Posted this in another thread, decided to start a new one since that thread is just spammed with nonsense.

Why is everyone justifying the lack of stuff to do in this game by how much content WoW had at release? You might as well say "It's ok that SWTOR doesn't have endgame because Pitfall and Pong didn't have endgame"

This is 2012. Game companies have millions and millions and millions more dollars to spend, MUCH better technology to use, bigger development teams, and MANY MANY years of gaming feedback to study and learn from mistakes.

Bioware didn't learn from anything. They copied an outdated model and tried to make an MMO out of a singleplayer game. Once you hit 50 in SWTOR, you beat the game. Everything else you do is just a small side quest to pass the time. There is no more character development, there is no reason to leave town, there is nothing to do in the world besides hunt datacrons (oh yes it is SO FUN to spend an hour running through zones to get to a coordinate you had to look up on youtube). You can't shape the world in any way, nothing is dynamic, and there is nothing to show for spending hundreds of hours playing other than token gear. PVP rank is also such a joke in this game, especially after 1.1 came out. People went from rank 30 to rank 70 in a few hours and bioware didn't do a roll back.. LOL? There is NO excuse for the game turning out this way. This is a singleplayer game that a million people can log into at once and talk to each other. Feels more like a console game than a MMO.

Hate to tell you people who say "slow down, play casually. you rushed through the game" but MMOs aren't made just for casual gamers. Casual gamers are a minority. The majority of the playerbase that plays a MMO when it first comes out are above casual. This is when an MMO has its largest player base, this is when the servers have queues, then when the noncasual players find out how terrible the game is at level cap, they quit. Then the server queues go away, then the servers become empty, then the servers merge, then you have a dead game.

Playing "casually" just means you are delaying your disapointment. Procrastinating doesn't make it go away. The game will still suck once you hit cap. When you decide to "have fun and play warzones at cap" you will start crying because everyone has bm gear and 3 shots you and it is unplayable.

A large portion of this community (yes, this sad sad community) could design better PvP zones than the BW team. This is the case in most games. Small third party mods almost always make games better. In games where you can write full mods to modify entire gameplay, these mods become more popular than the original game. Why? Because gamers know what gamers enjoy. Oh, but you say "why don't you just go to school for game development then and change the world?" Well people do that, but then they get hired by big game companies like EA and are forced to work a certain way. They are forced to follow the same terrible game design model year after year because in the end, the people with the big money have the final say. If you don't like it then you can look for another job.

Some of the best PvP concepts in online gaming can be found in smaller games and often f2p games, but these games never get a million+ userbase because the companies can't afford to hire a big enough team to handle that large scale of a userbase. Hacking always runs rampant, exploits get abused faster than they can get fixed, there isn't enough manpower to properly handle support tickets, they can't afford multimillion dollar advertising campaigns to get the word out, etc.

So until a company comes along and makes a MMO far different than the current model and becomes super successful, we are stuck with a future of failed copycat MMOs from companies like EA.

Oh, also Blizzard recently put up ads to hire developers for in-game advertising. This is something EA wants to do too. So in the future not only will you have to pay a monthly fee to play your MMOs from these companies, you will also have to look at Coke and Nike bilboards in game.

If you want to compare something like endgame content in a 2012 game to a 2004 game, then lets compare it to other aspects. Compare population numbers in SWTOR to population numbers in EQ1, DAOC, EVE. Did the majority of the population quit these older games within the first couple months? No. These games grew month after month after month. Did these games revolve around tiny instanced pvp/pve zones and grinding tokens that can be exchanged for the best armor/weapon sets in the game without effort? No. Did these games have over 200million dollar to spend, giant development teams. and 10+ years of previous MMO statistics to learn from? No. Could these games support more than 30 players on screen at a time without lagging everyone terribly regardless of computer power? Yes.

So please, stop comparing SWTOR endgame to WoW endgame, unless you want to compare other aspects of the game to the pioneers of MMOs, which were more successful for their time than SWTOR is. A year from now SWTOR will just be another Rift, Aion, AoC, Warhammer.

There are people that like the game as it is now and did not quit. I enjoy playing Warzones and I have no problems waiting another few weeks for Ranking Warzones and more pvp content/fixes.

