I see that several people posting in this thread here have the same concern as me: story. My biggest concern is that the feature of SWTOR that Bioware constantly talked about leading up to the game's release has now been all but shelved. This would be a disaster for the game, because I think cinematic story-telling is still the strength of the game and of Bioware. I worry that Bioware may be changing the direction of game more toward a "gear grind" or a more typical MMO in which story is a minor feature for people to play around with when they aren't doing hardcore raiding or PvP. When the lead writer suddenly left, that did a lot to reinforce this concern. I thought SWTOR was going to be different, but I'm concerned that we're getting on that same "treadmill" that I have seen in so many other MMORPGs.

If Bioware does want to keep the class stories going, why haven't we heard about any plans for it? Bioware reps have said that Makeb will not have any class story content, so this leaves folks like me concerned about the future of the game. I'm sure the planet-story for Makeb is great, but that's a poor substitute for extending the class stories, and the longer it takes to get new class story content, the less connected we will be with those characters. I'm already starting to forget a lot of details about the first character I played to level 50.

Going F2P is not a bad thing, but I think it is bad how BioWare is doing it. I doubt people who left might be happy with how it will be for them as preferred and I am not sure how many new players might join when almost every gaming website writes about how stupid they think it is to charge for quickslot bars.

I understand that BioWare has to make money, but it looks like they are greedy. I guess F2P members will not feel welcome here, and probably just leave instead of buying stuff. There are just to many F2P games out there which are welcome players who pay nothing much more, and the players know that, but BioWare acts like they are oblivious to the rest of the market.

And still the topic of server population is left out?

 

Sad to see this overlooked- I know its pretty much only an issue on the RP-RPG server, but its one that is now SERIOUSLY effecting the game play of those still there...

 

As a paying customer I demand there be a resolution to this issue before FTP comes out... FTP will NOT solve the issue for the 50 - post game lack of population.

 

-Seifan

unless you are on Oceanic servers, i wonder what the problem is with server population, europe has a healthy population, whith the PvE and RP servers at top, yesterday i even saw that there were more people on the RP server then the others. haven't checked on US servers, but looking at comments in other threads theys eem to be doing fine too. (please correct me if i'm wrong on the US part, but last week i saw a thread with a guy giving a good sum up of how the servers stabilized after the super servers, it was in that topic they said only oceanic seems to have problems)

2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

I love this.

Subscriptions are the number 1 reason people leave. Wait, there are still 9 million people paying a sub for WoW.

Stop deluding yourselves.

Two things I'm looking for basically for the leveling experience. One was stated earlier, but different areas to level or different planets so each new alt doesn't have to do the same quests, over and over and over. I'm leveling my fourth 50, and I just can't stand doing the same quests.

Maybe it's wrong to compare, but I had this feeling about WoW too, and tbh, i feel more 'into' the quests and story then i ever felt in WoW, so imo the questing has been done fine, doing all the quests on a planet overlevels you way too much anyway, so can easily skip the most annoying ones and bonus quests if you want. I just finished my 5th lvl 50, 2 imp side, 3 rep side, and i must say that even on my last one i did some quests that I havent done before (missed them maybe, or went off planet sooner) or don't remember anymore, incombination with the different class quests it did feel different for me, though i can imagine if you lvl a guardian and then a sentinel, the story will feel the same and gets a bit dull.

The other thing that would make leveling so much more interesting, actually have the quest lines of each faction cross paths a lot more. I never see Imperials while I'm leveling cause their quest lines take up one half of the map, and mine take up the other half. You just don't run into each other unless you wan to explore, but then you take the chance of running into lots of the opposite faction which doesn't usually end well.

On planets like Tatooine, Hoth, Belsavis, Voss and Corellia i encountered alot of people from same and opposing faction, didn't have problems with that at all, in fact, i still go to Voss lmost every day, just to do some hunting while farming scavenging/bio mats. On Voss there's even a quest that send you to the imperial camp (on rep side) to go check it out, they aren't that far at all.

