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Star Wars: The Old Republic: Spoilers Suck
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
In his latest column devoted to Star Wars: The Old Republic, MMORPG.com Community Manager Mike Bitton is thinking ahead to how he will insulate himself from the spoilers that so many are willing to divulge in chat, on Ventilo and online forums. See how he plans to keep the storyline secret from himself and then leave us a couple comments when you're through.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about spoilers. A lot. I have to say I’ve honestly become a bit paranoid about spoilers in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and for good reason. With storyline being part and parcel of the game experience and with eight storylines to play through and hundreds of hours of content spread between them, there are bound to be spoilers all over the place. Many times they’ll be completely unintentional. Will it even be possible to maintain the mystery of the various storylines in the live game?
I’m not too sure.
Read more of Mike Bitton's Star Wars: The Old Republic - Spoilers Suck.
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Comments
I will turn off general chat, will be playing the game with only combat tab visual to me. Showing what is going on in combat. then i will have a tab for convasations from the plot and the experince gained etc.
lastly the tab i wont really use with tells / say / ooc - whatever.
When im max level i'll start looking for a guild. We are 10 RL/internet friends who gonna play this and we all agree we can talk on VT about how the different classes progess, their abilities, how they might work for pvp etc .. BUT NEVER the story.
Im quite sure a lot dont care about this. But i look at this game as if it was another 3 movies of Starwars where im the main man! i dont wanna know if Darth Dinglehopper will kill Princess Lovelylooking in the end etc. I wanna experince it on my own, laugh, etc.
As i know the decisions you make wont change your class at all, so i will just choose what i like, not care what other thinks is best. If it had and impact on how you class would develop (skills, talents etc) then it was a whole other matter.
In each class story, Malgus is your father.
I don't think there is any way to be completely spoiler free. You will, inadvertently, learn something you wish you hadn't. All we can do is try to ignore general chat, and not read forums. In your case, good luck with that considering your job. Ha.
Although I'm more concerned with the potential spoilers in TSW. Due to the fact that puzzle-solving is a major part of gameplay, getting those mysteries and puzzles spoiled will suck a lot more than learning a few story points in TOR.
Gonna be hard, if not impossible. We can only try to limit exposure by exercising precautions, and hope not to be spoiled too much.
Where I think storyline spoilers will really hurt in TOR is in the fact that some of these decisions are supposedly pretty serious moral quandries. I would not want that impact ruined for me nor ruin it for someone else. I know its a game and I know the decisions you make have no real life consequences, but the ability to immerse oneself in an experience and make decisions within the context of that experience seems pretty exciting. I am in fact locking that portion of my cynical mind away so I can enjoy it without my years of jaded disappointment getting in the way.
Now I understand not everyone plays the game for that reason, but griefers are a vocal minority and I think most people will respect the veil of suspension of disbelief.
Just My 2 Lunars
We can all make a guild togeather!
Spoiler and Trolling Free Unit - or just STFU
I don't think it will be that big of a deal.
I suppose to me the article is somewhat ironic..
A discussion of turning off general chat and avoiding social interaction to not spoil a story.
{mod edit}
Anyway it just goes to the general idea of having a group you do like to play with that would respect your anti spoiler mentality. Then you can do the group content and be social...
It turns out that YOU were Darth Malgus the entire time.
Yeah, I have to say, when worrying about whether or not you get the full experience of the story line vs interacting with other players to experience the story and it seems like you really are just playing a single player RPG game and not much of an MMO.
Which is sort of my biggest fear about SWTOR, might be a great story line single player game, but I play MMORPG's to interact with the people and I just don't see this title strongly promoting that sot of interaction.
Oh sure, I'll still give it a try and have some fun, but am not expecting all that much from the title.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
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Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
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"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Well if there is enough content the spoilers should not matter. I probably won't play this game as I just view it as another Wow, only worse.
If the population stays after 3 months, I might take a look at it.
The OP is assuming players will wait while each and every story is told, not just skip through. I think you will find only 10 to 20% will actually wait while the story plays out. So not to hard to miss spoilers.
