Well, the days are closing in and sub becomes inactive in 2 days so I thought I share some of the reasons why I have left SWTOR. I unsubbed back in the beginning of July and unfortunately, I don’t see the game moving in a direction that would warrant my play time. I do wish this game and all its current and future players the best as I move forward to new games and activities. I had hoped SWTOR would be a game I would be playing for years but, sadly this is not the case. These are just my opinions and suggestions and I don’t present them as facts for the community. It’s a very very long post and main reasons are in BOLD and underlined for those who don’t care to read a wall of text. 1) Linear Game Choices. - The game very much leads you through the nose as you progress 1-50. From your companions, class story and order of planets you quest on. Even on the planets themselves you are constantly on rails, exploration outside of datacrons is not encouraged. After levelling a few toons I just grinded pvp and instances to level instead of doing the same thing over again. The world is also dead. If I looked outside my window and people were like the way they were in SWTOR I think I was in the Twilight Zone or something. The second thing for me that makes it feel you are locked in are that your LS/DS choices don’t really matter, or any choice you make while questing. There may be a change of dialogue, a slightly different way of doing a quest but, there are no changes of real substance. LS/DS determines your relics (or lack thereof for poor grey players) up to level 50, corruption, 1 companion, a few titles, and 1 legacy ability. This hammers it home that your choices don’t really matter at all, regardless what you do you're pretty much guaranteed the same outcome. 1A) Some Changes to Improve This - Small to grand scale dynamic events occurring on all the planets. Every once and awhile imps, pubs, local hostilities decide to take arms against players and friendly bases. Hidden areas or event determined (locals get the upperhand example) quests that are available to players who want to deviate from the path. Some changes that you make upon the world are permanent (phasing instead of private instances) so you feel like you were actually there and did something. Make the world more alive and static like the way cities and towns are in real life! Personal story should have at least 2 critical choices that affect the way remainder of your story is played. For example if 1 Sith Warrior makes the A choice after Act 1 and another Sith Warrior makes the B choice, the remainder of their personal story has notable deviations from one another. A questline that begins once someone reaches Dark1, Light 1, or Grey 1 (seriously stop gimping and lying to those people who choose grey!) to further explore their morality choices and ends when reach level 5. 2) Crafting - The ability to craft from your bank and companions gathering and crafting for you is the best part of crafting in SWTOR. The remainder of crafting isn’t good at all. The RE system is way too random and too much of a pain to deal with. Several times I would outright abandon tiers because, I couldn’t get the next level to pop after numerous times. Also, REing green cunning gear several times only to get the Redoubt to unlock made me want to head desk a few times. After levelling a few crafting professions I smartened up and just went Biochem. With Biochem if I had infinitely better luck with the randomness of RE and when I did RE and I got to the next level, I was guaranteed to acquire a recipe for something I need, not a Redoubt chest piece for my Sith Sorc. The items made with Biochem were relevant for a longer period of time and were not easily replaceable with comm and looted gear. Biochem and Cybertech (for grenades in PvP) felt like the only 2 viable choices in crafting. Couple your toons with either profession and Slicing for a few of them and you are set. Terrible design! 2A) Some Changes to Improve This - Crafting should be a viable and robust system for players to provide the community with gear and supplies. Reverse Engineering would have worked better as something we “learn” rather then a small random percentage to acquire a recipe. For example(all numbers are arbitrary): When you RE an green item (without setting anything) you learn 1% towards Overkill, Critical and Redoubt level of that item. When you crit on REing that item you learn at a rate of 3% towards Overkill, Critical and Redoubt along with acquiring the augment slot. When you choose to specialize into a recipe, say Overkill you learn at a rate of 5% for each RE, 7% for each critical success. The ability to know whether or not you know a recipe would have been helpful. Also, there needed to be more unique skins (and complete sets) for crafted gear so there is more of a demand from the community for them. 3) PvP - The best of times and the worst of times. Admittedly, this is the part of the game that was the most fun for me albeit at times, the most frustrating. Frustrating area coming more from the trolol players in there then game mechanics but, still some fault on Bioware’s part as well. Huttball was a lot of fun on my juggie and sorc, not so much on my Op and merc. Novare Coast being my second on the list for good times. Great players and friends made in WZ which definitely enhanced the experience. Changes to allowing same faction for all WZ in PvP and not having a cross server que where meh. Resolve problems and stun wars were meh too! Some issues with PvP first lie in how players are grouped up for a warzone. Pre 50 bracket you have a combination of players from level 10-49 in the same game. Bioware has a boost system in place to make it appear everyone is on the same playing level. Well they are not. A level 12 player vs a level 45 player will most likely get creamed regardless of skill level of the level 12 player. Not only does the level 12 not have access to skills in the latter part of their chosen tree but, they generally will not have equipped gear with tertiary stats such as Surge, Defense etc.. When everyone is boosted all those stats are boosted as well but the level 12 player will only have the stats they currently possess upped. You can even see the health difference between 2 characters of the same class with high level disparities, the higher level player will have more health and upon inspection better stats then the low level player. Even on my healers I have very easily taken down low level players, those specced into damage I’m sure can just kill them off 1 2 3. The second problem comes into play when you reach the 50 bracket. Until you are able to get War Hero gear (or at least BM but even then) just expect to get facerolled. The general community consensus is just to take it, grin and bear it through the daily grind until you get geared enough to become a viable member of the team and it’s your turn to faceroll those poor saps in Recruit gear. And if your team doesn’t have enough players in BM and WH to your liking well you can just leave that scrub team and reque. Also Ilum. Yeah =/ 3A) Some Changes to Improve This - Well, there are some ideas I have had rolling around in my head for this. One is to make small brackets for PvP under 50 say 10-29 and 30-49 with cross server que etcc.. Eh but, the more I think about it the better system in my opinion would just to make everyone geared level 50’s with gear only used in PvP. No expertise stats and you can only enter PvP with designated PvP gear. Warzone commendations are used to buy different looks for your toon but, everyone stays at the same gear level. PvP is determined more by skill (and healers heheh ) then gear alone. Engine should have been one that would have been able to handle large scale PvP skirmishes if you were going to launch and advertise it as a feature of the game. Also, might have been better to make such large skirmishes a separate que, cross server, maybe even Server vs Server so that battles aren’t lopsided because of faction imbalance. Should have launched with Novare Coast and additional maps added as time went by. Also, a 15 minute debuff for players that leave WZ’s early. 