And don't end well? what do you mean? are you one of those that speeders up and runs when seeing someone of opposing faction? then i might have killed you a couple times - love to pull you guys back with my Vanguard

Oh, and Lag and Crashing... Lag spikes are unbearable at times. There was a time a couple days ago, where no one on fleet on our server could basically do anything. You couldn't move, running in spot, and couldn't click anything. All you could do was type in general for 30 seconds at a time, multiple times. Then there's the crashing.... since 1.4, I have crashed every single day I have played at least once. Usually it's not during boss fights in operations, but it does get annoying cause it takes like 5 minutes to load the game back up each time.

On this I can't say much tbh, the only lag issue i have is the corellia spaceport, fleet is doable depending on several factors though. If i'm in the first instance on fleet and game hasn't finished loading everything, then it does lag for me, probably because gfx are still loading, but when everything is loaded and all people arround me show up, the lag is mostly gone, with a stuter here and there, but definately not worse then Dalaran or Stormwind in WoW, if i'm in the second instance on fleet it mostly is smooth as butter.

unfortunately you seem to have a rly bad experience with the game, i can only speak for me and a rl friend of mine (we play together most of the time, and he plays on a budget laptop, i play on a 3 year old high end pc) when we, except for some minor issues like blaster fire coming from everywhere but our gun, we have almost no issues with the game.

seeing Mr. Hickman mentioned they are adressing the lag issues again, i guess things will slowly get better, and i hope your expecience will know better days too.

edit : i forgot to comment on the loading, that's something that took kind of long for me too, when i still had fullscreen mode, also gave me problems with alt-tabbing etc. a couple of days ago i switched back to windowed mode, and the game loading goes alot faster now, and no probs anymore with alt-tabbing. I agree that there shouldn't be a difference, because it's the same game, but to work around some loading/crashing issues, this might be worth a try.

Nice post, keep them coming was a good read. I do however have something I would like to mention..

2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

 

3. The frequency of our Game Updates was way too slow. People were leaving because we were not releasing new content fast enough to keep up with the pace at which it was being consumed.

I feel these 2 points are part of the same problem. I very much doubt people dislike paying the monthly fee, I think it is more that the service you guys offered at the time did not justify paying monthly because there were many features missing at launch that were patched into the game later, it is getting better but still not quite there yet IMO, and people simply thought, this game is not worth the subscription fee. Free to Play won't solve the big issues of the game unless you release content on a regular basis(including class stories) and improve gameplay(i still see input lag and animation stuttering/delay esp on Jedi knight)

World of Warcraft has over 10million players who are more than happy to pay a subscription fee, wouldn't they be suffering the same problem if people did not like paying?

I LOVE this game, so much so that I can overlook the issues because I played KOTOR and have a love for the environment BioWare have created. I don't want the game to suffer due to people leaving because you are looking at the issue from the wrong perspective.

PvP, mr Hickman? What's your problem with that?

And when are we going to see either Open World PvP(Never because of the performance issue) or 3v3/4v4 Warzone matches?

I wuold like to ear from you one thing... why you have so much content inside the game that is not possible to gain. This is a really big mystery for me...

Last thing... i dream to work at BW as dev... !!!!

All I really want to know is ANY information on SGRA. We were told that they would be in game within the year, but the end of the year is quickly coming. Can we still expect them before January?

Given the history of the topic, I doubt you can answer anything, but I'll ask anyway.

forced me back to World of Warcraft

 

Lol

World of Warcraft which is such a noobish game

U are comparing swtor with wow have u gone mad

+ they have said they are trying to improve the buggs and the problems so be patient

 

No one wants to know u went on World of Warcraft No one care !!!!

 

And as far as the graphic problem is concerned use this link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibJPMeFcdZc

 

It will increase your fps until they are improving it Enjoy !!!

Do you guys (all of you, not just some of you, but everyone who is involved with the game) play it? Who are your characters? I imagine you couldn't tell us because you'd get mobbed in game with /whispers about pet issues. But then again, who's to say you can't just run a flashpoint, tell the group you're a dev, looking for issues with THAT flashpoint, and let them show you outright the specific things that they see on a daily basis and have them show you? You'll get a taste for class performance pretty quickly that way also.

