No one notices if you leave, and no one cares. Even if you were a regular and well-loved by everyone, next week no one even remembers you.

 

Hey, it's not true! I remember lots of people from the past actually... Domisotto the eternal noob PVPer optimist will be remembered forever! The day she quit a piece of the forums died that day...

I see that I am not the only sympathy-deficient person on this thread.

 

By far

 

Noisy exits never get the one leaving anything nor hold much sway with a bunch of forum regulars. The thread will get moved to Off-topic eventually.

I'm going to live down to my forum alias. My own view is that given the general nature of humanity, the only way there will be world peace is if we use the plutonium firecrackers. No war after that.

Nope, that sort of happened and we're still warring. Only a complete asteroid wipe out of humanity will work.

Also, OP no-one cares and sent your stuff to random peoples mail boxes

Can I have your stuff?

Despite the futility and way of going about it, I still sympathize knowing it's yet another APAC player leaving because of the near-unplayability of the game.

 

You guys get that most of these complaints from them are because the game is unplayable, and not because they necessarily dislike the same game you like, right? They're willing subscribers that got screwed over by bean-counters who deemed them expendable. They would be here paying money to keep the game going if they were getting the same experience you were getting in your lucky position living next door to the servers. Lucky you that you get to live close enough to the new servers that the game isn't a damn slideshow on low settings.

 

They didn't choose the position they were forced into. I know I'd be just as mad if the game I've poured so much time and money into over 7 years and was running on low/manageable server lag until the server merge that I had nothing to do with or ever asked for caused the game to be unplayable for me. In that situation, I still loved the game and wanted to keep putting money into it and keep playing, but something 100% out of my control happened to cause it to not be playable.

 

But blame the player's frustration in this situation on the player, right? EA did APAC right in this situation? Keep going after the player in these threads, by all means.

But blame the player's frustration in this situation on the player, right? EA did APAC right in this situation? Keep going after the player in these threads, by all means.

 

It's natural for the pack to attack a dissenter. It's sort of like a man in an opium den suddenly yells out, "hey this opium is awful I am done with it!" Naturally the denizens of the opium den will respond with "give me your stuffs!" and other non-empathetic responses. They only care about the fix their getting, not the fix you are not.

But blame the player's frustration in this situation on the player, right? EA did APAC right in this situation?

 

Just a quick clarification and this is by no means meant to dismiss any specific larger points: EA had nothing to do with the data center stuff. People often (and perhaps understandably) over-estimate how much EA (a publisher) has to do with individual divisions. It's often very, very little. And that includes things like this, which come out of a cost center budget and are negotiated with via a project and product team so as to determine how to use the budgets they have.

 

That budget primarily comes from revenue and that revenue primarily comes from how well they maintain, support and promote their game so that players will spend money on it. None of that is necessarily dictated by EA. Other parts of the budget come from cost center allocation that EA would distribute among all of its divisions and, within that, studios.

 

The data center consolidation and migration by Bioware was predicated upon two main things: a smaller population thus a desire to move to fewer servers and the cost of data center residency, which has spiked quite a bit. There's also been a lot of shutdown in data centers as a whole, industry-wide, which has led to spikes in prices as fewer options (relatively speaking) are available given certain needs.

 

Those two aspects coincided with yet a third thing: a desire to spend more budget on graphical updates for the engine and better hardware that can handle sharding, better solid state storage, as well as simply replacing hardware that was becoming outdated. Reducing costs around data centers always helps with this because it reduces your operational overhead over time, reduces compliance issues, eases auditing issues, reduces monitoring costs, eases replication and somewhat simplifies failover initiation.

 

To be sure, none of this is me saying that how this was handled did right by many players. I realize that's going to be heavily dependent upon how much someone was impacted.

 

But, again, none of that was mandated by EA nor forced upon Bioware by EA. The studios are largely autonomous (for better and worse) in terms of the decisions they make. They do, of course, have to report to EA how the budget they are allocated is spent and how that will, in turn, impact revenue and costs. This is why it's critical to have a product team that can serve as a "north star," as it were, for the project team (one part of which is the development team).

