I really like the game - but why I don't want to come back

It's only a grind if you make it a grind. Those unlocks aren't going away. They'll be right there, whether you get them next week or next year. It's only the "must have it now" mentality that makes legacy unlocks a grind.

If you play the game, you will get the money ... eventually. EA is not forcing you to grind out credits so you can have everything right now. That's a choice that people are making, but it's not a requirement.

If you do a little research on the new legacy crap you'll quickly discover that almost none of it is worth having anyways. e.g. The carrot is rotten.

Word. I wish you worked on the game though


Wow is fair more sandboxy (at least in vanilla) than swtor is too. There you had big worlds to explore and lots of quests in areas you didnt have to go to. Also you could progress through different zones when you levelled.

In swtor you go from plaent 1 to planet b to planet c when the story makes you. Worse than that you also have to go to areas within the planets. There is no exploring allowed. It really is a bizaare way to create an mmorg. It just feels like a single player rp game to be honest. Swtor = no exploring necessary

This would be a fair point if the game wasnt so damn linear. There really isnt much to do beyond what BW creates for you. And they didnt give you alot to do espicially at level 50.

Maybe - if you're a fresh MMO player. After a while, after a couple of different MMOs I tend to cancel my subscription once there are too many grinds. And I'm not the only one in that regard.

Exactly. I've yet to experience an environmental transition in SWTOR that wasn't behind a loading screen. I feel like i'm loading levels into the game, grinding the same stuff out (just because the quest setup and tear down is well-written, well voiced custscenes there's no reason for the quests to be so mind-numbingly dull and grindy; bombing runs on Gryphons from WoW, siege weapons, interacting with the environment, etc etc etc).

I just want Bioware to be braver. Take the current in-game event. If you reduce it down to what it is, it's a set of repeatable kill quests on one planet. Tattooine is in quarantine yet we can freely fly there; that's the perfect oppurtunity to introduce some fun new space missions (Pirates have setup a blockade to capture freighters fleeing Tattooine! Scramble! or We need you to run a blockade and take urgent medical supplies to Tattooine, this mission is off the grid). Bio nodes could have become infected, leading to the schematic for a cure or new stims, opening up crafting options for Biochem players. Bioware could have introduced varied, interesting action moments and opportunities with systems they already have in place.

Instead we get daily kill-quests.

I cancelled my subscription last night. I like TOR, mostly, but i'm not enjoying TOR at the moment. Let's see what 1.3 brings.

on one thing I agree: I wish BW would leave ea again. they are hurting BioWare a lot.
I will continue to subscribe SWTOR but I will certainly not buy another game from BW as long as that origin fiasko continues.

Sadly, the games are looking for the widest audience, rather than being satisfied with created a good game that may be a niche. With the wider audience, they cater to the least common denominator. And, as Generation Entitlement has invaded the gaming space, instant gratification and expectation of being rewarded for a lack of effort are becoming the norm. Unfortunately, as the standards are lowered for the lowest common denominator, games become too easy for others to master.

To some extent I agree with the original poster. But I'm still playing.

I wholeheartedly disagree that MMO's need grinds. The "oh, it's always been a part of MMOs" argument is self fullfilling. When you accept MMOs can't change - they don't.

"Linear questing is part of MMOs, always has been, always will be"... I give you GW2's dynamic world.
"Hotkey abilities are the core of MMOs, always have been, always will be"... I give you Terra's aim and dodge mechanics.
"Gold sellers will ruin your economy"... I give you Eve Online.
"Voice acting is too expensive to include in the WHOLE game, it's going to be limited to starting areas"... I give you The Old Republic.

EQ and WoW are not a statistical certainty. EQ found an audience. WoW had the existing customer loyalty to exploit it. Everything that came after was blinkered by WoW's success.

What MMO's have is a need to satisfy 4 distinct personality types (8 if you really want to go mad) and to keep those people who have very little free time on their hands entertained just as much as the people with lots of time on their hands.

Grinding is for 1.5 of those personality types, especially for the people with lots of time.

But imo, it doesn't have to be so. Someone with imagination and influence just has to find a new way of setting things up in such a way that grinding is optional, without creating a vacuum.

The original wow model was to have exponentially difficult content. Hard content was HARD. Some guilds never saw Naxx40. But at the time, that was normal. It was expected. Hard content required more preparation. More gathering. More crafting. Basically more time sinks. But it rewarded more prestige. "Guy in full Tier2" envy anyone? The expectation was that if you had a lot of time, you did the stuff that required a lot of time.

However, we now have this idea that everyone gets to see everything. Everyone, no matter how committed or time restricted should somehow get the chance to see everything and get most things.

Legacy rewards, imo, could replace grinding. Legacy is almost directly linked to time actively played. So make Legacy the grind - and make the rewards optional. Have daily quests - have them reward legacy. Each new tier, raise the legacy earned in everything except the new tier to allow players who aren't on the cutting edge the chance to buy those optional ship upgrades, quality of life things. Alternatively, have legacy points be earned on a diminishing returns basis - the closer you are the current legacy level cap - the harder it is to earn those points.

All of which is based on current ideas. Current entrenched ideas. Someone, somewhere is having a better idea. Hopefully those ideas will make their way into a game, preferably this game.

Wow... I don't think I've ever agreed with someone so much in my entire life.

I expected a lot from TOR, and it gave made good on a lot of those expectations... The only problem is, I think I had the wrong expectations.

The MAJOR problem for me is just how linear the game is. WoW had a massive world to explore when it was first released... TOR for the most part, has 2 separate level 1-10 areas for each faction, then you're forced to level through exactly the same planets, through exactly the same areas, through basically exactly the same quests, all the way through to 50. At least in WoW there was variety. I could level in 3 different areas at any given time, not one. It meant that levelling an alt was interesting, because you could see a lot of environments you might never of gone through before.

Not to mention the lack of world PVP. I don't know if it's just because the server pops are far too sparse, or whether the game was designed to play like this, but I have yet to encounter anything that even resembles Stranglethorn Vale in WoW. A shared quest hub, constant ganking and PvP occurring... Not to mention the sterile fleet environment, and the inability to raid any opposing factions town, unless BW allow you to, which 90% of the time you simply can't.

The main problem is that TOR is so incredibly theme park, it's just not scalable enough to build a long lasting 'world' for people to immerse themselves in. I've never been playing and felt really free to do what I want. Never been able to think... "What the hell, lets solo their fleet for a laugh", or "let's try and take down their transport droid". There's no option for this kind of freedom. All I can do with my game time is what BW wants me to do with it. Either do daily's, stale and unimaginative PvP, or repetitive Flashpoints. There's no diversity, no freedom. That is why this game isn't doing so well. Once you've seen the stories, got bored of the linear warzones, and completed all the FP's and OP's, there's nowt all else to do.

BW missed a trick here. They took every feature that exists in other MMO's (FP's, Ops, warzones, world PvP [Ha, Illum = joke], quests, crafting), added a story, but simply couldn't break free from their single player routes to create anything diverse. People want freedom from an MMO, and this doesn't offer that. There's no sense that you, as a play can make a change to anything around you, or affect anyone else's gaming experience, because, quite simply, you can't. You can affect your own game, and that's it. That's not very MMO imo, not very MMO at all.