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A red zoner pulls the plug: thoughtfully

February 9, 2012 by

An interesting perspective from a disappointed Australian SWTOR player made it’s way on the official forums today. Unlike some people who’ve decided to cancel their subscription, Canisrah has actually gone beyond griping, to detail in a thoughtful way why he’s not found SWTOR to be the game he thought it would be:

Well, I just cancelled my sub.

Thought I’d offer a few comments as I’ve been following this game for years and felt it deserved some sort of farewell. I was one of the Red Zoners who raged when BW left us out of initial pre-orders, and I was one of those who breathed a sigh of relief when the decision was made not to IP block us so we could play at launch.

My experience playing the game – technically, has been great. No noticeable lag, very few bugs, highly polished game. No real complaints.

In fact, I’m really disappointed that I don’t like the game more than I do. Maybe it’s my problem – maybe my tastes are changing or maybe the sort of game that used to appeal to me simply doesn’t anymore.

I was the rabid SWTOR fan in my group – I was the guy who made all the other guys pre-order and play. My Malgus statue is glaring at me on the shelf and my collectors edition box is proudly displayed.

So why am I cancelling?

Well… I played and enjoyed my BH up to level 41. When I hit Belsavis I suddenly realized I was bored stiff. The story had lost its luster, and I was doing seemingly pointless grinding and losing the will to live. Skyrim started calling to me, and the promise of upcoming titles like Diablo III, Shogun 2: Fall of the Samurai, and Mass Effect 3 compelled me to acknowledge that when they arrived, there’s no way I would spend my limited game time grinding away in this mmo.

In a desperate attempt to maintain my SWTOR enthusiasm, I started a slew of new characters, leveling them in bits and pieces in an effort to re-engage with a new story. But in each case staring at a long road of grinding interspersed with only fleeting moments of true story engagement was enough to scuttle that expedition before it even left port.

I even considered just letting my sub run for a few months – but then the reality of bleeding money for no apparent purpose (a misguided sense of loyalty or a last ditch attempt to justify all the hours of anticipation waiting for this game notwithstanding).

The age of the mmo is over, at least for me. The old game-play model this game adheres too is no longer interesting and I regretfully say that if SWTOR couldn’t do it for me, no mmo that holds to the old design paradigm will. I may give GW2 a fleeting peek, but only because it’s a no sub thing so I won’t have to invest so much.

I suspect SWTOR will be the last of the big budget mmos. And as much as it pains me to say it… I think it will struggle to maintain a large play-base.

But that’s just my view – and if you are playing and loving it and are in it for the long haul more power to you. Wish I could have been the same.

Peace out.

Obviously there’s no right or wrong in regards to a decision to quit. Personally I’ve really enjoyed the game and haven’t become bored at all. I also tend to judge an MMO once it’s been bedded down for at least 6 months. More unique to SWTOR, I’m also waiting for the damn game to launch worldwide to see what impact the larger community will have on the game, good or bad.

All that said, some people will also come to a quicker decision a game’s not for them, and fair enough too. Some will try to claim this is the start of a wave. It’s not: it’s a normal part of the evolution of an MMO post-launch. One respondent to the post on the forums (lunabaguna) put it perfectly in my opinion:

Perhaps this is a case of book vs movie for you. When you read a book, you get to make up a character in your head, if the character doesnt look how you want, you can ignore the description and make up something in your head. You get to create a backstory in your head, make the person who you want. With the voiceovers, its like a movie, the character has a certain personality that you cant control. Perhaps you just cant get into it because you cant form the character the way you see them.

So again: no matter how good an MMO is, its mechanics will be somewhat derivative and it will disappoint some people. You’ll only see me stating a real concern for SWTOR if hundred or thousands of posts as well written as Canisrah’s start appearing on the forums. My money is on that not happening.

Filed Under: Community, News, Opinion Tagged With:

Suggestion Box: is patch 1.1.2 an improvement?

February 9, 2012 by

The weekend’s well and truly on the way, so time to drag out the soapbox for another session.

This week it’s your turn to give bouquets or brickbats to SWTOR patch 1.1.2, which went live late Tuesday night. Are you finding it’s made your gameplay experience better? Aside from the Ilum issues remaining, is there anything that’s still a major gripe for you that the patch didn’t fix?

Post away in comments and get it off your chest!

Filed Under: News, Opinion, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

You, Robot – Part 2: Your companion as a lethal fashion accessory

February 8, 2012 by

Welcome to Part 2 of a three-part series on companions. You can view Part 1 here and you can download the most amazing Companion Stats Uber-Mega-Omnibus right here!