Yes and the people that are happy with the game right now are a minority as well. Over 20% of the population has quit the game already.

I'd say at least another 15%-20% decided to give it another month and saw how much the last couple of patches ruined the game even more and are just waiting for their subscription to end to quit playing (I'm a part of this group).

And the majority of the rest of the population is unhappy but still hanging onto a glimmer of hope that bioware will turn the game around.

Can you recall any major MMO release from a different company to have such unprofessional community communication? The patches are a joke. Simple game fixes that should have been rolled out immediately after they were discovered (talents not giving bonus damage, and not giving other intended effects, no roll back valor and the stupid ilum changes in 1.1, the changed cooldown animation, undroppable quests, 12vs8 warzone matches, warzones not counting for daily quest, etc) never got attention. Bioware doesn't address major issues in the game. These things are gamebreaking and make it extremely frustrating to play.

It seems like BW put more time into pointless hidden things in the game like datacrons (which are bad because they aren't something vanity, they are raw perm stat increases that you are FORCED to get unless you want to be at a large disadvantage), megenta crystals, shock water, etc, than they put into making sure the core gameplay worked well and there was REAL content (not small side crap) to keep players busy at cap. They were well aware that most of their population would hit cap within the first 2 months, and they did nothing to prepare for it. So now people just sit in town and queue WZs and have no reason to enter any worlds. Rift all over again.

After seeing them roll out patches that break the game more than fix it, and don't even attempt to fix the majority of major bugs at all, then that shows what kind of company they are and how much they care about making a solid gameplay experience. They just loaded money into it and expected all of the Star Wars fans to jump on board, which is what they got...however they also got a large majority of online gamers to jump on board in hope of getting a properly made, polished MMO...but that isn't what we got. What we have is a game with poor gameplay, TERRIBLE frame rate performance, but loads of cutscenes and voice acting. Now everyone except for the diehard Star Wars fans will quit and the game will be dead before they know it.

Yes and the people that are happy with the game right now are a minority as well. Over 20% of the population has quit the game already.

 

I'd say at least another 15%-20% decided to give it another month and saw how much the last couple of patches ruined the game even more and are just waiting for their subscription to end to quit playing (I'm a part of this group).

 

And the majority of the rest of the population is unhappy but still hanging onto a glimmer of hope that bioware will turn the game around.

 

Can you recall any major MMO release from a different company to have such unprofessional community communication? The patches are a joke. Simple game fixes that should have been rolled out immediately after they were discovered (talents not giving bonus damage, and not giving other intended effects, no roll back valor and the stupid ilum changes in 1.1, the changed cooldown animation, undroppable quests, 12vs8 warzone matches, warzones not counting for daily quest, etc) never got attention. Bioware doesn't address major issues in the game. These things are gamebreaking and make it extremely frustrating to play.

 

It seems like BW put more time into pointless hidden things in the game like datacrons (which are bad because they aren't something vanity, they are raw perm stat increases that you are FORCED to get unless you want to be at a large disadvantage), megenta crystals, shock water, etc, than they put into making sure the core gameplay worked well and there was REAL content (not small side crap) to keep players busy at cap. They were well aware that most of their population would hit cap within the first 2 months, and they did nothing to prepare for it. So now people just sit in town and queue WZs and have no reason to enter any worlds. Rift all over again.

 

After seeing them roll out patches that break the game more than fix it, and don't even attempt to fix the majority of major bugs at all, then that shows what kind of company they are and how much they care about making a solid gameplay experience. They just loaded money into it and expected all of the Star Wars fans to jump on board, which is what they got...however they also got a large majority of online gamers to jump on board in hope of getting a properly made, polished MMO...but that isn't what we got. What we have is a game with poor gameplay, TERRIBLE frame rate performance, but loads of cutscenes and voice acting. Now everyone except for the diehard Star Wars fans will quit and the game will be dead before they know it.

Could you stop posting in that color?

It's very annoying and makes peoples eyes bleed. I literally didn't read your post just because of the color.

Yes and the people that are happy with the game right now are a minority as well. Over 20% of the population has quit the game already.

Proof of fact? Yea i highly doubt those are even close to being accurate

The only people I see not enjoying the game are here on the forums. I have yet to me someone playing who says they don't enjoy the game. And i run with a guild of 50's every day along with numerous alts throughout the levels.