I personally don't want them to go say 'hi i'm a dev and come to play with you', i'd rather have these cool situations like i experienced in wow, where you are doing a dungeon or a raid and suddenly something weird happens, and a dev pops in, doing some funny stuff etc, maybe setting a challenge for that goup, a dev interaction ingame can be so much fun like that time where we were turned into leper gnomes dancing all the way to the lich king lolz, suddenly he started spawning hordes of 'hoggers'

My subscription is running out and the game is already uninstalled. When browsing Massively I learnt that SWTOR Executive Producer released "state of the game" and thought to myself: "Maybe they will finally say something true". Not that I care about this game anymore (I moved to much greener pastures) but it always strucks me that they try to repeat the same LIE again and again.

I won’t get to everything all at once, but I’ll try to hit some of the big ones, and talk about these topics as openly as I can.

And here I thought I would hear something SINCERE. God, was I wrong.

I’ve devoted my life to MMOs and the people that play them, and have some cool tattoos to prove it:

Aren't tattoos with failed games logos like old girlfriend tattoos?

1. Our game is awesome. People love it and want to play it.

It is OK for a while. When you go deeper it fails on many levels. It is obvious that during those meetings something else happened than everyone saying "the game is awesome". EA bosses told you: "The game is underperforming, we won't pour anymore money to it, go free-to-play and Jeff you will be controlling the damage".

2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

You underestimate the IQ of human species.

3. The frequency of our Game Updates was way too slow. People were leaving because we were not releasing new content fast enough to keep up with the pace at which it was being consumed.

Whoaaaa, a TRUE statement, well done. Partially true because that was not the only reason.

People leave for a lot of reasons

Probably. Who cares? People see the results and the results are layoffs and less people to work on the game. Doesn't sound very promising for the future.

We employ hundreds of QA professionals to ensure that our game is high quality, but sometimes bugs get through.

LOL. I mean, seriously??? It would be enough to hire 16 QA testers to find the Denova bug and Warzone 7/8 backfill bug.

Hundreds are really not needed. You should spend those vast resources you spend on QA elswere. /sarcasm off

Topic #3: Oceanic populations. Are we doing anything about them?

Never concerened me but I have seen what is your modus operandi with server populations and basically I can sum it up as "keeping your head in your ***".

To sum up - I don't see a point to those state-of-the-games because they don't give people hope the game can be better. They confirm you will deny the problems and spin what really happened. I don't know where it will lead you but I'm guessing not to a good place since it hasn't work for couple of months now.

Thank you Jeff for writing this. I appreciate the state of the game series.

However, I'm going to second others in that I believe F2P won't solve your problems. Personally I am not even thinking twice whether or not to continue subbing, because of the limitations of the F2P account. I will either sub, or I will leave completely. I suspect I'm not alone in that.

I have noticed the game improving, although extremely slowly. I hope you can keep going and reach the state that WoW had where the sheer amount of content was enough to keep people interested, even if it was linear content.

I hope you would pay more attention to little things too, as opposed to only the next operation.

My little list of things I hope get fixed:

- crafting window filters for searching recipes are buggy and useless. You should also add a search by name feature there, so its easy to confirm whether or not you have certain schematic/recipe before buying it off GTM. Better yet, add that check into galactic market itself.

- in the galactic market, it should be possible to filter what the crafting schematics produce, as in, the level and difficulty of the item in the schematic etc. Otherwise trying to find a schematic that you don't already own from the sea of recipes that the market search considers equal is a royal pain.

- please add new customizable gear APPEARANCES. Changing non-customizable gear into customizable feels like a band-aid. While somewhat nice, it doesn't help my inquisitor since inquisitor doesn't have properly good-looking gear PERIOD. I want new gear that I DON'T HAVE TO grind endgame hardmode operations to get. And I do hope you did fire the artist behind the endgame gear.