Combat is like fashion: you don’t want to be wearing the wrong thing for the occasion. Just as a bow tie and a thong might be appropriate attire at certain events, it may also be like using a Glock 26 for sniping. In other words, a poor choice that attracts the wrong kind of company.

From the time your first companion joins you, the advantages become obvious. Instantly you have someone to cover you, draw fire or in many other ways be the ying to your character’s yang. For most classes this means you get a DPS or Tank with melee or ranged abilities, whichever is complimentary to your own skillset. Only the Bounty Hunter gets a dedicated healer.

So are companions much more than a bipedal pet class? Simply put, yes they are. Functionally the mechanic is familiar, with a dedicated toolbar offering attacks and stances. The big difference is the versatility of control. Using various combinations of the AI toggles you can set certain abilities to operate automatically or manually. Don’t want your companion to use AoE when tackling an enemy? Turn it off. Do you want to choose when your companion uses their most devastating attacks? Go for it! Your companion’s toolbar can be expanded for full control or minimised if you’re letting them run on automatic, either way you get a lot of flexibility with this system.

Aside from them letting you take on many Heroic 2+ areas (in case you can’t find or don’t feel like dealing with another player), they’re also handy if a player bails out of your group halfway through. If this happens the group leader can select which companion of the remaining group members can jump in and fill the gap. While a last minute sub like this is not ideal and can’t realistically replace a capable human player, it can make the difference in completing the raid or gazing at the screen in abject defeat and wondering why you have no chicken.

Speaking of chicken, (no, not really, I just can’t think of a seque), there’s the ability to customise your companion’s skin colour and dress. While the initial selection of customisations is restricted, more customisations become available throughout the game. To be honest, I didn’t like this system as the customisations became available far too long after your companion initially joined you. It broke immersion and disrupted the emotional connection that Bioware work so hard to build. Happily this has changed with one of the recent patches. You now get to customise your companion as soon as they hitch their carriage to your train. Not only is this less jarring, it also means there are fewer identical companions running around the origin worlds.

So that’s the face and hair taken care of, what about the threads? As with your character, a little sartorial augmentation works wonders. Companions use the same core-stat system and need gear with the correct primary stat to do you the most good. They don’t have any relic slots, but that won’t matter until after level 15 – they also only have a single implant slot. The exceptions to this are the ship droids whose requirements are more… umm… mechanical, but they still use ear and implant slots, can ‘bear’ blaster pistols or rifles (main hand) and shields or generators (off-hand). Except that’s not entirely true. While they have slots for blaster weapons, they can not be equipped. There are hints that this may change but for the moment they are only useful as healers who will throw the occasional punch.  It’s also worth noting that companions can’t equip any item with light/dark side requirements, although they can use crystal mods.

Then there’s the troubling issue of ‘Affection’. No, actually that’s a lie. Affection isn’t that tricky at all, in fact you would have to work very hard to get them to hate you, except at certain pivotal points in their stories. In general any +affection you get is substantially greater than any negative awards. So it’s almost always a net gain. In any case it’s easy enough to buy their love although you need to know their tastes first (see the guide). The ship droids are (again) an exception. At present you can’t increase their affection, gifts or no gifts, so an absence of trinkets won’t reduce the menu planning or random cushion stuffing. Another little trick is to dismiss your companions (when practical) if you don’t think they’ll like your upcoming conversation choices. What they don’t hear, won’t hurt you.

You might be asking yourself why you should care what a companion thinks of you but there are practical advantages particularly in crafting, which is the exclusive province of your companions. Since it’s a fairly broad topic I’ll be covering that in the last article of this series, because, if you’re anything like me you just want to get on playing the game and won’t bother with this until later – which would be a mistake.

Just like that bow tie and thong.

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With: ,

Suggestion Box: Oceanic server names

February 4, 2012 by

Another weekend, another issue to chew over. Actually, this week there’s two. The first one is a direct call for your input: in a week’s time we’ll be chatting with BioWare’s Stephen Reid and we want YOUR questions to ask him. So head over here and post your questions in the format described in the post!

For discussion right here, right now, is a little bit of speculation about Oceanic servers. In particular, what names would you like to see them have?

Feel free to suggest either a more ‘official’, lore-friendly option or go all out and suggest some humorous / catchy / funky ones. For what it’s worth I’m thinking DragonFinn for a name – as both Australia and New Zealand claim ownership over both Dragon and the Finns 😉

Fire away!

Filed Under: News, Suggestion Box Tagged With: ,

Busting SWTOR bugs: “everything else is secondary”

February 1, 2012 by

It's not a bug but you get the drift!

