Darth Hater

PETE!!

Little background info here, So I work as a full time web developer and I was sitting at my desk today thinking, "I've been so bussy lately I should catch up on the Darthhater podcast while I work." Needless to say, I'm sitting at my desk, coffee in one hand and typing with the other, when I was suddlenly startled and blew my coffee all over my moniters!! The next time you want to drop a comment like "Order 66" on the air, please give us a little heads up! That shit had me rolling at my desk all afternoon!

Keep up the great work! :)

I think I was misunderstood, I wasn't advocating selling credits which would completely destabilize the economy, I was advocating being able to buy legacy stuff with Cartel points / real money instead of credits.  For example, a 1.2 million credit item would cost $12 worth of cartel points.  I don't think that this would affect the game with "loss of a credit sink" because this game has vastly excessive credit sinks already and the entire basis of a good F2P system would be time vs money, you either grind dailies or pay real money to get the same benefits.  People buying benefits wouldn't feel the need to grind dailies, which would actually help people doing their dailies by reducing the number of people trying to get respawning items and mobs.

I play this game every day for at least 6 hours a day and on my day off I play it for 30 hours or more.  I just don't understand why people don't like the game.  In regards to free t o play, I played Lotro as a free to play player as a lifetime subscriber and when it went f2p, I didn't mind it as much.  I don't play lotro at all since SWTOR came out, but that is because this game fulfills the role of the game I want to play and I don't want to play anything else.  I will continue to pay to play until I have no more income or they shut down the servers.  It's a great game. 

You can find numerous reasons why people 'don't like this game' or perhaps just don't enjoy playing it at all or anymore.

For other people SWTOR may not fill the role(s) of the game(s) they want to play despite it having some/many elements of the games they'd like to play.

I so wanted this to be a great game, and I'd still like to see the game succeed in the F2P model. None of this addresses my major problems with the game, however. To name a couple of big ones:

Warzones - Say I'm a player who just loves huttball, and that's pretty much all I want to do with my playtime. What can I do about that? I can queue up for weeks and keep just getting voidstar over and over (this actually happened to me). At least a raider has the option of getting a good enough group together and grinding their way into the content they want to see. If I'm not lucky enough to get a huttball pop, I'm not allowed to play huttball at all. No matter how good or dedicated a player is, that entire part of the game is only accessible by pure random chance.

Orbital stations - what is the point? Seems like they're only there to add extra load screens and wait times to a game which already has way too much of that stuff. In WoW, you could run across an entire continent without seeing a single load screen like eight years ago. Even the load screens they had felt more like montages than annoyances: it felt like you were skipping a long, boring ocean voyage to get the the fun stuff. Why not just have ships land in spaceports, and put the load screen in the hyperspace voyage part, so you feel like you're skipping the boring part.

Space combat - it's not bad, but why do I need to connect to a game server for this? Why is this single-player only when I'm already logged into a game which features PvP combat? Why would they put resources into this and NOT have Pazzak which was already working and polished like ten years ago?

I could go on and on, but I'll just sum up and say that many of the core design decisions have me scratching my head and wondering why.

Anyways, I was so psyched for this game, and I still do hope they turn it around and succeed.

 edit (&TL:DR) - agreeing with Pete, here. 40% may have said they don't want to pay a sub fee, but I believe that number could be much lower if more people thought the game was actually worth $15/month.

For myself, I might pay for unlimited huttball. I certainly will not pay for unlimited [random warzone, probably voidstar].

Quote from SpaceStampy »

I so wanted this to be a great game, and I'd still like to see the game succeed in the F2P model. None of this addresses my major problems with the game, however. To name a couple of big ones:

Warzones - Say I'm a player who just loves huttball, and that's pretty much all I want to do with my playtime. What can I do about that? I can queue up for weeks and keep just getting voidstar over and over (this actually happened to me). At least a raider has the option of getting a good enough group together and grinding their way into the content they want to see. If I'm not lucky enough to get a huttball pop, I'm not allowed to play huttball at all. No matter how good or dedicated a player is, that entire part of the game is only accessible by pure random chance.

Orbital stations - what is the point? Seems like they're only there to add extra load screens and wait times to a game which already has way too much of that stuff. In WoW, you could run across an entire continent without seeing a single load screen like eight years ago. Even the load screens they had felt more like montages than annoyances: it felt like you were skipping a long, boring ocean voyage to get the the fun stuff. Why not just have ships land in spaceports, and put the load screen in the hyperspace voyage part, so you feel like you're skipping the boring part.

Space combat - it's not bad, but why do I need to connect to a game server for this? Why is this single-player only when I'm already logged into a game which features PvP combat? Why would they put resources into this and NOT have Pazzak which was already working and polished like ten years ago?