To be honest, I hadn't quite thought about it this way yet. Yeah, there's a good chance there will be a few who love to ruin the gameplay for other players, but most of the times I don't pay attention to chat anyway. But that's because I usually solo. As for my friends, they know I hate spoilers, and won't do it to me. And I assume there will be a quick mute button for those asswipes who go the extra mile by actually messaging players individually.
I don't think I'll be able to go through absolutely spoiler-free, but I will sure do what I can to keep things to a minimum.
I don't think you'll find that at all. I think you'll find that most of the players will be wading through their own story, or multiple stories, with those rushing through it being a minority.
As for turning off the chat channels, I can see the need for that. You'll always have local and group chats though, which can still aid in giving you a community feel - primarily with those that matter most. People who are around you or are actually playing with you.
There was a scientific study recently on the effects of spoilers on various genres, measuring the enjoyment people got from stories spoiler-free or knowing spoilers ahead of time. Turns out that for nearly all genres they studied, the people exposed to spoilers got MORE enjoyment; and not much less in the remaining genre(s). Apparently spoilers not only don't spoil stories, they tend to enhance them. Which goes a long way to explaining why most people like to re-read favorite stories, watch favorite shows/movies, etc.
Definitly concerned...I'm just glad they are keeping the NDA in place for the majority of Beta testers...since as soon as they drop it, spoilers will flood every forum (which in truth is probably the main reason it is still active, since we all know that people that hate the game will attempt to ruin the experience for the rest of us).
In-game I will use my trusty friend.../ignore
They could easily make a chat filter..like they have for profanity. Only the profane words would be any character name that BIOWARE created in the stories. The ones that can actually affect or be affected by choice. If the filter detects any of these words then it will garble the whole post. That's the only in-game method to avoid spoilers..because no one can be relied on to shut their mouths after the NDA is lifted..lol.
Sounds like most people aren't even going to interect with other people till end game...maybe it should have been a single player game with online option at end.
probably in each race story as well ;p
Who is Malgus? .... nevermind ... want no spoilers!
hes the bad darth vadar wannabe sith guy u been seein in all the trailers
Well as the community gets bigger you will have more and more twits. What I'll probably do is keep general off just to avoid the 'Barrens' situations to begin with, and only drop in when I want to form a group. With guild, well, pick a guild that is anti-spoiler. Or have an anti-spoiler channel in vent or some such.
This of course assumes there are massive plot twists in the stories that nobody saw coming either, take Dragon Age, Mass Effect, KoToR 1 & 2, while awesome story it wasn't exactly a mystery novel either so...
There are ways to insulate yourself from spoilers, you just have to be willing to take them.
I am sort of left wondering how old Mike is as the anti spoiler camp brigade always has a slightly child-like naivety to it as near as I can read.
"Lately, I’ve been thinking about spoilers. A lot. I have to say I’ve honestly become a bit paranoid about spoilers in Star Wars: The Old Republic, and for good reason. With storyline being part and parcel of the game experience and with eight story-lines to play through and hundreds of hours of content spread between them, there are bound to be spoilers all over the place."
So what if you read a sentence or two of spoilers....look Mike you can choose not to read beyond the first hint that a post or some txt online has a spoiler about SW;TOR, assuming you are an adult with some self control. As for guildies and others chatting on vent...what mmo guilds do you play in, the ones I have been in have always been pro, and their are special chat channels for people to hop into, the idea that guildies would chat about spoilers in a raid or serious PvP channel is anathema.
So no real problem with spoilers for most of us. After all, you still have to play through the story. And remember, Mike, the best games we do play through more than once because they are in fact good and interesting to us.
You're paranoid.
It's really not that hard to avoid spoilers if you want to.
Have some self control, dude.
Let's remember that this "problem" comes from an excited, engaged, and well-populated user community. I try to avoid alt-tabbing in my games, but there are rare circumstances where it's the only thing that prevents a waste of a night and a lot of frustration.
There are far worse problems for MMOs. Shoving childish and cartoony pandas in my face comes to mind.
I look forward to moving subscription dollars over to a new publisher & developer team.