I did not want the game to fail. I was dissapointed in what I percieved was it's development later on in the pre release TOR forums. They seemed to be going out of their way to please a WOTLK style gear progression crowd. I was not totally against a themepark however, not at all. But I remember making an argument for pvp and pve components that were area spacific to make the two playstyles work together. I was immediately attacked for considering such an idea and was informed by many people that the WOW form of crafting was the future. Not kidding.
Then I see these rediculous interviews part one and two of the four pillars. Which they basically tell me that space travel is a waste of time and there will be plenty of monsters and loot. But even that I could, sort of live with. Then the races, well there are none. Ok there are different looking humans, some with spiked chins and some with a bandanas over their face. But none of the interesting ones. I protested in the forums of course only to be informed that no one would pay attention to races or how you looked because everyone would be having so much fun raiding.
Then I read the Ensidia interview and knew all hope was lost. Sadly I still hoped it would be a decent game dispite my reservations but my worst fears came true. Mainly because if they ever do another Star Wars mmo I will probably be in my mid 40s by the time its out.
I think they thought they could make a bare bones WOW and put enough fluff and story so that people would not notice. The problem with the game is simple, lack of mechanics. It was simply badly designed. There was nothing wrong with the intent it was the actual production.
I called the subs at 400k a month ago, seems it might be lower than that now since the mass exodus after 1.2 has continued - possibly 200k or so by June time.
It is no wonder they fired everybody.
Remember "maintenance mode" in Warhammer? No additional content for a year, 6 developers total, game barely on life support.
I called the subs at 400k a month ago, seems it might be lower than that now since the mass exodus after 1.2 has continued - possibly 200k or so by June time.
It is no wonder they fired everybody.
Remember "maintenance mode" in Warhammer? No additional content for a year, 6 developers total, game barely on life support.
That is where SWTOR is now.
Yup, maintenance mode coming soon. There's no way to fix the game. They'd have to start by getting rid of that abysmal hero engine first, and that's not going to happen. EA will put it on life support and drain every last cent from it as long as there are star wars fans, the niche players that will play it.
Swtor was destined to fail imo from the beginning. I say this because swtor development probably started at the height of WoW's popularity and so the publisher and developer thought they could make a similar game add a little bit of bioware's story and BAM you got a competitor to WOW. In most markets making a copy of a product will usually do a pretty decent job if done well, in the MMO market given the extremely long development time; if you were to just copy a competitor's product by the time you release it they might be a better product or the demand for such a product might have reduced.
And so swtor why it might have been a good game a few years ago, is nothing more than a relic of the past. The worst thing about swtor and the way EA is treating it is because EA probably had high expectations of bioware (i mean look at their history B4 DA2 and Me3 ending lol). So they probably spent more money trying to make a clone and now that BW hasn't delivered they like any reasonable business need to cut their loses and reinvest the money somewhere else. Once an MMO starts on the wrong track it doesnt leave it. they hasn't been any MMO that made a turn around short of going f2p, but when compared to WOW's billion dollar revenue a year the chump change made by a f2p isn't worthy to stockholders.
The good news it that developers/publishers are probably gonna consider coming up new brand new ideas instead of copying the current king and more importantly they will have realistic expectations and budget the game as such. (moving on, i think that is the reason why the Dev for Titan got replaced, cuz he was probably trying to make a WoW2).
bringing up class balance as a reason for SWTOR being dead is just stupid, class balance is only a real issue in pvp games.
EQ1 is a perfect example of what happens when class balance is very screwed up in a PVE MMO. Massive player exclusion from group and raid play just based on class selection was just the tip of the problems.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
Companies should just stay away from the Star Wars IP, it is hard enough to make a good MMO, let alone having to pay the 30% royalty fee or whatever it is...Leads to bad decisions and cost cutting ones imo....Having someone outside the studio (LA) having final say is not the greatest plan either....
Heck rip it off, make a generic space game, save the IP money, and make it right...
It's sad really, how people can respond to, and treat their customers so badly. The only reason they have a job at bioware right now is because of loyal star wars fans hoping for change.