Rich Vogel, SWTOR’s executive producer, has hammered out a developer blog post giving a little more insight into how BioWare are tackling the inevitable bugs that any MMO has. It’s a strategically timed post given the griping over patches and remaining in-game issues.

As you’ll read below, Vogel is pretty emphatic about what the development team’s priority is: fixing bugs, with everything else being “secondary”. There’s a lot of fairly basic information in the post, but there’s also some gems. One that tickled my fancy was this one:

Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.

I’m not sure merging the issue of bugs versus PC configurations is anything but a little disingenuous – sure some configs will affect gameplay but they’re not bugs as such unless they occur within the range of the acceptable system specs for the game.

A second issue is: surely the complexity of the system was taken into account with the development process, so I’m not sure that really clarifies a lot either.

Finally, I’m going to make a cheap shot at you BioWare: aside from the obvious expense of developing for the Mac side-by-side, its configurations are markedly simpler so perhaps that might’ve been a route to explore?

Anyway, if you’re not that aware of how bug hunting goes on in an MMO, read on for the detailed overview and we’d love your comments on whether the post from Rich Vogel clarifies things for you?

As one of the original members of the development team and having helped create the studio that brought you Star Wars™: The Old Republic™, I’m privileged to have been on this incredible journey that culminated in launching the game. Now that we are through launch I felt this was a great opportunity to talk about how we balance our efforts when it comes to fixing bugs and developing new content.

The good news is that we have a large team dedicated to the game, which gives us the flexibility to both fix bugs and develop new content. I want to make it very clear here that the live game service comes first though, and fixing bugs is our team’s first priority. Everything else is secondary.

Let me start by explaining how we go about determining when to fix an issue in the live game, whether it is a bug or an exploit. Let’s begin with exploits – those cases when we determine that a bug in the code can give an unfair advantage to a player. (Remember, not all bugs are exploits!)

If an exploit is discovered that threatens players’ experience in the game or the in-game economy, we will usually try to create an Emergency Patch to fix that exploit. Before we declare something an emergency though, we have to validate the issue with our internal Quality Assurance, or QA team. They gather data working with our Customer Service, analytics, and development teams to determine the extent of the exploit and the steps needed to reproduce it. Once we have the steps, we work on a plan to fix the issue. Depending how long the issue will take to fix and how risky it is, we will decide if we need to temporarily disable the cause of the exploit in the game.

Generally speaking, we can fix these types of issues pretty quickly once they are detected in the game. Our turn-around time is really good in this area and we’ve dealt with some recent exploits quite quickly. That’s because we have a dedicated Live Support team that handles these issues, made up of on-call engineers, designers, artists, and producers, who are available around the clock. Our extensive in-game metric tools are also always monitoring the game and generating reports – meaning that if anyone is exploiting, we are going to find out about it. Our main goal is to ensure you have a fun, balanced and fair gameplay experience in The Old Republic. We won’t stop looking for exploits and taking steps to correct them to maintain a fair game.

Fixing bugs in a game as massive as The Old Republic is a little trickier! The PC is a very complicated platform to develop for and getting the game to work flawlessly on every PC ever made is unlikely, but we want to fix as many bugs that affect players as we can.

Not every bug is created equal. Some bugs – even ones that might look simple – take a long time to deal with and some might not be able to be reproduced (as they may be random occurrences under special circumstances). With that in mind, we use a triage process to prioritize our bug lists. This helps us determine which bugs we fix first based on the bug’s severity (which is how many people it affects). We estimate the severity of bugs by looking at volume of tickets sent to our Customer Service team, Forum posts, and using our telemetry data from the game, amongst other things.

The first thing the development team does every day is triage incoming bugs. Team leaders from different groups within BioWare Austin meet to review the incoming bugs, which are pulled from our bug tracking software (managed by the QA team). QA gathers these bugs from several sources (player reports, internal QA, Customer Service tickets, and Community). Before any bug is tracked, we need to verify whether it is a real, reproducible bug by trying to reproduce it ourselves. Sometimes that cannot be done either because we don’t have enough information on the bug (so give us plenty of detail in bug reports, please!) or because there are special circumstances that cause this bug to occur which are not found through normal play patterns. If that is the case we reach out to the community or contact the player to help us reproduce. We have done this many times with great success. Thanks to all of you who have helped us track down these types of bugs.

