SW: The Old Republic - Episode VIII (May RNG Be With You)

[Gorth]

I wasn't playing the game at the time, but swtor oldtimers in my then guild told me that the game had no end game at launch. The first boss of what later became Eternity Vault was added and later the entire operation followed. At which time 4/5 of the players had left the game.

According to the same people (i.e. entirely anecdotal because I haven't checked it), the game was planned to have nine chapters for each class story, but ended after 3 as players were chewing through class story a *lot* faster than Bioware expected.

 

[kirottu]

8 hours ago, majestic said:

I even had my own hate thread in the German GSF forum, people accused me of all sort of cheating. It was fun.

Ah, the highest praise you can get in PVP.

[majestic]

6 hours ago, Gorth said:

I wasn't playing the game at the time, but swtor oldtimers in my then guild told me that the game had no end game at launch. The first boss of what later became Eternity Vault was added and later the entire operation followed. At which time 4/5 of the players had left the game.

That was Karagga's Palace. Eternity Vault was always in the game, it was just so easy that you could do it directly after leveling and so bugged that you could permanently mess up the puzzle boss for the reset period, and PVP gear had expertise attached to the base components at almost no (or actually no, not sure any more) item budget cost, making PVP another really easy way at the time to gear up - before level 50 players got a separate PVP queue. If you were an early level 50 player, you could quite frankly faceroll a game of PVP without any other 50ies in it on your own.

The pre-nerf hard mode level 50 instances dropped worse gear than EV or PVP and were a lot tougher to go through, which exacerbated the problem of having nothing to do. The entire "collect pre-raid BiS gear to get into raiding" part of the progression loop went away for almost all interested players. WoW has similar issues with their new expansions at times (WotLK was a prominent one that lead to a lot of winging) but the instances there are at least usually tuned in a way that it takes really good players to be able to progress in or even clear raids while undergeared.

Bioware did an admirable job in fixing things  - but by no means fast enough, and once the free month expired the game lost the first huge chunk of the player base, and never properly recovered from it.

 

[kirottu]

New expansion Legacy of the Sith.

I do hope the "tech modernization" means 64-bit client. 

[ShadySands]

I'm curious about the class mashups but my experience with the game doesn't have me very excited since I'm sure it's probably super low effort/cost.

[bugarup]

Nah, no new client. Overall it doesn't look anything moar special than the last expansion - five levels, teeny tiny drip of story + raid + flashpoint + some new mechanics, just wrapped into shiny but empty "Yay decade anniversary" hype, which was enough for simple souls on reddit to rejoice, mind you. 

Oh well. Will have to buy month's worth of sub now since they killed my click-a-link, get-a-weeks-worth scheme, that's...how many beers...no matter, I'm trying to reduce'em anyway. 

 

[213374U]

17 hours ago, ShadySands said:

I'm curious about the class mashups but my experience with the game doesn't have me very excited since I'm sure it's probably super low effort/cost.

I think the idea is that you can mechanically play as any Advanced Class provided it's still a Force or Tech class as relevant, while going through the Class story of your choice. So for instance play a Sith Assassin while going through the Jedi Knight story. The game would be significantly harder to balance otherwise and they moved away from skill trees to put a stop to hybrid specs. I don't see them going back to that now. It's an interesting idea, and the class stories are still the best part of the game, but that doesn't detract from the fact that it's still ten year-old content.

The loadouts sound good. It only took them ten years, but a win's a win.

And of course I fully expect a ton of bugs for at least 1-2 months after launch, as is custom after every expansion. And yeah, they explicitly said no new engine.

[Gorth]

On 7/3/2021 at 9:54 AM, 213374U said:

 And yeah, they explicitly said no new engine.

I know this isn't a race and wishful thinking gets you nowhere, but dammit, I wish somebody like Arenanet (Guild Wars 2) had been the people doing swtor. Third major expansion in the works, bimonthly content releases the size and scope of a swtor expansion they just teased us a few days ago with a major overhaul of the game engine/client to support Dx11 and proper cpu  multi core use. If just...