- Add more craftable gear that companions can wear. Several of the otherwise decent looking gear that my synthweaver can craft for example is locked to a class, meaning companions cant wear it.

- There are long-standing graphical bugs that still make me angry whenever I see them. Such as the "sitting in the air" glitch when you fly to a different star system aboard your own ship (I suspect that t here is a non-visible sitting animation that's taking place offscreen when the player activates the starmap, and if he exits the starmap or activates travel to another system before that animation is finished, the character will end up at a random place or something. The other annoying bug that has been herre forever is the companion lightsaber glitch, where the companions put a lightsaber to their belt without deactivating it. This happens at least aboard the personal ship.

Ok, I want to take this piece by piece. Many have sited much of what I'm about to say, so I will be brief on such things.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and finally have the opportunity to get it started.

Please, don't insult my intelligence. As my Father used to say, "If you really wanted to do it, you would have found the time." In between leveling 10 toons to 50, being GL of two guilds and maintaining their websites, working a full time job, and raising two special needs children on my own, I still find time to blog.

Topic #2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

As many have noted, it's not the cost, but the cost to value ratio. I'm sure many of those who left still have subs to other games. I know I do.

Topic #1: Staff: Why are some developers leaving The Old Republic™? How will the game be affected?

I've found a handful of these at best. Many times they are mixed in with other subjects, most notably Topic #2.

Topic #2: Bugs: How does testing work? Why do bugs get through? Why did Game Update 1.4 have so many of them? What are we doing to improve the process?

Posted dozens, if not hundreds of times. Should have been number one. The response:

As a side note, we finally got a lock on the last of the major issues from Game Update 1.4 and appreciate your patience with that one.

leads me to ask: So you got the lock, when are you going to fix it? I hope you didn't mean to imply that it was fixed. It's not.

Topic #3: Oceanic populations. Are we doing anything about them?

That was an obvious response. And as an issue, I have seen in twice on non-server specific forums. The other two at least were all over the General and Customer Service ones.

So in summation, you really didn't research this all that much. It's evident that someone is just blowing smoke up your skirt somewhere in the chain of command. Failing to realize that this game is nothing more than a single player game with a multiplayer option has cost you. Many of the people who left, did so because they realized that. The subscription cost was just their inarticulate response to your questions.

The game was rushed out the door, as evidenced in the progressively declining quality issues in each successive planet. The latest request on what we would like to see in the game, moddable gear, is nothing more than a ploy to find out what we would be willing to spend our money on in the CCM. Before that, the Cathar. A race that will probably be able to be purchased as well.

I have no problem supporting a game when it earns it. Being a Star Wars fan and understanding that this game is(for all intents and purposes) in a public beta test state is all that keeps me going. Not these half-baked responses to community ire.

For your next blog, I suggest that once your staff collates the data of the Forum "Hot Topics", you go and look yourself. It doesn't take much time to speed read some postings to glean from them the veracity of their claims. Maybe even throw a thought out there from time to time, just to let us know you are watching. Just as I have come to know many of these people who post regularly, you might too. It's easier to be real when you know someone.

To this last point, pay particular attention:

Put yourselves in our shoes from time to time.

It's something my old boss made me do. He made me sit down and be the customer. He made me listen, watch, and experience what the customer does. In this, he asked me, "Is this how you want to be treated?" Consider that the next time you are out having dinner, or going to the store, taking the car in to be serviced, whatever services you do. Then take your responses and paraphrase them to align with the poor service rendered. Then think on that.

Is that how you want to be treated?

Add me to the list of people who want to know the hows, whys, and whens of Same Gender Romance Arcs.

I have kept my subscription open to SWTOR, but I am mostly playing RIFT at the moment. Why is this? It is a combination of factors, the lack of communication regarding SGRAs being one of them.

