many of the other MMOs out there,often you still don't find that huge Star Trek The Mark of Gideon player base milling around you, maybe despite the game being considered great and being F2P... and yet these games are called MMOs.
So, "MMO" in itself - to me at least - just stands for a general type of game, where you have a persistant online world where many players can come together... which - I think - you'll have to agree fits SWTOR... ;-)
The difference is i was never excited for SWTOR, didnt think it looked particularly good and never in my life defended it.......I just have always loved bioware games (except DA2) and decided to get it purely off there name.
I am TRUELY excited for GW2 which is actually rare for me......i was not excited for WAR, AoC, STO, DCUO and didnt think any of them were going to be good.....and they were not.....luckily i saved my money and waited for free trial or F2P for all of these.
So yeah thanks for trying to generalize me with your all seeing knowlege
My all seeing knowledge is with Silvermaker.
You admit you bought TOR as some impulse buy be it hype or name recognition. Now you claim to really be excited for GW2 but what do you truely know about it? My guess, you know about the hype and it's got you hooked. Your going to impulse buy it too right?
I admit I don't know much about GW2 and I don't care too, fantasy is not my thing. I truly hope it's a good game and have heard good things about it but I also heard many good things about TOR, Rift, LOTR, Warhammer, STO and others before they launched so I'm going with hype is hype until proven otherwise.
With all due respect, you are that bug that can't resist the light from the zapper. You are the target every gaming company banks on and are the reason we have had bad game after bad game for many years. You purchase off hype alone and therefore you and the rest of us have no one to blame for it than yourself. Thank you so much for your contribution in buying games off hype and not waiting for the game to prove itself as a good game 1st. Thank you for impatiently waiting for a game’s release, helping to contribute to the hype and not giving the game just one month after release to even have a clue if it lives up to its hype or not.
Not sure about Nethermaster but it is true that there are plenty of people here that are like moths to the light. They think that the next release will be the ultimate game nomatter what.
To GW2s defense have it been toop of the hype list for 2 1/2 years so it is not as simple as it just is the next big game that stands for the hype, but that does not mean that it get those bungee players that gets hyped a few months before release, play 2 weeks and leave to never return.
GW1 recentlyt went over the 7-million units/customer threshold. That's a million customers since 2009 when it hit 6 million. And, yes, lots of those sales were deeply discounted, I'm not pretending otherwise. But the last significant update was 2007 and it's still selling 250K+ units a year.
So I'm not too worried that GW2 will fail. It's already far better than GW1 and far better, in beta, than any MMO I've played in years. Something I couldn't say with SWTOR. And whose probems I just chocked-up to beta, not incompentcy. Unfortunately, I was wrong and it was incompetency, not beta.
And I paid the price for ignoring how bad the late-build beta was and I bought a bad game that destroyed my Star Wars hopes for probably another decade. If not forever.
GW1 recentlyt went over the 7-million units/customer threshold. That's a million customers since 2009 when it hit 6 million. And, yes, lots of those sales were deeply discounted, I'm not pretending otherwise. But the last significant update was 2007 and it's still selling 250K+ units a year.
So I'm not too worried that GW2 will fail. It's already far better than GW1 and far better, in beta, than any MMO I've played in years. Something I couldn't say with SWTOR. And whose probems I just chocked-up to beta, not incompentcy. Unfortunately, I was wrong and it was incompetency, not beta.
And I paid the price for ignoring how bad the late-build beta was and I bought a bad game that destroyed my Star Wars hopes for probably another decade. If not forever.
Always love/laugh reading MosesZD's posting, they are just to /facepalm-y
Okay Moses,
you know that even today, almost 14 years after its release, BioWare's classic Baldur's Gate is selling quite well thru gog.com?
And only about 5 years ago was still sold as a re-released boxed game?
(I'm sure you'll love to dig up the numbers of how many units were sold/are sold on average per year.)
But the thing is that by your twisted "logic" the continuing success of BG must also mean that SWTOR can't fail.
Afterall comparing things like graphics and groupability alone SWTOR is by far better than BG.
And frankly, having played SWTOR in beta and release and both GW2 and TSW in beta, I have to say that GW2 felt more mediocre than many other MMOs I've played in the last couple of years.
With the TSW beta, despite the very low framerate I had, I still got the feel of a good spooky spooks story, and with SWTOR I had fun thru the complete beta and a very large chunk of the time after launch.
(If you want I can now start listing MMOs and how they stand on the "mediocre" scale when compared to GW2 but I think for everybody's sake I'll skip)
But with GW2, the fact that a game that is nothing but a loose gathering of mostly rather badly done versions of features picked from other games (where these features we done better) can be considered by MMO gamers to be the next evolutionary step, heck, that has actually destroyed my hope that MMO gamer will any time soon start maturing into something that is not just playing for the quick kick.
Seriously Moses, this is not Comedy Central, as entertaining as your postings are, maybe making statements that actually made sense would help your cause?
What I dont understand is where the hell was all the outrage in all the beta and CB. If the game was this bad I wouldnt care about any NDA, I would tell them to stick it and tell eveyone what the hell was actually going on.
Plenty of people were doing this. You been under a rock?
Always love/laugh reading MosesZD's posting, they are just to /facepalm-y
Okay Moses,
you know that even today, almost 14 years after its release, BioWare's classic Baldur's Gate is selling quite well thru gog.com?
And only about 5 years ago was still sold as a re-released boxed game?
(I'm sure you'll love to dig up the numbers of how many units were sold/are sold on average per year.)
But the thing is that by your twisted "logic" the continuing success of BG must also mean that SWTOR can't fail.
Afterall comparing things like graphics and groupability alone SWTOR is by far better than BG.
And frankly, having played SWTOR in beta and release and both GW2 and TSW in beta, I have to say that GW2 felt more mediocre than many other MMOs I've played in the last couple of years.
