It's time for SWTOR to change into something more than it is. Seems like for many of the higher players various problems center around the games fun factor being questioned. After that is the stupid factor. Systems an design they should have put in the game but didn't have time to put it in there yet. Then very last are the problems that came from the game being started up along with the way it's been starting up, and the reality that you can't predict that kind of thing. People are bored, grumpy, or angry. Then a blanket of forum censorship across the internet on the issue isn't allowing the discussion needed to fix anything. There are so many people interested who also have strong feelings one way or the other that it's a raging viral flame fest. Just like it was in 2009... Come back next month, we are noobs. HooRay!

Of the 123+ servers 110 of them were dreadful places to be. They are all but dead now because of it. Even in the remaining 13 the game is very different from one to the next depending on the person playing. So until you find a fun server, the game is useless. Now you are looking in a list of 13 servers instead of looking at 123+ which is impossible. If you played it an wanted to like it but couldn't or didn't try it yet. Now is a good time to jump in.

The next problem I had was that the game is ugly. I got tired of looking at it so I forced 16 texture filtering an it started to look good. Nobody tells you that. Then I had built up a large amount of hate of the game over 6 months trying 16 different servers with endless characters. So I watched a bunch of The Republic Show on GameBreaker TV. Not the new show so much as the archive launched show. Then I laughed it away pretty much.

@GrindedStone: It's just plain rude to speak ill of the dead.

For shame, FOR SHAME!!!

I raided in TOR up until the 1.2 patch came out. Here were the problem I saw with the game:

1. The Hero Engine is not good for PvP, and they never could nail down a good configuration setup for most PCs.
2. They took too long to get new MEANINGFUL raid content out. KP was fine, but it was barely a test of anyone's mettle. Soa was a bitch to get down, but Karagga was a chump.
3. They allowed servers to be dead for far too long. They needed to merge servers and offer transfers earlier. In not doing so, they basically showed a vote of no confidence to their player base.
4. The Legacy system was this big promising thing for people, and when it launched, people saw that it was virtually useless beyond vanity and a little commodity. There needed to be WAY more in that content.
5. Not setting up for custom UIs to be saved server side? FOR...SHAME! Dumb idea.
6. That 1.2 nerf to healers basically caused them to shoot themselves in the foot. Sorcs and Mercs became useless, while Ops were the greatest thing ever. It was a shitty imbalance that they took too long to fix.

Honestly, a lot of it comes down to mismanagement of patching and balance, but the reduced interest also came down to something bigger than that. They promised us this big, epic story where my decisions mattered. The only thing going Light or Dark determines in the long run is which speeder I want to get: Praxon Aero or Praxon Xeno. Meanwhile, the adventure was over a little too early, and the planets were generally boring in the middle. Tatooine and Hoth were dreadful places to go because of all the goddamn space that was unoccupied by ANYTHING, including environmental dressing.

I'm going to go back to the game at some point, probably after they raise the level cap. Even then, I'll probably be knee-deep in Guild Wars 2 at that point, so who knows if I'll bother?

@jakob187 said:

They promised us this big, epic story where my decisions mattered.

That sounds familiar.

Game just didn't live up to the expectations of people.

I still enjoy playing it but not for the reasons I should enjoy playing an MMO, I'll probably finish my Bounty Hunter's story line and stop playing unless something spikes my interest.

@Kidavenger said:

@GrindedStone: It's just plain rude to speak ill of the dead.

For shame, FOR SHAME!!!

I LOL'd

The core theme of any MMO is beating team based content where Bioware seemed to ignore that at their own hundreds of millions dollars of peril.

@scarace360 said:

Game just didn't live up to the expectations of people.

It lived up to plenty of expectations. If anything, I think that TOR is one of the best MMOs I've played. Its complexity is found in its simplicity. It does what other MMOs do in some better ways. For instance, the solo content was fan-fucking-tastic. Despite the promise of a big and epic story falling a tad flat, the fact still remains that I fought Darth Baras at the end of my story in front of the Imperial Council, proved myself as the Emperor's Wrath, and told the Council that they can fuck right off and better watch their backs if they fuck up. The moments where I made my Dark Side decisions felt excellent. They were super satisfying in terms of telling the story of someone following the Dark Side of The Force. I mean, seriously, when I ended up forcing Jaesa to kill her Jedi master and join the Dark Side...GODDAMN, THAT WAS AWESOME!

Unfortunately, the story ended. It's that part where I said "you wrote this excellent fucking character-driven story, but all of the stuff that I did in the story doesn't feel like it affected the world". It's the part where the parity of my experiences with the KOTOR games clashed too hard with TOR. I wanted to see the impact of my actions, and it didn't happen. THAT is where it fell flat.

Moreover, like I said, it was just a consequence of "too little too late" when they did finally roll shit out.

A couple of things I will give massive credit to BioWare for on TOR:

• The story was good, the dialogue was well-written, I actually cared about side quests that could've been menial, and the moments where my decisions played out in the story were great.
• Hard/Nightmare Soa will go down as one of the GREATEST raid fights of all time. So big, so grand, so epic, and so fucking tough! If all their raid content had been that well designed, then the end game would've been magnificent rather than just okay.
• The incentive for me to make multiple characters was finally there. I am not a guy that plays alts. Literally, I only ever have one character on a game. However, with TOR, I had one of every class. I wanted to see their stories, their play styles, and everything they had available to them. There was a LOT of content to devour for a solid couple of months before the first content patch hit.
• Patch sizes - EVERY FUCKING GAME COULD TAKE A LESSON FROM THIS GAME ON PATCH SIZES! I can't think of too many times where the patches were huge. The majority of patches I ever saw were below 100MB, and that would even be full raid-content patches like Karagga's Palace. That is fucking IMPRESSIVE!
• While some may look at some of the promotions they threw out as "fodder to keep people playing", I looked at it as a company that was super genuinely happy with people sticking to the game. I mean, they gave away a FREE MONTH OF GAME TIME to anyone who had hit max level or a certain Legacy ranking. NO OTHER MMO DOES THAT! It kept me playing, and it kept me subscribed. They also threw out some exclusive in-game titles for your character and a couple of other little things. Dedication reaps rewards, and that is fucking awesome.