 

More often than not, it's the product team that should be getting some of the flak for internal mis-management, not the publisher. It could certainly be the case that the product team, when reporting to EA, was told by EA that they should find ways to reduce costs. This would have been in an effort to have revenue exceed expenses, which is what all companies do who have shareholders. (It's pretty much what all companies do who want to make a profit; and that's just about all of them.) So Bioware's response to that was -- at least in part -- to do what much of the industry is doing: a data center consolidation strategy.

 

And that ends my wall of text that no one asked for!

Edited January 30, 2019 by Kryptonomic

Just a quick clarification and this is by no means meant to dismiss any specific larger points: EA had nothing to do with the data center stuff. People often (and perhaps understandably) over-estimate how much EA (a publisher) has to do with individual divisions. It's often very, very little. And that includes things like this, which come out of a cost center budget and are negotiated with via a project and product team so as to determine how to use the budgets they have.

 

That budget primarily comes from revenue and that revenue primarily comes from how well they maintain, support and promote their game so that players will spend money on it. None of that is necessarily dictated by EA. Other parts of the budget come from cost center allocation that EA would distribute among all of its divisions and, within that, studios.

 

The data center consolidation and migration by Bioware was predicated upon two main things: a smaller population thus a desire to move to fewer servers and the cost of data center residency, which has spiked quite a bit. There's also been a lot of shutdown in data centers as a whole, industry-wide, which has led to spikes in prices as fewer options (relatively speaking) are available given certain needs.

 

Those two aspects coincided with yet a third thing: a desire to spend more budget on graphical updates for the engine and better hardware that can handle sharding, better solid state storage, as well as simply replacing hardware that was becoming outdated. Reducing costs around data centers always helps with this because it reduces your operational overhead over time, reduces compliance issues, eases auditing issues, reduces monitoring costs, eases replication and somewhat simplifies failover initiation.

 

To be sure, none of this is me saying that how this was handled did right by many players. I realize that's going to be heavily dependent upon how much someone was impacted.

 

But, again, none of that was mandated by EA nor forced upon Bioware by EA. The studios are largely autonomous (for better and worse) in terms of the decisions they make. They do, of course, have to report to EA how the budget they are allocated is spent and how that will, in turn, impact revenue and costs. This is why it's critical to have a product team that can serve as a "north star," as it were, for the project team (one part of which is the development team).

 

More often than not, it's the product team that should be getting some of the flak for internal mis-management, not the publisher. It could certainly be the case that the product team, when reporting to EA, was told by EA that they should find ways to reduce costs. This would have been in an effort to have revenue exceed expenses, which is what all companies do who have shareholders. (It's pretty much what all companies do who want to make a profit; and that's just about all of them.) So Bioware's response to that was -- at least in part -- to do what much of the industry is doing: a data center consolidation strategy.

 

And that ends my wall of text that no one asked for!

 

On the contrary, I appreciate the clarification. Either way, though, the overall point stands that the APAC players were shafted and I don't think it's right to pile onto those players for something that was out of their control and their frustration is understandable.

On the contrary, I appreciate the clarification. Either way, though, the overall point stands that the APAC players were shafted and I don't think it's right to pile onto those players for something that was out of their control and their frustration is understandable.

 

Frustration is not exclusive to APAC players. People pile on anyone who expresses critical or negative comments whether it's due to APAC-related issues, gameplay issues, bug issues, story issues, etc. on these forums.

 

The way people behave is when something doesn't impact them, then it's not really a problem. Hence the lack of empathy on behalf of those who support and actively play the game.

 

The majority of complaints coming from players have absolutely nothing to do with them or their personal choices but everything to do with choices the SWTOR team has decided to make.

On the contrary, I appreciate the clarification. Either way, though, the overall point stands that the APAC players were shafted and I don't think it's right to pile onto those players for something that was out of their control and their frustration is understandable.

 

Frustration is understandable, but the OP has been causing a ruckus more than once. They've ragequitted numerous times already and shortly thereafter continued to troll. This poster explains it well:

 

A week ago, I read OP's last ragequit thread, as seen here: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959767. To its credit, it was mercifully short.

