I've already canceled mine. If I still get billed, I'm calling the bank and getting Bioware's ass on fire over it until I get my money back.

My reasons for canceling:

1) Crappy travel time everywhere. I didn't subscribe to have to spend about 2 hours every day just moving to a play area.

2) Load times and mass load screens. Didn't pay to see these every 10 minutes.

3) Slow-as-hell combat. Yeah. 3s-6s channel times and 1.5s+ activations on majority of the skills so good. I shouldn't need to waste 10+ seconds on a group of weak mobs when I'm 4 lvls higher and have the next planet's highest level gear because of crappy channel times.

4) Global Cooldowns on practically EVERYTHING. Whoever thought that up should be shot.

5) Playing Super Mario just to get stat boosts and items. As with GCD, person who thought hiding items and stat boost in hard-to-reach and faraway places needs to get shot.

6) A console RPG. God damn, this entire game, until the very ends of 50 or PVP, plays entirely like a console RPG. There's no reason to party unless you want extra items from flash points. Most people can solo heroics, if they're careful about it.

7) Open World PVP on a PVE server too good. Obviously, BW can't even designate their servers correctly.

8) Resource whoring. If there are just three people questing in an area, and no one parties, prepare to start being an asshole to get your quest done.

9) Shit-ton of servers for no reason. Merge them, make unlimited resource but set cooldowns per character to prevent spam mining. Otherwise, we get freaking empty worlds in a damn MMO. Where's the MM?

 

1) How are you playing that you have to travel that much? The most quests are nearly placed in a row.. you get to a new area, get your quests do them and the chances are high that after that you are near the next taxistation so that you can travel back and get your rewards.

2) The only times that I have long loading screens is when I start the game or when i get to a new planet.. which means maybe 2-3 times a day.

3) That really depends on what character you play...

5) Well those are bonus things..... nobody says that you have to do them. The effect those things have on the game is minimal.

6) And I am one of the people who like the fact that I can play this game solo... I don´t have that much time so I don´t like to depend on others to get things done... Btw.. the game is much more fun if you play it with a friend on the same lvl..

7) It is no open world pvp.. there are some special areas on some of the planets that you don´t have to visit if you want to go there.

And maybe is 8 the reason for 9

To summarize the whole thing...
I like this game.. sure it is not perfect but what is. I like the way the quests and the story are told and because I like RPGs I also have no problem with fast lvling and that you can pretty much solo this game. But even i am not to sure if I will play it after I finish a few classes... the endgame seems a little bit boring (Especially if you, like me, don´t like PvP).

@Red Aviary
I meant general Star Wars books...didn´t even know that there were ToR books..
And it has a been long time since I last played the KotoR games so I don´t notice most of the irregularities.The only thing that I really hate and will continue to ignore is

Spoiler

the flashpoint with Revan and HK in it

 

Tatooine, Alderaan, Corsucant, Taris.

Taris and Coruscant are annoying as hell for low levels without speeders. It's why I don't play Republic any more. At least Kaas and Balmorra have a rather large amount of speeders scattered around, though making a disconnected speeder route in DK kills it.

Also, Tatooine if you rushed the levels instead of taking your time. I rushed on one character once, and not having speeder on Tat made me never rush again.

PVP, Elevators, moving around between ships, moving around between planets to help people, and others along that line.

If you play this game as a solo, you won't hit these screens often. IF you actually try to run this thing as an MMO, you'll have a decent amount of load screens. Even if they only take 5-10s on a fast comp, you'll still find them too often.

Merc, Sorc, Sage, Sniper, Powertech. All of them have really slow as hell combat despite getting tagged as the nuke and AOE types.

I've played Juggernaut and Operatives. Melees have more action-oriented PVE, but they kill mobs slower than AOE spam, which already takes pretty long against mooks. Only good thing is that they can 1v1 easier, slightly. Even then, Sage/Sorcs have an easier time.

I mean, seriously, should a 1k HP lvl 11 monster really take 3s to kill if the player is lvl 33 and well-geared? And this is just one, not even counting the fact that most people don't even have that many strong AOEs and that these things swarm.

No, they aren't bonus. The shards can make some of the best relics in the game. The stat boosts give a 2-3% damage increase, which IS important in PVP, especially vs mirrors, where crit procs rule and 1% really helps.

I don't hate the fact that I can play solo. I love it. What I hate is that there is ZERO real multi-player challenge or actual interaction in the story. Hell, I can play through an entire day and never meet another player doing a quest in the area I'm in.