If your not enjoying the content then you don't have to pay for it, it's as simple as that. No need to come here and drop ridiculous #'s you obviously don't have any reliable sources for.

Could you stop posting in that color?

 

It's very annoying and makes peoples eyes bleed. I literally didn't read your post just because of the color.

Yeah, same here.

Sure you have valid points but that sh*t stings

Proof of fact? Yea i highly doubt those are even close to being accurate

 

The only people I see not enjoying the game are here on the forums. I have yet to me someone playing who says they don't enjoy the game. And i run with a guild of 50's every day along with numerous alts throughout the levels.

 

If your not enjoying the content then you don't have to pay for it, it's as simple as that. No need to come here and drop ridiculous #'s you obviously don't have any reliable sources for.

Ridiculous numbers? I'm sorry you must be blind. Compare server populations in the first week of launch to the populations now. If you played since launch and ever bothered to look at the servers, or payed attention to anyone who took the time to tally up player numbers on their server, then you would know. Open your eyes.

Also the only people who are unhappy are the ones posting on the forums? LOL. I can go to any server right now and find people complaining in general chat. Go ahead, type /1 and ask if anyone is unhappy with the game.

You say you enjoy the game because you level alts all day yet you don't see that as a problem? An MMO where there is such little to do endgame that there is no point in playing your main character anymore after 1 month and have to level new ones just to do something. Yeah, real good argument.

And yes you are right, I won't pay for it, and neither will most of the people playing now. I hope you enjoy playing in a barren game that gets wittled down to a handful of servers and it becomes impossible to get warzone queues or find people to play with. Yes, go on, support the current direction that BW is going in and let the game die. Be my guest.

Nothing screams facts like "

Ridiculous numbers? I'm sorry you must be blind.

"

Ridiculous numbers? I'm sorry you must be blind. Compare server populations in the first week of launch to the populations now.

Didn't they increase the server population caps by like 50%? so high would've gone to medium, medium to low etc. Idk, at peak times my realm sometimes even has queue times.

Nothing screams facts like "

 

"

Yes, nothing screams facts like servers going from 30 min queues at launch to being medium/low population.

Didn't they increase the server population caps by like 50%? so high would've gone to medium, medium to low etc. Idk, at peak times my realm sometimes even has queue times.

no, they just added a bunch of new servers, which is what Rift did. So after a ton of people quit, they end up with a ridiculous number of empty servers and have to do merges.

Didn't they increase the server population caps by like 50%? so high would've gone to medium, medium to low etc. Idk, at peak times my realm sometimes even has queue times.

They did. And I was pretty aware of this even before they changed the caps.

-----

Also, can you please stop changing the colour of your font? You're wishing to feel special or something? If people tells you to stop putting things in cyan, orange is not going to make it better.

Unlike the others, I've actually read your posts and I agree with some of your points. But don't put here stupid things taken from nowhere, if you want to complain use reliable sources, don't just throw some numbers there from your own experience. People won't take you seriously if you do so.

They did. And I was pretty aware of this even before they changed the caps.

 

-----

 

Also, can you please stop changing the colour of your font? You're wishing to feel special or something? If people tells you to stop putting things in cyan, orange is not going to make it better.

 

Unlike the others, I've actually read your posts and I agree with some of your points. But don't put here stupid things taken from nowhere, if you want to complain use reliable sources, don't just throw some numbers there from your own experience. People won't take you seriously if you do so.

I can post in whatever color I want. I find orange to be easier to read than the default color, if you don't like it then don't read it.

And you are a fool if you think that populations haven't dropped dramatically. Do yourself a favor and tally up the average number of players logged in your server at peak time, then see where that number goes in a few weeks. You want hard numbers, then go get them.

The small part of the population that thinks SWTOR is built just fine and BW is doing a good job are people who haven't been through this a million times before with other games over the years. These people are casual and their input is moot. That would be like me starting to watch a sport plagued with issues then saying "man, this sport is so perfect. every single rule in here is perfectly written, the refs do such a great job in every game, no salary cap is awesome, etc" and acting like I have a thorough understanding of the history of that sport.

They did. And I was pretty aware of this even before they changed the caps.

FACTS?

I have no place for your silly FACTS on these forums!

