The following was a post that I made in another thread as a response that had good feedback but has since been buried amongst the typical, angry forum posters. With Biowares recent 400k sub drop announcement, I think some of these should be re-iterated and hopefully applied. They are areas of the game that drastically need to be improved.

The feedback below was grouped together from both the Beta forums/general forums (before release) and the current forums of today.

First Impressions of the game (Characters, Customization)

-- More diverse aliens: The major, most requested things of Beta. Players were not happy that all of the races were of 90% "human" features. The most "popular" alien races were completely ignored (Bothans/rodians/togrutas/nautalons) and Biowares response was "We want romanceable races". Yes. The community was denied because of Biowares vision of who should get their shag on and it be "real"... IE, no wookie on Princess leia action (which I believe was the analogy that they used)

-- Character Customization. Easily the next biggest complaint of the community when the leaks came out of beta. "Millions" of options wasn't anywhere near accurate because the choices were barely different from one another. The community of both the general forums and the Beta forums wanted to see Slide bars and more control over their character creation (Since the majority of your time would be spent looking at your character in dialogue screens.) Biowares response to this was : Nothing. They never responded anywhere as to why they didn't allow color palettes or slide bars for everything to give the player a more robust FIRST IMPRESSION of the game. No response = Horrible.

Gameplay itself:

-- Space. The hope of the space side of things being as amazing as Xwing vs Tie fighter and JTL was quickly destroyed when details came out about the missions. Barrel roll starfox rail shooting was loudly dismissed by the community as a joke.

--Dynamic Events. No dynamic gameplay events that occur during leveling lead to extremely stale re-playability and gave no reason to re-visit most of the planets in the game. At 50, dynamic events could keep the player interested in leaving fleet to accomplish something other than waiting in a pvp que. In this day and age of MMO's, dynamic events are needed and desired, something that Bioware should've picked up on from what the community was saying in both forum areas.

--World PvP. The majority of people wanted more DAoC type wars and we got a broken "pvp" planet that was easily exploited. Also, most of the planets in this game are so big that you could level to 50 and rarely see a flagged player to fight. This resulted in the majority of pvp'ing still occurring in instances wz's. Granted, the majority of people that followed this game knew the PVP side of things would be on the back burner compared to the "story", but Bioware should've done its homework on what pvp'ers want. (Or listened to pvp feedback and not the whiners.)

--UI customization // dual spec. I'm only bringing this up because it was something that was hammered on the forums time and time again that bioware needed to adjust and fix. It took -too long- to see the UI customization and still far too long for the Dual Spec feature to even arrive. One of the major complaints from people that left was the UI and lack of being able to set it how they wanted. Both of these features were spoken about in depth during beta and well before the game released on the General forums. Waiting so long to implement what your community as a majority asks for is just not going to fly at this point.

--Stale 50 gameplay. Most notably dailies being the only reason to continue log on from the PvE side of things and even then, you didn't have to. There was really no reason to go back into Flashpoints because you could run normal EV's and be geared up within 2 weeks. This also goes back to the Dynamic events, giving level 50 characters another area to explore and keep themselves interested in the game.

--"Lifeless" planets. Mobs need to move and roam around, cities need to be more lively and interactive... all ideas from beta and general forums that would've given the worlds we explored more "depth" and not just zig zagging through the static bad guy places. One thing that Open World environments do well is suck a player into its surroundings.

--Bugs. I really don't even have to go into this one because players have harped on fixing the same bugs that are still around since release (and before it).

And the below text is something I wrote from when 1.2 was released and how Bioware (mis)handled the test server.

There are a lot of things that people are pissed about (and rightfully so) but it's mostly due to them wanting this game to SUCCEED and not fall off the cliff into the MMO's that should've been amazing and failed realm.

So Bioware, I do hope that you use this thread as a jump off point of where you've gone wrong so far and improve in these areas:

Moving forward with patches:

----There absolutely needs to be a Pre-made level 50 character/Copy current character availability on the Public Test. Why has this been pushed down as a "non important" factor is considerably questionable and leaves many MMO vets scratching their heads... If you want the customer feedback of the content that you're pushing (especially major content like this last patch), you NEED level 50's there.

----Having SELECTED guilds from obvious PVE orientation is not going to give you ideal feedback for the game as a whole. Why? Because they are essentially the 1% (Or 6% if you want to view it in Warcraft Terms of people that seen all content pre middle of Burning Crusade.) Yes, they're great min/maxers and will give pretty solid feedback for PVE of the Nightmare level... But that completely -removes- the PVP aspects of the game to be tested. You've seen the amount of rage that the 1.2 ranked warzone removal has caused and it is very understandable for that anger. Wouldn't more PVP testing at the start of the 1.2 patch on the PTS helped in this matter? Or at least started the pvp team on the ball to fixing it? Wouldn't certain heal changes (or certain classes not being changed at all) feedback been important to see before releasing this patch live?

