SWTOR has a history. The very beginning was great. Servers had little trouble, story line was awesome, PVP was epic. Then things started to turn sour. Lack of endgame caused may rats to abandon ship, and for good reason. Ilum.... just Ilum.... I mean what were you thinking.... Since then servers population has steadied as large scale server mergers reversed trend of increasingly empty planets and fleet. Question is: how to get players back and break the mold of MMOs.

I have an idea, and I will welcome any comments on it. SWTOR has 2 unique things going for it in the MMO community: story lines and companions.

Companions are truly unique to the MMO community and are no longer just 'pets' but interactable compadres that you can gear up and can mean the difference between downing a hard mob or dieing. Honestly, when was the last time anyone did any solo content without one?

The story lines of SWTOR are also truly unique to the MMO community, almost to the point where people believe SWTOR is just a single player game wrapped in an MMO. To a large degree this is true, but hell, it's fun, so why not. Many players (I'd wager most) have multiple alts.

Question is, how to use the strengths of SWTOR to appeal to the endgame crowd. This is where my idea comes in: I call it Army of One, but you can call it whatever. Ever notice that all the 'instanced' material in SWTOR is a factor of 2? Soloing in a 2 man job: you and your companion. FPs are 4 man. Ops are 8 or 16. SWTOR should USE this.

Imagine, you enter a FP and sitting next to you is your favorite alt (controlled by AI similar to companion AI) and your and your alt's companions are out, both controlled by AI. Look! you are soloing a 4 man FP. Imagine walking into a 16 man ops, and all you see are your alts and their companions! You are soloing a large scale OPS. In my opinion, this is something that is completely unique to the MMO community, would bring back the endgame crowd looking for larger scale encounters, and add a much needed unique feature to SWTOR that would require a lot of time and planning on a players part to execute.

Now, obviously there are drawbacks. You solo an ops and you just locked yourself out of that ops on every character you got. How does the AI handle getting out of the fire? Moving to a new platform? Or switching DPS targets? MMO now has truly no meaning in SWTOR, right?

Some of these can be address. Slightly improved AI commands, such as priority lists for ability (thinking similar to Dragon Age). Only allow SM ops to be soloed. People with 4 or 8 geared alts and companions aren't really doing SM, they are focused on HM, separate lockouts. (and to be honest, HMs would be too difficult).

I believe the pros of this idea outweigh the cons. However, I am not addressing the implementation cost of such a feature. However, imagine the time it would take to gear all these characters up, and organizing them into an ops force. It would be truly epic and, I believe, add a whole dimension to MMOs.

I welcome any comments,let the blasting begin.

I like the sound of that!

It makes having a legacy actually interesting/useful (other than having an extra buff or two)

This is a very good idea! I won't lie, it sounded strange at first, but it quickly became cool.

But I do have a question... Anyone who has ever done Soa boss knows: you need everyone on the same level. How would the AI react to this? And more importantly, what if your high-level alts are on opposite factions? As awesome as it sounds, I don't trust my operative holding a rifle next to my guardian's head!

I can imagine having a flashpoint-style mission where all of your companions could be active at once -- indeed, for the Trooper's Havoc Squad, it makes perfect sense -- but in general, we only see that sort of thing through scripted missions, because the mechanics of such an area would need to be quite different from having multiple real players react to different events.

In existing flashpoints/operations, they would be horribly bad in reacting to things like AEs, needing to interrupt or CC etc., or they would perform better than real players do -- it would be a mammoth programming task to have them react realistically.

That doesn't, however, preclude special companion-only mission, although again, they would be hard to balance between the ability sets of all the advanced classes and sets of companions.

You could get around complicated tasks such as SOA by a 'group on me', 'attack my target', or even a 'Tank X taunt button.' Not saying it'll be easy to code, but I don't think it would require more complex AIs than is already in the game. Maybe an improved 'Get out of the fire'.

The fact of opposite factions working together is the beauty of this. You have a family tree in your legacy. Let the family work together!

I would like to also say, it doesn't have to limited to 1 person. What about a group of 2 people, each controlling 8 characters. Just a thought.

It would appeal to players like me who either 1) Lost their guild in the mass exodus and are now guildless, friendless, and have a nostalgia feeling of raiding and 2) Who are distracted and can't dedicate an hour or 2 to raiding and can only dedicated a half hour here, hour there due to RL (you try to raid with a 9 week old).

