I think this sort of post is really poorly thought-out. I understand Bioware wanting to promote their game and advertise its various successes, but at this stage of things it really belongs on youtube and game review sites. To post it here without mitigating comment is to entirely miss the tone of the General Discussion forum. People here are, at best, split 50/50 between those who are happily enjoying the game and those who are having a problem big enough to make them come here to complain instead of playing. So to post something wholly celebratory here, without offering any comment to indicate an awareness of the incongruity or irony, is to come across as sort of out of touch. It makes the reader think that somehow bioware is completely unaware of the problems with the game. Or that they don't really care, like they're sort of saying "Ya ya, a lot of people seem to have problems with the game, but ignore that because everything is fantastic!" It's similar here in that as a person who has ultimately quit the game because of what I feel are game-breaking bugs, my reaction to this sort of announcement is "Really? The game is a smashing success? Well I guess I better give up on whatever notions I had of it improving, since it's already so close to perfect that we're throwing a little party." I'm not saying that's really the thought behind the action, obviously I have no way of knowing. But to me, that's how it seems.

My read on the situation is that at some point, probably like late spring/early summer 2011, they got the word from the top levels of their company that EA and Biowares executive branch had decided that it's extremely important to get a holiday release. Which is probably true, given the economics of the situation. But from that moment forward, their mandate is completely changed. People have to be yanked off of one project in order to be put onto a project that is more directly tied into the release-state of the game. Their priorities shifted to functionality. All of the content now had to be in place by Dec 20th, regardless of any other considerations. As that deadline ticked closer, bugs were either deprioritised as being not that important, or deprioritised as not being solveable within the given timeframe. Bugs that did not directly affect the ability of a person who just bought the game to sit down and play it had to be put on hold, with the hope that they'd be gotten to soon after launch. The problem with that is this: Once the game launches, priorities shift again. Now they have to A) fix the new game-breaker bugs that pop up with a full population, and B) move on with the release schedule. B is the real killer because now they HAVE to hit that March content update. Many of their programmers are locked into that task and can't be taken off of it, so the number of people available to troubleshoot plummets, so the bugs that were left behind a long time ago are not getting the love that Bioware hoped they'd be able to give them post-launch. This is fine as long as it's a reasonable bug, but anything sticky is going to just keep getting pushed aside in the name of newly emerging priorities. Which is why the warzone bug was in place at launch, and keeps getting fixed without actually being solved. The third, sort of unseen problem is their test server policy. By forcing people to level up characters instead of using premades, or copying characters from our own servers, they severely limit the number of willing testers, and then on top of that they severely limit the ability of those testers to find and solve problems because they're busy levelling.

Endgame is fine, maybe even good, except for the part where it's broken. Some people aren't experiencing game-breaking bugs, but apparently a lot of people are, myself included. Mine is that you sometimes don't get credit for warzone victories. It's a known bug that's been fixed three times now, and is still going. I've probably got 50 uncredited wins and maybe as many as twice that, which means I should be fully geared and moving on to premade warzones and deeper levels of tactical play. Instead I'm endlessly spinning my wheels, and paying for the privelage. The game was rushed out for the holiday season in an incomplete state (meaning with severe bugs, not that the content wasn't completed,) and since I paid full price for it and was being billed monthly until I cancelled in protest, I was pretty pissed off. So that's why the hate, at least for me.

We all know that saying something enough times makes it true, right?

I think if I were Bioware I'd rather be *****ed at than have people dispassionately conclude that the game is what it is and move on with their lives. Personally that's what I did, I got tired of complaining about the broken wz's and accepted that it wasn't getting fixed anytime soon, and just quit and went on to another game. I'm pretty sure bioware would rather just have me yell at them.

I dont think there are any channels that republic and empire share. I base that opinion on the fact that there isn't an endless stream of people asking "umad?" on any channels I'm able to see.

Not to worry, they have their top team of crack programming spider monkeys at work day and night fixing the base game.

haha!

No, I meant what I said, and I think I explained pretty clearly when asked. Personally, I'm fine with the concept of the pvp system. What I object to is that it hasn't worked since launch, and still doesn't now. If you're not experiencing game-breaking errors, that's great for you, but if you look around at this forum full of people all saying the same thing and think "Their experience is different than mine, therefore they're all wrong," then you're probably not using your brain correctly.

I think if english was your first language, you'd be closer to getting it.

For huttball I say "Control mid, and run and pass. Dont run with the ball unless you have to, there's a huge speed debuff. Ideally we just want to pass the ball from person to person all the way to the goal." I try to get it out right after the last line of the wz intro, and it actually seems to do some good.

Conceptually pvp is reasonable solid in some areas, though the open world almost couldn't have been handled worse. I'm on a pvp server with a huge population and I've been in no more than 3 random fights on my way to 50. I think there were fundamental design decisions involving the layout of planets making that happen. But I digress... What I mean by cluster**** really is the reward system. They only just now got around to getting rid of that bizarre, inexplicable random system where you could end up with 3 belts and no other pieces, or you could end up decked out one item right after another, either way just by dumb luck. But the warzone victory bug just goes on and on and on; this is at least the second time they've claimed a fix, and the second time they've been wrong. And meanwhile, there are a number of hotfixes that could be applied to make it tolerable, but haven't been. Leaving people who are trying to progress essentially spinning their wheels for weeks on end.

I hate cross-server pvp. Once they did that in WoW, you suddenly had people running around thinking it was funny to grab the flag but not capture it, and make everyone wait.

I guess I'm annoyed that this makes it sound like everything is sunshine and roses, while the actual feedback here in the pvp forum is that the entire system is a cluster****.

From the developer q&a: "Daniel Erickson: We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how popular PvP is in The Old Republic and we’ve been doubling down on our efforts to bring exciting new content and systems to the PvP community. Right now there’s a new Warzone planned for Game Update 1.2 which we’re already testing internally and really enjoying. We can say it’s enabled for same faction vs. same faction play, so if you’ve been playing a lot of Huttball, expect some variety soon! Also coming in 1.2 is the pre-season of our Warzone ranking system, bringing better matchmaking which means better PvP. In the future expect a ton more PvP news as we expand and polish what has proven to be one of the most popular aspects of The Old Republic. We’ve got big plans." You heard it folks, pvp is hugely successful and popular. Nothing to see here, go back to your homes, everythings just fine.