With the TSW beta, despite the very low framerate I had, I still got the feel of a good spooky spooks story, and with SWTOR I had fun thru the complete beta and a very large chunk of the time after launch.
(If you want I can now start listing MMOs and how they stand on the "mediocre" scale when compared to GW2 but I think for everybody's sake I'll skip)
But with GW2, the fact that a game that is nothing but a loose gathering of mostly rather badly done versions of features picked from other games (where these features we done better) can be considered by MMO gamers to be the next evolutionary step, heck, that has actually destroyed my hope that MMO gamer will any time soon start maturing into something that is not just playing for the quick kick.
Seriously Moses, this is not Comedy Central, as entertaining as your postings are, maybe making statements that actually made sense would help your cause?
Really?
What is so "medicore" about GW2?
And cut the word count, nobody is going to read through 500121951 words if it can be summed in 2 sentences.
And the only thing you confirmed - good games sell even after 7-14 years.
And yah, i still play trough BG 1/2 and Fallout 1/2 once-ish a year, and yah, they still beat the crap out of anything that releases today. Well, maybe not some indie games.
And yah, you can still buy Fallout 1/2 through Steam. 14 years...
Well another preordered game has died. Maybe I should stop pre-ordering stuff. Too late for GW2, already preordered that lol. But yeah. I had so much hope for this game. It really was fun ~1-20 levels. Then reality set in. This was No MMO.
While I agree that TOR is not what I or many had hoped for, and it is obvious that population fell in a noticable way, I cannot say it is dead. If it's population stababizes where it is (and could still stand to lose a few more), it will still be the #2 western mmo. It still has a population that outshines everything but WoW. And while I hoped for more, and many others did too - as the dust settles, we can see it has still made a large impact on the gaming world, for a lot of people.
Comments
Now this is an interesting turn of events!
So you're saying the game would be good if it had been B2P because it really is just a singleplayer game?
Okay, maybe it is high time for security measures to be put in place that confirm that the purchaser of a game is actually, well, not a moron? (not you of course!)
Not to offend anybody but you bought the game assuming that you are buying a MMO - which IMO SWTOR very much is but let's go with your view of things.
Then - for you - it turned out to be a singleplayer game.
Well, why didn't you just cancel your subscription?
See, I'm sure - just like me - you've bought this or that singleplayer game that you've played for a few days, weeks and then dropped because it was finished/got boring?
Or maybe even just played it for a few hours, maybe just minutes and then uninstalled it because it's a stinker?
Yeah, you lost the purchase price for the box, but that's it... maybe you even had a bit fun, maybe a few weeks long?
If you could venture a guess what would you say, how many hours did you play in the initial 30 days with SWTOR?
Because, if you were realistic, I'm sure you'd see that - even with the box price of SWTOR a bit higher than your normal new release game - you've probably gotten your money's worth for a singleplayer game.
Afterall you said yourself that it was fun when it had a population - which depending on when you bought it I'd say was for most of the first 3-4 months after release a given all the time for your initial 30 days... or a bad server choice on your end.
So why, if you felt like it was failing, didn't you then cancel your subscription? Because the population was still strong after your initial 30 days? And therefore you were still having fun?
See, this is what I really don't get: you buy a singleplayer game, you play it, you are done. - $60
You buy a MMO, you play it for 30 days (which in total playtime is probably more than what you get out of a singleplayer game), you feel like you are done with it - $60... just like a singleplayer game.
But with a MMO if you go past the initial 30 days, you are paying a fraction of the full price of a boxed game and still get to play...
With singleplayer games this usually either means you are now on a new game or requires the purchase of some expansion or DLC, which more often than not will cost you just as much as a month' subscription... if not more...
so, what's the fuss really about?
Can't be the money... because unless you rip your singleplayer games, well, with MMOs, even if you see them getting boring after 6 weeks, 2 months, you will have payed less than playing (and in turn obviously buying) singleplayer games.
Is it that you just feel cheated? "SWTOR should have been that great game, it should have made me be together with my guildies all the time, it should have been a game that forced other players to play with me..."?
In the EULA, did you anywhere read that by accepting this agreement you are selling away your free will to the game (and in turn to BW and EA and potentially even LucasArts?
I don't really think so...
whether and how you - and everybody else - is playing SWTOR is still - mostly - up to you.
And just to drill bthis home: Nobody will really mind if you complain about a game you purchased that turned out to be udder crap. (That's why I try to check out games in beta to see if the game is something I'd like to purchase before there'll be an official trial/demo be released.)
But by your own words the game isn't even bad, it's just that there aren't enough players on your server...
which ALWAYS(!) makes me scratch my head: if I'm on a train and my car is completetly crowded, but I can see that the other cars are pretty much empty, wouldn't it be considered normal for me to pick up my things and move to the next car?
Of course there is the "comfort factor" because maybe I have a load of bags, and my laptop case and a suitcase, all of which needs to be moved... which you should translate into having one or more high levelled characters.
Well, d'oh! If I really feel that bad in the crowded car, I will move - DESPITE of all my stuff! (Read: start on a new server even if I have to start a new toon on that server. Because, frankly, creating multiple characters IS part of BW's gameplay concept for this game!
I'm sorry maybe it's because it's early morning (somewhere in the world) but it always fumbles my mind how people claim that something is somebody else's fault when it is clearly their own fault...?
I'm not sure if it's really just a matter of mental capacity i.e. being a moron vs not being one, or if instead it's something to do with human nature...
but to everybody who claims that SWTOR is right now failing him because there are just not enough people to play with there's only one thing I can say: grow some social balls!
If you actually look, you will find other players! Maybe not in your guild (or what's left of it) or on your server/your faction.
But they are there!
Even if English is your second language, you need to rethink how you structure your writing. I don't know any language that would structure it the way you have.