 

Then two days later, the OP made a thread about chat filtering (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=959836), and Porsa pointed out that it was a bit odd for the OP to care about chat filtering when he was leaving the game anyway. OP responded with this pompous line about how he was advocating this topic for the betterment of the playerbase, even if he wasn't around to enjoy it. Both posts got deleted.

 

OP continued his noble campaign to enrich the playerbase by trolling the Arcann thread (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=9696902#post9696902) which OP apparently edited at some later point, and in general, not leaving or telling anyone else that he was leaving.

 

And that brings us up to speed to now. I usually dislike looking into people's posts, but as this all took place in the space of a week, and as I read OP's increasingly embarrassing posts at the time he made them, I think it's justifiable.

 

My sub expires next month. Apart from the occasional 90 day referrals and maybe a resub if there's an expansion, I'd prefer not to resub, [but you never know], so I have no definite plans to return. When I leave, I'll just leave. I won't make a big production out of it, because contrary to OP and others, nobody who's staying really GAF why you're leaving or how, except for the lols. At least you accomplished the latter, OP.

 

Do I have sympathy for the APAC players? I absolutely do and it really is unfair that they've just been cut off from a decent connection that way. In my opinion there were different ways to go about it, simply closing the datacenter not being one of them. I'll gladly support any movement to restore the datacenter so that the APAC players can get a normal connection again, because frankly, it's a very stupid decision to shut yourself off to a part of the market that way.

 

However, this particular case is different and while I can imagine the thread is fueled by frustration, there are other ways to go about it. This is not the way, this is not how you can gain results. What does Bioware or EA care if the OP quits the game or not? There will be someone else to replace them. If you want to change something, you actively try to convince people why you think your idea would be good for the game and try to build sympathy as well as support for it. Ragequitting (multiple times) is not how you garner sympathy or support for anything.

Edited January 30, 2019 by Ylliarus

Yeldah

 

can not agree more with your statement I know heaps of people who are now feeling your way some have now stop playing this game some are on play station 4 others have gone to XBOX playing some really interest games.

 

Like my 2 Brothers who stop playing this game in 2011 when it was going very much down hill they got sick of the developers only taking notice of those who cheated they have never returned to this game and ditched all ties to EA, Bioware who they blamed for the problems that cost them money and made the game very unhappy for them.

 

I had this discussion with them the other day I show them how this game is now and they said pull you money its crap, the only good thing they said about it was at least there is a new planet.

Frustration is not exclusive to APAC players. People pile on anyone who expresses critical or negative comments whether it's due to APAC-related issues, gameplay issues, bug issues, story issues, etc. on these forums.

 

The way people behave is when something doesn't impact them, then it's not really a problem. Hence the lack of empathy on behalf of those who support and actively play the game.

 

The majority of complaints coming from players have absolutely nothing to do with them or their personal choices but everything to do with choices the SWTOR team has decided to make.

 

I live in Western Canada. The game is slow and lags for me too. I don't undervalue his problem. What I lack sympathy for is people who ragequit dramatically [as if there's any other kind] twice in a week.

 

I lack sympathy for other things too, but to go off Yillarus' point, it's mainly based on how they present themselves. So the other day there's a thread about a guild perk that's showing up in pvp, and obviously a bug. I pvp so the issue is not unimportant to me. The 'strategy' they decide upon is to spam the forum with identical threads because apparently that really helps! That is just one way of how you turn someone who may have been sympathetic, deeply unsympathetic. Yes, let's spam the forum so our niche pvp issue will take center stage. Good thinking, guys!

 

Your point is that ultimately BW is to blame. It sure is. My point is that if you have a big, available target for people to direct feedback to [say, a once well-loved and now increasingly incompetent subdivision of EA], it seems really dumb to set yourselves up as a target in their place, by doing something likely to piss people off MORE than they're pissed off at the bigger target.

The majority of complaints coming from players have absolutely nothing to do with them or their personal choices but everything to do with choices the SWTOR team has decided to make.

 

I would agree. And while I have no specific love or hate for EA, I want to make sure people understand that the core of the problem truly is from the Bioware team itself when it comes to SWTOR. And it's problems of their own making. If anything -- and I know this would probably be an unpopular point of view -- my concern is that EA is not stepping in enough with Bioware.

