Jump to content

Sirsri

Members
  • Posts

    288
  • Joined

Reputation

10 Good
  1. As a paying customer what's wrong with that? Especially since he's asking on behalf of the convenience of not just his personal convenience but that of a large portion of the playerbase. That's why you don't normally do events like this in MMO's. Some poor dude who booked two weeks off back in january to start today is going to be out of luck. There's never a 'good time' for a time limited event. Winter holidays? Lots of people are traveling. Middle of some random month? People have jobs, and kids etc. There's always something. When you're a developer you don't want to make content people can't experience, that's just wasting money. Making content that is, intentionally, narrowly time limited is expensive and wasteful. E.g. with the rakghoul event they could have just made the plague time limited, left the rest of it in as a dailies grind for anyone who wants it enough. They could have even pushed it off to a separate phase/instance and let people deal with that who cared enough. An MMO is not my job, it's something I do for fun, denying me fun to make it time limited completely misses the point. One of the big things we worry about in the industry as a whole is digital archiving precisely because you might not ever be able to experience a PS1 or a coleco vision or whatever game the way it was originally done, it' s just hard to produce that stuff. With an MMO the time problem is compressed quite a lot, but when you take stuff out you do take away from the whole range of potential experiences, and that's bad.
  2. if you didn't play any of the closed betas leveling was about 100 hours. If you knew your way around more like 80 or less if you picked a class you knew particularly well. There are 168 hours in a week, and only need about 45 of sleep. Since the game wastes a lot of time (included in the hour figures above) on loading screens and travel in general you can actually fit other activities in (bathroom breaks and eating) while still progressing pretty easily. So basically if you took off the week of the 13th - 20th you could have pretty easily managed. I hit 50 just as the server went live and worked 2 days in between. Because my boss fails at reading when I book time off.
  3. While I disagree with your second paragraph based on the performance of the austin studio thus far, I think your first paragraph nails it. They only envisioned (within the budget they had) space as a minigame. For whatever reason they must have looked at jump to light speed, which was a freeform space combat experience and thought something about it was bad. Now sure, from the moment they announced it was going to be an on rails shooter people were clamouring for them to change it, but it's definitely what they wanted the experience to be right now. Making a full blown space game that allows you to, for example, gather resources and 'progress' in raids or the like would be a significant amount of work, so I can see them wanting to give that a proper treatment down the line. If I were (and I'm not) running it, I'd be thinking the first major expansion should be a proper space game with space progression and new ground raids, the expansion would expand ground leveling with some new space raids and sort of go back and forth like that.
  4. Sure. The question is more of a 'why 4 hours'. Which is a legitimate problem. In game development Art can be a problem where you just throw more bodies at it. Need 300 unique trees? 300 artists doing 1 tree a day can have them tomorrow, or one artist can be done in just over a year. The debugging stage of programming, can take a really long time because it takes as long as it takes to get it working. One programmer might take an hour, another a month. Depends on whether or not you diagnose the problems correctly and know how to fix them, even a really good programmer who diagnoses a problem slightly wrong can waste a lot of time.
  5. This was mostly a programming and UI update. This are the hard parts of software development. Spitting out art assets usually isn't prone to random things being wrong that you can't figure out, it's work and it's hard to gauge just how long the creative process takes, but it's just work. Programming is thinking. If you look at the patch notes they're actually quite extensive, so I'm sure there was a lot of dealing with all of that. But the new systems stuff, well lets look at it. Group finder: You need UI elements for all of this, and any description needs to work in multiple languages. You need some 'queues' of people that they join into. That's probably a variant on the warzone queue, but done by role. Then you need a mechanism to teleport people wherever (variant on some teleport developer code that I'm sure exists). So it doesn't seem all that hard. But then all of the sub parts are actually tricky. What can a player queue for, how do I know? Should we hard code that a level 50 can't go do the alderaan bonus series from the group finder? How do you handle premade groups? Unlike the warzone finder, where it would be one giant queue, premade groups in this are actually quite tricky. Even a 2 person group. If people only queued individually or as full groups this would be easy, have an individual queue for each 'role' (what if you double count someone because they selected 2 roles?) and then take the top person from each role to make a group right? Right. But now you have a premade. It's not hugely complicated, now you're trying to match people from the regular queue onto people in the premade. But that's all new programming and buggy. On top of all this are the network effects. What you can do with hero engine in bioware studios and what you can do with players spread out across multiple countries all connecting to a data centre are slightly different. Things like timeouts waiting for users to connect and so on are actually really tricky. Passing players in a way that absolutely cannot fail from cluster to cluster in a laggy environment is non trivial (but might be guaranteed to work due to enough existing code). But wait you say, what if I want to vote to kick someone? What if loot in a group finder event does something weird, can a CSR fix it? So now you have backend tools for the support people to use to try and find stuff that went wrong. Ranked warzones is a lot of maths to figure out rankings, and then making sure that when they fix bugs in one type of warzone that they don't linger in the other, and that sort of thing. If I were to guess, I would say around this time last year BioWare made the decision to not have a group finder at launch. Between then and the start of the weekend betas and then into the open beta was a long series of whack a mole with whatever problems existed. And then the game launched. And oops, ilum, warzones not giving credit for wins all of the time etc. etc. etc. They've been trying to triage problems that were arising. After making all those changes to go back and look at group finder is basically starting from scratch since they have all new loot/commendations/difficulty etc. One of the things that went with group finder was retuning a lot of the flashpoints. Sure, they should have had a group finder at launch. But they fundamentally misunderstood so much about how to design and test an MMO from the get go that they had to deal with all of those problems first before coming back to this one, and this is the sort of problem that has a lot of layers of complexity to it, that touch a lot of other systems and require a lot of changes that aren't directly related to the feature (retuning for example).