That being said -
I will preface this by saying that this is not only my feeling on the matter but speaks of the feeings of the many when it comes to MMOs. MMOs are different from single payer games in the amount of crap a player is willing to wade through in exchange for prolonged and social gameplay. That is why people have different expectations and requirements for MMOs.
Generally a single player game is not allowed to be filled with excess fluff and grind the way an MMO is. It is asked to be compelling and content rich from the start and have a solid ending. The quests and story missions are held to a higher standard of variation and depth. MMOs on the other hand exchange that for the promise of extended gameplay where suffering through something uninspired and monotonous will be rewarded with an edge or a level that puts you more on equal footing or puts you past the other players who do or don't make the same sacrifice. I wish it weren't so, but in MMOs we deal with a lot of excessive, bloated questing just to get to top level and then accept a level of grind as we interact with others at the end game. The boat in a game like SWTOR is what makes it a poor single payer experience vs the other KOTOR games and not worth the $60 for the initial month. The time taken to complete the "stories" is extened by mindless grind. It is like being asked to wait for 3 hours for your McDonads while you sit in the drive through. There is time value here, and it is not being well done. We are playing essentialy a 30 hour single player game over many times that many hours since it is bloated.
In many ways MMOS are glorified chat rooms. We need enough game to keep people compelled to play this and therefore more access to the people for social reasons.That is why we ask that games be good enough to hold onto a solid population. We want to be able to group and share experiences and have our glorified chat room filled with people ranging from elitists to stay at home moms. If a game is not that good, the quality of people you can communicate with is reduced as well as the quantity. You will be talking to people who don't know there are other options and are somehow willing to play a shit game.
All said and done - MMOs are a different animal. They need gameplay, story, etc. But the expectations of recurring gameplay and a strong population are the reward for sticking through those boring levels and quests. SWTOR just doesn't have that.
It is a bloated mess when viewed as a single payer experience, and it is surviving solely on the Star Wars name as an MMO.
Someone please make a good MMO.
It's nice to see people think that "massive" (or rather "massively") means you have to have 100+ people standing on top of each other in a small spot... at least that's how your post feels like...
Part of my PC gaming history goes back to the classic FPS online/LAN deathmatches followed by Team Deathmatch and CTF of the mid-/late 1990s.
Now, if you go back that far you may remember a game called Starsiege: Tribes.
THAT was a huge eyeopener for me because where up to then the game was up to 16 "players" (upped by bots if needs be, which was usually the case) chasing each other on a tiny map, suddenly the number of possible players on the field double (at least) and - aside from goodies like controlable turrets, vehicles, different character layouts, etc. - the maps grew epic! This was going to be a game that would allow a completely different style of playing.
My friends hated it!
Because the maps were so big, because there was no option for bots, it was all just too far spread out...
I'm just telling this to show how people may have different perceptions of how things are and how they should be.
In SWTOR I rarely found places crowded - with the exception of Fleet - but other places were definitely far from really quite empty.
Of course, some planets may have held a bigger crowd - just because there was more to them and you were willing to take your time exploring and completing all the quests, or maybe it was just that these planets were locations from the earlier parts of the story, meaning while maybe someone may not have levelled up his alt up to Hoth, he probably would have done at least to Nar Shaddaa.
And yet, while you may not see that many (or few) people squeezed into one tiny hub on the planet, I pretty much always came across some fellow adventurer here or a pair there.
I'd bet that with most of your team based FPS, the number of players was not higher than the actual number of players on any planet SWTOR has to offer. Obviously using around primetime for both games otherwise your FPS would have a clear "team assembling" advantage ;-)
It just felt like there's less players because you don't see them immediately.
Which takes things a step further: where does a "map" end in SWTOR?
I mean in most team based FPS things are pretty clear: that is the size of your map, there are amount X of players (and bots) in it.
But in SWTOR, would you consider a "map" to be a zone on a planet? A whole planet? The whole universe?
The thing is that obviously the further you spread your gaze, the more players there may be - depending on the overall server population, but picking the "right" server is obviously your choice ;-)
So, frankly, I don't think that "massively" means that I need to feel a huge crowd of players around me - it's great if one does - but rather that there is a large player base I can interact with.
Whether that means travelling to a different zone, city, continent or planet, that I'll leave open.
And yes, I bet that even those guys who were complaining that while they were sending out a LFG (and after an hour left because nobody came to them), will say that there was definitely a great number of players (e.g. in Fleet) spamming away LFG... ;-)
Yes, SWTOR is just as "massiively" as other games... having played both the TSW and the GW2 BWEs, I found that yes, while there are certain zones (part of the starting zones, the EB, in GW2, the village of Kingsmouth itself in TSW) once you leave these hubs the number of visible players drops significantly: in Kingsmouth between the skate park and the scrapyard, I met just 1 2player team in over 90 min; I walked around the zone around the Orochi Group post for about an hour without seeing anybody; on the Diessa Plateau I didn't see a single other player soul, only after about 4 hours of exploring when I got to the path leading into the Wayfarrer Hills I started seeing people again, and yes, around Hunter's Lake there were a good many people milling, so please no "it was just a bad time, at other times the plateau would be full" excuse.
The same for the EB (and yes, my server had a fairly strong population): venture away from the big clash you can go for long minutes without seeing any of your allies or player character enemies...
and sadly I think this is the norm: once a game has lost its "new car smell" people have hit "endgame" which means that they'll concentrate onto very few locations, which is further not help by obviously those players who actually have left the game because they figured out it's just not their cup of tea.
Bigger world, less people, always a feel of less "massively".
baritone3k, can I return that advice straight back to you?
Because, frankly, your posting left me scratching my head more thahn once going "what is he trying to say?" Maybe it would be easier if - in general - postings in forums would have to be done as pictographs...
Now, from what I gathered from your posting, I think we come from 2 completely different schools of, well, gaming.
