This is a long thread, mainly around raiding. There is no TL;DR, so if you're someone who doesn't care about raiding or someone too awesome to read this, do the usual go back to wow reply, it's appreciated. As is your intelligence.

Let's see, I've been level 50 since the 18th december, yes I rushed to the endgame (I've seen everything in the voice overs at the beta, so no need to watch them a second time), and likeminded peope from my guild did the same, as did other players who don't care for much other than endgame. I am fully aware that we're a minority, so I'm not saying we're entitled to anything, but how the hell do you advertise and market this game by saying operations, flashpoints and pvp is what people should look forward to once reaching the level cap, when 2 out of those 3 are completely broken?

Half of the flashpoints have severe bugs which often force you to restart the entire instance, with all the trash minus the bosses you've already killed. For anyone not knowing what I'm talking about, this applies to both raids and flashpoints, try to leave the raid or group and get reinvited as the leader. You're basically saying, if the group leader disconnects for a longer period of time (15 minutes or so), the group as a whole is being punished by having to redo all the trashmobs? How does that make sense?

The other half is even worse. Is there a reason you release a game where just about every instance has a gamebreaking bug? In flashpoints, most of it is alright, since it's only 4 people and there are ways to get around it with some sweat and tears, but in opertaions, having the first boss of the both instances heavily bugged? Then following by major bugs on every boss that comes after..... I mean, really? You can't release 1 bossfight without major bugs or annoyances? How can you advertise on this, when the product is not even close to being complete? I'm very disappointed, I've never tried a new MMO that released with this quantity of bugs, including wow 7 years ago. You would have done better by locking the operations for a few weeks if you already felt that your game was ready for release, instead of this. Now I'm sure nobody on this forum actually cares, because you're all enjoying and taking it slowly, so by the time you're level 50 (christmas next year) the operations will actually work as intended. And the communication link between developer and player regarding this is also practically non existent. Bioware is aware there are bugs, and it's high on priority list. A priority list which is deployed when exactly, 2015? And what bugs are you actually aware of, because we don't know that either. Fixing the entrance bug is by far less important than fixing a boss, for me personally.

Please for the love of god, I think we deserve some more communication, as things stand there is almost no reason to continue paying after the first month ends, raiding and doing flashpoints is not fun, at all, it can't be just me. Think about all the casual players who have little to no time daily to spend on this, they too will be 50 within January due to the holiday season. You want them to be entangled in the massive amount of bugs every few hours they get to play, so they don't have time to even kill one boss? I really don't think so.

OPTIONAL READ ------ Examples of bugs and broken mechanics I stated above:

Here I'll illustrate just a fraction of the bugs in the game, and since I've seen most of them I'll focus on only the entrance stuff which people will do first when they hit 50, so the thread doesn't end up in 500 pages. I'll only write the bugs that are massive and ruin the experience, not the billion of small ones which are mere inconveniences. Operations only, flashpoints aren't things people do scheduled so they don't really matter, even if half of them is currently not doable due to last bosses being severely bugged.

- The hutt cartel boss:

Okay, so where do I start here. First off, this boss itself is a blast, the concept and the way it executes it's attacks are awesome and force everyone, caster or melee to be on the alarm at all times. Really love what you've done with it, especially the "swipe" mechanic, it's fun and a breath of fresh air, never seen anything like it in wow/rift/AoC.

Now with all the praising out of the way, what were you thinking when you designed the way this fight is initiated? For those of you that don't know how it runs, here is the biggest bug of all, once you click a door you basically enter the room, or well technically you fall down into the gladiator area, where he is standing. The second you fall there, he does a massive swipe and kills everyone. So sure, let's consider this not being a bug and the intended design, because right now the only way to pull it is to send your tank in, have him skip the voice overs, and tell the rest when it's safe to enter. Wait that's a bit wrong from my part, the boss has no normal attack so a tank is not needed. It is actually safest to send in a inquisitor/sage, due to the dash ability. Only swipe will kill you anyway so its not an issue.

Now you might wonder why I'm complaining about this? Because clearly, that could just be a valid tactic, having the "tanK" enter first and move the boss from where the rest of the raid spawns/falls. Sure, but here is a problem. 4 out of 10 times the first player entering will bug and not fall down to the boss. Bugging the entire encounter along with it, only way to resolve this is to die and go again. Other 4 out of 10 times, the "tank" entering will die from fall damage when he enters the room, while the rest that fall there take no damage. But when he falls to his death, those that follow die from swipe the second they enter. EVERY time all 10 people enter, 1 is 100% to die from this bug(this was the case with us, took two hours and probably around 3 real attempts at the boss to kill it), that being the fall damage bug. So this means you have to use combat res right away, and if someone has slow loading time or whatever, he is likely to die to swipe followed right after, because the boss has no real "aggro" and normal attacks, it keeps turning all the time and swiping wherever it pleases (for those that are unfamiliar with combat res, at least on 8man you get a raidwide 5 minute debuff which makes it impossible to combat ressurect more than 1 person each 5 minutes). This design in itself is awesome, but heavily hindered by all the atrocities of bugs that follow.

