Say what you want, BW really is trying

I don't think I have really complained at all about things here, but occasionally, the repetitive ones really start to tick me off. For instance, every time I have to go reset my options back to the correct values, I rage a little bit inside and say, "How *********** hard is it to do something that simple? I am simply *********** sick and tired of having to this so often."

It's not a question of whether they are trying or not, because they obviously are, but I think the frustration from players sets in when they realize how long this game took to develop, the amount of $$ spent making this and with all that, it seems like its still in beta. Sadly, this game should be better than it currently is and we should not be plagued with all the simple problems that we have given the time and $ spent developing.

Do you have any idea how many MMOs out there have dev teams that don't even try?

Does SOE's ill-treatment of the SWG player base ring a bell? Rangers broken for multiple years until the solution was to take them out of the game. CH's told they would get new pets and then 2 weeks after the new pets were put out, NGE erases their prof from the game. Swordsman gimped for pretty much the entire pre-CU period... with whole entire skill boxes that were empty of new skills. Dancers unable to earn healing experience in theaters... for months and months. Whole zombie hordes of AFK macro-tainers that were allowed to stay in game for years until the CU made the entertainer professions obsolete. Addition of new planets that you had to pay for (Kashyyk) where they claimed there was content for every class, but then there was literally nothing but a new cantina to dance or play music in for entertainers. MASTER Dancers falling down on low-level dances -- falling down on their butts mind you -- not acknowledged for over a year and then told "working as intended".

And then there were the outright bald-faced lies from SOE. "The CU is here to stay," while they were already testing the NGE version of SWG. "Battle Fatigue will not be taken out of the game, ever." Removed in the very next patch. "Smugglers will be getting love next." Patch after patch, no love for smugglers.

So which would you rather do... pay $15/mo. to a dev team that is actually trying to respond to our concerns (and IMO, doing so in a timely fashion -- look how quickly they rolled out the cooldown animation options)? Or pay $!5/mo. to a dev team that completely ignores you, deletes 3/4 of the professions in the game, and lies through its teeth to you while doing all that?

I'll take trying over lying any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Haha! He wasn'y being positive, he was being condescending and patronizing.

I'm notoriously cheap, but it's really not the cost of the item but the value I think I'm getting for my money.

Products do not have inherent value just because they're inexpensive.

So what should they be doing? Do tell.

Chessack are you nuts!?!?!?!? ~panic~ SW:G WAS AWESOME AND PERFECT!!!

Phew avoided a 10 poster riot on these forums.

Yeah I know. I loved the game too. SWG had lots of great features. I played and loved my dancer from a few weeks after launch until the day NGE came out. Although she was completely worthless game-wise once the CU was put into effect (because she could no longer heal anyone of anything).

But, people seem to be looking at SWG with rose-colored glasses. Just compare how the BW devs are approaching issues to how SOE approached them. For example, the Droid Engineer class was completely broken from launch until March 2004. That's 9 months of a class that basically could not sell most of its droids, because those droids were not useful as originally designed. Just looking at the patch notes from the initial launch of the droid enhancement publish is hilarious. For example, "Combat Droids will have all the fighting functionality of a regular combat-capable creature" -- which of course means that before the publish, literally from July 2003 through March 2004, combat droids were NOT as good as combat-capable creatures.

And scroll down to look at some of the other patch notes having nothing to do with droids. Other gems in the same publish, and again remember, we are talking about what for TOR would be an early fall 2012 release in terms of time scale (9 months after launch):

"Dodge enhancing Food now decreases your chance of being hit." -- Why is this note in there? Isn't that what dodge enhancing food always did? Well, no... until the patch, dodge enhancing food.... did nothing. And notice that the Droid Invasion publish was so completely unsatisfactory, that in the VERY NEXT PUBLISH (April 27 2004, 1.5 months later), it's named "Droids Rebuilt" -- because they had to do even more to make the DE class viable.

That's two full publishes and 10 months of delays just to get the Droid Engineer profession working somewhat properly relative to other crafting professions like Bio-engineer or Armorsmith. Because before that, DEs were always broke, since nobody ever wanted most of what they crafted.

Never mind the fact that combat in the game was so unbalanced and broken that they could not figure out what to do about it, and ultimately had to scrap the ENTIRE system and build a new one (the Combat Upgrade), and it took them until March 2005 to do that, 21 months after launch. And all they did was make things so much worse, that they had to introduce another whole-game revamp in November of 2005 (NGE).