Now, I won't go and say that one is right (mine of course) and the other isn't, because that would make as much sense a discussing whether playing soccer in a real stadium with 2 real teams is the better form of gaming over playing tetris on your PC in your mom's basement.
For me, RPGs HAVE TO BE bloated.
Because the game is not about having your character in "endgame", it's about his progess, his way there. The "end" is sort of the (anti-)clymax.
I understand when you are saying the game is too bloated for a (good) singleplayer game.
And I'm torn whether to agree or not.
I took the liberty of playing one of my characters completely without stress , sort of casual, without any PvP, pretty much always doing all quests. It took me about 4 months to get this character to level 50 - despite or maybe rather because of the character being huge fun to play. And more importantly, now after 5 months I still haven't completed his story.
I could have fasttracked this character up to lvl50 like all my other characters but, well, I guess - in general - I had too much fun playing him.
Yes, of course, there were moments when I wanted (and actually did) speed things up forward, which is where I would agree to a certain "bloating" alas, just because I didn't like these passages doesn't mean they are bad. You may have liked them. ;-)
Yet, I would still rather invest all that time than getting to play a reader digest version of a singleplayer game.
Which seems to be what you are asking for?
Comparing MMOs to chatrooms is... well... a bit of a weird but technically correct look. Remember that MMOs find their origins (amongst other) in MUDs.
Allowing people to gather in an electronic space is, well, not much different from you gathering your mates on a Friday evening in your flat: you have a bunch of people gathered.
Now, the problem is what to do... because, well, if you don't find a way to entertain them, people will leave, "chatroom" or flat.
Which makes things complicated as we don't all tick alike!
From the early 80s, not even 10 years old, I was playing D&D with a core group of friends. Some friends fell away naturally (moving, loss of interest, etc.) but the core group stuck.
Of course each member of the core know other people who knew people who knew people, etc.
So, once we had all grown into hormone raged teenagers with this huge chaos called "social life" other things started happening, and I'm not referring to girlfriends.
Suddenly there were drunken parties to be had out in some guy's house or the woods, or grouptrascks out to the city's musical and club hotzones, etc.
Followed in the mid-90s by... the computer! Cart your PC from A to B for an evening of LAN deathmatching!
Now, if we were all alike, we'd probably all have done everything together.
Instead me, I didn't care about seeing my buddies puking their guts out on booze night, they didn't have the drive (or money) to go to that gig of that new rock band...
In that sense the "chatroom" fell apart or at least was less frequented... while everybody still had fun, in their own way.
So, to get back to your picture:
Yes, a "chatroom" needs to have "game" to keep people coming AND staying, all of that is as you say.
The question is just what is this "game"?
Frankly, if I play some FPS for a map or two, yeah, it's fun, but it will not make me want to come back as soon as possible (usually).
On the other side, if I can progress my character in a game further AND I include in that helping the poor adventurer who bit off a bit too much and is about to be clubbered to death by a mob, a character I've never seen before, hey, great!
But no matter if I just hop to help, actually team up or just go solo on my own, what I have in a MMO is a vast, alive (at least partially via pre-programming) (PvE) world.
In short: if there is enough content to let me have fun growing up my character, I couldn't care less if there are other players around or not... it would just be nicer.
And yes, as I said based on the singleplayer "aspect" of SWTOR, to me there is enough.
Unlike in GW1 where after stepping out of the starting city and just doing 3 missions as well as a bit of exploring and killing a few monster I found my character to be lvl 8 within 4 hours... with a level max of 20? And not just 2 further episodes to go, and an expension, but I actually hadn't even started this episode yet at all!.
There may be lots of content but if all the progress I'm getting is moving thru the story and getting new gear but no further character progress, f**k it, I'd rather play something else!
And yes, heck, where were all the people? Not one single other PC character outside the starting city!
To you, "expectations of recurring gameplay and a strong population are the reward for sticking through those boring levels and quests", allowing to send my character off on a new adventure and helping my fellow player man or woman, when they need help, that's, well, I'm not calling it "the reward" but rather the fun of playing the game, with problably having fun as the reward...
That's why I'm saying we come from different schools of MMO gaming... to me BW has actually done a good job with SWTOR because you have 8 character classes each with their own story. Which should already raise the "replay value" of the game to 8.
Of course, if you didn't know better, if you completed every single (side) quest on your first toon, if you didn't keep some Heroic quests for toon number 2, 3 and 4, well, then of course you can only work with the "replay factor" coming from playing a character of the other faction.
Now, you may have noticed that I was looking at the whole thing rather PvE focused.
This is not because I don't like PvP but rather because PvP is a rather complex thing to me.
First, it should not be "endgame": nothing should be "endgame", because at "endgame" you have reached the end of the game, the final confrontation... so, jumping in a game straight to "ndgame" is just like jumping to the end of a movie because, well, you want to know how it ends... but don't care why it ends that way, how things go there this way...
PvP should be something that is constant. Which only becomes a problem if allow characters to progress within certain brackets too fast: nothing wrong if you man up your toon within the first 10 hrs so that he can deliver a fair share of damage and also can take a fair beating so that he doesn't have to go hunting rats anymore as the top of his feelings...
but do we really need to see our character jump from lvl20 to lvl30 (even when just playing casual) when the lvl max is 50?
Of course... because gamers need the "reward" of getting a new lvl, of getting that extra spell that they can now use once per day, etc.
I'll reference back to me and my buddies playing D&D: We had whole strings of weekend session over a couple of months without anybody (or maybe just one of the characters) hitting a new level.
We still got rewarded, our reward was to see that we had just received 312 XP (not to mention the looy that had come over the course of the session) which meant we only needed 6481 more XP to get to the next level.
How many times have you played an MMO and actually checked the XP progress bar after a fight to see how much closer this fight had gotten you to the next level?
Small rewards are just too small for today's gamers.