I remember when the game was first announced and shortly thereafter some screenshots were released. There was a humungous constructive thread on character design and armor/item looks. Developers openly said they were stylizing the game to their liking. In beta (closed and open), the armor and stylization came up numerous times, to no avail.
There was also alot of developer interaction good and bad during development. People asked questions and posted ideas. When it came to the wow clone, kill x, courier, sandbox/themepark elements, it was very clear. Bioware, refused to lsiten to their customers on what they wanted. They were going to develop what they thought we wanted.
The development at bioware really opened my eyes , to how they manage their development. Their treatment of the community is terrible.
things that really went wrong with swtor imo:
MMO , i feel like im playing a nexon game. It's less mmo than guild wars.
space combat, probably one of the biggest things. It's star wars, space is 3/4 of what it's about. Bioware "focused on ground" k, but it's star wars, make a different mmo if you want to take the space out of star wars.... I just don't get how they could release a space combat like this. IT's like they got to end development and one of the developers was like "we forgot space". Developer lead says "oh man we gott ado something we release soon". Random developer "i can rip open my star fox cartridge and we can emulate it into our game". Lead developer "k , awesome dude, you saved us".
Solo, lonely feeling empty huge worlds.
QA tester employed by bioware "hey guys, it feels really lonely here, the worlds are large but desolate". Lead developer "don't worry you will have a companion", "and the best thing about taht companion is you will need it to do all of your leveling". They made these huge worlds with no ambience, no interaction, hoth was when i realized they were just making larger zones so i would spend 90% of the quest just getting to the objective and back.
MOBS... the same thing ever zone. Static 4 normals, or 2 normals 1 silver etc... it never changes. No big roaming packs not suprises. By the time i was level 25 , i started to ask myself if they forgot to add some randomness to enemy npcs.
cities and hubs are void of life. THere is nothing going on. Again, it seems like they forgot or lost 25% of their development somewhere.
Crafting, just send companions....no originality whatsoever. It is a ripoff of wow, made easier. Seriously, take a step back and realize, one of the crafting skills was slicing. Send companion to go get money........come on.
The ui , macros , combat delay. All these things should have been addressed prior to release. It shows taht the developer has little to no respect for it's customers.]
pvp - 4 hours ques on servers for random warzones. I would say that open world pvp was a disaster since they shut it down. Snuffing ranked warzones 30 seconds before patch deployment probably cost them at least a chunk of subs.It ws the final nail in the coffin for me to be 100% honest. I did in fact enjoy pvp more than anything in star wars. It was the closest aspect of the game that gave me a star wars feel. After the duplicate random item bag issues, farming comms, etc i felt that ranked would at least give me a goal to shoot towards.
1.2 and test realm. A$$hats , no character copies to test server, put end game content on test server. WTF is the point. Only thing people got to test was the ui change. hey they tested it, it works, everything else that was lvl 50+. They can't test it, durrr wonder why it still sucks.
forum moderation. Never seen anything like it, there is no community interaction from the developers. Its the same copy/paste posts over and over. Threads locked at an astronomical level.
tldr game is crap, selfish devs, great single player, no community, no open world, no space combat, dead servers, horrible community management. wish it would get better, but after latest press release, selfish developer is selfish.
This pretty much sums up my feelings about SWTOR.
Guess what was one of the major reasons I gave up MMOs?
SWTOR.
and I no longer believe that the MMO Owners give a damn about the Players one bit... as long as the Owners get their money that don't care. SWTOR proved that if it proved anything at all.
It's sad really, how people can respond to, and treat their customers so badly. The only reason they have a job at bioware right now is because of loyal star wars fans hoping for change.
I remember when the game was first announced and shortly thereafter some screenshots were released. There was a humungous constructive thread on character design and armor/item looks. Developers openly said they were stylizing the game to their liking. In beta (closed and open), the armor and stylization came up numerous times, to no avail.
There was also alot of developer interaction good and bad during development. People asked questions and posted ideas. When it came to the wow clone, kill x, courier, sandbox/themepark elements, it was very clear. Bioware, refused to lsiten to their customers on what they wanted. They were going to develop what they thought we wanted.