Wrong. Any republic can gank an Empire player on the world map and vice-versa. I've had republics camp out datacron sites and basically kill any empire low lvl that gets there.

Know the balloon datacron on Tatooine? One day on the Corelian Run server (Pure PVE server), there was a duo Commando + Sage that camped that place and ganked the hell out of any low lvl that tried to get the shard and str cron there.


Makes no damn sense for a PVE server to allow PVP griefing. Leave that in the PVP designated area, not the PVE maps, especially when not even near the republic camp.

 

Oh.. seems you did think much more about those things than I did...
Most of those things you only notice when you spend much time in the game...and like I said I don´t have that time so I don´t notice these things.. And because I suck at PvP those datacrons are not that important for me (And I always thought that you need to have you PvP toogled on to get attackable.. because I was just on Tatoine and met some Imps that i couldn´t attack).
But if these datacrons are as important as you say they are shouldn´t it be ok if they are not that easy to reach.. I mean they should be something special and not something everybody has to have..

 

Are you serious?

Holy shit, have you never played a game before where balance was based on who the hell paid more money to the cash shop or the fact that someone's kicking your ass isn't becasue they're better, but because they literally bought gold for gear? That's exactly what datacrons are. They're annoying, BS, tedious side-quests to get really important stat boosts and items that the devs put in to drain your money.

If you PVP competitively without them, you're effectively crippled. If they were actually FUN to get, like fight a boss that needs 4 people to take down or beat a Flashpoint, they wouldn't be BS.

It's the simple fact that Bioware added this obvious time sink in place designed to ONLY drain your subscription time and to cripple you if you don't. That's what pisses me off.

Apparently, people find it okay to pay for Super Mario instead of Star Wars MMO, but that's your choice.

 

No comment on the current game discussion... but whaaaat? Zahn, Stover, Allston, Stackpole. All wrote fantastic EU books. Plenty other examples, but those stand out for me. Any Star Wars fan worth their salt wishes Zahn wrote for Star Wars, not Lucas.

 

Show me on the doll where the bad MMO touched you, Evan.

I can't say anything that Erandil hasnt already, but I agree with him completely. This game hasn't been without its share of issues, but it is what it is. If you find it fun, then fantastic. If not, move on.

The only other thing I want to add is this: Ive had no issue with the MMO part of this game. One quick line in general chat, "Looking for more for ***" and I have an instant group. Ive populated my friends list with 14 people so far, that I regularly group with.

If youre having issues with this, its not the game, its you.

 

I love the game. For me, it's an amazing mix between a solo RPG, an MMO, and a MOBA. With the lvl 50 bracket being added to BGs, I find them to be extremely balanced for all levels which is amazing. I don't have to avoid them except for 19/29/39 etc like you had to in WoW.

If I want to PvP, I can hop in at any time and be a useful addition to the team. I struggle to get medals because I nearly always end up with 70k damage and healing, missing out on two medals by less than 5k. Despite never getting more than 5 medals, I get a lot of MVP votes and feel that the PvP is more than just a time sink. At level 10-49 with no gear, you are still useful and PvP is like LoL where you jump in and don't lose automatically because of lower gear level/time spent farming prior to the match.

If I want to RPG, the single player story and questing is the best of any MMO I've ever seen. I am invested in my characters and their decisions, and I have escaped out of several conversations, not to avoid evil points, but because the decision was actually unsettling.

If I want to MMO, each world has 5-15 Heroic quests that are fun to do, and finding groups is never hard, even when the republic side is out-populated 3:1. There are tons of flashpoints that do feel unique and have some substance to them that are conveniently located as well.

That isn't to say the game doesn't have problems, because it does. I'm running it on an old as shit computer (a laptop at that) that gives me 15 FPS on average. During peak hours in warzones, I drop to around 5 and do nothing but heal because it's all I CAN do. My load times are in excess of 30 seconds, sometimes even a full minute on larger planets like Hoth/Tatooine. Classes are nowhere near balanced for leveling. Troopers and Bounty Hunters have two amazing specs that solo everything with ease and breeze through every zone they want at record speed because of their absurd damage and survivability compared to knights and warriors who can't DPS their way out of a paper bag and struggle with their class quests. I can't tell you how many times I've seen "LF help with Lord Praven, will pay" in tatooine general.