 

And I do believe -- but cannot prove -- that this hands-off approach has colored EA's focus on other Star Wars titles. They are very gun-shy when it comes to a team (as part of a studio) creating a new Star Wars game because the contract, which ends in 2023, will be something that both EA and Disney have to renegotiate. And given that reality, from EA's perspective a multi-year development cycle that leads to a game that may be more costs than revenues has to be concerning.

 

I want to be clear: I'm not a shill for EA. EA has done plenty to earn some bad will among gamers. But in some ways they kind of have the problems that the ancient Romans had. They basically took over but allowed everyone to practice their own beliefs, as long as they paid their taxes and didn't rebel. Studios within a publisher often have that same kind of freedom. For better ... and worse.

 

Consider this statement from Patrick Söderlund, of EA: "We can't afford to make similar mistakes."

 

He was referring to the lootbox issues with Battlefront 2. A lot of people blame EA for all that. But DICE general manager Oskar Gabrielson actually had quite a bit to do with the "selling" of the idea. In one statement he said: "We've heard the concerns about potentially giving players unfair advantages. And we've heard that this is overshadowing an otherwise great game. This was never our intention. Sorry we didn't get this right."

 

Notice that it was DICE who got this wrong. Yes, EA got the flak. And yes EA was the one that ultimately reversed the decision. But the incorporation of the idea and the mechanics behind it were part of the product team at DICE.

 

Anyway, too much of a tangent. Sorry. My point was that I believe Söderlund's quote reflects a much wider sentiment of Star Wars within EA. And I do believe that, in many ways, some EA decision-makers wouldn't mind having the license removed from them as it would take away a lot of concerns about how to effectively monetize games for such a popular franchise.

I understand where you guys are coming from--but I feel the frustration others feel because I know I'd probably be even more frustrated if it happened to me, and I see the way a lot of forum posters react to that and it only makes that person feel worse, and EA/Bioware gets to go about shafting people that like their game because they know the original complaint will be drowned out by people ridiculing or minimizing the complaint/complainant for several posts and sometimes pages.

 

I get where you might think the OP and similar thread-starters might be "trolling" but I really don't see it that way. I don't think they're trying to get a rise out of their audience in these cases just for the kicks. They like and want to continue to play, just like us who are either content or willing to look past or simply don't do that aspect of the game causing problems. But it mostly gets treated like "good riddance; I got mine; who cares about your problems; you're just a whiny troll; we don't need you or your money" like Lhancelot alludes to.

 

I see it less as trolling and more as desperation because any complaints INCREASINGLY fall on deaf ears and some people are looking for an outlet in a desperate attempt to find a reason to stay with the game that they, especially in the case of APAC players, didn't want to leave.

... but I feel the frustration others feel because I know I'd probably be even more frustrated if it happened to me ...

 

Absolutely agreed. One of my biggest frustrations with the Bioware team is watching them, year after year, simply not seem capable of learning how to engage with a community. Even with something like the data center move: perhaps this was simply in the cards and nothing we could say would do a thing to change it.

 

But there are ways to manage the communication with a player base that is going to be impacted by this. Not just the player base that is most directly impacted but also ... the rest of us! The rest of us who might be losing even more of the game's population as a result; the loss of good will many of us might feel on behalf of others, even if we're not impacted.

 

The same applies to the oft-stated problems of bugs that simply seem to live on forever, with little or no acknowledgment. Or the lack of concern for feedback on PTS. Or the lack of (apparent) concern around sentiments being expressed around gearing.

 

These are the "death by a thousand cuts" kind of things that absolutely tarnish and corrode the relationship between the player base of a game and the people who provide the game. The original

 

The original poster said "Your sneaky business tactics and disdain for your customers is going to be the end of you" and while I'll personally hold off on the sneaky business tactics part, the notion of disdain for the customer is a perception that I think most of us could agree is a valid perception, even if we disagree on the extent of its impact.

I live in Western Canada. The game is slow and lags for me too. I don't undervalue his problem. What I lack sympathy for is people who ragequit dramatically [as if there's any other kind] twice in a week.