The development at bioware really opened my eyes , to how they manage their development. Their treatment of the community is terrible.
things that really went wrong with swtor imo:
MMO , i feel like im playing a nexon game. It's less mmo than guild wars.
space combat, probably one of the biggest things. It's star wars, space is 3/4 of what it's about. Bioware "focused on ground" k, but it's star wars, make a different mmo if you want to take the space out of star wars.... I just don't get how they could release a space combat like this. IT's like they got to end development and one of the developers was like "we forgot space". Developer lead says "oh man we gott ado something we release soon". Random developer "i can rip open my star fox cartridge and we can emulate it into our game". Lead developer "k , awesome dude, you saved us".
Solo, lonely feeling empty huge worlds.
QA tester employed by bioware "hey guys, it feels really lonely here, the worlds are large but desolate". Lead developer "don't worry you will have a companion", "and the best thing about taht companion is you will need it to do all of your leveling". They made these huge worlds with no ambience, no interaction, hoth was when i realized they were just making larger zones so i would spend 90% of the quest just getting to the objective and back.
MOBS... the same thing ever zone. Static 4 normals, or 2 normals 1 silver etc... it never changes. No big roaming packs not suprises. By the time i was level 25 , i started to ask myself if they forgot to add some randomness to enemy npcs.
cities and hubs are void of life. THere is nothing going on. Again, it seems like they forgot or lost 25% of their development somewhere.
Crafting, just send companions....no originality whatsoever. It is a ripoff of wow, made easier. Seriously, take a step back and realize, one of the crafting skills was slicing. Send companion to go get money........come on.
The ui , macros , combat delay. All these things should have been addressed prior to release. It shows taht the developer has little to no respect for it's customers.]
pvp - 4 hours ques on servers for random warzones. I would say that open world pvp was a disaster since they shut it down. Snuffing ranked warzones 30 seconds before patch deployment probably cost them at least a chunk of subs.It ws the final nail in the coffin for me to be 100% honest. I did in fact enjoy pvp more than anything in star wars. It was the closest aspect of the game that gave me a star wars feel. After the duplicate random item bag issues, farming comms, etc i felt that ranked would at least give me a goal to shoot towards.
1.2 and test realm. A$$hats , no character copies to test server, put end game content on test server. WTF is the point. Only thing people got to test was the ui change. hey they tested it, it works, everything else that was lvl 50+. They can't test it, durrr wonder why it still sucks.
forum moderation. Never seen anything like it, there is no community interaction from the developers. Its the same copy/paste posts over and over. Threads locked at an astronomical level.
tldr game is crap, selfish devs, great single player, no community, no open world, no space combat, dead servers, horrible community management. wish it would get better, but after latest press release, selfish developer is selfish.
This pretty much sums up my feelings about SWTOR.
Guess what was one of the major reasons I gave up MMOs?
SWTOR.
and I no longer believe that the MMO Owners give a damn about the Players one bit... as long as the Owners get their money that don't care. SWTOR proved that if it proved anything at all.
enough said.
Which makes terrible business sense. I'll never understand, especially when price is not the competative factor.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
The problem with 99% of MMOs is that the Devs keep trying to force "the game that they want us to play" instead of "the game that we want."
Developer arrogance is at the core of the issue. One gets the impression they do not play their own game, and certainly not at a high level, so they don't really know or understand what it is like on live servers; their changes in 1.2 were simply the opposite of what needed to be done, and they ignored all the player feedback telling them what a disaster it was going to be.
Simply put, that entire lead dev team and the forum admin team for SWTOR.com needs to be fired.
I hope they were part of the layoffs, but I bet instead it was the programmers and middle-staff who did not make the bad decisions and did not deserve to be fired.
I liked 1.2. Lots of people on the swtor forums liked 1.2. It improved game balance. But lots of players DON'T WANT GAME BALANCE. You like having characters/class-combos that let you completely dominate the melee dps classes (the ones that most people pick first until they get facerolled a few times).
