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Vrachara

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    Belgrade, Serbia
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    Gaming, reading, biking
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    Student
  1. Quote: "Rtwozero - Any plans to implement region by region maintenance times? Blaine Christine (Sr. Producer, Live Services): At this time there are no plans to implement separate maintenance times by region. Star Wars: The Old Republic is a global service with no restrictions on a player’s server choice. Unfortunately the trade-off is that we have to maintain a single service environment, which leads to global maintenance periods. We are very sensitive to the fact that we are limiting play time once per week with a global scheduled maintenance. We have carefully examined global peak times and the number of players affected by our planned downtime. Those of you that have been with us since launch may have noticed that the first few patches were scheduled at 4 AM CST; we very quickly adjusted to 2 AM CST. The reason for this adjustment was an analysis of the peak time play patterns by region that resulted in the current start time. We understand that this is especially concerning to players in the European and newly opened Asia/Pacific server regions. We will always do our best to minimize the downtime, but it is the only way that we can perform critical service updates on the game client and on the game’s network infrastructure, underlying platform systems and so on. Thank you for bringing your concerns to us – we will always listen and do our best to make adjustments when possible, but at this time, we have to move forward with a single global maintenance period." Alright - so how about you guys switch that time so that it comes up in the middle of the night for European servers? Cause I'd just love to see the reaction you get from US/CA players over their servers being unavailable in the middle of the day. There is absolutely no reason to do this. I appreciate the same forums, that's a good idea. But performing maintenance on both European and US servers at the same time is just ridiculous. I don't even get how it makes sense on your side, it's not like you have all your servers in one location, the EU servers are in Ireland, just have them start maintenance earlier so both EU and US have the same maintenance times considering the time zones. You prattle on about watching peak times, but if you can look me in the text and tell me in the middle of the friggin' day is the lowest peak time for EU servers, I'm gonna have to call bullcrap on you. You might've adjusted those for the US servers peak time, but it's absolutely unfair to impose the same time on the EU servers (not to mention, again, I fail to see any sort of reasoning for it).
  2. Any chance with the UI update this patch you can allow us to move companion skills around? If not to our own bar (which I don't see why it's not an option), then at least allow us to rearrange them on theirs. See, we have to lose an entire bar - one we generally really need considering we have a pile of useful abilities and no macros available to downsize the number of buttons we need for them - to use companion skills at our leisure, which is not really fantastic. But if we don't want to do that, we can still use 4 of their skills. Now, 2 of them are admittedly helpful to most people, "attack" and "passive" in order to pull back a companion and tell them to attack again or switch targets (although these should be bindable to other keys, but that's another matter). The other two abilities however, 2 random attacks, they are perfectly competent to use on their own. What they are not competent at, is using their other abilities accordingly, like their offensive/defensive cooldowns and their AoE. If we could move their abilities around, or at the very least, be able to activate them (further than the 4th ability) when their bar is not expanded, we could use these abilities. It's still the same amount of micromanaging, we just don't sacrifice our own piece of UI to do it.
  3. Anything coming for them any time soon (without the 'tm')? With the removal of colour crystal restrictions, there is now quite literally nothing exclusive to them, while a lot of items still retain a requirement of being on one side of the alignment or other. Why not simply make items for those between the first thousand points of both sides? They don't even have to be new items, just giving some equivalent to the items we have now would be good. It's a shame to neglect this, especially considering it's something BioWare stated they're aware of pre-launch. Don't get me wrong, I'm not here to cry "you promised!", but I just enjoy the idea of a grey Jedi and right now, I know my new character's gonna be missing out on stuff and get nothing for it.
  4. My first post was eaten by the "Preview" button, so will make this one a bit less elaborate. What was the point of making PvP servers? A PvP server is designed for one thing, World PvP. Yet there's a very clear design choice made by BioWare to make the entire leveling experience almost completely divergent for Republic and Empire. On my main's road to 50, I've seen maybe 3 Republic players throughout the entire experience. I figured it might just be me, so asked some people on a PvP server instead and... well, can see for yourself: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/1086569-PvP-servers-and-world-PvP Short version, people with 2 level 50s that have had a single world PvP encounter and such, not a single person saying it's worth rolling on a PvP server for the enhanced leveling experience. "But wait, this is an MMO, surely what's at the endgame counts, not the leveling experience!" I hear you say? Well, first off, this is TOR, so the leveling should not be ignored. But that aside for the moment, what do we have at endgame world PvP? Illum? That's a PvP zone on a PvE server as well. So what exactly was the idea of a PvP server? We have planets that are completely protected from the incursion of another faction. Even when we're on the same planet, we're rarely in the same zone at level 50. At level 50, the only reason to step out off the Fleet, onto a planet is to do a series of daily quests and there's barely even a handful of those. There's no need for gathering or earning credits due to missions, most, if not every single profession can provide a steady income and since Slicing does that out of thin air, there's a constant stream of credits into the economy, so it doesn't come out of people grinding the money, ie. playing the game, just sending 5 out of 6 of their companions on missions. I really wanted to roll a character on a PvP server for some fun. I wanted to have to look over my shoulder when leveling, to be able to stalk an enemy player from time to time and have some fun at 50 out in the world, near the Flashpoint entrances and such. But none of that is an option in TOR, purely because of the design decisions. And this is not something that happens by accident, not even to a junior programmer, so I'm wondering, why have you chosen to not have world PvP in TOR?
  5. Waiting on a Battlefield 3 queue so I'll be brief: Step 1: Go onto http://www.curse.com Step 2: Look for a WoW add on called CooldownCount Step 3: ... (omitted for legal reasons regarding copyright laws) Step 4: Profit!