Shoo!

Ridiculous numbers? I'm sorry you must be blind. Compare server populations in the first week of launch to the populations now.

You mean the week during winter break when most people don't have school or work....

You mean the week during winter break when most people don't have school or work....

Actually most schools still have classes in the 2nd week of december, many colleges have finals that week, and I don't know where you work but jobs around here don't give you a month long christmas vacation.

And yes, the game released when headstart came out. You could preorder the game up to the second that "official" release happened, giving you a key and access to the game at any time.

Either way, compare the first 3 weeks of release to what we have now if it would make you happier. There has been a population decline since then, and since BW keeps releasing patches that break more than they fix, it hasn't been going up at all.

Proof of fact? Yea i highly doubt those are even close to being accurate

 

You can tell...my guild had 40-60 online members in first 3-4 weeks...now is 5-7 top and we are leaving in the end of this mounth.Im sure its not only us.

My server was Full for first cople of weeks and you had to w8 like 40 mim.Then they increse cap...it was still full but you w8ed like 1min.Now in rush hours is max hevy.I dont think they increse cap again...they didnt have to;].

 

 

Sandichi..man dont waste your time...this will change nothing.People who are injoing game now will open there eyes after 2nd alt.Come on.. haw many times you can do same quests all over again XD.Only class quests are new but its like 5% only.

 

We are leaving...we wasted to much time on this joke game...no point wasteing it on forum.

Proof of fact? Yea i highly doubt those are even close to being accurate

 

You can tell...my guild had 40-60 online members in first 3-4 weeks...now is 5-7 top and we are leaving in the end of this mounth.Im sure its not only us.

My server was Full for first cople of weeks and you had to w8 like 40 mim.Then they increse cap...it was still full but you w8 like 1min.Now in rush hours is max hevy.I dont think they increse cap again...they didnt have to;].

 

 

Sandichi..man dont waste your time...this will change nothing.People who are injoing game now will open there eyes after 2nd alt.Come on.. haw many times you can do same quest all over again XD.Only class quest are new but its like 5% only.

 

We are leaving...we wasted to much time on this joke game...no point wasteing it on forum.

Yeah, I know that I am probably wasting my time but I would rather use my remaining subscription time to post on the forums rather than play this game

If enough people post and get the truth out there, then more and more people will read it and less and less people will even consider picking up the game. If this has a big enough impact and costs game companies enough subscriptions, then maybe they will finally open their eyes and change their ways. Something we can only hope for to save the future of MMO gaming.

The only other hope we have are games like GW2. If it becomes the next "big thing" then maybe EA, Trion, Blizzard, etc will learn from them. It will also be a wonderful example of a game company that doesn't have to charge a monthly subscription but still makes enough from microtransactions and game sales to support a full staff.

I can post in whatever color I want. I find orange to be easier to read than the default color, if you don't like it then don't read it.

 

And you are a fool if you think that populations haven't dropped dramatically. Do yourself a favor and tally up the average number of players logged in your server at peak time, then see where that number goes in a few weeks. You want hard numbers, then go get them.

 

The small part of the population that thinks SWTOR is built just fine and BW is doing a good job are people who haven't been through this a million times before with other games over the years. These people are casual and their input is moot. That would be like me starting to watch a sport plagued with issues then saying "man, this sport is so perfect. every single rule in here is perfectly written, the refs do such a great job in every game, no salary cap is awesome, etc" and acting like I have a thorough understanding of the history of that sport.

 

I don't think it's fine. I don't even think it's competitive.

They have so much to fix, improve and repair. But as other games do aswell.

Your example of the sports it's simply a lackluster. 90% here in Europe watch football. Say 90%, 80%, 70%, whatever. It's absolutely without doubt the majoritary sport, from every 5 minutes of the sports section in any news program, 4'5 are dedicated to it. And is football well done? No. It's still a sport where when the ball goes off the playing zone, the timer keeps going on. Where it doesn't matter how obvious a fault is or it is not, referees do NOT ever watch a replay to confirm their choices. Yet still 70-80-90% people interested in sports keeps constantly viewing it as their main choice. And I could keep the whole night talking about how many issues this sport or any other does. Or anything, doesn't need to be a sport.