On my mercenary chapter 1 ending class quest, it took me 35 minutes to kill a level ~32 elite because I didn't realize that his companion who I had already "killed" was healing him to full. She had become untargetable because she was the quest mob after the boss was killed. Despite this guy hitting like a truck, knocking me back 50 yards into a group that I hadn't killed (elite/strong/weak), and receiving somewhere around 350k healing, I killed him anyway on the first attempt. The reason it took me 35 minutes? After I realized that the healing wasn't coming from him 20 minutes in, I kept fighting him next to his padawan because I wanted it to be an epic experience.

On my Sentinel chapter 1 culmination? I had to force camo the boss off me and let my padawan tank because I have 0 sustain, low damage, and low defenses. The torhead page for that quest has a lot of people who died multiple times before they completed it.

The companion system is boinked, and the soloing strength of a class is extremely dependent on when they get their healer. While the split storylines are interesting and feel unique, having 2 less companions than other classes at comparable levels isn't fun, it's frustrating as hell when they have better help and better crew missions on top of it. Despite all that, I enjoy this game. And while it's interesting to have multiple classes with different storylines, the only one worth using, ever, is the healer.

I play with 10 FPS regularly, and I enjoy this game immensely. If you don't, you should move on. But honestly I like the datacrons. It's like an easter egg hunt with tangible rewards. Then, at the same time, you don't need to get every easter egg because you only really need 2/7 types to remain "competitive" in the strictest of raid guilds. Twenty datacrons is hardly a huge investment. That's like a few minutes of research and a couple of hours to complete if you found 0 in your 1-50 time. I'm at 29/30 for the planets I've visited right now because I enjoy hunting them. In WoW, I got to walljump to some funny NPC gathering. Here, I get to get bonus stats.

I don't know about the quest node problems you said you were having. My server is heavy status whenever I play and I run across people all the time, but with the exception of a few poorly executed quests, I never have trouble getting the items/mobs I need. It is 30x better than WoW in that respect.

As for the channel times, it really isn't that bad at all. 1st, why do you need to kill a level 11 as a 33? 2nd, companions are great for that. I farmed a good 2k rep and several thousand alignment points from black talon on my level ~35 mercenary and it took less than 15 minutes a run. Autoattack takes down mobs with that much of a level difference. I'm currently playing a smuggler and the aoe is pretty substantial. Stealth to a mob to backblast, grenade, blaster whip, then use the upper hand charge to aoe again. If the first mob didnt die, blaster bomb is back off cd, which kills it giving you another upper hand charge. The 2nd upper hand aoe will kill off whoever your companion shot, giving a third charge to aoe or punch down the last one's sliver of remaining HP. None of it is channeled and the playstyle is rewarding, even though I have some sick delay most of the time. I can't get off a backblast and a cheap shot within a dirty kick, though I should be able to do both with a second to spare.

I've also played a vanguard to level 30, and I don't know why you include a powertech as a channeler. My entire playstyle revolves around autoattacks proccing ion shell and punching people in melee. I have two channeled abilities: mortar, which one-shots weak and normal mobs or brings them to within 5% of death, and ion pulse (flamethrower equivalent) which is spammable aoe.

I don't know if those problems are truly turning you off to the game or if you had a bad experience with a class or zone and are just pissed off at it in general. I know I wanted to rip my hair out trying to get GM/Gladiator in WoW, and I was ready to quit this game when my sentinel was weak as shit.

 

The game has flaws to be sure, it's still a very decent game considering it just launched. It's lacking some things, most of the thing I myself miss has been said to be on the horizon.

Mostly looking forward to rated pvp. How they implement that will make or break the game for me.

Unfortunately I suffer from MMO exhaustion, I can't really bring myself to grind the typical mmo-endgame. I took my last 4 towards Battlemaster rank during the Ilum Free Valour Day but now I cba log in to just grind non-competitive warzones day in and day out. I'll be cancelling 'til rateds pop in and will give it a renewed try then, hopefully it turns into something worthy of the subscription from a pvp point of view.

As a concluding sidenote pve, while decent is the pinnacle of mmo exhaustion in my world. I did EV hardmode fairly easily and bonethrasher as well, stopped logging in basically at the new patch. Killing dragons just isn't fun anymore.

 

I have two major beefs with this game, both of which I expect to be fixed sooner rather than later (or else!).

