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Raeln

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  1. I am one of those 6 month subs - I'm currently trying to decide whether to drop my sub or just change to 1 month at a time.
  2. Compared to creating the game, server transfers are easy level work. Keep drinking the kool-aide. There's no reason for any game developer, be it Blizzard or Bioware, to take longer than than a couple months to push out server transfers - especially in Bioware's case where they have many servers that don't even have enough population on them to pay the utility cost of keeping them powered up.
  3. The game is now 6 months old - yes, many are going to have 1 level 50. How many have 2, 4 or 6 level 50s? As far as EA claiming casuals have left - EA's definition of casual doesn't match mine.
  4. If this is the case, then it's purely management that is driving this game into the bug zapper (gucomics.com).
  5. It's not that it can't be done. It surely can. It just isn't necessarily affordable for the developer at the current $15 a month sub price. Again, I'm only talking about LIVE events where GMs take control of mobs during the event. These types of events require a living, breathing GM to be at the keys on each server to control these mobs personally. Developers should certainly consider creating scripts that can run randomly where some number of mobs attempt to invade a town or city - that's certainly possible and should happen. There's plenty to do. I think some of the issue is they were expecting something different from WoW. The missing LFD system certainly does leave a big hole because there are many like me that don't want to idle on the Fleet while waiting for a group to form.
  6. Moving data from one database to another is a very mechanical and low-level task. While there is some logic with making sure a transferred account doesn't have character names taken - simply creating a simple process to choose another name is not difficult. After 6 months, it's clear that Bioware/EA apparently did not have server transfers very high on the priority list or they would be done. The slothfulness of Bioware/EA on pretty much everything they are doing is what is destroying this game and it's sad. The game is actually very fun for me to play. I love how my gunslinger and commando feel to play - but, it's obvious that unless BW/EA kicks it into gear, this game is going to drop under the minimum number of subs they claim they need to survive (if it hasn't already). I thought that I would be playing this game for several years to come but I'm on the verge of canceling and giving them some time to catch up on necessary features like transfers and LFD. Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic, but I'm not expecting 1.3 until mid-July.
  7. Oddly enough, in more important software development (you know, where software that must work or someone will die in real life) - there are deadlines. A developer somewhere out there has to ballpark when the project can be done and give an estimate on when that will be to the investors or the client requesting the work. That deadline is often contracted and the developer will begin to lose either a bonus or fixed amount of money for each day or month the project goes over the deadline. It's only MMOs that have gotten a free pass on release deadlines by coining the terms "soon" or "when it's ready". Outside the gaming industry - it ain't that way. Investors rarely dump money into a software project with no ready date and they get even less likely to keep dumping money in it when the deadline keeps getting pushed back. It would be one thing if Bioware had to invent all sorts of new technology to accomplish their server transfers, but they don't. Other MMOs have been transferring their characters all over their game worlds for years. It's a series of elegant scripts - not a software project on the level of reinventing the NASA space project.
  8. It's not feasible for a game company to run live server events like back in the days of EQ1. There are too many servers and at best, the event would have to be scripted because it would be impossible for a company hire an extra 100 to 200 employees to acts as these event organizers (need at least 1 per server to run a live event simultaneously). I believe the last live server event that I know of in EQ1 was when Verant still owned the game. After selling it to SOE, I think their future "events" were merely scripts that had a very rare chance to run or were globally triggered by an admin. I think these live events would be awesome but it's only something that I would expect to happen in a niche game with a smaller playerbase. Keep in mind there is a downside to a short 1 to 2 hour "live" event too. It tends to upset or disappoint players that could not be online or were unaware that such a thing might happen at that time. Imagine someone getting the "I was there at the event" T-shirt for their character, only because they happened to be online. Their friend didn't because well - they were at work and couldn't log on. Live events - if they were even financially feasible, are a double-edged sword.