Let’s get back to our triage process. Every day we review incoming bugs as well as existing bugs to determine the order in which we fix these bugs. The highest priority bugs are what we call ‘blocker bugs’. These are any type of bugs that block a player’s progression through the game, and they’re important enough that they may be fixed via an emergency patch. Whether a bug is fixed in an emergency patch or not depends on the complexity of the bug (which dictates how risky it is to implement) and whether or not there is a workaround available to allow a player to progress. If there is a workaround available, we will usually wait to push that bug into the next publish and ensure players know about the workaround. This allows any players affected to continue to progress, while giving us time to ensure the correct fix won’t unduly affect the rest of the game.

The balancing act of fixing bugs while ensuring we maintain a stable game is always tricky. We have to make sure that when we publish a fix to the live game it doesn’t alter the game code in a way that can make things worse. This is a normal part of complex software development, but it means we have to assess the risk on what we publish to the live game very carefully. The more bugs we fix with each publish, the higher the risk of breaking things, as we’ve changed more game code. That is why we try to limit the number of bugs and types of bugs we address with each patch. If we can fix a lot of low risk bugs we will push more out. Our most important goal is remove as many annoying bugs as fast as we can; currently we aim to push out patches which help fix bugs weekly but that can change depending on the severity of the bugs.

Please remember, if we don’t respond publicly to a bug that does not mean we are not going to fix it. We want to make sure we provide a good playing experience to our players. That is why we have a large team of people working every day to bug fix and remove exploits from the game.

In terms of developing new content I wanted to let everyone know that we are committed to publishing new features and content on a regular basis. It is important to make sure the game is always changing. We have several strike teams working on future game additions. We have a huge list of features and content we want to put into the game and we are constantly adding to it based on feedback we get from the community and from playing the game ourselves. Every single one of us on the development team plays the game, and we see the same issues you do and where we need to expand.

Our most important goal is to make sure you continue to have fun playing our game and we will do everything in our power to make you feel that you are getting your money’s worth every month. Thank you very much for playing!

Over to you: do you think BioWare are wearing down the onslaught of bugs?

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With: ,

Why I don’t want to get to Level 50 (at least yet)

January 31, 2012 by

Now that it’s well over 6 weeks into the life of SWTOR, there’s no shortage of Level 50s running around. Unlike those who levelled up in the first week or so, most of those who’ve reached end-game will have actually experienced the storyline in at least a brief sense. Some will have put in a huge number of hours and truly experienced the story from start to finish, but I’d argue they’re in the minority.

For the rest of us still levelling, we’ve either been putting in a lot less hours, stopping to explore everything, or both. That’s certainly where I’m up to. My Jedi Sage is at Level 29, and whilst running over a sand dune in Tattooine, I stopped to check out the scenery and take a screen shot or two. Whilst standing there I once again thought about how it’d be sad to end that initial levelling journey.

Like any game, that first time achieving a key objective is usually the most memorable and I have no doubt that’ll be the case with SWTOR. What accentuates this for me at present is the current griping about the game’s end content. Given I haven’t experienced that content myself, I’m not in a great position to critique it, but if the end-game isn’t quite as engaging as the levelling content, then I have an even better reason to enjoy the journey rather than speeding to the destination.

There’s a fairly strong opposing argument however. Given how story-driven SWTOR is, even if you do rush through some of the story, every class has different quests so you can easily roll two or three toons and not repeat the same quest once. That still seems a little short-sighted an approach though, as any story is only as strong as its component parts, so skipping through quest cutscenes here and there must affect the overall experience.

Overall, this is a long-winded way of saying that SWTOR is a damn enjoyable visual experience in addition to its story. There are legitimate gripes about performance and end-game content, but both can be easily remedied and in the meantime, I’ll keep stopping at the top of sand dunes to admire the view.

How about you – have you enjoyed the levelling experience and do you feel you’ve done everything you wanted on the road to Level 50?

Filed Under: News, Opinion Tagged With:

Family Research Council Decries ‘SW:TOR’ Update Allowing Homosexual Relationships

January 29, 2012 by

In what should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council has decided that the latest update to BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is more than just added content; it’s a strong political statement that must be stopped at all costs!

After some players complained about not having enough relationship options in the new game, BioWare agreed to allow gay and lesbian couples to pair up in the Star Wars universe. This, of course, makes them homosexual activists seeking to destroy the bonds of the family through devious digital means. I’ll let Tony put it in his own pun-laden words:

“In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side. The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking. You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!”
Read the rest at www.ology.com

Filed Under: From the internets!

Suggestion Box: Douchebaggery

January 27, 2012 by

Over on the SWTOR Gamers of Oceania Facebook page, David K. asked the question on whether people had noticed a migration of what can be loosely termed as ‘WoW Douchebaggery’ – incivility toward lower level players, slagging gear etc etc. I haven’t seen a lot of it myself on my server, but I’ve certainly had other people mention it.