You could get around complicated tasks such as SOA by a 'group on me', 'attack my target', or even a 'Tank X taunt button.' Not saying it'll be easy to code, but I don't think it would require more complex AIs than is already in the game. Maybe an improved 'Get out of the fire'.

 

The fact of opposite factions working together is the beauty of this. You have a family tree in your legacy. Let the family work together!

 

I would like to also say, it doesn't have to limited to 1 person. What about a group of 2 people, each controlling 8 characters. Just a thought.

 

It would appeal to players like me who either 1) Lost their guild in the mass exodus and are now guildless, friendless, and have a nostalgia feeling of raiding and 2) Who are distracted and can't dedicate an hour or 2 to raiding and can only dedicated a half hour here, hour there due to RL (you try to raid with a 9 week old).

Now this makes it sound ingenious. I would still prefer other players, but this would be a nice substitute, for I am guildless-ish. Consider me a 100% supporter of this thread.

PS- I can't imagine it would be too painful to code, probably not much harder than the current companion command system.

PSS- oh raiding with a nine-month-old would be a joy, as a nine month old would be the only person in the world who doesn't ragequit when they can't beat a boss.

This could also work with all companions for an op. Including the player, there are 8 characters per player, there are:

HK, ranged dps

1 ranged tank, can also dps

1 melee tank, can also dps

1 ranged dps

1 melee dps

ship droid, heal

1 healer, can also dps

player, can dps, tank, or heal depending on class

no matter what role the player is in, you can have the right composition

This would require some extra work by the player to get hk, but it is still an idea.

The original Guild Wars did this and allowed you to pretty much solo all content as you could have the 8 members of your party as your different alts. This made micro-managing them a little more difficult.

In most of the heavy mechanics fights in the Operations (HM TfB Dreadguards I am looking at you) this will probably never be achievable. To be honest I am not sure turning the MMO aspect into a single player game will cause people to come back to this game.

The main problems I see right now are lack of endgame content, recycling the same operations with different tiers of difficulty is not endgame. Nor is PVP running on the same maps.

If they added in the ability for player made content (esp. WZs) you would see a lot more interest in the game, eventhough the PVP in this game can turn into Stun Wars or Lag Wars very quickly.

I would be happy if you could que for 4 man op or heroic and check mark in order of strength to companion roles that could be filled. If you and your comp are slightly above level because of side missions and WZ, AND they have gear comparable to a a real player it does work. SO instead of line of DPS waiting on healers and tanks you could at least get to run the mission. This would mean at end game when the missions repeat folks have the practice. Maybe you would need to really focus on your role making the difference because if the comps fail it is because of lack of gear or the fact that the AI and skills are limited. COMP healer do pick priority well and comp tanks usually pull aggro.

I just love watching Blizz yell the equivalent of BANZI in Jawanese. It can work and running more fps is always better than none. Yes I know about guilds and getting a group.

I came up with this idea because if you are not hardcore, not going after HM OPS, at least you have a reason to go into SM ops once you're all decked out... to deck out your companions who NEED the gear because you are going to use them.

Also, I would be in favor of only allowing this in SM or certain OPS.

The whole "Army of One" thing sounds good, but here's a different take on it: instead of placing one of your alts in the hands of an AI (they're really no substitute for an actual experienced player), instead make it so that you can have multiple companions summoned at once. Like SWTOR gives so many cool companions that it sucks that we can only use one at a time. Let's make it so that we can have 3-5 of them out all at once. Would make Makeb & Oricon more tolerable and it'd make gearing up your companions much more worth it.

And once this is implemented, can we get soloable fps that drop companion-specific gear? Would have to come up with a different name for them naturally, but you get the idea.

I welcome any comments,let the blasting begin.

First of all, the companion system is not unique to SWTOR and has been done (to better extent) in some older games. The same is true with "alt as companion" idea.

Don't get me wrong, the idea of having my characters keep each other company is great and I would really like to see it implemented. First companion to go would definitely be Gus Tuno as I'd rather level a new Smuggler than have him annoy my Gunslinger.

SWTOR has a history. The very beginning was great. Servers had little trouble, story line was awesome, PVP was epic.

The good old days when level 50 players in full pvp gear farmed the level 10 people who didn't even have sprint at the time