Latest Badfeeling Podcast with Bioware Devs

IM returning, so not sure how to remark pvp content. Would it be possible to make a new server that could hold 500 players? If they were able to make new pvp content, why not a massive all out scale battle then? Have it mirror elder scrolls or dark age of Camelot in some way. How much would it cost realistically to get up an running, no clue... You could scale the battle to whatever size. Ex: you go onto planet x where there is a limit of 500 players. While on planet x you get scaled bonuses for taking out a turret or barricade or choke point. what happens is that is order to take out the choke point a mini battle starts and it queues up. there must be x amount of players and they must be on planet x to queue for it. It would be a persist nt battle. If a guild takes over choke point b, then that guild gets a bonus til it no longer has it. You would need to massively intensentivize the zone though.

My average long time commitment to a game is 3 years. After that I need to shoot stuff for a while and go back to battlefield. So the question is what is the life expectancy of players? Does the game already have enough to meet that life expectancy? Are the new players feeling as if they cant compete with veterans? I got to level 65 pretty quick, and havnt found it hard, so why would new players leave?


I know in any game I play, I say as soon as guild chat dies my guild is dead. My guild has been here for 2 years and a few of us are on discord, and a few chat and run things. There in lies an issue with Star Wars, its a mutt. Its mixed between single player and multiplayer which is great. I need my downtime away from other people so I can pay attention to the story. I could see some things that would help out like guild events or guild bonuses outside of conquest. Im not sure if adding another Flagship would help, but hypothetically if you add another flagship or a fleet to rank up, new bonuses could be implemented that would help pve in some way, and possible pvp. Only reason I mention guilds is because I would expect most of us are in a guild. Well, what does your guild do? Why not give a guild bonus if all players that run an op are in your guild?

As for crafting, not sure if that would help out to add more or not or what you would even craft besides mounts...…. SO then I guess why not add it? new schematics for craftable speeders.

You can't, not in the modern era of MMOs. That is the reality of todays MMO playerbase. No MMO, not even WoW, can release new content at a pace to satisfy all it's player base (both active and currently inactive). There are plenty of MMOs to choose from, and they are mostly on staggered content updates relative to each other. Couple that with the fact that most MMOs also have a flexible access business model rather then sub-only and you have an environment that actually encourages the more nomadic tendencies of todays MMO players.

But your question is sure to invite a host of special interest groups in reply who know exactly what will fix the game for them... them personally.

You can.

Just because you can't prevent some, or even most people from game-hopping doesn't mean that there aren't ways to improve or perform outreach that increase the retention rate. It's obvious that throughout different MMOs you have different levels of engagement, it should be the goal of every developer to try to make it's game the go to destination.

In your zeal for a perfect playing field with no attempts to cheat by anyone ..... I think you took the comment from Eric to an editorial extreme.

No company actually wants to ban players... but they DO want them to behave within stipulated norms (hence the purpose of a ToS, and enforcement of it). Which is why they have Terms of Service and a sliding range of sanction discipline to begin with.

And non-permanent sanctions are one of the better ways to go about the more malicious trouble makers... and if they continue to persist... they can and do perma-ban multiple time offenders.

Stop pretending like they never suspend, or never perma-ban bad offenders. By your imperative.. you would have been banned from the forum by now... rather then just receiving the occasional removed thread/post and a warning or short suspension. Yet.. if you were persistently bad in the forum... you would in fact get perma-banned. Same goes for the game.... only on a wide range of issues or bad behaviors.

Hey so I wrote down the notes from the podcast posted above on reddit and I just want to clarify one thing

This line was in regards to a wider discussion about the gaming population and the devs pointed at how this is common in most games and in particular MMO:s like WoW, GW2 and Final Fantasy, and comments made by for example Ghostcrawler and other lead developers on those games. Again listening to the actual podcast is recommended to catch the context of some of these comments

It's hardly a SWTOR - only problem, players consume content far quicker than the developers can generate it, thus the possible shift towards empowering players with Rishi SH PvP and other player generated content.

A noble goal.. and unobtainable. No MMO is THE GO TO destination. But there are a cluster of the more popular ones that do in fact trade active players between them... mostly by virtue of their staggered releases of new content relative to each other.

Don't get me wrong... some studios do better at retention then others but not by any notable margin, and it appears to be more driven by the overall theme of the MMO rather then it's actual content pace. Overall... they have no control over the whims of the player who is constantly seeking something new to do, and given the rapid consumption of content by the average MMO player these days. Nor can any MMO be all things to all people, yet some players will play an MMO that is not actually suitable to their content preferences.. and then constantly complain and demand the studio do more to please them personally.

I agree.

But what we have here is yet another exercise by some in the forum to take snippets out of context and then weaponize them to conform to their favorite complaints about the game and the studio and start tossing said weapons left and right.

I very much agree with this assessment. And one of the things I like about SWTOR... in spite of all it's various flaws as an MMO.. is that they do put a good amount of emphasis on adding features and content that give the player more control over what they wish to spend time on. The new PvP SH is a very recent and notable example of this.. and I see already some are organizing PvP nights inside Rishi Strongholds, giving out prizes, etc. etc... which harkens back to a decade ago in my view when players were more willing to self-organize and create group based entertaining activities within an MMO rather then rely on everything to be spoon fed by the studio.

This. I will not do pvp. I have done exactly twice in the years I have been here. (1) to get the droid companion and (2) the dark/light event. While I know some people like pvp there is really nothing in pvp that interest me and if they are going to only focus on pvp then ....

And on another note, most of the people in my guild have been here since launch and they have stayed more than the casual ones so I am not sure where they are getting their ideas about the vets of the game.

"PvE

New PvE content makes loads of people play it for a short time while it declines heavily over time, new PvP content isn't even close and is more stable in terms of player base. (Question regarding spikes with new content)"

If I'm interpreting this correctly, it really doesn't tell us much. Players can target playing new pve content quite easily, but new pvp content is lumped with old, so players can't target new maps only. So players who are only interested in new content can focus on new pve content to the exclusion of old content, but to access new pvp maps they have to queue for old as well. If they were to finally give us the option to queue for the maps we want, things might look quite different.

if you read the recent interview with former BioWare employee Daniel Erickson, you will see that they don't wonder at all. Their actual business model was to have people drop off and only come back for new content. They seem perfectly fine with doing things that way.

in other words, the Fatal flaw was their core philosophy in the first place and no plans designed to keep those interested in content and story playing the game.