Instead, I just simply try to report every bug I see on the game through grinding up my characters. I don't expect a perfect game. Sometimes you even laugh to some bugs.

Professions need to be balanced and made useful, they need to fix the equipment purchase overall, several bugs need to be fixed in most aspects of the game and, again, I could stay the whole night, and probably the rest of the week counting things that need to be fixed and I won't even finish.

But you're simply not contributing to nothing in making this thread. You might see yourself as a hardcore gamer who stands for the justice and who is never wrong, I only see a dumb guy that tells me that he can "write in the colour that he wants" and that I can just stop reading him if that makes me upset, yet when others told him to stop using cyan, he changed it.

Basically you're bored and you've decided to waste your time here. It's fine. You're still better than those who decide to spend their time being afk on warzones. Unless you're being afk on a warzone right now while you complain here .

I'm playing at the republic side and on republic fleet I've seen a regular 120~~150 population on 10--12 pm since preorder days. If you think you're the only one who check things out, come down from your rainbows. But I guess there will come your "then your server might be a special case" or whatever you want to call it.

tl;dr: You're not helping anyone creating this. Your post is as useless as this one of mine, since you'll probably just quote me and answer me with a brand new pony-rainbow colour font telling me how foolish I am, even when I've already said I share some of your points and just asked you to not take out data from nowhere.

I don't think it's fine. I don't even think it's competitive.

 

They have so much to fix, improve and repair. But as other games do aswell.

 

Your example of the sports it's simply a lackluster. 90% here in Europe watch football. Say 90%, 80%, 70%, whatever. It's absolutely without doubt the majoritary sport, from every 5 minutes of the sports section in any news program, 4'5 are dedicated to it. And is football well done? No. It's still a sport where when the ball goes off the playing zone, the timer keeps going on. Where it doesn't matter how obvious a fault is or it is not, referees do NOT ever watch a replay to confirm their choices. Yet still 70-80-90% people interested in sports keeps constantly viewing it as their main choice. And I could keep the whole night talking about how many issues this sport or any other does. Or anything, doesn't need to be a sport.

 

Instead, I just simply try to report every bug I see on the game through grinding up my characters. I don't expect a perfect game. Sometimes you even laugh to some bugs.

 

Professions need to be balanced and made useful, they need to fix the equipment purchase overall, several bugs need to be fixed in most aspects of the game and, again, I could stay the whole night, and probably the rest of the week counting things that need to be fixed and I won't even finish.

 

But you're simply not contributing to nothing in making this thread. You might see yourself as a hardcore gamer who stands for the justice and who is never wrong, I only see a dumb guy that tells me that he can "write in the colour that he wants" and that I can just stop reading him if that makes me upset, yet when others told him to stop using cyan, he changed it.

 

Basically you're bored and you've decided to waste your time here. It's fine. You're still better than those who decide to spend their time being afk on warzones. Unless you're being afk on a warzone right now while you complain here .

 

I'm playing at the republic side and on republic fleet I've seen a regular 120~~150 population on 10--12 pm since preorder days. If you think you're the only one who check things out, come down from your rainbows. But I guess there will come your "then your server might be a special case" or whatever you want to call it.

 

tl;dr: You're not helping anyone creating this. Your post is as useless as this one of mine, since you'll probably just quote me and answer me with a brand new pony-rainbow colour font telling me how foolish I am, even when I've already said I share some of your points and just asked you to not take out data from nowhere.

Not sure why one of your main arguments is post color. I prefer orange to cyan, that's why I changed it and kept it. I picked cyan at random, but now I found a color I like. Not sure why you are trying to use that as an argument? You are the one who sounds dumb making comments like that. "I'm gonna prove to you why your post about the game isn't good based on what color you typed it in". Really?

Also your point about football holds no grounds either. Just because your sport has issues and still has a lot of fans doesn't mean anything. It has fans because they enjoy watching it/don't have an alternative. Complete opposite of this case. SWTOR is losing players because it has problems and many people DON'T enjoy playing it anymore and there ARE alternatives. Many of SWTORs problems do a very good job of preventing people from having an enjoyable gameplay experience. I can name a ton of them if you want.

