Unsubscriber's Thread: Tell us a few things

Since this is my final day with an active sub, here are my top five reasons for leaving:

1. Sterile worlds. The NPCs literally stand around and do nothing. On worlds like Coruscant and Nar Shadda, I should feel like I'm on cities that take up the entire world. I should feel like I'm on a bustling world filled with billions, if not trillions. Instead, I look at nearly empty corridors with one or two clusters of NPCs here and there.

And worse, when you have a crowd of NPCs, the cloning effect is ridiculous. I chuckled when I first went to the Dealer's Den on Coruscant and saw the line up of four female NPCs lined up in front of the bouncer all had the exact same outfit, face, and hairstyle. I assumed those were just place holders for replacement later on, but then I went to Taris, and saw more NPC cloning. And Nar Shaddaa. And Tatooine.

2. Lied to by developers. I remember the "twenty people beating up on a single large boss isn't heroic" statement. I also remember the "your personal Star Wars story" claim. And the "the trinity is something we want to get away from." "There is an orange, moddable set for every green set of gear in the game." "Choices have consequences." "Content will roll out on a regular basis." "There has been no change in the number of subscriptions." "We have thousands of gear designs, enough that each class fills an entire hallway." And so on. And so forth.

3. Puzzling design decisions. I remember Daniel Erickson making the statement prior to launch that the developers were told by the Producers "if you think you know everything about developing a game, forget it. The fans will let you know when you get it wrong." So, how in the name of all that is holy did they come up with things like the lack of customisation both during and after character creation? Or the lack of species choice. Or the lack of gear choices. Or the Giant Shoulderpads of Noob Pwning. Or the limited crystal colours. Or lack of customisation of ship interiors. Or Legacies that require you to share a surname across all characters, regardless of faction or species. Or the lack of things like mini-games. Or the ability to sit in seats that aren't in your ship. Or lack of realistic reasons to re-do flashpoints and dailies (which should have been easy for a company that prided itself on their story-telling abilities).

4. Dev arrogance. This is the big one, though. Everyone who was in beta remembers the infamous "sit the hell down and shut the hell up and just tell us about the bugs" post by Zoeller. That probably should have been our first clue. Erickson's "remember when Han and Chewie hopped in the Falcon and just dicked around" comment was another. The absolute refusal of the devs to talk to us after launch, though, is the worst. For God's sake, the SGRA crowd was asking for an answer to the question "Is it in the game or not" for two years prior to launch, and was completely ignored until literally five months before the game went live before being told "no." And they had to wait until the Guild Summit before getting any answer as to when they would be put in. Since getting the vague answer of "some time this year" at the Summit, they haven't heard a single thing about it. People asking about upcoming patch contents are ignored, the looking for group people were marginalised as "community destroyers" for daring to ask if the (then future) LFG would be cross-server, since servers were dead, and people asking for transfers and server merges were told they weren't going to happen because those were "a last resort" (which, as it turns out, wasn't so last as we were led to believe). Every body else was given the stock "we can't talk about that," "sometime in the future," "it's on the wall of crazy, but not sure when we'll get to that" answers that the developers knew annoyed the hell out of the community, but constantly used anyway. Even now, when questions are asked about the free to play details, these are still being used, despite the community team promising to improve communications. I suppose that's still better than the poor SGRA crowd. Those people are still being actively ignored by the developers and community team.

5. Free to Play. Needless to say, this was the final straw. If over one million people paying $15 per month isn't enough to keep a game fun, interesting, and engaging, I can't see how going free to play with even fewer paying customers is going to make things better. Even this might not have been enough to totally disgust me, had EA not pulled out the laughably pathetic "40% said they didn't want to pay a sub, so we're going to accomodate them by going free to play." I don't like having my intelligence insulted, and I don't like being lied to even more with the "we'll bring in new content every six weeks once we go free to play" shpiel they're trying to shovel onto us now.

So, that's it. I'm officially done. I can't see any reason for why I'd be back, either. To those who are staying, I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I hope this game lives up to what you want it to be, and that it continues to live up to what you find it to be. And I sincerely hope that this game survives past the next six months. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Still, who knows. Perhaps the rumours that the company who owns Bethesda having talks with EA are true. Perhaps EA might do something like sell Bioware off to that company. If that actually happens, maybe TOR can be rebuilt and re-launched later down the road, with all (or most of) those things the people who have left eanted in this game. This is just wishful thinking, of course, one that ranks up there with my dream of a hot tub party with Jessica Alba and Eva Mendes.