4) Space - Is not the final frontier. It’s Galaga Redux and I admit, I had a lot more fun playing Galaga then space missions in SWTOR. That could be because the game was released in 1981 and was appropriate for it’s time and current competitive games whilst SWTOR space missions feel like we have gone backwards. It looks great visually but the rails, companions buzzing in your ear and repetitiveness of it leave it little charm. I knew what it was going to be like before launch and I thought “well maybe I can just go with it” but, that was not the case. After doing the missions on a few characters I completely abandoned it. When I watched Star Wars Trilogy as a kid my hero of the story was Han Solo. He had his own ship, he did what he wanted, went wherever he pleased and he smuggled Spice. I wanted to experience the vast emptiness of space, the wonder, amazement and discovery in a SWTOR universe, smuggle Spice, get dangerously close to stars, land on uninhabited planets and walk around etc... Instead I got a click map and a space shooter on rails. In hindsight I realize how lame it was for SWTOR not to have a robust space exploration system. It’s Star Wars, sheesh! 4A) Some Things to Improve This - Should have been more like EvE with less ganking and boring mining and tons of exploration with the awe and wonder like Spore has. Space missions as they are should have been the side quests of Space not the heart of it. Also, skirmishes be they PvP and PvE in space. Customize the ship interior and be able to interact with more things on it. Guild ships. Yeah that. 5) Fluff, and Fun - Oh Legacy you just could not fill that niche. You talked the community up the wazoo about this feature and then you didn’t even launch with it released. Yeah okay that wasn’t your shining moment. Then when the first version came out it was lackluster at best. Your second addition to it came and I think most people smartened up that it was just an elaborate credit sink for nothing worthwhile. The only thing I found useful from Legacy perks were finishing Act2 and gaining access to that buff for all other toons. I’d say presence for maybe those people still traditionally levelling. I stopped doing Dromund Kaas and the rest of the planets a long time ago. Also unlocking races, eh. The other “fun” and “fluff” features, absolutely no reason for me to drop credits into. After Legacy you have some small items you can purchase after reaching Social levels or from special merchants like CE or DD merchants. Hmm, I think that is it. There are no little programmed fun events going on ever, can’t interact with hardly anything, no easter egg things of interest, nothing seasonal or something great to to involve the community, no exploration. Just nothing at all for you to do outside the norm of levelling and grinding. You have 2 events (one just started) which are killing and looting items and doing dailies. Cause everyday I think at work, “Man, I can’t wait to log into SWTOR and do some dailies!” Hell, I remember dragging my friends in EQ1 to BB to show them this dwarf I found named Glorin Binfur that would react to things you typed out to her like “ I love you.” I remember GMs organizing level 1 rogue halfling jumps off of mountains for prizes in EQ1 amongst other things. EVERQUEST1 over 10 years ago had these things in game!!! Dammit, I mean c'mon seriously they even had a dye system. In GW2 I found an underwater Quaggan Village in the Sylvari starting area. There was a sea organ down there with a Quaggan nearby humming a tune. The tune is the beginning of the GW2 theme and if you figure out how to play it on the organ all of the instruments will come alive and play the tune. A giant clam also opens up with a chest inside containing a few random items. That small thing was so epic in it’s own right and so memorable and filled the desire in me to find more things like it, of which I have no doubt there are more in the game. SWTOR has so much possibility to add things like this to the game but, they just aren’t seen as important or the devs don’t care or something. It’s a shame, a real shame. 5A) Some Things to Improve This - The Legacy system needs major love and less credit sink! There needs to be some small scale events going on, or mini games, or some fluff outside of the levelling gear grind of the game. Pazaak, sabbac, swoop racing, wampa target practice, easter egg mini games etc... just something more. Anything else to give people besides dailies and hanging around the fleet queuing for instances and pvp. Unique and complete sets for different tiers of Dark, Light and Grey toons would have been nice too along with a dye system! 6) Business Model and the Desires of the Community - When a company decides to compete with well established competitors in a particular area of business they need to hit the gates running. They need to not only offer the same features and services as their competition but, need to take it one step further. Another notch up to convince people to switch to their company and retain them or even try the business out. Why would anyone want to switch from their current MMO to SWTOR? Is brand name and IP enough to not only have people play SWTOR but also continually subscribe? Unfortunately, for Bioware/EA that doesn’t seem to be the case. When the game launched in December 2011 outside of VO SWTOR trailed behind what other MMOs were offering. Instead of the gates opening and SWTOR being at a sprint, it was a crawl. Since that time SWTOR has been playing catch up, implementing tools and game mechanics that should have been available come launch. Suggestions and ideas that were brought forth since Beta were just rebuked and rebuffed. With some they caved in, albeit a little late with the amount of subs they have lost. From group finder, to the ability delay to server transfers, etc.. they just took too long to do anything about things that mattered to players. The enthusiastic communication from Bioware quickly dried up which seemed to drive the community into a frenzy. Not only that but, the promises, such as rolling out new content monthly never happened which further enraged players and furthered the decline. Coupled with the bugs and “thousand paper cuts” of problems happening just contributed to the let down. The end game is roll alts?! You are kidding me! 6A) Some Things to Improve This - SWTOR should have released with the expected same features as other competitors have and something more. Yes VO and the “4th pillar” (story) is nice but when the 4th pillar ends at 50 and VO conversations are trivial and pointless, well what do you have? They should have had at least 2 major content patches near ready to roll out onto the test server and more in alpha stage. This would have been able to keep up the expected pace and promise of continuing new content. More PvE and PvP content at launch and additional updates at least every 2 months until the 6 month mark and then a slow down, a continuous test server, knowing what valid concerns are (ability delay, blaming it on us then admitting there was a problem) and knowing where to put your foot down (constant nerf/buff syndrome, opening tons of servers). Statements and promises concerning the game are kept. Open and honest communication, no PR spin that no one believes and shreds your credibility. If you make a mistake, just own up to it apologize and try to do better next time. Isn’t that what we teach our kids? We don’t raise them to put massive spin on a mistake they made to try and shift the blame elsewhere or make themselves look good. In closing, there are a ton of other little things I didn’t touch upon that could use improvement. This post is a novel as it is! Thank you people I played with in SWTOR for making the gameing experience much more tolerable. Wouldn’t have kept on logging in if it wasn’t for you guys. TheTeaSpice

