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Star Wars: The Old Republic: Legacy Perks and Group Finder Thoughts
MikeB
Community ManagerAdministrator RarePosts: 6,555
Now that Update 1.3: Allies is available on live servers, we're weighing in with our thoughts on some of the updates key features. In this week's Star Wars: The Old Republic column we'll be talking about the update's new Legacy Perks and Group Finder features. Read on!
Update 1.3: Allies isn’t the most impressive update to come to Star Wars: The Old Republic to date, but I do feel that many of its major features were greatly needed in the game so I welcome them nonetheless. Unfortunately, it’s been a bit longer than I’d like since we’ve had a real meaty Update to sink our teeth into, so I can only hope that Update 1.4 is around the corner. The one downside of giving players easier access to all your content is that it’ll get churned through that much quicker.
Read more of Michael Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic: Legacy Perks and Group Finder Thoughts.
Comments
Honestly as of patch 1.3 I do feel like SWTOR is out of beta as it has most of the features now set in stone that most mmorpgs do release with. While I do not find it to be a great game its still not that bad and has a better atmosphere then Rift and others that released more recently. It may be a game on rails but at least finally now it has the tools and perks of most mmo's at release. Just wish they would add in some more warzones and fix the open world pvp planet with some of the old DAOC and WAR mechanics as the pvp plays very similiar to WAR.
Hope I get a good seat before the usual suspects arrive.
/popcorn
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
Well won't keep you in suspense then.
My thoughts on this patch? :: Makes half-hearted wanking motion::
Been playing off and on the last three weeks on the one house mate's abandoned account that still has time left. Though by "playing" I really mean mostly trolling Dromund Kass gen chat.
"More populated servers are bomming" Yeah A whole five rather than two. Not exactly a triumph in an AAA Star Wars based game less than seven months old.
Group Finder. Considering how small groups are and also considering companions can be used to pad out a missing member or two, I seriously don't see the LFG as much of a big thing at all. And considering how many people I saw that were still making groups the old fashioned way last night on three seperate servers, looks like quite a few players aren't using it. Or if they are, they aren't getting good results.
New Legacy perks? Don't give a toss, personally. Most of them seem like a waste of time, where you grind out something you don't really want (certain race to fifty unlock) so you can then play what you do want. More of those options do nothing for me.
Ranked Battle Grounds? Just seems like another way to divide up the player base between factions of casuals and elitest assholes. Wow did that with the Arena and I feel that is the mile marker for when that game started to turn to shit.
Not a bad patch mind you, and this time they seem to have avoided seriously breaking anything, but still does little to adress the major reasons people aren't sticking with this game.
The only things I see that are worth while in this patch are the additions of adaptive armors and allowing any piece of armor to be augmented. Everything else is just Bioware playing catch-up, or pointless white noise.
I think the development team could have benefitted greatly from hiring Uncle Owen. He would have made sure the dev team and their minders stayed put and buckeled down on working on the game, instead of continually skiving off to "pick up some Power Converters."
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
The problem with the game is that it's 95% single player. The other 5 is a few redundant dungeons and the same old Warzones over and over again. It's not fun. It feels more like a really long KoTOR with a multiplayer patch.
meh its a good game. if you like star wars.
Oh, no. No, no. I appreciate the sentiment, but your posts (such as this) are far too thought out and constructive. I'll save my popcorn for later, thankyouverymuch.
I want a mmorpg where people have gone through misery, have gone through school stuff and actually have had sex even. -sagil
My thoughts are that now with everything in 1.3 in place, the game is finally ready to launch. Oh wait...
Yah, having 3 band-aid patches in a row doesn't make me feel good. I don't care about the server merges at all, they did that because they needed to keep the population together. However, pretty much everything up to 1.3 has been them fixing leaks. I don't feel like the dev team even knows what their own game is about anymore.
You spend the first 49 levels by yourself for the most part, partaking in an awesome story on both planets and personal levels. Suddenly you hit 50 and they hit you in the guts with mind numbing repearters and runing the same dungeons you already have. HEck even the raiders are bored to tears
Unfortunnately this patch adds absolutely nothing to the issues with the game, the perks (1.2 and 1.3) are overpriced as hell if you're a casual leveling up crafting and that despises the boredom of repeating dumb annoying dailies.
With their background in RPG's i really tought story would matter but outside class quests (some very good quest for some classes but mostly meh) everything is exactly the same grind (sure you can choose to kill a guy instead of sparing him, but that matters only for that chain and nothing else changes, pretty much pointless (some rare gems but not good enough)).