As for my sports reference, I was referring to a new sport/league coming out based on another sport. Like the XFL for example. This is how SWTOR fits the analogy. Your reference would only work if SWTOR was the only widely played game in its genre. If that were the case, then yes, everyone would continue to play SWTOR because there is nothing else that they can play to get the same features...which isn't true at all. There were better games in the past, and there are better games coming out. You football fans are stuck with football because a new version of it doesn't come out every year that has a bigger budget than the current league that 70% of all football fans immediately switch to.

I also like how you mention republic fleet numbers. Funny, because those numbers also mean nothing. Go into the world. When the game came out, most people weren't sitting in the republic fleet. They were out in the world leveling or in warzones/flashpoints. Now, the world has a fraction of that population, and the remaining population sits in the republic fleet. So no, you don't have the same number of people on your server. You have about the same small number of people on the fleet, and you have an empty world...because well there is no reason to go into the world at 50, which is one of the main problems of this game and others of recent.

I find these posts invigorating. I like educating people. It's fun.

Posted this in another thread, decided to start a new one since that thread is just spammed with nonsense.

 

 

Why is everyone justifying the lack of stuff to do in this game by how much content WoW had at release? You might as well say "It's ok that SWTOR doesn't have endgame because Pitfall and Pong didn't have endgame"

 

This is 2012. Game companies have millions and millions and millions more dollars to spend, MUCH better technology to use, bigger development teams, and MANY MANY years of gaming feedback to study and learn from mistakes.

Despite that, content still takes time to create. The fact is, WoW has had 13 years of development time. Bioware could have learned all sorts of lessons (and i feel they learned quite a few), but the simple fact of the matter is it takes to create content. It's not like they can keep the game in development to just keep creating content forever. These people get paid by shareholders who want to make money.

For an interesting read, and some information on how this works in reality, i suggest:

http://mrlizard.com/rants/why-havent-they-fixed-this-bug/

Ill quote the portion relevant to this part of the thread:

There is no “done” in games like this. Nor is there bug-free. You release when the game is playable, or you do not release at all. For one thing, many bugs, especially balance issues or server issues, simply do not show up until there’s 200 thousand people playing for an extended period — and you cannot have an extended open beta for that many people, the cost is simply too much. In most cases, games are kept in development until the order comes down: Ship something, or look for new jobs. That’s the fact, and there’s really no hope of it changing any time soon.

The reason people (justifiably) compare this to WoW at launch is because the two games had similar development cycles before they released. There are only so many man-hours available to create stuff. Given a similar development timeline, SWTOR managed to launch with more content (and quite a bit more DISTINCT content) than WoW did.

Thats an accomplishment. Simply throwing more bodies at the thing wont help, in fact, it can hinder things.

Bioware didn't learn from anything. They copied an outdated model and tried to make an MMO out of a singleplayer game. Once you hit 50 in SWTOR, you beat the game.

This is different from any themepark MMO ever made, how, exactly?

Everything else you do is just a small side quest to pass the time. There is no more character development,

Funny, there are more questlines on Illum and Belsavis, as well additional questlines being added to Corellia in 1.2, and a story about Rakghouls.. and the Operations have stories...

and there's plenty of ways to advance your character.

there is no reason to leave town, there is nothing to do in the world besides hunt datacrons (oh yes it is SO FUN to spend an hour running through zones to get to a coordinate you had to look up on youtube).

So dont look them up. Try and find them yourself, if you're so skilled. I found all the datacrons on Hutta, Dromund Kaas, Korriban, and Belsavis with no help at all.

You can't shape the world in any way, nothing is dynamic, and there is nothing to show for spending hundreds of hours playing other than token gear.

Which, again, is different from any MMO, how? Thats what you do at endgame in MMOs. you get gear/stuff.

PVP rank is also such a joke in this game, especially after 1.1 came out. People went from rank 30 to rank 70 in a few hours and bioware didn't do a roll back.. LOL?

Well, you're right, it is a joke. The joke, however, is on the people that somehow think it matters. Battlemaster gear is only about 2% better than Champion gear in the stats that matter (endurance, expertise) and is WORSE in some others unless you yank the mods and replace them. Joke's on you for thinking the ranks mattered in the first place.

There is NO excuse for the game turning out this way. This is a singleplayer game that a million people can log into at once and talk to each other. Feels more like a console game than a MMO.

