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Zerophin

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  1. I love group quests but honestly they just don't work in this game because there simply isn't enough "demand" (especially for heroic 4's in later planets.) When you have 30 people on Voss all at different points in their "questing" it is virtually impossible to find 3 others to group with in any reasonable fashion. I want to do them while leveling but I certainly am not going to spend three hours spamming general for 2M to do them. Good idea that just doesn't seem to work very well in practice. Sad.
  2. So let's see... Common reasons people say LFD is not needed include: 1 - Make friends and go to them when you want to group (because everyone on your friends list is ALWAYS online whenever you need them) 2 - Be in an active guild (because everyone is in a guild with 300 members all at your call whenever you want to run a FP) 3 - Playing with people in your server is somehow "better" (as if idiots aren't abound on your server as well) Guess what? Nothing, NOTHING, stops you from grouping with friends, guild-mates or being "server exclusive" with LFD. Basically you just don't want other people to find groups faster is what it boils down to because either a) you have a very narrow view of what an MMO should be and everyone MUST adhere, b) you had a bad LFD experience in WoW and somehow have amnesia regarding how those bad groups happened before LFD just as often or c) you just want to a jerk to the guy that logs in at 8:00 after a long day at work, has a small guild that isn't always online and just wants to do a fast flashpoint in the half hour he has to play. Keep listening to the vocal minority and you'll end up with another dying MMO. /sigh Really love this game but it is easily the hardest time I've had to group in an MMO ... EVER (as a Tank to boot.) LFG within the server will do nothing to solve the problem ... mark my words; this road has been taken before and the result will be the same.
  3. None of them have worked ... period. Eventually it degrades back to general chat. Remember how awful and unused the LF tools Blizzard tried to put in before LFD were? The core problem isn't the "getting people together" part - it's creating a big enough pool of players that lets you do so quickly. To get that pool you need to extend the reach beyond the server. You know an interim step may be to "cluster" servers into sets of 4-5 for LFD purposes. It's FREAKING MATH ... nothing else. That's a brilliant suggestion that totally solves the problem
  4. Nothing drags MMO development down more than people that continue to hold on to past memories (while wearing rose-colored glasses) of how awesome it was sitting in places like Iron Forge spamming /1 LF Healer BRD or camping named mobs in EQ. Sadly these folks tend to be the most vocal while those that want "modern tools" are more apt to silently quit than spend months debating on an MMO forum.
  5. This is exactly why cross-server LFD is needed and developers need to stop listening to the senseless hyperbole coming from players who feel it ruined WoW. No "in-server" tool will resolve the issue that players are facing right now (particularly Republic) because there simply isn't a big enough pool within each server to efficiently build groups. Sure there is this theoretical nirvana where everyone has a robust friends list (with friends always online) and a huge mega-guild that never has a shortage of healers just *dying* to run flashpoints. Hate to break it to folks but that doesn't exist for a lot of players in the game and expecting casual folks to seriously build networks when they just want to log in for 30 minutes after work and bang out a flash point is inane in 2012. I ran a very successful raiding guild in WoW and used LFD all the time. Even with the incredibly hard heroics at the launch of Cataclysm I was able to have pretty solid experiences MOST of the time. Sure there were idiots, sure there were ninjas and sure there were people I had to kick - but net/net the fact I could log-in and get a group going in under 5 minutes FAR outweighed the negatives. Doing the same within my server only would have taken much longer (most of the time) and often would have left me with just a different set of idiots in my group. Nothing, even the awful UI, will kill TOR faster than people not being able to group quickly. I love this game and I had to log in disgust last night after spending 2 hours in the fleet looking for ONE more person to do level 50 flashpoints (healer needed ... of course.) This is during a Friday night, prime time, heavy pop server. Also I kept seeing the same 4-5 people advertising all night long for the same flash points. Sure, there isn't a problem - keep telling yourselves that. Bioware really needs to stop listening to the vocal minority and FAST because if they did a real poll of people playing the game (not just forum surfers) I bet over 75% would be pro cross-server tools. Everyone in my guild is for it.
  6. You're obviously just selecting certain pieces of my post to try to discredit my post claiming I want "easy" rewards. Clearly I led a raiding guild for seven years raiding pre-nerf cutting edge content six nights a week because I just love easy-mode rewards. Let me shock you: I could care less if they made them weekly and kept the commendation counts the same - it has nothing to do with the "purples" as the kiddies say. Some of us actually play to be challenged every night - not to do "housework" MMO style. While MMOs by their nature have a grind element - it is absolutely insane to embrace tedium because "it's just the way it is." Seriously you should look into playing an Asian MMO - they are experts at developing grinding marathons. Some of us just like the "game" part - you know where you are actually challenged, engaged and /gasp having fun. Not a great troll, but I'll give you a daily commendation for trying. I'm off to bed, I think the vast majority of the posts here prove that I'm not alone in my thoughts. I really do give Bioware credit for making a very solid game, it's just a shame they fell back to some of the old "stand-bys" that annoy the heck out of *most* people.