 

I lack sympathy for other things too, but to go off Yillarus' point, it's mainly based on how they present themselves. So the other day there's a thread about a guild perk that's showing up in pvp, and obviously a bug. I pvp so the issue is not unimportant to me. The 'strategy' they decide upon is to spam the forum with identical threads because apparently that really helps! That is just one way of how you turn someone who may have been sympathetic, deeply unsympathetic. Yes, let's spam the forum so our niche pvp issue will take center stage. Good thinking, guys!

 

Your point is that ultimately BW is to blame. It sure is. My point is that if you have a big, available target for people to direct feedback to [say, a once well-loved and now increasingly incompetent subdivision of EA], it seems really dumb to set yourselves up as a target in their place, by doing something likely to piss people off MORE than they're pissed off at the bigger target.

 

You are completely right about this

I live in a city where protests are very common--and there's no easier and quicker way to piss off the people who would actually agree with your point than to block them in their vehicles in any way on the street/highway. They're actually more likely to run you over at that point without a care in the world than even mutter "good for you for standing up for your convictions"

 

Same deal here--blaming/hating/minimizing the person complaining or the argument they're making, even if you agree with it, simply because they're doing it in a way that you don't agree with. In this case, you don't like the "spam" in the discussion threads (that move less and less frequently every day, so...what's the problem for you?) much like the driver in the luxury SUV doesn't like being blocked from their ten-minute drive to McDonald's by people protesting fairness in whatever social issue that actually has importance in the real world, and will literally start pushing people with their vehicle and get cheered on by idiots watching that on TV.

 

Now I know this is just a discussion forum for a game that isn't real life and you might personally never actually cheer for the ******* "pushing" protestors out of the way, I'm just saying it's a similar situation where everyone starts ignoring the argument and it gets minimized and forgotten and never solved in a vicious cycle that is perpetuated more by the person willfully getting angry over inconvenience/method of the messenger rather than the problem itself.

 

*I'm using "you" generally, because this phenomena is hardly unique to you

Absolutely agreed. One of my biggest frustrations with the Bioware team is watching them, year after year, simply not seem capable of learning how to engage with a community. Even with something like the data center move: perhaps this was simply in the cards and nothing we could say would do a thing to change it.

 

But there are ways to manage the communication with a player base that is going to be impacted by this. Not just the player base that is most directly impacted but also ... the rest of us! The rest of us who might be losing even more of the game's population as a result; the loss of good will many of us might feel on behalf of others, even if we're not impacted.

 

The same applies to the oft-stated problems of bugs that simply seem to live on forever, with little or no acknowledgment. Or the lack of concern for feedback on PTS. Or the lack of (apparent) concern around sentiments being expressed around gearing.

 

These are the "death by a thousand cuts" kind of things that absolutely tarnish and corrode the relationship between the player base of a game and the people who provide the game. The original

 

The original poster said "Your sneaky business tactics and disdain for your customers is going to be the end of you" and while I'll personally hold off on the sneaky business tactics part, the notion of disdain for the customer is a perception that I think most of us could agree is a valid perception, even if we disagree on the extent of its impact.

 

Agree very much. How many customer blow-ups would have been minimized or simply eliminated if the communication had simply been more up-front and transparent?

I deal with this a lot in my occupation where bad things can happen, but because I'm up front about the situation and let them know exactly what I'm going to do to fix or improve the situation they leave with a good impression 99% of the time (and some people are simply baffled because they believe, like in other places, they're going to get screwed over by my mistake and they are expecting me to do what other bad companies do and either blame them or ignore them or simply not fix my error. Who does that sound like? )

You are completely right about this

I live in a city where protests are very common--and there's no easier and quicker way to piss off the people who would actually agree with your point than to block them in their vehicles in any way on the street/highway. They're actually more likely to run you over at that point without a care in the world than even mutter "good for you for standing up for your convictions"

 

Same deal here--blaming/hating/minimizing the person complaining or the argument they're making, even if you agree with it, simply because they're doing it in a way that you don't agree with. In this case, you don't like the "spam" in the discussion threads (that move less and less frequently every day, so...what's the problem for you?) much like the driver in the luxury SUV doesn't like being blocked from their ten-minute drive to McDonald's by people protesting fairness in whatever social issue that actually has importance in the real world, and will literally start pushing people with their vehicle and get cheered on by idiots watching that on TV.

