Star Wars; Old Republic

50% of our small guild have gone back to Eve, the other 8 of us are still playing a lot as and when we all get online, we are a pretty casual bunch these days.

I still like the game a lot and I am looking forward to playing it for a while.

The only thing that might draw me from it is 'The Secret World'.

Our duo hasn't yet run out of alts to play with.

sahiel wrote:

Gab wrote:

Gracerath wrote:I honestly am curious about the state of the game internally. Of everyone I played with during release (15-20 people) all but 1 have quit. I'd love to be a fly on the wall during those meetings.

This. Never got into it myself, but all of the WOW crowd that I know who played have already quit.

Just another Rift/Aion/AoC etc...

I see the opposite, more and more of the people I know from WoW are letting subscriptions drop and starting Star Wars.

Anecdotal information is anecdotal

Sure, this makes sense because WoW is at the point in the game where the final tier has been out a while and the expansion is on the horizon. The question isn't whether or not people are dropping their WoW sub in favor of TOR, it is whether they keep their TOR sub active for any meaningful length of time. Most of the people I played with left WoW for one reason or another over the course of Cataclysm (most of us finally tired of the end game treadmill). Then we hit 50 and the end games were just too similar and we saw a majority leave. I imagine that most people who left WoW because they were tired of end game probably didn't find any satisfaction with TOR end game.

But yes, anecdotal of course.

I believe I got an email I wasn't supposed to about getting some game time. All the legalese in the form mentioned adding 30 days of free game time to my current subscription but I had cancelled at least a month before that. I think it was probably meant for people that took part in the free week they had a while ago and resubbed. I'm sure I could complain to someone and get the free game time but mistakes happen and I really just don't care.

They've been sending a flavor of the free game time email out to just about anyone who had an active account but then canceled.

Fridmarr wrote:They've been sending a flavor of the free game time email out to just about anyone who had an active account but then canceled.

Actually there is a little more depth to it.

BioWare pulled some "big" end-game features from their major game update Patch 1.2. They plan to release them in smaller content drops the moment the items are ready.As an apology they were (are?) giving away 1 free month of play to people with an active subscription and 1 or more level 50. (There may have been 1 more requirement?)

They also added a few extra free days to everyones accounts due to some extended maintinence stuff.

Shyrtandros wrote:(There may have been 1 more requirement?)

One or more level 50 character OR enough sub-50 alts to unlock Legacy level 6.

This weekend, I've tried my hand at SWTOR's PvP for the first time, and I can now confirm that...

Barathorn wrote:10-49 PVP is 100% a lot of fun - far better than WOW PvP in every respect even with only 3 Warzones to play

Kihra wrote:I find 1-49 PvP to be really fun, but at 50, it's a lot less fun.

Gracerath wrote:The fun pvp action is really to be had pre-50. The matches feel a bit more balanced.

crazyharry wrote:Level 10 - 49 PVP is currently a lot more fun than being a newbie in level 50 due to the huge impact no expertise has and the randomness involved in getting geared up.

...I fully agree with all of the above. The normalized sub-50 WZs were surprisingly enjoyable. Level 50? Not so much.

I've heard rumors that GW2 uses a similar "horizontal progression" (being higher level gives one more options rather than more power). If that's true, I might seriously considering trying it out.

Passionario wrote:I've heard rumors that GW2 uses a similar "horizontal progression" (being higher level gives one more options rather than more power). If that's true, I might seriously considering trying it out.

Depends. For structured PVP, there is no progression at all to an extent. You are temporarily auto-leveled to max level from whatever level you are, given all your skills, and given default level 80 gear. You can spend your PVP currency for different gear skins and possibly gear that has it's stats distributed differently, but there is no actual progression based on level.

