• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Star Wars: The Old Republic |OT| EA: "Let's blow this thing and go home!"

So, today a GM tried teleporting my character stranded on Hutta back to Korrbian and failed so I put in another ticket. That will probably take another 4 days to get answered.

I also finished listening to the Revan audio book. I thought it was even better than Deceived. All fans of KOTOR and TOR lore should give it a read/listen. It takes place 300 years before TOR and really sets up a lot of the things that have to do with Revan in TOR, so don't be afraid to read it before finishing questing or doing the dungeons in TOR.
 
Weird. I was in the middle of an instance and was dropped out of the game and out of the client. When I tried to log back in, it just spit back that my pass/email login was wrong. *shrugs*
I suppose this is a good point to stop for the night. See if it is resolved by tomorrow or so.
 

Thoraxes

Member
Today’s scheduled maintenance to implement the patch 1.0.2d will not be taking place. We will update the Community when this patch is rescheduled. Thank you for your patience.

There.

What's in 1.0.2d?
 

water_wendi

Water is not wet!
Kill things and click on stuff.

Thats disappointing. Debates centered around the welfare of lower class citizens of Coruscant.. using a telescope to map unknown stars in the galaxy.. observing PvP battles and writing news articles to submit to the Holonet.. anything but killing things and clicking on stuff. TOR had its shot and lost.
 

Tacitus_

Member
Thats disappointing. Debates centered around the welfare of lower class citizens of Coruscant.. using a telescope to map unknown stars in the galaxy.. observing PvP battles and writing news articles to submit to the Holonet.. anything but killing things and clicking on stuff. TOR had its shot and lost.

What are you smoking?
 

Jrmint

Member
So what's the consensus on the best Marauder leveling spec right now? I recently hit level 10 with my alt, and have no clue which tree to use. I don't want to read the entire talent tree for each spec lol.
 
This is one of my main reasons I cancelled. My brother has been max level for a few days, and he's been looking at gear. When he realized that the PVP gear was easier to get and better than PVE items, he cancelled his sub. It's like having battleground gear in WoW being better than heroic gear.

Not that they can't turn it around, but it's decisions like these that make it abundantly clear that this is Bioware's first MMO.

Uh... of course this is Bioware's first MMO. It's not like they tried to hide it.
 
Yeah not sure how I feel about the developer helping out near the end, and also touting the fact that it was in Beta and how shocked they were no one found it. I don't know about other players in Beta, but I was busy testing the actual game to go on a goose hunt for a pink lightsaber. :lol

Interesting that he wants feedback on those types of puzzles and that they might be going this route in the future for other hidden items.

Where can one get this crystal?
 

erragal

Member
So what's the consensus on the best Marauder leveling spec right now? I recently hit level 10 with my alt, and have no clue which tree to use. I don't want to read the entire talent tree for each spec lol.

Annihilation is the only really viable Marauder spec right now while leveling. Carnage is so rage starved that it seems only plausible in an 'ideal circumstances' type fight. Annihilation gets point blank shorter cooldown Force Charge to help a lot with rage management, decent self-healing to reduce downtime quite a bit, and their tree is frontloaded with a lot of functionality so you aren't waiting forever to be effective.
 
how much further do I have to go to finish act one with my sith inquisitor? I am level 12, on second planet and have started the class missions

dont really enjoy playing a sith inquisitor assassin as the dual bladed light saber doesnt feel epic when I have to hit enemies a dozen times to kill them, but am thinking will unlock the legacy thing which I think is given end of act 1?
 

vitaminwateryum

corporate swill
how much further do I have to go to finish act one with my sith inquisitor? I am level 12, on second planet and have started the class missions

dont really enjoy playing a sith inquisitor assassin as the dual bladed light saber doesnt feel epic when I have to hit enemies a dozen times to kill them, but am thinking will unlock the legacy thing which I think is given end of act 1?

Act 1 goes until about level 30.
 
A lot of people don't like leveling and find your position on it to be equally baffling. They play MMOs for the endgame (PvP, dungeons, raids, gearing and eventually alts).

All I'm saying is that even the most hardcore levelers in WoW still took much longer to max out than in SWTOR, and that was in a far less friendly leveling system for many classes. I'd say that even if you listen to all the text in the game that it wouldn't take more than 7-10 days. Took me about 3 to get to 39 on my Trooper skipping maybe half of the sidequest text (but reading the subtitles). There's no way SWTOR is a longer leveling experience than vanilla WoW.

