Quit looking at Vanilla WoW through rose tinted glasses. It was shit.

I dont think many people realize the scope of what TOR encompasses. The game is a huge undertaking. Comparatively, TOR blows Vanilla WoW out of the water.

 

I'll agree with this. ^ Compared to today,vanilla WoW was shit. There are just so many little features, little tweaks here and there that make Vanilla so much worse than we remember it. If you actually sat down and tried to play that game today, you'd be horrified.

 

Vanilla wow?
You mean no battlegrounds at all?
You mean with rogues backstabbing with swords with 10x the power/escapes of current scrapper operatives/scoundrels?
You mean with PvP balanced around who one shots the other in southshore/tarren mill first?
You mean when the only source of gear was end-game raiding which consisted of ONLY 40 man instances that took stupid amounts of grinding and gear but no skill to down? The same gear that would give you double the hp and damage of non-raiders, making pvp even more of a joke?
You mean when the level 60 instances were 10 and 15 man raids that dropped BLUES and took 4 hours to run?

Goddamn vanilla wow was hot shit. Go find a private vanilla wow server if you like it so much. This is leaps and bounds ahead of vanilla wow in terms of polish.

edit: And you have to drop by spaceports and the station because you dont have mail on your ship, big whoop. Do you even remember wow where level 30s were expected to run through 2 enemy zones to get to scarlet monastery? Or the fact that there was NO easy way to get to ANY instance? How about running through the wetlands, the loch area, and dun morogh just to get to ironforge to use an auction house? That was the height of well-thought out game design and polish?

 

WoW uses WarCraft 3's game engine. WarCraft 3's game engine was 3-D, yes, but it was an ugly piece of cartoony bullshit. And it put me off from playing it. I only played the game to (cheat) and pass all the levels so I could watch their kickass cinematics. Everything else was an ugly sack of garbage. Since WoW uses WC3's engine, it's also an ugly sack of shit. I got bored with it, and I gave the game an honest couple of tries (even if I did only play on private servers and not retail). I'd honestly give WoW a 6/10 on graphics. WC3 is the same. They're barely above "average" because they made it look cartoony, and ugly as a fuckin' diseased troll.

 

I'm confused about people who point how bad WoW was in retrospect, because it lacked refinement. WoW didn't really have the benefit of previous MMO models to look at, and pretty much designed their game from.scratch and turned the MMO model into something that has become a phenomena. TOR benefits from the refinement and polish of years of other MMO that WoW didn't have at its inception.

 

...what? No. WoW was almost an exact copy, with a little Blizzard polish, of the original Everquest. Hell, the original developers even CAME from the development team of Everquest.

 

I'm amazed at people who think WoW was the first mmo. It became huge because it had Blizzard backing it and could draw from the MMO crowd, its devoted WC3 fanbase, and the Diablo/DII fanbase, not because it did anything extraordinary.

As Agnostics put it, quit looking at vanilla WoW with rose-tinted glasses. Rose-tinted shit is still shit. Sure, it was an upgrade from soupy shit to an at least solid turd, but it's still shit.

 

Kind of like how initial TOR is despite having 10+ years of MMO games to pull from to find out what works and what doesn't.

How about everyone taking off all the damn glasses already and admit that both initial WoW and TOL are shit because they both have absolute newb MMO developers>

 

No offense but I kind of discount your opinion from everything based on my LoL experience with you. You seem to hate this game for no real reasons, just personal gripes. Which is fine for you not to play, but is far from making the game shit. I don't enjoy FPS games because of my slow connection, but that doesn't make BF3 or CoD shit.

I have no idea where you are traveling, but the travel times in this game are better than WoW by far.

I have no idea what you are doing that has load screens this often. Some of the mid-game class quests to nowhere areas have several load screens in a row, but the load times for small areas like warzones, your ship, or random ships in space for quests are extremely low. My computer is very old and I play the game on low with 15-20 fps, and my load times aren't that bad or that often.

So you don't like casters? Play one of the several non-channel time classes. I realize a bounty hunter doesn't sound like a mage class, but the mercenary is a mage, more or less.

Have you ever played an MMO?

Very few datacrons are actually difficult to reach. Wow did this except your reward, instead of being anything useful, was seeing a bunch of trolls dancing or the 'airport' above ironforge.

Why do you need a reason to party? If you want to, the option exists and is very efficient leveling, faster than solo. In WoW, partying at all was a detriment compared to grinding or questing. Even in their 3 expansions, it was always faster to run quests solo than it was to run instances.

There's a bug in one area on one world. "fucking bioware cant do anything right ffs" Good thing you can release to your own graveyard with no penalty and get out of the area. Or do you miss rez sickness?

I have never run into this problem. The questing is so much smoother than WoW in every way. The worst respawn time I ran into was like 3 minutes on an elite mob. Even in an area that was swamped (coruscant on release week), quest items and mobs were easy to get. In WoW, collection quests were always hell. Sometimes, mobs didn't even drop their shit group-wide, so partnering didn't even help.