WvW PVP, where three servers are pit against each other across 4 maps, is supposed to be GW2's replacement for world PVP, so progression isn't really horizontal. You are auto-leveled to the appropriate level and you won't have as many skills as someone who leveled through exp., but gear still does matter. Someone who is level 80 with level 80 gear will still crush someone who is level 5 with level 5 gear who was auto-leveled to 80. There is no actual PVP only stat like SWTOR and WoW has though, so there will not be a huge discrepancy between max level characters.

Gracerath wrote:Then we hit 50 and the end games were just too similar and we saw a majority leave. I imagine that most people who left WoW because they were tired of end game probably didn't find any satisfaction with TOR end game.

That's pretty much what I ended up doing. Was enthusiastic at first, hit 50, found that for me the raiding content wasn't really anything I'd call improved over what WoW had, then leveled a couple of alts, but got tired of the storylines for each class being the minority of the leveling content. Checked back in with the free week for 1.2, wasn't impressed with the story stuff in new content, decided to not renew. I'd still say the game is pretty good value if you like Bioware's storytelling for playing through a storyline once as a Republic character and once as Imperial Character, which does get you a fair bit of content. It's just not an MMO I'd find myself subscribing for consistently though.

I'd particuarly recommend either Jedi Knight or Sith Warrior if you want more a typical Star Wars experience, or Smuggler or Imperial Agent (Especially Imperial Agent) if you don't.

Yeah, I'm curious about this. Figured I would pop into this thread since I was lurking MT and saw it.

Upon launch, I and many others were really excited about SW:TOR. Frankly I loved it. I even raided twice a week with a great bunch of people. My plan was to raid in SW:TOR while WOW got boring. Well, WOW is boring as all hell now, but SW:TOR was worse & I quit bitterly a while back. Pretty much all my friends quit too so I wasn't the first, or the last... With like maybe one exception -- Kihra is still playing, right? -- I've yet to hear of a current wow raider who's still enjoying swtor, although I should probably read through this thread a bit more. I laid out a lot of my concerns with the game here and while this post predates Patch 1.2 (the Jesus Patch apparently) I don't think a lot of my irritation has changed.

Is anyone here playing this game still (and raiding)? Should I go back and try it again? I keep getting these "COME BACK! FREE MONTH!" emails...

And yeah I would love to be a fly on the wall on SWTOR's development or business meetings. I wonder what they think went wrong? I don't really know how the game is doing but I can't imagine well... of course my opinion is very biased based on my experience & the experience of people who play games in a similar manner to me (i.e. focus on raiding).

Since I fit the description, i'll chime in, 6/8 heroic wow raider atm and have always played the game to raid. Currently still playing, raiding in and enjoying Star Wars. I think a big issue was certainly the ease of the initial raids, Nightmare mode wasn't very... nightmarish. The current new raid, Explosive Conflict certainly turned the dial up though, both in terms of more mechanics to the fights and simply harder difficulty due to better tuning of the bosses. Still not perfect, but a step in the right direction.

I'm not sure if it helped or not but I did something very unusual for me when I started SW, I didn't start a guild with my friends from WoW, I went out, played and actually applied to a guild that seemed cool. It was surprisingly hard to go back to being 'the new kid' since for the last few years I've always started guilds in new games with wow friends and we've ended up being relatively insular as a result. In the end though it has totally been worth it, made a ton of new friends, didn't rely on the same small group keeping playing and it made discovering the game with new people all the more fun. I would thoroughly recommend it. A bunch of my WoW friends ended up applying to and joining the SW guild i'm in, which is cool, but i'm very glad it's not our guild and it's one we joined as new players.

Stepping outside the comfort zone was tough, but ultimately I think it made the game far more fun and have far more longevity for me.

Thank you Sahiel. It's nice to hear from another raider about how the endgame is.