Point is people are just setting themselves up for dissapointment when they get to 50 within a few days of launch of a new MMO, and they always do. You always run into the wall of "what now?". At the fastest we get MMOs who put out a monthly content update with a single new instance which usually will be taken down in about 2 hours or less itself. You see it over and over again when a MMO comes out, people get to max within the first week and get tired of the lack of things to do.

Having alts of course is important and those doing that obviously have more sense IMO at least, it's those with a single character with no intention of alts and basically feel stuck at a ceiling .... you have to go, "what did you expect?". See it all the time with friends who play pretty much every MMO and are maxed in about a week and then whine about lack of end game, no new MMO has been able to support these folks. EVE is one of the few that does I think because it basically is all about dynamic player interaction and not premade content that players can beat. It's something I would love to see more MMOs capable of achieving.

Vanilla WoW probably did take longer, though they have streamlined the leveling to be much quicker nowadays, it was much more grindy in Vanilla and they realized that the leveling experience didn't need to be so ridiculous. leveling in TOR is not too fast, and it's not slow either, it's about right if anything, though now how well they support that end game is of course left to be seen. In Warhammer the whole Renown thing kept people going (course what else was there to do in that game?), I would hope that Valor rankings will have a similar effect but it doesn't seem like the rewards are worth it?
 

erragal

Member
Vanilla WoW probably did take longer, though they have streamlined the leveling to be much quicker nowadays, it was much more grindy in Vanilla and they realized that the leveling experience didn't need to be so ridiculous. leveling in TOR is not too fast, and it's not slow either, it's about right if anything, though now how well they support that end game is of course left to be seen. In Warhammer the whole Renown thing kept people going (course what else was there to do in that game?), I would hope that Valor rankings will have a similar effect but it doesn't seem like the rewards are worth it?

I've found the level pacing to be really flawless. If anything it's just a -smidge- too fast and may only feel that way because I hate being slightly overleveled for everything. I understand why I'm overleveled but if only there was a way for me to turn off experience for a planet, that'd make me really happy as someone who enjoys the challenge aspects of MMO PVE.

More importantly there's so much content on just a single playthrough that anyone -genuinely- upset by how 'thin' endgame is must be trolling. TOR's launch endgame is better than WoW, AoC, Warhammer, Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Aion and every korean grinder's endgame. Only Rift has launched with the equivalent loadout of hardmode small group dungeons and multiple raids; and most people are aware that had the single best launch of any MMO ever.
 
The xp rewards really flow at times and seem to really boost up the leveling process here. Just simple things like space missions early on give you huge boosts, and bonus missions in quest areas will usally give you crazy amounts of xp, and more so than the actual quest you were on in some cases. Every little thing has xp being tossed at you too it feels like. If got your character rested up, things do move fairly quick.
 

eznark

Banned
It's intentional. All MMOs do stuff like this to pad out the time to cap, but some ways (like this one) are more obnoxious and transparent than others. Its incredibly off-putting when you spend 10 minutes returning to your ship to talk to a guy only to be ordered back to where you came from, adding 20 minutes to 3 minutes of actual content. Ships that travel faster than light, yet people can't make a phone call?

That's an example of what I meant when I said earlier that the MMO part was fucking up the RPG part.

Of course it is, that's why I'm more than a little annoyed at it. I was hoping to get gain a level last night based on the pace I had been going but I get stuck in this bullshit quest that basically has a loading screen every three minutes, combined with the fact that I have to run from one taxi to the next, then to my ship, then to blah blah blah. Wasted pretty much my entire night doing one retardedly worthless quest that literally added nothing to the story. Hell all they had to do was give me a reason to do it, like a room full of dudes to fight through, and I probably wouldn't have noticed as much.

So transparent, and why? It's a freaking MMO, do they really need to add travel time? I get it for Mass Effect, but for an MMO it seems dumb.
 

eznark

Banned
Yeah, the people who level as quickly as they can to the cap then complain that there isn't anything else to do are idiots.

Pretty much. This game is paced wonderfully (putting aside my frustrations with last night) for someone who wants to play an hour or two a night. The main story is great and I don't necessarily feel like I need to do every quest on every planet in order to move on.

I get the frustrations of people who leveled as fast as possible, but this whole game seems so story focused that I don't see why you wouldn't just go back and do one of the 7 other stories. If that's not your bag, then this game probably isn't for you right now. Come back when they improve the MMO side of things, which I imagine will come eventually.
 

Interfectum

Member
Yeah, the people who level as quickly as they can to the cap then complain that there isn't anything else to do are idiots.

