Devs at the latest cantina: Class Story, not at the moment...

The bottom line is that the game is still relatively young, so fans of all different kinds of content feel like they're getting shafted. It will all grow over time. But, being honest, class stories are the thing that people should be able to yell loudest about when asking for new content. Not saying it will happen, just saying it's the most legitimate gripe.

***edit*** Oh, yes, it will happen, though.

He's not making a claim. He's explaining the fallacy when people they throw out what they KNOW is best for game, when only sampling a very small portion of the data.

Young? Hmmm....2-1/2 years isn't exactly "newly released"...

They're all right to feel like they're getting shafted. GSF is the only thing that's gotten attention for the past few months. I happen to love GSF but I'm well aware I'm in the minority. No crafting, no Ops, no PvP, a horrible FP...the game has stagnated.

It's gone through long stretches of stagnation too, first with the turnover from when the original team got mostly laid off to the new one picking up the pieces and finally getting Makeb to us, and then what will be an entire year in april in between any sort of story-based questing content whatsoever minus the one time quest on Oricon and intro-outro scenes to daily areas.

Thanks for taking that single line from my post and not understanding the rest of the content

I'll just put it here again in the hope that without the opening line it's more understandable and less likely to cause a knee jerk reaction.

Class story is made to a much higher standard than the rest of the content, a so called 'Gold' standard. I recall the world quests were made to the same standard but the fact that all classes on a faction will run through them diminishes them slightly.

All future content for levelling will be rated against the best memories of levelling which invariably comes from the class stories.

However from a development process you need to herd so many more cats to get the 4 classes per faction to hit the same beats and have the same breaks as all the other classes. Not to mention that most people I have had the pleasure of gaming with in SWTOR feel class story is something they want to do alone.

Not to mention a few other aspects many of my friends have had against the class stories. It doesn't feel like their character, it's Bioware's. The choices just aren't meaningful enough.

I commend Bioware on the class stories, it was brave to put out a single player game with a few mmo activities tacked on into the heavily populated MMO genre. But ultimately I think it creates too higher expectation of the content to come (and this was the reference to the Albatross I was going for).

While not wanting to set expectation too low I am old enough to set my sights at more realistic targets. Bioware will have the metrics, and it will show how many players get a character to the end of their class stories (of the 9 gamers I joined SWTOR with only 2 of us got to level 50 (end of class story) with at least one character and now I'm the only one still playing) and how many players get multiple characters to maximum level across both factions. I would also hope the metrics are advanced enough to see how those character get to that end point. Do they quest at a leisurely pace or are they pushed through as quickly as possible with maximum use of the spacebar.

It should be off those metrics that future decisions are considered.

If the greater part of the player base only get through the story on one class (or at best one class per faction). Then it benefits the game as a whole to put out less class specific content and more faction specific content.

Agreed. I was hopeful at the end of 2013, but we're back to the same old pace of ULTRA slow. It is what it is...but it costs them players.

My general feel is that EA knee-capped them in terms of development staff, hence the pace.

What's sick is that the funds pulled in from the cartel market were supposed to be able to cover costs to help speed things along and get more bodies working on the game, but it doesn't appear that way.

It's too bad, because the game really could benefit from having just an extra questing team of people added to it.

No, 2 1/2 years is definitely not "newly released," but it is young for an MMO. An MMO that has had a good deal of expansion (IMO)since launch. Plus, you really have to discount the first six months because they were still fixing and implementing everything that should have been in at launch, were it not so rushed.

Yes, all gripes are legitimate, but only Class Story fans can say that there has literally been nothing added in that aspect since launch. Again, not saying that it will ever happen (it will), but if that's your thing, you have a very powerful set of legs under your argument.

We can only guess the team size based on what we see come out at release. But what I see seems to indicate multiple content teams working in parallel. Completely ignoring Cartel Market stuff, they seem to have had the following tracks running in parallel:

1) GSF
2) Housing / Guild Flagships
3) All the content they described in the latest roadmap

That feels like a decent sized team to me. Could be wrong, this stuff could be a lot easier than I imagine.

People will counter with Makeb and a whole lot of non-questing story, which is why now I try to be very specific and use the term "Questing Story" or storylines now - to make it clear what the expectation is.

I really wish bioware had one more team dedicated to quests - just a small team of maybe 3-4 people, who's only job it is, is to create smaller quests to be released all throughout the year and maybe tie into whatever the big release is that year. Not looking for anything excessive or extravagant - just something to keep questers who have hit 55 busy until the next small batch of quests hit. Would certainly help, since it is going to be over a year (potentially WELL over a year) before the next batch of significant quests actually hits live.