Right now, my problem with SWTOR is that I am not a raider or a PvPer, and I have two characters at level 50. Aside from grinding dailies (which is not my idea of a fun time), there really isn't much for me to do at the top end, and I'm put off levelling any more alts because I just can't take levelling through the non-class quest missions a third time. I suppose I could just play the other side through to 50, but I have a Republic level 40-some alt, and many quests feel like re-coloured and re-badged missions from the Empire side.

Also, I'm put off by the idea that in levelling my three main characters as far as I have, I may well have missed out on SGRA with them when they're finally introduced. This also effects my desire to level more alts, I am worried that if I level any more characters any higher than I already have them (most of my alts are in their 20s, some are lower on account of the new character slots that were more recently added), they, too, will miss out. So I'm in a stalemate right now as far as play is concerned.

Another concern is the population state of the Oceanic servers. I was always dubious about the idea of locally hosted servers for the Oceanic community (especially when they weren't available when the game first went live in December 2011), and while I love my sub 50ms ping times to the current servers, I'm pretty sure that the solution to this problem will only come when we're folded back into the US server farms. I do not want to be merged into the RP and PvP servers, because I know if I were an RPer or a PvPer, I'd want to keep my server type - I would have rolled on those servers because I wanted to RP or PvP, and the fact of the matter is - if anyone's being stripped of their server types in such a merge, it will be the non-(pure)PvE servers. I am also dubious about the idea of a single locally hosted super server - I doubt it would be worth the amount of money Telstra would try to squeeze out of EA/Bioware to run it. (If the Oceanic servers had been available when the game released in December 2011, we might not be having the population issues now, as we'd have pretty much all rolled on them right at the start, and not ended up being split by the separate release in March.)

Then we come to the lack of variety in levelling content, which I touched on when I talked about SGRA above. I am an alt-o-holic, and when this problem is combined with the lack of communication regarding SGRA content - it's very frustrating for me to keep playing. (Here's a hint as to why I'm playing RIFT right now - RIFT has multiple levelling paths for both factions, and they aren't just copy-paster versions of the other side's missions (except in neutral areas, of course)).

so I've been in on the consumer side of the business for 12 years now. also starting with daoc.

were you the person that thought buffbots were a fine idea because everyone had to pay 2 subscribtions in order to compete ?

do you realize I did not touch warhammer because I never wanted to touch a mythic product after that ?

with free to play, well that might also not be for me. I am going to have a close look at what you do.

daoc, ea, the industrie has a reputation for exploiting more than they are entitled to. compared to a baker, he makes a bread and earns a fair price for that bread. what you always are trying to do is to exploit more than you are entitled to and betray your customers where ever you can.

dont get me wrong. earn your money, make a living and profit but don't cheat.

the bugs: don'T you have a PR guy that can correct you on the ******** you wrote here. there is no army of QA'ers. you can't afford it and the bugs are the result. how on earth can someone not notice all the bugs with 1.4. how can someone not notice that the gunslinger sounds of the ability he uses the most are a mess, how can the army of QA'ers not notice in weeks what one person notices in 5 minutes.

then the bugs persist for another few weeks without even being acknowledged as such. I still ask myself whether the charged burst change was intentional.

and last but not least: not delivering enough content in a themepark mmo is a newbie mistake mr-twelve-years-in-business. blizzard was surprised about the pace at which the consumers finish content 6 years ago, you simply arent allowed to be surprised in 2012 if you had made your math.

Dear Mr. Hickman,

As a first thought, someone at Bioware MUST finally realize, that the company needs it's policies regarding communication changed. Most people in the community feel that even when a Bioware representatives talk, they say next to nothing. Being so secretive has had a huge negative impact on the game, and still does.

Pre-launch we were so hyped up, but knew so little about the game. The huge blanks were simply filled by our imagination. So when we found out that Bioware went a different way then what we thought was the only logical one, we were really upset, and people started leaving.

Now, we never really know what is happening. We know there will be a new race, planet sometime this year, we have known this since summer, with no ETA. People were expecting HK and the rest with 1.4 because of this type of communication. We don't know what kind of work your developers are doing on the engine, where are they now, what kind of problems are they facing.