So over to you: if you’ve played WoW or another MMO, how’s the social scene in SWTOR appearing to you so far? Is there just the odd idiot, a wider culture of poor behaviour or have you found it a bed of roses?

Also, anyone wanting to start lobbying for Douchebaggery to be included in the Oxford dictionary should feel free!

Filed Under: News, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

HeroEngine is the unsung platform behind SWTOR

January 23, 2012 by

Star Wars: The Old Republic is one of the most ambitious undertakings in video game history. When the game launched in December, it was the fruition of six years of work by as many as 800 developers and an investment of an estimated $200 million.

One of the secrets behind the successful development of the game was the HeroEngine, a development platform for building online games that was created by Maryland-based Idea Fabrik.The goal of the engine is to break down the barriers to good online game development by creating a free-to-use solution that lets creators take over and push the technology to the background.

The Star Wars game is the first gigantic title to use Idea Fabrik’s HeroEngine, which was designed to enable designers of huge multiplayer games, or massively multiplayer online games, to quickly add content or update existing features on a continuous basis. While the Star Wars game required a huge number of developers, the HeroEngine tools helped streamline the process so that those developers could work more efficiently and so BioWare, owned by Electronic Arts, didn’t have to hire an even larger army of game makers. With the HeroEngine’s technology, developers log into the HeroBlade client, where they can code, drop in art assets and build the entire game.
Via venturebeat.com

Filed Under: From the internets!

Why financial analysts need to be Force Choked

January 20, 2012 by

I stumbled across this little gem tonight, and it got me fuming:

Shares of Electronic Arts Inc. fell nearly 3% to $17.75 on Thursday morning after an analyst with Brean Murray Carret & Co. cut his price target on the stock to $22 from $28, citing concerns about the recently released online multi-player game “Star Wars: The Old Republic.” In a note to clients, analyst Todd Mitchell wrote that “creeping concerns” about the performance of “Star Wars” — which was released in late December — is causing him to trim his earnings estimates for the 2013 fiscal year. “Specifically, initial sales appear to be below expectations, and casual observation of early play is causing us to rethink our churn assumptions,” Mitchell wrote.

Ok, so one guy who has ‘casually observed’ some early play, combined with some guesswork on sales numbers that only EA / Bioware would know at this point, makes EA shares drop nearly 3%.

Whether you love or hate the game, can you see the insanity in a system that drives perceptions that way? If SWTOR sucks as a game, well that’ll become apparent when people leave it in droves. That’s a better measure than one guy putting making prognostications without nearly no data. It’s the equivalent of this site being the arbiter of whether SWTOR is good for oceanic players or not. We may have an opinion but we don’t package up the little turd nuggets we publish each day and claim them to be expertise from up on high.

My rant’s over but I’d love to hear yours. Do you think one person should be having such an impact?

Filed Under: Opinion Tagged With: ,

Suggestion Box: Music or Not?

January 20, 2012 by

This week I thought we’d move the suggestion box away from the battlefield and get cultured. Specifically, let’s talk music. I still haven’t gotten sick of SWTOR’s soundtrack at all, which is probably helped by the fact it’s quite sparse depending on what you’re doing.

So jump in and let us know: are you playing SWTOR with the music on, and if not, what do you do instead?

Filed Under: News, Opinion, Suggestion Box Tagged With:

SWTOR post-mortem: it’s more innovative than an FPS

January 17, 2012 by

Labelling Star Wars: The Old Republic competent but not innovative is “unfair”, BioWare told Eurogamer – the MMO does more than today’s FPS and action games to push its respective genre forward.

“It’s been a little bit of an unfair characterisation,” SWTOR game director James Ohlen remarked to Eurogamer. “Because if you look at other game genres, if you look at a Battlefield or a Call of Duty or a Gears of War or even a Half-Life – those games use the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true game mechanics of the first-person shooter genre that’s been around for 20 years.

“If you look at real-time strategy games, they kept the same tried and true interface and the same tried and true mechanics that existed for 20 years. Same with adventure games, same with platformers, same with fighting games, sports games.

“I don’t know why the MMORPG genre is not considered to be a genre,” Ohlen shrugged. “It could be that World of Warcraft has dominated for so long that people just think of it as just a single game genre.

“But it is a genre, and we wanted to appeal to fans of that genre – we don’t want to turn them away by making something that’s radically different. And we wanted to take the lessons that have been developed in that genre over years and years and years and basically refine them, much like other companies do with other genres.
Via www.eurogamer.net

Filed Under: From the internets!
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