Since this is my final day with an active sub, here are my top five reasons for leaving:

1. Sterile worlds. The NPCs literally stand around and do nothing. On worlds like Coruscant and Nar Shadda, I should feel like I'm on cities that take up the entire world. I should feel like I'm on a bustling world filled with billions, if not trillions. Instead, I look at nearly empty corridors with one or two clusters of NPCs here and there.

And worse, when you have a crowd of NPCs, the cloning effect is ridiculous. I chuckled when I first went to the Dealer's Den on Coruscant and saw the line up of four female NPCs lined up in front of the bouncer all had the exact same outfit, face, and hairstyle. I assumed those were just place holders for replacement later on, but then I went to Taris, and saw more NPC cloning. And Nar Shaddaa. And Tatooine.

2. Lied to by developers. I remember the "twenty people beating up on a single large boss isn't heroic" statement. I also remember the "your personal Star Wars story" claim. And the "the trinity is something we want to get away from." "There is an orange, moddable set for every green set of gear in the game." "Choices have consequences." "Content will roll out on a regular basis." "There has been no change in the number of subscriptions." "We have thousands of gear designs, enough that each class fills an entire hallway." And so on. And so forth.

3. Puzzling design decisions. I remember Daniel Erickson making the statement prior to launch that the developers were told by the Producers "if you think you know everything about developing a game, forget it. The fans will let you know when you get it wrong." So, how in the name of all that is holy did they come up with things like the lack of customisation both during and after character creation? Or the lack of species choice. Or the lack of gear choices. Or the Giant Shoulderpads of Noob Pwning. Or the limited crystal colours. Or lack of customisation of ship interiors. Or Legacies that require you to share a surname across all characters, regardless of faction or species. Or the lack of things like mini-games. Or the ability to sit in seats that aren't in your ship. Or lack of realistic reasons to re-do flashpoints and dailies (which should have been easy for a company that prided itself on their story-telling abilities).

4. Dev arrogance. This is the big one, though. Everyone who was in beta remembers the infamous "sit the hell down and shut the hell up and just tell us about the bugs" post by Zoeller. That probably should have been our first clue. Erickson's "remember when Han and Chewie hopped in the Falcon and just dicked around" comment was another. The absolute refusal of the devs to talk to us after launch, though, is the worst. For God's sake, the SGRA crowd was asking for an answer to the question "Is it in the game or not" for two years prior to launch, and was completely ignored until literally five months before the game went live before being told "no." And they had to wait until the Guild Summit before getting any answer as to when they would be put in. Since getting the vague answer of "some time this year" at the Summit, they haven't heard a single thing about it. People asking about upcoming patch contents are ignored, the looking for group people were marginalised as "community destroyers" for daring to ask if the (then future) LFG would be cross-server, since servers were dead, and people asking for transfers and server merges were told they weren't going to happen because those were "a last resort" (which, as it turns out, wasn't so last as we were led to believe). Every body else was given the stock "we can't talk about that," "sometime in the future," "it's on the wall of crazy, but not sure when we'll get to that" answers that the developers knew annoyed the hell out of the community, but constantly used anyway. Even now, when questions are asked about the free to play details, these are still being used, despite the community team promising to improve communications. I suppose that's still better than the poor SGRA crowd. Those people are still being actively ignored by the developers and community team.

5. Free to Play. Needless to say, this was the final straw. If over one million people paying $15 per month isn't enough to keep a game fun, interesting, and engaging, I can't see how going free to play with even fewer paying customers is going to make things better. Even this might not have been enough to totally disgust me, had EA not pulled out the laughably pathetic "40% said they didn't want to pay a sub, so we're going to accomodate them by going free to play." I don't like having my intelligence insulted, and I don't like being lied to even more with the "we'll bring in new content every six weeks once we go free to play" shpiel they're trying to shovel onto us now.

So, that's it. I'm officially done. I can't see any reason for why I'd be back, either. To those who are staying, I sincerely wish you the best of luck. I hope this game lives up to what you want it to be, and that it continues to live up to what you find it to be. And I sincerely hope that this game survives past the next six months. I'm not holding my breath, though.

Still, who knows. Perhaps the rumours that the company who owns Bethesda having talks with EA are true. Perhaps EA might do something like sell Bioware off to that company. If that actually happens, maybe TOR can be rebuilt and re-launched later down the road, with all (or most of) those things the people who have left eanted in this game. This is just wishful thinking, of course, one that ranks up there with my dream of a hot tub party with Jessica Alba and Eva Mendes.