There are some project I've been following for years that are absolutely open. We know what the separate people are working on, where are they at, what will they work on next. And the communities are way more forgiving and patient. It's like heaven and hell.

The perceprion of the game is not only influenced by what is happening in-game.

And some major problems that I personally would like you to talk about:

1: Massive performance issues since launch. Why isn't TOR using the power graphics cards and multi-core CPU-s provide? Why aren't you supporting DX11, and are you working on a 64bit client? The fact that people have to use a 3rd party app (SWTOR Unleashed) to get somewhat proper performance is a huge shame on Bioware.

2: What is the state of things people have been begging for since launch? Like chat bubbles. Hood-toggle. Why -not even in the cartel shop - won't Jedi finally get some hood-down versions of the jedi robes/armor, if the hood toggle is for some weird reason beyond your programmers capabilities? This question has never been answered, we got hints that the art pipeline has to be changed for that... if it does, your art guys made some terrible choices. But never a word on simple hood down versions of the in-game robes. (low level, because playing a JK this way simply sucks)

3: What happened right before the big beta weekend? There were so much more armor models in game, that were simply removed before launch. They did not clip, nor have any other issues, and looked super cool. Why were they removed, when are we getting them back? Please see this thread: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=541885

Huge, huge shame Bioware.

4: I'm against Dual spec, but many want it. Any update on that?

5: Any plans to make the game play less linear?

The perception of the game will remain bad after F2P if you don't change some policies. Policies are not the LAW. And frankly, if you want to be open, you will sit down, and in about an hour answer all of the questions - properly !!! - that we have since the Launch of the game.

We're working with Jeff to be able to provide consistent, regular updates for this column. We haven't quite nailed down the cadence yet, but definitely look forward to more than just a few per year.

I always like to see articles like these. Thank you.

 

I find that the frames per second are at times very low for the type of video card I have. I use an Nvidia GeForce GTX 670. With everything set on maximum and at 1920x1080 resolution it is for the most part supposed to be around 110 FPS. Places like the fleet I notice 20 or less FPS at times. That is a significant drop for a card of that magnitude. It chops and clips and lags. On other MMO's I do not have any problems at any time whatsoever in the FPS department. Only SWTOR.

We were discussing this the other day in our guild, as we have some guys still playing wow and other mmo's, what might be the cause of low fps at times (read fleet or higly populated areas) could be because of the diversity in gear. In WoW endgame most peopel have the same gear, because that is the endgame gear (well, transmogrification changed that a bit). Which makes that when, for example, if you have 100 people wearing e.g. 6 different sets will load faster (less lag) then when you have 100 people and they have a wide mixture of items, which all have to be loaded, itemization in SWTOR is so divers, with orange gear combinations, that there is so much more to load in from the people around you. I remember the Blizzard devs makinf a remark about this explaning that when you had lag in dalaran, it was because of the people in your neighbourhood had more divers gear, that caused lag, because of all the items that have to load in from the server.

so whenever i have lag on the fleet, i always see it as there being a lot of people with divers gear, which is nice, if i rn around on fleet, you see people running around in all sorts of combinations of gear.

Thank you very much for your post Jeff!

I am a pure pvper at heart who has played both Daoc and Warhammer online. So, PvP is what i am going to adress here.

(a) FoTMs can be really annoying. They get countered in rankeds after a short while, but class stacking (even by accident) in normals can be really frustrating, especially for those undergeared. Add that certain advanced classes (commando especially) has been neglected for quite some time now and you will probably see for yourself that class balance needs work. Feel free to check the PvP forums for some nice ideas buried under rants.

(b) Ranked Warzones. There are some issues there, mainly that competition is limited to 2-3 guilds per server. As much as i like the guys behind the enemy toons, it gets boring to see the same ppl over and over. Eventually you know their moves and the game is decided on who makes the fewer mistakes. The fact that each server has one or two hardcore PvP guilds left per faction makes it rough for new guilds to form up and start playing ranked. And why should they, they will get the gear anyway and after that, there are no rewards. (Remember how many people your RvR reputation patch, 1.1,brought into the RvR lakes in WaR? Its because people got an incentive to play) So, imho Ranked WZs, aka the real PvP endgame needs cross server quing and it needs it fast. Also, there is an issue related to class balance, which more or less limits you to practically one team set up. Thats annoying too!