 

Hate to tell you people who say "slow down, play casually. you rushed through the game" but MMOs aren't made just for casual gamers. Casual gamers are a minority.

... this is what makes me th ink you're just trolling. 11 million WoW subs. Blizzard's own stats will tell you that less t han 25% of them have ever stepped foot into a raid. Casuals DOMINATE MMOs. Most of SWTOR's playerbase STILL isn't 50.

The majority of the playerbase that plays a MMO when it first comes out are above casual. This is when an MMO has its largest player base, this is when the servers have queues, then when the noncasual players find out how terrible the game is at level cap, they quit. Then the server queues go away, then the servers become empty, then the servers merge, then you have a dead game.

 

Playing "casually" just means you are delaying your disapointment. Procrastinating doesn't make it go away. The game will still suck once you hit cap. When you decide to "have fun and play warzones at cap" you will start crying because everyone has bm gear and 3 shots you and it is unplayable.

Stop PvPing in greens? Since you can have head to toe purples the moment you hit 50, you've got no one to blame here but you.

Again, though.. what are you expecting? What is there to do in (Insert MMO Name Here) at endgame other than... repeat content/raid/pvp?

Oh.. that's right... nothing.

A large portion of this community (yes, this sad sad community) could design better PvP zones than the BW team. This is the case in most games. Small third party mods almost always make games better. In games where you can write full mods to modify entire gameplay, these mods become more popular than the original game. Why? Because gamers know what gamers enjoy. Oh, but you say "why don't you just go to school for game development then and change the world?" Well people do that, but then they get hired by big game companies like EA and are forced to work a certain way. They are forced to follow the same terrible game design model year after year because in the end, the people with the big money have the final say. If you don't like it then you can look for another job.

 

Some of the best PvP concepts in online gaming can be found in smaller games and often f2p games, but these games never get a million+ userbase because the companies can't afford to hire a big enough team to handle that large scale of a userbase. Hacking always runs rampant, exploits get abused faster than they can get fixed, there isn't enough manpower to properly handle support tickets, they can't afford multimillion dollar advertising campaigns to get the word out, etc.

 

So until a company comes along and makes a MMO far different than the current model and becomes super successful, we are stuck with a future of failed copycat MMOs from companies like EA.

 

Oh, also Blizzard recently put up ads to hire developers for in-game advertising. This is something EA wants to do too. So in the future not only will you have to pay a monthly fee to play your MMOs from these companies, you will also have to look at Coke and Nike bilboards in game.

Blizzard put out guys for in-game adds for Diablo 3 (which is free to play after you purchase it) and, it is assumed, Project Titan, which the scuttlebutt says might be Free-to-play on some level. Also, in-game adds for the SC2 Battle.net client. Shocking

If you want to compare something like endgame content in a 2012 game to a 2004 game, then lets compare it to other aspects. Compare population numbers in SWTOR to population numbers in EQ1, DAOC, EVE. Did the majority of the population quit these older games within the first couple months? No.

Yes. EVE, particularly, took a gigantic dive post-launch, because the game is VERY particular and only a very limited crowd can enjoy that game. EQ1 fell off immediately. Something like 50% - now, they eventually regained it all, and more, but post-first-month-falloff is a fact of MMO life. DaoC.. never really exploded. They didnt have a lot of crowd to lose.

What delusion allows you to believe that these games didn't bleed subs.. hey, you know, unimportant. Suffice to say the facts are out there if you're not a lazy git.

These games grew month after month after month. Did these games revolve around tiny instanced pvp/pve zones and grinding tokens that can be exchanged for the best armor/weapon sets in the game without effort? No.

None of those games had, even at their peak, even 50% of the subs of SWTOR, either. Why? Because they were too hardcore and hard to get into, and drove people away in job lots. And in many of those games (particularly EQ1 and EVE) they had months of falloffs before the games started to pick up and expand.

Did these games have over 200million dollar to spend,

This might be relevant if this game cost more than ~100 million. But it didn't. Investor calls and PDFs are FUN!

giant development teams.

Actually, strictly middling-sized for an MMO

and 10+ years of previous MMO statistics to learn from? No. Could these games support more than 30 players on screen at a time without lagging everyone terribly regardless of computer power? Yes.