So yeah, TOR is a mixed bag of emotions for an MMO. I WILL go back to that world once they raise the level cap. However, I would really like to see it go on a F2P model. I feel like it would greatly benefit from it. The biggest problem was just that you could feel how incomplete the game was once you got the end game content. If EA had given them the time to really refine the game beyond what was released, it would be a killer game with far more people still on it.

Honestly, I feel like they just need to release some solid content between now and the holidays, push promotion behind their "free to level 15" idea or just go flat-out F2P, and really give players an incentive to come back and check it out once the new level cap is released.

Mentioning patches reminded me of something: I had a friend who had no end of technical issues with the game while I was shocked how poorly it performed on my machine as well. Mentioning raids reminded me another thing: SWTOR raids were not good either where they were they make the mistakes MMOs years ago made with one raid taking too long to gear up for while the other was too easy which means you simultaneously are frustrated and bored.

Diablo 3 didn't help but both Wow: Mists or Guild War 2 launches are months away where if they don't improve things rapidly SWTOR is "done" and minor updates won't help.

If you haven't played SWTOR with 16X texture filtering then you haven't played SWTOR. If you haven't played SWTOR on The Fatman you haven't played SWTOR. You wouldn't believe it.

Top 13 Sunday 9:00 6/10/2012

1. Jedi Covenant - The Fatman *both full*

2. Drooga's Pleasure Barge

3. Harbinger

4. Canderous Ordo

5. Veeboo Lunx

6. Lord Ieldis

7. Vrook Lamar

8. Ajunta Pall

9. The Swiftsure

10. Jung Ma

11. The Ebon Hawk

12. Lord Adrass

@jakob187 said:

@scarace360 said:

Game just didn't live up to the expectations of people.

It lived up to plenty of expectations. If anything, I think that TOR is one of the best MMOs I've played. Its complexity is found in its simplicity. It does what other MMOs do in some better ways. For instance, the solo content was fan-fucking-tastic. Despite the promise of a big and epic story falling a tad flat, the fact still remains that I fought Darth Baras at the end of my story in front of the Imperial Council, proved myself as the Emperor's Wrath, and told the Council that they can fuck right off and better watch their backs if they fuck up. The moments where I made my Dark Side decisions felt excellent. They were super satisfying in terms of telling the story of someone following the Dark Side of The Force. I mean, seriously, when I ended up forcing Jaesa to kill her Jedi master and join the Dark Side...GODDAMN, THAT WAS AWESOME!

Unfortunately, the story ended. It's that part where I said "you wrote this excellent fucking character-driven story, but all of the stuff that I did in the story doesn't feel like it affected the world". It's the part where the parity of my experiences with the KOTOR games clashed too hard with TOR. I wanted to see the impact of my actions, and it didn't happen. THAT is where it fell flat.

Moreover, like I said, it was just a consequence of "too little too late" when they did finally roll shit out.

A couple of things I will give massive credit to BioWare for on TOR:

• The story was good, the dialogue was well-written, I actually cared about side quests that could've been menial, and the moments where my decisions played out in the story were great.
• Hard/Nightmare Soa will go down as one of the GREATEST raid fights of all time. So big, so grand, so epic, and so fucking tough! If all their raid content had been that well designed, then the end game would've been magnificent rather than just okay.
• The incentive for me to make multiple characters was finally there. I am not a guy that plays alts. Literally, I only ever have one character on a game. However, with TOR, I had one of every class. I wanted to see their stories, their play styles, and everything they had available to them. There was a LOT of content to devour for a solid couple of months before the first content patch hit.
• Patch sizes - EVERY FUCKING GAME COULD TAKE A LESSON FROM THIS GAME ON PATCH SIZES! I can't think of too many times where the patches were huge. The majority of patches I ever saw were below 100MB, and that would even be full raid-content patches like Karagga's Palace. That is fucking IMPRESSIVE!
• While some may look at some of the promotions they threw out as "fodder to keep people playing", I looked at it as a company that was super genuinely happy with people sticking to the game. I mean, they gave away a FREE MONTH OF GAME TIME to anyone who had hit max level or a certain Legacy ranking. NO OTHER MMO DOES THAT! It kept me playing, and it kept me subscribed. They also threw out some exclusive in-game titles for your character and a couple of other little things. Dedication reaps rewards, and that is fucking awesome.

So yeah, TOR is a mixed bag of emotions for an MMO. I WILL go back to that world once they raise the level cap. However, I would really like to see it go on a F2P model. I feel like it would greatly benefit from it. The biggest problem was just that you could feel how incomplete the game was once you got the end game content. If EA had given them the time to really refine the game beyond what was released, it would be a killer game with far more people still on it.

Honestly, I feel like they just need to release some solid content between now and the holidays, push promotion behind their "free to level 15" idea or just go flat-out F2P, and really give players an incentive to come back and check it out once the new level cap is released.

Maybe it just failed my expectations which where astronomical. It will do better if it does go F2P and it is a good game but I still feel like its missing that spark. The thing that when I get up in the morning before getting dressed or eating I want to sit down and play.