- Eternity Vault:

First boss here. After you kill the trash about 80 times, the boss will actually spawn. The boss itself has no major bugs so to speak, but having him spawn is the biggest problem ever. Having to exit the operation just to redo his trash is a major time sink. Why is it that sometimes he just won't spawn? For us it took 4 trash clears for him to actually spawn, clearly this can't be the way you intend it? Because it took one and a half hour with resetting and all that.

Second boss, Gharj or whatever the lava one is called. Now this is a funny boss. If you wipe on him after the initial pull, every time you gather up to buff and all that, the boss won't be aggroed or anything but each time he jumps (almost each time) a person in the raid will just die. There is no damage displayed or nothing, he will just die. You cannot outrange this. At first we thought it was some kind of mechanic failure, but clearly when he still kills you after you exit the area, I'm sure his range can't be throughout the entire galaxy, can't really jump high enough to kill someone on imperial fleet, or at least I hope not. Some mighty force use right there at least. So here you will basically spend several minutes (in some extreme cases maybe even an hour) every time before you can initiate the fight, unless of course you're baller enough to start it with people dead prior to the fight. By the way, dying on purpose and coming back to the boss does not resolve this issue. You will still randomly die whenever he wants you to die, before engaging him. I'm not even sure he kills you at this point, could just be darth vader 3000 years from the future shooting invisible laser eyes at you and laughing.

These 3 bosses are bosses every raid will do first, I'm not going to continue this wall of text for the rest, but like I said, every single boss in this game right now has a bug so severe it ruins the entire experience of both operations. It's incredibly annoying, you can only imagine this in more casual guilds which don't want to spend 8 hours a day on raids.

So please Bioware, can you tell me and the rest of us, probably 80% of your customer base (that will care about at least flashpoints if not operations, because the game offers nothing else) when you plan on focusing your efforts on fixes for raids/flashpoints? I mean if you aren't at least ashamed of this, you should feel some remorse towards all of us that paid so much money for your "great" game.

Reading through this essay is not very convenient.

Yes let me focus on the under 10% of players that pay the same amount to play as the other 90%.

I'm probably going to write a nice letter to the customer service department in about 2-3 weeks. I figure it's the holiday season and their development teams have probably been working around the clock to get this game released in time for their launch date with as few bugs as possible.

The only issue is there are so many bugs in this game that I don't know whether I can justify a subscription to this game. The Original Poster listed quite a few end game bugs that will probably give people a few things to rage about once they get to that point. As for myself, I'm finding myself disconnected from my guild and parties due to the guild/party chat bug.

I spent over 2 hours trying to figure out how to deal with Flashpoint Herpes, which is the party not being able to enter an instance due to an error message saying it has to be reset, but the party leader can't reset it. One solution is here: Solution. Not only that, but the inconsistency of loot dropping off of Hard Mode bosses (even when your party does not wipe) with the frequency of types of loot just makes me understand the League of Legend ragers.

I'm trying to do my part by reporting bugs as I find them (lately, I've been sending in at least one report a day).

I'm not going to say I don't enjoy this game, because I do. I enjoy this for the story, but it's kind of a two shot deal in terms of the over-arching story line in that I'll take Light on one character and then Dark Side choices on another. Outside of that there's 6 other base class storylines to follow, but the big time sink of this being an enjoyable multi-player experience is just not there for me. I paid a single player RPG price for the game and I'm getting that experience, but the deal breaker for me is if the party/guild chat bug isn't fixed by the time subscriptions kick in, I'm going to have peace out.

TL;DR - Fix your chat bugs. Fix your end game content. Without these fixes, you've merely given us Knights of the Old Republic 3 with the ensuing 7 DLC storylines packaged into one.

Reading through this essay is not very convenient.

 

Yes let me focus on the under 10% of players that pay the same amount to play as the other 90%.

If you read what I actually wrote, you'd probably understand how this concerns you too, unless you never plan on doing a flashpoint in your life. In that case, I don't really know why you're playing this game, because it offers nothing else, as stated above.

I'm not asking for a grace period, I'm merely asking for communication, because this is what the game is, your leveling is just the start. As things stand, we have no clue when they plan on doing anything about it, don't you find it annoying that something advertised is missing in the game you paid for, based on that advertisement?