Interesting article on SWTOR

HA! :d

OMG and that Obiwan pic .... ROFLMAO! Why havent I been linked to these jokes yet? You guys have failed me ... *force choke*

Like with anything people only go online to vent their negative emotions. Anyone who tries to get in a few positive remarks gets burned to the ground by everyone else. It's the same with product reviews; people generally only write something about a product when it's negative. You're hoping to prevent people from buying the product that way. When you have a positive experience with a product you generally don't take the time to write anything about it, because you're happy and content.

Another thing is the fact that people who actively post on the forums are generally only a small part of the actual population playing the game.

I think both sides have some good points.

Yes the game is incomplete, but who should be surprised by that? As many have said, no MMO is complete at launch and it really is impossible to be. You could beta test a game for 5 years and still find issues, not to mention in that time all of the content will get old and the player base will get discontent. The best you can hope for would be a game that is fairly polished and a dev team willing to work on improvements...and I think that is what we have here.

Yes the game was over hyped, but, again, who should be surprised by that? Bioware has been extremely successful and this was their first attempt at creating a MMO. A SW MMO on the back of their extremely successful SW console games. Bioware could have done basically no advertising and this game still would have been hyped before launch.

Yes the game could have more endgame content but do remember what this game was supposed to be about. It was about the story! The SW experience! That is what this game was sold on, not the vast amount of raids and other end game content. This is probably the single biggest problem in my opinion, people that bought the game for x, y, and z when it was meant to do a, b, and c and. Most people simply don't want to acknowledge that a game they want to play may not be for them. PVP and raids were NEVER supposed to be a huge part of this game and it was never advertised as so. If that was the kind of game you were looking for, you had plenty of warning and should have chose a different game.

The other side has some points too though.

Bioware has made some very interesting decisions to say the least and the mod team doesn't do a particularly well job...though a lot of that goes back to people buying a game that wasn't designed to do the things they want. The decision to only launch in North America at first was probably a poor decision but perhaps necessary for a relatively smooth release. As much as I like people being banned for abusing content, I think more time should have been spent on fixing the problems rather than penalizing the customers. Certain areas/aspects of the game do seem broken or unfinished but I am not sure waiting to release a planet or game system until it is fully functional is better than releasing it in stages?

The point about the forum being full of SW fan boys and WoW haters has some merit as well. I too was a long-time SWG player that was somewhat hoping to have a similar but better experience. I accepted long ago that it would not be a sandbox type game and that space combat would be a very small part of the game, two things that disappointed me but the game had/has plenty to offer.

That said, the conduct on the forums really is astonishing, though not all that surprising. I haven't been playing MMOs as long as many here but it seems to me the communities get worse with every game that is released. There is a big difference in honesty and rudeness. I read a few quotes here and in some of the other closed threads about the subject and saw several people basically saying that honesty was about upsetting people and that just isn't the case. You can be honest without being rude and hateful. These games thrive off of strong communities and we are only hurting ourselves (and Bioware of course) here. The more splintered this community becomes, the less chance the game has to be successful because it will take millions of active, dedicated players for the game to survive. Sure it could still become a very good game with a terrible community but eventually that will destroy a game just as fast if not faster than issues with the game itself.

SWG was unfinished, this game was playable to max level right out of the gate. It had a few bugs here and there but this game was the best MMO launch I've experienced in more than a decade of online gaming.

The biggest problem now days is the player base expecting perfection from day 1, and that will never happen simply because the scope of an MMO is so large that every contingency can't be thought of, let alone covered.

People need patience, something sorely lacking in today's "Want it NOW" society. If you don't like it, you have the option to go do something else. No one is twisting your arm and telling you that you have to keep playing MMO's.

They deserve what they are getting.

They absolutely blantantly ignored the players. Which has long been the modus operandi of Bioware, and especially EA. A match made in the blackest of hells.

They are shocked that PVP was so important to the players....considering I was one of the first 1000 people to register on these forums, I can say unequivocally that the only reason for that is that they refused to listen to the huge multitudes of the people pre-beta asking for it and suggesting ways to do it.

They somehow managed to reach the conclusion that the people that played SWG and loved it til Sony stuck it in and broken it off....didnt know what they wanted....refusing to learn from others mistakes...how quaint.

I could almost forgive them for that, except they actually had the audacity to try to hype this game as having "Open world PVP"....as anybody can tell you, their ....open world pvp.....could very well be the poorest excuse of open pvp ever done in a game. The open world PVP is a freaking open Zone PVP....one Zone and they go out of their way to keep the factions apart both ingame and out of game.

They went out of their way to fragment and seperate the playerbase from each other. Like the golden rule of MMO's is to have people together not intentionally seperate them.

I could keep going...but it is just obvious that someone at Bioware should have taken a MMO 101 class.

Nobody expected it to be perfect, but gosh darn did they really screw the proverbial pooch on a fair number of things.

Just imagine how much more polished this game would have been if 1.2 was the release.

A good chunk of the negativity wouldn't have existed.

lol, waited along time to say that I bet. (Why not say first 100? or 10?)

Did they ignore the player base? Or did a segment of the player base ignore what the game was supposed to be?

You know if you are on the market to buy a new vehicle and you really want a SUV, you shouldn't buy a car. You go to the lot and test drive a car...care salesman asks you what you think and you say "What I really want is a SUV. If you could make this car a SUV, it would be perfect." The company takes the feedback and designs a sporty package with stuff like a trailer hitch, bike rack, reinforced suspension, etc. and you decide to buy it. Well don't be disappointed when the car still isn't a SUV. If you wanted a SUV, go buy a SUV.

Bioware advertised this game on story, on the SW experience. Beta was basically a test drive where everyone could see the direction of the game. I understand what you are saying about the thousands of people that would have loved to have a PVP based SW game but that was NEVER the intent here. I was here maybe 20 minutes after you and there were a lot of things that I wanted this game to be too. If PVP was really that important to me (or sandbox features and an in-depth space element in my case), I simply would have bought a different game...certainly wouldn't have thought I could change the direction that late in production.

The PvP isn't so good (CC'd to death should never happen), and the RvR is terrible (considering Bioware have run WAR for 23+ months now and have much of Mythic).

That honestly isn't whining, it's the truth, I can't understand why they carried almost no lessons over from WAR PvP/RvR-wise.




The Devs themselves seem to have completely abandoned the idea of RvR for the foreseeable future with 1.2 as well.

Ultimately many of the expectations came from the immortal words of 'we can't talk about that'.

If when asked how story would interact with the MMO element of the game and told you might get an e-mail about something you did then this would have stoped people thinking that MMO and story would be intergrated.

When asked how they would explain a trooper taking down a Jedi we were told well the Jedi will just be a basic jedi but the trooper will be the best and most highly trained. Turns out the JC was more powerful in the force at 5 than his master. Doesn't sound that basic, if Bioware had just said we aren't then people wouldn't have expected anything else.

The list goes on and on about things people formed expectations about cause the communication wasn't clear.