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Kimyrielle

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  1. I actually don't like to have to play alts, so having one large story is much, much preferable over 8 tiny ones to me.
  2. Experience. Normally if a so-called "casual" questions that raiders should exclusively get all good items in the game and/or are the most important group in a game etc, the response isn't nearly as polite and constructive as yours. Agreed. I am not totally against them adding more raids down the road (I can't complain about most MMOs not catering at all to my interest if I not willing to let other groups have a piece of the cake either), I am just against making them the sole focus of everything "endgame" as they did for the first couple years of this game's lifespan. Remember when every single content update read like "Added: 1 new raid, 2 new Flashpoints, 1 new PvP arena"? If I remember right they didn't add any new planet until Makeb released and I can't remember any planet ever being released as a "free" content update, unlike raids which they released all the time. Btw, Flashpoints are just small raids - instances stuffed with scripted bosses having silly mechanics. Same thing, just a little less hard to properly execute for their smaller group size. In the end...honestly? They still have so much catch-up work to do in terms of content for the rest of us that they'd probably need to add more story content for 2-3 years before they could add a raid again. Not saying they should actually do that, but to get back on even terms in terms of attention, they'd need to. Just to put the raiders' complaints about currently not getting new raids into perspective. Yes, as I said, raids are hard only because it's difficult to make 8/16 people execute the required steps in exact unison. Other than figuring out the silly scripted mechanics in the first place of course, but that's what most raiders use YouTube for anyway. There is nothing "elite" about raiding, like grinding it just takes time. That being said, I am not going to tell you what sort of content to enjoy. In an ideal world, there would be content for all of us and we all would get nice stuffz as a reward. In reality we're competing for the devs' limited resources, for I don't think they can reasonable develop a meaningful number of raids -and- a meaningful number of story episodes at the same time. As I said above, I want this game to allow me to play all the content in a group if I want to. My (one) gripe with the story content is that it basically forces you to solo it (you get discouraged from playing it in a group by getting no credit for the episodes you didn't start yourself). I might never set my foot into a raid or even a hardmode FP, but I still would like to quest with friends.
  3. I play it only with two (one Pub, one Imp) at this time. I will play it with another pair later on when they content will feel fresh again. If I played it will all my characters at once it would indeed feel as grindy as any raid.
  4. I am super happy about finally seeing a MMO putting a strong focus somewhere else than raids. I am a longterm MMO player, but raids have never done anything for me. Personally? I find them boring. They are just scripted fights that play out 100% the same every single time you attempt them and are difficult only because of obscure (and often silly) mechanics and zero margin for error in execution. For some reason raiders think because they invested time into practicing the step-by-step recipe long enough to beat these otherwise super boring fights it makes them the elite of MMO players. But what they are doing is in end not fundamentally different from grinding trash mobs in a Korean grinder - doing the same thing over and over until you get what you want. Except that grinders usually don't develop a sense of entitlement to have exclusive access to every single desirable item in the game, raiders often do - resulting in a toxic relationship between the raiders and the 90% of the players that don't do them. I would be absolutely thrilled if SWTOR would keep the direction it is evolving now. The one gripe I have with the new content is that it can't be reasonably played with friends at all. While I might dislike raids, this is still a MMO and I would like to enjoy it with friends. The next storyline I would hope to cater to be played either solo or in a small group (so that all group members would get credit for advancing the quest). Otherwise I have never been happier with the game.
  5. Maybe it's just me, but seems the topic is still very relevant. I played through the high level planets lately, and there were rarely more than 20 people on either Belsavis, Corellia or Voss at any time. Illum usually had 10 or less. I call that "dead". Not every time when an older thread is brought back up doing so is "pointless". In that case it's more like a still open wound that is still relevant.
  6. Yes, right now there is little reason to go back to planets as soon as you are max level. It's the typical poor endgame design SWTOR copied from *cough* some older MMO, where everything meaningful you can do at maximum level is dungeons and raids - which can be accessed from the fleet, so there is no reason going anywhere else anymore. At max level, 98% of SWTOR's content is either obsolete or meaningless. Open world PvE in this game desperately needs a boost. We need more quests on planets with actual replay value and more meaningful rewards for those, so that not -everything- desirable drops only in dungeons and raids. People are reward driven, they go where the money is. Stuff it all inside raids, and raids is all they will do. Or quit if they don't like raids. Heroics and world bosses are an underused mechanism to get group content into the open world and people to leave the fleet, too. There is no written law saying that all group content needs to be a dungeon or raid. Or that all boss fights need to be scripted "follow this recipe and don't stand in the fire when the mob's health bar reaches 24.8%" yawners. There is plenty of things that can be done to planets to make them more interesting for max level characters.
  7. I am playing multiple MMOs too, and when people talk SWTOR, it's usually the F2P system getting the heat. And let's face it - SWTOR -does- have the most punishing and restrictive F2P system of any MMO I am aware of. At no point the game tries to hide that it's considering F2P/Preferred status players to be second-class customers and wants everyone to subscribe instead. Other games give subscribers -more- while this one gives cash shop customers -less-, piling restrictions upon more restrictions. I guess 90% of the bad reputation SWTOR has stems from the F2P system alone. To be honest, SWTOR's F2P system -does- make you either subscribe or start hating the game. The people in the other games probably tend to be from the latter group, I guess.