  6. The problem isn't so much that the text isn't clear. The text is quite clear, it just seems like a stupid idea given that they basically made crit crafting augments irrelevant for the moment. There isn't really a situation where you'd craft gear worth anything that a 3% bonus to augment crit chance would be worth 300k. The 'we need a response from bioware' is more of an incredulous 'is this really what you intended it to do?' and probably more relevantly 'is there some reason to think this would be a good idea going forward?'. I mean, bioware could be adding in 'high end' crafting where you would make a significant number of comparable to raid level pieces, where the 3% chance would pay off in the end (think black hole gear), or they could extend it to all crit. But currently as described the ability seems bafflingly dumb. Or they could actually intend for us to be making lots of black hole gear for example. That's fine, it's just not clear what their intent behind the design is, or if it's just a waste of money. In that sense you could say the neutral GTN on your ship was in the same category. It very clearly was what they wanted it to be. And in the broader context of making all GTN's the same makes sense, but it seemed like a stupid idea at the time without that information.
  7. EQ2 never got that big. http://mmodata.blogspot.ca/ tracks data for this stuff. EQ2 only ever peaked around 400k subs and yes, that was very early.
  8. Some people in my guild had a lot of rage about this. They'd raced to log in dec 13th or whatever the absolute first possible moment was to get their names, and then to be forced to change them because BioWare wrecked the server we were on did no make them happy people. And rightfully so, people cared a lot about their names and BioWare didn't even try and resolve the issue in a fair way, so I'll probably need to recruit more people and bioware will lose some more subs. Serves them right.
  9. My guild transfered yesterday and just about everyone had that problem. It seems to go away eventually. It's probably related to doing a move then copy, they probably have do one extra 'move then copy' on the target server for some reason (maybe for renaming or whatever). It's possible the character you can't access is in your 9th character slot, which is hidden from players and only really there for bioware technical stuff.
  10. It's standard on a competing product. And it's purely a convenience issue, but this game wastes enough of my time, a few thousand or small tens of thousands of credits a week is immaterial. It's the time wasted making sure I get the right spec for tonight, depending on who shows up. And then changing back to my old spec (wastes more time). Worse still is that you tend to need to respec because someone had to go or the like, and you're trying to fill in, which means the time you spend respecing is not only wasting your time, but it's wasting 7 or 15 other peoples time. Clicking buttons to set a spec, and then set bars back up isn't fun. One can argue about whether or not choosing a spec can be fun, but there's nothing 'fun' about trying to select the right talents quickly when you already know what you want them to be. it's a time waster, and importantly, it's not a fun time waster, it's busy work, and busy work should be done by computers, not people.
  11. SWTOR as an entity is in trouble if enough people leave. LucasArts doesn't want another SWG on their brand, nor does EA want to keep pouring in the resources (especially the LA licence) to a product that's not making enough money. What those cutoff points are is hard to say, because obviously EA may be willing to run at a loss until they have something else near release that would replace. The problem we're into is what are they going to try and do to either attract new subscribers, retain the ones they have etc. They may not radically change the game, but they might start trying a lot of things that end up being complete disasters.
  12. Doesn't really work that way. This was a "leave on these terms now, because we're not providing guarantees about what's happening to you later". If you don't leave you're now left with a vacated server, whether it was able to plod along previously or not. All ways around this was bizarre. I wouldn't say stupid, although stupid is probably correct, I could be wrong. They're emptying out most of the severs leaving them unplayable and concentrating populations. But it's not clear what's going to happen to the vacant servers. Anyone else would have shut down servers and moved people to target servers (mid size or otherwise). BioWare seem to be resisting the need to 'close servers' so they're going to basically have a bunch of abandoned servers that are no longer viable, but are sticking around for no apparent reason. Concentrating servers is good (give or take how they're resolving name conflicts badly, and then the guild and and guild bank problems). Concentrating people into some servers and leaving others mostly empty is strange, probably stupid, but definitely strange.
  13. There's nothing really wrong with having a space mini game. This is a much narrower and more efficient use of art assets than a full blown space sim, and given the problems they have everywhere else I can see needing some time to get it all together. SWG didn't have JTL for a couple of years after all. But you're right in that BioWare was told the moment they announced an on rails shooter that people wanted a proper space game. Whether they have one coming or not is hard to say, but they should be up front about what the plan is for space. Adding another space mission to the existing system doesn't really hurt anyone or do any harm. It's not like the programmer time to make an actual space game is being used on the mini game missions, and the art assets may as well get used somewhere.
  14. yes, but WoW has a much lower entry point cost wise than SWTOR has, as the price of the base game dropped repeatedly over the years. They've also had all sorts of things to try and persuade you to get your friends to join (including free trials for friend invites). Recruit a friend has been around since 2008. The market place has changed too. When WoW came out the only real competition was EQ, and it was dated by that point (and had a lot of problems). By now lots of MMO's have betas, trials, RaF type programmes etc. SWTOR shouldn't be any different.
  15. And WoW and EQ2 are both natural progressions of EQ1. Sometimes they differentiate themselves for the sake of being different from each other, and sometimes they steal good ideas from each other.
×
×
  • Create New...