 

Now I know this is just a discussion forum for a game that isn't real life and you might personally never actually cheer for the ******* "pushing" protestors out of the way, I'm just saying it's a similar situation where everyone starts ignoring the argument and it gets minimized and forgotten and never solved in a vicious cycle that is perpetuated more by the person willfully getting angry over inconvenience/method of the messenger rather than the problem itself.

 

*I'm using "you" generally, because this phenomena is hardly unique to you

 

Not really sure how I'm completely right when your argument is the total opposite.

 

So tell me, how often has a ragequit thread spurred BW to fix x issue? A discussion forum is not real life, and doesn't behave according to real life rules. It's one of the things that pisses me off when people make analogies to restaurants or shoe stores as some kind of comparison to videogame developers. There's no comparison.

 

The pvp spammers MAY have a viable strategy, though I'm highly skeptical. What I think spam threads mainly do is draw players' attention [rather than the devs] to x broken thing, persuading them not to bother with it until it gets fixed. That's the main thing I took from the many Ossus threads: hold off on playing it until BW fixes it, whenever that might be. Of course, this is a subset of the players who actually read this forum, meaning it's probably not enough to form a statistical blip big enough to concern BW.

 

I think there's an irony here to call for better communication from the devs [which I certainly agree with], but to excuse and minimize rage threads. Player communication evidently doesn't need to be improved, eh?

Edited January 31, 2019 by Ardrossan

Do I have sympathy for the APAC players? I absolutely do and it really is unfair that they've just been cut off from a decent connection that way. In my opinion there were different ways to go about it, simply closing the datacenter not being one of them. I'll gladly support any movement to restore the datacenter so that the APAC players can get a normal connection again, because frankly, it's a very stupid decision to shut yourself off to a part of the market that way.

 

However, this particular case is different and while I can imagine the thread is fueled by frustration, there are other ways to go about it. This is not the way, this is not how you can gain results. What does Bioware or EA care if the OP quits the game or not? There will be someone else to replace them. If you want to change something, you actively try to convince people why you think your idea would be good for the game and try to build sympathy as well as support for it. Ragequitting (multiple times) is not how you garner sympathy or support for anything.

Couldn't have said it better myself. The replies aren't just the pack attacking any dissident, it's calling someone out.

nevermind. Edited September 12, 2019 by Lhancelot

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Breathe in …. slowly … Breathe out … slowly !

 

Nothing changes.

 

Breathe in … slowly … Breathe out … slowly !

 

Patience !

 

Breathe in … slowly .. Breathe out … slowly !!

 

All that anger, disillusionment .. disappointment and misdirected bitterness !!

 

Breathe in … slowly … Breathe out … slowly !!

 

But why ? And for whom ?

 

Breathe in … slowly .. Breathe out … slowly !!

 

To what end ?

 

Change ?

 

Endurance ?

 

Lasting creativity and genuine growth.

 

Thank You

No one at bioware will miss this one person.... but remember 1 person is 1 more person, and swtor loses more subscribers than they gain year after year. Last I heard that hadn't changed.

No one at bioware will miss this one person.... but remember 1 person is 1 more person, and swtor loses more subscribers than they gain year after year. Last I heard that hadn't changed.

 

Nice necro.

 

Also, I was kind of a dick in this thread, sorry guys.

Lol at the responses. Not surprised, OP may have been a bit childish but the replies almost embody why this forum has become so dead and the utter failures of "Electronic Atrocities" (lmao) and BioWare to properly manage a game in one of the most successful IPs ever. A loud quitter is still a quitter, you could just leave these threads to rot without response but that definitely can't be a thing, even while the game marinates in its own ragu and heads toward another potential disaster.

No one at bioware will miss this one person.... but remember 1 person is 1 more person, and swtor loses more subscribers than they gain year after year. Last I heard that hadn't changed.

 

This would be true except it isn't for the OP. They keep coming back, if they even actually quit at all.