Yes, I'm getting back to PvP: Imagine if with quick influx and slow progress you were to grow an ever increasing pool of available players for PvP fit for your level. And not just your level but pretty much every gamer having enough enemies to pick from that are of a suitable level for him?
And even more: while of course you will slowly see an "elite" forming, those who just go crazy spending 100 hrs per week in game, even their progress is slow enough to not put them in contact with any "endgame" content from the game within the first 9 months.
This will allow the game designers to work with less stress on getting new low-/mid- and high-level content added to the game.
But back to PvP:
Yes, there may be an "elite" but if you've actually understand where the real benefit of a 3 faction PvP system rests, then you'll also understand how "rusty" the feet of this "elite" actually is: just have 3 lvl30 team up on a lvl40 "elite" and down he may go.
Or maybe it's 6 lvl20s?
You get the idea...
And now, what if we actually make the whole PvP even more interesting: assets, objectives, so that the whole PvP gets away from simple "let's see how often I can kill you in the next 15 min."
And now, how about this radical thought: if you work with some sort of scoring system, make away with the idea that the only way to score is thru killing!
I mean after all we are pitting human minds here against each other... and as little hope as I have for Mankind, there is still that small spark (fuelled mostly by seeing what is done in other game genre) that a battle of wits - attacker sneaking up on target, defender having successfully pre-setup countermeasures, attacker needs to find way to counter these countermeasures, defender needs to make judgement calls if he feels like his defense is losing strength, potentially by doing so actually creating the hole in his defense that he was afraid of was already there, etc.
A team based PvP match doesn't have to be a Chuck Norris Delta Force action flick, it may also be much closer to a heist flick...
Okay, okay, lots and lots written... why nobody will probably read. Or understand. *shrug*.
So I'll just close this in a very simple way: I like SWTOR because for me it works in most ways, it is fun to me (please note: not in all of them)
Other people don't like it for whatever reason, which I can accept.
The thing is just that even if you ldon't like it it doesn't makes the game a definitely bad one.
BW promised a living SW(TOR) universe: check
BW promised a story driven game: check
BW promised a feel for the game akin to a SW experience: check
Did they proomise a game where you'll be drowining in a sea of players? Nope
Did they promise that the game will be all about PvP? Nope
It is really simple: if the game doesn't work for you, whether on your 1st day in, your 29th, your 32nd, your 89th or your 264th, if it just doesn't work (anymore) you should leave...
but remember that potentially it was you who could have made things better, and I'm not talking about sending the devs a mail listing the latest (unresolved) bugs, but instead actually using the community to create something if the community is thinking that something is missing for the community of the game.
Sweet BeeJeeBuzz! Wall of text just hit me for 10,000 damage!
holy mother of text.. anyway I quoted this because it's probably the single biggest thing I think this game failed on it does not feel anything like a SW experience to me at all.. feels like a very generic themepark MMO with a sci-fi skin on it pretending to be star wars.
I angered the clerk in a clothing shop today. She asked me what size I was and I said actual, because I am not to scale. I like vending machines 'cause snacks are better when they fall. If I buy a candy bar at a store, oftentimes, I will drop it... so that it achieves its maximum flavor potential. --Mitch Hedberg
Okay, when I mentioned the structure of the writing I was referring to the breaking up of the paragraphs which are jsut a few steps less frustrating to read than a wall of text. Your content makes sense. I was just referring to how your paragraph structure being so disjointed made it tough. I edited some of your prior post to make it fits more natural paragraph structure.
I dig most of what you are saying, and we do disagree on SWTOR. The game is not 8 times a single player game. It is a bloated mess of a single player game so repetitive and uninspired that more than 1 replay on either faction will result in 10% variation in story and interactions.
The gameplay is also weak. If God of War was this unresponsive and static, the teens would not pick it up.
In terms of paying in boredom along the way in MMOs, it is done with the expectation of a pay off. If they game is shit at tend game or otherwise, those times you weren't jazzed to do that quest or interested in what was around the corner ended up feeling like they cheated you out of your time. The player ONLY ENGAGED IN THOSE SHITTY ACTIVITIES with the hope of a later payoff which enhanced the game. If the game ends up being crap, the time was wasted. As opposed to say perfecting a level in Super Mario Brothers or more rectenly Rayman: Origins and have a direct result of feeling accomplished regardless of the later results. Dark Souls and Demon Souls function on an excrutiating level of jeopardy for your character. The reward is in the art, story and sense of accomplishment of competing the game or progressing. SWTOR doesn't have a reward, because the game is easy enough that 90% of the population can compete it, the art is weak (IMO), the "choices" are paper thin and the only strength being that it is the most current non-dance Star Wars game on the market.
So for the cehckist - you missed one.
BW promised to make an MMORPG - NOPE.
They made a bloated single player game that will only serve as an MMO to people for whom a McDonald's cheesebuger would serve as a NY Strip.
Someone please make a good MMO.
I trusted Bioware enough to buy this game and hell i lasted longer in the horribly bad Perfect World
SWTOR is just soooo boring and waaaay to easy. I lasted 2 weeks of really playing then on and off for a week then cancelled my sub.
My friends were pissed at me but of coarse all of them quit in the next month due to boredom.
And now im a full time GW2 fanboi until it comes out :P
Playing: PO, EVE
Waiting for: WoD
Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO
Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Isn't that always the case with the current MMO scene and the same problem with swtor at beta. People always waiting for that next big thing, then they get disappointed and move on to the next.
A lot of words...very little content... if you were trying to use a writing style that simulates in words what it's like to play TOR, job well done
But you're bending reality. I was there in beta and release. The quest hubs were appropriately populated back then. So much so that competition for quest objectives and mobs caused friction in chat. Groups were findable for planetary group quests. Other than in the 1st 2 planets, that just does not exist now.