It is funny that you tell that story. I also actually did something (a little bit) similar to you and didn't end up in SW:TOR with my wow guild. My wow guild kinda scattered and I was very worried about having a chance to raid in SWTOR, so instead of following them, I took a chance and followed Kerriodos, who I knew just from reading his posts here on MT and discussing raiding and paladin-ing with him. Kerri and I play in similar wow guilds on the same WOW schedule with similar attitudes and competitive progression. So I figured that whereever he would raid would probably be a good SWTOR raiding option for me. But, it was very scary because I left my (scattered) WOW friends behind. Sometimes they were like, "Where are you Ana?? Why did you leave us?? Why are you on that server??" -- but it was definitely the right choice. I loved meeting my new SWTOR guildmates and meeting a whole new crowd of people that were not dissimilar to me and raided neatly around my wow schedule. It definitely kept me in the game longer than I otherwise would have stuck with it.

So like you said, it was very nice to be the "new kid" and not already have all the same friendships and cliques from wow. I love meeting people :3 It was scary but a good choice.

Unfortunately Kerri is such a bad, eventually I ragequit so I didn't have to put up with him anymore

Twitter informs me that I've just been insulted, but I'm too lazy to actually read it.

On the subject of Star Wars, though. I actually really enjoyed it while I played, but despite being an officer in the SWTOR branch of Odyssey, swinging a sweet purple lightsaber, and playing with some of my favourite people ever, I ended up finding loggin on more a chore than anything. I approached the game pretty casually, and yet still managed to clear content very quickly; I think I mostly found it too easy to hold my interest, and 2 nights a week a heavier schedule than I felt justified committing to (on top of 3 WoW nights).

For that reason, it's good to hear that the new content has ramped up the difficulty a bit. It almost makes me want to check in on everyone-=-I'll have to keep an eye open for another free weekend or whatever. Who knows, maybe it'll draw me in (though I expect it will take an open API for addons to make me seriously consider raiding often again).

It's OK kerri. Reading isn't an important skill for a tank to have anyways

anafielle wrote:It's OK kerri. Reading isn't an important skill for a tank to have anyways

That's because as it is the only skill a WoW tank really needs to clear current content is "don't fall asleep with your eyes closed."

I suppose even you get to be correct once in a while I can't disagree with that. I switched out of tanking and have more fun.

Anyways, SWTOR, since I have moar ranting to do.

It's nice to hear that the raid content has improved over the first instance or two. But looking back, I was pretty happy with SWTOR for a while. I really was. I was willing to put up with the first 2 raid instances because it was their very first shot, and because I could see obvious improvement in KP over EV. So much of it was just garbage, yet there were glimmers of a fun endgame there, some interesting decisions, some mechanics that would approach difficulty if tested and tuned correctly. I was happy to see where more experience would lead their encounter designers. I liked my guild and I liked my class (Jedi Sage. Ranged is fun!!) I was even very satisfied with how closely many of my potential DPS specs were tuned together- something WOW has always struggled to keep straight when balancing classes of different DPS specs.

But then came the guild summit and the combat log debacle. I guess looking back, I kinda ragequit over the whole combat log thing.

I was just so mad, so mad. Their approach to combat log was not ok. Their approach to combat log spat on everything that I enjoyed about raiding. I felt as though I was personally insulted as a raider that they would cripple something that is an integral part of my raiding experience to placate whining forum trolls. And if that was their design team's vision for raiding, I wanted no part of it. I was very unhappy because I really wanted to believe in the game, I wanted to have this plan for me to raid in SWTOR when I was bored and 8/8 in wow content... but then the devs were like "nah, we aren't really that serious about giving you compelling content, we are going to half ass it and put our effort elsewhere."

So ... um, I did rage. And quit. I did feel very much like as a raider that the devs had given us the finger. But maybe now, I am just embarassed at how rage filled I was and wondering if I should go try it again. Kinda waiting to see if someone says, "Ana, give SWTOR another shot, you weren't fair to it last time." But maybe I was fair. IDK.

What happened with the combat log?

I think they refused to implement it.

Arnock wrote:What happened with the combat log?

Combat log was implemented in 1.2; however, it can only be saved to a file.

This approach allows for post-battle WoL-style performance analysis, while preventing Recount-style e-peen battles during the game.