Yup.

They chew through content way too fast and they'll never be satisfied. I mean, what would a content patch do for someone who went 1-50 in a week? They'd be done with it in a day.
 

vitaminwateryum

corporate swill
oh man how many hours is that given I am level 12 and starting planet two

wanted to wait for legacy until playing my JK

Unless you're going to start your JK after they release the legacy stuff, the only thing you're getting out of having your legacy unlocked is a surname and the ability to collect legacy xp.
 

eznark

Banned
Yup.

They chew through content way too fast and they'll never be satisfied. I mean, what would a content patch do for someone who went 1-50 in a week? They'd be done with it in a day.

The people who do that in WoW, what have they been doing the last 7 years? Do they just run the same raids over and over every night? The same handful of PvP arenas? What keeps those people subscribing?
 

erragal

Member
The people who do that in WoW, what have they been doing the last 7 years? Do they just run the same raids over and over every night? The same handful of PvP arenas? What keeps those people subscribing?

So they can troll the forums? In the BC era the tuning was high enough that outside of the people lucky enough to have a group of 29-35 very skilled and committed people progression came slowly. Interestingly I believe the difficulty of that content trained a huge population of hardcore MMO players far too well in raid mechanics; if you make everything that challenging again you'll never be able to persuade casuals to play your game.

Outside of that most of the people I knew that never took breaks from WoW had multiple max-level alts that they also ran through the content; once the WotLK era hit the raid oriented players would run on a cycle of push hard at content release then play casually or not at all till the next content cycle. It was almost a seasonal game instead of a year round game.

PVP players I have no clue; I'd never subscribe to an MMO just to run the same three scenarios over and over.
 
The people who do that in WoW, what have they been doing the last 7 years? Do they just run the same raids over and over every night? The same handful of PvP arenas? What keeps those people subscribing?

WoW has the benefit of having been around all those years and building up lot of content over the years. Also the race to end game was not as big of a thing back when WoW launched. It's not till some time after WoW came out that the notion that the "real game" begins at endgame came to be. Vanilla wow took longer to level through as the grind was much greater so people didn't rush as much through things. Lot of things were added eventually through the game along with all the big paid expansions adding to the game. And not everyone has been playing WoW for a full 7 years, many people started later after the game had arleady added bunch of content and expanded, and many people take prolonged breaks from the game and go back after big content updates.
 

eznark

Banned
So they can troll the forums? In the BC era the tuning was high enough that outside of the people lucky enough to have a group of 29-35 very skilled and committed people progression came slowly. Interestingly I believe the difficulty of that content trained a huge population of hardcore MMO players far too well in raid mechanics; if you make everything that challenging again you'll never be able to persuade casuals to play your game.

Outside of that most of the people I knew that never took breaks from WoW had multiple max-level alts that they also ran through the content; once the WotLK era hit the raid oriented players would run on a cycle of push hard at content release then play casually or not at all till the next content cycle. It was almost a seasonal game instead of a year round game.

PVP players I have no clue; I'd never subscribe to an MMO just to run the same three scenarios over and over.

Yeah, I subscribed for over a year probably (at the very start of the game) and played super casual with four or five friends. I never hit the level cap, so I have no idea what an end game is supposed to be like. I like that this game has fast pacing, I can definitely hit the cap (thankfully not as absurdly fast as DCUO) but then there are 7 other stories to experience in between hopefully playing a bit with the GAF guild and stuff on end game. This game seems uniquely well suited to hold people's attention because of the strong (in my opinion) storytelling.
 

frequency

Member
I personally think the leveling is way too quick in this game so I don't blame those who got to 50 and find the content lackluster.
I'm not 50 yet myself, but to be more than half way there in like 3 weeks is way too fast.

But then I come from an era where it could take several months or > year to reach cap at the pace I play. "Back in my day..."

I've always been a fan of the leveling content in MMOs. I find a lot of enjoyment out of seeing people level with me. Recognizing people as I get higher and watching their character grow along with my own. But with the pacing of MMOs nowadays, that's just not possible for me anymore :(
I think that plays a huge part in why I used to have no issues meeting people in MMOs, but in the post-WoW world, I find it extremely difficult to make friends in game.
Also, end game almost always ends up being "a job" since everyone ends up being super serious about stuff up there. I also have a problem with repeating content so... yeah.

I know there are different stories and stuff, but the story quests feel so far apart when you're re-doing the same generic quests with the same dialog on the same planets over again.
 