Nvm, I found the answer to my question! Thanks for the UI changes, very much needed and appreciated. Look forward to the GTN to having some love in a later patch. TheTeaSpice

I have the same issue with Mumble. With Vent, if I open Vent as admin it works no problem but, now after patch you have to dance around to try and get Mumble to work. Skype and other voips work fine, no need to start as admin or before/after launching SWTOR. Couldn't say how to fix it, sorry. TheTeaSpice

I personally do not like the changes made to the UI. The previous one one (minus it not being customizable) was fine and working for me. All the flashing and the blue bars make it much more difficult to figure out CD's then ever before. Reverting to the prior UI before this patch would be wonderful, not very interested in PvE/PvP until some changes are made. Thanks! TheTeaSpice

Yes please and thank you for showing in detail how simple improvements go a long way. +1 TheTeaSpice

Thank you for bringing this up. The auto distribution system in normal operations is appalling. Whoever came up with that bright idea should be dragged over a bed of hot coals. This system doesn't prevent ninja looting, it prevents players from properly gearing themselves up and watching others be given loot they can't use or already have. Please change this and allow NbG and master looting options. While you are at it how about a /roll feature. Yeah I know, its like so 90's and not "innovative" but, it works and is still useful in mmos. You don't have to constantly try and reinvent the wheel here. I can't speak from experience regarding hardmode and nightmare mode but, it's kind of depressing that no new mechanic was added for nightmare mode. Sure, it's a dance, a tank and spank or a race before a hard enrage happens but, having to learn something extra for nightmare mode makes the win and accomplishment that much more satisfying. TheTeaSpice

I will be sure to check this out. Since Bioware has decided not to have specific server forums, I think it would be easier to see what is going on in the community on each server (and at large) then the way it is here. Not to mention the search button has been down for *maintenance* a little too long for my taste. TheTeaSpice