[bugarup]

LOL the market thing's gone insane. I had some stuff taking space in my cargo hold forever because it was selling for peanuts before, I looked it up "just in case", saw that the full set was selling for 10 mil, put up the chest piece for 5 mil and what do you know, it actually got bought!

BRB, flipping through alts looking for more trash to sell

[213374U]

I've made several billions by flipping items in the last few months alone. Insane inflation is definitely a thing and I have no clue what's driving it. I suspect that the removal of referrals has caused a decrease in the overall supply of CM items, but I doubt that's the only factor.

In other news, PTS is up for testing a super early version of what 7.0 disciplines may look like. In short: it's downright terrible (and it's not just me being a Negative Nancy as usual, check out the feedback thread if you don't believe me). Apparently Bioware designers, in their infinite wisdom, believe that the game is too complex for us smooth brained plebs and is in need of a serious ability pruning so it has way less buttons to press. I haven't been confounded by the game's systems or mechanics for a long time, but I will admit, their design decisions rarely fail to leave me scratching my head in bewilderment.

This may finally be the end of the game for me. I only need one or two more NiM achievements anyway.

[kirottu]

Game developers and over correcting, name a more iconic combo. 

[Gorth]

16 hours ago, 213374U said:

I've made several billions by flipping items in the last few months alone. Insane inflation is definitely a thing and I have no clue what's driving it. I suspect that the removal of referrals has caused a decrease in the overall supply of CM items, but I doubt that's the only factor.

Got no numbers to back it up (pun unintended), but I have a hunch that the referral scam scheme did a lot of damage, but nothing even close to the gold sellers who runs bot farms. One thing Arenanet did right, they control the market, including the buying and selling of ingame currency vs. cash shop currency. You play the trading post right, you don't need a credit card and vice versa, you got a fat credit card, you can buy ingame gold from people wanting to sell their gold for cash shop currency, for the latest skins for fashion wars. Of course Arenanet also takes a cut of every currency transaction, so it constantly drains gold out of the game.

Edit: Arenanet controls the exchange rate, so they can to at least some degree control the market.

[213374U]

Yeah. Credit sellers are a big problem and have been for a long time. Various exploits introduced a lot of credits into the economy as well, and only Bioware knows to what extent the damage was mitigated. The fact remains that the entry barrier for new players is impossibly high unless they want to spend real dollars in the cash shop.

Ironically, Bioware has always been reluctant to introduce a more or less direct way to convert real currency into credits -even going so far as removing pvp and ops passes which were always top sellers- both cutting themselves out of a potential revenue source, and making people turn to third parties to buy credits anyway.

Edited July 11, 2021 by 213374U

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

10 hours ago, kirottu said:

Game developers and over correcting, name a more iconic combo. 

MMO players and Stockholm Syndrome.

[kirottu]

On 7/11/2021 at 6:43 PM, KP the meanie zucchini said:

MMO players and Stockholm Syndrome.

Hey now, there's no need to bring personal attacks into this.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

1 minute ago, kirottu said:

Hey now, there's no need to bring personal attacks into this.

I'm attacking my(past)self.

[bugarup]

It's not even Stockholm, just plain sunk cost fallacy.

[213374U]

Heh. The realization that I don't really need to keep paying sub even if I don't ever clear every instance because there's more games out there than I'll ever be able to play was liberating, to say the least.

What's currently in PTS in addition to the standard fare marketing pitch seems to be giving people serious WoW BFA vibes. I wouldn't know because I never played WoW. However, the actual gameplay is the only thing that's keeping me playing currently. So if they finally manage to screw that up too...

 

[ShadySands]

Gave the new update a spin. Made a sorc/sin Jedi consular since I can never stay Pub-side because Imp force abilities look cooler... I also don't feel bad abandoning the consular's love interest for Lana not that I'll probably make it that far into the story before a week of not playing becomes a year again. I did sorc/sin so I could fling purple lightning and also sneak past stuff when I don't get to the endgame of grinding my heroics-per-hour.