I personally think the leveling is way too quick in this game so I don't blame those who got to 50 and find the content lackluster.
I'm not 50 yet myself, but to be more than half way there in like 3 weeks is way too fast.

But then I come from an era where it could take several months or > year to reach cap at the pace I play. "Back in my day..."

I've always been a fan of the leveling content in MMOs. I find a lot of enjoyment out of seeing people level with me. Recognizing people as I get higher and watching their character grow along with my own. But with the pacing of MMOs nowadays, that's just not possible for me anymore :(
I think that plays a huge part in why I used to have no issues meeting people in MMOs, but in the post-WoW world, I find it extremely difficult to make friends in game.
Also, end game almost always ends up being "a job" since everyone ends up being super serious about stuff up there. I also have a problem with repeating content so... yeah.

I think a big part of the faster leveling is wanting people to experience the other class stories without making it feel like a daunting task. I might not play through all 8, but I at least want to see a force/non-force user story for both factions. If I was looking at sinking a month of playtime in for each class to do that then I probably would not even try. The rate so far feels just right to me and I never feel like I am grinding away since the story keeps me engaged. This is coming from someone who played pre-WoW MMOs and also got involved in the race to the cap on several WoW fresh server starts.
 
I personally think the leveling is way too quick in this game so I don't blame those who got to 50 and find the content lackluster.
I'm not 50 yet myself, but to be more than half way there in like 3 weeks is way too fast.

But then I come from an era where it could take several months or > year to reach cap at the pace I play. "Back in my day..."

I've always been a fan of the leveling content in MMOs. I find a lot of enjoyment out of seeing people level with me. Recognizing people as I get higher and watching their character grow along with my own. But with the pacing of MMOs nowadays, that's just not possible for me anymore :(
I think that plays a huge part in why I used to have no issues meeting people in MMOs, but in the post-WoW world, I find it extremely difficult to make friends in game.
Also, end game almost always ends up being "a job" since everyone ends up being super serious about stuff up there. I also have a problem with repeating content so... yeah.

Old MMOs used to take forever but people have grown to want the pacing to be much quicker. Much of older MMO pace was simply dictated by level of grind, and most old MMOs never had actual content to sustain the leveling process so players were forced to grind endlessly till they were high enough to find some new quests.

I think they give away a bit too much xp in TOR as so many things just toss it your way, but the pace does not feel that it's too fast. The worst offender has to be DCUO so far, as that game was insanely quick. Playing it casually I still was max in the first week and already getting top tier armor pieces.
 

Patryn

Member
oh man how many hours is that given I am level 12 and starting planet two

wanted to wait for legacy until playing my JK

If you're just starting Coruscant, you're actually still in the prologue. Act 1 starts after you get your ship (between level 15-19), and runs until about level 30-35 (I was 33 when I finished). Act 1 took me about 48 hours to finish with my Commando.

And I want to say that I'm quite enjoying my JK alt right now. Just hit level 16, and getting towards the end of Coruscant now.
 

Interfectum

Member
I'm level 37 and I'm loving the pacing so far. I'm not sure why people want a 3-4 month grind to get to max level. I'll probably end up 'beating' the game with my first character in about a month which seems perfectly reasonable to me.
 

frequency

Member
I know I'm in a very small minority with my opinion.

I guess my major issue is that I just suck at meeting people. The sense of community seems to have suffered greatly for me with this pacing.

I know that most people like fast progress though. So I don't expect anything to return to the way it was. I guess I just felt like reminiscing for a bit.

The multiple stories stuff is neat. I just wish the standard quests had different dialog or something. But I know that's asking for too much.
 

eznark

Banned
I know I'm in a very small minority with my opinion.

I guess my major issue is that I just suck at meeting people. The sense of community seems to have suffered greatly for me with this pacing.

I know that most people like fast progress though. So I don't expect anything to return to the way it was. I guess I just felt like reminiscing for a bit.

The multiple stories stuff is neat. I just wish the standard quests had different dialog or something. But I know that's asking for too much.

For me the best game for meeting people was Warhammer. It had those great "just be in this area and you will auto group" instances which made it easy to group up with people. I think that could easily be done with these 2/4 person flashpoints, which I was really hoping would come over. That was the only MMO I've played where it seemed easy to group up with strangers. It also required no "LFG" spamming, which was nice.
 

Interfectum

Member
For me the best game for meeting people was Warhammer. It had those great "just be in this area and you will auto group" instances which made it easy to group up with people. I think that could easily be done with these 2/4 person flashpoints, which I was really hoping would come over. That was the only MMO I've played where it seemed easy to group up with strangers. It also required no "LFG" spamming, which was nice.