Still have the dumbest character creation i've seen in years, customization is still poor (can't change your style (new hairdo) or your companions). Most quests have been done to death before(voice acting doesn't really change that), Worlds are static, lifeless. boring most of the times (again some exceptions but not enough). Full blown themepark is just dead.
I'll wait for new story, maybe till then the game gets better.
Interesting reply considering that there's something like a dozen so called "AAA mmorpgs" released during the past 10 years, and I cant recall any of them having a group finder, or like anything that resembles the legacy perk system.
While I thought a group finder is a must in a game like SWTOR (100% themepark) by todays standards, and was one of the biggest reasons I left the game after running through the story, it is only starting to be "the norm" just recently. Same goes with ranked stuff, legacy perks, and the likes, I cant recall any of the dozen mmorpgs I've played to have that stuff at release, if ever.
These are very nice and needed additions in a game built like SWTOR, unfortunately these things do not change the core of the game which is not really built to support continuous play at max level and after cleared story. Running dailies in few locations and a set of instances is not my idea of a fun, vast, and immersive mmorpg when talking about lasting experience that is supposed to go on for years.
It is kinda hard to justify all these convenince perks and XP bonuses in a game where you level rather quickly and the game is already convenient with quick travel and stuff. And the others? Not exactly worth it since the perks are per character and not for your whole legacy.
I would like to know if the Group Finder tool is causing level 10-49 players to do more flashpoints or if they are going to be powerlvling through content even more now and skipping FPs.
Right after server transfers and this update seems to be the best time for me to step away from SWTOR for quite some time.
Just another "yawn" patch in a game sorely lacking in a great many things. The fact that most of the updates are just "perks" or UI changes shows how far removed from the playerbase Bioware is...and how little they know about the MMO market.
Maybe 1.4 will be the F2P patch.
QFT
1.3 = more legacy crap, other than the lfg tool that 1.3 has the patch offers nothing. How bioware can continue to miss the mark with this type of crap is behond me.
Oh well waiting for tsw to come out and see what happens to the sub numbers.
1.3 == 1.0
This is when the game should have come out, but EA made them come out for a Christmas release, for good solid business reasons. If they released now, they would have never gotten the initial market share they could afford to lose (that 400K they lost in April that many games would love to have as a total subscriber base).
Now, on my west coast RP-PVE server (Begeren Colony), after a couple low pop servers were invited to consolidate to us, the fleet is hopping (as are the PVP queues), and the server is marked HEAVY and just at the margin of having a queue every night. This is just about perfect.
The release for 1.3 is content light, but I suspect it's actually pretty mechanics heavy, so in lines of code and QA, it was probably intense for the devs. Much of this stuff was, sadly, retrofit. I have heard that in beta the userbase opposed this style of groupfinder for PUGs, so it wasn't planned.
I have suspected that many of the endgame mechanics were retrofits that EA imposed to do the classic and chronic marketing mistake of "let's make it more like a mainstream MMO (this is to say, WOW)" (see http://gamasutra.com/blogs/ShavaNerad/20100408/87077/World_Of_Warcraft_Too_Big_To_Fail.php and https://plus.google.com/101371184407256956306/posts/P6yZqcn2YC7 "KOTOR with Friends" [also on the swtor.com forums]). They should let Bioware be Bioware, and, yes, IN FACT, let it be a single player MMO with multiplayer features.
There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, that could describe most peoples' experiences in Eve and a lot of other successful MMOs. It describes what may very well be, if you as Project Daedelus, a majority play style -- just not the play style of the loudest forum folks, because it tends to be the play style of some various extroverts and all introverts. And there are a lot of introvert gamers, yo?
So, you loud folks, get over yourself. Just because you are loud, does not make you the majority. Just as in the physical world, size (in this case, CAPS, number of letters, vicious language, whatever) does not make you more important in your opinions. Unfortunately, many of the money people haven't figured that out either.
In 5, 10 years, I'm afraid we'll be looking back at SWTOR the way movie folks look back at Blade Running -- a work that wasn't a commercial hit in its time, but is later acknowledged as a huge artistic groundbreaking influence on later work and artists in an emerging genre, that at the time had very little artistic respect.
And the haters? You'll all forget that you didn't like it by then. Conveniently. You'll tell folks how you pre-ordered and were in the beta. Yuh. Whatever.
Call me a fangirl, go ahead. But come back and check this then, and call me "Cassandra."
Heh.
Shava
Ya i gave up on this game now to wait for beta for ESO.
when you arogant stupid people like james ohlen and gabe ametewhatever purposely destroying thier own game and to arogant to realize it what can you do?