  6. Cool. Question though, how does Empire fit into this?
  7. This is the sign for "more than", which is what the OP was talking about: > This is the sign that you're talking about in relation to the number he mentioned: = OT: It's not the age, it's what you do with it. We're still building games with UDK, which is ridiculously old, simply kept up to date. WoW itself was built 7 years ago, which predates Hero engine and it has a 64 bit executable, so you're barking up the wrong tree, this is something they simply didn't make a priority yet, much like the DX11 (which is comparatively, a far more shameful fact)
  8. Not that I'm siding with his argument, but those people are sitting their on their initial purchase time. Once we see the subscription numbers after January, or maybe a few months past (assuming they don't get to work on these issues before that), I wouldn't be too surprised if he ended up being right. I'd also be massively sad and disappointed over it, because these are such minor issues that could be sorted out by even a junior game designer with a heavy set of boots and some lending of the same to his team's posteriors.
  9. Problem is, TOR has a lot of potential. The game is not crap, the game is great, but filled with completely crap game design decisions (and a ToS written by the quite experienced EA ToSers). These are things that the development team could sit down and fix in a single week, probably less. But they're afraid of losing control and sadly, they fail to realise that trying to control an MMO defeats the whole purpose of playing one. Full sandbox is not what players are after. WoW (f.ex., can throw Rift in here too or most other MMOs) is to TOR what street racing is to NASCAR. Yeah, street racing still leaves you with streets (themepark), you're not racing in an open desert (full sandbox), but you're still on more than a single pathetic rail, driving in circles all day long.
  10. If it was recoloured WoW, I'd play it rather than play TOR. The OP is right, the linear level design really does put you on rails like the space combat does, it just does that with a touch more subtlety, though the illusion doesn't work on many. Lemme paint you the difference, in WoW, I see a palace, I know "If I find a way to get up there, I can walk on it". In TOR, if I see a building in the distance on Coruscant or Nar Shadaa, I'm sitting there knowing fully well it's just a backdrop. It's the same difference you have in open world RPGs, like, say, Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim and BioWare's other games like Dragon Age. Yes, Dragon Age does have a backdrop over there, but that isn't the world, that's the backdrop. If it was a 2D game, that'd be the background, if it was an OS, it'd be your wallpaper, a completely inconsequential and useless thing that just sits in the background for the looks, not something you can interact with - and that has no place in an MMO in my opinion. Their lazyness went so far in fact, that they didn't even stick to the subtle approach of cornering you off with a mix of steep edges, energy shields and crap like that. No, if you go to Tanaris, you can walk across the desert, see a place 200 meters from you and not be able to get there on foot. Why? Because there's an arbitrary exhaustion zone between you and the place in question. I tried to ignore the linear design up to that point, telling myself it's just certain worlds and nothing consequential, but seeing that bollox just broke my illusion to pieces.
  11. I hate to jump on the bandwagon, but this has EA written all over it. It's Origin EULA all over again and it looks like they haven't learned their lesson yet. Between the linear level design, sharding and all this account banning/suspension bollox all happening over their own incompetence, I'm finding myself just not feeling like playing the game and sticking to other games instead; my SI has been stuck between level 30 and 31 for a week at least.
  12. Yeah, the whole sharding business is a load of bollox. I knew it would be from the moment they mentioned it, but I was hoping they'd at least keep it reasonable and only use it per need. Plus I was holding them to their word that it'll mostly just be used at launch for low level planets - and we know better now, don't we... It's sad. Looking at the planets with less than a hundred people about and more than one shard is just pathetic. The only thing worse is realising that if they're using it here, there's no hope of it being just a launch thing because once everyone levels up, we'll all be at more or less the same place in hubs, which will be more populated than planets are now. Goes hand in hand with their level design. They're clever, I'll give them that, but whether it's my years of playing games or some experience with being able to see things 'behind' the game, my brain is just not stupid enough to persuade itself that a whole lot of their area design is just a pretty picture hanging in the background that isn't actually the real world. This is what every WoW player feared and what we were constantly told was not the case pre-launch, with images of Hoth and Tattooine flying by.. the part that was missing in those pictures was the "ohwait, if you try to walk there by going through here, there's actually an exhaustion area". If you're not getting what I mean by the above paragraph, go and play WoW and try to access every bit of every zone. Then try the same in TOR and you'll see how less common it is in TOR. A slightly steep edge might as well be a texture with a "sod off" written on it and they utilized those a lot to make an open world be as linear as possible to anything other than the naked eye.. I'm really bummed because I love the game. The obstacles in the way are so easy to get rid of, yet they're clinging to them like they're some brilliant game design hundreds of thousands of their players just don't get. I remember James Ohlen saying once how you had to understand as a game designer that no matter how much you like some aspects of your game, they're useless if your entire playerbase doesn't give a damn about them (yes, rephrasing, but it's the same sentiment). Wish they could put that motto to work here.
  13. So it's the player's fault that they were interacting with items in the intended way? Where in ToS does it say "you can not loot the item at the same location more than x times per hour"?! Where in ToS does it say "you may not interact with the items in the world in the way we intended, in the way we don't like"? If you don't like something, fix it. You have the tools, you have the ability and an MMO is a game where people are used to things getting fixed when they get overpowered. Hell, remove the items obtained if you feel it was done unfairly. But a ban? For the developer's incompetence? Hell no. Hi EA - I was kinda hoping to not see your face around here.
  14. Yeah, to clarify, screw cross-server LFG. I hate what that's done to WoW and I'm definitely all for social interaction, server familiarity and getting to know the people you play with. The problem is, without even the basic means of finding a group, I'm not getting a chance to meet those people in the first place.
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