  7. Why does it offend you that I dare challenge that idiom in one respect (being daily quests?) I don't know why I'm bothering but I played MMOs for ten odd years for the challenge of clearing content with a group friends. The organization and coordination needed for raids and PvP drove me to endure the less pleasurable parts of the genre. I know it may confuse you but it is possible to not enjoy grinds and repetition but enjoy being challenged and pushed hard to perform well in a game. Pressing a button every day for 30 days to get enough pellets to buy a weapon is NOT the same as coordinating a group of 25 players to kill M'uru. I don't begrudge allowing access to gear to solo players but I do begrudge the lazy and thoughtless way MMOs are doing it via Dailies. We can expect better. We can expect the game to deliver more strongly for both casual and hardcore players alike. If you honestly think that grinding repetition is anything other than a mechanism to keep you subscribed and that it's "good gameplay" then you are just being naive. I understand "why" it is the way it is - but that doesn't mean we as gamers shouldn't challenge developers when we aren't having "fun." This thread clearly shows that very few people are having a lot of fun saving timmy the pilot every day on Illum. It's really troll like to think someone who is against dailies just wants hand-outs. Maybe some do, but there is room for intelligent debate that doesn't fall back to "lol he juz wantz gears."
  8. Ever hear of addition by subtraction? You don't always need to replace a bad idea with a good one, sometimes just getting rid of the bad idea in and of itself fixes the problem. Dailies are a bad idea, I already know people who won't bother with TOR just because they specifically HATE daily quests. Want a new idea? You know what is kind-of fun? Those solo "flash points" they have throughout the story quest with interesting mini-bosses. Why not make 4 of those, rotate them weekly, add random drops to the trash and give commendations upon clearing the boss? You can re-use mobs and locations so no heavy lifting is needed by the developers. After a few cycles you can add new bosses. If you want, you can even make longer ones that take a day or two to clear and provide a raid-style save feature. If you make 4, after 3 months you've only done each 3 times ... that's not terrible. It isn't a magic bullet but we're too far gone to re-invent TOR into something else (not that it needs to be on a wholesale basis mind you.) It's solo friendly content without being completely inane.
  9. You know once upon a time I was like you - I thought that you had to "earn" every little pellet through hours and hours of tedious "work" and that grinds built character. Then I woke up one morning and realized it was a freaking video game and video games are supposed to be ... hold for it ... fun. It is about doing LESS tedious stuff to get to the punchline. It's not like you really "earn" the epic gear anyway by doing inane quests every day. Any "old school" raider would scoff at the fact these things even provide the rewards they do for such "trivial" effort. Elitist attitudes need to die in the proverbial fire, and I used to be an elitist myself. Yeah, because clearly that's my desire. I'd rather they stick those implants on a boss that takes 5 months to learn - that would be "earning it" in your parlance. You think logging on every day to save billy the ewok from his shuttle makes you "earn" tier gear? I really could care less that people get it but I do care when people think it's something other than doing your homework every night to get your allowance. /facepalm
  10. That's a developer problem not a player problem to be perfectly frank. If you need dailies to "bribe" people to stay subscribed then you have a problem. I'm fine keeping my subscription running even if I'm out of content for a month between patches, who cares it's $15 bucks. Your game should be good enough to keep people paying even during lulls (and I'm pretty sure BW/EA can pull that off w/o dailies.)
  11. No, the quests give you the story - the dailies REPEAT the story over and over and over every single day. You can have the original quest without the repetition. I can think of about a million other things to do in an hour in a half in and out of game that are infinitely more entertaining. An hour and a half is an awful long time for someone who has only about that amount of time to parse for gaming every night as many casual players do. You can ignore them though ... BUT.. The problem is the rewards aren't really such that you can ignore them so you have to be a good hamster and get on the wheel.... It's the worst part of the MMO model and this is coming from someone who lead raids for eight years at a high level. Why don't we skip the BS and get to the actual content of raiding and doing content - REAL content like flash points, operations and pvp. Name me one raider in WoW that enjoyed grinding dailies for weeks to get shoulder enchants? You can't - unless they are trolling for laughs. It's not challenging, it's not fun and it's just freaking WORK. I'd rather spend 2 hours wiping on an impossible boss. Because that's how every MMO has worked, that's the only way to do it? None of us geniuses here can ask the dumb question "why are we doing something that is so devoid of fun to get to the "fun?"" Imagine if the dailies were removed - the rewards were moved to flash point drops or what-have-you - do you think anyone would really quit over it? Doubtful.
  12. If you paid attention to my original post I did present a compromise - make them weekly instead of daily and adjust rewards accordingly. Stating a complaint isn't whining, nor is asking for something "better" in a genre that sorely needs a kick in the pants. I have other "ideas" but none of them fit into this box. We're not theorycrafting a new MMO, we're trying to make the one we have better.
  13. No it wasn't missed - you just seem fine with the absolute worst form of tedium possible - non-challenging repeat quests over and over every single day. At least raids were fun :/
  14. Rather not turn this into another sandbox-vs-theme park debate because I'm not sure that dailies are a "staple" that is required to be a theme park. Un-fun design can happen in either category, and dailies are an example of "un-fun" design. TOR was never, EVER, going to be a sandbox game (for better or worse.) Let's just see if we can make it a "better" theme park
  15. Thanks for the colors, I don't think I could have gotten your point without the emphasis You're right, we should all just accept the fact that MMOs are stuck in a bygone era and we should all accept that repetition of mundane tasks on a daily basis is the backbone of a good entertainment product. There will always be people that think that farming named mobs in EQ and waiting for a call at 4am for a spawn was fun ... but yeah, that's not really the majority by any stretch any longer. There are plenty of fun activities in MMOs including raids (before they become farm-fests), dungeons (before they become farm-fests) and PvP. I'll add to that leveling for the first time ever thanks to Bioware actually making an MMO with the "RPG" part attached. How can you even compare dailies to raiding? /boggle MAYBE farm-mode raiding, but most guilds knew when to stop farming because it was wearing out their player's psyches.
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