An auto-grouping option for heroics would be awesome.
 
I know I'm in a very small minority with my opinion.

I guess my major issue is that I just suck at meeting people. The sense of community seems to have suffered greatly for me with this pacing.

I know that most people like fast progress though. So I don't expect anything to return to the way it was. I guess I just felt like reminiscing for a bit.

The multiple stories stuff is neat. I just wish the standard quests had different dialog or something. But I know that's asking for too much.

There is different dialog that is class based in many of the generic side quests, course lot of it is recycled by the quest giver, there is unique dialogue for some of the various class specific choices and at times the sex. Usually though it's often based on being a force user or a non force user. The two sith classes will have pretty much same dialogue, but a non force user class will have some different dialogue in many cases. Not a big difference of course but nice that there is some differences or at least a bit of effort on that front.

For me the best game for meeting people was Warhammer. It had those great "just be in this area and you will auto group" instances which made it easy to group up with people. I think that could easily be done with these 2/4 person flashpoints, which I was really hoping would come over. That was the only MMO I've played where it seemed easy to group up with strangers. It also required no "LFG" spamming, which was nice.

Public quests were cool, though became a pain later on in the games life cycle since finding players to do them became a pain. A similar thing would have been nice to have been done for the heroic areas of the game here.
 

eznark

Banned
An auto-grouping option for heroics would be awesome.

Oh yeah, heroics is what I mean, not flashpoints. Just go into the green and have another door with a red. It turns green when a second (or fourth) person comes in and the group can move forward.

Boom. Solved.

Public quests were cool, though became a pain later on in the games life cycle since finding players to do them became a pain. A similar thing would have been nice to have been done for the heroic areas of the game here.

Yeah. I stopped playing as soon as I got a horse (so 20 I think). I then tried to come back like a year later and there were zero people doing mid-level quests.
 

SleazyC

Member
The people who do that in WoW, what have they been doing the last 7 years? Do they just run the same raids over and over every night? The same handful of PvP arenas? What keeps those people subscribing?
Pretty much. You run the same raids over and over to completion and either stop playing or play very little (in my old WoW guild during progression we used to raid four nights a week, once we finished up we would raid one night a week or not at all). I never PVP'd hardcore but that was something you had to keep doing in WoW to make sure your rating did not fall far behind.

The same thing will happen to TOR to people who level and consume content quickly and they will continue to complain. These people are probably in the very small minority of the population playing the game though.
 

frequency

Member
There is different dialog that is class based in many of the generic side quests, course lot of it is recycled by the quest giver, there is unique dialogue for some of the various class specific choices and at times the sex. Usually though it's often based on being a force user or a non force user. The two sith classes will have pretty much same dialogue, but a non force user class will have some different dialogue in many cases. Not a big difference of course but nice that there is some differences or at least a bit of effort on that front.

There's like a line or two different, but most of the conversation ends up being the same.
It really highlights that no matter what dialog option I choose, almost all conversations end the same way as I accept the quest anyway.
That stuff bothers me.

But yeah... I'm being unreasonable with my complaints I know.
 
Oh yeah, heroics is what I mean, not flashpoints. Just go into the green and have another door with a red. It turns green when a second (or fourth) person comes in and the group can move forward.

Boom. Solved.

The one issue is that most heroics are tough later on and really require you to form a proper group that follows the mmo trifecta. Auto grouping would not give you the proper group builds. It worked in WAR because the areas basically created a large sized group with it's content meant to be done solo, where you need the group to take on boss level characters and it was really a competition to seewho can do best in that quest area. Heroics in TOR are set up more like traditional quests that simply require a proper group usually to do.
 
There's like a line or two different, but most of the conversation ends up being the same.
It really highlights that no matter what dialog option I choose, almost all conversations end the same way as I accept the quest anyway.
That stuff bothers me.

But yeah... I'm being unreasonable with my complaints I know.

Bioware's notorious for this in their single player games too.
 

eznark

Banned
The one issue is that most heroics are tough later on and really require you to form a proper group that follows the mmo trifecta. Auto grouping would not give you the proper group builds. It worked in WAR because the areas basically created a large sized group with it's content meant to be done solo, where you need the group to take on boss level characters and it was really a competition to seewho can do best in that quest area. Heroics in TOR are set up more like traditional quests that simply require a proper group usually to do.

Sure, but autogrouping doesn't preclude premades from going in.
 
Top Bottom