First, endgame is riddled with absolutely ridiculous bugs. Winning BGs only to find that you didn't get credit for the daily/weekly quests is infuriating. The bugs that persist in the dungeons even more so. If we wipe on the final fight in Boarding Party even once we don't get loot? Really? How about half my raid getting Death Touched while walking through the 2nd boss of EV's chamber... after we've cleared him. There are tons of these little things that just make me want to put my head through a brick wall, but I'm fairly confident that they'll be fixed. We're only 6 weeks into the game, after all.

The second thing is that they really, really need to look at how endgame gear is earned/distributed. From a pve perspective, the tier 1 stuff (tionese) is just not worth collecting. Getting columi and champion gear is just too damn easy. I'm honestly just spending all my tionese commendations on Mako since 2 weeks after hitting 50 I just don't need that shit anymore. So basically tier 1 is a joke. And I don't think I know a single person who has bought a piece of T1 pvp gear, so forget that.

As far as columi is concerned, you get a drop and you get your gear. That's it. The commendations seem completely worthless, since at the rate I'm going right now I'll literally have farmed every piece of columi gear from dungeons before I have enough columi commendations to buy even one piece of gear from a vendor. This should be the other way around. Maybe have hard mode operations drop gear tokens, but for the most part make players earn their gear through time and effort instead of dumb luck.

For pvp gear, the situation is even worse since 95% of all the gear you get will be from a random drop from a pvp bag. Once you get the battlemaster ranking this is the only way to get this gear - through sheer luck of the draw. It's really disheartening.

If they tune down the luck factor involved in getting endgame gear and make the T2 stuff harder to get, and the T1 stuff actually relevant, they'll be doing themselves a favor. I mean I expect to have full T2 gear by the end of the week, and after that, there's what? A broken T3 set with shit stats that I can only get by running hard and nightmare ops?

Pretty lame if you ask me.

 

Well, I've decided that Skyrim has ruined me. I'd forgotten that in most games travelling is really boring and the combat is just plain slow, as Evan Tide said.

 

lol wut? Skyrim combat is fucking lame.

Hold on, let me think about which of my two abilities I'm going to use to kill this monster...





...Hey, at least give me some time!

 

Edited: Off Topic.

Meh, I disagree.

But anyway, I see your points with the issues about lategame. I'm just.. not impressed.

It certainly feels rushed.

 

The bugs and poor design decisions are starting to get on my nerves. It really feels like this game was rushed out for Christmas.

I mean no guildbank, ability delays, broken quests, long load times that has gotten worse since the beta, broken bosses, the random pvp loot, illum (lol..), noting to do with your money, too few models (gear, people, speeders), the way they're trying to force people to interact with each other (no mail or recall to your ship so you have to use the spaceports (I've seen less than 5 people there during my way to 50...) but I'm still playing.

Why? Because the story is good, the voice acting is nice (for a mmo), and pvping and endgame with friends is fun(when it's not bugged). Got an assassin and one mercenary at 50 and an 26 juggernaut.

Its good that they keep updating and adding stuff, I don't think I'd be playing, despite the good stuff.

 

It was totally rushed for Christmas.

 

World of Warcraft released: 2004. SWTOR Released: Late 2011/Early 2012.

It feels like the opposite is true. SWTOR is just a shitty precursor to WoW, except it's 8 years too late.

 

Or, you could think of it as WOW has had 8 years to get it right, while SW:TOR has had a few months now.

SW:TOR vs 2004 WoW Vanilla leans heavily towards TOR. And I say that without havingplayed it.

 

It depends what you are talking about. WoW wasn't polished on release, but it was as polished as any game could be of its size, shit loads more then SWTOR is. And I just mean the features and flexibility WoW offers, mainly in the user flexibility of the interface, add-ons etc etc, and has offered since near the start, just completely out does SWTOR. SWTOR are talking about adding this stuff, but it just does not compare, even there patch notes on what is to come.

That's just personal taste, I like to customize and macros etc etc. You could just say that's not a part of this game, except it's like a carbon copy of WoW in what it tries to do, with a graphical overhaul.

And WoW did not have this many bugs and glitches for important parts of the game (PvE, FPs, FP HMs, Ops, PvP etc etc.) Minor glitches, but definitely not major glitches like this game has on such a wide scale.

This is just wrong. I can easily stand by your point, WoW has had 8 years to get it right. It's valid. But in their first month it was still 100 times better then SWTOR is now.

 

That's because you are a retard and don't know vanilla WoW was fucking fantastic for it's time and SW TOR has nothing on it.

 

NOt having that much experience with TOR, I guess I can't really argue with you. My post was made because I felt you weren't taking the 8 years WoW has had to improve itself.