It's actually funny reading posts by all of those people that picked their class because it was op'd and are now squealing like stuck pigs. Most can't spell any of their reasons out or point to numbers, they just repeat buzz acronyms like "TTK" and say "damn I'm not OP anymore" in 50 different ways using lots and lots of paragraphs. And they spend energy attacking marauders for being OP even though few can play them well, 1.2 didn't change much with them at all and they aren't the best class out there atm in duels or tourneys (I don't play or care about marauders myself).
Wierd how people are going "I TOLD YOU SO" with remarks in how they played beta and "knew" it would turn bad.
SWTOR was an excellent levelling experience. Yes I used SWTOR and EXCELLENT together.
There was NOTHING wrong with SWTOR until you hit the ENDGAME which did NOT EXIST.
SWTOR fell in the same pit of not having a working endgame at launch as Rift did. But Rift has an insane pace for updates and that's why the game is still striving today. SWTOR on the other hand has a really slow update cycle and they aren't able to keep the retention up. Bioware did pull off a really good SPRPG with many nice MMOish features, but in the end the ENDGAME killed it.
If you create a similar endgame as WoW, make sure you have enough content to compare to WoW. Excuses like "well Vanilla WoW was close to what we have" is just lazyness and in no way founded. Don't release a MMO without tons of content. That's just silly.
SWTOR was a great game with bad design of non-existant endgame.
Good form requires that you repeat that post, on at least a daily basis, until the Evil Overlords of EA refund your three hours of pay. Foam at the mouth and roll around on the ground a bit, speaking in tongues.
Unfortunately, there is no award for nonstop rage duration.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Comments
I did not want the game to fail. I was dissapointed in what I percieved was it's development later on in the pre release TOR forums. They seemed to be going out of their way to please a WOTLK style gear progression crowd. I was not totally against a themepark however, not at all. But I remember making an argument for pvp and pve components that were area spacific to make the two playstyles work together. I was immediately attacked for considering such an idea and was informed by many people that the WOW form of crafting was the future. Not kidding.
Then I see these rediculous interviews part one and two of the four pillars. Which they basically tell me that space travel is a waste of time and there will be plenty of monsters and loot. But even that I could, sort of live with. Then the races, well there are none. Ok there are different looking humans, some with spiked chins and some with a bandanas over their face. But none of the interesting ones. I protested in the forums of course only to be informed that no one would pay attention to races or how you looked because everyone would be having so much fun raiding.
Then I read the Ensidia interview and knew all hope was lost. Sadly I still hoped it would be a decent game dispite my reservations but my worst fears came true. Mainly because if they ever do another Star Wars mmo I will probably be in my mid 40s by the time its out.
I think they thought they could make a bare bones WOW and put enough fluff and story so that people would not notice. The problem with the game is simple, lack of mechanics. It was simply badly designed. There was nothing wrong with the intent it was the actual production.
I called the subs at 400k a month ago, seems it might be lower than that now since the mass exodus after 1.2 has continued - possibly 200k or so by June time.
It is no wonder they fired everybody.
Remember "maintenance mode" in Warhammer? No additional content for a year, 6 developers total, game barely on life support.
That is where SWTOR is now.
Yup, maintenance mode coming soon. There's no way to fix the game. They'd have to start by getting rid of that abysmal hero engine first, and that's not going to happen. EA will put it on life support and drain every last cent from it as long as there are star wars fans, the niche players that will play it.
What happens when you log off your characters????.....
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFQhfhnjYMk
Dark Age of Camelot
Swtor was destined to fail imo from the beginning. I say this because swtor development probably started at the height of WoW's popularity and so the publisher and developer thought they could make a similar game add a little bit of bioware's story and BAM you got a competitor to WOW. In most markets making a copy of a product will usually do a pretty decent job if done well, in the MMO market given the extremely long development time; if you were to just copy a competitor's product by the time you release it they might be a better product or the demand for such a product might have reduced.
And so swtor why it might have been a good game a few years ago, is nothing more than a relic of the past. The worst thing about swtor and the way EA is treating it is because EA probably had high expectations of bioware (i mean look at their history B4 DA2 and Me3 ending lol). So they probably spent more money trying to make a clone and now that BW hasn't delivered they like any reasonable business need to cut their loses and reinvest the money somewhere else. Once an MMO starts on the wrong track it doesnt leave it. they hasn't been any MMO that made a turn around short of going f2p, but when compared to WOW's billion dollar revenue a year the chump change made by a f2p isn't worthy to stockholders.