Sincerely speaking, that's quite okay.
Not that recount-battles were THAT bad, anyway. There's times when all you really should do is strive for that number.

That's not what I thought happened. I was told it was self-only?

Which isn't a combat log at all, that's just a "check your numbers and pat yourself on the back" log. It's great for optimizing your damage........... which is like, BASELINE performance expectation in a hardcore raid. A self only combat log will help you beat H Ultraxion -- and really nothing else. A raid is a (well, in SWTOR) 8 or 16 person affair. Seeing 1/8 or 1/16 of the fight in a log isn't helpful one bit when you are trying to figure out how to improve on what the whole group is doing. I cannot count the number of times that I have learned from someone else's mistake (or hope someone else learned from my mistake), or poured over the whole raid's damage breakdown on different targets, or compared my performance to other people to improve, not to epeen away. All of that is impossible when you hide parts of the combat log for everyone because the devs want to make it impossible for 5 man pugs to hurt feelings. Or, more accurately, 5 man PUG jerks will always be jerks, they'll just be jerks in other ways than linking some numbers out of recount.

There were a lot of other ways to soothe the butthurt forum kids than to cripple the whole thing. For example, make it only include guildmates, or disable it in PUG groups, or make the whole-raid combat log only active in raids, or make it toggleable by the raid leader or something. But taking a (full featured) combat log away from raids was the best way to drive off raiders. I didn't like the attitude it showed.

So it is obvious that I wanted more out of SWTOR raiding than it was going to give me -- but that's just plain too bad, because I thought SWTOR raiding looked cool. They can't design a compelling encounter without giving raiders access to the information that we are used to getting in WOW though.

I could be wrong though. Was the combat actually implemented for everyone or is it still self-only? Been a while since I had a look. I am told that the self-only stuff could be pieced together anyways to make an actual log of the evening.

The current implementation of the Combat Log is just a personal log. It records everything you do or everything done to you. Damage dealt and received, healing dealt and received. The way it works is that you enable logging to file and it records everything and drops it in a document in your “My Documents” folder. Once you’ve obtained the log you can use a 3rd party program to breakdown everything for you.

Contrary to what a lot of people believe you actually can see the entire raids performance instead of just your own, and you can see it in real time too. A program like MOX Desktop Parser works great. You just point the program to your log folder and it does the rest just like “Recount” would for WoW. It has an option for a “Pop-out Window” to look similar to Recount.

In order to get it to show everybody you have to do a “Raid Sync” basically the raid leader will generate a “Raid Key” for example MZL_L_1138, everyone drops it into their Parser, Syncs and then when combat begins everyone will show up.

While it requires the extra step of dropping in a raid key it’s no harder than installing a WoW Addon.

It's currently only everything that happened to, was done by you. However, Mr Robot has a tool whereby you upload your log quicksmart after a fight, tag it with guild name, time etc. So does everyone else in raid and boom, it combines them to a full Op report that covers everything that happened in the fight.

Ouch... In before "Free to play".

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ea-sales-beat-targets-star-wars-takes-hit-2012-05-07?siteid=yhoof2

1/4 of your player base gone in a quarter? No bueno, on second thought being a fly on the wall in that room doesn't sound too appealing.

Gab wrote:Ouch... In before "Free to play".

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/ea-sales-beat-targets-star-wars-takes-hit-2012-05-07?siteid=yhoof2

1/4 of your player base gone in a quarter? No bueno, on second thought being a fly on the wall in that room doesn't sound too appealing.

Shame to see such a drop but I think it's probably a bit ridiculous to expect a game with 1.3 million paying subs to go free to play. If it drops down to well below a mil, that's certainly likely but given they were 'aiming' for 1.5 mil as their target audience I doubt it'll be even on the table, certainly not until they've had a year or more to try and rebuild their subscriber base, given two new content patches are slated this quarter and an expac possibly near the end of the year.