When i saw them showcasing a group finder tool at a game expo that was it for me lol. Like seriously if all you have to showcase is a group finder and future content "coming soon" its game over for me.
Until james ohlen and gabe are givng the boot that game is screwed and going to continue to be screwed.
F2p wont fix the problem either despite all the hype of f2p for swtor. The fundamental problem is incompetent stupid devs and james ohlen lol.
The game should be called star wars "the coming soon" republic
If they spent 1/3 the time the do on bad PR on development wed be getting somewhere. Unfortunately they think doing tons of interviews saying "coming soon" and fluff interviews is going to bring people back lol
Yep, I really liked the stories, companions, the planets, everyone talking to my little characters and what not. after months of farting around I hit 50 and bam, dailies.
I love pvp if it's done right, DAoC, Shadowbane, I like the big open world throwdown, not the little matches with the clock ticking. The dungeons are really good but when that's about all there is it gets old quick, the speed at wich they are adding true content is in my opinion to slow.
Unless they start banging out a reason to log in, feel like your a part of Star Wars and have big Chewbaca sized battles, the decline will continue. It's why everyone left, not because they didnt have the group finder in the game yet.
I like the game, still, perhaps I'm just a die-hard now but for me the major attraction is the fun I have raiding in the game, crafting all my own gear with my 7 alts & slowly working them all up to 50, but I'm aware I am a minority player in terms of my "Alt-itis" I would welcome another 8 character slots...no I'm not joking.
I've been loving the group finder myself, I hadn't seen any of the flashpoints beyond the first for either faction and since it's been out I've been in the next four republic flashpoints and got to do them rather quickly too.
Haven't paid any attention to the legacy perks since I'm on a new server and am only up to legay level three but to be honest I find most of the legacy stuff too pricey even on the items that open for all characters and from what I hear single character perks are even more exxpensive so these are things that I won't be seeing for quite some time.
The group finder I thought was worth it but as the article suggests this patch is no 1.2 and I'm curious as to why things like level increase aren't included yet?
I don't care for group finder, really. I like to socialize if I'm the mood. But I like the effort, really.
I playe SWTOR on the open beta weekends, I like the game then but I've only bought it 3 days ago. I'm enjoying it again, but I still feel the world is a bit lacking in living things. Rift, AoC, EQ2 are examples of a good alive world for me. It's a pitty that in the last year we don't talk about virtual worlds anymore, just online games. I still remeber the rush of exploring for the first time WoW, Guild Wars, SWG, EQ2 many many years ago... Anyway, I think SWTOR is a good game and with room to grow. I never get to end game, I like to roleplay many different characters...
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So far I liked everything they added, even being happy before. But some perks are pretty expensive (especially for altholics). So far love a lot, and it is acceptable ammount, shortening time to 5 sec companion needs to sell junk.
The only thing I miss in swtor is ability to have multiple builds. dps/healer, dps/tank. Just for fun while experimenting various builds (Rift had this since day 1 and not only dual as Wow added after long years), but being more necesity at end game.
Otherwise, swtor for me remain best game ever. Playing since day 1 now aprox half year and still feels good logging back like first days.
Playing TOR and luving it lolz, Dont pretend like there is anything better out there , specially not wow.
I found patch 1.3 to be pretty ho-hum myself. I think it helps a lot if you want to run FPs and Operations, but you're still in the same LFG fix for the planetary heroics: spamming General chat, basically. As for the Legacy perks, they are so freaking expensive that they can hardly be called "perks" at all, imo.
All in all, though it was a decent patch, there are not enough "fixes" here to keep me subscribing to the game. My current sub runs out in early August, so I figure if Bioware doesn't improve the planetary heroic and/or extremely lame interplanteray travel problems by that point, I'll be moving on the GW2. I have enjoyed my time in SWTOR, I have, but the game's (many) flaws are just ... wearing on me. I expect better for $15/month.
Bioware, take a hint from GW2, and institute true map travel to all discovered planets/the fleet/your ship. I'd rather watch paint dry than endure the current tedious, running-through-spaceports, loading-screen-intensive mess you have now.
I really doubt this.
Where's the open world PvP? Yeah, the group finder is like, something that should have been in at launch. The ranked warzones can't be done unless you have a group of 8, and you can't take a group of 8 into a non-ranked warzone (so you can't really practice together).
Overall, it's clearl a step in the right direction but I would have to say this is getting closer to where it should be. A lot of people have returned to the game with the patch, but not sure how long they will stay when they realize that besides the LFG tool and the full servers, not much else really has changed besides cosmetic.