And your premise that if you want to find people you can expand your horizons and go find them in other places falls flat simply because this is an extremely linear game with just one area at any given time that is level appropriate. It's not even a match for WOW in that respect where you at least have optional level-appropriate areas for the first 40 levels or so.
Yes, bigger worlds always feel less massive people-wise, but when a not-so-big MMO starts feeling downright lonely and even the innevitable gathering spots (the fleet) have 1/10th the population they used to have you know there's something not right. There is no denying that group content prior to the level cap is mostly irrelevant now--especially the planetside H2+ or H4 content--since you'll get tired of looking for a group long before you find one. Heck, even the max level content is mostly dead except for the one FP everyone does to grind the daily.
Nah... this is not how MMOs are or should be. It's no fun this way and I don't blame anyone who feels like it's dying or nearly dead because it is.
PS... before you ask, I play in one of the "busiest" and the friendliest NA server, Ajunta Pall. What I'm describing is the best multiplayer experience you're going to get.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
The difference is i was never excited for SWTOR, didnt think it looked particularly good and never in my life defended it.......I just have always loved bioware games (except DA2) and decided to get it purely off there name.
I am TRUELY excited for GW2 which is actually rare for me......i was not excited for WAR, AoC, STO, DCUO and didnt think any of them were going to be good.....and they were not.....luckily i saved my money and waited for free trial or F2P for all of these.
So yeah thanks for trying to generalize me with your all seeing knowlege
Playing: PO, EVE
Waiting for: WoD
Favourite MMOs: VG, EVE, FE and DDO
Any person who expresses rage and loathing for an MMO is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.
Sure and when they activate every account that reached legacy level 5 and give it a free month, they'll be able to announce rising sub numbers next quarter. It all depends on how far you want to stretch the term subscriber.
Believe what you will, the truth is out there...
Iselin, are you sure you played (the last couple of months) the same game as me? And played MMOs for a longer time at all?
First: of course are the "starting areas" going to thin out the longer the game runs. For this not to happen you would have to have either a constant stream of new characters being created, or the game would have to offer either replay value or new content for these areas.
The latter option is apparently something that will be tried in GW2, alas, how much new content and if any at all how quick it will be included remains to be seen, the "replay value" on the other hand... while downscaling may make old quests something of a challenge again (not that I really found any in the 3 starting zones, understandable as these are starting areas and supposed to make an easy start for new players) how much fun there is to once more collecting apples or gathering raven eggs, I really don't know...
The first option, creating new characters is actually something that BW build SWTOR upon (legacy system), but that is also not accepted by many gamers. Their take is: played my character, reached "endgame", I'm done.
So not utilizing that option is simply the player's choice.
Now, I don't know how far you played the game but if you call it linear, I'd say that you've played it only one of many possible ways:
Example: My first toon was a Smuggler, both in beta and after release.
I took him thru the - yes, somewhat linear drag - of the first few planets until finally I got my ship and was hunting for Nok's treasure. Which gave me 2 planets to go to: Alderaan and Tatooine, no indication which one I should go to first.
I picked Tatooine, explored my way around all of it, ended up more often than not in Imperial territory, wasted 2 days trying to get back to a data cron that sat nicely in sandpeople/Imp lands (first time I couldn't take it was because I had too many active missions and didn't know about it), snuck close to the Sarlacc pit avoiding guards that were about twice as powerful as me, etc. and finally ended up in the Light Spring. And failed there miserably!
Pissed off I flew to Alderaan, again started exploring, got to a point when I thought that I would progress on in the treasure hunt in a moment but obviously hadn't completed Tatooine yet, flew there, failed again, flew back to Alderaan, did more stuff there, went hours deep into lvl40 area (trader's circle) and even land that was exclusively meant for Imps - don't ask how much of a pain it is if your bags are full with non-grey stuff and there is no Rep vendor at all, just Imp vendors!
And yes, I flew to Ilum before even setting foot on Hoth. Just because it was there and I figured I could find some grade 6 resources.
So, in what way you are calling SWTOR a (extremely) linear game, I'm not sure... I wouldn't.
Especially as there are places that are reserved for higher level than the one you are most likely going to be when you are on that planet following the normal story course, e.g. the trader's circle on Alderaan, the Sep/Imp island on Ord Mantel, not to mention bonus missions that may lead you back to planets you have left levels ago...
As to population loss, and failing to find groups...
Honestly, I love how people put the blame for that on the game.
take a step away from MMOs, heck, even PC games: mid-90s my D&D (p&p) group had badly splintered: girlfriends, band practice, PC gaming, all left my people rather doing other stuff than sitting around a living room table with candles and minatures rolling dice.
Should I blame D&D (or to be exact: AD&D 2nd Ed.) and call it a bad game (after having served well us for over 6 years with other versions of (A)D&D before that for about 7-8 years?)?
Or should I have put on my marching boots, walked to our local RPG shop and checked if there were other groups I'd like to join?
There are choices each player makes when it comes to SWTOR, and I don't mean "should I choke that guy or slash him?"
You pick a server when you start, you pick a faction, a race, a class, etc.
but nobody says you can only make these choices once (well, actually due to the alt focus you are supposed to make the character creation choices repeatedly...)
so, if you've noticed that your server is f**d up and "dying", of course you can sit there crying until BW sets up character transfers, but obviously it is you yourself who is missing out if you just wait for it to happen and don't become active in some way, shape, form yourself. Whether that means getting people onto your server or hopping over to a different server, that is up to you.
See, I was "lucky": I picked my server based on the fact that a popular streamer was making that one her home. Of course there was the nerd in me who thought that maybe I'd join up with her. But there was also the smart guy in me who was sure that a good many other nerds would think like that and therefore go to and stay on her server. Despite a fair loss of people - the server was the unoffical but yet officially declared by the gamers APAC US server, so of course once APAC happened people down under went for their own servers - this server is still one of the strongest in US.
You could have been just as lucky... especially now that it has pretty much been established that Fatman is the most populated server.