  9. The hardcore players are the ones that rush through the content. They burn it up, spit it out - cry that there isn't more to do. Unsubscribe and buy the next game. They may come back when a new content patch comes out and in 2 months, they are gone again. The casuals are the ones logging on, slowly consuming content but provide a nice pad of numbers when you do a /who. They also make things like LFD and PvP queues work.
  10. The subscriber base that SWG, AoC and EQ had will not sustain a game this size. The revenue is just not enough. WoW emulated the console "Easy" or "Normal" settings, and did it very well. I know EQ1 was more of a "Hard" console setting, due to the heavy group requirement on everything, including farming crafting materials. We've seen how "Cataclysm'ing" raid content in 1.2 worked out - can't find enough people to run EC even on storymode. No, the core of a MMORPG is not the hardcore player. It hasn't been in any MMO that wanted to retain more than 300 to 400k subs.
  11. A game full of those 4 to 5 hour a week players fills the game developer's bank account so they can make more content for the 20+ hours a week players. This is not new science. This is how WoW has operated for the last 8 years, and yes - I knew people that literally only played about 2.5 hours a week there. They also remained subscribed for years because they hadn't consumed but a fraction of the content that others had.
  12. Persistence is effort. It takes "effort" to reach valor rank 70. It requires many hours of waiting in a queue and hundreds of Warzones to earn the valor. That is "effort". The word you are looking for is "skill". No MMORPG will ever deny gaining PvP points again (read: WoW failure) when losing. Someone always has to lose in PvP and people that consistently lose tend to quit playing very quickly. This is also why ratings killed the WoW Arena system. Complimentary points are what ensures they stick around. The fail part of PvP in an MMORPG is that the developers keep wanting to attach gear progression to it just like they do PvE.
  13. Raids are very unpopular - in another generation or two, I believe we'll be lucky to find any more than 1 or 2 single boss raids - tossed in just so the developers say, yeah, we have raids too. If raiding was so popular, keeping an ops team full would not be so much of a chore in every MMORPG to date.
  14. TOR is not failing due to lack of difficulty. If anything, the increased difficulty of EC is driving away the meat and potatoes of the raid_willing playerbase. Pre-1.2, we could pick up a 8th dps from an alliance guild and do HM EV/KP without barely slowing down. It was great. Post-1.2, we can barely find anyone and no one wants to even think about bringing fresh blood to an EC run - it's just too much headache to train them. My Ops team finally just gave up. TOR will not pull this from the whirlpool of death by trying to up the challenge. What TOR is missing is core features. Without server transfers for players to relocate to a vibrant server and LFD for people to get a group going in moderate amount of time - people leave. On top of that, the rewards for HM Flashpoints need buffed a bit so that there is actually a reason for people who still raid to run them and bolster the queue times. It's poor development that is killing TOR. TOR had some solid ideas and a decent launch but EA/Bioware has drastically fumbled the football by being too slow to get support features in place.
  15. Shouldn't be. For the most part, Legacies are nothing more than a surname and a bunch of true/false unlocks. While I'll acknowledge some issue with merging existing family trees - I think it's acceptable to expect a player to rebuild the family tree after a server transfer (like a respec), considering how rarely one should be transferring to start with. There have been some very serious patch issues. There are also some bugs that are still present since release - I'm sorry, but in 2012, a released PC game should not have problems losing the mouse cursor, ever. I had to abort two space missions this week because the mouse cursor disappeared while I was talking on voice chat. The bugs are prevalent enough that until our raid team broke up - we literally did not know whether we died to not performing the mechanic properly or if it was bugged in someway. That's a bad trend to have happen. It's their job. Snap to it. If they don't - then perhaps the wrong people were laid off. Business is business. (and yes, I've been laid off before) That's moving pretty fast considering it isn't even on the PTS yet. We could dream for megaservers but what Erickson actually said was higher capacity servers. That indicates to me that their are looking to just increase the cap on population a single server can have - then hope people transfer to that server.
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