I'm on what is now a light population server, and I can find groups relatively easy and run into plenty of people.

What exactly is your MMO experience that makes you think this game is bad? All of the problems you've listed are things I've seen and experienced to a much worse degree in WoW, Ultima, Warhammer, and Aion.

Or is this another Kennen fiasco where you are definitely right no matter what? "I have the worst score of anyone on the team in any measurable way, but there is nothing I could have possibly done better."

 

When I was talking about WoW vanilla vs SWTOR vanilla, I was not talking about combat prowess, features added such as battlegrounds, LFGs, travel speed achievements and so forth later on in the game. They are superficial and reflect nothing on the quality of the game, only the gameplay. I was talking about the bugs, glitches and so forth in every main aspect of the game which, comparatively, was a lot better then SWTOR is now. The design and implementation of the game was better, hands down.

Features etc etc, then sure, SWTOR vanilla will always be better then WoW vanilla, because WoW did it (mostly) first, and SWTOR had a lot to pick and choose from.

On another note, SWTOR vanilla grew a lot faster then WoW did. Could be the game, could be the new times and popularity of mmorpgs, could be the awesome franchise, who knows. It'll be interesting to see who will last the longest at high popularity, if each game is as good as we are saying.

 

What utter fucking nonsense.

When vanilla released whole quest lines were bugged or not implemented, accessible quest areas were incomplete, and on top of it all, the servers were a fucking mess. I recall the disaster that happened 2-3 months post release of the game (we're not even this far into it with TOR) where all game servers were down for three whole days.

Most of the WoW endgame content wasn't implemented or was inaccessible and was, guess what? Filled with bugs.

WoW wasn't even close to as polished or smartly designed as TOR is even months into post-release. At least in TOR they had fixed all the bugs you would encounter while leveling earlier than a month after release of the game. Oh, and as far as I know all hard mode flashpoint bugs have now been corrected (but fuck Soa).

Keep in mind this is coming from a rabid WoW vanilla addict. I played religiously for 3 years in college and quit WoW all together when BC was released because I hated all the changes they made.

 

Rogues were backstabbing with swords for like 2 months after release. Believe me, that was a game-breaking bug because using a sword to backstab more than doubled the damage on an ability that had an innate 30% crit chance. If you crit, you killed. If you didn't, your autoattacks would be enough to finish the job.
I haven't played wow for over a year now, but I know that a year ago, they still hadn't fixed blink.
It took them over 6 years to fix vanish.

 

BioWare needs to bring back, or revamp the armor color matching system. My bounty hunter and Trooper are tired of looking like clowns.

 

Yeah... that really would be really great..

 

Alright so gentlemen I've been debating buying this for a while and Im seeing sort of a mixed reaction, is it worth it to just grab it now full price?

 

Yes, the leveling is awesome and imo even blows a non-modded Skyrim out of the water.

Just dont expect epic endgame right away. The flashpoints and operations are decent, a few bugs but generally okay and fun for those whom still enjoy it. PvP is fun, a few bugs here as well and the reward system is retarded.

Most importantly, it's still an MMO - if you're suffering from "mmo-burnout" like me, you'll probably enjoy the leveling and get tired real quick of endgame.

 

I really enjoy PvP, but Voidstar has some issues and Huttball is so imbalanced. If you get unlucky with rez timers you spend way too much time on the sidelines in voidstar, and it can also lead to you losing a door. Having fixed timers in the form of the civil war speeders is a much better system.

As for huttball...it's fucking huttball. I love it so much for Baron Deathmark commentary and the general idea, but FUCK is it imbalanced for sages/sorcs. Playing as a smuggler, I feel so fucking useless on that map. It's knockback or lose.

 

Alright well I finally bit the bullet and bought this and I fucking love it so far. On paper its got the same grind feel as WoW but the story and the way everything is presented easily make up for that. Any suggestions on trade skills to pick up for a Jedi Shadow?

 

If it's still in the same shape I left it. Biochem. All the way. All classes. Always.

 

Biochem is nice for sure. On my Sage (bio/bio/diplomacy) I've had a level appropriate reusable stim and potion since level 15, and it is very nice. However, treasure hunting, slicing, and underworld trading are all better for money making imo and I recommend them if its you're first character. Alderaan and Voss are areas where slicing nets you some 20k from the boxes in your questing areas, and slicing missions, while no longer giving you massive returns, still give you augments which sell well and missions for other gathering professions which net 30k on average.

Money certainly isn't a concern on even your second character, but the first play through you can find yourself strapped for cash at certain stages if you don't take a money maker profession. I took slicing/gathering/gathering on my first 2 characters and had a couple million credits and a few cargo holds full of supplies I could use to level up professions afterwards.