  8. More planets would be awesome. Storytelling is what this game is great at, so by all means, add more storytelling!
  9. I like this FP. I really do. And that's coming from someone who's usually fairly wary of MMO dungeons. It's a tad different every time I play it (big, big plus!), has no silly scripted gimmick mechanics I'd have to watch YouTube videos for in order not to get kicked out of a group for "not knowing the fight", and even scales to level, so friends of different level can play it together. All FPs should be like that.
  10. I am aware that when they designed SWTOR they sat down and copied every single aspect of WoW, because they thought it's a surefire recipe for success (and we all know how well that worked out for them!). But even when you look at WoW: Raids, raids, raids isn't the -only- thing they added. If I am not totally mistaken, they added significant open world content with every expansion too, much more than we saw added to SWTOR so far. When I look at the 2014 roadmap...it's still an awful lot about "instances with scripted boss fights" (both operations and FPs fall under that category). I don't claim this to be representative at all, but I know a lot of people who quit SWTOR. And every single one of them I talked to (yes, is in 100%) named the endgame as one of the major reasons they left. I know that a lot of people love raiding and there is nothing wrong with it. I am not saying "stop adding raids". But I -am- lobbying for a more balanced approach. To me, SWTOR's biggest strength was always the story content, and in in particular the possibility to play it with friends in a meaningful way, thanks to the multiplayer dialogue mechanism, that to the best of my knowledge is still unique in all MMOs out there. I don't quite understand why they don't add more of what they're really good at and instead add content they're competing against 20 other MMOs with, but maybe it's just me. (PS: I love the Bounty/Rakghoul events you named as an example. That's the stuff I'd like to see more of. Right now there is quite frankly not enough non-raiding content around to keep a non-raider busy, these events are still too far and between.)
  11. Well, instead of calling me "self-delusional" for interpreting your words the way you wrote them.... maybe next time write what you mean, then people might not misunderstand you? And yet here you are, complaining about not having a whole lot of different battles to fight. Which, as I said about, is a direct consequence of the very game design you claim "works". Well, if it's all that perfect and people enjoy it, what are you complaining about? Again, I am NOT saying there shouldn't be gear progression at all, only that it it's bad idea making it the main focus of the entire endgame the way SWTOR and some other games do. The truth is always the middle ground. PS: While I don't wish to derail this thread into a debate about GW2, in contrast to your claim there is no indication that its playerbase is declining at all, much less what could be the cause of it. if it does. Please at least stick to facts you can back up.
  12. The rate on which they're churning out new operations with is irrelevant as long as they tend to add new tiers of gear at the same time (which they do) - in that case it will always be the "same 10 encounters" people farm, only for a shorter period of time. I dunno about you, but killing the same 10 mobs for six months or killing the same 10 mobs for a year is almost equally boring. It's just too much of the same in either case. I am not as completely opposed to gear progression as I might come over as here, but they addition of new tiers needs be made carefully to avoid people getting stuck with only 1-2 instances to play at a time (I think we all agree that this is a bad thing!). Someone referred to Guild Wars 2 earlier - yes they introduced tiered gear too, but it's -barely- more powerful than the previous tier and thus will not render any existing content trivial. They also completely ruled out another tier for the foreseeable future. Which IMHO is the way you can do it without harming the game too much in terms of power creep. SWTOR's excessive focus on gear progression with comparatively rapid release intervals of new tiers is actually one of my bigger pet peeves with the game. Also - from my perspective, they focused on "raiding type" content (ops and FPs) waaay too much in the past, at the expensive of other types of content. We got no meaningful continuation of the story content, no player/guild housing and too few new open world areas/planets to really matter. SWTOR's endgame is the typical "go raid or go home" stuff, that leaves PvE players who don't wish to participate in mindless farming of scripted bosses mainly with rolling yet another alt. I realize that some people love raiding, and there is nothing wrong with that. But they really should find a balance between different types of content and story/open world PvE clearly got the short end so far.
  13. It's odd that you would say it that way, for I have you already proven wrong by naming several examples of character progression that doesn't make a character any stronger and are still a staple in at least some MMOs. It's even odder that after disagreeing with me on the gear progression thing you write another post complaining about how horrible it is having to farm the same 10 encounters over and over - a symptom in MMOs directly caused by them overfocusing on vertical gear progression, instead of at least adding a component of horizontal/non-stat increasing progression content at the same time. People on the internet...
  14. To a certain degree what you said is correct, but there is no reason why the idea of progression (which is indeed a part of the RPG genre) needs to be reduced to gear ONLY. There are many other ways to progress a character, that usually get neglected by MMO developers. Mind you, "progression" doesn't necessarily need to mean "making them stronger" all the time, it can be other fun things like learning new crafts, new skills, or such mundane things like furnishing a house or starship. Why the only form of progression used in max level MMO content is usually "gear progression" is beyond me.
  15. I know that you were being sarcastic, but there is really no written law that max level content in MMOs needs to be a boring gear treadmill where people farm scripted instances ad nauseaum that play the exact same way every single time you do them.
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