----LISTEN TO YOUR FEEDBACK AND COMMUNICATE BACK. I will point this thread out RuQu / Lileth Public Testing ...tests. Within this thread were critical discussions and tests on how the healing changes dynamically HURT the healing classes and drastically reduced their usefulness. Granted, the majority of this conversation was PvE orientated, but it was about the changes that were supposed to "balance" healing across the boards. You had statistical information and extremely thorough tests done by a couple of folks and never once responded to their findings. Never once listened to any of the factual information and questions/concerns/suggestions that came up from healers on how to actually balance the game. These were people that put days into -testing-.

I can understand having your own plans, but listening to suggestions of healers that are well respected in the community and looking at their findings could not possibly HURT your design. The people that are left subbed want this game to succeed, but blatantly not listening to feedback with numbers, well, I should say not RESPONDING to the healing community...is not going to leave a good sign to keep those healers testing in the future. (As a matter of fact, Lileth decided to stop testing a few weeks ago once they realized it was going to deaf ears.)

---- It had been suggested within that thread (and I 100% agree with this) that Bioware should induct Class leads that specifically listen//interact on the Forums on hot topics REGULARLY ( Especially during the Public Test times ). If it's too many people to have for each class/sub class, at least have the Primary 3. Tanking // DPS // Healing. The healing community in every MMO that I've ever been apart of has been extremely tight knit and can probably provide the most accurate feedback with a collective agreement. The problem here is that the Logical and Factual folks who test thoroughly under different circumstances//boss fights//warzone fights 1v1vsteam survivability etc... have their threads lost in the 100's of pages of RAGE. If there were a community leader that we could speak with and get actual feedback from them for why changes are happening, a lot of players would be more comfortable with the changes and accept them or at least offer alternative solutions that the development team hasn't thought of.

When players get responses of, "Healers were doing too well, we nerfed them" it gives no concrete information as to WHY we were doing so well. One possible reason that healing classes in Nightmare modes were easy was because the actual difficulty of Nightmare... wasn't hard. Why? Because there was nothing significantly changed about each fight. An extra mob, more health, harder hitting is not going to change a healer rotation. Throwing more movement into a fight, adding more complexity to the boss fights (IE different and new mechanics to learn and deal with), having more stages of the fight...ADDS to the difficulty and management of heals throughout the encounter.

I want this game to succeed and I hope that more effort is put forward into Listening and Communicating (not 24 hours before btw) during the Public Tests because not doing either of the above = You do not care about our opinions and will do what your design is regardless.

This is basically one big bullet list of things discussed by your community. Please take note of it and improve from here Bioware, your true fans that are still here will appreciate you that much more. (And possibly talk some people into coming back!)

Awesome, a thread hoping to save the game is moved into the Suggestion Forum that is completely unused by the player base.

Hopefully the Devs actually view this section since it would be the least cluttered with angst.

Awesome, a thread hoping to save the game is moved into the Suggestion Forum that is completely unused by the player base.

 

Hopefully the Devs actually view this section since it would be the least cluttered with angst.

i think about 95 percent of the suggestions they look at if they do look at this section probably end up in the trash can anyway

i think about 95 percent of the suggestions they look at if they do look at this section probably end up in the trash can anyway

10char

There's one thing BW need to do. Describing it at a highly abstract level, they need to make SWTOR feel more like a virtual world (or a virtual galaxy rather). At the moment it doesn't feel like a "place" at all, it feels like a bunch of places strung together, with some space stuff tacked on. There's little illusion of a galaxy; and with the individual zones, for some reason they themselves have a rather claustrophobic feel, even though some of them are in fact quite large by any MMO standards.

Integrating ground and space might go some way to solving this. The spaceship doesn't feel like a spaceship. You don't feel like you're piloting it. Through space. To get from one planet to another. The illusion just isn't there, I'm afraid.

But this isn't just about design. It's about feeling like you're part of something (i.e. a virtual place). At the moment lots of people feel pretty isolated on their servers, for example. If people can't get that sense of being part of something buzzy, they're just going to drift away.

Which would be a shame, because there are indeed lots of fun and immersive aspects to the game.

i think about 95 percent of the suggestions they look at if they do look at this section probably end up in the trash can anyway

Only if they are stupid, which given the handling of 1.2 is possible.

There's one thing BW need to do. Describing it at a highly abstract level, they need to make SWTOR feel more like a virtual world (or a virtual galaxy rather). At the moment it doesn't feel like a "place" at all, it feels like a bunch of places strung together, with some space stuff tacked on. There's little illusion of a galaxy; and with the individual zones, for some reason they themselves have a rather claustrophobic feel, even though some of them are in fact quite large by any MMO standards.

 

Integrating ground and space might go some way to solving this. The spaceship doesn't feel like a spaceship. You don't feel like you're piloting it. Through space. To get from one planet to another. The illusion just isn't there, I'm afraid.

 

But this isn't just about design. It's about feeling like you're part of something (i.e. a virtual place). At the moment lots of people feel pretty isolated on their servers, for example. If people can't get that sense of being part of something buzzy, they're just going to drift away.

 

Which would be a shame, because there are indeed lots of fun and immersive aspects to the game.

This is a more indepth "Lifeless planets". Thanks!