© Resolve. I am fully aware that CC can be dispelled and that i can CC as well, not only get CC'd. Having said that, i think that you should really look back in your Daoc and WaR solutions to Crowd Control immunity. I liked them, unlike Swtors system. I understand that you wanted to make CC system more rookie friendly and i have to admit few ball carriers in Huttball get full resolve before leaving the pit nowadays, but its really easy to abuse with little coordination. You should really look into how long a character can be disabled if stuns are used correctly. Which isn't really nuclear physics.

(d) PvP Options. To begin with, there are too few warzones in the game and sadly i am dissapointed by the "Khaines embrace" for dummies upcoming warzone. I am fine with copying WaR scenarios in swtor, but seriously, get one of the cool ones (Battle for Praag, or the Maw of Madness. Even Nordenwatch was better Designed than Alderaan Civil War). However, no matter how fun the warzones can be, nothing compares to solo or 4man group roaming in an open pvp location, or to an epic outnumbered defence of a location. Having said that, i strongly believe that Ilum was really poorly designed, to an extent it was a horrible place to have fun with friends. No shrines, no bunkers (keeps) to defend or ninja cap, a really Vast map with few choke points without any true strategic meaning since the opposition could just run around them, swtor maginot lines. It goes without saying that there will be a zerg in outdoor pvp, but its frustrating when your only option is to zerg at 1 fps/hour. Ilum ended up a matter of numbers, whoever had more, would spawncamp the enemy till they got their daily/weekly done. WaR wasn't like this and thats why its orvr was amazing. So, hopefully you are revamping Ilum. Please consider adding some objectives that can be defended and make it so people will want to hold/cap it, instead of running to the next one. Oh, and add collision already.

Really hope you amaze us with the upcoming patches! Keep up the good work and thanks for your time making the post

2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

 

3. The frequency of our Game Updates was way too slow. People were leaving because we were not releasing new content fast enough to keep up with the pace at which it was being consumed.

Lol you failed at the second sentence! What a pity, but the reason why people leave is not subscription.

Firstly thanks for doing this it's always nice to hear what the devs are thinking. A few comments on your statements from the perspective of an altoholic pve player if I may.

1. Our game is awesome. People love it and want to play it.

The class stories are awesome (well mostly) and the world storyline are awesome the first time round. Unfortunately the way the game is designed you effectively have to wade through the world quests on every single character. I haven't rolled a smuggler because I just can't face the Republic act one class quests for a third time.

However the game as opposed to the story is repetitive and buggy - mostly buggy.

This would be less of a problem but it is exacerbated by the terrible customer service provided with both response time and problem resolution being something of a bad joke.

2. The subscription requirement was driving away huge numbers of people who do not want to commit to paying monthly.

Because people felt it wasn't worth the money which is not the same as the instinctual aversion to the subscription model the official statements (including yours) appear to blame for the games current woes.

Whilst I am still subscribed looking back at the updates released for the game up to 1.4 it is certainly difficult to see any content in them that justifies a subscription apart from the group running HM ops as mostly what the updates introduced was bugs most of which still have not been adequately resolved.

The only meaningful content updates for sub 50s has been the legacy system and I'm sure that you are aware of the consensus opinion regarding the legacy system.

3. The frequency of our Game Updates was way too slow. People were leaving because we were not releasing new content fast enough to keep up with the pace at which it was being consumed.

True enough although I would argue that part of the problem was, and is, your continual failure to meet self imposed deadlines - like the one you're about to miss now coupled with frankly the new content just isn't up to scratch.

Adding a new tier of ugly as sin sub 40k ripoff armour and an operation to grind (and grind and grind) it in certainly isn't a type of game update I'm willing to stay subscribed for long term.