An Appeal to Bioware Regarding Operations Difficulty and Design

just wana point out the dev said trolling

Now imagine having 100 players that you have to make content for and, 1 of those players demand you dedicate significant amount of time and make content especially just for him (that other 99 dont care for at all), because he claims he is a special snowflake and if he leaves your DM-ing will be"epic-fail"

Would you do it?

I love it how people make this '1%' claim without defining it. Either they are subsuming a broad and diverse playerbase under a single label... or they have the belief that virtually every player of these games is a bumbling idiot. I suppose if you consider the playerbase in general to be a bunch of incompetents people shoudl be more offended.

A few points:

1) The content is already made - no one is asking for content to be made for the hardcore crowd only. We are simply asking for Bioware to make use of the 3 difficulty settings and tune them such that the hard and nightmare modes represent a challenge. This does not lock anyone out of anything. Everyone still gets to see the end game content at varying levels of difficulty.

2) Your examples are massively exaggerated. If you can show me any statistic that says there are 100 casual players that actually raid for every 1 hardcore raider I'll retract that but I think the chances of that happening are abysmally small.

3) If the only thing for us to do is simply "roll an alt" I can't see this game retaining many long term subscribers. A large number of people simply have absolutely no interest in doing this and, even for those that do, if the only re-playability in the game lies in rolling alts the majority of the game's subscribers will move on to other things within 2-3 months. SW:TOR promised a decent end game and has the system in place to deliver such. Large numbers of people, myself included, bought the game based upon this. If the game's developers have no intention of delivering this kind of content I'm okay with that. I will feel that I was mislead but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it and will simply move onto another game that doesn't mislead its customers.

Patch 1.2 will be the real test for SW:TOR. I'm eager to see what happens because I really think it will be a make or break point for this game.

I'd like to see people actually define their 'casual' and 'hardcore' modifiers. More so people who claim to be representing '99% of the playerbase'. Because they're just subsuming the vast and diverse playerbase under a singular mantle of 'casual' in a means of projecting 'virtue' rather than as a concrete argument.

I posted earlier as a casual player who wants there to be a difficulty level that I can't achieve based on my limited time input. Will you please elaborate on the theory that one tier of incredibly difficult raiding makes the game less fun and enjoyable for those who do not have the time to finish it? I understand that an inordinate amount of resources should not be put into content that only 1% of player base will undertake. However, they are not clamoring for special snowflake status, and I've been pleasantly surprised by the lack of "epic fail" type language in this thread. The end game pve model that Bioware adopted is made up largely of raiding. They did a pretty nice job in their first attempt at it, however, raiders have come here to state that they would like to see an added degree of difficulty that comes in the form of mechanics, not just more health/more damage. In all honesty that type of difficulty is just a gear check, and caters to the no lifers you so strongly despise.

Finally, and most importantly, the hard core raiding community are the vast MAJORITY of people who test end game on the PTR. This tier of raiding is incredibly buggy. It was Bioware's first shot at it, and in all honesty I think they did a pretty good job, especially due to the fact that are dealing with a myriad of issues on top of raid bugs. However, they have at their disposal a group of people who are totally willing to test all of that content and provide bug feedback on every imaginable strategy and sequence of events that will happen in a given fight. This is an incredible benefit to casual players when they get to end game, as I can attest that beating the bugs on HM SOA is hard and it is frustrating. I have limited play time, and I want to fight bad guys not rng, and a strong group of hard core raiders who play test a good bit of upcoming raid content can help insure that.

Just read the OP. Well-thought out. A post I, and I'm confident much of the raiding community, strongly supports.

At it's core, we need more challenging encounters that take days/weeks, NOT hours, to complete on maximum difficulty 16m.

The bugs are similarly significant. However, there has clearly been a marked improvement between EV and Karagga in terms of bug prevalence. Just please don't lose your ambition for introducing interesting mechanics because you're afraid of creating a few bugs, devs! Soa is very buggy at the moment, but is probably the most interesting of the encounters so far (I personally also enjoy The Annihilator Droid and Karagga).

I would add further comment, but Jinga presented all the points my guild have been discussing for weeks very well.

Nice speech pal, the only thing missing was a power point.

Right now I'll give you points for the 'duh' factor, everyone who cares about this already acknowledges it and I'm guessing has no problem agreeing with you.

So...cheers I suppose on your cleaning me of the five minutes it took me to pour through this redundant text.

/snark off

Yeah....dude, we know.

Thats besides the point since similar mechanics are already present throught a game, art is reused... "Just tuning it a bit to be at random person "Acceptable difficulty level" takes considerable amount of time.

Really? My examples are massively exaggerazed? Comes from a guy that havent thrown single hard number and uses descriptive words like "many" " a lot of" .... which mean absolutely nothing. If you prove that significant amount of players want this over something else i said already said ill agree with that. But you aint quite good at that.

Theres lot of replayability if you dont play 10+ hours a day. And guess what? 99+% doesnt.

And if you think that large masses think that "play same exact thing (raid) every week for x weeks till RNG gawds smile upon you to obtain some digital item that nobody cares about" is some kind of exeptional replayability you are mistaken.

For you maybe. For 99% others dont give any significance to "are nightmare modes in 1.2 a bit harder or not". BW has hard numbers and is toning down 16-mans. That should be quite an indicator for you.

Devs have already said that if playerbase start pushing NMs they will reconsider. Guess what? Playerbase just started pushing HMs.

Serious question. What DID the community members in '08 want then?

You say that they didn't want raids by a large majority, and from what I've seen they also don't want PVP as embodied by recent MMOs. So did they just want KOTOR3 with chatroom functionality? Not trying to be a dick, I'm genuinely curious what people thought this game would be.

On topic: The game when you get right down to it is reskinned WoW. Yes it has voiceovers and cutscenes and all that, and that's great, but it's only relevant while you're leveling. Once you hit 50 none of those things matter at all and you're left with the gameplay itself.

When you look simply at the gameplay at level 50, this game is a less responsive WoW, with less features and worse raids/dungeons. The state of raiding in this game doesn't surprise me at all, since Bioware has never done an MMO or raids of any kind. Their best bet is to go all in and copy WoW.

If you're going to have multiple difficulties, then they need to be mechanically different as well. The Raids should be tested on the PTR (which still has no character copy feature so it's no wonder nothing is properly tested). None of this matters at the moment though since their number one priority should be squashing the existing bugs in Master Loot, 4 man HMs and all all Ops difficulty levels.

2 months in and this is still not done, and in patch 1.2 they're adding significantly more features and code, which is sure to present more bugs. Bottom line, I'm sticking around to see how 1.2 pans out, but it had better be impressive or they stand to lose a lot of subscribers, including myself. With the "fixes" they've made to the GCD indicator over the last few patches, I have little hope that 1.2 will be the savior Bioware needs it to be.

Don't misunderstand though, this game will never need to go FTP, unless Bioware thinks they'll make more money with that model and microtransactions. The Star Wars IP has enough fans that this game cannot possibly fail, no matter how badly Bioware messes up the gameplay. SWG was a pile of **** after the NGE and it still made money, and would still be making money today if Sony was able to run it concurrently with TOR.