Throughout all this time... Scouts and Rangers were broken. Nothing was done. Swordsman was broken. Where's the Swordsman publish? Melee other than perhaps TKA was gimped compared to ranged. Nothing was done (their answer? "Don't bring a knife to a gun fight."). Musicians had bugged instruments like the Nalargon that were bugged for years and years and years.

Many of these issues were literally never acknowledged. And that was with an active "community rep" system where each profession had a representative that, supposedly, had a direct line of communication to the devs. If you could go back and read those old forums you'd see rep after rep resigning in frustration over the fact that they couldn't even get an answer to any of their questions, couldn't get a dev response to anything of substance. Chefs -- broken for months, food useless because it's so much weaker than Doc buffs but just as expensive (or more so) to make. Fixed only after months and months of forum complaints. And lets not forget the economy, shattered by the "dupe bug" which was that if you had say 50,000 units of a resource, you could split it to two stacks of 25k, log out, log back in, and you'd have 2 stacks of 50k. People repeated this over and over again until they had 10 billion of some super great resource, and then stockpiled it, never needing to buy it from anyone again.

And then all the AFK professions -- you could AFK master almost every prof in the game, including combat. This fact was not addressed for many months. That's right, for almost a YEAR, we couldn't even just get a straight answer out of the devs, despite reps of almost every prof asking it, as to whether AFK macroing to mastery was legal or not. And when they finally answered us, what did they say? "Working as intended."

Ponder that for a minute... They actually decided as a dev team that people setting the game on macro and going off to the movies and mastering their profession without even being at keyboard, was a valid and reasonable way to play their game. When, ever, has a dev team said this? At the same time in City of Heroes, which was run by a bunch of MMO dev novices, a few weeks after launch, when it was discovered people were AFK leveling, they put an auto-logout feature in to stop it, in an emergency patch that came out 48 hours after the behavior was first confirmed. And in every other MMO that I've played, AFK macroing is illegal. But in SWG... first, a year of not answering as to whether it's OK or not, and then, the answer is, "Yeah, it's OK to bot the game."

I'm sorry but there is just not even a comparison between how BW has responded to issues, and how SOE did. BW changed their CD interface not once but THREE TIMES in the first two months to try and help people better visualize their hotbar animations. Compare this with SOE, which I don't think ever once responded to a request to make the hotbar more user friendly -- and certainly not while I was playing the game.

Again, I'll take BW trying and maybe not always succeeding, over a cavalier disregard of players or the game that SOE showed not just in SWG but in every SOE game I ever played (which is why I refuse to ever play any SOE games anymore).

I'm not sure they are trying hard enough.

Look at the server merge thread. This has been an issue for over a month. Where is the action? Okay you can point out how hard it can be to merge servers, which is valid. But how long do you think people on dead servers will renew their subscription? I haven't even heard a peep on this.

There doesn't seem to be any definitive statements of action on multiple issues. For the first time, I think this game will fade badly. Launching without so many features that people expect (player transfers, cross server PVP, LFG finder), and the lack of quick response to bugs and low pop servers will be the death of it.

EA should launch an investigation into how the funds for this incredibly expensive game were wasted.

The problem with the server merge is you don't merge servers when you have more players coming in than going out....also a lot of the servers are overcrowded so Bioware needs to address that; I'm betting free transfers along with some type of bonus to the lighter servers will be in the cards soon.

The overwhelming majority of negative posts I'm reading on these forums seem to be written by people unfamiliar with MMORPGs or how they evolve, to that point where one may feel that they are describing a failed shooter such as "Call of duty", rather then a successful MMORGP launch.

The rest are so full of logical falacy, assumption, incorrect assertions, or proceed from a false premise so incorrect that they are difficult to read, digest, and reply to without leaning toward correcting the afore mentioned infractions rather then argue the points made.

There have been a few gems that did list valid issues to be addresses, but they are far and few between in this mish-mash of negativity and misinformation.

What we know at this point is that the argument can be made that this launch has exceeded that of previous games of this nature. We know, and most expect, that there are some bugs in the game. We know that none, at this point, are game breaking, and that most are of the minor nuisance level.

We know that the development team have stated their dedication to both the game and the fans, and we know that they have continually demonstrated that and are continually working to correct any issues at hand on a priority basis.

Really, making predictions such as "ftp by tomorrow" do no service, make no quality assessment, provide no useful information regarding anything that can be of use to the average player or the development team.

The game will sink or swim based on the dedication and ability of the developers. So far that is a very promising set of parameters.