[Lorfean]

I have a question for current SW:TOR players:

I am a long-time WoW player and fan of the KotOR games who dabbled in TOR at release and then again after it went free-to-play, but it never managed to really hook me. I'm looking for a fun sandbox-like game to play with my wife. We both love Star Wars and I think TOR could be really fun to experience and play through together... We're not necessarily interested in end-game content or even in doing a lot of group content, just something we can casually do together and enjoy.

How is the learning curve for this game for someone (her) whose last MMO experience was WoW Cataclysm? Is the free-to-play version of the game friendly to new players or are there so many restrictions that it might turn her off? How is the co-op experience? I seem to remember something about party members being able to "roll" for who gets to make choices in dialogue, etc.

Your insight would be greatly appreciated

[Humanoid]

My understanding is that the F2P restrictions aren't as horrific as they used to be, but looking them up, they still seem rather annoying. I mean things like a low number of hotbars, no bank access, being restricted to one tradeskill, inability to trade or send mail (particularly relevant for co-op I imagine). I would say that if the game manages to grab you enough to commit beyond a day or two, then getting at least preferred status is something you'd probably want. I would say give it a go for about 10 levels (which gets you off tutorial planet and into the main "city") and if you're continuing past that, upgrade.

Now, the cost to upgrade to preferred status and lift the worst of the restrictions is small, you just have to buy something, anything. But a common recommendation is that instead of paying for a microtransaction, it's better to subscribe for a single month instead, which unlocks all current expansions for you, permanently and therefore is technically much better value.

The counter-argument of course is that you might get bored of the game and never even make it to that expansion content. That was my experience in a co-op run with my sister actually. The 1-50 content was good - and yes, you do roll for who wins dialogue - but we found the first expansion content so limited that we quit at the end of it. The reason for this is fairly obvious, in that up to level 50, every class has their own story tailored to them alone so it feels both personal and coherent. After that, the content is the same for all classes with little more than lip-service paid to your class, and the storytelling therefore become very generic.

I'm not sure I can comment much on the actual gameplay because I understand some systems have been significantly overhauled since I last played 5+ years ago. Since then they've killed the Aussie servers and I'm not going to go back to cross-Pacific pings ever again, so I won't be back. But from what I remember it just feels like a clunkier but workable version of WoW. The limited UI customisation tends to become the primary challenge, as you can probably imagine what playing WoW without mods is like - keeping track of things like cooldowns and DoT durations is a royal pain. I remember my critique at the time of its launch, that it wants to have the mechanical complexity of WoW, but provides you none of the tools to manage that complexity by banning mods. That said, they've at least improved on the amount of in-game customisation allowed since then. Besides that, it just feels a bit "off" too, in that your actions lack the oomph or immediacy of WoW, partly the fault of the somewhat wishy-washy animations.

[Hurlshort]

The only two games my wife has ever really played were WoW and TOR, so I'd think the learning curve will not be an issue. Co-op was a lot of fun early on as you quest together, considering you roll to see who gets to have their say. If only that worked in real life.

[213374U]

If you are looking for a sandbox, look elsewhere. SWTOR is an on-rails themepark MMO. The endgame scene is in a bad place right now. The expansion scaling and tuning is bad, there is no new endgame content, and the grind is terrible. I've quit the game over how bad it is, and I had been doing consistent raiding for the last, eh, 5 years or so. It's a complete dumpster fire.

That being said, if you want to play with someone else and aren't especially interested in endgame I'd say give it a go. A lot of the F2P restrictions won't impact you overmuch and the base content, the class stories, is probably the best the game has to offer even after all these years. They have pretty much removed the grindy aspects the game used to have back when you played it and you can basically take it as a single player or coop CRPG.

 

[Gorth]

I tried starting the game up over the weekend. Just sat there staring at one of my characters on the screen for a while. Just couldn’t get into it at all again

 

I think the whole knights of the eternal grind thing just left me in some kind of gamers ptsd

 

Or maybe other mmos spoiled me

[kirottu]

Star Wars: The Old Republic in 64-bit on PTS!

I still probably have to wait a year or so before I have the strength to go through Fallen Empire/Eternal Throne again.