The good news it that developers/publishers are probably gonna consider coming up new brand new ideas instead of copying the current king and more importantly they will have realistic expectations and budget the game as such. (moving on, i think that is the reason why the Dev for Titan got replaced, cuz he was probably trying to make a WoW2).
EQ1 is a perfect example of what happens when class balance is very screwed up in a PVE MMO. Massive player exclusion from group and raid play just based on class selection was just the tip of the problems.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
yeyeye blablabla swtor is bad blablabla
MOVE ON!
this was suppose to be the WoW killa; yeah right!
Companies should just stay away from the Star Wars IP, it is hard enough to make a good MMO, let alone having to pay the 30% royalty fee or whatever it is...Leads to bad decisions and cost cutting ones imo....Having someone outside the studio (LA) having final say is not the greatest plan either....
Heck rip it off, make a generic space game, save the IP money, and make it right...
This pretty much sums up my feelings about SWTOR.
Guess what was one of the major reasons I gave up MMOs?
SWTOR.
and I no longer believe that the MMO Owners give a damn about the Players one bit... as long as the Owners get their money that don't care. SWTOR proved that if it proved anything at all.
enough said.
Which makes terrible business sense. I'll never understand, especially when price is not the competative factor.
Forever looking for employment. Life is rather dull without it.
Moria expansion was alright, but i seriously hated the layout inside the mines. They really dropped the ball on that one.
The problem with 99% of MMOs is that the Devs keep trying to force "the game that they want us to play" instead of "the game that we want."
SO true.
DM's guide FTW eagle!
Survivor of the great MMORPG Famine of 2011
Developer arrogance is at the core of the issue. One gets the impression they do not play their own game, and certainly not at a high level, so they don't really know or understand what it is like on live servers; their changes in 1.2 were simply the opposite of what needed to be done, and they ignored all the player feedback telling them what a disaster it was going to be.
Simply put, that entire lead dev team and the forum admin team for SWTOR.com needs to be fired.
I hope they were part of the layoffs, but I bet instead it was the programmers and middle-staff who did not make the bad decisions and did not deserve to be fired.
I liked 1.2. Lots of people on the swtor forums liked 1.2. It improved game balance. But lots of players DON'T WANT GAME BALANCE. You like having characters/class-combos that let you completely dominate the melee dps classes (the ones that most people pick first until they get facerolled a few times).
It's actually funny reading posts by all of those people that picked their class because it was op'd and are now squealing like stuck pigs. Most can't spell any of their reasons out or point to numbers, they just repeat buzz acronyms like "TTK" and say "damn I'm not OP anymore" in 50 different ways using lots and lots of paragraphs. And they spend energy attacking marauders for being OP even though few can play them well, 1.2 didn't change much with them at all and they aren't the best class out there atm in duels or tourneys (I don't play or care about marauders myself).
Wierd how people are going "I TOLD YOU SO" with remarks in how they played beta and "knew" it would turn bad.
SWTOR was an excellent levelling experience. Yes I used SWTOR and EXCELLENT together.
There was NOTHING wrong with SWTOR until you hit the ENDGAME which did NOT EXIST.
SWTOR fell in the same pit of not having a working endgame at launch as Rift did. But Rift has an insane pace for updates and that's why the game is still striving today. SWTOR on the other hand has a really slow update cycle and they aren't able to keep the retention up. Bioware did pull off a really good SPRPG with many nice MMOish features, but in the end the ENDGAME killed it.
If you create a similar endgame as WoW, make sure you have enough content to compare to WoW. Excuses like "well Vanilla WoW was close to what we have" is just lazyness and in no way founded. Don't release a MMO without tons of content. That's just silly.
SWTOR was a great game with bad design of non-existant endgame.
Good form requires that you repeat that post, on at least a daily basis, until the Evil Overlords of EA refund your three hours of pay. Foam at the mouth and roll around on the ground a bit, speaking in tongues.
Unfortunately, there is no award for nonstop rage duration.
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.