When they launched? Not in your dreams, sonny. EQ1 used to drop to a slideshow or CTD with 30+ people on the screen, even from high spec machines at the time. DaoC keep sieges were notoriously prone to crashing the servers and bringing client's to their knees for the better part of the first year. Eve.. is a different case. Eve only has to render ships. There's not an entire world of 3D geometry to render - thats a lot less strain on the game. WoW used to slideshow with more than 30 or 40 people on the screen. I have fond memories of Tarren Mill/SS slideshows. (not really)

So please, stop comparing SWTOR endgame to WoW endgame, unless you want to compare other aspects of the game to the pioneers of MMOs, which were more successful for their time than SWTOR is. A year from now SWTOR will just be another Rift, Aion, AoC, Warhammer.[/color]

Well, Bioware could hope it turns out like Rift, which, despite the fact that i dislike it, is wildly successful for that company.

Yes and the people that are happy with the game right now are a minority as well. Over 20% of the population has quit the game already.

A minority? Hardly. If that were true, there wouldnt still be 1.7 million active subs. Hurtful fact for you: a tiny, tiny percentage of players EVER post on the forums. Less than 5% on WoWs site, and usually less for other games.

I'd say at least another 15%-20% decided to give it another month and saw how much the last couple of patches ruined the game even more and are just waiting for their subscription to end to quit playing (I'm a part of this group).

 

And the majority of the rest of the population is unhappy but still hanging onto a glimmer of hope that bioware will turn the game around.

 

Can you recall any major MMO release from a different company to have such unprofessional community communication?

WoW. Rift. Warhammer (which had no forums of any kind) Conan, Aion.

The patches are a joke. Simple game fixes that should have been rolled out immediately after they were discovered (talents not giving bonus damage, and not giving other intended effects, no roll back valor and the stupid ilum changes in 1.1, the changed cooldown animation, undroppable quests, 12vs8 warzone matches, warzones not counting for daily quest, etc) never got attention. Bioware doesn't address major issues in the game. These things are gamebreaking and make it extremely frustrating to play.

Got a degree in software engineering to go with that ignorance? Somethign "as simple" as a talent not givng the proper bonus might involve a few HUNDRED man hours to track down in a code base this large. Then you have to replicate the bug, work out a fix without screwing up everything around it, and then test the fix to make sure you didnt destroy anything else.

It's not as easy as pressing a button that says "fix". Lets talk about bugs in WoW that are still in the game.. 8 years later. Squashing bugs isn't that easy.

They are working on them. They get fixed in the fastest possible time, but sometimes that might take weeks or months to track down (or never. Im looking at you, oh pet-dismount-bug)

It seems like BW put more time into pointless hidden things in the game like datacrons (which are bad because they aren't something vanity, they are raw perm stat increases that you are FORCED to get unless you want to be at a large disadvantage),

70 to each stat - two of which help you. Its about the equivalent of.. having a pair of items with an augment slot. It isn't that big of a deal. I still dont have all of mine.

megenta crystals, shock water, etc, than they put into making sure the core gameplay worked well and there was REAL content (not small side crap) to keep players busy at cap. They were well aware that most of their population would hit cap within the first 2 months, and they did nothing to prepare for it. So now people just sit in town and queue WZs and have no reason to enter any worlds. Rift all over again.

You're aware that guys that work on code aren't the guys that work on content, right? Different teams.

Most of the population still isn't at the cap.

After seeing them roll out patches that break the game more than fix it, and don't even attempt to fix the majority of major bugs at all, then that shows what kind of company they are and how much they care about making a solid gameplay experience. They just loaded money into it and expected all of the Star Wars fans to jump on board, which is what they got...however they also got a large majority of online gamers to jump on board in hope of getting a properly made, polished MMO...but that isn't what we got. What we have is a game with poor gameplay, TERRIBLE frame rate performance, but loads of cutscenes and voice acting. Now everyone except for the diehard Star Wars fans will quit and the game will be dead before they know it

Almost every terrible framerate problem has been traced to people's computers. There are a number of known issues that are end-user and not something BW can fix

You should look into them.

Got a Phenom? Problem is on your end

Got an older i5 or i7 (Nehalem core)? Problem is on your end

Got any one of several motherboard chipsets? Problem is on your end

Got a bunch of bloatware running? problem is on your end.