I could go on and on, but I'll just sum up and say that many of the core design decisions have me scratching my head and wondering why.

Anyways, I was so psyched for this game, and I still do hope they turn it around and succeed.

 edit (&TL:DR) - agreeing with Pete, here. 40% may have said they don't want to pay a sub fee, but I believe that number could be much lower if more people thought the game was actually worth $15/month.

For myself, I might pay for unlimited huttball. I certainly will not pay for unlimited [random warzone, probably voidstar].

i always thought that the random pvp map thing was weird.   why not have a queue list for each map?  perhaps a random map gen for a tournament system would be good? 

i can't agree more with you about the scratching your head about so many of the game design choices. 

I believe they would have to include cross server to give players the option to choose which WZ they want to play.

And by the looks of it, there will not be cross-server tech for a long, long, loooooooong time.

I have to echo Pete's thought - that maybe this will get people in and then they will sub or at least spend the money to get the extra content. Personal experiece, is I started LoTRo F2P and ended up subbing becuase I liked the game and the extra's it provided to sub players - it was worth it to me. Maybe / Hopefully, this will do the same for others.

I'm not sure who to blame more for this current status to be honest - BW or EA. I think BW's "heart" if you will is in the right place, but EA is ONLY thinking about the bottom line. I'm as surprised as everyone else that its going to be F2P within a year of launch. 

I think players expectations have changed over the last few years. As far as the amount of content available at one time. Level 50 is pretty respectable for a new game out the door. MANY MANY MMO's are that or less when they first launched. How many years did it take for WoW, EQ2, LoTRo to get to the levels they are now - several years after launch, so to expect TOR to be 60-70 out the gate I think  is not a proper expectation. Having said that, BW has made some missteeps that could be very easly fixed. If you think about the warzones - the mecahnics are in place, remap/reskin them. I mean Huttball SCREAMS for multiple maps. Maybe with the new level of people they have on staff and "new content every 6-weeks" we'll see little stuff like that.

Its really hard to say what the future holds for this game. I like the general feel / pace of the game, love the IP and love SW - so I hope they can move ahead with it, and this is just a bump in the road. If not...well then time will tell.

I'm 100% with you on the missteps and it baffles me how so many 'easy' fixes could and would improve the game yet it seems they aren't prioritized or even noticed.  It all just goes back to the game not being ready for release when they released it.  

With how long it took get what was released in the =~8 months it has been live it makes me think a year delay might not have been enough either.

I'm also not so sure on your segregation point, i do "get it" because in my battlefield 3 clan i play with we've had it with the DLC's haves and have nots, e.g."shall we have a close quarters night on the Sever tonight or not oh no we cant johnny wants to play and he hasnt brought it"  But i dont fear it affecting too much with the F2P model. since the invention of A PVP stat and warzones and the slow death of world PVP,  people are already segregated, theres some PVPers who just do warzones in their expertise gear, theres some PVEers that just do PVE and theres some who do both,

I just see the new system augmenting that and allowing the pvpers who just want to pvp to go F2P and then buy the pvp content they want, ditto for the PVErs and if people want all the content they can pay the $15 subscription. that is if the Cash shop works how i think it might with content packs "tier 1 raid pack (EV/KP/EC) 1000 CC($10)" or "tier 1 flashpoint pack 500 CC ($5) or "Tier 1 warzone pack (the 4 current warzones) 500 CC ($5).

Still im just guessing the lack of detail on what could be in the cash shop is just a huge question mark they need to reveal soon,  they have to be careful with the pricing that its not low enough to piss off subscribers or high enough that its just not worth buying piecemeal so it drives F2P players not to buy the content packs but to leave the game because of it.

Haven't listened to the cast yet, but always appreciate a Top Gear reference. 

I can't believe someone thinks the content patches that have been released so far are 'huge' or that the other people sitting there didn't say anything to show they didn't agree with that assessment.

Seriously people think what has been released were 'huge' patches?  

Oh and of course there is the obligatory opinion that more money somehow equates to a better game which at least someone voiced a contrary opinion towards even if he didn't outright say that.

Considering how far apart they were yes they were huge patches. Normally patches that size are 6+ months apart not a couple of months.

New Content we got since launch:

- Kaon Under Siege;

- Lost Island;

- Explosive Conflict;

- Novare Coast;

- Karagga's Palace??;

What we had at launch but has gone away:

- Ilum;

Remember JO and DE interviews about delivering content and making those US$ 15 bucks worth it, how much $$ in subs since december/2011: US$ 105

I believe the "huge" patches were due to fixes (Legacy System) and quality of life (UI custom, LFG).

LotRO got content patches to their "books" every ~2 mos prior to going f2p and Rift gets big content patches every few months as well.  BW is definitely behind the curve on this.