Your choice if you rather stay on your server...
because what YOU are describing is not at all what I've experienced on The Swiftsure... sorry.
And if you look here Swiftsure's population is supposedly hardly bigger than your Ajunta's: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=449144
Which takes me to saying I don't know if it's something in the water, or something they pump in the air, or just that Swiftsurers are "better", but heck, life seems to be better on Swiftsure :-P
we could now go thru the spiel of analyzing if maybe you are playing at the wrong hours or if there is anything else going on, plus obviously that due to the fact that these numbers are averaged out other factors may come into play where the number on Swiftsure is at peaktime actually by far bigger than what Ajunta offers, but frankly, i can't be bothered because to stay on your server or to switch is your choice...
But let me say one last thing: from what I've seen on the forums as basis for complaints that a LFG tool needs to be added, it was always the same story: "went into Fleet, voiced LFG, saw all those other people spamming LFG, waited an hour for somebody to come back to me on my request, got fed up, logged out."
I have seen the LFG spam in Fleet with 2 different players LFGing (without details) repeatedly after each other. I dropped a line in chat why the two don't just talk to each other. Their spam stopped...
But what might be more important: for normal H2+ and H4 quests, whenever I felt like maybe doing one and I hopped to the planet, made my way sort of into that very general area of the quest, I always ended up findng players to team up with. Because, yes, of course, why would you be standing at the arse of it all when you actually are looking for action at the head end?
So, no offense meant, but maybe it's players trying to go the easy way that is disrupting the grouping in SWTOR?
Dude, you know it's all about The Man! The Man is trying to stick it to ya, and if it ain't The man then it's The Man's wife or his white dog, man, you dig... man?
Jeez, get a grip on yourself! (But not in that way, maybe the other way...), reviews are in the end how somebody rated something, nthing more, nothing less.
Frankly, they may be fun to read but whether it is for a movie or a game or the latest cereal, I wouldn't use any such review as a foundation to build my house on. Just because these people are not me!
Their (positive or negative) reviews may actually completely realisticlly reflect their experience, their feelings (without any big money prompting) but their PCs maybe be better/worse than mine, they may be highbrow intellectuals/thumbsucking rockmunchers, need a crowded cinema/have to watch a movie alone, etc. which may not match me/my situation in the least and therefore their review is actually completely useless to me.
I trust myself to make the call. That's why I try to get into betas for games I may potentially be interested in.
I've had that fortune (without having to pay or getting paid) for SWTOR, GW2 and TSW (as some of the last few) and that's what I'm basing my judgement call on: GW2 is a game that offers lots of features but the substance in itself is just too bad or not even there that I can only call the game mediocre (when comparing the feature to how it was done in another game). No sale!
TSW fails to really get me involved in the start, later just doesn't make me want to party, but worst of all the coding/engine seems to hate system, as I never got above 4 FPS no matter how I teaked. Maybe I'll consider buying the game again, when I get myself a new system but that is a long many months from now. So no sale!
I played 10 hrs in the beta of SWTOR and I had loads of fun with my smuggler. Because of that I made up my mind to not just buy the box once the game was actually released, I actually also bought the early access.
Yes, in the months since release I've had a number of minor glitches. But to this day I enjoy playing SWTOR, at least enough keep the sub running even if I don't play 8 hrs per day (much nicer to just sit at the pool and get roasted). So, thanks to the beta SWTOR was sold to me, because initially I thought that my system wouldn't even be able to run the game...
In the end: you say that people who rate SWTOR great have no credibility (or people with no credibility rate SWTOR great), but in what way should we consider your credibility as given? Just because - maybe - you are NOT working for an advertising site?
My all seeing knowledge is with Silvermaker.
You admit you bought TOR as some impulse buy be it hype or name recognition. Now you claim to really be excited for GW2 but what do you truely know about it? My guess, you know about the hype and it's got you hooked. Your going to impulse buy it too right?
I admit I don't know much about GW2 and I don't care too, fantasy is not my thing. I truly hope it's a good game and have heard good things about it but I also heard many good things about TOR, Rift, LOTR, Warhammer, STO and others before they launched so I'm going with hype is hype until proven otherwise.
With all due respect, you are that bug that can't resist the light from the zapper. You are the target every gaming company banks on and are the reason we have had bad game after bad game for many years. You purchase off hype alone and therefore you and the rest of us have no one to blame for it than yourself. Thank you so much for your contribution in buying games off hype and not waiting for the game to prove itself as a good game 1st. Thank you for impatiently waiting for a game’s release, helping to contribute to the hype and not giving the game just one month after release to even have a clue if it lives up to its hype or not.
Not sure about Nethermaster but it is true that there are plenty of people here that are like moths to the light. They think that the next release will be the ultimate game nomatter what.
To GW2s defense have it been toop of the hype list for 2 1/2 years so it is not as simple as it just is the next big game that stands for the hype, but that does not mean that it get those bungee players that gets hyped a few months before release, play 2 weeks and leave to never return.
Hey, that MMO/McD analogy is what I keep using... though we may use it in slightly different context, and of course for different games: to me GW2 with all it's features is really just nothing but a fast food place serving quick and easy to eat snacks, especially when you compare who those very same features are "served" in other "restaurants" (read MMOs)... in this context here comparing SWTOR story feature with the one in GW2, well, I don't think we need a long deliberation which of the 2 is the McD cheeseburger ;-)
I left the MMORPG off the checklist for a good reason:
it's rather hard (impossible) to objectively determine if a game is an MMORPG or not. At least not in this day and age.
Most MMOs have already dropped the "RPG", while still sort of following the old concepts. Alas, with random PvP having become ever more important, I'd voice my doubt how much that actually is a RPG feature.
Is a game a RPG just because it features burly men in plate armour and gay elves with bows?
I personally think that this definition from Wikipedia is rather good:
"A role-playing game ... is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines."
And for me neither "assuming the role" nor "acting out these roles" means "hey, I styled him cool in character creation, now I got him some skills and a power weapon, I'll be off killing myself some noob players",not really fit. ;-)
SWTOR's storyline system as well as the his choice options in general, yes, that do make a case for SWTOR being RPG. As does the WZ "background" and style (though, well Huttball... errr...)
The other 3 factors - "Massively" "Multiplayer" and "Online" - are a mixed bag of beans: obviously the game runs online, so that's ticked; multiplayer is everything that is more than 1 human player. You can do a lot alone, by yourself, in SWTOR, but certain things would require more than one player if you wanted them to make sense: of course you can complete a Heroic 2+ or 4 alone if you've levelled high enough past the recommended level for that quest. But you'll only get 5 XP out of it. Also, by the nature of the game, YOU can't restrict access to the game making it a single player game by your choice. BW could, but BW keeps the servers open... and I'm pretty positive that on each server you'll find at least 2 players. So yes, I'd tick that box as well... though maybe only with a pencil rather than with a pen ;-)
Finally "Massively": what is massively? There is no definition for the standalone term of "massively" in regards to MMO gaming.
The best I'd come up with is that it is actually "Massively Multiplayer" combined.
Which means asking at what number of players you go from normal multiplayer to "massively multiplayer".
In the late 90s it was usually 8 to a side, so 16 in total.
There were games that blasted past that and supported up to 32 players, maybe even had numbers over 100 as potentially possible attached to them.
These days we haven't actually gone much further with most games topping out at 32.
But just to cover our bases, would any number past 100 qualify as "massively multiplayer"?
Because based on the calculations I have seen every NA server has at least on average 300 players on it.
So just going by bare numbers that should make it "massively multiplayer", it's just that due to the size of the "map" (read the full server with all its planets, cities, zones) the amount of players just doesn't feel "massively"...
but neither did it feel like it at peak time in the GW2 BWE if you were outside the starting zones or when you were in the EB but away from those one or two big battles going on...
I'd say maybe seeing a game as a MMO is up to what the player is comfortable with: somebody may require 200 players all time around him for a game to be a MMO, for others it's 50, 20, 10 or maybe just the promise that you can have a large number of gamers in there... afterall if you look at many of the other MMOs out there,often you still don't find that huge Star Trek The Mark of Gideon player base milling around you, maybe despite the game being considered great and being F2P... and yet these games are called MMOs.
So, "MMO" in itself - to me at least - just stands for a general type of game, where you have a persistant online world where many players can come together... which - I think - you'll have to agree fits SWTOR... ;-)
GW1 recentlyt went over the 7-million units/customer threshold. That's a million customers since 2009 when it hit 6 million. And, yes, lots of those sales were deeply discounted, I'm not pretending otherwise. But the last significant update was 2007 and it's still selling 250K+ units a year.
So I'm not too worried that GW2 will fail. It's already far better than GW1 and far better, in beta, than any MMO I've played in years. Something I couldn't say with SWTOR. And whose probems I just chocked-up to beta, not incompentcy. Unfortunately, I was wrong and it was incompetency, not beta.
And I paid the price for ignoring how bad the late-build beta was and I bought a bad game that destroyed my Star Wars hopes for probably another decade. If not forever.
Always love/laugh reading MosesZD's posting, they are just to /facepalm-y
Okay Moses,
you know that even today, almost 14 years after its release, BioWare's classic Baldur's Gate is selling quite well thru gog.com?
And only about 5 years ago was still sold as a re-released boxed game?
(I'm sure you'll love to dig up the numbers of how many units were sold/are sold on average per year.)
But the thing is that by your twisted "logic" the continuing success of BG must also mean that SWTOR can't fail.
Afterall comparing things like graphics and groupability alone SWTOR is by far better than BG.
And frankly, having played SWTOR in beta and release and both GW2 and TSW in beta, I have to say that GW2 felt more mediocre than many other MMOs I've played in the last couple of years.
With the TSW beta, despite the very low framerate I had, I still got the feel of a good spooky spooks story, and with SWTOR I had fun thru the complete beta and a very large chunk of the time after launch.
(If you want I can now start listing MMOs and how they stand on the "mediocre" scale when compared to GW2 but I think for everybody's sake I'll skip)
But with GW2, the fact that a game that is nothing but a loose gathering of mostly rather badly done versions of features picked from other games (where these features we done better) can be considered by MMO gamers to be the next evolutionary step, heck, that has actually destroyed my hope that MMO gamer will any time soon start maturing into something that is not just playing for the quick kick.
Seriously Moses, this is not Comedy Central, as entertaining as your postings are, maybe making statements that actually made sense would help your cause?
Plenty of people were doing this. You been under a rock?
Really?
What is so "medicore" about GW2?
And cut the word count, nobody is going to read through 500121951 words if it can be summed in 2 sentences.
And the only thing you confirmed - good games sell even after 7-14 years.
And yah, i still play trough BG 1/2 and Fallout 1/2 once-ish a year, and yah, they still beat the crap out of anything that releases today. Well, maybe not some indie games.
And yah, you can still buy Fallout 1/2 through Steam. 14 years...
Alas, I tend to agree. *le sigh*
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
Well another preordered game has died. Maybe I should stop pre-ordering stuff. Too late for GW2, already preordered that lol. But yeah. I had so much hope for this game. It really was fun ~1-20 levels. Then reality set in. This was No MMO.
While I agree that TOR is not what I or many had hoped for, and it is obvious that population fell in a noticable way, I cannot say it is dead. If it's population stababizes where it is (and could still stand to lose a few more), it will still be the #2 western mmo. It still has a population that outshines everything but WoW. And while I hoped for more, and many others did too - as the dust settles, we can see it has still made a large impact on the gaming world, for a lot of people.